The 1916 Irish Rebellion is the companion book to a three-part documentary series to be broadcast worldwide in 2016. Narrated by Liam Neeson, the documentary, entitled "1916 The Irish Rebellion," and its related seventy-minute version are initiatives of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame. The series will broadcast on RTE and American Public Television.The 1916 Irish Rebellion includes a historical narrative; a lavish spread of contemporary images and photographs; and a rich selection of sidebar quotations from contemporary documents, prisoners' statements, and other eyewitness accounts to capture the experiences of nationalists and unionists, Irish rebels and British soldiers, and Irish Americans during the turbulent events of Easter Week, 1916. In the first part of the book, Nic Dhiarmada surveys Ireland's place as part of the British Empire in the decades leading up to 1916, with special emphasis on earlier Irish movements to achieve independence or at least some measure of self-governance. She then outlines the events leading to the Easter Rebellion of 1916, including the crucial events of Thursday through Saturday prior to Easter.The second part details the events of the Easter Rising and the week of violent fighting, ending in the failure of the armed insurrection in Dublin.
Her third part discusses the fate of the leaders of the Rising, many of whom were immediately court-martialled and executed. Nic Dhiarmada suggests that the Irish Rising, its ideals, and the subsequent election of members of the nationalist movement to prominent government offices were instrumental to the later creation of the sovereign Republic of Ireland, as well as an inspiration to anti-colonialist insurrections elsewhere in the world.