03.27.2016 12:00 AM

The Easter Rising

One hundred years ago today. Saoirse!

6 Comments

  1. Merrill Smith says:

    Not true. It was 100 Easters ago, but the actual anniversary is still four weeks away.

  2. Aongasha says:

    The initial uprising was a failure, with the population divided in it’s support of the Rising. As is usual with governments though, their arrogance turned it into a pyrric victory for the British, that eventually led to Irish independence. They took the leaders, plus a number not even involved, out and shot them. They went so far to execute James Connolly while tied to a chair, because of a broken ankle. And thus British idiocy created the Irish martyrs that roused the population and led to all those years of hate and violence, as well as to the creation of the Irish Free State.
    Napoleon perhaps said it best, ‘In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.’

    Anocht a tham sa bhearna bhaoil,
    Le gean ar Ghaeil chun bis n saoil
    Le guna screach f lmhach na bpilar
    Seo libh canadh Amhrn na bhFiann.

    Slainte!
    Aongus Og

  3. Craig McKie says:

    Let us remember as well the ancestral origins of this document.

    For this and most other statements of this ilk, there is the Declaration of Arbroath, 1320 AD.

    “…for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”

    and it in turn is almost identical to xxxiii of Sallust’s Bellum Catilinae

    “But we ask neither for power nor for riches, the usual causes of wars and strife among mortals, but only for freedom, which no true man gives up except with his life (At nos non imperium neque divitias petimus, quarum rerum causa bella atque certamina omnia inter mortalis sunt, sed libertatem, quam nemo bonus nisi cum anima simul amittit)” Gaius Sallustius Crispus, usually anglicised as Sallust (86 – c. 35 BC)

  4. davie says:

    England got a few centuries’ experience in grabbing and running its empire in its own back yard.

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