I didn’t cry. He had to face the ordeal by himself in the morning. If I broke down, it might have broken him down. I said, ‘What did you do to that priest down there?’ ‘That damn fellow came in here’, he said, ‘and told me he’d give me confession if I’d admit that I was wrong and that I was sorry. I’m not sorry. I told him that I gloried in what I’d done.’ I was expecting a baby but didn’t tell him that in case it might upset him.
I asked an officer to have his body sent to me. He hemmed and hawed and said he’d had no instructions about it. In the end he promised to do something. But they wrote to me afterwards that I couldn’t have the body for burial. I walked home by myself from the Castle to Fairview. There was a smell of burning in the air. I had to walk in the middle of the road because things were falling off the roofs. In O’Connell Street a big policeman stopped me. When I told him who I was and where I was going, he said, ‘You’d better go down Fairview, ma’am. There’s some soldiers up at Parnell’s Monument and they’re not very nice.’ I had to climb over a big pile of rubble in North Earl Street. The bricks were still hot. I never met a sinner all the way home.
I had sent the children down to Limerick and there was no one in the house. I don’t drink but I had whiskey and brandy in the house in case any wounded were brought in. Now, I thought, I’ll have one twenty-fours hours of oblivion; and I took out a bottle of port and filled myself out a glass. I thought it would be strong. But I was awake again in an hour.
My sister came up from the country, and that night a lorry came and took us to Kilmainham to say goodbye to my brother [Ned Daly]. I heard it coming before any of them and I said, ‘It’s coming to take us to Ned. He’s going to be shot.’ They thought I was going off my head. But a few minutes later we all heard it. Then it stopped outside the house. My sister didn’t want me to go but I insisted. My brother was in uniform. He looked about eighteen. There was a group of officers outside the cell. They seemed to have some spite against him. The soldier holding the candle had been in my husband’s firing party. He said that my husband was the bravest man he’d seen. I lost the baby about a week later. I don’t know if it was a boy or a girl. I worked at the prisoners’ fund even when I was in bed. It saved me from going mad. God must have put the idea into my head.
Before the end Pearse wrote a number of poems and letters66 to his mother and to his brother Willie. He had no idea that Willie was to be executed, as though he took part in the Rising, he had not taken part in its planning and held no position of authority.
To my mother
My gift to you has been a gift of sorrow,
My one return for your rich gifts to me…
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.
A mother speaks
Dear Mary, that didst see thy first-born Son
Go forth to die amid the scorn of men
For whom He died,
Receive my first-born son into thy arms,
Who also hath gone out to die for men,
And keep him by thee till I come to him.
Dear Mary, I have shared thy sorrow,
And soon shall share thy joy.
Pearse told his court martial:
When I was a child of ten I went down on my bare knees by my bedside one night and promised God that I should devote my life to an effort to free my country. I have kept that promise. As a boy and as a man I have worked for Irish freedom, first among all earthly things. I have helped to organise, to arm, to train, and to discipline my fellow countrymen to the sole end that, when the time came, they might fight for Irish freedom. The time, as it seemed to me, did come, and we went into the fight. I am glad we did. We seem to have lost. We have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future.
…I assume that I am speaking to Englishmen, who value their freedom and who profess to be fighting for the freedom of Belgium and Serbia. Believe that we, too, love freedom and desire it. To us it is more desirable than anything in the world. 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 freedom, then our children will win it by a better deed.
I repudiate the assertion of the prosecutor that I sought to aid and abet England’s enemy. Germany is no more to me than England is. I asked and accepted German aid in the shape of arms and an expeditionary force. We neither asked for nor accepted Germany (sic) gold, nor had any traffic with Germany but what I state. My aim was to win Irish freedom: we struck the first blow ourselves, but should have been glad of an ally’s aid.
Kilmainham Prison
2 May, 1916.
He wrote again to his mother on 1 May, saying:
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, but 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 be a great consolation to me when dying.
He repeated the sentiments of the poem To My Mother:
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 be blessed because you were my mother.
He wrote to Willie, saying: ‘Dear old Willie, Goodbye and God bless you for all your faithful work for me at St Enda’s and elsewhere. No one can ever have had so true a brother as you.’ In his final letter to his mother he also referred to Willie saying: ‘I hope and believe that Willie and the St Enda’s boys will be safe.’ His hopes were only realised for the St Enda’s boys.
One of the most poignant events of the period was the wedding of the dying Joseph Plunkett to Grace Gifford in his Kilmainham cell shortly before he was executed. The details of the wedding were told and retold throughout Ireland and abroad. Plunkett had become engaged the previous December intending to be married on Easter Sunday. MacNeill’s orders countermanded not only the Rising but also the wedding. Grace and he agreed that if he were arrested she would marry him in prison. Like Kathleen Clarke and Mrs Pearse, Grace had a doubly agonised period of waiting for news, in the misplaced hope that the leaders would be treated as prisoners of war, because two of her loved ones were also shot. At dawn on Wednesday, 3 May, 1916, Grace’s brother-in-law, Thomas MacDonagh, was executed in Kilmainham.
In her biography67 Marie O’Neill graphically described how Grace reacted when she realised that her fiancé was also to be shot; she went out and bought a wedding ring. O’Neill writes that the jeweller was about to close for the day when ‘a young and attractive lady, evidently of good social position’ entered the shop. As she asked to see some wedding rings ‘she tried to stifle convulsive sobs’. The jeweller, a Mr Stoker, remarked: ‘You should not cry when you are going to be married.’ She told him that she was ‘Mr Plunkett’s fiancée’ and that she was to marry him that night before his execution. He tried to comfort her. She thanked him ‘very courteously’, chose the most expensive ring and paid for it in notes.
O’Neill quotes Grace’s own account of how she went through the wedding dressed in ‘a light frock made of a check fabric with white collars and cuffs’ and a light brimmed hat:
I entered Kilmainham Jail on Wednesday 3rd of May at
6 pm and I was detained there till about 11.30 pm when I saw him (Joe) for the first time in the prison chapel where the marriage was gone through and no speeches allowed. He was taken back to his cell and I left the prison with Father Eugene MacCarthy of James’s Street. We tried to get shelter for the night and I was finally lodged at the house of Mr. Byrne – bell-founder – in James’s Street. I went to bed at 1.30 and was wakened at 2 o’Clock by a policeman with a letter from the prison commandant – Major Lennon asking me to visit Joseph Plunkett. I was brought there in a motor and saw my husband in his cell, the interview occupying 10 minutes. During the interview the cell was packed with officers, and a sergeant who kept a watch in his hand and closed the interview by saying ‘Your time is now up’.
This rather denatured account omits details such as the fact that on her first visit to the prison she spent the hours alone walking up and down a prison yard, while Plunkett remained confined to his cell. Or that the wedding took place in darkness (the gas supply failed) apart from one candle held by a soldier. Two soldiers carrying rifles acted as witnesses. Plunkett, who had been detained in the same conditions as the other condemned men, in a small cell with a plank bed and one blanket, but no light, was brought to the chapel in handcuffs. The handcuffs were removed for the ceremony and replaced immediately afterwards. He was executed at 3.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 4 May after telling a Capuchin priest, Father Albert, that he was dying for the Glory of God and the Honour of Ireland.
The insurgents had no animus towards the British Tommies. In the last retreat from the GPO George Plunkett risked his life to carry a wounded soldier to safety. Before going out to fight, Pearse told the St Enda’s boys always to remember if they won their freedom that it had come through the son of an Englishman. In his last letter to ‘My darling Wife, Pulse of my heart’, Michael Mallin said that although when thinking of her and their children that his ‘heartstrings were torn to pieces’ he found:68 ‘…no fault with the soldiers or police I forgive them from the Bottom of my heart, pray for all the souls who fell in this fight Irish and English.’ For their part individual British officers spoke highly of the rebels. ‘They were the cleanest and bravest lot of boys he had ever met’ was one officer’s verdict. A Captain Shanley, in particular, was recalled as being ‘a Christian and a humane man,’ and spoken particularly highly of by Connolly, whose last words as the firing party took aim were: ‘Father forgive them for they know not what they do’.
In the end it was the English who did not forgive Maxwell. In the aftermath of the Rising, London oscillated between favouring a policy of carrot or stick, without giving Maxwell any clear guidance as to which to pursue. In June he correctly judged that:
Though the Rebellion was condemned it is now being used as a lever to bring on Home Rule, or an Irish Republic. There is a growing feeling that out of Rebellion more has been got than by constitutional methods, hence Mr. Redmond’s power is on the wane… It is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between a Nationalist and a Sinn Feiner… If there was a General Election, very few if any, of existing Nationalist MPs would be re-elected so there is a danger that Mr Redmond’s party would be replaced by others perhaps less amenable to reason. He thought that the major plus of British military policy was that it had taught the rebels that they could never be a match for trained soldiers.
He bore no hostility towards the Irish. On the contrary; Maxwell advocated the installation of an Executive which would ‘meet a warm-hearted people half-way in redressing grievances’. Amongst these grievances he cited absentee landlordism and the terrible poverty of Dublin which ‘could easily be prevented’. His advice was disregarded and he went the way of the Harrells, the Birrells and the Nathans. By the autumn of 1916 the politicans had made Maxwell a scapegoat for his executions policy, removed him from Ireland and transferred him to the nondescript post of GOC Northern England. He was refused the rank of full General which he had held in Egypt. His most telling judgement was not heeded. In it he concurred with the IRB whose cause his executions policy had done so much to further – the basic cause of the outbreak was the latitude allowed to Carson and the Ulster Volunteers.
Aftermath
After the Rising, events in Ireland proceeded, like bankruptcy, in two ways: gradually and suddenly. Within a few months, public opinion had swung against London so much that the prisoners became more of an embarrassment in jail than at liberty, and by Christmas many were set free, Michael Collins among them. He set about building up both Sinn Fein and the IRB, when he took over the running of the Prisoners’ Fund from Kathleen Clarke, Tom Clarke’s widow. An actor who played a fleeting role in these pages, Alex McCabe, whom we saw earlier being acquitted for possession of explosives, had a larger part to play in a turning point episode.
One of Collins’ initiatives was to put up a prisoner, Joseph McGuinness, as a candidate in a by-election in Longford. The poster showed a man in prison garb with the wording: ‘Put him in to get him out’. When the election result was counted, however, it appeared that McGuinness had not got in. The Irish Parliamentary Party candidate had won by a slender margin according to the returning officer. McCabe, who was a very tall man, later described to me what had happened. ‘I was wearing the trench coat, the leggings, I must have looked a real IRA man. I jumped up on the platform and I took out my .45 and I stuck it in me man’s ear, drew back the hammer and suggested that he might like to think again.’ Not unreasonably in the circumstances, the returning officer fell in with this suggestion, and mirabile dictu, a box containing 1000 first preference votes for McGuinness was discovered. Sinn Fein was on the march.
They were helped along the route by a combination of infliction and endurance. Thomas Ashe wrote a poem, Let Me Carry Your Cross for Ireland, Lord, and became the first hunger striker of the twentieth century to die. Simultaneously, Collins was disproving Maxwell’s theory that the rebels had been conclusively taught that they could not successfully contest with trained soldiers. There would be a bloody guerrilla war, an even bloodier civil war, negotiation, partition and the emergence of the two contemporary states of Ireland.
James Craig became the Prime Minister of the smaller state, the six counties, which comprise today’s ‘Ulster’. This afforded him the opportunity of personally answering the question that he had posed in the House of Commons after the Rising: what steps were being taken to clear out Sinn Fein supporters from the public service? The methods he chose – discriminating and gerrymandering – successfully combated the Catholic birthrate despite sporadic outbreaks of IRA violence, until a civil rights movement arose in the 1960s, chanting not the Soldiers’ Song, but We Shall Overcome. The energies thus released eventually led to a renewal of large-scale hostilities between the Orange and the Green. Both the effects of 1916 on the physical force school of Irish Republicanism and the traditional Tory/Orange relationship could be seen at junctures along the thirty years of violence and bloodshed which followed the Catholic demands for civil rights.
When the Tories took power in June 1970, they immediately replaced Labour’s Birrell-like policy with a heavy-handed crackdown on Republicans. Within a few days, a section of the Falls Road in Belfast was placed under curfew and houses ransacked for arms. Provisional IRA recruitment soared and in February 1971, there occurred the first death of a British soldier in the contemporary Troubles. The following August, the Conservatives introduced internment without trial to Northern Ireland. Several hundred Catholics were rounded up, but no Protestants except Ivan Cooper, a civil rights activist and an MP. During the internment period, the British introduced a series of interrogation techniques which eventually led to the Dublin Government charging its British counterpart with torture. The European Court of Human Rights eventually found that the British had been guilty of ‘inhuman and degrading treatment’.
One of the very few victims of the interrogation techniques to survive – most died in their forties – was Kevin Hannaway, a cousin of Gerry Adams. When I asked how he had managed to sur
vive a week of hooding, beating, sleep deprivation, hallucinatory drugs and ‘white noise’, he replied: ‘The Last Words; I kept thinking of the last words of the 1916 men, and I said to myself, look at what those men went through. Sure what am I getting – nothin’.’
The Tory/Orange ‘Curragh Mutiny’ factor was again evident in 1974. A power-sharing Executive between Protestants and Catholics was brought into existence by the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973, but it was destroyed by what was known as the Loyalist Workers’ Strike of 1974. During the strike, which paralysed power plants and sewerage works, barricades were erected across streets by members of the Ulster Defence Association and the UVF. These were manned by masked men armed with clubs, and in some cases, firearms. People could not get to their work and those who did so were openly intimidated. Throughout all this, British Army patrols in full uniform stood idly by alongside the barricades, turning a deaf ear to Nationalists’ suggestions that the illegal blockades should cease.
In the twenty years of violence that followed, a more politically minded generation of Republican leadership arose, and eventually entered into behind-the-scenes negotiations which led to the IRA ceasefire of 1994, and ultimately to the Good Friday Agreement. Along the way 1916 sometimes became an uncomfortable memory. How could Pearse and the others be honoured while their inheritors, the Provisional IRA, were condemned? The answer to this question for the Irish Government of the time resulted in a somewhat muted commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Rising. For some opponents of Irish Nationalism, the violence led to an effort to downgrade Pearse’s reputation in a manner reminiscent of the anti-Casement smear campaign. While admitting that there was no evidence for the theory apart from a line in one of his poems, critics began suggesting that he was homosexual!
1916- the Easter Rising Page 15