And more.
"Why so few were prepared to fight once the rising had started if indeed it was the will of the "Irish People"
I never said it was "The will of the Irish people" - I said it became popular immediately it became known (except for those with relatives who had been conned into fighting in "a thoroughly unpopular war".
It would have been impossible for anybody to join in anyway - what with - hurley sticks and pikes?
They didn't know what was going on until it was underway and were totally unprepared for fighting - bit feeble, don't you think?
"At one time he [Lloyd George] "
Quoting llod George as a supporter of your argument is somewhat desperate, don't you thing - especially when his Government's conniving brought about "the war that would immediately follow" with their double-dealing with the Unionists.

A little more from the Pile
From 'The Damnable Question' George Dangerfield 1976
"This was simply not true, however, of Mr. Redmond and his colleagues. In the first week of March, and with the magical assistance of Mr. Lloyd George, the Prime Minister persuaded Messrs. Redmond, Dillon and Devlin to accept a six years' exclusion from Home Rule of six of the nine Ulster counties.
The idea was not new. It had been raised by Mr. Churchill in 1912;16 it had been the subject of an amendment in the Commons early in 1913; it had appeared in the course of the abortive Asquith-Bonar Law discussions late in that year; in October and November Lloyd George had tried in vain to urge it on Mr. Redmond; and in late December and in January, Carson had told Asquith that nothing but exclusion would do.17
Why then had Redmond given way, in March 1914, to proposals he had sternly rejected in the previous November? The answer can only be the "Leviathan interview": the interview when Asquith exploded his "bomb" and Redmond — as Miss Stanley was told — "shivered visibly."18 The interview had had, as Mr. Asquith put it, its "salutary" effect; it had forced the Irish leaders into making concessions in the hopes of placating the Opposition and the Orange Unionists. These concessions were little short of calami- tous. To agree to special conditions for Ulster under an all-Ireland Parliament in Dublin was one thing: to accept the exclusion of six Ulster counties from the control of that Parliament, even on a temporary basis, was quite another. It made a rent in the ideal of the "seamless garment" — it was the first Nationalist obeisance to that principle of Partition which afterwards became a great stumbling block to peace in Ireland.
When Mr. Asquith presented the six years' exclusion plan to Parliament on 9 March, Sir Edward Carson contemptuously dismissed it as a "sentence of death with a stay of execution of six years."19 In Ireland, Sinn Fein and Irish Freedom condemned it out of hand, and Cardinal Logue confessed that he found it hard to consider becoming, even temporarily, a virtual foreigner in his cathedral city of Armagh. The Irish Party's reluctant sacrifice of principle to expedience had been made, therefore, and it had been made in vain: the damage to its reputation had been incalculable. In short, the Unionist leaders had used the Army Annual Bill plot to bring about, they hoped, a dissolution of Parliament and the end of Home Rule: the Liberal leaders had used it for precisely the opposite reasons. Caught in this crossfire, this curious form of interparty collusion with regard to Irish interests, Mr. Redmond had become the most prominent casualty. The other, to be sure, was the Liberal Government, whose weakness had now been exposed to the whole political world."
Jim Carroll