Theme: Revolt, 1916

O King that was born

To set bondsmen free,

In the coming battle,

Help the Gael.

— Patrick Pearse, "Christmas 1915"

It figures – the loss of Irish independence all started because of a fight over a woman.

In 1166, Dermot McMurrough, the king of Leinster, was overthrown for stealing a prince's wife, Devonguilla, and was banished across the water to England. While there, he plotted an attack to retake his kingdom, a plan Henry II wholeheartedly supported. In fact, he pledged his military aid to the mission in exchange for land grants in Ireland. The attacks commenced in 1169, with English forces commanded by Richard Fitzgilbert de Clare, aka Strongbow, the first of many English warlords to terrorize Ireland. The forces swept through quickly, easily retaking Leinster for McMurrough and, in the exchange, establishing territory in Ireland for the English – a situation the British would not want to give up for another eight centuries.

As the English strengthened their presence in Ireland – always claiming it was a defensive move, because English enemies could land in Ireland and from there easily prepare an invasion of England – the Irish began to realize they were being screwed. The first rebellions, supported by Spain, occurred in fits and starts throughout the late 16th century. Cromwell landed in 1649 and beat up on the Irish for a while. By 1848, the Young Ireland movement took advantage of the famine chaos to stage a few symbollic uprisings. By the end of the 19th century, Irish independence was beginning to assert itself, even if the Irish didn't always realize independence is what they were working for. The Gaelic League and Sinn Fein were precursors to the Home Rule bill that passed British Parliament in 1914, even though it was never fully enforced.

By the time Europe was embroiled in the first Great War, the leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood began to formulate the notion of real rebellion, and on Easter weekend 1916 they took the first steps of Irish independence. They failed fairly miserably in the act itself, but their martyrdom would turn the tide of public sentiment and make Irish independence a long-overdue reality within the next decades.

Our itinerary did not include a visit to the General Post Office, but I worked it in on my own one afternoon. I had to see the site of the rebellion's beginning, the steps from which Patrick Pearse read the republic proclamation aloud and pasted it to the wall. The proclamation was a fiery document, bold and blustery, inclusive of women in the first line and ahead of its time with a suggestion of a welfare state (a clear influence of commie Irish patriot James Connolly). More than 1,500 volunteer fighters turned out to hear the proclamation and to take up arms to seize and defend strategic points in and around Dublin. The heart of this action was, of course, the GPO.

The takeover – which had its moments of comedy, including the customer at the post office who insisted on completing his purchase of stamps before leaving – was swift and easy, if not thought out thoroughly. No one cut phone lines, so the British army officers were able to summon reinforcements from Belfast and Athlone with a simple phone call. The Irish volunteers were poorly armed, too; a shipment of weapons supplied by Germany never made it to Dublin; the ship carrying the arsenal was captured by the British and scuttled between Ireland and England. The rebels were also plagued by a naivete inherent to socialist strains of thought pervading their ranks – they were certain that capitalist England would not destroy its own property in combatting the Irish volunteers.

Wrong. General Sir John Maxwell, who took over as commander of the British midway through the siege, arrived with this declaration: "If necessary I shall not hesitate to destroy all buildings within any area occupied by the rebels." The British response was fierce and indiscriminate. The city was shelled from gunboats in the Liffey, and streets were strafed with machine-gun fire. Pearse and the bulk of volunteers held out from the upper windows of the GPO, despite the heavy and accurate shelling that, by week's end, destroyed nearly all the building except the facade. (The pillars out front still bear the marks of gunfire.) When a public servant and his family were killed in the street waving a white flag, Pearse realized it was time to end the hostilities and sought terms with the British.

When it was all over, 64 Irish volunteers were dead, not counting those who would be executed, and 134 British soldiers killed. The civilians suffered the most, with 220 dead and the wounded exceeding 600. The center of Dublin was rubble. In the days to come, more than 3,000 Irish would be arrested as conspirators, and the leaders of the revolt were secured and prepared for execution.

The bulk of Ireland was appalled – at the revolutionaries, not the British. Most Irish considered nationalism to be a flight of fancy, not something that could be realized and probably not worth considering. The execution of the rebels, though, changed a great many minds, esp. in the way many of the executions were bungled. The stories of the men became fine mythology that became the staple of education of the children of the Free State. The stirred passions made the Anglo-Irish War five years later inevitable, and the re-evaluation of the rebels' stubbornness, bravery and transcendence was most eloquently summed up in Yeats' beautiful poem:

Easter 1916

I have met them at the close of day

Coming with vivid faces

From counter or desk among grey

Eighteenth-century houses.

I have passed with a nod of the head

Or polite meaningless words,

Or have lingered awhile and said

Polite meaningless words,

And thought before I had done

Of a mocking tale or gibe

To please a companion

Around the fire at the club,

Being certain that they and I

But lived where motley is worn:

All changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent

In ignorant good-will,

Her nights in argument

Until her voice grew shrill.

What voice more sweet than hers

When, young and beautiful,

She rode to harriers?

Thhis man had kept a school

And rode our winged horse;

This other his helper and friend

Was coming into his force;

He might have won fame in the end,

So sensitive his nature seemed,

So daring and sweet his thought.

This other man I had dreamed

A drunken, vainglorious lout.

He had done most bitter wrong

To some who are near my heart,

Yet I number him in the song;

He, too, has resigned his part

In the casual comedy;

He, too, has been changed in his turn,

Transformed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone

Through summer and winter seem

Enchanted to a stone

To trouble the liing stream.

The horse that comes from the road,

The rider, the birds that range

From cloud to tumbling cloud,

Minute by minute they change;

A shadow of cloud on the stream

Changes minute by minute;

A horse-hoof slides on the brim,

And a horse plashes within it;

The long-legged moor-hens dive,

And hens to moor-cocks call;

Minute by minute they live;

The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice

Can make a stone of the heart.

O when may it suffice?

That is Heaven's part, our part

To murmur name upon name,

As a mother names her child

When sleep at last has come

On limbs that had run wild.

What is it but nightfall?

No, no, not night but death;

Was it needless death after all?

For England may keep faith

For all that is done and said.

We know their dream; enough

To know they dreamed and are dead;

And what if excess of love

Bewildered them until they died?

I write it out in a verse –

MacDonagh and MacBride

And Connolly and Pearse

Now and in time to be,

Wherever green is worn,

Are changed, changed utterly:

A terrible beauty is born.

The journey:

Recurrent themes: