1916 Easter Rising

The 1916 Easter Rising was a short-lived rebellion against British rule that became a lasting source of Irish republican memory. In the Price household, its story connected the declaration of an independent republic to the martyrdom of Patrick Pearse, and made remembrance itself part of political life: a legacy carried in ritual, contested history, and the silences surrounding later conflict.

Background and Course

The Rising occupied a particularly prominent place in the history told at the Price family home on Slievegallion Drive. A group of Irish revolutionaries seized the post office in Dublin and declared the establishment of a free and independent Irish Republic. The rebellion’s moment of triumph was brief. British authorities crushed it, and Pearse was court-martialled and executed by firing squad alongside fourteen of his comrades.

The book places the Rising within a longer history of British rule in Ireland, while distinguishing the rebellion from the later events that reshaped the island. After the Irish War of Independence, Ireland was partitioned in 1921: twenty-six counties in the South achieved a measure of independence as the Irish Free State, while six counties in the North remained under British rule. The Price family’s preference for calling the latter place the North of Ireland rather than Northern Ireland shows how political meaning could attach even to a place name.

Pearse and the Ideal of Sacrifice

As a child, Dolours Price heard stories of the Rising’s dashing heroes and of Pearse, a poet and one of the rebellion’s leaders. The book presents him as an inveterate romantic, drawn to the idea that giving one’s life for a cause could be redemptive. He imagined bloodshed as a cleansing force and praised the Christlike deaths of earlier Irish martyrs. His writing before the Rising joined the battlefield to a vision of national renewal, making sacrifice not merely a consequence of rebellion but part of its imagined purpose.

The defeat and executions gave that ideal a powerful, dangerous afterlife. The Rising’s memory offered the Price family a story of national resistance, but the book also stresses the cost attached to devotion to the cause. Its history does not treat martyrdom as an abstract emblem: it shows how a language of sacrifice could shape the expectations inherited by later generations.

Ritual and Inherited Memory

For Dolours, commemoration began as a childhood act. On Easter Sunday she wore her best white frock, carried a basket of eggs, and pinned an Easter Lily to her chest in remembrance of the failed rebellion. The ritual felt to her like joining a secret league of outlaws. Yet it took place under the threat of regulation: commemoration was controlled under the Flags and Emblems Act, and displaying the Republic’s tricolour in the North could lead to imprisonment. When Dolours saw a policeman approaching, she learned to cover the lily with her hand.

That small gesture brings the Rising’s memory into the present tense. A child’s emblem of remembrance was also something that had to be concealed from authority. The ritual joined family inheritance to public risk, showing how the rebellion’s defeat did not end the struggle over who could commemorate Irish nationalism, or how.

The Rising in the Book’s Memory of Conflict

The book’s epigraph frames war as something fought again in memory after the battlefield has fallen silent. The Rising supplies an early and formative example of that second struggle: its defeat became a story of heroes and sacrifice, retold within a family and passed on through ritual. Its place in the narrative helps explain why the past in the Price household could feel immediate rather than settled.

That unsettled quality persists in the book’s account of later conflict. It describes the absence of a formal process for deciding how to commemorate or understand the Troubles, and the continuing influence of political silences and competing accounts. The Rising is not presented as a simple cause of those later disputes; rather, its place in the Price family’s inherited history illuminates how republican memory could be cherished, regulated, and contested across generations.