Apps and digital books give in-depth insight into events of 1916

New technology was a key part of the 1916 Rising. The choice of the GPO, the centre of postal communication in Dublin, as the headquarters of the Irish Volunteers was not purely symbolic.

A group of rebels also took over the Marconi Wireless School across the road from the GPO and tapped out a Morse code message, announcing news of the Rising to an international audience. The rebels also had their sights set on the telephone exchange on Crown Alley, and their failure to take control of it was at the root of the Rising’s defeat: it enabled the British army to call in reinforcements from England. The rebels were defeated after just five days.

These are some of the facts outlined in 1916: A Guided Tour Mobile App (€0.99), which offers an audio tour of the central Dublin outposts where the insurgents fought against the British army. Originally recorded for cassette release in 1991, the audio has been re-released by Reclaim the Vision of 1916: A Citizens Initiative, spearheaded by artist Robert Ballagh. The app uses mobile technology to ground the narration in a physical journey which guides the listener along the Liffey from Liberty Hall to Boland’s Mill, then to St Stephen’s Green, Dublin Castle, Kilmainham and back along the quays to the Four Courts and the GPO. It ends at the Garden of Remembrance on Parnell Square.

On foot, the journey takes far longer than the hour-long audio suggests, but the quality of the narration makes for good listening even without the visual aspects of the journey. (For sedentary listeners, the app provides a slideshow of contemporary and historical photographs and documents.)

Old-fashioned quality

The narration was written by the late Tomás Mac Anna, former director of the Abbey Theatre, and read by Donncha Ó Dúlaing, who brings some terrific rolling rs to his intonation. Traditional music, rebel ballads and poetry, read by Bosco Hogan and Eithne Dempsey, provide ambience to the material. The old-fashioned quality of the presentation creates a pleasing historical immersion for the contemporary listener/reader, though the sound quality remains high despite the archaic feel of the material.

1916 Portraits and Lives takes a biographical approach to the Rising, presenting 42 key figures alongside original portraits, which were commissioned by the Office of Public Works and the Royal Irish Academy to mark the centenary of 1916. A digital version is being offered free as a gift from the State through its website ireland.ie/portraits until the end of April.

The book is illustrated by David Rooney, whose fine black-and-white scraperboard engravings lend a noirish, cinematic feel to scenes from the Rising, as well as to its key personalities.

The portraits are built up from thin white-cut lines and are rarely formal. Instead the figures are placed within the context of the Rising. Thus Winifred Carney hands a typewritten sheet to James Connolly as snipers defend the GPO in the background, Tom Clarke surveys the street outside his stationery shop while Constance Markievicz pulls the trigger of a gun. Most movingly, The O’Rahilly is pictured at the moment of his death in a doorway on Moore Lane “crying for water and writing his name in blood on a wall”.

The text is taken from the Royal Irish Academy's Dictionary of Irish Biography, while a meaty introduction by Patrick Maume provides a summary of the causation and key events of 1916.

Revisionist perspectives

Editors James Quinn and Lawrence William White explain the selection of lives offered. The majority represent the perspective of the republican revolution, of course, but there are also biographies of several figures who opposed the Rising, soldiers and administrators from the colonial regime, and two prominent historians, whose differing revisionist perspectives remind the reader of the continuing evolution of history (and historiography).

Easter 1916: Selected Archive Pieces From the New Statesman(€0.99), meanwhile, is a digital release of contemporary reportage and opinion. At the time of the rebellion, the New Statesman was under the editorship of Clifford Sharp, who maintained a nuanced approach to unfolding political events both in Ireland and internationally. The journal was also where WB Yeats often first published his poetry, and the collection includes an article from 1915 by JM Hone analysing the poet's growing disillusionment with the nationalist movement. It also includes the full text of Yeats's 1920 poem Easter, 1916 which was first published in the prestigious journal.

The collection opens with a an uncredited editorial from 1914, which places the threat of civil war in the context of European upheaval and the first World War. There is an anonymous first-person account called The Tragedy in Dublin, in which "an Irish Correspondent" reports from the vantage point of St Stephen's Green, witnessing wounded rebels being attended by their comrades and "an old gentleman in Naval uniform walk out, greatly daring, from his club"; he was at once arrested by two sentries and led into the green despite his protest: "But I'm not on duty."

The highlight, however, comes from George Bernard Shaw in his essay Some Neglected Morals of the Irish Rising, which was published just after the first executions in Kilmainham Gaol. "Do not give way to an intemperate admiration of patriotism," he writes; a warning that both English and Irish readers would have been wise to heed in the aftermath of the rebellion.

“If you wish men to be good citizens,” he warns in a conclusion that resounds today, “you must teach them to be good citizens.”