Little Stories
Little Prints
2016
Brian Lalor
'Raising the Flags, noon, 24 April, 1916', Mezzotint
Despite the fact that there are many photographs of the Irish Citizen Army and the Irish Volunteers drilling or on manoeuvres in the months leading up to the Rising, when the insurrection actually took place, nobody thought to being a camera into the General Post Office or the other revolutionary outposts, depriving historians of any visual record of the events as they enfolded within the various
garrisons.
A seminal moment in the course of Easter Monday was the raising over the GPO of the various flags carried by the participating forces, an event as significant as the reading of the Proclamation to a bemused group of passers-by on Sackville Street. There is not much agreement as to who raised which flag so the image shows the Volunteers’ ‘Irish Republic’ (the tattered original is on display in the National Museum at Collins Barracks), the Citizen Army’s ‘Starry Plough’, and the ‘Tricolour’, the unofficial Irish national flag since 1848.
Brian Lalor, artist and writer, has exhibited his prints internationally, most recently in Spain and the United States, and is represented in many public collections. His last major exhibition was a retrospective, 'Voussoir, prints 1980-2010'. Recent books include 'Ink-Stained Hands', a pioneering study of fine-art printing in twentieth century Ireland.