Easter Rising

Easter Rising, Irish republican insurrection against British government in Ireland, which began on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, in Dublin. The insurrection was planned by Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, and several other leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was a revolutionary society within the nationalist organization called the Irish Volunteers; the latter had about 16,000 members and was armed with German weapons smuggled into the country in 1914. These two organizations were supplemented by the Irish Citizen Army, an association of Dublin workers formed after the failure of the general strike of 1913, and by the small Sinn Féin party.

The uprising was planned to be nationwide in scope, but a series of mishaps led to its being confined to Dublin alone. The British had learned of the planned uprising and on April 21 arrested Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement in County Kerry for running arms for the rebels. Eoin MacNeill, the leader of the Irish Volunteers, therefore canceled mobilization orders for the insurgents, but Pearse and Clarke went ahead with about 1,560 Irish Volunteers and a 200-man contingent of the Citizen Army. On April 24 their forces seized the Dublin General Post Office and other strategic points in Dublin’s city centre, and Pearse read aloud a proclamation announcing the birth of the Irish republic. British troops soon arrived to put down the rebellion, and for nearly a week Dublin was paralyzed by street fighting. British artillery bombardments compelled Pearse and his colleagues to surrender on April 29.

Pearse and 14 other leaders of the rebellion were court-martialed and executed by British authorities in the weeks that followed. Though the uprising itself had been unpopular with most of the Irish people, these executions excited a wave of revulsion against the British authorities and turned the dead republican leaders into martyred heroes. The Easter Rising signaled the start of the republican revolution in Ireland and led to the Irish War of Independence. Because Eamon de Valera was the senior survivor of the rising, he gained much of his personal popularity with the Irish people from that event.