On Easter Sunday 1916, the Irish rose up to fight for their independence from Britain. Newspapers across the world gave the Easter Rising greater prominence than reports from the front lines of World War I.
Seven members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood Military Council planned the rebellion. They, along with the Irish Volunteer Force and the Irish Citizen Army took over important buildings in the city of Dublin, including the General Post Office. Five of the seven were later executed.
Paul Derrick from County Monaghan in Ireland has built a 50,000 brick replica of the British assault on the Irish occupation of that building. This part of the conflict occurred toward the end of April and culminated in the expulsion and scattering of the rebels when the building was burned.
The model includes Sackville Street past Nelson’s Pillar and then on down to Henry Street. The inside of the GPO is shown, including James Connolly, IRB rebellion organizer, on a stretcher in the atrium the rebels used as a hospital.
The LEGO replica of the events took Derrick 200 hours to build over a period of a year. The time span was due to the difficulty in accruing the hard-to-find pieces that make the model historically accurate. Technical pieces originally made in 1979 and envelopes from the Harry Potter LEGO series were especially difficult, and he needed them in large numbers.
The GPO allowed Derrick to take pictures and measurements so he could represent the space in proper scale with the LEGO people figures. Derrick also worked with photographs from the rebellion.