Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland by Quentin Outram & Keith Laybourn

Author:Quentin Outram & Keith Laybourn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

© The Author(s) 2018

Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn (eds.)Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Irelandhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62905-6_7

7. Making Irish Martyrs: The Impact and Legacy of the Execution of the Leaders of the Easter Rising, 1916

Mark McCarthy1

(1)Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Galway, Ireland

Mark McCarthy

Email: [email protected]

The disproportionateness of power that resulted from the British conquest of Ireland proved to be a recipe for intermittent political violence, as exemplified by the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. Its suppression resulted in the abolition of the parliament which had sat in Dublin since 1692, following the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland under the Act of Union, 1800. Further rebellions against British rule were waged by Robert Emmet in 1803, the Young Irelanders in 1848 and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) or Fenians in 1867. As in 1798, these all ended in failure. The Irish experience of armed conflict, however, saw the emergence of a political rhetoric of separatism. According to William J. McCormack, this typically invoked ‘heroes’ who ‘were inheritors of French revolutionary ideas’. Among the names commemorated were: Theobald Wolfe Tone, who took his life whilst in captivity in 1798; Robert Emmet, who was executed after the rebellion in 1803; and the three Manchester Martyrs—William Philip Allen, Michael Larkin and Michael O’Brien—who were executed for the killing of a policeman in 1867. By means of nurturing ‘the mystique of banditry’, nineteenth-century subversive organisations ‘became “represented” by figures from the past, whose activities … conformed to the notion of “dying for Ireland” or “giving their lives”’. 1

There were others, however, who sought to reimagine the future through constitutional means. One of these was John Redmond, who became the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) in 1900. This party was on the verge of obtaining some degree of independence from Britain on 11 April 1912, when the Third Home Rule Bill was introduced in the House of Commons. It offered an Irish parliament with control over domestic affairs, which would remain inferior to Westminster. This prospect was strongly opposed by Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party. On 28 September 1912, around 250,000 unionists pledged their opposition to Home Rule by signing the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant at Belfast City Hall. Tensions increased after Carson established the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), with James Craig, on 31 January 1913. In a sign that it would resist the introduction of Home Rule by force, the UVF imported 24,600 rifles through Larne, County Antrim between 24 and 25 April 1913.

In response, a decision was made to establish the Irish Volunteers, to defend Home Rule, at a meeting in Wynn’s Hotel, Dublin on 11 November 1913. This mobilisation of nationalists in support of Home Rule, as Charles Townsend has noted, enabled republican activists from the IRB to ‘move from the sidelines to the centre of events’. Although the majority of the rank-and-file membership of the Irish Volunteers were probably Home Rulers rather than separatists, the organisation’s executive was dominated by the IRB who now ‘had their hands on something like an army’.

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