The Irish President has said he does not believe it is dangerous to commemorate the past and that it is "useless... to effect some kind of amnesia".
Michael D Higgins said he would consider it "amoral" to tell victims of violence, in Northern Ireland for example, that they should put it behind them.
"If you are involved in the ethics of memory, you have to transact it, so therefore, you recognise it, and you look at that complexity and that is when you must be open to the different narratives which must be placed side by side," said the Head of State.
Security services on both sides of the border will be on high alert amid fears the commemorations could be hijacked by dissident republicans.
It was Easter 1916 when a poorly-armed band of poets, Irish language enthusiasts and former British soldiers seized Dublin’s General Post Office.
They read a proclamation declaring Ireland an independent republic, but were quickly overcome by the British, who executed 16 of the leaders, turning public opinion.
Sinn Fein President Gerry Adams TD said: "When the British ruthlessly came in and killed the leaders, they quite deliberately took the head of the revolution. The thinkers and philosophers were removed."
Two years after the uprising, Sinn Fein won a landslide victory. Ireland had voted for the aims of those executed - a republic.
Home Rule had already been agreed but suspended by the outbreak of World War One.
Former Irish prime minister John Bruton says there was no need for an armed uprising.
"People are saying 'well it is not justified to use the gun now - but we are going to justify its being used the past'," he said.
"Now in my view it was wrong on both occasions. 1916 was unnecessary. We had Home Rule already. There was no need for violence. It didn't meet the criteria… of a just war."
The Queen paid her respects to those who had been executed during her historic state visit to Ireland but Northern Ireland's First Minister won't commemorate them.
Arlene Foster MLA said: "For me, as a Unionist... who has lived through the troubles in Northern Ireland, where frankly the Easter Rising was used as a justification for the legitimacy of what actually occurred there... it is something I don’t see as fitting of official commemoration."
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