Six days that Ireland lost and won
The yard of Kilmainham Gaol, May 12, 1916. James Connolly, commander of the Irish Citizen Army, can't stand. A bullet shattered his leg during the fighting, and gangrene set in. The jailers tie him to a chair. The sergeant raises his hand, and the firing squad fires a volley. It's the sixteenth execution in ten days, and at this moment, somewhere in Belfast, Cork, or Limerick, an ordinary Irishman, who only yesterday was cursing the rebels for the destroyed streets, silently crosses himself.
Public opinion in the country has already taken a complete turn. British command doesn't know about it yet.
Three Irelands
By 1914, the island was split in three. John Redmond's constitutional nationalists sought Home Rule, limited self-government within the empire. Their protracted parliamentary work culminated in the Government of Ireland Act, passed in 1914. A parliament in Dublin, an Irish cabinet, albeit under the crown. It seemed the issue was settled.
Ulster thought differently. Over two hundred thousand Protestants signed the "Holy Covenant" in September 1912, vowing to resist Home Rule. The first to sign was Edward Carson, a lawyer and parliamentarian. Next came the Ulster Volunteer Force, a private army of up to one hundred thousand men, openly purchasing rifles from Germany. For the first time in a century, a British political dispute had erupted into armed conflict before a shot had even been fired.
And there was a third player. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, founded in 1858, cherished the memory of the 1798 rebellion and the Fenian uprisings of the 1860s. For the Brotherhood, Home Rule was a sop, and the path to independence lay only through rebellion. While Redmond bargained in Westminster and Carson marched in Belfast, the IRB waited. The war provided a pretext.
Solution
In August of 1914, the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood resolved to raise an uprising before the end of the war. In May of 1915, a Military Commission was formed. Patrick Pearse, a teacher and poet; Joseph Plunket, a twenty-four-year-old tuberculosis sufferer from a Catholic aristocratic background; and Éamonn Cheant, a musician. In January of 1916, James Connolly, a socialist born in the Edinburgh slums and head of the Irish Citizen Army, joined them. He brought several hundred armed workers. In April, a seventh, Thomas MacDonagh, was co-opted. Seven men, seven signatures on the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, seven death sentences.
Seventy-two hours before the performance, the plan fell apart. On April 21, Good Friday, the British fleet intercepted the German steamship Aud off the coast of Kerry. On board were twenty thousand rifles, ten machine guns, and a million rounds of ammunition. The captain, realizing he couldn't escape, opened the seacocks and sank the cargo. Roger Casement, the intermediary with Berlin, was arrested that same day.
Eoin MacNeill, the nominal leader of the Irish Volunteers, learned of the impending uprising by chance and third-hand. On the night between Saturday and Sunday, unaware of the destruction of the Auda, he sat down to write a counter-order. The announcement appeared in the Sunday Independent on Easter Sunday morning. Units across Ireland received various orders. A council of war met in Liberty Hall, drank tea, smoked, and debated what to do. They decided to begin a day later, on Easter Monday, with Dublin's forces alone.
Six days
On the morning of April 24, around 1,200 people occupied key buildings in the city center. The General Post Office on Sackville Street became headquarters. The Four Courts of Justice, City Hall, the South Branch of the Dublin Union, the Royal College of Surgeons, and Stephen's Green were all occupied. The attempt to take Dublin Castle, the heart of British administration, failed. Sean Connolly's unit occupied the nearby City Hall. Connolly himself was killed an hour after the first shot.
Around midday, Patrick Pearse stepped out onto the steps of the General Post Office and read the Proclamation. Several dozen passersby stood before him, more curious than inspired. One woman asked a neighbor what was going on and moved on. Meanwhile, the document proclaimed the Irish people's inalienable right to sovereignty, universal suffrage, and the equality of citizens regardless of faith. Seven signatures under the text, two weeks later, would prove to be death sentences for the signatories themselves.
Inside the General Post Office, Winifred Carney, armed with a revolver and a typewriter, sat at Adjutant Connolly's desk. Around two hundred women from Cumann na mBan worked as messengers, nurses, and fighters. For the first time in Irish history, stories on equal terms with men. From the rooftop, the rebels transmitted a message in Morse code proclaiming a republic. The first radio broadcast from a state that did not yet exist.
The British recovered faster than Liberty Hall had expected. On Tuesday, units from the Curragh Camp entered the city. By Wednesday, trains carrying British recruits were arriving at Kingsbridge Station every twenty minutes. On April 26, the Sherwood Foresters clashed with a rebel detachment at number 25 on Northumberland Road. The battle raged all day. The British lost several dozen killed and wounded. This was the last time the rebels fought on equal terms.
Connolly was counting on the British not being able to use it. artillery In the center of the capital, they would be afraid to destroy the commercial districts. He was mistaken. By midweek, eighteen-pounder field guns appeared on Sackville Street. The gunboat Helga sailed up the Liffey and opened fire on Liberty Hall. Hundreds of shells rained down on headquarters. On the evening of the 27th, the General Post Office was ablaze. On the night of the 29th, the garrison breached the walls of the neighboring buildings and retreated to Moor Street.
On Saturday, Elizabeth O'Farrell approached the British lines with a white kerchief. A few hours later, she accompanied Pearse to General William Law. The surrender was unconditional. In his order to the remaining troops, Pearse wrote that he agreed to surrender "to prevent further bloodshed among the citizens of Dublin and in the hope of sparing the lives of our fighting men." The next day, the last troops surrendered. weapon.
Price
Over the course of six days, approximately four hundred and eighty-five people died in Dublin: two hundred and sixty civilians, one hundred and forty-three British soldiers and police, and eighty-two participants in the uprising. Among the dead were approximately forty children. More than two and a half thousand were wounded.
A significant number of deaths were among citizens caught in artillery fire, crossfire, or mistaken for rebels. The Sackville Street block lay in ruins. The façade of the General Post Office stood, but the interior was destroyed by fire. Reconstruction would not begin until 1929, when it was already in the Free State.
Dublin's initial reaction was hostile. Columns of arrested rebels, led to detention centers, were greeted with shouts and spitting. Newspapers, under military censorship, called the rebels adventurers and murderers. Municipal records gave the events the pointedly neutral name of "the recent disturbances." It seemed the uprising had been lost not only on the streets but also in people's minds.
Kilmainham
On May 2, a military tribunal began its work in Dublin. General John Maxwell, appointed military governor, acted under the Defence of the Realm Act. The tribunal met without the press, and the charges were framed as treason in wartime.
Between May 3 and 12, fifteen people were executed by firing squad in the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol. On May 3, Thomas Clarke, Patrick Pearse, and Thomas MacDonagh. On May 4, Edward Daly, Michael O'Hanrahan, William Pearse, and Joseph Plunket. On May 5, John MacBride. On May 8, Éamonn Cheant, Con Colbert, Sean Houston, and Michael Mullin. On May 9, Thomas Kent, in Cork. On May 12, Sean MacDiarmada and James Connolly. On May 16, Roger Casement was hanged in London's Pentonville Prison after a civil trial.
The rhythm of the executions proved more deadly than the executions themselves. The executions took place in small groups, spread out over ten days. Every morning, the newspapers printed new names. The execution of William Pearce, who had played no significant role in the uprising and was shot, as many believed, for his brother's surname, caused shock. The execution of Joseph Plunkett, who was dying of tuberculosis and had married Grace Gifford in the prison chapel a few hours before the shooting, was described in leaflets as cruelty without justification. Connolly, tied to a chair before the firing squad, became an image that no longer fit into any explanation of harsh military necessity.
Mass arrests were underway at the same time. Around three thousand were detained in Dublin and the surrounding countryside, three times the number of rebels. Around eighteen hundred men were sent without trial to the Frongoch camp in North Wales. There they sat for months, reading banned books and debating the future. Frongoch, intended by the British as a place of isolation, became, as historians later described it, a university of republican revolution. Among its "students" was Michael Collins.
A dispatch from the British ambassador in Washington, Cecil Spring-Rice, to London recorded the reaction of the Irish diaspora, saying that Irish-Americans now saw blood in their eyes. The Catholic Church, which had initially condemned the rebellion as an adventure, changed its tune. By June 1916, memorial services for those executed were being held in churches across the Irish provinces.
From Frongoch to Dublin on the twenty-second
The five years between Easter 1916 and December 1921 condensed a century of political change in Ireland. Sinn Féin, which had not organized the rebellion but was associated with it by the press and word of mouth, rallied the surviving participants and amnestied internees of Frongoch. In the general election of December 1918, it took seventy-three of Ireland's one hundred and five seats in the British Parliament.
The elected members refused to go to Westminster. On January 21, 1919, they assembled in Dublin's Mansion House as Dáil Éireann, the revolutionary parliament of an independent Ireland. That same day, in Tipperary, at a place called Soloweedbeg, Irish Republican Army volunteers shot and killed two Royal Constables. These two events on one day ushered in the War of Independence.
The war of 1919, 1920, and 1921 was waged as a guerrilla campaign. The Irish Republican Army, under the operational command of Michael Collins, who had fought at Frongoch, confronted British regular troops, police, and auxiliary forces. A truce was concluded in July 1921. In December, the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed. It created the Irish Free State, a dominion within the British Commonwealth, comprising twenty-six southern counties. The six northern counties remained in the United Kingdom.
The Treaty split the republican movement. The civil war between the proponents and opponents of the compromise in 1922 and 1923 claimed more lives than the War of Independence itself and divided Irish politics for decades. In 1937, a new constitution transformed the state into Ireland, without formal dominion status. In 1949, it became the Irish Republic, finally severing ties with the crown.
Of the seven who signed the Proclamation in April 1916, not a single one survived. Of the twelve hundred who rose on the first day, those who passed through Frongoch were those who signed the treaty in 1921 and buried each other in 1922. Between these two lists, the history of one nation spanned five years.
British General Maxwell, signing the execution orders, was convinced he was acting in the name of the empire, the law, and common sense. That's how it may have looked from Dublin Castle in May of 1916. From Kilmainham, it looked different. And from 1922, it looked nothing like that: the empire in Ireland was no more.
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