The Proclamation of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic was announced at the beginning of a weeklong insurrection mounted by Irish nationalists with the aim of ending British rule in Ireland. On April 24, 1916, the Monday after Easter, a ragtag body of civilian soldiers led by members of the Irish Volunteers, a Catholic paramilitary organization, seized the General Post Office in Dublin in an attempt to make it the headquarters of a rebellion against the British Empire. The leaders of what came to be called the Easter Rising, or 1916 Rising, were romantics— poets, politicians, and professors mainly, as opposed to professionally trained soldiers. When they took the post office that morning, one of their leaders, Patrick Pearse, strode out the building’s front entrance at noon to proclaim Ireland’s independence from the British Empire.