Tom Clarke(1858–1916)

Thomas James Clarke was born at Hurst Castle on the Solent coast of Hampshire on the eleventh of March 1858, son of James Clarke, a sergeant of the Royal Artillery from Carrickfergus in County Antrim, and Mary Palmer of Clogheen in County Tipperary. The family followed the father's army postings through his boyhood in South Africa, and on the father's discharge in 1865 settled at Dungannon in County Tyrone, where the boy was raised and schooled. He took the IRB pledge of Fenian membership in his eighteenth year, emigrated to New York in 1880, and joined Clan na Gael under the New York leader John Devoy.

He sailed for England in April 1883 under the assumed name Henry Hammond Wilson as part of the Clan na Gael dynamite campaign of 1881 to 1885, was arrested at Birmingham in April 1883 with two confederates, was convicted at the Old Bailey of treason-felony on the fourteenth of June 1883 and sentenced to penal servitude for life. He served fifteen and a half years in Chatham, Portland and Portsmouth convict prisons in the harshest conditions of the late-Victorian penal system, refused throughout that period to seek a remission of sentence, and was released under amnesty in September 1898 in his fortieth year. The fifteen and a half years made him the senior surviving Fenian prisoner of the period and gave him the moral standing that his later leadership of the IRB rested on.

He returned to New York, married Kathleen Daly of the Limerick Daly Fenian family in 1901, took American citizenship in 1905, returned to Dublin in 1907 in his forty-ninth year, and opened a small tobacconist's shop at 75A Parnell Street in central Dublin which became the operational headquarters of the rebuilt Irish Republican Brotherhood for the next nine years. He was elected to the IRB Supreme Council in 1908, became Treasurer in 1911, and through the long Edwardian and pre-war years rebuilt the IRB into the disciplined revolutionary organisation that took control of the leadership of the Irish Volunteers from 1913 onward. The IRB Military Council that planned the Rising was substantially his creation; Pearse, Mac Diarmada, Plunkett, Ceannt, Connolly and MacDonagh were the six signatories the Council reached its decisions through, and Clarke was the seventh and senior.

He stood with Pearse, Connolly and the other signatories on the steps of the General Post Office in Sackville Street on Easter Monday the twenty-fourth of April 1916 as the Proclamation of the Irish Republic was read. As the oldest of the seven and the senior surviving Fenian, he was, by mutual agreement of the Military Council, named the first signatory of the document. He fought through the six days of Easter Week from the GPO garrison, signed the surrender with Pearse on the twenty-ninth of April, was tried by field general court martial on the second of May, was executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol on the morning of the third of May 1916 in his fifty-ninth year, and is buried in the quicklime grave at Arbour Hill Cemetery. His Parnell Street tobacconist's shop is marked by a plaque; his name appears first on the Proclamation reproduced on every Irish state document of the Republic. The Clarke name in modern Irish revolutionary history carries the weight of the fifteen and a half years and the first signature.