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Hello, my name's David Rundsenman and this is past, present, future, the History of Ideas podcast.

Today, the first of two episodes with the Irish writer, broadcaster and historian, Fenton O'Toole, discussing the trials of the Easter Rising 1916. Today we're going to be talking about the Rising itself and the trials, if they can be called that,

that led to the executions in Dublin of 14 of the men involved.

And then we're going to be talking about the related but very different treason trial

in London of Sir Roger Casement.

Fenton, in talking about the backstory to Easter 1916, we could go back a long, long way. I mean,

presumably you could go back all the way. I think so that we have somewhere to start, maybe we should

just go back to 1914, because the outbreak of the First World War changed everything everywhere,

including the politics of Ireland. So I'm

going to say something which I know is too simplistic. So you can tell me why it's too simplistic.

But one way you could characterize what happened with the outbreak of war in August 1914 is in the

months and indeed years leading up to that, the neuralgic fear in Britain of civil war, Civil Uprising in Ireland was based on the North,

Ulster, and indeed what was being driven by British politicians.

War changed that.

That fear went away and the focus turned eventually to the south.

So uprising, which was a prospect in Ulster, vanished,

and the locus of anxiety moved to the south. Is that too crude? No, it really is hard to

overstate the extent to which the fear of civil war in Ireland, which of course would also

...