Does anyone know the approx nr of freedom fighters in 1916?

[Bingo]

The price of the tickets is a joke in this day and age, plus it was on TV and the football on offer isn't up to much in fairness, wait till the bandwagon gets going......

2600, Oh wait, ye are discussing the 1916 rising, i thought it was the expected average attendence at this weekends championship match.....carry on.

[Fear ón Srath Bán]

What the fck were the other 4,997,400 doing? Were they cowards, were they brit lovers, did they not care and have the me fein atitude as todays Irish have?

Ever hear of Eoin Mac Neill (Michael Mc Dowell's grandfather), who issued a countermand just before the Rising was to take place, causing the virtual wholesale cancellation of the Rising outside of Dublin?

[Bogball XV]

The best way to figure out the number of leaders is to look at the number of politicians who are related to 'leaders of the 1916 rising' and then work your way back, that should leave us with a figure of roughly the 5M that Sligonian was referring to earlier.

[Rav67]

At any given time in the last 250 years the vast majority of Irish nationalists have favoured constitutional routes to changes in the relationship with Britain, with the possible exception of the few years after the Easter Rising executions up to the signing of the Treaty.

I think people have always had to balance whether armed insurrection was worth it in terms of blood that would be shed, and importantly whether there was any chance of success.  In 1916 even politically-minded nationalists wouldn't seriously have thought Ireland (or a part of it) would have been able to have independence in the next decade, and would rightly have thought what is the point in getting killed in another of the pantheon of historical failed uprisings.

[deiseach]

The Easter rising had no real support among the people. I have read that those arrested were booed and jeered in the street when they were being taken away like so many spare parts.The needless executions were the perfect remedy, a real pile driver to the nation consience, and changed all that. The British lost Irish "hearts and minds" and created the martyrs famous in the last century which fueled the War of independance and subsequent campaigns.
I aint complaining but Just supposin the executions had not taken place would we be living on an Island still completely under British rule.

Another narrative of the Rising given short shrift by Joe Lee. There was a rent-a-mob attacking the rebels that consisted mostly of those whose living was most closely linked to that of the Britsh Army. The Dublin papers were ruthlessly censored, with William Martin Murphy's Indo only too happy to parrot the official line as part of his spat with Connolly. Lee went to the bother of reading the uncensored provincial newspapers which were quite sympathetic to the Rising, the main quibble being the futile loss of life - there's that omnipresent-yet-unspoken threat of extreme state violence again, a threat that incidentally was useless in the face of Unionist rebellion as the Currragh Mutiny demonstrated

[deiseach]

At any given time in the last 250 years the vast majority of Irish nationalists have favoured constitutional routes to changes in the relationship with Britain, with the possible exception of the few years after the Easter Rising executions up to the signing of the Treaty.

I think people have always had to balance whether armed insurrection was worth it in terms of blood that would be shed, and importantly whether there was any chance of success.  In 1916 even politically-minded nationalists wouldn't seriously have thought Ireland (or a part of it) would have been able to have independence in the next decade, and would rightly have thought what is the point in getting killed in another of the pantheon of historical failed uprisings.

+1. You mention the use of 'constitutional routes'. One of the roadblocks on that route would always be the House of Lords, an institution that all through the Victorian era felt confident enough to automatically reject any legislation passed by the House of Commons regarding Ireland if that majority in the Commons was secured only by the block vote of the Irish MP's, the Irish votes not really counting.