Alison Healy: On discovering what the rebels ate during the Easter Rising
Birthday cake amid open warfare. Commandeered cattle. Scores of sandwiches.
Have you ever wondered what the rebels ate during the Easter Rising? The thought never occurred to me until I read some of the volunteers' personal stories in Michael Kenny's new book Easter Week 1916: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories. He trawled through the witness statements held by the Bureau of Military History to see what it was like for the ordinary people who joined the Rising.
Volunteer Patrick Kelly told how he was fast asleep when a comrade burst into his house on Easter Monday morning to tell him the Rising was happening. He woke him up by pulling on his big toe. As he hurriedly got dressed, his father attended to his rifle while his mother sent him packing with sandwiches.
When apprentice butcher Robert Holland joined the Rising, he hardly expected to be deploying his butchering skills. Stationed at Marrowbone Lane garrison, he was the right man in the right place when three cattle were commandeered nearby. He was asked to slaughter one of them and prepare it for cooking.
READ MORE
The Tuesday of the Rising marked his 19th birthday. From Inchicore, he was one of four Holland brothers who fought in 1916. He probably thought no one would remember his birthday but his brother Dan popped in from another wing of the building to wish him well.
Better still, his 15-year-old brother Walter, who was acting as a messenger boy, slipped through the barricades and went home to Inchicore for a brief visit. He returned with a homemade birthday cake from their mother.
Robert must have dreamed of that cake many times when he sat in Knutsford prison near Manchester after the Rising. One of his witness statements in the Bureau of Military History recalled how hunger forced him to eat the lime from the wall. A small piece of bone in his soup would sustain him for hours, sometimes days. He remembered telling a fellow prisoner he would chance eating a picture of the Last Supper, he was that hungry.
Matters took a turn for the worse when he was sent to solitary confinement where the food ration was even smaller. 'I spent hours thinking of cakes and parties I had attended. If only I had a little of what was left over from those now, how I would have appreciated it.'
Mary Anne Callender might also have had reason to look back ruefully at her life before the Rising. She ran the Lucan Restaurant on Sarsfield Quay and managed to keep it open during the Rising, famously providing Patrick Pearse with his last meal before his execution.
She was in the restaurant when she heard news of the executions and she exclaimed 'May the Lord have mercy on their souls'.
This was overheard by a British army chauffeur who stormed out. According to her son, the volunteer Ignatius Callender, the restaurant generated 80 per cent of its business from the nearby Royal Barracks. The authorities put the restaurant out of military bounds and it was shuttered the following month.
But Mrs Callender was not a woman to scare easily. Early on the Wednesday morning of the Rising she saw Ignatius handling ammunition in his bedroom. He told her he was bringing the ammunition to the Church Street area. This would have placed her son a little too close to the action for her liking, so she declared she would do the job instead.
She secured the ammunition inside her blouse and brought a jug and money with her, so that she could pretend she was going to buy milk and food in Stoneybatter. Mission accomplished, she returned to run her restaurant and Ignatius got on with his work of scouting and delivering messages across the city.
Heavy gunfire brought him to a standstill at the corner of Parliament Street and Essex Street later that morning. He spotted an old woman, waiting to cross the street. She was bound for 11am Mass and refused to turn back. He took her umbrella, tied his handkerchief to it and waved it into the street to stop the gunfire. It took about five minutes for the firing to stop and he escorted her across the street safely.
She promised to pray for him, and perhaps her prayers worked. He was captured on Saturday evening and a British officer ordered a soldier to take him away. After they moved down the street, the soldier admitted that he didn't know what to do with him and advised him to make a run for it.
He did so, bracing himself for a bullet that never came.
·
Easter Week 1916: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Stories is published by the National Museum of Ireland and is on sale at the museum shop in Collins Barracks.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Irish Times
10 hours ago
- Irish Times
Read the headlines and wonder if everyone is on Ozempic and has ADHD? It's all a bit overwhelming
You already know that absurdity is embedded in our digital world, and yet the constant bombardment confirming as much can be utterly overwhelming. You're endlessly overloaded by conflicting information and opinions. You scroll through news of ecological disaster , war, political failure and economic instability. Then you get an ad for protein yoghurt and an artificial intelligence clip of someone telling you to quit your job and follow your dreams when the average Dublin rent is almost €2,500. Also, there's something fluttering in the back of your mind about who has nuclear weapons and who doesn't. You wonder if you should take the weight loss drug everyone is talking about, except what about that comment you saw on Instagram saying, 'my cousin is a podiatrist and said it makes your feet fall off'? You read headlines and wonder if everyone is getting a facelift and an ADHD diagnosis – it's starting to feel like it – and it all feels absurd. It is absurd – this sense of rudderless, directionless urgency strips our experience of meaning. After watching a terrifying 30-second video about muscle loss and ageing, you order some protein yoghurt. Human beings are meaning-oriented creatures. We don't do well without a sense of 'why'. Why we should get up in the morning. Why we should do the necessary things we'd rather not do. Why our lives and choices, as well as those of other people, matter. Meaning fuels us through difficulty, contextualises life's inevitable suffering and gives us a sense of fulfilment in our own effort. It prevents us from feeling that we could be replaced by an actor who looks kind of like us without anyone noticing. Without meaning – Aristotle calls it telos – the wheels fall off. A sense of meaninglessness is central to feeling clinically depressed, so while it might seem like an abstract and theoretical problem – a fruity, modern malaise – it really isn't. We are experiencing a collective crisis of meaning; the grand narratives we once bought into, and which connected us through shared belief, are no longer cutting it. This is the postmodern reality, and it's a lot of dancing tweens on TikTok and billionaires on testosterone building space shuttles and men past or pushing 80 (and who do or do not have nuclear weapons) sabre rattling on social media. It's a lot of total absurdity without a lot of meaning. READ MORE Logotherapy – the creation of Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist Viktor Frankl – is unsurprisingly seeing a resurgence lately, given our thirst for meaning. Frankl outlined it most famously in his 1946 book Man's Search for Meaning, where he introduces the 'therapeutic doctrine' he formulated. It's a form of psychotherapy that places pursuit of meaning at the centre of life. We can cope with pretty much anything, Frankl suggests (any 'how'), if we can find meaning in it (if we have a 'why'). Meaning is not given to us from outside, he says, and it can come in many forms. Like the existentialists, Frankl thought that meaning is something we create for ourselves rather than something awaiting us out in the world. Especially when we're struggling, Frankl suggests, we need a reason to navigate our way through whatever life is demanding of us. He's not about endless rumination and self-examination, though, and in an age of tedious self-optimisation and hyper-therapised narcissism, it's little wonder that people are reconnecting with Frankl's suggestion that we consider one question above any other: 'What is life asking of [me]?' [ How absurd: the world as Albert Camus saw it Opens in new window ] French-Algerian philosopher Albert Camus is another thinker who spent most of his career on questions of meaning, but he went another way with it. It makes sense that the destruction and narrative chaos of the second World War spurred these sorts of questions. It was Camus who brought the concept of absurdism into the mainstream. Unlike Frankl and people such as Jean-Paul Sartre , who agreed that there is no objective meaning to life but suggested that we create it, Camus rejected meaning altogether. Our great cause of suffering, he suggested, is our deep desire for meaning, clarity and a sense of purpose in a universe that has no inherent meaning. It offers us no answers. This is the absurdity, Camus says, our primordial desire to make sense of a senseless universe. The absurdity is not about the world being nonsensical, but about its inherent and unresolved contradiction. In our constant desire to make sense of the mayhem. [ We like to romanticise Ireland's past, but too much remembering could be bad for us Opens in new window ] We can make meaning, Frankl says, we can find it, as others suggest, or we can revolt, as Camus would put it. His approach is not about giving in to despair or becoming cynical or turning into the worst Facebook comments section troll you can imagine. It's about permitting the contradiction without trying to resolve it – looking right at the absurdity rather than away from it and being all right with it. We can't make sense of what's going on around us, but we can decide what we think about meaning, and what we're going to do with it.
Irish Times
10 hours ago
- Irish Times
I'm paying €757 to keep my child busy for 3.6 hours a day. Summer childcare maths doesn't add up
I used to believe in spreadsheets, that formulas and colour coding had magical powers to put order on a chaotic world and reveal the path to an optimised life. It worked for travel planning, for career choices and for household budgets. But then I tried to make it understand the magical thinking of the maths of Irish family life, and both my spreadsheet and my faith in rationality disintegrated into a sea of alarming little red triangles with exclamation points. The final straw was summer holiday childcare maths. Irish workers are entitled to four weeks of annual leave per year, while Irish schools and (many) preschools are closed for about 13 weeks a year. Parents can request unpaid 'Parent's Leave' from their employer, which is roughly 2 weeks per year per child for the first 12 years. This would mean that even if there are two parents, and each takes different holidays, and the unpaid leave, a max of 10 of the 13 weeks off could be covered. For households where all adults work – and for those with the resources to do so – this is where camps come in. Summer camp as a concept has a dreamy quality; it conjures canoes and tyre swings and lifelong friendships formed by the bonfire. The reality, in Ireland at least, is a little more prosaic. There are frantic Google searches, fights for places, fistfuls of cash to mostly private providers, and all for the pleasure of depositing your child at a random scout den before dashing to squeeze some work into the 3-4 hour window you have before you need to pick them up again. [ The summer juggle: How to work while the kids are off Opens in new window ] My child is 4½, and we're facing our first summer of this. After several weeks of planning she signed up for six weeks of camps during the nine weeks of summer break. I have co-ordinated with other families to make sure she turns up at each random scout den with at least one familiar face, though this means she will be attending camps by five different providers, in five different locations. The total cost, for one child, is €757. And for this money, even optimising for longer camps, across these six weeks we'll be getting an average of 3.6 hours of cover per day. READ MORE These short hours add another incentive to team up with other families. The only way I can imagine getting through the summer as a working family is to participate in the elaborate barter system known as play dates. Sometimes this 'I'll pick them all up Tuesday if you do Wednesday' is explicit, sometimes it's unspoken. Often it's a lifeline. Some families have moved beyond the barter system to something approaching co-operatives; parents banding together over school holidays to take turns minding each others' kids. Taking one day off to mind four or five kids is the same hit to finite holiday allowances as taking one off for just your own, without the expense of private camps. This reinvention of traditional economic models – bartering, co-operatives – on a micro level should signal to us that something approaching market failure is happening at the macro level. Most camps feel designed to deliver a few mornings of entertainment and maybe educational enrichment to children who are otherwise at home for the summer, cared for by a non-working parent. But two-thirds of Irish mothers work outside the home, according to the Growing Up in Ireland Survey. This disjointed maths – the gulf between the world a system presumes exists and reality – feels very familiar. Like how we have six months of maternity leave, but childcare for those under 12 months old doesn't exist. Like how you can get a mortgage for 3½ times your salary, but average Dublin house prices are 8 times average salary levels. [ Ulcer-inducing summer childcare: It seems like the camps begin at 9am but end at 9.15am with a 45-minute commute Opens in new window ] This cognitive dissonance leaves tens if not hundreds of thousands of households scrambling to find ways to make things work. But no amount of spreadsheeting can solve a problem that was never designed to be solvable. It doesn't need to be this way. Public provision of childcare outside of term time is the norm in many countries, such as France, where schools and municipalities organise affordable offerings throughout school holidays that cover the work day. More could also be done to facilitate those who want to spend more time away from work over summer. Policies such as parent's leave, that give employees the legal right to request unpaid leave. I am planning to reduce the hours I work per day over the summer months, something I can do as I work for myself, and that allows me to keep the lights on and get projects lined up for the autumn. This idea of 'summer hours' is common in some parts of Europe, but would probably take government support to become mainstream here. Parents have built patchwork systems that somehow work, cobbled together from WhatsApp groups, favours, and sheer will. Imagine what we could do if the official systems tried even half as hard. Liz Carolan works on democracy and technology issues, and writes at
Irish Times
11 hours ago
- Irish Times
How rural Ireland is turning to vacant property grants for development
Cloverhill House outside Ballinamore in Co Leitrim has been in the O'Connell family for almost 100 years. John O'Connell's grandfather James purchased the property on July 4th, 1925 at auction. It was one of the finest houses in the area, with six bedrooms, an inside toilet and hot and cold water, relative rarities at the time. The house passed to John's mother Dolores, who died in 2012 leaving the house empty. Ownership passed to him and he was left with a dilemma – the house was too good to leave empty, but too expensive to do up to a standard that a family – in this case his own – could live in. The introduction of the vacant property refurbishment grant in July 2022 was the catalyst for him and his wife Amanda to do what they aspired to do. The grant allows for payments of up to €50,000 for the refurbishment of homes that have been vacant for at least two years and an extra €20,000 for structural work on homes that are derelict. READ MORE They used the €50,000 to properly insulate the house, install underfloor heating and carry out rewiring and replumbing. 'It's been dragged into the 21st century,' he says. From being a house that was so cold that his mother chilled jelly in the hallway, it now has an A3 rating. Working with Leitrim County Council was 'an absolute dream', he says. They filled out the appropriate paperwork, submitted it and within a few days they came back to carry out the initial inspection. 'Within two or three days, we had approval to start our work on the house. A month later we started the work.' 'I don't know if we would have taken on this project, if we didn't have this grant,' says Amanda. 'The cost of materials had trebled if not quadrupled and the cost of labour had gone up. The most important thing for us was getting the fabric of the house right, the decorative stuff could come later.' The O'Connells and their three children are moving into the house and vacating the home they built for themselves after they got married in the early 2000s. Their family home will be put on the market to rent. The housing crisis has had a catastrophic impact on the availability of rental properties in many counties. There is not a single property to rent in Ballinamore, Leitrim's second biggest town on either or There are two properties to rent in the whole of Co Leitrim on and four on Daft. Leitrim is one of nine of the 26 counties in 2024 where the number of grants applied for through the vacant properties scheme was higher than the number of homes built (65 per cent), according to figures complied by Hardware Association Ireland, which represents builders merchants and the DIY industry. The others are Roscommon (also 65 per cent), Donegal (62 per cent), Sligo (64 per cent), Cavan (61 per cent), Mayo (54 per cent), Kerry (53 per cent), Tipperary (53 per cent) and Monaghan (51 per cent). This is a tribute to the popularity of the grant, but also a reflection of how little private development is going on in rural Ireland. In Leitrim just one private housing estate has been built since the crash; in Longford none has been built. In Leitrim there were just 120 homes built in 2024, when there were 223 applications for the vacant grant. More than 70 per cent of the applications to Leitrim County Council for the grant have been approved. This is similar to the national rate of approval. Of the 12,404 applications made by the end of March, 8,652 were approved at a cost of €112.5 million. Hardware Association Ireland recently met Minister for Housing James Browne . They suggested to him that he extend the scheme beyond single dwellings to allow the grant be used to convert vacant retail properties into housing. This would apply, for instance, if an owner had a multistorey property above a shop so that they could apply for separate grants for multiple apartments. HAI estimates there are 20,000 homes that could be brought back into use from multiple over-the-shop conversions into apartments. 'We are fairly sure of the numbers. This a winning formula and there are not many success stories in housing. We believe that it can be easily done in a realistic manner,' says HAI chief executive Martin Markey. He would appear to be pushing at an open door with the Minister, who said last week that the vacant property grant was a 'massive part' of the Government's response to the housing crisis. He cited the conversion of a derelict row in Carlow town into 12 social housing units as an example of what could be done. 'It was amazing to see a derelict street brought back into a row of houses that people want to live in. I want to see more of this,' said Browne. 'Over-the-shop is a crucial part of that. We will be making an announcement on that in the very near future.' Evidence of the popularity of the grant came when 300 people turned up to the Landmark Hotel in Carrick-on-Shannon on June 19th, along with 30 exhibitors, for a seminar organised by Leitrim County Council. They heard presentations from Anne Marie O'Connor from the Department of Housing 's vacant homes unit, from Leitrim County Council's vacant homes officer Shane Mulvey and from Mel Galvin, a research and development co-ordinator at the Atlantic Technological University in Sligo, who spoke about grants offered by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) . The main speaker was celebrity architect Hugh Wallace, who is evangelical about the grant, having availed of it to do up his home in Clanbrassil Street in inner-city Dublin. Hugh Wallace has used the vacant property refurbishment grant. Photograph: Gerry Faughnan Mr Wallace said the scheme is easy to understand and those applying for it are working with local authorities who want to help rather than put obstacles in the way. 'It is very unrestricted as grants go. It's about a house being vacant for two years and/or with structural defeats and or up to €50,000 towards renovations of the interior. That's as simple as the grant is," he said. 'The great thing about the grant is that the councils want to give it out. All the councils around the country want to be helpful because a derelict building does no use for them. The original bill of sale from Cloverhill House, which has been in the O'Connell family for almost 100 years 'From my experience, it is actually a very simple grant to get. The councils come out they do an initial inspection. It is very important that you have done minimal or no work before the inspection and you monitor what you are doing, keep all your bills and at the end of the process all your invoices, and the council will pay out those monies.' Through the SEAI, householders can avail of grants of up to €25,000 on top of the €70,000 from the vacant homes grants. The caveat is you cannot apply for two grants for the same item – insulated doors, for instance – through the vacant property grant and the SEAI. Wallace praised local authorities for their willingness to issue the grants and to cut through the red tape that is holding up so many housing projects. The scheme is working well but the €20,000 available to fix structural problems in derelict homes is not enough, he suggested, and there should be a more even split in grant money if somebody spends €70,000, as €20,000 is insufficient for remedying structural defects.
