´óÏó´«Ã½

The Sinn Féin movement was established by Arthur Griffith. He was a Dublin printer, born in 1871, who had a keen interest in Irish history and culture. He had been an enthusiastic supporter of Parnell but after his fall came to feel a growing contempt for the home rule party. He thereafter focussed his energies on trying to find an alternative way forward for Ireland. Drawing lessons from the experience of Hungary, he argued in 1902, that Irish MPs should simply withdraw from Westminster and set up an assembly of their own in Dublin. This, he believed, Irish citizens would recognise and the British government in time be compelled to accept. Ireland would therefore emerge as a self-governing partner with Britain, with both sharing the English Crown as head of state. He was also convinced that Ireland could develop a strong, self-sufficient economy by erecting tariffs to exclude competing industrial imports from Britain. In 1905, he launched the Sinn Féin (‘ourselves’) Party, its programme based on these ideas. Until 1916, it remained a small, Dublin-centred organisation. But owing to his immense gifts as a writer, Griffith became the best-known nationalist journalist in the capital and his movement was therefore widely held to be responsible for having caused the Rising.

In fact, the ‘dynamic force’ behind the Rising was the IRB – an underground, separatist, revolutionary movement, established in 1858. Until 1910, its leadership was elderly, ineffective, inactive and corrupt. It was then revitalised by a new generation of energetic members dedicated to precipitating a revolution to achieve Ireland’s independence. The process was begun in Ulster, where younger elements, influenced by the passion and militancy of the unionists, transformed the local republican movement. Subsequently, they focussed their energies on purging the national leadership in Dublin. By 1911, they had succeeded. Thomas Clarke and Sean MacDermott were then in control; they were talented, effective and ready to exploit any favourable opportunity which might arise.

This was not long in coming. By 1913, even moderate nationalists were convinced that they should form a paramilitary organisation to reinforce their demands for self-government and exert additional pressure on the British government in the same way that Ulster unionists had done by establishing the Ulster Volunteer Force. When, in November, a respected academic, Eoin MacNeill, suggested such an initiative in a newspaper article, the IRB leaders immediately seized on this opportunity. They helped organise the public launch of the new force, the Irish Volunteers, on 25th November 1913. They hoped to infiltrate it and use it in a future rising. It was not, however, the first to be formed in the capital that year; two weeks earlier Dublin workers had begun to set up the Irish Citizen Army.