UK intelligence reported #ThisDayInHistory in 1981 that #Unionist #terrorist group #UlsterDefenceAssociation would keep killing #IrishRepublicans, but UK's gov. refused to proscribe the organization as the laws required, offering tacit support for violence against IRA supporters.

"#Yeats’s great poem about the uprising of #IrishRepublicans against British rule on 24 April 1916 marked a turning point in #Ireland’s history and in Yeats’s career. Through four stanzas Yeats enacts the transfiguration of the movement’s leaders – executed by the British shortly after the event – from ‘motley’ acquaintances to heroic martyrs, and interrogates his own attitude to nationalist violence."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/podcasts-and-videos/podcasts/close-readings/political-poems-easter-1916-by-w.b.-yeats
#Easter1916 #WBYeats #poetry #IrishLiterature #EasterRising