Easter 1916: The Enemy Files

MORSE CODE BEEPING

On the afternoon of April the 24th 1916,

the War Office in London received a telegram from Army Irish Command

informing it of an armed uprising in Britain's second city, Dublin.

With the Great War at its bloodiest, some 1,400 insurgents seized

the General Post Office and other strategic locations in the city.

Patrick Pearse, one of the uprising's leaders,

read a proclamation declaring Ireland an independent republic

and Britain's enemy in the trenches, Germany, a gallant ally.

For five years, I sat at the Cabinet table in 10 Downing Street.

For two of those as Secretary of State for Defence.

I'm about to explore how, a century ago,

predecessors behind these walls,

war-weary ministers, responded to a bloody rebellion in Dublin.

These are the documents of the day.

Cabinet papers, intelligence reports, military orders

and diaries - British files undisturbed since they were written.

Here is the story of the Easter Rising told by British politicians,

soldiers, spies and bureaucrats.

Was Dublin just another battle at a time of war,

when military justice was immediate and brutal?

Or did the men who wrote these documents,

with their handling of the Rising, hasten the end of an empire?

Did an unlikely band of rebels, with playwrights and poets as leaders,

do more to advance the cause of Irish freedom

in five days than nationalist politicians had done

in the previous 50 years?

Or did they damage the cause of an Ireland independent and united?

Do the answers lie in the enemy files?

In 1916, Britain was mired in a great war with Germany that

required a seemingly endless supply of young men to

replace their dead comrades in the trenches.

Meanwhile, above this tobacconist's shop

nestled in the tenements of north Dublin, a secret and subversive

organisation was plotting an armed revolt against the British state.

The proprietor of the shop was Thomas Clarke,

a 58-year-old veteran of the Irish republican movement who,

along with his small band of co-conspirators

of republicans and socialists,

planned a nationwide uprising for the Easter weekend of 1916.

Money was raised, guns were bought,

clandestine meetings were staged - a secret plot

in the heart of the mighty but distracted British Empire.

But the British weren't too distracted to scent

the whiff of rebellion in the air.

The Dublin Metropolitan Police was running two agents,

codenamed Chalk and Granite, in the months before the Rising

and they had infiltrated the ranks of the conspirators.

And a few hundred yards away from Downing Street,

at the nerve centre of Britain's fledgling Secret Service,

the spies knew about this elaborate plot in Ireland.

Britain's Secret Service Bureau - which, in 1916, became MI5 -

had obtained German code books

and, in room 40 of the Admiralty, read enemy signals, including

some passing between the German Embassy, in Washington, and Berlin.

In late March 1916, the Director of Naval Intelligence

reported that, "The extreme Irish-American party

"contemplates an armed uprising timed for the 22nd of April

"at the latest."

Other intelligence obtained

in Dublin and Berlin confirmed the plot,

which leaves me wondering why,

when the Rising occurred one day late on Easter Monday,

both the senior British politician in Ireland, Augustine Birrell,

and the senior army commander, Major General Friend,

were both in England

while other army officers had left Dublin for horse races and the seat

of the British government at Dublin Castle was virtually undefended?

DOOR OPENS

Pauline. Hello.

Hello.

How could it be, then, that the British government was

so unprepared for the rebellion?

I think we should remember,

this was 1916, the most difficult part

of the First World War.

Very difficult for the ministers of the day to take on board

the fact that there was something really potentially quite

nasty taking place, you know, in the heart of the country

and in the domestic context.

So information coming in about what was going on in Ireland -

very inconvenient and, if possible, to be ignored

because there were bigger things at stake.

I wonder if I could ask you to comment on specific documents.

Here is an extraordinary sheaf of telegrams.

These are sent from the Embassy of Germany, in Washington, to Berlin.

This one particularly.

"The Irish leader, John Devoy, informs me that

"the Rising is to begin in Ireland on Easter Sunday.

"Please send arms to arrive at Limerick, west coast

"of Ireland, between Good Friday

"and Easter Sunday. To put it off longer is impossible.

"Let me know if help may be expected from Germany."

It's signed Bernstorff, who I think is the German ambassador.

That is authentic information, unconscious information. That is

to say that the enemy does not know that it's in our possession.

Therefore, there is no reason to suppose that this is in any way

false information or in any way put forward to act as a decoy.

That's a sort of crown jewel of intelligence

when you get something like that.

The intelligence breakthrough on Ireland

came on the 10th of February 1916,

when a message was intercepted and decrypted giving the planned

date for the Rising as between Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

Here, in unpublished memoirs by Henry Oliver,

Admiral of the Fleet, he says,

"We knew beforehand that the revolution in Ireland would start on

"Easter Monday 1916 and made naval preparations in advance.

"The Cabinet would not believe the First Lord."

Mm.

What do you make of that?

I say, even in the context of the situation I've described,

I find that quite surprising. By modern standards,

not actually taking the Director of Naval Intelligence

seriously would be a pretty extraordinary thing to do.

I think you come back, then, to the culture

and the context in which people are operating and the immaturity

of the system, which leads to the ability, actually,

just simply to ignore information which is highly inconvenient.

Ireland had plagued Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.

From 1910, his coalition government had relied on John Redmond's

Irish Parliamentary Party for a majority.

And the price was home rule for Ireland -

a form of limited self-government in Dublin.

The threat of a Catholic-dominated parliament shook unionist

and Protestant Ulster to its core.

Armed militias were organised into the Ulster Volunteer Force

to resist home rule, prompting nationalists to form their own

rival militia, the Irish Volunteers.

The island was awash with guns,

with rival militias numbering over 100,000 men each.

Ireland was on the brink of civil war.

The parliamentary bill introduced by Asquith's Liberal government

and supported by the many Irish Nationalist MPs at Westminster

would give home rule to Ireland in September 1914.

Ulster volunteers began to import arms and to drill, in large numbers,

preparing to defy the will of Parliament.

The government took no effective action.

Indeed, Asquith felt relief when the outbreak of war with

Germany in August 1914 at least avoided civil war in Ireland

as Irishmen flocked to enlist

and as the enactment of home rule was postponed, while the war lasted.

That left two strong impressions - that whenever the government was

threatened with violence it would dither

and, that after all the promises,

all the efforts of the constitutional nationalists

and all the strife, Ireland had somehow been cheated of home rule.

The Great War turned rival militias into brothers-in-arms,

as men from the Ulster Volunteer Force

and the Irish Volunteers fought on the same side in the trenches.

The Irish problem was put on hold.

But a small minority of the Irish Volunteers refused

to fight for Britain.

They stayed at home and a future rebel army was born.

Roy. Very good to see you.

War breaks out in August 1914

and John Redmond, leader of the nationalists,

makes an historic decision - to support the war.

In popular and even populist terms, to endorse the war, which is

supposed to be going to be a short war,

in August, September 1914 seems a very good idea

because it will both demonstrate home rule as bona fide

and it will bring in the home rulers on the same side as Ulster.

"We will go into battle side-by-side with our Ulster brothers

"and these little

"local differences will disappear."

In terms of rhetoric,

it's enormously successful

in the short-term and really enthuses people

and when the Volunteers split over his endorsement of their support

of the war, the vast majority of the Irish Volunteers follow

Redmond in supporting the war

but that means that they will go off and fight

and very often be killed on the Western Front and,

slowly but inexorably, the advantage shifts to the small minority who had

refused to support the war.

What's been going on amongst the Irish people

between 1914 and 1916 that makes the Easter Rising possible?

One of the key elements in all this is a demographic one.

The youth of the people who fight in 1916,

and who make the weather before it, cannot be overemphasised enough.

And the fact that, in some ways,

they're warring against their parents

and their parents' generation as much as against

the British state is, I think, very important.

This is what's happening between 1914 and 1916 among a small minority

but it's a very active and a very propulsive minority.

And it's people who have a sense that to spill blood and to spill

your own blood in a sacrificial sense for a national rebirth

is actually part of the deal.

The rebels struck on the 24th of April 1916 - Easter Monday.

A time of sacrifice and new life coming out of the dead land.

They seized the General Post Office for headquarters and,

just after midday, to the mild curiosity of passers-by

on this bank holiday afternoon, Patrick Pearse stood outside the GPO

and read out the proclamation.

The small audience soon dispersed

and the curious few read the document that was pasted up

on nearby buildings as the tricolour of the new republic

flew above Dublin's main street.

I think I came around to thinking that the worst of the British

position on Ireland is that it's ignorant, that it's neglectful,

it's distracted, its mind is somewhere else,

it never focuses, it hesitates.

Would you agree with that?

The British responses to Ireland have often been below par.

On the other hand, there are a couple of salient points.

One is that home rule has been passed

and that fairly frantic efforts are being made behind-the-scenes,

whereby Redmond can see home rule delivered without

a civil war in Ireland. The other thing, of course,

is that they're involved in a world war and to look at Ireland's

little susceptibilities and Ireland's nationalist sensitivities,

at a time when the entire continent is aflame with war,

is perhaps expecting rather a lot.

As the Rising entered its second day,

the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Wimborne,

was isolated in the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park in Dublin.

Fearing for his own safety, Wimborne,

an unelected figurehead, took a decision of historic significance -

by proclaiming martial law without consulting the Prime Minister.

The following day, the Cabinet extended martial law

throughout Ireland for an indefinite period.

And the process of changing moderate nationalists into

revolutionary republicans had started.

Ireland was placed under military control.

Field Marshal French ordered two brigades to Ireland without

waiting for approval from the War Office.

In April 1916, the Sherwood Foresters were in training

near Watford, preparing for the war in France although,

due to a shortage of weapons, some of them had yet to fire a rifle.

On Easter Monday, they were on leave and they had to be gathered up

from the cinemas and pubs for an extremely rapid departure by rail.

But instead of heading for a Channel port,

they were carried north

and rumours began to sweep through the trains that they

were about to fight not Germans but their fellow countrymen -

Irish rebels on British streets.

One of the officers onboard ship, captured the mood of that day.

"I make no bones about it, it was tragic.

"You must remember that all of the officers

"and men came from Nottingham and the Retford-Newark-Worksop

"district of the county and they all knew each other

"and each other's parents and relations.

"They had not the slightest desire to shoot down the Irish

"or any other English-speaking people."

The first ship to steam out of Liverpool, the Munster,

was too small for the two battalions that it had embarked

and, with speed trumping every other consideration,

officers' kit and the battalion Lewis machine-guns were left behind.

And so London's first response to the uprising

in Ireland was to send underequipped officers

commanding poorly trained soldiers with no heavy weapons,

to fight an enemy that had taken up entrenched-sniper positions

on the roads into Dublin.

The reinforcements from England,

so anxiously awaited by General Friend, landed here at

Dun Laoghaire, which then was known as Kingstown, on the Tuesday night.

In the morning, the four battalions of Sherwood Foresters marched

through streets which, according to one of their officers,

Captain Arthur Lee, were thick with people clapping

and cheering north-west towards Dublin.

The officers had been invited to breakfast by members of

the Royal Yacht Club,

where they awaited orders from brigade headquarters.

They'd arrived in an Ireland that was staunchly against the Rising.

-Kevin, hello.

-Michael.

Now, I believe it's your view that the Irish people were

essentially misled about the events of 1916. Why so?

Because it wasn't necessary for Irish independence to be

brought about by the use of violence.

The interesting thing about the leaders is that not one of them

had ever stood

for any electoral office ever, apart from James Connolly, who stood

for Dublin Corporation in the Wood Quay ward and he came last.

Otherwise, not one of those people,

who could have stood for Parliament or local government,

had chosen to have done so.

They chose the violent route without ever trying the democratic one.

The British Parliament had indeed passed a Home Rule Act but it

was in suspension and nobody had solved the problem about what

to do about Ulster, so were not the Irish justified in being

suspicious about these intentions?

That doesn't justify them killing Irish men

and women in the streets of Dublin.

This is one of the major problems about the way 1916 has been

taught in Ireland, that it is not perceived as it actually was -

acts of violence against Irish people doing their daily duty.

It's perceived as somehow or other

an insurrection against British soldiers.

The police who were murdered in 1916 were Irish police officers.

They were given no choice, no chance,

no opportunity to have an opinion about this.

Their lives were cut down, just as the proclamation protecting

the rights of all Irish people

was being read in the GPO.

So, if you like, it was a foundational act of hypocrisy

to say, on the one hand, we respect you, on the other hand,

we'll kill you because you're on the wrong side.

One of the things that has struck me about the documents is

the character and quality of the Sherwood Foresters who arrived.

I mean, it seems a lot of them were very inexperienced and very,

very young. And also put in a traumatic situation where

they were being shot at by their own countrymen,

by fellow citizens of the United Kingdom at the time.

Can you imagine the state of mind they must've been in?

It's impossible to understand how a soldier can cope with

the situation where, essentially,

they are fighting a civil war for which they have no preparation.

Soldiers by 1916 had been taught to fight trench warfare,

they were not taught how to fight house-to-house fighting,

which is an entirely different skill.

The insurgents would have had a very clear advantage.

They knew the streets, they knew the windows,

they knew the nature, the topography of Dublin.

It's quite clear that the officers of the Sherwood Foresters

and other troops arriving,

they were completely ignorant of the circumstances

in which they were fighting

and if you have a man firing from behind a window,

of which there were very few on the Western Front, he has a clear

advantage over an incomer who has no knowledge of where he is.

Wednesday, April the 26th - the third day of the Rising.

On landing in Ireland,

the British troops must have wondered who this enemy was.

There seemed to be scant support for the new republic

on the streets of Ireland.

But as the troops got ever closer to the centre of the city,

the reality of the Rising became brutally apparent.

They marched into a killing zone and the Great War was about to

arrive in the affluent surrounds of Georgian Dublin.

The rebels could hear the troops coming before they came into sight.

They were armed and ready.

The first volley of shots peppered into the marching column

and ten men lay dead within seconds.

GUNSHOTS

The massacre was at its worst here at Mount Street Bridge

where the British dead and wounded lay knee-deep as fire

poured upon them from shooters in Clanwilliam House.

This was unnecessary carnage.

These rebel strongholds could have been bypassed

to be cleared up later.

Indeed, the brigade commander, Colonel Maconchy,

questioned the order

to clear each building as he advanced.

But this was 1916, the year of the Battle of the Somme,

when generals routinely ordered the boys to go over the top.

Strewn along the canal banks, the bridge

and around the schoolhouse nearby lay some 230 men dead and wounded.

-Robert, what a pleasure.

-Hello, Michael.

The British tactics of advancing and destroying the enemy house-by-house

with terrific casualties, what does that tell us about their mentality?

Well, it tells you the generals had been in France where they'd been

doing the same thing for many months.

I mean, it was a British tactic - storm forward,

it doesn't matter how may people you lose.

Interestingly, the 1916 rebels - as my dad would have called them -

the 1916 rebels, they were also killing an awful lot of innocent people

and they took precious little heed of their own lives.

I've got here an extract from the brigade commander's diary.

He's talking about a number of officers who are shot, then he says,

"I return to Balls Bridge to the telephone and asked the Irish Command

"if the situation was sufficiently serious to

"demand the taking of the position at all costs."

-Absolutely extraordinary.

-Bleak, isn't it?

Bleak that these were the tactics that were adopted.

And obviously adopted knowing that Dublin was filled with civilians.

In other words, there was no concern taken over the number

of innocent people who were going to be killed in these battles.

This was a British city, this had to be stamped out quickly.

There was no letting this run on and on

and starting to have negotiations, that was out of the question.

What kind of military response do you expect other than

an absolutely brutal one?

I think that Britain had been in the war so long by this stage

and there had been so many massacres of our own men that they

had come to a stage of thinking where casualties didn't matter.

It only mattered when you ran out of men.

It didn't matter how many you kill on the streets of Dublin

or on the fields of the Somme, as long as you had more to come.

But the one thing Britain could not tolerate was a war at home.

The German fleet was to attack British cities

on the east coast, we had zeppelins over London.

Dublin was a step too far.

This was a major British city up in arms

and I think they all went a bit mad.

Britain's enemy in a terrible war was complicit in the Rising.

Germany supplied arms to the rebels, there was

talk of a German invasion of Ireland.

Now all over Dublin it was proclaimed that

the Irish Republic and Germany were allies.

Sooner or later,

they discover a proclamation of an independent Ireland, which

refers to the Germans and the Central Powers as gallant allies.

OUR gallant allies, I think.

I mean, that must have been a huge provocation.

Yup, that was a death sentence.

That was a death sentence, that killed them straight away.

I mean, why they'd sign their name to that...

Was it really necessary to put in "gallant allies"?

I can't believe it was but they put it in. Pearse did, anyway.

There is a very odd parallel, and I don't wish to belabour it,

between the kind of cult of blood

and martyrdom - which we can read in the proclamation itself,

it's so rhetorical -

and another cult that exists today in the Middle East,

which I don't even need to name,

which also has a cult of blood sacrifice, other people's blood too.

With the General Post Office in rebel hands,

communications between Dublin

and the outside world were severely disrupted

and commanders here could not know whether this uprising was

Ireland-wide, affecting both South and North.

But the Amiens Street Station had not been seized

and its telegraph office was intact, enabling this telegram to be

sent via the Great Northern Railway Company Ireland.

"Deliver following message from military headquarters, Dublin,

"to garrison commander, Belfast. What is situation in Belfast?

"Can you or 15th Brigade spare troops for Dublin if required?"

The answer was that the North was quiet

and that a large number could be spared and loaded onto the trains.

As soon as the news reached Belfast, the UVF mobilised its forces.

Unionist leader Sir Edward Carson offered 50,000 men,

"for the maintenance of the King's authority."

Craigavon House may be considered the spiritual home

of Ulster unionism.

The Ulster Volunteer Force was founded here and

from the steps of the house, unionism's leader,

Sir Edward Carson, proclaimed Ulster's Solemn League and Covenant.

Carson was the first of just under half a million people to sign

the Covenant in just a few September days in 1912

as a grand petition of defiance against home rule.

Until the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914,

unionists had been preparing to take up arms against

the British Crown to prevent home rule in a united Ireland.

When news reached these parts of the Easter uprising in Dublin,

organised as it was by an unelected minority,

it met with predictable condemnation from unionists

but also with disapproval from a majority of nationalists.

-Eamon, hello.

-Hello, Michael, how are you?

-Nice to see you.

-Very good to see you. Shall we have a seat?

Thank you very much.

I've got a little diary here that was written by a soldier

in the Ulster Regiment, fighting on the Russian front in 1916.

"The Irishmen in the brigade,

"at hearing that there is a rebellion going on in Ireland,

"are very much disturbed.

"Several of them wanted to go home straight away."

-It must have been a great shock to Ulster.

-Well, absolutely.

These were members of Carson's Army,

who formed up outside this house, for example,

to fight for Britain, for Ulster, for the Empire.

And suddenly they hear that

there is a revolution occurring in Ireland.

They wonder if their homes are safe, if their families are safe,

and there's an impulse to seek firm intelligence from the War Office.

Some of them were even threatening to leave their posts.

Does the fact that there exists in Ulster

a well-armed and loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force

give a certain amount of leeway to the British

-to move troops south?

-I think the documents show that, you know?

Remember, there's a lot of people in the UVF

who are not fighting at the front - they were working in the shipyard,

they were managing farms, and they're well-armed.

We have plenty of evidence of flying columns, for example,

motorised flying columns,

operating in Ulster during the week or so of the Rising,

in places like Tyrone and Armagh, and of course this enables the RIC

to concentrate on internal security, the regular police, if you like,

and it allows, obviously,

British troops stationed in Belfast and Armagh and elsewhere

to be sent to Dublin to crush the rebellion.

A document that surprised me very much

is the record of the parliamentary debate from Westminster.

This is the 3rd of May 1916,

and both Sir Edward Carson and Redmond appear to have

come much closer together as a result of the uprising.

They both talk about there being less bitterness between them

than at any recent time.

One of the ironies is that you had a wartime truce

between unionism and nationalism, as you had in British politics.

But you also had more of a camaraderie

in mixed communities in The North of Ireland.

You had, for example, nationalist and Orange bands

marching the volunteers as they took train for the Western Front.

Increasingly from 1914, Carson believed that if sectarian violence

broke out at any stage during the war,

it would discredit the unionist case,

so he is cultivating this friendship with Redmond, it's reciprocated,

and that becomes very important after the Rising

in seeking, er, an immediate Irish settlement,

which will, if you like, enable Britain to concentrate on the war.

Before World War I, unionists had been prepared for civil war

to prevent home rule within a united Ireland.

The rebels blew home rule apart in just a few days.

So there's a certain irony here, isn't there?

Before the First World War,

the unionists are prepared to take up arms to fight against home rule,

but it's not clear whether they'll defeat it.

But with the Easter Rebellion,

the idea of home rule in a united Ireland has been dealt a blow.

Yes, I think historians would now agree that the Easter Rising

really made partition more likely.

The only question was the acreage and the time limit of partition.

Certainly after the Rising there's a demand

to do something to shore up Redmond,

to shore up moderate loyal nationalism,

which with Carson has co-operated with Britain in the war.

And even Carson is prepared to extend the hand of friendship

to Irish nationalism. It might have worked,

it might have produced a partitioned Ireland

with a very soft line on the map,

because both parts of Ireland would still have been part of the UK,

subject to the overriding authority of London.

But it's doomed because Redmond is fatally damaged

as Sinn Fein rises from the ashes of the GPO,

but Carson is also diminished.

While still the popular hero of Ulster unionism,

he asked for sacrifices from Ulster unionists,

abandoning the outlying unionists

in places like Cavan, Monaghan and Donegal.

He found himself diminished by all that politicking.

He would remain a figurehead,

but he never holds the same authority again

within Ulster unionism.

1,000 troops were dispatched from Belfast

to complete a cordon around the north side of Dublin.

Field artillery from a garrison at Athlone arrived from the west.

16,000 troops arrived from England.

And the patrol vessel Helga sailed up the Liffey

with insurgent strongholds in her sights.

The rebels were now surrounded, and the noose was tightening.

GUNFIRE

British soldiers suppressed republican positions

with machine guns, spraying them with so many bullets

that return fire was impossible.

Then came the artillery barrage.

And by the morning of Thursday April 27th,

the fourth day of the Rising, the centre of Dublin was ablaze...

EXPLOSION

..and a rebel defeat inevitable.

Having suffered such heavy casualties

in house-to-house fighting,

the British used artillery against the General Post Office

and other major buildings held by the rebels.

The noise of the battle was deafening,

the destruction was widespread,

and fires raged across the centre of Dublin.

As Britain struggled with Germany on the Western Front

and appealed to the United States for its support,

the blazing ruins of its second city

were not the image that it wanted to offer to the world.

As the General Post Office was pounded by artillery,

the most vicious street fighting occurred in the mesh of tenements

around North King Street, just north of the River Liffey.

The British troops had tried to take this republican enclave

only to see 45 of their own shot dead or wounded.

On Friday April 28th, with the Rising in its fifth day,

General Lowe ordered a merciless advance along the street,

that became a key component in the bitter legacy of the Easter Rising,

as the British troops were about to avenge their fallen comrades.

The British troops sent to quell the Rising

were ordered that every man found in a house

from which shots had been fired

was to be considered as a rebel

whether armed or not,

and that no prisoners were to be taken.

In May, a military court of inquiry met here,

at Richmond Barracks in Dublin,

to consider allegations that British soldiers had killed civilians

in North King Street and prisoners in cold blood.

A senior Home Office civil servant, Sir Edward Troup,

advised ministers against publishing the evidence

as it might be used for hostile propaganda.

Why? Because he believed that the orders given to the troops

were, as he put it, "the root of the mischief".

But what better for hostile propaganda than a cover-up?

General, Sir Edward Troup comments here

that the root of the mischief

was the military order to take no prisoners.

This in itself may have been justifiable,

but it should have been made clear that it did not mean

that an unarmed rebel might be shot once he'd been taken prisoner.

It was the root of the mischief, wasn't it?

Short answer is, yes, it was the root of the mischief,

but I think Brigadier-General Lowe,

when he gave his written orders and then repeated them verbally, orally,

to his commanding officers,

was unclear in what he actually intended.

The soldier likes clarity. I think as the orders were passed down

from the brigadier-general in charge of the operation

right down to the private soldier on the ground,

clarity was inserted, and the soldier on the ground

understood that they were not to take any prisoners,

and if you don't take any prisoners,

people that you believe have done wrong, you shoot.

I don't think actually Brigadier-General Lowe

intended that everyone should have been shot.

I wonder what the order DID mean.

Because in the end, after all, prisoners WERE taken.

What he was really trying to say is, "Let's get on and get this done.

"We're not going to take any prisoners."

He didn't mean - and I'd like to think he didn't mean -

that we're going to kill everyone that we're dubious about.

But that was how it was interpreted.

General Maxwell says here,

"Parties of men under the great provocation of being shot at

"from front and rear,

"seeing their comrades fall from the fire of snipers,

"burst into suspected houses

"and killed such male members as were found.

"It's perfectly possible that some innocent citizens

"were shot in this manner,

"but the blame for such casualties must be on the shoulders

"of those who engineered the rebellion in the city."

How do you feel about that?

I think that's a very senior person

elegantly attributing blame in a convenient place.

In the hurly-burly, the intensity of the situation,

very difficult for them in an instant to say,

"That's a Sinn Fein rebel and that's an innocent person."

When a bullet is fired, the echo and the ricochet

mean you really have no idea where it's coming from.

Resonates entirely with my own early experiences

in the early '70s and '80s in Belfast.

Taking cover behind a red pillar box

or round the corner of a red telephone box, it feels most odd.

You look up and see shops which you recognise in your own home town,

but there are people out there shooting at you.

It's a very unnerving and unusual experience,

and these young South Staffordshire soldiers would have found that too.

We meet here in rather extraordinary circumstances,

because this is what remains of the Richmond Barracks,

and somewhere in here was the court of inquiry.

Do you imagine that it would have been an injustice

for some of these ordinary soldiers to face further disciplinary action

if actually they were following orders

which told them to regard every man

in a house from which fire was coming, to be thought a rebel

and that they were to take no prisoners?

The correct answer has to be,

every man in every situation is responsible for their own actions,

and they have to apply their own moral judgment.

That's fine in principle.

But take, let's say, an 18-year-old South Staffordshire private soldier

in the hurly-burly and the confusion that we're just talking about.

It was probably easier for him to keep in his mind,

"We're not taking any prisoners,"

than to actually use and apply that quite sophisticated moral judgment.

So you start to backtrack it,

and say, "Well, who does carry the responsibility?"

and it starts to edge up the chain of command.

And on the face of it, it would seem that an unclear instruction

issued by Brigadier-General Lowe

was, as Sir Edward Troup said, the root of the mischief.

On Saturday 29 April, 1916,

six days after he'd read the proclamation outside the GPO,

Patrick Pearse, with the building tumbling down around him,

realised that he would have to accept

Britain's demand for unconditional surrender.

Overseeing the surrender

was the newly appointed Military Governor of Ireland,

General Sir John Maxwell.

In the great drama of the Easter Rising,

Maxwell would become one of its most divisive figures,

and at this critical moment, he had centre stage.

The general was determined to crush this insurgency with great speed,

and bring World War I justice to bear on the ringleaders.

Traitors on the Western Front were shot dead.

Why should traitors on the streets of Dublin

be treated any differently?

British ministers showed their resolve to suppress the Rising

by appointing a military governor.

General Sir John Maxwell

was chosen partly because he had no record with Ireland.

He blamed the government

for failing to deal with the rebellion effectively,

before it reached a head.

Not unreasonably, in my view.

But that made him determined

to resist interference

by elected ministers as he crushed it.

Because Maxwell knew what he needed to do,

while Asquith merely reacted to events after they had happened,

the history of Ireland bears the stamp of the general

more than of the Prime Minister.

-Charles.

-Michael, hello.

Good to see you.

Maxwell has been pretty much demonised.

He's a name that many Irish people would remember today.

But it seems to me that it is the politicians who,

through their neglect, allow him to make the weather on the ground.

Would you agree with that?

Well, ultimately that's true.

He's only an instrument of policy.

If you send a soldier in to do this job,

you must expect him to bring military preoccupations.

His job as he understood it was to act resolutely.

He didn't have much connection with Ireland,

that seems to have been rather a good reason for appointing him,

but did he then lack

an understanding of Ireland, do you think?

I think most of the senior soldiers lacked a real understanding

of Ireland. There were one or two exceptions,

but most of them, from Kitchener downwards,

they tend to take a pretty simple view of Sinn Fein

and they just cannot believe that it is a movement

that really has any moral authority, and so most soldiers

are really looking for ways of destroying Sinn Fein

from a very early point.

Having suppressed the Rising in a swift and brutal fashion,

Maxwell moved on to swift and brutal justice.

Once again, he was largely left to his own devices.

The general decided who lived and who died.

Once the rebellion has been crushed,

we get to the matter of the courts martial,

and the death penalties and the executions.

What do you think Maxwell's reasoning is at that time?

I don't know if he had a fixed idea

about how many people should be executed,

but he wanted to have very rapid proceedings.

As very often when soldiers

are sent to do difficult jobs by governments,

the governments often don't define their terms of action.

I think in this case the question really is,

was there a point at which the British authorities

could have stopped the execution process?

Is there a number that would have been considered reasonable?

And I mean, the number that were executed

would not be considered excessive in some situations.

But in Britain, inside the United Kingdom,

it's...enough to provoke, er, a very hostile public reaction.

But when he faces these criticisms, on the one hand, he says,

"I might have executed many more people, I've been quite lenient,"

and on the other hand he says that,

"I have a thick skin, I can weather this."

I think he just hoped that his analysis,

that the mass of Irish people were loyal

and that they would accept and even possibly applaud

the punishment of the leaders of this revolt...

When he finds that he's wrong about that,

I think he's increasingly upset.

Whether that's because he realises that this is his big chance,

if you like, and he may have blown it...

He tries not to give that impression,

but one feels that there's something of that about it.

16 men, including every signatory of the Proclamation,

were sentenced to death.

Thomas Kent was shot at the Military Detention Barracks in Cork,

and Roger Casement was hanged in Pentonville Prison in London.

But the vast majority of the executions

were carried out at Kilmainham Gaol

during a ten-day period in May 1916.

When it came to forming up the firing squads

that marched along this track from the barracks towards Kilmainham Gaol,

the British soldiers were willing enough.

They'd seen their comrades mown down by snipers

just a few days before.

Amongst the officers and NCOs, feelings were more complex.

Second lieutenant William Wylie, a barrister,

was an unwilling prosecutor

who believed that the courts martial should be held in public

and that the accused should be assigned a defence lawyer.

Out of sense of justice, he conducted, effectively,

both the prosecution and the defence.

Lieutenant AA Dickson rehearsed the firing squads meticulously

and he was very pleased with the efficiency of the operation.

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

was fighting an existential struggle against Germany

and the war was not going well.

The Easter rebels had plotted with Berlin

and killed 116 British officers and men.

At a time when soldiers were being shot for desertion,

it was perhaps a surprise

that as few as 16 insurgents were executed in total.

But...what the Irish situation required

was not a judicial or military response

but a political one.

The fact that Patrick Pearse and others had courted martyrdom

should have alerted the British government to the propaganda trap.

Alas, the Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, never got a grip.

After the first three had been executed,

he's recorded as limply "being surprised"

that the trial and sentence had been so rapid.

General Maxwell was allowed to go on

piling up the martyrs,

particularly here, in the Stonebreakers' Yard.

Sergeant Major Samuel Lomas wrote in his diary that,

"Thomas MacDonagh was marched in blindfolded..."

"..and the firing party placed ten paces distant."

GUNSHOTS

"Death was instantaneous."

"The second, PH Pearse, whistled

"as he came out of his cell."

GUNSHOTS

"The third, JH Clarke, an old man, was not quite so fortunate,

"requiring a bullet from the officer

"to complete the ghastly business."

SINGLE GUNSHOT

Just over an hour later, Lomas wrote,

"This business being over, I was able to return to bed for two hours

"and excused duty until noon."

General Maxwell ordered a large lime pit

to be dug in the yard of the Arbour Hill Prison

and the bodies were brought in ambulances

along the banks of the Liffey.

Each corpse was identified by a nametag

and a sketch map marked its final resting place.

The Prime Minister, Asquith, wanted to grant Mrs Pearse's request

that the remains of her two sons, William and Patrick,

be returned to her for interment in consecrated ground.

But Maxwell vetoed,

arguing that they would be "turned by Irish sentimentality

"into the shrines of martyrs."

Well, that was going to happen wherever they lay,

but the general had seized the opportunity

to make the British appear to the Irish

as inhumane, shabby, and sacrilegious.

Prime Minister Asquith came to Dublin on 12 May 1916.

His timing could hardly have been worse.

He landed in Dun Laoghaire

just hours after James Connolly and Sean Mac Diarmada had been shot.

Asquith ordered an immediate end to the executions.

Declan.

-Very good to see you.

-How are you?

I'm very well. I must say that even as a Brit,

I find Arbour Hill a pretty moving sort of place,

and I wondered whether you'd ever seen these.

These are British sketch maps made as the bodies were brought here.

This one points to where the graves are.

This one lists the exact positions of certain bodies.

-Had you ever seen those before?

-I've never seen these before,

and I'm sure most Irish people haven't either.

-What's your reaction to them?

-Well, it's poignant,

and in more ways than one.

Sad to think of the dead men, but also, there seems to be

a kind of military mind trying to control,

create the illusion of control

where perhaps most control is already lost.

You have written of the rebellion as being

a kind of street drama, you referred to the fact that

some of the rebels wore costumes, carried sabres.

Why do you think of it as a street drama?

Why would they want it to be a street drama?

They take over the Post Office,

which is disastrous from a military, strategic viewpoint,

as Michael Collins warned them at the time,

because it's exposed on all sides,

but it's brilliant as street theatre.

It cuts across the life of the capital city,

it seizes the main building, and it paralyses communications.

It makes everyone attend.

And at the end of week, Pearse symbolically hands over his sword

to the British officer.

It's almost a gesture from... the age of opera, if you like.

General Maxwell believed that

he'd brought the curtain down on this production,

and he was sure there would be no repeat performance.

He thought the Rising could be a blessing in disguise.

We were talking about theatricality,

and I was struck by this document too.

It is the rubric for the executions.

And this has a certain theatricality as well.

"The rifles of the firing party will be loaded by other men,

"one rifle with a blank cartridge, 11 with ball.

"The men will not be told which one is blank.

"Once a prisoner has been shot,

"a medical officer will see that he is dead.

"The body will immediately be removed.

"A label will be placed on the breast."

I mean, this is theatricality as well, isn't it?

It's incredibly deliberated.

It is a production, like the Rising itself,

and maybe a counter-production -

not quite as effective, but interesting in its way.

But I think it may also be rooted, as I say,

in this fear that they're losing control.

And also, maybe, I've read accounts, for instance,

of the men who actually carried out the executions,

and one of them reported back that they all died bravely,

but MacDonagh died like a prince.

There's a sense in which, which you often get with soldiers,

that when they're asked to kill someone,

they actually kind of admire some of the people they're asked to kill,

and don't really want to.

And that's why I say the British official mind was conflicted.

Maxwell and his firing squads

had a dramatic effect on Irish public opinion.

The executioners' bullets

and the dark shadows of martial law over Ireland

transformed the villains of Easter Monday into national heroes.

In the years after the Rising, the Irish Parliamentary Party

continued the political fight to secure home rule,

but they were swept aside by Sinn Fein

in the general election of 1918.

The Rising changed the nationalist consensus in favour of home rule

into a widespread demand for an Irish republic.

The rebels had set Irish history on a different course,

and within five years, the island would be split in two.

The gun was about to replace the ballot box.

Ireland had changed utterly.

GUNSHOTS

What I take from these eloquent documents gathered along my journey

is that the disaster suffered by Britain in Ireland in 1916

was caused by the government's neglect.

It failed to read Irish minds,

or to counter the build-up of military activity

first in the North and then in the South.

And following the Rising, it failed to control General Maxwell.

Asquith learned about key decisions, like the declaration of martial law

or the execution of rebel leaders, after the event.

And it strikes me, as a former politician,

that the government, distracted by world war,

failed to apply its political nous to Ireland.

I'm convinced that the rebels made the modern history of this country.

Without the Rising, Ireland would not have won her independence,

her freedom, when she did and as she did.

But I fear that the ferocity of the Rising,

and of its suppression by the British, set the standard,

and that the violence that has plagued this island

during the last century is also part of their bequest.

And the rebel dream of an Ireland united North and South

is no closer today than it was at Easter 1916.