established in response to the lockout. But he lent his support on the understanding that the ICA would have a strictly defensive role; he resigned when it became a military entity. Sheehy Skeffington testified before a tribunal in 1913 as a witness to the arrest of the leading trade unionist Jim Larkin on O'Connell Street, and the subsequent police assault against a peaceful crowd, which had occurred on the last weekend of August 1913. His testimony stated that he was in the street with a group of women caring for a person who had already been assaulted by the police when a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Police charged towards this group with his baton raised. He reports that it was only because he called out the policeman's number that the man was dissuaded from the violence he had so clearly intended. He said that he was later abused by a gang of policemen showing clear signs of intoxication in the yard of the police station at College Green where he went to make his complaint, and that their officers had no control over their behaviour. In 1914, on the outbreak of World War I, Sheehy Skeffington campaigned against recruitment and was jailed for six months. He supported the peace crusade of the American car manufacturer Henry Ford; and when Countess Markievicz advocated armed uprising by Irish nationalists, he challenged her to a debate on the subject. She accepted the challenge in an open letter published in James Connolly's newspaper, The Workers' Republic. Easter Rising Francis Sheehy Skeffington is often considered one of the martyrs of Ireland's 1916 Easter Rising. In his biography of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann wrote that Sheehy Skeffington "died at the hands of the British ... when he quixotically tried to dissuade the Dublin poor from looting". But Sheehy Skeffington's death can be more accurately explained as a consequence of Dublin Castle's suspicion that he was a Sinn Fein conspirator and Captain John Bowen-Colthurst's violent hostility towards any and all suspected rebel sympathisers. Timothy Healy's opinion was that Sheehy-Skeffington was shot because he was a witness to Bowen-Colthurst's murder of James Coade. Political background Francis Sheehy Skeffington had always supported Home Rule for Ireland. After 1913 he had also supported his friend Thomas MacDonagh's more separatist Irish Volunteers; however he grew increasingly critical of the Volunteers' growing militarism, and in an open letter to MacDonagh published