Outbreak of the Easter Rising

On 24 April 1916, Easter Monday, at about noon, armed units of Irish nationalists seized a dozen or so buildings in the centre of Dublin, among them the General Post Office in Sackville Street. Outside the Post Office Patrick Pearse read the proclamation of the Irish Republic. So began the Easter Rising, the largest armed rising in Ireland since 1798, directed against British rule at a time when the United Kingdom was at war with Germany.

The conspirators

In 1914 Parliament in London passed Home Rule, that is, autonomy for Ireland, but after the outbreak of war it postponed its introduction until the war was over. The Irish Volunteers, the nationalists’ armed organisation, then split in two. The overwhelming majority, known from then on as the National Volunteers, followed the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, who called for fighting on Britain’s side, and tens of thousands of its members joined the British Army. A few thousand, later more than ten thousand, opponents of the war led by Eoin MacNeill kept the name of the Irish Volunteers. Nor were they subject to conscription, because the Military Service Act did not apply to Ireland.

Within the Volunteers worked men of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, which as early as September 1914 had decided to stage a rising before the end of the war, counting on German help. From 1915 it was prepared by the Brotherhood’s secret Military Council: Thomas Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Pearse, Joseph Plunkett and Éamonn Ceannt, and later also Thomas MacDonagh. In January 1916 it was joined by James Connolly, the labour leader and commander of the socialist Irish Citizen Army, who had threatened to rise on his own otherwise. The conspirators hid their plans not only from the authorities but also from MacNeill, who would accept fighting only if the British tried to disarm the Volunteers or introduce conscription in Ireland. Pearse, as the Volunteers’ director of organisation, announced three days of “parades and manoeuvres” for Easter, which for those in the know were the signal for the rising.

The countermanded order

The plan began to fall apart before the holiday. On Holy Thursday MacNeill learned what was being prepared. On Good Friday the British intercepted the ship Aud carrying German arms, and off the coast of Kerry Roger Casement was arrested. When MacNeill concluded that without arms a rising had no chance, on the night of Saturday to Sunday he issued an order cancelling all the Sunday manoeuvres. It was sent out to the units and printed in the Sunday edition of the “Sunday Independent”. The Military Council met on Sunday morning in Liberty Hall, the headquarters of the Citizen Army, and decided to begin the fighting a day later. The Volunteers and the Citizen Army were from then on to form a joint Army of the Irish Republic. Pearse became its commander-in-chief and president of the provisional government, and Connolly commander of the forces in Dublin.

The authorities in Dublin Castle knew of rumours about the conspirators’ plans, but did not expect them to move so soon. The Under-Secretary for Ireland, Matthew Nathan, and the Lord Lieutenant, Lord Wimborne, agreed on Sunday on the arrest of the leaders, but decided to wait until after the holiday and for the consent of the Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, who was in London. The commander of the forces in Ireland, General Lovick Friend, had gone to England, and many officers were spending the bank holiday Monday at the Fairyhouse races near Dublin. Birrell’s consent arrived on Monday at noon, when the rising was already under way.

The first day

Because of the countermanded order, far fewer people turned out on Monday morning than had been planned: according to the most often cited estimates, about 1,200 Volunteers and members of the Citizen Army and of the women’s organisation Cumann na mBan. Some were in uniform, some in civilian clothes with armbands. Before noon the units set off for their assigned positions. Roughly 400 men from Liberty Hall, with Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, Mac Diarmada and Plunkett, seized the General Post Office in what is now O’Connell Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, and hoisted the flags of the republic over it. Shortly after noon Pearse read the proclamation outside the building; it was later pasted up on walls and handed out to passers-by.

The proclamation “to the people of Ireland”, addressed to Irishmen and Irishwomen, was signed by the seven members of the Military Council. In the name of God and of the dead generations it proclaimed the Irish Republic a sovereign independent state, and its authors called themselves the provisional government. It promised religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens, and a government elected by the votes of all men and women. It also said that Ireland was supported by “her exiled children in America” and by “gallant allies in Europe”, which the British read unambiguously as an alliance with Germany.

Within a few hours the other units occupied a ring of buildings around the centre. Edward Daly’s 1st Battalion took the Four Courts on the Liffey, and Seán Heuston’s company the Mendicity Institution on the other side of the river. MacDonagh’s 2nd Battalion seized Jacob’s biscuit factory, Éamon de Valera’s 3rd Battalion Boland’s Mill and the area around Westland Row station, and Ceannt’s 4th Battalion the South Dublin Union workhouse. A Citizen Army detachment under Michael Mallin, with Constance Markievicz, dug in in St Stephen’s Green. The insurgents cut telephone and telegraph lines, damaged several railway lines and put up barricades. A small group seized the Magazine Fort in Phoenix Park, but the explosion of the charges laid there was too weak to give a signal to the whole city.

Not everything succeeded. A Citizen Army detachment under Seán Connolly approached the gate of Dublin Castle, the seat of the British administration. An unarmed policeman, James O’Brien, who tried to stop it, was shot dead, according to some accounts the first casualty of the rising. The attackers took the guardroom but went no further, although the Castle was weakly defended, and instead seized the neighbouring City Hall. Seán Connolly was killed that same day, and during the night soldiers retook City Hall. The insurgents also failed to take the telephone exchange or Trinity College, which was defended by students of the Officers’ Training Corps and by Dominion soldiers on leave. As a result the authorities kept their communications, and the college later became an important base for the army.

The British were taken completely by surprise and in the first hours acted chaotically. A troop of lancers sent to Sackville Street came under fire from the Post Office and lost three killed and one mortally wounded. The heaviest fighting of the first day was for the South Dublin Union, where soldiers of the Royal Irish Regiment broke into part of the buildings. After the deaths of three unarmed officers the Dublin police were withdrawn from the streets, and looting of shops began in the centre. Still on Monday the command called up reinforcements from the camp at the Curragh, and during the night Brigadier-General William Lowe arrived from there and took over command in Dublin. Lord Wimborne issued a proclamation in which he announced “the sternest measures” against the rebellion, attributed to the incitement of “foreign enemies”, and called on the inhabitants not to go out into the streets. In the House of Lords the government admitted the next day that “serious disturbances” had broken out in Dublin, but gave assurances that the situation was “well in hand”.

What came next

Outside Dublin the rising spread to only a few places: County Galway, Enniscorthy in County Wexford, and the area around Ashbourne near Dublin. Germany, in keeping with its earlier promise, tried to distract the British: on the night of 24/25 April airships dropped bombs on eastern England, and in the morning German battlecruisers shelled Lowestoft and Yarmouth. In Dublin the army quickly gained an overwhelming numerical superiority and began to use artillery. On Saturday 29 April Pearse agreed to unconditional surrender, and after him the other units surrendered in turn. According to the findings of the Glasnevin Trust at least 485 people died during the rising, including about 260 civilians, 143 soldiers and policemen and 82 insurgents, counting those executed later, and over 2,600 were wounded. At the beginning of May, after secret trials before courts martial, fourteen leaders, including all the signatories of the proclamation, were shot in Kilmainham Gaol. The executions and mass arrests turned opinion in Ireland: the rising, which in its first days most Irish people had met with incomprehension or hostility, became within a few years a symbol of the struggle for independence.