Are we over the annual poppy thread?

British soldiers shot dead unarmed prisoners after they had surrendered, along with innocent bystanders, during the 1916 Easter Rising, the spark that was to lead to Ireland's war of independence, hitherto secret documents reveal.
The papers, released yesterday at the public record office, also show how army officers and civil servants covered up evidence that rebel prisoners and uninvolved civilians were summarily shot, to avoid what they called "hostile propaganda".

By the end of the week, the area was still not cleared. The South Staffordshire regiment under a colonel Taylor advanced, in two days, 150 yards down North King Street, losing 14 dead and 32 wounded. [2]

Taylor took over the Bolton Street Technical School with his men deployed on the roof of the building. When an improvised armoured car arrived it allowed the British troops to shelter behind it and finally advance up North King Street and to enter the houses.

General Lowe had ordered that, ‘no hesitation was to be shown in dealing with these rebels; that by their actions they had placed themselves outside the law and that they were not be made prisoners’.[3] However it was the civilians on the street that took the brunt of the consequences of this order.

Infuriated with the losses they had suffered, on late Friday evening and early Saturday morning, the troops broke into the homes of the locals and shot or bayoneted 15 civilian men whom they accused of being rebels. They killed three men at 170 North Kings Street whose dead bodies were found to have bayonet wounds, then broke into number 172 and killed two men. In number 174 two more were shot dead. Two more civilian men were killed at number 177 and in 27 North King Street another four men, who all worked there at the Louth Dairy were found dead in a basement and one more man was killed at number 91. The fifteenth James Moore was shot dead on adjoining Little Britain Street by the British troops. And there may have been a 16th killed on nearby Coleraine Street, though it is not clear who killed him. [4]

Ellen Walsh, a resident of 172 North King Street, recalled soldiers pounding on her door until she opened, and demanding, “Are there any men in this house?” Thirty soldiers ransacked the house, “like wild animals or things possessed”. They took the two men in the house aside, one of them Walsh’s husband, and killed them.[5]

At number 177, two men, Paddy Bealen (also spelled Bealen), a 30 year old pub foreman and James Healy a 44-year-old labourer at the Jameson Distillery were killed.

Mary O’Rourke, the owner of the pub where Bealin worked, had been sheltering with him in the cellar when British troops took over the house at number 177. She told an inquest into the death of Paddy Bealin, that Bealin and her 13 year old son were searched by the military. Bealin was taken away a soldier said to a guardroom and never seen alive again.

Rosanna Knowles of 173 North King St said she had conversation with soldier relating to the shooting of Bealen, ‘was there much [sic] killed?’ she asked him, The soldier replied, ‘There was a good deal of our men killed and a good deal of the others. I only felt sorry for the poor fellows at the corner (O’Rourkes)’… According to Knowles the soldier said;

I pitied him from my heart though I had to shoot him. He had made tea for me’. He said that the soldier had brought the prisoner downstairs in Mrs O’Rourke’s, the soldier said that the man had given him his pen knife and his ring. He produced the pen knife but he had lost the ring. He said that he brought him downstairs he had not the heart to shoot him straight and they told him to go up the stairs and they let bang at him [shot him] from the foot of the stairs’.