On Easter Monday 1916, the Irish republican Pádraig Pearse stepped in front of the General Post Office in Dublin and declared a new Irish Republic. The famous Proclamation has since become a symbol of the Irish struggle for self-determination and freedom from the tyranny of British imperialism. The violent rebellion of which Pearse was a part — what we now call the Easter Rising — was mathematically speaking a failure. Its leaders were rounded up and executed, while Ireland’s status as a British dominion did not formally end until 1949.

Yet the Rising has left an indelible mark on Irish history, as the poet W. B. Yeats prophetically wrote: “All changed, changed utterly.” Ireland’s main political parties for example, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, can trace their origins back to the civil war that erupted after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, which was meant to quell republican sentiment. It is also little coincidence that the Troubles began shortly after the 50th anniversary of the Rising. Or that the very name of the Good Friday Agreement, which largely ended sectarian violence, carries overtones of the rebellion.

In the centenary year then, it seems appropriate to reflect on 1916, its impact on what it means to be Irish and the transformations that have since occurred in Irish society. Here three Irish students, all at University College London, share their thoughts.

“The Rising to me was one of the first modern anti-colonial events outside of the Boxer Rebellion to shake the world,” says Jake Céileachair, a second-year history undergraduate. “Because of that, Irishness has become sort of synonymous with rebellion. It’s a myth, but a myth that younger Irish and the world have embraced. It’s why in Ireland a lot of youth are turning to groups like Sinn Féin, who despite being essentially social-democratic maintain the image of a revolutionary Ireland.”

Despite previous (failed) uprisings in 1798 and 1803, the Easter Rising really marks the start of anti-British agitation in Ireland, according to Enda O’Riordan, who is studying for an MA in philosophy. “The hundred-year mark makes a difference because it represents how long that sense of Irish independence has been maintained,” he says.

For Jake, the impact of the Rising on Irish politics has been astronomical, not just because it led to the creation of the two major political parties. “It gave us a new political culture or language, something civic,” he explains. “The Irish didn’t rebel as clans or chieftains or declared their independence exclusively in Irish. Instead they were republicans or socialists. This was as much a Rising against absentee landlords as the entirety of Anglo supremacism.”

Conor Waldron, a first-year PhD student in chemical engineering, sees the Rising as a statement of how far Ireland has come in the last hundred years. “We have a more equal society now than we used to,” he says. “There’s also a sense of pride in resisting foreign occupation and that idea of resistance has somewhat returned with the hardship after the financial crisis and austerity.”

All Irish students encounter the Easter Rising before they leave school and are tested on it in their compulsory Junior Certificate exams. But Conor, a native Dubliner, is also keen to stress the complexities of the event, which often get lost in history curricula. He says: “When we remember the Rising, we shouldn’t paint it too rosily, as a big victory by the Irish. There are forgotten groups that we need to commemorate as well, such as the British soldiers who fought in it and women’s part in it.”

He admits, though, that it’s hard to teach young children about such a complicated period of Irish history that requires a lot of context: “It’s easier to digest if you say, ‘These are the heroes and these are the villains.’”

In the hundred years since the Rising, there have been sweeping changes to Irish society, including the increased visibility of women in the workforce, the recent introduction of same-sex marriage and — perhaps most fundamentally — the gradual erosion of Catholicism in Irish life. “When I was growing up, I learnt only about Catholic teachings in religion classes,” says Enda. “But my youngest sister, who is four school years below me, learnt at least something about other faiths.”

Though the Catholic Church is still entrenched in schools, it is perceived as out of step with wider society and the numbers attending Mass decline every year. “There are increasingly negative attitudes towards the Church, in terms of its hold on education and its stance on LGBT rights,” adds Conor. “At the moment there’s no one thing that’ll replace the Church and it might take another generation or two to see what’ll fill the gap.”

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the new waves of immigration that are shifting Ireland’s demographics. As the country becomes more multicultural and more integrated into the EU, Conor hopes that immigrants will be able to adapt successfully to the Irish way of life, including traditions such as hurling and Gaelic football. “If you move to anywhere but Dublin, you have to engage in the Irish culture,” he says. “I certainly don’t want immigrants to be expected to show an interest, but if they want I very much hope there will be Irish people happy to share our culture with them, including our language.”

Indeed before the Easter Rising, the Gaelic League sought to inspire an indigenous cultural revival that would restore Gaeilge to its former glory. Yet more than a century later, the Irish language is permanently endangered, despite its official status and the fact that bilingual signs and announcements can be found everywhere you travel in Ireland.

Jake believes there are no easy solutions to the problem of making Irish prominent again, short of either cultural genocide or alienating the Irish people from the rest of the world. Though the Irish language schools that have emerged are an excellent idea, he argues the government needs to move more fully in that direction.

“Right now you have a stupid bureaucratic way of keeping the language alive by having teachers that aren’t qualified because they’re fluent but because they have the skills to teach the bare basics regardless of their fluency,” says Jake, who is originally from Cork.

He compares the situation to English learners of a second language who quickly forget their GCSE knowledge because of the lack of contextualisation. “Students outside the Gael [Irish-speaking] schools don’t know how to do arithmetic in Irish, think scientifically in Irish, converse in Irish or understand their literature written in Irish,” he complains. “Functionally it’s not worth saving, but to let Irish die would be extremely cruel. It’s not only an insult to those who have spoken it and died at the hands of the Empire; it’s an insult to ourselves as Irish people.”

Conor is ambivalent about the need to maintain the indigenous language and thinks policymakers need to be more pragmatic, emphasising other more commonly taught languages such as French or German. Most students have to learn Gaeilge until they are 17 or 18 and its difficulty helps fuel resentment towards it.

“It’s expensive to preserve Irish and it’s not practically very useful outside of Ireland,” he says. “Oftentimes when I travel abroad, I meet Europeans who speak two or three languages and I feel completely ignorant. But then I realise I do know two languages; it’s just that I’ve been made to study one that is useless. It’s not fair from that point of view.”

Enda, who partly grew up in a Gaeltacht (majority Irish-speaking) area and like the others used to be fluent, is happy that Irish remains a curriculum staple. But he doesn’t think much more can be done to increase its popularity. “It’s ultimately up to Irish people to determine for themselves whether it has value for them,” he says. “I do think the culture should be kept alive one way or another, but expecting every Irish person to speak Irish given the amount of devotion required to yield results is not the appropriate solution.”

Studying at UCL, Conor believes his Irish identity is stronger now that he is away from Ireland. “When you’re at home, you very much take your nationality for granted,” he reflects. “It’s something I’m quite proud of. I’ve never met anything but interest when I tell people that I’m Irish. We have a reputation for being a friendly and fun-loving country; I think there’s a lot of truth in that.”

Enda agrees about his sense of Irishness. “I definitely didn’t think about nationality when I was in Ireland; probably a bit more since I’ve been away,” he says. “These things only become transparent when you find yourself in a situation where your experiences of national identity don’t resemble what everyone else talks about when they talk about those experiences.”

On the other hand, Jake paints a more world-weary picture, and says he is reluctantly proud to be Irish: “Poverty is on the rise, our language is on life support and our history is more or less miserable, but it’s what we have. What else would we be? And despite it being a perpetual existential crisis (there’s a reason Samuel Beckett existed), it’s our existential crisis and it’s damn worth defending.”