Search Results for 'Francis Sheehy-Skeffington'

BY CAROLINE FORDE (POSTDOCTORAL RESEARCHER, CENTRE FOR GLOBAL WOMEN’S STUDIES) AND ELAINE MEARS (DIRECTOR, STORIES OF UNA)

Home Rule, the campaign for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom, was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1870 to the end of World War I. It dominated all local and national papers in Ireland. Men fiercely argued its pros and cons while Ulster protested that if Home Rule was introduced it ‘would fight, and Ulster would be right.’

‘What the hell is going on?’ appears to be what the British Prime Minister Herbert H Asquith, is thinking as he disembarks at Dun Laoghaire on May 12 1916, almost three weeks after the Easter Rising. Following six days of intensive fighting, Dublin city centre was unrecogniseable. Practically all its main buildings were destroyed either by artillery fire or burnt out. The list of casualities was horrendous. One hundred and sixteen army dead, 368 wounded, and nine missing. Sixteen policemen died, and 29 wounded. And this at a time when Britain was fighting an appalling war in France, which seemed unending, and its mounting causalities were not only threatening his government’s survival, but had filled the British people with dread and alarm.