WHY IS 1916 AN IMPORTANT DATE IN IRISH HISTORY?

Easter Monday, 1916

For hundreds of years the Irish people had suffered greatly under English rule. There had been many unsuccessful attempts to defeat the English. 

On Easter Monday 1916, a few hundred men and woman took over key buildings in Dublin City. A proclamation was read outside the General Post Office in O’Connell Street, declaring Ireland’s right to freedom. 

It was like a Greek tragedy. The leaders were mostly poets, thinkers, men of culture. They hoped for a miracle but they must have known before they marched out that they couldn’t win. Padraig Pearse, one of the leaders, forecast his own death in his poem A Vision. He drew his strength to go on partly from a religious belief in the power of blood sacrifice such as that of Jesus Christ on Calvary. Events proved him right. 

More information: Easter 1916

The majority of the people in 1916 were no longer oppressed. They didn’t want the trauma of a war. They knew that Home Rule, regional Government such as Wales and Scotland have, was a certainly as soon as the First World War was over. Farmers had won the right to own their land, there was religious freedom and the Irish language and culture were experiencing a tremendous revival. 

At first the Easter Rising, as it is now called, was as unsuccessful as all previous risings. Within a week the leaders had surrendered and it all seemed to be over. Then the executions began. As fifteen leaders were executed in ones and twos at intervals of days, the people grew shocked and angry. Nationalist feeling was awakened where it had been dormant. There was no looking back until Independence was achieved in 1921.

 Source: Why do the Irish? by Fiana Griffin

I am come of the seed of the people, the people that sorrow;
Who have no treasure but hope,
No riches laid up but a memory of an ancient glory,
My mother bore me in bondage, in bondage my mother was born,
I am of the blood of serfs;
The children with whom I have played, 

the men and women with whom I have eaten
Have had masters over them, have been under the lash of masters,
and though gentle, have served churls.

Padraig Pearse

MÍCHEÁL Ó COILEÁIN: IRISH COURAGE TO FREEDOM

Michael Collins

Mícheál Ó Coileáin (1890-1922) was a soldier and politician who was a leading figure in the struggle for Irish independence in the early 20th century. Collins was an Irish revolutionary leader, politician, Minister for Finance, Director of Information, and Teachta Dála (TD) for Cork South in the First Dáil of 1919, Adjutant General, Director of Intelligence, and Director of Organisation and Arms Procurement for the IRA, President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood from November 1920 until his death, and member of the Irish delegation during the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations. 

Subsequently, he was both Chairman of the Provisional Government and Commander-in-chief of the National Army. Collins was shot and killed in an ambush in August 1922 during the Irish Civil War.

Born in Woodfield, Sam's Cross, now the Michael Collins Birthplace, near Clonakilty, County Cork, Collins was the third son and youngest of eight children. Most biographies give his date of birth as 16 October 1890, but his tombstone cites 12 October 1890. 

The struggle for Home Rule, along with labour unrest, had led to the formation in 1913 of two major nationalist paramilitary groups who would launch the Easter Rising: the Irish Citizen Army was established by James Connolly and the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), to protect strikers from the Dublin Metropolitan Police during the 1913 Dublin Lockout. 

Michael Collins in a meeting

The Irish Volunteers were created in the same year by the IRB and other nationalists in response to the formation of the Ulster Volunteers (UVF), an Ulster loyalist body pledged to oppose Home Rule by force. 

Collins became one of the leading figures in the post-Rising independence movement spearheaded by Arthur Griffith, editor and publisher of the main nationalist newspaper The United Irishman, which Collins had read avidly as a boy. 

Like many senior Sinn Féin representatives Collins was elected as an MP, for Cork South, with the right to sit in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom in London. Unlike their rivals in the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Sinn Féin MPs had announced that they would not take their seats in Westminster but instead would set up an Irish Parliament in Dublin. 

On 22 August 1922, during the Irish Civil War, Michael Collins was killed in an ambush here by anti-treaty IRA forces while travelling in convoy from Bandon. The ambush was planned in a farmhouse in Béal na Bláth close to The Diamond Bar.

Brendan Behan wrote the poem The laughing boy lamenting the death of Collins. This poem was translated into Greek in 1961 by Vasilis Rotas. In October of the same year, Mikis Theodorakis composed the song Tο γελαστό παιδί, The laughing boy, using Rotas' translation. The song was recorded by Maria Farantouri in 1966.

More information: BBC

 Early this morning, I signed my death warrant.

Michael Collins