The Impact of 1916 Reverberated Beyond Ireland And The Celtic Countries

NEWS FROM THE CELTIC LEAGUE

We are still attempting to locate rare footage of inter-Celtic involvement in the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter rising has come to light. This year?s 100th anniversary gives it a new impetus.

The Easter Rising had an influence however far beyond Ireland and indeed the other Celtic countries as Australian historian Daniel Leach recorded in an article some years ago. He said:

?For militant nationalists in the minority regions of Western Europe the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 exercised a powerful and enduring influence. Not only had the insurrection itself provided dramatic inspiration to an entire generation of such nationalists in the years before the Second World War, but its veneration in various nationalist literatures had also installed Irish figures such as Patrick Pearse and James Connolly in equally (and sometimes more) exalted positions as indigenous heroes.

?In Brittany, for example, a young Fa?ch Debauvais excitedly daubed the walls of his native Rennes with the words ?Vive l?Irlande!? during the Rising, and his colleague Olier Mordrel would later write of how the idea of staging their own gallant last stand, as at the General Post Office in Dublin, stirred the passions of Breton nationalists:

?A thousand times we went to sleep dreaming of being in combat at the H