Easter Rising,

     also called EASTER REBELLION (1916), republican insurrection in Ireland
against  British government there, which began on Easter Monday, April 24,
1916, in Dublin. The insurrection was planned by Patrick Pearse, Tom Clarke,
and several other leaders of the  Irish Republican Brotherhood, which was a
revolutionary society within the nationalist organization called the  Irish
Volunteers; the latter had about 16,000 members and was armed with German
weapons smuggled into the country in 1914. These two organizations were
supplemented by the  Irish Citizen Army, an association of Dublin
workers formed after the failure of the general strike of 1913, and by the
small  Sinn Féin party.

The uprising was planned to be nationwide in scope, but a series of mishaps
led to its being confined, in the event, to  Dublin alone. The British had
learned of the planned uprising, and on April 21 they arrested the Irish
nationalist Sir Roger Casement in County Kerry for arms running for the
rebels. Eoin MacNeill, the leader of the Irish Volunteers, therefore
canceled mobilization orders for the insurgents, but  Pearse and Clarke went
ahead with about 1,560 Irish Volunteers and a 200-man contingent of the
Citizen Army. On April 24 their forces seized the Dublin General Post Office
and other strategic points in Dublin's
city centre, and Pearse read aloud a proclamation announcing the birth of
the Irish republic. British troops soon arrived to put down the rebellion,
and for nearly a week Dublin was paralyzed by street fighting. British
artillery bombardments and fires compelled Pearse and his colleagues to
surrender on April 29.

Pearse and 14 other leaders of the rebellion were court-martialed and
executed by the British authorities in the weeks that followed. Though the
uprising itself had been unpopular with most of the Irish, these executions
excited a wave of revulsion against the British authorities and turned the
dead republican leaders into martyred heroes. The Irish government
collapsed, and, from then until the establishment (Dec. 6, 1921) of the
Irish Free State, the British made several attempts
to govern, none of which was very successful. The Easter Rising heralded the
end of British power in Ireland. Eamon  De Valera, because he was the senior
survivor of the rising, dated much of his personal popularity with the Irish
people from the time of that event.

(I received this excerpt via email and it is from the Britainnica Encyclopedia,
so it should be of high quality and hopefully apolitical.)