Tom Clarke's signature

Some republics are declared by the men who expect to govern them. Others are declared by men who know they will be dead inside a fortnight, and who sign anyway, because a signature placed in the right order at the right hour outlives the hand that made it. The first kind of declaration founds an administration. The second kind founds a memory, and a memory, in Ireland, has always done the harder work.

THE OLD FENIAN

Thomas James Clarke was born in the Royal Magazine Fort at Hyde Park on the eleventh of March 1858, a British Army sergeant's son moved between postings in South Africa and Ireland before the family settled at Dungannon in County Tyrone. He took the oath of the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1880. In 1883 a London court sent him to penal servitude for life for his part in the Fenian dynamite campaign. He served fifteen years in Pentonville and Portland, much of it in conditions designed to break a man's reason, and came out in 1898 with his reason intact and his politics unrevised. He went to America, married Kathleen Daly of the Limerick Dalys, and in 1907 came home to Dublin to open a tobacconist's at 75A Parnell Street. The shop sold cigarettes and the Irish Freedom paper across the same counter. Behind it, for nine years, he rebuilt a brotherhood that the Castle had presumed buried. By April of 1916 he was Treasurer of the IRB Supreme Council and, by the careful judgement of every later historian, the man in whose patience the Rising had been incubated.

EASTER SUNDAY, LIBERTY HALL

Easter Sunday, the twenty-third of April, was a day of disasters held off by hours. Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order in that morning's Sunday Independent had told the Volunteers across the country to stand down. The arms expected from the Aud lay at the bottom of Queenstown harbour. The Provisional Government sat in the second-floor council room at Liberty Hall on Beresford Place, on the north quay of the Liffey, and decided, against the day's evidence, to rise on the Monday at noon. They settled the final wording of the Proclamation through the afternoon. By evening Christopher Brady, the Citizen Army printer, was setting six paragraphs of Garamond on a foolscap sheet on the third floor, the gas in its mantle giving off the yellow light by which men signed for things they would not live to see contested.

THE ORDER OF SIGNATORIES

Twenty past nine. Clarke is fifty-eight years old in three weeks and looks older, the prison years sitting behind his eyes the way weather sits in a stone wall. On the desk in front of him is the proof. Six paragraphs, the formal address Irishmen and Irishwomen at the head, the seven names to be set out at the foot in the old republican order, the senior signatory at the top-left. The Supreme Council has voted on the order in private the day before. The order they have given him is: Thomas J. Clarke, then Mac Diarmada, then MacDonagh, then Pearse, then Ceannt, then Connolly, then Plunkett. Pearse will read it from the steps of the General Post Office at noon tomorrow and the public mind will, naturally and forever, attach the document to Pearse's voice. The signature at the top-left is for the other audience, the one that reads documents after the men who signed them are in the ground.

He weighs the sheet in his hand. The garrison at the Castle and the Royal Barracks musters six to seven thousand. MacNeill's order has cut tomorrow's field to perhaps twelve hundred men. The numerical balance is six to one and worsening by the hour, and he is enough of a soldier of the long war to know what six to one means on a Dublin street where the British can bring artillery up the river. The Rising will not hold a week. The Proclamation he is about to sign is the political document of a defeated rising, and that, precisely, is its function. A successful rising would have needed a constitution. A defeated rising needs a text. Wolfe Tone gave them one in 1798. Robert Emmet gave them one from the dock in 1803. Now it is his turn, and his name will go in the place where Tone's would have gone, because the Supreme Council, which is the only authority he has ever recognised, has voted that it should. The thought is not pride. It is bookkeeping. Fifteen years in Portland, nine years behind the Parnell Street counter, every oath administered in back rooms from Tralee to Belfast, all of it accounted for in a single line of copperplate above six other names. He picks up the pen.

THE SIGNATURE

He signs Thomas J. Clarke across the top of the list. The hand is the flowing copperplate of a man trained at Saint Patrick's National School in Dungannon in the 1860s, a hand that has signed itself onto British prison records and American naturalisation papers and the lease of a Parnell Street shopfront, and that now signs itself onto the founding document of an Irish Republic which does not, at the moment of signature, exist. Mac Diarmada signs after him, the limp from his polio making the walk to the desk slow. MacDonagh, Pearse, Ceannt, Connolly carried in on a chair on account of his ankle, Plunkett pale from the glandular tuberculosis that is killing him faster than the British will. Brady's press takes the stereotype. The first impression, a thousand sheets, runs through the small hours. By eight on Monday morning the bundle is in Pearse's hands at the GPO. At noon Pearse reads it from the steps in O'Connell Street, and a country that has not yet been told it is at war is, by the time he finishes, a republic in declaration.

KILMAINHAM

He was at the GPO from Monday through to the surrender on the Saturday. They marched him with the others to Richmond Barracks, court-martialled him on the second of May, and shot him in the stonebreakers' yard at Kilmainham at half past three on the morning of the third, the first of the sixteen. Kathleen, brought to him in the cell the night before, would record what he said to her in her memoir. I and my fellow signatories believe we have struck the first successful blow for freedom, he told her, and so sure as we are going out this morning, so sure will freedom come as a direct result of our action. She was three months pregnant and lost the child within the week. The British, having decided the affair was over, kept shooting men in the yard at Kilmainham at first light for nine more mornings, and by the ninth morning had managed, with a thoroughness that would have impressed Clarke himself, to convert a city's exasperation into a country's grief.

THE LONG VERDICT

Within five years the political equation he had calculated at the Liberty Hall desk had resolved itself. The 1918 general election returned Sinn Féin in seventy-three of the one hundred and five Irish seats. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in December 1921. Kathleen Clarke sat in the First Dáil, in the Free State Senate, and in 1939 was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, the first woman to hold that office. The Proclamation hangs now in the National Museum at Collins Barracks, the original first-impression sheet brown at the edges, the seven signatures still legible, his still at the top. The tobacconist's at 75A Parnell Street, the shop that had been the cover for nine years of patient work, carries a bronze plaque set there by Dublin Corporation in 1966.

Some republics are declared by the men who will govern them. This one was declared by a man who had spent fifteen years in an English prison for refusing to stop, who had spent nine more years behind a Dublin counter making sure others would not stop either, and who placed his name in the senior position because the brotherhood he had rebuilt had voted that it belonged there. The vote was a piece of internal bookkeeping. The signature was a piece of paper. The Republic, when it came, came in their order. On the proof-sheet under glass at Collins Barracks, the ink of Thomas J. Clarke still sits at the top-left, in the place the Supreme Council voted for it on the twenty-second of April, where it has been for a hundred and ten years.