Easter, 1916: The Irish Rebellion

Abstract

As Charles Townshend points out, the biggest change in recent years is the final release of the accounts by participants in the Easter Rebellion assembled by the Bureau of Military History. This has enabled him to write a fresh and vigorous study of one of the key events in modern Irish history, an incident seminal to both the formation of two Irelands and Anglo-Irish relations. His treatment has three broad parts—the background to the rebellion, the contours of the rising itself, and its aftermath. In his final chapter the author provides a stimulating discussion of that all-important aspect: how the rising has been passed down in history. Townshend's is one of two books published to mark the 90th commemoration of the Rising and it is the one surely most worth reading. If the account lacks an overarching thesis, it has many sub-themes and is a corrective to earlier literature. The most significant portion of the book lies in his analysis of the rebellion in Dublin which, as noted already, is enriched by the first-hand observations of participants. To supplement the narrative, the tome contains a handful of maps, photographs, a biographical glossary and a bibliography. Probably more of the first two would aid readers who are not so familiar with Irish history or at least the history of the rebellion. Few will dissent from Townshend's observation that the ‘deepest weakness in the structure of the Union lay at the level of social psychology and ideology’ (p. 26). This shortcoming was to be seen in the aftermath of the Easter Rising and played no minor role in the way the Union came unravelled. His conclusion that the Great War marked the ‘finalization of partition’ making ‘normalization’ difficult if not impossible’ (p. 358), commands assent. Also, it is impossible not to concur with the author's belief that, though the leaders of the rebellion were undoubtedly guilty of failing to grasp the contradiction between the desire for an ‘Irish Ireland’ and their assumption that the island must form a single political unit, this same insurrection undoubtedly played a part in cementing partition ‘but it is not easy to argue that its part was decisive, or that the Irish-Irelanders were unique in their error’. In many respects the constitutional nationalists had a similarly blinkered approach. While this is a challenging and worthy book, of which the author can be proud in the context set by him, it is somewhat one-dimensional—one-dimensional in the sense that it is intimately focused on the rebellion in Ireland, mainly but not wholly in Dublin. As the author notes, ‘the provincial rising may not have amounted to an emergency, but it was enough to justify the extension of martial law across the whole country….’ (p. 242). A strength of the narrative is the stress Townshend places on opinion formation, though the ultimate difficulty would prove to be that there was more than one opinion to emerge from the rebellion. That process took hold remarkably quickly in the aftermath of the episode. For, as the author observes, Prime Minister Asquith's sanguine view of the position began to dissolve even as he departed Ireland for Westminster. Indeed, Townshend's discussion of the transformation in opinion on all sides is one of the highlights of the book and forms a useful introduction to the Anglo-Irish War, which he has done much to illuminate. It could be argued that this aspect ensured that what otherwise might have been a localised disturbance became a central reality for the greater part of the country. Events and responses outside Ireland do not receive much attention. This lacuna is evident in the bibliography, where major works on British figures, notably Conservative leaders such as Bonar Law, are omitted, while the impact of the Rising, in the United States of America and the British Empire, is only touched upon in passing. In leaving out parts of the picture, the book, if a triumph, is less rounded and ultimately less definitive than it could have been.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 172 citations exist upstream.