1916- the Easter Rising

by Tim Pat Coogan

  Things had changed so much from the time of Hannaway’s ordeal that a former top Provisional apologist and activist, the writer Danny Morrison, who has written a play about Pearse, said on RTE69 as this was being written that when he first went into Long Kesh, the evidence of Pearse’s influence was widespread amongst the prisoners in their writings, poetry, design of artefacts and so on. But with equal parts candour and realpolitique, Morrison said that at this stage in the Republican struggle, the Provisionals had adopted a ‘fundamentalist position’. There was a great difference between those days and the contemporary era, when Sinn Fein was trying ‘to manage a Peace Process’.

  As Morrison spoke, the wing of Republicanism that does not view Pearse merely as an outdated ‘fundamentalist’ was gaining recruits by the week. The American State Department70 reckons that the Real IRA, which bombed Omagh and has made repeated attacks on London, has doubled its size since 1999. As a result, the US has placed the Real IRA on its list of banned terrorist organisations which it is a crime to support.

  However, of far more importance than the continuing reputation of an Irish icon, are the equally continuing evidences that the forces which led to 1916 have still not fully died away. In the spring of 2001, during a Westminster election campaign, it became increasingly evident that the progress of the Good Friday Agreement was becoming disturbingly reminiscent of the path of the Home Rule Movement. Firstly, after the ceasefire was declared in August 1994, the Tories in October introduced a new and retarding factor – the decommissioning argument. Although their guns stayed silent, an attempt was made to force the IRA to give up their weapons before they could be admitted to peace talks. Because of this demand, the Peace Process broke down in February of 1996 with the Canary Wharf bombing, but was reinstituted through a combination of American intervention and New Labour’s coming to power, independent of the Ulster Unionist MPs at Westminster on whom John Major’s administration had depended in its internecine war with the Eurosceptics.

  The result of the reinstatement – the Good Friday Agreement – was greeted with a Home Rule-like majority of approval in referenda north and south of the border and widely welcomed in ‘the UK mainland’. Yet, at the time of writing, the Agreement is not secure. The fundamentally anti-Catholic, anti-Nationalist wing of Unionism, which joins the Orange Order and votes for Ian Paisley, has made of the Agreement the contemporary variant of the Home Rule issue. Under pressure from this wing the allegedly pro-Agreement segment of Unionism, the Official Unionist Party led by David Trimble, baulked at the idea of sharing power with Sinn Fein and seeks to out-Paisley Paisley in its stentorian demands for decommissioning.

  Furthermore, far from meeting the Republican’s counterdemands for demilitarisation, the British Army issued a secret directive71 stating that the Army’s objective was to maintain a standing army of at least 10,000 troops in Northern Ireland for the foreseeable future. This was in spite of the fact that at the time the three sovereign governments involved were actively engaged in Peace talks. By way of underlining this viewpoint, the Army built large, expensive forts in the heart of Nationalist areas after the Ceasefire was declared. New Labour has not been any more successful in preventing this situation than was Old Labour during the Workers’ Strike of 1974, nor for that matter, the Liberals in the days of Field-Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. The hope of majority opinion on the island of Ireland is that somewhere, somehow, a centre will be found in Unionism that will deliver on the Good Friday Agreement, that the decommissioning problem will be defused and not replaced by some other ploy, that the rise of the Real IRA will be checked, and that the huge majority of people in favour of peace in the island of Ireland will get their way.

  This is, in a sense, where we came in – with Unionist opposition to the huge majority in favour of Home Rule, and a small and unrepresentative IRB determined to seize the moment whenever it should arise. True, the Conservative backing for the Unionists is the palest of pale shadows compared with what it was in the days of Milner and Kipling. Nevertheless, as the last days of John Major’s government showed, the Conservatives were prepared to play a modern version of the Orange Card in return for Unionist votes at Westminster. It cannot be overlooked that it was the Conservatives who introduced the decommissioning issue into the situation after the Provisional ceasefire was declared. Where the IRB factor is concerned, a spokesperson for the Real IRA explained the movement’s policy to me:

  The Unionists will never agree to anything, and when it comes to the crunch, the British won’t force them. And in any event, what business do the British have in Ireland anyhow? Force is the only thing they’ll listen to.

  The Provisional IRA has agreed to legitimise the British presence, recognise the border and place its faith in Sinn Fein’s political methods and demographic change. My own belief is that the problem will one day – and perhaps sooner than people believe – be solved by the forces of demography. The results of the census taken on 29 April, 2001 are expected to make it clear that the Nationalist population of the six counties is increasing enormously while that of the Protestants is ageing and diminishing. Unfortunately for the prospects of enlightened political leadership emerging within the Unionist community and acting in the light of this demographic inevitability, its youth is increasingly obtaining its third level education in the UK whence it does not return. But Ian Paisley’s son, who is following in his father’s ideological and political footsteps, shows no sign of emigrating, and the British forts still stand provocatively in places like Belfast, Armagh and Tyrone. The Real IRA profits accordingly. So long as these factors obtain, one cannot close the book on 1916. As Yeats wrote after the Rising:

  But who can talk of give and take

  What should be and what not

  While those dead men are loitering there

  To stir the boiling pot.

  For those new comrades they have found

  Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone, …

  Since Yeats wrote those words Lord Edward and Wolfe Tone have gained many ‘new comrades’, including Bobby Sands and the hunger strikers of 1981. To the dismay of Nationalists, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, John Reid, temporarily suspended the Stormont Assembly during August 2001 as a ploy to head off David Trimble’s threatened resignation as First Minister of the Northern Assembly over the decommissioning issue. In fact, the correct course would have been to hold new elections. On 14 August, 2001 the IRA responded to this move by withdrawing an offer to cooperate over decommissioning. Nationalists fear that the Unionists are merely using the decommissioning argument in order to avoid sharing power with Catholics, reacting towards the Good Friday Agreement as did their ancestors to the Home Rule Bill almost a century ago. The narrative continues.

  Select Bibliography

  Readers wishing to pursue the subject of 1916 further will find substantial bibliographies in the scaled-down list which I hereby append. Of my own writings, The IRA (HarperCollins), Michael Collins and de Valera (Hutchinson) deal with 1916 and in the bibliographies and references indicate where further studies may be pursued. Of works written by contemporary figures, I would recommend Piaras Beaslai’s Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland and Dorothy Macardle’s The Irish Republic, the latter in particular for documents and speeches. Beaslai, being a knowledgeable participant himself, brings unrivalled insights to bear. From the British side, there are the biographies of Sir Henry Wilson by C. E. Callwell (Cassell), and General Sir John Maxwell by Sir George Arthur, which though it does not say much about 1916, does give a valuable insight into the military mindset of the time. Also recommended is The Revolution in Ireland by W. Alison Phillips (Longman’s). For an insight into how the Dublin Castle system worked, and how the then Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell thought and acted, there are Leon O’Broin’s Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising and The Chief Secretary, a biography of Birrell. For an informed Unionist perspective, there is Patrick Buckland’s Ulster Unionism (Gill & Macmillan), and A.T.Q. Stewart’s Th
e Ulster Crisis. For the actual events of Easter week, there is Edgar Holt’s Protest in Arms (Putnam), and above all, Max Caulfield’s Easter Rebellion (Muller). For this classic work, Caulfield conducted hundreds of interviews with the participants on both sides, as well as drawing on contemporary sources. Both for mentality and the inner machinations of the IRB, there is Sean Cronin’s The McGarrity Papers (Anvil). And, also for mentality, there is nothing in print to equal Piaras MacLochlainn’s Last Words, a compendium of the last letters and statements of the executed 1916 leaders, printed by the Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society, Dublin, 1971.

  Endnotes

  1. Cathleen Ni Houlihan, W. B. Yeats, 1902, The Collected Plays of W. B. Yeats, Macmillan, New York, 1934.

  2. For Churchill’s and other Conservative and Unionist policies and speeches see Ulster Unionism, Patrick Buckland, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1973.

  3. The Irish Republic, Dorothy Macardle (4th ed.), Irish Press, Dublin, 1951.

  4. Ibid.

  5. Quoted in Wherever Green is Worn, Tim Pat Coogan, Hutchinson, London, 2000.

  6. The Year of Liberty, Thomas Pakenham, Literary Guild, London, 1969.

  7. Macardle, op.cit.

  8. Coogan, op.cit.

  9. For a lucid and enlightened account of Irish developments from the Famine to the 1916 period, readers are recommended to Ireland Since the Famine, F. S. L. Lyons, Charles Scribner & Sons, New York, 1971.

  10. For this and subsequent Conservative and Unionist comments, unless otherwise stated, see Buckland, op.cit.

  11. Edward Carson, A. T. Q. Stewart, Gill’s Irish Lives series, published by Gill & Macmillan, Dublin from 1971 onwards.

  12. In addition to Buckland, see A.T.Q Stewart’s masterly account of the period in The Ulster Crisis, Resistance to Home Rule, 1912, Faber & Faber, London, 1967.

  13. Quoted in The IRA, Tim Pat Coogan, HarperCollins, London, 2000.

  14. Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland, Piaras Beaslai, Vol. 1, Phoenix, Dublin, 1926.

  15. Quoted in Michael Collins, Tim Pat Coogan, Hutchinson, London, 1990.

  16. Ireland Since the Rising, Tim Pat Coogan, Pall Mall, London, 1966.

  17. Stewart, op.cit., contains the best account of the episode.

  18. The McGarrity Papers, Sean Cronin, Anvil, Tralee, 1972.

  19. Both equally well described in The Untold Story, the Irish in Canada, Robert O’Driscoll & Lorna Reynolds ed., Celtic Arts of Canada, Toronto, 1988.

  20. Macardle, op.cit.

  21. Cronin, op.cit.

  22. Macardle, op.cit.

  23. Cronin, op.cit.

  24. Macardle, op.cit.

  25. Last Words, Piaras F. MacLochlainn, Kilmainham Jail Restoration Society, Dublin, 2000.

  26. Asgard, W. Nixon & Capt. Eric Healy, Coiste an Asgard, Dublin, 2000.

  27. The Chief Secretary, Leon O’Broin, Chatto & Windus, London, 1969.

  28. See Sean T. O’Kelly, quoted by Macardle, op.cit. and Joseph Lee in Revising the Rising, Ni Dhonnachadha and Theo Dorgan, eds., Field Day, Derry, 1991.

  29. Interview with author at Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes offices, Dublin, 1965.

  30. Macardle, op.cit.

  31. Beaslai, op.cit.

  32. Quoted in The Easter Rebellion, Max Caulfield, Frederick Muller, London, 1963.

  33. Lloyd George, Memoirs of the War, Vol. 1, Odhams, London, 1938.

  34. Birrell to the Royal Commission on Ireland, 1916, quoted by Macardle, op.cit.

  35. For Birrell’s Irish career, see Leon O’Broin’s The Chief Secretary, Chatto & Windus, London, 1969 and Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising, Sidgwick &: Jackson, London, 1970.

  36. Beaslai, op.cit.

  37. Dublin Castle and the 1916 Rising, Leon O’Broin, Sidgwick & Jackson, London, 1970.

  38. 1916 Paper, Box 5608, no.6588, Irish National Archives.

  39. For the German contacts with the Irish situation see the works of Cronin, Macardle and Stewart already cited. Also Robert Montieth’s Casement’s Last Adventure, Dublin, 1953 and The Mystery of the Casement Ship, Karl Spindler, Berlin, 1931.

  40. Both Caulfield and Macardle gave excellent accounts of the final confrontation within the Volunteers on the eve of the Rising.

  41. Macardle, op.cit.

  42. Cronin, op.cit.

  43. Caulfield, op.cit.

  44. Michael Collins, Tim Pat Coogan, Hutchinson, London, 1990.

  45. Ibid.

  46. Caulfield, op.cit.

  47. The texts of the various Proclamations which appear in this work can be found in either Macardle or Caulfield.

  48. Six Days of the Irish Republic, William Redmond-Howard, Dublin, 1916.

  49. On Another Man’s Wound, Ernie O’Malley, Anvil Books, Tralee, 1979.

  50. Caulfield, op.cit.

  51. Coogan, Michael Collins, op.cit.

  52. Redmond-Howard, op.cit.

  53. Caulfield, op.cit.

  54. Redmond-Howard, op.cit.

  55. Quoted in Michael Collins, Tim Pat Coogan.

  56. Max Caulfield’s account of the last hours in the GPO can hardly be bettered, but readers seeking more information are also recommended to a number of works by survivors of the fighting cited in his bibliography, specifically those by Desmond Ryan and Sean MacLaughlin. Though not a participant, Edgar Holt’s Protest in Arms 1916–23, Putnam, 1960 is also worth reading.

  57. Quoted by MacLochlainn in Last Words.

  58. MacLochlainn, op.cit.

  59. Quoted by Tim Pat Coogan in de Valera, Long Fellow, Long Shadow, Hutchinson, London, 1993.

  60. Quoted by Macardle, op.cit.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Yeats’s Poems, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1989 et seq, Norman Jeffares, ed.

  63. WO 141/21 and W141.27, PRO, London.

  64. Quoted by MacLochlainn, op.cit.

  65. Quoted by Tim Pat Coogan in Ireland Since the Rising, Pall Mall, London, 1966.

  66. Quoted in MacLochlainn, op.cit.

  67. Grace Gifford Plunkett and Irish Freedom, Marie O’Neill, Irish Academic Press, Dublin, 2001.

  68. Quoted by MacLochlainn, op.cit.

  69. The interview took place as part of the major programme on Pearse’s life put out by the studio to commemorate the Rising’s anniversary in 2001.

  70. State Department announcement, 30 April, 2001.

  71. GOC Directive to Senior Officers, Northern Ireland, 1997, quoted by Tony Geraghty, The Irish War, HarperCollins, 1998.

  About the Author

  Tim Pat Coogan, one of Ireland’s most prominent journalists, is also well known as an historian, broadcaster and writer. He has appeared on television in most English-speaking countries and throughout Europe, and has written for a number of Irish, European and American publications, including the Sunday Times and the New York Times. He was appointed editor of the Irish Press in 1968. His first book, Ireland Since the Rising (1966), was the first history of that period. His definitive history, The IRA, which has been constantly revised and updated, followed in 1970, and The Irish: A Personal View was published in 1975. He has written biographies of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera. His most recent books include The Irish Civil War (with George Morrison, 1998), The Irish Diaspora (2001) and Ireland in the Twentieth Century (2004), A Memoir (2008), The Famine Plot: England’s Role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (2012) and 1916: The Mornings After (2015).

  Illustrations

  The Citizen Army at Liberty Hall: The headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union bearing the banner ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland!’ Collection Sean O’Mahoney;

  Constance Markievicz was a founder member of the Citizen Army and fought with the rebels at St Stephen’s Green and the Royal College of Surgeons. She continued to take a prominent part in Irish politics until her death in 1927. National Museum of Ireland;

  Mary Spring-Rice and Mrs Childers photographed by Erskine Childers on his yacht, the Asgard, holding imported arms which were successf
ully landed at Howth Harbour. National Museum of Ireland

  Volunteers march to Howth to meet the Asgard and offload the rifles. National Museum of Ireland;

  Lord Wimbourne inspecting troops at Dublin Castle. He became Lord Lieutenant in 1915 and urged that stronger action be taken against the Volunteers in the period before the Rising. Cashman Collection

  A key figure in the Irish Republican Brotherhood and one of the seven signatories to the declaration of the Irish Republic, Padraig Pearse’s ideal was a free and Gaelic Ireland, shown here in his barrister’s robes. He was executed on 3 May 1916 after the Rising.

  This historic document, issued by Thomas MacDonagh, countersigned by Pearse, called all Volunteers to a parade on Easter Sunday. National Museum of Ireland;

  The rebels met no resistance at the GPO. Crowds viewed their activities with some amusement until weapons were produced. Collection Tom Graves

  Michael Collins was one of the few Volunteers dressed in full uniform during the Rising. Collins introduced the art of guerrilla warfare to Ireland and the world. Collection Tom Graves