Tuesday, April 18, 2006

Easter Monday, 1916

Easter Monday, 1916.

The day it all began, Ireland would never be the same again nor would the British Empire for that mater.

A mere handful of men fought the might of the British Army in a doomed battle and little more than 5 years later, managed to drive them to the negotiating table and out of Ireland, well almost.

The Empire’s denizens, suffering her imperial presence, furtively took notice and asked, “Well if the Irish can do it and they live next door! well we can do it here too!”
Whether “here” was the Indian Sub Continent, South, East or West Africa, the Middle East & Palestine. Wherever territory was ruled by the Union Jack”. Ireland’s fellow strugglers were heartened by her resolve & her spirit and adopted the Irish principle of “why not?” In the course of the next 40 years, the sun set on an ever shortening empire as people after people rose up against Whitehall.

Not much notice is taken of that week in Ireland by World Historians but its effect in history are still felt today. Just as dramatic as a certain “Tea-Party” in Boston and almost equally as important.

The irony is that those ideals that liberated Ireland in 1921 and consequently lit the torch paper to the destruction of the empire was American in its concept. The ideals of 1776 inspired those men of 1916 as the founder of Modern Irish Republicanism – Theobald Wolfe Tone was a devotee of Jefferson, Franklin & Paine.

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