Ireland’s 1916 rebellion, which took place during Easter week 1916, was ineffective in itself ending British rule in Ireland. But although the Easter rebellion was quickly quelled by police and British forces, what followed led directly to the creation of the Irish Free State six years later.
The Easter Rising was organized by members of the Irish republican Brotherhood and started on Monday, April 24, 1916. By the following Saturday the rebels had surrendered and were taken into custody by British forces acting in conjunction with the Royal Irish Constabulary(RIC).
In 2016, Ireland will mark the centenary of the Easter Rising.
According to the Glasnevin Trust, which has conducted research into the number of victims of the Easter Rising, 485 men, women and children were killed during the brief rebellion. The breakdown of the casualties is: civilians 54 percent; British Army and police 30 percent; Irish rebels 16 percent.
One of the British Army casualties, and the first of 31 British soldiers killed that week, was Captain Frederick Dietrichsen. A commanding officer with the Sherwood Foresters Regiment, Dietrichsen was killed by rebel forces at Dublin’s Mount Street Bridge. There, in one of the bloodiest battles of the Easter Rising, a detachment of Sherwood Foresters were ambushed by Irish rebel volunteers.
Now Captain Dietrichsen’s grand-daughters have called for a permanent memorial to the British dead to be erected in Dublin. Their call has been backed by the Sherwood Foresters Museum which has written to the Irish government seeking support for a joint monument to both British soldiers and Irish volunteers.
Against a background of, at best, lukewarm enthusiasm for an independent Irish State among the general population, the Easter Rebellion, by members of the Irish Volunteers led by schoolmaster and Irish language activist Peter Pearse, allied to the smaller Irish Citizen Army of James Connolly stood little chance of success.
The rebels seized key locations in Ireland’s capital, Dublin, the most famous of which being the General Post Office in O’Connell Street. There, the rebels, despite attempting to tunnel to neighbouring buildings, remained under siege by the British Army before surrendering on Saturday, April 29, 1916.
Outside the capital, there was little rebel action. The only significant incident was an attack on the RIC barracks at Ashbourne, County Meath.
The 1916 Easter Rising was almost certainly doomed to fail before it started in its aim of Irish independence. But it was the actions of the British Army both during and in the aftermath of the rebellion that would provide the spark to an Irish independence movement gathering support, ultimately leading to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. The 1921 treaty was the precursor to the Irish Free State Constitution Act 1922. That Act provided for the partition of the island of Ireland, creating the 26 counties making up the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, comprising the six remaining counties, which remained part of the UK.
Opinion in Ireland is divided as to the appropriateness of such a memorial to British troops who lost their lives in Ireland during those frantic five days in 1916.
Writing in the Irish Times, Stephen Collins is sympathetic to such an approach arguing that rather than the 2016 commemorative programme being sacrificed to suit the political agenda of the present as some Irish republicans have claimed, rather “the current warm and healthy relationship between Ireland and the UK is enabling us to look at the relationship between the two in a healthier way than the old nationalist and unionist narratives permitted.”
In support of his view that Ireland has moved beyond the old unionist and republican narrative, to a stage where its citizens can acknowledge the common humanity of all who suffered and died during the 1916 rebellion and its aftermath, without feeling that it undermines Ireland’s national identity, Collins poses the questions, “Did the ordinary Dubliners who were killed in 1916 die for Ireland? And what about the policemen who saw their duty as keeping the peace?”
He cites the example of a grandmother killed during the Easter Rising by a stray rebel bullet during an exchange of fire with the British Army as she was having a bath.
But in an article on Irish Central, Niall O’Dowd says it’s insulting to remember British Army deaths equally during the 1916 commemorations.
O’Dowd highlights the stark example of rebel leader James Connolly who was sentenced to death by firing squad in May 1916. Members of the British Army strapped the badly injured Connolly to a wheelchair and blindfolded him executing Connolly by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin. Connolly’s was one of 16 such executions of rebel leaders during the weeks following the Easter Rising.
If any single event could be said to have lit the touch-paper for Ireland achieving a form of independence from the United Kingdom just six years after the Easter Rising, it was the Kilmainham Gaol executions.
In the aftermath of the Easter Rising the British State sought to quell guerrilla tactics, largely devised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Michael Collins, by sending detachments of “Black and Tans” to Ireland. Officially called the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force, the Black and Tans were a force of temporary constables recruited to assist the RIC during the Irish War of Independence.
The Black and Tans, numbering in the thousands, and so-called from the colour of their improvised uniforms composed partly of British Army khaki and RIC green, were mainly recruited in Great Britain, many of them being British World War I veterans. The Black and Tans became infamous for their brutal attacks both on civilian property and Irish civilians.
Black and Tans’ atrocities became routine. In the summer of 1920, the Black and Tans sacked and burned many small towns and villages in Ireland starting with Tuam in County Galway. They also laid waste to Trim, Balbriggan, Knockcroghery, Thurles and many more.
In November 1920 they besieged Tralee in revenge for the abduction and killing of two local RIC men by Irish rebels. They closed all the businesses in the town, let no food in for a week and shot dead three local civilians. On December 11, 1920, the city of Cork was targeted by the Black and Tans. They sacked much of the city and destroyed a large part of the city centre.
During Ireland’s Black and Tan years, a total of 404 members of the RIC died in the conflict and more than 600 were wounded, however it isn’t clear how the casualties split between “regular” RIC officers and Black and Tan auxiliaries.
As Niall O’Dowd asks of these dead Black and Tans, “Shall we hear calls to commemorate their fallen too equally?”
O’Dowd argues that like it or not, the British were in Ireland as conquerors and were never accepted by native Irish.
“The British Army in 1916 was defending an imperialist possession and was quite ready to kill maim and massacre those who opposed British rule,” he adds, posing the question, “In the new Ireland are these aggressors to be considered on a par with the Irish revolutionaries and the Irish citizens who died?”
Whether there should be equivalency in how Ireland remembers the fallen of 1916 and all that ensued is a question that’s likely to be argued right up to next year’s Easter Rising centenary commemoration.
