The Irish Revolution, 1916-1923 (7 page)

In January 1916 James Connolly was co-opted onto the military council. This socialist and trade union activist had been active in organising the
Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU)
in Ireland since 1910. He played a key role in the 1913 Dublin lock-out, the mass dismissal of trade union members by Dublin employers, and following the failure of that and the departure of the ITGWU leader James Larkin to the USA, he became the recognised leader of the labour movement in Ireland. During the lock-out Connolly had formed the
Irish Citizen Army (ICA)
to protect workers in Dublin. Between 1914 and 1916, as a result of the spiralling Ulster crisis, the detrimental impact of the First World War on socialism and the weakness of the trade union movement in the wake of the lock-out, Connolly turned increasingly towards separatism and the use of militant action to overthrow British rule in Ireland. Concerned that Connolly and the ICA might take precipitate action and ruin its plans, the IRB's military council decided to include him in their conspiracy (Townshend, 2005: 93–4).

Irish Transport andGeneral Workers Union (ITGWU)
: Trade union founded by Jim Larkin in 1908.

Irish Citizen Army (ICA)
: Militia formed by James Connolly to protect striking workers in Dublin city during the 1913 lock-out which played a key role in the Easter Rising.

The capture of prominent buildings in Dublin City was the focus of the insurrection. The plan highlighted the lack of military or logistical training or experience among the collaborators. As a result key strategic buildings, such as
Dublin Castle
and Trinity College, appear to have been omitted and the obstacle of the River Liffey in cutting off bases on the northern and southern sides of the city from each other was not given sufficient attention (Townshend, 2005: 100–1). The extent to which the organisers intended for the rebellion to spread outwards from Dublin into the provinces is disputed, although their lack of knowledge about the Volunteers in the country and the absence of sufficient weapons to arm units outside of the city, suggests that the Dublin insurrection was always their main focus (McGarry, 2010: 210–11).

Dublin Castle: The administrative
centre of British government in Ireland.

The last aspect of the planning was the acquisition of arms and ammunition. For over a year before the Rising strenuous efforts were made to acquire the necessary material from Germany. In April 1915 Plunkett and Roger Casement travelled to Berlin in an effort to convince the German Government that their plans were sufficiently serious and well-advanced to be worth the
German Government's while getting involved. In addition to arming the rebels, it was hoped that Germany would also send a military force to participate in the Rising, as France had done during the United Irish revolt of 1798, though hopefully with greater success. Casement was also involved in raising an Irish Brigade from Irish soldiers who had been captured by the German Army while fighting for the British Army during the First World War, a mission that met with very little success. It soon became clear that Germany had no intention of taking part in an invasion and was only prepared to provide one shipload of ‘second-rate rifles’ (Townshend, 2005: 104–5, 116). The inadequacy of the German support greatly increased Casement's fears for the success of the Rising, and as he returned to Ireland in April 1916 aboard a German submarine, it was with the intention of convincing the military council to call it off.

The last remaining task of the organisers was to convince Eoin MacNeill to allow the Irish Volunteers to participate in the Rising. His initial acquiescence was achieved when the contents of a document emanating from Dublin Castle were leaked at a meeting of Dublin Corporation, indicating that the authorities planned to arrest the leaders of Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League and the Volunteers and raid these organisations’ headquarters and the leaders’ homes. This castle document has long been considered to have been substantially forged by Plunkett in an effort to deceive MacNeill. While it was certainly doctored, it appears to have been based on genuine plans drawn up by the administration outlining precautions to be undertaken in the event of conscription being extended to Ireland (McGarry, 2010: 117; Townshend, 2005: 131–3). By Holy Thursday 1916 the Rising was set to proceed three days later on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, with MacNeill having agreed to the use of the Volunteers and a consignment of arms
en route
from Germany aboard the
Aud
.

The
Aud
arrived as scheduled in Tralee on Holy Thursday. Although British intelligence was aware of it, no action was taken to intercept it. To have done so, would have revealed to the Germans that the British had broken their codes. Allowing the
Aud
to land might also have resulted in the capture of a greater number of the conspirators. It has also been suggested that permitting the landing was a propaganda ploy aimed at showing up the treachery of both the Irish revolutionaries and their German collaborators, and less plausibly that elements within the British administration wanted the Rising to proceed in order to provide an excuse for repressing militant nationalism. Whatever the reason, an opportunity to halt the Rising was deliberately passed up (McGarry, 2010: 114; Townshend, 2005: 126–7; Foy and Barton, 1999: 65–7).

A planned rendezvous with the U-boat carrying Casement failed, partly because of the absence of radio communication on the
Aud
and the poor
navigation of its captain, Karl Spindler. An exhausted Casement, who had spent a week cramped in the submarine, came ashore on Banna strand on Good Friday morning, where he was arrested by police who had been alerted to the presence of a suspicious figure. The following day, aware of the failure of his mission, Spindler scuttled the
Aud
and the chances of the Rising succeeding sank along with the arms intended for the Volunteers. The local Kerry Volunteers were partly to blame for the fiasco, having failed to keep watch for the
Aud
or pick up Casement (Townshend, 2005: 128–31).

On receipt of the news that Casement had been captured and the German arms sabotaged, Eoin MacNeill decided to cancel the involvement of the Volunteers in the Rising, realising there was no chance of success. He also discovered that he had been deceived about the nature of the castle document. On Easter Sunday morning a notice was published in the
Sunday Independent
newspaper announcing that orders for Volunteer mobilisation were ‘hereby rescinded, and no parades, marches, or other movements of the Irish Volunteers will take place’ (Townshend, 2005: 138–9). The plans of the military council were in disarray, without either the munitions or the personnel to put their insurrection into effect.

EASTER WEEK

In spite of MacNeill's action, the military council, and Clarke and Pearse in particular, felt they had gone too far with their plans to abandon them and decided merely to postpone rather than cancel the Rising. This decision was taken with the knowledge that the Rising could not succeed but would have symbolic significance. It raises the question of whether Pearse intended the Rising to be a blood sacrifice. The man most closely associated with the Rising was a relative newcomer to revolutionary life. A trained lawyer, who had dedicated much of his career until that point to education through his Irish-language school, St Enda's, Pearse was a home ruler until the early 1910s. The strength of Ulster unionist resistance to home rule, the fear of it being defeated and the opportunity offered by the First World War drove him into the IRB and the Irish Volunteers (Augusteijn, 2010: 281). Some of his writings provide evidence of his belief in the efficacy of blood-letting: ‘bloodshed is a cleansing and sanctifying thing’. However, the notion that his main aim in planning the Rising was to sacrifice himself to advance the cause of Ireland ignores the in-depth planning undertaken by the military council. Pearse was serious about trying to mount a rebellion for reasons other than a mere symbolic blood sacrifice and the decision to proceed with the doomed insurrection stemmed more from the view that ‘action was preferable to inaction’ (McGarry, 2010: 52, 96, 101).

Mobilisation orders were dispatched to units of the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers to assemble on Easter Monday, but the confusion between these and MacNeill's order resulted in only about 1,600 Volunteers assembling for the delayed insurrection (Augusteijn, 2010: 308). Mobilisation was slow on Monday morning. Aside from the confusion generated by MacNeill's and Pearse's contradictory orders, some Volunteers overslept, some were at the big race meeting in Fairyhouse where the Irish Grand National was being held, while others feared the consequences of taking part in a futile exercise that was doomed to fail (McGarry, 2010: 126–8; Townshend, 2005: 153–4). Nevertheless, by about noon the rebels had occupied the buildings they had targeted. The main garrison was based in the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville (now O’Connell) Street, Dublin's main thoroughfare, and consisted of a mixture of Volunteers and ICA commanded by Pearse and Connolly.

The four Dublin City battalions of the Volunteers occupied different geographical zones of the city. Ned Daly's First Battalion was based at the Four Courts on the north-west quays and covered the surrounding areas including North King Street, Church Street and the North Dublin Union (the Richmond Hospital). Approximately 130 men of the Third Battalion under Eamon de Valera occupied Boland's Mills and also seized Westland Row railway station. A similar sized force, led by Eamonn Ceannt, took the 50-acre South Dublin Union site (now St James's Hospital) along with the Jameson Distillery in Marrowbone Lane and the surrounding streets. The last unit, Thomas MacDonagh's Second Battalion, had intended to cover the area north-east of the city around Fairview, but much of it was redeployed back to the city centre and remained in occupation of the Jacob's factory south of the river on Bishop Street. The bulk of the ICA, which was unaffected by MacNeill's countermanding order and as such mobilised to near its full strength, took up positions in St Stephen's Green, a 22-acre public park (Townshend, 2005: 165–80).

A number of factors explain the choice of these locations. With regard to the Volunteers they largely remained within their own localities. The positions were strategically located near important transport depots. The Four Courts garrison was close to Broadstone railway station, the terminus for the trains from Athlone, where the army's artillery was housed. The original location of MacDonagh's Second Battalion included Amiens Street (now Connolly) Station, the base for the Dublin–Belfast railway service, while the South Dublin Union was close to the terminus for southern trains at Kingsbridge (now Heuston) Station. Yet, the only battalion to seize a railway station was de Valera's, which occupied Westland Row. Daly's and MacDonagh's failure to take Broadstone and Amiens Street made it much easier for the army to respond quickly by bringing reinforcements from Belfast and 18-pound field guns from Athlone that were crucial to the quelling of the rebellion.
These failures were possibly due to inadequate manpower, rather than poor strategic planning. The four city locations might also have been chosen to give the Volunteers a good vantage point to cover the four main army barracks within the city limits, Richmond, Portobello, Marlborough and the Royal (Townshend, 2005: 153–83; Hayes-McCoy, 1969: 260–1).

The non-occupation of the principal railway stations was compounded by the failure to seize the telegraph office at Crown Alley, just across the river from the GPO, or the greatest propaganda prize of all, Dublin Castle. There is still much debate about whether the Volunteers ever planned to capture the castle or were deterred in the mistaken belief that it was too well defended. The ICA garrison under Seán Connolly mistakenly opted instead for the nearby City Hall, from which they were easily ejected within a day by British reinforcements and where Seán Connolly was killed by a sniper from the castle (Townshend, 2005: 162–4; McGarry, 2010: 141).

The ease with which the rebels occupied their targeted buildings illustrates the extent to which the administration, police and army were taken unawares by the rebellion. Both the commander of the army in Ireland, General Friend, and the Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell, were in England for Easter and there were only 400 soldiers scattered across the various barracks in Dublin City. While an armed uprising was not expected, the authorities were well aware that elaborate Volunteer manoeuvres had been planned for Easter Sunday, which makes their lackadaisical attitude to security difficult to explain. In Birrell's absence, the civilian response was handled by the Under Secretary, Sir Matthew Nathan, who appears to have underestimated the rebellion and been at a loss to respond in the absence of Birrell. Arthur Hamilton Norway, the head of the Irish Post Office, spent Easter Monday morning in Dublin Castle with Nathan, whom he described as ‘a man who was not cool and steady, but rather bewildered’ ( Jeffery, 2006a: 44). Birrell and Nathan had adopted a tolerant approach to both the Volunteers and the ICA prior to the Rising, leaving them with no choice but to resign immediately afterwards.

The army responded more quickly and effectively than the civilian administrators. On Tuesday night martial law was declared in Dublin and extended countrywide the following day. Also on Tuesday reinforcements from within the island arrived from the Curragh and Belfast along with heavy artillery from Athlone, underscoring the disastrous effect of the rebels’ failure to secure the railway stations. These were strengthened by reinforcements from Britain who arrived by boat at Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire) on Wednesday. By the end of the week there were 20,000 troops in the city. On Wednesday, the armed yacht, the
Helga
, began the bombardment of the city from the River Liffey, destroying Liberty Hall (the headquarters of the ITGWU) and much of the centre of the city around the GPO. This barrage, exacerbated by a lack of adequate supplies of food and ammunition, exhaustion
and the realisation that no reinforcements were coming for the rebels from either the provinces or Germany, resulted in the collapse of the short-lived Irish Republic when Pearse surrendered on Saturday, 29 April (McGarry, 2010: 167–8, 189–94, 204–6; Townshend, 2005: 186–96).