First-hand views on Rising unveiled in online archive

First-hand accounts of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence are among important historical documents being made widely available to the public for the first time in almost half a century.

The Defence Forces’ Bureau of Military History yesterday published online a collection of personal histories recalling events leading up to the establishment of the Irish Free State.

The material, which includes the recollections of members of the IRB, Cumann na mBan, Sinn Féin, and the Irish Citizen Army, was previously classified as highly sensitive. As a result, knowledge of their existence was relatively little known as they were secretly stored within the Department of the Taoiseach over the intervening decades..