Abstract
The Easter Rising in Ireland in 1916 was an exercise in catharsis. The leaders who were executed for their part in it, particularly Patrick Pearse, conceived of an uprising as a redemptive act: their rhetoric was about the need to save Ireland from apostasy and to vindicate the timeless doctrine of separatist nationalism.1 The British reaction to the rebellion was everything those who took part in it thought it would be. The executions of fifteen of the rebels under martial law engendered a popular mood of outraged justice; out of this emerged a new and fluid political context. In his Political Violence in Ireland, Charles Townshend argues that the Rising was, to a large extent, a manifestation of violence in politics. He states:
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