On Easter Monday, roughly 1,200 members of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army occupied strategic buildings across Dublin, with Patrick Pearse reading the Proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office. British forces crushed the rebellion within a week, but the execution of its leaders transformed public opinion and set Ireland on the path to independence.
The rebels chose their moment deliberately: Britain was consumed by the First World War, and republican leaders gambled that German arms might arrive to support them, though a shipment aboard the Aud was intercepted days earlier. Patrick Pearse, a schoolteacher and poet, stood on the steps of the GPO and read a proclamation declaring Ireland a sovereign republic, addressed to 'Irishmen and Irishwomen' rather than merely men—a notably progressive touch for its time.
The fighting lasted six days and killed roughly 485 people, many of them civilians caught in crossfire, before the greatly outnumbered rebels surrendered. Dublin's O'Connell Street and much of the city center lay in ruins from British artillery.
At first the Rising was unpopular with ordinary Dubliners, who jeered the surrendering rebels. But Britain's subsequent execution of fifteen leaders by firing squad, including the badly wounded James Connolly who was shot while tied to a chair, curdled public sympathy into fury. W.B. Yeats captured the shift in his poem 'Easter, 1916': 'All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born.' Within six years, most of Ireland had won independence.