Republican News · Thursday 24 April 2003

Reliving Easter 1916 in Dublin

BY ROISIN DE ROSA

In the glorious sunshine of Good Friday, Aengus ó Snodaigh TD and Mícheál Mac Donncha took a few hours off from Leinster House to bring alive the days of Dublin City in Easter Week 1916.

For a few hours, Dublin's streets came alive: O'Connell Street was teeming with the workers locked out in 1913, crowding under the Imperial Hotel (what is now Clery's) to hear Jim Larkin speak, when thousands of police baton charged and shot down several workers.

Then it was down to the river, where those bringing in the weapons from Howth were met by the King's Own Scottish Borderers Regiment at Bachelor's Walk, where three were shot dead. After that it was on to Liberty Hall, the Citizen Army base, where James Connolly, revolver in hand, had greeted the RIC raiding party who had come to confiscate his newspaper with the words "drop them, or I'll drop you". The RIC didn't come back.

It was then back to the GPO and the Moore Street area, tunnelling through the houses to escape and then to the surrender by Pearse and Nurse O'Farrell at the end of Moore Lane; where the O'Rahilly, who had opposed the Rising but took part because "I have helped to wind the clock - I want to see it strike", had stepped out, only to be shot down from the barricade below. We walked past the spot where his body lay for a day, and where he, dying, wrote a last message in his own blood on the pavement to his wife.

It was a tale of a people starved into submission, of glorious deeds, of British savagery, of terrible defeat but also victory in its aftermath; it was the story of an uprising that set a fire alight, to be followed through the century by those who struck out in armed revolt against oppression, who learned that victory could be had, power could be seized - no matter the firepower of the oppressor.

From Dublin 1916 we came back up to Parnell Square and Dublin 2003, where the tour ended to great applause and a flurry of purchases of Easter Lilies.