You cannot spend two days in Dublin without walking past 1916. The bullet marks are in the stonework on St Stephen’s Green, the Proclamation is on the wall at Arbour Hill, and the GPO on O’Connell Street is both a working post office and a national monument.
What happened over that week, and what happened in the six weeks after it, produced the state that Ireland became. It is worth understanding before you look at any of it.
The background, briefly
Ireland had been governed from Westminster since the Act of Union in 1801. A Home Rule Bill granting a devolved Irish parliament finally passed in 1914 after decades of constitutional campaigning — and was suspended for the duration of the First World War.
That suspension is the pivot. Constitutional nationalism had apparently won and then been told to wait. A smaller, more radical group concluded that waiting was the mistake, and a secret council within the Irish Republican Brotherhood planned a rising while the war was on.
Meanwhile some 200,000 Irishmen were serving in the British Army. That fact is essential to understanding why Dublin reacted as it did.
Easter Week
Monday 24 April 1916. Around 1,200 volunteers seized buildings across the city centre — the General Post Office on Sackville Street as headquarters, the Four Courts, Boland’s Mill, the South Dublin Union, Jacob’s factory, and St Stephen’s Green, where the Citizen Army dug trenches.
Patrick Pearse read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic from the GPO steps to an audience that was largely baffled.
The military position was hopeless from the start. The countrywide rising had been called off by the Volunteers’ chief of staff, who had not been told; a German arms shipment had been intercepted; and the numbers were a fraction of what had been planned.
Tuesday to Friday. The British brought in troops and artillery, including the gunboat Helga firing up the Liffey. Sackville Street was shelled and burned. The heaviest fighting was at Mount Street Bridge, where a handful of volunteers held a British column advancing from Dún Laoghaire and inflicted around 240 casualties.
Saturday 29 April. Pearse surrendered unconditionally to prevent further civilian deaths.
The cost: around 485 people killed, of whom more than half were civilians, including forty children. The city centre was in ruins.
Why opinion turned
Dubliners did not welcome the rebels. Volunteers being marched to captivity were jeered and pelted, particularly by women with husbands and sons in the British Army. The city had been wrecked, looting had been widespread, and the rising had no popular mandate.
Then the British executed the leaders.
Between 3 and 12 May, fifteen men were shot by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol, one at a time, over ten days, after secret courts martial. Roger Casement was hanged in London in August.
The drip of executions over a fortnight was the error. James Connolly, whose ankle was shattered, was carried in on a stretcher and tied to a chair to be shot — a detail that circulated immediately. Joseph Plunkett married Grace Gifford in the prison chapel seven hours before he was executed.
Within two years Sinn Féin had swept the 1918 general election, the War of Independence had begun, and the constitutional party that had campaigned for Home Rule for forty years had been annihilated at the polls.
Where to see it
The GPO on O’Connell Street — still a working post office, with the GPO Witness History exhibition inside. The columns on the portico carry bullet marks.
Kilmainham Gaol — the stonebreakers’ yard where the executions took place. Book weeks ahead.
Arbour Hill, behind the church in Stoneybatter — the mass grave of fourteen of the executed men, with the Proclamation carved on the wall in Irish and English. Free, and almost always empty.
St Stephen’s Green — the trenches are gone; the bullet marks in the College of Surgeons on the west side are not.
Mount Street Bridge, with a memorial to the fighting there.
Collins Barracks — the National Museum’s Proclaiming a Republic exhibition, free, with the original material.
Glasnevin Cemetery, where most of the participants on all sides eventually ended up, which is the point the guides there make well.
The part that gets left out
The Rising is the founding story, and the founding story is tidier than the decade that followed it. The War of Independence, the Treaty, and then the Civil War of 1922–23, in which the new Irish government executed 77 anti-Treaty prisoners — more than the British had executed in 1916 — and in which Michael Collins was killed by other Irishmen.
Kilmainham held prisoners from both sides. Collins and de Valera are buried a short walk apart in Glasnevin. Any honest account of 1916 in Dublin runs on into that, and the better guides in this city do.