Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic

The Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic was announced at the beginning of a week-long insurrection mounted by Irish nationalists with the aim of ending British rule in Ireland. On April 24, 1916, the Monday after Easter, a ragtag body of civilian soldiers led by members of the Irish Volunteers, a Catholic paramilitary organization, seized the General Post Office in Dublin in an attempt to make it the headquarters of a rebellion against the British Empire. The leaders of what came to be called the Easter Rising, or 1916 Rising, were romantics—poets, politicians, and professors mainly, as opposed to professionally trained soldiers. When they took the post office that morning, one of their leaders, Patrick Pearse, strode out the building's front entrance at noon to proclaim Ireland’s independence from the British Empire.

The Republic of Ireland today dates its beginning to this moment in much the same way as the United States dates its birth to the Declaration of Independence in 1776. The similarities do not end there. Just as in the American colonies, there had been a viable alternative of home rule under the British Crown. There was a similar division of sentiment among the people whose independence was being declared. Certainly, the signatories to each declaration realized they had taken their lives in their hands, but there is a crucial difference. Unlike the American colonists, the writers and signatories to the Irish proclamation in 1916 expected to fail, to give their lives as a “blood sacrifice” to the cause of Irish independence. However, despite their correct assumption that they would all fail and die, or perhaps because of it, they launched Ireland on the path to rebellion against the British Empire that would finally end in their nation’s freedom.