President of IRB and Easter Rising
McCullough was elected to fill the vacant seat of the President of the IRB late in 1915, a position he held during the Easter Rising of 1916, though he took no active role in the rising itself. He was not a member of the Military Committee that was responsible for its planning (and probably didn't even know of its existence until after the rising). It is likely that the other members of the 3-person IRB executive, Clarke and MacDermott (the treasurer and secretary) supported his nomination as president because, being isolated in Belfast, he would be in no position to interfere with their plans. Nevertheless, during Holy Week he got word of what was afoot and travelled to Dublin to question Clarke and MacDermott, who avoided him as long as they could. Eventually they informed him of their plans, which he was brought to support.
Though he was an officer of the Irish Volunteers, in charge of 200 men in Belfast, it was decided that Belfast could not take part in the rising, as the dominance of the Ulster Volunteers in the northeast could lead to sectarian civil war. Therefore McCullough was to lead Volunteers in his area to Dungannon, County Tyrone, from where they would link up with Liam Mellows in Connacht. Although the Volunteer's Chief of Staff Eoin MacNeill issued a countermanding order, cancelling orders for the rising, McCullough took 150 Volunteers and Cumman na mBan women by train from Belfast to Dungannon. There he found that the local Volunteers under Patrick McCartan did not want to leave their home area and McCullough decided to return to Belfast. During the abortive Rising, he accidentally shot himself in the hand Nevertheless he was arrested that week and taken to Richmond Barracks in Dublin. He spent several months incarcerated in Frongoch in Wales and Reading Jail. On his release he married Agnes Ryan, a sister of James Ryan.
It has been argued that as President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood at the time of the Easter Rising, the title President of the Irish Republic was by rights his, and not Patrick Pearse's. However, as he had no real role in the planning of the insurrection, and was not in the vicinity of Dublin, where it was clear the leadership would need to be, it is understandable that Pearse was given the title instead.
McCullough's decision not to fight in the Easter Rising lost him his pre-eminent position among Belfast republicans. One, Sean Cusack later said that he told McCullough, "we all felt he had, to some extent, let us down".
Read more about this topic: Denis McCullough
Famous quotes containing the words president of, president, easter and/or rising:
“Our age is pre-eminently the age of sympathy, as the eighteenth century was the age of reason. Our ideal men and women are they, whose sympathies have had the widest culture, whose aims do not end with self, whose philanthropy, though centrifugal, reaches around the globe.”
—Frances E. Willard 1839–1898, U.S. president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union 1879-1891, author, activist. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 137-40 (January 1887)
“Within us, the people of the United States, there is evident a serious and purposeful rekindling of confidence, and I join in the hope that when my time as your President has ended, people might say this about our Nation: That we had remembered the words of Micah and renewed our search for humility, mercy, and justice.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping—rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas—But, goodness, why need they do it?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity. When an American says that he loves his country, he means not only that he loves the New England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)