IRISH HISTORY
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CHAPTER 28 THE RISING OF 1916 THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF BRITISH RULE
O wise men, riddle me this: What if the dream come true? What if the dream come true? And if millions unborn shall dwell In the house that I shaped in my heart The noble house of my thoughts? P H Pearse.
Without doubt, Padraic Pearse was one of the most remarkable men ever born in Ireland. The son of an English stonemason and an Irish mother, he developed an early preoccupation with Irish history, and in childhood games would cast himself as a self-sacrificing martyr. Later his curious and powerful writings define a philosophy that sets the Irish cause in the light of a tremendous religious mission. Born on Nov. 10, 1879, at 27 Great Brunswick St., Dublin, he would grow to be the perfect example of the words of the American patriot whose name he bore, ‘I know not what course others might take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!’ (In the Virginia Convention, March 23, 1775.) Indeed, these words would have formed a very proper epitaph on the gravestone of the leader of the Easter Rising of 1916, Patrick Henry Pearse. Teacher, poet, philosopher, he came with a message destined to cultivate a rich revolution in the nation’s intellectual life. Every generation, Pearse said, must make protest in blood against foreign dominion; otherwise Ireland’s claim to independent nationhood would be annulled. In one of his most typical school plays, a saintly youth takes the place of the king at the head of the failing army, and by the gift of his young life wins a victory. ‘Let me do this little thing, O King’, says the boy as he goes forth to death. This was undoubtedly how he saw his own life. He saw beauty in sacrifice and believed that ‘without blood there is no remission of sins’. Pearse felt ashamed that the people had grown used to slavery. He declared at a commemorative meeting for Robert Emmet in March 1911 that ‘Dublin will have to do some great act to atone for the shame of not producing a man to dash his head against a stone wall in an effort to rescue Robert Emmet’. The Irish were the ‘embarrassment’ of nineteenth century Great Britain and Pearse had expressed the shame of this with passionate feeling in The Rebel: And because I am of the people, I understand the people... Their shame is my shame, and I have reddened in it, Reddened for what they have served, they who should be free, Reddened for that they have gone in want, while others have been full, Reddened for that they have walked in fear of lawyers and of their jailers With their writs of summons and their handcuffs, Men mean and cruel! And I say to my people’s masters: Beware, Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people, Who will take what ye would not give. Did ye think to conquer the people? Or that Law is stronger than life and than men’s desire to be free? We will try it out with you, ye that have harried and held, Ye that have bullied and bribed, tyrants, hypocrites, liars!
Recently, some historians, for the want of anything better to do and to justify their own useless, empty and pathetic lives, have tried to vilify Pearse, because of his preoccupation with the need for a blood sacrifice. In their acquiescent they have found a new morality. But then Ireland has had more than it’s share of such spineless, spiritless, treacherous, compliant Anglophiles. They find it convenient to ignore the historical fact that Pearse was as prepared as any one of the republicans to give Home Rule a chance. At a representative meeting in Dublin on 31 March 1912, against the tide of opinion at the meeting to discuss the Home Rule Bill due to be introduced in eleven days, Pearce said that he was prepared to give Redmond a chance to get a genuine Home Rule measure enacted. He warned, however, that: ‘If we are cheated once more there will be red blood in Ireland’. They also ignore the fact that Pearce simply did not have the capacity to create the rebellion on his own. Seán T O’Kelly, who knew all the leaders and the part they played in the Rising wrote: ‘If any man could be said to be responsible for the inspiration of Easter Week, or for the carrying through successfully of the resolution to revolt — credit must be given to Tom Clarke. Clarke can truthfully be described as the man above all others, who made the Easter Rising. He, it was who inspired it originally, and he it was, who in broad outline, laid the plans.’ The other personality involved in bringing the revolution to fruition was James Connolly. (As Connolly would have said about the begrudgers ‘it doesn’t matter how much the idiots outnumber you, they’re still idiots’.) Born in Edinburgh of Irish parents, he knew poverty all his life, and worked from the age of eleven before joining the British army. In 1896 he came to Dublin and formed the Socialist Republican Party. He immigrated to America in 1903 where he became an organiser for the Industrial Workers of the World. He returned to Ireland in 1910 and helped to organise the Dockers and mill girls of Belfast. In 1914 he formed the union members into the Irish Citizen Army. Connolly was a socialist, but this was before The Soviet Union and China had given socialism a bad name. He believed in the Marxian doctrine of social revolution, and worked always to bring about that violent revolt against the capitalist system from which the new order was expected to rise. Pearse, no less than Connolly, was opposed to the capitalist order that had for generations destroyed his native country, but he did not share Connolly’s reliance on class war. He hoped to achieve his objective with patriotism, by inspiring all classes with a lofty ideal and thereby direct the nation to a nobler order than the present. To Pearse the opposite to the capitalist system was good government just as the opposite to bad socialism would be good government. Connolly, however, despite his socialist ideology, was not pledged to a communistic future, and would have supported any program that made for democracy in industry and equitable distribution of wealth and power. He was intensely patriotic and when awaiting execution said to his daughter: ‘Other socialists will not understand why I am here — they forget that I am an Irishman’. Of Connolly, Seán T O’Kelly wrote: James Connolly was the driving force. As well as being a man of brains and a highly cultivated intelligence, he was in everything a man of action. If it were not for the insistence of Connolly, the Rising might not have taken place just exactly at that time. He with his great yearning for freedom for his native land and for the liberty which would give a chance to Ireland to work out a worthy social system for the downtrodden, was restless and eager and insistent that the Rising should come off at the earliest possible moment.’ O’Kelly described Pearse as ‘probably the ablest and most inspiring figure of that time ... ‘ During the Home Rule crisis of 1912—14 Connolly maintained that the Liberals would betray Ireland and in 1914 when partition was proposed he wrote: ‘...such a scheme should be resisted with armed force if necessary. (For it) would destroy the Labour movement by disrupting it. It would perpetuate in a form aggravated in evil the discords now prevalent, and help the Home Rule and Orange capitalists and clerics to keep their rallying cries before the public as the political watchwords of the day. In short, it would make division more intense and confusion of ideas and parties more confounded.’ Connolly had a lucid forceful style of writing. He was no warmonger, but he hated capitalism and he hated imperialism and he hated Britain. He was hard-working and energetic. In 1914 he was head of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, editor of the Irish Worker, and commandant of the Irish Citizen Army. Connolly’s notes on street-fighting are still used in works on guerrilla warfare today. All his life he fought for the working class, and there are times when they must have frustrated him. Of the war in Europe he wrote: ‘Should the working class of Europe, rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such glorious examples and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world.’ Connolly’s writings grew reckless, and his paper was closed down. He continued to write and publish using a hand press and his loathing of Britain was no secret: Consider well what this Empire is doing today, and then see if you can withhold your admiration. At the present moment this Empire has dominions spread over the Seven seas. Everywhere it holds down races and nationalities that it might use them as slaves, that it might use their territories as sources of rent and interest for aristocratic rulers, that it might prevent their development as self-supporting entities and compel them to remain dependent customers of English produce, that it might be able to strangle every race or nation that would enter the field as competitor against British capital or assert its independence of the British capitalist. He described the Irish fighting in the Dardanelles as ‘poor slaves ... who are asked to carry rifles, and add to the number of Irish corpses that manure the hills and ravines before the guns of the Turk’. In 1914 he also wrote: ‘We have no foreign enemy except the treacherous government of England — a government that even whilst it is calling upon us to die for it, refuses to give a straight answer to our demand for Home Rule’. On Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, the Irish Volunteers and the Citizens Army seized strategic points in Dublin and proclaimed the Irish Republic. Pearse stood on the steps of the GPO, and read out a document signed by the seven members of the military council, proclaiming a republic: Irishmen and Irishwomen! In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives the old tradition of nationhood ... We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies ... In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to National freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations... The Republic guarantees civil and religious liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which has divided a minority from the majority in the past... ...In the supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline, and by the readiness of its children, to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called. It began with the assurance that the rebels were acting in the name of God and on behalf of the dead generations of Irishmen; it went on to confirm that England’s long occupation of Ireland had given it no right to ownership of the country. It was also giving young nationalists a program for the future. The republican forces consisted of about 1,300 Volunteers and 200 members of Connolly’s Citizens Army. The odds were extremely unequal. Large reinforcements were being hurried from Britain into Ireland. The fighting lasted a week. The confrontation was ferocious, the rebels held their ground wherever they were lodged, and the British casualties were considerable. By Thursday night the city of Dublin was under a canopy of crimson smoke from the British gunboats on the river, which were shelling and igniting great buildings in O’Connell Street. By now, the lines of communication between the rebels’ strongholds were broken. The British forces concentrated on reducing the headquarters of the insurgents, the General Post Office, over which the Republican flag still flew, to ruins. The revolt was staged, as much a drama as a military exercise. In fact, if the military and the drama clashed, it was the drama that took ascendancy. There was a theatrical element in several of the leaders — McDonagh in a cloak carrying a sword; Eamonn Ceant carrying bagpipes and wearing a kilt; Plunkett wearing antique rings on his fingers and with a filigree bangle on his wrist, wearing a Sam Brown belt with a Mauser automatic pistol and military sabre dangling from it. Even their choice of the General Post Office as a military headquarters was disastrous but the dramatic effect was phenomenal. The classic front of the GPO, with its portico and pillars was to be an awe-inspiring sight by Friday night with the roof and pillars wrapped in tongues of flames. By Friday the whole centre of Dublin city was ablaze, 450 people, many of whom were civilians, were dead with over 2500 wounded. The city was in ruins with the damage estimated at a massive 2 Million pounds. The loss of life among non-combatants was appalling. The British who had been engaged in the North King Street fighting in Dublin were going crazy. Every charge had been beaten back by the Volunteers who had placed sandbags in the window of a public house, which they called ‘Reilly’s Forth’, and from this advantage point they demolished their attackers. The British, goaded to a state in which they lost control, killed civilians and buried the bodies in backyards, and the crimes were not discovered, in some cases, until the rising had been over for many weeks. While Connolly, with a bullet wound, was still directing the defence Pearse wrote his final manifesto amid the carnage: I desire now, least I may not have an opportunity later, to pay homage to the gallantry of the Soldiers of Irish Freedom who have during the past four days been writing with fire and steel the most glorious chapter in the later history of Ireland... For four days they have fought and toiled almost without cessation, almost without sleep, and in the intervals of fighting, they have sung songs of the freedom of Ireland. No man has complained, no man has asked “why?” Each individual has spent himself, happy to pour out his strength for Ireland and for freedom. If they do not win this fight, they will at least have deserved to win it. But win they will, though they may win it in death... If we accomplish no more than we have accomplished, I am satisfied. I am satisfied that we have saved Ireland’s honour ...of the final countermanding order which prevented these plans from being carried out, I shall not speak further. Both Eoin MacNeill and we have acted in the best interests of Ireland. For my part, as to anything I have done in this, I am not afraid to face either the judgement of God or the judgement of posterity. The reference to Eoin MacNeill, who was a cautious and moderate man, concerned the cancellation of the Rising made by MacNeill on Easter Monday, when a Countermanding Order was broadcast through the land. It was in part due to Roger Casement’s failure to land a shipment of 20,000 rifles in Kerry, and partly due to MacNeill’s opposition to a rising. He favoured instead accepting and defending Home Rule. Pearse, in his letter, suggests that he felt that it was well that a Rising had taken place, but also well the whole country had not come into it. A localised rising was enough to give Ireland her blood sacrifice. If a military victory was impossible, it was good that the necessary sacrifice was limited. By Saturday, the General Post Office was aflame, and the Republican Provisional government had to evacuate its headquarters. Soon after, Pearse surrendered: ‘In order to prevent the further slaughter of unarmed people, and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers...’ So the Rising ended. But the tragedy was only beginning. In ones and twos fourteen leaders of the Rising were shot after a secret military trial. The seven signatories of the proclamation of independence (Pearse, Connolly, Clarke, McDonagh, MacDermott, Plunkett, and Ceannt) were all executed to the outrage of the Irish public who had now begun to revise their opinion of the insurgents. Many of the executed prisoners were mere boys. Sir Frances Vane, an officer of the British army who had taken an active part in the rising, wrote: The execution of the so-called rebel leaders were carried out in the most brutally stupid manner. The execution of three of the senior chiefs would have been adequate for justice, instead of fourteen, one or two a day, over a fortnight, culminating by Connolly, a badly wounded man, taken out, tied in a chair, for he could not stand, and shot like a dog. They were all buried in a mass grave filled with quicklime to burn their bodies
The Rising never had the popular support of the people; At least there was very little evidence of support in Dublin where the Rising took place. The little band were jeered at and spat upon as they took up their positions in various parts of Dublin. As sections of the city were laid waste the attitude of the citizens changed to serious anger and hostility.
As the various garrisons were being marched to captivity, after their surrender, they were subjected to abuse and curses especially by women who had sons fighting in World War I supposedly for the defence of small nations. (There were 200,000 Irishmen fighting for Britain in the war.) They even had chamber pots poured on their heads as they passed underneath windows. The Catholic Church condemned it, as was their wont. None of the Irish MPs in the House of Commons gave it support.
If Pearse and his companions had waited for public opinion before making their stand nothing would ever have happened. The rebel leaders believed that Ireland was in danger of losing its national identity, and that bloodshed was a lesser evil. They knew as Jacques Maritain said, (Man and the State) `People as a rule prefer to sleep. Awakenings are always bitter.' It was only when they were killed, when they became sacrificial lambs, that public opinion turned.
However, fifty years later in 1966 for the golden jubilee celebrations, the achievement of the men of 1916 was complete. Church and State, Catholic, Protestant and every other denomination competed with each other to worship the rebels of fifty years before. Cardinal Conway presided at High Mass in St Patrick's Cathedral Armagh, to mark the jubilee. Cardinal Logue, his predecessor, at the time of the rising, had denounced the rising as a `lamentable disturbance' while using plenty rancorous vitriol. Ninety-seven other death sentences were commuted to penal servitude for various terms from three years to life. A huge roundup began all over Ireland. In every village there were arrests. Thousands were imprisoned. Thousands of men and women prisoners were sent to rat-ridden internment camps in England. ‘The shot Irishmen’, wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘will now take their places beside Robert Emmet and the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland, and beside the heroes of Poland and Serbia and Belgium in Europe; and nothing in Heaven or earth can prevent it...?’ Shaw was right. The callous shooting of the boy prisoners, most of all, roused in Ireland a storm of indignation. People began to ask themselves, ‘who were these men’. The answers were rather startling. They were schoolteachers, poets, mystics and academics. There was also a remarkable spirit of religious devotion displayed by the doomed men that stirred the depths of Irish emotion. There was the quixotic figure of Sir Roger Casement (the British consul turned revolutionary) on board the submarine U-19, captured at Tralee Bay and taken to London to be imprisoned without a change of his sea-wet clothes — to be hanged. There was the epic voyage of the Aud, loaded with guns and ammunition for the rising, disguised as a cargo ship under the command of the resourceful Captain Karl Spindler. And in the rising itself there were the immortal thirteen at Mount Street Bridge, holding back a wave of British troops; Cathal Brugha with twenty-five bullet wounds still blazing away with his handgun as he sang ‘God Save Ireland’; the O’Rahilly, the head of his clan, alone and dying, crumpled up in Sackville Lane tracing out a last note to his wife and children, crying out ‘God help you, poor Ireland!’ There was the mystical poet Joseph Mary Plunket already dying of tuberculosis but condemned to be shot by the British, marrying Grace Gifford in his tiny cell by candlelight, with an armed guard as witnesses, four hours before he was executed. James Connolly, unable to stand, and dying of the wounds received in the fight, strapped to a stretcher and propped up as a target for the firing squad. James Stephens, a literary man, Anglo-Irish by birth, middle-class and non-Catholic, summed it up in one of the memorable literary pieces written soon after the rising: We are a little country and you, a huge country, have persistently beaten us. We are a poor country and you, the richest country in the world, have persistently robbed us. That is the historical fact, and whatever national or political necessities are opposed in reply, it is true you have never given Ireland any reason to love you, and you cannot claim her affection without hypocrisy or stupidity ... No nation has forgiven its enemies as we have forgiven you, time after time down the miserable generations, the continuity of our forgiveness is only equalled by the continuity of your ill-treatment. His little book Insurrection in Dublin was written before the execution of the rebel leaders took place but by the time he was writing the foreword to it Pearce’s blood sacrifice had been made, and he wrote, ‘If freedom is to come to Ireland — as I believe it is — then the Easter Insurrection was the only thing that could have happened’: The blood of brave men had to sanctify such a consummation if the national imagination was to be stirred to the dreadful business which is the organising of freedom; and both imagination and brains have been stagnant in Ireland this many a year. Writers and poets began to romanticise the rising. They were fascinated by its gallant hopelessness. George Bernard Shaw was an unexpected ally and his adoring British public was shocked by his letter published in the Daily News of 10 May 1916: My own view is that the men who were shot in cold blood, after their capture and surrender, were prisoners of war, and that it was, therefore, entirely incorrect to slaughter them ... taken in a fight ... which was a fair fight in everything except the enormous odds my countrymen had to face. It took Yeats longer than the others to come around to viewing the rising with sympathy but eventually the indomitable Irishry was roused in him after a short visit to ravaged Dublin. His complete conversion to admiration for the executed leaders was expressed in his ‘Easter 1916’: ‘An excess of love bewildered them ‘till they died...’ And ending with the memorable refrain, ‘A terrible beauty is born’ about the situation that was to develop from the aftermath of that fateful and foreboding event. A new spirit of nationalism began to make itself evident. There was a slowdown in recruiting for the British army. No more came the thousands of strong young men who would offer themselves as fodder for the German guns. At a general election, all Nationalist Ireland declared its allegiance to the Republican ideal. A policy of abstention from Westminster was adopted. The Republican representatives assembled in Dublin and founded Dail Eireann, the Irish Constituent Assembly, proclaiming the Republic again. A message was sent to the nations of the world requesting the recognition of the free Irish State, and a national government was erected. No sooner had the new government begun to function than Britain stepped in with her army of soldiers and constabulary, harassing and imprisoning the workers who were employed in a hundred new constructive projects. This move by England called forth a secretly built-up Irish Republican Army which began a guerrilla warfare, and quickly succeeded in clearing vast districts of the constabulary which was ever England’s right arm in Ireland. Lloyd George quickly met this Irish resistance. He not only poured into Ireland regiments of soldiers with tanks, armoured cars, aeroplanes, and all the other terrorising paraphernalia that had been found useful in the European war, but also he organised and turned loose upon Ireland an irregular force of Britons, among the most vicious and bloodthirsty known to history — the force that quickly became known as the Black and Tans after the famous county Limerick pack of hounds. Then, to break the Irish spirit and subdue the Irish, a war of vengeance was waged upon the Irish people, unparalleled for blind fury and fearful cruelty by any war, in any civilised country of the world, since the 17th century. This war of reprisal was foisted on combatants and non-combatants, Irish women as well as men, toddling child and tottering aged, all alike. The wholesale burning of hundreds of villages, towns, cities, the looting, the spoliation of the inhabitants, though in themselves appalling, were as nothing compared with the cold-blooded murders perpetrated by the British, and the elaborate refinement of torture, worse far than death — fearful tortures that frequently only ended when slow death snatched their prey from them. It was intended that the job of ‘settling Ireland’ should, as Cromwell’s campaign on which it was modelled, be sharp, short and decisive. It should be over and done with before the outside world awoke to the fearful reality of what was happening. The English press, with a bare two or three exceptions, the English correspondents of foreign newspapers, and the English cable service, performed well their job of backing the British army in the field. They saw to it that not only was the hideousness of their campaign in Ireland concealed from the world, but that instead, the brave Irish citizens’ army, made up mostly of young boys, fighting for freedom in a very unequal fight, were lied about and painted to the world as ignorant, miscreant rogues and ruffians. Loyally doing their bit in the disgraceful campaign of hoodwinking the world, the highest, most ‘Honourable’ government officials, from Premier Lloyd George down, in their lofty citadels in the British House of Commons, deliberately and persistently falsified the accounts of the occurrences on Ireland. They denied, without faltering, the barbarous crimes of the British, which they knew and approved of, and unashamedly palmed off upon the clean-fighting sons of Ireland callous and fiendish cruelties that were inherent alone to the beasts of their own. They even insinuated that the murders, by disguised and masked British scoundrels, of Mayor Thomas MacCurtain of Cork, who was shot in his own home, and Mayor Clancy of Limerick, were perpetrated by their own Republican comrades who, they intimated, slew them because they were traitors. Thus did the Honourable British gentlemen blacken the dead, and their families, as well as the living. Yet the well-contrived campaign for the quick squandering of Ireland and breaking of Ireland’s spirit did not come off on schedule. The atrocities that were meant to frighten and subdue only stimulated the outraged nation to more vigour. By the time the fight was expected to end, it was found to be only begun. However carefully the army of falsifiers guarded every gateway by which the truth might escape to the world, tricklings of truth had begun to find their way out, and the world was beginning to whisper of strange British carry-on in Ireland. More than anything else, perhaps, the world was awakened to the truth of the situation in Ireland through the extraordinary heroism of Terence MacSweney (Mayor of Cork in succession to the assassinated MacCurtin), who was arrested and tried by court martial on a charge of being in possession of ‘documents likely to cause disaffection to his Majesty’. In protest against the foreign tyrants who jailed him, he refused to eat in a British dungeon. He died, after three months of starvation. The world was stirred. The terrible truth about Britain’s rape of Ireland was being realised. The English themselves began to protest. Some to save face, rather than to save Ireland. The Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury speaking in the House of Lords in 1921 said: ‘What is being done in Ireland is exactly what we condemned the Germans for doing in Belgium’. The Moderator of the Presbyterian Church in England, Rev. Duncan MacGregor, said: ‘The result of the present policy is that British rule has become a byword and a scoff in every country in Europe, and across the Atlantic...’ Ex-Prime Minister Asquith declared: ‘Things are being done in Ireland with the knowledge and approval, if not under the direction of Government officials, which would disgrace the blackest annals of the lowest despotism of Europe.’ The British Labour Party sent a Commission to Ireland to investigate. Their findings can be summed up in one sentence taken from the closing paragraph of their report: ‘Things are being done in Ireland, in the name of Britain, which must make her name stink in the nostrils of the whole world’. The Hon. C Masterman of Macclesfield stated: Speaking with a full sense of my responsibility as former Cabinet Minister, I declare the evidence is overwhelming that a systematic policy of terror is being pursued in Ireland — defended by Lloyd George, backed by the flagrant lies of Sir Hamar Greenwood, and organised by officials in high places in Dublin. The attempt is not merely to punish the guilty, but to break the whole spirit of Ireland by inflicting punishment upon people who are as innocent as babes unborn. That was the system which under the German invasion of Belgium, turned the whole world against Germany. Yet in every particular the things going on in Ireland today are a replica — in some cases they are worse than — the things the Germans did in Belgium. Lord Hugh Cecil, in the House of Commons in 1921 said: ‘The methods adopted in Ireland have no precedent whatever in the story of the restoration of law and order by previous governments in the nineteenth century’. General Sir Hubert Gough, Commander of the Fifth Army in World War I and having served in Ireland wrote a letter to the press in 1921 in which he said: ‘Law and order has given way to a bloody and brutal anarchy, in which the armed agents of the Crown violate every law in aimless and vindictive and insolent savagery. England has departed further from her own standards, and further from the standards even of any nation in the world not excepting the Turk and the Zulu, than has ever been known in history before’. The Turks were accused of the genocidal murder of one-and-a-half-million Armenians in 1915. At his court martial in 1916 Patrick Pearce said: ‘When I was a boy of ten I promised God that I would devote my life in an effort to free my country. I have kept my promise. If you strike us down now we shall rise again and renew the fight. You cannot conquer Ireland; you cannot extinguish the Irish passion for freedom. If our deed has not been sufficient to win that freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.’ As he walked to his execution, Pearse heard two volleys of shots; Clarke and his old friend Thomas MacDonagh had preceded him in death. With a soldier on each side and blindfold already in place, Pearse was hustled to a corner of the prison walls, past the pooled blood of Clarke and MacDonagh. At that very moment, his brother Willie was being led up to the jail and he was sure it was to his own death.
In the northwest corner of the compound, where a blindfolded Patrick Henry Pearse stood, the order rang out, ‘Aim.’ When one of the soldiers allowed his rifle to dip, the officer in charge ordered, ‘As you were. Now the officer ordered, ‘Aim,’ again and then finally, ‘FIRE!’ At the gates of the jail, where Willie Pearse was being led in, he heard the sound and a warder turned to his guards and said, ‘Too late.’ They turned him around and took him back to Richmond Barracks, no one told him he had just heard the sound of his brother being killed. Willie was shot the next day. The poet philosopher, visionary, barrister, teacher, and leader of the failed Rising was executed by firing squad in Kilmainham jail, Dublin, on 3 May 1916. ‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ would have formed a very proper epitaph on the gravestone of the leader of the Easter Rising of 1916, Patrick Henry Pearse. *** Letter to his Mother, 1 May, 1916 Arbour Hill Barracks, Dublin. 1st May, 1916. My Dear Mother, You will I know have been longing to hear from me. I do not know how much you have heard since the last note I sent you from the G.P.O. On Friday evening the Post Office was set on fire and we had to abandon it. We dashed into Moore Street and remained in the houses in Moore St. on Saturday evening. We then found that we were surrounded by troops and that we had practically no food. We decided in order to prevent further slaughter of the civilian population and in the hope of saving the lives of our followers, to ask the General Commanding the British Forces to discuss terms. He replied that he would receive me only if I surrendered unconditionally and this I did. I was taken to the Headquarters of the British Command in Ireland and there I wrote and signed an order to our men to lay down their arms. All this I did in accordance with the decision of our Provisional Government who were with us in Moore St. My own opinion was in favour of one more desperate sally before opening negotiations, but I yielded to the majority, and I think now the majority was right, as the sally would have resulted only in losing the lives of perhaps 50 or 100 of our men, and we should have had to surrender in the long run as we were without food. I was brought in here on Saturday evening and later all the men with us in Moore St. were brought here. Those in the other parts of the City have, I understand, been taken to other barracks and prisons. All here are safe and well. Willie and all the St. Enda’s boys are here? I have not seen them since Saturday, but I believe they are all well and that they are not now in any danger. Our hope and belief is that the Government will spare the lives of all our followers, but we do not expect that they will spare the lives of the leaders. We are ready to die and we shall die cheerfully and proudly. Personally I do not hope or even desire to live, hut I do hope and desire and believe that the lives of all our followers will be saved including the lives dear to you and me (my own excepted) and this will he a great consolation to me when dying. You must not grieve for all this. We have preserved Ireland’s honour and our own. Our deeds of last week are the most splendid in Ireland’s history. People will say hard things of us now, but we shall be remembered by posterity and blessed by unborn generations. You too will he blessed because you were my mother. If you feel you would like to see rue, I think you will be allowed to visit me by applying to the Headquarters, Irish Command, near the Park. I shall I hope have another opportunity of writing to you. Love to W.W., M.B., Miss Byrne,”. ? and your own dear self. P.S. I understand that the German expedition which I was counting on actually set sail but was defeated by the British. It is clear from this letter, written before his Court Martial, that Pearse had no illusions as to what the findings of the Court Martial would be. The letter was never delivered. It was instead used against Pearse at his Court Martial. The text of the letter did not come to light until 1965. The original is still held by the Public Records Office in London. These may not be inspected until the records are a hundred years old. Poems written in Arbour Hill Detention Barracks, 1 May 1916 To my mother My gift to you hath been the gift of sorrow, My one return for your rich gifts to me, Your gift of life, your gift of love and pity, Your gift of sanity, your gift of faith (For who hath had such faith as yours Since the old time, and what were my poor fail/s Without your strong belief to found upon?) For all these precious things my gift to you Is sorrow. I have seen Your dear face line, your face soft to my touch, Familiar to my hands and to my lips Since I was little: I have seen How you have battled with your tears for me, And with a proud glad look, although your heart Was breaking. 0 Mother (for you know me) You must have known, when I was silent, That some strange thing within me kept me dumb, Some strange deep thing, when I should shout my love? I have sobbed in secret For that reserve which yet I could not master. I would have brought royal gifts, and I have brought you Sorrow and tears: and yet, it may be That I have brought you something else besides— The memory of my deed and of my name A splendid thing which shall not pass away. When men speak of me, in praise or in dispraise, You will not heed, but treasure your own memory Of your first son.
P. H. PEARSE.
Arbour Hill Detention Barracks, 1st May 1916.
TO MY BROTHER
O faithful! Moulded in one womb, We two have stood together all the years, All the glad years and all the sorrowful years, Own brothers; through good repute and ill, In direst peril true to me, Leaving all things for me, spending yourself In the hard service that I taught to you, Of all the men that I have known on earth, You only have been my familiar friend, Nor needed I another. P. H. PEARSE. Pearse had no idea that his brother was also to be executed.
This is the Proclamation of the Republic that Pearse read to a bemused gathering on Easter Monday, 24th April, 1916 as the GPO was occupied by the revolutionary forces:
POBLACHT NA H EIREANN
IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.
Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength, she strikes in full confidence of victory.
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty; six times during the last three hundred years they have asserted it to arms. Standing on that fundamental right and again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom, of its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and all of its parts, cherishing all of the children of the nation equally and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment of a permanent National, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God. Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, in humanity, or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.
Signed on Behalf of the Provisional Government.
Thomas J.
Clarke, Thomas
MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett
View a photograph of an original broadside copy of the Proclamation
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