A Very Modern Rising

The Easter Rising began in central Dublin at midday on 23 April 1916 when about 150 uniformed men marched from the headquarters of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union up the quay by the river Liffey, before turning right on to Sackville Street and then charging into the General Post Office, the GPO. Irritated customers at first refused to take the insurgents seriously but they soon took control of the building, tearing down partitions and erecting barricades to defend it from the expected counter-attack. At the same time other contingents of the Irish Volunteers (the nationalist paramilitary group formed in response to the Ulster Volunteers, the anti-Home Rule militia in the north-east) and the Irish Citizen Army (the workers militia formed to defend strikers during the great Dublin lock out of 1913) established themselves at various strategic locations around the city. By the time the holiday crowds, among them a sizeable contingent of British officers, began returning to Dublin from the traditional Easter Monday meeting at Fairyhouse racecourse in Co. Kildare, the most significant rebellion against British rule in Ireland for a century was underway. To most people, even to the majority of those who took part, the launch of the Rising was a complete surprise because it had been planned in secret by a handful of members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, better known in its Victorian heyday as the Fenians. Ernie O' Malley, a young medical student and later a celebrated guerrilla commander in the War of Independence, described the rebellion as a 'thunderclap'. After a day or two when spectators could gather to watch the unfolding pageant at the GPO, now flying the Irish tricolour rather than the Union Jack, the fighting intensified. By Wednesday of that Easter Week British forces had succeeded in surrounding the GPO and a gunboat sailed up the Liffey and began shelling Liberty Hall. Within a few more days the Rising was over: 450 people had been killed and a further 2,500 wounded.

The Proclamation of the Irish Republic is reprinted in Clair Wills's book. It was read outside the GPO by Patrick Pearse, the Rising's best known leader: 'Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children by her flag and strikes for her freedom'. Fifty years later when I entered the junior infants class at my primary school in a village in Tipperary, a framed copy of the Proclamation hung on the wall at the back of the classroom. Indeed, on my first day at school I had delighted the headmaster by standing in the echoing corridor with my mother and performing my party piece, naming the seven signatories of the Proclamation: Pearse, Clarke, MacDermott, MacDonagh, Ceannt, Plunkett and Connolly. My reward was a bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk. But around the same time, far away in university libraries, some Irish historians were already beginning to reassess what became known as the 'myth' of 1916 and asking whether the pictures of those seven men arranged around the words of the Proclamation should be looking out at us through that glass frame on the schoolroom wall. They began to ask if the Rising, the foundation drama of the Irish identity we were already imbibing in junior infants, had even been necessary for the birth of the Irish state we knew as the Republic of Ireland. Yet even those critiques of 1916, and the fierce controversies they provoked in the years afterwards, were all concerned with examining a self-contained, hollowed-out event and its two dominant personalities, the nationalist Pearse and the socialist, Connolly. What Clair Wills has done in this book is to expand our understanding of 1916 in space and time, both how it was experienced then and how it has been remembered and recycled to the present day.

The method for this inquiry was already established in That Neutral Island, her...