EIRE Prime Minister of Freedom
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All Ireland will be free when the palm and the shamrock are worn together.
Old Irish proverb.
This week, as for the first time since 1799 Palm Sunday and St. Patrick's Day came together, there were ominous whispers in Eire that "big events" were in the offing. The outlawed Irish Republican Army was expected to plant a few more bombs in Great Britain. Northern Ireland might blaze with revolt against British rule.
But the day came and went without violence or total freedom. The Irish Prime Minister made a St. Patrick's Day radio speech to the U. S. in which, as usual, he briskly criticized the British Government. New York City's numerous and enthusiastic Irish defiantly paraded up Fifth Avenue against a blinding snowstorm. And the period of great expectations moved to Easter Week, a time of the year which can be and has been most productive of Irish history. It may be moved still further forward, but World War II may well bring a turning point, an end of a 300-year era of Irish history.
On Easter Monday, 1916, during World War I, a few thousand determined Irishmen decided that "Britain's extremity is Ireland's opportunity" and thought the time ripe for revolt. As a popular rising, the Easter Rebellion was a decided flop. In only four of the country's 32 counties did Irishmen take to arms. Only one small but aggressive group of people took part in it. The majority of Irishmen thought it was foolishly timed, were more angry than sympathetic about the commotion it caused.
But years and the English were to change the six-day Easter Rebellion into a hallowed event in Irish history. The revolters who lived through it became heroes, and those who died because of it were added to that list of Irish martyrs —Pat Pearse, Robert Emmet, Terence MacSwiney—which has been growing ever longer since the day in 1603 when proud Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, last of the great Irish princes, was forced to kneel humbly before King James I.
The immediate aftermath of Easter Week was the execution of 5 leaders, the sentencing of 75 revolters to penal servitude, the imprisonment of 23, the internment of 1,841. Later, in London, the best known of the Easter Week conspirators, Sir Roger Casement, died on the gallows, despite the pleas of Pope Benedict XV and the U. S. Senate. British civil servant turned Irish patriot, Sir Roger had been arrested on the Irish coast only a few hours after landing from a German submarine. His trial was in the glorious tradition; before a British judge and jury he argued Ireland's case against England fully as eloquently as had young Robert Emmet, the heroic Protestant Irishman who had led an attack on Dublin Castle, 113 years before.
Careers as well as martyrs were made that Easter Week, and among those who carved a future for himself was a young, gawky, until then unknown professor of mathematics. Given a battalion command, he led out 50 partly armed men to hold two miles of strategic railway line and canal in Dublin. First he seized Boland's flour mills and bakery as his headquarters. Then, as the British troops came nearer, he called his men together and addressed them: "You have but one life to live, and but one death to die. See that you do both like men.