Ireland's seismic political transformations from the years 1916 to 1923 were paralleled by a similar period of immense personal change for MacBride. His relatively tranquil existence in Paris, albeit somewhat disrupted by wartime privations, came to a sudden end as news of the Easter rebellion filtered through. His life over the following eight years would change utterly: first, a massive psychological readjustment, as John MacBride's execution transformed him in the eyes of his estranged wife and son from feared bogeyman to revered martyr. Second, Maud Gonne's urge to be in the thick of the action drove the family first to London, then on to Dublin, MacBride thus forced to leave behind forever the security of his childhood home and his first language in exchange for a peripatetic existence in what was effectively a foreign country. This sense of displacement was reinforced by the imprisonment of his mother in Holloway Prison. MacBride was then shipped around from trusted family friend to casual acquaintance, his half-sister unable or unwilling to care for him. Eventually, he settled down to a thoroughly eccentric education at the hands of a Benedictine maverick. These were destabilising years, politically and personally: MacBride's own physical and emotional upheavals mirrored by wider turmoil in Ireland.

Easter Rising

John MacBride was not part of the inner sanctum of the IRB which planned the Rising of 1916; on Easter Monday, he was on his way to meet his brother ahead of a family wedding, and happened upon Thomas MacDonagh and his Second Battalion of Irish Volunteers at Stephen's Green.