“They have something to say.”

March 26, 2016 5:43 PM

Curious Journey - The 1916 Easter Rising [YouTube] [Documentary] In 1973, Kenneth Griffith, the renowned documentary maker, gathered together a group of veterans of the Irish Rising. Almost half a century after the terrible events they lived through, this highly diverse group - branded terrorists by the British in their youth and now highly respected citizens - gave their own vivid account of what it was like to live through those turbulent times.

Related:

- Easter Rising centenary: How the 1916 Insurrection Shaped Modern Irish History. by Rozina Sabur [The Telegraph]

What was the Easter Rising?
On Easter Monday 1916, a group of Irish nationalists staged a rebellion against the occupying British government in Ireland, in an attempt to establish an Irish Republic. The group of rebels hoped to spur the public into rebellion to overthrow the British, but didn’t attract much public support.

Who were the key figures?
One of the rebels, Eamon de Valera, evaded a death sentence and dominated Ireland’s political landscape, first as Taoiseach, then as president.
Another, Roger Casement, had planned a shipment of German arms and ammunition for the rebels but it was detected by the British shortly before the Rising. Casement was charged with treason and executed in the summer of 1916. Patrick Pearse, was part of the Irish Volunteer Force and played an active role in preparing for the Rising, though it is unlikely he fired any shots. Before his execution he was proclaimed President of the Provisional Government the rebels attempted to establish. Trade union leader James Connolly was a key figure in the pro-independence movement. The image of a wounded Connolly facing a firing squad changed public opinion and was a key contribution to the bitterness against the British in Ireland. Thomas Clarke, a republican revolutionary, had been in favour of armed revolution for most of his life. He spent 15 years in English prisons before his role in the Easter Rising, and was executed after it was thwarted. Seán MacDiarmada, another signatory of the proclamation, was a member of the Military Committee of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Thomas MacDonagh, a political activist poet had also signed the proclamation. A member of the Gaelic League, he was a founding member of the Irish Volunteers with Pearse and Eoin MacNeill. Éamonn Ceannt, another signatory of the proclamation, was on the military committee of the Irish Republican Board. Joseph Plunkett, one of the original members of the military committee also signed the proclamation; largely responsible for the plan the rebels followed during the Easter Rising, his ill health prevented him from having too much active involvement.

What was the backdrop to the unrest?
A crucial moment in Ireland’s history, the Easter Rising of April 24, 1916 was predicated on growing tensions between Irish nationalists and the British government. Since the 1800 Act of Union which merged Ireland with the UK and the later potato famine in 1845-47, pressure had been mounting for Home Rule. The Act of Union meant Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and was governed from Westminster. Since its inception Irish nationalists had been staging their opposition to this shift of power. Nationalists lobbied for an arrangement whereby the country remained part of the UK but had some form of self-government. It was not until 1914 that a bill to this effect was passed through Westminster, but its implementation was suspended at the outbreak of the First World War.

- The Bloody Legacy of the Easter Rising, Still Dividing Ireland a Century On. by Tom Rowley [The Telegraph]

On a chilly morning in Dublin, a man wearing nothing but a kilt and a rugby shirt came to honour the founding fathers of one nation, traitors to another. As the seconds passed, he stood still by a memorial to the men, beneath the Irish tricolour, the flag of the state they fought so bloodily to create. When at last he turned away, his eyes were red and his voice strained. “I’ve got so much respect for those men lying in there,” he said, giving his name as Terry. Those men were the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, an armed rebellion against British rule that was quashed in less than a week but that began a series of events culminating in Irish independence six years later. After defeating the rebels, the British executed 14 of them and buried them here, behind the capital’s Arbour Hill prison.

- Martyrs With Guns and the Easter Rising by Lawrence Downes [The New York Times]

To me it was a thrilling tale of doomed courage. A handful of rebels rose up in arms to demand independence while Britain was distracted by the Great War. Though the rebellion was swiftly crushed and its leaders executed, it catalyzed Ireland’s transformation from oppressed colony to independent republic. How this happened, exactly, was unclear to me. But like anyone raised Roman Catholic, I understood triumph in humiliation, the worship of sacrificial death. The part that seems odd now, but did not then: martyrs with guns. Ireland is marking the centenary of the Rising this year with programs and parades the island over. It does so gingerly, knowing that its path from 1916 to the present day is strewn with agonies: years of civil war and terrorist bloodshed. And though there has been courageous peacemaking, sectarian hatreds still smolder, buried, like a coal-seam fire.

- Easter Rising, Enniscorthy 1916: Writing About a Revolution. [Irish Times]

The 1916 Rebellion began in Enniscorthy in the early morning on the Thursday of Easter week, with the Athenaeum, a building close to the castle in the centre of the town, as headquarters. An emergency hospital and a kitchen were set up by member of Cumann mBan. One member claimed that there were about 70 or 80 women working in the Athenaeum while she was there during Easter week. Some 33 women who participated in the Rising in Enniscorthy were awarded military service pensions in 1934. In the aftermath of the surrender in early May 1916, the majority of Cumann na mBan members avoided imprisonment. Two prominent members, however, were arrested and detained – Kathleen Browne from Rathronan Castle and Nell Ryan from Tomcoole, Taghmon, were imprisoned in Waterford Jail and subsequently detained in Richmond Barracks, Kilmainham Gaol and Mountjoy Prison. Kathleen Browne was released in early June 1916 while Nell Ryan was deported to Lewes Prison, England, in June and was not released until October 1916. The Republican flag was hoisted over the Athenaeum when the rebellion began and saluted with bugler and firing party. The three women who hoisted the flag, members of Cumann nBan, were Greta Comerford, Una Brennan and Marion Stokes. Three writers remember these three women: George O’Brien remembers his grandaunt Greta Comerford, Roddy Doyle his grandaunt Una Brennan and Colm Tóibín his neighbour Marion Stokes.

- 1916: Nursing the Wounds of the Easter Rising by Sinead McCoole [Irish Times]

Nursing staff were on duty in the workhouses in the city during Easter week. The South Dublin Union was a location for the soldiers of the Irish Republic who had taken over the city and declared a Republic. Workhouse hospital nurse Margaret Kehoe (45) was still tending the inmates during Easter week. When she was recorded in the 1911 census she was living in house 10 in the union complex which then housed 3,817 inmates. She was tending a wounded volunteer, Dan McCarthy, outside Acute Hospital 3 on Easter Monday when she was shot. Dan survived but Margaret, who was born in Carlow, was fatally wounded when she went to his assistance.

Margaret Rachel Huxley, the former matron of Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital and founder of the Dublin Metropolitan School for Nurses and also of the international council for nurses was also tending the wounded during the Rising. The year before she had taken over the position as matron of the Dublin University Women’s Voluntary Aid Detachment’s Hospital at 19 Mountjoy Square. She ran it with the assistance of a matron, two trained nurses with Belgian refugees working in the kitchen. During Easter week she also opened her own private nursing home, on Lower Mount Street, for casualties. Women opened their homes as hospitals at the time. It was recorded that numbers 32 and 35 Fitzwilliam Square were opened as temporary hospitals for those injured during the fighting. The occupier of 32 was Miss Meade, while a Miss Fletcher is listed at 35.

- Why, 100 Years After the Easter Rising, Are Irish Women Still Fighting? by Olivia O'Leary [The Guardian]

It was never just England. It was always Pagan England. When I was a small child at school in Ireland, that was the difference between us. England was pagan, and Ireland was holy. And Holy Ireland had no place for liberated women. So what happened to the promise of equality in the Proclamation of the Irish Republic read out on Easter Monday 1916 by the poet and rebel leader Patrick Pearse, and addressed to “Irishmen and Irishwomen”? The proclamation declared an end to British rule but it also guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities for all citizens. It made a commitment to universal suffrage, extraordinary for the time, and two years before women in Britain won the vote. Constance Markievicz, the feminist and socialist who played a prominent role in the 1916 rising. So how did the document’s message become stifled by a conservative culture obsessed with female chastity and purity, and so terrified of glimpsing the outlines of a woman’s body that in the 1950s we were still condemned to conceal ourselves in voluminous cardigans? How did that dream of a radical, free Ireland give way in the succeeding years to Holy Ireland, where generations of women felt they had to hide themselves away?

- The Easter Rising, and a Tale of Two Friends Torn Apart by War. by Daniel Mulhall [The Guardian]

The complexities of that era are well illustrated by the parallel lives of two Irishmen named Thomas who both met violent deaths during that fateful year. Thomas MacDonagh and Thomas Kettle were born within two years of each other, in 1878 and 1880. Both men edited nationalist periodicals and supported the cause of votes for women. They sympathised with Dublin’s trade unionists during the bitter industrial dispute of 1913. By 1916, MacDonagh and Kettle were published authors, colleagues and friends at University College Dublin, where they both held academic posts. MacDonagh, one of the seven signatories of the proclamation of the Irish republic issued during the Easter Rising, was executed in Kilmainham jail on 3 May 1916, alongside his friend and fellow poet, Patrick Pearse. Four months later, on 9 September, Thomas Kettle died fighting for Britain in the Battle of the Somme. How was it that two such similar individuals could end up on different sides of history? The answer is that they didn’t. In fact, they were part of what the late historian Keith Jeffery has termed the “seamless robe of Irish experience” during this period.

- What Should Britain Feel About the Easter Rising? How About Shame? by Kevin Meagher [The Independent]

The centenary of the Easter Rising, the insurrection by Irish republicans in Dublin 100 years ago is a secret history to most people on this side of the Irish Sea. The Easter Rising was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The total loss of control in Dublin, even for just a week, was a wounding humiliation for Britain. If uppity Fenians could bring the second city of the Empire to its knees, nothing would ever be the same again. Revisionist British history has it that, by the standards of the time, and taking into account we were midway through the First World War, their treatment was no worse than what should have been expected. But tying the badly-wounded trade union leader, James Connolly, to a chair in the yard outside Kilmainham Gaol, merely for the pleasure of killing him by firing squad, was as disastrous a piece of public relations then as it sounds now.

- Irish government launches free 1916 Easter Rising e-book. [Irish Central]

Irish Foreign Minister Charlie Flanagan announced last week that the Irish government has provided a gift to the world to mark the Easter Rising’s centenary: a free downloadable e-copy of the Royal Irish Academy’s book "1916 Portraits and Lives". The book, a winner of the Best Use of Illustration in Design at the 2015 Irish Design Awards, is a collection of 42 short biographies, accompanied by original illustrations by artist David Rooney, of the men and women whose lives helped to shape or were touched by the events of the Easter Rising. It is available to download until March 31 at www.dfa.ie and www.ireland.ie/portraits.

- The 1916 Rising - rarely seen images. [Irish Times]
- Previously.

posted by Fizz (22 comments total)

See also Roddy Doyle's FaveBook feed (of all things) today.
posted by wenestvedt at 5:46 PM on March 26, 2016

huh. weird. i was in the uk last week and listened to some program on radio 4 about this. i realise that doesn't make me an expert, but the tone there was rather more questioning about whether this was the right thing to do at the time - it was seen as traitorous by many irishmen away fighting on the front, while others at home, who were trying to find a political solution through self-governance felt betrayed. it also seemed to be poorly planned and executed.

i wonder if i caught one half of a pair of programs that balanced each other out? or is this post one-sided?
posted by andrewcooke at 6:28 PM on March 26, 2016 [1 favorite]

Thanks for this. My dad's from Belfast, but I am ashamed to say I don't know much about this history. This post's a great start--might somebody recommend some other good books that I can read to learn more?
posted by synecdoche at 6:39 PM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

Theologian condemns 'unchristian' Rising.
posted by Segundus at 6:51 PM on March 26, 2016

I was in Dublin in 1992 and went to the Garden of Remembrance (Wikipedia). I still remember the whole site: the pool, the benches & flowers, and the statue of the Children of Lir turning into swans and taking flight. Very pretty, very moving.

And as I read these articles, I am realizing that once upon a time I knew a lot of this, and somehow forgot. Gah, lousy memory, you're letting me down!
posted by wenestvedt at 7:06 PM on March 26, 2016

As someone else with a father from Belfast who wanted a better grounding in Irish history, I recently read Robert Kee's Green Flag series based on the answers to an older question on the green, the third volume of which focuses specifically on 1916-1923.
posted by Strutter Cane - United Planets Stilt Patrol at 7:15 PM on March 26, 2016 [2 favorites]

How did that dream of a radical, free Ireland give way in the succeeding years to Holy Ireland, where generations of women felt they had to hide themselves away?

Éamon De Valera and his state-enforced fantasy of a rural, Irish-speaking, quasi-medieval, wholly devout Catholic country, which did cultural and economic damage to the nation for decades.
posted by Harvey Kilobit at 8:49 PM on March 26, 2016 [15 favorites]

Wow, Fizz. Great post. I just watched the whole documentary and it's quite something.

Regarding Roger Casement: Was listening to this RTE Radio 1 podcast on him today, and it links his travels to the Congo and his eventual execution with his homosexuality.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 9:07 PM on March 26, 2016

1) Interesting to note that De Valera was an American.

2) We are now a hundred years past the 1916 Easter uprising. At the time, they were less than 60 years past the massive depopulation of the country due to disease and forced emigration caused by deliberate British misrule. Literal, no-kidding genocide at British hands, because, as Sinead O'Connor brings up in her music - there was no famine. The crops of grain and corn in the fields were just fine that year. Irishmen weren't allowed to keep the grains and corn. Only the blighted potatoes. The British seized "their" crops at bayonet-point from starving Irish tenants. Ireland did not recover. She is now still smaller than she was before the "famines."

So! In 1916, Irish troops were being marched into the murder-machines of the First World War... for what? To defend what from who, exactly?

3) As regressive and awful as Ireland has been to women's reproductive rights, let us look at North Ireland... ohhh... the Abortion Act of 1967, law of Great Britain in all other places, doesn't apply there. Gotta go to England, Scotland or Wales for your safe and legal abortion. It's not De Valera, there is a deeper cultural issue that needs to be addressed.

4) Ireland was a Neutral in WWII, inasmuch as they held the Axis in much lower esteem than the British. American and Brit pilots downed over Ireland were allowed to "escape" - the Germans they hung onto until the end of the war. They had first hand experience with ultimate evil, and they called it like they saw it.
posted by Slap*Happy at 9:18 PM on March 26, 2016 [17 favorites]

This January during the Superbowl and ancillary precursor programming in the US there was an ad for, who knows, American football via cable conglomerates or some such shit, which was extraordinarily generic, showing how all ethnicities of American football fans, white fans of the Atlanta Falcons and pink fans of the Pittsburgh Steelers and green fans of the Seattle Seahawks and tan fans of the Washington DC football team all come together on Sunday in our American living rooms to together celebrate the football values of extreme violence and doing everything possible for a win and how that makes our great nation the greatest, THE GREATEST, ever in the world ever because football. Not that namby-pamby soccer but FOOTBALL.

It was lame on its own merits.

But every time I saw it it drove me nuts, because the soundbed for the ad was what had presumably been perceived as a neutral marching-band song, a song with a martial tenor but not associated with a pro or college American football team, mostly unknown in this great nation.

It was a marching band setting of "The Foggy Dew".

So every time this brainless paean to togetherness and the family achieved through competition, shit-talking, cheating, and extreme violence played, the line "Britannia's Huns with their long range guns" rang out in my foggy mind.

The centenary of the Rising roughly, due to Easter's wandering ways, coincides with my half-centenary. So I thank you, Ireland, for my red hairs and mordant sense of humor, which stem from you.
posted by mwhybark at 12:34 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

The main State commemoration is live on the RTE Player now - as far as I can tell it seems to be working for IP addresses outside Ireland.
posted by o seasons o castles at 2:19 AM on March 27, 2016

I like this video made by Simon, a homelessness charity, a lot.
posted by hfnuala at 2:27 AM on March 27, 2016 [1 favorite]

Countess Markievicz was also a key figure, and became the first woman MP in the UK (though as a Sinn Fein member she didn't take her seat). I feel compelled to point her out because women's role in the conflict here is normally revised to that of nurses and protesters rather than soldiers and she was just as famous for her active role in the Rising as the men, which was inspirational when we were girls. (I was and am a pacifist but having a woman clearly be one of the leaders of such a thing showed us that maybe there were options in life beyond being a good girl as dictated by society).

That said I'm kind of looking forward to the commemorations being over. The various sides scrambling to claim rights to the legacy is really sickening at times, especially living in the part of the country where it's still all being played out.
posted by billiebee at 2:43 AM on March 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

thanks for putting this together.

I almost wish I hadn't clicked into the live commemoration, although due the fact that I can't find it on any channel here in the South of the UK, the link is welcome.

As an unwilling member of the Irish Diaspora I feel quite uncomfortable and distanced watching us use the militaristic forms we inherited from our former rulers.

we're celebrating our Independence by slavishly following the imagery we inherited, just like our laws and systems of government.

I'm actually sad to say that if we exchanged the daffodil for the poppy and changed a few other symbols around there would be no difference from any other UK commemoration.

going to Twitter to see if there are any breaths of fresh air to be found.....
posted by Wilder at 4:43 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

...and bingo! I give you the "Eire-brushing" phenomenon
posted by Wilder at 5:02 AM on March 27, 2016 [2 favorites]

i wonder if i caught one half of a pair of programs that balanced each other out? or is this post one-sided?

I think that you caught a program that reflected the interpretations of the revisionist school of Irish history, which despite its name was actually the dominant way of writing academic Irish history for about 40 years. (It was revisionist in the late 1960s. It was totally establishment by the time I started studying Irish history in the 1990s). Basically, for the first 50 years after the Easter Rising, most Irish historians created a nationalist narrative, in which the people who participated in the Easter Rising were founding fathers (always fathers) who liberated the nation from its oppressive British occupiers. Then in the late 1960s the IRA became active again in Northern Ireland, and that narrative became incredibly dangerous. How could you glorify 50-year-old nationalist violence but condemn contemporary nationalist violence? Irish historians responded to that problem basically by deciding not to glorify older nationalist violence or really nationalism at all. According to the revisionist school, British rule was pretty benign (or at least had to be understood in the context of the time, but really it was pretty benign), the Famine was not genocide and actually couldn't have been prevented, most nationalists were unsophisticated fanatics with sexual hangups, most Irish people throughout history were happy British subjects.... I'm caricaturing a little bit, but only a little bit.

I haven't really kept up on this since I left grad school, but my sense is that we're in a post-revisionist moment, when there's not such a strong imperative to show why nationalist violence is terribly, horribly misguided and stupid, or conversely to show nationalists as patriots and nation-builders the way they had been before the late 60s. But it's really hard to extricate events like the Easter Rising from that old debate, because it's been so overshadowed by subsequent events for so long. All history is political, but the politics of Irish history are really on the surface in ways that are hard to avoid.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 6:05 AM on March 27, 2016 [10 favorites]

The commemoration of the Easter Rising is a complex story in its own right. As John Dorney has argued: 'it shows how a state can try to control the understanding of its history'.

The 50th anniversary, in 1966, was a hugely significant event, celebrated with a military parade through Dublin. (You can see colour footage of the 1966 parade here, as part of the RTE online exhibition on the Easter Rising.) Unionists like David Trimble have argued that the nationalism of the 1966 celebrations was a disastrous mistake, because it played into the hands of the extremists (on both sides). Others have argued that the government in 1966 was actually trying to distance itself from militant republicanism, even if it didn't fully succeed:

The public display of 1966 was an attempt by the government to wrestle the legacy of the Rising away from militant republicans who did not recognise the state. Lemass's government saw 1966 as a chance to highlight Ireland's fragile new prosperity and present the country to the outside world as a forward-thinking nation ripe for investment and tourism. It was almost like a bizarre forerunner of staging Eurovision. The idealism that it wanted to inspire among the young was about building a prosperous modern state.

But by the time of the 60th anniversary, in 1976, the Troubles had begun in Northern Ireland, and the Irish government drastically scaled back the commemoration of the Easter Rising. To anyone who could remember the celebrations just ten years earlier, the change was extraordinary, as Colm Toibin has pointed out:

Every night during Easter Week 1966 our family watched the drama-documentary about Easter 1916 on state television. A friend of the family who had been in the Rising and had known the leaders came to watch it with us. The executions were drawn out, each moment dramatised – the grieving family, the grim prison, the lone leader in his cell, writing his last poem or letter. Sometimes the emotion in our house was unbearable and when it came to James Connolly’s turn to be executed my mother ran out of the room crying. We had never seen her cry before.

In less then ten years we moved from a time in which the state sponsored such emotions to a time when the songs we learned at school were banned on the state radio.

This is the history behind Michael Higgins's recent appeal to treat the centenary of the Easter Rising with 'ethical sensitivity'. It's the history of 1966 and 1976, not just the history of 1916.

My impression, watching from a distance, is that there's a big difference now that the events of 1916 are no longer within living memory. I was in Dublin a few weeks ago and saw some of the preparations for the centenary celebrations (posters up everywhere advertising commemorative bus tours and the like), and it all had the feel of a heritage makeover, with everyone trying very hard to keep it at a safe distance from present-day politics. ('All so unimaginably different / and all so long ago', as an Irish poet once wrote.) But I'd like to hear the views of any Irish MeFites who have been watching the celebrations more closely.
posted by verstegan at 6:51 AM on March 27, 2016 [7 favorites]

Thank you. Terrific and super-informative post about a transformational moment in time.
posted by blucevalo at 7:41 AM on March 27, 2016

it was seen as traitorous by many irishmen away fighting on the front, while others at home, who were trying to find a political solution through self-governance felt betrayed. it also seemed to be poorly planned and executed.

One story I heard was that the locals were so unsympathetic to the revolutionaries that when they were led out in chains from the police cells the morning after being captured, some women came from their houses to empty the night's chamber pots over the rebels' heads.

Having read ArbitraryAndCapricious's post, though, that story now seems to have a sort of 'Belgian Babies' character to it.
posted by devious truculent and unreliable at 10:26 AM on March 27, 2016

going to Twitter to see if there are any breaths of fresh air to be found.....

Waterford Whispers
posted by roolya_boolya at 11:39 AM on March 27, 2016 [3 favorites]

1916 was inside job claims Jim Corr
posted by Damienmce at 4:32 PM on March 27, 2016

A few thoughts on this from Dublin, in no particular order.

Firstly, great post! Haven't worked my way through all the articles yet, but I will.

I'm Dublin born and bred and have done my damnedest to avoid most of the commemoration coverage and all the ancillary thinkpieces because it was obvious everyone was going to have a go at appropriating it for their own ends. The couple of actual historians I know have said that overall they reckon the level of sheer wrongness was even worse than they could have expected. These would be actual historians rather than the parade of hacks with books to sell, of which there are many.

My father was born twenty years after the Rising and has echoed what's been said elsewhere, that people of his generation simply weren't taught about that period of recent history as it was followed in short order by the War of Independence and the Civil War. Better just to gloss over the whole thing.

For anyone like me who has a healthy distrust of politicians of all stripes, the fact that as these commemorations happen we don't actually have a government has been delicious. It has doubtless kept some of the grandstanding in check.

Whilst they gave us yesterday's silly militaristic parade, the State has also worked on downplaying the violent nature of the rising. The most visible aspect of this was the appearance of a large banner on the Bank of Ireland building featuring images of four parliamentary nationalist figures. I can see why the apparatus of any State would have this tendency, no matter how unlikely another armed insurrection might be.

The two main broadsheet newspapers outdid themselves with their Saturday editions. The Irish Times reproduced their 1916 coverage, but omitted the rather contentious headline 'SINN FEIN REBELLION IN IRELAND'. So embarrassing was the Irish Independent's coverage of the event itself, in which a writer encouraged the young men of Ireland to sign up for the slaughter in northern France in order to atone for the sins of the rebels, that they bizarrely opted to reproduce their coverage of the fiftieth anniversary commemorations instead.

The role of women has at least been acknowledged, but certainly not to the extent it deserves. The First Lady made a powerful speech at the grave of Countess Markiewicz which mostly got lost in the surrounding noise.

Offering hope for the future and great entertainment for those amused by the permanent outrage of the religious right, the State broadcaster wrapped up its Easter Sunday programming by showing The Queen Of Ireland, a documentary about Ireland's most famous drag queen Panti Bliss (previously).
posted by o seasons o castles at 11:19 PM on March 27, 2016 [5 favorites]