Easter week 1916 in Ireland

Easter Rising – Easter week 1916 in Ireland.
The Irish rebellion on Easter Monday, Dublin burns and starves and reprisals and consequences.

Dublin in ruins
Dublin in ruins after the Easter Rising.

Part III of Easter Rising. Here to Part II !

Irish rebellion on Easter Monday

The heart and soul of the Irish strategy was to capture specific important spots in Dublin, and keep these so long as possible, thus undermining British power over the city. It had been subsequently expected that one of three situations might occur: the nation might rise in patriotism and sympathy; the English might understand the overall inability of controlling Ire­land and remove; and final and slightest of dreams, the Germans might one way or another reached Ireland to relief the rebels.

Considering that rebels didn’t have guns of any type, their primary strong-points could simply hold out so long as the British didn’t make use of their own artillery. Connolly and the socialists wished that the British would, with regard to capitalist motives, not bombard Dublin and thus demolish their very own – or mainly their own – building. This, as well, had been a fantasy.

Starting time for the Easter Rising had been 12:00 hours and since Easter Monday was a Bank Holiday there were folks in the roads who viewed the modest units of Volunteers as well as the Citizen Army moving, equipped with firearms, through the urban center to get their numerous strong points. It resolved to go, generally, surprisingly properly. 5 main complexes or sets of houses had been captured north of the River Liffey, 9 south of it, and a few of the railway stations had been occupied. Headquarters had been set up within the huge General Post Office in Sack­ville Street (now O’Connell Street) from which Irish banners were flown and where Patrick Pearse declared the introduction of a provisional government for the fresh Irish Republic.

Together with him in the Post Office were Connolly as military commander, The O’Rahilly, the really ill Joseph Plunkett, Sean MacDermott, Tom Clark, as well as other heads. There, as well, was a guy known as Michael Collins. The rebels immedi­ately began arranging the Post Office resistant to the assault which they anticipated al­most immediately.

Eamon de Valera
Aftzer the Easter Rising, Eamon de Valera formed in 1919 an illegal Irish parliament. He then continued to press against the British until the Irish independence.
The 4 additional primary strong-points captured had been the South Dublin Union, a congeries of poor-houses and so forth commanded by Eamonn Ceannt; the Four Courts, the head offices of the legal profession, where large law publications were utilized as sandbags under Eamonn Daly; St Stephen’s Green, where ditches had been excavated as well as barricades of motor-cars constructed commanded by Michael Mallin and Countess Markievicz; along with Boland’s Flour’ Mill under Eamonn de Valera, which protected the approach roadways from Kingstown, today Dun Laoghaire, where whatever supports from Britain would most likely disembark.

An effort to capture Dublin Castle was unsuccessful. An effort to grab a significant amount of firearms along with ammo belonging to the arsenal in Phoenix Park called the Magazine Fort was just to a degree effective and only a number of rifles grabbed. However, the rebels effectively cut phone lines, and Dublin Castle had been temporarily practically cut off. Yet another triumph had been that a troop of Lancers which tried to charge down Sackville Street had been repulsed with casualties.

The English had been surprised and had been currently practically entirely, unaware. Dublin Castle instantly requested military up from the Curragh as well as other barracks outside Dublin and also asked the government for supports. Right now there, Lord French had been commander-in-chief. He was an Irishman as well as a hardcore Unionist. He right away directed that at least 4 divisions be prepared for transport to Eire.

British policy was basically put into opposite. Appeasement of the Irish was off; the rebels were to be smashed, fast, as well as extremely. However, if the English in Dublin had been unaware, so had been the rebels. They had not any wireless connections both amongst the strong-points they had captured or even with link rest of the world. Contact by runner grew to become problematic and finally hopeless once the battle come to its peak.


From the military point of view, Tuesday had been remarkably peaceful. The English closing in very carefully. Their technique was to place a cordon all around that part of Dublin where the rebels strong-points had been, subsequently cut that vicinity in two, and lastly clean up.
The British relocated artillery and soldiers into Trinity College, a natural fort which the rebels couldn’t capture, though they had designed to achieve this. The explanation had been the limited quantity of fighting men on hand.

Looting started by the folks. Martial law had been announced. British support troops reached Kingstown. A crazy English officer, Captain Bowen-Colthurst, had 3 harmless reporters shot ‘while attempting to escape’ – an expression to generally be hideously common, and not just in Eire. The crimes had started.

Dublin burns and starves

By Wednesday morning hours the rebels had been outnumbered 20 to 1. The English troops today started to strike serious. Their initial steps were to eliminate Liberty Hall, the head offices of the Labour Party as well as the trade unions, by shellfire from the gunboat Helga. As it took place, the rebels had awaited this, and the structure had been totally vacant. The British gunfire had been not accurate and lots of additional complexes had been hit and a lot of citizens slaughtered.
The British military had been deploying artillery; for example a 9-pounder gun had been fired against an individual sniper.
Dublin started to burn, and also the citizens to starve, because there wasn’t any foodstuff arriving in the town.

British infantry fire on the Four Courts
British infantry fire on the Four Courts – a central Irish rebel strong point in Dublin.
It was no more a police action but full-scale battle in which hardly any effort was made to save the citizens. In the meantime, English troops marching in from Kingstown had been ambushed by de Valera’s men and suffered serious casualties, however simply by the huge numbers pushed their way through.
St Stephen’s Green had been eliminated of rebels, who retreated into the Royal College of Surgeons, and set up a new strong-point there.

On Thursday a fresh English commander-in-chief landed. Because Eire had been under martial law, he held complete powers there. It was General Sir John Maxwell, a military of several contrasts who had returned the month before from Egypt, where he had already been commander-in-chief of the Anglo-Egyptian forces. Despite the fact that he numbered the Countess Markievicz among his relationships, he had hardly any familiarity with the existing political atmosphere in Ireland, and, without a doubt, as events were to confirm, did a lot more to weaken English power in Ireland compared to all the rebels combined. He had already been instructed by the British prime minister, Asquith, to put down the rebellion with all available momentum. Which he did no matter what political results.

The troops from Britain had been at this point in action. They were generally fresh and un­trained recruits, and when they found that lots of the fighters of the Irish Repub­lican Army – as the rebels these days and hence­forth named themselves – weren’t in most cases dressed in a uni­form they started firing on male citizens on sight.


On this Thursday assaults were undertaken on Boland’s Mill, the fighters in the South Dublin Union had been pressured to retreat, and there had been shelling of the General Post Office, which started to burn from the top downwards. Connolly had been injured two times. The earliest wound he hid from the men: the next wound had been more severe, for one foot had been smashed, and he was in terrific pain. Using morphia he continued, leading the struggle as best he could.

Dublin burns
Dublin burns.
The Dublin fires were at this time huge conflagra­tions. Because of the roads full of small-arms fire and also the water lines many times broken, these could not be handled. However, not any key rebel strong-point gave up.

On Friday Connolly instructed the women who had battled so fearlessly to go out of the General Post Office complex, which had been at this time burning and blocked. Later that day he and Pearse together with the surviving rebels es­caped from the house that was at this point virtually red-hot and roughly to break down. They discovered a brief retreat place in the neighborhood, while the English soldiers carried on to shell the vacant build­ing. Pretty much all realized that the end had been close.

A final engagement had been battled for King’s Street, close to the Four Courts. It required a number of Five Thousand English troops, supported by armored cars and artillery guns, 28 hours to breakthrough about One hundred fifty yards versus a bunch of Two hundred rebels. It had been there were soldiers of the South Staffordshire Regiment shot and bayoneted citizens hiding in cellars.

And after this everything had been finished. Saturday morning hours Connolly and Pearse surrendered unconditionally.

Such as many other things concerning the Easter Rising, deaths are difficult to calculate. It appears those of the English soldiers were about 500; the ones from the Irish, which includes citizens, about twice that amount. Material destruction had been calculated in these days at approximately £2 1/2 million. Significant areas of Dublin lay in ruins.

Reprisals and consequences

Irish rebels in a British gaol
After their surrender, Irish rebels in a British jail.
When, on Sunday, the captured rebels had been marched through Dublin from one jail compound to another one, they were sometimes jeered at and booed by the folks, especially in the slum sectors. The bulk of public opinion had been contrary to the rebels prior to the Rising and continued to be so until the reprisals started.

On the direct instructions of the cabinet in London, reprisals had been secret, instant, and cruel. The leaders had been tried by court-martial and shot: only the moment they were killed were their deaths declared.
Some of those thus shot were Willie Pearse, who was no front-runner and who, this had been commonly thought in Ireland, had been executed simply because he had accompanied his well-known brother; the in­valid Plunkett; and, most unpleasant of all to Irish opinions, Connolly, who was dying and who had to be propped up in bed for the court-martial in his hospital room. He had been executed in a chair, due to the fact he couldn’t stand.

A tide of outrage entered all Ire­land. That tide didn’t go down when Asquith explained these methods in House of Commons; nor when he understood that a mis­taken had been undertaken, and sacked Maxwell.

When the British government finally realized that the practices had been uniting all Ireland in opposition to Britain, there was one more switch of English strategy. Most of the 3,000 rebels imprisoned following the Easter Rising were released from English jails. They came back to Ireland and started right away to re­organize a fresh and even more formidable IRA, at this time with the support of the Irish people. It was intended as a gesture of appeasement by Lloyd George, the new prime minister, who invited to an Irish Convention created to fix ‘the Irish problem’. Considering that Sinn Fein boycotted the Convention, it had been a total disappointment.

British victory parade in Dublin
General French’s British victory parade in Dublin, 1919.
Once more English strategy had been thrown into reverse, and the heads of the new inde­pendence movement were imprisoned early in the year of 1918. Michael Collins, nevertheless, avoided arrest, even though there was a price on his head, dead or alive, which eventu­ally grown to the amount of £10,000. He was to be the outstanding guerrilla chief in the subsequent game of the fight. The Irish leaders, with considerably support from Irish people in North America, both financial and emotional, initiated establishing a workable replacement administration which could and did take control once the English should have finally observed that they couldn’t be successful.

Sinn Fein won, and gained the majority of the Irish seats in the 1918 election. The elected members, nevertheless, created their unique ‘parliament’, Dail Eireann, instead of take a seat in Westminster.

Collins drew up a method of resistance, first passive, after that obstructive, and then finally active, which has since already been followed in other places in opposition to British imperialism, as well as resistant to the imperialism of any other countries. And in January 1919 the first shots of the fresh rebellion had been fired in County Tipperary.

The Easter Rising was a complete disaster. But nevertheless, it was a complete triumph. Following Easter week 1916 consistent British control in Ireland became an impossibility. The disaster became a victory. Some other tragedies would follow.

Nevertheless, the Irish done it, and by themselves – Sinn Fein.


t_arrow2 to Part II: Sinn Fein – David and Goliath

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1 thought on “Easter week 1916 in Ireland”

  1. Thank you: An excellent commentary! It isn’t widely known on my side of the pond (USA) that the Easter Rising garnered almost no support from the local population! British military excess, brutality and a seemingly total lack of concern for civilians is what destroyed any hope of Union! You make this quite clear!

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