1916 (19 page)

Clarke had no option left but to rely entirely on the ranks of the Dublin IRB and Wolfe Tone clubs to create some kind of rebel force. By kidnapping Hobson, he attempted to ensure that, through his own presidency of the Wolfe Tone clubs, he could order the whole of the Dublin IRB’s ranks to take part. Meanwhile the leader of the Dublin Gaelic Athletic Association, Harry Boland (whose father had been an IRB-Parnellite figure during the early 1890s),
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also persuaded some men to take part,
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as did James Connolly within Irish Citizen Army circles. In London, Seán MacDermott approached Mark Ryan, a seventy two year old former IRB leader, and apparently informed him of the plans for a Dublin revolt.
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Several London IRB men, including Michael Collins, did indeed take part. Fred Allan seems to have known about the Rising plans but decided not to take part and tried, in vain, to dissuade his best friend John Mac-Bride (who had lived with Allan’s family since 1905) from engaging in what he knew would be a suicidal act.
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According to G.A. Lyons, who had hoped to bring the Dublin IRB and Belfast Protestants together in a volunteer force in 1911 and who was stationed at Westland Row during the Rising,
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the simple and hastily drawn up plan for a rebellion in Dublin – namely seizing various public buildings, proclaiming a republic and hoping the public would then rally to the rebels’ side – followed virtually the same parameters as a plan that James Connolly had suggested to the IRB seventeen years earlier.
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This might indicate that Connolly was responsible for inspiring the conduct of the Dublin Rising, which was really nothing more than an 1848-style citizens’ revolt (effectively the last such episode in European history), when would-be ‘free citizens’ manned various public buildings (or ‘barricades’) in defence of a cause of national liberty in the face of an unaccountable monarchical government and virtually waited to be shot to pieces. As Michael Collins would note, the 1916 Rising was intended by the IRB to be ‘a wonderful gesture – throwing down the gauntlet of defiance to the enemy, expressing to ourselves the complete freedom we aimed at’.
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The Daly-Clarke family had the Proclamation of the Republic drafted and signed in the home of J.W. Power, a republican of the Land League days.
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Tom Clarke, as the first signatory, was appointed president of the provisional republican government, while Pearse was appointed the ‘commander in chief ’ of the government’s forces and Connolly the commander of the Dublin forces (which, in practice, was much the same thing).
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The other four signatories had no designated rank as members of the so-called Provisional Government.
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However, the first two signatories of the Proclamation, Clarke and MacDermott, as treasurer and secretary respectively of the three man executive of the IRB, could theoretically claim to have done so on behalf of the whole IRB organisation, as per its constitutional rules, thereby making the rebellion officially an act of the IRB.
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This was no doubt Clarke’s desire, so as to attempt to vindicate his old comrades, the IRB’s ‘Fenian dead’. Reputedly, Pearse was again persuaded by Clarke to act as an orator, reading the rebels’ Proclamation outside the GPO, before two flags were raised: first a plain green flag bearing the words ‘Irish Republic’ and then Meagher’s old 1848 tricolour,
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which had not been publicly displayed in Ireland for fifteen years.
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When Clarke announced in the GPO that a republic was going to be proclaimed, many Irish Volunteers were apparently surprised, presumably because, as members of the Irish-Ireland generation, most had never expressed any interest in republicanism, an ideology generally associated with the supposedly ‘priest-eating’ republic of France. Realising that he was effectively rebelling on behalf of an organisation (the IRB) that no longer existed, Clarke justified his action by stating that if some such action was not taken in Ireland at that particular moment in time, it would never occur.
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He also stated that if the attention of the international community was ever to be attracted to Ireland’s desire for independence, only
a republic could ‘appeal to the imagination of the world’.
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This reflected the fact that the revolutionary ideal of the IRB had always been, in John MacBride’s words, to ‘add another republic to the republics of the world’, alongside the two pioneers of modern democratic governments in the western world, namely the republics of America and France.
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The insular separatism of the Irish-Ireland movement, which desired to protect Ireland from secular currents of thought or the influence of the outside world, was not something that had been shared by the old republicans who, in the words of Clarke’s old mentor John Daly, desired to ‘demolish the Bastille of history’.
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Not surprisingly, familiar as it was with the Daly-Clarke connection going back to the 1880s, one of the very first actions taken by Dublin Castle, after suppressing the small revolt in Dublin and executing its leaders, was to raid Daly’s Limerick home.
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The 1916 Rising (not unlike Ulster Presbyterians’ ‘solemn’ protest in 1912) not only took the form of a citizens’ revolt, it was evidently intended to be one. MacDermott noted that, ultimately, he was relieved that most Irish Volunteers had not been brought into the conspiracy, because there would have been an unnecessary degree of death and destruction as a result.
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Another illustration of this side to the Dublin revolt was the diverse motives of those who took part. Apart from greying IRB republicans, the rebels included young socialist members of the Citizen Army, Catholic intellectuals who were leaders of the Volunteers and various individuals who probably simply felt a need to do
something
since it was feared that they all were about to be arrested anyway and the Volunteer movement suppressed. Furthermore, if some people within the GPO did not know that a republic was going to be proclaimed, it may be presumed that many of the rebels who gathered elsewhere in Dublin, at the request of various (non-IRB) Volunteer officers, also had no such thoughts on their minds. Indeed, were it not for the printing of the Proclamation, no one would probably have known afterwards that the Rising was nominally a republican affair, since a republican demand had not been made in Ireland for very many years.

The Rising did not go to plan. The rebels in the GPO, armed only with rifles, believed they were going to be engaged in a gun battle with British soldiers, but instead were shelled by artillery or gunboats on the Liffey, with the inevitable result that most properties and businesses on O’Connell Street and the surrounding areas were indiscriminately destroyed. This helped create resentment against the rebels for instigating such destruction in the city centre. As Clarke had hoped, however, public opinion altered
dramatically once he and the rebel leaders were executed, for this ensured that they became martyrs, of one kind or another.
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As the Catholic press was already very sympathetic to the Irish Volunteers, it was naturally resentful that the British government not only executed various Volunteer leaders but embarked on widespread arrests thereafter. This prompted John Dillon, the
Catholic Bulletin
, numerous Dublin priests and the IRB’s old enemy, Bishop O’Dwyer of Limerick, to express sympathy for the executed rebels, the latter proclaiming that the rebellion should wake the British government up to its need for home rule.
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As the Gaelic League party was already antagonistic to the Irish party, a swing to Sinn Féin was to be expected in the wake of the executions. From New York, however, John Devoy was amazed by priests’ expressions of sympathy with the deceased rebels, as he interpreted events in Ireland in a very different light to the much younger Irish-Ireland generation.
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Meanwhile, much to the chagrin of the IRB in Dublin, once sympathy for the executed rebels and all political prisoners reached a height during the winter of 1916, the Catholic press latched onto the singular personality of Pearse, who was falsely presented as the leader and organiser of the Rising.
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Shortly thereafter, Pearse was even cited by some priests as a role model for Irish Catholic youths:

Everything is overshadowed by the Christian concept, and the religion that is found here [in Pearse] centres in Christ and Mary. The effect of fifteen centuries of Christianity is not ignored or despised … Ancient, medieval and modern Gaelic currents meet in him … He will appeal to the imagination of the times to come more than any of the rebels of the last one hundred and thirty years … His name and deeds will be taught by mothers to their children long before the time when they will be learned in school histories … They will think of him forever … as a martyr who bore witness with his blood to the truth of his faith, as a hero, a second Cuchulainn, who battled with divine frenzy to stem the waves of the invading tide.
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Such propaganda helped to turn the 1916 Rising into a Catholic event in the mind of the general Irish public and retrospectively gave it great popularity. The ideal of ‘adding another republic to the republics of the world’ clearly did not have the same appeal to the Irish-Ireland generation as much as the refrain of the hunger striker Thomas Ashe, ‘let me carry your cross for Ireland, Lord’, a motto more suited to an Irish Christian missionary than an Irish nationalist or republican. The mood of this time was perhaps best reflected by the fact that, in late 1915, James Connolly felt that he was going
totally against the grain of Irish public opinion by suggesting that the needs of the body could sometimes be placed before the needs of the spirit.
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During 1916–17, Fred Allan, Joseph McGrath and others raised funds for the families of executed 1916 rebels, most of which was then handed over to Kathleen Clarke (Tom’s widow). Mrs Clarke then chose Michael Collins to be the new IRB secretary, Harry Boland to be the new treasurer, and Seán McGarry (ex-manager of
The Republic
and formerly a close friend of Tom Clarke) as president.
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Thereafter, these men, most notably Collins, attempted to turn the IRB into a directing revolutionary committee within both the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin, to ensure that both organisations would take up the IRB’s republican ideals. Only two of the commanders of the haphazard 1916 forces were not executed, namely Countess Markievicz and Éamon de Valera, both of whom were made icons of the Rising as soon as public opinion began to be swayed in its favour by the Catholic press. As is well known, the latter went on to become the new leader of Sinn Féin. Like Parnell, de Valera proved able to appeal to both revolutionary and conservative constituencies, while the Sinn Féin party of 1917–22, like the Irish party of 1880–5, was a conglomerate of nationalist revolutionary and conservative political elements. In the revolution that followed, however, one must be cautious not to overemphasise the importance of the IRB owing to the small size of its membership. Furthermore, recent studies have convincingly suggested that this ‘revolution’ for very many volunteers was simply an opportunity to revive the land war of the 1880s, and had little or nothing to do with ideological considerations.
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In turn, debate on the revolution has become more realistic and begun to resemble some of the historical debates on the republican upheavals that took place in France between 1789 and 1871, and the motives of the various volunteer forces that took part in those struggles.
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To some extent one could say that
two
different risings took place in Dublin at Easter 1916. First, there was a republican rising, to vindicate the ‘Fenian dead’ of the nineteenth century, launch an independence struggle in Ireland, and revive the IRB. Second, there was an ‘Irish-Ireland’ rising, designed to champion the cultural separatism of the Irish-Ireland movement and, more specifically, the anti-First World War stance adopted by the Irish Volunteers. The 1916 Rising would not have happened were it not for Tom Clarke’s IRB circle. However, it was the Irish-Ireland separatist ideal, which was already well-established by 1914, that the Rising was destined to symbolise in the mind of the general Irish public. This was the dual heritage of the 1916 Rising.

When Pádraig H. Pearse walked out from the General Post Office in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 to read the Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic it declared, among other things, that the rebellion that was just starting was ‘supported by her exiled children in America’. As news of the Rising spread across the city the rumour grew, according to the poet and novelist James Stephens, that ‘many Irish-Americans with German officers had arrived also with full military equipment’.
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The recognition of this connection between America and Ireland should have come as no surprise. Historical circumstances had brought them together over the past centuries. America had been the refuge, the haven, to which the Irish could flee hunger and distress, social and religious discrimination, and political and economic constraints. The result was a huge population in the United States with Irish roots and many with a bitterness toward the British regime and a determination to assist any Irish movement to achieve independence. All of this gave Ireland and the United States a very interwoven history. While the actual Rising may have been a total surprise to the spectators along O’Connell Street that April morning, it should be no surprise that there was an American dimension to these monumental events.