1916 Commemorative School Competitions, Projects & Other Events in O’Connell Secondary School

O’Connell School and the 1916 Rising

Remembering, Reflecting and Re imagining

It seemed at first like just another quiet Easter Monday. The schools were closed for the holidays and a young Christian Brother, William Allen, was enjoying a game of handball with some confreres at an alley in Marino, Dublin. Then an unexpected thing happened. No less a personage than the order’s Superior General, Brother Willis, came on the scene, looking worried. He interrupted the game to tell the players that the ‘Sinn Féiners’ had risen up in arms against the government. He told them to return immediately to their various monasteries and to avoid the city centre. It was 24 April 1916. The Easter Rising had just begun.

As Brother Allen hurried back to his base at O’Connell Schools, North Richmond Street, he encountered barricades at two bridges, manned by the Irish Volunteers. He was in his black clerical clothes and the insurgents saluted him and waved him through. It would be a tense, eventful week in O’Connell’s, as the fighting raged in nearby city centre. With deliveries to the shops disrupted, the Brothers had difficulty finding food. When they went out in search of supplies, they wore their black silk hats so as not to be mistaken for combatants. As one Brother approached a butcher’s shop on Berkeley Road, a bullet hit the door. After all that risk, there was no meat available. Two of the Brothers managed to get a half sack of flour at a bakery on Jones’s Road. Brother Allen recalled how a contingent of exhausted British soldiers, who had moved up from The Curragh, rested on the lawn at O’Connell’s, before moving off again after hearing shots from the North Strand direction.
The events of that momentous week in Irish history would leave a lasting impression on this young Christian Brother from West Cork. Brother Allen would eventually discover that among the rebels was a sizeable number of former O’Connell Schools (OCS) students, some of whom he knew personally. Current pupils of the school had also taken part, while on their Easter holidays. After the rebels surrendered at the end of a week’s insurrection, the British tended to release the younger insurgents. Thus, boy soldiers such as Richard Gogan and Sean Lemass, both aged 16, would return quietly to their classes at O’Connell’s. Both of them would later become Fianna Fáil members of the Dáil, with Lemass rising to the position of Taoiseach.
In old age, on 29 July 1968, Brother Allen drew up a list of OCS participants in the Rising. Probably relying largely on memory, he came up with 125 names, but noted that this was not necessarily a complete list. As part of the school’s commemoration of the 1916 events, I have tried to trace the background of all of those who took part in the Rising. My research in digital archives that were, of course, unavailable to Brother Allen indicated about ten additional names – there may well be others. There are some remarkable names on Brother Allen’s list. Three of the executed leaders of the Rising were past pupils, all shot by firing squad on the same day, 8 May 1916. They were Con Colbert, Sean Heuston and Éamonn Ceannt. The latter was one of the seven men who signed the Proclamation declaring an Irish Republic, and he had been in the same OCS class as Heuston. Among the many rebels who survived the Rising was another notable OCS man, Sean T. O’Kelly, who became President of Ireland. (Courtesy of S. Boyne).