iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

One young man who answered the call was a 14 year old boy called Patrick Brennan of D Company 3rd Battalion IRA.

000

The date was set for Easter Sunday 1916. Details were kept secret, risings in Ireland had been betrayed before. On this fateful day, members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army would rise up and capture strategic locations throughout the city of Dublin.Including the GPO and Boland's Mill.

Discussions were underway with the Germans about delivering more arms to Ireland and support for a rising. A distraction to Britain's rear would help their war aims. For others, like James Connolly, they saw a third way. Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland.

Many in Ireland believed the home rulers like Redmond and thought that come the end of the Great War Ireland would get what had been promised it. A degree of freedom. But others were more sympathetic to the Germans.. They had known British promises before.

100

Robert Poole @robbmonster.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Henry Connolly enlisted in the Royal Field Artillery and rose to the rank of corporal but on Christmas Day 1915 received a battle field commission.Whether due to courage, aptitude or heavy losses in his unit it is not known. But this working class lad from Mohill now held a letter from King George.

100

The response is, predictably heavy handed. Asquith visits Dublin beating the drum of war any many follow the call. Perhaps out of patriotism perhaps out of desperation. One of these is a thing man from Leitrim. William Henry Connolly who will become Patrick Brennan's father in law...

100

Robert Poole @robbmonster.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

It's hard to know what happens to the Brennan's in the next decade but in this time war begins to rage in Europe and things heat up in Ireland. Erskine Childers lands German guns in Howth for the Irish Volunteers and strikes begin to send shockwaves through workplaces. The British army responds...

100

Robert Poole @robbmonster.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

By 1911, the next census things seemed to be looking up for the Brennan's. They were living in a two-up-two-down mid-terrace on Hastings Street in Ringsend. Though the family had now grown to 9 with the birth of 6 more children joining Patrick including twins Annie and Denis.

100

Although these conditions may sound hellish, I'm sure Denis and his pregnant wife Annie would have preferred this to their next home... The South Dublin Union workhouse...

100

In 1906 in an article for the Irish Times a journalist wrote of the conditions in these tenamants, ‘every shape of disease germ, both physical and mental, is being bred at hot-house speed. That top back room of the Dublin tenement house is the devil’s incubator.'

For the working class of Dublin this was nothing unusual. Overcrowding, poor diets and infectious diseases were the norm. Despite a population decimated by famine the population of Dublin was growing. Housing was scarce and many were forced to live in crumbling tenamants.

My Great Grandad Patrick Brennan was born in 1901. Life at the turn of the century in Dublin was tough for the working class. Census documents for 1901 show his parents Denis and Annie living on Great Brunswick street in a room in a house they shared with six other families. 16 people in total.