The 1916 Easter Rising

1916 — On Easter Monday 1916, a small band of rebels seized the centre of Dublin and proclaimed an Irish Republic. Their defeat, and the executions that followed, changed the course of Irish history.

On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, around 1,600 men and women took to the streets of Dublin to strike for Irish freedom. The rising was planned in secret by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and carried out by the Irish Volunteers together with James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army. A countermanding order from the Volunteer leader Eoin MacNeill — issued after the plans were discovered and a German arms shipment aboard the Aud was lost — meant far fewer turned out than intended.

The rebels seized the General Post Office (the GPO) on Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street) as their headquarters, and occupied buildings across the city. From the steps of the GPO, the schoolteacher and poet Patrick Pearse read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which declared Ireland a sovereign, independent state and guaranteed equal rights to all its citizens.

The Rising was led by the seven men who signed that Proclamation: Thomas Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamonn Ceannt and Joseph Plunkett. Other garrisons were commanded by figures who would loom large in later Irish history, among them Éamon de Valera at Boland's Mill and Countess Constance Markievicz, second-in-command at St Stephen's Green.

For six days the rebels held out. The British authorities poured in thousands of reinforcements, brought up artillery, and used the gunboat Helga to shell the city centre. Fierce fighting raged — nowhere more bloodily than at Mount Street Bridge, where a handful of Volunteers inflicted heavy losses on advancing British soldiers. Much of the centre of Dublin was reduced to smoking ruins. By the end, some 485 people had been killed, the majority of them civilians caught in the crossfire.

With the GPO ablaze and the city devastated, Pearse ordered an unconditional surrender on Saturday 29 April to prevent further slaughter of civilians. The nurse Elizabeth O'Farrell carried the surrender notice through the streets to the British lines. The rebels were marched into captivity, jeered at first by many Dubliners who blamed them for the destruction.

Then came the event that turned everything. Between 3 and 12 May 1916, fourteen of the leaders were shot by firing squad in the stonebreakers' yard of Kilmainham Gaol (a fifteenth, Thomas Kent, was executed in Cork, and Roger Casement was later hanged in London). Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh were the first to die, on 3 May. Joseph Plunkett was executed hours after marrying his sweetheart Grace Gifford in the prison chapel. Most terribly of all, James Connolly — so badly wounded that he could not stand — was carried in on a stretcher and tied to a chair to be shot, on 12 May.

The bodies of the executed men were not returned to their families. They were taken to Arbour Hill, laid in a mass grave without coffins, covered in quicklime, and the grave filled in. Today a wall behind that grave bears the words of the Proclamation, in Irish and in English.

The executions, drawn out over ten days, horrified the public. Sympathy that had been absent during the Rising now swelled into open support for independence. As the poet W. B. Yeats wrote, "All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born." Within a few years, the ideals of Easter 1916 would carry Ireland to independence.