Dublin Burning is a vivid, clear-eyed account of the 1916 Rising and is the most complete account we have from a senior participant. No other senior Volunteer figure has left a similar memoir of Easter Week.

'I stood on the rooftops in the gathering gloom. Dublin burning! What a sight! Gruesome, awe-inspiring. Man's inhumanity to man--there is nothing so brutal and callous in all creation. Columns of deep black, evil-looking smoke spiralled up into the darkening sky. Flames leaped, twisted, curled and danced fantastically and the glow of this inferno tinted every object with a lurid redness. The face of a Volunteer, as he looked towards me, took on this horrid tinge. It was as if all the evils that had tormented our people through the ages were now gathered in our metropolis and were having a witches' frenzy of ritual and grim stalking death. The scene etched itself deep on my memory never to be effaced except by death. It was a scene symbolic in its gruesomeness of the agony of the dear motherland and through the long and tedious centuries of oppressive thraldom. Would it ever end?'

Commandant W.J. Brennan-Whitmore