The Irish Citizen Army underwent a complete reorganisation in 1914. In March of that year, police attacked a demonstration of the Citizen Army and arrested Jack White, its commander.
Seán O'Casey, the playwright, then suggested that the ICA needed a more formal organisation. He wrote a constitution, stating the Army's principles as follows: "the ownership of Ireland, moral and material, is vested of right in the people of Ireland" and to "sink all difference of birth property and creed under the common name of the Irish people". An intellectual dispute broke out within the ranks of the ICA between
Liam O'Briain and the ICA's military commander,
Michael Mallin, who thought that the former's plan for an integrated movement was totally unrealistic. O'Brian wanted to pursue a strategy without the Dublin brigade being "cooped up in the city". Mallin told him that, on the contrary, the whole strategy was to focus on the central objective on and around
Dublin Castle. Little did they know that the Castle and the barracks behind possessed no more than a skeleton garrison, and could have been taken by a token force. He described the formation of the nationalist force as "one of the most effective blows" that the ICA had received. Men who might have joined the ICA were now drilling—with the blessing of the
Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB)—under a command that included employers who had stood with Murphy against those trying to "assert the first principles of Trade Unionism". When in the late summer of 1914, it became apparent that Connolly was gravitating towards the IRB, O'Casey and
Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, vice-president, resigned from the ICA. In May 1914,
Jack White had also withdrawn from ICA, replaced as chairman of the executive by Larkin, but it was to join Volunteers. Explaining that he had always "to link the Labour and National Causes as soon as they can be linked", White, who had clashed with O'Casey, insisted that the nationalist militia was an allied force. It was a move for which later, as a socialist, he was to express regret. What White failed to appreciate, according ICA veteran and trade unionist,
Frank Robbins, was that, despite the guiding presence of Connolly, the men he had drilled in Dublin, "while trade unionists, were not by any measure socialists". The ICA was grossly under-funded.
John Devoy, the prominent Irish-American member of IRB Fenians, believed the existence of "a land army on Irish soil" was the most important sign since the founding of the
Gaelic League. James Connolly, a convinced
Marxist socialist and
Irish republican, believed that achieving political change through physical force, in the tradition of the
Fenians, was legitimate. The ICA was the victim of small numbers, that shrank to only 200-300 persons, and fitful discipline. In October 1915, armed ICA pickets patrolled a strike by dockers at
Dublin port. Appalled by the participation of Irishmen in the
First World War, which he regarded as an imperialist, capitalist conflict, Connolly began openly calling for insurrection in his newspaper, the
Irish Worker. When this was banned he opened another, the ''Worker's Republic''. British authorities tolerated the open drilling and bearing of arms by the ICA, thinking that to clamp down on the organisation would provoke further unrest. A small group of IRB conspirators within the Irish Volunteers movement had started planning a rising. Worried that Connolly would embark on premature military action with the ICA, they approached him and inducted him into the IRB's Supreme Council to co-ordinate their preparations for the armed rebellion which became known as the
Easter Rising. ==Easter Rising==