238. Ireland’s Fight For Freedom: The Easter Rising (Ep 1)

24:55I saw the place where he was thrown into an unmarked grave. And very weirdly, next to that place was thrown in 20 years later, more than 20 years later in 1940, an Indian who was the man responsible for killing Michael O'Dwyer, the man from Tipperary who was in charge of Punjab at the time of the Jandung Manapur massacre. Right next door. So what they did was, because there was not much room. Sorry, it's a diversion, but it's so interesting. It's a good night version. It's a little square of green earth outside the walls of the prison, round the back, and there's nothing to mark it. It's just a rising mound of earth.

25:32They would bury the people that they hanged in layers, like the most macabre cake you've ever heard of, so certain depths. Because there wasn't so much room, you'd have them one, two, three, four, five deep, maybe, and there would be a plum line thrown into where the bodies were buried. There would be a little chart saying at this level is Roger Casement, for example. And Udham Singh, the man I wrote about, was buried almost within fingertip touching distance of Roger Casement in that mound and left that way until the 1970s where he's then exhumed and taken to India. So I think there are so many foreshadowings between Irish politics and Indian politics.

26:12And I'm going to keep getting excited about that throughout these episodes that we're doing, these three episodes. But I think that that was the inspiration behind, well, if Casement can go home, can't we bring our boy home as well? And this mass movement from the mid-1960s to the 70s of bring him home, bring him home. And we have a very detailed account from the British archives of the process of the disinterring. It's a fairly grisly business you'll appreciate, but they had to document everything very carefully. But the British ambassador in Ireland in 1965 found himself with a bit of a dilemma about whether he should be visible at the ceremony to remark the return of the body of Roger Casement.

26:56Dermot, let's go back to January 1916 when Casement is very much alive and talk about what happened on the 21st of April with the British Navy intercepting the German steamer, the Ord. And this was Roger Casement's plan, wasn't it, to get more arms into Ireland. Take us there. Well, Roger Casement was very pessimistic about an inadequate level of support from Germany. Now, you'll understand, of course, that there were certain advantages in cooperating with Germany on the part of Irish nationalists to try and complicate the British war effort, but also to try and bolster the potential for Irish rebels to be successful if they had outside assistance.

27:37But Casement was aware that the Germans were not taking this as seriously as Irish nationalists would have liked. So whilst he was travelling back with some support, it wasn't near enough. And Casement actually had the intention, while he was travelling back, of persuading the organisers of the Rising to call it off, because he didn't believe it had any prospect of success. And he was very pessimistic about the ability to build those international alliances. So this is a very sad tale for Casement. Ultimately, he finds himself on a beach in Kerry. He's stranded. He's disoriented. He's clearly not well, as nobody would be having travelled that long in those conditions.

28:18And of course, that begins the end of Roger Casement, who ultimately becomes a figure of great derision. Is there a tip-off? Are the British troops waiting for him? Do they know these arms are coming? Yes, I mean, they have intelligence in relation to this, and he is ultimately picked up. So this is one of the interesting aspects of the whole of that story of 1916 is just how clued in the British authorities were to what was going on and what was being organised. Now, the answer is not particularly well. They did have certain strands of information and intelligence, but they had also taken their eye off Ireland.

28:50And, you know, many of the people who they had on their list of potential subversives or radicals were actually eminently respectable pillars of the community by 1916. So they're not necessarily looking at the right lists or the right people. But I mean, that casement episode is a harbinger, I suppose, of complications in relation. Let's not forget to what was being planned as a nationwide rising in 1916. The plan was not that it would be confined to Dublin. The original plan is that there will be a countrywide rebellion. And because of a series of mishaps and because of the deceptions that went on and because the head of the Irish Volunteers, who's Owen McNeill, who was a history professor, who are perhaps not the most natural of rebel leaders, because he was deceived, he called off the instruction for Irish Volunteers to mobilise on Easter Sunday.

29:42After the guns were captured, after the horde is seized by the Navy. And he also was aware that there were conspiracies to organise things behind his back. He was being kept out of the frame. And when he subsequently discovered that, he was hugely angered by the level of deception because a rumour had been put about as well that the British government were intent on disarming the volunteers, which old MacNeill originally would have accepted would have been grounds for resistance. But his line, of course, was that Ireland was not a poetic abstraction, that it couldn't afford this luxury of a rebellion that had no prospect of success, and that it was deeply irresponsible to go ahead with it.

30:20Well, so all of these misgivings, guns confiscated, heroes of the movement imprisoned, thrown in jail, and nobody knowing just what kind of intelligence the British have. Nevertheless, at 11am on the 24th of April, 1916, around 1 ,000 Irish nationalist Republicans gather in central Dublin. Now, tell me who they were, these people. They weren't all Irish volunteers and they weren't all Irish Republican Brotherhood. Who else was there in that crowd? Yeah, I mean, we won't bamboozle people with the names of many different organisations, it's important to recognise that the 1916 Rising was planned in secret, ultimately by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, often referred to as the Brotherhood, which actually dated from the late 1850s in the aftermath of the famine.

31:09Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were secret, oath-bound members of an organisation, a clandestine organisation that was dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland. through violence. And again, the members of the IRB also infiltrate other organisations, including the Irish volunteers. So they are operating on that level. There is also a smaller Irish Citizens Army, which arises as a result of labour unrest in Ireland in 1913. There was a great famous lockout of employees in Dublin, about 20 ,000 employees in Dublin in 1913. That citizen army was there to represent the interest of workers.

31:46And of course, most famously associated with James Connolly, who becomes an iconic figure in Irish labour history. And you also had Cuman the Man. And Cuman the Man was the female auxiliary of the Irish volunteers. And I emphasise auxiliary because they did not have equal status with the Irish volunteers. So it's a variety of these different groups who assemble at the beginning of the Easter Rising. And what sort of people are they, Dermot? Are they poets and intellectuals and urban middle class, or are they the urban poor? They're a mixture. No, I mean, most of them are not poor. There were certainly those who represented the labour interest.

32:24There are those who are intellectuals. Patrick Pearce, of course, who becomes the commander in chief of the Republican forces, the president of this nascent Irish Republic, is famously a schoolmaster. He's a poet. He's a cultural figure. They're not household names. And we need to remember that. The 1916 writing makes them household names. Pierce was well known within educational and cultural circles. He had been increasingly radicalised by the war. He gives a cracker of a speech, doesn't he, at the funeral on the 1st of August. And he says, the seeds sown by the young men of 65 and 67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today.

33:01The British think they have pacified Ireland, but he tells them that the fools, the fools, the fools, they have left Arfinian dead. And while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland will never be at peace. Now, what was interesting about that speech is very carefully choreographed, and there was also a great mobilisation of volunteers in uniform. They were paying homage to one of the Fenian dead, the Fenian being another description of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, from the 19th century when they came to prominence. And Tom Clarke, who was also involved in organising the Rising, he was a veteran Fenian.

33:33He was guiding Patrick Pearce in the preparation of that speech, and he said to him, make it hot as hell. So there's a very careful choreography around this. This is an advantage to try and show the strength and determination of the volunteers, but also invoke the legacy and the lesson of the Fenians. And that's why we get this emphasis in 1916 on the dead generations as well as the living. So, Pierce is very much imbued with that sense of a historic as well as a contemporary purpose. So, you have these firebrands who are making it hot as hell, and people do obey the call from all walks of life, as you've said.

34:12Now, interestingly, you'd think they'd try and besiege Dublin Castle or somewhere like that, which is the headquarters of British rule in Ireland, but they don't. They go to the Jacob's Biscuit Factory, the home of Jacob's Cream Crackers. It's not the obvious place to... No. The magazine fort, a military fort in Phoenix Park, St. Stephen's Green, and the General Post Office, which is the central, the beating hub of this rebellion. Now, first of all, let's go straight to the General Post Office because that will become the iconic battle of all. We should say maybe, Anita, before we go dive in, that this is Easter Monday.

34:50It's a holiday. Many army officers are off enjoying the Ferry House races. And so they've got a sort of empty Dublin in which they can do all this. Yeah. And I mean, the original plan was to mobilise on Sunday. But because of the confusion, they postponed it until Monday. Monday, the Post Office, the General Post Office was open on the Monday. It was a working day for the post office. Some of those who turned up to buy stamps were in for a very rude awakening. But it's interesting what you refer to there, Anita, in relation to the strategy about seizing certain prominent city centre buildings.

35:22You would have assumed that they would have gone to Dublin Castle as the historic centre of British rule in Ireland. But the idea was that they would seize prominent city centre buildings and then buildings on the outskirts of the city to try and cover the approach to the city. Now, it's not a particularly sophisticated military strategy, is it? The idea is that they will dig themselves in and wait to see what the response will be. But this also, I suppose, illuminates another very interesting strand, which is the degree to which it was consciously staged as a drama. There were those Irish who at this time were fighting in considerable numbers in the British army.

35:56They were being lost in the industrial scale of slaughter during the First World War. But what happens in Dublin in particular in 1916, there's a relatively small group who are staging this drama by seizing these buildings. It's a show of defiance, of course. It's also an invitation for Britain to respond. But what they can do during that initial period of confusion is communicate their message. One of the reasons why they take over the GPO, it's the centre of communications, obviously, the head of the post office. Of course, like in a revolution more recently, seizing the Telegraph office would be the equivalent.

36:30Yeah, and I mean, it's Sackville Street, you know, it's the main thoroughfare of Dublin City. Patrick Pearce cuts a somewhat strange figure outside the GPO in reading the proclamation of the Irish Republic, which of course, ultimately becomes an iconic Irish political document. Can I read it? So for people who don't know it, I mean, it is a stirring piece of work. We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be sovereign and indefeasible. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights, equal opportunities to all its citizens and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all its past, cherishing all the children of the nation equally.

37:16I mean, it's staring stuff. Now, remember what cherishing all the children of the nation equally means, because it's the most quoted phrase in the 1916 proclamation. It's not about children or infants, as we understand in the modern era. All the children of the nation, unionists and nationalists. And he goes on to say that, you know, we will be oblivious to the differences that have been fostered by an alien government, you know, that ultimately we will resolve our own differences. Well, unionists certainly weren't oblivious to those differences, but it also begins in the name of God. There's an intense religiosity to many of that generation in relation to how they frame their particular mission.

37:51But the promises of equality and of equal suffrage between men and women, they are very advanced. They're very progressive. There were about 200 women who were involved in the 1916 rising. Many of them were emboldened by this promise of equality. And the proclamation was a mixture of the words of Patrick Pearce and James Connolly. You can see the different influences. Controversially, you also, of course, and it is a piece of war propaganda, let's be honest about that as well, you also controversially have the invoking of our gallant allies in Europe. And that is a reference to Germany, of course.

38:26So there's also a reference to the exiled children, You know, Ireland's exiled children. You can see how the different layers of the Irish experience, the historical experience are being woven into that. And in many respects, it's timeless. You know, we do need to put it in the context of 1916, but subsequent generations have also made what they want to make or what they wanted to make of the words of the 1916 proclamation to kind of latch it on to many future causes. Dermot, now in the GPO, there is a young man aged 26 from Cork, a very handsome young man who will be a major figure in the next three episodes.

39:06Tell us about Michael Collins. Michael Collins was not well known at this point in 1916. He's in a very junior position as aide de comp to Joseph Plunkett, who ultimately becomes one of the executed 1916 leaders. And Michael Collins' experience in 1916 is vital. It's formative. It also convinces him that the military strategy of 1916 cannot be the military strategy of the future when it comes to the Republican movement. You do not dig yourself in and wait to be attacked. You adopt a completely different approach. So the lessons of 1916 from Michael Collins are very important. It's also significant, I suppose, that he is junior enough or not well known enough not to be one of the high profile victims.

39:52Well, very famously, I mean, in the film, very famously, you know, the film Michael Collins of the same name, starring Liam Neeson, he's there. But, you know, you've got the British walking down the line saying, pick out the leaders and they pick out the man. next to Michael Collins, but not Michael Collins, because he's a nobody. I mean, he's a tall and statuesque young fella, one of many who is fighting on this day. That's one of the interesting things about 1916, about those who survive it. I mean, obviously the rebels hold out for nearly a week and you can see that there's a lot of resentment initially in Dublin and elsewhere towards what they have done, because this causes a huge surprise and huge disturbances.

40:2940 children are killed during in the 1916 rising, about 500 people overall. And of course, as always is the case, the majority of them are civilians because the GPO was cheeked by jowl with some of the most densely populated parts of the city. And these are poor people. And of course, ultimately, Patrick Pearce is appalled, he says, by the civilian shootings that he has witnessed. And it persuades him ultimately to surrender. And of course, there are a number of British Crown forces who were killed as well, about 130 of them and about 80 of the rebels, but over 250 civilians and 40 under 18. So that's the kind of body count.

41:08It's not a high body count in relation to the scale of what was going on in Europe at that time. But again, because of the compact nature of the city and the surprise it caused and the embarrassment that it caused to the British authorities, it makes an impact well beyond its numbers. So, I mean, Michael Collins is not pulled out of the line, the big fella, as he's known. The Longfella is somewhere else entirely. Eamon de Valera is at Boland's Mill, and he is actually a commander, and by rights, when that too is put down at Boland's Mill. Let's talk a little bit about Eamon de Valera, a bit about his background, and why this American link will ultimately be his salvation after the Easter Rising.

41:47Well, you see, Eamon de Valera was born in New York, and he was somebody who ultimately is returned to Ireland at a very early age to live with his grandparents in Limerick because his mother felt that was the best option for him. His dad is Spanish? His father's Spanish. That's, you know, the de Valera name, of course, does not suggest a dyed-in-the-wool Irish man. Some of his enemies were later to use that as a slur against him. You know, the Spanish onion and the Irish stew was a famous insult hurled at Eamon de Valera. But, you know, know, he did grow up in Limerick and was schooled there.

42:24And I mean, Eamon de Valera was an eminently respectable maths professor and teacher. Quite an austere and pious figure. He was. And I mean, those who knew him well would argue that, you know, there was a humorous side to de Valera and a softer side to de Valera that wasn't necessarily seen. But he met his wife, Sinead, when he was studying Irish. She was his Irish teacher. So he's very much imbued with that sense of the Gaelic League mission to spread Irish language. He's committed to education. but of course he becomes involved in the Irish Volunteers. He attended the inaugural meeting and he's galvanized by that sense of purpose and possibility and the wearing of uniform and we should remember how important that was, that sense of belonging to a collective and having a purpose but he had serious qualms about membership of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

43:09De Valera was conservative. He did not believe the oath-bound secret societies were appropriate when it came to the promotion of that particular cause. But he recognised too, of course, that he had to sideline his conscience to a degree if he was to assume a prominent role in 1916. But we should emphasise, Anita, it's not so much his American citizenship as the fact that he is not considered a ringleader. And those who were in charge of identifying the ringleaders and ultimately were involved in the court marshals, they did not recognise Eamon de Valera as one of the ringleaders. And the chronology of executions is important here because the executions occur between the 3rd and the 12th of May.

43:55And there's a building up of expectation. Rumours are swirling around Dublin. One contemporary observer described it as like watching blood seeping from behind a closed door. An opinion is beginning to change. It perhaps would have been wiser of Britain to have executed the leaders at the same time very quickly in the immediate aftermath, but that's not what they did. But de Valera ultimately is identified by the authorities as one who is not regarded as a principal actor. He's also not particularly well known to the other sort of Dublin-based revolutionaries, is he? He's an outsider at this point.

44:25This is it. I mean, obviously, what makes de Valera famous is his status in the aftermath of 1916 as the sole surviving commandant of the 1916 rising by 1917. So he does have a certain rank, obviously, within the Irish volunteers. But that did not mean by any means that he was nationally a well-known figure. And John Maxwell is sent over from Britain as a military governor to suppress the rising. And he writes letters to his wife. And one of the interesting observations he makes is that ever since the British government turned a blind eye to the business in Ulster, they've had nothing but trouble in Ireland.

45:03And it was interesting that he was being a bit more nuanced. He was tracing the problems back to the arming of the Ulster volunteers that we mentioned earlier on in 1913. So he was trying to see a wider picture there. But what he was suggesting in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising was that obviously it's our duty to suppress this strain of rebellion, but there are bigger questions there about whether the British authorities have had their pulse on Irish affairs. Demet, one other figure we must talk about before we deal with the aftermath of all this is the Countess, Constance Markievicz. She's a very colourful character.

45:38Can I do a wee quote from Yates, who was completely obsessed with her and her sister? It's a poem called To Eva Gore Booth and Con Markowitz. And it starts off referring to their home in Lissadale, the light of evening Lissadale, two girls in silk kimonos, both beautiful, one a gazelle. So, you know, these are two sort of women who are brought up in a rarefied environment, but Con Markowitz is an absolute firecracker of a revolutionary. And again, I mentioned earlier on those whose background would suggest little sympathy with the cause of the Irish Republic, finding themselves with the zeal of the convert.

46:11And Markievicz, of course, was one of them. She was actually presented to Queen Victoria, given her aristocratic background. And you mentioned the estate there in Lissadell. And she begins to move in artistic circles. She's a painter. She wants to go to art school. She eventually persuades her parents of that. She meets, of course, this Polish count who has links and land in Ukraine, actually, and she becomes Constance Markievicz. But she also immerses herself in many of those circles that we mentioned. She becomes involved in an organisation that is the youth wing of the Irish Republican movement.

46:44She's also, of course, identifying with the cause of labour. And ultimately, in 1916, she is with the Irish Citizen Army. She's second in command at Stevens Green. There's conflicting testimony about whether she shot a policeman at the outset of the 1916 Rising. On the balance of probability, she probably did and seemed to be particularly animated by it. But she was also, as a woman, not going to be executed after 1916. She was second in command under Michael Mullen at Stevens Green. And Markievich has this remarkable sense of purpose when it comes to the cause. She is hugely proud of the idea of bearing arms and of being in uniform.

47:25And when you look at her correspondence, you can see the extent to which it is imbued with excitement. You know, she regards these events as thrilling in so many respects. And, you know, that's what guides her, that sense of purpose and excitement. But also, So I suppose that ultimately she's the ultimate rebel because she really is dancing on the grave of the tradition she has been brought up in. There's two wonderful quotes by her when she's talking to her friends in the run up to the Rising. One is she tells them, if you could shoot straight with an air gun, you could do the same with a rifle.

48:03And then a bit of advice to her fellow Easter risers. She says to the women, dress suitably in short skirts and strong boots. Leave your jewels in the bank and buy a revolver. And of course, she goes on to become the first woman elected to the House of Commons. And she becomes a Sinn Féin minister. And she died prematurely. Markievicz was also a chain smoker. She didn't look after herself. Her health completely broke down and she was dead by 1927. But she did enough in that 10 or 12 year period to ensure her place in the history books in a very prominent place. Well, look, I mean, first of all, I've been pronouncing her name because I read the poetry.

48:45It's Markievicz. Markievicz. I learned a thing today. Thank you, Dermot. Anita, I can't let this episode end without bringing in a relation. I know it always thrills you when my relations turn up. Oh, God, really? Okay, good. So, Dermot, he does this all the time. He's like the Where's Wally of history. Basically, there's one of them in every chapter. Go on. But my grandfather's younger brother was in the Scots Borders. And we are a Catholic family, and he was a very pious young man who was considering going to the priesthood. And we've got all his letters at home from Dublin, 1916, and he is absolutely torn apart.

49:22Because as a good Catholic, he thinks he shouldn't be shooting and fighting his fellow Catholics. And these heartbroken letters as he's on the barricades, shooting into the GPO. Likewise, there were Irish men in the British Army who found themselves charged with the task of suppressing and shooting on the rebels in 1916. And it's a reminder of the sheer complexity of Irish loyalties and of Irish alliances and allegiances during that period. It's so fluid. And this man is posted straight from here to Ypres and he gets caught on the wire and is gassed a month later. Out of the Irish frying pan into the horrors of that fire.

50:01Yeah. God, and again, sort of the Indian experience as well. Those who are sort of starting to ask for home rule themselves in India who then get shipped off to fight in lands that they've never been to, maybe never out of their own home villages before, dumped on sort of the Western Front, freezing in clothes that aren't warm enough to keep them. And then they go back and nobody thanks them the way they think they should be thanked. Well, Tom Kettle, and I'll just finally mention this, Tom Kettle was a well-known Irish academic and nationalist who was appalled by 1916 because he had joined the British Army.

50:38He believed in the righteousness of the cause of the war. And what he said about 1916, and he was ultimately to die in the Battle of the Somme, what he said about the 1916 rising is that I will go down if I go down at all as a bloody British soldier, while the 1916 rebels will be remembered as heroes and martyrs. which brings us back to this idea of the stage, the rising staged as a drama in 1916, and what it did to the reputations of those who fought it and who died in it, in contrast to the anonymity of the slaughter on the Western Front. Well, look, our next episode is going to deal with what happened to the rebels now that they have been forced to surrender to the British.

51:26Will anyone be shown mercy? If you want to hear that right now, what you do is sign up to our Empire Club. And the way to do that is empirepoduk.com. empirepoduk.com. You get early access, you get bonus episodes, you get a weekly newsletter. But for those of you on our usual slipstream, till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durimple.