1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  O’FARRELL: The Commandant of the Irish Republican Army wishes to treat with the Commandant of the British forces in Ireland.

  PORTAL: The Irish Republican Army? – the Sinn Feiners, you mean.

  O’FARRELL: No, the Irish Republican Army they call themselves and I think that is a very good name, too.

  PORTAL: Will Pearse be able to be moved on a stretcher?

  O’FARRELL: Commandant Pearse doesn’t need a stretcher.

  PORTAL (turning to another officer): Take that Red Cross off her and bring her over there and search her – she’s a spy.

  However, General Lowe, who combined the sending of men to the slaughter with an old-world courtesy, behaved in a more gentlemanly fashion. He sent her back to Pearse in a motor car to Moore Street with a note and a verbal message to the effect that there would be no negotiation, only an unconditional surrender. Lowe’s only concession was that he would accept the surrender of the other commandants. After surrendering to Lowe, who was accompanied by his son John, Pearse was taken before General Maxwell at the headquarters of the Irish Command at Parkgate Street. Here he had what Maxwell’s biographer has described as a ‘short and stern’ interview with the General, who demanded and got the instrument of surrender (see picture section).

  After signing the order, Pearse was locked in a sitting room (which later became the office of the Irish Minister for Defence) with Lowe’s aide, Major de Courcy Wheeler, who was ordered to shoot him if he tried to escape. However, de Courcy Wheeler wrote later, Pearse merely ‘smiled at me across the table and did not seem in the least perturbed’. De Courcy Wheeler also took part in the last act of Edward Daly’s surrender. The British were impressed with Daly’s bearing and allowed him to march from the Four Courts at the head of his men, carrying their rifles to the surrender point, the Gresham Hotel in Sackville Street. When Lowe saw the weapons he told de Courcy Wheeler to order the men to lay down the guns. Daly, however, intercepted the command, stepping forward as if he were on parade and issuing normal drill instructions. The men obeyed him smartly and de Courcy Wheeler was so impressed that involuntarily he exchanged salutes with Daly. Watching his aide salute, Lowe was heard to exclaim:58 ‘God! Saluting a rebel!’

  It took some time for the surrender order to be accepted. Connolly countersigned Pearse’s order when it was brought to him in the Red Cross Hospital in Dublin Castle, but wrote on it: ‘I agree to these conditions for the men only under my command in the Moore Street District and for the men in the St Stephen’s Green Command’. Two priests had to visit Pearse in his cell in Arbour Hill Detention barracks on Sunday to get a copy, dated 30 April, for the men in the Church Street area. Ashe sent Richard Mulcahy under safe conduct to the cell also the same day and only surrendered when Mulcahy returned to tell him that Pearse had said it was no use holding out. When two Wexford Volunteers, Sean Etchingham and Seamus Doyle were brought to him later he gave them another copy of the surrender order whispering to them to hide their arms in safe places. ‘They will be needed later’, he said. When Elizabeth O’Farrell presented de Valera with the order he at first refused to accept it, fearing that it was a trap. Some of his hesitancy was due to the fact that rumours of captured soldiers being shot out of hand on the Western Front were common in Dublin. In his case, the sort of slaughter which precipitated such action had occurred, not on the far away battlefield, but a few hundred yards away under his command. Moreover, his men had not been in action and wanted to fight on, but they were persuaded that surrender was the only way to spare de Valera’s life. He was not fully convinced that it would be spared, and took along a captured cadet, G. F. Mackay, to witness his surrender, so that at least he would not be shot out of hand. He told his captors:59 ‘Do what you like with me, but I demand proper treatment for my men’.

  When the men realised that de Valera had surrendered, they took some convincing before they themselves gave up, emerging from the bakery still carrying their rifles and refusing to carry a white flag which had to be borne by a Red Cross worker. Nevertheless, despite these ambiguities, de Valera would be remembered as the only Commandant of 1916 to survive the firing squads. Dubliners would remember the flag on the tower incident and a remark he made as he was marched to a holding centre at the Ballsbridge Showground (the Spring Show had at last come to an end). Passing No. 25 Northumberland Road where the gallant Malone had died, he looked at the people coming out of their homes to bring tea to the soldiers guarding him and his men and said bitterly: ‘If you had only come out with hayforks.’

  Where the GPO garrison were concerned Murphy’s law continued to operate. The fine weather with which the Rising opened turned to drizzle at its close as the prisoners were corralled on the open ground behind the Rotunda where the Volunteers had been founded. Another ironic choice of location by the British was the taking over of Tom Clarke’s shop as a centre of operations. Initially, Michael Collins had derived some comfort from the fact that the tricolour somehow survived the holocaust and still flew over the GPO, but that piece of symbolism proved inedaquate to ward off the effects of the psychological let-down after the surrender. To this, the strain of the week, hunger and in particular, thirst, and the damp and depression of a sleepless night in the open were added to the humiliations imposed on the prisoners by the officer in charge, a Captain Lee-Wilson.

  He had some of the prisoners stripped, among them Tom Clarke, and paraded on the steps of the Rotunda for the benefit of the nurses looking out of the adjoining hospital windows. Clarke had sustained a bullet wound in the elbow during pistol practice and Captain Lee-Wilson ordered that the bandage be torn off, opening the wound. Michael Collins tried to comfort the older man, attempting to keep him warm during the night by wrapping his arms around him. When the prisoners were eventually ordered to march to a detention centre a couple of miles away Lee-Wilson ordered that Sean MacDermott’s stick be taken from him. Polio had rendered MacDermott unable to walk without it and he had to be carried towards his fate by a comrade. One of Lee-Wilson’s ukases was an order that the prisoners be forced to relieve themselves where they lay. Michael Collins survived to relieve himself for all this in another fashion some years later by having the same Lee-Wilson shot.

  The Rising had killed and severely wounded some 1350 people. The centre of Dublin was gutted. Approximately 61,000 square yards of buildings were destroyed. Damage was estimated at some £2,500,000 Sterling in the values of the day. On top of this, approximately one-third of the city’s population had to be given public relief. The interruption of food supplies meant that throughout the week the threat of starvation had hung over the city. The initial outrage that greeted all this was hardly surprising. Dubliners, some with husbands and relatives at the Front, had hooted and jeered at the prisoners as they were marched through the city they had shattered. Vegetables were thrown at them, even the contents of chamberpots, as they passed by, dirty, weary, hungry, yet still with sufficient defiance in their ranks for some to continue singing their ‘scaffold songs’. The metamorphosis of this band of bungling idealists into a host of heroes is one of the most amazing transformations in Irish history.

  General Maxwell played a pivotal role in the transformation. He later prepared a memo for Asquith explaining his actions:

  In view of the gravity of the Rebellion and its connection with German intrigue and propaganda and in view of the great loss of life and destruction of property resulting therefrom, the General Officer Commanding in Chief Irish Command, has found it imperative to inflict the most severe sentences on the organisers of this detestable Rising and on the Commanders who took an actual part in the actual fighting which occurred. It is hoped that these examples will be sufficient to act as a deterrent to intriguers and to bring home to them that the murder of Her Majesty’s subjects or other acts calculated to imperil the safety of the realm will not be tolerated.

  This policy created a public relations disaster. The day after the surrender, prisoners were marched to Richmond Barracks where they were
screened by the ‘G Men’ (the political wing of the police force), for court-martial and the death sentence. For reasons we shall shortly explore, the conduct of the actual court-martial itself also angered public opinion. As can be seen from the following list, those executed included not only the leaders of the Rising but some of those who had fought most bravely:

  P. H. Pearse shot in Dublin May 3

  Tom Clarke shot in Dublin May 3

  Thomas MacDonagh shot in Dublin May 3

  Joseph Plunkett shot in Dublin May 4

  Edward Daly shot in Dublin May 4

  William Pearse shot in Dublin May 4

  Michael O’Hanrahan shot in Dublin May 4

  John MacBride shot in Dublin May 5

  Eamonn Kent shot in Dublin May 8

  Michael Mallin shot in Dublin May 8

  Con Colbert shot in Dublin May 8

  Sean Heuston shot in Dublin May 8

  Sean MacDermott shot in Dublin May 12

  James Connolly shot in Dublin May 12

  Thomas Kent shot in Cork May 9

  Roger Casement Hanged in Pentonville Prison (London) August 3

  In terms of the daily slaughter on the Western Front the totals were not high, but coming against the background of Conservative and Unionist opposition to Home Rule, those executions changed Irish history. The rebellion was not even over when the Glasgow Observer of 29 April, 1916, after making some ritual condemnations of the Rising, went on to say:

  No Irish Nationalist should grovel to his British neighbour over what happened in Dublin on Monday. It was simply the consequences of what happened earlier at Larne when the associates and followers of Sir Edward Carson flouted and defied the law of the land, held up its legal guardians and engaged in military operations…. Hand in glove with them in the lawlessness was Mr Bonar Law, now a Coalition Minister and Sir F. E. Smith, then Carson’s ‘galloper’, now Attorney General for England. The Carsonite Rebellion, for that is what it was, was not merely tolerated and utilised by the whole Tory Party…Larne begat Dublin.

  On 6 May, Maxwell had been summoned before the Cabinet and warned that no woman was to be executed (Asquith, it seems, had already vetoed Countess Markievicz’s execution) and that only the ringleaders and proved murderers should be shot. But as the days passed, the executions continued, ordered in secret court martials, which gave the public no inkling of who had been sentenced or who was next, and spread out in a manner which readers may assess for themselves from the dates given above. With every firing squad volley, more and more people came to agree with the Glasgow Observer’s opinion: ‘Larne begat Dublin’. The swing in public opinion saved de Valera’s life. He had been due to be shot after Connolly, but was one of those whose sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. No one denied that the rebels had fought bravely and fairly. Asquith began to find himself under pressure from public opinion to halt the executions. Irish Americans were particularly denunciatory and England desperately needed American assistance in the war. Asquith himself displayed no anti-Irish feeling. In a remarkably fair-minded assessment for any Englishman in the circumstances, let alone a Prime Minister, he told the House of Commons:60

  So far as the great body of the insurgents is concerned I have no hesitation in saying in public that they conducted themselves with great humanity which contrasted very much to their advantage with some of the so-called civilised enemies with which we are fighting in Europe. That admission I gladly make and the House will gladly hear it. They were young men; often lads. They were misled, almost unconsciously I believe, into this terrible business. They fought very bravely and did not resort to outrage.

  Well aware of what was happening to Irish public opinion, the Irish Parliamentary Party appealed both publicly and privately that the executions be stopped. In the House of Commons John Dillon pointed out to the Prime Minister that it was the first rebellion in Irish history in which the people had aided the Government but that the Government response had been martial law and executions: ‘It is not murderers who are being executed,’ he said; ‘it is insurgents who fought a clean fight, a brave fight’. Privately John Redmond warned Asquith that the executions were destroying what was left of the credibility of his party. Even within his own ranks the cracks were showing. Dillon, for example, visited the prisoners after they were transferred to jails in England and congratulated them on the fight they had put up. In a notably prophetic and courageous protest, given that he was living in wartime England, dependent on the British public for his livelihood, George Bernard Shaw wrote:61

  My own view is that the men who were shot in cold blood, after their capture or surrender, were prisoners of war, and that it was therefore, entirely incorrect to slaughter them. The relation of Ireland to Dublin Castle is, in this respect, precisely that of the Balkan States to Turkey, to Belgium or the City of Lille to the Kaiser, and of the United States to Great Britain.

  Until Dublin Castle is superseded by a National Parliament and Ireland voluntarily incorporated with the British Empire, as Canada, Australasia, and South Africa have been incorporated, an Irishman resorting to arms to achieve the independence of his country is doing only what Englishmen will do, if it be their misfortune to be invaded and conquered by the Germans in the course of the present war. Further, such an Irishman is as much in order morally in accepting assistance from the Germans, in his struggle with England, as England is in accepting the assistance of Russia in her struggle with Germany. The fact that he knows that his enemies will not respect his rights if they catch him, and that he must, therefore, fight with a rope round his neck, increases his risk, but adds in the same measure to his glory in the eyes of his compatriots and of the disinterested admirers of patriotism throughout the world. It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet. The shot Irishmen will now take their places beside Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Serbia and Belgium in Europe; and nothing in Heaven or earth can prevent it…

  The Military authorities and the English Government must have known that they were canonising their prisoners…

  I remain an Irishman, and am bound to contradict any implication that I can regard as a traitor any Irishman taken in a fight for Irish Independence against the British Government, which was a fair fight in everything except the enormous odds my countrymen had to face.

  There were, of course, other Irishmen who did not share Shaw’s view. On the day that Kent and Mallin were shot James Craig rose in the House to ask Asquith: ‘What steps had been taken to clear out members of the Sinn Fein Society from the Postal Service, Land Commission and other Government Departments?’ A memorial was signed by 763 of Dublin’s leading citizens, all of them Unionists, protesting against any interference with the discretion of the Commanders in Chief of the forces in Ireland and the operation of martial law. The Irish Independent and the Irish Times were both virulently hostile to the rebels, as was the Irish Catholic, which termed the Rising ‘as criminal as it was insane… traiterous and treacherous’. Both the Independent and the Irish Catholic were owned by William Martin Murphy who had been Larkin and Connolly’s principal opponent during the great lockout of 1913. On 10 May, after noting that some leaders were still awaiting sentence (including Connolly), the Independent’s leading article continued:

  When, however we come to some of the ringleader, instigators and fomentors not yet dealt with, we must make an exception. If these men are treated with too great leniency, they will take it as an indication of weakness on the part of the Government…let the worst of the rebels be singled out and dealt with as they deserve.

  The Irish Times also wanted blood, thundering that the ‘rapine and bloodshed of the past week must be punished with a severity which will make any repetition of them impossible for many years to come’.

  In a classic display of loyalty not to the Crown, but the half-crown, on the day that
MacBride was shot the Dublin Chamber of Commerce wrote to Buckingham Palace protesting the loyalty of the Chamber to the Crown and its abhorrence of the action of ‘a section of the community’. However, the Chamber averred that the acts of murder and carnage would not have occurred were it not for the ‘gross and imponderable laxity, long continued’ of the Irish Government. As a result, the Chamber had decided that ‘rebuilding costs etc should be provided by the Imperial Treasury without delay…’

  Later, on the Nationalist side, in his poem Easter 1916, Yeats summed up the feelings of the thoughtful, torn between a feeling that on the one hand had the Rising not occurred, the British might yet have played fair over Home Rule, and on the other a troubling recognition that now that it had occurred a whole new situation had been created:62

  Was it needless death after all?

  For England may keep faith

  …MacDonagh and MacBride

  And Connolly and Pearse

  Now and in time to be,

  Wherever green is worn,

  Are changed, changed utterly:

  A terrible beauty is born.

  In an effort to see for himself what was happening Asquith visited Dublin and saw the prisoners in Richmond Barracks (now Griffith Barracks). He pronounced them ‘very good-looking fellows with such lovely eyes’ and ordered that they should be thoroughly screened to ensure that they really were involved in the Rising. By then it had become obvious that in the post-Rising round-up, the British had swooped on people who were not even Gaelic Leaguers never mind physical force men. Apart from the captured insurgents themselves more than double the number who had actually taken part in the Rising were rounded up. Asquith did attempt to introduce Home Rule, but his proposal that the Act should go into operation as the war raged nearly broke up the strongly Unionist coalition. One member, Lord Selborne, actually resigned and the form of Government which contributed so much to the outbreak of the Rising was reinstituted in August 1916 with Wimborne becoming Lord Lieutenant once more and H. E. Duke becoming Chief Secretary. The appointments further underlined the increasing irrelevance of Redmond’s party, and for Nationalists at least, furnished an answer to Yeats’s suggestion that England might ‘keep faith’.