17

The Dublin Rising, 1916

On Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, John Dillon, who had gone over to Dublin for the parliamentary recess, wrote to Redmond, who had stayed in London:

‘Dublin is full of the most extraordinary rumours … you must not be surprised if something very unpleasant and mischievous happens this week.’¹

The issue of the Freeman’s Journal, the party paper, which appeared the next day, Monday, 24 April, was a routine one and fairly dull. Its first leader was about a by-election pending in Queen’s County between two Home Rule Nationalists standing on an identical policy of loyalty to Redmond, and competing simply because no candidate had been selected for the constituency by the party convention. Only two items in the paper hinted at unusual events and both were mysteriously imprecise. One concerned the arrest of a prominent member of the Tralee Irish Volunteers, a Mr Austin Stack, on a charge of importing arms from Germany. The other reported that a collapsible boat with arms and ammunition had been found on Currahane strand, County Kerry, and that a stranger of unknown nationality had been arrested in the vicinity and conveyed under escort to Dublin.² Only later that day was it announced that the stranger was Roger Casement, and by that time the people of Dublin themselves had been caught up in extraordinary events.

The next issue of the Freeman’s Journal to appear bore the comprehensive dates 26 April to 5 May, and its first leader began:

‘The stunning horror of the past ten days in Dublin makes it all but impossible for any patriotic Irishman who has been a witness of the tragedy enacted in our midst to think collectedly or write calmly of the event.’

The event which took not only the ordinary population of Dublin but most of the rank and file of the Irish Volunteers wholly by surprise had started in an almost dreamlike way on Easter Monday morning, while devotees of the Freeman’s Journal were still calmly perusing the leader about the election in Queen’s County.

Around noon a number of odd things had begun to happen in Dublin. A party of some hundred or so Irish Volunteers and Citizen Army men marching through the streets of the city, as they had been in the habit of doing for months past – and attracting particularly little attention on a Bank Holiday when more normal holiday-makers had gone to the races – stopped opposite the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, then turned and ran into the building.** Within a few minutes, flourishing revolvers and even firing some shots into the air, they had cleared out both customers and officials. Soon two flags were flying from the buildings: one the traditional green flag with the gold harp, with the words ‘Irish Republic’ now inscribed on it in gold; and the other a new flag strange to most people, a tricolour of orange, white and green. The Post Office had become the headquarters of the new ‘Republic’.

A little later, amazed by-standers saw Patrick Pearse emerge on to the steps of the portico and read a proclamation from ‘the Provisional Government’. This stated that in the name of God and of the dead generations, from which Ireland ‘received her ancient tradition of nationhood’, she was summoning her children to her flag and striking for her freedom.³ The proclamation spoke of the long usurpation of Ireland’s right to control her own destinies by ‘a foreign people and government’, and stated most inaccurately that in every generation the Irish people had asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty, adding ‘six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms’. It referred to ‘gallant Allies in Europe’ who were supporting Ireland, thereby blandly dismissing the fact that the flower of Ireland’s manhood had been fighting those allies in Europe for the past twenty months. Indeed, almost within the hour Irish men of the 3rd Royal Irish Rifles and the 10th Royal Dublin Fusiliers, themselves the product of the most recent British Army recruiting drive in Ireland, were the first to move against this self-styled republic in the Post Office.⁴ Small wonder that Pearse’s words fell among a largely uninterested crowd and that the principal sounds to greet them were not cheers but the crash of breaking glass as a Dublin mob, taking advantage of the absence of the police, began to loot the fashionable shops in O’Connell Street.⁵ The proclamation was signed by Clarke, MacDermott, MacDonagh, Pearse, Ceannt, Plunkett and James Connolly.

Meanwhile, the ‘Republic’ had already drawn first blood. A party of Volunteers had set out before noon on an audacious expedition to blow up the large ammunition dump at the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. They had skilfully tricked the sentry, gaining entry by pretending to pursue a football, and after wounding another sentry and taking the rest of the guard prisoner, cut the telephone wires and successfully placed a gelignite charge in part of the fort. They had, however, been unable to find the key to the main ammunition dump, for it had been taken by the officer in charge to Fairyhouse Races for the day. The subsequent explosion was not very great and did little important damage. The Volunteers made off with some captured rifles, but as they were hurrying away spotted a boy leaving the fort to give the alarm. He was the seventeen-year-old son of the Fort’s commandant, who was then away in France, serving with an Irish regiment. The boy was shot with a revolver before he could reach a telephone and died within twenty-four hours.⁶

Another early casualty had been an unarmed middle-aged constable of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, named O’Brien. He had been on the gate of Dublin Castle when men of the Irish Citizen Army had appeared and tried to gain entrance. In the best traditions of the force he put up his hand, and was shot dead.⁷ The party entered the Castle yard and, after throwing into the guardroom a home-made bomb which failed to explode, made the six soldiers they found there prisoner. Unknown to the Citizen Army men this was the only guard in this part of the Castle at all and the usual substantial garrison normally to be found round the corner in Ship Street mustered twenty-five men. The traditional seat of British rule in Ireland for many centuries lay within the rebels’ power. Undoubtedly the news of its capture would have produced a psychological shock throughout Ireland. But almost inexplicably the Citizen Army men seem to have taken fright at their easy early victory and, evacuating the Castle itself, preferred to occupy some buildings opposite. More blood began to flow as they were engaged there by men of the Royal Irish Rifles and the Dublin Fusiliers who reached the Castle in the early afternoon.⁸

Over much of Dublin it was still quite difficult to appreciate that a coordinated attempt at rebellion had broken out. A young Irish writer, emerging an hour later for lunch from the National Gallery where he worked as registrar, knew nothing of what had happened until, approaching St Stephen’s Green, he noticed crowds standing about in curiously silent inquiring attitudes as if there had been an accident. Physically, what had happened was that the ‘Sinn Feiners’ (detachments of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army plainly acting in harmony for once) had occupied some two dozen strong points – including St Stephen’s Green – throughout the city, dominating barracks, railway stations, key approaches, and other prominent public thoroughfares. From the Post Office Pearse, now calling himself Commandant-General of a joint Irish Republican Army, exercised a rather static command with Connolly, Clarke and Plunkett. Commandant Thomas MacDonagh, the poet and university English lecturer, had occupied Jacob’s Biscuit Factory behind Dublin Castle. A Citizen Army group to which Countess Markievicz, wearing green uniform and flourishing a revolver, was attached, had occupied the park in St Stephen’s Green. There they had dug themselves in, until, coming under fire from the dominating Shelburne Hotel, they recognized that their position was militarily unsound and withdrew to the large distinguished building on the further side of the Green which was the College of Surgeons.

Among several other prominent positions occupied and fortified were the Four Courts under Edward Daly, the nephew of an old Fenian of ’67, and Boland’s Flour Mills, under the mathematics professor, Eamon de Valera, whose outposts commanded the main road into Dublin from the harbour of Kingstown, along which government reinforcements from Britain might be expected.

Although a quite ambitious plan for a more general rising had at one time been envisaged, involving other parts of Ireland and a more extensive and mobile occupation of Dublin itself, a whole sequence of misunderstandings, muddles and unfortunate disasters prevented it ever being put seriously to the test. Basically the pattern of the rebellion which unfolded over the next five days was that ‘the Irish Republican Army’ remained in most of the positions it had occupied on Easter Monday, inflicting what casualties it could – and these were sometimes substantial – on Irishmen and others in the British Army, who, backed by heavy artillery fire, inexorably closed in on them and eventually forced them to surrender. Any close study of the activity that took place during these five days in the epic headquarters of the rebellion, the General Post Office, reveals that apart from a brief moment in the afternoon of Easter Monday when Volunteer riflemen shot down and killed four Lancers of a detachment trying to make their way down O’Connell Street, its occupants did almost nothing at all under increasingly accurate shell-fire until they eventually tried to evacuate the burning building on Friday. Though some sixteen of the garrison were wounded, including James Connolly by a bullet in the ankle, none were killed until this attempted sortie on the Friday, when The O’Rahilly was one of those who fell, as they made a dash down Moore Street. In the meantime Pearse, Clarke, Plunkett and Connolly talked away the days, encouraging the men, issuing occasional over-confident dispatches about other parts of Ireland rising and German help being on the way, even once speculating among themselves on the advisability of appointing a German prince King of Ireland after the war, but always supremely confident that the assumption on which they had allowed the Rising to go ahead was justified.⁹ This assumption was that success or failure was irrelevant and that it was the action itself which would stir old slumbering fires of fierce nationalism within the hearts of the Irish people, and eventually make the new green, white and orange flag now flying defiantly from the roof of the Post Office the flag of a truly national Ireland.

‘We thought it a foolish thing for four score to go into battle against four thousand, or maybe forty thousand,’ protested an ancient Gaelic hero in a play Pearse wrote late in 1915.¹⁰

‘And so it is a foolish thing,’ had come the super-heroic response. ‘Do you want us to be wise?’

For years Pearse had been pining to see the mystical ‘red wine of the battlefield’ on Irish soil.¹¹ He gave the rank and file of the Volunteers no chance to challenge the rhetorical question of his play. But even Pearse, planning insurrection on the assumption that wisdom was irrelevant, had taken steps to make it as effective as he could. When, however, a series of events in the few days before the Rising caused it to be not only less effective than he and the IRB could make it, but downright disastrous, neither he nor the IRB were particularly worried. When at Liberty Hall on Easter Monday morning Connolly was assembling his men for the march to the Post Office, he told his friend William O’Brien: ‘We are going out to be slaughtered.’ O’Brien asked him if there were any chance of success at all. ‘None whatever,’ replied Connolly.¹²

In the interval between the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa in August 1915 and Easter Monday 1916 the Irish Volunteers had shown a slight but perceptible increase in their numbers for the first time since their split with the main body. This was due to a combination of practical and political factors. Among these were: the growing awareness that Redmond’s own Volunteers were becoming ineffective as they were drained off to the war; the simultaneous feeling that the prospect of Home Rule, like the prospect of an end of the war itself, was receding into obscure mists of time in which a British Government might find it easier not to keep faith; the retention of a higher proportion of young farmers’ sons on Irish soil than usual, owing to the halt in normal emigration; and the growing Irish determination that the threatened Conscription Act should never be applied to Ireland. The Conscription Act finally went through in January 1916. It was totally opposed by Redmond and the Irish party and in fact excluded Ireland. But the threat of an extension of conscription to Ireland was thereafter always present, and now that the main parliamentary battle on the subject had been won, such a threat was very much easier to implement quickly.

Yet, in these circumstances, the remarkable fact was not so much that the numbers of MacNeill’s followers slightly increased but that they did not increase more significantly. According to police intelligence reports the increase was some 3,800 in eight months from August 1915 to April 1916.¹³ But the British Army was able to obtain from Ireland over three times that number of recruits in the same period, 1,827 of them in the single month ending 15 April alone.¹⁴ Though the Irish Volunteer parades became better attended and their and the Citizen Army’s activity increasingly noticeable, resulting in a particularly good turn out both in Dublin and Cork for St Patrick’s Day, 17 March 1916, they were still also noticeably out of tune with the vast mass of public opinion in the country. An Irish Volunteer of the time from Ennscorthy, County Wexford, has recorded how the farmer who lent him and his companions a hay-loft for drilling ran a serious risk in obliging them, because of their unpopularity.¹⁵ Ernest Blythe, one of the principal Volunteer organizers of the day, has written of the 1914–15 period: ‘The attitude of the majority of the people towards the Irish Volunteers and their independent nationalist stand was one of incredulity, suspicion or dour hostility.’¹⁶ On 22 March 1916 an anti-Sinn Fein demonstration took place in Tullamore, when fourteen Irish Volunteers were besieged by a hostile mob in the local Sinn Fein hall. Feeling that they were inadequately protected by the police they fired revolvers to keep the mob away, and when the police moved in to disarm them resisted arrest, wounding a Sergeant Aherne seriously.¹⁷

The professions of the young men finally arrested in the Tullamore case give a useful cross-section of the social stratum from which the Irish Volunteer rank and file of the day were drawn. They consisted of a clerk, a barber’s assistant, an apprentice, a malt-house workman, a blacksmith’s assistant, a drayman, a painter, a cycle mechanic and a labourer.¹⁸ Local police elsewhere described the Volunteers as being composed principally of shop assistants, artisans and, in the country districts, of small farmers’ sons, while an English eye-witness of the occupation of the Post Office in Dublin a month later – who, incidentally, had the nerve to go in and ask for stamps before the Republic could be officially proclaimed – also commented on the fact that the rebels seemed drawn from the poorer classes. ‘There were no well-dressed men amongst them,’ he explained a few days later to fellow Englishmen, totally bewildered by events, ‘although the Sinn Fein movement has within it a great number of better-class people.’¹⁹ In other words they were of the same class as those who for twenty months had been dying in Flanders and at the Dardanelles, though as yet unrepresentative of them.

A marching song written some years earlier had recently become popular with the Irish Volunteers. The words had a rather artificial stagey ring, characteristic of the histrionic attitude the Volunteers often seemed to embody.

I’ll sing you a song, a soldier’s song,

With a cheering rousing chorus

As round our blazing camp-fires we throng

The starry heavens o’er us.

Impatient for the coming fight

And as we watch the dawning light

Here in the silence of the night.

We’ll chant the soldier’s song?

Soldiers are we, whose lives are pledged to Ireland,

Some have come from the land across the sea …**

It was called ‘The Soldier’s Song’ and though still almost unknown to most of the country was, within six years, to become the National Anthem of Ireland.

But although in this pre-Rising period the ‘Sinn Feiners’ were unrepresentative and even unpopular, the delicacy of national sensitivity in the prevailing situation was shown at the end of March when a public meeting was held in Dublin to protest against the ordered deportation of some ten Sinn Fein organizers from Ireland. The idea of banishment from Ireland was an ugly one in many Irish minds, and the hall was full and an overflow meeting was held outside it. It was this emotional area in Irish minds, with roots deep in Irish history, that Pearse and other members of the IRB’s military council were determined to affect. Myth and reality had interacted on each other throughout Irish history. With a personal courage amounting almost to mania, Pearse and his fellow conspirators set out to turn the myth into reality by living it out in cold blood.

Up to a week before the Rising Eoin MacNeill, the nominal head of the Volunteers, had had no knowledge that it was being planned. He had, however, had certain misgivings, derived largely from the writings and utterances of people like Pearse and Connolly that some such action might one day be contemplated. Therefore in the middle of February 1916 he had made a deliberate point of attacking the living myth theory.

We have to remember [he wrote, in a memorandum designed to lay down the policy for the Irish Volunteers] that what we call our country is not a poetical abstraction, as some of us, perhaps all of us, in the exercise of our highly developed capacity for figurative thought, are sometimes apt to imagine – with the help of our patriotic literature. There is no such person as Caitlin Ni Uallachain or Roisin Dubh or the Sean-bean Bhoct, who is calling upon us to serve her. What we call our country is a concrete and visible reality. Now we believe that we think rightly on national matters … if we are right nationally, it is our duty to get our country on our side, and not to be content with the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong. As a matter of patriotic principle we should never tire of endeavouring to get our country on our side …. I do not know at this moment whether the time and circumstance will yet justify distinct revolutionary action, but of this I am certain, the only possible basis for successful revolutionary action is deep and widespread popular discontent. We have only to look around us in the streets to see that no such condition exists in Ireland. A few of us, a small proportion who think about the evils of English government in Ireland are always discontented. We should be downright fools if we were to measure many others by the standards of our own thoughts.

I wish it then to be clearly understood that under present conditions I am definitely opposed to any proposal that may come forward involving insurrection. I have no doubt at all that my consent to any such proposal at this time and under these circumstances would make me false to my country besides involving me in the guilt of murder.²⁰

Bulmer Hobson, who shared these views with MacNeill and was particularly anxious about Pearse’s intention, had been instrumental in getting MacNeill to draw up the memorandum. After it had been discussed with the Volunteer leaders at MacNeill’s house, Pearse categorically denied that he was planning an insurrection or that his view of the Volunteers’ function was any different from their publicly declared defensive aims. In fact Pearse was lying, for the date for the Rising had already been decided on as Easter Sunday 1916. It had been notified as such to Devoy in America on 5 February and subsequently passed to the Germans. Another deception of MacNeill by Pearse concerned the labour leader James Connolly.

Since the beginning of the war Connolly, who became the outstanding Irish labour figure after Larkin’s departure for America in October 1914, had been writing more and more outspoken denunciations of the British Government and of the recruiting campaign in Ireland, and hinting more and more openly at the need for someone in Ireland to rise in arms against Britain while the war lasted. He had, as early as 9 September 1914, been present at a meeting in the Library of the Gaelic League in Dublin at which the desirability of a rising was discussed, together with important members of the IRB such as Clarke, Pearse and Ceannt, and another outsider, Arthur Griffith. But it seems that the IRB members at this meeting did not let Connolly or other outsiders into the full secret of their own decisions or of their contacts already made with the Germans through Devoy.²¹ Connolly appears to have had little real knowledge of the IRB’s existence at the time, and, as the war continued, he became more and more impatient with and even contemptuous of the Volunteers. The IRB told him nothing of their own appointment of a secret Military Council and he judged the Volunteer organization at its face value.

Larkin’s paper, the Irish Worker, had been suppressed in December 1914, and Connolly who had been editing it started a successor, the Worker, which in turn was suppressed after its sixth issue in February 1915. Thereafter he printed and published the Workers’ Republic with his own plant at the Transport Workers’ Union headquarters in Dublin, Liberty Hall, also the headquarters of the hundred or so strong Citizen Army. Across the front of Liberty Hall hung a bold banner proclaiming: ‘We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser – but Ireland’. In itself it was an expression of sentiment which MacNeill would have found unexceptionable. But towards the end of 1915 MacNeill was being made increasingly anxious by talk of Connolly’s intention to bring out the Citizen Army in a rising on its own account.²²

The two utterly different temperaments of Connolly and MacNeill were illustrated in the respective issues of the Workers’ Republic and the Irish Volunteer for Christmas Day 1915. Connolly, after reminding his readers of the price Wolfe Tone had paid for inaction at Bantry Bay in 1796, concluded with the words:

The Kingdom of Heaven [Freedom] is within you.

The Kingdom of Heaven can only be taken by violence. Heavenly words with a heavenly meaning.

Christmas Week, 1796; Christmas week, 1915 – still hesitating.²³

Connolly’s frequent attacks in the Workers’ Republic on the Volunteers for their lack of aggressiveness not only alarmed MacNeill and irritated many rank-and-file of Volunteers but also caused considerable anxiety to Pearse and his fellow IRB manipulators behind the scenes. They began to fear that Connolly would be as good as his printed word and start an individual insurrection with the tiny Citizen Army which would prematurely wreck their own plans.

On 19 January 1916 Connolly disappeared for three days, and his whereabouts remained unknown even to his closest friends. When he reappeared at Countess Markievicz house on 22 January he seemed like a man with a load off his mind. The next issue of the Workers’ Republic carried a new solemn determined note, the reason for which was not disclosed. He had in fact spent the three days in conclave with Pearse and the other IRB leaders, and had been made party to the secret of the Rising. He was himself appointed a member of the IRB’s military council. He knew now that an insurrection was on for Easter Week.**

But Pearse used this incident to lull MacNeill’s suspicions still further. A short while earlier, at the official request of the official Volunteer executive, MacNeill had arranged a private meeting with Connolly at which he heard him at first hand put forward his view that an immediate insurrection was necessary, and declare that whether or not the Volunteers came out the Citizen Army would fight in Dublin. Pearse, who was present at this meeting, assured MacNeill afterwards that he agreed with his point of view and that he would persuade Connolly to abandon his project. ‘Very shortly afterwards’, that is to say, presumably just after Connolly had spent his three days in conclave with the Military Council of the IRB, Pearse told MacNeill that he had got Connolly to abandon his project.²⁴ Though this, unlike his earlier statement that he was of MacNeill’s point of view, was literally true in the sense that Connolly had now abandoned his project of a separate rising, it was deliberate deception of MacNeill who was thus led for the time being at any rate to believe that no ‘act of rash violence’ was being planned. In any case, shortly afterwards MacNeill received further assurances not only from Pearse but also from Plunkett that no insurrection was being planned.²⁵ MacNeill’s own concept of the Volunteers’ purpose remained, so it appeared, the only accepted one, namely that they would only take to arms if an attempt were made by the government to disarm them or to introduce conscription.

However, MacNeill’s anxieties did not stay lulled for long. Several instances had already come to his notice of military dispositions being made for the Volunteers by Pearse, without his own authority, and early in April he actually received through the post a letter from America (that had incidentally been opened by the censor) containing a review article to the effect that a rising aided by Germany was planned for Ireland in the early summer by an extremist group in the Irish Volunteers. MacNeill publicized the fact and strongly disclaimed any such thing in the last issue of the Irish Volunteer to appear, which was dated Saturday, 22 April 1916. But by then MacNeill’s peace of mind had been shattered by other events, and within twenty-four hours both he and the majority of the Volunteers themselves were in a state of considerable turmoil.

On Wednesday, 19 April 1916, a Sinn Fein alderman at a meeting of the Dublin Corporation read out a document, allegedly stolen from Dublin Castle, detailing instructions for the arrest of the Volunteer leaders and other national figures and for the suppression of the Volunteer organization. MacNeill had been shown the document at the beginning of the week. Although the arrest of the leaders was in fact under consideration at Dublin Castle, and contingency plans for it had doubtless been prepared, it seems virtually certain that this particular document was a bogus one, prepared, possibly on the strength of some information received from the Castle, by Joseph Plunkett and Sean MacDermott. Though it was suspect in some quarters at once, it served its purpose at first so far as MacNeill was concerned, for he accepted it and its menacing implications for the Volunteers as genuine. The secret design of Pearse, Plunkett and the rest of the IRB’s Military Council was that MacNeill should openly and unwittingly undertake for them a large part of their undercover mobilization for insurrection.

The defensive conditions in which MacNeill had always been prepared to consider some action for the Volunteers, namely an impending attempt to be made by the government to disarm them, now seemed fulfilled. He ordered the Volunteers to prepare themselves against suppression by the government. His orders for this were made out in consultation with the other members of the Volunteer executive but, in MacNeill’s own words, ‘neither then nor at any previous meeting was the policy of insurrection adopted or proposed in any form’.²⁶ On Thursday night, 20 April, MacNeill learnt for the first time that in addition to his own order, other orders had also gone out unknown to him which were ‘only intelligible as parts of a general scheme for insurrection’.²⁷ Appalled, he, Bulmer Hobson and another member of the Volunteer executive, J. J. O’Connell, went round at midnight to Pearse’s school, St Enda’s, to confront him with what they had discovered and there for the first time Pearse admitted that a rising was intended. MacNeill told Pearse he would do everything in his power, short of informing the government, to prevent the rising and would issue countermanding orders. A few hours later, on Friday morning, Sean MacDermott came to MacNeill’s house and told him for the first time that a large quantity of arms was about to be landed from Germany. MacNeill, who still believed on the strength of the Castle document that a government swoop on the Volunteers was in any case imminent, realized that with the arrival of the arms the die would be firmly cast and agreed to accept what looked like the IRB’s fait accompli.

‘Very well,’ he finally said to Sean MacDermott. ‘If that is the case I’m in with you.’²⁸

From this moment onwards MacDermott, wishing doubtless to simplify the IRB chain of command in the Volunteers as the crisis approached, and assuming that MacNeill would prove no further trouble, began to suggest privately that MacNeill had resigned as Chief of Staff of the Volunteers. He had already been suggesting earlier in the week that MacNeill was sanctioning all the secret preliminary orders for the insurrection. But there was as little truth in the new report as in the earlier one, and MacNeill, in spite of his new awareness that so much had already been going on behind his back, does not seem to have doubted that he again held authority over the Volunteers.

To prevent any possible further disruption of the Rising’s plans the IRB also took the precaution of neutralizing the one other man who it seemed might seriously make things awkward for them. On the Friday evening they kidnapped and held prisoner over the next few crucial days Bulmer Hobson, the man who a few years before had done so much to give their organization life. However, unpleasant surprises were still in store for them.

On the following morning, Saturday, 22 April, two Volunteers arrived in Dublin from the south-west of Ireland to see MacNeill with dramatic information. In the first place, they were able to enlighten him that the ‘Castle Document’ on the strength of which he had based his initial orders to the Volunteers to prepare for mobilization was a bogus one, designed to get him to do just that. More important still, they brought news that the arms ship on which the leaders were depending and on the strength of which he had reluctantly agreed to go into an insurrection with them had been captured by the British Navy and had sunk itself in Queenstown harbour. The 20,000 rifles and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition Pearse was expecting were at the bottom of the sea. Roger Casement, a link between the insurrectionists and the Germans, had landed from a German submarine and had been captured almost immediately.

MacNeill at once sent messengers all over Ireland cancelling any orders the Volunteers might have received for special action. He also arranged for a notice to appear in the largest circulation Sunday newspaper, The Sunday Independent, rescinding any orders that might have been issued to the Volunteers for Easter Sunday and forbidding every individual Volunteer from taking part in any parades, manoeuvres or other movements. On the very morning therefore of the day on which Pearse, Connolly and the rest of the military council had planned to come out in arms for an Irish Republic, they found the men they hoped to command paralysed by an order from their official leader telling them not to move.

This was a severe enough blow, but that caused by the capture and destruction of the arms ship had been even worse.

For almost a year now negotiations of a rather desultory and unprofessional sort had been going on between the IRB and the Germans for some form of military help. The situation had been rendered opaque by the fact that their chief resident representative in Germany was Casement, a man embittered since early 1915 by the failure of the Irish Brigade to fulfil his hopes, and by what he increasingly considered the cynical exploitation of the Irish cause by the Germans.

In April 1915 the IRB had sent Joseph Plunkett to Germany to make its first direct contact with Casement. He had taken a month getting there via neutral countries, but when he arrived had nothing to tell that Casement did not know or had not guessed already.²⁹ There was to be a rising some time before the end of the war and he had come to see what sort of military help was available. Casement himself was at this time already doubtful that any effective scheme of active cooperation with the Germans could be worked out.³⁰ The Germans after all had had their eyes opened to the limited appeal of Irish separatism by the failure of the Irish Brigade. And the thin, ailing, poetical Plunkett made a poor impression on them as a specimen of Irish revolutionary militancy.³¹ However, Casement took Plunkett along to see the German General Staff, where he could personally put forward the IRB request for fifty thousand rifles with ammunition for the Irish Volunteers. The Germans turned this down, telling Plunkett in so many words that there were millions of Irish in the United States and he should get the arms from them.³² When, about 25 June, Plunkett eventually left Germany, he took with him a message from Casement for Dublin to the effect that it was not going to be possible to get an Irish Brigade together, that Casement saw no way of getting German help and that he regarded his own mission as ended.³³ Whether Plunkett delivered this message and in what terms is not known.

Casement was left behind, admiring Plunkett personally for the effort he had made but feeling that he had done little but add to the ridicule of his (Casement’s) own situation. For once he even saw the German position quite tolerantly. ‘In our own land,’ he wrote, ‘they see only that no force exists, that talk expresses the extremity of Irish nationalism – and that if I represent anyone it must be a mighty small handful.’³⁴

A renewal of the request for arms came in October 1915 through the German military attaché in Washington passing on a message of Devoy’s. It was proposed that rifles and ammunition should be sent in submarines to the coast of Kerry, and Fenit pier in Tralee Bay was suggested as a suitable landing point.³⁵ But the German Admiralty informed the General Staff in December 1915 that submarines were not practical. And Casement wrote to New York later in the month that arms could not be supplied.³⁶ His efforts now were concentrated on getting the Germans to send the tiny group of the Irish Brigade to fight for the Turks, finally securing an assurance from the German General Staff to this effect on 4 January 1916.³⁷ They were to be sent to Syria. Three weeks later he retired for a ‘nerve rest’³⁸ to a nursing home in Munich, leaving Robert Monteith, the ex-British NCO and Irish Volunteer instructor sent out via New York in October to help with the Irish Brigade, to take over in Berlin as a direct link for Devoy and the IRB with the German government.

But although Pearse and the military council were about this time perfecting their final arrangements for the Rising, they seem to have shown little sense of urgency or devotion to detail on the question of a supply of arms from Germany. It was something they were hoping for and for which they made provisions in their plans for the rising in other parts of Ireland than Dublin, and yet paradoxically something to which they hardly gave the detailed priority it might seem to have deserved.

On or about 5 February 1916 Devoy in New York received a coded message from the IRB in Dublin, brought personally across the Atlantic by a seaman named Tommy O’Connor, to the effect that an insurrection would break out in Ireland on Easter Sunday, 23 April. The decoded message was passed to the German Ambassador in Washington who in turn passed it on by radio to Berlin on 10 February.³⁹ Devoy sent a cable to Berlin confirming this and asking rather vaguely for arms to be delivered ‘between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, Limerick West Coast’.⁴⁰ This was followed by a letter setting out the request in greater detail and specifying a need for 100,000 rifles, and for artillery, together with German officers and artillerymen.

Casement, still unwell in his nursing home at Munich, was visited there early in March by Monteith with news of the cable, and sent a memorandum back to Berlin stressing that the Germans must notify the Irish clearly about landing places and times before sending the arms. On 16 March he and Monteith went to the General Staff in Berlin, and on the next day to the German Admiralty to hear the arrangements made with Devoy: 20,000 rifles, 10 machine guns and 5,000,000 rounds of ammunition were to be sent, together with 55 men of the Irish Brigade. The ship was to be met off the Inishtookert lightship in Tralee Bay between Friday, 20 April and Sunday, the 23rd, and the pilot boat meeting it was to show two green lights after dark. Devoy had sent a cable agreeing these details.⁴¹

Both Monteith and Casement were appalled by what they considered the inadequacy of German help in the circumstances. And yet they were in an awkward position, for the Rising was clearly going ahead, and even this amount of help would be better than nothing. After protesting to the Germans bitterly against the inadequacy of the arrangements, they concentrated on two objectives: first, to prevent the dispatch of the fifty-five members of the Irish Brigade, and second, secretly to get a message through to Dublin strongly urging that no rising should take place in the circumstances.

After some argument with the Germans, in which Monteith and Casement maintained that no more than twelve out of the fifty-five members of the Irish Brigade were reliable, the Germans finally agreed not to send them.⁴² Casement also managed to persuade the German Admiralty to let one member of the Irish Brigade – the only Irish American to have joined it, named McGooey – over the frontier into Denmark to try and get a ship to Scotland and then to Ireland. His ostensible purpose was to tie up the final arrangements for the arms landing. His real instructions from Casement, however, were to say that Casement ‘strongly urged “no rising” …’ and to ‘get the heads in Ireland to call off the rising and merely try to land the arms and distribute them’.⁴³

When the German General Staff heard of McGooey’s departure they were furious, accusing Casement of sending him off to try and stop the Rising. No word of McGooey seems ever to have been heard again. If he had reached Ireland it seems possible that, though he would almost certainly not have deflected the leaders from their intention to start an insurrection, what he had to say might have had some material bearing on events, for he may also have carried the information that the arms ship had no wireless.**

Devoy’s letter to the Germans suggested that Casement should remain in Germany as ‘the accredited representative till the end of the war of the Irish Revolutionary Body’.⁴⁴ But Casement persuaded the Germans to let him go with the arms to Ireland together with two companions, Monteith and another member of the Irish Brigade named Bailey. They were to travel by submarine. Casement’s hope was to get ashore in time to dissuade the leaders from going through with the Rising. If unsuccessful in this he would identify himself with what he knew to be a desperate cause.

Things were even more desperate than he knew. In spite of Devoy’s agreement to the arrangements with the Germans given in the middle of March, the IRB in Ireland seem to have been rather inconsequential about their arrangements for the arms landing. At the beginning of April they sent Joseph Plunkett’s father, an elderly Papal Count, to Switzerland. Through the German Embassy at Berne on 5 April he transmitted a message to Casement in Berlin, reiterating that the Rising was fixed for Easter Sunday (evening), that the arms ship should arrive in Tralee Bay ‘not later than dawn of Easter Monday’ and that the dispatch of German officers was imperative. Casement tried desperately to convey to his mysterious informant that all was not well, but could make no contact. In any case, four days later the arms ship, a former ship of the British Wilson line captured by the Germans and renamed the Libau but disguised for this occasion as a Norwegian trawler, the Aud, had sailed for Tralee Bay. Three days later Casement, Monteith and Bailey set out on the same journey by submarine.

Meanwhile, incredibly it only now seems to have occurred to the Military Council in Dublin that if the ship arrived any time before Sunday, 23 April in the bracket of three days originally agreed, it would alert the British and seriously compromise the chances of the Rising starting undetected on the Sunday evening. They therefore at that late stage sent Plunkett’s sister to America with a message which she delivered to Devoy on 14 April, five days after the Aud had sailed. It stated that on no account must the arms be landed before the night of Easter Sunday. Devoy sent the message to Berlin, but the Germans had in fact no way of communicating with the Aud since she was without wireless.

In these circumstances it might have been expected that the rebel leaders would at least inquire whether the Aud carried a wireless or not. At the very least it might have been expected steps would be taken to meet the ship on the three earlier days originally agreed in case she arrived earlier than Easter Sunday. No such steps were taken. The most charitable explanation is that the leaders, weighing the risk of the arms ship’s early arrival against the possible loss of the arms, decided that the former was the most serious. Their top priority after all was the occurrence of the rebellion, not its military success. In fact the Aud arrived in Tralee Bay after a journey through the British blockade on the afternoon of Thursday, 19 April. She was even seen there by the pilot, who, having received orders to expect nothing until Sunday, merely wondered what ship she was and went home. She remained there nearly twenty-four hours without signal from the shore, whereupon the captain, feeling that he could not risk waiting there any longer, moved away. His luck then ran out for he was intercepted by the Royal Navy, escorted into Queenstown and there with some skill succeeded in scuttling his ship and its cargo, raising the German colours just before he did so.

On the early morning of the same day, Good Friday, Casement, Monteith and Bailey landed from their submarine in a rubber dinghy on Banna strand, County Kerry. The dinghy overturned in the water and they were soaked to the skin. After walking some distance Casement, exhausted, hid in some brambles on the site of an ancient fort while the others pressed on to Tralee to try to make contact with the Volunteers. Early in the afternoon he was found there with sand on his trousers and a used railway ticket from Berlin to Wilhelmshaven in his pocket by a sergeant and constable of the RIC. He spent that night in Tralee gaol from which he might possibly have been rescued by the Volunteers if their leader, Austin Stack, had not been under strict instructions not to take any premature action until the Rising broke out in Dublin. However, through a priest, who was allowed to visit him, Casement managed to get out a verbal message which was taken to Dublin by a Volunteer. Pearse heard it from the messenger himself the next day, Saturday. It ran simply: ‘Germany sending arms, but will not send men.’⁴⁵ But Pearse, who up to the last moment seems to have been hoping not only for troops but also some naval and air diversion to help the Rising, knew by then that even the arms would not be coming, for the news of the sinking of the Aud had also reached him.⁴⁶

The disasters and errors of judgement had not been all on one side. The British Government had known since early in the war a good deal about the movements and intentions of Roger Casement in New York and Germany.⁴⁷ Early in 1915 British Naval Intelligence had broken the German diplomatic code and had been intercepting messages between the Embassy in Washington and Berlin, including those from Devoy which retailed information about the projected rising. This information and its source seems never to have been passed as a matter of urgency directly to Dublin Castle.

The possibility of some German invasion of Ireland had naturally been in the minds of the administration in Dublin Castle in a routine way. They were well aware that splinter elements in Ireland, like the Irish Volunteers, besides opposing recruiting might in certain circumstances favour an insurrection with German support. But they were also aware of what a minute section of Irish opinion these splinter elements represented. They knew that the vast majority of the Irish population were loyal to the Crown and behind the imperial war effort. Still, they kept their ears open. As always in Irish history the government had informers in the Irish radical quarters of the day, but for the first time in Irish history these appear themselves not to have been really well informed.⁴⁸ Clearly the government was given no proper concept of the IRB’s role or effectiveness at the time. An intercepted letter from Casement in Germany to MacNeill even made it appear that MacNeill himself was one of the most dangerous men they had to face. In these circumstances the Liberal Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, understandably saw as his paramount task the need to keep a balance between prevention of a nuisance and the inflation of nuisance value into something more important than it was.

In this he was much encouraged and supported by the Parliamentary Nationalist Party’s leaders, Redmond, Dillon and Devlin. Unionists were often outraged at the latitude allowed to the anti-recruiting activities of the Irish Volunteers and the relative freedom with which they paraded and manoeuvred. But the party leaders, who had as much to lose as anyone at their hands, always insisted that the only real danger the Irish Volunteers presented was as potential martyrs. Thus, although there was sporadic suppression of the various splinter ‘seditious’ organs of the press and some prosecution and deportation of individuals under the Defence of the Realm Act, Birrell and his Under-Secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan, in amicable consultation with the Nationalist Party leaders, pursued what might be called a ‘soft line’ towards the small dissident minority. Though Birrell, as early as November 1914, had recognized ‘the danger of a real street row and sham rebellion in Dublin’,⁴⁹ his chief concern was not to turn this small minority into traditional Irish martyrs. What he could hardly be expected to know without better sources of information was that a small minority within this small minority was determined that it should turn itself into martyrs at all costs.

The third member of an administrative triumvirate at Dublin Castle was the new viceroy who had replaced Lord Aberdeen in 1915, Lord Wimborne, formerly Sir Ivor Churchill-Guest, who had been created a peer in 1910 to swell the Liberal minority in the House of Lords. Wimborne was more orthodox in his view of authority’s responsibilities than Birrell or Nathan and more naturally sensitive to the insistence of the Southern Unionist leader, Lord Midleton, that something should be done about the Irish Volunteers. And it was Wimborne who, at the last moment, very nearly prevented the Rising from breaking out altogether.

In November 1915 Birrell, in reply to a remonstrance of Midleton’s about the Irish Volunteers, said that they could not be disarmed nor could their parades be forbidden because to take notice of speeches made by crack-brained priests and other enthusiasts would only halt the growth of loyalty in Ireland. ‘I laugh at the whole thing,’ he added.⁵⁰

On the other hand, both he and Nathan were quite aware that winter of the perceptible increase in the numbers of the Irish Volunteers. Nathan was the less cocksure of the two. In November 1915, with the possibility of conscription for Ireland looming, he even described the situation as ‘bad and fairly rapidly growing worse’.⁵¹ With what was, for that time, almost uncannily premature foresight, he actually told Birrell that the Nationalist Party had lost control of the country, and Lord Midleton that ‘Sinn Fein’ were edging out Redmond.⁵² Given such an appreciation, the coolness with which the administration was able to receive some of the reports from informers, and, in a roundabout way, British intelligence in the early months of 1916, seems remarkable.

British intelligence certainly behaved almost casually with the knowledge at its disposal. In the middle of March both Nathan and Wimborne saw a report from the Inspector General of the RIC in which he stated that information had been received ‘from an informant in Ireland to the effect that the Irish Volunteer leaders have been warned to be in readiness for a German landing at an early date’.⁵³ Nathan continued to insist that he did not believe that the leaders of the Volunteers meant insurrection.⁵⁴ A strong recommendation from the GOC Irish Command, General Friend, that the Volunteers ought to be proclaimed had been turned down the month before.⁵⁵ And Birrell wrote to Midleton at the end of March that ‘to proclaim the Irish Volunteers as an illegal body would be in my opinion a reckless and foolish act and would promote disloyalty to a prodigious extent’.⁵⁶ Midleton replied that the Castle was shirking its responsibility, and though the charge was unfair, for Birrell and Nathan’s policy was carefully thought out, their continued unruffled confidence in the developing circumstances was certainly surprising. Wimborne himself was becoming anxious and was relieved to hear that at least a number of Sinn Fein organizers were being banished from Ireland at the end of March, speculating personally whether ‘Clarke, Connolly and others whom I don’t remember’ might not soon follow them.⁵⁷ In justification of Birrell’s and Nathan it must be said that even the deportations caused nationalist ripples beyond mere Sinn Feiner circles. Dillon himself noted anxiously: ‘To me it appears that the tension has been seriously increased.’⁵⁸

The military continued to wish to play safe regardless of political considerations, and a proposal was made that the garrison in Ireland should be reinforced by one or more infantry brigades from England.⁵⁹ The officer in charge of Irish intelligence reported that there was undoubted proof that Sinn Fein Irish Volunteers were working up for rebellion, if ever they had a good opportunity.⁶⁰ Reports from informers inside the ranks of the Volunteers sometimes confirmed this, but others said that in spite of the impatience of some young men in the Volunteers, backed by Connolly and the Citizen Army, the leaders were against a rising at present. Nathan’s nerve held. He had again been momentarily disconcerted after St Patrick’s Day, 17 March, when uniformed Volunteers with rifles and bayonets had manoeuvred in the centre of Dublin and held up traffic for two hours.⁶¹ But on 10 April he wrote to Lord French, now GOC Home Forces in Britain: ‘Though the Volunteer element has been active of late I do not believe that its leaders mean insurrection or that the Volunteers have sufficient arms if the leaders do mean it.’⁶²

A week later he was handed a letter from the general in charge of the defence of the South of Ireland which relayed information that a landing of arms and ammunition was expected on the south-west coast, and a rising fixed for Easter Eve. And two days later an informer reported that MacDonagh, the Volunteer Commandant, had said to his men: ‘We are not going out on Friday [Good Friday], but we are going on Sunday …. Boys, some of us may never come back.’⁶³ A time had been fixed for a general Volunteer march out on Sunday.

All this naturally put even Nathan on his guard. Birrell was in London. Nathan saw that the police were in a state of alert. But on the Saturday morning he heard of the capture and sinking of the Aud, and also that the man who had been arrested the previous day after landing from a German collapsible boat was Sir Roger Casement. The news seemed immensely reassuring both to himself and to Wimborne. The military, too, shared the view that Casement was the key man in the business. When on Sunday morning they read in the Sunday Independent that all movements ordered for the Volunteers for that day had been cancelled, they drew the reasonable conclusion that such plans as there were for a rising had been totally ruined.

However, such overwhelming evidence now existed of the Irish Volunteers’ connection with the German enemy that, after some insistence from Wimborne, Nathan agreed on Sunday morning to cable Birrell in London for permission to arrest them. At lunch he assured his host and fellow-guests that all danger of a rising had been averted with Casement’s arrest and that they could go to Fairyhouse Races on the following day, Easter Monday, quite happily.⁶⁴

But there was work to be done, for a load of gelignite had been stolen that morning and taken to Liberty Hall. A police raid to recover this had to be planned and dispositions made for the projected arrest of the Volunteer leaders when permission arrived from Birrell in London. A conference was held that Sunday evening with senior army and police officers and the viceroy himself. Wimborne pressed for the arrest of from sixty to one hundred of the leaders that very night (Sunday).⁶⁵ Nathan, however, insisted on waiting for permission from Birrell to arrive the next day.

Birrell sent it the next morning. Nathan was in his office making final practical arrangements with the Senior Intelligence Officer and the Secretary of the Post Office, having just told the latter that the telephone and telegraph services in south-western Ireland must be temporarily confined to naval and military use, when rifle fire rang out below the window. It was the policeman on the gate being shot dead by the Citizen Army. The Rising had begun.

The shooting of fellow Irishmen in more or less cold blood continued sporadically for the rest of the day. There was an unpleasant scene near Beggar’s Bush barracks shortly after four in the afternoon. A detachment of what was confusingly called the Irish Volunteer Defence Corps, a reserve training body of the British forces, consisting of middle-class Irishmen over military age, returned at that time from a route march in the countryside where they had been oblivious of events in Dublin. They carried rifles but no ammunition. Some sniping was in progress round the barracks at the time. The rebels, seeing the reserve corps (known as the Gorgeous Wrecks, from the GR they wore on their arm bands) marching down the road towards them, understandably did not stop to ask questions but poured a withering fire into the khaki ranks. They killed five and wounded nine. A little later that evening the writer James Stephens witnessed the shooting by a Volunteer of a civilian trying to extricate his cart from a barricade the Volunteers had built at St Stephen’s Green.⁶⁶ Stephens noted that at that moment the crowd’s mood, which earlier in the day had been one of bewildered curiosity, was one of hate for the Volunteers. At just about the same time fifty miles away at Castlebellingham in County Louth, an Irish constable named McGee and an English grenadier guards officer named Dunville were shot when lined up against some railings with other prisoners by Volunteers under the command of a Belfast electrical engineer named John MacEntee. MacEntee himself had until only the year before been a supporter of Redmond’s and trying to get a commission in the British Army.⁶⁷ The Irish constable, who had been shot at least twice, died within a few hours; the Englishman, though shot through the chest, subsequently recovered.

But the shooting of the defenceless was not to be confined to the rebel side. On the evening of the next day an Irish officer of the Royal Irish Rifles, who was by nature excitable and eccentric and who had been in the retreat from Mons and wounded at the Battle of the Aisne, arrested three journalists in the Dublin streets, Thomas Dickson, Patrick MacIntyre and the well-known pacifist Francis Sheehy Skeffington.⁶⁸ The next morning without any sort of trial and entirely on his own initiative he had them shot by a makeshift firing squad in the barracks yard. The firing squad did its work so badly that a second party had to be assembled a few minutes later to finish Sheehy Skeffington off.⁶⁹ Later in the week some civilians were killed by the military in a house in North King Street while prisoners in their custody.⁷⁰ Such incidents on both sides were not significantly representative of the character of either, only of the nature of the situation for which anyone initiating a cold-blooded insurrection in these circumstances must take responsibility.

The Catholic Church, of which Patrick Pearse was a devout member, sanctions violent rebellion only when the government is a tyranny, ruling by force against the will of the governed, and the insurrection is approved by the community as a whole. As MacNeill had already emphasized, by no stretch of the imagination could it be maintained that such a state of affairs prevailed in Ireland in 1916.**⁷¹ But Pearse had transcended mundane Church teaching with a vision of morality which equated what he saw as Ireland’s redemption with the work of the Redeemer himself. Since, as a good Catholic, he knew that in the last resort, whatever the Church’s rules, the final judgement on his action lay elsewhere, he had no moral doubts. It was hardly a coincidence that the date of the Rising had been fixed for Easter.

Though opinion continued to harden against the Volunteers during the course of the week, particularly when the British Army’s heavy shelling of rebel strongholds in Dublin caused increasing destruction and casualties, James Stephens, who kept a day-to-day record of impressions and events, noted that as late as Wednesday when the heavy shelling started there was a strong ambivalence in public feeling, a reluctance, particularly among men, to express much more than curiosity or astonishment at what had happened. One part of people’s minds was even grateful that the Volunteers had managed to hold out for as long as two days and avoid total humiliation.⁷² Women were on the whole more condemnatory, often saying that all the rebels ought to be shot. ‘Civil war’ was how a nurse in Dublin Castle typically thought of what was going on, and many of the emotions at work were those that invariably accompany civil war.⁷³ And yet at the same time there was something special about this one, for the same Irishman was sometimes on both sides at once. Myth and reality were themselves warring in Irish minds. It was the very development on which Pearse and Connolly with their conscious reactivation of the myth had been counting.⁷⁴

Wednesday, 26 April, saw the Volunteers achieve their greatest military success of the rebellion. On that morning the first British reinforcements from England landed at Kingstown, welcomed as deliverers by the local population, and marched towards the centre of the city.⁷⁵ They were men of the Sherwood Foresters from the English midlands, few of whom had been in the army more than three months. Advancing down Northumberland Road towards Mount Street Bridge to cross the canal which rings the centre of the city at this point they ran into extremely effective fire from de Valera’s outposts, and it was only after many hours of bitter fighting that they succeeded in crossing the canal. The Sherwood Foresters’ casualties here were four officers killed and fourteen wounded and 216 other ranks killed or wounded, and these amounted to more than half the entire British Army casualties in the rebellion. The essentially static and defensive nature of the rebel command’s psychology was, however, once again manifested in this situation, for although de Valera’s men in the outposts round Mount Street base fought with great bravery against overwhelming odds, the headquarters battalion in Boland’s Mills remained virtually inert throughout the engagement.

Such psychology undoubtedly made things easier for the Army Commander, General W. H. M. Lowe. It was his strategy to tie a cordon round the area in which the rebel strongholds were situated, and then methodically reduce this by artillery fire – supported by the gun-boat Helga on the Liffey – and infantry pressure. To many people the Army’s progress seemed slow, but given the extent to which it had been caught off guard on the Monday, with less than two thousand troops in Dublin altogether, and the need to bring reinforcements not only from other parts of Ireland but from England, the plan was carried out with methodical efficiency.

By Thursday evening the words Irish Republic on the green flag above the Post Office had been scorched to a deep brown by flames.⁷⁶ The building was on fire and no longer tenable as rebel headquarters. The O’Rahilly led the sortie to establish new headquarters elsewhere, in which he was killed by machine-gun fire as he dashed with his men up Moore Street. Pearse and Connolly – now on a stretcher with his ankle broken – were the last to leave the building, and after a temporary halt in a grocer’s they knocked their way through the walls of a number of buildings to a fishmonger’s shop in Great Britain Street.⁷⁷ From there Pearse witnessed the shooting down in the street of a publican and his family trying to leave their burning house under a white flag. In the circumstances the sight was too much for this gentleman who had longed for red war in Ireland. In any case his work was done. He had shown that the myth could be made to live. Now, to ensure its survival there was need in his eyes only for that death, which in the words of the greater Myth in which he was also a believer, would confer eternal life.

Connolly, a very different kind of man from Pearse, subscribed to the same fundamental belief in surprisingly similar terms. ‘… In all due humility and awe,’ he had written in an editorial in the Workers’ Republic in February 1916, ‘we recognize that of us, as of mankind before Calvary, it may truly be said “without the shedding of Blood there is no Redemption.” ’⁷⁸

Blood had been shed but the Calvary image had still to be completed.

At 3.30 p.m. on Saturday, 29 April, Pearse, wearing his Volunteer uniform with its Boer War style slouch hat, surrendered to Brigadier General Lowe on the steps of the burnt-out Post Office, ceremonially handing over his sword. For the rest of that day and on the following Sunday morning Pearse’s and Connolly’s orders to surrender were carried round to the various isolated Volunteer strongholds by a nurse who had been in the Post Office during the week, Elizabeth O’Farrell, now under British escort. Some of these strongholds were still virtually untried and intact. A Volunteer posted in a window overlooking St Stephen’s Green had not even fired a shot, and when the order for surrender came round on Sunday there was a cry from the garrison there: ‘Surrender! We haven’t started yet.’⁷⁹ Other garrisons, such as those in the South Dublin Union Workhouse under Eamonn Ceannt, and in the Four Courts area under Edward Daly, were hard pressed after bitter fighting in which they had conducted themselves with chivalry and courage.

The rebel casualties were not particularly heavy: 64 killed altogether during the week.⁸⁰ But casualties among civilians were high from sniping and artillery fire. Civilian casualties altogether were at least 220 killed, and an unknown number in excess of 600 wounded.⁸¹ Total casualties among all Crown forces were 134 killed or died of wounds and 381 wounded. The killed included 35 officers and men of Irish regiments,⁸² 5 GR’s and 17 Irishmen of the RIC and Dublin Metropolitan Police. Most of the police casualties occurred not in Dublin at all but at a fight near Ashbourne, County Meath, on Friday, when a party of forty RIC men under a chief inspector, on their way by motor-car to relieve the police barracks at Ashbourne which had been reported occupied by Volunteers, were skilfully ambushed by rebels under Volunteer Commandant Thomas Ashe. The fight lasted for five hours, and when the police had run out of ammunition they surrendered. Eight of them had been killed and fifteen wounded.⁸³ The same group of rebels had been moving fairly freely over both eastern County Meath and northern County Dublin during the week, raiding police barracks and disturbing communications. The fate of the rebellion was, however, totally unaffected by their activity or by the ‘Battle of Ashbourne’, and it was in a different though also tragic role that Commandant Ashe the next year was to make a contribution to the success of Irish republicanism.

Elsewhere in Ireland, thanks to the double disaster of the loss of the German arms ship and the conflicting orders of MacNeill and Pearse, the Volunteers’ efforts were either of less significance still, or, in most cases, nil. The town of Enniscorthy was actually taken over by the local Volunteers for three days from early Thursday morning, 27 April, while the police sat in a state of uneasy siege in their barracks, but no fighting took place, and when the leaders of the rebels sent an offer of help to the beleaguered garrisons in Dublin James Connolly turned it down. After a military armoured train moving up from Wexford had sent them into a defensive position on Vinegar Hill the rebels, who numbered about six hundred altogether, surrendered unconditionally having barely fired a shot.⁸⁴ John MacEntee, one of the leaders in County Louth of the party which had shot Constable McGee, made his way to Dublin and pluckily joined the besieged Post Office three days before the surrender.⁸⁵ In County Louth his men had dwindled to fourteen as the news reached them of British troop movements in their direction.

In Limerick, an old centre of Fenianism, two bodies of Volunteers over a hundred strong had been mobilized on the Sunday before the outbreak but then disbanded on receipt of MacNeill’s countermanding order. The next day they actually received another order, from Pearse this time, telling them to go into action all the same but, understandably perhaps in view of their own disarray and the known loss of the arms ship, they did not obey.⁸⁶

In ‘rebel’ Cork which had seen a very strong turn-out of armed and uniformed Irish Volunteers on St Patrick’s Day only a month before, there was a similar story. Over a thousand men were in fact successfully mobilized for Easter Sunday, their task being to hold the military forces in the area while the arms from the Aud were being distributed. They received the countermanding order and dispersed, only to receive another order from Pearse the next day telling them that the action in Dublin was on and that they were to carry out their original instructions. However, since in the course of these days they actually received no less than nine separate dispatches from Dublin altogether, some of them contradictory, they eventually decided to do nothing. After the Rising the IRB held an inquiry into this activity and found, perhaps rather leniently by strict military standards, that ‘Cork could not have acted other than it did’.⁸⁷

In Belfast 132 Volunteers were mobilized in the Falls Road. But no countermanding order was needed here to throw their plan into confusion. This had been worked out by Pearse and Connolly in Dublin and provided for them to cross Ulster without engaging in any action and, together with other Volunteers from Tyrone, join up with the larger bodies due to rise in County Galway. However, the Tyrone men when they heard this plan flatly refused to leave their own county and the plan disintegrated. The leader of the Volunteers in Ulster, refusing to commit the Belfast men alone, was thus driven into total inaction.⁸⁸ Ironically, he was none other than Denis McCullough, the young pioneer of the new IRB with Hobson a few years before, and by right of his position as President of the Supreme Council technically, under the IRB constitution, ‘President of the Irish Republic’. But Pearse, in taking on responsibility for the Fenian myth through the secret Military Council had appropriated this title for himself, although whether or not with McCullough’s acquiescence is not clear.

In Galway, Liam Mellows, one of the Sinn Fein organizers who had been deported by Nathan and Birrell the previous month but who had made his way back to Ireland in disguise, managed to mobilize a thousand or so men. They had no more than sixty rifles and 350 shotguns between them and had been particularly dependent on the anticipated arms from the Aud. Some even carried pikes in the ’98 tradition. They captured one police barracks and its five Irish policemen but failed to capture another defended by a similar handful. They cut some telegraph wires and uprooted some railway lines but eventually, after moving for some days desultorily round the county, harassed by troop movements and even some shells from a warship in Galway bay, dispersed on receiving news of the insurrection’s collapse in Dublin.⁸⁹ Their failure was reminiscent of similar Fenian activity in 1867.

Except for the factual element of defeat the same could by no means be said of the rising in Dublin as a whole. Ineffectual as it had been in terms of military achievement, mustering altogether only about 1,500 rebels unsupported and even strongly condemned by the populace, it had brought about the only serious and disciplined fighting that had ever been conducted by Irishmen in single-minded pursuit of Wolfe Tone’s aim of a totally independent Irish Republic. Something quite new had happened in Irish history. The centre of Dublin lay in ruins to prove it. Although the rebellion had come as a shattering surprise to ninety-nine per cent of Irishmen of all classes and political beliefs, being unexpected even by most of those who carried it out, such an event could not leave any nationally-minded Irishman’s attitude to events in the future unaffected.