A different Easter parade

last updated 8 January 2015

Dublin

Ireland celebrated the anniversary of the Easter Rising last week, for the first time in 35 years. Crowds lined Dublin streets for a full-blown military parade, and an army captain read out Ireland’s Proclamation of Independence as politicians and soldiers wept. The 1916 uprising against the British was the work of a small group of rebels, and was quickly and brutally put down. But it started a wave of guerilla warfare that led to independence in 1921 for all of Ireland except six counties in Ulster, in the north. Ireland quit marking the anniversary in the 1970s because the event had become an excuse for violence between the Irish Republican Army and Ulster militias.