in 1915 in his own paper The Irish Citizen, Sheehy Skeffington wrote: "As you know, I am personally in full sympathy with the fundamental objects of the Irish Volunteers ... [however,] as your infant movement grows, towards the stature of a full-grown militarism, its essence – preparation to kill – grows more repellent to me." At the outset of the Easter Rising, Sheehy Skeffington opposed the violent methods of the insurgents, advocating a nonviolent form of civil disobedience, while his wife Hanna actively sympathised with the insurgents and joined the group of women who brought food to those stationed at the General Post Office and the Royal College of Surgeons. In contrast, on the first day of the rising (Monday 24 April 1916) Francis risked crossfire to go to the aid of an English soldier outside Dublin Castle. As Hanna recalled the incident six years later: "When the outbreak began on Easter Monday my husband was near Dublin Castle. He learned that a British officer had been gravely wounded and was bleeding to death on the cobblestones outside the Castle gate. My husband persuaded a bystander to go with him to the rescue. Together they ran across the square under a hail of fire. Before they reached the spot, however, some British troops rushed out and dragged the wounded man to cover inside the gate." Attempts to prevent looting Shortly after that incident Sheehy Skeffington was seen climbing up onto the steps of Nelson's Pillar on Sackville Street, and haranguing a crowd of inner-city paupers to stop looting shops. He was hooted and jeered, and his next move was then to cross the street, enter the GPO, and demand to speak to James Connolly, one of the principal leaders of the insurrection, who was also a labour leader and sympathetic to Sheehy Skeffington's socialism. Connolly sent out some armed men to quell the looting. The men climbed an overturned tramcar to berate the looters, and even fired shots over the looters' heads. The next morning, 25 April, Sheehy Skeffington went back into the city centre and, again according to Hanna, "actively interested himself in preventing looting". He returned to the GPO, emerging around one o'clock, and began to walk around the area pasting up a typewritten flyer. The flyer read: When there are no regular police in the streets, it becomes the duty of citizens to police the streets themselves