Children of the Rising, by Joe Duffy, Hachette Ireland, €19.99
The first child to be killed in the Rising, Sean (John) Frances Foster
This is a highly readable and well researched account of one aspect of the Rising which has been largely ignore up to now and Joe Duffy is to be congratulated for highlighting the suffering of not only those children who were killed or wounded but also those who lives were blighted by the tumultuous events of Easter week 1916. It is not a dry, scholarly work, and all the better for that, as it chronologically traces the conflict from the very beginning, noting that within 24 hours of the Rising starting 14 children were killed. The first child to die in the Rising, Sean (John) Frances Foster, was shot in his pram on Church Street on Easter Monday. He was one of forty children, aged sixteen and under, who died in the Easter Rising.
A nun distributing bread after the Rising
Children of the Rising is the first ever account of the young lives violently lost during the week of the 1916 Rising, and up to now almost never commemorated.
Boys, girls, rich, poor, Catholic, Protestant – no child was guaranteed immunity from the bullet and bomb that week where teeming tenement life existed side by side with immense wealth.