ABSTRACT
For many republicans the apotheosis of the tradition of rebellion was reached in the Easter of 1916 when a small group of rebels seized the centre of Dublin and proclaimed the creation of an Irish republic. The event has mesmerised the movement ever since. The rising is celebrated annually and the memory of its leaders intoned regularly to validate republican actions in the present. In 1986 the movement’s Easter declarations insisted that the modern day members of the IRA ‘are the inheritors of 1916 because they have the same spirit of freedom which motivated the 1916 rebels’. 1 Ruairi O Bradaigh identified the influence of the 1916 rising as the central feature of the modern republican persona: ‘a republican today is one who rejects the partition statelets and gives his allegiance to and seeks to restore the 32 county republic of Easter Week.’ 2
