To What Extent Was the Failure of the Easter Rising Due To Internal Divisions?

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TO WHAT EXTENT WAS THE FAILURE OF THE EASTER RISING DUE TO INTERNAL DIVISIONS?

The Easter Rising of 1916 had profound and far-reaching effects on Ireland’s subsequent history.  It has been referred to as “The Irish War of Independence” and was the pivotal event in ultimately securing independence for the Republic of Ireland.

  Hindsight has its defects as well as its advantages.  Because the 1916 rising has lodged itself so firmly in the mythology of Irish revolution it has been easy to regard it as inevitable.  But it was far from inevitable.  Apart altogether from the internal divisions among the leaders which almost paralysed it at the start, the conditions precedent for a truly national insurrection were simply not in evidence.  This was the point above all others that Macneill had tried to drive into the heads of his colleagues when in February 1916 he set down on paper the pros and cons of a rebellion.

  For considerable time it appeared that the critical confrontation in early twentieth-century Ireland would take place not between the British government and Irish nationalists, but between Irish capital and Irish labour, this theory was dashed in 1916.  On Easter Monday, April 24th, 1916, a force of Irishmen and women under arms estimated at between 1,000 and 1,500 attempted to seize Dublin.  Their ultimate intention was to destroy British rule in Ireland and create an entirely independent Irish Republic to include all 32 counties of Leinster, Munster, Ulster and Connaught.  Their leaders Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and the others, knew their chances of success were so slight as to be almost non-existent, yet they fought and died for their love of their country.

  Yet if Pearse and the other leaders, expected that an insurrection would lead to a blood-sacrifice, which in time might inspire a revivified nation to wage a more successful war, this was not the view of all the revolutionaries.  Nor did it mean that even those who held the sacrificial doctrine went into the struggle without doing what they could to plan for victory.  And however deficient their planning may seem in retrospect to have been it was done in deadly earnest and in full knowledge of the consequences of failure.

  The earliest initiative appears to have been taken in America, where in August 1914 a special committee of clan na gael met the German ambassador in New York to tell him of their intention to organize an armed revolt in Ireland and ask for military assistance.  The news was communicated to Ireland and the supreme council of the IRB decided, within a month of the outbreak of war, that there should indeed be a rebellion but that it should take place even if German aid was not forthcoming.

For centuries, Ireland had been under English rule, the English perceiving the Irish to be barbarians who had to be tamed.  The invasion by King Henry II of England in the twelfth century, the attempts by future English monarchs to colonize Ireland with English, the massacres orchestrated by Cromwell (1652), and the way the English had treated the Irish during their “darkest hour”(The Famine 1845-1852) had all contributed to the growing dissatisfaction among the Irish natives.  Many had attempted rebellions before, none had succeeded in obtaining what most of the Irish population desired – a free country, one in which they could claim back their rightful heritage as landowners.

  Circumstances that led to the Irish rebellion of 1916 are of an intense complexity, historical, social, and political.  The history complexity, from the British point of view, can be traced to a general misunderstanding of the Irish character and of Irish desires.  The English were bewildered by the fact that most Irishmen, and all educated Irishmen, spoke English, and wrote it, as well as, and often better than, most Englishmen.  They were further bewildered by the fact that a very large proportion of the Irish governing class was of English or Norman ancestry.  In 1916, the English had not grasped the fact that for two centuries – since the brutal smashing of the old Irish governing class and the theft of their lands – it was precisely these people, Grattan, Tone, Parnell and so on, who had led the Irish in their longing to be free of alien rule. 

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  Several events laid the building blocks for the Easter Rising of 1916, all of which had bearing on what would take place.  Firstly, the centuries of national oppression by British landlords and increasing capitalism had led to the formation, in a Dublin timber yard, of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or I.R.B. in 1858.  They were direct descendants of the rebels known as the Fenians.  Their numbers never exceeded more than 2000 men, who were mostly intellectuals – writers, poets, teachers, professionals – and they were fiercely patriotic.  Significantly, they were prepared to use force in order to achieve national ...

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