For six days in Easter week, Dublin was the ruined backdrop for a bloody theatre of armed Irish rebellion. Michael Portillo explores the causes and events of the 1916 Easter Rising.

In 1916, at the height of WW1, armed insurgents rose up against the British in Dublin, the empire's second city. Using secret documents, cabinet papers, intelligence reports, military orders, diaries and letters, Michael Portillo pieces together the story of this uprising from the British point of view.

Was Dublin just another battle at a time of war where military justice was immediate and brutal or, by their actions, did the British men who wrote these documents hasten the end of an empire? Did an unlikely band of Irish rebels, led by playwrights and poets, do more to advance the cause of Irish freedom in five days than nationalist politicians had done in the previous 50 years, or did they damage the cause and condemn the island to a history of violence? Michael looks for the answers. This is the story of Ireland's Easter Rising as told by British politicians, soldiers, spies and bureaucrats.