From: sos@oz.plymouth.edu (Steffan O'Sullivan)
Subject: Re: IRISH: Easter Rising 1916??
Organization: Plymouth State College - Plymouth, NH.
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 92 14:09:17 GMT

c9119870@wombat.newcastle.edu.au (ANTIGONE) writes:
>Could any of you Irish History scholars fill me in with the
>particulars of the 1916 Easter Rising?
>
>Was it considered a success? (By the Catholics, that is)

Hmm - this is all from memory of 22 years ago, the last time I read
anything on it, but here goes:

It was not, at the time, considered a success.  It was successful only
in that it provided some martyrs for a couple of years later, when the
Irish soldiers in the British army came home from WWI.

Irish militancy hadn't been very strong before the Easter Uprising.
James Connelly's IRB (Brotherhood was changed to Army after the
uprising) was a small group, more talk than action.  Connelly was on
the British "bad boy" list, though, for his part in the anarcho-
syndicalist strike in Dublin some four years earlier, so they sort of
watched him.

Padraig Pearce was a poet whose heart longed to fly with the great dead
heroes of Ireland.  He was probably expecting to die, and hoping his
death would indeed spark a resurgence of patriotism, which it did.  I
think most of the others hoped to survive, believing the rather
improbable success story these two painted for them if they joined in
an uprising.

The Germans were to have supplied thousands of rifles (arranged by Sir
Roger Casement, who had earned his title spying in the Congo for the
British), but the submarine delivering them never met the party on land
to receive them - I believe there was a car crash on the way to the
rendezvous.  Casement landed alone, without the rifles, and was
arrested (I'm not sure when).  At first, this almost stopped the
uprising, but they decided at the last minute to go ahead with it.  I
do believe that the upshot of this disaster was that very little
happened outside of Dublin.

Pearce and Connelly strode up to the General Post Office on Easter
Monday morning and raised the Irish flag.  Pearce read the declaration
that Ireland was now an independent country, and that the provisional
government was headquartered in the GPO.  IRB soldiers went throughout
Dublin and seized key points.  Probably most of the Catholic Irish
considered them suicidal poetic lunatics.  The IRB asked them all to
please stay out of the army's way until the British admitted they had
lost Ireland.

Oddly enough, the British did not admit this.  There was sporadic
fighting at first - the Irish involved in the uprising were about 1200,
and the British had a lot more police and soldiers than that - then
intensified.  It went on for a week, by which time the British had
brought more soldiers and even gunboats up the Liffey which were
shelling the IRB strongholds.  Connelly, the main general, was
wounded.  Pearce finally issued the surrender notice in order to save
civilian lives, since the British were tending to shell entire
neighborhoods near the strategically held IRB spots.

As many of the IRB as the British could find were arrested, and there
was no news at all from Dublin Castle (British hq in Dublin) for some
weeks.  Things got tense, and people who had been cursing the idiots
who were responsible for all the damage and bloodshed in Dublin now
were demanding to know what had happened to the heroes, and where were
they, and what was their condition, etc.  Finally the British began
releasing terse notes to the newspapers to the effect that P.  Pearce
was executed for high treason this morning, J. Connelly was executed
this afternoon for high treason, and so on.  Over twenty of the leaders
were scheduled to be executed, but some were reprieved, including
Eamonn de Valera, because he was born in New York and was therefore a
US citizen.

It turns out that Pearce, Connelly and 13 others were executed without
trial, by military court which had no real jurisdiction over them since
they weren't in the British military.  It later leaked out that
Connelly hadn't been given any but the rudest first aid, and, feverish
and possibly gangrenous, was strapped to a stretcher leaned against the
wall for the firing squad.  This was the height of British stupidity in
the whole affair: far from crushing the Irish spirit, the brutal,
illegal executions united the country where it had previously been
split.  Sir Roger Casement was also executed, though through a proper
trial.  These sixteen men became the 16 Martyrs whose death did indeed
spark the War of Independence 1919-1921.

As I said, this is all from memory, and please check the facts before
accepting this.  I believe it to be roughly true, however. I welcome
corrections.

Disclaimer: I am not Irish, I was born and raised in the U.S.A.
Despite the last name, I am at most of 1/8 Irish descent, and they came
over in the 1840's.  I am descended from at least six other
nationalities, including just as much English as Irish, and more
Swedish and French than either of them.  I have no nationalist axe to
grind, and consider the current IRA a parcel of brutal idiots.  I wish
Irish-Americans and Irish-Australians would stop supporting them
financially - they are savage thugs who deserve nothing but your
prayers that they'll give up their damnable ways.

-- 
  - Steffan O'Sullivan		         sos@oz.plymouth.edu
Newsgroups: soc.history