Tired of being under the clutches of British rule for centuries, a group of Irish nationalists came together and decided to launch a revolt on April 24, 1916. Since the 18th century, the British had enacted a series of harsh anti-Catholic restrictions that didn’t sit well especially with the Irish Catholics. Also in the 18th century, 1.5 million Irish were made to starve during the Potato Famine of 1845-1848.
Thus, under the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organisation, the group formed the Irish Republican Brotherhood Military Council.
The insurrection was earlier planned for Good Friday, April 21, 1916, but the group eventually decided on Easter Sunday, April 23, 1916. However, upon hearing that a ship carrying German weaponry was captured, the Military Council decided to carry out the insurrection on Monday, April 24, 1916, following an emergency meeting.
Led by Patrick Pearse , the group of nationalists rioted and attacked British provincial government headquarters across Dublin and seized the Irish capital’s General Post Office. Following this, they proclaimed the independence of Ireland. But this victory was shortlived. The British soon resonded with a counter attack later that day and by April 29, the uprising had been crushed and the leaders captured. Over 250 civilians lost their lives in the incident while over 2,000 civilians were injured. WB Yeats wrote his famous poem “A Terrible Beauty” after he heard about the rising. “All changed, changed utterly a terrible beauty is born.”
Given the losses suffered, the uprising was at first considered as a betrayal by many Irish citizens and the 1916 leaders who were eventually captured and imprisoned were spat at on their way to jail. However when the executions on them began, the national mood changed. The executed leaders were held up as martyrs of the Irish freedom struggle and on the whole the uprising set in motion the desire for establishing an independent Irish republic. By 1921, 26 of Ireland’s 32 counties won independence with the declaration of the Irish Free State which then became an independent republic in 1949.
However with six northeastern counties of the Emerald Isle still a part of the United Kingdom, a few nationalists reorganized themselves into the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to continue their struggle for full Irish independence. But in the late 1960s things took a violent turn when Catholics in Northern Ireland began to riot against the Irish Protestants over discriminating British policies. Terrorists bombings and attacks ensued throughout late 1990s as a peace remained elusive. However in July 1995, the IRA announced its members would give up all their weapons and pursue the group’s objectives through peaceful means. By end of 2006, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that the IRA’s military campaign to end British rule was over.
APRIL 25
It remains as one of the most widely read classics till date but it was on April 25, 1719 that Daniel Defoe’s fictional work The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe was first published.The tale about a shipwrecked sailor who together with his Man Friday spent 28 years on a deserted island was first mistakenly thought to be a travelogue about the author’s own experience. However it was later it revealed that the story is infact based on the experiences of shipwreck victims and of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailor who spent four years on a small island off the coast of South America in the early 1700s.
A middle-class Englishman, Daniel Defoe was earlier a small merchant who went bankrupt in 1692 and turned to political writing to support himself. It was only after he was almost 60 years that he turned to writing fiction. The success of the novel spawned an independent literary genre of it’s own known as Robinsonade which is viewed as survivalist fiction.
