Profs & Pints Nashville: Ireland’s Easter Rising

Profs and Pints Nashville presents: “Ireland’s Easter Rising,” on a pivotal moment in Ireland’s fight for independence, with Mark Doyle, professor of history at Middle Tennessee State University, scholar of Irish history, and author of Fighting like the Devil for the Sake of God: Protestants, Catholics and the Origins of Violence in Victorian Belfast.

[Doors open at 6 pm. Talk starts at 7. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nashville-ireland-rising ]

During Easter Week of 1916, a time when hundreds of thousands of other Irishmen were fighting on Britain’s behalf on the First World War’s Western Front, a small band of rebels staged an armed anti-British rebellion in Dublin.

Their goal was to rid Ireland of the British domination that it had been under in one form or another for nearly 800 years. Although in the short-term their uprising ended disastrously, in the long-term it managed to inspire a largely successful fight for independence.

Learn in depth about this rebellion and how it altered Ireland’s history with Professor Mark Doyle, a scholar and teacher of Irish and British history who has conducted extensive research in Dublin and Belfast. He’ll explain the background, course, and legacy of the Easter Rising, which will mark its 110th anniversary next month.

You’ll learn how the leaders of Ireland’s Easter Rising sought to occupy key places around Dublin in hopes of sparking a general uprising and persuading Germany, Britain’s enemy in the Great War, to help their cause. Their plan failed because not only did no island-wide rebellion occur, but most Dubliners scorned them as reckless adventurers. In less than a week, hundreds of rebels were killed and thousands arrested, with central Dublin being left a smoking hull.

The Easter Rising was, by most measures, a dismal failure. But in the weeks and months that followed something remarkable happened. Britain’s brutal suppression of the rising, combined with the dignified way in which the rebel leaders met their deaths and skillful organizing by surviving rebels and other Irish nationalists, eventually caused the Easter Rising to be seen not as a tragic farce but as the first blow in a longer struggle.

Dr. Doyle will shed light on how a doomed band of rebels lit the flame that eventually consumed the whole island. He’ll examine what their memories mean today in an Ireland that, despite having changed utterly from what it once, still struggles to realize the lofty goals of the men and women of 1916. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: From the “Easter Proclamation of 1916” issued by those involved in the rising.