Revolutionary
The Gaelic League was from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915 a proposal was put forward to abandon this policy and become a semi-political organization. Mac Neill strongly supported this, and rallied to his side the majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, who then had been President of the League for 22 years, resigned immediately afterwards.
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill met members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and other Irish Nationalists. One such colleague, The O'Rahilly, ran the league's newspaper, An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asked MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject more broad than Gaelic language issues. MacNeill submitted a piece called "The North Began", encouraging formation of a Volunteer force committed to the rights of Irishmen, much as the Unionists had done earlier that year with the Ulster Volunteers in an effort to thwart Home Rule. Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approached MacNeill about bringing this idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill became chairman of the council that formed the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, MacNeill was opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any British suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the empire.
Since the inception of the Irish Volunteers, the Irish Republican Brotherhood had planned on using the organization to stage an armed rebellion, with the goal of separating Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing a republic. The entry of the UK into the First World War was, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do so. With the co-operation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials planned a general rising on Easter, 1916. On the Wednesday before, they presented MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British were going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter, called the Castle Document, was a forgery. When MacNeill learned about the IRB's plans, and when he was informed that Roger Casement was about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he was reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action was now imminent and mobilisation of the Volunteers would, at this stage, be a defensive act. However, on learning of the arrest of Casement, and the loss of the promised German arms, MacNeill countermanded the order for the Rising in print, severely reducing the number of volunteers who reported for duty on the day of the Easter Rising. Patrick Pearse, Connolly, and the others all agreed that the rising would go ahead anyway, and it began on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916. The rising lasted less than a week, and after the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill was arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment, though he had taken no part in the insurrection.
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