Easter Uprising, 1st World War and my Grandad,

The Proclamation to the people of Ireland.

During the first world war there was an insurrection in Dublin and Pádraig (Patrick) Pearse, one of the leaders, declared independence for Ireland on the steps of the General Post Office. There is the proclamation above.

The British, who ruled Ireland at the time, attacked the insurgents with their 'long range guns' and ever since, the rebellion has been commemorated in Dublin each Easter.

The date was actually Easter Monday 23^rd April 1916, it was organised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood and called The Easter Rising (in Irish Éirí Amach na Cásca).

Apart from knowing their catechism, the Irish know the names of all the heroes from that Easter week, and the names of the fifteen men who were executed by firing squad very soon afterwards.

Pearse was one of the first to be executed on May 3^rd 1916; 9 days after the start of the insurrection.

One of those shot was the poet Joseph Mary Plunket who was suffering from consumption, at the time, and was married in the prison chapel just before his execution. He didn't write any poems, as far as I'm aware, about the insurrection (maybe he didn't have time) but some of his poems have a feeling of death about them.

His father was a Papal Count which is why his Christian names are of a saint; one male and one female as is the custom for Papal Counts.

W. B. Yeats wrote the poem 16 Dead Men which dealt with the executions (the 16^th man was Sir Roger Casement who smuggled arms into Ireland) and his masterpiece of a poem Easter, 1916.

I asked my mother one day what grandad did in the uprising and she said “Ah – he was away getting gassed. Fighting for the British.”

She said it as if the sole purpose for going to France was to be gassed. But that's what happened. I asked my grandad what he knew about the Easter Uprising and he said very little.

He said the officer called him to one side and told him that there was a bit of trouble in 'your country.'

Thousands of Irish men were away fighting with the British whilst their comrades were at home fighting against them. It is the dichotomy the Irish have found themselves in over and over again - for example I believe they were on both sides during the American Civil War.

The 'bit of trouble in your country' was followed by the civil war and when independence was finally won, a movement of Unionists wanted the north to be partitioned away from the south and stay colonised by Britain. It is generally called Ulster but Ulster is made up of nine counties and there are only six in the so called Northern Ireland – a phrase my mother never used, by the way; she called it The North of Ireland.

If the whole of Ulster was to stay British it might have meant a majority of Catholics so they dropped Cavan, Donegal and Monaghan and left them in the Republic: talk about Gerrymandering. So the north were left with one Catholic county – Derry.

There is a pub in the San Fernando Valley called the 32 Counties - that's how many counties there are in the whole of Ireland so you know where their sympathies lie.

If you are wondering how this all started, and how there were, or are, so many protestants in the north, you have to go right back to the time of King James I, who sent a contingent of Scottish protestants to the north of Ireland. This was called The Jacobean Plantation of Ulster and a significant amount of land was set aside for Scottish courtiers and servants.

I don't know how many were sent over but it was about the same number who went on The Mayflower to America a short time later. I think the population of America speaks for itself but Catholicism still dominates most of Ireland.

However, The Jacobean Plantation of Ulster is recognised as the biggest ever real estate rip off.

But back to 1916; back to my grandad fighting with the British in the trenches; an Irishman aged about 20 when he went off in 1916. He was a married man with at least 2 children – my mother born in 1914 and her brother Tom – and was finding it hard to manage so he joined up.

I didn't ask him much about it, as I wasn't that interested in that war back then, but I pressed further about the atmosphere he found in Dublin upon his return from the Great War. He said he didn't get on well with his brother who had fought on the other side in Dublin.

He would go to the pub with his two brothers and the three of them were from different organisations; one was in the IRA the other in the IRB and my grandad was an ex (gassed) British soldier as far as they were concerned; it didn't stop them drinking with each other though.

My grandad would tell me of the days before he went away and he would say that the owl-ones (women) would stand on the street with their long frocks and pee in to the drains; you knew when this was happening, he said, as you could see them opening their legs slightly and standing for a few minutes – very handy for them too, now I think.

Here we are 96 years after the Amach na Cásca; Ireland, Southern Ireland, the Irish Republic, is ruled from Dublin but the country is still partitioned. The people up there call themselves Irish but they are still under the jurisdiction of London.