HISTORY: MARY E DALYreviews Rebels: Voices from the Easter RisingBy Fearghal McGarry Penguin Ireland, 366pp. £20
THE 1916 RISING is one of the best- documented rebellions of the 20th century. In 1947 the Irish government set up the Bureau of Military History to collect statements from participants in the Rising and the War of Independence. The idea for this oral history originated with Dudley Edwards, professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin, and the proposal was strongly supported by his fellow historians, who were keen to ensure that the history of modern Ireland was not written wholly from official sources.
Although the bureau was controlled by civil servants, not historians, and the records were not released until 2003, when the last witness had died, the 1,773 statements now available to researchers in the National Archives of Ireland and the Military Archives provide informative and often moving accounts of the Rising and subsequent events. They also have the potential to produce some significant re-evaluation or, dare I say, revision of the history of the Rising.
The bureau records are not comprehensive: there are very few statements from Ulster or southern unionists, supporters of the Irish Parliamentary Party, British soldiers or government officials. Éamon de Valera, Richard Mulcahy and Seán Lemass are among the conspicuous absences, as are those who died before the bureau got down to work. Many uncompromising republicans declined to be interviewed, though some gave statements to Ernie O’Malley, which are now held by University College Dublin.
Charles Townshend's Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion(2005) and Fearghal McGarry's The Rising: Ireland, Easter 1916(2010), have already mined this material in recent years. Readers of McGarry will find some familiar themes and personalities in his new book. On this occasion, however, the story is told through a collage of witness statements, with readers guided through the material by short sections of commentary from McGarry. He describes the book as an effort "to distil the vast testimony of the statements into a coherent, readable narrative".
There are chapters on topics such as the reasons why men and women got involved in the Rising or the Irish Volunteers, the impact of the onset of the Great War, in 1914, and the story of Easter week in Dublin and farther afield. The section dealing with the battle of Ashbourne – an encounter that anticipated the guerrilla war of 1919-21 and resulted in the deaths of eight Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) men, two Volunteers and one civilian – is one of the highlights of the book. Eyewitness accounts from both rebels and members of the RIC describe the fighting, the deaths and the serious injuries. The chapter closes with the statement of Constable Bratton of the RIC: “Subsequent to the battle of Ashbourne I was brought to Buckingham Palace and decorated by the king for my actions. I resented this, but I had no alternative.”
The most moving material concerns the surrender and the aftermath, including imprisonment and the identification and interrogation of key figures in the Rising. Several members of Cumann na mBan recalled waking to the sound of shots, and one noticed that, at Mass in Kilmainham, four men kneeling in the front seat were the only people to receive Communion, “which we thought significant”. All were soon to be executed. There are harrowing accounts by Thomas Mallin, brother of Michael Mallin, who accompanied his sister-in-law to visit her husband on the eve of his execution, and by Áine Ceannt, who described waiting for confirmation that her husband had been executed.
Reading these statements, it is possible to see why their release was delayed. As McGarry emphasises, they present a story of confusion, not of a carefully planned rising, and thus have the capacity to damage the romantic and glorious images of Irish republicanism that were dominant in the 1940s and beyond. The Belfast Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) leader Denis McCullough described being sworn into the IRB in Donnelly’s public house “by a large obese man . . . evidently a good and steady customer of Donnelly’s. I was disappointed and shocked by the whole surrounds of this, to me, very important event and by the type of men I found controlling the organisation; they were mostly effete and many of them addicted to drink.”
The bureau provided a forum for the “voices of the losers”, those who disagreed with the decision to have a rising or how it was planned. It was a chance for men such as Bulmer Hobson, the IRB leader who was kidnapped to prevent him preventing the Rising, to get their version of events on record. Hobson’s testimony is extremely revealing about the divisions in the ranks and is less than complimentary about Pearse, “a sentimental egotist full of curious Old Testament theories about being the scapegoat for the people”.
The confusion surrounding Easter week in Ulster, and the resentment of the Volunteers and IRB there at the unrealistic orders and counterorders emanating from Dublin, provides further evidence of division within the ranks. Ulster is interesting also because it was the only area where priests appear to have played a significant role in the Volunteers. According to Denis McCullough, some of the priests believed that the planned rising was “engineered and inspired by Connolly . . . not a Volunteer but a socialist rising”.
By 2016 the 36,000 pages of evidence in the Bureau of Military History will be supplemented by witness accounts in the military pension files (applications for pensions submitted by members of the Volunteers, Cumann na mBan and others who took part in the Rising, the War of Independence or the Civil War). Readers can expect many more accounts of these years written from the perspective of participants.
Prof Mary E Daly is a member of the school of history and archives at University College Dublin. Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond, which she edited with K Theodore Hoppen, was published earlier this year by Four Courts Press
