Joseph Mary Plunkett(1887–1916)

Joseph Mary Plunkett was born at 26 Upper Fitzwilliam Street in Georgian Dublin on the twenty-first of November 1887, second son of Count George Noble Plunkett (Papal Count, Director of the National Museum of Ireland, MP for Roscommon North 1917 to 1922) and Mary Josephine Cranny of a wealthy Dublin business family. He was raised at the family townhouse and at the Plunkett country seat at Larkfield, Kimmage, on the southern outskirts of Dublin, was educated at the Catholic University School at Leeson Street and at Belvedere College, took the BA at the National University in 1908, and through his early twenties travelled in Algeria, Italy and Sicily for the chronic tuberculosis from which he suffered all his life.

He published his first volume of verse The Circle and the Sword in 1911 in his twenty-fourth year, edited from 1912 the Irish Review (the central Irish-cultural-revival monthly of the period, with contributors Pearse, MacDonagh, AE Russell, James Stephens), and through the literary-revival years built the close working friendships with Thomas MacDonagh and Patrick Pearse (the three of them taught the boys of Pearse's St Enda's School in Rathfarnham and produced the school's annual theatricals) that brought him into the inner circle of the Easter Rising leadership. He took up the Irish Volunteers on its founding in November 1913, served on its provisional committee, and after the September 1914 Volunteers split took the directorship of military operations of the breakaway Irish Volunteer minority under Eoin MacNeill.

He was sworn into the IRB in 1915, was elected to its seven-man Military Council in early 1916 as Director of Military Operations, and through the months January to April 1916 drafted at the Plunkett family house at Larkfield, Kimmage (the Kimmage Garrison where the British-Irish returned-emigrant Volunteers were billeted and trained) the detailed military plan of the Easter Rising: the seizure of the General Post Office and the linked perimeter positions across central Dublin, the lines of communication, the supply, the engagements rules. He travelled to Berlin in April 1915 on behalf of the IRB to negotiate with the German government the supply of arms that became the Aud expedition of April 1916 (the consignment intercepted by the Royal Navy off the Kerry coast on the twenty-second of April 1916).

He fought through Easter Week from the General Post Office garrison at the side of Pearse and Connolly, signed the Proclamation as Director of Military Operations, was carried out of the GPO under the surrender weak from the throat-surgery he had had ten days before the Rising, and was tried by field general court martial at Richmond Barracks on the second of May 1916. On the evening of the third of May he was given permission to marry his fiancée Grace Gifford (the cartoonist and political artist) in the prison chapel at Kilmainham Gaol; they were married at eleven thirty on the night of the third of May with two armed warders as witnesses, were given a ten-minute interview later that night, and Plunkett was taken out for execution by firing squad in the prison yard at dawn on the morning of the fourth of May 1916 in his twenty-ninth year. He is buried in the quicklime grave at Arbour Hill Cemetery with the other executed leaders. The marriage in the chapel and the morning at the wall are at the centre of the popular memory of the Rising. The Plunkett name in modern Irish revolutionary history carries the weight of the military plan, the Proclamation signature and the chapel marriage.