Patrick Pearse

Patrick Henry Pearse (known to Irish nationalists as Pádraig Pearse or by his Irish name Pádraic Anraí Mac Piarais; 10 November, 1879 – 3 May, 1916) was a teacher, poet, writer, nationalist and political activist who was one of the leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. He was declared "President of the Provisional Government" of the Irish Republic in one of the bulletins issued by the Rising's leaders, a status that was however disputed by others associated with the rebellion both then and subsequently. Following the collapse of the Rising and the execution of Pearse, along with his brother and fourteen other leaders, Pearse came to be seen by many as the embodiment of the rebellion. Current Taoiseach Bertie Ahern describes Pearse as one of his heroes and displays a picture of Pearse over his desk in Irish Government Buildings.Bertie Ahern, interviewed about Pearse on RTÉ, 9 April 2006.

Radical nationalism

Patrick Henry Pearse was born in Dublin. His father, a Catholic convert, was from a Cornish nonconformist family and an artisan/stonemason, who held moderate home rule views and his mother, Margaret, was from an Irish-speaking family in County Meath. The Irish-speaking influence of his aunt Margaret instilled in him an early love for the Irish language.

In 1896, at the age of only sixteen, he joined the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge), and in 1903 at the age of 23, he became editor of its newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis ("The Sword of Light").

Pearse's earlier heroes were the ancient Gaelic folk heroes such as Cúchulainn, though in his 30s he began to take a strong interest in the leaders of past republican movements, such as Theobald Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmet, both, ironically, Protestant skeptics; it was from these men that those such as the fervently Catholic Pearse drew inspiration for the rebellion of 1916. As Conor Cruise O'Brien wrote regarding Patrick Pearse, he (Pearse) viewed the Rising as "a Passion Play with real blood."

St Enda's

As a cultural nationalist educated by the nationalist Irish Christian Brothers, like his younger brother Willie, Pearse believed that language was intrinsic to the identity of a nation. The Irish school system, he believed, raised Ireland's youth to be good Englishmen or obedient Irishmen, and an alternative was needed. Thus for him and other language revivalists, saving the Irish language from extinction was a cultural priority of the utmost importance. The key to saving the language, he felt, would be a sympathetic education system. To show the way, he started his own bilingual school, St. Enda's School (Scoil Éanna) in Ranelagh, County Dublin, in 1908. Here, the pupils were taught in both the Irish and English languages.

With the aid of Thomas MacDonagh, Pearse's younger brother Willie Pearse and other (often transient) academics, it soon proved a successful experiment. He did all he planned, and even brought students on fieldtrips to the Gaeltacht in the west of Ireland. Pearse's restless idealism led him in search of an even more idyllic home for his school. He found it in the Hermitage, Rathfarnham, where he moved St. Enda's in 1910.

However, the new home, while splendidly located in an 18th-century house surrounded by a park and woodlands, caused financial difficulties that almost brought him to disaster. He strove continually to keep ahead of his debts while doing his best to maintain the school.

The Volunteers, the IRB and the Easter Rising

In November 1913 Pearse was invited to the inaugural meeting of the Irish Volunteers, formed to enforce the implementation of Westminster's Home Rule Act in the face of opposition from the Ulster Volunteer Force. The bill had just failed to pass the House of Lords at the third effort, but the diminished power of the Lords under the Parliament Act meant that the bill was only to be delayed.

Early in 1914, Pearse became a member of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, an organisation dedicated to the overthrow of British rule in Ireland and its replacement with a Republic. Pearse was then one of many people who were members of both the IRB and the Volunteers. When he became the Volunteers' Director of Military Organisation in 1914 he was the highest ranking Volunteer in the IRB membership, and instrumental in the latter's commandeering of the Volunteers for the purpose of rebellion. By 1915 he was on the IRB's Supreme Council, and its secret Military Council, the core group that began planning for a rising while World War I raged on the European mainland.

On 1 August, 1915, Pearse gave a now-famous graveside oration at the funeral of the Fenian Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa. It closed with the words: "Our foes are strong and wise and wary; but, strong and wise and wary as they are, they cannot undo the miracles of God Who ripens in the hearts of young men the seeds sown by the young men of a former generation. And the seeds sown by the young men of '65 and '67 are coming to their miraculous ripening today. Rulers and Defenders of the Realm had need to be wary if they would guard against such processes. Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations. The Defenders of this Realm have worked well in secret and in the open. They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but, the fools, the fools, the fools! — They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."

Was Pearse "President of the Irish Republic"?

Pearse, given his speaking and writing skills, was chosen by the leading IRB man Thomas Clarke to be the spokesman for the Rising that he hoped would soon occur. It was Pearse who, shortly before Easter in 1916, issued the orders to all Volunteer units throughout the country for three days of manoeuvres beginning Easter Sunday, which was the signal for a general uprising. When Eoin MacNeill, the Chief of Staff of the Volunteers, learned what was being planned without the promised arms from Germany, he countermanded the orders via newspaper, causing Pearse to issue a last minute order to go through with the plan the following day, greatly limiting the numbers who turned out for the rising. Without MacNeill on board as their figurehead, the Military Council needed someone else to take the title of President of the Irish Republic and Commander-in-Chief. Pearse was allegedly chosen over Clarke, as Clarke was a convicted felon and it was claimed eschewed any such role, while Pearse was respected throughout the country, and a natural leader.

However the claim that Pearse was designated President of the Republic was widely disputed in the aftermath of the Rising. Clarke's wife stated in her autobiography that the Rising leaders understood that Clarke was to be president, hence his position as the first name on the list of signatories of the proclamation. Emmet Clarke, son of Tom Clarke, then a child, recounted meeting surviving figures of the Rising in the presence of his mother when they were released. One leading figure asked Mrs Clarke and her son "Who in the hell made Pearse president?" Emmet Clarke, in an interview broadcast on RTÉ 9 April 2006. Opponents of Pearse accused him of using his role as chief propagandist for the rebellion to draft statements referring to himself as president. The claim that Pearse held such a role only featured in a secondary document issued, one drafted by Pearse himself, not in the actual Proclamation.Arthur Mitchell & Padraig Ó Snodaigh, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, Irish Academic Press 1985. In addition that document used the term "President of the Provisional Government", not "President of the Republic". A "President of a government" is akin to a prime minister, not a president of a state.Among states which use or used that form of address to refer to a prime minister are Spain and the Irish Free State, where the latter's prime minister was called ''President of the Executive Council. The fact, though, that Pearse and his colleagues discussed importing a Hohenzollern prince as an Irish constitutional monarch if the Rising were successful, suggests that their ideas for the political future of the country were as yet inchoate and unformed.

When eventually the Easter Rising did erupt on Easter Monday, 24 April, 1916, having been delayed by one day due to the interception by the British Navy of weapons arriving from Germany aboard the vessel Aud and the publication of MacNeill's countermanding order, it was Pearse who proclaimed a Republic from the steps of the General Post Office, headquarters of the insurgents, to a bemused crowd. When, after several days fighting, it became apparent that victory was impossible, he surrendered, along with most of the other leaders. Pearse and fourteen other leaders, including his brother Willie, were court-martialled and executed by firing squad. Sir Roger Casement, an IRB leader who had tried unsuccessfully to recruit an insurgent force among Irish-born prisoners of war in Germany, was hanged in London the following August. Thomas Clarke, Thomas MacDonagh and Pearse himself were the first of the rebels to be executed, on the morning of 3 May, 1916. Pearse was 36 years old at the time of his death.

Writing subsequently, Michael Collins was critical of Pearse. Comparing him to Connolly, Collins wrote: 'Of Pearse and Connolly I admire the latter most. Connolly was a realist, Pearse the direct opposite . . . I would have followed ^* through hell had such action being necessary. But I honestly doubt very much if I would have followed Pearse — not without some thought anyway.Collins to Kevin O'Brien, Frongoch, 6 October 1916, quoted in Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins, Hutchinson, 1990.

Ruth Dudley Edwards, a biographer whose sympathies with the Orange Order are well known, http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:5ceT3n71zaQJ:www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php%3FstoryId%3D1053615+%22Ruth+Dudley+edwards%22+%22orange+order%22+%22faithful+tribe%22&hl=ga&gl=ie&ct=clnk&cd=34;html=/archive/1999/06/11/nwat11.html; http://www.tesco.com/books/product.aspx?R=0006388906&bci=415%7CFaith*14%7CPrize%20Winners; http://www.telegraph.co.uk/htmlContent.jhtml?html=/archive/1999/06/11/nwat11.html summed up her conclusion about Pearse and the Rising with the words: Pearse and his colleagues had no mandate merely a belief that because their judgement was superior to those of the population at large, they were entitled to use violence.Ruth Dudley-Edwards, "The Terrible Legacy of Patrick Pearse", Sunday Independent, 14 April 2001.

Pearse's writings

Pearse wrote stories and poems in both (Irish and English, his best-known English poem being "The Wayfarer". He also penned several allegorical plays in the (Irish language, including The King, The Master, and The Singer. His short stories in Irish include Eoghainín na nÉan ("Eoineen of the Birds"), Íosagán, Na Bóithre ("The Roads"), and An Bhean Chaointe ("The Keening Woman"). Most of his ideas on education are contained in his famous essay "The Murder Machine". He also authored many essays on politics and language, notably "The Coming Revolution" and "Ghosts".

Largely because of a series of political pamphlets Pearse wrote in the months leading up to the 1916 Rising, he soon became recognised as the voice of the 1916 Rising. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, Pearse was idolised by Irish nationalists as the supreme idealist of their cause.

However, with the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland in 1969, Pearse's legacy soon became associated with the Provisional IRA. Pearse's reputation and writings were subject to criticism by some historians who saw him as a dangerous, fanatical, psychologically unsound (as per Conor Cruise O'Brien) individual under ultra-religious influences. As Conor Cruise O'Brien, a former unionist politician, put it in writing: Pearse saw the Rising as a Passion Play with real blood. In his 1972 book States of Ireland Cruise O Brien was to reveal a deeper, more personal reason for his oppostion to Pearse and indeed the Easter Rising. The Rising, he said, resulted in his family's "rightful" position, as leading members of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Irish society being denied them.

Others defended Pearse, suggesting that to blame him for what was happening in Northern Ireland was unhistorical and a distortion of the real spirit of his writings. Though the passion of those arguments has waned with the continuing peace in Northern Ireland following the Belfast Agreement in 1998, his complex personality still remains a subject of controversy for those who wish to debate the evolving meaning of Irish nationalism.

His former school, St. Enda's, Rathfarnham, on the south side of Dublin, is now the Pearse Museum dedicated to his memory.

Personal life

Little is known about his private life, but there has been much speculation. Some of his poetry, and his apparent lack of any romantic involvement with women throughout his life, has led to presumptions that he was homosexual, a rumour that existed within his own lifetime, where his bachelor status, and lack of relationships with women, was noted. Indeed, the Sue Denham column in The Sunday Times (UK) said that the evidence for this was "overwhelming" (see^*).

The question of whether Pearse was a homosexual remains controversial, and relies largely upon inferences drawn from the absence of female attachments during his life. No evidence has been produced that Pearse ever engaged in either heterosexual or homosexual acts. Curiously, as with Abraham Lincoln, who also faced contemporary rumours as to his sexual orientation, a posthumous story was constructed claiming that Pearse had had a love affair with a young woman, Eveleen Nicholls, eventually leading to an engagement. In the case of Pearse it was claimed that his heart was broken when this young woman drowned, with him as a result avoiding any romantic attachments. Unlike Lincoln's supposed "true love" who never actually existed, the woman named as Pearse's lover did exist. However no evidence exists of anything other than a friendship between the two. Irish historian and former advisor to the Ulster Unionist Party, Ruth Dudley-Edwards, who wrote a biography of Pearse, concluded that he was "almost certainly a latent homosexual". Not all historians agree with this analysis, though a majority do not dismiss the possibility.

Footnotes

Sources

Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins, Hutchinson, 1990.
Ruth Dudley-Edwards, Patrick Pearse: the Triumph of Failure London: Gollancz, 1977.
F.S.L. Lyons, Ireland Since the Famine, Collins/Fontana, 1973.
Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic, Corgi, 1968.
Arthur Mitchell & Padraig Ó Snodaigh, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, Irish Academic Press 1985.
Mary Pearse, The Home Life of Padraig Pearse. Cork, Mercies 1971.

External links

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Patrick Pearse