GETTY Padraig Pearse and children collect firewood from damaged buildings after the 1916 Easter Rising

A small crowd gathered to listen to the pale man wearing the incongruous Aussie broadbrimmed hat. Pearse, a school teacher and a poet, haltingly read a Proclamation. His words would ring down the years, although not as potently as the gunshots which followed. Pearse was declaring the formation of an independent Irish Republic, of which he was commander-in-chief. He was announcing rebellion against British rule in Ireland. Already that morning 1,200 Irish nationalists had stormed the strategic buildings of central Dublin, the GPO on Sackville Street among them. Crown intelligence had failed hopelessly and the insurgents had taken over the properties at will. Ah, but you do not tread on the tail of a sleeping lion and expect it to purr. The lion woke and roared. For a week there was intense street fighting between British troops and the rebels.

GETTY British Regulars sniping from behind a barricade of empty beer casks

Rebel strongpoints were pounded by artillery, heavy mortars, even by a gun boat on the River Liffey. A square mile of central Dublin was reduced to smoking ruins. Still the rebels fought on against almighty odds, until one by one their garrisons fell and they were forced to accept the only terms on offer: unconditional surrender.

Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom The Proclamation

This weekend is the 100th anniversary of “the Rising” and Dublin is having a nostalgia-fest of parades, fly pasts, exhibitions, not forgetting a State event attended by the Taoiseach, the Irish PM. There were will be wreaths for the rebels who fell. Across the world, in pubs and clubs of the Irish diaspora, the exploits of the Rising’s boys will be lauded in song. Doubtless someone will read aloud WB Yeats’s poem Easter 1916 with its haunting lines on the “terrible beauty” of the insurrection. The night air will be thick with the wild whiskey romance of it all. Of course, too much whiskey is poison. The Easter Rising is the creation myth of Eire, southern Ireland. While there is no doubting the bravery of Pearse and his friends you have to mangle history to portray them as noble heroes, or the Rising as anything but a flop. Then there is the truth about the Rising that can only be whispered: It is the terrorism gift that keeps on giving. Let’s go back to the Proclamation, sometimes called Ireland’s Magna Carta, read by Pearse in his idiosyncratic hat on the GPO’s steps. The first paragraph is rousing stuff: “Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” And then you think, who are the “us”? The ultranationalists from Irish Republic Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army who staged the Rising were wholly unelected. No one asked them to mount their insurgency. They had no mandate from the Irish people who overwhelmingly supported devolution, or Home Rule, within the Empire. The Rising was a putsch. The really devilish detail of the Proclamation comes in the second paragraph, where the rebels declared they were supported “by gallant allies in Europe”. Their “gallant allies” were... the Kaiser’s army. The same Kaiser’s army that was slaughtering British soldiers in the trenches of the Great War.

GETTY View from Nelson's Column showing ruins in the city of Dublin after the Sinn Fein Easter Rising

Such was the treason of the rebels that two of their leaders, Joseph Plunkett and Roger Casement, had travelled to Germany to give an Ireland Report, complete with suggestions on the best places for the Kaiser to land his army on the emerald isle. For a British government facing the military might of Germany in 1916, this was the ultimate stab in the back. Pearse and the Kaiser had more in common than Britain-hating. They shared a mystical belief in the power of blood sacrifice. Pearse wrote admiringly about the shedding of blood: “We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.” The tragedy of the Easter Rising is that the blood spilled belonged mostly to other people. Of the 500 who died in the Rising, just 64 were rebels. The remainder were Tommies and civilians.

GETTY The aftermath of the Easter uprising with the ruins of a car in the foreground

Small wonder, perhaps, that the initial reaction of almost all Irish men and women to the Rising was hostile. The rebels were booed and stoned by Dubliners as they were led off to imprisonment by British soldiers. The Church cursed the rebels and so did Dublin’s shopkeepers, because tens of thousands of the city’s poor had dodged the bullets to loot coal, sweets and clothes. And toys. One eye-witness recalled that: “Little girls hugged teddy bears and dolls as if they could hardly believe their good fortune.” The Easter Rising was a squib, damped by blood. Outside of Dublin the Rising had no support and the Crown put down the Rising to general applause. Yet, out of the very jaws of victory, the British managed to snatch defeat.

GETTY A British army soldier stands guard over Irish republican prisoners in a temporary hospital