James McCormack (Irish revolutionary) most, their goal soon became the establishment of an independent and socialist Irish nation. Other prominent members included Constance Markievicz, Kit Poole, Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, Seán O'Casey and P. T. Daly. In 1916, they took part in the Easter Rising – an armed insurrection aimed at ending British rule in Ireland. The ICA uniform was dark green with a slouched hat and badge in the shape of the Red Hand of Ulster. Their banner was the Plough and the Stars. The significance of the banner was that a free Ireland would control its own destiny from the plough to the stars,
Easter, 1916 figures who eventually led the uprising. The deaths of these revolutionary figures at the hands of the British, however, were as much a shock to Yeats as they were to ordinary Irish people at the time, who did not expect the events to take such a bad turn so soon. Yeats was working through his feelings about the revolutionary movement in this poem, and the insistent refrain that "a terrible beauty is born" turned out to be prescient, as the execution of the leaders of the Easter Rising by the British had the opposite effect to that intended. The killings