N E W S R O UN D
Dublin
24 April 1916
Catastrophist coup at
More than 500,000 people swarmed
into the centre of Dublin for the 100th
anniversary celebration of Ireland’s defining national myth. They were treated to a
21-gun salute and a flypast by the Irish Air
Force. And a minute’s silence and the Last
Post to dead heroes.
The Irish President laid a wreath
watched by the thronging crowds outside
the General Post Office building where the
rebels issued the Proclamation of the Irish
Republic on Easter Monday 1916. Within
two weeks its 15 key signatories would be
dead, shot by firing squad.
All so different from the 50th anniversary in 1966, which passed off with
scarcely a whimper.
But, then, the unfinished business of
Ireland’s fight for freedom from British
rule was about to enter a new and bloody
chapter with the re-ignition of the Troubles in the North.
The Irish question that had bedevilled
politics at Westminster for 30 years, had
finally looked to be solved in 1914 with the
passing of the Bill for Home Rule that the
Irish Parliamentary Party had been demanding. Ulster Unionists led by Sir Edward Carson responded by landing a shipload of guns
and ammunition imported from Germany.
Then, the First World War intervened, and Home Rule was suspended,
as hundreds of Irishmen signed up for
the slaughter fields of the Western Front.
Constitutional politics appeared to have
6
As the Western front descended into a bloody quagmire,
British rule in Ireland was challenged by a group of Gaelic
visionaries. But the imperial response of pitiless, overwhelming
force and dawn death squads backfired. Jason Dunn reports
on a defining event in the history of the Emerald Isle
triumphed. Only the revolutionary trade
union leader James Connolly saw Irish
nationalist aspirations could only be
achieved through international socialism.
Unlike other labour leaders who had
backed Britain’s march into the war, Connolly was, before anything else, a militant
workers leader. With James Larkin at the
helm of the Irish Transport and General
Workers Union, they united Protestant
and Catholic workers in a series of bitter
industrial dispute in 1913 that sent the
shockwave of class struggle around all of
Ireland. He’d set up the Irish Citizen Army
to protect strikers from employers reprisals.
Connolly famously prophetically said
that all the efforts of the Irish Republican
movement would be in vain, if they did
not establish a socialist republic: “England
will still rule you through her capitalists,
through her landlords, through her financiers, and a whole array of commercial and
individualist institutions.”
Into this volatile mix stepped the
cultural visionaries of Gaelic Ireland led
by Padraig Pearse who saw that only a catastrophist gesture, a blood sacrifice could
alter the tide of history.
The Irish Republican Brotherhood, feeble remnants if the agrarian Fenian secret
society had infiltrated the Irish Volunteers
and had planned an armed uprising.
But with thousands of Irishmen fighting
for the British cause in the bloodletting on
the Western Front, the appetite for insurrection had faded. Then, three days before
the rising was planned, the Anglo-Irish
scholar Sir Roger Casement was arrested
after landing from a German submarine off
the Kerry coast, on his return from an unsuccessful attempt to secure German arms.
He wanted the rising called off.
On the Easter Monday 1916, only a
fraction of the numbers the insurrectionists expected actually answered the call to
arms. But for the cultural catastrophists, it
was now or never. Men like Joseph Plunkett, Eamon Ceannt, Sean Mac Diamada,
James Connolly and Pearse, scholar, poet,
believer in the ethereal symbolism of mar-