Why St. Patrick’s Day 1916 became a turning point in Irish history

Today, St. Patrick’s Day might call to mind shamrocks, Guinness, and a diminutive, bearded man dressed in all green. But in 1916, it became a public dress rehearsal for revolution. 

That year, thousands of armed men donned tattered uniforms and brimmed hats to march through the streets of Dublin, Cork, and Limerick in St. Patrick’s Day parades—not for patriotism’s sake, but to plan the logistics of an insurrection against the ruling British government. 

Publicly, the men were protesting the prospect of sending Irishmen into the Great War on behalf of Great Britain. But privately, a group of Irishmen were planning something bigger: an insurrection for the following month that would come to be known as the Easter Rising, leading to the deaths of over 480 people and over 2,600 injuries. 

On that day, frustrations with British presence in Ireland—which had been brewing for decades—finally boiled over. Here’s the history behind the dawn of Ireland’s fight for independence and how the 1916 St. Patrick’s Day parades served as a stepping stone on the road to The Rising. 

Who were the Irish Volunteers?

At the end of the 19^th-century, Ireland was on the verge of achieving some independence from Great Britain. The Irish Home Rule movement would allow the country to have a limited form of self-government, but still legally exist as a part of the United Kingdom. “The majority of people were on board with that on the eve of the First World War,” says Darragh Gannon, Georgetown’s associate director of Irish studies and the author of Proclaiming a Republic: Ireland, 1916, and the National Collection. “But the European conflict changed everything,” Gannon explains.

In response to the Home Rule bill in 1912, a group of Protestant Ulstermen banded together to form the Ulster Volunteers. The paramilitary group feared losing their ties to Britain and being governed by a Catholic-majority parliament in Dublin. 

An opposing group emerged in response: The Irish Volunteers. 

But the Irish Volunteers were still finding their footing. Internally, the group disagreed on the best way to achieve home rule. One member, John Redmond, believed that the best way to secure home rule would be by joining with Britain to make sure it won the impending war with Germany. 

In a famous speech, Redmond encouraged Irish Volunteers to don British military uniforms and fight “as far as the firing line extends.” Ninety percent of the Volunteers were on board.

But not all the Irish Volunteers agreed with the call to fight for a British cause. After Redmond’s speech, 12,000 dissenting Irish Volunteers splintered off and formed a new bloc. This new minority faction was led by Eoin MacNeill, a professor at the University of Dublin and the chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers; as such, their group retained the original name. Redmond’s men, meanwhile, rebranded themselves The National Volunteers. 

The rise of anti-war sentiment

World War I shaped the political climate in 20^th century Ireland. As the country was a part of the United Kingdom when the war began, 21,000 Irishmen were serving in the British Army and another 47,000 reserve men were mobilized in the first couple of months of the war. By February 1916, over 13,600 Irishmen and women had lost their lives in the war. 

(How WWI got Nat Geo into the map business.)

At the same time, there had been setbacks with the Home Rule bill. Redmond successfully led the Irish Parliamentary Party to pass the Home Rule bill, also known as the Government of Ireland Act 1914.  However, due to the outbreak of the war in July 1914, the implementation of the Home Rule Act that was supposed to begin in September 1914 was immediately suspended.

At the height of the tension, the Irish Volunteers and the Ulster Volunteers both sourced guns from Europe to prepare for violent conflict. Germany, which had a vested interest in destabilizing the U.K., supplied the Irish Volunteers with over 20,000 rifles.

Anti-war sentiment began to take hold, especially as fears about military conscription spread throughout Ireland, as military service was compulsory for British citizens.

“It was believed, rightly, by the British that [conscripting the Irish] would be political dynamite,” says Caoimhe Nic Dhaibheid, University of Sheffield’s professor of Irish history and curator for the National Museum of Ireland’s exhibit on The Rising. 

Out of the Irish volunteers, “a small grouping of radical nationalists” started to form called the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Nic Dhaibheid explains. Leading activists from this exclusive group decided that it was time to organize a revolution, and thought Easter would be a symbolic date for the rising, due to the entanglement of Catholicism and the Irish nationalist movement.

Moreover, Volunteers would be freed up from work, given it was a bank holiday. However, the group was strategic. They knew that rushing into rebellion with no plan could jeopardize the success of their plan; the St. Patrick’s Day marches, therefore, helped them assess the potential success of their larger resistance goals.

“By March 1916, those plans were well underway,” Nic Dhaibheid says. “It involved liaising with nationalists in the U.S., especially in New York City, and also trying to secure help from the German Empire to send arms and men in order to stage a rebellion.” 

A St. Patrick’s Day parade would be an ideal place to hide in plain sight as they prepared. 

1916 St. Patrick’s Day

St. Patrick’s Day was a day of piety in Ireland, as the day’s name pays homage to the fifth-century priest and bishop acknowledged as the individual responsible for bringing Christianity to Ireland.

(Who was Saint Patrick and why does he have a day?)

On the morning of the 1916 parades, churches held special masses for the Irish Volunteers before they set out to demonstrate. As author and historian Fearghal McGarry notes in his book The Rising, these services served as a “potent cocktail of patriotism, camaraderie, and piety.” 

“The [mass] had a profound effect on me which will never leave my mind,” one Volunteer told McGarry in The Rising, adding that parade organizers “appeared to look in their uniforms as if receiving a special blessing from God, and undoubtedly every man attending that mass received such a blessing.” 

Over 38 processions were held nationwide, with about 5,995 total marchers practicing street fighting and conducting armed maneuvers. The largest demonstrations took place in Dublin, with around 4,000 Irish Volunteers to take control of the city center. The parades served as a public display of strength, prowess, and military potential.

“It was almost like you were performing revolution on the streets as a prelude to the real thing,” McGarry says.

Though a large force of armed British policemen were present at the scene, McGarry explains that they had no choice but to comply with the direction of the Volunteers. 

Only seven men knew of the true end goal during the 1916 St. Patrick’s Day marches. The Seven Signatories—Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett, Patrick Pearse, Seán MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, and Tom Clarke—were planning the April uprising while participating in the secret military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

Even the Irish Volunteers’ Chief of Staff Eoin MacNeill had no idea that plans for an Easter Rising were well underway. The Seven Signatories left most volunteers in the dark to avoid infiltration by spies or British intelligence.

Meanwhile the British government ignored the protest parades. Since the Volunteers mostly marched around with outdated weapons and had a general ragtag sensibility, many British policemen found their processions more amusing than threatening. 

“The British saw them as playing toy soldiers,” Gannon says. 

Though some members of British intelligence had a sense that something was brewing, officials generally agreed that suppressing the demonstrations would only further encourage the rebels and fan the flames of their cause. “Even though they were keeping tabs on the volunteers, they thought it better to keep well enough alone,” Gannon explains. 

The 1916 protest’s lasting legacy

Just weeks later, members of the Irish Volunteers took to the streets again. But to the Seven Signatories’ dismay, only 1,200 men showed up on April 24, 1916. As it turns out, keeping most volunteers in the dark about the plans of Easter Rising backfired. Most Volunteers were unsure about when the Rising was supposed to occur, and conflicting news reports led to mass confusion among their ranks.

Nonetheless, a small group of armed men marched on, this time firing their rifles instead of holding them steady. The British responded swiftly, quelling dissent by executing the rising’s leadership, including the Seven Signatories and nine additional leaders. In turn, those men became martyrs for Ireland’s independence fight; people were enraged with the killings, and the tide of public sentiment shifted fundamentally towards the nationalist movement. 

The British inadvertently changed what had been a fringe rebellion into a critical tipping point in Ireland’s fight for independence.

The events of the 1916 St. Patrick’s Day protests may have been overshadowed in history by the Rising. But experts still agree that the parades should hold a spot of symbolic and military relevance in the grand story of Ireland’s history.

The parades served as an essential testing ground for the Volunteers and laid the groundwork for their Easter uprising, according to Gannon. 

Above all, leaders of the Irish Volunteers sought to know if their men would be ready to fight when the time came. 

“Would their men show strength and resilience, parading with weapons through Dublin city center under the watch of the British authorities, or would they cower away?” Gannon says. 

The St. Patrick’s Day parades, drawing thousands of armed and impassioned participants, answered in the affirmative.