The Three Jacks: Music

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This is a song Henk wrote about the Easter Rising in Dublin, 1916. Here's the story behind it:

Easter Monday, 1916, dawned in Dublin with clear blue skies. The people had become used to the sight of the local republican militias parading the streets on such holidays with their ancient, empty guns across their shoulders. They were "playing at soldiers," the people said - unlike the real soldier boys, fighting for the Empire in the trenches of Flanders' field. In years to come though, as a result of the events of that day, the people of Dublin would come to call such balmy days: "rebellion weather."

As the leader of a column of Irish Volunteers reached the foot of the General Post Office steps, he drew his saber and called the men to right-wheel and charge. The people buying stamps stared in bewilderment as the rebels began to barricade the windows and doors and shook out the green flag of a republic. All across the city that day, a rag-tag coalition of rebels occupied the government buildings, breweries, bakeries and shops. The people treated it as a side-show, looked on and laughed. "Crazy Rebellion in Ireland" trumpeted the London Daily Express.

And a crazy rebellion, indeed, it was. The Great War was raging in Europe and the Germans had promised the rebels guns, but most had failed to arrive. Those that had gotten through - loaded into taxis by boy-scout troops and shop assistants and hidden for this day - were ancient, obsolete, single-shot rifles. Orders for a nationwide rebellion had been given, countermanded, and given again. In the end, through all the resultant confusion, "the rising" was largely confined to Dublin.

The leaders were as strange a collection as the rebellion itself. Pearse was a visionary poet and schoolteacher. Plunkett was a poet and journalist. Clarke was an old Fenian revolutionary with over fifteen years in English jails to show for it. MacDonagh was a professor of English. MacDermott had been a barman before showing the gift of the gab that had made him the Volunteers' main recruiter. Ceannt was a civil servant. Connolly, leader of the "Citizen Army," was an iron-willed socialist. His second-in-command, ostrich plumes in her slouch hat and nursing a Mauser machine-pistol, was a pampered aristocrat, the Countess Markievicz. They all fully expected to be slaughtered.

The rebels held out against the British army for five days of bitter fighting which left much of the city center in ruins and close to 1,400, all told, dead and wounded. Finally, when all hope was lost and further fighting useless, the rebels were ordered by their commanders to surrender. As they reluctantly laid down their guns and were marched to the prisons with their hands on their heads, much of Dublin turned out to jeer and spit.

Then followed the courts martial and the summary executions. Pearse, MacDonagh and Clarke were the first batch shot. Plunkett was allowed to marry his sweetheart, surrounded by soldiers with bayonets fixed, before being taken out and shot. Connolly's ankle had been shattered by rifle-fire and he was sat in a chair for the firing squad to do its work. And so it continued.

As the details of the executions were reported, day after day, and the British troops began savage reprisals among the populace, the mood of the City began to turn and the executed rebels came to be seen - as they had planned - as martyrs in the cause of Irish freedom. The rebellion and the reprisals that followed, were, indeed, to spark the civil war that eventually led to the creation of the "Irish Free State."