Easter Rising

Dear Hearts,

April 24th is the 104th anniversary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, when the Irish Republican Army and its political branch, Sinn Fein, rose up in the Dublin Post Office against the British Army. In a few weeks, the Rising was put down and the ringleaders brutally executed, one of them pulled off his death-bed, strapped to a chair and shot to death in front of the public.

The Rising may have been stopped, but it laid the seeds for the Irish War of Independence from 1919-1921, which was won by the IRA. The result was the 26 southern counties become Eire, the Republic, and the 6 northern counties became Northern Ireland, a colony of Great Britain, as it is today, but maybe not for long.

The root of the Rising was the genocide of the Great Famine, An Gorta Mor, from 1845-1852, in which 1.4 million Irish were starved to death by the English masters. Our ancestors were living on nettles and droppings of birds. There was enormous bounty of exports from Ireland in mutton, beef, wheat, corn, all of it to the British army and navy. The Irish were only allowed to keep the potato, which was blighted. 2 million emigrated during the Famine.

The malnutrition still is reflected in our family’s chronic lung insufficiencies: Lefty’s first four sons died inside a month, Dad, Big Sully had emphysema, I have COPD and was born with bronchitis, as was Mick, but now our little ones seem to have grown safe from the echoes of the Famine.

The English have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

Our great-great-grandmother, Honore Corbett, Grandpa Sheehan’s mother, had a brother, John Corbett, who was Company Commander of A Company, Fourth Battalion, West Clare Brigade, Western Division, Irish Republican Army. He fought with great distinction and is still remembered in Clare as a hero of the Republic of Ireland. He never made it to America, but his nephew did, bringing us along too.

Our great-grandfather, Jeremiah B. O’Sullivan, from Coolygorman in Limerick, killed the English rent collector, after a brutal eviction of a poor widow and the rape of her young daughter by him. Jeremiah (Diarmuid) was born in 1850, in the teeth of the Famine. His grandfather, also Jeremiah, had been killed in 1824 in the nearby village of Drumcolliher, by an English patrol. Jeremiah grew up with this thorn in his heart, and when he heard about the brutality of the eviction, he lay in wait in An Paircin na Phuca, The Little Field of the Ghost, and ambushed and killed the English bully, then had to flee for his life.

That’s how we got here.

When the people in Collygorman learned I was Jeremiah’s great-grandson, they shook my hand, applauded and cheered and said, “Good on him, lad—he was a great man.”

God bless America, and God bless us and keep us and save us from harm, and God save Ireland.

Love,
Seamus the Older