1916 commemorations: Need to put ourselves in leaders’ mindset

Our efforts to understand the 1916 Rising and its leaders should focus on their expectations of what would happen and not just what transpired, according to one of the country’s leading historians.

Joe Lee, Glucksman chair of Irish History at New York University, said we need to look closely at what was happening on the ground in April 1916 “as distinct from the way things are romanticised retrospectively”.