Anne-Marie Ryan - 16 Dead Men: The Easter Rising Executions

The Sixteen Dead Men about whom Yeats wrote his poem in the aftermath of the Easter Rising were a diverse group. Ranging in age from twenty-five to fifty-eight, their occupations included headmaster, tobacconist, poet, railway clerk, university lecturer, printer, humanitarian, water bailiff, art teacher, silk weaver, corporation clerk, farmer, trade union leader, bookkeeper, chemists clerk and newspaper manager. Two of the leaders were born outside Ireland: Thomas Clarke in the unlikely location of a British Army barracks on the Isle of Wight, James Connolly in the Irish ghetto of Edinburgh. Some had complicated national and religious identities: Patrick and Willie Pearse were the sons of an English stone carver, Thomas MacDonaghs mother was the daughter of English parents, Roger Casement was raised a Protestant but secretly baptised a Catholic by his mother, and John MacBride was the son of an Ulster-Scots Protestant from Co. Antrim. Others had close links with the institutions of British imperialism that they would later fight against: Michael Mallin and James Connolly were former soldiers in the British Army, amonn Ceannt was the son of a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) constable and Roger Casement had been knighted for his services as a British consul exposing the dark side of the rubber trade in the Congo and Peru.

This group of men, who participated in an armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland in April 1916, came to the point of insurrection by a variety of pathways. For many of them, their revolutionary instinct had developed at a young age. Thomas Kent was in his early twenties when he was imprisoned for his activities with the Land League in Co. Cork in the late nineteenth century, Michael OHanrahan grew up hearing stories of his ancestors involvement in the 1798 rebellion in Co. Wexford, Edward Daly was born into a Limerick family prominent in the Fenian movement, Con Colbert and Sen Heuston were members of the nationalist youth organisation Na Fianna ireann, and Sen Mac Diarmadas republican politics were nurtured by his national schoolteacher, who provided him with books on Irish history.

For some, the declaration of an Irish Republic on 24 April 1916 was the culmination of a lifetimes struggle. Thomas Clarke had become active in the secret revolutionary organisation the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) as a young man and had served fifteen years imprisonment for his involvement in the preparations for a Fenian bombing campaign in Britain; James Connolly had devoted his adult life to improving conditions for working-class people in Scotland, Ireland and America, and was a long-standing advocate of the establishment of a socialist Irish republic. But for others, the conversion to radical nationalism came late. Patrick Pearse was a speaker at a pro-Home Rule rally as late as March 1912, amonn Ceannts nationalist activities were mostly confined to the Irish language movement until he was elected to the Provisional Committee of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913, while Thomas MacDonagh was not co-opted onto the Supreme Council of the IRB until shortly before the Easter Rising.