A century ago, the world was still locked in the horrors of the Great War. The bloody battles of World War I, which changed the face of history, still had two years of slaughter to run.

Patrick Pearse, a trained barrister prominent in literary and educational pursuits, was the rebellion’s central figure.

But 1916 was also the year of the Irish Easter uprising against the British in Ireland. The events of Easter 1916 have a place in Irish history analogous in some ways to that occupied by the storming of the Bastille in France and the Boston Tea Party in the US. The Easter rising, or rebellion as it has sometimes been called, was a seminal event in modern Irish history, both for the formation of the two Irelands and Anglo-Irish relations.

I spent almost five years of my life dealing with Anglo-Irish problems in Northern Ireland, starting first as a soldier commanding my battery in an infantry role in Londonderry (or Derry as Catholics in Northern Ireland prefer to call it).

Later, this was followed by four years as a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defence responsible for operational policy in Northern Ireland. The so-called ‘Irish problem’ has therefore always held a special interest for me.

I have recently been reading an excellent book, Easter 1916: The Irish Rebellion, by the eminent professor of history at the University of Keele, Charles Townsend, which provides an in-depth account of the Easter week events of 1916 and also sets them in their historical context.

In the course of describing the cultural and political developments leading up to the military action in Ireland in 1916, Townsend provides vivid portraits of the leaders on both sides of the brief conflict. The Irish nationalists who organised the rebellion included many with experience in political agitation.

Thomas Clarke had been imprisoned for 15 years over his attempts at bombings in England in 1883.

James Connolly was a British Army deserter who founded the Irish Citizen Army in 1913. Joseph Plunkett was not only a cultural nationalist, but also attempted to procure arms for his Irish cause, together with Sir Roger Casement, the most internationally high profile nationalist.

The rebellion’s central figure was Patrick Pearse, a trained barrister prominent in literary and educational pursuits who had been associated with the emerging Irish cultural nationalism by the early 1900s. This activity led to much more militant leanings for the popular Pearce. It was he who was instrumental in planning the 1916 rebellion. In its midst, he became commander-in-chief of the Army of the Irish Republic in Dublin as the fighting raged during Easter week.

However, these would-be revolutionaries who began the Easter rising were not without their opponents.

What the rebels could not win, heavy-handed British authorities won for them

Not only did the British and Irish Protestants stand in the way of a free united Ireland, so too did other Irishmen who favoured Home Rule and a political accommodation with the British government.

This resistance came most notably from John Redmond, a Nationalist MP from County Wexford, who sought Home Rule and tried to achieve this by having the Irish demonstrate their willingness to support the British war effort, beginning in 1914 with enlistments in the British Army – in which hundreds of Irishmen served with distinction, earning 37 VCs in the course of the war.

Although Redmond was not a Unionist, he was certainly more conservative in his politics than those who subsequently sought to uncouple Ireland from Britain through violence.

The rebels themselves had a different concept of what the Great War could mean for their cause. “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity” was a common expression in the first few weeks of the war.

It is no coincidence that the rising in Dublin was planned to take advantage of Britain’s distractions as a result of its military commitments in Europe.

The rebellion was initially planned for Easter Sunday, that most symbolic day in the Catholic calendar. However, due to a conflict within the nationalist leadership, Eoin MacNeill of the Irish Volunteers, who did not want to support the plans for a rising, spread the word around much of the country that it had been called off. This caused organisational, logistical and mobilisation problems, all of which seem to have taken the wind out of the insurrection.

Nonetheless, it still led to the organisers managing to get started the next day, April 24, 1916. The account given by Townsend is of almost complete confusion among the officers and rank and file, who turned out with a mixture of weapons and equipment to take over Dublin, notably the General Post Office there which is now the icon and symbol of the 1916 rising.

Where men had guns, they had little ammunition. Where they had bullets, they had little food. There was little coordination between units spread out over the city. The rising had the look of an impromptu affair, not well coordinated or planned. In the end, only about 1,200 men mobilised, ensuring that it would ultimately be suppressed.

The equally disorganised response by the British authorities meant that, after the first few days of violence, many of the British army units which had been haphazardly thrown into the fray were initially bloodily repulsed and badly bruised. The British response looks in retrospect to have been slapdash, partially due to their absolute unpreparedness for the rebellion. Nevertheless, within days, British officials understood the seriousness of what was happening in Dublin and moved in to crush it within a week.

What to do after the rebellion had been quelled became a quandary for British officials, both civil and military.

Martial law was declared, which not only affected all of the Irish living in the city (even those who wanted nothing to do with it), but also drove many to resent the British and transfer their sympathies – if not their loyalties – to the rebels.

This was particularly exacerbated by the execution of sixteen of the rebel leaders, including Pearse, who had known that the rebellion could only end with his own death. The country had a new set of martyrs.

Although many soldiers and some civilians had been killed and damage caused to property was significant, martial law and the shooting of rebel leaders was perceived by a large part of the Irish people as unwarranted and heavy-handed.

It ultimately proved instrumental in driving many of the Irish into the hands of the nationalists. While the 1916 rising failed, it created enough support for the establishment of an independent Irish Republic that eventually the British government was forced to yield.

It was a muddled, even botched affair, and would probably have been no more successful than the numerous violent attempts at securing Ireland’s independence that had preceded it over the centuries, had the British not rushed to execute the leaders.

What the rebels could not win, heavy-handed British authorities won for them.

More importantly, what began in Dublin, the capital of Ireland, as little more than an urban skirmish proved, in the end, to be the first serious crack in the edifice of the British Empire.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 gave southern Ireland dominion status as the Irish Free State and, after a bloody civil war and several more turbulent years, eventually achieved full independence as the Republic of Ireland.