Perhaps it’s testimony to how Modern Ireland has moved on that a fellow exec on the Irish paper I worked on didn’t know the rebels’ names… so for him here’s the Easter Reprising.
Another who worked for me thought that King Billy had won the Battle of the Boyne and passed that off jokingly as a lack of interest in history.
Ireland’s history, of course, would have been very different had its people and those of its neighbours left history where it was.
But then God did give his greatest creation a rewind button and the Irish (most of them) use it more than the pause or fast forward.
A new age
This time of year, Easter, is particularly poignant in the Land of Saints and Scholars.
With holy observance and the end of 40-day Lenten fast with family fun, beer and chocolaty children.
And remembrance of those who made a symbolic (and real) sacrifice by laying down their lives for the holy grail of Irish freedom.
Now the whys and wherefores of those six days from Easter Monday, 1916 have been addressed ever since that day.
With many considering Ireland’s unofficial poet laureate WB Yeats encapsulating it best in his retrospective piece Easter 1916.
Tour de force
Of course the Irish being the loquacious and oratory people they are.
It will surprise nobody that there is an Easter 1916 tour in Dublin for you.
Well, a number, but we’re picking out one just for you when you visit the Fair City.
Like all the best Irish tours it starts in a pub, the International Bar on Wicklow Street.
Where Scots-born James Connolly was shot dead by a British firing squad.
And you’ll finish where the heroic rebels ended their days., Kilmainham Gaol.
Tied to a chair on account of his gangrenous leg.
Walk through Dublin on any given day and you will find plaques of the fallen from those six days.
Lorcan good
And tour leader and writer on the Rising Lorcan Collins will walk you through it all.
It’s all an Easter Reprising for visitors who want to learn about the birth of the Modern Nation.
History nuts, and locals who should have listened at school and appreciate the sacrifices of those who laid down their lives for the Republic.