The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #45911   Message #3791502
Posted By: Jim Carroll
22-May-16 - 06:47 AM
Thread Name: BS: Easter Rising - April 24-29, 1916
Subject: RE: BS: Easter Rising - April 24-29, 1916
You are still trying to divert this argument away from the actual subject on to an argument about argumnets - your stance it to reject documented facts and opinions based on those facts and have us accept your unqualified opinions without makin any effort to peroduce facts to back them up.
Time to move on, I think.

How the Risinfg was conducted.
From The Making of Ireland James Lydon
"Far from being a military shambles and the misconceived plot of poets and idealists intent on a blood-sacrifice, the organization of the rising in Dublin was praised subsequently by the British. The Chief Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police said that the military articles published in The Irish Volunteer before the rising were worthy of praise and that the conduct of the rising itself was 'all done very well'. No less a person than General Maxwell reported to the war office in London that 'the fighting qualities so far displayed by the rebels gives evidence of better training and discipline than they have been credited with'. A member of the royal commission set up to investigate the rising, Sir Mackenzie Chalmers, was convinced by the evidence that it was 'exceedingly well arranged'; and Sir Mathew Nathan, a former soldier who became Under Secretary for Ireland, told the commission that 'the conduct of the insurrection showed greater organizing power and more military skill than had been attributed to the Volunteers'.
The original plans had been carefully worked out, but had to be modified when the German arms failed to be delivered and when MacNeill's influence caused most of the intending participants to withdraw, so that only about 1,800 in all came out in Dublin. By the time that Pearse, Connolly and the other leaders occupied their carefully chosen garrisons in Dublin, the most they could hope for was to hold out for a week or so and forcibly bring the notion of a sovereign Irish republic before the eyes of the world. Their strategy was original, unlike that normally practised by revolutionaries. Wimborne, the lord lieutenant, commented afterwards: 'There was no conflict in the streets. The ordinary tactics of revolutionaries, which I imagine to be barricades and so on, were not resorted to ... at the very start they took to the houses and house-tops'.
Even had larger numbers of Volunteers joined in, the lack of arms would have been a disaster. On St Patrick's Day, when a grand Volunteer parade was held, the police carefully counted all those on parade, which came to 4,555; but only 1,817 of these were armed, half with old rifles and the rest with shot¬guns. Outside Dublin the rising took place only in a few scattered places in counties Galway, Wexford and Dublin, and there, too, the lack of arms was a disaster. In Galway, for example, where Liam Mellows had been promised 3,000 German rifles from the Aud, the 1,400 Volunteers who joined the rising (more than fought in Dublin) had, according to a police report, only seven rifles, 86 shotguns and seven revolvers. No wonder Liam Mellows said later: 'I had to send many of them home. I never knew the blackness of despair until then'.
Under those circumstances, then, what was achieved was beyond what poets and academics might be expected to achieve. There is no doubt that Patrick Pearse was consumed with the notion of being a new Cu Chulainn, prepared to sacrifice himself for Ireland. But he was also the author of The Murder Machine, an important work on education, and the founder of St Enda's, a school under lay management, where his theories were put into practice. He was not just a visionary, but a capable editor, teacher and organizer who gave the British government a fright and nearly caused a crisis in the middle of the war."
Some "shambles", some "contemptible joke"

Jim Carroll