A masterful study of the Easter Rising - Rated 
Few events in modern Irish history are as pivotal as the 'Easter Rising', the dramatic seizure of the General Post Office and other parts of Dublin that marked the declaration of the Irish Republic. Yet for decades the event has never received the thorough examination it deserves, due in part, as Charles Townshend observes in his preface to this fine book, to the long-standing reticence to release the oral histories of the event contained within the archives of the Bureau of Military History. Their release in 2003 provides the best opportunity yet to study the uprising, and Townshend has risen to the challenge by providing a penetrating examination of the origins and the impact of the Rising.
Townshend traces the origins of the Rising to the development and definition of Irish identity in the late nineteenth century. Here the breadth of his examination is immediately apparent, as he moves beyond the political to study the role that the cultural movement known as the Celtic rising played in inspiring Irish nationalists to challenge British rule. A key figure bridging between the cultural and the political was Patrick Pearse, the president of the provisional republic claimed in the aftermath of the seizure of the General Post Office. By delving into Pearse's past as a nationalist consumed with freeing Ireland not only from British political domination but its cultural domination as well, he illustrates just how important the cultural component was in inspiring the nationalists and driving them towards action.
Yet Irish politics in those years was dominated not by nationalism but the issue of Home Rule. Here Townshend focuses on the reaction to the Home Rule measure in Ireland, which catalyzed Unionist resistance in the north to the devolution of Irish government. The formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force, in turn, inspired southern nationalists to form their own armed group, the Irish Volunteers, a movement quickly subsumed by the Irish Parliamentary Party into their organization. Yet the outbreak of the First World War and the decision by Irish parliamentary leader John Redmond to support the war split the Irish Volunteers and came to undermine his standing.
The nationalist Irish Volunteers that broke away from main group were themselves divided over the next step, however. As they gained in standing with the growing unpopularity of Redmond's decision, Pearse and other members sought to take advantage of Britain's difficulty to throw off her rule of Ireland. Given the attitudes of the Volunteer leadership, such planning had to take place in secrecy, and one of the great strengths of this book is Townshend's laudable effort to wade into the confused jumble of half-hidden events to detail the evolution of the Rising. What was initially envisioned as a nationwide rebellion quickly became a Dublin-centric event that would take advantage of a planned Easter Sunday mobilization to strike against British rule. The last-minute efforts by the nationalist Volunteer leadership to head off the rebellion, though, resulted in a confused and only partial assemblage of Volunteers on the following day.
The three chapters on the Rising itself form the heart of Townshend's book, and they recount an event characterized by confusion on both sides. The poor preparations and questionable decisions by the rebels were equaled only by those of the British authorities, whose overreaction in the aftermath of the rebels' inevitable defeat turned them from extremists into heroes. Townshend concludes the book by looking at the belated efforts by the British in the aftermath of the Rising to craft a settlement in response to the growing nationalist challenge to their control over Ireland - a challenge that in the end they failed to avert.
With its clear prose and painstaking reconstruction of the tangled events of the Easter Rising, Townshend's book is a masterpiece of the historical craft. The thorough research and judicious analysis contained within its pages is unlikely to be bettered as a guide to the complicated and confused developments that led to this dramatic and exciting event. For anyone seeking a study that will help them understand the Easter Rising, its background, and its consequences, this is the one to read.
A detailed work marred by bias - Rated 
Townshend's book offers a detailed & well-researched account of the 1916 rebellion. A transparent prose style gives the book an air of authority & significance. Unfortunately, the author's Republican leanings mar the book's credibility as a definitive account.
The book is enhanced by detailed accounts of the actions of the Republican protagonists prior to the rebellion. To his credit, Townshend does not shy away from describing the schisms which divided Irish nationalism. However, he is determined to represent events within the context of his own sympathies. This is apparent when he describes the militarization of the Republicans. He alleges that this was sparked by the activities of the UVF. Unfortunately, he collapses his argument by describing in detail how Republicans sought to procure weapons - & participated in military drills & terrorism - before the UVF existed.
He also fails to invoke the nature of the military & political context in which the rebellion took place. The rebels staged armed attacks during a time when Britain was engaged in a massive conflict abroad. They did this with the (limited) support of the enemy. Up this point, he concedes that Ireland had been ruled in an inconsistent - largely liberal - fashion. He seeks to engage our sympathies for the minority of rebels who were executed by denying his reader the opportunity to fully appreciate the wider context - world war, the perceived threat to Britain via Ireland & the inexperience of the British Army in urban fighting. Predictably, the "British" voice is restricted to the generals & politicians, who are portrayed as charlatans or brutes. We learn nothing of the ordinary soldiers. Republican atrocities are played down, as the general unpopularity of the rebels. He barely mentions Belfast or Ulster.
Townshend states that his aim is to present a clear & concise account, devoid of the mythology which characterises nationalst/Republican accounts of these events. However, he allows his bias to "pre-edit" his account. He inadvertently sustains the myths he denounces.
A superb, detailed account - Rated
A few hundred rebels seized control of central Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, and eventually were shelled out by the British as they retook the city; while most of the leaders were shot by firing squad, the survivors became the nucleus of the political movement that fought for and then ruled the independent Irish state that emerged in 1921. It is generally regarded as one of the turning points in Irish history; and while Townshend tries to cast some doubt on that assessment, he doesn't really succeed, carried away as he is by the drama of the topic. There's lots of detail here, and some very interesting analysis as well.
The most extraordinary finding for me was the true extent of British repression in the run-up to 1916: specifically, that there was so little of it. MI5 employed 1453 people as postal censors in England, Scotland and Wales by the end of 1915. In Ireland there were precisely ten people doing the job, five in Belfast and five in Dublin. Of course, the Post Office, as it turns out, was pretty heavily infiltrated by militant nationalists anyway, so it might not have done any good; but they simply were not trying. (The fact that the GPO was the headquarters at Easter 1916 is not especially relevant here.) The government had no intelligence capability - or rather, there were a number of intelligence-gathering agencies, but they don't seem to have been reporting to anyone, and no effort appears to have been made to find out who exactly was in control of the various armed militias parading around the place, let alone what their political agenda and concrete plans might be. Even the Pope had been told that an Easter rebellion was planned, but the British were caught completely by surprise.
I also found very impressive Townshend's reconstruction, practically from the historiographical equivalent of trace fossils, of why Easter 1916 was planned as it was. Since all the people who actually knew what was going on had been executed within a few days of the end of the rebellion, and almost all the documentation, if it ever existed, had been lost, this was not an easy task. But he does a good job - significantly, many of the survivors among the rebels had been (or at least later claimed to have been) proponents of the guerilla warfare model that indeed was successful between 1919 and 1921, rather than the urban seizure which Pearse, fascinated as he was by Robert Emmett's 1803 adventure, had fixated on early in his career. Emmett, of course, didn't even manage to lead his rebels to the end of Thomas Street; but for Pearse, and for Joseph Mary Plunkett, who actually wrote the plan for 1916 (such as it was), that was hardly the point.
He's also very good on the actual events leading up to and surrounding the outbreak of the rebellion. There had been a scare from a leaked Dublin Castle document apparently planning for repressive measures to be taken in the event of introducing conscription. This led to the ramping up of tension and expectation, and seemed to offer an excuse to start the rebellion on Easter Sunday. Eoin MacNeill, of course, countermanded the orders; but as things turned out, he was not fully in control, and the rebellion went ahead, though on a smaller scale, on Easter Monday instead.
Another strength of the book is his description of what happened outside Dublin - more than is usually recounted, including relatively successful operations in Louth and Meath, and a dignified surrender with no lives (or even weapons) lost in Cork, for which both the British forces and the Cork rebels were duly chastised by their colleagues.
I was very interested in the argument in an early chapter that Redmond and the Irish Party had irretrievably lost their credibility as early as 1915. Redmond, as leader of the Irish Nationalists, had taken a huge gamble by committing them to the service of the British during the first world war. He was comprehensively screwed over by two factors. First, the British army (Lord Kitchener in particular) decided not to incorporate the existing Irish Nationalist paramilitary structures into the army, with symbols and regimental identity etc, as was done for the Ulster Volunteers. Second, the war lasted a lot longer than people expected, which meant that Home Rule was now put off for far longer than the few months originally anticipated and that Redmond's main political role collapsed into being a British recruiting sergeant. Meanwhile the war was not going well. The only news most people were getting from the Western front was the telegram telling them their sons were dead. And while wages were frozen but prices rising all over the United Kingdom, it was in Ireland that wages were lowest and fewest jobs were created on foot of the war effort.
Rather to my surprise, after outlining his (to me) revolutionary and innovative analysis of the 1914-16 period, Townshend appears to retreat back into that orthodoxy in later chapters dealing with the 1916-18 period, which made me wonder if he really believed his own argument.
Anyone interested in Irish history, of whatever political views, should be grateful to Townshend for pulling this material together and in particular for the wealth of detail about the precise military facts of what happened. It's an excellent book, though I would like to know more about the revolutionary implications of the bicycle.
THE definitive account - Rated
In his preface, the author identifies the absence for over eighty years of a truly academic work on the events surrounding the Easter Rebellion in Dublin in 1916.
Whilst this book has very high standards in presenting the information, this is no 'high brow' work intended only for the few. It is very readable indeed, and the opening three chapters on 'Revolutionism', 'The Militarization of Politics' and 'England's Difficulty', bring clarity to the background to the relationships between the various Irish political and social institutions that became the conduits for the rebellion. Indeed the Irish dilemma is put in its historical context very effectively and the vibrant (if not impulsive) personalities of some of the participants shine through.
The student and researcher will in reading this book, find new gems of insight that will add to the understanding of the rebellion. The clarity of writing style and explanation of the political dynamics both inside and outside Ireland ensures that the reader can understand the rebellion in a logical way. No mean achievement in following the progress of any revolutionary story, being so often a hostage to fortune and usually no respecter of a planned timetable of events.
For the serious student of Irish history this is a long overdue book and it expands insights and background which have until now been diluted over many worthy books by other authors.
However the general reader must not be discouraged by what appears from the preface and the author's self proclaimed intention, of producing a definitive work on the subject. This can imply it will be academic and therefore tough going but nothing could be further from the truth. It is highly recommended.
As with all books on the 1916 rebellion, keep a large scale city map of Dublin to hand. It rewards the investment particularly when following the military actions in what is a battlefield site.
Michael McCarthy
Editor, "The Battle Guide"
Guild of Battlefield Guides.
Excellent, detailed account of the key event of modern Irish history - Rated
The Easter Rising of 1916 was the most significant event in modern Irish history, yet most accounts I have come across up to now have been fairly biased either for or against the rebels. This is an excellent and objective history of the events of the Rising, with a detailed analysis of the background, the key personalities and the evolution of the main ideas of the time, which I found fascinating.
Townshend meticulously assesses the value and truthfulness of various sources he cites, and the confusing picture he paints of the planning of the Rising reflects the realities of the time. The last chapter is an insightful analysis of the legacy of the Rising and the disputes over its meaning by later generations, as well as an attempt to put it in an international context.
The only criticisms I have are that he deals quite quickly with the executions of the leaders, although he does discuss the impact of them, and his writing style is less fluid than some other historians. If you are looking for an easy read, Tim Pat Coogan's account might suit you better, although it's not as detailed.
Regardless of your political views, this is a great book which certainly gave me a better understanding of how modern Ireland was created.
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