Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic

Context

The Easter Rising of 1916 was the product of long-term enmity between England and Ireland. The relationship of Ireland to what became the United Kingdom had been poorly defined ever since Henry II's Norman armies had successfully completed their conquest of the area surrounding Dublin in 1171. For centuries afterward, English rulers and Parliament never seemed able to appropriately define how Ireland fit into their realm. By the seventeenth century, Ireland was frequently considered an occupied European Catholic nation and potentially an enemy of Protestant England; it was also viewed as a sullen and often rebellious colony peopled by natives whose indigence, superstitions, and belligerent nature would not allow them to accept the “superiority” of English institutions. Yet, after the union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801, Ireland was an integral part of the United Kingdom, and its security needed to be assured against European powers that in the past had threatened to occupy it and separate it from Great Britain. Nevertheless, as far as the Catholic Irish were concerned (and an increasing number of Protestant Irish, who often were the only people with the power, connections, and money to lead rebellions), there was only one status for the British in Ireland: hated occupiers, who had never followed through on their promises to equalize the status of the Irish people in the United Kingdom. The Irish—both Catholics and Protestants— always knew that the British considered them inferior; thus, they never fully accommodated themselves to British rule.

In the early twentieth century, several events came together to establish a real breaking point for Ireland and Great Britain. Among the most important were the growth of a proud and influential new Gaelic cultural movement, the imminent but never quite immediate success of the Home Rule movement to secure self-government for Ireland under the British Crown, the paramilitary efforts of Protestant Ulster to keep any effort at Irish separatism from succeeding, and the beginning of World War I and Ireland's contribution to the British war effort.

During the nineteenth century, famine, emigration, and a stagnant education system caused traditional Irish, or Gaelic, culture to go into steep decline. Meanwhile, political possibilities were developing abroad. In 1867, after the Austro-Prussian War, Hungary became a separate and self-governing entity under the Austrian Crown, and this provided a political model to which Irish patriots appealed. The Hungarian model became translated in the Irish context as the concept of Home Rule: the reestablishment of a separate Irish parliament, government, and state that was subject to the English Crown and its diplomatic and defense interests but otherwise remained independent.

In preparation for future Home Rule, members of the secret nationalist organization, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), began to establish Gaelic cultural associations and institutions, intending to free themselves from the tyranny of the English language and culture. Thus, the Gaelic Athletic Association revived hurling and Gaelic football; it became a subsidiary of the Gaelic League, founded by Eoin MacNeill, which promoted the Gaelic language and culture. One of the league's executive directors was Patrick Pearse, a teacher of Gaelic who founded a pair of schools in the Dublin area. Another offshoot was the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, which put on plays by William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge and later would premiere works by the Socialist and nationalist writer Seán O'Casey. All these organizations helped establish a political and economic union referred to by its founder, Arthur Griffith, as Sinn Féin, or “Ourselves Alone,” in November 1905. The growth of a distinct Irish culture is central to understanding the authors of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, since many of them were involved in these groups.

Although Sinn Féin called for the outright independence of Ireland, most Irish seemed content with the concept of Home Rule in the pre–World War I era. Most of Ireland's representatives in the British House of Commons had been working toward that goal since the 1870s and 1880s. In 1910 the Liberal Party maintained its hold on Parliament with a slim majority that had to rely in part on Irish support to stay in power. The price of power was a new Home Rule bill, the third attempt at such legislation in Britain's parliamentary history; owing to the leadership of John Redmond, the leader of Ireland's Home Rule Party in Parliament, the act finally passed the House of Commons in September 1912 and, after overcoming opposition in the House of Lords, was scheduled to be implemented on September 28, 1914.

Protestants in Ireland had always opposed Home Rule, especially those residing in the six predominantly Protestant counties in Ulster in northeastern Ireland. During past rebellions, Protestants had suffered displacement, torture, and murder at the hands of the Catholic majority. For most Protestants, Home Rule meant “Rome Rule,” or rule by the Roman Catholic Church, and they fiercely opposed any separation from the British government. Their leader in Parliament was Sir Edward Carson, a well-known lawyer and leader of the Irish Unionist Parliamentary Party. Carson was likewise invited to lead the Ulster Unionists by James Craig, a member of Parliament. They, in turn, were supported by Andrew Bonar Law, whose ancestors had come from Ulster. Together in January 1913 they encouraged and supported the formation of a paramilitary organization, the Ulster Volunteer Force, which imported guns illegally and drilled in preparation for civil war should Home Rule finally be implemented. In opposition, the members of the Gaelic League, Sinn Féin, and the Irish Republican Brotherhood founded their own paramilitary group, the Irish Volunteers, in November 1913. The group's early members included Eoin MacNeill, one of the founders of the Gaelic League; Patrick Pearse, promoter of the Gaelic language at his school, Saint Enda's, in Dublin; Thomas MacDonagh, a poet and teacher at Saint Enda's and founder of the Irish Literary Theatre; and Joseph Mary Plunkett, also a poet and playwright and editor of the Irish Review, an important literary magazine that connected the Irish nationalist community. The Irish Volunteers also staged a spectacular gun-smuggling operation in July 1914, and Ireland seemed on the verge of civil war just two months before Home Rule was to be implemented.

Then, to the surprise of all concerned, the focus swung away from events in Ireland. The Great War, now known as World War I, broke out, and Britain joined the side of France and Russia in early August 1914. The British and various Irish organizations all agreed to lay down their arms and conceded that Home Rule—set to be implemented in just a month —would be shelved until the end of the war, provided that special arrangements would be made for the concerns of the Ulster Unionists. Two hundred thousand Irishmen, Protestant and Catholic, joined Britain's war effort, including all the Ulster Volunteers and 170,000 of the Irish Volunteers, the vast majority, who renamed themselves the National Volunteers. About 13,500 Irish Volunteers refused to join the war to fight on the side of the British. They kept the name Irish Volunteers, and formed a Central Executive in Dublin, led by MacNeill, the members of which included Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett.

The war was ostensibly fought against the imperialism of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Turkey. The irony that Irish Catholics were fighting for the British Empire, which had suppressed their aspirations for independence for centuries, was not a small issue. Likewise, there seemed to be little recognition of Irish sacrifices in setting aside their national cause for that of London. As always, there was discrimination against Irish Catholic divisions in the British Army. Whereas members of the Ulster Volunteer Force were allowed to put orange badges on their uniforms to signify their national origin, the request of the former Irish Volunteers to have an Irish harp placed on their uniforms was rejected out of hand. Finally, the threat of conscription at home angered those who could not brook the hypocrisy of fighting and dying in the name of an empire whose sovereignty they opposed.

It was in light of this historical background that the Easter Rising of 1916 was organized. The Central Executive of the Irish Volunteers combined forces with a Socialist paramilitary group, the Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly and the future playwright Seán O'Casey. Through contacts in America, the rebels secured the aid of Sir Roger Casement, a prominent British diplomat and an Anglo-Irish sympathizer who negotiated with Germany to ship a boatload of weapons to the Irish coast. Casement also worked to recruit a brigade of Irish prisoners of war in Germany. Idealists all, the poets and playwrights in Dublin and the diplomat in Germany hoped that an organized uprising with German support would incite the Irish populace into general revolt. Ireland would force its independence in the middle of the war, and the new republic might even secure a place at the peace conference when the war ended.

All of this proved illusory, as was usual in Irish history. Casement could barely persuade fifty of two thousand prisoners to join his brigade; the rest despised him as a traitor. The German government agreed to ship the guns but lost interest in fomenting rebellion, since it seemed clear that most of the Irish population was uninterested, if not hostile. The ship carrying the guns never met its contact on the Irish shore and was scuttled before the British navy captured it. Casement was brought to Ireland on a German U-boat and arrested just hours after he reached land. It was not even Easter Sunday, and the plot had already fallen apart. But people like Patrick Pearse, the most vocally supportive of the revolutionaries, were determined to go forward, because only “blood sacrifice” could rid Ireland of its servitude to the British Crown and dependence on English culture. The Easter rebels determined that the blood sacrifice would be their own, for their nation's good.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the rebels marched on the most imposing British government building in Dublin besides Dublin Castle, where the British authorities sat. Since the castle was considered too well defended, the rebels marched on the General Post Office (GPO) and seized it as their headquarters. With Pearse in the GPO were James Connolly, Joseph Mary Plunkett, and two of the main IRB military strategists for the Easter Rising, Thomas J. Clarke and Seán Mac Diarmida (also called Sean MacDermott). Also in the GPO was a young soldier who would rise to leadership in Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army when the Easter Rising was over, Michael Collins. Upon seizure of the GPO, a flag with the Irish tricolor was raised over the building, and Pearse walked outside to read the proclamation to a confused group of passersby.

Other strategic points were taken throughout the city over the course of the next twenty-four hours. The most important of these locations were the government's justice center, the Four Courts; a government workhouse for the poor, the South Dublin Union, where the rebels were commanded by one of the signers of the proclamation, Éamonn Ceannt; the W & R Jacob Biscuit factory, where Thomas MacDonagh was commander; the Royal College of Surgeons; and Boland's Flour Mill, where one of the leaders was a New York–born IRB member named Éamon De Valera. Outside Dublin, Irish Volunteers launched insurrections in Louth, Wexford, Galway, and Ashbourne. Two important cultural figures remained uninvolved: Eoin MacNeill, who called off most of the Irish Volunteers once he had heard about the failed landing of German arms and Roger Casement's arrest, and Arthur Griffith of Sinn Féin, who opposed using violence to achieve independence.

Despite being outnumbered three to one, the rebels held out for nearly a week, even as the GPO was being shelled from a British gunboat. When the rebels surrendered, British forces under Sir John Maxwell arrested 3,400 people, twice the number of actual participants in the Easter Rising. Nearly half were interned in Wales without trial. Under the rules of martial law, which had been declared by Lord Wimborne, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Maxwell convened military courts-martial as if they were taking place on the battlefield in France. This meant there would be no jury and no defense witnesses. This procedure was controversial by British standards; according to the Defence of the Realm Act passed in August 1914, a court-martial was to have both a jury and a professional judge. In Ireland itself, 183 civilians were tried, and ninety of them received death sentences.