'We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland' — Easter Uprising, 1916
Padraic Pearse's proclamation on the 23rd of March 1916 outside the GPO in Dublin is surely one of the most courageous and self sacrificial speeches in modern history.
Pearse was leader of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who teamed with James Connolly’s Irish Citizens Army and the women of Cumann na mBan in an armed act of insurrection, that lasted almost from Easter Monday 1916 to the following Saturday.
It’s an incredible story, an attempt at revolution almost certainly doomed to failure, and yet it becomes the blood sacrifice that is the foundation stone of the modern Irish Republic.
There is an Easter Uprising episode of The Rest is History that is in the pantheon of that incredible podcast, which features historian Professor Paul Rouse.
Rouse tells the story spectacularly. It begins with an attempt by British diplomat turned Irish nationalist Sir Roger Casement to import German guns via a submarine drop in Cork, a mission which was intercepted by the British and resulted in Casement’s execution for treason. His speech at his trial is up on Speakola.
Despite the non arrival of German weapons, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers and the other revolutionaries decided to push on with the planned uprising on Easter Sunday. There was indecision though, and Eoin Macneil of the Volunteers published a countermanding order in the Dublin press calling off ‘military maneuvers’.
The leaders of the IRB decided to push on, nevertheless, shifting the day of reckoning to Easter Monday. They hoisted a sign at Dublin’s Liberty Hall saying, ‘We serve neither King nor Kaiser’ and entered the post office building. Pearse read his Proclamation of the Irish Republic:
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
OF THE
IRISH REPUBLIC
TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELANDIRISHMEN 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 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 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 of all 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 Government, 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, inhumanity, 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
SEAN Mac DIARMADA THOMAS MacDONAGH
P. H. PEARSE EAMONN CEANNT
JAMES CONNOLLY JOSEPH PLUNKETT
Although the British were initially taken by surprise, not enough Dubliners joined the Uprising, approximately 2000 rather than the hoped for 20,000, and when thousands of British soldiers mobilised, the rebellion was defeated. By the following Saturday, the Irish Republican Brotherhood had signed an unconditional surrender. Of the 485 people killed, 260 were civilians, 143 were British military and police personnel, and 82 were Irish rebels, including 16 rebels executed for their roles in the Rising. There was an idea amongst the rebels that ‘blood sacrifice’ would turn the Irish population towards the nationalist cause.
As Rouse says, it does become a ‘sacral story’. The executions went on for an interminable ten days, and public outrage crystallised into support for Sinn Fein as a mass revolutionary movement.
If you’re a little bit interested in all this, listen to Paul Rouse episode, it really is brilliant. Rouse also recommends R.F. Foster’s ‘Vivid Faces - The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923’ and William Irwin Thompson’s The Imagination Of An Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916
Apart from being an accelerant towards independence, the Easter Uprising fuelled endless great art, from Yeats to U2. It was called ‘the Poets Revolution’, even at the time. Here is the last verse of William Butler Yeats’s immortal ‘Easter, 1916’:
Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born
I had a go at getting Professor Rouse on Speakola to talk about Pearse’s speech. I got a no from Professor Rouse, and it’s a tricky and time consuming business finding guests, recording interviews, editing the audio and basically keeping the podcast going. Your support here for Speakola is a vote for the project, whether it’s the podcast, the speech library, this newsletter, or some other facet. It’s a one person project. Your donations and subscriptions are Speakola’s only revenues.
