An Cosantóir

www.military.ie THE DEFENCE FORCES MAGAZINE | 27 hesitate to destroy all buildings within any area occupied by rebels.' Trinity's defenders applauded the use of artillery against rebel strongholds instead of the 'expensive tactics' of a frontal assault by troops. They agreed that only intensive shelling would drive the rebels from their fortresses. Joly rejoiced as Liberty Hall 'received its quietus,' but would surely have changed his tune had the heavy guns been turned instead on his beloved university. He correctly foresaw that 'once captured, nothing but the wholesale destruction of buildings, containing the most precious heirlooms of the ancient university, would suffice to dislodge the enemy.' As Michael Taaffe's nightmare scenario suggests, Trinity's library was a symbol to generations of graduates. The destruction of 'the College's greatest asset' would have been a tragedy on the scale of the loss of the University of Louvain's library in August 1914. No-one would have intended this outcome, but war is no respecter of culture. Trinity meant little to soldiers like Lowe and Maxwell, and as the historian Charles Townshend notes, 'an alien kind of militarism was in the ascendant' during the Rising. Joly conceded that rebel occupation would have consigned Trinity to 'the same fate which befell every public building into which the Sinn Féiners entered.' Fire would probably accomplish what shelling did not. By the end of Easter Week at least some of the university's fine buildings would have resembled the shell-like remnants of the recently refurbished General Post Office. What of the wider strategic implications? Rebel occupation of Trinity would not only have deprived the Crown of a vital troop concentration centre, but also prevented the division of rebel forces planned by Brigadier-General Lowe. British troops would no longer be able to simply bypass and ignore rebel strongholds like Boland's Bakery and Jacob's Biscuit Factory. Attacks on these places would have driven the surviving rebels towards the centre of the city, accentuating a natural centripetal tendency as the British cordon tightened. For the beleaguered rebel outposts Trin- ity would then have become a place of refuge; even the head- quarters garrison at the GPO and Ned Daly's 1st Battalion at the Four Courts might have made it across the Liffey, especially with the rebel snipers commanding Carlisle (later O'Connell) Bridge from the heights of Trinity. Given Maxwell's refusal to accept anything less than uncondi- tional surrender and the rebel leaders' desire for as spectacular a 'blood sacrifice' as possible, the stage was set for a fight to the death, possibly across the Fellows' Garden as Taaffe had envis- aged. There would be no civilians dying in tragic circumstances to dishearten Patrick Pearse, only a straight-out showdown between the armed forces of the Crown and what Thomas MacDonagh called the 'zealous martyrs' of the new Irish Republic. Trinity would have become first a funeral pyre for the rebels, and then – rapidly – a shrine to their memory. There would be fewer insurgent leaders for General Maxwell to execute, but the shock of their grisly deaths would contribute to shifting public opinion in their favour. With rebels' ashes mixed in the rubble of the university's once splendid buildings, who would then be in a hurry to rebuild the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinty? It took thirteen years to reconstruct the GPO, and over a decade to restore the Custom House; within six years of the Rising most of Ireland was under new management, a Free State created in the image of the dead rebel leaders. During the Rising a rumour spread in the suburbs that, should the rebels succeed in their audacious enterprise, Patrick Pearse was to be Trinity's new Provost. Elsie Mahaffy scoffed at the idea, but Pearse ended Easter Week as Commandant-in-Chief of the Army of the Republic and President of the Provisional Government, and within a few years the railway station and main street on Trinity's northern boundary would both bear his name (over the energetic protests of Trinity's board). Is it entirely fanciful to suggest that any new educational establishment erected on the former site of Trin- ity might have been called 'Pearse College Dublin?' About the Author: Dr Rory Sweetman is a Kildare-born New Zealander who holds history degrees from Trinity College Dublin and Cambridge University. He has published extensively on aspects of the Irish abroad and is the author of Bishop in the Dock: The Sedition Trial of James Liston in New Zealand (Dublin, 2007), which won the Sir Keith Sinclair Prize for History. His latest book is Defending Trinity College Dublin, Easter 1916: Anzacs and the Rising, published by Four Courts Press (2019).

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