Irish writers and the Easter Rising: Patrick Pearse

One hundred years ago this week, the lives of three Irish writers, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett, came to an end at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin.

All three were executed for their part in the Easter Rising. They were among the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic issued on Easter Monday 1916 and read out by Pearse from the steps of the General Post Office shortly after it had become the rebellion's headquarters.

In retrospect, it may seem strange that three of the seven signatories of the Proclamation were published poets, but the journey that brought these three young men to the point where they took leading parts in the 1916 Rising sheds light on the Ireland from which they came. All three were born in the final quarter of the 19th century and grew up in an Ireland that was changing, politically, economically and culturally. I plan to post three blogs in their memory in the coming week or so, starting with Patrick Pearse.

Pearse was born in Dublin in 1879. Son of an English-born monumental sculptor and an Irish mother, he studied languages at University and qualified as a barrister, but it was the movement to revive the Irish language that captured his imagination and shaped his life. Pearse joined the Gaelic League (founded in 1893 following a famous speech by Douglas Hyde on the necessity for de-Anglicising Ireland) when he was still in his teens and within a few years he was appointed editor of the League's journal, An Claidheamh Soluis (The Sword of Light).

Like many of his contemporaries Pearse tended to glorify the ancient virtues of Gaelic Ireland and viewed these as indispensable also in the modern world. He saw the 20th century Gael as 'the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life, the regenerator and rejuvenator of the literature of the world.' The young Pearse was a turn of the century Irish cultural nationalist par excellence. But what was it that took him from being a zealous language enthusiast to the leadership of an insurrection in 1916?

Pearse was originally a supporter of Home Rule which he believed would provide an adequate political environment for the advancement of his cultural aspirations for Ireland. Pearse was radicalised by developments in Ireland in the years before the First World War, when he became a prominent member of the Irish Volunteers, set up in 1913 as part of the struggle for Home Rule and in response to the establishment some months earlier of the Ulster Volunteers.

In 1914, Pearse sided with the minority within the Volunteers who refused to go along with Irish Party leader, John Redmond, when he urged his supporters to enlist for war service. By 1915, his skills as an orator meant that he held centre stage at the Dublin funeral of the Fenian, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, where his fiery rhetoric made a powerful impression. This led to him joining the inner circle of those in the Irish Republican Brotherhood who planned the 1916 Rising. As President of the Irish Republic proclaimed on Easter Monday 1916, Pearse was among the first the face the firing squad on 3 May 1913.

Pearse was not a great poet, but did have a gift with words.

I turned my back
On the vision I had shaped,
And to this road before me
I turned my face.

And his passionate nationalism shines through the lines of his poems.

I am Ireland
I am older than the Old woman of Beare
Great my glory:
I that bore Cuchulainn the valiant.

Pearse identified with Cuchulainn, the hero of the Irish mythological cycle and sought to apply his qualities to the needs of 20th Ireland as he saw them.

The best-known of his poems is probably The Mother, where he tries to comfort her for the loss of 'two strong sons' 'in bloody protest for a glorious thing.' But Pearse left his best poetic work till the last. He wrote The Wayfarer in his prison cell on the eve of his execution. It is a fine piece of writing, especially given the circumstances in which it was composed.

The beauty of the world hath me sad,
This beauty that will pass;
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree,
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening,
Lit by a slanting sun,
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy.

Pearse's story - a journey from cultural nationalism to separatist republicanism under the influence of events in Ireland and the wider world - was a fascinating one. He was a complex personality, an idealist who indulged in sanguinary rhetoric, but was ineffectual during the Rising and resolved to surrender after he had witnessed actual civilian bloodshed. He was fundamentally a man of his times, 'caught in that sensual music' (to quote words used by Yeats in a different context) of early-20th century Irish nationalism, which attracted so many talented men and women of that generation, and part of whose offspring is our independent Irish State.

Daniel Mulhall is Ireland's Ambassador in London