Workers Union. Leader of the employers was William Martin Murphy, owner of Independent Newspapers.
Another key ICA leader was Constance Markievicz, who later became the first Minister for Labour in the first Dail Eireann. Unlike the Volunteers, women were given equal rights in the Citizen Army, carrying arms and in positions of authority within the army.
Markievicz was second in command of a detachment of mainly ICA forces involved in battles around Stephen Green. After a week's ferocious bombardment that destroyed much of the city centre, including the GPO, the rebels surrendered. Sixteen of the leaders were courtmartialled by the British and shot. Connolly, wounded twice in the fighting, was snot in a chall. Markievicz too, was sentenced to death but had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
Another of the leaders, one Eamon de Valera, escaped death because he had been born in the US. The remainder of the rebels were interned in Wales. It was not until after the 1918 Election in which Sinn Fein gained a huge majority, that the armed struggle -the War of Independence - began.
The Rising had been deliberately timed, in Connolly's phrase, to take advantage of Britain's difficulty in the war with Germany. Just before, a German submarine loaded with arms, was scuttled off the Kerry coast when discovered by the British. Initially, the rebels WCIC denounced on all sides. Many Dublin working class families had relatives fighting for the British in Members of John Redmond's Irish Party with seats in the British parliament denounced the Rising as an undemocratic putsch. Geared to gaining independence by "constitutional" means, the Irish Party were closely tied to the Liberals. But the Liberals had split over Home Rule, partly because of an army mutiny in Ireland in 1914 after Conservative Randolph Churchill advised his party to "play the Orange Card". Lenin versus ultra-left
But it was the left critics of the Rising who attracted the ire of Lenin. His particular target was the author of an article in a German left wing paper who argued that the nationalist movement remained only a "purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing". Lenin situated the insurrection in the context of imperialism. Social revolution was inconceivable witnoul revolts by small nations in the colonies and in Europe.
"Whoever calls such a rebellion a "putsch" is either a hardened reactionary, or a doctrinaire hopelessly incapable of envisaging a social revolution as a living phenomeThe debate about the character of the Rising continues to the present day. It was claimed that the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the Rising in 1966 gave an impetus to the growth of nationalist sentiment, particularly in the North. Particularly sensitive on this issue were governments in Dublin who in recent years abandoned any official celebrations of the Rising.
The fact that they are to be resumed this year indicates the confidence of these most antirepublican elements that the national question has been safely buried, for the moment.
Alongside the abandonment by successive Dublin Governments of any pretence to seeking national independence and unity, has come so-called historical revisionism, the idea promoted first in Ireland and now in Britain that the British Empire was not really as bad as nationalist historians had made out. A whole school of mainly Oxford based historians have argued, often under the guise of leftsounding progressivist antinationalism, that the majority of the people in Ireland were, at the very most, indifferent to British rule and that many favoured it because of its benefits. "Democratic" facade The underlying claim is that republicans seeking to end British domination are backward tanatics, congenitally prone to violence and this is contrasted with the "constitutional" and "democratic" British way. Biographies of Republican leadgency in Ireland, means they are better at subduing the Iraqis than the rather crude Americans.
Blair even sent ex-RUC Chief Ronnie Flanagan to investigate collusion between the state and militias. All in the name of bringing "democracy" to the premodern and backward Iraqis.
Some on the left see the struggle in Iraq as a dangerous diversion from the struggle for socialism. And there is undoubtedly a small section of the Iraqi resistance that is sectarian in its aims, outlook and methods. However, the main source of sectarianism are those elements which depend on the US and not the resistance.
Over the past six months US casualties have fallen as sectarian attacks have grown. The US is desperate to avoid any repeat of the alliance between Sunni and Shia such as Al Sadr.
The main obstacle to socialism on a global scale is not the Islamic reactionaries who form a small part of the Iraqi resistance to occupation, however "backward" they are claimed to be by the benign imperialists in Washington and London.
The danger comes, as it did in 1916, comes from the ruling class in the imperial powers.
Even if the final settling of accounts with these elements will have to come from workers in these countries themselves. there is no doubt that they would suffer a severe blow from defeat in Iraq.
Armchair revolutionaries among the British left would do well to remember on this anniversary of the Easter Rising, Lenin's 1916 criticism: "Whoever "pure" social revolution will never live to see it."
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Socialist EDITORIAL BOARD: Tami
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