A grandfather with a rifle under the floorboards, a granny whose hero was Patrick Pearse and playing ‘Insurrection’ in the playground – Irish writers reflect on what the 1916 rebellion has meant for them and their country

Colm Tóibín

In the early hours of the Thursday of Easter week 1916 my grandfather came into the front bedroom of the small house in Enniscorthy. His sons woke and watched as he lifted some of the floorboards and removed a rifle. The Rising in Dublin had begun on Monday, but outside Dublin there was confusion. To get a clear idea of what was happening, a man called Paul Galligan had gone by bicycle the 75 miles from Enniscorthy to Dublin, arriving on Easter Sunday. The following day he met with three of the leaders of the Dublin Rebellion in the General Post Office. He was told to go back home to Enniscorthy and instruct the other members of the movement to take the town and hold the railway line, thus stopping British forces from getting from Rosslare to Dublin. He rode back to Enniscorthy by a circuitous route so he would not be detained, arriving on the Wednesday. The Rising in Enniscorthy began the following morning. Between 100 and 200 took part at the beginning, although more joined later. Compared to Dublin, the Enniscorthy Rising was small. No one was killed; two or three were wounded; no buildings were destroyed. “We had one day of blissful freedom,” one of the Enniscorthy leaders said. (The Rising lasted just a few days.) But perhaps its real importance came when the Rebellion ended. The British arrested almost 300 people in Enniscorthy and its environs. One of these – Séamus Doyle – was even sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted. In later years, he lived in a house close to ours and devoted himself to the growing of roses and grumbling about boys who kicked their football into his garden.

My grandfather was arrested and taken to Frongoch, an internment camp in Wales. Some of the Irish prisoners were a bit surprised to find that, while they spoke English to each other, their guards spoke Welsh. Frongoch became a university for the guerrilla war that came later. Just before Christmas 1916, my grandfather and many others were released. They arrived at the railway station in triumph as heroes on Christmas Eve 1916.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Colm Tóibín. Photograph: JP Gandul/EPA

When I was growing up, I knew all about this, but it was hardly ever spoken of. Somehow, the legend was in the air rather than in general discussion. If you asked about it, people from the older generation would go silent. Boasting about your involvement would have ruined the mystique that surrounded the Rebellion. In 1966, there were huge celebrations in the town for the 50th anniversary. At home, we had a postcard that my grandfather had sent my father from prison in Wales. We watched a drama-documentary about the Rebellion on television with one of the women who had actually taken part in the room with us. Those who led the Rebellion and were executed afterwards were viewed in the same way as Catholic martyrs were. The rebellion was, for some of those involved, serious and political. My grandfather and his friends wanted to get the British out of Ireland, as many others in India and Africa and other places did. But the power of the rebellion came from its symbolism as much as from its strategy. Or a central element in the strategy was theatrical and symbolic. The rebels wanted to storm the Bastille of the imagination since they did not have the numbers or the arms to storm the real one. For us growing up, the executed leaders were fully mystical.

Anne Enright

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Anne Enright. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe/The Guardian

Boys, when they are playing cowboys and Indians, do more dying than killing. When it comes down to it, “Bang you’re dead” is pretty flat and unexciting compared with the chest clutching, spinning and reeling that precedes being killed for fun. Patriotism, when I was a child, was all about “dying for Ireland”. It was a trick you could do with your dog: “Beg. Paw. Roll over and die for Ireland!”

There was too much reverence – that was why we mocked. I got sent from the table, when I was 12, for saying that Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Rising, was a homosexual – not a word I understood, at the time. I saw the bullet holes in the facade of the GPO and that was exciting and real, but the national mythology that flowed from that moment felt odd. I mean, as a child I did not trust it and I am not sure why I should trust it now.

The men of 1916 had no chance of success. They went out to die, a few hundred of them – while thousands were being slaughtered each day in the trenches of Belgium and France. The scale was important. Big wars are terrible and killing civilians is just cowardly, but pitching a few hundred men against the might of the British army is a revolution. It was a transcendental moment of sacrifice and of suffering. Perhaps it was a result of colonisation, with its enforced poverty and shame, but Ireland was for a long time interested in the idea of suffering well, or of suffering better than the oppressor; none was expected to suffer more, or more quietly, than the women of Ireland, into whose bodies and biology suffering was hard-wired. So the idea of blood sacrifice is not removed, in my mind, from a modern state that cannot legislate for the proper medical treatment of pregnant women, because suffering is something we are supposed to do well. Also dying, if it comes to that.

All nations have founding myths. I suppose I would prefer to have a revolution in my country’s past than a monarchy. I would prefer to move on from Catholic nationalism than from fascist dictatorship. But the truth is that local history has given way, in my lifetime, to global economics, and we have no good stories for this: no parades, no revolutions. The stories we tell ourselves about the past are not about politics. I mean they are not about fairness, about who has power and where the money goes. They contain a deeper madness. The stories we tell are about killing and being killed, and why that was all a terrific thing to do.

Roddy Doyle

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Roddy Doyle. Photograph: Martin Godwin/The Guardian

I was seven years old for the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, in 1966. The story had no complications. It was Ireland against England, good v bad, Irish Catholicism v paganism. And we won. We were the proof that we’d won, the boys and girls crammed into the classroom, learning the Proclamation of Independence, which was drafted by the leaders of the Rising, off by heart, from a tea towel that the teacher had pinned to the top of the blackboard, roaring the words out for Ireland. We didn’t understand what we were shouting: “The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities of all its citizens.”

We ran out to the yard and played Insurrection. And, again, we always won. The enemy was invisible. When we played cowboys and Indians, there was never a shortage of Geronimos. But in the spring of 1966, nobody wanted to be English.

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

Today, I love the complications. Many of the men in the GPO were actually English. I found that out only a few months ago. The children of Irish parents, they’d come over to Dublin from London, Manchester and Liverpool, to avoid conscription. The best named was Johnny “Blimey” O’Connor.

Elizabeth O’Farrell, the nurse who delivered the surrender, was gay – as were many of the women involved. I read about that last week.

One of the leaders, Joseph Plunkett, wore spurs but lacked a horse. Patrick Pearse, the president of the new Republic, cycled in to the Rising with a sword on his belt. These lads had style. In a lull in the fighting, or before it got going, they sat together and discussed which member of which European royal family they would invite to become king of Ireland. They opted for the Kaiser’s youngest son. Prince Joachim Franz Humbert of Prussia nearly became the first king of the Republic of Ireland.

An Irish cockney called Blimey, a gay woman walking alongside Pearse as he surrendered, two men who would soon die for the Republic earnestly selecting a monarch that would share their sense of style. I love my country.

Ruth Dudley Edwards

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ruth Dudley Edwards. Photograph: Mark Winter/Demotix/Corbis

As a child, the Easter Rising meant the huge picture of carnage in the GPO that turned on my republican granny. At school, it was about the seven men whose photographs surrounded the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. They were apparently the greatest patriots in all Irish history, with the saintly Patrick Pearse being the noblest of all.

Possibly because of Granny’s excesses (she was a fan of Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin too), I’m temperamentally suspicious of hero worship and the traditional Irish nationalist affection for myths about perfect heroes and frightful villains.

So I thought it time to examine the Rising and wrote a biography of Pearse that caused offence to many by revealing him to be human: selfless, industrious, morally and physically courageous, adventurous and gifted, but also arrogant, reckless and consumed with a death wish and a narcissistic desire to have his name ring down the generations.

My new book The Seven looks at the seven fascinating men who – with no mandate of any kind and for disparate reasons – staged a violent revolution in a democracy. Because they were given retrospective legitimacy, this set a precedent that has brought great misery to Ireland ever since. The history of the last century is of various IRAs using the Easter Rising and Pearse’s brilliant propaganda to justify their campaign of terror and to groom young people to kill and die for Ireland.

It is our history, so we can’t ignore it, but the government is commemorating rather than celebrating, and acknowledging and honouring for the first time the non-rebel dead, including civilians, police (mostly Irish Catholic) and British soldiers. There is honest, open debate about whether the Rising was justified.

Diehard republicans hate that, but it makes me proud of my country.

Kevin Barry

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kevin Barry. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

Not long ago, one of the young drug addicts who hangs around on the Liffey boardwalks near O’Connell bridge told me that he had seen an angel above the river, and that she spoke to him, but he could not make out the words. I would not take him for a reliable witness – we had never met before, but he insisted that we were old acquaintances, and that in fact I was supposed to have come to see him on the Tuesday. His eyes were very far away and he had not many teeth and he was chewing on pills that he popped from a card. I couldn’t make out the brand name. Most of the drug addicts around the Liffey now aren’t on heroin or crack any more – they’re on pills they buy off the internet (benzies, lithium, dalmane) and they eat them in ferocious quantities, enough to summon angels and to make the last of a dreary Dublin winter seem a paradise, I suppose, for a while at least. If it suddenly starts pissing down, you can always go and mooch around Easons or McDonald’s, banging into the furniture, or another likely shelter is beneath the portico of the GPO, 150 yards away, where the Proclamation of a Republic was beautifully declaimed, and some days it is nice to dream that it is possible that we might get to live in one yet, where in fact we are all cherished equally, that we might be housed and treated, and not left to the streets, where the only salvation for body and soul lies in a deep narcotic psychosis, where the city thrums its thousand colours, and there’s an angel in the sky above the river.

Michael Longley

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Michael Longley. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

When the 75th anniversary of the Easter Rising came round in 1991, the Irish government seemed reluctant to give even oblique support to the IRA by commemorating too vigorously the militant republicanism that gave birth to the state. At the time, this underplaying of a central historical moment seemed wrong to me. It was as though Yeats’s great, ambiguous refrain “A terrible beauty is born” was being diluted into “Yes, something rather significant did happen round about then”.

So I accepted an invitation to join in one of the commemorative events, a marathon poetry reading at the GPO. In the long queue of readers I was proud to take my place between one of the key figures in the revival of poetry in Irish, Máire Mhac an tSaoi, and Michael D Higgins, who is now Ireland’s illustrious president. I read elegies for people killed in the Troubles, and I said that, coming from Belfast, I felt Irish sometimes and sometimes I felt British. The large crowd seemed sympathetic to my declaration of dual allegiance.

Yeats writes in “Easter 1916”, the greatest of war poems, “Too long a sacrifice / Can make a stone of the heart”. Part of me wants to echo my wife’s suggestion that we should erect a statue to Amnesia and then forget where we put it. In Northern Ireland today, the past still gets in the way of the future. But, deep down, I need to celebrate this foolhardy, vainglorious uprising organised by poets and dreamers. In addition, the commemorations planned by the Irish government now make room for people north and south of the border to lament the Battle of the Somme, that bone-headed shambles in which thousands of Irishmen, Catholic and Protestant, fought and died. My father, a boy-soldier in the London Regiment, survived the folly and mayhem.

Joseph O’Neill

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Joseph O’Neill. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

Since I wasn’t there, I connect to the Easter rebellion chiefly as a reader; and my main text is the Proclamation, which I helplessly read as someone who is “Irish”. The inverted commas refer to my awareness of the artificial, random and coercive nature of nationality, an awareness that grows only stronger as the years pass and my distrust of the very notion of national identity increases. And yet for some reason I’m still susceptible to enchantment by these words:

Irishmen and Irishwomen: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

The enchantment is transient and, finally, perplexing, as it must be: there is no uprising currently going on in Dublin, and my peculiar patriotic feeling has nowhere to go. The revolutionary summons can only be answered imaginatively, as if one were responding to a compelling piece of fiction. Whenever I read the famous Christmas dinner scene in Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Mr Casey cries loudly, “Poor Parnell! My dead king!”, I experience exactly the same emotional trajectory.

The Easter Rising’s mythic resonance is, then, to a large extent attributable to its novelistic qualities. It has vivid protagonists with transparent and sympathetic motivations; it centres on a flawed but heroic adventure; it comes to a tragic, morally clarifying end. Pearse, a playwright as well as a rebel, could not have dreamed up a more dramatically complete arc.

Part of the job, as we “remember” 100-year-old events we cannot personally remember, is to reckon with this reality: in spite of all the settled historical data, by default we find ourselves in the situation of the fantasist. This is the tricky bit. What is, and what ought to be, our fantasy?

Sebastian Barry

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sebastian Barry. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

My grandfather Matthew Barry was a passionate believer in the new country that had formed in his youth. He had learned Irish in preparation for it. I remember a puzzling moment when I was a little boy walking with him in Herbert Park, when he broke away from me to whisper in Irish to an old comrade. I can see them still, heaped in years, speaking haltingly in the dusk.

He was a nationalist in the old style. My father, his son, apolitical to a fault, said that his father had come out in 1916 but would never speak of it, possibly because he had killed a man. But Eoin MacNeill’s order cancelling the Rising was obeyed in Cork, so if my grandfather came out that Sunday morning, he must have gone home again in short order.

My great-grandfather, his father, a penniless textile worker in Cork, joined the Irish Volunteers in July 1914, when he was already 63. Did they stand side by side in the street, father and son, that cancelled morning?

My great uncle on the other side, a Catholic subdeacon in Dublin Castle (where his father was chief superintendent of the Dublin Metropolitan Police), was sent to fetch the Capuchin Fr Aloysius because James Connolly in the Red Cross hospital needed to see him. It was shortly before Connolly was disgracefully shot.

In 1966 my mother Joan O’Hara played Countess Markiewicz in an RTÉ re-enactment. She looked very like her. Markiewicz is hard to idealise because she was by many accounts snobbish and reckless, but I seem to remember my mother striking a noble pose nonetheless. There was a great effort made to mark the 50th anniversary. But in the same decade, half a million people had to emigrate to find work.

But I think with pride of my grandfather and great-grandfather, blind-sided in Cork. They were lit with an old-fashioned passion that perhaps remained stateless in the upshot. Their country never formed properly around them, and they spoke their Irish in a forsaken garden.

Claire Kilroy

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Claire Kilroy. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

The Irish do not celebrate an Independence day or Bastille day. Few could name the date on which the 26 counties regained their independence from Britain. The devastation caused by the civil war soured any sense of triumph. My grandmother could talk about the murders by the Black and Tans that she witnessed as a child – she saw her neighbours being shot and burned to death – but she could never speak about the war in which brother killed brother, except to say that dreadful things happened on both sides. Instead of celebrating independence, we mark the Easter Rising.

The founding act of our nation was a doomed one. The Easter Rising failed. It was always going to fail. It could not but fail from a military point of view, but it was a heroic failure. In the heartbreaking letters that the rebels wrote to their loved ones on the eves of their executions, and in the lyric poetry of Yeats – “a terrible beauty is born” – the Rising became not just heroic in nature, but poetic. Over the ensuing decades of mass emigration and economic stagnation, the Irish nurtured this version of our spirit. We were failures, but we were heroic failures; we had poetical souls. As Beckett wrote: “fail again; fail better”.

I didn’t read the Proclamation until maybe 10 years ago. I missed the night bus and was wandering along O’Connell Street after midnight when there it was, displayed in the window of the GPO. I was moved by these voices from the grave: within days of its printing, the signatories had all been executed. There was a sweetness and inclusiveness in it that I had not anticipated. We are still failing to “cherish all of the children of the nation equally”, but we are failing better at it.

Glenn Patterson

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Glenn Patterson. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian

As a rule, I am wary of small numbers of men and women taking up arms in the name of the People, especially when they start invoking God. Yet I like Ireland. I feel at home in every part of it, south as well as north. I like the people, lower case: those born here and the increasing numbers who choose to live here. The thought that any part of what I like might have been brought into being by the women and men who rose on Easter Monday a century ago is, to say the least, paradoxical.

I am reminded of Sherwood Anderson’s “The Book of the Grotesque” (I live in Belfast: it’s never far from my mind), which describes a world full of beautiful truths to live by and the paradox whereby a person snatching up one of those truths and trying to make it his own becomes a grotesque, and the truth so embraced a falsehood.

There is much that is beautiful in the language of the 1916 Proclamation, and much that is grotesque in what it has been used (and is still being used by some) to justify, although even within Ireland it certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on that. We seriously fucked up over the Rising’s golden jubilee, or “they” did (I was four, it’s one of the last things of which I can truly say I am absolved): the celebrations in the south and, more lethally, the overreaction in the north. I hope this time round all who wish to remember remember, and are allowed to remember, with dignity and magnanimity.

Then maybe once this and the other forthcoming centenaries are over – the clocks have been definitively reset, from 1916 to 2016 (or 2023) – we could all try squeezing our truths a little less tight.

Paul Murray

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Paul Murray. Photograph: Patrick Bolger Photogrraphy

Seven years ago this weekend, I moved to the northside Dublin enclave of Stoneybatter. I didn’t know the neighbourhood, and it was only after I’d arrived I realised I was living next door to Arbour Hill cemetery, where 14 of the executed leaders of the Rising are buried. I’d always felt ambiguous about 1916. It seemed impossible to separate out from the litany of killings I’d heard recited on the news almost every morning of my childhood – the infamous Troubles, that ate away at the souls of everyone living on the island. But in the years that followed, I came to know the cemetery well. In an area with no gardens and little greenery, it’s a kind of oasis, somewhere people come to eat their lunch, read a book in the sunshine or let their pets run about; republicans may or may not be pleased to know that the omphalos of modern Irish history is known to locals as “Dog Park”. When my son was born, I’d walk him up and down in his buggy and read over the Proclamation, which is reproduced on the wall behind the leaders’ graves. I was surprised at how progressive it was, how inclusive, with its commitment to equality for all, regardless of religion or gender.

I would love to live in the Ireland they imagined. It hasn’t turned out quite like that. Although they’ll roll out the red carpet (literally) for Donald Trump, and bend over backwards to help the world’s richest company avoid tax, Ireland’s political elite have made this a hard country to be poor, or sick, or old, or young.

And yet there is much to be thankful for. The people you meet are sane and decent; and in Dog Park, it seems to me something of that revolutionary spirit prevails. For what’s more revolutionary, today, than being outdoors, away from your screen, talking – or, even better, listening – to someone who’s different from you? Ireland still creates spaces for exchanges like that, where nothing’s for sale; next month, when the politicians have gone, and the flags and the guns, the graveyard will be filled again with the cries of dogs and newborns, the joyous, unquantifiable sound of peace.