How each side saw the Great War

The outbreak of the first World War in August 1914 had directly contradictory effects on hard-line Irish nationalists and on the British authorities.

On the one hand, the timing of the Rising was determined by the nationalist slogan "England's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity" and the belief on the part of the militants in the Irish Republican Brotherhood that their cause would be disgraced if the war were allowed to pass without an armed Irish revolt.

To the British authorities, on the other hand, the war actually seemed to remove the threat of trouble in Ireland. The potential conflict between the Ulster Volunteers who were pledged to fight against Home Rule and the National Volunteers, who had armed themselves to fight for it, seemed to have been defused. The implementation of Home Rule was shelved; the main leaders of both unionism and nationalism were urging their followers to bury their differences and join the army together; and the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, went so far as to describe the apparent easing of tensions in Ireland as the "one bright spot" in a gloomy world.

Irish nationalism was inextricably entwined with the first World War. For participants on all sides, the Great War was the context for the smaller conflict in Ireland. The Proclamation of the Republic acknowledged in its opening lines the support of "gallant allies in Europe", meaning Germany. James Connolly, in a dispatch from the GPO, claimed that the British army, "which boasts of having stormed the Dardanelles and the German lines on the Marne" was "afraid" to storm the buildings held by the rebels. One nurse who cared for wounded government troops reported that many of them complained "We're in Hell again, we might as well go back to France".

The Citizen Army dug trenches in St Stephen's Green, as if the tactics of the Great War had become second nature. Likewise, the English soldiers who were mown down on Mount Street Bridge walked shoulder-to-shoulder towards the guns like men going over the top in France or Flanders. The crowds of angry women who gathered throughout Easter Week to denounce the rebels were mostly the wives of some of the 140,000 Irish soldiers then serving in the first World War. Sir John Maxwell was sent in as military governor at the end of Easter week, not because he was regarded as the best man for the job, but because the first choice, Sir Ian Hamilton, had been in command at Suvla Bay, where Irish soldiers of the 10th Division had taken very heavy casualties and, as the chief of the imperial general staff, Sir William Robertson noted, there was "a good deal of bitterness in Ireland about Suvla".

The war shaped the attitudes and circumstances that made the Rising possible. James Connolly, a committed internationalist, was driven to despair by the utter failure of the socialist belief that the workers of Europe would refuse to fight each other and asked, "What then became of all our protests of fraternity? Were they all as sound and fury, signifying nothing?" He turned instead to Irish nationalism, convincing himself that an Irish revolution might mark off a wider European revolt against capitalism and the war. The split in the National Volunteers over the war left a smaller faction of Irish Volunteers, which was easier for the militants in the IRB to control. Their support for the war gradually eroded the authority of John Redmond and his Irish Parliamentary Party as the initial flush of popular enthusiasm turned to wariness about the possibility of conscription into an increasingly nightmarish conflict.

This loss of authority gathered pace after July 1915, when Pope Benedict XV denounced the war as futile, and Irish bishops, such as the outspoken Edward O'Dwyer of Limerick denounced Redmond's refusal to follow papal teaching.

Paradoxically this evidence of growing unease in Ireland was one of the reasons why the British authorities failed to clamp down on the militants before the Rising. They feared that in this unsettled atmosphere, any intervention might create a backlash that would affect recruitment to the army. With far bigger things on their minds, they hoped that Ireland, left to itself, would be one less thing to worry about. FINTAN O'TOOLE