From R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (New York: Penguin, 1988)

There is a detailed and rather fruitless controversy about how early the 1916 rising was planned, and what form it was intended to take. The picture necessarily remains shadowy: much that was later rationalized as prelude to the rising may have simply been planned resistance to conscription [the draft system sought by the British to help them in World War I]. What matters more is that the web of subterfuge and concealment about insurrection reflected a division within nationalist circles . . . Not even the Irish Republican Brotherhood was united behind the eventual decision. Thus 1916 was made by a minority of a minority, and many of those involved were pitchforked into action with no notice whatsoever. This owed a good deal to the methods of the reconstituted IRB, and still more to the style of leadership typified by Patrick Pearse.

The ideology of 1916 is inescapably connected with Pearse, whose ideas underwent a notable, though rather obscure, radicalization from 1913. His enthusiasm at the sight of armed Ulstermen and his desire to emulate them have been mentioned: `we may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing.' . . . His messianic and sacrificial notion that the `Irish' cause was somehow congruent with Christ's sacrifice appealed to MacDonagh and Plunkett as well: the idea of a revolution in consciousness brought about by a symbolic and willed loss of life. . . . Pearse's aesthetic [interesting use of that word here; toward the end of the semester, we'll ask whether war itself has "aesthetic" value--sg] frequently celebrated the beauty of boys dying bravely in their prime, rather than growing into the compromises of adulthood. His ecstatic celebration of the sacrifice of death in the European war as a welcome and energizing force may be less comprehensible, but is no less important.

What complicates the picture is the adherence of James Connolly--far more of an intellectual than Pearse, and up to this an apparent advocate of hard-headed Marxian internationalist socialism. Until shortly before the rising, he had followed his own path . . . he had been drilling his own Citizen Army. There is some evidence that he expected a revolution within Ireland to light a European fuse, a fairly common idea among internationalist socialists during the early months of the war . . . . In an abrasive interview, [someone else recalled,] `he had a notion that once a stand was made, however, brief, in Dublin, the country would turn in a mass against the British government and overthrow it.'" . . .

Any theoretical contradictions present in the 1916 rising, however, were obscured by the fact that its rhetoric was poetic. Several poets took part, and the most famous reaction to it was a poem: Yeats' `Easter 1916,' written between May and September and strategically published during the Anglo-Irish war four years later. But an intrinsic component of the insurrection . . . was the strain of mystic Catholicism identifying the Irish soul as Catholic and Gaelic. . . .

Theory apart, what about the practicalities of insurrection? Given the war scenario, German aid was heavily canvassed through the channels of Clan na Gael and the inevitable John Devoy; more flashily, the dictum of `Ireland's opportunity is England's adversity' was advocated by Roger Casement in his cloak-and-dagger negotiations on the Continent through 1914-15. German support tended to be restricted to the formal and conditional, though arms imports were arranged. . . .

German contacts had undertaken to send arms (20,000 rifles and ten machine-guns) to County Kerry `by' Easter Sunday--a rather vague arrangement. In the event, missed connections and leaked information produced a fiasco, with the arms-steamer captured and scuttled . . . . None the less, in circumstances of confusion, acrimony and a barrage of countermanding orders, the Military Council went ahead, on Easter Monday instead of the planned Sunday, in a venture that could now be run only on blood-sacrifice lines.

Circumstances had made it a Dublin enterprise--annoying and frustrating supporters in the country who had received countermanding orders by the weekend . . . . In Dublin a force of at most 1,600 (the Irish Volunteers with about 300 Citizen Army) took over key buildings, centered on the GPO in O'Connell Street--where Pearse issued his Proclamation on behalf of `the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic.' . . .

The whole enterprise dumbfounded general opinion in Dublin; many accounts exist that record astonishment, derision and occasional inspiration . . . The pragmatic Michael Collins, future mastermind of the guerrilla war [NOTE: there's a movie just about, or about to be, about his story], was one of many irritated by Pearse's style: `I do not think the Rising week was an appropriate time for the issue of memoranda couched in poetic phrases, nor of actions worked out in similar fashion. Looking at it form inside . . . it had the air of a Greek tragedy about it, the illusion being more or less completed with the issue of the before mentioned memoranda.' But to Pearse and others inside the GPO, what still mattered was the theology of insurrection . . . .

As the revolutionaries talked, the authorities moved in. . . . Easter Monday took [the British] by surprise; the city was critically undermanned, by guards with empty rifles and an army that was one-fifth the strength it attained after Easter. Inexperienced troops were hastily drafted in; those shot down at the battle of Mount Street Bridge were newly arrived conscripts who believed, according to Dublin folk-memory at least, that they were in France. A week of bitter fighting ensued, taking the form of attacking established rebel positions, rather than streetfighting in its normal sense; much of the city centre was shelled to ruins, despite Connolly's belief that a capitalist government would not destroy urban property. By the next Monday, when fighting was at an end and the inferno of the GPO had been evacuated, 450 had been killed and 2,614 wounded; 116 soldiers and 16 policemen were dead. Committed and exalted Volunteers had made their mark against army forces who had not hesitated to pulverize the rebels into submission. The first stage of the blood-sacrifice ritual had been accomplished, and the first act of what Collins contemptuously called a `Greek tragedy' had been played. The form the next act took was up to the British government.

The draconian reaction of the authorities to the rebellion should be understood in terms of international war and national security; but is also has to be seen against the background of alienation and Anglo-phobia inherent in so much of the Irish experience. Following the rising, . . . the Volunteers secured a moral, and on occasion even a military, advantage. Martial law was imposed indefinitely, under a Military Governor and extended through Ireland: arrests, trials on a large scale and deportations to prison camps in Britain followed. In dealing with civilians, the statutory powers of the Defence of the Realm Act were generally used but reprisals against the innocent and defenceless mounted ominously. Already, during the rising, householders in North King Street had been indiscriminately murdered by soldiers; under martial law a succession of appalling incidents took place . . . .

Finally, the courts martial and execution of the leaders completed the process: ninety death sentences were passed, seventy-five of them commuted, including that of Eamon de Valera.

The fifteen grisly executions in early May created as many martyrs. The case in law, given the German connection, was conclusive for the death penalty: but in the circumstances of Ireland during 1916, the decision against commutation was inflammatory.

Rural Ireland, whose attitude towards separatist nationalism in 1915 had been found by Volunteer organizers a mixture of `incredulity, suspicion and dour hostility,' soon rediscovered traditional modes of resistance to established authority. Even more striking was the shift in `respectable' opinion. The appalled reaction to the rising among the urban middle classes immediately afterwards, preserved in a plethora of resolutions passed by county councils, was rapidly moderated by the behaviour of local garrisons: . . . George Bernard Shaw mounted a campaign to have the rebel leaders treated as prisoners of war, not traitors . . . John Dillon's celebrated speech in the House of Commons on 11 May 1916 implicitly endorsed the rising in moral terms. The message was clear: in order to avoid anarchy the government must enable constitutionalists to extract Home Rule from the rapidly polarizing chaos.