Dublin Irish Festival 2016

“The Easter Rising and the Ordinary Irish.” As the Irish, at home and abroad, commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Easter Rising, most celebrate the Irish heroes – the signers of the Proclamation, those who seized the government buildings in Dublin, and those who died in the fighting or were hanged thereafter. But none of this involved the ordinary Irish – most of whom had eased into the life of British Ireland by the early 20th Century. I will talk about these ordinary Irish – how they participated in life in Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, how they viewed the Easter Rising as it occurred, and how their views changed afterwards.