Patrick Pearse

16Lives

Ruán O'Donnell

• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781847178534
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

On 24 April 1916, as President of the Provisional Government, Patrick Pearse appeared under the GPO Grand Portico on Dublin's O'Connell Street and read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. Nine days later, he was the first of the rebel leaders to be executed.

Pearse was born in Dublin on 11 November 1879, to an English father and an Irish mother. Considered the face of the 1916 Easter Rising, for many he was also its heart. In this definitive biography, using a wealth of primary sources, Dr Ruán O'Donnell establishes as never before the significance of Pearse's activism all across Ireland, as well as his dual roles as Director of Military Operations for the Irish Volunteers and member of the clandestine Military Council of the IRB.

On 3 May 1916, Pearse was executed in the Stonebreakers Yard at Kilmainham Gaol, at the age of thirty-six.

Chapter 1

The Young Pearse

Patrick Henry Pearse was born on 11 November 1879 into a family of English, probably Anglo-Norman, stock and pre-modern Gaelic Irish heritage. His father James was born in London in 1839 and lived for many years in Birmingham where he worked as a stone-carver. The boom in church-building and Gothic decoration brought James Pearse to Dublin, and, by the early 1860s, he was a foreman for Charles Harrison at 178 Great Brunswick Street. From 1864, he sculpted for Earley & Powells of 1 Camden Street.

He had married Emily Fox in Birmingham the previous year. Mary Emily was born in 1864 and James Vincent in 1866. Agnes Maud followed in 1869. Both Agnes and her sister Catherine, who was born in 1871, died in early childhood. Such tragedies contributed to an inharmonious marriage, which ended with the death in 1876 of Emily from a spinal infection. She was just thirty years of age.¹

A short time later, on 24 October 1877, James married Margaret Brady in the Church of St Agatha, North William Street, Dublin, and they set up home at 27 Great Brunswick Street, modern-day Pearse Street. James operated his stone-cutting business from this address. Great Brunswick Street was a major thoroughfare leading to College Green and fashionable Grafton Street, with easy access to O’Connell Bridge and the north side of the river Liffey. They faced the substantial campus of Trinity College Dublin and were adjacent to Tara Street Fire Brigade Station.

James’s second family produced daughter Margaret (‘Maggie’) in 1878, Patrick in 1879, William in 1881 and Mary Brigid in 1884. Living conditions were far from salubrious but were vastly superior to the city’s notorious tenements where tuberculosis (TB) wreaked havoc.

Margaret Brady’s extended clan had farming interests, which provided the city-born Pearse children with a modicum of rural exposure. Contact with their great-aunt Margaret was especially significant. In 1913, Pearse wrote:

I had heard in childhood of the Fenians from one who, although a woman, had shared their hopes and disappointment. The names of Stephens and O’Donovan Rossa were familiar to me, and they seemed to me the most gallant of all names; names which should be put into songs and sung proudly to tramping music. Indeed my mother (although she was not old enough to remember the Fenians) used to sing of them in words learned, I daresay, from that other who had known them; one of her songs had the lines ‘Because he was O’Donovan Rossa, and a son of Grainne Mhaol.’²

Pearse’s maternal grandfather, Patrick, had left the Nobber district of Co. Meath in the 1840s to escape the worst years of the Great Irish Famine and had settled in Dublin city. A supporter of the radical Young Ireland movement in 1848, he was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB, aka ‘Fenians’), who, from 1858, revived the revolutionary agenda.³

Pearse recalled a visiting ballad singer performing ‘Bold Robert Emmet’ and other favourites in the republican repertoire, songs that moved him to explore the locality after dark, hoping to find ‘armed men wheeling and marching’. Upon finding none, he sadly declared to his grandfather that ‘the Fenians are all dead’.

Certainly, the family into which Patrick Pearse was born was steeped in Irish cultural inheritance, a tradition of political engagement and a sense of the diaspora.⁴ At least two Bradys had fought as United Irishmen during the 1798 Rebellion, one of whom was reputedly interred in the ‘Croppies Grave’ on the Tara Hill battle site. Walter Brady, Pearse’s great-grandfather, survived the bloody summer and qualified for the Amnesty Act that enabled the vast bulk of combatants to resume private life. Pearse’s maternal granduncle, James Savage, was a veteran of the American Civil War of 1860–5 in which approximately 200,000 Irish-born soldiers participated. It is unknown whether Savage was one of the tens of thousands who simultaneously joined the Fenian Brotherhood, sister organisation of the IRB, who were reorganised as Clan na Gael. When facing execution in 1916, Pearse claimed, ‘when I was a child of ten I went down on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I would devote my life to an effort to free my country. I have kept that promise.’⁵

James Pearse thrived as an independent ecclesiastical sculptor and occasional partner of Edmund Sharp in the late 1870s and 1880s. The firm produced altars, pulpits, railings and expensive features for churches the length and breadth of the country. A healthy volume of contracts brought prosperity, and in 1884 the family relocated to a house at 3 Newbridge Avenue in the coastal suburb of Sandymount.⁶

Not only a respected craftsman and an independent thinker, James Pearse was also a man versed in English literature. His library included books on the plight of Native Americans, history, legal tracts, language primers and modern classics. Significantly, he possessed republican tendencies and admired Charles Bradlaugh, a radical polemicist with the Freethought Publishing Company. In 1886, James published a pro-Home Rule pamphlet in which he stressed his English ancestry to underline the innate justice of the proposed devolution of local government to Dublin.⁷ Raised in a household where aesthetic, philosophical and cultural values were prized, Pearse cherished his ‘freedom-loving’ parents from ‘two traditions’ who ‘worked in me and fused together by a certain fire proper to myself … made me the strange thing I am’.⁸

In 1891, Pearse was sent to the Christian Brothers on Westland Row, where the robust, practical education posed no challenge to the highly intelligent youth. The school was convenient and one of a select few that taught Irish as part of the curriculum, providing Pearse with an untypically strong grounding for a Dubliner, which he later exploited with considerable effect.⁹ Pearse mused that the people he presumed to be ‘gallant and kingly’ were unknown to his schoolmaster in Westland Row.¹⁰

By 1900, Pearse possessed a BA in Irish, English and French from University College Dublin (UCD) and a BL from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). His prowess in Irish ensured a temporary teaching position in UCD as well as work as an external examiner in Irish history at Clongowes College, Co. Kildare.¹¹

In September of that year, James Pearse died while on a visit to Birmingham. An Irish Times obituary reported that the funeral was held in St Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, and that James Pearse was a man who ‘rapidly rose to the foremost place amongst the ecclesiastical sculptors of the Three Kingdoms. Essentially a Gothic artist, his works may be seen in practically every church of importance throughout the country, forming beautiful and enduring memorials to the skill of his chisel.’¹²

It fell to Patrick to administer the estate of his father, who died intestate.¹³ Although still twenty-one, and a self-described ‘law student’, Pearse was listed as ‘Head of Family’ in the Census taken on 31 March 1901.¹⁴ He was called to the Bar in Dublin later that year. The family address was 39 Marlborough Road, Ranelagh, in October 1903.¹⁵ Building on the status accorded their father, the cultural, educational, artistic, legal and political accomplishments of Patrick and Willie Pearse were frequently charted in the mainstream print media.¹⁶

In 1896, at the age of sixteen, Pearse had formalised his commitment to promoting the national language by joining the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge). At its inception in 1893, Douglas Hyde strove to situate the project firmly in the cultural domain; however, politically active members, not least an invisible cadre of IRB men, intended a more ambitious programme. The Gaelic League, as with the Fenian-inspired Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), went from strength to strength as rising membership yielded a national organisation unconnected to the State.

Although by no means precocious, Pearse was tenacious and ambitious and applied himself with vigour to all matters dear to his heart. As early as 1897, the teenager averred in an address to Irish-language revival...

Table of contents

• Cover
• The 16Lives Series
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• 16Lives Timeline and Map
• 16Lives Series Introduction
• Contents
• Chapter 1: The Young Pearse
• Chapter 2: Republican Politics
• Chapter 3: Prelude to Insurrection
• Chapter 4: Momentum
• Chapter 5: Countdown to the Rising
• Chapter 6: President and Commander-in-Chief
• Chapter 7: Court Martial and Execution
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photos
• Copyright