The Easter Rising

Michael T Foy, Brian Barton, Michael T. Foy

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780752457031
• eBook ISBN: 9780752472720
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

On Easter Monday, between 1, 000 and 1, 500 Irish Volunteers and members of the Irish Citizen Army seized the General Post Office and other key locations in Dublin. The intention of their leaders, including Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, was to end British rule in Ireland and establish an independent thirty-two county Irish republic. For a week battle raged in the Irish capital until the Rising collapsed. The rebel leaders were executed soon afterwards, though in death their ideals quickly triumphed.

lluminating every aspect of that fateful Easter week, The Easter Rising is based on an impressive range of original sources. It has been fully revised, expanded and updated in the light of a wealth of new material and extensive use has been made of almost 2, 000 witness statements that the Bureau of Military History in Dublin gathered from participants in the Rising. The result is a vivid depiction of the personalities and actions not just of the leaders on both sides but the rank and file and civilians as well. The book brings the reader closer to the events of 1916 than has previously been possible and provides an exceptional account of a city at war.

1

The Planning of the Easter Rising: Part One

The Easter Rising of 1916 was planned and carried out by a secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and, in particular, a small Military Council of its leaders: Tom Clarke, Sean MacDermott, Patrick Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett and Thomas MacDonagh. In January 1916 they also formed an alliance with the radical socialist James Connolly who had established an Irish Citizen Army dedicated to a workers’ republic but ultimately made common cause with this group of conservative nationalists in order to overthrow British rule in Ireland.

Serious IRB preparations for a rising began only with the outbreak of the First World War but, in one sense, a rebellion had been in the making ever since the organisation was founded in 1858. There had been previous revolutionary attempts to establish an Irish republic, all of them unsuccessful. The Rising of 1798, inspired by Wolfe Tone’s Society of United Irishmen, had assumed serious proportions in various places, including Ulster. Those of 1803 and 1848 were miserable failures and while initially the IRB’s extensive ‘Fenian Conspiracy’ in 1867 had seemed dangerous, it too failed ignominiously. But they all left behind potent symbols and memories and the republican revolutionary tradition was never completely eradicated.

With no realistic prospect of revolution during the next decades, the IRB supported Charles Stewart Parnell’s Home Rule movement as the best available strategy for undermining British authority. However, even that limited ambition collapsed with Parnell’s fall in 1891 and the defeat two years later of a Home Rule Bill for Ireland. During the early 1880s the IRB’s sister organisation in America, Clan na Gael, concentrated on a dynamiting campaign in England that had Londoners living under daily threat as bombs exploded at the Tower of London, London Bridge, left-luggage rooms and tunnels in the underground railway system. Eventually Special Branch arrests ended the bombings.

In the early twentieth century the IRB began rejuvenating alongside a cultural and intellectual renaissance in Irish nationalism as many younger nationalists diverted their energies into the Gaelic League and Gaelic Athletic Association, which in turn became IRB recruiting grounds. This new dynamism originated in Belfast where it was driven by Denis McCullough and Bulmer Hobson.¹ They seemed most unlikely political allies. McCullough was the son of a veteran republican and a Catholic educated by the Christian Brothers, while Hobson came from a middle-class Quaker family and had attended Friends’ School Lisburn, where his study of Irish history had converted him into a disciple of Wolfe Tone. Despite an austere, intellectual and rather priggish personality, Hobson soon revealed himself to be a formidable organiser and a prolific journalist and propagandist. He was also a talented platform speaker, capable of popularising ideas and supporting his arguments with a multitude of facts and figures assembled through what his biographer has called a ‘voracious appetite for researching topics’.² Drawing lessons from Irish history, Hobson was constantly seeking ‘a line of action which was neither abject surrender nor futile insurrection’.³ Once he settled on that line Hobson pursued it with great single-mindedness and a self-righteousness and inflexibility that were always likely to aggravate his IRB colleagues. In March 1908 Hobson moved to Dublin where, by the eve of the First World War, he had had become arguably the most important – and certainly widest known – republican leader. With seemingly boundless energy Hobson was ‘at the apex of his IRB career’⁴ as chairman of its Dublin Centres Board, editor of the organisation’s journal, Irish Freedom, and member of the Supreme Council. In the capital Hobson worked closely with two allies, Tom Clarke and Sean MacDermott, and the story of Irish republicanism up to the Easter Rising was largely shaped by their fluctuating relationships; an association that began harmoniously but ultimately imploded into mutual loathing and an enmity that knew no cease.

Clarke was born in 1857 in the British military barracks on the Isle of Wight, the son of an English army sergeant married to a woman from Tipperary.⁵ The family eventually settled in Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, where Tom became involved in various nationalist societies and was sworn into the IRB by John Daly, a prominent republican. In search of employment, Clarke emigrated to New York where he met John Devoy, leader of the Clan na Gael. Soon the organisation sent him to England on a bombing mission which British agents infiltrated from the very start; Clarke’s arrest was inevitable. At the Old Bailey in May 1883 he conducted his own defence, but after deliberating for just over an hour the jury found him and three fellow defendants guilty of treason. When the judge sentenced them to penal servitude for life Clarke shouted to him: ‘Goodbye! We shall meet in heaven.’ He remembered being ‘hustled out of the dock into the prison van, surrounded by a troop of mounted police, and driven at a furious pace through the howling mob that thronged the streets from the Courthouse to Millbank Prison. London was panic-stricken at the time’.⁶

Like all other Irish ‘Special Men’, Clarke was soon transferred to Chatham Prison, the British equivalent of Devil’s Island. Usually there was no hope of release for twenty years and he endured a Calvary of ‘relentless savagery’ that involved physical hardship, perpetual silence, intellectual starvation and mental and emotional desolation. This regime was specifically designed to crush a prisoner’s body and spirit, something in which it normally succeeded well. Two fellow defendants went mad and the third was only released because of a serious heart condition. During three months of one cold winter Clarke spent forty days of punishment in the so-called Arctic cell, recalling later that ‘the horrors of those nights and days will never leave my memory’.⁷ He avoided insanity through his ‘unconquerable will’,⁸ endlessly practising mathematical calculation by counting the number of bricks in cells, bolts on doors and arrows and buttons on inmates’ clothes. Clarke’s salvation came suddenly in 1898 through a government amnesty. He re-emerged as a terribly damaged man, physically wizened, prematurely aged, socially inept, paralysingly shy and filled with hatred for British politicians and British rule in Ireland which he blamed for robbing him of the best years of his life. Yet at the same time he was also now a man ‘steeled and hardened, the embodiment of Fenianism, an impregnable rock’,⁹ convinced that he had survived for a purpose. Now more than ever committed to revolution, Clarke simply decided that he would start all over again.

Initially, Clarke didn’t envisage himself as the actual leader of a movement, and making his way to the summit of republicanism involved him in a long and somewhat twisted journey. Returning to Ireland in 1899, he fell in love with Kathleen Daly, the 21-year-old niece of his old friend John Daly. By marrying her Clarke was really joining a political clan and in Kathleen he had found a perfect soulmate whose ferocious political commitment matched his own, who worshipped him and gave him the support that sustained him for the rest of his life. In a later age she would have sat in her own right on the IRB’s Supreme Council. In 1900 Clarke emigrated once again from Ireland, partly to get a job but also because of his disappointment at the republican movement’s failure to strike a blow during England’s entanglement in the Boer War. By 1901 he was working in a New York pump room while serving his political apprenticeship under John Devoy, who was still the Clan leader. Devoy proved to be an excellent mentor who taught Clarke much about leadership and together they established a republican newspaper, the Gaelic American, with Tom as its general manager. By now Clarke was developing into an increasingly self-confident operator, a skilled organiser, manipulator and propagandist. However, by 1907 Kathleen’s temporary ill health had forced him to resign from the Gaelic American and move his family to a farm. When American newspapers began speculating about a coming Anglo-German war Tom decided to return home to be ready for such an opportunity. Although Kathleen would have happily stayed she knew that for her husband ‘everything began and ended with Ireland and her freedom’.¹⁰ The birth of the first of their three sons was a double delight for Tom because ‘having a son to follow him to carry on the fight for Ireland’s freedom was almost too good to be true’.¹¹ The Clarke who landed at Cork in November 1907 was very different from the naïve young man of a quarter of a century earlier. Now more rounded and experienced, with Devoy’s endorsement, he brought with him a vision of rejuvenating the Irish Republican Brotherhood by recruiting men of action and setting it on a course to revolution.

Clarke was soon co-opted on to the Supreme Council, and he carried on his political activities discreetly from a tobacconist’s shop that he set up at 75a Parnell Street. This apparently humdrum public front for his subterranean activities suited him very well because as a ‘ticket-of-leave’ man he could be returned to jail instantly if he too blatantly violated the terms of his amnesty. Clarke’s charisma and implacable purpose rapidly made him an iconic figure, someone whose sacrifices and triumphant survival were inspirational; a towering personality whose shop became almost a shrine to republicans from all over Ireland.

The store was of a size that did not permit more than half a dozen men to stand in front of the counter at a time. There was just about enough space between the counter and the wall for two men to walk in together. Along the wall were arranged all of the important Dublin and Irish newspapers, weekly and monthly periodicals, and so forth. Behind the short and narrow counter was a large assortment of brands of tobacco, cigars, pipes and cigarettes, with a sideline of stationery. The window was occupied mainly by a cardboard representation of an Irish round tower, advertising the Banba brand of Irish tobacco. Both the window and the store itself were brilliantly lighted, and the whole place suggested care and attention and spotless cleanliness.

But the store and its attractiveness were forgotten after the first glance at the man who stood behind the counter. Of medium height, with grey hair thinning away from the temples, dark blue eyes deeply sunken under shaggy brows and high cheekbones standing up in startling prominence from thin, sunken cheeks, the general appearance of the man was keenness personified. Seemingly nearing his seventies, he was, nevertheless, possessed of a force and vigour that might well have been envied by men in their early thirties. The truth was that the man was in the prime of life. Brutality and confinement, however, had left on his features a mark that death alone could remove, but had been powerless to subdue the fire that glowed within and animated every thought and action of his life.¹²

Another visitor recalled Clarke’s piercing eyes and the assiduous manner in which he collected information: ‘He knew what was taking place in all Irish organisations as the IRB had members in all, but to the stranger he knew nothing outside the news in the press.’¹³

It took a few years for Clarke to winkle out those leaders who had presided over the IRB’s decline, but in that time he protected and advanced talented younger protégés. Clarke also revived the pilgrimage to Wolfe Tone’s grave at Bodenstown, organised an annual commemoration of Robert Emmet’s birth and in 1911 inspired the founding of Irish Freedom, a journal whose influence far exceeded its circulation. By then his drive and vision had brought him to the top of the republican movement.

With Sean MacDermott he also established the political friendship of his life, a somewhat unlikely partnership that more than any other inspired the Easter Rising.¹⁴ MacDermott was born the son of a farmer in 1884 in Co. Leitrim, and after leaving home at 15 he had worked successively in Glasgow and then Belfast as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Dedication
• Contents
• Authors’ Note
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The Planning of the Easter Rising: Part One
• 2 The Planning of the Easter Rising: Part Two
• 3 The First Morning of the Rising and St Stephen’s Green
• 4 Boland’s Bakery
• 5 Jacob’s Factory and the South Dublin Union
• 6 The Four Courts and the Mendicity Institution
• 7 The General Post Office
• 8 A City at War
• 9 The Rising outside Dublin
• 10 Suppression, Courts Martial and Executions
• Bibliography
• Copyright