On Easter Monday, 1916, in the middle of World War I, some 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army seized the General Post Office and several other sites in Dublin. They were led by Patrick Pearse, a leader of the Irish Volunteers and of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and by James Connolly, a revolutionary socialist and workers’ leader who founded the Citizen Army.

Under conditions of deepening opposition to British colonial rule and to the imperialist war, the rebels had counted on setting off a national revolt. While uprisings did erupt elsewhere in Ireland, the hoped-for general insurrection did not transpire. After days of bitter fighting, the survivors surrendered to overwhelming British force on Saturday.

In the course of the fighting, British artillery leveled a large part of Dublin. Pearse, Connolly, and thirteen other Irish leaders were sentenced to death and shot.

Although the Easter Rebellion was crushed, it inspired a rising tide of struggle in Ireland. Sinn Fein, the nationalist political party, grew rapidly in the wake of the revolt. In 1919 the Volunteers (now incorporating the Citizen Army) adopted the name Irish Republican Army. A civil war developed.

In 1921 the British government, unable to crush this nationalist revolt by force, reached agreement with the bourgeois leaders of the Irish nationalist movement to partition Ireland. Eamon De Valera, a surviving veteran of the Easter Rebellion, later became president of the formally independent Irish Free State. The island’s six northern counties, however, remained under British colonial rule. The IRA and Sinn Fein opposed the partition and continued the fight for an independent, united Ireland.

The Easter Rebellion was the first major outbreak of revolt by the oppressed and exploited in Europe since the beginning of World War I. The Irish rebels’ stand, “We serve neither king nor kaiser, but Ireland,” was in stark contrast to the treacherous conduct of the majority of European labor and Socialist leaders, who told the toilers to put aside their fight for justice and a decent life for the good of “their own” governments’ war efforts.

At the time of the Easter Rebellion, the minority left wing in the international Socialist movement—those who opposed calling a truce with the exploiters in the class struggle and supporting the imperialist rulers in the war—was debating what policy to adopt toward the fight by oppressed nations for the right to self-determination. How to evaluate the Easter Rebellion became a part of that discussion…. V.I. Lenin [the central leader of the Russian Revolution]…argued that the social revolution by the working class against capitalist rule is inconceivable “without revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe.”  
 
 
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