Cool Zone Media.
Hello and welcome to Cool People Did Cool Stuff. The podcast is You're on episode four of it. You're on episode four of it. I'm your host, Margaret Kildroy, My guest is Katie, and the producer is Sophie and audio engineers Danel and on Woman wrote the theme song, Hi everyone, how are you doing so good?
Spent so many minutes since we last chatted, I know, just absolute minutes of break where we talked about tea.
We did and it was nice. So everything is in its Margaret knows how to speak, Margaret in place. Everything good, Everything is all happening, Yeah, except everything's all fucked up, much like my last attempt to say a sentence, because the Easter Rising is about to happen, but it's about to happen in a really messy way instead of a nice easy way. I mean, they absolutely still would have lost,
but it would have been really interesting. So some cowards and leader ship fucked the whole thing up, and people driving at night without headlights fucked the whole thing up. When in doubt where headlights, where headlights use headlights. People are still gonna go, much like I'm gonna keep I'm just as brave as they are because I'm continuing to talk. Yeah, persevere, Yeah, because of all the fuckery and confusion caused by having
a cowardy thought he was in charge. Only twelve hundred folks mustered on Monday morning in Dublin at this place called Liberty Hall. Yeah, there's not enough to govern. No, I mean, I guess depends on what you do with the twel hundred people. But this shouldn't work well whatever they made it, this place called Liberty Hall, which is incidentally the first place that the Irish flag was flown publicly.
Again I distrust any history. This is first time. Six days earlier, a sixteen year old girl flew the all green flag, all green with Irish Republic painted in gold on both sides. There were a bunch of flags that flew during the rising, including that green one. Also the Irish tricolor, the one that we have now, where green represents the Catholics, orange represents the Protestants and white represents a lasting truce between the two. This flag actually has
been around since eighteen forty eight. It was designed by French women who were sympathetic to Irish nationalism because the Irish were all about the French revolution right, Everyone who wanted to not have a monarch anymore was like, yeah, the French Revolutionist seems pretty fucking cool, am I right? And so some French women were like, all right, we'll do it to your specs and they were like, yeah, we want like unity between the Protestants and the Catholics,
which is fucking cool. And during the Easter Rising, that's when it became the flag of the Irish Republic. They flew both of those flags. They also flew the starry plow I talked about last time, and then also the harp on the green flag, which is a way older Irish flag. Lots of flag options, yes, Ireland has had a lot of uprisings, so it has a lot of
options available to it. Twelve hundred people muster the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Citizen Army and the Kumin Navan, the all women's unit, and of course there was also women in the Irish Citizen Army. About three hundred women participated in the rising. I've read, but I'm unsure that if this is of the original twelve hundred, or if this includes
the people who joined later in the week. Overall, the women in the Citizen Army were trained to fight those in koumen Nivan, were there as auxiliaries to like cook and record things and run messages and.
All of that.
But to be honest, I'm starting to doubt that this is as clear cut as most people represent it, because, yeah, like there's this one story of the secretary who shows up with a portable typewriter and a handgun, and a lot of people I think sometimes like if there was a woman, they were like, oh, they were in kumen Nivan, instead of it being like, no, they were separate. They were with the citizen Army. But then whatever, it's not
as clear cut as anyone's presenting it. Armed with Mauser rifles, shotguns, revolvers, and the occasional semi auto pistol. What about they actually had enough guns for people at the beginning, because they didn't have nearly as enough people, right, Yeah, so they kind of had they had enough guns.
Yeah.
They fanned out through the city center and took key positions, barricading themselves into buildings and barricading the streets. There's like one scene early on where the Countess and one hundred other people are just digging up the streets to build barricades. That's my girl, I know, I know, towering over everyone else.
Yeah.
James Connolly's son Roderick was there with his father. He was only fifteen years old. His daughter Nora was there too. She was the one who was like, yo, are we doing this? You know? But she was there at the very beginning. But then she was sent up north to rally more women to come down from the north of the country. And they only made it back after the later surrender six days later.
Yeah. It takes time to go travel back then too.
I know.
And then they like ran into problems of having a circumerces they did, they had adventures. Yeah, four hundred rebels took the Post Office the GPO, as their headquarters for the rising, and then Pierce stood outside and proclaimed the Irish Republic, which is fucking cool. They passed out their proclamation throughout the city, which was printed by a woman typesetter. And I'm not going to read the whole thing, but
here's some pretty sick parts of it. Irishmen and Irish women in the name of God and the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood Ireland through us summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom. We declare the right of the people
of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, cherishing all the children of the nation equally and oblivious to the differences carefully fostered by an alien government which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Sounds pretty good to me.
Yeah. The fact that they came out the gate being like, this isn't a weird Catholic versus Protestant thing that divide was given to us by our colonial masters. They also pioneered Irish radio. The first ever radio broadcast in Ireland was them using Morse Code to announce the Irish Republic because all the like phone lines and shit were cut, you know, and it was sent out in Morse Code.
And it involves someone climbing up to a radio, climbing up a radio antenna in the middle of this thing with like their snipers everywhere to fix the radio antenna to broadcast this. They could have taken Dublin Castle, but they didn't know that they could have taken Dublin Castle. They like showed up and shot the cop who was hanging outside, and then they didn't press too far in because they were like, oh fuck, we think it's full of soldiers. There were barely any soldiers there, and they
absolutely could have taken it. Lots of armchair generals in the Intervening century have suggested that they should have done this or that strategically, but overall of it probably wouldn't better or if they take it Dublin Castle. Some of the rebels were sick and or disabled. One person, that guy with tuberculosis Plunket, had like an open wound on his neck from his illness and was probably about to die.
Yeah, was he out there spreading it around?
It is contagious. Yeah, yeah, but people don't really understand that super.
Well don't Okay, Well, anyway, I was.
Going with bravery here, but now I do have to think about it from that point of view.
Yeah, it's hard to forget the last few years we just lived through.
So yeah, no, totally. There's another one of the rebels, at least one more, I think, maybe more than another who shows up to the general muster is so sick or like disabled in a way where he can't necessarily walk quickly, so unlets the rest of the group move ahead while he slowly made his way to his position, and including these just because I think that disability is not always included.
When absolutely it's important and it is brave. Yeah, it is very brave to come out and when you don't have the same mobility when you yeah.
Right, and it's just like, ye people have this, Oh, these good strong men and I'm like, this is a bunch of weirdos who got together to do this thing, you know. And the first person to die in the rising was a civilian, a woman named Margaret Koch. A rebel named Dan McCarthy had just been shot and she was a nurse and she's in full nurse's uniform and she's like, well, I'm clearly a civilian. I'm in full
nurse's uniform. So she runs to go save him, and the British are like, yeah, we don't care, and they shoot her and they killer well. The first fighter killed was a rebel and he was an actor in the Citizen Army. His name was Sean Connolly and he led the takeover of City Hall. He was on the roof readying to raise the Irish flag when a sniper took him down. And that's the kind of thing that's like so narrative that it feels a little convenient, But there
is an eyewitness who testifies this. I've also read that the cop outside the Palace was the first person to die in the rising, And I don't know how everyone knows how I feel about first.
Yeah, it's almost impossible to.
Uh, yeah, someone probably knows. But I have read multiple things that contradict each other, and I'm not right in dissertation. The rebels didn't get nearly as many positions as they would have liked because the don't show up lads order had happened, you know, and an awful lot of people were at home, unsure what they were supposed to be doing. The chief medical officer of the rising was a woman named doctor Kathleen Lynn, who had spent this past several
years teaching combat medicine to the rebels. And she's at the General Post Office, and it's like not just is coordinating care and providing care. Despite the low turnout of rebels, the British forces were caught off guard and whenever soldiers tried to investigate, they got shot, you know, And so at one point the first day. There's all of these
different stories of the Countess and what she got up to. Right, there's this version where she shot a cop, but then there's another version where she later says, I put my gun into his belly, but I knew him, so I couldn't pull the trigger. And then there's another version that was at one point there's an eyewitness of this one. They're like trying to hold this place in the streets, and all these soldiers come running around the corner, and
so she shoulders her pistol. They use these these mousers, these long barreled pistols where the holster could become a shoulder stock. They're kind of like cool. Oh, they guy called broom handle guns. Anyway, she shoulders her pistol, one of the like three pistols she brought with her. There's a benefit to being the rich lady in the war, yeah, although all with different whatever. I'm not going to get
in the gun nerd stuff. Anyway, she shoots at or shoots a small squadron of soldiers and sends them off running and possibly shot two of them, but looting breaks out across the city. Once all this starts happening because starving people are like, you know, it'd be pretty cool if we had that stuff that we can now have because the police are busy, right, and they were really
classy about it. Women were like stealing fans, dresses and jewelry and then like parading around in the streets, you know, and cops tried to stop them, but the looters drove them off by the classic method of shooting at the police.
Yeah, and then they scattered. Yeah.
Yeah. And everyone is like, like a lot of historians, including leftist or whatever, they're like, oh no, there was looting, as if this was like like there was like fires in the city and that's bad, right, But I'm convinced the looters were another column in the struggle, as the uncontrollables.
We're just so out there, so in chaos, making it harder for the you know, everyone to respond to the rebellion.
It's good, Yeah, it's good, actually, you see.
Yeah, And the British government declared marshal law the next day, which I'm surprised it took them that long. Honestly, get your shit together. Some of the rebellion was hindered by outright misogyny from the rebels. There's this guy di Valera, who will talk more about him later, but he actually goes on to be the like one the longest serving politicians in Irish history.
Of course he does, I know.
And he just like there's like a bunch of women who are ready to fight, and you're like, what do we do? And he's like, I'm not giving orders to women and then leaves dumb, dumb. Yeah, fuck him. Although it's funny because he's on the oh god, Irish politics so complicated.
It's messy, it's messy.
He's on the right side of the civil war or the wrong side of the civil opinion whatever. So meanwhile in Galway, on the other side of the country, on the west coast of Ireland, in the Gallatact, the part that is still Irish speaking had never been fully colonized or anglicized. Five hundred volunteers show up armed with like fuck all, they did not get the rifles and they're trying to do a rising of their own with like
shotguns and pistols and nothing. But they've been even more fucked by the stand down order because the actually just kidding, please rise order had a harder time reaching them. Yeah, their commander had been sent over from Dublin, and he was like, this rising is about kicking the English out, But the rank and file of the Galway Rising these are like rural poor as far as I can tell overall. And this is the side that my uncle fought in, or like several of my uncles fought in. They were
pretty convinced that it was about land distribution. They were like, no, the problem is landlords, and I guess that's attached to England, you know. And so they were like they wanted to also in addition to targeting like British colonial outposts, they were like, we're going to target the largest states in the landlords, including ostensible nationalists, because the whole point of this is to be free, you know. But they barely
had any rifles. They managed to blow up a bridge, capture some officers, and get into one gunfight, but pretty soon they dispersed and then a lot of them got arrested. And at some point along the way, my uncle got shot in the leg, or he got shot in one of the later wars. And my family was wrong when they told him he was shot in the rising, because I don't.
Know when they told him, did he not know.
So I got told he when I met him, was one hundred years old, and he wasn't oh double communicative. I got told by the Irish family that he had been shot in the rising. That was like filtered through some people who might not have known the difference between that the Rising and the War of Independence in the Civil War that like nerds like me know about.
And he's one hundred years old and not necessarily again I got ya, Yeah, totally. The fighting in Dublin back and now we're back over the East Coast. I just had to include Galway because of my family and because also because it gets left out and there's actually a bunch of other places that the Rising happened.
I love Galway.
I know it's the only place in Ireland I have actually been.
But magical.
The fighting in Dublin went on for six days, but the rebels didn't take the railways, and thousands of reinforcements from England flooded in over the rails. Sixteen thousand soldiers or twenty thousand, depending on what you read. Some of them were fresh from the Western Front of World War One. Since they're World War One soldiers, they do what World War One soldiers do They just fucking shelled everything. Yeah, in artillery, there is no problem that a grenade or
a mortar round won't fix. And they outnumbered the rebels about ten to one, maybe more.
It's not good numbers.
No, Connolly and the other leaders. They had miscalculated. They'd assumed that the English wouldn't want to destroy their own city. Dublin was like the second city of the Empire, you know. Yeah, at the end of it. They underestimated the British Crown's appetite for destruction.
Yeah, yeah, colonial.
Forces like whatever, we'll just make you poor people build it for us again. Right, we don't live there, we don't care exactly. In the post office, the headquarters, and there's this woman there who is feeding everyone. And her name was Nellie Gifford, and she's fucking cool. She's a socialist, she's a friend of the countess. She'd showed up armed and ready to fight, but she noticed that no one had taken care of the food. So she used her gun in the old fashioned way to procure food for everyone.
She waylaid food transport vans and got them to donate to the cause.
Very cool.
Yeah, and then she cooked it for everyone, and then she went around to shopkeepers to convince them to donate as well. And I think it's a mix of robbed and convinced.
I'm like convinced how wielding her gun, I feel like picking things up, saying you want to donate, don't you?
I know you do?
Yeah, you care about the cause, strong armed them. Sure are some nice windows in here, right to see them broken?
Yeah, shame for them to get blown out.
Yeah. But one of the things that actually people argue a lot about is how popular the Easter Rising was or wasn't at the time. The primary narrative is that it was not popular and that the average Irish person supported home rule kind of but was loyal and wanted the war to be won and wanted nothing to do
with any of this. However, there's a lot of counter arguments to that, and primarily from the working class and the poor people were like, no, we're actually into this, and so there was a lot of support as well. So I think of what it was is people were divided. Yeah.
And one of the reasons that Nellie give her to so interesting to me is that so she single handedly keeps morale up at the post office because they're eating well for a while, right, And it's easy as a feminist to be like, hey, women didn't just cook, they fought. But it's also important, like we are joining the patriarchy and undervaluing traditional women's roles like cooking and caring for the wounded. If we don't hold that as equal.
Thank you. I think it's so important.
Yeah, that to me is completely under my the whole idea of feminism. To me, it's like, it's not that those roles are not important, they're vital.
Yeah, exactly, it's.
Respected as equally important because it is.
Yeah, and Nelly fucking Rules was ready for whatever needed doing. If what needed doing was shooting, she was there to shoot. But what she realized what needed doing was feeding people. She was there to feed. And she was an actress in her mid thirties. She was fiercely Protestant. Okay, all her brothers, it's like, whenever you see this, like all our brothers did this, all our sisters did this. She had like three or four of each, I think. Yeah,
different time, different place. All her brothers had stayed loyal to the crown, but all of her sisters were revolutionaries. Yeah, all of her sisters except her eventually conferred to Catholicism in order to marry Catholics who were in the revolutionary ranks. And she was like, nah, I'm good as a Protestant. I just stayed Protestant. She lived to be fucking ninety. She spent the rest of her life fighting for the rights of prisoners and looking after stray cats and dogs. Yes,
fucking sounds incredible. Yeah, she sounds like my kind of people. I know, I know. And so the Rising, it is not going well. The British just massacred civilians. They just would blow up buildings and shit, know, like you better get out of here. Slowly, the British took rebel positions
one after the other. However, at Mount Street Bridge, seventeen rebels held back more than one thousand British soldiers and in the process shot two hundred and forty of the British soldiers whoa only four of the seventeen rebels who held this bridge died. Wow, and that group of seventeen inflicted two thirds of the casualties that the British took for the entire week.
All right, those are some impressive numbers right there. Yeah, yeah, well done. Well done, lads, well done. Yeah.
And what's funny is like I've also read analyses that was like, if the British hadn't had actually cared about shit the higher ups, they would have just taken a different bridge to get where they were going.
Yeah, it was.
But the leaders don't care. They're like, well, just keep sending dudes until we win.
We'll wear them down.
Yeah, we outnumbered them ten to one. Why do we care what happens to nine of our ten guys? You know one of the founders. Actually, before we tell you about one of the founders, the British Volunteer, I would like to tell you about the foundations of our society, which is people using media to sell stuff.
Such an important point, Margaret, really good.
Yeah, yeah, I definitely would love to learn more about that.
Oh you're in luck. Here they are and we're back. We're back. Okay. So one of the founders of the Irish Volunteers was this guy who was named the over Hilly And what kind of bad dos do you have to be for your name to be the instead of Michael? Like he was born Michael, but he was like, I am the And this was part of his de anglicization because the head of a clan was called them like, oh, which over do you mean? Oh? I mean the oraheely
mm hmm. And this guy, he's interesting to me. He was director of arms for the volunteers, and he had overseen a lot of the military training. But he'd also been completely against the rising. He had been part of the tell people not to rise plan. But when he found out it was gonna happen anyway, he was like, and he said, and again, they don't miss with their quotes, at least poetically. They don't miss with their quotes. He said, it is madness, but it is glorious madness. All right,
he's ready to go, so he joins in. Yeah, he or his friends set his own car on fire in the street at a barricade. At one point, he like brings his car. He's like, I think he's kind of rich. He like shows up and he like has his car and they use it for a bunch of stuff and then they're like, all right, we don with the car set it on fire now, yeah, and like, none of
these people think they're going to survive. I think this is the guy who like he like shit makes Connolly's hand and is like, all right, I'll see you later, and James Connolly looks at me because I'm never going to see you again. Yeah, that happened with someone, and I think it was the o'reheely. I'll see you in hell, motherfucker.
Yeah.
Like, but but you know his equals right, you know we're both gonna do it. Yeah, see you heaven, motherfucker.
Yeah.
And on Friday, the o'raheely leads a charge through the street and he's gunned down, and then he survives for like twenty one hours, bleeding to death in a doorway. He writes a letter to his wife while he is bleeding to death in the doorway, and it's I'm gonna just quote the whole thing. It's not very long. Written after I was shot, Darling Nancy. I was shot leading a rush up Moore Street and took refuge in a doorway.
While I was there, I heard the men pointing out where I was and made a bolt for the lane way I am in now. I got more one bullet. I think tons and tons of love, Dearie, to you and the boys and to Nell and Anna. It was a good fight. Anyhow, please deliver this to Nanny Orahley forty Herbert Park, Dublin, Goodbye, darling.
Wow, it was a good fight anyhow.
Yeah, it's kind of sweet, you know, it is very sweet. And here's just sometimes letting yourself be won over by glorious madness. If all your friends are jumping off a bridge, sometimes there's a reason.
Well, I also think acknowledging that these opportunities don't come very often once in a generation, as has been established, and this is the thing that you're working towards, and acknowledging that it's not an ideal situation. But are you going to live the rest of your life thinking I should have gone out there and died with everyone else?
You know?
Right, of these characters we've laid out, I think most of them would not be living a life they want to live if they never didn't make that choice to join when push comes to shove.
Absolutely, and there's actually going to be a there'll be some quotes later basically to that effect. Yeah, So Connolly at the General post Office, he's the you know, sort of military commander of it all. I mean, Pierce is also one of the commanders. Right, he gets shot at least twice in the process of all of this, I've read a few accounts. Most likely he got shot first in the shoulder while doing some shit at a barricade, but he kept keeps going. Later, he takes a bullet
to the ankle and it goes really bad. It goes really badly. He is unable to stand and he slowly starts dying. And the way it gets presented, they're like he led from a lying down position for days. That's one version. When I read versions that more actively and intentionally focus on the women who are involved in the
rising and are less on the great man of history. Page. Yeah, he was laying around in a stretcher and he was doing what he could, and command fell to the second in command, doctor Kathleen Lynn, the head of all the medical stuff. She was overseeing the headquarters of the rebel at the end well on Saturday, the rebels surrendered unconditionally because they were losing badly, and primarily they surrendered, as far as I understand, because the British kept fucking killing civilians.
They thought that the British wouldn't just massacre civilians because they overestimated the ethics of their enemy. But I've read unconditional surrender, and I've also read that Patrick Pearce negotiated, you can kill those of us who signed the proclamation,
but not everyone else. Yeah, one woman from the kumin Avon, Elizabeth O'Farrell, had the unfortunate honor of delivering the order to surrender to all the other positions because there's no way of communicating, right, so they had to bring her with a white flag and be like, hey, it's true, we gave up. A lot of the volunteers didn't want to give up, but eventually everyone surrendered.
Yeah.
As the volunteers surrender, the working class of Dublin gave them, As one Canadian reporter referred to it, an ovation. Soldiers would like have to go into the crowd to push and like shut people up. As everyone cheered on the rebels as they were marched off to jail, and the poorer the district, the more support the rebels had. Because there's this other part of the story where when the soldiers land, a lot of them are cheered on by the people of Dublin, right, being like, hey you're here,
shut these weird troublemakers up, you know. Yeah, it was a very divided city in the end. Two hundred and sixty civilians were killed, mostly but not exclusively by the British. One hundred and twenty six UK forces were killed, seventeen cops were killed, and eighty two Irish rebels were killed in the fighting.
How many the British did you say?
One hundred and twenty six plus seventeen cops?
Is that?
No?
So overall the rebels killed way more British people than the British killed of them. However, the British killed a fucked onn of civilians and more Syrians died than anyone else.
Yeah, pretty gruesome strategy.
Yeah. Absolutely, more than three thy five hundred people arrested, which, if you remember correctly, is more than the people who participated. Almost all of the people who are arrested, and this does not map to who did the uprising. Almost all of who was arrested was young Catholic men.
Huh.
Because there were just raids and roundups over the following days. Anyone who was suspected of having anything to do with it was rounded up. Ninety people were sentenced to death. Most of them don't end up being executed, Okay, fourteen or fifteen of them were executed by firing squad, mostly leaders.
I'm really annoyed that I run into different numbers everywhere about this, because I think people are counting differently mm hm, because some people are counting Roger Casement, who's hanged, and some people aren't. And then some people are counting this other guy who I'll talk about in a moment, and some people aren't, James Connolly, the socialist. He's almost dead already, right, He's taken these two bullets. Doctors telling me is only
a few days left. And then you have this moment where the soldiers are like, hey, is he Is he well enough to shoot yet? And the doctor like who I think was a British guy, like looked and was like, I cannot, No patient is good enough to shoot. You know. I wish I should have written actual quote down. But before he dies naturally of naturally, before he dies of bullets that were inflicted several days earlier.
Before he naturally dies of unnatural causes.
Right, a priest comes in and does last rites and people like to argue about this because people like want to claim James Connolly is an atheist or Catholic or blah blah blah blah blah right, because people want to own this man's legacy and can't understand the complicated fact that he was a socialist who was culturally Catholic and possibly in some ways theologically Catholic even we spent a lot lot of his time talking shit on the church,
and he believed in materialism. But he did his last rites. The colonial occupying Army of Ireland came in, took him out, tied him to a chair, and shot him. And he never saw socialist Ireland. Neither has anyone. Yet his children kept up the fight for another generation. His last words weren't a letter given to his daughter to give to the Field General for the British. And it was a complex. It starts off with a complaint about how the prisoners are treated, because he's an activist to.
The end, yeah, right, right to the bitter end.
Yeah yeah. And then he talks about how you know England has no rights to Ireland, and then the last line is I personally thank God that I have lived to see the day when thousands of Irish men and boys and hundreds of Irish women and girls were ready to affirm that truth that England had no rights to Ireland and to attest it with their lives if need be.
That really doesn't sound like a sentence in atheist would write.
But no, I yeah, yeah exactly. Patrick Pierce wrote a farewell letter to his mother which which is and it included the line this is the death I should have asked if God had given me the choice of all deaths to die a soldier's death for Ireland and for freedom. We have done right. People will say hard things of us now, but later on will praise us. And that is fucking true.
It is true, And I mean that is the crux of what I was saying before. Yeah, you know, it's like I'd.
Rather die a martyr, die fighting for what we believe in, for our country.
Yeah. My goal is to be the cat lady who lives to be ninety, but but not by having not stood up when standing up r happening exactly.
Yeah.
Willie Pierce, Padrick's brother, hadn't been a leader and hadn't killed anyone in all of it. He had been in the fighting right, but he was like rank and file. They killed him too because of his last name, Oh one man, Thomas Kent. He hadn't come out to the
rising because of the order to stay home. But he and his like he was from a like strong we fucking hate the English family, right, And so when they show up to try and arrest all the usual suspects, they show up to his house and are going to arrest him, and he and his three brothers resisted arrest and killed a cop in the process. He was executed, and he's part of the reason that the count is kind of messed up. But yeah, different tastes.
Yeah, he wasn't even a part of it technically, right, He probably would have been.
He absolutely would have been. Yeah, but he was told to stay home, and he did what he was told to do.
Man, that's also sucks too.
If I was somebody that was committed and then I got the other and then I missed the memos somehow and I stayed home, that would be a bitter pill to swallow.
For sure.
Absolutely, I'd maybe I would go fuck up a cop too, Yeah, I know, especially if they came to arrest me for the thing I didn't even get to do.
Dare you want to see me fight? I'll fight.
Yeah, I'll give you something to write about. Ninety nine years after he was executed, his remains were exhumed from the prison where he'd been buried and were reburied in a state funeral. Joseph Mary Plunkett, he was the tuberculosis guy or the wound on his neck. Yeah, you know, he's rich. He let his family use the has, let the people use the land. Yeah, and you know, he almost died just of TB. But he was sentenced to death.
His fiancee, Grace Gifford, who his sisters to crap. Some of the other people that I've talked about, I can't remember right now. I think Kathleen Lynne, the doctor. Okay, So his fiance had just converted to Catholicism in order to marry him, and when she heard about her fiance's execution date, she went out and she bought a ring, and she found a priest and she showed up at the jail and was like, you're gonna let me fucking marry this man.
Let me marry this tuberculous man.
Yeah, before you fucking kill him. A few hours before his execution, they have a ceremony in the jail cell and the guards give him give them like ten minutes together after the wedding to like talk.
Like not even fucking consummate that marriage.
Yeah, they would interrupt every minute to be like nine minutes now, eight minutes now was there a Dick Dix. She went on to become a politician for Free Ireland. There's also this whole thing where like her his family tried to cut her out of the will because his will was like I leave it all to my widow. And then they're like, oh, there weren't enough witnesses for the marriage to count or whatever.
The fuck did they win?
Uh, she won some money to twelve years later or like in nineteen thirty one, it's like fifteen years later. Awful. Yeah. And there's another guy. His name's Tom Clark. He was of the older generation of revolutionaries. He had been part of that get some bombs and go to London and see what happens plan from the eighteen eighties. So he had been he was a revolutionist from you know, thirty years earlier that he was like, well, it's the best
thing going. He had spent fifteen years in prison for his i mean first terrorism and he went to the US. He came back, he opened a tobacco shop. He supported unions and he wouldn't sell newspapers. That were owned by union busters. He also supported women's rights, and he was fifty eight when he was executed for his role in
the rising. His last words were conveyed through his wife, and they were my comrades, and I believe we have struck the first successful blow for freedom, and so sure as we are going out this morning, and so sure will freedom come as a direct result of our action.
In this belief, we die happy. He also told his wife to make sure that that asshole coward Owen McNeil would be held to account for what he had done, and said, quote, he is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him, and.
I bet it was.
Yeah, although I mean I think overall, I think people really like the rising, and so what happens is people try to take the rising and make it be about what they want it to be about.
You know, Yeah, I guess, And mostly I mean in the immediate aftermath, the confusion of what the narrative is. But ultimately no, it's a very clearly he messed up.
Yeah, yeah, I mean again, it's like impossible to know what would have happened if several different things have gone differently. Yeah. But one thing that is as certain as the fact that we will each one day die, is that this podcast will be interrupt to buy advertisers who's all have very different volumes because they speak in a very maximized volume way to get your attention and try to convince you to do things that you shouldn't do, that you should totally do with your life. We love our ads
and we're back and we're back. Yes, Okay. Now I'm going to tell you about this person and you're gonna understand why she's my favorite of.
All of Margaret Scott a lovely smile on her face. Oh yeah, she's excited.
Yeah. Well, I hadn't yet told you about the lesbian bomber lady who was a sniper.
Okay, saving the best for last day.
See you guys like are close to us. Yeah, she survives. So I went through the people who died first, and her name was Margaret Skinner. Okay Skinnader, Yeah, okay. Margaret Skinader was born to Irish parents in Scotland and she became a school teacher. She later joined the Kumenovon branch in Glasgow in Scotland, and she was a crack shot with a rifle, and she spent her free time in Ireland smuggling detonators in her hat and testing dynamite with
the girls in the hills around the city. Okay, and I think spent time blowing up British soldiers and shit in Dublin when she got bored, Like I think she was dynamiting British positions before the rising.
Amazing.
She dressed like a boy during the rising to run messages when she wasn't busy sniping or scouting, and she had four men under her command. She was almost certainly gay. There's a lot of like, you know, she wasn't like, hello, I am a lesbian, said she was like hello, I'm clearly a lesbian and live with the following woman.
Yeah, yeah, you know.
She was also a socialist and she was shot three times during the rising while trying to burn down some houses to stop the retreating army. Like the British were like trying to like run through some houses. So she's like fuck it, said fire to them, got shot three times for it. She survived. She wrote autobiography which I haven't read yet but has the sick and Humble title doing my bit for Ireland. Yeah, and then at the very end of it, she's gonna do one of the
most cool people did cool stuff things of all. No, she doesn't represent herself in court. She does the other thing. She fucking breaks out of custody. Yes, she's in the hospital right because she got shot a whole lot of times. Is there a tunnel? Is there a tunnel? No? Okay, okay, there was a tunnel, And I didn't have a way to put it in because I wasn't as certain about it because I've read both that it happened and that it almost happened earlier. There was a part where I
think Pierce and all the others are not Pierce. The people at the post office they had to escape, so they started digging an escape tunnel. Yeah, but I'm not certain whether or not they succeeded. At So there was a tunnel, and she breaks out of custody. She's at the hospital and she just like gets out past the guards and gets the fuck to Scotland. She's like, fuck Ireland.
They underestimated that woman.
Absolutely. They're like, this lady got shot three times. She's not going anywhere. Plus she's a lady, and she's like uh huh, After the war, she did union organizing and school teaching. She went back to school teaching and she fought for women's rights, and she's fucking cool as hell. She's a top tier margaret. Then there's this leader, the half Spanish, half irishman born in the US named Amon de Valera. He's the one I mentioned that HM wouldn't
give orders to women. He wasn't executed because of his American citizenship. He was absolutely one of the leaders of the rising. The British were trying to get the US to enter the war, and so killing an American wasn't like gonna do them good, right. He becomes the third President of Ireland. Later, oh, he also does this interesting shit. He is the leader of the Well, we'll talk about what happens after the we'll talk. We'll get to that
anyway along the way. Later he becomes hell a conservative or he was always hell a conservative, depending on who you ask. He's like one of the most strongly Catholic of all of the people. But in nineteen thirty seven he was the person who abolished the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown. So oh, good for him, I guess there. Yeah, the Countess she'd been one of the main leaders of the whole thing, and she may or may not have killed between one and three people between zero and three.
She was sentenced to death, but they commuted it to life in prison on literal account of like, but you're a lady though. Okay, they were like, we can't kill you, you're a girl. Well, she had a quote in response to this, I do wish your lot had the decency to shoot me.
Yeah, I mean, honestly, it's worse just to be in prison the rest of your life.
Yeah, far less lady like.
Yeah. One of the things that I've learned by reading history that does not map to any current understanding in American politics is that one of the best ways to not be in prison for a long time is for the movement that you're a part of to keep fighting
really fucking hard. Because often throughout history, different governments have been like, maybe if we let their prisoners go, they'll stop blowing things up, right, right, So none of the Easter Rising arrestees are going to spend an incredibly long time in jail. Okay, Because Ireland successfully wins a war of independence early O, Well, we'll talk anyway. She goes on to become the first woman elected to the House of Commons, like I was saying, right, and then but
she refused to take the role. And then later she becomes the Minister of Labor for Free Ireland as Land's first woman minister and Europe's second woman minister. Wow. But Revolutionary Ireland was a lot more progressive than after the Revolution Ireland, and it wasn't until nineteen seventy nine that Ireland gets another woman minister. The rising itself was of mixed popularity with the Irish people, but the executions were
really really unpopular. They do not get through the ninety The rest of the executions are commuted out of fear of pissing people off even more except for Roger Caseman because his trial was separate and the other thing that happened. I think I mentioned this before, but during his trial he kept all these like careful hit this like journal. He kept a very careful journal of all his travels around the world, and he kept a secret other journal of all the dudes he fucked. Ooh, and he was
a total size queen and interesting. So it was like, this is how big this dude's stick was?
Total size queen.
Yeah, the British pulled out the ifuck Dudes Journal it's called the Black Journal or something, and to try and turn Catholic Ireland against him, and it's moderately successful. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are like, no, it's a lie. And then like later journalists were like, it's not a lie. Y'all are home of phobes. Yeah. Oh so he gets hanged. It's the end of his life.
But he lived an amazing fucking life. Almost two thousand of the arrestees are taken a concentration camp in England and Wales where they basically and I feel like I have to bring it up every time I say it on the show, Concentration camps starts meeting a different thing after World War Two. It's still not good, but it means take all the people of the following type and put them in one place. The Japanese and Ternman camps
were one hundred percent concentration camps. Yeah, so they get together and plot a rebellion while they're in this fucking thing, right. The Irish War of Independence kicks off in nineteen nineteen. Only three years later, England sues for peace. The treaty offer comes and it's like you si got to swear allegiance to the crowd. And so this time, when the War of Independence had kicked off, they'd made their own government, they'd made the doll Air and the yeah, Irish government whatever.
And a ton of women were in this first doll, like just a ton of them, and a lot of them were leaders of the rising, or widows or mothers of people who had died in the rising. Yeah, And so it was basically like a thing that we see over and over again in history, is all of the men sort of like run to the front, get killed, and then the women do the work. The men are great, they did amazing work, but so the women keep it up.
Every single one of the women in the doll voted against the treaty with England that ended the war by making Ireland subservient to England again. So if Ireland had listened to women, the Civil War would have been averted. However, they would have had to resume war with the English probably who fucking knows how that would go. Yeah, And that civil war leader of the pro treaty side was guy Michael Collins, who was in the Rising. But he has enough of a hagiography already, and I don't like
like him. My uncle didn't like him, so I didn't include him.
Oh yeah, that's a long standing family grudge. Leave him out.
Yeah. The guy who led the other side was Aimin de Valera, the guy who wouldn't give orders to women.
And became eventually president.
Right, So that's like another part of his complicated legacies. Like well, yeah, you know, the Irish Civil War can't be mapped neatly left and right because you have a lot of the conservatives and a lot of the more radical folks on the side against the treaty, whereas it's more of the like centrists and like middle of the road people who are like, fuck it, I just want the fighting to be done.
I mean, tale as old as time.
Yeah, and we have no idea how it would have gone if they had turned on the tree. It's possible that they would have won full independence. Possible they would have been completely subservient. Who fucking knows. How we talk about historical events always shifts. And one of the ways that people talk about the Easter Rising is fascinating to me. It's probably wrong, but it's fascinating. It is both the most pagan and Catholic thing ever, and therefore it is
the most irish thing ever. People call it a blood sacrifice and the ideas that the rebels knew that they would lose, and that their ideas weren't even popular, but that they spilled their blood for their country it would spur others to fight and would lead to freedom. But I buy the argument that this isn't true because they planned the whole thing. They tried to win. They didn't go out to try to die, right, They were willing to die, and they accepted blood sacrifice as a thing
that was okay, but it wasn't their plan. Ireland today does not reflect what they fought for, either side of the nationalists or the socialist side. I did even more reading about Pierce in the Intervening couple of days, and well, not since you all heard this on Monday, but since last week's episodes, since we've last met. Yeah, exactly the people who matter on like those listeners, sure, yeah, are they even real except.
For the ones it's looking on sponsors links?
Oh yeah nada. Yeah. So he was more democratic and egalitarian in his nationalism than I had initially assumed, and he would have been against and I read this from a I think this was Kiera and Allen's position and from the book nineteen sixteen, and I tend to resonate with it. He would have been against that Ireland doesn't own its own natural resources. They're sold cheaply to international corporations. Connolly.
Of course, the socialist said exactly what would happen if you don't get rid of capitalism, you don't get rid of colonialism. He had that whole quote. If you raise a green flag over Dublin, it's not going to change anything unless you get rid of the landlords. But what it did set up, I'm going to quote Kiera and Allen from that book nineteen sixteen. Easter Rising gave birth to a quote revolutionary tradition that has passed like a
thread through subsequent decades. Sometimes this tradition has moved masses of people, while at other times it has been confined to the margins. Was it for this that the men of nineteen sixteen died is one of the most common sayings of the modern rabble rouser. Official Ireland tries to deal with the subterranean revolutionary tradition by canonizing and mummifying
the leaders of nineteen sixteen. Train stations, schools, and hospitals are called after them, but even while their sacrifices are acknowledged, their actual ideas are gutted of anything resembling a revolutionary thought. Interesting. Yeah, And one of the things that's really interesting to me too is the rebels weren't just fighting for Ireland. They positioned what they were doing in the context of the
British Empire. Connolly wrote extensively about Britain's colonialism in India, and in nineteen fourteen he wrote about his desire to fight this way quote starting thus, Ireland may yet set the torch to a European conflagration that will not burn out until the last throne and last capitalism, bond and debenture will be shriveled on the funeral pyre of the last warlord. And you know it's a good poetic quote. When I have to look up a word at a venture is just like some like.
Alone you Oh, okay, thank you. I did not know that.
I love that you had to look ventured.
That's your mark.
Yeah, thinking about that, Martyorie. The thing about the deaths of the rebels, I mean, that is just such a big part of Irish culture in general, all the people throughout the all the different rebellions and risings, and uh, that they hold this mythical status. Yeah, in Irish society and to this day everywhere. Of course it's you know, especially Belfast in different parts of the country, you know, but yeah, that's baked into what it feels to be
Irish and when you're in Ireland, it's it's everywhere. Yeah, I don't know, it's not really a point. It's just you know, thinking about all of this history and this fight that has continued and you know, in how many people have died fighting for this, and yeah, the way that the message and the realities get mutated and the outcome for the people, you know from the very beginning would probably not be very thrilled totally.
You know, I would absolutely love to have a beer with the Countess and yeah, and Connolly and the I forget her name, the lesbian bomber sniper, Margaret's Skinnader. I would love to hear what they think about all of this. And I mean some of them lived long enough that they did get to write about it, and so some of it we can go and read, right, because like that's the other problem is we'll boil it down to Pearson Connolly, who are great, and I don't want to
take anything away from them. You know, well great is not whatever they did an amazing and interesting thing.
You know.
We don't have to agree with everything that they or believe, but yeah, but we don't. I don't want to take anything away from what they did. They are figureheads of this of these movements, you know, and then there's many, many other people involved in these movements. And I like the method. I mean, I think it shows on the show where instead of taking away from the people who get put up as figureheads, is also elevating other people and being like, let's add to the roster of our heroes.
Adding the context and yeah.
Yeah. So within a few years, Ireland fought a war of independence. It did not shatter the British Empire, but it showed that it could be beaten, and it also showed how to beat it guerrilla warfare. The Irish didn't invent using guerrilla tactics against the British. They themselves were heavily inspired by the Bores of South Africa, but they in turn influenced others, including the rebellious movements in Myanmar,
India and Egypt, and that's part of their legacy too. Yeah, and that's the story of the Easter Rising.
It's a wonderful story. Margaret. Thanks a lot of research you did.
Yeah, this was one of those sometimes I have lots of days in a row where I wake up and work and then do that until I go to sleep. Agnada. Yeah.
Oh it's fascinating, I mean, but yeah, it's so complicated. I've learned a lot, and I don't know, it's interesting, especially that, Yeah, the inspiration for other uprisings, other you know, movements around the world too.
You forget that, yeah, or I don't know it didn't know?
It makes sense well, and it's partly because like I love Irish history clearly it shows in my choice of subjects. I also love it because of my family connection, but I also love it on its own. But there is this problem where white Americans are like, oh, look the good white people the Irish, you know, and so we can be like, ah, yes, the Irish, they overthrew England
and that's all that matters, you know. And I don't know shit about the Egyptian independence movement yet, not yet, you know, And like I know a little bit about the Indian independence movement. Actually, until two weeks ago, I knew more about it than I knew what the Irish wan. But I still don't know enough. I don't know enough that I couldn't just do a show on it without doing a fuck ton more research. Yeah, you know, and we mythologize. I actually wrote about this in my substack.
Oh here's my like a little plug. Oh good, I wrote a substack article. It will be a couple weeks ago by the time you're listening to this about the rising, and it covers the rising, but it also talks about the way that we mythologize, and the way that I've mythologized Irish rebels and all of that. And it's complicated.
It's it's a you know, we want simple black and white heroes, and then you're like, yeah, they kidnapped their friend and then spread lies in order to get people who didn't know that they were about the fighting uprising to go do an uprising, you know, and they got everyone killed. And yes, the British did the shelling. Any rational understanding of British tactics would have been like, the English are going to show up here, in shell, they're just going to blow shit up, you know.
But it's important to acknowledge all of it. We have a tendency, yes, to want to put our heroes up, or the people that are fighting for the thing that we believe in.
We want to put them on a pedestal. We deal with presidents all the time.
But the reality is we need to stop doing that in the sense that they're human beings and complicated and messy, and that a lot of choices fall into a very moral gray area regardless of your goal, how pure your goal is, how do you get there? You know, But we have to be able, we have to be able to think about things honestly that no totally.
And actually it's funny you point out like and I'm like I was as you're saying that, I was like, oh,
it's not a single American president that I like. But then I'm like, then, why am I talking about these people who are like, yeah, this guy was cool, we did this thing, and then he became the president for a really long time, and he was a little conservative and he was like part of the Irish theocracy that and then I'm like, oh, so in my mind, being a politician as an example of this moral gray area of people like drifting away from the you know, the
Easter Rising was like the pure rising, right, whereas the War of Independence and especially the Civil War were messy and there's not a good guy in the English in the in the Irish Civil War. Even though I have a side that I am sympathetic to, right, the anti treaty side, the more freedom side, I am sympathetic to it. Am I so sympathetic to it that I think it would be okay for me to kill the person I just fought a war of independence with. I don't think so.
But what if that person is now trying to kill me because I'm saying that we shouldn't swear of oath of lee since the King, you know. And you can
see how this wound is left by colonialism. You can see how the Irish versus Irish fight continues to this day because of this, And that is why Star Trek said that twenty twenty four is the year of Irish unification and shin Faine is currently I don't actually think they're going to pull this off, but shin Faane is currently coming into power in Northern Ireland, and so there's like again, this is a the meme level.
As it was written, so it shall be yeah, yeah, exactly cool.
Canty, you got anything you want to plug for us?
Oh?
Sure, why not. I have a show with Cody Johnston called Some More News. You can watch the YouTube channel on Wednesdays or you can listen to it as a podcast.
Speaking of podcasts, we also have a podcast called.
Even More News, which we co host and that's every week. And that's that's it. That's it, that's what I'm plugging. That's what I yep.
Get your news from it instead of Twitter, and you will be a happier person.
Yeah.
I already accidentally plug my substack. I have a book out again. It's the one that I told you about, the kickstarter for last year, one of the ones I told you about, a kickstar for last year. I have a tabletop roleplaying game called Pan Number City. If you want to be a revolutionist blowing up various god things in a vaguely actually really kind of set around nineteen sixteen,
but in a fantasy world. You can do it by playing Pa Number City with your friends, or you can do what I did as a kid and not have any friends and by role playing game books and read them and imagine playing them and yet almost as not nearly as much enjoyment, but some enjoyment out of it. And it's available for sale now because it's finally out. It came out on February second, and you can get it. Its distribution is not fully in place yet, but you
can get it. So you can't go to like your game story get it yet, but you can go to Tanglebilderness dot org, or you can just type in the number city because there's not too many things named that and one of them is my book.
School requested at their local game stores. Would that help?
So at some point I'm going to tell people to start doing that thing once we get the distribution network in place. We've been so focused on getting this We kickstarted this book and so we were like, we're going to do so many things, and then we had to do all those things, and now we're like, we tried to get it out to the backers as soon as possible. So now we're setting up that got it.
The answer is eventually, eventually, folks, eventually you'll be called into action.
Yeah, Sophie, what do you got?
We at cool Zone Media have a new weekly podcast. It is called Better Offline. It is hosted by ed Zitron, and it is a weekly show exploring the tech industry's influencing manipulation of society. As of today's episode, the trailer should be out and episode one drops on February twenty first check it out.
Ooh, I'm definitely going to check that out. Sounds depressing.
Yeah, it is wickedly talented.
Yeah, just an amazing tech journalist. So very excited about that one.
All right, we did it. I will see you all next week.
NYE bye.
Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.