Redemption - Leon Uris [287]
Its founder, president, and chief of staff was Eoin MacNeill, an Ulsterman of mixed religious background. MacNeill was a straight-down-the-line Gaelic revivalist and republican. The extent of his military expertise was that he was a professor of history at Dublin University and an academic at the Royal Irish Academy.
In matters of a pending revolution, MacNeill steered a tenterhooks course with his Home Army, making certain it didn’t get mixed up in anything with live ammunition. MacNeill did arch up his back to warn the British he would fight any attempt to conscript his men.
Otherwise he stayed aloof from intimate contact with the aggressive Irish Republican Brotherhood, although he certainly realized the Home Army was riddled with Brotherhood people.
Chief among the Brotherhood infiltrators into the Home Army was Padraic Pearse, who rose to second in command behind MacNeill. Pearse, who likewise had earned his military qualifications as headmaster of a secondary school, was a prominent force on the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood fully intended to use the Home Army as its instrument of a rebellion. The Supreme Council, therefore, secretly plotted the Rising without bothering to consult with Eoin MacNeill, Commander of the Home Army. They came to a decision that rebel Ireland would rise on Easter Sunday of 1916.
The gist of the plan was for Padraic Pearse to call up the Home Army for maneuvers on April 23, as was within his power to do. It was commonplace in Dublin these days to see the various volunteer groups holding maneuvers by storming buildings, throwing up barricades, and engaging in mock street battles, as well as marching through the town in close order drill.
Dublin Castle didn’t put much coin in all this. The Home Army was held in quite shallow esteem.
A simultaneous rising of the countryside was also planned. Sir Roger Casement, a retired Anglo-Irish diplomat of Ulster Protestant origin, was a diehard Brotherhood man. He would travel first to America and thence to Germany to gain support. His plan was money from America and guns and possibly troops from Germany.
The German guns would be landed somewhere in the west of Ireland and put into the hands of republicans to support the Dublin Rising.
Many years ago Conor Larkin told me that this kind of coordinated operation was scarcely an Irish tradition. In utter confidence, he told me he felt it close to impossible to plan and execute a mission involving several thousand men—especially Irish men.
Sir Roger Casement learned bitterly that most Irish-Americans supported the Allies in the Great War, and a rebellion in Dublin would probably not sit well with them. Finding little support in America, he went on to Germany.
The German High Command was curious to learn how serious their involvement in Ireland should be. The wildest of scenarios might see German submarines using the waters off the west coast of Ireland, and possibly even some German troops or officers landing there. They offered Casement to form up an Irish Brigade out of their stockpile of Irish prisoners of war. When only fifty-two men volunteered, and most of them sleazy, German enthusiasm dimmed.
Nonetheless, Germany had to keep a hand in, should the rebels get lucky. Casement’s plea for a hundred thousand rifles was reduced to one shipload of twenty thousand.
In the beginning of April, Padraic Pearse, as second in command and chief of operations, issued an order from Home Army Headquarters, Liberty Hall, the Dublin trade union building. He called on the Dublin Brigades to assemble with arms and ammunition for maneuvers on Easter Sunday, April 23.
The chief English representative at Dublin Castle, Lord Nathan, and his military commanders saw the document and did not seriously investigate the possibility of trouble.
In a stroke of something less than genius, Pearse issued a second order