Easter Week

During Easter Week 1916 a small group comprising Irish Volunteers and members of James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army, seized Dublin’s GPO and proclaimed an Irish Republic. British forces were brought into Dublin to put down the Rising, which lasted for almost a week.

Outside of Dublin, some Irish Volunteer units had also mobilised in places such as Cork, Galway and Coalisland, but because of Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding order, most of them returned home without fighting

In Dublin 64 of the rebels were killed, along with 132 British soldiers and around 230 civilians. Public opinion was initially unsympathetic to the rebels due to the loss of life and the destruction of public buildings in Dublin. In Newry, the Nationalist Frontier Sentinel newspaper described the events in Dublin as a “Wicked and Insane Movement”.

After the execution of the key leaders of the Rising, including Patrick Pearse and James Connolly and mass arrests of IRB members and Sinn Féin supporters, there was an upsurge of sympathy among many of the Nationalist population.