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 independence for Ireland.
Another military force had been created on November 13th, 1913, as a direct counterforce to the Ulster Volunteer Force, the latter of which had been formed by the English as a resistance to Home Rule. The Irish Volunteers numbered around 200,000 Irish men and women, but only 2,000 were trained and armed. They essentially represented the radical, militant I.R.B.-influenced element, with a central executive dominated by Macneill, Hobson, O’Rahilly, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Plunkett. Arms were imported for them, and attempts to confiscate these weapons led to the killing of three people by British soldiers in Bachelor’s Walk, Dublin, in mid-1914. These two Irish armies were therefore waiting to fight for their country. Also, around the turn of the century, the English had tried to reduce the rights of Irish workers. The socialist and General Secretary of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, James Connolly, supported a rebellion by the workers.
Certain historians believe that the Home Rule Bill added to the tensions that lead to the Easter Rising. Some historians such as Gearoid o Tuathaigh believe that Home Rule was more than just extra ingredient, “Home Rule…crisis which exploded on the political scene in 1912 and which was to lead inevitably to the rebellion of 1916”. The Home Rule Bill was originally brought about in 1886, the Irish Home Rule movement was brought about to repeal the Act of Union 1801 that joined Ireland to Britain, and to establish an Irish parliament responsible for internal affairs. In 1870 Issac Butt formed the Home Rule Association and Charles Parnell led the movement to Parliament from 1880. Gladstone’s Home Rule bills in 1886 and 1893 were both defeated. The Liberals introduced a third bill in 1912, which aroused opposition in Ireland where the protestant minority in Ulster feared domination by the Catholic majority. Ireland appeared on the brink of civil war but the outbreak of World War One rendered further consideration of Home Rule opportune. The divide over Home Rule was not merely political, it stretched in to religious views, and the main divide seemed to be between the Catholics and the Protestants, both afraid the other would gain more power over the country.
In the results of the 1874 elections, a spectacular fifty-nine MPs subscribed to Home Rule. Though its personnel remained dominated by land, the new intake from 1874 showed an increase in bourgeois-professional interests – notably journalism and law – and even two tenant farmers. With Fenian rhetoric in the background, the Home Rulers were ready to respond to crisis in Ireland and insensitivity from the government. Both conditions would be met in full measure by the end of the decade, when the sudden decline in agricultural prices became a vital factor for Irish political history.
What followed was the politics of Parnellism. Home Rule was converted under a charismatic leader to an aggressive political campaign of threat and bluff, based on what had eluded every other Irish parliamentary initiative: a disciplined, pledge-bound, dictatorially organized party machine.
Before the English could impose more laws on the Irish, another event occurred which would have a massive impact – World War 1. This was the opportunity the I.R.B. had been waiting for. They decided that another armed resistance should occur before the end of the War, believing that as most of the English army would be involved in the fighting in mainland Europe, their numbers would be weakened. The I.R.B. set up a Military Council, whose chief mission was to plan the rising, in secret.
The Council initially was made up of just three men – Eamonn Ceannt, Padriag Pearse and Joseph Plunkett. Pearse was a poet and a schoolmaster, but he was also a member of the I.R.B. with direct links with the Irish Volunteers. Later, Tom Clarke and Sean MacDiarmada joined the Council and by January 1916, James Connolly had become a member. Connolly had formed the Socialist Republican Party in 1896 and the Irish Citizen Army in 1913. He was later regarded by many to be the leader of the Easter Rising. Thomas MacDonagh joined the council on April of 1916. These seven men were the “intelligence” behind the uprising.
As the war dragged on the anti-war Irish volunteers, closely linked to Pearse, flourished. They became closely identified with Sinn Fein’s anti-recruitment campaign and the broad front of Anglophobia that merged inevitably into pro-Germanism. This marked the beginning of an important shift in the balance of power within the nationalist movement. Although that only gradually became apparent, the proliferation of private and unofficial armies was enough in itself to make it imperative that the Liberal government should act quickly either to produce a settlement or to quell the gathering storm.
The Irish Citizen Army had come into being during the labour dispute partly to enable the locked-out men to defend themselves in clashes with the police, and partly to combat the demoralizing effects of unemployment by giving them some cohesion and sense of purpose. It was suggested by an ex-Army officer, Captain J.R. White, that a course of drilling would help to occupy the men usefully and in November he put his plan to effect with the approval of Larkin and Connolly. Since the Irish Volunteers were being founded at the same time, it was unlikely that the Citizen Army would attract many recruits and in fact, when the men went back to work, their little force almost disappeared.
The Irish Citizen Army joined forces with the IRB, and a minority of the Irish Volunteers to fight for Irish independence. The Volunteers had split after John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, called for the Irish Volunteers to join the British army, to defend small nations against the ambitions of Germany. 170,000 men from the Volunteers, who renamed themselves the National Volunteers, supported Redmond. The minority that supported the rising numbered around 12,000, representing on the whole the more active and extreme section of the movement, they kept the original name. At this point it seemed as though the only support for the rising was coming from Irelands everyday people, none of the important MPs who held high positions in government wanted anything to do with it.
The IRB had remained relatively dormant during the period of the home Rule movement. Some IRB members in fact supported these constitutional moves; John O’Leary, James Stephens and John Devoy backed Parnell. But the organisation as a whole never lost sight of what it saw as essential, a physical rebellion. Home Rule was second best, and they were convinced that nothing more could be won from Britain without blood being spilled. A split with the American Fenians had been healed in 1876, and a new constitution had been developed.
This constitution enshrined three democratic principals:
- The IRB, while preparing for war, was to confine itself to ‘moral influence’ in time of peace;
- The IRB could not resort to war until the time for doing so had been decided by a majority of the Irish nation;
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The IRB was to support every movement, which could advance the cause of Irish independence, consistent with the maintenance of its own integrity.
The IRB was the glue that stuck the main leaders of the rising together, even if some of them struggled to go in a different direction. Of the seven men who signed the proclamation of the provisional government six of them were members of the IRB by choice, the seventh, James Connolly was included in the group because he had been threatening to lead his Citizen Army in rebellion if no one else moved. An apparent advocate of hard-headed Marxian internationalist socialism, Connolly, until shortly before the rising, had followed his own path: he was not involved in the original plans of the IRB Military Council, but had been drilling his own Citizen Army. There is some evidence that he expected a revolution within Ireland to light a European fuse, a fairly common idea among internationalist socialists during the early months of the war – though, as Lee has cogently pointed out, he might have more profitably tried to analyse the relationship between peasant economies and social revolution contemporarily preoccupying Jaures, Bernstein and Lenin. All the signatories seemed to have differences with one another at some point but historians suggest that Connolly had the most. Unknown to Connolly at the time, the IRB had successfully infiltrated the Volunteers’ leadership, and they were concerned with his agitation. Pearse, speaking in December 1915, said that Connolly “will never be satisfied until he goads us into action, and then he will think most of us too moderate, and want to guillotine the half of us. I can see him setting up a guillotine… For Hobson and MacNeill in particular. They are poles apart”. R.F. Foster was correct to point out that Connolly and Pearse were eventual but unlikely companions in arms.
Various historians, including Foster, believe the risings failure also was due to the internal divisions between MacNeill and the seven signatories. MacNeill had not been told of the plans for an insurrection on Easter Sunday. To him there could be no justification for a physical-force rebellion without extreme provocation, and only then with a very strong probability of success, and he felt that neither of these existed at that time. When he was finally informed that a rising was planned for the 24th April 1916 – Easter Sunday – he was appalled, and immediately published a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the ‘manoeuvers’ planned for that day. Thus causing great confusion in Volunteer ranks up and down the country. This, MacNeill thought, would be the end of the matter. It was indeed the end of any prospect of a countrywide rising, but it was not the end of the plan for blood-sacrifice, and it was not the end of the deception of MacNeill. On Easter Sunday the leaders of the war party meet up, it was obvious that they were committing military suicide, they decided that they would strike at noon on Easter Monday, with whatever forces they could find. And attempt to carry out the initial plans for occupying key buildings in Dublin. In order to prevent any further checkmating by MacNeill, Pearse wrote to him and sent Macdonagh to his house with the message that the parades organised for Easter Sunday had been countermanded according to his instructions. When MacNeill found out of the new plan it was too late for him to do anything about it.
Due to his interference, MacNeill had caused one of the major shortages in numbers. Volunteer groups up and down the country were in disarray over whether or not to join in the insurrection as planned, therefore the turn out of man power was weak, and an obvious ingredient for failure.
The Rising not only suffered from a shortage of manpower but also as shortage of ammunition. As mentioned earlier in the essay in august 1914, a special group of clan na Gael meet with the German ambassador in New York to ask Germany for help with ammunition, supplies and financial support so that they could stage an up rising. Sir Roger Casement, who had served in the British consular service in Africa, became the IRB’s agent in this. They were already receiving some Irish-American assistance from Clan na Gael in the United States. The crux of the matter was the extent to which the Germans would be prepared to help and the degree to which it would be possible to co-ordinate their assistance with an uprising in Ireland. There had been at one point, some talk of German soldiers being involved. Casement is said to have believed that no insurrection could succeed without the aid of perhaps 50,000 German troops. Given the Navel situation, t was realised that it would be impossible to land foreign troops anywhere along the Irish coast. Due to changes in times and dates, mass confusion was caused. Communication between Ireland and Germany had to be made through America so there was always a delay in messages. To add to the problems of communication, a German agency in New York was raided, one of the first things found was a wireless stating facts about when and where to land the weapons, so without knowing the Irish had informed their enemy of their plans. In the event, missed connections and leaked information produced a fiasco, with the arms-steamer captured and scuttled; rendezvous was never made with the German submarine carrying Casement, who was arrested, after landing. Without the aid of the Germans weapons or manpower the leaders of the rising knew it was doomed to fail.
Unfortunately these mishaps were only part of a larger pattern of confusion and division at headquarters. To understand the effect of this confusion and division upon the country at large it must be remembered that the military plan for the insurrection had been drawn up by a very small group – Pearse, Ceannt, Plunkett and Connolly – and that in the interests of security it was kept highly secret. So secret that even the provincial leaders of the volunteers were given only a very general notion of what they were to do and even that at what was, for some of them, extremely short notice.
Due to the mishaps and confusion, the rising was very weak, it was imminent that it would fail. Yet there was still hope that the British troop would not turn out in force as hoped from the beginning, moreover, Connolly’s assertion that the British would not bomb or shell Dublin’s economic and financial centre proved lamentably wide of the mark. On Easter Monday there was three times more British troops and policemen than rebels, that isn’t including the troops who poured into Ireland in the commencing week.
Overall, the Irish rebellion did not stand a chance against the might of the British troops, with their lack of weapons, manpower and support from their fellow countrymen. I, myself, along with historians such as Lyons, believe that the failing of the Easter Rising of 1916 can not be pinned on a specific target, all the issues mentioned in the essay added their problems to the mass confusion. Although I don’t believe the reason for failing can be pinned on one moment or occurrence I believe the main causes of failure were, the failings of the Germans to supply weapons and manpower and the confusion caused by MacNeill at the last minute. Even if the Germans had not been able to land weapons but all the Volunteers had turned out then I believe the Irish rebellion would have stood a much better chance against the British troops.
Whether or not their rebellion had succeeded the leaders of the Easter Rising had lit the flame of rebellion for their own generation.
Ireland since the famine; F.S.L.Lyons
Modern Ireland 1600-1972; R.F. Foster
A Little History of Ireland; Martin Wallace
Irish Rebellions 1798-1916; H. Litton
The Irish world: The history and cultural achievements of the Irish people – various authors (incl. Gearoid o Tuathaigh)
Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 - R.F.Foster
Life of John Redmond – D.R. Gwynn
Irish rebellions; 1798-1916 - Helen Litton
Ireland 1945-1970; J.Lee (essay)
Connolly Ain’t Nothing but a Train Station in Dublin: The Expropriation of James Connolly’s Revolutionary Legacy by Irish Republicanism; J. Dana (essay)
Paddy and Mr. Punch, connections in Irish and English history; R. F. Foster
F.S.L.Lyons; Ireland Since The Famine