1916 Rising: ‘People don’t live history. They just live their lives’

If you walk along Dublin’s Mount Street on a regular basis, or take the Luas home from Middle Abbey Street, the chances are you don’t even glance at the buildings around you, let alone think about what might have taken place there in the past.

Open Joseph EA Connell jnr's new book, however, and you will look at the city in a whole new way. As the author explains, Dublin Rising 1916 is not a history of the Rising but a self-guided "awakening for the reader".

“Mine’s a very localised book, and that’s the reason why it’s split up into postal codes,” Connell says. “People can take a look at the maps, which are quite functional, and say, ‘I am here and this is what happened around me, in this area’.”

Connell was born in Colorado, spent most of his life in California and now lives in Florida. You’d never guess from his courteous, softly spoken manner that he once played football for the San Francisco 49ers, nor that he was assigned to the 82nd Airborne division of the US army, which specialises in parachute assault operations.

The football left Connell with dodgy knees, and due to an ocular condition he also wears an eyepatch. None of which holds him back in the slightest. A couple of years ago he walked into an American hospital and said: “I have two kidneys. Would you like one?”

Having subjected him to a battery of physical – and, more to the point, psychological – tests, the medical authorities accepted his donation with alacrity.

With Irish antecedents on his father’s side, Connell first came to Ireland as a child, in the 1960s. “I remember my parents taking me to museums and the guide would be saying, ‘This is the picture of so and so’. And I’d say, ‘Well, what are those medals for?’ I’ve always been very interested in the little things.”

New to the city

On subsequent visits he became particularly interested in the Rising. “I wasn’t so familiar with the city at that time, and I’d ask people where things happened, and they had no idea. I started reading the histories, but I wasn’t really finding the stories of the people.

“It was never my intention to write a book. I started writing for myself in a loose-leaf notebook; kept going and going and going. Then I couldn’t find things myself, so I had to go back and categorise it.”

Since then Connell has published several books on the period, is a columnist for History Ireland and has a regular spot on Newstalk's Talking History show.

His passion for 20th-century Irish history is ongoing; but it’s always the stories of the people behind the headlines which interest him most. Is there one , that, for him encapsulates the Rising?

“There was a lady who was shot in the hand as she was carrying her child, and the child was killed,” he describes. “The lady received £40 compensation because she couldn’t work because of her hand. She received no compensation for the loss of her child.”

When the violence first broke out on Easter Monday, Dubliners treated the action as a kind of street theatre. “But as it went on and the fires started,” he says, “things changed.”

In order to recreate the fighting street by street, house by house, Connell needed to do meticulous research. And he had to imagine the Dublin of the day.

A very different city? He gestures at the leafy groups of trees along O’Connell Street.

“In 1916 they weren’t there. There was no cover; you could see three or four hundred yards down the street.” This is why both sides were able to shoot at each other. “It was terrible then – and it’s still terrible fighting on an urban battlefield now.”

Connell doesn’t agree with the popular view of 1916 as an unmitigated disaster for the city, and for Ireland.

Public opinion

With his military training, Connell is well placed to make judgments about combat tactics.

“The strategy of the Rising was very, very flawed. They weren’t going to beat the British, and they knew it. They wanted to hold off and get worldwide public opinion on their side; that wasn’t going to happen.

“But if you break it down district by district, position by position, tactically they did a very good job and they should be commended for this because the amateur Irish did a better job than the professional British. They really did.”

“People don’t live history. They just live their lives, and the history enfolds around their lives. That’s all it is. They were ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”