The 1916 Easter Rising

Abstract

On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, over one thousand Irish rebels occupied prominent buildings across Dublin, triggering a battle for control of what was then a major UK city. Confronted by over twenty thousand British soldiers, many of Irish nationality, the rebels had little chance of military success. The insurrection collapsed within six days, resulting in some five hundred fatalities and destroying much of the commercial heart of the city. Over the next days and weeks, the British authorities executed fifteen ringleaders and arrested over three thousand suspects. Organized by the Irish Republican Brotherhood and carried out by members of the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army, and Cumann na mBan, the insurrection was a minor military episode in the context of the First World War. But as a symbolic act of armed propaganda, centered on the proclamation of an Irish republic, Easter 1916 transformed Ireland. Although the uprising was initially unpopular with many nationalists, it undermined the Irish Parliamentary Party and derailed its moderate goal of Home Rule (political devolution within the UK state). The success of Sinn Féin in the 1918 UK general election and Britain’s refusal to concede its demand for an Irish republic led to the War of Independence (1919–1921) and Irish Civil War (1922–1923). For sources on the latter, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Irish Civil War. After independence, popular accounts of the Easter Rising presented its organizers as heroic patriots who embraced martyrdom to secure Irish independence. From the early 1960s, nationalist interpretations were challenged by more scholarly revisionist accounts, which questioned the justification, rationale, and effectiveness of the rebellion. The outbreak of the Northern Irish Troubles in 1969 ensured that historiographical reevaluations of the Easter Rising and broader Irish Revolution became the subject of public controversy. For the literature on the wider Irish Revolution, see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article The Irish Revolution, 1911–1923. In recent years, the success of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement has taken the heat out of these debates, with post-revisionist historiography shifting the focus from the morality of republican violence to overlooked aspects of the rebellion, such as the role played by women and the experiences of people from ordinary backgrounds. Despite the decline of Catholicism and nationalism as markers of Irish identity in recent decades, social memory of the independence struggle continues to inform ideas of Irish statehood. The centenary of the Easter Rising in 2016 saw its commemoration take on renewed significance, albeit with post-nationalist pluralist interpretations, which emphasized progressive emancipatory impulses, overlapping with more traditional narratives of the fight for Irish freedom.