The Rest Is History - 339: Ireland: The Easter Rising, 1916
Episode Date: June 8, 2023The Easter Rising began in Dublin's General Post Office on Easter Monday, 24th April 1916, with Patrick Pearse’s dramatic proclamation of the Irish Republic. Led by republicans opposed to British ru...le in Ireland, this was the most significant uprising in more than a century - and changed the entire course of Irish and British history, with effects that still reverberate today. In today’s episode, Tom and Dominic return to the GPO in Dublin, as the brilliant Professor Paul Rouse tells the bloody story - at once inspiring, terrifying and heartbreaking - of the Easter Rising and its extraordinary aftermath. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death.
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith for all that is
done and said. We know their dream, enough to know they dreamed and are dead. And what if excess of
love bewildered them till they died? I write it out in a verse. Macdonagh and McBride and Connolly
and Pearce, now and in time to be, green is worn are changed changed utterly a terrible beauty
is born so dominic those are the the closing lines of william butler yates's great poem
easter 1916 written about the easter rising yeah which we began this series it seems a long time ago several centuries ago with um
with the proclamation read by patrick pierce outside the gpo where we are currently sitting
as we reach the fourth and final episode in our great suite through the history of ireland and
its relations right and it's extraordinary to be doing this story, the Easter Rising, 1916.
Surely the most discussed, celebrated moment in Irish history.
It's extraordinary to be recording that in the GPO,
in the building that was the epicentre of the drama.
We're looking out over O'Connell Street, the buses, the trams.
So if you do hear a bit of banging and crashing outside and sirens and whatnot,
that's all part of the exciting Irish local colour.
And we're back with the person who read that proclamation for us
so brilliantly at the beginning of the first episode,
Paul Rouse, Professor of History at University College Dublin.
So, Paul, the stage is set and, you know, off you go.
I mean, this is your story.
I don't think you want two British people to be telling the story
of the Easter Rising, do you, or do you?
Well, I think it is
an extraordinary story. It's a British story and an Irish story. And Tommy Redd from WB8s,
it's a story of poet and poets and their poetry and its impact. It's a story of poverty
from another strand with James Connolly. It's a story of poverty from another strand with James Connolly.
It's a story of language and education
with Patrick Pearce.
And it's a story of those ardent revolutionaries
who were there,
who all walked in right under where we stand here
at the GPO just before noon on Easter Monday,
1916, 24th of April,
and declared an Irish Republic in this building. And you read the bit about
Pearson McDonagh. I come to the start of that poem though, which Yeats wrote several months
after the rising. He's ambiguous in how he views the rising, but he didn't publish it in 1920,
which is really interesting. He held
on to it because the world was changed and he says changed utterly, but it was changing with
a rapidity after 1916, which emphasizes just what a pivotal moment in Irish history it is,
and by extension in the history of the United Kingdom. But he opened that poem, Easter 1916,
by saying, I have met them at close of day, coming with vivid faces.
And for those people who read deeply in Irish history, they'll know that Vivid Faces is a
brilliant book written by Professor Roy Foster, who was just an outstanding historian in Oxford
for very many years. And that idea that I met them at close of day, these were people that
were known to Yeats and known to Dubliners, known to people all around the place.
And you must remember Dublin was a small city.
Dublin felt and still sometimes feels
like a country town
because its centre is so small.
You can't walk the streets of this city still
without meeting someone who you know
or running into them in different places.
And Ireland is a small country.
So even people who move up to the place are known
and there are connections and there are, it's networks of associations, but also a family and
of schooling and of local loyalties remade in this city. And they're all across this period.
So who are these people then? Who are the people who Yates is eulogizing and who take this fateful step in Easter in 1916? founded after the famine in America and in England. They had flows of guns, flows of money
coming from America. But the truth of it is, they had done nothing about revolution since 1867.
They had sought to enter into politics and to be part of organization, but they could not be
considered to be successful. Indeed, they were mocked as a group of old people who really didn't do a whole pile.
And if you look at
one of their number,
it was reconstituted
in 1906, 1907.
And it was a new generation
took over the IRB
and one of them,
and to give you an idea
of what they were like,
one of them is Dennis McCullough.
Dennis McCullough
was brought into a pub
in Belfast
and sworn into the IRB.
He was brought to the pub
by his father.
So it's a kind of
secret organisation.
Secret organisation.
It's kind of like
Finian Freemasons. That's exactly it. And they're dedicated to the pub by his father. So it's a kind of secret organisation. It's kind of like a Fenian
Freemasons. That's exactly it. And they're dedicated
to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland.
And by violent
means apparently. And McCullough
in this pub was disgusted by what he saw.
He saw a whole load of windbags
who had no interest in doing anything. So he shipped
them out one after the next,
including his own father. So when
his own generation came in,
the one person from the older generation who was central to that was Tom Clark. So Tom Clark had
been involved in a dynamiting campaign in the 1880s in England, was arrested, spent a lot of
time in English prisons, came out around 1900, went to America for a few years, but in 1906 was
living around the corner from here where he ran a tobaccoist. And that tobaccoist
shop became a hub of revolution. People coming in and out of it, passing notes. He's reorganizing
the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who are ready to go. And at the core of this revolution is the
Irish Republican Brotherhood, who, it was Clark who held a meeting just after the outbreak of
the Great War in September 1914,
who said, we will strike before this war ends.
He was disgusted that there had been no rebellion during the Boer War,
and he was determined not to miss this chance.
So Clark set on revolution.
And later, in early 1915, set up a small military council to develop the plans.
So there at the core of everything that happens
is the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The second group who are involved are a group of socialists,
essentially the Irish Citizen Army, headed by James Connolly. Connolly was born in Scotland,
born in Edinburgh, to Irish emigrant parents who had come to Ireland as a labour organiser
and had been involved in the 1913 lockout, which was a really famous trade union conflict with
businesses in Dublin, which was a seminal moment again in Irish labour politics. And it was a
vivid illustration of the poverty of Dublin and And the poverty of Dublin, there's all this nonsense spoken about Dublin
as a second city of empire,
of the second city of empire.
What does that even mean?
What does it mean to be the second city of empire?
And it was the style of Birmingham as well, by the way,
and Calcutta and Edinburgh.
So it was one of those titles.
But what Dublin did was,
was a deeply divided society
where you had a crust of people with a lot of money.
In the beginning. There's a
rising middle class, but on the bottom, there are people who are in the most appalling circumstances
living around the place. So you get 25,000 families living in one room accommodation.
Many of those families even took in lodgers into their one room. They had no sanitation,
no running water. There were often cattle and sheep, or cattle kept out the back
of the houses for milk and so on. So this is a very poor, very poor city. And it was out of this
city that labor agitation began in 1913. But the labor agitation happened at exactly the same time,
of course, as the Ulster Volunteers had been founded by Carson. So James Connolly had a
simple idea. We would protect our workers by setting up
our own militia, the Irish Citizen Army, and they trained. And Connolly was disillusioned by 1915
with progress. The war had got in on him. He was himself a former British Army soldier, by the way,
but he set on revolution too. The volunteers knew he was set on revolution, so they pulled him into
his military council.
So that's the second group of people. And just before you move on to the next groups,
that shows, doesn't it, just how much Irish politics has been radicalized and I suppose paramilitarized by the experience of 1912 to 14. It is impossible to understand the 1916 rising
without looking at the militarization of Irish society begun by
Edward Carson and the Ulster Volunteer Force and their foundation, added to by the gun running at
Larne, where the Ulster Volunteer Force brought in German and other guns with which to say that
they will resist home rule at any cost in Ulster, radicalized also by the uncertain loyalty of the British
army in Ireland through its Curragh mutiny, essentially says we will not dispossess the
Ulster volunteer force of those guns which they have brought in.
I mean, how extraordinary is it that the British army could not be relied on to do the will
of the British government?
What a statement of the state of British politics that that is.
But the Irish volunteers
under Eoin MacNeill,
a professor of medieval history
and early Irish history
at University College Dublin
at the time,
and a complete and utter
rebuttal to the idea
that academics are useless,
founded the Irish volunteer force
after writing an article
called The North Began.
And they too began to run in guns through 1914. And you get this split then after the war when
John Redmond asked those volunteers to join the British army and fight for the empire,
thereby guaranteeing home rule of the volunteers. I'll come back to explain that split more fully
when we talk about more people in it. But what it meant was that there was a standing army of 10 to 15 000 people who were in ireland the militia who
were there to be tweaked towards the idea of revolution but that militarization of of ireland
you're right like dominic it's fundamental to the context in which there are guns and people out parading in Dublin.
So the other groups that are involved.
So we've got the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Citizens Army.
And there are other groups as well.
So there are poets, there are educators.
There are more ideas than groups.
So you've got a group of groups of kind of Catholic intellectuals, people like Thomas McDonagh.
Again, these people are brilliantly described in vivid faces and their ideas are all over the place and they're part of a
a kind of an irish ireland movement which is all around the idea that you know ireland should have
its own culture it's an awakening of ideas using modern ideas and you know the way there was
british press would tell a kind of biggles type stories for the late 19th And you know the way there was British press would tell a kind of
Biggles type stories
for the late 19th century.
You know that idea of
magazines being put out.
There were Irish versions
of those stories
where the heroes of 1798
and of 1848
and of 1867
were recast.
Because one of the things
that struck me reading about
the Easter Rising
is that a lot of the
Irish nationalist organisations are definitely drawing on British models. of the things that struck me reading about the easter rising is that a lot of the the irish
nationalist organizations are definitely drawing on british models even the irish volunteers are
they're kind of doing drill like the british army do their officers are mimicking the style of
british officers yeah i mean so and that whole cult of kind of manliness we did an episode on
king solomon's minds just a few weeks ago this has been kind of gyliness. We did an episode on King Solomon's Mines just a few weeks ago.
This has been kind of gaelicised, I suppose you would say. Yeah, they gaelicised it by turning it on its head. So you have the English model of sport in
Ireland. You have rugby and soccer and cricket and formed in modern clubs around Ireland,
but they fly the Union Jack. They have the Lord Lieutenant as their patron.
So in the middle of the 1880s,
a group of Irish nationalists,
but people who were sports lovers,
founded the Gaelic Athletic Association
and resurrected the game of hurling,
made a game which they called Gaelic football,
took control of athletics and said,
right, you choose English laws for sport
or Irish laws for sport.
Now, of course, the reality of people's lives are that people don't necessarily live like
that.
They want a little bit of this and a little bit of everything really.
And, but that's there.
Those ideas are there in the background.
It's English popular culture is everywhere in Ireland in the late 19th and early 20th
century.
There's a sort of Boy Scout aspect to this, isn't there? Yeah.
So Nafina Aaron is a remaking of the English Scout movement,
except soaked in the history of Irish republicanism
and the idea of Irish separatism.
And loads of those guys walk into this building with Pierce in 1916.
And that really, really matters
to the idea of a creation.
And this is the last thing, this idea,
this last group of people who are influenced
by the idea of Ireland, by this notion.
And there's a school not far from here,
St. Andrew's National School.
And the roll book for Easter week 1916
has no students in it because it says closed for the
poet's revolution. And that tells you something. So where does poetry come into the revolution?
I think poetry comes in, in three different ways. The first of it is this creation of the idea,
the alternative to the British empire. And this idea, this world of ideas that there is an ancient Ireland
remade through its history,
that there is mythology
through Cú Chulainn and Nafina,
which can be put there
and this,
our antiquity,
we were there before
the British Empire was,
we were there before they even,
before the Anglo-Saxons
even pitched up.
Yeah, we were here
and we'll survive them.
Yeah.
We'll be fine.
We will go back to our ways.
So that idea is there.
So poetry matters for that.
It helped create that.
It matters too because there were poets who fought and died in the rising or were executed after the rising.
Pierce wrote poetry.
McDonagh was a really well-regarded poet.
James Connolly wrote poetry and plays and so on.
This was a revolution of words and revolutionaries who used words
all the time. And the third may it matters
is the words of Yeats
afterwards and the amount and the words that
were written about it and how they
told a very particular story
of the revolution. And that can be
seen in the accounts from the time and
afterwards. So again, reading about this
again and again, scholars
make this point. So Peter Hart
described the entire Easter Rising as a unique example of insurrectionally abstract art, which
I thought was kind of brilliant. What does he mean by that? My favourite book on the idea of this,
and I commend it to everybody, it was recommended to me when I took a course in the Irish Revolution
in 1989 by Professor Michael Athan, called The Imagination of an Insurrection, written by an American philosopher called William
Erwin Thompson. It is just the most magnificent exploration of the relationship between poetry
and revolution and the human condition and how those three things are not, you know,
they're all related and all intertwined. And there is a thing, there is a thing where people
have taken selected writings
from some of the people,
notably Patrick Pearce from The Rising,
and see it only as bloodlust.
And they decontextualize it
from the idea of war in Europe at the time
and the stuff that was being written
by the poets of the Great War
and what they saw.
And it was as if there was a death wish
from some people that they saw it And it was as if there was a death wish from some people that
they saw it as theater, that they didn't understand that these were somehow woolly
people who did not understand what war was. And that is entirely wrong. In my view,
they went and planned this for a long time. You may argue that the plans turn out to be terrible
and impossible and that it did indeed become bloody protest rather than coup d'etat.
You may argue that, but they fought, they struggled for a long time to plan for it.
But this is the idea that Patrick Pearce in particular is associated with it,
that they know that the revolution is going to be wiped out, that they will probably be killed.
And so that they are kind of offering themselves up,
the phrase is, as a blood sacrifice, modelled on the sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
Yeah, it's kind of like the fact that it was Easter as well, and that it's kind of insurrection
as resurrection, and that it's poetry and prayer, and it's all rubbed in together. But where I think
that breaks down is the extent to which
they sought to arm themselves
from Germany.
They sought to go,
why did Pierce go on
speaking tours of America?
Why did they try and raise money?
Why did they import so many guns?
Why did they spend
more than a year planning?
So they're planning from what point?
From the moment the war breaks out
or from a few months?
They're talking about it
from the moment,
they decide the moment the war breaks out, but the military council really gets going in the spring of 1915. So home rule has been passed, but it's been constantly pushed back,
delayed. And is that because, is the reason they want to do an uprising because they think
actually the British will always find a way not to give us home rule or because they think
home rule is just nowhere near enough. We want to push for more. So the view is that home rule is not
enough, that because of the limitations to do with finance and on defence, that really it's
anemic and it doesn't amount to anything approaching independence. Number one. Number two,
the home rule was on the statute books had been passed signed off by the king
but it was now clear that there was going to be exclusion for at least six counties for a period
of time and clearly indefinitely because a tory government would come back in and you know things
will be changed and things will be moved on yeah and there was that old adage of irish republicanism
which ties in with the idea of Ireland being
dangerous because of its links with France and Spain. But this is it recast in a different way.
The gallant allies in Europe, we can use these people to get ourselves the guns that we need.
We can't get enough through America, but we can use the Germans to help us be freed. And that
old adage of England's difficulty being being ireland's opportunity it's such
a cliche but it's a cliche for a reason but why are the british not aware of what's going on
i mean because if all these guns are being collected and poets are writing manifestos
and yet it seems to take the british completely by surprise john dylan makes a speech
in the spring of 1915 in scotland so john dylan is the just sorry i should explain that yeah so
john dylan so back in in the spring of 1915 john dylan who's john redmond's number two in the irish
parliamentary party is making a speech in scotland and, listen, there's a lot of talk at the moment about what's going to be arising in Ireland in the next while.
He says, they're not going to do that.
Like Michael Fish with the report of the hurricane.
It's not going to come.
But they know people are talking about it, Patrick Pearson and whatnot, but they think
these are just, you know, it's like students in the pub talking about revolution.
I mean, this will never happen.
Is that basically a condescending attitude almost?
It is, but it's understandable in very many respects, and not least because of the militarization that we spoke about.
Because these Irish volunteers are actually up and down parading and have been for a couple of years.
They're out on the streets.
Right. years. They're out on the streets. And it's a familiar thing to see militias of men in military
formation marching up and down the streets and being called and going on manoeuvres. So it's
easy to understand and to convince yourself that it's going to be fine. Another reason, of course,
is that Redmond, John Redmond, was telling Augustine Burrell, the chief secretary for Ireland,
and telling Dublin Castle and telling Wimberd, they're all new. Oh no, the worst thing you can do here is to move against these guys.
Then you will cause revolution. Yeah, of course. I mean, that so often happens, right?
Yes. So move against them, try to suppress them and you will give them a cause. Yeah.
And essentially you can understand a lot of 1798 by understanding that approach. So it became British. It was the Commission of Inquiry after the Rising blamed Borel, Augustine Borel, and blamed Dublin Castle for their failures before the Rising. I think it's much more, it's not as clear as that. I think that's easy. It's an easy way to do it, but it doesn't hold water.
So before we go to the break, Paul, and get into the actual story, the narrative,
that the character who more than anybody else embodies the spirit of the Easter Rising,
we've mentioned him a couple of times, but we've never really explained him, is this guy,
Patrick Pearce. So he's actually been missing. When we did the Home Rule crisis and all that,
his name never featured at all. I mean, I don't know. You said that everybody knew everybody in Dublin.
But who is he?
Is he a big figure?
And how is it that he, more than anybody else, becomes the, you know, the walking embodiment of this kind of the spirit of this extraordinary year?
In a revolution peopled everywhere by extraordinary characters, there is nobody quite like Patrick Pierce. He has his demonizers and he has his idolaters who have sought to position him in a certain way and to cast him in a certain light.
And almost always they do disservice to the scale of the intellect that were there, the scale of achievements that were there outside the revolutionary sphere. So he was born into
an English father who was... He was a Brummie, wasn't he?
Yeah, and Stolmason. And he went to
university, studied English and Irish and French,
qualified as a lawyer, but he was motivated most of all
by Irish language revival
and by involvement
in the Gaelic League.
He became editor
of a newspaper
called On Clive Sullish,
which was the most important
Irish language publication there.
And he sought always
to expand the boundaries,
but it was education
which motivated him
more than anything else.
He set up his own
boys' school,
St. Enda's,
on the south side of Dublin
and added a girls' school
to it because he was
an absolute believer in equality between men and women. So he set up St. Edith's, which only lasted a while.
The education in St. Endes was Gaelic. The idea was that there should be education
through bilingualism. And he went to Belgium and studied the methods that were used there,
brought them back to Ireland and sought to kind of build a citizenship and an idea of intellectual journey, which was around this. Was he involved in politics? Yes,
he began to be pulled into politics. He stood in favor of home rule. In 1912 and 1913, he believed
in the idea of home rule. He didn't think it was enough, but he thought it was a decent thing to be going on with it was only later into 1914 that he really became radicalized onto the idea that there
should be a revolution now some people say it's because his school was failing
and that he needed money and his life was kind of unraveling on him and that he had
painted himself into the corner where he needed to make a dramatic statement. I disagree with that. I think that's denying him his own agency. And he showed a clear pattern
through his life of evolving his thought in a whole load of ways. I should say, by the way,
in passing, if anyone wants to read a brilliant exploration of the education system in Britain
and Ireland, read The Murder Machine, which is a book he wrote about how rote learning
was destroying education at the time.
And he called for creativity and innovation
and a child-centered approach to education
way, way, way ahead of his time.
Anyway, he was on the military council,
appointed to the military council of the IRB in 1915,
and he was then set on revolution.
He was inspirational or driving the idea that there
should be guns imported that there would be training and that ireland would rise and the
date set for this rebellion was easter 1916 right i think at this point we should take a break
and then when we come back you could take us through the events of Easter 1916.
Chiara, it means smart in Italian.
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But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid,
you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home.
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Welcome back to The Rest Is History.
We are entering the final lap of this mighty Irish marathon.
Paul Rouse, who has been doing a Herculean job.
But Paul, the end is finally in sight for you.
Take us through the story of Easter 1916.
Sir Roger Casement, who would have been known across Britain and Ireland in the first two
decades of the 20th century as the man who had investigated the imperial outrages in the Congo,
who'd repeated it in the Amazon, who had then become a devotee of the idea of home rule and then became a gunrunner
for the Irish volunteers. He went to Berlin at the beginning of the Great War and he sought to
raise an army of Irish prisoners who'd been taken by the Germans to form a brigade to come over.
He had sought also to convince the Germans to send 20,000 men
or 15,000 or whatever they would give to the cause and land them in Limerick and they would
march and take the land and failing that he wanted guns, he wanted rifles. Well, finally, before
Easter 1916, the Germans sent on a ship 20,000 guns and casement came by submarine to the south coast of Ireland. This was seen as what
would make the revolution possible. There would be an uprising if there were guns, even if there
weren't German soldiers themselves, but the volunteers would now have the weaponry with
which to rise. Casement, everything went wrong. Casement ended up staggering onto the shore at Bannestrand in
County Kerry, where he'd capsized on the boat and inflatable coming in. The ship on which the arms
were being brought from Germany was intercepted and the captain of it scuttled it before it went
into Queenstown in Cork. The question was, what would the rebels do who had said they were going to rise? The stats
part of the story ended with Roger Casement being arrested and ultimately being imprisoned in the
Tower of London. And after the rising, as we will see, he was hung in Pentonville prison in August
1916. By then, the whole situation in Ireland had been fundamentally
changed. So he could at least say that he had played a part in the transformation of Ireland,
though not in the manner in which he might have expected when he stepped off that submarine
in April 1916. So that's all gone wrong. The question the rebels for pierce and his pals who have been
planning this is do they go ahead anyway and they do go ahead anyway i mean it's the amazing thing
isn't it they go ahead anyway and they can go ahead because what happened was immediately after
the war began john redmond the leader of the irish parliamentary party called for the irish
volunteers to join the british army and to fight in France. That led to a split in the Irish volunteers in which 15,000
or so, between 10 and 15,000, went with people under the charge of Eoin MacNeill.
And they began to drift towards the idea of revolution. But McNeill would only go if there was two things happening.
If the volunteers were going to be suppressed
by the state
and if there were arms coming from Germany
and genuine prospect of success.
So in the week before Easter 1916,
those guys who were set on revolution
from the IRB
took a document that was in Dublin Castle
and I think the phrase in English politics
is sexed it up
and made it that the volunteers were about to be suppressed and convinced McNeill of that.
And then they told McNeill there were guns coming from Germany. So McNeill agreed, everyone would
rise on Easter Sunday morning. We would call for manoeuvres and we would use those manoeuvres
to take various strategic places around Dublin and that the country would be sized with Limerick as a base and everything would manoeuvre there and then everything would rise and the British would be overthrown.
Now, the problem was when MacNeill heard that the casement had been captured and there were no guns coming. He balked at the idea.
Number two, he began to believe that the castle document was a forgery.
This document that said there was suppression.
Well, it was the makings of a forgery,
which had a basis in a real document that appears.
But it was ultimately a forgery.
If you change the document, it's a forgery.
So yes, it's a long answer to a simple question.
So McNeill issued countermanding orders,
said that on Easter Sunday,
there would now be no manoeuvres.
He published a notice on the front page
of the Sunday Independent,
which best-selling paper in the country
to cancel everything.
So now the rebels with Pierce and Tom Clark,
they're in Connolly, they're in a quandary.
What do they do?
They fear, they made a fateful decision.
They said, we won't go on Sunday.
We'll go on the Monday instead.
The problem was they mobilized on Easter Monday morning and there was confusion in the ranks
of all the volunteers.
So there weren't 15,000 came out.
In course of the whole week, fewer than 2,000 came out.
And on the morning themselves, there were probably fewer than 1,000.
So into this building here, just after noon, they gathered in Liberty Hall, just down along the river from us here, which was the headquarters, which had a sign hanging outside it.
We serve neither King nor Kaiser.
They walked out through the doors of there and they headed to various parts around the city in their mobilization.
They walked through through the doors of there and they headed to various parts around the city in their mobilization.
They walked through these doors here.
There were five soldiers on duty.
They shot a sergeant in the face and they took over the general post office.
And wasn't there was one very unfortunate British soldier who was here buying stamps?
Incredibly bad timing. His timing was not ideal.
And apparently he got access to a bottle of
brandy later in the week and he uh he took a lot of minding i think is the phrase that was uh
that was bandied um so they walk in i mean a small group of them ultimately compared with the
the 15 000 they were hoping for what's the reaction of the people of Dublin
when these guys pitch up and they say,
listen, everybody, it's a revolution, a republic.
I mean, the people who are buying stamps,
going for lunch, going about their daily business,
I'm guessing they're not swept.
I mean, knowing crowds as I do in history,
they're probably not swept up instantly
by revolution enthusiasm, are they?
No, because they're used
to people parading
on the streets
and now Pierce is outside
in his uniform
reading a proclamation
of a republic
which they can't conceive of.
And there are people there
who are mocking,
there are people
who've got family
who are fighting
in the British Army
in the front,
people looking at him
in bemusement
and of course there were others
of course who were happy
to see it as revolution. But it's what happens next is
really important. The rebels then began to put up barricades around the city. So they begin to
stop life in the city and they attack Dublin Castle. And it is at Dublin Castle that the
first shots of the revolution are fired and a policeman is killed going in. Now we know in
hindsight, and everybody says this military plan was terrible. Why didn't you take Dublin Castle?
Why didn't you take Trinity College? Why did you take the list of buildings that you took? Why did
you go to the GPO? Yes, it's a grand building on the best street in the city. The post office isn't
the obvious place you would seize first. No, nor is Stephen's Green, where they built a trench
in the middle of the green. Nor is the Four Accords.
Not a bad building along the Liffey.
But the thing about Dublin Castle, so the policeman who gets shot is unarmed.
And I think they were what about kind of, there's one armed soldier in there.
And the sense of Dublin Castle is this powerful nerve centre of imperial control.
And actually it seems to have been completely hopeless.
Burrell was in London
for the weekend.
Other officials were away.
And lots of officers
were off at the races,
weren't they?
They were at the Irish Grand National,
which was down in Ferry House.
But it tells you
how little they expected
to be a revolution.
They may have been worried
on the Sunday,
but after all,
they'd got casement.
They'd got the guns.
They'd seen the countermanding order. There's no evidence that these guys are going to go out on the Monday and
stage a revolution. So why won't I enjoy my Easter Monday? Why wouldn't I go to the races?
And the rebels didn't know. It's easy to say now, well, there were no guns there.
There weren't 200 soldiers. Why didn't you take Dublin Castle and hold it?
They might've considered it to be just too difficult to do it.
So they,
but they took city hall,
which is right beside Dublin Castle,
a formidable building.
And actually,
if anybody wants to read an account of that,
have a look online at the Bureau of Military History account of Harry Colley,
who was a C-O-L-L-E-Y who fought in that revolution.
And he tells a really dramatic,
vivid story of it.
My favorite thing they take is the Jacob's Biscuit Factory.
That was what I was going to ask.
Why on earth do they take the Jacob's Biscuit Factory?
There is no obvious reason why.
That was a lot of biscuits.
That was the case.
They also took a mill, Bolin's Mills,
and they took the South Dublin Union,
which is a site of, anyone who's been to Dublin
will know James's Hospital.
But not Trinity College, which is great.
I mean, that would be a very strong place to hold, wouldn't it?
Yes, and if you've got significant numbers with you,
you might take Trinity College.
But the plan for the Rising has been lost.
So they say there were three copies made of the plan for the Rising.
They were so worried about informers.
They didn't make loads of copies, didn't disperse them,
and the plans were lost.
We don't know exactly what they intended to do before the mobilisation
ended up the way it is.
And probably
the most bizarre decision
was actually to go
into Stephens Green,
which visitors to Dublin
will know is
a beautiful public space
at the top of Ravenswick
where they dug a trench
in the manner of modern warfare.
Well, isn't that because
they thought,
you know,
they think
modern warfare
is all about trenches.
Yes.
The Great War, France and Flanders. So obviously what you need to do if you're trying to capture a city you know they think modern warfare is all about trenches the great war
France and Flanders
so obviously
what you need to do
if you're trying
to capture a city
is dig a massive
big trench in the middle
and prepare for
you know
to repel attackers
disappointingly though
there are high buildings
all around us
where
snipers
which leaves you open
and it was
an unmitigated
disaster
and they went through
across Stevens Green
to the Royal College of Surgeons
where they stayed
the rest of the week there.
And my favourite detail
almost from the Easter Rising
is that when the British duly arrive
and there's kind of fighting
over St. Stevens Green,
that there's a kind of
twice daily truce
where the park keeper
is allowed to go in
and feed the ducks,
which I think reflects very well on both sides.
I think,
I think that's true.
I think that's true.
I think it's matched only as a piece of trivia from the rising by the fact
that two people who fought in the rising,
John Loder and Arthur Shields ended up starring in a Hollywood film,
which won five Oscars in the 1950s,
a John Ford film.
So that's,
I think the only thing that may match.
But isn't there a bloke as well, his
mum comes to take him
home?
Yeah, his mum
would call to the
GPO and tell him to
stop that mess and
then go home.
But he came back
the next day.
Oh, okay.
The next day there
was no, he didn't
leave after that.
So to go back to
the Monday, by
Monday afternoon,
the city has not
risen.
And many of the
people in the city
when they find out,
am I right in this, that many of the people when they find out what's going on are furious appalled they
think it's a i mean not everybody of course there is a whole you can't generalize but they haven't
had the reaction the unbridled enthusiasm that they might have hoped for yeah no that's absolutely
clear i think it sometimes overplayed the extent to which people opposed what they did because the turn came so quickly afterwards and after the executions that it feels to me too much to say that, oh, the city was appalled, the city was disgusted. There were definitely people who were disgusted and appalled by it, but I would be slow to say how general that was. There were people amazed. But people often seem to say that it's women in particular who are hostile to it. And there are comparisons to the, the trickateurs, the women who
would knit in front of the guillotine in the French revolution, that women are so hostile
that the volunteers are often kind of quite nervous about the violence that they might
inflict on them. Yes. And again, that is said, but again,
probably the best contemporary account of The Rising is a beautiful book by James Stevens,
which is called The Insurrection in Dublin. And he talks about that idea of resentment at the rebels from particularly women on the streets. And so we can't deny that that's the case.
It's the extent of it and how quickly it changed, I think, is that issue, number one. Number two, he has a brilliant line in it when he talks about
the rumours that were sweeping Dublin when this happened. Cork had been taken. Munster was in
rebel hands. The English were surrounded and in their barracks and couldn't leave. The country
had risen. As he said himself, rumours were created and winged in the course of that week and they spread through the city. But the British are not
surrounded and presumably troops are starting to be mobilised and brought in to try and pacify
the rising. So what's the process by which the British come into Dublin?
They come in without any difficulty at all because the rebels have not cut off the strategic ways into the city from Kildare, from the Curragh camp. So they come in
easily. They stabilize the situation in Dublin Castle. It's clear by Monday evening that it's
fine. By Tuesday, martial law has been declared. They bring four 18 pound artillery guns up from McLean and they're set up near Trinity College there on Westmoreland Street.
And they begin to send troops over from Wales.
They put troops on the ships.
And when those troops arrive on the Wednesday, they cannot believe how eloquent the English being spoken by the people they meet are because they thought they were
going to France. Yeah, of course. But even, I mean, the extraordinary thing. So within
arguably less than a day, the final outcome is decided, right? Because they're, you know,
it's pretty obvious probably by nightfall on the Monday that this isn't going to be
a successful revolution that, you, that Dublin Castle still stands,
the British are on their way,
this is going to be snuffed out.
Oh yeah, and there are, above us here,
the Irish Republic flag, the green flag with the harp on it,
is flying at one end, the tricolour,
the green, white and orange is flying at the other end.
But the rebel headquarters,
how does it communicate with everybody else?
There are barricades at each end but the rebel headquarters how does it communicate with everybody else there are barricades at the end of the
each end of the
street with
British soldiers
at each end of them
there's a smell
and sound of
revolution
yeah
there's gunshots
everywhere
James Stevens
writes
he talks about
writing this
as he hears
shots in the streets
there are horses
dying on the street
and later there are
wild horses
running up and
down the street
and then there's
looting
everywhere around the city and they loot cricket bats don't they they loot they loot I later there are wild horses running up and down the street and then there's looting everywhere around the city and they loot cricket bats don't they they loot they'd loot i think
there are some incredible scenes so there's the scene of five people pushing through a dublin
street carrying a grand piano five of them which has been looted and there are people who loot
cricket bats and balls and they play cricket on the bottom of Sackville Street. And there's a
beautiful phrase and poignant and desperately sad one about, which James Stevens writes about
a group of children who've looted a sweet shop and they get to taste things, but they most likely
have never tasted before and may never again in the rest of their lives.
Almost all the people we've talked about, apart from Thomas talking about the crowds,
have been men
but there are women
involved in this
in the Easter Rising too
aren't there?
Yes
and they're
extremely important
to the Rising
and to the idea
of the Rising as well
and they run from
somebody like
Constance Markievicz
who was from
the Gore Booth family
very,
Lissadel House
very familiar to Yeats
and she
is a figure who was in Stephen's Green,
was involved in the Irish Citizen Army.
Kind of saw herself and was seen by others as the leader of that group
who were up there and who were treated to Dublin Cassettes.
She fired apparent claims to have killed somebody
or there are claims that she shot one person there.
There are others such as Margaret Skinner
who came from Scotland
to come over and fight.
And Countess Markievicz
has a tremendous costume,
doesn't she?
And this also seems to be
part of the Easter Rising
is that people want
to look good for it.
The imagery of the Rising matters
and it certainly,
she was wearing a hat
with ostrich feathers
and it was quite the statement
I think when it was out there and it has led, I think, to an unfortunate image of her as being excessively vain. And there is no doubt she had a certain vanity and do that. But she was also famous for her diligence and her committee work and her willingness to do all the hard work as well as she wasn't there for the glamour of revolution. She had worked exceptionally hard to create that revolution. And if you look at the women who were in the rising, they span people from that elite
of Irish society, right down to people who came from the very poorest circumstances and found a
sense of liberation from being treated as equals within the Irish citizen army. Now we can't dress
this up. We cannot pretend that all the men who were out in 1916 reviewed women as their equals.
It's obvious that they didn't, and they certainly didn't. Some people didn't want them there at all.
Some men didn't want them there at all, and some definitely didn't want them firing guns.
And they were seen as being there to do the catering or the medical work. So it's not,
we have to be careful here in how that is presented.
And what about the British? When these soldiers arrive, they think they're going to France
and they find that they're in a city
within the United Kingdom.
What is their take on what is happening?
Well, first of all,
you look at the soldiers
who walk in from Kingstown,
now Dun Laoghaire,
in the south side of Dublin.
They walk in,
a group of them goes
on the wider road
in through Donnybrook
and they're fine.
They make it to Stevens Green in that area without problems.
But there's a group come in along Northumberland Street and they've been set up by an outpost from Avon De Valera's crowd who are in Boland Mills.
And they run into an ambush.
And there are the guts of 250 British soldiers who are killed or wounded, being caught in the crossfire between about 17 or 18 rebels.
One rebel talks about how the gun was too hot to handle. He'd been firing it that often. And that
was almost like it was charge of the light brigade idea that we will go through this road.
Or I guess battle of the Somme, coming out of a trench and discharging.
Which comes in very quickly afterwards, of course. And again, by the way, it's a formidable
foundation stone for Ulster Unionism
and central to Ulster Unionist identity.
But in that,
it is clear on Wednesday
that there is only going to be one result.
If there were any doubt,
because the Helga, a gunboat,
comes up the Liffey
and stops, first of all,
beside Liberty Hall,
which is along,
beside the Customs House. There's nobody in Liberty Hall, but it's Liberty hall, which is along beside the customs house.
There's nobody in Liberty hall,
but it's a statement.
This is where the rebels left from.
This is the home of anti-capitalism in Dublin.
And they blew it to pieces.
Meanwhile,
by Thursday,
this building here is being subjected to a barrage of artillery shells and
incendiary shells coming from across the river.
They're not like attempting to storm the buildings. Storming buildings in urban
warfare would have been incredibly difficult. A lot of
loss of life. So they just take this
place and they essentially burn it.
So there is an incredible description
of that. So this
is Louisa Norway. She is
who is Louisa Norway?
She is the wife of
the head of the post office after norway and so she
she wrote it seemed as if the whole city was on fire the glow extending right across the heavens
and the red glare hundreds of feet high while above the roar of the fires the whole air seemed
vibrating with the noise of the great guns and machine guns it was an inferno we remained spell
bound and i can't tell you how i longed for you to see it so the sense there that this is a horror but also an incredible spectacle and sackville street as it
was then was the most handsome city in dublin i mean the most handsome street in dublin yes
and as the freeman's journal wrote afterwards the most handsome street in europe had been destroyed
and turned into a room like you would see at Ypres.
And it was a simple case. We look at the GPO and this, for people who don't know it, there's a couple of hundred meters between the GPO and the Liffey. All of this was flattened.
Everything was blown out of it. The rebels had had to retreat back along there.
And there was no doubt the overwhelming gunpowder. They didn't try and storm the building,
which would have cost
enormous loss of life.
So they just put shells in.
So by the end of the week,
the rebels,
I mean, they've held out
for a few days,
but it's perfectly obvious to Pierce
to hold out much further
would involve colossal loss
of civilian life.
There's just no points.
And he agrees to surrender.
On Friday, they're forced to
leave this building here
to evacuate through the back entrance
or through a side entrance onto Moore Street.
There's a retreat with a couple of hundred people.
James Connolly's on a stretcher.
He's not able to walk.
His ankle is gone.
Plunkett is sick.
There are a lot of people in a bad way,
but the heat is too much to say.
The timbers from the roof are cascading down
there's talk about
the intense heat
and everybody's hungry
and they've all been
Right, even in the biscuit factory
because apparently
they're complaining
that they're so fed up
with eating biscuits
that they'd do anything
to have some bread
which is
And what happens then
is they withdraw
down Henry Street
and onto Moore Street
where there's a last stand
on the Friday night
but by Saturday morning,
Plunkett is sending Elizabeth O'Farrell
under a white flag
to suggest a surrender
and looking for terms.
And it's told back to say
it's unconditional surrender or no surrender.
And they go for the unconditional?
They go for the unconditional surrender.
And Elizabeth O'Farrell is then dispatched
around the city to go to the different garrisons.
And you talked about the view of the city being on fire, but the rebel garrisons were untouched elsewhere.
Broadly speaking, there was trouble around the forecourts.
There was street fighting around that area, which led to a lot of civilian death, many killed by the British army who couldn't distinguish between rebels and civilian as they came through.
South Dublin Union was left untouched.
Bowlands Mills was left largely untouched.
So they were going,
wait, we don't need to surrender.
And the country hadn't risen,
but Enniscorthy had been taken.
And Enniscorthy, they're going,
why do we have to do this?
Out in Ashburn,
there'd been a small rising in Ashburn
where there were running battles with the RSC and British army. They don't want to stop. But they do stop eventually.
They do stop within a couple of days and it's clear that the Republic lies in ruins.
But this is the fascinating thing, isn't it? So the rising has been a complete failure.
Militarily, you know, it hasn't worked, but the reason we're even doing this podcast is because politically it is a
resounding success.
And now the usual accounts that I'm guessing that most people listening to
this will have,
who know about it will have at the back of their minds is the British defeated
the rising and then completely screwed it up by their their violent
repression and by the cruelty of the executions and all this now i both tom and i were listening
to a series of lectures by your old tutor professor michael lafferman ucd who compared it with the
the paris commune of 1871 for the parisune, he said 20,000 people were executed.
Is it 16 executed?
Including casement. Including casement at the end
of these. So in other words,
actually when you look at people repressing
rebellions, well, the British
don't execute loads of... But he also
makes the point that this is seen as treachery
and treason. In the middle of a world war. In the middle
of a world war where Britain is facing
a kind of deadly threat that the rebels
have sided with the Kaiser.
But also, does he not also make the point, he says
for Asquith's government, it's
completely and utterly inconceivable that they would say
oh chaps, that was
poor form.
The centre of Dublin lies
in five years prison, then you can come out
and be rehabilitated. I mean, that's never going to happen, right?
And to add to that, the rebel leaders themselves knew they were going to be executed
beforehand there was no there was no surprise in this right but how then does it become such a
massive issue i mean these guys we've come from downstairs the statues are there the sense of
martyrdom the sense that these guys gave their lives against a hideously repressive enemy, and that this became an absolute motivating, I don't want to say legend, because that makes it sound like it didn't happen.
It did happen.
The extent to which it became…
It changed utterly.
A terrible beauty is born.
Right.
How did it then become become against the background of
the slaughter in the trenches how does it become this dare i say tom sacral it is a story for
nationalism oh it is a sacral story and it's the answer is because of the executions because it
doesn't matter what happened in paris it didn't matter these things and it comes back to this
idea where i disagree with the idea that there was widespread revulsion around the place.
There is an underlying current there, which is looking for a reason.
And the reason you find is in the executions.
And you can see it in the middle of the executions.
The executions began on the 3rd of May and they ran for 10 days.
And that was a mistake because by the middle of the 10 days, there are people looking for clemency. And when you have people looking for clemency, you have to deny clemency. And it becomes a story as much as the execution that actually irish nationalists are holding the
british to quite high standards that they feel that the british have then failed to to maintain
is there an element of that i wouldn't think so i think they're just people they're just looking
for reasons to i think you're looking for reasons and if you look at it it happens immediately and
there's a roundup afterwards which is a a disaster. They corral three and a
half thousand people. Loads of people are sent to Wales and interned and people are moved to
different places. They lift all the wrong people as well as who are rebels there. There's stories
coming out, but also now the factory of nationalist grievance has something to work with. It has two
things. It has, sorry, it has two things. It has the fight now
because there has been
a redemption through resurrection
and it has the treatment
afterwards to work with.
One other extraordinary
consequence of this
is that one group
who you've not mentioned once
is Sinn Féin.
Sinn Féin,
which had been
a monarchist party.
Arthur Griffith was a monarchist. He wanted a
kind of Austro-Hungarian system. And the British don't really know what Sinn Fein is and say,
this is all Sinn Fein's work. This is a Sinn Fein uprising. And they basically,
the reaction to the Easter Rising creates Sinn Fein as a kind of, as a mass revolutionary party, I guess.
Does it? Is that right?
And it begins by things like Sinn Féin being named.
So for example, the Irish Times published a handbook,
which is a huge seller,
sells out of the rebellion,
a couple of hundred pages with pictures and portraits
of the leaders,
and they call it the Sinn Féin Rebellion.
So the idea, Sinn Féin is an idea. It's an accumulation of the idea, and Sinn Féin rebellion. So the idea Sinn Féin is an idea.
It's an accumulation of the idea and Sinn Féin in Irish means ourselves.
And it captures an idea beautifully.
Now Sinn Féin had nothing practical to do with the rebellion at all, but it now becomes a vehicle for people to push into.
Right.
And push they do.
But it's amazing.
It's amazing some of the things that happen.
Within a month,
there are prisoners who've been wrongly lifted or had nothing to do with the rising
are coming back on ships
and they're being met at the quay
by loads of people wearing tricolors.
A year after,
there are requiem masses
for the executed of 1916.
Huge crowds are going.
There is now taunting of the soldiers in the streets.
A year after the rebellion, on Easter Monday, 1917,
a group of people come here to the rubble of this site
and they gather to say the Irish Republic is not dead,
that the Irish Republic transcends time,
that Pearson Connolly and Clark and Kant and MacDiarmida,
by the very fact of establishing their provisional government,
by signing that proclamation, by leading revival,
had made certain the idea that there could be no unity.
So that raises a wonderful counterfactual.
What if the rising had been cancelled?
What if, you know, the casement, the failure of the gun running that you started this part of the episode with,
what if the rising doesn't happen?
Is the course of Irish history different or would the trigger have come at some point in the 1910s anyway?
Yeah, it's a brilliant question. And
this idea of the counterfactual of this period has been looked at by, say, for example, someone
like Professor Alvin Jackson up in Edinburgh, a brilliant historian, who's looked at what would
happen if home rule had been granted, for example. And it's one of those things that it's really
difficult. What I can say is there is a strain of Irish society which never
accepted the idea of a United Kingdom. And in the middle, there was a huge swathe of population
who, they were Irish, they were not British. And it comes down to language as well and terminology.
Ireland was never part of Britain. There were people who identified and still identify as British who lived in Ireland, but it was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and terminology. Ireland was never part of Britain. There were people who identified and still identify
as British
who lived in Ireland
but it was part
of the United Kingdom
of Great Britain
and Ireland.
That geographic boundary
had to matter
and maybe
in time
things would have been
dissolved to the point
where it wouldn't matter anymore
but there was no evidence
in history
that that would be the case.
But it does go ahead
and Fogel-McGarrion
brilliant book on the rising. Yeah, it's a it's a fantastic book he he describes the proclamation with which we
began this series as a stunningly ambitious act of imagination and the amazing thing about it is
as you've been saying that this stunningly ambitious act of imagination creates a reality
that maps onto the act of imagination in the long run. Because
what happens in due course is the war of independence, the civil war, the establishment
of the free state, independent state of Ireland exists now, kind of does follow from this to a
degree, doesn't it? And you look at some of the people who are here, who came back, and we didn't
mention the people who came from England or Scotland to fight in this rebellion,
one of whom was Michael Collins, who came back having worked in the post office in London for a while.
And they learned the lessons, because there had been a dispute in the volunteers before this one,
whether they should be going into a hedge campaign, as in it would be guerrilla warfare. But they learned the lessons. They never set up in the city again.
They go for guerrilla warfare and it is the rebels
who are from here they build from this and they build out into success where the idea of anything
less than ultimate independence will not be acceptable but that is another story is that
we will have to we will clearly have to return to dublin at some future point to do the rest of the story. The War of Independence,
the Civil War,
Ireland in the 1920s and so on. I know
we're also going to do a series about the Troubles
at some point, so more Irish history to
come. And I hope Joyce. Tom's
desperate to do Joyce because Tom wants everybody
to know, and this is really
what this series has been about. This is the
story we want people to take away, isn't it
Tom? That you once won a t-shirt and a james joyce themed pub quiz pub crawl quiz
competition in dublin yes but i don't i don't want that to be the note on which we end dominic no
well it won't be because we should say a massive thank you to paul rouse who has performed manfully
we've asked an awful lot of you paul because basically your brief was to do all Irish history.
So thank you so much,
not just for your fantastic performance in the episode,
but also for your tremendous hospitality here in Dublin.
And we also did a live show, didn't we, last night, Tom?
So thank you to everybody who came,
to all our Irish listeners.
And also thank you to Angus Lefty,
who has provided this room,
looking out over what was Sackville Street,
is now O'Connell Street.
And here we are.
I mean, what better place to have recorded this series
than in the GPO itself.
So thank you, Paul.
And thank you to everybody for listening.
And goodbye.
Bye-bye.
Goodbye. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History.
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I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. That's restishistorypod.com