The Rising

‘This ain’t no half-arsed revolution ... This is the business.’ So declared Desmond Ryan, a protégé of Patrick Pearse, to bemused officials in Dublin’s General Post Office, as the building was occupied by a small band of Irish Volunteers on Easter Monday, 1916. The opening salvo of the Easter Rising was rhetorical, the violence that accompanied the week-long rebellion was (or became retrospectively) steeped in symbolism: for many nationalists in Ireland, the revolutionary moment in 1916 represented the birth of the nation and the independent Irish state. Historians have often focused on the justification, political effects and consequences of the rebellion; Fearghal McGarry opts for a different course in this compelling book, weaving together a vast array of personal narratives mined from the witness statements gathered by the Bureau of Military History. This extraordinary oral history archive, collected during the 1940s and 1950s, contains some seventeen hundred first-hand accounts of the revolutionary events that occurred during the decade preceding the creation of an independent Irish state in 1921. Even before the archive was opened to historians in 2003, the late Peter Hart celebrated the fact that ‘Ireland’s may be the best-documented modern revolution in the world’ (The IRA at War, 1916–1923 [2003; rev. ante, cxix (2004), 1093], p. 5); now, with full access to the Bureau of Military History statements, historians of political revolution will find for the Irish experience an unparalleled treasure trove of source material

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