April 24 - Ireland's Easter Rising (updated Aug. 22, 2016)

Patrick Pearse

On this day in 1916, the Easter Rising began in Dublin. Its aim was to end British rule and create the Irish Republic. It came to be known as the Poets' Rebellion because many of its leaders were teachers or writers.

Schoolteacher Patrick Pearse and Socialist leader James Connolly called for supporters of the Republic to gather at Dublin's General Post Office on Easter Monday, bringing whatever weapons they could find.

Members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, about 1,200 in number, turned out, but most citizens of Dublin were unprepared for, some even unaware of, the uprising.

The uprising itself was, by many conventional measures, a failure: Poorly planned and lacking solid support, it was quashed after a week.

Many leaders, like Pearse and Connolly, were hastily executed for treason. But as George Bernard Shaw wrote in The New York Times the following month:

It is absolutely impossible to slaughter a man in this position without making him a martyr and a hero, even though the day before the rising he may have been only a minor poet. ... The military authorities and the British Government must have known they were canonizing their prisoners.

Shaw was, of course, right. (He also remains the only person to have won both a Nobel Prize for Literature, in 1925, and an Oscar, in 1938, for Pygmalion, re-made as a musical and a movie, My Fair Lady.)

Outrage over the executions resulted in a wave of nationalism among the Irish, many of whom had previously been ambivalent about an Irish Republic, and galvanized the movement. The Republic of Ireland achieved independence from Great Britain five years later.  (Thanks to Garrison Keillor for his post on this event in The Writer's Almanac.)

Comments on the Easter Rising in Ireland:

A 6-minute movie on the Easter Rising may be watched by clicking here. You will like it if you love Ireland.

The rebel song "Who Fears to Speak of Easter Week" was a rewrite of an earlier song about 1798.

As my friend Tim Sullivan sums up:

Connolly and other wounded were shot tied to chairs and the rebels were jeered by the Dublin crowd as they were marched away. Ireland was fortunate  that Michael Collins was not killed but was sent to jail. Here is a song in his memory.

Comments on the Glamor of Unsuccessful Rebellions:

Unsuccessful uprisings are more memorable than successful ones. Their lack of success and the harsh reaction of the ruling party proves that the uprising was justified.

The Brazilians got their independence from Portugal because a resident Portuguese royal said: “You want independence? You GOT it!” Very unexciting. So in order to have some heroes to make a little fuss about in the history books, Brazilians go back to an earlier, unsuccessful upraising.

Brazil glamorizes an unsuccessful plot of a century earlier, the “Inconfidencia” led by a dentist named Tiradentes (“tooth puller”). He was turned in by a co-conspirator who was deeply in debt and was looking for compensation for being an informer. Tiradentes was hanged. The other members of the plot - except, I take it, the informer - were exiled to Angola and Mozambique. The actual independence day is less celebrated than the unsuccessful plot.

IRELAND | War of Independence

Finbarr (Fin) McCabe at the Javits Center

At the BookExpo in New York last week, I met Finbarr (Fin) McCabe. Elsewhere, in my CityEconomist blog, I discuss his views on the future of the publishing industry. My photo of him is at left.

We talked a bit about Irish history in the 20th century. He is an expert on Liam Mellows, a Socialist Irish Republican.  Mellows led hundreds of poorly supplied Republican volunteers in Galway. He was executed by the Free State Army in 1922, after the Irish War of Independence. It was the same year that Michael Collins was killed.

(The Dublin Easter Rising by Irish Republicans in 1916, and the British reaction, turned Irish public opinion towards independence. It resulted in the election of many Irish nationalists, who formed the first Dail Eireann in 1919. British refusal to accept the Dail precipitated the War of Independence, which ended in 1922 with reprisals.)

On the Second World War–what the Irish Republicans call "the Emergency", since Ireland was neutral during the war– Fin recommended F. S. L. Lyons' book, Ireland since the Famine, and Antony Beevor's new 800-page popularized history on the Second World War, focusing on grand strategy in the Atlantic and Pacific theaters, and stories of individual soldiers. The Independent's reviewer notes Beevor's extraordinary story of a Korean soldier who is taken by the Japanese, then the Soviets, then the Germans and finally by the Americans in the Normandy invasion. Beevor's story underscores both the chaos of war and how individual soldiers were caught in the vortex. The reviewer thinks that the broad sweep of the new book's canvas diminishes Beevor's scope for bringing home the fascinating details of his earlier books about aspects of the Second World War.

Although Ireland was neutral, Fin makes the point that during Wold War 2 the Republic sent the second-largest volunteer force to join the British Army, after South Africa.