Witnesses to history

Fintan O'Toole explains the background to the supplement and how it was compiled

When we talk of the Easter Rising, as we will do in this 90th anniversary year and even more so on the 100th anniversary in 2016, we are talking about two quite distinct things. One of them is, in the simplest sense, a myth. It is a story to which great significance has been added by the meanings that people wish to read into it. This Easter Rising is, depending on one's point of view, the founding act of a democratic Irish State, a historic act of treachery, a mandate for any unelected group to take up arms in the name of the Irish Republic, a supreme expression of unselfish idealism. It is bitterly contested, both by those who wish to lay claim to its legacy and by those who abhor it. Those arguments are, however, not really arguments about the past. They are arguments about the present and the future. One's view of this Easter Rising is determined very largely by one's view on other subjects: on the Northern Ireland conflict, on nationalism and socialism, on the awkward relationship between the terrorist and the freedom fighter.

The other Easter Rising is an event. It is a complex set of events that happened to real people at a specific time and in specific places. Those people had fears and aspirations, expectations and uncertainties. They lived with upheavals that are very hard for us to imagine, in the midst of the bloodiest conflict the world had ever known. They found themselves in a time of deep instability. Huge technological changes - radio, X-rays, cinema, telephones, audio recording, aeroplanes - were altering the ways in which people understood the physical world around them. Slaughter was the new norm in Europe, and it was happening on an industrial scale. Within a year or two of the Easter Rising, a series of vast empires - the Russian, the Ottoman, the Austro-Hungarian and the German - would crash and burn.

In this feverish, violent context, people on the island of Ireland were no better and no worse than those in other European countries. They reacted to their times by joining mass movements - for workers' rights, for the rights of women, for a Gaelic revival, for Irish independence, against Irish independence - that gave them a sense of purpose and belonging.

They felt that history was turning and that they could play their part in shaping it. They protested, they marched, they drilled and, when the call came in 1914, the men joined armies in vast numbers and went to the battlefields to kill each other.

This past is another country and the Easter Rising is part of it. Even if it helped to shape us, it is in some respects immensely distant from us. Yet the people who took part in it on all sides were people like us, with the same basic feelings. We know what happened after the Rising, but at the time, they did not know what the outcome of their actions would be.

The Catholic nationalist soldiers who joined the British army because their Catholic nationalist leaders told them to do so for Ireland's sake didn't know that within five years they would be seen as traitors to Ireland. The policemen of the unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police or the armed Royal Irish Constabulary, most of them Catholics and nationalists, didn't know that they would come to be seen as men who occupied the wrong side of history. The rebels themselves didn't know on Easter Monday 1916 even what the following days, never mind what the following decades, would bring. Were they going out for yet another set of routine manoeuvres or was this for real? Would the Germans invade to help them or not? Would they hold out for a day or a month? Would they be revered as heroes or damned as fools?

The citizens of Dublin - who, after all, bore the brunt of the violence - started out with two overwhelming questions: who the hell are these people and what do they think they're doing?

The myth and the event were, of course, intertwined from the start. The leaders of the Rising may have begun with the notion of staging a real military revolt that would overthrow British rule, but by Easter Monday, when the hoped-for German aid had failed to materialise and a countermanding order had weakened their mobilisation, they knew that this was an impossibility. They settled for a symbolic act, a dramatic gesture. Many of them had written plays and they saw the Rising to some extent as a huge piece of theatre, the live enactment of Ireland's desire for independence. The event was primed to explode into myth, and indeed, within a short period it did.

AND, AT A DISTANCE of 90 years, the myth has all but occluded the event. The Rising's symbolic meaning gets far more attention than its lived reality. We tend to forget that it was not, after all, a piece of theatre. Real people put their lives on the line to stage the Rising or to stop it. Real people got caught up, against their will, in the destruction of their city. Real people suffered, died, and were bereaved.

The aim of this supplement is to return, insofar as possible, to that lived reality of the Rising. It is not an argument about the Rising's meaning. It does not express views about whether it was right or wrong, whether it was an act of heroic self-sacrifice or of criminal folly, whether it left Ireland a legacy of freedom and democracy or of division and zealotry. Stephen Collins sets out, without comment, the claims of various political parties to be the true heirs of the women and men of 1916. But the aim of this supplement is not to adjudicate between those claims. It deals with the Rising not as a myth but as an event - the most astonishing and dramatic single event in Ireland in the last 200 years.

What we've tried to do here is to return to the people who took part in or witnessed this event. This can be done now in a way that was not possible on any previous major anniversary. In the last few years, the Bureau of Military History has made available through the National Archives the first-hand testimonies it gathered from survivors of the Rising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These are remarkable documents, superbly put together by the military historians, who managed to construct clear first-hand accounts without losing the sense of the individual voices of their sources. They are, of course, memories recorded at least 30 years after the event - like people now recording what they did in the 1970s - and memories are inevitably shaped by a knowledge of subsequent events.

But they are nonetheless remarkably vivid and frank - perhaps because the interviewees could speak or write in the knowledge that their accounts would be sealed until the end of the 20th century. We have drawn on some of these accounts (including material that has never been published before) and supplemented them with contemporary letters and diaries to give a flavour of events as they unfolded from day to day. This day-by-day narrative is not just a way of telling the story. It is also closer to the way in which people actually experienced the Rising, getting from one chaotic day to another, not knowing what would happen next or even what was happening now in any part of the city or the country beyond their own immediate location.

The Rising had an anarchic feel: the rebels' plans went awry from the start, the authorities were unprepared, and in the first days the citizens, out of touch, were stunned. The streets had the feel of a mad carnival, a surreal cityscape of revelling looters, dead horses, haphazard barricades, a mad and murderous army captain, an exotic countess, a weird jumble of exhilaration and terror. Wild rumours took the place of hard facts.

It is this texture we have tried to recreate. We have tried on the one hand to bring the reader closer to that week, to give a sense of the intimate reality of a big event in what was then a small city. We have tried, on the other hand, to attain a kind of distance, to allow the reader to stand back from the often passionate arguments about the rights and wrongs of Easter 1916 and to sense what that momentous event might have felt like for those who, bychoice or accident, were sucked into it. Above all, we have tried to remember one thing: that before they were saints or sinners, heroes or villains, those involved were human beings animated, as we are, by hope and hatred, by humour and horror, by the desire to shape history and by the need to survive it.


This supplement was compiled and co-ordinated by Kieran Fagan.