EASTER 1916
Roll of Honor
Padraic Pearse
Thomas McDonagh
Joseph Mary Plunkett
Roger Casement
Sean MacBride
Michael Mallin
Sean Heuston
Sean MacDiarmada
Thomas Clarke
Willie Pearse
Ned Daly
Michael O’Hanrahan
Eamonn Ceannt
Conn Colbert
Thomas Kent
James Connolly
Easter 1916
The Irish Volunteers had planned a general uprising for Easter Sunday, 1916. The rising was to extend throughout the country and its success depended heavily upon an expected shipment of arms from Germany. When the German liner AUD was boarded by a British patrol in the sea near Tralee, Co. Kerry, and the ship and armaments were scuttled by the liner’s crew, word was sent to Volunteer Headquarters to cancel the proposed insurrection.
Nevertheless, on Easter Monday, the Dublin battalions paraded. They seized and occupied various strongholds throughout the city. The Proclamation of the Republic of Ireland was read by Padraic Pearse from the steps of the General Post Office.
The Volunteers were hopelessly outnumbered but the fighting continued for a week. On Saturday, April 29, at 2 p.m. Pearse surrendered unconditionally.
Within two weeks, fifteen of the leaders of the rising were executed by the British. The death sentences of Countess Markiewicz and Eamonn deValera were commuted to life imprisonment. Roger Casement was hung in England in August, 1916.
The men of 1916 were a diverse group of scholars, laborers, tradesmen and poets, yet they all shared the vision of an Ireland for the Irish and the hope of freedom.
Padraic Pearse was Headmaster at Saint Enda’s School which he had founded in Dublin. Both his brother Willie and Thomas MacDonagh taught there with him. Pearse spent the last few hours of his life in his cell in Kilmainham Prison composing a poem to his mother, who was about to lose two sons to the executioner.
One of the doomed leaders converted to Catholicism on the night before his death. Another, Joseph Plunkett, was married in his cell on the night prior to his execution.
On May 12, 1916, the last signatories of the Proclamation were put to death: Sean Mac Dermott, crippled by polio, and James Connolly, who was sentenced to death as he lay in his hospital bed. Connolly was then transported by a stretcher to the execution spot where he was propped up in a chair and shot.
England, through its hasty action in attempting to crush the seeds of rebellion, had unwittingly created a new set of martyrs for the cause of Irish freedom. The die was cast and Ireland’s fight for unity and freedom was now being waged with a new spirit of determination.