This article was published in Republican News in the 1973 Easter Commemoration issue (21st April). This may be a reprint from an earlier publication (possibly Wolfe Tone Monthly). The language, such as ‘Irish Ireland’ suggests a date in the 1930s or 1940s. Some of the detail may also be inaccurate. Enough of those who mobilized in Belfast in 1916 were Protestant, like Sam Heron himself and Herbert Pim, that the idea of a march to an anniversary mass in 1917 reads more like a vision of 1917 seen through the prism of the conservatism of the 1930s.

According to Roger McCorley, in a memoir, in the aftermath of the 1916 Rising and the releases from Frongoch that autumn, the Sinn Féin movement was re-organised in Belfast in early 1917 and the Sean McDermot branch of the Irish Volunteers was re-established in February/March 1917. This was followed in May by the formal re-structuring of the units in the city (including, for a time, a political commissar). As Easter was on 8th April, the 1917 Easter Rising commemoration took place between these two events. (From the Treason Felony)