Last week we had a talk and discussion about the role of James Conolly and the Easter Rising in the struggle against British imperialism, and the comrade who gave it has kindly sent us the text of the talk. Enjoy!
I think it is important to put the events of 1916 into some kind of historical context so I am going to begin by giving a lightning survey of the events leading up to the Rising starting in 1885. In the election that year the Parnellites won 85 of the Irish seats, whereas the liberals won none. Parnell was the leader of the Home Rule Party in Ireland. They now held the balance between the liberals and the conservatives. In this situation Gladstone decided to give Ireland its own Parliament. His Home Rule Bill, however, was defeated in the Commons because 93 Liberals voted against it. Gladstone resigned and with the Liberals split the Conservatives came to power.
In 1893 Gladstone became Prime Minister again. He was dependent on the 81 Nationalist members in Parliament because the Liberals only had a majority of 40 over the Conservatives. Another Home Rule Bill was introduced. This time it got through the Commons, but it was defeated in the Lords. Once again Gladstone resigned and, except for Roseberry’s brief ministry, the Liberals didn’t rule the country again until their landslide victory in 1905. Then the new prime minister, Campbell-Bannerman, could afford to adopt a ‘wait and see’ approach to Home Rule because he was not dependent on Irish votes. All this changed under his successor. In 1909 the Lord’s lost their veto over legislation voted for by the Commons three times, and following the 1910 election the Liberals were once again dependent on Irish support. A new Home Rule Bill was introduced. In 1912 it passed through the Commons by a majority of 10 votes, but the House of Lords rejected it by 326 votes to 69 in January 1913. It was reintroduced and again passed by the Commons but was again rejected by the Lords, this time by 302 votes to 64.
Home rule was vehemently opposed by many Irish Protestants, the Irish Unionist Party and Ulster’s Orange Order. Most of the leaders of this opposition, especially Sir Edward Carson, threatened the use of force to prevent Home Rule. They were helped by their supporters in the British Conservative Party. In January 1912, after first obtaining the sanction of local magistrates, the Ulster leaders openly began to raise and train an army - the Ulster Volunteers. On 28 September 1912 at Belfast City Hall just over 450,000 Unionists signed the Ulster Covenant to resist the granting of Home Rule. The British Government let them raise money to buy arms.
In November 1913 the supporters of Home Rule formed the Irish Volunteers. It was not formed to fight the British government, but rather to ensure that the government did not waver in its intention to enact the Home Rule legislation it had initiated. The Volunteers included members of the Gaelic League, Ancient Order of Hibernians and Sinn Fein, and, secretly, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. Redmond, the leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, took over control of the Irish Volunteers
Tension mounted and some kind of military confrontation seemed to be a possibility. Early in 1914, Lloyd George proposed a temporary exclusion of Ulster for three years. Redmond grudgingly acquiesced to this as “the price of peace”.
When Carson rejected 'temporary' exclusion, a military solution seemed the only alternative. But in late March 57 officers in a cavalry brigade stationed in Curragh threatened to resign their commissions if they were ordered to go to Ulster to reinforce the Government’s position. With other resignations imminent the Government backed down. The Ulster Volunteers continued to buy arms. One of their major operations in getting arms involved the smuggling of almost twenty-five thousand rifles and between three and five million rounds of ammunition from Germany. The shipments landing in Larne, Donaghadee and Bangor in the early hours between Friday 24 and Saturday 25 April 1914. Nothing was done to prevent this.
On 25 May1914 the Commons passed the Bill’s third reading by a majority of 77. Asquith, however, accepted the Lords' demand to amend the Act to temporarily exclude the six counties, which for a period London would continue to govern, and would later make special provision for them. How temporary the exclusion would be, and whether northeastern Ireland would eventually be governed by the Irish government, remained an issue of some controversy. To save endless debate in parliament, George V invited MPs from each of the British Liberal and Conservative parties, and two each from the nationalists and unionists to a conference at Buckingham Palace. The conference, held between 21 and 24 July, achieved very little and Redmond and his party reluctantly agreed to what they understood would be a trial exclusion of now six years. Using the Parliament Act, the Lords was deemed to have passed the Act. It received the Royal Assent in September 1914.
For all its shortcomings, the Bill was for Redmond the fulfilment of a lifelong dream. "If I may say so reverently", he told the House of Commons, "I personally thank God that I have lived to see this day" It made Redmond a nationalist hero and he could have had every expectation of becoming head of a new Irish government in Dublin. When war broke out 1914, Asquith decided to abandon his Amending Bill, and instead rushed through the Suspensory Act which ensured that Home Rule would not come into operation until the end of the war. The Ulster question was 'solved' through the promise of amending legislation. What this would be was left undefined. In spite of this Redmond remained very popular. This can be seen by the fact that at the start of War, over 90% of the Irish Volunteers followed his call to support the British war effort and enlisted in the 10th and 16th (Irish) Divisions of the British Army.
This left the Irish Volunteers with a rump estimated at 10–14,000 members. Even among these there was considerable opposition to the idea of an unprovoked rising including from leading members like Bulmer Hobson, a northern journalist of Quaker background, and Eoin MacNeill, a history professor and chief of staff of the volunteers.
Ignoring this opposition the Military Council of the Irish Volunteers secretly organised the Rising. The Council consisted of Joseph Plunkett, Thomas MacDonagh, Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke, Sean MacDermott, Eamonn Ceannt and eventually James Connolly. Their aspirations to mount a serious military challenge to Britain rested on two things falling into place.
The first was a supply of arms. Negotiations for arms were carried out with the German Government which agreed to send a shipment of 20000 rifles, 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition and a supply of explosives to the rebels by the ship the Auld. But although the Auld reached the Kerry coast safely on Good Friday 21 April 1916, its presence was detected by the British authorities and the captain was forced to scuttle the ship.
The organisers also needed to organise a large mass rising without the authorities finding out. Their solution was an ingenious, if rather cynical, one. The Military Council decided to mobilise the entire Irish Volunteer Force for manoeuvres on Easter Sunday, a sight to which the British authorities had become accustomed, and to inform them only at the last minute of the intention to rise. They expected that some volunteers would return home, but thought many would remain to fight. It was hoped that if the rebels could hold out in Dublin, until separatists in the rest of Ireland rose up in support.
This didn’t work for 2 reasons. Firstly, MacNeill discovered the Military Council’s plan on Easter Thursday, and issued an order countermanding the mobilization. Secondly the plan was so secret that few people, even amongst the leadership, knew precisely what was happening. Volunteers, particularly outside of Dublin, who would have supported the Rising, had they known the Military Council’s intentions, obeyed McNeill’s order. The military plans of the rebels have also been criticised by historians and other observers. Most of the leaderes lacked military experience. The selection of the GPO as the headquarters had little symbolic or strategic value. In contrast, and despite their vulnerability, the rebels failed to capture the more strategic Trinity College or the symbolic Dublin Castle. Nevertheless the fighting lasted from Easter Monday to the following Monday. Although often dismissed as an event of little military significance, the resistance of the rebels and the British authorities’ determination to suppress the rebellion as quickly as possible, ensured that much of the city centre was devastated by artillery. An estimated 1500 rebels participated in the fighting. 450 people died (250 civilians, 116 soldiers and 64 rebels including the 15 leaders subsequently executed by the authorities). Over 2,600 were wounded, mostly civilians.
The Easter Rising is the defining event of the modern Irish republican tradition. It is seen as the central episode in the long story of Ireland’s struggle for independence and the proclamation of 1916 is regarded as the founding document of the Independent Irish State.
Yet the initial reaction of most Irish people was hostile. The rebel prisoners were jeered by Dubliners as they were led off by British soldiers. The response of the nationalist press which generally supported Redmond’s Irish Party was also hostile. An editorial by the Galway Express said, ‘Easter Monday, 1916, has made history. But oh, what rank and nauseating stains will besmear its pages – how generations yet unborn will burn with shame.’ The Irish Independent infamously appeared to encourage General Maxwell to continue executing the rebel leaders when it appeared that the ringleaders might yet be saved due to public consternation about the policy of executions.
It has been argued that as there was no chance of military success, the rebellion’s leaders faced with a choice between imprisonment for an ignominious failure to rise, or for mounting a heroic if doomed protest, opted for the ‘propaganda of the deed’. Their tactics appeared to reflect that it had become an essentially symbolic insurrection. The occupation of a number of prominent strongholds around the city and the decision to fight in an orthodox military fashion added a symbolic and moral weight to the protest that guerrilla tactics would not have had. But simply then waiting for the Brits to come implied a certain air of defeatism.
It is certainly true that some of the leaders craved military action at any cost, and had reconciled themselves to martyrdom. Pearse, for example, was deeply influenced by Catholicism and the pagan tradition as represented by the ancient Irish sagas. He tried to combine what he saw as the pagan ideals of strength and truth with the Christian ideals of love and humility. This led him to desire martyrdom which would ensure his immortality and the redemption of his people. - his views were shared by his fellow poets Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett. He attached an unusual importance to the notion of blood-sacrifice as his response to the arming of the Ulster Volunteers shows,
I would like to see every body of Irish citizens armed. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people, but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood, There are many things more horrible than bloodshed and slavery is one of them.
He described the first 16 months of the War as the ‘most glorious in the history of Europe’ arguing that ‘the old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields.’
So why did Connolly became involved in the Easter Rising if it was doomed to failure and can only be understood as a symbolic gesture with the religious and mystical overtones of a search for martyrdom and the idea of blood sacrifice. He had at one time rejected Pearse’s heroic conception of war and emphasised the differences between socialism and nationalism. Responding to Pearse’s militant rhetoric he wrote ‘We do not think that the heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot’.
In the months running up to the rebellion, however, his writing took on a more Nationalist tone, By July 1915 he was in contact with physical force nationalists and, in early 1916, as we have seen, he was coopted onto the IRB’s Military Council. By this time Connolly’s rhetoric had begun to resemble that of Pearse. Connolly wrote that ‘no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover self-respect … we recognise that of us, as of mankind before Calvary, it may truly be said: “Without the shedding of blood there is no redemption.” He was also given Last Rites before his execution.
Connolly’s biographers have struggled to reconcile this kind of statement and his acceptance of the Last Rites prior to his execution with his atheistic Marxist background. In fact it has allowed groups like the ‘Catholic Truth Society’ to claim that although he might have used Marxist words he genuinely held orthodox Catholic and nationalist values.
Some socialists have also criticised Connolly for submerging his ‘red ideals’ in the ‘Green Revolution’ e.g. Sean O’Cassey wrote:
Jim Connolly has stepped from the narrow byway of Irish socialism onto the broad and crowded highway of Irish nationalism … The big creed of Irish nationalism became his daily rosary, while the higher creed on international humanity that had so long bubbled from his eloquent lips was silent forever and Irish labour lost a leader.
I will try to explain why both views are incorrect. To begin let us look at his religious views.
You can only understand them by relating them to the historical context in which they were written. Recent research has thrown light on the question. In a letter to the Scottish socialist John Matheson, 30 January1908, Connolly wrote:
For myself, though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not gone to my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left. I only assumed the Catholic pose in order to quiz the raw freethinkers, whose ridiculous dogmatism did and does dismay me, as much as the dogmatism of the Archbishop. In fact I respect the good Catholic more than the average free-thinker.
Clearly the first sentence in no way contradicts Connolly when he wrote:
We feel that Socialism is based upon a series of facts requiring only unassisted human reason to grasp and master all their details, whereas Religion of every kind is admittedly based on ‘faith’ … Socialism, as a party, bases itself upon its knowledge of facts, of economic truths, and leaves the building up of religious ideals or faiths to the outside public, or to its individual members if they so will. It is neither freethinker nor Christian, Turk nor Jew, Buddhist nor Idolator, Mohammedan nor Parsee – it is only human.
Nor does it contradict Connolly when he defined religion::
as the outcome of the efforts of mankind to interpret the workings of the forces of nature and to translate its phenomena into the terms of a language which could be understood. . . . Religions are simply expressions of the human conception of the natural world.
So if this is what he believed why did he pose as a Catholic? As we have seen he said it was to oppose the free thinker. This attitude goes back to his contact with the Socialist Labour Party during his time in the USA. The SLP had reprinted an article by the Belgian socialist Vanderville which argued that the most important remaining struggle was between the Black International and the Red International.
Connolly opposed it because he thought it pandered to an implicit racism in US society. At the time Catholics made up a large proportion of recent immigrants and were often attacked on a religious basis. This reaction unfortunately found an echo in some socialist circles when the supposed intellectual superiority of a’ free thinking’ position was counterpoised to the backwardness of Catholics. On his return to Ireland he was equally vehement in his attacks on those “raw atheists” within the labour movement there who, by claiming that the Catholic Church bred anarchism and terrorism, alienated the majority of Catholic workers from the cause of socialism.
He was convinced that Catholicism could not be kept out of the debate on socialism in Ireland. He believed that it would be pointless to try to win the mass of Irish people to socialism by putting himself forward as an atheist. Catholic workers he believed were rebels in spirit and democratic in feeling because for hundreds of years there had been no class as lowly paid or as harshly treated as themselves. So when the socialist Tom Bell asked, “Was he a Catholic?” he replied:
In Ireland, all Protestants are Orangemen and howling jingoes. If the children go to the Protestant schools, they get taught to wave the Union Jack and worship the English King. If they go to the Catholic Church, they become rebels. Which would you sooner have?
Connolly was, however, opposed to every tendency to identify socialism with the Catholic Church. He condemned any attempt by the hierarchy of the Church to dominate public opinion and to attack the labour movement and socialism:
As long as the priest speaks to us as a priest upon religious matters we will listen to him, with all the reverence and attention his sacred calling deserves, but the moment he steps upon the political platform, or worse still, uses the altar from which to tell us what to do with our political freedom, then in our sight, he will cease to be a priest and be simply a politician.
During the Dublin labour dispute of 1913, Connolly furiously condemned the role of the Catholic hierarchy and their open support for the employers.
He was always careful to make this distinction between the Church as an institution and individual Catholics who, refusing to accept the Church’s “bull-dozing,” “stand by their rights as citizens, whilst observing their duties as Catholics.” Both priests and ordinary Catholics who actively supported labour were a positive asset to the foundation of a socialist Ireland. His understanding of socialism as taking up the basic humanistic values the Church as an institution had rejected prepared the ground for an alliance with those Irish nationalists who had become disillusioned with the superficial dogmatism of the Catholic Church.
He was confident that the future of Catholicity (in the sense of a strictly nondenominational body of Christian values) was safe in a socialist Ireland. He believed that the Catholic Church would not oppose socialism, in view of the Church’s acceptance of the de facto government and social order of a country in order to preserve its own position:
When the Church realises that the cause of capitalism is a lost cause it will play along with Socialism.
Connolly accepted being given the Last Rites at the request of Padraic Pearse, a devout Catholic who had moved very close to Connolly’s socialist teachings. Carl Reeve and Anne Barton Reeve in ‘James Connolly: the Road to the Irish Rebellion’ contend that it is impossible to believe that at this time, when he felt he represented the deepest hopes of Irish men and women, the majority of whom were Catholics, that he would affront the people he led, and refuse the last rites for the dying a most sacred sacrament whatever his personal beliefs. Seen in this light, Connolly’s acceptance of the last rites of the Catholic Church before his execution was not contrary to, but in keeping with, his position as a socialist and his understanding of how to relate to his predominantly Catholic audience. In any case whatever doubt there is about his religious beliefs his actions as a great Union organiser clearly show his commitment to socialism and as Lenin wrote:
Unity in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed class for the creation of paradise on earth is more important to us than unity of proletarian opinion on paradise in heaven.
Now let us turn to O’Casey’s accusation that Connollly abandoned socialism and wrapped himself in the ‘Green Flag’. All empires say they want to bring civilisation, democracy etc. to childlike people who can’t do it for themselves. Connolly spent much of his life attacking these pretensions of empire. He is important because he was the first prolific socialist writer from one of the colonies. His central concern was how the fight for independence linked up with the struggle against capitalism in Ireland. Indeed he saw the link as intrinsic to everything he did. The membership card of the ISRP was crystal clear in its attitude to empire:
The subjection of one nation to another as of Ireland to the authority
of the British crown is a barrier to the free political development of the
subject nation and can only serve the exploiting classes of both nations …
Therefore the national and economic freedom of the Irish people must
be sought in the same direction, viz, the establishment of an Irish
Socialist republic.
Fighting empire brought Connolly into contact with the IRB, the 2,000 strong secret society, which traced its roots back to the Fenian movement. From his earliest days in Ireland he tried to win over the Republicans to socialism. He directed many of his arguments in his paper ‘The Workers Republic’ towards them and wrote for some of their papers. He argued that the Nationalist movement had to move beyond ‘a morbid idealising of the past’ and present a political and economic programme to the people of today. To do this the Republicans should form a political party and seek to win elections. In that way they could challenge the Home Rule Party which was continuously compromising with imperialism and ‘drive them from political life’.
Perceptively he wrote:
A party aiming at a merely political republic and proceeding along such lines
would always be menaced by the danger that some astute politician might by
enacting a sham measure of Home Rule, disorganise the Republican forces by
an appearance of concession until the critical moment passed.
This, it should be remembered, was written before Lloyd George, managed to do precisely this with the Treaty.
Connolly believed that the bourgeoisie could no longer lead a struggle for independence. He wrote the Irish rich,
Have now bowed their knee to Baal, and have a 1000 economic strings in the
shape of investment binding them to English capitalism as against every historical attachment drawing them to Irish patriotism; only the Irish working class remainas the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for Irish freedom.
Therefore it is ridiculous Connolly argued to:
talk of revolting against British rule and refuse to recognise the fact that our
way to freedom can only be hewn by the strong hand of labour, and that labour revolts against oppression of all kinds, not merely the peculiarly British brand.
He saw that workers did not compartmentalise the form of oppression they had to fight. Once in a struggle against empire, their consciousness widened and they began to look for the full liberation of their class.
No amount of protestations could convince intelligent workers that the class
which grinds them down to industrial slavery can, at the same time, be leading
them forward to national liberty.
To the objection that a fight for a socialist republic would frighten off potential allies he made this devastating reply:
It may be pleaded that the ideal of a Socialist Republic, implying, as it does
a complete political and economic revolution would be sure to alienate all our
middle class supporters who would dread the loss of their property and privileges. What does this objection mean? That we must conciliate the privileged classes in Ireland! But you can only disarm their hostility by assuring them that in a free Ireland their privileges will not be interfered with. That is to say, you must guarantee that when Ireland is free fron foreign domination, the green coated Irish soldiers will guard the fraudulent gains of capitalist and landlord from ‘the thin hands of the poor’ as remorselessly and just as effectually as the scarlet-coated Emissaries of England do today.
On no other basis will the classes unite with you. Do you expect the masses to
fight for this ideal?
He claimed that:
The cry for a ‘union of classes’ is in reality an insidious move on the part of
our Irish master class to have the powers of government transferred from the
hands of the English capitalist government into the hands of an Irish government and to pave the way for this change by inducing the Irish workers to abandon all hopes of bettering his position.
When the Irish Parliamentary Party called for unity to get Home Rule Connolly replied,
Every oppressor of the poor, every heartless sweater, every enemy of progress
and champion of reaction feels perfectly safe in Ireland as long as the cry of ‘national unity’ paralyses the hand of the friend of progress and forbids open
Warfare against the Irish oppressor and reactionist who shelters behind the Green or Orange flag.
This message is very radical because it contradicted a key tenet of all republican organisations from Connolly’s time to today that at least until Irish independence was achieved and partition removed there had to be national unity between all the Irish people. So it was not a question of wrapping the Green Flag around him and joining the National community. He defended Home Rule because it was a legitimate democratic demand and it would open the way for class politics to emerge in Ireland.
Connolly was adamantly opposed to Partition, but not from a nationalist perspective. He believed that it would produce ‘a carnival of reaction’ where Irish politics would be dominated by two right wing blocks for decades. Partition would help the ‘Home Rule and Orange capitalists to keep their rallying cries before the public as the political watchwords of the day.
He was determined to open a political space for protestant workers and called for special propaganda ‘for conversion to socialism of Orangemen’. Part of that meant exploding the myth that the Orange Order stood for civil and religious liberty. In an article he pointed out that William of Orange was actually supported by the Pope during the Battle of the Boyne and that the Te Deum was sung in the Vatican to celebrate his victory. He appealed for Catholic and Protestant worker to fight alongside each other. When 1000s of Catholics and rotten Prods were expelled from their jobs in 1912 he called for a march led by the non sectarian Labour Band and had nothing to do with Joe Devlin’s exclusive appeal to Catholics to come to the rescue of their Northern brethren. Joe Devlin was a journalist and a prominent Nationalist politician. Connolly also recruited workers from the Larne aluminium plant into the ITGWU, when the town was a noted bastion of Orange support. His strategy was to encourage a militant joint struggle and in the course of that struggle to take up the issue of loyalism.
Crucial to this was his vision of what type of Ireland he wanted. Only a bold call for a socialist Ireland rather than an Ireland united on a capitalist and clerical basis could hold any appeal to Protestant workers. There was no future for Protestant workers in a capitalist Ireland where the green flag fluttered;
When the Sinn Feiner speaks to men who are fighting against low wages and tells them that the Sinn Fein body has promised lots of Irish labour at low wages to any foreign capitalist who wished to establish in Ireland, what wonder, if they come to believe that change from Toryism to Sinn Feinism would simply be a change from the devil you know to the devil they do not.
From all this it can be clearly seen that Connolly saw socialism and the fight against imperialism as part of the same battle. Home rule in a united Ireland could only come about by uniting catholics and protestants workers in a revolution to establish a socialist republic. To understand how Connolly got from this position to one in which he could be accused of abandoning socialism for nationalsim we have to next look at the effects the First World War had on him.
1914 was an appalling year for Connolly. In February the ITGWU was finally beaten in the great lock out. March and April brought the Curragh Mutiny. In July partition became a virtual certainty when Home Rule leaders entered negotiations with the Unionists at a conference in Buckingham Palace. On top of all that, August brought war and the collapse of the Second International. Connolly had to deal with these disasters virtually alone. The main networks that he had helped to create - the ITGWU and the small socialist party, the ILP – were either weakened or severely disoriented. At the first ILP meeting after the outbreak of the War, Tom Johnson, the future leader of the Irish Labour Party favoured a victory for the allies as being ‘better for the growth of liberty and democratic ideas’. The other members voted to suspend all public meetings less they led to violent opposition. To oppose the War Connolly had to hold street meetings under the name of a ficticious organisation: the Belfast Section of the Irish Citizen Army.
He took up the classic Socialist position:
We have held and do hold that war is a relic of barbarism because we are governed by a ruling class with barbaric ideas; we have held and do hold that the working class of all countries cannot escape the horrors of war until in all countries the barbarous ruling class is thrown from power.
His solution to war was summed up in one word revolution. He had already, in 1914, indicated what his choice would be in such a situation. He had written:
Even an unsuccessful attempt at socialist revolution by force of arms, following the paralysis of the economic life of militarism [by a general strike], would be less disastrous to the socialist cause than the act of socialists allowing themselves to be used in the slaughter of their brothers.
However in the absence of a socialist party, and in the context of a defeated working class, he could only strike a blow in Ireland on Republican terms. This is why he not only joined the 1916 Rising but became one of its main instigators. At no point did he think purely in nationalist terms, rather he recognised that a blow struck in Ireland against a great empire would give encouragement to colonial struggles all over the world. He hoped that it would set off a chain reaction:
Starting thus, Ireland may yet set a torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and last capitalist bond and debenture will be shrivelled on the funeral pyre of the last war lord.
The Proclamation issued in the General Post Office was quite limited but Connolly’s support for the Rising was not conditional on it having a semi-leftwing message. It was his desperation to do something against the war. This desperation might explain some of the things he said and the fact that during the Rising itself he never issued a specific socialist proclamation stating publically that he wanted both ‘economic as well as political liberty.
Finally we have to address the question whether the Rising was an heroic gesture with no hope of success. The efforts made by Joseph Plunkett and Roger Casement in Germany pointed to the serious nature of the Military Council’s efforts to get German assistance. In their history of the Easter Rising Michael Foy and Brian Barton argued that the ‘Ireland Report’.the lengthy memorandum submitted by Plunkett and Casement to the Germans represented ‘a detailed and cogent analysis of the conduct of a successful military campaign whose unmistakable objective was the complete destruction of British military and political power in Ireland’. There were only 6,000 combat troops in the island who were supported by 9,500 members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The leaders had hoped to mobilise the bulk of the 16.000 Irish Volunteers and to have used the 20,000 rifles from the Auld to arm them. It is arguable if this had happened the Rising would have been successful, or if not successful sufficiently damaging to Britain to severely hamper her war effort. Therefore the question should really be whether when this didn’t happen should they have called the Rising off and if they had decided to do this would it have been possible?
