Thousands of spectators lined the streets as 2,500 serving and former members of the army, navy, air corps and police marched through the city center to the sound of brass bands, the rumble of tanks and the roar of military aircraft.

Earlier, dignitaries including Prime Minister Bertie Ahern and President Mary McAleese gathered for a wreath-laying ceremony at the General Post Office, headquarters of the rebels during the Rising.

Reviving the military commemoration of the Rising has aroused passionate feelings and much argument in Ireland, with modern political rivalry added to the historical debate over whether the rebels were heroes or thugs.

In the 1970s, when Irish nationalist guerrillas were waging an armed campaign in Northern Ireland, the province that remained part of the United Kingdom when the rest of Ireland gained independence in 1922, military displays to mark a bloody insurrection against British rule were seen as inappropriate.

But a 1998 peace deal in Northern Ireland, and last year’s pledge by Irish Republican Army (IRA) fighters to lay down their arms, paved the way for the Irish government to revive the march and reclaim the title Oglaigh na Eireann, the name used by the IRA to describe itself in Irish, for Ireland’s defense forces.

Many in Ireland see the rebels as martyrs to the cause of Irish independence and as the founding fathers of the modern Irish republic, which in recent years has gone from being one of Europe’s poorest countries to one of its richest. ’Terrible beauty’

"The men and women of Easter 1916 gave their lives so that Ireland could gain her freedom," Ahern said during a ceremony earlier on Sunday at the jail where the Rising’s leaders were executed.

But others reject the romantic view of the Rising’s "terrible beauty," as poet W.B. Yeats saw it, and see the rebels as a band of thugs whose actions had little popular support, and whose insurrection led to a civil war and thousands more deaths.

They note that Ireland, though part of the British empire, had its own government at the time of the Rising and thousands of Irishmen were fighting for Britain in World War One.

"Given the tidal wave of tacky emotion about 1916 which is engulfing everything in its path, it is not easy to reject both the Easter Rising and the decision to make a big deal of its 90th anniversary," newspaper columnist Eoghan Harris wrote.

The Rising was "an irrational response to the imagined loss of Ireland’s ’soul’", he said, adding in this week’s Sunday Independent : "Irish politicians avoid the fact that there was absolutely no moral justification for 1916."

The government went some way towards recognizing calls to see the Rising in a broader context by also honoring in the parade the many Irish troops who died in the Battle of the Somme, which took place in the same year as the Rising.

Ahern’s decision to revive the parade was not only an attempt to dust down the image of 1916.

It also enabled the government to reassert its nationalist credentials — Ahern’s Fianna Fail party was headed by Eamon de Valera, a leader of the Rising — and position itself as the Rising’s natural successor ahead of general elections next year.

The IRA’s political ally Sinn Fein, which has long considered itself the only true Irish republican party, has been growing steadily in popularity.