On Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s military council put their names to the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, declaring they were the provisional government of an Ireland free from British rule. In effect, each man had knowingly signed his own death warrant. Since then, the seven have been eulogised and used as political weapons by many. To challenge the morality of the Rising was to be denounced as unpatriotic, even un-Irish. One hundred years on, however, there is an increasing recognition within Ireland that it’s time for the founding fathers to come under proper scrutiny.
