Dividing Ireland: World War I and Partition

122 THE EASTER RISING AND AFTERMATH
Commandants and Vice-Commandants of the Irish Volunteers,
was set up by the IRB leadership. This Committee was gradually
dropped, and in its place a secret Military Council was constituted.
An Executive, which constituted the Supreme Governing Body of
the IRB when the Supreme Council was not in session, secretly
placed the whole Irish Volunteer movement under the Military
Council’s authority, and gave it the absolute discretion to make
peace and war. The Military Council originally consisted of Joseph
Mary Plunkett, Eamonn Ceannt, and Patrick Pearse, with Tom
Clarke and Sean MacDermott ex-officio members. James Connolly
and Thomas MacDonagh were later co-opted onto the Council. 2
The question as to whether the IRB even had the legitimate right
to initiate an insurrection was debated within the inner councils of
the Brotherhood. Dr Patrick McCartan asked other IRB members, in
January 1916, ‘who are we…to call a rising. Before you commit a
nation to war, you should have the support of the people. We
haven’t the support of the people. We should gain that first’. 3 But,
for a key number of IRB men, the stance taken by Redmond
represented an insult to Ireland’s nationhood. The essence of
blood sacrifice and the salvaging of Ireland’s honour was recorded
by IRB member Charles Travers, when he encountered Thomas
MacDonagh and Patrick Pearse just prior to the insurrection, set
for Easter 1916. The former told him ‘The soul of a nation is more
important than the body’ and that the ‘soul must be preserved’.
Pearse, however, had decided to carry on with the rising despite
hearing of the cancellation of the Irish Volunteers’ all-Ireland
mobilisation by Eoin MacNeill who, on discovering the plans, had
feared it would be a debacle. Pearse explained to Travers that ‘We
shall serve the soul of the nation, Eoin MacNeill will preserve the
body. The body will later respond when the soul is revived. We are
both right’. 4
According to Patrick Duffy, a section leader in the Dundalk Irish
Volunteers, the majority of the Volunteers did not know of any
planned rising and regarded the movement in the ‘nature of a
threat’ to the British Government, in the manner that the 1782
Volunteer movement had been. Although Duffy thought that they
would have resisted a government attack on the Irish Volunteer
organisation, or any attempt to conscript them, the membership
‘did not contemplate any aggressive action’. 5 To ensure that
the Irish Volunteers did turn out for an Easter mobilisation, the
cover for the rising, the rebel leaders sought to create a climate of
crisis regarding the Government’s intentions. When Gerry Byrne, an
IRB member, and a lieutenant in the Dublin Irish Volunteers, met
Pearse two weeks before the rising, the latter told him that he had