← After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal
Loading summary
Transcript41 lines
- [00:00]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, we're your hosts Anthony Delaney and Maddy Pelling. And if you would like After Dark, Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal ad free and get early access.
- [00:10]
Maddy Pelling
Sign up to History Hit with a History Hit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries with top history presenters and enjoy a new release every week.
- [00:21]
Anthony Delaney
Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:27]
Conor Mulver
They say opposites attract. That's why the Sleep Number Smart bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm but they want soft. Sleep Number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm. Sleep Number does that too. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed so you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. Sleep Number Smart beds start at $999. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [01:00]
Matt Lewis
Work management platforms Ugh. Endless onboarding. IT bottlenecks admin requests. But what if things were different?
- [01:08]
Unknown
We found love in an open space.
- [01:11]
Matt Lewis
Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding, beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use prompt free AI. Huh? Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use. The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA Auto Insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply.
- [01:48]
Anthony Delaney
Hello, it's Anthony here. Before we get started, this is just a warning that this episode contains graphic discussions of violence. Kilmainham Jail, Dublin it's the dead of night on May 3, 1916. The jail sits to the west of Dublin city centre, where less than a week ago Irish rebels were in bloody combat with the British army claiming independence. The city is fresh with the traumas of war. Buildings torn apart by artillery fire, hundreds of lives lost. In his cell, Patrick Pearse, one of the architects of the Easter Rising, is granted final correspondence with his loved ones, having been found guilty of waging war against the king in a secret court and sentenced to death by firing squad. Reflecting on his fate to his mother, he this is the death I should have asked if God had given me the choice of all deaths, to die a soldier's death for Ireland and for freedom. The silence is broken by footsteps approaching his cell. Once the key rattles in its lock and is opened. The silhouette of a British soldier fills the doorway. It is not long after 3am Pierce is marched through the cold corridors and taken outside into the prison yard. The night sky is the colour of iron. Army soldiers stand in front of Pierce now and a white cloth is tied about his eyes. In that final letter to his mother, he concluded, I will call to you in my heart at the last moment. Patrick Pearse was among the first to be executed following the Easter Rising. And though the Irish Republic had not yet been born, through his death an icon of a free Ireland, a martyr, had been created.
- [04:05]
Maddy Pelling
Hello and welcome back to After Dark. I'm Maddie.
- [04:07]
Anthony Delaney
And I'm Anthony.
- [04:09]
Maddy Pelling
And we are returning again. This is our second episode on the Easter Rising. If you listened to our first, you will know that we spoke about the events, the political landscape leading up to this moment. And our amazing guest, Dr. Conor Mulver, put it into context of the First World War, which I think was a really fascinating point that I'm going to be taking forward in my knowledge of this history. Connor is returning again to guide us through the events of the Rising itself and its aftermath. Conor, welcome back to After Dark.
- [04:40]
Unknown
Hi, Maddie. Hi, Anthony. Great to be back.
- [04:42]
Maddy Pelling
It's fantastic to have you. So we have skipped ahead a little bit in terms of the story and we heard about Pierce there in Kilmain in jail, which is an incredibly evocative space and I hope we'll have time to talk about that on this episode. I visited many years ago and it really brought this period of history to life for me. Let's just take a few steps back and talk about the day of the Rising itself. We left in the last episode, the rebels taking the General Post Office and starting to build what becomes known, I suppose, this kind of ring of steel of positions throughout central Dublin. So can you tell us how those events unfold and what the British reaction to this looks like on the ground?
- [05:24]
Unknown
Yeah. So Easter Monday, remember the Rising that was planned for Easter Sunday has been called off and now there's Monday and the volunteers are going to hold a parade again and again under the COVID of parading down the street, just to focus in on the rebel headquarters. They parade down O'Connell street like they've done the previous Easter, like they've done at various points around. So police, even passing soldiers, you know, they just look in disdain at these rebels who are all dressed up in their own strange green uniforms and carrying their rifles, and they think to them, why aren't these guys off in the first World war fighting like we are. And then as they pass the General Post Office, the order is given, the post office on your right attack. And they just invade the post office. So they take over the building. They catch everyone by surprise. There's always, I think people focus in on this, but it is worth mentioning, apparently there's a British army officer in there who's just trying to buy some stamps. He just suddenly finds we're not talking dozens of rebels here, we're talking hundreds of rebels pouring into the post office. And he's placed under arrest, as are other British soldiers who are kind of caught up around the city. So these people have taken over buildings. And I think it's worth for a minute talking about the tactics here because some historians don't really rate the rebel tactics. Ultimately, the 1916 Rising is a failure for the rebels. They're defeated in that they surrender. But I've spoken at length elsewhere. I have a video that you can watch on YouTube and elsewhere called the Destruction of Dublin. And I talk about the tactics and I build on Professor Michael Laffin, who's a professor here in UCD and one of my own PhD supervisors. And he talked about the inspiration for the rebellion, and I decided to follow that thread. So they looked at what happened in the Paris commute, which was one of the most recent examples of urban warfare. They also looked at a small holdout by some anarchists in London, which is called the Battle of Sydney street, where ultimately Winston Churchill personally directed artillery and a detachment of soldiers from the Tower of London to dislodge anarchists led by a Lithuanian anarchist called Peter the Painter, who held himself up in a house and had to be dislodged by soldiers. So the idea here is that Joseph Mary Plunkett, the primary planner of the tactics of this, says they're going to take buildings all around the city and then they're going to hold those buildings. They're going to create barricades. And remember other urban examples of this. Paris had been barricaded in 1830, it had been barricaded in 1848 and barricaded in 1870. And the rebels were well traveled individuals. Some of them had secondhand knowledge of the American Civil War as well, which is in recent memory. And Ploker is planning the exact same thing. He says they're going to attack us with infantry and particularly cavalry, because this is an urban space. And he's also drawing on his great romantic Irish hero, Robert Emmett, who had a very unsuccessful rebellion in 1803, and he planned similar tactics With Emmett Pioneers, everything from a folding pike that you can hide under your jacket to very early IEDs with exploding planks to stop cavalry. Anyway, that's 100 years previous, so we'll leave that maybe for another episode, but Plunkett basically decides we're going to barricade the streets. We're going to take these key strong points and all the buildings they take are fortified buildings. We can talk about Stevens Green in a minute. And there's been debate over historians, particularly in recent years, about whether the targets were chosen as strong points, as military, militarily useful targets or as ideological targets. And I'll just run through the places they take. They take the Post Office on a concrete. The first Battalion of the Irish Volunteers take the forecourts, which is on the Liffey, the main river that runs through Dublin. The 2nd Battalion under Thomas McDonagh take Jacob's biscuit factory, which is in the southwest of the city. The 3rd Battalion under Eamon de Valera, take Boland's Mills, another flour mill in the east of the city. The 4th Battalion of the Irish Volunteers take the South Dublin Union, which is a. It's somewhere between a hospital and kind of like a county home. It's a. For poor people, it's where they're taken in on benefits. But it's a notoriously corrupt institution in Dublin. And the Irish Citizen army, that very small unit, they have a small muster and they dig trenches in Stephen's Green. Now, many people have ridiculed these. Let's ask ourselves about the ideological reasons why these areas would be taken. The General Post Office is where the post comes from, Dublin. And in previous rebellions, like in the 1798 rebellion, the signal for a national uprising was that the mail coaches would be stopped. So if the post didn't arrive in your town, you knew that Dublin had been captured and that a rebellion was on. Now, there's no surviving document to say the rebels had this in mind, but it could be one of the reasons that the post offices take it. The other four, I think, is much more clear. The Four Courts were the centre of British justice in Ireland. Jacob's Biscuit Factory and Boland's Mills were supplying biscuits and flour to the British soldiers in the First World War. They had also been notorious employers during the lockout. And remember, James Connolly in the Irish Citizen army were veterans of the lockout. So they had chosen institutions that have been very much against them. I should also say about the Post Office, the Gaelic revival in the Irish language movement had been the centre of members of the Irish Volunteers. And for years the Post Office had had spats with Gaelic revivalists over handling mail in Irish. So they were again Persona non grata with the rebels. The South Dublin Union, as I mentioned, had a notorious reputation for corruption. It was run by some of the most corrupt politicians in local government in Dublin. And in James Conley's newspaper, the Irish Worker, he referred to this as Ireland's Bastille. And historian Lauren Arrington has amazing work on this, where she's dug into these kind of ideological reasons why all these places were taken. So I would say it's a mix of Lauren Arrington's thesis that, yes, there are strong ideological reasons for taking all these, but also, if you look at the map of Dublin, and I'm looking at a map of Dublin, there's the Irish Times, produced many years ago, that lists the rebel strongholds and then all the British military barracks in Dublin. There are seven functioning military barracks in Dublin at the time of the 1916 Rising, and only one of them lies within that ring of steel that you mentioned, Mattie, and that's the barracks at Dublin Castle, which is actually very understaffed at this point. The rebels don't know that. And they attempt to attack Dublin Castle, they're repelled. And they ultimately have to take City hall to try and pin down the soldiers in Dublin Castle. But every other barracks, Beggars Bush, Portobello Barracks, Richmond, the Royal Artillery barracks, the Royal Barracks and Marlborough Barracks, all of them lie outside those rebel positions. So each rebel battalion takes a position that commands a key arterial route into the city and has no soldiers inside it. So they're seizing and holding buildings, and then they're waiting for the British to respond. They're holed up in good buildings. And standard laws of military tactics is that defenders can defend on a ratio of 1 to 3. So you need about three attackers to have military superiority over a defender. So the rebels are weaponizing their military inferiority by taking and holding these largely stone buildings. And remember, the South Dublin Union has a commanding position on a height. Jacob's biscuit factory has smoke sacks and towers in it that Thomas MacDonough sends snipers up into. Then I suppose we need to talk with Stevens Green as well. Same in Bowler's Mills. They're able to put snipers. They, although Bowlands takes almost no direct military activity in itself. Stevens Green. The Citizen army dig trenches, and many historians have ridiculed these trenches over the years. But I'm one of those historians who has gone. I've looked at the very few surviving photographs of the trenches at Stevens Green. And I think that really causes us to ask different questions about this. The trenches weren't just dug in the middle of the green, as you'll hear many historians say. They, they were dug right up against the railings commanding on the main road that actually if I was to go into town from here in UCD now, I would go along the N11 as it is now in Dublin's transport plan. And those rebels were able to dig concealed trenches with parapets in front of them and then big 6 foot high railings that nobody could climb over. And from there they were able to snipe down the main southern road into Dublin. So the rebels, I would argue are effective in their tactics in seizing and holding key positions that mean that the British have a really hard time of it in infiltrating and creating a cordon around Dublin that they can then punch into. And I would, I've argued elsewhere that this is an incredibly effective military tactic by the rebels. So that's the situation we have on Easter Monday. The rebels seize and hold the city. The British first response is to send a detachment of lancers down Sackville Street, O'Connell street to find out what's going on because they've got all these reports from civilians that buildings are taken over, the rebels have gone mad, they've done things like this. And the rebels immediately open fire on these lancers when they come within rifle rage and lancers and horses are killed and the carcasses of those horses lie on the streets rotting for the rest of Easter Week 1916. So the rising that Plunkett had planned for a cavalry and infantry rising is effective when that happens and only later in the week as we'll come to discuss when the one thing the rebels had not really banked upon, that the British would use artillery on their own city. And this is the folly of James Connolly, I would say predominantly as a socialist. He said capitalists would never shell their own buildings. They own these things, they're not going to destroy their own property. And he uses a little bit too much of Karl Marx and not enough of reading the Paris Commune and things like this and what actually happened in Paris. And he thinks the capitalists are going to be, you know, very protective of this. I think the thing he forgets is capitalists buy insurance so their buildings are insured. They know they're going to get them back. The British military aren't the ones that own the buildings. So the British army, they know that they don't want to risk the lives of their soldiers. So they actually are very cautious about sending troops anywhere near the rebel positions after Monday. And what they do is they start to lob artillery shells from two places. One, a very, very small gunboat in the Liffey, which. Which again, people have over emphasized the significance of. It's called the Helga. It's actually a marine inspection boat that's under the command of the Department of Agriculture. And the historian Lar Joy has written excellently on this and he's kind of. He's put the Helga in context. It wasn't throwing shells all over Dublin. It destroys Liberty hall and it does very little else during Easter week. But heavy artillery is shipped in from At Loan, where there's an artillery regiment and a detachment. A battery of guns are placed in Trinity College, Dublin. They're successfully infiltrated using the rail network. And they're the ones that drop the heavy artillery on O'Connell street and dislodge the rebels from only one of their six. Okay, the citizen army have to retreat to the Royal College of Surgeons. But they're not dislodged. The only rebels who are fully dislodged are those at the gpo, and that's because they shell that position. So that gives you a sense of what's happening, maybe militarily in Easter week.
- [16:22]
Anthony Delaney
It's such a complex set of events in many ways, and I love some of these ideas that you're putting forward. What strikes me though, is that there's been in the last kind of five, 10 years, just following the centenary, I suppose, we have this recalibration of what was happening and how it might have been. Cause you're absolutely right. My impression of this rising particularly was a. Oh, lads, we just didn't get it together and it wasn't. And you know, ultimately we know it failed. But some of the things that you're saying here is really opening up a new light to me in terms of the understanding of what's going on. In terms of, yeah, there was strategy going on here and actually what's going on up at St. Stephen's Green is actually quite impressive to a certain extent. Give us an idea, though, about that week. You've hinted at some of the retaliation that's happening from the British army, but we have Easter week now and we know this fails. How does it fail? How does it come to fail? So we've gotten to the point that you're saying that the GPO was taken, but the other strongholds still remain. How does that start to fall apart over the course of Easter week.
- [17:27]
Unknown
So on Monday and into Tuesday morning, the rebels cannot believe their luck. Their various diary accounts talk about almost a festival atmosphere in the gpo. They can't believe that this has worked, that they've held these buildings, that the British army has been caught completely unawares. By Tuesday, the British government start to respond. And it's really interesting in terms of the fallout for the Rising, that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the representative of the King in Ireland, flicks into his traditional colonial role, which is that if there's ever an uprising in a colony, the Lord Lieutenant acts as a colonial governor and directs things. So on Tuesday, martial law is declared by the Lord Lieutenant. So civilian law is out the window. Rebels can be executed for sedition, things like that, which will soon happen. And multiple things start to happen simultaneously. First of all, the British army create a cordon. So this is very much about containment for the British Army. And maybe we flip now from the rebel tactics to looking at the British army tactics. The first thing they want is they don't want the rebels to be able to break out of their positions and they don't want reinforcements to come into the rebel positions. Only one small detachment of reinforcements come in from that 5th Battalion of the Irish Volunteers under my ancestor, Thomas Ashe in County Meath. He's doing so well using guerrilla tactics in County Meath, that he sends a platoon sized detachment down to Dublin to assist the rebels in Dublin. They come down and bolster forces. After that point, there's a British military cordon on the north of the city that no one can come in or out of. The Dublin Castle garrison begin to bolster their position. And that was one of the great failures of the rebels on Easter Monday, that they didn't take the castle and they take back City hall, where those rebels who had tried to take the castle are now dislodged from. And that's one of the early scenes of quite intensive fighting. The other big one then is that rail insertion of troops and artillery into Western Roe Station. It's actually now called Pearce Station because the Pearse brothers had their shop right behind it. We renamed all our stations in 1966. So two things happened there. First of all, that artillery is snuck in the back gate of Trinity College, Dublin, and they set up that artillery. And from Wednesday onwards, they start lobbing shells onto Sackville street or Collins Street. A detachment of troops then literally bind like cloth and bandages around their hobnail boots and they creep up Kildare Street. For anyone who's familiar with Dublin, or if this whets your appetite to come and see 1916 Dublin, book yourself a plane ticket right now and come along and see this for yourself. So the street that the National Library and Dale Aaron is on, Gildare Street. At dawn, British soldiers creep from Trinity College, Dublin, up that street and they install themselves in the upper windows of the Shelburne Hotel. From a military tactical perspective, this is genius from the British army side and disastrous for those Irish Citizen army in Stephens Green. Remember, they dug those trenches facing out to the southeast of the city. In military terms, this is what we call an enfiladed position. The British were able to fire and a bullet will literally hit multiple people. So they put machine guns in the top floors, hotel rooms of this hotel, the Shelburne Hotel, which is still a hotel today. And as dawn breaks, they open up with Vickers and Lewis machine guns on those rebel trenches and the rebels have to retreat from their trenches. And they've identified a strong building to the rear, the Royal College of Surgeons, and they retreat into that building. And again, they hold the Royal College of Surgeons for the rest of the week. But that's Tuesday. So the Irish Citizen army have been dislodged, the artillery is being set up and now things start to really happen on the Wednesday, this is when the gunboat, the Helga sails down the Liffey. It destroys Liberty hall immediately and it starts to probe the positions at the gpo. The British start to realise that the GPO is the main site of activity. The British army at various barracks, like Portobello barracks, are pinned down by the 2nd Battalion. Eamon de Valera has a small detachment that set up an ambush on Mount street, which is the result of the largest set of casualties. British forces who've landed at modern day Dudley Kingstown, which is a port to the south of the city, are marching into town. And just as they reach the canal at a bridge there, rebels have laid a very effective ambush for them. So they have rebels shooting to their front and rebels shooting to their side. And the British commanders just keep marching troops into the ambush and there are heavy, heavy casualties at Mount Street Bridge. One of the things that I often think is a really tragic thing for the soldiers involved, first of all, they caught the winner in France. They didn't know they were in Ireland when they disembarked. And they were surprised then to find, oh, we're actually being sent into action in Dublin. So that must have been an incredible culture shock and psychologically very disorientating for those troops. And then as they think they're still on a route march, they start to be opened up upon. But the other thing is they hide behind advertising billboards that they think are solid and they're actually made out of paper. And the rebels start just firing in cover from view rather than cover from fire. The rebels start killing them as they're hiding behind paper signs at the canal there. So that's the other great loss of life on the Wednesday. At this point cordon on the south of the city is being established. So by Wednesday, the rebels are completely hemmed in. And this is where the artillery, particularly from Trinity College Dublin, starts to take heavy effect. The south Dublin union manage to hold out and they repel a major attack to the southwest of the city on the Wednesday. And then a northern attack occurs down King Street. This, interestingly, in the history of warfare, is the first ever time that improvised armored fighting vehicles are used in urban combat. So British soldiers decide we're going to sustain significant losses if we do what happened in Mount street yesterday and try and march troops down from Broadstone Station down into the city. So what they do is they go to the Guinness factory in Dublin. What we're famous for here, I suppose, to listeners and perhaps drinkers around the world, they go to the Guinness factory and they take the. This is kind of like the 80 moment. This is like your BA Baracus montage. They take boilers from the Guinness factory and they mount them on the back of flatbed trucks and then they get welding irons and they cut loopholes for rifles into these trucks. We see versions of this in Ukraine today. These are kind of improvised armour tanks where they're just cobbled together from things that are lying around. And they put troops into the back of these. They drive these down North King street and just like modern APCs today, they reverse them up to the back of the houses and then they pour soldiers into houses that they think rebels are lodged in. The big problem there is there's civilians who live in those houses because Dublin is a living city. And in North King street is one of the most horrific massacres to occur during the Rising, that British soldiers shoot unarmed civilians, men, women and children who are hiding in the basements and the rooms of their own houses when they launch in, seeing red mist at the back of these Guinness boilers and these improvised armored personnel carriers. So, yeah, there's a lot going on.
- [24:21]
Conor Mulver
They say opposites attract. That's why the sleep number Smart Bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm, but they want soft. Sleep number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm. Sleep number does that too. Why choose a Sleep number Smart bed so you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. Sleep number Smart beds start at $999. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Exclusively at a sleep number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [24:54]
Matt Lewis
Work management platforms Ugh. Endless onboarding IT bottlenecks Admin requests but what if things were different? Found love in an open Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding, beautiful reports in minutes, custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use prompt free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use. The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA auto insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable. Reliable all at the touch of a button. Get a quote today. Restrictions apply.
- [25:42]
Anthony Delaney
Hi, I'm Matt Lewis, host of Echoes of History, the podcast that plunges you.
- [25:47]
Unknown
Into the ranks of the Knights Templar.
- [25:49]
Anthony Delaney
Across ancient Egypt and behind the barricades.
- [25:52]
Unknown
Of history's great revolutions to explore the worlds recreated in Assassin's Creed. In our new series Chasing Shadow Shadows, we're in feudal Japan alongside samurai warlords and shinobi spies. Whether you're gearing up for Assassin's Creed Shadows or captivated by Japan's rich history, this podcast, brought to you by Ubisoft and History Hit, is a must.
- [26:14]
Anthony Delaney
Listen, Chasing Shadows is out now on.
- [26:16]
Unknown
The Echoes of History podcast.
- [26:33]
Maddy Pelling
It's striking me, from what you're saying there, Connor, that this is a very different kind of warfare to the warfare that's going on in mainland Europe. And of course, before anyone writes in, you know, that's not to say that everyone was out in sort of rural France in trenches in the First World War. And of course there was fighting in towns and villages and cities as well. But certainly from our modern perspective, the view of the First World War that we have is very much sort of in Flanders in those rural settings, and that this instead is psychologically different. As you say, it's practically difficult. People are adapting, literally, boilers from the Guinness factory. The army itself, the British army, is not necessarily equipped tactically or in terms of the kit that it has to deal with this. And these soldiers who are brought from England and they believe that they are turning up in France to fight and actually they're in Dublin. That's so psychologically strange. It's so tactically strange to me, and I suppose the view of fighting in this urban space, even, I mean, I'm looking at the photos. We have a photo in front of us here of some rebel snipers on a rooftop and you can see the city stretched out behind them. And I think it's kind of easy to forget that this was a living city, that people were still attempting, I suppose, in this moment to go about their daily lives, obviously somewhat interrupted and terrorised, and obviously with devastating consequences for a lot of innocent civilians. But this is happening within a city that is alive and going about its business. And there's just something so, I suppose, tantalising and terrifying about the way that warfare in the space had to be adapted and that over the two weeks that this is going on, in terms of the buildup in Holy Week and then Easter Week itself with the fighting, that the nature and the shape of this conflict is constantly changing and the reaction to it is changing as well. Do you think that's fair to say?
- [28:20]
Unknown
Absolutely. And I think for the citizenry of Dublin, this is a complete shock and it is important to talk about the reactions of civilians to this. So, first of all, the civilian populace is not a monolith. There are many different reactions, from sympathy to abject revulsion. We have to remember, first of all, there are women and children in Dublin whose sons and fathers are all fighting in France and in Gallipoli and Palestine and elsewhere when this is happening, sometimes referred to as separation women. So they're relying on a payment from the British army to put food on their family's table. And we know that over 200,000 Irish men fought in the First World War and estimates of between 35,000 and just under 50,000 died. So for those individuals to see these rebels who've been not going to fight in the First World War, as they may see it, more wealthy individuals who can afford not to fight, you know, Pearson and Plunkett, and people are quite well to do, middle class individuals. And the poorest citizenry of Dublin, some of whom were locked out during the lockout and weren't allowed to return to their employers and found themselves in a really tricky bind in 1914. And finally, the British army was the only employer that was going to take them. Now, that's not everyone, but that is definitely a situation that occurred for certain families. So those separation women are saying, first of all, this is a kick in the Teeth for my relative who's in a trench right now sweating and dying. Secondly, my livelihood is dependent on a check and a packet of money from the British army every week or every month. And thirdly, you're destroying our city. And one of the things that happens in the early days is because of the poverty of Dublin. Dublin has the highest infant mortality rate outside of Calcutta in the British Empire at this point, if I'm correct, it's the poorest city in the United Kingdom as far as I know. So, like Dublin is really not the thriving tech center silicon docks that it is today. It's a very different city in 1916. So poor people who see that the police leave the streets and all these big fancy shops that have furs and sweets they've never tasted and shoes that they might not even have on their own feet, they loot. There's a sense of anarchy that we find in most revolutions, but it's present on the streets of Dublin and some of those civilian individuals are the victims of this. The majority of people who die in Dublin during the 1916 Rising are civilians. And in 2016, myself and a colleague, Professor John McCafferty, edited the diary of a Capuchin friar who worked on Church street and he ended up actually ministering to the rebels. He was in the forecourts when they surrendered to kind of talk to them. And then he goes to Cainham Jail and he ministers to Pearce and Connolly and others in their cells and gives them absolution before they go to the firing squads. But the first thing that the Friars in Church street have to deal with is a one year old child who's being pushed by a sibling in a pram. And a shot rings out on the keys from either British soldiers or rebels in the forecourts in the melee that happens when that's taken and a completely chance shot. Your listeners will be warned about the distressing nature of this. But a stray bullet flies through this child's head and he slumps dead in his own pram in front of his brother. And his brother doesn't know what to do. So he runs the child up to the Friars and Church street and the Capuchins have to start taking in all the citizens from a really poor district there and a district that's about to be involved in the North King street massacre. And they basically have to start ministering to and feeding these people from the poorest areas of Dublin and looking after their, not just spiritual, but very much the material welfare for the duration of Easter week in the Middle of this. So those kind of stories for me give a sense of just how terrifying it would have been to live in the center of Dublin. For those living in the suburbs, it amazes me. There's a great diary by a Catholic called Mary Martin, whose sons are off fighting in the First World War. And she's very much anti rebel during the Rising. But she's also just noting how little information is coming out of the city and rumor is flying around the place. No one knows what's going on. At one point, I think there's a barrage balloon that's flying over Dublin and people think it's a German zeppelin that comes from Elsie Henry's diary. So there's all kind of stuff happening all at the same time. And the British army don't quite know what's going on. The rebels have a decent sense of what's going on, but they don't know where the troops are. And the civilian population of Dublin don't know whether to loot, run away or join the rebels or point out areas to the British Army. They take, you know, and all those things happen at once.
- [32:42]
Anthony Delaney
We've said this and we've hinted at this from the very start. We kind of know where this is going, Conor, and we've set up what it felt like and what it was like on the ground during that week. The experiences of people who were involved in the uprising, the experiences of people who are trying to suppress it, the experiences of people who are trying to just go about their daily lives. But this does come to an end and the Rising is not successful. You've commented there, and I think it's really key for people to remember that there wasn't necessarily the widespread support amongst the entire population of Dublin that people might have assumed there would have been for this kind of operation, especially considering what comes in the next five, six years. At this moment in time, that support is not there. What are the immediate factors that lead to surrender?
- [33:29]
Unknown
So when the rebels are dislodged from the gpo, it catches fire sometime on Thursday into Friday, and the roof rafters catch, fires start dropping into the main area. James Connolly, one of the key rebel leaders, the leader of the Irish Citizen army, he exits the GPO to try and get some kind of visuals on what's happening on Sackville Street. And while that happens, he's caught by an enemy sniper. So British army sniper shoots Connolly first in the arm and then later in the leg when he's trying to crawl back into the GPO and he's ministered to by a UCD medical student called James Ryan, who tends to his wound with as much medical knowledge as a med student has during the Rising. He does go on to become a decent doctor, by the way. But the decision is made by the rebels of the GPO that the building is on fire, we're surrounded by snipers and the cordon is closing in on us. So they decide to evacuate the GPO and they break out a side door and they go up Moore street, which is still a bustling street in Dublin today. Now again, in urban warfare, this to me amazes me in terms of modern tactics of military operations in urban terrain, fighting in built up areas. The rebels, I don't know how they decide this is a good idea, but this is still military doctrine for modern armies today and it's NATO doctrine for how to do this. But they mouse hole through buildings so they don't just run up Moore Street. Now, in the initial dash of Moore street, one of the rebel leaders, the O'Reilly, is shot by machine gun fire. There's a machine gun posted at the top of Moore street and he dies on the street. And he actually, in his dying breath, he drags himself into a doorway bleeding out, and he writes a letter to his wife. And it's a really poignant letter. There's actually a giant facsimile of it up on the doorway that he's killed in today. And he writes tons and tons of love to you, Nancy. He bleeds out with his letter in his hand. So, you know, this is the kind of poignant amendment, the very serious happening at the same time at this point, the rebels break into these terrace of houses and they start smashing through the walls of each building to get into the next building. So they're punching up the street towards that machine gun position undercover, exactly as any modern soldier would be trained to do. And when they get to a certain point, they start to realize they're surrounded. The deaths they've seen of civilians on the street outside and the death of people like the O'Rahli convince Pearse particularly that further loss of civilian life would be disastrous here. So they decide to parley for surrender and they send a nurse, Elizabeth O'Farrell, and again, Mattie, to go back to your point about the agency of women of this, it's a woman who is one of the medical orderlies in Cumannamon who's sent out to parlay with the British army officers. And she comes back and tells the rebels the only terms we're being offered are unconditional surrender And Pearse signs an order. He has a typewriter in his possession. Winifred Carney, who's the secretary to James Connolly, has brought a typewriter with her and a revolver on the train down to Dublin when she's getting ready for the Rising. So again, there's these incredible stories that all converge, but I assume on Winnie Carney's typewriters, because I don't know of any other typewriters in the gpo. I'll read this out for you. In order to prevent the further slaughter of Dublin citizens and the hope of saving the lives of our followers, now surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered, the members of the Provisional government present at headquarters, which at this point is a terraced house with mouse holes in it, have agreed to an unconditional surrender. And the commandants of the various districts in the city and country will order their commands to lay down arms. And that signed P.H. pearce, 3:45pm 29th of April 1916. And then James Connolly, who, remember, has two bullet wounds at this point, signs underneath and says, I agree to these conditions. The men only under my command in the Moore street district and for the men in the Stevens Green Command, and Thomas MacDonough signs then as a brigade adjutant underneath to make clear. And then Elizabeth Farrell and others go around in motor cars under a white flag with a British military escort and they deliver that written order to the different garrisons who are still fully stocked, fully armed. Remember, two of them are in food factories, so they may have been sick of biscuits by the end of it, but they're not short of provisions. And the whole question of provisioning is a fascinating one. They provision themselves quite well. So all the other garrisons, including 5th Battalion up in County Meath, who have disabled telegraph lines, railway, they've attacked a police barracks, they've shot a detachment of Royal Arch Constabulary who've tried to show up to ascertain their whereabouts, and they're in possession of a farmhouse with full ammunition and weapons at this point. And some of them a don't believe the surrender and have to get verbal clarification and are brought down to the captured rebels to confirm this. And they're disgusted by the idea that they have to surrender because they've held their districts so successfully. So again, this is where myself and other historians in more recent years have questioned this abject failure. Pearse decides to cancel the Rising, to surrender unconditionally to prevent further loss of life. But militarily, the rebels are still in possession and hold of the majority of what they take on Monday by Saturday and even into Sunday of 1960.
- [38:29]
Maddy Pelling
Is there a feeling of betrayal then amongst the rebels that only a certain number of individuals, yes, leaders, but it is only a certain number have made this decision on behalf of everyone.
- [38:40]
Unknown
It's a really good question, Matty, and I think it feeds into the mentality of future Irish Republicans. So just to take one example, in the South Dublin Union in the southwest of the city, they've had intensive fightings. It's a big spread out campus and the rebels were holding various buildings and they fought building to building as the British pushed them back. But they were still in possession of buildings on the campus of what's now St. James's Hospital, the South Dublin Union. When the surrender comes to them and their commander surrenders and he says to them, okay, we're going to surrender, he's ultimately executed. But the second in command there is Karl Brugha. And Karl Brugha has taken a serious amount of lead in those things. There's various rebels who were shot multiple times during the Irish Revolution. But he has somewhere between 9 and 13 bullets in him like he, he's bleeding out and he's still fighting back against the British. And he's discussed by the surrender. But his commandant says, yeah, we're going to surrender, we're going to lay down our arms. And later on Karlbrugh decides that surrender was the wrong thing to do in 1916. We should have held out. We actually were in a better position than we realized when that surrender order came into us. And ultimately Colbrugh will find himself holding a building in Dublin again in 1922 when he's an anti treaty Republican during the Civil War. And I believe that his mentality in the South Dublin Union is what convinces him not to surrender. Then what he does essentially is he walks out of Hammam Hotel in 1922 with two revolvers in his hand into a detachment of Free State soldiers and he's gunned down in hail of bullets. And the second time it is fatal for him. That insight into Colbrugh gives us a sense of how some of those leaders. Thomas Ashe is another one. He dies on hunger strike in 1917. It convinces them that the next time they're not going to surrender, they're not going to lay their under arms. And a Rubicon is crossed with the general surrender in 1916. In some senses, it's the last time that we see a kind of gentlemanly, chivalric type of warfare in the Irish Revolution and the Successes of the 5th Battalion under Thomas Ashe and Richard Mulcahy in Ashburn and County Meath, convinces rebels who recongregate in the prison camps they're sent to after the Rising that guerrilla warfare is the way to go for. So the Michael Collins and the things that you would have seen from those movies that we talked about at the top of the show, they are very much from the War of Independence period and indeed the Civil War period. And the rebels learned from their mistakes in the 1916 Rising. They're not going to wait for the British army to come and catch them and drop artillery shells on top of them. They're going to hit the British army in their rear echelons, they're going to hit supply chains, they're going to hit them in transit, they're going to ambush them, they're going to shoot them in their beds when they're intelligence officers, and then they're going to fade back into the civilian population. In the 1916 Rising, the rebels wear uniforms. All through the War of Independence, rebels wear civilian clothing and trench coats and they hide revolvers and submachine guns and rifles under their trench coats. And ultimately they go guerrilla in the front, flying columns up and down the country. And that's all influenced by the learnings they have for what worked and what didn't work in the 1916 rosary.
- [41:48]
Anthony Delaney
We started this second episode by talking about Potter Pierce in Kilmainham. How quickly after the surrender do the arrests and then the resulting executions, how quickly afterwards do they begin?
- [42:03]
Unknown
So the arrests begin immediately. The garrisons, when they surrender, are marched to different holding locations. One of them is now the biggest maternity hospital in Dublin, the Rotunda Hospital. It has a little garden in the centre of it and they're held in those locations. At this point, detectives from the intelligence services of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, the G Division, are brought in and they walk through the ranks of the rebels and they identify people that they. They know. So those people are hived off from the general pens. And there's like, I have photos of this. There are literally razor wire pens made in certain barracks, like Richmond Barracks. They're held in the Rotunda. So they're held in various kind of prisoner of war camps around the city. And those individuals are identified as leaders, are brought into various prisons for detention, and they're ultimately put in front of court martials, remembering that martial law has been declared. So this is now all the military's gig. The rest of the rebels are put on cattle ships and they're sent over to Britain and they're put into internment camps. One Internment camp is up in Ulster. And I guess the idea there is they're being put among a hostile Ulster Unionist population where it's going to be a little harder for them to escape. But the main prison camp that everyone knows about is from GOK internment camp in Wales. And I had a student who wrote a dissertation several years ago about from gok. Her name is Charlotte Campbell. She's a public historian today. In Charlotte's work, she looked at what From GOK was used at in a longer time frame. And Frongoch was an internment camp for German officers up until the Rising. And essentially what they do is they clear out the German officers, they find other places to put them, and then they just ram from GOK camp full of rebels and indeed suspected rebels. There were many people at Frongoch who had nothing to do with the Rising. Owen MacNeil, who we talked about, who spent so much effort during holy week of 1916 trying to cancel the Rising. He's rounded up, he's put in front of a court martial, he's actually delivered a life sentence, and he's put into various prisons reading Gaol where Oscar Wilde had been. But he's put in various British jails. So the innocent and the guilty are rounded up together. The big mistake is that in those jails, and particularly in places like the internment camp at Frongok, the rebels are allowed to congregate freely. They run their own prison rules, kind of like, you know, what you'd see in the Great Escape, where all the Allied soldiers are able to have their own rank structure and have their own parades in the morning and things like that. The rebels do all that. They teach each other Irish. They also teach each other Spanish, because a lot of them want to escape to South America. So the Spanish Dictionary is the most borrowed book in the prison library in reading jail after 1916, by the way. And by allowing this, the rebels start to articulate to each other and the people that they find themselves interned with the Republican principles that they fought the Rising on. So there's two places where the Rising is turned into a myth and a mobilizing force for future revolution in Ireland. One is in the prison camps, in the jails themselves, and the second is on the streets of towns and cities up and down Ireland. And this is where we talk about the change in the population's mindset. Firstly, the women of Cumannaman who are released almost immediately, they don't go to Wales or anything like that. They're released from the pens in Dublin because, remember, the British army have made huge propaganda value out of the Germans shooting the nurse Edith Cavell in Belgium. So the British order that Constance Markovich and other women who were involved in the Rising are absolutely not to be shot and all the women who've been interned are to be released. They don't want the Germans and others making propaganda value out of the gender politics of this. So those women are committed Republicans and revolutionaries and they start printing up mass cards for the people who will be executed at the start of May 1916. They start telling the populace about the sacrifice of the rebels and they start to create a martyrology out of the sacrifices and the debts of 1916. So women are at the heart of mobilizing the Irish public towards Republicanism over 1916, 17 and even into 1918. And this incredible political reversal happens. Remember, about three quarters of the Irish population were voting for moderate constitutional Home Rule MPs in the last election in December of 1910. In 1918, the Sinn Fein party, which becomes the political vehicle for for the inheritors of the 1916 Rising and its survivors, that wins 73 out of 105 seats in Ireland in the 1918 general election. They didn't hold a single seat in 1910. They won half of the by elections. After the rising. They win five out of 10 by elections. But they're a political non entity. And through all that propaganda work by released prisoners and by those female activists up and down the countries, they start to convert people to the cause of Republicanism. And in 1919, then the dull government starts to abstain from the Westminster Parliament. They completely reject the whole apparatus of the British government in Ireland. They erect a completely successful counter state, new republican police, republican courts, they boycott taxes. And then the other thing they do is they start to launch a guerrilla war. And by the summer of 1921, that means that the British army has been forced into truce negotiations and ultimately a treaty with the inheritors of the 1916 Rising, the Republican rebels of the War of Independence. And that change in Irish politics is I think one of the most seismic changes in modern revolutionary politics, maybe this side of the Russian Revolution, which I know you guys have talked about extensively in your podcast. And it's happening at the same time as the Bolshevik and the February Revolution in Russia. So this is again, I like to situate this in the First World War because it very much happens within that zeitgeist.
- [47:56]
Conor Mulver
They say opposites attract. That's why the sleep number smart bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you. Whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm, but they want soft. Sleep number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm. Sleep number does that too. Why choose a sleep number smart bed so you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. Sleep number Smart beds start at $999. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Exclusively at a sleep number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [48:28]
Matt Lewis
Work management platforms endless onboarding IT bottlenecks admin requests. But what if things were different? Monday.com is different. No lengthy onboarding, Beautiful reports in minutes. Custom workflows you can build on your own. Easy to use prompt. Free AI. Huh. Turns out you can love a work management platform. Monday.com the first work platform you'll love to use.
- [49:08]
Maddy Pelling
I found this, well, the two conversations that we've had, Connor, so helpful in terms of, as you say, situating this history within this broader global moment. And I didn't know that about the women as well being released. And it's so fascinating, I suppose, this sort of underestimating by the British of what those women were capable of and actually sort of how impactful they were in the Rising, but also in its aftermath and sort of shaping those political and sort of public opinions. I just wanted to ask about the executions of the male leaders of the Rising. I remember going to Kilmainham, as I said, I think it was about 10 years ago now. And I remember there's a display, I hope it's still there, of some of the items left by these prisoners who were executed. And I remember a pair of glasses. And to my shame, I don't know which leader they belong to, but they're broken. One of the lenses is smashed, presumably from I guess the moment of execution or possibly, I suppose, violence beforehand. But these were, you know, the heart of this story is human beings, human beings making decisions to act and to drive forward what becomes an arena of big tactics and military action. But there are people at the heart of this and the executions themselves. Can you say something about the nature of them? Because they seem to me the absolute antithesis of the chaos of the fighting itself, that these are very cold, state sponsored executions. These are a way of just eliminating these people and there's something sort of performative about that. How do you see the executions sitting within the narrative of this and how are they seen at the time?
- [50:50]
Unknown
So it poses a real problem for the British authorities because they have to simultaneously be somewhat magnanimous so as not to turn the entire country immediately into rebels, which ultimately I think we conclude is what happened. Now, the result of the 1918 general election. I know I said 73 of those 105 seats go to Sinn Fein, but that's a multiplier effect from first past the post. Of about a million votes cast in Ireland, half a million go to Sinn Fein. So there's still a portion of the population, about a quarter million people vote for Irish home rulers, but they only get six seats. So that's a facet of politics. The British hand down 90 death sentences, but the majority of these are commuted to terms of life imprisonment. And in Irish rebellions going right Back to, well, 1798 is actually pretty ruthlessly put down. Robert Emmett is hanged in Dublin in 1803. But in 1848 and 1867, what they end up having to do is just put prison sentences and in 1848 in particular, transportation. So sending rebels off to the colonies, to Van Diemen's land, modern Tasmania and to Australia, where ironically, Those rebels in 1848 become senior politicians in Australian politics. So it just shows you that maybe executions are the wise thing to do if you want your rebels to go away and cease to be a problem. But there's huge political pressure put by the Irish MPs in Westminster on the British government to stop executing people. And remember what I said previously about the whole attitude of the British government. Before the Rising, the British authorities were being told by the Irish mps at Westminster, don't pay these guys any attention. If you pay them attention, the people will start to sympathise with them. And it's the same thing with the executions. People are disgusted by the executions. They're only told about who's been killed the morning of. And the executions happen as executions tend to in the middle of the night, when prisoners are most compliant. So people are taken from their cells at 3 and 4 o'clock in the morning, they're brought down to the breaker's yard in the prison, they're lined up against the wall and a firing squad is marched out and they execute them. Interestingly, in terms of who actually carries out the executions, I understand this is a long term trend in the British Army. If executions occur after an action, the unit that has suffered the heaviest casualties is the one tasked with carrying out the executions. Presumably because it psychologically will help them, I suppose, face that foe again. So the Sherwood Foresters who suffered the worst casualties at Mount street are the ones who were given the grim task of shooting the rebels at Kilmainham. And the executions occur from the 3rd of May onwards. So there's quite a lag time. Obviously, trials have to be held under martial law and the first three people executed are Patrick Pearce, Tom Clark and Thomas McDonough, three people who unambiguously were at the centre of this. The next day, however, Joseph Plunkett, again, absolutely guilty as charged. He planned the whole Rising. He's the key tactician of it. Ned Daley, who's in Command of the 1st Battalion down at the forecourts. But then Patrick Pearce's brother, Willie Pearce, who's quite a gentle soul, he's a sculptor. His job was designing funeral monuments with his dad in their funeral monument business. And he really seems to be executed because he's Patrick Pearce's brother and for no other reason than that. So those kind of cruelties start to really underline that. On the 8th of May, for instance, Sean Houston, who's only a child, and Con Colbert are shot. Michael Mallon has. I'm going to get the number of his children wrong, but it's like five children that he's leaving at home and one of his children who lived up to the Centenary. And my friend and the biographer of Michael Mallon, Brian Hughes, interviewed his son who was born in 1916 or 1917, after his father was executed and became a priest out in Asia. He's executed with a child under one left behind. Thomas McDonough's young son is left behind as well. He's only just been born, I think the year before the Rising. And then the final cruelty, the last executions on 12 May, Sean McDermott, who had polio and walked with a limp for the whole of his life, and James Connolly, who's already been shot twice and is gravely wounded. And the reason that they have to wait until the 12th of May is they actually have to wait for Conley to recover enough so they can shoot him again. And he's sat on a box to be shot because he can't physically stand up because that wound to his leg. So these cruelties are capitalized upon by Republican propagandists and they're just disastrous for the British military authorities. By May. It's really interesting. The Irish Parliamentary Party, John Redmond, says, obviously some people are going to have to be shot. And the Irish Parliamentary Party hated the lockout syndicalists, so they hated Larkin and Connolly and anyone involved with the Citizen Army. So I suspect that's what John Redmond is alluding to when he says certain people are going to have to be shot. Like there were other People who shot policemen and shot soldiers and were guilty of murder. So Redmond says they have to go, but he says, by and large, you've got to stop shooting people. This is going to turn the whole population of Ireland against us, the Irish Nationalists, and against you, the British government. So for that reason, no more executions happened. There's one other person that the British government said we have to execute this person, and that's Roger Casement. You can't allow somebody who is a Knight of the Realm and then goes over to Germany, meets with Bethman Hollweg during the First World War, meets with the German Imperial Command, talks to prisoners of war and convinces a bunch of them to go and fight against the British Empire. This guy is dangerous, dangerous, dangerous. So the first thing they do is they destroy Roger Caseman's reputation. They circulate his diaries, which have now been deemed to be authentic. The vast majority of people now agree that his diaries are authentic, but they document in meticulous detail both his exploits as a gay man, but also how much he was paying for sex. And there's a colleague of mine, Tom Hulme, up in Belfast, who's writing a fascinating history of queer Belfast at the moment. And one of the sources he's using is Roger Kaseman's diaries, because he can tell rent boys and where they were operating and how much they were charging for Roger Casement's diaries because he was a compulsive diarist and he had to write all this stuff down. So the British government take facsimiles of these diaries and they circulate them to key nationalists and say, is this the guy you want to protect? And they weaponize people's Catholicism in doing that. So Roger Casement stands a civilian trial because he hasn't been captured under martial law. He's been kept in the Tower of London as a traitor. And they have to dig back into the British statute book to find the law that Roger Casement has broken, because he hasn't really done anything. And there's a law from. I hope we get the date right here. 13:16 in the reign of Edward VII, if I'm getting my medieval history correct here. And he's deemed to be guilty of that law by an interpretation of a single comma in that act of raising treason among the King's enemies. And he's hanged in London in August of 1916, and he's the 16th and final rebel to be executed. And again, his reputation is destroyed. But even Roger Casement, among Catholics and among others, is lionized as a martyr for the cause. And you really have to appreciate just how effective the republican propaganda of these 16 deaths was used. It's used to completely convert people's mentality, to make them believe in a republic. And particularly among young generation who hadn't had an opportunity to vote. Many of them weren't of age. And remember, the franchise was extended quite extensively between 1910 and 1918. There was supposed to be an election in 1915, but it was canceled because of the war. That's where Asquith's coalition government comes out. So this new generation seems to be the ones that vote overwhelmingly, those half a million individuals who throw their weight behind Sinn Fein and give a retrospective mandate for what happens with the rebels in 1916.
- [58:29]
Anthony Delaney
I remember it was, well, nine years ago now, unbelievably nearly 10. And in Ireland we had a huge commemoration of the centenary of the 1916 Rising. It was everywhere. You couldn't move for it. And to a certain extent, there was a feeling afterwards, potentially especially maybe for people who are not necessarily historians, that they felt a little 1916 doubt and they were a little overwhelmed by some of the. You know, there was documentaries, there was plays on, there was all kinds of things. And it was really, really interesting. And it was actually. I don't think I can think of another public history event that has gone into the population as successfully as that did, maybe to the point of overkill across all the different branches of it. But it highlighted something to me at the time. And I remember thinking the original ideology behind the 1916 Rising has, in the course of only 100 years, slightly been forgotten. And it started to be. And it's been great to be reminded of some of that now, actually, Conor, by what you've been talking us through. But there was always this idea of Ireland's place in its much broader context with the rebel leaders themselves. But what started to happen, I think, over the course of, say, from the 70s, 80s onwards, and potentially understandably, the 1916 Rising, to me at least, I perceived it as the point at which people in Ireland started to understand who they weren't, rather than who they were. The answer to that, being British, I think that betrays some of the ideology that is happening in Ireland in 1916. And I think it's far more complex and far more interesting because of its complexity. And actually when we're now at a point where we're talking about the possibility at some point down the line, line of Irish reunification, that we have to go so far beyond 1916, so far further back, I would advocate towards the 18th century, but that would be very much me to do that, to understand what that might look like for Irish people and Ireland in the future. But my parroting question, Conor, to you is this. Why should British people know about the 1916 Rising?
- [60:35]
Unknown
The 1916 Rising is a fundamental event in the history of the Union, the Union of the Crowns in Britain. So it is the event that changes the course of Irish history and leads to the breaking of the Union. If it wasn't for the 1916 Rising, and this isn't entering into a counterfactual, there's a question mark over whether Ireland would have the same status in the United Kingdom today as Wales or Scotland with a devolved parliament that deals with local affairs. But there would still be an MP for Dublin that I might vote for at a first past post election that goes to Westminster to represent my interests over there. So it's fundamental in Britain's political history. It completely changes the composition of the House of Commons. It completely changes the entire makeup of Britain's politics. I think it also is probably the first opening shot of decolonization. Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionists, stands up in the House of Lords in 1921 after the treaty is signed. And now he's reacting to the War of Independence. But as we know today, it all starts back in the 1916 Rising. And he said, it's a horrible admission to make to your people in Egypt and in India and all the rest of the empire that you hadn't got the men, the money, the pluck or the will to hold down a country within 20 miles of your own shore. So that's Edward Carson in 1921. And I argue this consistently to students essentially predicting decolonization in 1921 and saying, if you let Ireland go, if you guys, the most powerful army in the world has just beaten the Kaiser and you couldn't hold down a small country with three and a half million people in it 20 miles from your shores, how can you ever allow the British flag to fly over this sprawling empire again? And Indian revolutionaries, African revolutionaries, indeed revolutionaries that aren't even in the British Empire. So, like Algeria is looking towards the Irish War of Independence for inspiration when the Franco Algerian War is happening and they're reading copies of a later Irish revolutionary, Tom Barry's Guerrilla Days in Ireland is translated into Arabic. Muammar Gaddafi is aware of what's happening in Ireland and is very keenly aware of Irish history and ultimately supports the ira. During the Troubles, I met with Thabo and Becky in 2016 to talk to him about the linkages between South Africa's history and Ireland's history. And he was keenly aware of Robert Emmett, he was keenly aware of the Eastern rebels. And really, interestingly, for a black South African leader who knew his Irish history, I asked him, well, what do you think about the Irish support for the Boers? Like they're the apartheid Boers who made black South Africans lives hell throughout the rest of the 20th century. And he said, well, that was a necessary step in getting the British out before we had to assert black power in Africa. So he was sympathetic to the Irish rebel cause and he very much saw Ireland in decolonial terms. So I think for British people, if they're trying to understand everything from decolonization, the Commonwealth today, like, there wouldn't be a Commonwealth if it wasn't for Ireland. The term Commonwealth is essentially taken out of the wastebasket of history. The last time it's used in British history by Cromwell during his Commonwealth, and then Lloyd George took off the term and he rebrands the empire as the Commonwealth in order to fit Ireland into it. Ireland is ultimately ejected from the Commonwealth when it becomes a republic. And then the very next year, India says, oh, we'll follow suit. We'll become a republic too. We'll get rid of the monarchy. And such is the threat to the integrity of a wider global Britishness that the Commonwealth now accepts republics within it. So the entire redefinition of what Britain was at the turn of the, let's say, 19th into 20th century, as to what Britain is today, and I think about the handover of Hong Kong, I think about the Chagos Islands right now as we're talking, and it's changing status, a lot of that is predicted by Irish people who have this unusual status in British imperial terms that they're simultaneously European, white, but colonized. And that's what puts them sometimes at the vanguard of decolonisation. And it's very clear in the debates around the Anglo Irish Treaty that the more advanced Irish Republicans saw the rottenness of the British Empire. And they very much saw that what they were doing in Ireland was the first step in breaking down an empire that they knew was morally corrupt around the world. So if you're interested in global history, if you're interested in everything from slavery to race relations in Britain today, I think that understanding the aspirations of the 1916 Rising. And Anthony, you're so correct to go back to the document. In the proclamation, they begin with Irish men and Irish women. So gender equality is literally the first three words of the 1916 proclamation. And they declare equality, they declare the rejection of empire, and they declare a republic. So in doing all of that, they're avowedly non sectarian, they're avowedly open. And I think one of the things that is lost in the subsequent Irish Revolution is a deep civic nature to this. So I've said at various points that the rebels see Ireland in spatial terms. They go back to the ideals of the United Irishmen. Speaking to an 18th century historian, they very much see that everyone resident on the island of Ireland has an equal stake in the state. They want to create an anti monarchical republic in the vein of the French Revolution and of a long history of Irish Republicanism. So in that sense, the Irish Republic is anti sectarian. People like Roger casement and Noel MacNeill are constantly trying to bring the Ulster Unionists into the fold. Now, that's lost to a certain extent in the War of Independence and particularly in the Anglo Irish Treaty. But the aspirations of creating a sovereign, independent republic in the Proclamation are way ahead of their time. They're very much a document that situates itself within a history of anti imperialism and decolonization. And I think for those reasons, for a British audience, for a global audience, and for people who might be listening to your podcast in other countries that have tread divergent paths to independence. And I've spoken to leaders from India, Tanzania, South Africa. I've also spoken to historians from Sri Lanka. I've spoken to Canadians about this. And I've been around the world talking about the 1916 Rising and Republicanism. I've taught about this in Moscow and in Delhi and in Chennai. It's a concept in political history and in military history that has resonances for people studying similar independence movements all around the world.
- [67:03]
Anthony Delaney
I wish I had my Irish flag now to hang outside my house in Greenwich because I'm feeling very patriotic after that color. That was wonderfully, wonderfully put. Thank you so much for that and thank you for listening more Irish history by stealth for the After Dark audience. But listen, it's one of those things that Irish people know so intimately, well, often to whatever extent, and then people beyond our shores don't necessarily know. So we do think it's a really important part of history to platform internationally in Britain and America as well. So thank you so much, Conor, for helping us to do that. If you've enjoyed this episode, as Conor mentioned during these chats over the last two episodes, we have episodes on the Great Famine in Ireland available too. And we have other lighter, more paranormally focused or mythically focused, shall we say episodes on the history of the Banshee, amongst others there as well. So go and check those out. Thank you to Connor and to all of you for listening to these two episodes. Do let us know your thoughts. You can contact us at after dark@historyhit.com that's after darkstoryhit.com and until next time, thank you very much.
- [68:18]
Conor Mulver
They say opposites attract. That's why the Sleep Number Smart bed is the best bed for couples. You can each choose what's right for you whenever you like. You like a bed that feels firm, but they want soft. Sleep Number does that. You want to sleep cooler while they like to feel warm. Sleep Number does that too. Why choose a Sleep Number Smart bed so you can choose your ideal comfort on either side. Sleep Number Smart beds start at $999. Price is higher in Alaska and Hawaii. Exclusively at a Sleep Number store near you. See store or sleepnumber.com for details.
- [68:50]
Matt Lewis
The last thing you want to hear when you need your auto insurance most is a robot with countless irrelevant menu options. Which is why with USAA Auto Insurance, you'll get great service that is easy and reliable, all at the touch of a button. Get a quote Today Restrictions app.