ABSTRACT
The Easter Rising and cultural nationalism It is a commonly held view that a sense of blood sacrifice was the primary motive in the minds of those men who carried out the Easter Rising of 1916. But the insurrection was not the first example of this mentality during the war. In September 1914 a plan had been hastily prepared to prevent Asquith and Redmond from speaking at the Mansion House recruiting rally in Dublin. Some twenty members of the Irish Volunteer Provisional Committee met and decided to carry out what was described as a coup d’état, on the night before the rally, by forcibly seizing the National Volunteer Headquarters in order to declare Redmond’s nominees expelled from the original Volunteer Executive. According to one IRB member, Pearse Beasley, it was James Connolly, the socialist and syndicalist, who persuaded senior IRB men Tom Clarke and Sean MacDermott to take such a desperate action. Connolly wanted two hundred men ‘who were ready to die’ and fight to the last man, so as to prevent the building being occupied by Redmond’s supporters. According to Beasley some members of the IRB opposed this on the grounds that it would be misunderstood in Ireland and around the world as ‘mere rioting’. MacDermott had told Beasley that although the IRB were not in a position to hold an insurrection ‘we must do something’. In contrast, Thomas Ashe, another leading IRB member, informed MacDermott ‘I am ready and willing to die for Ireland without a moment’s hesitation. But this isn’t dying for Ireland’. In the event, only eighty fully armed men turned out, and when scouts reported that the Mansion House was guarded, Connolly, Clarke and MacDermott eventually decided that the enterprise should be cancelled.1
