We must agree to disagree about the present situation - maybe things were very much different were you were brought up and spent the major part of my life than where I was.
Not to say that people didn't treat organised royal events in the same way as they did Christmas (which has as little to do with Christianity as November the 5th has to do with the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament).
My experience among the people I worked with right up to the time I retired was that royalty was a non-issue and the few to whom it was important tended to be figures of fun.
The way I described the Easter Week events was exactly as I believe it happened - I would highly recommend Thomas M Coffey's Agony At Easter for some remarkable eye-witness accounts of the end of the rebellion in Dublin. The image of Connolly strapped into a chair because he was too badly wounded to stand in front of a firing squad remains the most powerful image of those events even today.
Had the British packed all the rebel leaders off to Frongoch along with the rank-and-file rather than systematically butchering them, I have little doubt that they would have remained in the public mind as a bunch of cranks and there certainly would have been no impetus for the War of Independence that followed.
Jim Carroll