fuckyeahmarxismleninism:

By Sue Kelley

They rose up in Dublin at St. Stephen’s Green, the Four Courts and various other key locations around the city, and in the countryside at Wexford, Louth, Meath, Cork and Galway, among other places.

During the hundreds of years of British colonialist domination of Ireland, the Irish people had been starved and denied basic rights like voting and holding office, owning property, practicing their religion or even speaking their own language. Their churches were destroyed, they were denied schooling, and many were forced to eke out an existence on small pieces of rocky ground.

Easter 1916 was not the first time the Irish had taken up arms to fight their oppressor. It was preceded by the Rebellion of 1798, Emmet’s Rising in 1803, the Young Irelanders of 1848, the Fenian Rising of 1867, the agrarian struggles of the 1880s and the Lockout of 1913. More recently, we should not forget the Hunger Strikers of 1981 and countless other acts of resistance and rebellion. But as President Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein said, “Few touch the mind and the heart as deeply as the Easter Rising of 1916.”

The year 1916 saw the coming together of socialists, republicans, nationalists, suffragists and Irish culture activists into a revolutionary movement to establish a democratic and egalitarian republic. Masterminded by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the fighting included the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers Force.