Customer Reviews

Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a story of an insurrection that led ineluctably - and against all odds - to a small nation's freedom, so here's an interesting question. How does an author manage to recount this rip-roaring tale such that his description of the prologue and aftermath are fascinating, but that the chapters on the action-packed rebellion itself are incomparably dull? Answer - with passages such as this:

"B Company was to take over Westland Row Station, and send a party up the line to Tara Street Station where they were to link up with 2nd Batallion which would be in charge of the Amiens St area. C Company would occupy Boland's bakery and dispensary, together with Roberts' builders yard and Clanwilliam House; barricade the canal bridges at Grand Canal Street, Mount Street, Baggot Street and Leeson Street, where they should join up with the 4th Battallion and/or the Citizen Army. D Company was to be based at Boland's mill, and patrol the section between the bakery and the quays. F Company was to occupy Kingstown harbour. (E Company, which came from St Enda's school, was specially detailed to form part of Pearse's HQ force)"
[p. 176]

Feel yourself nodding off? I worked for some years in offices in the area described above (specifically Westland Sq and Grand Canal Quay), and I can say that even I found this description just not worth ploughing through. (Some of the placenames mentioned above are not even on the book's map.) Chapters 6-8 of this book, which cover the events of Easter Week, consist of a stupefyingly dull logbook of such details. With the reader's nose thus pressed against history's canvas, all shape and sense of the story is lost. After sixty pages of such researcher-exhibitionism, the reader emerges with no strong sense as to what was happening, who was commanding whom, how the rebels were faring throughout, or even the proximate causes of the rebellion's end. It's a shame, because the remaining nine chapters, covering the prologue and aftermath, are very readable and informative. They are also, however, debatable.

Townshend's account, for a start, scarcely brushes the surface of the long chronicle of English brutality in Ireland, and he seem to assiduously sideline the idealism and heroism of the 1916 rebels. At my home village, for example, our local football field is named after two republican soldiers who were captured by the Black & Tans: one had all his fingernails torn out with a pliers before being shot and the other was killed after being tied to the back of a van and dragged behind it. Thus locals might find it rather difficult to swallow Townshend's claim that the spirit of the age was circumscribed by 'the characteristic British values of reasonableness, compromise and non-violence' (p. 31). Far more grating, however, is the book's persistently condescending tone. Townshend speaks of 'the laxity of [Pearse's] logic' [p. 15]; the 1798 Rebellion as 'a vicious *civil* war' [p. 24]; 'the semi-hysterical Irish-American Republican culture' [p. 50]; that Major John MacBride's 'sudden promotion was certainly due to his military reputation rather than his intervening experience as a water bailiff for the [sic] Dublin Corporation, or his famous drink problem' [p. 179]. And so on.

It's certainly true that the Easter rising was characterised by great confusion and many missed opportunities, But the more one reads this book, the more one senses what Townshend is trying to disguise - that he genuinely relishes playing up minor incidents which aggregate to make the 1916 Rebels appear clownish. He explains in the preface that he chose to subtitle the book 'The Irish Rebellion' because 'that term - "rebels" - carries a charge of romantic glamour which was wholly appropriate' [p. xviii]. With that in mind, it's surprising to find that this dryly written book manages to drain all sense of heroism, self-sacrifice and tragedy from a story that's suffused with all of these qualities. Pearse, Clarke and MacDonagh, for example, are shot rather matter-of-factly in one sentence [p. 279].

Townshend's analytical skills tend to break down during his peroration. It is a captious and empty point to make, for instance, that 'the planners of 1916 had shown little if any interest in alienating northern Unionist opinion, and the possibility that their action might cement the partition of Ireland' [p. 349]. As is well known, the Unionists responded to the abolition of the House of Lords veto (which had blocked two prior Home Rule bills but now could not block the forthcoming one) by forming themselves into a massively armed and aggressive militia. The leaders of 1916 - idealists all - could hardly have been expected to take on the might and materiel of the British Empire on one front whilst reaching some sort of 'compromise' with the most extreme adherents to that Empire on another front. Asking Irish nationalism to find an accommodation with such militant anti-nationalism would be asking rather too much.

Morover, it's easy to see which of the two political entities is in the better position today - the Republic is independent and its long-term future is solidly secure, while the Northern Unionists, still clingingly dolefully to an anachronistic relationship (featuring no mutual warmth) with a post-Imperial Britain, will be outpopulated By Irish nationalists within decades and are merely prolonging the inevitable. Townshend nevers chides the Unionists for failing to consider the long-term prospects of cementing a partition in which their half was always going to become the far less viable political entity.

Additionally, Townshend does not trouble to rebut the revisionist Francis Shaw's breathtaking claim that Home Rule was 'a realistic and achievable goal' - a claim which completely ignores (i) the manner in which Ireland's 'internal majority' in favour of Home Rule always found themselves frustrated in Westminster by a four-to-one 'external majority' against; and (ii) whether or not it was culturally desirable in the first place. It might plausibly be argued that the volcano of Irish nationalism which burst through following 1916 was hardly 'created' by the event itself, but had been bubbling beneath the surface all along. How we are supposed to square this with the plausibility of perpetual subordination to England is unclear. Not only did the British fail to kill Home Rule with kindness, the 1916 Rising demonstrated that Home Rule, even if granted, would not have gone far enough.

Nevertheless, read as a desiccated factual account this book is certainly informative about the causes and consequences of the Rising. It deserves credit for placing the insurrection within the context of World War I, which few histories of this period seem to trouble with. However, it must be said that the centre has fallen out of the book: the account of Easter week itself is detailed to the point of incomprehensibility, and thus the most exciting part of the story has been left poorly told.

If you are looking for a British view of the Irish Rising of 1916 this is the book. British historian Townshend minimizes the long Irish struggle for independence and puts forth the idea that it was not always a cohesive movement - this seems to be his way of negating previous efforts or even trying to suggest its invalidity. But what long drawn out independence movement ever was cohesive for hundreds of years? He even takes up the British narrative on the Land War, for example, and states that the Irish tenants "exaggerated" their plight. Yeah, right. The British government reports said the same about the Irish Famine. Parnell's downfall gets dismissed as displaying "reckless defiance of Victorian public morality".

As another reviewer states he highlights what are small incidents in the actions of the 1916 men and women - MacDonagh "looked strained" and Connolly sometimes uncertain over military actions - and makes them look confused and clumsy. This is the main way he tries to discredit them. In his Epilogue he defends the "revisionists" historians and attacks Seamus Deane for asserting that "revisionism was not an attempt to re-write value free history but in fact was an anti-nationalist, Unionist project." Townshend goes beyond revisionism to a British view of Irish history. And the Irish don't come off too well.

I wouldn't take this book seriously for anyone looking for a cogent read on 1916.

Charles Townshend has written a fairly good book on the Irish Easter Rebellion of 1916. Meticulously researched, and quite informative; any reader interested by the events will enjoy it.

And yet on a higher level this book won't completely satisfy its readers, because it is essentially a political and military history of events that were far more than simple matter of politics and military science. What brought men and women to stage an uprising that they knew couldn't succeed, and would lead to their leaders' executions? Was it patriotism? Was it idealism? Was it frustration with their lot? Such questions make it clear that the events of that Easter week are not the exclusive domain of historians, but also the domain of dramatists and psychologists.

These clear gaps brought to mind Macaulay's writing about the Irish: "The Irish were distinguished by qualities which tend to make men interesting rather than prosperous. They were an ardent and impetuous race, easily moved to tears or to laughter, to fury or to love. Alone among the nations of northern Europe they had the susceptibility, the vivacity, the natural turn for acting and rhetoric, which are indigenous on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea...The genius, with which her aboriginal inhabitants were largely endowed showed itself as yet only in ballads which wild and rugged as they were, seemed to the judging eye of Spenser to contain a portion of the pure gold of poetry."

A book that would adequately capture this element of Irish culture would almost certainly be an amazing book, as it is, this is "only" a good book.

This book was very informative about the history of the Irish "Troubles." The information was well researched and it flowed in such a way as to make it easier to understand without being overly simplistic.
At times the military information was so detailed that the flow was slowed a little. This is, however, the most concise book I've read on the subject and leaves the reader with a more comfortable understanding of the basis of a very complex political issue.

Few events in modern Irish history are as pivotal as the "Easter Rising", the dramatic seizure of the General Post Office and other parts of Dublin that marked the declaration of the Irish Republic. Yet for decades the event has never received the thorough examination it deserves, due in part, as Charles Townshend observes in his preface to this fine book, to the long-standing reticence to release the oral histories of the event contained within the archives of the Bureau of Military History. Their release in 2003 provides the best opportunity yet to study the uprising, and Townshend has risen to the challenge by providing a penetrating examination of the origins and the impact of the Rising.

Townshend traces the origins of the Rising to the development and definition of Irish identity in the late nineteenth century. Here the breadth of his examination is immediately apparent, as he moves beyond the political to study the role that the cultural movement known as the Celtic rising played in inspiring Irish nationalists to challenge British rule. A key figure bridging between the cultural and the political was Patrick Pearse, the president of the provisional republic claimed in the aftermath of the seizure of the General Post Office. By delving into Pearse's past as a nationalist consumed with freeing Ireland not only from British political domination but its cultural domination as well, he illustrates just how important the cultural component was in inspiring the nationalists and driving them towards action.

Yet Irish politics in those years was dominated not by nationalism but the issue of Home Rule. Here Townshend focuses on the reaction to the Home Rule measure in Ireland, which catalyzed Unionist resistance in the north to the devolution of Irish government. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, in turn, inspired southern nationalists to form their own armed group, the Irish Volunteers, a movement quickly subsumed by the Irish Parliamentary Party into their organization. Yet the outbreak of the First World War and the decision by Irish parliamentary leader John Redmond to support the war split the Irish Volunteers and came to undermine his standing.

The nationalist Irish Volunteers that broke away from main group were themselves divided over the next step, however. As they gained in standing with the growing unpopularity of Redmond's decision, Pearse and other members sought to take advantage of Britain's difficulty to throw off her rule of Ireland. Given the attitudes of the Volunteer leadership, such planning had to take place in secrecy, and one of the great strengths of this book is Townshend's laudable effort to wade into the confused jumble of half-hidden events to detail the evolution of the Rising. What was initially envisioned as a nationwide rebellion quickly became a Dublin-centric event that would take advantage of a planned Easter Sunday mobilization to strike against British rule. The last-minute efforts by the nationalist Volunteer leadership to head off the rebellion, though, resulted in a confused and only partial assemblage of Volunteers on the following day.

The three chapters on the Rising itself form the heart of Townshend's book, and they recount an event characterized by confusion on both sides. The poor preparations and questionable decisions by the rebels were equaled only by those of the British authorities, whose overreaction in the aftermath of the rebels' inevitable defeat turned them from extremists into heroes. Townshend concludes the book by looking at the belated efforts by the British in the aftermath of the Rising to craft a settlement in response to the growing nationalist challenge to their control over Ireland - a challenge that in the end they failed to avert.

With its clear prose and painstaking reconstruction of the tangled events of the Easter Rising, Townshend's book is a masterpiece of the historical craft. The thorough research and judicious analysis contained within its pages is unlikely to be bettered as a guide to the complicated and confused developments that led to this dramatic and exciting event. For anyone seeking a study that will help them understand the Easter Rising, its background, and its consequences, this is the one to read.

Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion is essential for any who would understand the history of Ireland: it changed millions of lives forever and this new coverage traces these changes, re-creating the social and political scene of the times. From the roots of Irish insurgents who occupied Dublin as the British waged war on them to leaders who made a difference, Easter 1916 summarizes some forty years of scholarship on the topic, adding its own dramatic flair and insights - and even the Bureau of Military History records which contains testimony from survivors. A quite vivid re-enactment of events results.