Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
The Easter Rising
The more radical factions within Sinn Féin, the IVF and the ICA saw Britain's difficulty as
Ireland's opportunity, and planned to rise up against the Crown on Easter Sunday, 1916. In
typical fashion, the rhetoric of the rebellion outweighed the quality of the planning. When
the head of the IVF, Eoin McNeill, got wind of the plans, he published an advertisement in
the newspaper cancelling the planned 'manoeuvres'. The leaders rescheduled the revolu-
tion for the following day but word never spread beyond the capital, where a motley band
of about a thousand rebels assembled and seized strategic buildings. The main garrison was
the General Post Office, outside which the poet and school teacher Pádraig Pearse read out
the
Proclamation of the Republic
.
The British Army didn't take the insurgence seriously at first but after a few soldiers
were killed, they sent a gunboat down the Liffey to rain shells on the rebels. After six days
of fighting the city centre was ravaged and the death toll stood at 300 civilians, 130 British
troops (many of whom were Irish) and 60 rebels.
The rebels, prompted by Pearse's fear of further civilian casualties, surrendered and were
arrested. Crowds gathered to mock and jeer them as they were led away. Initially, Dubliners
resented them for the damage they had caused in their futile rising, but their attitudes began
to change following the executions of the leaders in Kilmainham Gaol. The hostility shown
to the rebels turned to outright sympathy and support.
Many Dubliners were appalled at the sentences received by the leaders of the Rising, especially the fate
suffered by 18-year-old Willie Pearse, whose main offence was that he was Pádraig's brother. James Con-
nolly, the hero of the Dublin working classes, was so severely injured during the Rising that he was
strapped to a chair and shot.
