Lentorama 2023: It Happened on Holy Saturday

Day 25: Orders countermanded... for what it was worth

If there's any piece of Irish history that non-Irish people know about, it's the Easter Rising of 1916, an attempt at declaring a free Irish state that was put down by the British after a few days. Events of the preceding weekend, including those of Holy Saturday, April 22, made the success of the Rising unlikely at best.

The problems actually started on Good Friday, when rebel leader Sir Roger Casement was arrested and the shipment of 20000 rifles that he was supposed to take was scuttled in Cork harbor. The Rising needed those weapons if it were to have any chance to succeed, and on the following day Eoin MacNeill - founder and chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers - countermanded the plans made by other leaders of the Volunteers to mobilize its members for the Rising (an event MacNeill had only learned about two days before).

While MacNeill's orders had force within the Volunteers, those leaders in the organization who had planned the Rising decided to stay the course. They feared that not going through would be more damaging to the cause of Irish independence than failure. And they were sort of right - the Rising failed and its leaders executed, become martyrs for the cause. Ireland would become free within a decade, though not without further violence.