The Irish rebellion was a reaction to 400 years of British oppression of the Irish nation and people.
Heading to Ireland next week, Dublin, Galway, Adare, Dingle Peninnsula.
The past few years I have begun to suspect that my ancestor was part of Lord Cromwell's New Model Army that invaded and colonized Ireland. My family name originally came from Cheshire but all the documentation of his voyage to America indicated my ancestor left the British Isles from Ireland.
Not quite. The only “oppressed” ones were the radicals that got violent, even for the most part during Cromwell’s time; during the famine, the oppressors of people were mostly Irish as well, who were themselves landowners and threw the system into chaos by trying to sell off their holdings to unsuspecting English buyers.
And whether the Irish want to admit it or not, their MPs wielded real power in Westminster (over one quarter of the planet’s land mass at the height of the British Empire), and no, the Scottish and Welsh MPs did not unite with the English ones against them as some kind of monolithic bloc. After the emancipation of Catholics that was secured by Daniel O’Connell, that included Catholic MPs too (from all over Britain).
The 1916 rebellion was mostly communistic and fomented by atheistic communist leaders that infiltrated the Fenian organization. That is why Lenin took such inspiration from it. Instead of total repeal of the Act of Union (which O’Connell had originally campaigned on), all the Irish were seeking at the time was Home Rule; but the communist propaganda line at the time was that such would be withheld thanks to the war.