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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2025
From several books which have been published in the past few years, it has become possible to understand more clearly one of the most remarkable mysteries in the history of Irish political agitation. The full truth will probably never be known, though it concerns the whole subsequent development of Irish history. To any student of politics, the growth of the Sinn Fein agitation must always be a fascinating and perplexing problem. And the more recent books which have thrown light on the matter have made no attempt to deny that Sinn Fein, as a policy, and still more as a violent agitation, was not only unpopular, but was actually hated by the mass of the people in Ireland at the time when the organisers of the Dublin rising of Easter week, 1916, carried out their carefully arranged plans, which were intended to take the country by storm. Mr. P. S. O’Hegarty, whose Victory of Sinn Fein was the first complete revelation published by one of the chief organisers of the secret society which launched the Dublin rising, quite openly glories in the claim that the leaders of the rising had acted in a way which the people as a whole disapproved.
‘The insurrection came upon the people of Ireland like a thunderbolt. They had not been expecting it, and they did not want it. . , . The insurrection was therefore universally and explosively unpopular. The populace fraternised with the British soldiery during the fighting, gave them food and smiles; in Cork the Redmondite Volunteers mobilised and helped the British by guarding bridges, etc.; in Dublin the populace attacked the wives of the men who were fighting; and the resolutions of various public bodies in the country condemning the insurrection may still be read. If Ireland as a whole could have got hold of Tom Clarke and his comrades during that week it would have torn them to, pieces. For a moment the whole fate of Ireland stood in the balance. Had the English but the wit to see it, the insurrection played right into their hands. ... If they had laughed at it, tried the promoters before a magistrate, and ridiculed the whole thing, with no general arrests and no long vindictive sentences, they could have done what they liked with Ireland. But the completeness of their victory, their crushing of the insurrection with the approval of the Irish Parliamentary Party and of the mass of public opinion, took away their political sanity. . . . When Sir John Maxwell shot to pieces the Government of the Irish Republic he put an end to the English domination of Ireland.’