The 1916 uprising against British rule was a first step to independence, but the violence that followed led to its marginalisation – until now

As the lights finally dimmed at Dublin’s famous Abbey Theatre last night, the audience rose to its feet through air thick with emotion, and cheered in a way – with an intensity – with which people do not usually acclaim a play. They had been watching an appositely shattering production of The Plough and the Stars by Sean O’Casey, the great playwright’s complex commentary on the Easter Rising that begat the Irish republic a century ago.

During the week of the Rising in 1916, the Abbey was due to stage a play by the theatre’s founder WB Yeats, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, about the mythic-political figure of Mother Ireland; but, writes historian Tim Pat Coogan, “the stage drama had to be postponed because the street theatre outside took over”. In the Irish capital this weekend, stage and street merge again, but in reverse: brutal reality in the theatre, commemorative drama past the exit.

Dublin this weekend is inevitably a one-theme town. The Proclamation of the Republic read by the Rising’s leader, Patrick Pearse, on Easter Monday 1916 is printed on kitchen aprons and chocolate bars, emblazoned across the sides of buses. Bookshops display an overwhelming range of titles while Irish-American tourists buy up T-shirts bearing the unlikely figure of James Connolly, a founding father of revolutionary socialism, to wear around shopping malls back home.

A parade on Friday from Kilmainham jail, where the Rising’s leaders were executed, was led by a band from the US ironworkers union, IBEW, and another from Dublin. Men wearing 1916 Irish Volunteer uniforms took to the football pitch before Ireland’s 1-0 victory over Switzerland. Unofficial merchandise includes portraits of the seven signatories of the Proclamation glazed into ceramic plates, for sale on Dublin’s streets.

The Easter rebellion was the beginning of the end of empire for Britain and among the first European revolutions of the 20th century. But O’Casey’s play is not a simple eulogy to the week-long revolt by armed rebels from the nationalist Irish Volunteers and communist Irish Citizens Army, who seized the General Post Office and other buildings in the then colonial capital, only to be crushed by the first deployment of modern artillery against an inner city. A war of independence followed, then civil war over the subsequent partition of Ireland.

O’Casey’s play is about poverty, the Rising viewed by inhabitants of a tenement, touched by its themes of death and patriotism, but set in the present.

“It’s a play – and this is a production – about the promises of 1916, nationalism as ideology, empire as slaughter – and about what all this means for ordinary people,” says the Abbey’s director Fiach Mac Conghail.

“And the amazing thing is that these quite sophisticated conversations are now happening all over Ireland: what was the Rising, what was it about and what does it tell us about now?”

So there is severity and sincerity beneath today’s march past the GPO and the carnival tomorrow which Irish television RTE calls “the biggest public cultural and history event that has ever been staged in this country”.

'Things were never quite the same again': stories from the 1916 Easter Rising Read more

Ireland has an epic and complex relationship to the Rising. Commemoration began days after it was crushed: a book of photographs produced “as a souvenir, to commemorate what had just happened”, says the principal archivist at University College Dublin, Kate Manning.

On the first anniversary in 1917, a flag was hoisted in the snow and Yeats published his poem Sixteen Dead Men, for the executed leaders of the Rising who became its martyrs, “to stir the boiling pot”.

In 1926, rival 10th-anniversary commemorations were held across the civil war divide by supporters and opponents of the treaty. Modern Ireland’s patriarch, Éamon de Valera, staged the first march-past at the GPO during the 1930s, himself on a podium, turning the Easter moment into a homage by the Rising to the state, rather than vice-versa.

Coogan recalls the 50th anniversary in 1966 as being “like high mass. Any attempt to analyse the Rising was heresy, only there was no attempt to build on the promises of 1916 in terms of politics or the border.” That spring, however, Nelson’s column outside the GPO was blown up the by IRA, and Troubles in the North were imminent. Mac Conghail at the Abbey also said: “We’re all very comfortable with the Rising as the culmination of an Irish cultural movement, but less so that it became a military uprising, too.”

Ireland’s relationship to 1916 has been complicated by the Troubles. Now it can belong to us again John Waters, author

John Waters is author of Jiving at the Crossroads, a discourse between his own rock’n’roll generation and that which lived through the Rising; people like his father who “scrimped and saved for years to put together the makings of a life he would never live”.

“Ireland’s relationship to 1916 has been complicated by the Troubles,” says Waters. “Now, the peace process has liberated our relationship to 1916 inasmuch as, while war was fought in the North, to identify with the Easter Rising was to be taken as endorsing the Provos. The ending of that war means that 1916 can belong to Ireland again.”

“For 35 years,” says Coogan, “governments tended to keep their heads down past the GPO, for fear of giving credence to the Provisionals. This time, the original idea was to get corporate sponsorship for these events. It looked like Apple getting the GPO, Google the College of Surgeons; there didn’t seem to be much public funding.

“But then suddenly there was this great surge of interest – visits and projects in schools were a huge success, there was a real popular demand for something to happen.”

In recent decades, says Waters, the Rising has been serially misremembered and marginalised. “It shocks me how little people know of the men of 1916. Until recently, most of their written works, including Pearse’s essays like The Coming Revolution, were out of print.”

For most families and folk, Dubliners and those arrived on buses from all over the country – and from America’s diaspora – this is a festival of now, in a new, changed Ireland. But many people agree that the executed leaders of 1916 would turn in their graves at the sight of modern Ireland and this carnival. One could take any line of the Proclamation with which to measure the present, and at this moment some people inevitably do.

Those in the west of the country – whence the Rising really came – who have for a decade been trying to combat a vast gas project by Shell, refer to the proclaimed “right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland”, in a country known for its generosity towards multinational companies. Maura Harrington of the Shell to Sea group talks about “people not having the same awareness of colonisation by the multinationals now as they had 100 years ago of colonisation by the British empire. Different imperium.”

Coogan wonders what 1916’s founding fathers would have thought about “the way the banks have looted this country with the consent and connivance of the political establishment. More people have committed suicide during this period of austerity than were killed during the Troubles. Thousands lose their homes every week, or else remain courtesy of vulture-capital mortgages.”

Another is the promise of “cherishing all the children of the nation equally”, after the church paedophilia scandal and discovery of mass graves of orphans at Tuam.

With that in mind, part of this centennial week’s celebrations has been the sound and sight of hundreds coming through the Ark children’s art centre for its “Put Yourself In the Picture” project – to paint themselves and be drawn by Ireland’s leading artists, including Brian Maguire, better known for his work in prisons.

There Maguire sits, now etching not lifers in Portlaoise prison, but cheeky faces and wonky glasses in charcoal “because that’s the crucial line in the Proclamation as far as I’m concerned, about children, and it certainly isn’t happening. All that – Tuam, the church abuse of children – was the legacy of how de Valera hijacked the Rising, and forged the world in which I grew up in: Catholic, living in the dark.”