Margaret Skinnider

“ Tommy lined them up in front of the jail and led them off down the street singing "The Watch on the Rhine" at the top of their lungs.
There was no end to the stories I heard as I lay there in the hospital. Stories of heroism and stories of disaster followed one another, each strengthening my belief that the courage and honor of the heroic days of Ireland were still alive in our hearts. Perhaps it is for this we should love our enemies: when they cleave with their swords the heart of a brave man, they lay bare the truth of life. ”

“ That is because for many centuries we have been harassed by men in British uniform. They have become to us symbols of a power that seems to delight in tyranny.
Even while I was cycling toward the post-office, the crowd had reassembled to watch the raising of the flag of the Irish Republic. As the tricolor—green, white, and orange—appeared above the roof of the post-office, a salute was fired. A few days later, while it was still waving, James Connolly wrote: "For the first time in seven hundred years the flag of a free Ireland floats triumphantly over Dublin City!" ”

“ Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, or its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations. ”

“ When it is remembered that England's enemies have always been regarded as Ireland's allies; that an English war, wherever fought, is a signal for us to rise once more, no matter how many defeats we have suffered, it might have been supposed the British, stationed in such numbers in and around Dublin, would not have been put to sleep by what must have seemed, to the wary observer, an acute attack of openness and a vigorous interest in military affairs. ”

“ Out on Leinster Road one day, I walked past that house where, not nine months before, I had met so many people of the republican movement. The house was empty, with that peculiar look of bereavement that some houses wear. It had been an embodiment of the Countess Markievicz, and, now that she was gone, looked doomed. Where was she? Over in England in Aylesbury Prison, but fortunately at work in the kitchen. I could not fancy her depressed beyond activity of some sort that in the end would be for Ireland's good.
"A felon's cap's the noblest crown an Irish head can wear." ”

“ Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity, or rapine. ”

“ If we accomplish no more than we have accomplished, I am satisfied. I am satisfied that we have saved Ireland's honour. I am satisfied that we should have accomplished more, that we should have accomplished the task of enthroning, as well as proclaiming, the Irish Republic as a Sovereign State, had our arrangements for a simultaneous rising of the whole country, with a combined plan as sound as the Dublin plan has been proved to be, been allowed to go through on Easter Sunday. ”

“ The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past. ”

“ Connolly is the answer to those who think the rising was the work of dreamers and idealists. No one who knew him could doubt that when he led his army of working-men into battle for the Irish Republic, he believed there was a good fighting chance to establish such a republic. He was practical, and had no wish to spill blood for the mere glory of it; there was nothing melodramatic about him. A north of Ireland man,—he originally came from the only part of Ireland I know well, County Monaghan,—he had many times given proof of sound judgment and courage. ”

“ On consultation with Commandant Connolly and their officers I have decided to agree to unconditional surrender also.
Thomas MacDonagh.
The British did not shoot any one on Sunday. They let us meditate on all that the past week had done to our leaders. There is no torture so excruciating as suspense. It is the suspense which Ireland has had to endure for generations that has weakened her more than any battles. How we have waited and waited! It has always been hard for us to believe we were not to realize our hopes. ”

“ If we abandoned the Green before they could join us, they would be cut off and in great danger. As I rode along on my bicycle, I had my first taste of the risks of street-fighting. Soldiers on top of the Hotel Shelbourne aimed their machine-gun directly at me. Bullets struck the wooden rim of my bicycle wheels, puncturing it; others rattled on the metal rim or among the spokes. I knew one might strike me at any moment, so I rode as fast as I could. My speed saved my life, and I was soon out of range around a corner. ”

“ Dublin is full of such streets, lanes, and courts where houses, years ago condemned by the authorities, are still tenanted. These houses are symbolic of the downfall of Ireland. They were built by rich Irishmen for their homes. To-day they are tenements for the poorest Irish people, but they have not been remodeled for this purpose, and that is one reason why them seem so appalling—the poor among the ruins of grandeur. ”

“ As it was, the rising had taken people completely by surprise. Before they could recover from that surprise, it was over, and its leaders were paying the penalty of death or imprisonment. One week is a short time for the general, uninformed mass of a dominated people to decide whether an outbreak of any sort is merely an impotent rebellion, or a real revolution with some promise of success. Besides, there have been so many isolated protests in Ireland, doomed from the first to failure. ”

“ Liberty Hall was a shell, empty of everything but memories.
Around the post-office, all other buildings had been leveled, but the great building stood there like a monument to Easter Week.
The windows stared vacantly from the house on Leinster Road. Everything had been taken from it. The looters must have had a merry time. Hundreds of houses had been thus sacked, for the British soldiers had lived up to that Tommy whose words make Kipling's famous song:
The sweatin' Tommies wonder as they spade the beggars under,
Why lootin' should be entered as a crime ”

“ The only toilet, to be used by all the people in any one of these houses, is also in the backyard or, worse still, in a dark, unventilated basement.
The head of a family in these one-time "mansions," which number several thousand, seldom makes more than four or five dollars a week! Of this amount, if they want the luxury of even a small room to themselves, they must pay about a dollar. Is it any wonder that the word "rent" has a fearful sound to the Irish? After this rent is paid, there is not much left for food and clothes. Starvation, even in time of peace, is always hovering near. ”

“ We knew that all over Dublin, perhaps by this time all over Ireland, other groups like ours were filled with the same intensity, the same determination, to make the Irish Republic, no matter how short-lived, a reality of which history would have to take account. Besides, the longer we could keep our tricolor flying over the College of Surgeons, the greater the chance that Irish courage would respond and we should gain recruits. ”

“ Indeed, there are as many Irish there as in Dublin itself, and the spirit among the younger generation is perhaps more intense because we are a little to one side and thus afraid of becoming outsiders.
In February, when conscription came to Scotland, there was nothing for members of the Irish Volunteers in Glasgow to do but to disappear. I knew one lad of seventeen whose parents, though Irish, wanted him to volunteer in the service of the empire. He refused, telling them his life belonged to Ireland. He went over to fight at the time of the rising, and served a year in prison afterward. ”

“ Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory. ”

“ In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called. ”

“ Two fifths of the inhabitants of Dublin live on this fare the year round. If they have beef or mutton once a week they must eat it boiled or fried, since the fireplaces are too primitive for roasting or baking. Neither will they permit baking of bread or cakes.
Yet Ireland could raise fruit and vegetables and grain for twenty million people! I have seen ships deep laden with food for need of which the Irish are slowly starving—I contend undernourishment is starvation—going in a steady stream to England. The reason was that the English were able to pay better prices than the man at home. ”

“ I do not believe any one who has not seen what we call a "baton charge" of the Dublin police can quite comprehend the motives which make for such ruthless methods.
In the first place, whenever the police are called out for strike duty or to be on the lookout for rioting, they are given permission to drink all they wish. At the station-houses are big barrels of porter from which the police are expected to help themselves freely. ”

“ Mrs. Connolly went about, picking up little things that would go in her trunk but the absence of which would not be noticed if any inquisitive policeman came in to see whether anything suspicious was going on. As we left, none of them looked back or gave any show of feeling. Revolution makes brave actors.
That afternoon I was again at ammunition work. This time my duty was to go about Dublin, taking from hiding-places dynamite and bombs secreted therein. Once, on my way back to Liberty Hall with some dynamite wrapped in a neat bundle on the seat beside me, I heard a queer, buzzing noise. ”

“ Here in Dublin, though the streets [Pg 33] and lanes seem full of children, the death-rate is tremendously high. The population of all Ireland has decreased fifty per cent. in fifty years. In Poland, under the rule of the Russian czar, the population increased. It is one thing to read about Irish "grievances," it is another to be living where they go on year after year.
"Grievance"—that is the way the British sum up our sense of wrong, and with such effect that people the world over fancy our wrongs are not wrongs but imagined grievances. ”

“ For that reason the story of the "Dublin Insurrection" may become legendary in Ireland, where it passes from mouth to mouth, and may remain quite unknown throughout the rest of the world, unless those of us who were in it and yet escaped execution, imprisonment, or deportation, write truthfully of our personal part in the rising of Easter week. ”

“ I was taken to a room where a police [Pg 194] official began to ask me questions. It was, I believe, my "loyal" Scotch accent that put them off guard, when I asked for a permit to go to Glasgow. At the hospital one of the nurses shook her head, following a long talk, and said:
"Your opinions and your accent don't go together."
I have often been told that I look more like a teacher of mathematics, which, indeed, I am, than like an Irish rebel, of which I am more proud. ”

“ Indeed, after it was all over, the [Pg 71] rising was often called the "Sinn Fein Revolt." The Sinn Fein was an organization which had become a menace to Great Britain because of its tactics of passive resistance. The words Sinn Fein, as already stated, mean "ourselves alone," and the whole movement was for an Irish Ireland.
The Sinn Feiners are likened to the "Black Hand" or other anarchistic groups by those who read of them as leaders of a "revolt." As a matter of fact, they were, from the first, the literary, artistic, and economic personalities who started the Celtic Revival. ”

“ If we had been able to take the British as completely off guard in the country districts as we did in Dublin—had there not been the delay of a day in carrying out concerted action—we could have seized all the arms and ammunition of the British arsenals on the island.
To-day it would be harder, for the British are not likely to be again caught unaware of our plans. Besides, they are taking precautions. Drilling of any sort is forbidden; foot-ball games are not allowed; all excursions are prohibited. The people are not allowed to come together in numbers on any occasion. ”