Easter Rising 1916

The 1916 Easter Rising occurred between Easter Monday, 24 April, and Saturday 29 April, when about 1, 800 members of the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army occupied various prominent buildings in central Dublin. Their headquarters was established at the General Post Office in O'Connell St., where Patrick Pearse read out a proclamation establishing the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic. Besides Pearse, the signatories were Thomas Clarke, Seán MacDiarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamonn Ceannt, James Connolly, and Joseph Plunkett—all members of the Military Council of the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood)
Other Volunteers seized such buildings as the Jacob's Factory, Boland's Mills and The College of Surgeons.
The leaders of The Rising and their followers held out for a week, vastly outnumbered by the British Forces. On Saturday the 29th of April, Patrick Pearse gave the orders for an unconditional surrender.
The leaders of the 1916 Rising were all put on trial. Fifteen were shot in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin between the 3rd and 12th of May. These executions caused a sea-change of attitudes and created much public sympathy towards the ideals of the 1916 leaders.

Irish Potato Famine

Ireland is in your hands, in your power. If you do not save her, she cannot save herself. I solemnly call upon you to recollect that I predict with the sincerest conviction that a quarter of her population will perish unless you come to her relief.
Daniel O'Connell to the British House of Commons, 1847.

Beginning in 1845 and lasting for six years, the potato famine killed over a million men, women and children in Ireland and caused another million to flee the country. The Famine began in September 1845 as leaves on potato plants suddenly turned black and curled, then rotted, seemingly the result of a fog that had wafted across the fields of Ireland. The cause was actually an airborne fungus (phytophthora infestans)

Ireland's potato crop failures in the past had always been regional and short-lived with modest loss of life. Between 1800 and 1845, sixteen food shortages had occurred in various parts of Ireland. However, during the Famine the crop failure became national for the first time, affecting the entire country at once.

The French sociologist, Gustave de Beaumont, visited Ireland in 1835 and wrote: "I have seen the Indian in his forests, and the Negro in his chains, and thought, as I contemplated their pitiable condition, that I saw the very extreme of human wretchedness; but I did not then know the condition of unfortunate Ireland...In all countries, more or less, paupers may be discovered; but an entire nation of paupers is what was never seen until it was shown in Ireland."

"Famine fever"--cholera, dysentery, scurvy, typhus, and infestations of lice--soon spread through the Irish countryside. Observers reported seeing children crying with pain and looking "like skeletons, their features sharpened with hunger and their limbs wasted, so that there was little left but bones." Masses of bodies were buried without coffins, a few inches below the soil.

Over the next ten years, more than 750,000 Irish died and another 2 million left their homeland for Great Britain, Canada, and the United States. Within five years, the Irish population was reduced by a quarter.

The Irish potato famine was not simply a natural disaster. It was a product of social causes.

During the Famine, British government officials and administrators rigidly adhered to the popular theory of the day, known as laissez-faire (meaning let it be), which advocated a hands-off policy in the belief that all problems would eventually be solved on their own through 'natural means.'

In adhering to laissez-faire, the British government also did not interfere with the English-controlled export business in Irish-grown grains. Throughout the Famine years, large quantities of native-grown wheat, barley, oats and oatmeal sailed out of places such as Limerick and Waterford for England, even though local Irish were dying of starvation. Irish farmers, desperate for cash, routinely sold the grain to the British in order to pay the rent on their farms and thus avoid eviction.




The Irish watched with increasing anger as boatloads of home-grown oats and grain departed on schedule from their shores for shipment to England. Food riots erupted in ports such as Youghal near Cork where peasants tried unsuccessfully to confiscate a boatload of oats. At Dungarvan in County Waterford, British troops were pelted with stones and fired 26 shots into the crowd, killing two peasants and wounding several others. British naval escorts were then provided for the riverboats as they passed before the starving eyes of peasants watching on shore.

As the Famine worsened, the British continually sent in more troops. "Would to God the Government would send us food instead of soldiers," a starving inhabitant of County Mayo lamented.

The Irish Potato Famine left as its legacy deep and lasting feelings of bitterness and distrust toward the British

Celtic Art and Designs

The Celts kept no written records but had an oral tradition, so all important events that needed remembering, as well as themes which revolved around their heroes, celtic gods and celtic goddesses and beliefs, were learned celtic artwork largely by continuous repetition as chants or were woven into prose form.

Celtic art is a huge culture as it has it's own history. Celtic art is actually a collection of many celtic designs, pictures etc.
Celtic art work is ancient and by medieval Celtic peoples who spread over Europe in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. They produced sophisticated metalwork, stone and wood carving, and illuminated manuscripts, decorating these objects with a variety of geometrical, knotted, and spiral designs, stylized animals and human figures.

There are some celtic designs to be found in traditional Celtic art which are most famous :
Celtic Knot :



Celtic knots were carved into the rocks by an unknown race of megalith builders thousands of years before the Celtic culture arrived. Celtic knotwork is found in many celtic designs and pictures, jewellery, clip arts.
This style of design and decoration was in fact brought to Britain in the 6th century AD by Saxon Christian monks and was used exclusively to illuminate the hand-written Christian Gospels. The Saxon people used some of the art for personal decoration.

Celtic cross :

Celtic Spiral : The spiral is the natural form of growth, and in every culture past and present has become a symbol of eternal life. The whorls represent the continuous creation and dissolution of the world; the passages between the spirals symbolize the divisions between life, death and rebirth.
the best examples are found on stone monuments such as Newgrange, in Ireland http://www.knowth.com/newgrange.htm

Celtic animal clipart: Animals and birds were sacred to the Celts. Zoomorphic ornaments show that nothing is as it first appears; plants turn into tails, and, interweaving, develop a head, legs or feet.



Celtic design collection and key patterns : The key patterns like the celtic spirals in straight lines, celtic borders and lines, celtic buttons, celtic backgroungs are connected and used repetadly to have a complex designs and symbols.

Typical Irish Dance

Irish dances can broadly be divided into social dance and performance dances. Irish social dancing is danced by formations of couples, often in squares of four couples. Irish social dance is a living tradition, and variations in particular dances are found across the Irish dance community.
Irish performance dancing is traditionally referred to as stepdance. Irish stepdance, popularized in 1994 by the world-famous show "Riverdance," is notable for its rapid leg movements, body and arms being kept largely stationary. The solo stepdance is generally characterized by a controlled but not rigid upper body, straight arms, and quick, precise movements of the feet.
The tradition of step dancing in Ireland grew from an indigenous form of percussive dance that developed alongside traditional Irish music. The current incarnation of this tradition is known as sean-nós dancing (damhsa ar an sean-nós or rince sa sean-nós). The strongest tradition of sean-nós dancing persists in the Connemara Gaeltacht in the West of Ireland, although sean-nós dancers can be found throughout Ireland.