As we near the centenary of Dublin’s Easter Rising, we are seeing a number of new works addressing what was the most important political event in modern Irish history. Fearghal McGarry’s gracefully written oral history of that event joins Charles Townsend’s recent Easter 1916 (Lanham, MD, 2006) and Clair Wills’s Dublin, 1916 (Cambridge, MA, 2009), as well as a number of more specialized and popular works. Given an extensive existing literature, one might well wonder how much more can be added to our understanding of this event. Much of the specialized work is now being done in literary circles, usually a sign that the historians have wrung a subject dry. Yet this book is a very different history based on a set of newly available sources materials, and it reaffirms the salient truth of history—nothing is as clear as it might seem to be.

The author, a senior lecturer in history at Queen’s University, Belfast, has plunged himself into a series of hundreds of eyewitness accounts recorded by the Irish government’s Bureau of Military History in the late 1940s and early 1950s. These documents were collected by the government and unavailable to historians until 2003. The interviewers were a smattering of government officials and military men, and those interviewed were participants, witnesses, and contemporaries of the Rising. Many veterans, however, refused to submit to interviews, and when you add that to the vicissitudes of memory, you have a fascinating but not wholly trustworthy source of information.

Townsend has made use of these materials, but McGarry’s use here is far more extensive and problematic. The author himself enumerates the problems: eyewitnesses who intentionally and unintentionally distort things, confuse and omit others, and claim authoritative knowledge that probably nobody had in an event that was confusing to those on the ground. A larger problem is that the statements were compiled, redacted, and edited by interviewers who had every reason to mediate these accounts. Even after recognizing these problems, the author is perhaps too ready to embrace the idea that these sources are as dependable as written ones would be at the same time he is surely right to argue that these documents are the most important evidence we have about the mentalité at work here.

The result is fascinating, suggestive, and richly textured with journalistic moments where the subject just comes alive with interviews that give us new voices and enrich our understanding. While there were many enthusiasts ready for action, there were many Volunteers who were ambivalent about what they were about to do. Many others were in denial or ignorant and surrendered themselves to the peer pressure of friends and leaders. Most of the rebels knew little history of political action, but others were deeply committed and proudly traced their roots back through the generations of Irish resistance to British rule.

McGarry maintains that few were driven by ideology, and he does so even when witnesses tell of their belief of the need for action. One might ask then what could this sense of conviction be without ideological justification? What does it mean if it is not indicative of a sense of intellectual confirmation that ideas were critically important? From the evidence, Patrick Pearse’s role was critical. While there were skeptics there were more who respected him and believed in what he stood for, and, while it is probable that few went out to become a “blood sacrifice” à la Pearse and his fellow poets, the evidence points to the galvanizing effect of these ideas. The author expresses surprise that many held inconsistent religious views and is tone deaf to the common language of Catholic martyrdom alive not only in Ireland but also at the front in France. This failure speaks volumes about what is a highly restricted definition of ideology and its impact on people’s lives and attitudes.

While many thought they were going to succeed, the pessimism of others testifies to the fact that many had resigned themselves to see the Rising in mainly symbolic and not military terms. It is certain that the leadership had come to see the major benefit to be symbolic and historical, proof positive that ideas were critical to the event. Revolutionaries are always in the minority, and there will always be historians who overestimate their importance. But there are always historians who find inconsistencies in the beliefs of participants and believe this proves that the ideas at the top had little impact on those who followed that leadership to violence and death.

Confusion, bad planning, the deaths of civilians, stupidity, and ineptitude are a part of warfare and maybe even more so in the case of revolutions, and it was present in abundance that week. But evidence of these merely reminds us that war is always a series of blunders and accidents. The British sent waves of soldiers across the Mt. Street Bridge only to see them mowed down by a handful of Volunteers. McGarry is right to point out that these were the tactics of the Somme to come, tactics that the French and Germans had largely abandoned by mid 1916. More maddeningly, the British could have easily flanked the position—apparently they too had ideas that trumped practical considerations. The rebels also blew opportunities and made spectacularly bad strategic and tactical decisions.

This is an important book. It presents new evidence and injects life into a much studied subject. It is written clearly and takes into account the broader historiographical issues at play. But it resonates with the popular sensibilities of Ken Burns’s video history of the Second World War more than it does with academic history. Townsend’s work, given its detailed political and military focus, remains the definitive work on the Rising. Wills’s book is more sensitive to the complexities at the heart of the Rising and the specialized works on leading figures, but the cultural issues at play here remain critically important to any understanding of what happened in 1916.