Easter Rising Ignites: Irish Rebellion Against British Rule

Roughly 1,200 Irish republicans seized key buildings across Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 and declared an independent Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office on O'Connell Street. Patrick Pearse, a schoolteacher and poet who commanded the rebel forces, read the Proclamation of the Irish Republic to a bewildered crowd of passersby. Most Dubliners had no idea an insurrection was planned. Many were openly hostile to it. The Rising was the work of a small, determined minority within the broader Irish nationalist movement. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organization that had infiltrated the Irish Volunteers, planned the rebellion over months, deliberately excluding the Volunteer leadership from key decisions. A shipment of German arms aboard the Aud was intercepted by the Royal Navy on Good Friday, and Eoin MacNeill, the nominal Volunteer commander, issued a countermand canceling all maneuvers when he learned the true purpose of the Easter exercises. The conspirators went ahead anyway, knowing the odds were hopeless. British forces responded with overwhelming firepower. A gunboat on the Liffey shelled Liberty Hall. Artillery reduced parts of O'Connell Street to rubble. Snipers on both sides made movement through central Dublin lethal. Civilian casualties were heavy, far exceeding military losses on either side. After six days, with much of central Dublin burning and further resistance futile, Pearse ordered an unconditional surrender on April 29. Sixty-four rebels, 132 British soldiers, and at least 254 civilians were dead. The British response to the surrender transformed Irish politics. Ninety death sentences were handed down by military courts. Sixteen leaders were executed by firing squad over ten days in May, including the badly wounded James Connolly, who was tied to a chair because he could not stand. Public opinion, initially hostile to the rebels, shifted dramatically. The executions created martyrs where there had been extremists, and within five years, the Irish War of Independence had begun. The Easter Rising failed militarily and succeeded completely as an act of political sacrifice.