After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Easter Rising: First World War In Dublin

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

(Part 2/2) On Easter Monday in 1916, Irish rebels read a proclamation of independence that sparked a week-long battle with the British army.Over the next six days, this new bloody frontier of the First World War unfolded and became known as the Easter Rising.How did the Irish rebels plan to take on the might of the British army? How did this pave the way for eventual Irish independence? And did the 1916 Rising spark the beginning of the end for the British Empire?In this second of two-parts, Anthony and Maddy talk to Dr. Conor Mulvagh, lecturer in Irish History at University College Dublin, about the dramatic events of 1916 Easter Rising and its aftermath.This episode was edited by Tom Delargy and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  You can take part in our listener survey here.All music from Epidemic Sounds.After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal is a History Hit podcast.

Hi, we're your hosts, Anthony Delaney and Maddie Pelling. And if you would like after dark myths, misdeeds and the paranormal ad free and get early access, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, it's Anthony here. every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, it's Anton here. Before we get started,

this is just a warning that this episode contains graphic discussions of violence. Kilmainham Jail, Dublin. It's the dead of night on May 3rd, 1916. The jail sits to the west of Dublin city centre, where less than a week ago Irish rebels were in bloody combat with the British army, claiming independence. The city is fresh with the traumas of war, buildings torn apart by artillery fire, hundreds of lives lost. In his cell, Patrick Pearce, one of the architects of the Easter Rising, is granted final correspondence with his loved ones, having been found guilty of waging war against the King in a secret court and sentenced to death by firing squad. Reflecting on his fate to his mother, he writes,

This is the death I should have asked if God had given me the choice of all deaths, to to his mother, he writes, It is not long after 3am. Pierce is marched through the cold corridors and taken outside into the prison yard. The night sky is the colour of iron. Army soldiers stand in front of Pierce now and a white cloth is tied about his eyes. In that final letter to his mother, he concluded, I will call to you in my heart at the last moment. Patrick Pierce was among the first to be executed following the Easter Rising, and though the Irish Republic had not yet been born, through his death an icon of a free Ireland, a martyr, had been created. Hello and welcome back to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

And I'm Anthony. And we are returning again. This is our second episode on The Easter Rising. If you listened to our first, you will know that we spoke about the events, the political landscape leading up to this moment, and our amazing guest, Dr. Conor Mulver, put it into context of the First World War, which I think was a really fascinating point that I'm going to be taking forward in my knowledge of this history. Connor is returning again to guide us through the events of The Rising itself and its aftermath. Connor, welcome back to After Dark.

Hi Maddie. Hi Anthony. Great to be back. It's fantastic to have you. We have skipped ahead a little bit in terms of the story and we heard about Piers there in Kilmain in jail, which is an incredibly evocative space and I hope we'll have time to talk about that on this episode I visited many years ago and it really brought this period of history to life for me. Let's just take a few steps back and talk about the day of the rising itself. We left in the last episode the rebels taking the General

Post Office and starting to build what becomes known as this kind of ring of steel of positions throughout central Dublin. So can you tell us how those events unfold and what the British reaction to this looks like on the ground? Yeah, so Easter Monday, remember the rising that was planned for Easter Sunday has been called off and now there's Monday and the volunteers are going to hold a parade again. And again, under the cover of parading down the street, just to focus in on the rebel headquarters, they parade down on Connell Street like they've done the previous Easter, like they've done at various points around.

So police, even passing soldiers, you know, they just look and disdain at these rebels who are all dressed up in their own strange green uniforms and carrying their rifles. And they think to them, why aren't these guys off in the first world war fighting like we are? And then as they pass the general post office, the order is given the post office on your right attack and they just invade the post office. The order is given the post office on your right attack and they just invade the post office. So they take over the building. They catch everyone by surprise. There's always I think people focus in on this, but it is worth mentioning. Apparently there's a British

army officer in there. He's just trying to buy some stamps. He just suddenly finds we're not talking dozens of rebels here. We're talking hundreds of rebels pouring into the post office and he's placed under arrest as our other British soldiers who are kind of caught up around the city So these people have taken over buildings and I think it's worth for a minute talking about the tactics here because Some historians don't really rate the rebel tactics. Ultimately the 1916 rising is a failure for the rebels They're they're defeated in that they surrender. But I've spoken at length elsewhere.

I have a video that you can watch on YouTube and elsewhere called The Destruction of Dublin. And I talk about the tactics and I build on Professor Michael Laughlin, who's a professor here in UCD and one of my own PhD supervisors, and he talked about the inspiration for the rebellion. And I decided to follow that thread. So they looked at what happened in the Paris Commune, which was one of the most recent examples of urban warfare. They also looked at a small holdout by some anarchists in London,

which is called the Battle of Sydney Street, where ultimately Winston Churchill personally directed artillery and a detachment of soldiers from the Tower of London to dislodge anarchists led by a Lithuanian anarchist called Peter the painter who held himself up in a house and had to be dislodged by soldiers. So the idea here is that Joseph Mary Plunkett, the primary planner of the tactics of this, says they're going to take buildings all around the city and then they're going to hold those buildings.

They're going to create barricades. And remember other urban examples of this. Paris had been barricaded in 1830, it had been barricaded in 1848, it had been barricaded in 1870. And the rebels were well-travelled individuals. Some of them had secondhand knowledge of the American Civil War as well, which is in recent memory. And Plunkett is planning the exact same thing. He says, they're going to attack us with infantry and particularly cavalry because this is an urban space. And he's also drawing on his great romantic Irish hero, Robert Emmett, who had a very unsuccessful rebellion in 1803.

And he planned similar tactics with Emmett pioneers, everything from a folding pike that you can hide under your jacket to very early IEDs with exploding planks to stop cavalry. Anyway, that's a hundred years previous. So we'll leave that maybe for another episode, but Plunkett basically decides we're going to barricade the streets. We're going to take these key strong points and all the buildings they take are fortified buildings. We can talk about Stevens Green in a minute. And there's been debate over historians, particularly in recent years, about whether the targets were chosen as strong points, as militarily useful targets, or as ideological targets. And I'll just run through the places they take. They take the post office on O'Connell Street. The first battalion of the Irish Volunteers take the Four Courts, which is on the Liffey, the main river that runs through

Dublin. The second battalion under Thomas MacDonagh take Jacob's Biscuit Factory, which is in the southwest of the city. The third battalion under Raymond de Valera take Boland's Mills, another flower mill in the east of the city. The fourth battalion of the Irish Volunteers take the South Dublin Union, which is a, it's somewhere between a hospital and kind of like a county home. It's a, for poor people, it's where they're taken in on benefits, but it's a, for poor people, it's where they're taken in on benefits, but it's a notoriously corrupt institution in Dublin. And the Irish Susan Army, that very small unit, they have a small muster and they dig trenches in Stevens Green. Now, many people

have ridiculed these. Let's ask ourselves about the ideological reasons why these areas would be taken. The general post office is where the post comes from Dublin and in previous rebellions, like in the 1798 rebellion, the signal for a national uprising was that the mail coaches would be stopped. So if the post didn't arrive in your town, you knew that Dublin had been captured and that a rebellion was on. Now there's no surviving document to say the rebels had this in mind, but it could be one of the reasons that the post office has taken the other four.

I think it's much more clear. The four courts were the center of British justice in Ireland. Jacob's Biscuit Factory and Boland's Mills were supplying biscuits and flour to the British soldiers in the First World War. They had also been notorious employers during the lockout. And remember James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army were veterans of the lockout. So they had chosen institutions that have been very much against them. I should also say about the post office, the Gaelic Revival and the Irish language movement had been at the centre of members of the Irish Volunteers.

And for years, the post office had had spats with Gaelic Revivalists over handling mail in Irish. So they were again persona non grata with the rebels. The South Dublin Union, as I mentioned, had a notorious reputation for corruption. It was run by some of the most corrupt politicians in local government in Dublin. And in James Connolly's newspaper, The Irish Worker, he had referred to this as Ireland's Bastille. And historian Lauren Arrington has amazing work on this where she's dug into these kind of ideological reasons why all these places were taken. So I would say it's a mix

of Lauren Arrington's thesis that yes there are strong ideological reasons for taking all these, but also if you look at the map of Dublin, and I'm looking at a map of Dublin that the Irish Times produced many years ago that lists the rebel strongholds and then all the British military barracks in Dublin. There were seven functioning military barracks in Dublin at the time of the 1916 Rising and only one of them lies within that ring of steel that you mentioned, Maddy. And that's the barracks at Dublin Castle, which is actually very understaffed at this point. The rebels don't know that and they attempt to attack Dublin Castle. They're repelled and they ultimately have to take City Hall to try and pin down the soldiers in Dublin Castle. But every other barracks, Beggars Bush, Portobello barracks, Richmond, the Royal Artillery barracks, the Royal barracks and Marlborough barracks,

all of them lie outside those rebel positions. So each rebel battalion takes a position that commands a key arterial route into the city and has no soldiers inside it. So they're seizing and holding buildings and then they're waiting for the British to respond. Their holdup in good buildings and standard laws of military tactics is that defenders can defend on a ratio of one to three. So you need about three attackers to have military superiority over a defender. So the rebels are weaponizing their military inferiority by taking and holding these largely stone buildings. And remember the South Dublin Union has a commanding position on a height. Jacob's biscuit factory has smokestacks and

towers in it that Thomas McDonagh sends snipers up into. Then I suppose we need to talk with Stevens Green as well. Same in Boland's Mills. They're able to put snipers there, although Boland's takes almost no direct military activity in itself. Stevens Green, the citizen army dig trenches and many historians have ridiculed these trenches over the years. But I'm one of those historians who has gone. I've looked at the very few surviving photographs of the trenches at Stevens Green. And I think that really causes us to ask different questions about this.

The trenches were just dug in the middle of the green, as you'll hear many historians say. They were dug right up against the railings, commanding on the main road that actually, if I was to go into town from here in UCD now, I would go along the N11 as it is now in Dublin's transport plan. And those rebels were able to dig concealed trenches with parapets in front of them and then big six foot high railings that nobody could climb over. And from there, they were able to snipe down the main southern road into Dublin. So the rebels, I would argue, are effective in

their tactics in seizing and holding key positions that mean that the British have a really hard time of it in infiltrating and creating a cordon around Dublin that they can then punch into. And I would, I've argued elsewhere that this is an incredibly effective military tactic by the rebels. So that's the situation we have on Easter Monday. The rebels season all the city. The British first response is to send a detachment of Lancers down Sackville Street, O'Connell Street to find out what's going on because they've got all these reports from civilians first response is to send a detachment of Lancers down Sackville Street, O'Connell Street, to find out what's going on because they've got all these reports from civilians that

buildings are taken over, the rebels have gone mad, they've done things like this. And the rebels immediately open fire on these Lancers when they come in in rifle rage. And Lancers and horses are killed and the carcasses of those horses lie on the streets rotting for the rest of Easter week, 1916. So the rising that Plunkett had planned for a cavalry and infantry rising is effective when that happens. And only later in the week, as we'll come to discuss, when the one thing the rebels had not really banked upon, that the British would use artillery on their own city. And this is the folly of James Connolly, I would say predominantly as a socialist.

He said, capitalists would never shell their own buildings. They own these things. They're not going to destroy their own property. And he uses a little bit too much of Karl Marx and not enough of reading the Paris Commune and things like this and what actually happened in Paris. And he thinks the capitalists are going to be very protective of this. I think the thing he forgets is capitalists buy insurance. So their buildings are insured. They know they're going to get the back. The British military aren't the ones that own the buildings. So the British army, they know that they don't want to risk the lives of their soldiers. So they actually are very cautious about sending troops anywhere near the rebel positions after

Monday. And what they do is they start to lob artillery shells from two places. One, a very, very small gunboat in Bolalyffie, which again, people have over-emphasized the significance of. It's called the Helga. It's actually a Marine inspection boat that's under the command of the Department of Agriculture. And the historian, Laird Joy, has written excellently on this and he's kind of, he's put the Helga in context. It wasn't throwing shells all over Dublin. It destroys Liberty Hall and it does very little else during Easter week but heavy artillery is shipped in from at Lone where there's an artillery regiment and a detachment a battery of guns are placed in Trinity College Dublin and they're

successfully infiltrated using the rail network and they're the ones that drop the heavy artillery on O'Connell Street and dislodge the rebels from only one of their six, well, okay, the citizen army have to retreat to the Royal College of Dissertions, but they're not dislodged. The only rebels who are fully dislodged are those at the GPO, and that's because they shell that position. So that gives you a sense of what's happening militarily in Easter Week. Rob It's such a complex set of events in many ways, and I love some of these ideas that you're putting forward. What strikes me though is that there's been, in the last five, ten years, just following the

centenary I suppose, we have this recalibration of what was happening and how it might have been. Because you're absolutely right. My impression of this rising particularly was, oh lads, we just didn't get it together. And it wasn't, and you know, ultimately we know it failed. But some of the things that you're saying here is really opening up a new light to me in terms of the understanding of what's going on, in terms of, yeah, there was strategy going on here. And actually what's going on up at St. Stephen's Green is actually quite impressive to a certain

extent. Give us an idea though about that week. You've hinted at some of the retaliation that's happening from the British army, but we have Easter week now and we know this fails. How does it fail? How does it come to fail? So we've gone to the point that you're saying that the GPO is taken, but the other strongholds still remain. How does that start to fall apart over the course of Easter week? So on Monday and into Tuesday morning, the rebels cannot believe their luck. There are

various diary accounts talk about almost a festival atmosphere in the GPO. They can't believe that this has worked, that they've held these buildings, that the British army has been caught completely unawares. By Tuesday, the British government start to respond. And it's really interesting in terms of the fallout for the rising that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the representative of the King in Ireland, flicks into his traditional colonial role, which is that if there's ever an uprising in a colony, the Lord Lieutenant acts as a colonial governor and directs things. So on Tuesday, martial law is declared by the Lord Lieutenant.

So civilian law is out the window. Rebels can be executed for sedition, things like that, which will soon happen. And multiple things start to happen simultaneously. First of all, the British army create a cordon. So this is very much about containment for the British army. And maybe we flip now from the rebel tactics to looking at the British army tactics. The first thing they want is they don't want the rebels to be able to break out of their positions and they don't want reinforcements to come into the rebel positions. Only one small detachment of reinforcements come in from that fifth battalion of the Irish volunteers under my ancestor Thomas Ash in County Meath. He's doing so well using guerrilla

tactics in County Meath that he sends a platoon sized detachment down to Dublin to assist the rebels in Dublin. They come down and bolster forces. After that point, there's a British military cordon on the north of the city that no one can come in or out of. The Dublin Castle garrison begin to bolster their position. And that was one of the great failures of the rebels on Easter Monday, that they didn't take the castle and they take back City Hall where those rebels who had tried to take the castle are now dislodged from. And that's one of the early scenes of quite intensive fighting. The other big one then is that rail insertion of troops and artillery into Westlerow station. It's actually now called Pierce station because the Pierce brothers had

their shop right behind it. We renamed all our stations in 1966. So two things happened there. First of all, that artillery is snuck in the back gate of Trinity College, Dublin, and they set up that artillery. And from Wednesday onwards, they started lobbing shells onto Sackford Street or Collins Street. A detachment of troops then literally bind like cloth and bandages around their hobnail boots, and they creep up Kildare Street for anyone who's familiar with Dublin, or if this wets your appetite to come and see 1916 Dublin, book yourself a plane ticket right now and come along and see this for yourself. So the street that the National Library

and Dall Airen is on, Gilder Street, at dawn, British soldiers creeped from Trinity College, Dublin up that street, and they installed themselves in the upper windows of the Shelburne Hotel. From a military tactical perspective, this is genius from the British Army side and disastrous for those Irish citizen army in Stevens Green. Remember, they dug those trenches facing out to the southeast of the city.

In military terms, this is what we call an enflated position. The British were able to fire and a bullet will literally hit multiple people. So they put machine guns in the top floors, hotel rooms of this hotel, the Shelburne hotel, which is still a hotel today. And as dawn breaks, they open up with Vickers and Lewis machine guns on those rebel trenches. And the rebels have to retreat from their trenches. And they've identified a strong building to the rear, the Royal College of Surgeons, and they retreat into that building. And again, they hold the Royal College of Surgeons for the rest of the week. But that's Tuesday. So the Irish citizen army have been dislodged. The artillery is being set up and now things start to really

happen on the Wednesday. This is when the gunboat, the Helga, sails down the Liffey and destroys Liberty Hall immediately and it starts to probe the positions at the GPO. The British start to realise that the GPO is the main site of activity. The British army at various barracks like Portobello Barracks are pinned down by the 2nd Battalion. Eamonn de Valera has a small detachment that set up an ambush on Mount Street, which is the result of the largest set of casualties. British forces who've landed at modern-day Dunleary, Kingstown, which is a port to the south of the city, are marching into town.

And just as they reach the canal at a bridge there, rebels have laid a very effective ambush for them. So they have rebels shooting to their front and rebels shooting to their side. And the British commanders just keep marching troops into the ambush and there are heavy, heavy casualties at Mount Street Bridge. One of the things that I often think is a really tragic thing for the soldiers involved. First of all, they thought they were in France. They didn't know they were in Ireland when they disembarked, and they were surprised then to find, oh, we're actually being sent into action in Dublin. So that must have been an incredible culture shock and psychologically very disorientating for those troops. And then as they think they're still on a route march, they start to be opened up a pot. But the other thing is they Advertising billboards that they think are solid and they're actually made out of paper and the rebels start just

Firing in cover from view rather than cover from fire the rebels start killing them as they're hiding behind Paper signs at the canal there. So that's the other great loss of life on the Wednesday at this point Corden on the south of the city is being established So by Wednesday the rebels are completely hemmed in and the south of the city is being established. So by Wednesday, the rebels are completely hemmed in. And this is where the artillery, particularly from Trinity College Dublin, starts to take heavy effect. The South Dublin Union managed to hold out and they repel a major attack to the south west of the city on the Wednesday. And then a northern attack occurs down King Street. This interestingly in the history

of warfare is the first ever time that improvised armoured fighting vehicles are used in urban combat. So British soldiers decide we're going to sustain significant losses if we do what happened in Mound Street yesterday and try and march troops down from Broadstone Station down into the city. So what they do is they go to the Guinness factory in Dublin, what we're famous for here, I suppose, to listeners and perhaps drinkers around the world. They go to the Guinness factory in Dublin, what we're famous for here, I suppose, to listeners and perhaps drinkers around the world. They go to the Guinness factory and they take this kind of like the AT moment. This is like your BA Baracus montage. They take boilers from the Guinness factory and they melt them on the back of flatbed trucks. And then they get welding irons and they

cut loopholes for rifles into these trucks. We versions this Ukraine today these are kind of improvised armor tanks where they're just cobbled together from things that are lying around and they put troops is the back of these they drive these down our king street and just like modern a bc today the reverse of the back of the houses and then they pour soldiers into houses that they think rebels are lodged in the big problem there is. rebels are lodged in. The big problem there is there's civilians who live in those houses because Dublin is a living city and in North King Street is one of the most horrific massacres to occur during the rising. That British soldiers shoot unarmed civilians, men, women and children, who are hiding in the basements and the rooms of their own houses when they launch in seeing red mists at the back of these Guinness spoilers and these improvised armor personnel carriers. So, yeah, there's a lot going on. Betrayal. Power. Revenge. One of England's most dramatic royal sagas comes to life in

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It's striking me from what you're saying there, Conor, that this is a very different kind of warfare to the warfare that's going on in mainland Europe. And of course, before anyone writes in, that's not to say that everyone was out in rural France in trenches in the First World War. And of course, there was fighting in towns and villages and cities as well. Certainly from our modern perspective, the view of the First World War that we have is very much in Flanders in those rural settings. This instead is psychologically different. As you say, it's practically difficult. People are adapting literally boilers from the Guinness factory. The army itself, the British army is not necessarily equipped tactically or in terms of the kit that it has to deal with this. These soldiers who are brought from England and they believe that they are turning up in France

to fight and actually they're in Dublin, that's so psychologically strange. It's so tactically strange to me. I suppose the view of fighting in this urban space, even I mean, I'm looking at the photos. We have a photo in front of us here of some rebel snipers on a rooftop and you can see the city stretched out behind them. I think it's kind of easy to forget that this was a living city, that people were still attempting, I suppose, in this moment to go about their daily lives, obviously somewhat interrupted and terrorized and obviously with devastating consequences for a lot of innocent civilians. But this is happening within a city that is alive and going about its business. There's just something so tantalizing and terrifying about the way that warfare in the space had to be adapted. over the two weeks that this is going on in terms of the build up in Holy Week and then Easter Week itself with the fighting that the nature and the shape of this conflict is constantly changing and the reaction to it is changing as well. the reactions of civilians to this. So first of

all, the civilian populace is not a monolith. There are many different reactions from sympathy to abject revulsion. We have to remember, first of all, there are women and children in Dublin, whose sons and fathers are all fighting in France and in Gallipoli and Palestine and elsewhere when this is happening. Sometimes referred to as separation women. So they're relying on a payment from the British army to put food on their family's table. And we know that over 200,000 Irish men fought in the First World War and estimates of between 35,000 and just under 50,000 die. So for those individuals to see these rebels who've been not going to fight in the First World

War, as they may see it, more wealthy individuals who can afford not to fight, you know, Pearson and Plunkett and people are quite well-to-do middle-class individuals and the poorest citizenry of Dublin, some of whom were locked out during the lockout and weren't allowed to return to their employers and found themselves in a really tricky bind in 1914 and finding the British army was the only employer that was going to take them. Now that's not everyone, but that is definitely a situation that occurred for certain families. So those separation women are saying, first of all, this is a kick in the teeth for my relative who's in a trench right now, sweating and dying. Secondly, my livelihood is dependent on a cheque and a packet of money from the British Army every week or every month.

And thirdly, you're destroying our city. And one of the things that happens in the early days is because of the poverty of Dublin, Dublin has the highest infant mortality rate outside of Calcutta in the British Empire at this point, if I'm correct. It's the poorest city in the United Kingdom, as far as I know. So like Dublin is really not the thriving tech center, Silicon docks that it is today it's a very different city in nineteen sixteen so poor people to see the police leave the streets and all these big fancy shops that have furs and sweets they never tasted and shoes that they might not even have in their own feet they lose. on shoes that they might not even have on their own feet. They loot. There's a sense of anarchy that we find in most revolutions, but it's present on the streets of Dublin. And some of those civilian individuals are the victims of this. The majority of people who die in Dublin during the 1916 Rising are civilians. And in 2016, myself and a colleague,

Professor John McCafferty, edited the diary of a Capuchin friar who worked on Church Street. And he ended up actually ministering to the rebels. He was in the forecourts when they surrendered to kind of talk to them. And then he goes to Camaenum jail and he ministers to Pierce and Connolly and others in their cells and gives them absolution before they go to the firing squads. But the first thing that the friars on Church Street have to deal with is a one-year-old child who's being pushed by his sibling in a pram and a shot rings out on the keys from either British soldiers or rebels in the four courts in the Malí that happens when that's taken and a completely chanced shot. Your listeners will be warned about the distressing nature of this, but a stray bullet

flies through this child's head and he slumps dead in his own pram in front of his brother and his brother doesn't know what to do. So he runs the child up to the Friars and Church Street and the Capagins have to start taking in all the citizens from a really poor district there and a district that's about to be involved in the North King Street massacre. And they basically have to start ministering to and feeding these people from the poorest areas of Dublin and looking after their, not just spiritual, but very much the material welfare for the duration of Easter week in the middle of this. So those kind of stories for me give a sense of just how terrifying it would have been to live in the centre of Dublin. For those living in the suburbs, it amazes me. There's

a great diary by a Catholic called Mary Martin, whose sons are all fighting in the First World War and she's very much anti-rebel during the rising, but she's also just knowing how little information is coming out of the city and rumours flying around the place. No one knows what's going on. At one point, I think there's a barrage balloon that's flying over Dublin and people think it's a German zeppelin. That comes from Elsey Henry's diary.

So there's all kinds of stuff happening all at the same time. And the British army don't quite know what's going on. The rebels have a decent sense of what's going on, but they don't know where the troops are. And the civilian population of Dublin don't know whether to loot, run away or join the rebels or point out areas to the British Army. They, you know, and all those things happen at once. We've said this and we've hinted at this from the very start.

We kind of know where this is going, Connor, and we've set up what it felt like and what it was like on the ground during that week. The experiences of people who were involved in the uprising, experiences of people who were trying to suppress it, the experiences of people who were trying to just go about their daily lives. But this does come to an end and the rising is not successful. You've commented there, and I think it's really key for people to remember, that there wasn't necessarily the widespread support amongst the entire population of Dublin that people might have assumed there would have been for this kind of a purpose, especially considering what comes in the next five, six years. At this moment in time, that support is not there. What are the immediate factors that lead to surrender. So when the rebels are dislodged from the GPO, it catches fire sometime on Thursday into Friday, and like the roof rafters catch fire and start

dropping into the main area. James Connolly, one of the key rebel leaders, the leader of the Irish Citizen's Army, he exits the GPO to try and get some kind of visuals on what's happening on Sackville Street. And while that happens, he's caught by an enemy sniper. So British Army sniper shoots Connolly first in the arm and then later in the leg when he's trying to crawl back into the GPO. And he's ministered to by a UCD medical student called James Ryan, who tends to his wound with as much medical knowledge as a med student has during the rising.

He does go on to become a decent doctor, by the way. But the decision is made by the rebels and the GPO that the building is on fire, we're surrounded by snipers and the cordon is closing in on us. So they decide to evacuate the GPO and they break out a side door and they go up Moore Street, which is still a bustling street in Dublin today. Now again, in urban warfare, this to me amazes me in terms of modern tactics of military operations and urban terrain, fighting and built up areas. The rebels, I don't know how they decide this is a good idea, but this is still military doctrine for modern armies today. And it's NATO doctrine for how to do this, but they mouse all through buildings. So they don't just run up Moore Street. Now in the initial dash of Moore Street,

one of the rebel leaders, Theo Raleigh, is shot by machine gun fire. There's a machine gun posted at the top of Moore Street and he dies on the street. And he actually, in his dying breath, he drags himself into a doorway bleeding out and he writes a letter to his wife. It's a really poignant letter. There's actually a giant facsimile of it up on the doorway that he's killed in today. And he writes tons and tons of love to you, Nancy. He bleeds out with this letter in his hand. So you know, this is the kind of poignant amendment, the very serious happening at the same time.

At this point, the rebels break into these terraces of houses and they start smashing through the walls of each building to get into the next building. So they're punching up the street towards that machine gun position, undercover, exactly as any modern soldier would be trained to do. And when they get to a certain point, they start to realize they're surrounded. The deaths they've seen of civilians on the street outside and the death of people like the O'Rally convince Pierce particularly that further loss of civilian life would be disastrous here. So they decide to parlay for surrender. And they send a nurse,

Elizabeth O'Farrell. And again, Maddie, to go back to your point about the agency of women in this, it's a woman who is one of the medical orderlies in Cumann na mBan who sent out to parlay with the British army officers. And she comes back and tells the rebels, the only terms were being offered are unconditional surrender. And Pierce signs an order. He has a typewriter in his possession. Winifred Carney, who's the secretary to James Connolly, has brought a typewriter with her and a revolver on the train down to Dublin when she's getting ready for the rising. So again, there's these incredible stories that all converge. But I assume on

Winnie Carney's typewriters, because I don't know of any other typewriters in the GPO. I'll read this out for you. In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens and the hope of saving the lives of our followers, now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the members of the Provisional Government present at headquarters, which at this point is a terrorist house with mouse holes in it, have agreed to an unconditional surrender and the commandants of the various districts in the city and country will order their commands to lay down arms." And that's signed, PH Pierce, 3.45 PM, 29th of April, 1916. And then James Connolly, who remember has two bullet wounds at this point, signs underneath and says, I agree to these conditions, the men only under my command in the Moore Street District and for the

men in the Stevens Green command. And Thomas McDonagh sighs then as a regatta agent underneath to make clear. And then Elizabeth O'Farrell and others go around in motor cars under a white flag with a British military escort and they deliver that written order to the different garrisons who are still fully stocked, fully armed. Remember two of them are in food factories so they may have been sick of biscuits by the end of it, but they're not short of provisions. And the whole question of provisioning is a fascinating one. They provision themselves quite well. So all the other garrisons, including the Fifth Battalion up in County Mead, who have disabled telegraph lines, railway, they've attacked the police barracks, they've shot a detachment of Royal Irish Const constabulary who've tried to show up to ascertain their

whereabouts and they're in possession of a farmhouse with full ammunition and weapons at this point. And some of them, A, don't believe the surrender. I have to get verbal clarification and are brought down to the captured rebels to confirm this. And they're disgusted by the idea that they have to surrender because they've held their districts so successfully. So again, this is where myself and other historians in more recent years have questioned this trusted by the idea that they have to surrender because they've held their districts so successfully.

So again, this is where myself and other historians in more recent years have questioned this abject failure, pierced to sides to cancel the rising, to surrender unconditionally, to prevent further loss of life. But militarily, the rebels are still in possession and hold of the majority of what they take on Monday by Saturday and even into Sunday of 1916. MS. Is there a feeling of betrayal then amongst the rebels that only a certain number of individuals, yes leaders, but it is only a certain number, have made this decision on behalf of everyone? MR. It's a really good question, Maddie, and I think it feeds into the mentality of future Irish Republicans. So just to take one example, the south union in the west of the city they've had intensive fighting it's a big spread out compass and the rebels were holding various buildings and they fought building to building as the British push the bike but they were still in possession

of buildings on the campus of what's now st jane's hospital the central union when the surrender comes to them and their commander surrenders and he says to them, okay, we're going to surrender. He's ultimately executed. But the second commander is Carl Brewer and Carl Brewer has taken a serious amount of lead in those things. There's various rebels who are shot multiple times during the Irish revolution, but he has somewhere between nine and 13 bullets in him. Like he's bleeding out and he's still fighting back against the British. And he's disgusted by the surrender, but his commandant says, yeah, we're going to surrender. We're going to lay down our arms. And later on, Carl Brewer decides that surrender was the wrong thing to do in 1916. We should have held out. We actually were in a better position than we realized when that surrender order came into us.

And ultimately, Karl Breuer will find himself holding a building in Dublin again in 1922 when he's an anti-Treater Republican during the Civil War. And I believe that his mentality in the South Dublin Union is what convinces him not to surrender then. What he does essentially is he walks out of Hammam Hotel in 1922 with two revolvers in his hand into a detachment of Free State soldiers and he's gunned down in a hail of bullets. And the second time it is fatal for him. That insight into Karl Breuer gives us a sense of how some of those leaders, Thomas Ash is another one, he dies on hunger strike in 1917,

it convinces them that the next time they're not going to surrender, they're not going to lay there under arms. And a Rubicon is crossed with the general surrender in 1916. In some senses, it's the last time that we see a kind of gentlemanly chivalric type of warfare in the Irish Revolution. And the successes of the Fifth Battalion under Thomas Ash and Richard McCahey in Ashburn and County Meath convinces rebels who recongregate in the prison camps they're sent to after the Rising that guerrilla warfare is the way to go for. So the Michael Collins' and the things that you would have seen from those movies that we talked about at the top of the show, they are very much from the War of Independence period and indeed the Civil War period.

And the rebels learned from their mistakes in the 1916 Rising. They're not gonna wait for the British Army to come and catch them and drop artillery shells on top of them. They're gonna hit the British Army in their rear echelons. They're gonna hit supply chains. They're gonna hit them in transit. They're gonna ambush them.

They're gonna shoot them in their beds when they're intelligence officers. And then they're gonna fade back into the civilian population. In the 1916 Rising, the rebels wear uniforms all through the War of Independence. Rebels wear civilian clothing and trench coats, and they hide revolvers and submachine guns and rifles under their trench coats. And ultimately they go guerrilla in the front flying columns open down the country.

And that's all influenced by the learnings they have for what worked and what didn't work in the 1916 Rising. We started this second episode by talking about Potter Pierce in Kilmainham. How quickly after the surrender do the arrests and then the resulting executions, how quickly afterwards do they begin? So the arrests begin immediately. The garrisons, when they surrender, are marched to different holding locations. One of them is now the biggest maternity hospital in Dublin, the Rotunda Hospital. It has a little garden in the centre of it and they're held in those locations.

At this point, detectives from the intelligence services of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the G Division, are brought in and they walk through the ranks of the rebels and they identify people that they know. So those people are hived off from the general pens and there's like, I have photos of this, there are literally razor wire pens made in certain barracks, it's like Richmond barracks. They're held in the rotunda, so they're held in various kind of prisoner of war camps around the city. And those individuals are identified as leaders are brought into various prisons for detention and they're ultimately put in front of court marshals remembering that martial law has been declared. So this is now all the military's gig.

The rest of the rebels are put on cattle ships and they're sent over to Britain and they're put into internment camps. One internment camp is up in Ulster and I guess the idea there is that they're being put among a hostile Ulster Unionist population where it's going to be a little harder for them to escape. But the main prison camp that everyone knows about is Frongach and Tirmann camp in Wales. And I had a student do a round of dissertation several years ago about Frongach. Her name is Charlotte Campbell. She's a public historian today. In Charlotte's work, she looked at what Frongach was used at in a longer timeframe.

And Frongach was an internment camp for German officers up until the rising. And essentially what they do is they clear out the German officers, they find other places to put them, and then they just ram Frongach camp full of rebels and indeed suspected rebels. There were many people at Frongach who had nothing to do with the rising. Owen McNeill, who we talked about, who spent so much effort during Holy Week of 1916 trying to cancel the rising, he's rounded up. He's put in front of a court martial. He's actually delivered a life sentence and he's put into various prisons, Reading Jail, where Osterweil had been, but he's put in various British jails. So the innocent and the guilty are rounded up together. The big mistake is that in those jails and particularly in places like the intern are rounded up together. The big mistake is that in those

jails and particularly in places like the internment camp at Frongach, the rebels are allowed to congregate freely. They run their own prison rules, kind of like, you know, what you'd see in the great escape where all the the allied soldiers are able to have their own rank structure and have their own parades in the morning and things like that. The rebels do all that. They teach each other Irish. They also teach each other Spanish because a lot of them want to escape to South America. So the Spanish dictionary is the most borrowed book in the prison library in Reading Jail after 1916, by the way. And by allowing this, the rebels start to articulate to each other and to the people that they find themselves intermed with the Republican principles that they fought the rising on. So there's two places where the rising is turned into a myth and a mobilizing

force for future revolution in Ireland. One is in the prison camps, in the jails themselves. And the second is on the streets of towns and cities, up and down Ireland. And this is where we talk about the change in the population's mindset. Firstly, the women have come in the mall who are released almost immediately. They don't they don't go to Wales or anything like that. They're released from the pens in Dublin, because remember, the British army have made huge propaganda value out of the Germans shooting the nurse, Edith Cavell, in Belgium.

So the British order that Constance Markovich and other women who were involved in the rising are absolutely not to be shot. And all the women who've been interned are to be released. They don't want the Germans and others making propaganda value out of the gender politics of this. So those women are committed Republicans and revolutionaries and they start printing up mass cards for the people who will be executed at the start of May 1916. They start telling the populace about the sacrifice of the rebels and they start to create a martyrology out of the sacrifices and the deaths of 1916. So women are at the heart of mobilizing the Irish public towards republicanism over 1916, 17 and even into 1918.

And this incredible political reversal happens. Remember, about three quarters of the Irish population were voting for moderate constitutional home rule MPs in the last election in December of 1910. In 1918, the Sinn Féin party, which becomes the political vehicle for the inheritors of the 1916 rising and its survivors, that wins 73 out of 105 seats in Ireland in the 1918 general election. They didn't hold a single seat in 1910. They won half of the by-elections after the rising, they won five out of ten by-elections, but they're a political non-entity. And through all that propaganda work, by released prisoners and by those female activists up and down the countries, they start to convert people to the cause of republicanism. And in 1919 then the Dáil government starts to abstain from the Westminster

parliament, they completely reject the whole apparatus of the British government in Ireland. They erect a completely successful counter-state, new Republican police, Republican courts, they boycott taxes. And then the other thing they do is they start to launch a guerrilla war. And by the summer of 1921, that means that the British army has been forced into truce negotiations and ultimately a treaty with the inheritors of 1916 rising, the Republican rebels of the war of independence.

And that change in Irish politics is, I think, one of the most seismic changes in modern revolutionary politics, maybe this side of the Russian revolution, which I know you guys have talked about extensively in your podcast. And it's happening at the same time as the Bolshevik and the February Revolution in Russia. So this is again, I like to situate this in the First World War, because it very much happens within that zeitgeist. I found this, well, the two conversations that we've had Conor, so helpful in terms of, as you say, situating this history within this broader global moment. I didn't know that about the women as well being released. It's so fascinating, I suppose, the underestimating by the British of what those women were capable of and actually how

impactful they were in the rising, but also in its aftermath and shaping those political and public opinions. I just wanted to ask about the executions of the male leaders of the rising. I remember going to Kilmainham, as I said, I think it was about 10 years ago now, and I remember there's a display, I hope it's still there, of some of the items left by these prisoners who were executed. I remember a pair of glasses, and to my shame I don't know which leader they belong to, but they're broken. One of the lenses is smashed, presumably from, I guess, the moment of execution, or possibly, I suppose, violence beforehand. But these were, you know, the heart of the story as

human beings, human beings making decisions to act and to drive forward what becomes an arena of big tactics and military action. But there are people at the heart of this. The executions themselves, can you say something about the nature of them? Because they seem to me the absolute antithesis of the chaos of the fighting itself. These are very cold, state-sponsored executions. These are a way of just eliminating these people. And there's something sort of performative about that. How do you see the executions sitting within the narrative of this and how are they seen at the time? So it poses a real problem for the British authorities because they have to simultaneously be somewhat magnanimous.

So as not to turn the entire country immediately into rebels, which ultimately I think we conclude is what happened now. The result of the 1918 general election, I know I said 73 of those 105 seats go to Sinn Féin, but that's a multiplier effect from first past the post of about a million votes cast in Ireland, half a million go to Sinn Fein. So there's still a portion of the population, about a quarter of a million people vote for Irish home rulers, but they only get six seats. So that's a facet of politics. The British hand down 90 death sentences, but the majority of these are commuted to

terms of life imprisonment. And in Irish rebellions, going right back to, well, 1798 is actually pretty ruthlessly put down. Robert Emmett is hanged in Dublin in 1803. But in 1848 and 1867, what they end up having to do is just put prison sentences and in 1848 in particular, transportation. So sending rebels off to the colonies, to Van Diemen's land, modern Tasmania, and to Australia, where ironically those rebels in 1848 become senior politicians in Australian politics. So it just shows you that maybe executions are the wise thing to do if you want your rebels to go away and cease to be a problem.

But there's huge political pressure put by the Irish MPs in Westminster on the British government to stop executing people. And remember what I said previously about the whole attitude of the British government before the rising. The British authorities were being told by the Irish MPs in Westminster, don't pay these guys any attention. If you pay them attention, the people will start to sympathise with them. And it's the same thing with the executions. People are disgusted by the executions. They're only told about who's been killed the morning off. And the executions happen as executions tend to in the middle of the night when prisoners are most compliant. So people are taken from their cells at three and four o'clock in the morning. They're brought down to the breakers yard in the prison. They're lined up against the wall and a firing squad is marched out and they execute them.

Interestingly, in terms of who actually carries out the executions, I understand this is a long-term trend in the British army. If executions occur after an action, the unit that has suffered the heaviest casualties is the one tasked with carrying out the executions, presumably because it psychologically will help them, I suppose, face that fall again. So the Sherwood foresters who suffered the worst casualties at Mount Street are the ones who were given the grim task of shooting the rebels at Kilmainham. And the executions occur from the 3rd of May onwards. So there's quite a lag time. Obviously trials have to be held under martial law. And the first three people executed are Patrick Pierce, Tom Clark and

Thomas McDonagh, three people who unambiguously were at the centre of this. The next day, however, Joseph Plunkett, again, absolutely guilty as charged. He planned the whole rising. He's the key tactician of it. Ned Daly, who's in command of the First Battalion down at the Four Courts. But then Patrick Pierce's brother, Willie Pierce, who's quite a gentle soul. He's a sculptor. His job is designing funeral monuments with his dad in their funeral monument business. And he really seems to be executed because he's Patrick Pierce's brother and for no other reason than that. So those kind of cruelties start to really underline that. On the 8th of May, for instance, Sean Houston, who's only a child, and Con Calvert are shot.

Michael Mallon has, I've got to get the number of his children wrong, but it's like five children that he's leaving at home. And one of his children who lived up to the centenary, and my friend and the biographer of Michael Mallon, Brian Hughes, interviewed his son, who was born in 1916 or 1917 after his father was executed and became a priest out in Asia. He's executed with a child under one left behind. Thomas MacDonagh's young son is left behind as well. He's only just been born, I think, the year before the rising.

And then the final cruelty, the last executions on the 12th of May, Sean McDermott, who had polio and walked with a limp for the whole of his life, and Jamesnolly who's already been shot twice and is gravely wounded and the reason that they have to wait until the 12th of May is they actually have to wait for Connolly to recover enough so they can shoot him again and he sat on a box to be shot because he can't physically stand up because that wound to his leg. So these cruelties are capitalized upon by republican propagandists and they're just disastrous for the British military authorities. By May, it's really interesting, the Irish parliamentary party, John Redmond says, obviously some people are going to have to be shot. And the Irish parliamentary party hated the lockout syndicalists.

So they hated Larkin and Connolly and anyone involved with the citizen army. So I suspect that's what John Redmond is alluding to when he says certain people are gonna have to be shot. Like there were other people who shot policemen and shot soldiers and were guilty of murder. So Redmond says they have to go. But he says, by and large, you've got to stop shooting people. This is going to turn the whole population of Ireland

against us, the Irish nationalists, and against you, the British government. So for that reason, no more executions happened. There's one other person that the British government say, have to execute this person and that's Roger Casement. You can't allow somebody who is a knight of the realm and then goes over to Germany, meets with Betman Halvage during the First World War, meets with the German Imperial Command, talks to prisoners of war and convinces a bunch of them to go and fight against the British empire. This guy is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous.

So the first thing they do is they destroy Roger Kasem's reputation. They circulate his diaries, which have now been deemed to be authentic. The vast majority of people now agree that his diaries are authentic, but they document in meticulous detail both his exploits as a gay man, but also how much he was paying for sex. And there's a colleague of mine, Tom Hulme, up in Belfast, he's writing a fascinating history of queer Belfast at the moment. And one of the sources he's using is Roger Katzman's diaries, because he can tell

rent boys and where they were operating and how much they were charging from Roger Katzman's diaries because he was a compulsive diarist and he had to write all this stuff down. So the British government take facsimiles of these diaries and they circulate them to key nationalists and say, is this the guy you want to protect? And they weaponize people's Catholicism in doing that. So Roger Casement stands a civilian trial because he hasn't been captured under martial law. He's been kept in the Tower of London as a traitor. And they have to dig back into the British statute book to find the law that Roger Casement has broken because he hasn't really done anything. And there's a law from, I hope we get the date right here, 1316 in the reign of Edward the

seventh, if I'm getting my medieval history correct here. And he's deemed to be guilty of that law by an interpretation of a single comma in that act of raising trees among the king's enemies. And he's hanged in London in August of 1916 and he's the 16th and final rebel to be executed and again his reputation is destroyed but even Roger Casement among Catholics and among others is lionized as a martyr for the cause and you really have to appreciate just how effective the republican propaganda of these 16 deaths was used. It's used to completely convert people's mentality, to make them believe in a republic and particularly among the young generation

who hadn't had an opportunity to vote. Many of them weren't of age and remember the franchise was extended quite extensively between 1910 and 1918. There was supposed to be an election in 1915 but it was cancelled because of the war. That's where Asquith's coalition government comes out. So this new generation seems to be the ones that vote overwhelmingly, those half a million individuals who throw their weight behind Sinn Fein and give a retrospective mandate for what happens with the rebels in 1916. I remember it was, well, nine years ago now, unbelievably nearly 10. And in Ireland, we had a huge commemoration of the centenary of the 1916 Rising. It was everywhere. You couldn't move for it. And to a certain

extent there was a feeling afterwards, potentially, especially maybe for people who were not necessarily historians, that they felt a little 1916'd out and they were a little overwhelmed by some of the, you know, there was documentaries, there was plays on, there was all kinds of things. And it was really, really interesting. And it was actually, I don't think I can think of another public history event that has gone into the population as successfully as that did, maybe to the point of overkill across all the different branches of it. But it highlighted something to me at the time. I remember thinking that the original ideology behind the 1916 Rising has, in the course

of only 100 years, slightly been forgotten. And it's been great to be reminded of some of that now, Connor, by what you've been talking us through, but there was always this idea of Ireland's place in its much broader context with the rebel leaders themselves. But what started to happen, I think, over the course of, say, from the 70s, 80s onwards, and potentially understandably, that 1916 rising, to me at least, I perceived it as the point at which people in Ireland started to understand who they weren't rather than who they were. The answer to that being British. I think that betrays some of the ideology that is happening in Ireland in 1916. I think it's far more complex and far more interesting because of its complexity. And actually, when we're now at a point where we're talking about the possibility at some point

down the line of Irish reunification, that we have to go so far beyond 1916, so far further back, I would advocate, towards the 18th century, but that would be very much me to do that, to understand what that might look like for Irish people and Ireland in the future. But my part in question, Conor, to use this, why should British people know about the 1916 Rising? The 1916 Rising is a fundamental event in the history of the Union, the Union of the Crowns in Britain. So it is the event that changes the course of Irish history and leads to the breaking of the Union. If it wasn't for the 1916 Rising, and this isn't entering into a counterfactual. There's a question mark over whether Ireland

would have the same status in the United Kingdom today as Wales or Scotland with a devolved parliament that deals with local affairs but there would still be an MP for Dublin that I might vote for at a first past the post-election that goes to Westminster to represent my interests over there. So it's fundamental in Britain's political history history it completely changes the composition of the house of commons it completely changes the entire. Make up of britain's politics i think it also is probably the first opening shot of decolonization edward carson the leader of the union stands up in the house of lords in nineteen twenty one. in the House of Lords in 1921 after the treaty is signed. And now he's reacting to the War of Independence, but as we know today, it all starts back in the 1916 and rising. And he said, it's a horrible admission to make to your people in Egypt and in India

and all the rest of the empire that you hadn't got the men, the money, the pluck or the will to hold down a country within 20 miles of your own shore. So that's Edward Carson in 1921. And I argued to this consistently to students, essentially predicting decolonization in 1921 and saying, if you let Ireland go, if you guys, the most powerful army in the world is just beating the Kaiser and you couldn't hold down a small country with three and a half million people in it, 20 miles from your shores. How can you ever allow the British flag to fly over this sprawling empire again?

And Indian revolutionaries, African revolutionaries, indeed revolutionaries that aren't even in the British Empire. So like Algeria is looking towards the Irish War of Independence for inspiration when the Franco-Algerian War is happening and they're reading copies of a later Irish revolutionary, Tom Barry Barry's Guerrilla Days in Ireland is translated into Arabic. Murmar Gaddafi is aware of what's happening in Ireland and is very keenly aware of Irish history and ultimately supports the IRA during the Troubles. I met with Thabo Mbeki in 2016 to talk to him about the linkages between South Africa's history and Ireland's history and he was keenly aware of Robert Emmett, he was keenly aware of the Easter Rebels. And really interestingly for a black South African leader who knew his Irish history,

I asked him, what do you think about the Irish support for the Boers? Like they're the apartheid Boers who made black South Africans' lives hell throughout the rest of the 20th century. And he said, well, that was a necessary step in getting the British out before we had to assert black power in Africa. So he was sympathetic to the arch rebel cause and he very much saw Ireland in decolonial terms. So I think for British people,

if they're trying to understand everything from decolonization, the Commonwealth today, like there wouldn't be a Commonwealth if it wasn't for Ireland. The term Commonwealth is essentially taken out of the wastebasket of history. The last time it's used in British history by Cromwell during his Commonwealth. And then Lloyd George does soft the term and he rebrands the Empire as the Commonwealth in order to fit Ireland into it. Ireland is ultimately ejected from the Commonwealth when it becomes

a Republic. And then the next very next year, India says, oh, well, we'll follow suit. We'll become a republic too. We'll get rid of the monarchy. And such is the threat to the integrity of a wider global Britishness that the Commonwealth now accepts republics within it. So the entire redefinition of what Britain was at the turn of the, let's say, 19th into 20th century as to what Britain is today the turn of the 19th into 20th century as to what Britain is today.

And I think about the handover of Hong Kong. I think about the Chagos Islands right now as we're talking and its changing status. A lot of that is predicted by Irish people who have this unusual status in British imperial terms that they're simultaneously European, white, but colonised. And that's what puts them sometimes at the vanguard of decolonisation. And it's very clear in the debates around the Irish-Irish Treaty that the more advanced Irish Republicans saw the rottenness of the British Empire and they very much saw that what they were doing in Ireland was the first step in breaking down an empire that they knew was morally corrupt around the world.

So if you're interested in global history, if you're interested in everything from slavery to race relations in Britain today, I think that understanding the aspirations of the 1916 rising, and Anthony, you're so correct to go back to the document. In the proclamation, they begin with Irish men or Irish women. So gender equality is literally the first three words of the 1916 proclamation and they declare equality. They declare the rejection of empire and they declare a republic. So in doing all of that, they're avowedly non-sectarian. They're avowedly open. And I think one of the things that is lost in the subsequent Irish revolution is a deep civic nature to this. So I've said at various points that the rebels see Ireland in spatial terms. They go back to the ideals of the United Irishmen, speaking to an

18th century historian. They very much see that everyone resident on the island of Ireland has an equal stake in the state they want to create, an anti-monarchical republic in the vein of the French Revolution and of a long history of Irish republicanism. So in that sense, the Irish Republic is anti-sectarian. People like Roger Casement and Noel McNeill are constantly trying to bring the Ulster Unionists into the fold. Now that's lost to a certain extent in the War of Independence and particularly in the Anglo-Irish Treaty, but the aspirations of creating a sovereign, independent republic in the proclamation are way ahead of their time.

They're very much a document that situates itself within a history of anti-imperialism and decolonization. And I think for those reasons, for a British audience, for a global audience, and for people who might be listening to your podcast, in other countries that have tread diversion paths to independence. And I've spoken to leaders from India, Tanzania, South Africa. I've also spoken to historians from Sri Lanka. I spoke to Canadians about this and I've been around the world talking about the 1916 rising and republicanism.

I've taught about this in Moscow and in Delhi and in Chennai. It's a concept in political history and in military history that has resonances for people studying similar independence movements all around the world. I wish I had my Irish flag now to hang outside my house in Greenwich because I'm feeling very patriotic after that colour. That was wonderfully, wonderfully put. Thank you so much for that. And thank you for listening. More Irish history by stealth for the After Dark audience. But listen, it's one of those things that Irish people know so intimately well often, to whatever extent, and then people beyond our shores don't necessarily know. So we do think it's a really important part of history to platform internationally in Britain

and America as well. So thank you so much, Connor Connor for helping us to do that. If you've enjoyed this episode, as Connor mentioned during these chats over the last two episodes, we have episodes on the Great Famine in Ireland available too, and we have other lighter, more paranormal-ly focused, or mythically focused shall we say, episodes on the history of the Banshee, amongst others there as well. So go and check those out. Thank you to Conor and to all of you for listening to these two episodes. Do let us know your thoughts. You can contact us at afterdark at historyhit.com. That's afterdark at historyhit.com. And until next time, thank you very much. you