Patrick Pearse

Patrick Pearse “The fools, the fools! They have left us Fenian dead.” Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa was a founder-member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). He spent a number of periods in prison, and was sentenced to 20 years in 1865. During that time he was elected as a Member of Parliament for Tipperary, even though as a convicted felon he would have been disbarred from taking his seat. Eventually, in 1871, O’Donovan Rossa was offered early release on the condition that he left the country. He travelled to New York, but remained an active Fenian in exile, orchestrating a bombing campaign in Britain and writing a series of popular accounts of his time in prison. When O’Donovan Rossa died in 1915, IRB leaders were quick to see the propaganda potential in bringing him home. Thomas Clarke sent work to New York that the body should come home immediately. With plans for a rising already underway, the Volunteers had been keeping a low profile to avoid arrests. Yet for the old Fenian’s funeral, Clarke and his comrades decided that the occasion should be spectacular, with large numbers of Volunteers present and as much fiery oratory as could be mustered. To the end, Clarke chose Patrick Pearse, a senior member of the Volunteers and the IRB, to give the oration. Pearse had impressed Clarke two years earlier with his address at Tone commemoration in Bodenstown. Then he had proclaimed to the Volunteers that they stood at the ‘holiest place in Ireland; holier to us even than the place where Patrick sleeps in Down. Patrick brought us life, but this man died for us.’ Now at O’Donovan Rossa’s graveside in Glasnevin, Pearse surpassed himself. The funeral attracted a great deal of press coverage, and settled the question of the rival claims on Rossa – and by extension the Fenians more generally – firmly with Pearse and his comrades. As the first major public event to be staged by the Volunteers it was a remarkable success. Pearse’s address – described as a ‘masterpiece of patriotic rhetoric’ – was widely noted and reprinted. It sounded, as one contemporary later put it, the Reveille of Easter; the next notable oration by Pearse would be given in 1916 from the steps of the GPO as commandant-general and president of the Provisional Republic. “It has seemed right, before we turn away from this place in which we have hid the mortal remains of O’Donovan Rossa, that one among us should. In the name of all, speak the praise of the valiant man, and endeavour to formulate the thought and the hope that are in us as we stand around his grave. And if there is anything that makes it fitting that I, rather than some other, I rather than one of the grey-haired men who were young with him and shared in his labour and in his suffering, should speak here, it is perhaps that I may be taken as speaking on behalf of a new generation that has been rebaptized in the Fenian faith, and that has accepted the responsibility of carrying out the Fenian programme. I propose to you then that, here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows; that, here by the grave of this unconquered and unconquerable man, we ask of God, each one for himself, such unshakeable purpose such high and gallant courage, such unbreakable strength of soul as belonged to O’Donovan Rossa

“Deliberately here we avow ourselves, as he avowed himself in the dock, Irishmen of one allegiance only. We of the Irish Volunteers, and you others who are associated with us in today’s task and duty, are bound together and must stand together henceforth in brotherly union for the achievement of the freedom of Ireland. And we know only one definition of freedom, Let no man blaspheme the cause that the dead generations of Ireland served by giving it any other name and definition than their name and their definition.”