Centenary of the Easter Rising commemorations marking the occasion began on Easter Eve (26 March), as President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin. This was preceded by traditional Irish song "The Parting Glass" being performed by the Island of Ireland Peace Choir and succeeded by a minute's silence. Acting Taoiseach Enda Kenny and Acting Tánaiste Joan Burton were also present. Relatives of the dead were there too and were only permitted to lay their own wreaths when President Higgins was done. Later that day, President Higgins gave a keynote address at a ceremony in the Royal
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