The symbolic nature of the Easter Rising
What was the military strategy of the 1916 rebels?
The following is an extract from The Rising (Centenary Edition)by Fearghal McGarry.
The extraordinary battle which raged throughout the centre of Dublin from Monday 24 April until the following Saturday has formed the subject of intense political and historical controversy. There is little disagreement about what happened — around 1,600 rebels occupied a ring of prominent buildings, fortified them, and awaited the arrival of British army soldiers whose superior numbers and firepower soon crushed their resistance — but more about its significance. Much controversy has centred on the military strategy of the rebels. Why were buildings of obvious strategic or symbolic value — such as Trinity College and Dublin Castle — not occupied? Why were positions of negligible military value, such as St Stephen’s Green, seized? Underlying these questions is a debate not so much about the tactics of the rebels as their fundamental motives. Was the Rising an attempted coup d’état or an irrational blood sacrifice?
Recent studies of the IRB have emphasized the symbolic nature of the event: ‘the 1916 rising was not a national insurrection, but a citizens’ revolt or the last 1848-style rebellion in European history, when would-be “free citizens” simply “manned the barricades” in defence of a cause of “national” liberty against an unaccountable monarchical government and virtually waited to be shot to pieces’. Describing the rebellion as a ‘unique example of insurrectionary abstract art’, Peter Hart has gone further than this, arguing that it lacked even the rudimentary coup d’état ambitions that characterized the 1848 model of insurrection:
“The surprise, the proclamation, the tricolour, the seized buildings and barricades were all there, but the targets seem almost purely symbolic or even arbitrary: instead of the arsenal, city hall or barracks, they occupied a post office, a bakery, a public park. There was probably some military rationale involved — it’s hard to tell since no record of the plan has survived — but there was certainly no intention of seizing power.”
Regardless of its rationale or strategic limitations, a powerful nationalist narrative emerged within months of its suppression: the Rising was seen as a heroic fight by selfless patriots who had recklessly taken on the might of the British Empire, the nobility of their cause and vindictiveness of the British response resurrecting a quiescent Irish nation. From the Rising followed the rise of Sinn Féin, the war against Britain, and ultimately Irish independence.
Long commemorated by republicans as the Irish equivalent of the storming of the Bastille, historians have naturally adopted a more complex and critical perspective since the Rising first became a subject of scholarly inquiry in the 1960s. Writing in a context in which a simplistic, heroic narrative still held sway, many historians (pilloried as ‘revisionists’ by their nationalist critics) drew attention to ‘the conspiratorial, undemocratic, and destructive nature of the rebellion’. Particular criticism was directed at two aspects of the insurrection: the absence of a democratic mandate for the actions of the rebels and their military futility. ‘The planning and conduct of the Rising’, one leading historian has recently argued, ‘provided chilling confirmation that military victory was not its primary objective’:
“By raising their tricolour in the centre of the main shopping area and close to Dublin’s northside slums, the rebels ensured massive human and material losses once their position was attacked. It is difficult to avoid the inference that the republican strategists were intent upon provoking maximum bloodshed, destruction, and coercion, in the hope of resuscitating Irish Anglophobia and clawing back popular support for their discredited militant programme.”
In this reversal of the traditional heroic narrative, it was the ordinary people of Dublin who were sacrificed for the nation, and the achievement of the rebels was not to strike a blow for freedom but to kill the Irish Party’s efforts to fashion a peaceful path to independence. Underlying much of the controversy surrounding the Rising is the difficulty of disentangling its violence from that which followed, not only during the War of Independence but also the Civil War and the more recent Northern Irish Troubles which can all be seen as consequences of the military council’s successful revival of the physical-force tradition. Interestingly, the notion that the rebellion had inflicted unjustified violence on the civil population was widely expressed both at the time and over the next decade by a broad section of opinion including unionists, Home Rulers, and, perhaps most controversially, the iconoclastic dramas of the socialist playwright Seán O’Casey. By the 1930s, however, such criticisms were voiced much less frequently as a more pious attitude to the rebellion came to prevail in southern Ireland.
Fearghal McGarry is Senior Lecturer in History at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is the author of a number of books on Irish history in the twentieth century, including The Rising: Ireland: Easter 1916, and Eoin O’Duffy: A Self-Made Hero (2005). More recently, he has edited Rebels (2011), a collection of first-hand testimony by revolutionary veterans. He is currently working on a project exploring the links between Dublin’s Abbey Theatre and the Easter Rising.
