Fearghal McGarry - Rebels: Voices from the Easter Rising

Voices from the Easter Rising

FEARGHAL McGARRY

PENGUIN IRELAND

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First published 2011

Copyright Fearghal McGarry, 2011

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The acknowledgements on p. xxiii constitute an extension of this copyright page

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Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN : 978-0-141-96930-5

For my father, Des, whose father participated in the gun-running at Howth in July 1914, and my mother, Ita, whose mother witnessed what followed on Easter Monday, 1916

Shortly before noon on 24 April 1916, Easter Monday, over thirty men drawn from the ranks of the Irish Volunteers, Fianna ireann and the Irish Citizen Army crowded into a small house off Rutland Street in Dublins north inner city. The men, who had been mobilised at short notice, were instructed to remove their uniforms and exchange their rifles for automatic pistols. Their mission was the destruction of the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park, site of the British Armys principal armoury in the city. One group set off for the Park by bicycle, while two other sections travelled by tram.

In his witness statement to the Bureau of Military History, Gary Holohan described how he and Paddy ODaly, who would lead the attack, stopped at a shop on Ormond Quay to purchase a football before joining their comrades in the Park.left for the Fairyhouse races with the key in his pocket. Although they succeeded in mining the small-arms ammunition store, the dull explosions that followed which could not be heard beyond the Park did not provide the desired dramatic prelude to the Rising. Undeterred, the rebels clutching their captured rifles and singing The Soldiers Song raced to the city centre to join their comrades in the GPO.

Although the Rising would come to be seen as an unequal battle between chivalrous rebels and the might of the British Empire, the violence of Easter Week was sometimes less clear cut. The soldiers encountered by the rebels in the Magazine Fort were frightened youths; one was weeping copiously. The sole fatality of the raid was an unarmed 14-year-old civilian, Gerald Playfair, the son of the forts commandant, who was shot three times as he attempted to enter a house near the Park to raise the alarm. I jumped off my bicycle, Holohan recalled, and just as the door opened I shot him from the gate. The rebellion pitted Irish rebels against Irish servants of the Crown as well as British soldiers, and the majority of those who lost their lives in Dublin that week were civilians. Ultimately, the failure of the raid like the military failure of the Risingitself proved irrelevant. The scale and audacity of what was attempted transcended the strategic limitations and often inept execution of the insurrection. Easter 1916 and the ill-judged response that it provoked from the British government demonstrated the tremendous power of political violence, even when deployed on a small scale in a militarily ineffective way by an unrepresentative minority, to change the course of Irish history. After the Rising, nothing would be the same again.

No event did more to shape the politics of modern Ireland than the Easter Rising. Before 1916, Irish nationalism was dominated by a moderate constitutional tradition represented by John Redmonds Irish Parliamentary Party. A devolved Home Rule parliament a constitutional settlement that would keep Ireland within the United Kingdom appeared by far the most likely outcome of the political crisis that had intermittently convulsed Ireland and Britain since the introduction of the Government of Ireland Bill in 1912. That alternative future was destroyed, along with much of the centre of Dublin, in April 1916. The scale, timing and impact of the Rising shocked contemporaries, even those such as the chief secretary, Augustine Birrell In killing Home Rule, the rebels transformed Ireland, reviving a moribund physical force tradition and establishing republicanism as the dominant element in Irish politics. By January 1919 a revolutionary government had secured a democratic mandate to bring into being the Republic that the Easter rebels had died to proclaim. The next five years brought guerrilla war, partition, secession and civil war.

The Rising not only altered the course of Irelands history; it shaped its politics over the decades that followed. The emergence of popular support for a republic the most extreme of the competing objectives advocated by militant nationalists before 1916 led inexorably to the War of Independence. As W. B. Yeats had recognised as early as 1917 when he wrote Sixteen Dead Men: who can talk of give and take While those dead men are loitering there ? The acceptance in 1922 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty by a majority of Sinn Fin deputies, a political settlement that fell substantially short of republican objectives, made inevitable the civil war that followed. Opposition to the Treaty was based less on its political flaws than on what those who remained loyal to the Republic notionally established in 1916 saw as its moral and spiritual illegitimacy. For these republicans, this consideration outweighedthe wishes of the Irish electorate; as amon de Valera, the only surviving commandant of the Rising, declared: the people had never a right to do wrong. Despite the cessation of revolutionary violence in 1923, the politics of independent Ireland long remained polarised around the question of the Republic. The legacy of the Rising proved no less contentious in Northern Ireland, where it served to legitimise the violence of the Provisional IRA during the Troubles and continues to provide a rationale or pretext for the actions of dissident republican paramilitaries to this day.

We now know a great deal about the events of 1916, and yet there remains much disagreement about fundamental aspects of the Easter Rising. Did the rebels think they had any chance of success, or was their insurrection intended as a symbolic act of sacrifice? What sort of society did they wish to bring about? Why did the actions of an initially unpopular conspiratorial elite generate mass support? Such debates arise in part from the continuing political potency of the Rising, but also from the fact that while we know an enormous amount about leaders such as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly, the motivations and experiences of the rank and file ordinary men such as Gary Holohan and Tom Leahy, without whom there would not have been an Irish revolution have remained obscure. Reconstructing the Rising from within and from below, this book presents the story of these people in their own words.