AFTERMATH
The British Army reported casualties of 116 dead, 368 wounded and 9 missing. Sixteen policemen died, and 29 were wounded. Rebel and civilian casualties were 318 dead and 2,217 wounded. The Volunteers and ICA recorded 64 killed in action, but otherwise Irish casualties were not divided into rebels and civilians.
General Maxwell quickly signalled his intention “to arrest all dangerous Sinn Feiners,” including “those who have taken an active part in the movement although not in the present rebellion,”[45] reflecting the popular belief that Sinn Féin, a separatist organisation that was neither militant nor republican, was behind the Rising.
A total of 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested, although most were subsequently released. In attempting to arrest members of the Kent family in County Cork on 2 May, a Head Constable was shot dead in a gun battle. Richard Kent was also killed, and Thomas and William Kent were arrested.
In a series of courts martial beginning on 2 May, ninety people were sentenced to death. Fifteen of those (including all seven signatories of the Proclamation) had their sentences confirmed by Maxwell and were executed by firing squad between 3 May and 12 May (among them the seriously-wounded Connolly, shot while tied to a chair due to a shattered ankle). Not all of those executed were leaders: Willie Pearse described himself as "a personal attaché to my brother, Patrick Pearse"; John MacBride had not even been aware of the Rising until it began, but had fought against the British in the Boer War fifteen years before; Thomas Kent did not come out at all—he was executed for the killing of a police officer during the raid on his house the week after the Rising. The most prominent leader to escape execution was Eamon de Valera, Commandant of the 3rd Battalion.
A Royal Commission was set up to enquire into the causes of the Rising. It began hearings on 18 May under the chairmanship of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. The Commission heard evidence from Sir Matthew Nathan, Augustine Birrell, Lord Wimborne, Sir Neville Chamberlain (Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary), General Lovick Friend, Major Ivor Price of Military Intelligence and others. The report, published on 26 June, was critical of the Dublin administration, saying that "Ireland for several years had been administered on the principle that it was safer and more expedient to leave the law in abeyance if collision with any faction of the Irish people could thereby be avoided."Birrell and Nathan had resigned immediately after the Rising. Wimborne had also reluctantly resigned, but was re-appointed, and Chamberlain resigned soon after.
The Leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were buried in the old prison yard of Arbour Hill prison. The memorial was designed by G. McNicholl, the Proclamation of 1916 is inscribed on the wall in both Irish and English.
The president of the courts-martial was Charles Blackadder.
1,480 men were interned in England and Wales under Regulation 14B of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, many of whom, like Arthur Griffith, had little or nothing to do with the affair. Camps such as Frongoch internment camp became “Universities of Revolution” where future leaders like Michael Collins, Terence McSwiney and J. J. O'Connell began to plan the coming struggle for independence. Roger Casement was tried in London for high treason and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 3 August.
According to Peter Berresford Ellis it has become firmly set in people’s minds that the Dublin people jeered the prisoners as they were led off to imprisonment, and that this description of how Dublin viewed the insurrection has almost become written in stone. He suggests that it was certainly a view that the imperial propaganda of the time wanted to impress on everyone,and that newspapers were unlikely to publish anything to the contrary.
Examples cited by Berresford Ellis include, Dorothy Macardle, writing in her The Irish Republic, "The people had not risen. Some had cursed the insurgents." Thomas M. Coffey in Agony at Easter: The 1916 Irish Uprising writes, "The defeated insurgents quickly learnt how most Dubliners still felt about their rebellion when a raucous crowd came pouring out of the side streets to accost them ... The flood of insults was so fierce and vitriolic it hit the marching prisoners with an almost physical impact."
According to Berresford Ellis this perspective became less tenable when a long obscure eyewitness account of the period resurfaced in 1991. Canadian journalist and writer, Frederick Arthur McKenzie, was one of the best-known and reputable war correspondents of his day according to Berresford Ellis. He was one of two Canadian journalists who arrived in Dublin with the English reinforcements sent to put down the insurrection. McKenzie had no sympathy for the Irish ‘rebels’ and German sympathizers, as he perceived them, and was no anti-imperialist.
McKenzie published The Irish Rebellion: What happened and Why, with C. Arthur Pearson in London in 1916, he notes, "I have read many accounts of public feeling in Dublin in these days. They are all agreed that the open and strong sympathy of the mass of the population was with the British troops. That this was in the better parts of the city, I have no doubt, but certainly what I myself saw in the poorer districts did not confirm this. It rather indicated that there was a vast amount of sympathy with the rebels, particularly after the rebels were defeated." Berresford Ellis then cites a passage by McKenzie describing how he watched as people were waving and cheering as a regiment approached, and that he commented to his companion they were cheering the soldiers. Noticing then that they were escorting Irish prisoners, he realised that they were actually cheering the rebels. The rebels he says were walking in military formation and were loudly and triumphantly singing a rebel song. McKenzie reports speaking to a group of men and women at street corners, "shure, we cheer them" said a woman, "why wouldn’t we? Aren't they our own flesh and blood." Dressed in khaki McKenzie was mistaken for a British soldier as he went about Dublin back streets were people cursed him openly, and "cursed all like me strangers in their city." J.W Rowath, a British officer had a comparable experience to McKenzie and observed that "crowds of men and women greeted us with raised fists and curses."
Brian Barton & Micheal Foy cite Frank Robbins of the Irish Citizen Army who records seeing a group of Dubliners gathered to cheer the prisoners while being marched into Richmond barracks.They also report de Valera’s surrendered Boland’s mill, where crowds lined the pavement in Grand Canal Street and Hogan Place and pleaded with the insurgents to take shelter in their houses rather than surrender. Foy and Barton concluded "Public attitudes locally were not uniformly hostile in an area which the police had come to regard as increasingly militant in the months before the Rising. Some of the British soldiers who fought there noted a strong antipathy towards them." At the South Dublin Union, Major de Courcy Wheeler noted that there was no hostility from the people towards the insurgents: "It was perfectly plain that all their admiration was for the heroes who had surrendered."
This account flatly contradicts most of the contemporary accounts, says Berresford Ellis.This is a view shared by Michael Foy and Brian Barton also highlighting expressions of sympathy from the people who watched the prisoners being marched away. Quoting the diary of John Clarke a shopkeeper who writes "Thus ends the last attempt for poor old Ireland. What noble fellows. The cream of the land. None of your corner-boy class."
Foy and Barton felt the contradictions could be modified by other factors. They examined the routes which the British soldiers took the prisoners. Michael Mallin’s column of prisoners they say were marched two miles to Richmond barracks through a "strongly loyalist and Protestant artisan class district." It was from this district that the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and other Irish regiments of the British army drew their recruits. It was around Richmond barracks they say, that people lived who were economically dependent on the military. Another aspect they raise was the degree of hostility from Dublin women whose sons were serving in the army in France. They note that some priests at Church Street rebuked the insurgent prisoners and wounded. However the generally accepted account of the population of Dublin being uniformly hostile to the surrendered insurgents is one of the myths repeated so often as to become 'history.'
Berresford Ellis concludes that it has becomes clear that the insurrection of 1916 needs more considered research and analysis before we can be certain that it is "assessed in its rightful historical context." The assertion that it was an unpopular rising by a small band who were jeered and insulted on their defeat as they were led off into captivity is just one of "the myths that have been propagated.
General Maxwell quickly signalled his intention “to arrest all dangerous Sinn Feiners,” including “those who have taken an active part in the movement although not in the present rebellion,”[45] reflecting the popular belief that Sinn Féin, a separatist organisation that was neither militant nor republican, was behind the Rising.
A total of 3,430 men and 79 women were arrested, although most were subsequently released. In attempting to arrest members of the Kent family in County Cork on 2 May, a Head Constable was shot dead in a gun battle. Richard Kent was also killed, and Thomas and William Kent were arrested.
In a series of courts martial beginning on 2 May, ninety people were sentenced to death. Fifteen of those (including all seven signatories of the Proclamation) had their sentences confirmed by Maxwell and were executed by firing squad between 3 May and 12 May (among them the seriously-wounded Connolly, shot while tied to a chair due to a shattered ankle). Not all of those executed were leaders: Willie Pearse described himself as "a personal attaché to my brother, Patrick Pearse"; John MacBride had not even been aware of the Rising until it began, but had fought against the British in the Boer War fifteen years before; Thomas Kent did not come out at all—he was executed for the killing of a police officer during the raid on his house the week after the Rising. The most prominent leader to escape execution was Eamon de Valera, Commandant of the 3rd Battalion.
A Royal Commission was set up to enquire into the causes of the Rising. It began hearings on 18 May under the chairmanship of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst. The Commission heard evidence from Sir Matthew Nathan, Augustine Birrell, Lord Wimborne, Sir Neville Chamberlain (Inspector-General of the Royal Irish Constabulary), General Lovick Friend, Major Ivor Price of Military Intelligence and others. The report, published on 26 June, was critical of the Dublin administration, saying that "Ireland for several years had been administered on the principle that it was safer and more expedient to leave the law in abeyance if collision with any faction of the Irish people could thereby be avoided."Birrell and Nathan had resigned immediately after the Rising. Wimborne had also reluctantly resigned, but was re-appointed, and Chamberlain resigned soon after.
The Leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising were buried in the old prison yard of Arbour Hill prison. The memorial was designed by G. McNicholl, the Proclamation of 1916 is inscribed on the wall in both Irish and English.
The president of the courts-martial was Charles Blackadder.
1,480 men were interned in England and Wales under Regulation 14B of the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, many of whom, like Arthur Griffith, had little or nothing to do with the affair. Camps such as Frongoch internment camp became “Universities of Revolution” where future leaders like Michael Collins, Terence McSwiney and J. J. O'Connell began to plan the coming struggle for independence. Roger Casement was tried in London for high treason and hanged at Pentonville Prison on 3 August.
According to Peter Berresford Ellis it has become firmly set in people’s minds that the Dublin people jeered the prisoners as they were led off to imprisonment, and that this description of how Dublin viewed the insurrection has almost become written in stone. He suggests that it was certainly a view that the imperial propaganda of the time wanted to impress on everyone,and that newspapers were unlikely to publish anything to the contrary.
Examples cited by Berresford Ellis include, Dorothy Macardle, writing in her The Irish Republic, "The people had not risen. Some had cursed the insurgents." Thomas M. Coffey in Agony at Easter: The 1916 Irish Uprising writes, "The defeated insurgents quickly learnt how most Dubliners still felt about their rebellion when a raucous crowd came pouring out of the side streets to accost them ... The flood of insults was so fierce and vitriolic it hit the marching prisoners with an almost physical impact."
According to Berresford Ellis this perspective became less tenable when a long obscure eyewitness account of the period resurfaced in 1991. Canadian journalist and writer, Frederick Arthur McKenzie, was one of the best-known and reputable war correspondents of his day according to Berresford Ellis. He was one of two Canadian journalists who arrived in Dublin with the English reinforcements sent to put down the insurrection. McKenzie had no sympathy for the Irish ‘rebels’ and German sympathizers, as he perceived them, and was no anti-imperialist.
McKenzie published The Irish Rebellion: What happened and Why, with C. Arthur Pearson in London in 1916, he notes, "I have read many accounts of public feeling in Dublin in these days. They are all agreed that the open and strong sympathy of the mass of the population was with the British troops. That this was in the better parts of the city, I have no doubt, but certainly what I myself saw in the poorer districts did not confirm this. It rather indicated that there was a vast amount of sympathy with the rebels, particularly after the rebels were defeated." Berresford Ellis then cites a passage by McKenzie describing how he watched as people were waving and cheering as a regiment approached, and that he commented to his companion they were cheering the soldiers. Noticing then that they were escorting Irish prisoners, he realised that they were actually cheering the rebels. The rebels he says were walking in military formation and were loudly and triumphantly singing a rebel song. McKenzie reports speaking to a group of men and women at street corners, "shure, we cheer them" said a woman, "why wouldn’t we? Aren't they our own flesh and blood." Dressed in khaki McKenzie was mistaken for a British soldier as he went about Dublin back streets were people cursed him openly, and "cursed all like me strangers in their city." J.W Rowath, a British officer had a comparable experience to McKenzie and observed that "crowds of men and women greeted us with raised fists and curses."
Brian Barton & Micheal Foy cite Frank Robbins of the Irish Citizen Army who records seeing a group of Dubliners gathered to cheer the prisoners while being marched into Richmond barracks.They also report de Valera’s surrendered Boland’s mill, where crowds lined the pavement in Grand Canal Street and Hogan Place and pleaded with the insurgents to take shelter in their houses rather than surrender. Foy and Barton concluded "Public attitudes locally were not uniformly hostile in an area which the police had come to regard as increasingly militant in the months before the Rising. Some of the British soldiers who fought there noted a strong antipathy towards them." At the South Dublin Union, Major de Courcy Wheeler noted that there was no hostility from the people towards the insurgents: "It was perfectly plain that all their admiration was for the heroes who had surrendered."
This account flatly contradicts most of the contemporary accounts, says Berresford Ellis.This is a view shared by Michael Foy and Brian Barton also highlighting expressions of sympathy from the people who watched the prisoners being marched away. Quoting the diary of John Clarke a shopkeeper who writes "Thus ends the last attempt for poor old Ireland. What noble fellows. The cream of the land. None of your corner-boy class."
Foy and Barton felt the contradictions could be modified by other factors. They examined the routes which the British soldiers took the prisoners. Michael Mallin’s column of prisoners they say were marched two miles to Richmond barracks through a "strongly loyalist and Protestant artisan class district." It was from this district that the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and other Irish regiments of the British army drew their recruits. It was around Richmond barracks they say, that people lived who were economically dependent on the military. Another aspect they raise was the degree of hostility from Dublin women whose sons were serving in the army in France. They note that some priests at Church Street rebuked the insurgent prisoners and wounded. However the generally accepted account of the population of Dublin being uniformly hostile to the surrendered insurgents is one of the myths repeated so often as to become 'history.'
Berresford Ellis concludes that it has becomes clear that the insurrection of 1916 needs more considered research and analysis before we can be certain that it is "assessed in its rightful historical context." The assertion that it was an unpopular rising by a small band who were jeered and insulted on their defeat as they were led off into captivity is just one of "the myths that have been propagated.