Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic

Impact

The leaders of the Easter Rising, as expected, received the opportunity to give their “blood sacrifice.” They all were executed by firing squad from May 3 to May 12. The methods and reasons behind the executions circulated widely soon after they had taken place. Patrick Pearse's little brother, Willie, was executed for no more reason than having worshiped his brother. Joseph Mary Plunkett was ill after having had an operation on the glands in his neck; just before his execution he married the sister of Thomas MacDonagh's wife, and thus both sisters were left widows. James Connolly had been so gravely wounded that the firing squad had to prop him up in a chair to shoot him. Roger Casement—a Protestant with a better social pedigree—would be executed months later in Pentonville Prison in London after a formal trial for treason. The fifteen executed in Dublin received no funerals; their bodies were covered in quicklime as if they were corpses left to rot after a battle.

During his court-martial, Pearse declared, “You cannot conquer Ireland. You cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed” (Judd, p. 243). He was right. If the insurgents had been considered fools and traitors during the Easter Rising, they became martyrs immediately after they had died. Most of the rest of the death sentences were commuted to imprisonments as the British government tried to correct its mistake, but the damage was done. The summary nature of the executions, the speed with which they had taken place in comparison to the excruciatingly long number of days it had taken to perform them, and the clear embarrassment of the coalition government in London over the conduct of their defense forces turned Irish public opinion decidedly in favor of the Easter Rising. Masses were said in the names of the rebels, and numerous public demonstrations followed throughout the remainder of World War I.

Although Sinn Féin had not been involved, it was still widely believed to have been the organization behind the Easter Rising. This had the odd benefit of causing scores of members of the IRB, the Irish Volunteers, and other politically minded people to flock to Sinn Féin and transform it into a political party. The father of Joseph Mary Plunkett was elected in a by-election to the British Parliament, but he refused to take his seat. He asserted that there was a legitimate government established in Ireland by the proclamation and that was the only government he recognized. Other separatists, some of them in jail, were also elected to Parliament. One of them was Éamon De Valera, elected in July 1917, and he likewise refused to go to London. Three months later in October, De Valera was appointed head of both the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin.

In early 1918 the British government tried to introduce conscription in Ireland; this was the last straw for many who had not gone to war earlier at the behest of their colonial overlords. Certainly, they were not willing to do so after the Easter Rising. Nationwide resistance to the draft meant that it was never implemented. Furthermore, Catholic southern Ireland was by this point virtually united for independence, just as Pearse and the other leaders of the Easter Rising had hoped.

In December 1918 the British coalition government held a general election, largely to cement its status as the nation assigned to broker the peace agreement with Germany. The election was also the first in Britain's history to be conducted on the basis of universal adult male suffrage. The election results solidified Sinn Féin's hold on aspirations for an independent Ireland. Sinn Féin collected seventy-three of 105 Irish seats in Parliament, swamping the Ulster Unionists as well as the Irish Parliamentary Party, which advocated Home Rule. Promptly, the elected Sinn Féin members of Parliament refused to accept their seats in London and instead stayed home in Dublin, where they formed the Dáil Éireann, their own Irish parliament, just as Arthur Griffith had always wanted.

What Griffith had hoped for, however, was that the separation of governments could be concluded peacefully. Such was not to be the case; more as Pearse and his colleagues had foreseen, the independence of Ireland was to be obtained through the shedding of blood. The Irish War of Independence began in January 1919. The Irish Volunteers, having renamed themselves the Irish Republican Army in October 1917, fought a bitter guerrilla war against the British and their Protestant Irish allies across the streets of Dublin and Belfast and the whole of Ireland under the leadership of Michael Collins. Two years later a truce was signed, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Ireland received a status in the British Empire that was vaguely more independent than “Home Rule”—the new Irish government would be called a “Free State.” However, six Protestant counties in Ulster were allowed to opt out of the Free State to remain a part of the United Kingdom, and Ireland was divided between north and south. By the end of 1922, Collins and Griffith were dead, De Valera resigned as the new president of the Irish Free State, and Ireland launched itself into civil war over the provisions of the treaty. Yet the promises of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic had largely been achieved. It would take another year of civil war to force acceptance of the geographic and religiously based split on the population of Ireland. The rebels' prediction in 1916 of “blood sacrifice” had come true with a vengeance.