Connolly · 1916
Tied to a chair at Kilmainham
On the morning of the twelfth of May 1916, James Connolly, signatory of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, founder of the Irish Citizen Army, was carried on a stretcher from his bed at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where he had been treated for the wounds he had taken at the General Post Office during the Easter Rising, into the stonebreakers' yard at Kilmainham Gaol next door, was tied to a chair because his shattered ankle could not bear his weight, and was shot by firing party of the British Army at six minutes past three in the morning. He was the last of the sixteen leaders of the Rising to be executed at the gaol over the previous fourteen days. He was forty-seven years old. Born in the Cowgate of Edinburgh to Monaghan-emigrant parents, he had been a soldier of the King in his youth, an autodidact trade-unionist, founder of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, organiser of the Dublin Lockout of 1913, and the only one of the seven Proclamation signatories whose interest in an Irish Republic was, before anything else, an interest in the conditions of the Dublin working class. The manner of his execution, more than any other single act of the British government in 1916, turned Irish public opinion against the union and toward the republic he had not lived to see.
It is twenty past two on the morning of the twelfth of May 1916, in the upper room of the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, on the bed where the British Army has had him under medical guard for nine days, with a Capuchin priest, Father Aloysius, kneeling on the floor beside the bed and an English military doctor at the foot. He is forty-seven years old. He is James Connolly, born at 107 Cowgate, Edinburgh, on the fifth of June 1868, to John Connolly of Monaghan, manure-cart driver, and Mary Connolly of Carrickmacross. He has, at the moment, three open wounds: in the right ankle, where a ricochet through the front of the GPO took the bone apart on the twenty-seventh of April; in the left shoulder; and in the left arm. He has gangrene rising in the ankle. His wife Lillie has just left the bedside on the orders of the duty officer, who has come up to tell him at midnight that the firing party will form up at half past two.
He has had Father Aloysius read him the Penitential Psalms. He has had the priest hear his confession. He has, by the priest's later memoir, asked the priest to come with him to the yard at the gaol next door, and the priest has agreed.
The duty officer comes up the stair at twenty past two with two stretcher-bearers and a wooden chair from the operating theatre. He explains, awkwardly, that Mr Connolly will not be able to stand at the post and that the chair has been brought so that the firing-party may be done in the proper way without prolonging the matter. He apologises. He is, by his own deposition years later, a Lieutenant of the Sherwood Foresters who had been called to the duty by drawing-of-lots and who, by his own account, had not slept for two nights.
Connolly thinks: I was a soldier of the British Army from 1882 to 1889. I know how a firing-party stands. I know how a man stands at the post.
Connolly thinks: I cannot stand. The ankle will not take the weight. The chair is the right answer.
Connolly thinks: the chair is, however, the answer that the country will see in the morning. The country will see a man who could not stand to be shot.
Connolly thinks: Pearse stood. MacDonagh stood. Plunkett stood, with his rosary in his hand, two hours after his wedding. The country saw all of them stand.
Connolly thinks: Connolly will be the one who could not stand. Connolly will be the one tied to a chair. The country will not forgive that.
Connolly thinks: that is no concern of mine.
He is laid on the stretcher. He is taken down the stair, through the courtyard of the hospital, across to the side gate of Kilmainham Gaol next door, into the gaol, along the long corridor, into the stonebreakers' yard. The dawn is not yet up. The gaslights are on. The chair has been placed at the wall opposite the firing-party of twelve. He is lifted from the stretcher to the chair. The duty officer gives the bearers the rope to tie him to the chair. The rope is passed twice around his chest and once around his right arm because the gangrene has weakened him and he cannot now hold himself upright on the seat.
Father Aloysius gives him absolution. The duty officer reads the warrant in a level voice. The firing-party are told to dress their pieces. Connolly is asked, by the form of the duty, if he wishes to make a final declaration. He says, by Father Aloysius's deposition: I will pray for all brave men who do their duty according to their lights. The duty officer nods. The duty officer gives the order. The firing-party fire on the count of three. The execution is carried out at six minutes past three in the morning.
James Connolly's body was buried with the bodies of the other fifteen executed leaders of the Rising in a mass grave in quicklime at Arbour Hill Detention Barracks. His widow Lillie was not informed of the location until 1923. The grave is now a national monument. The Royal Hospital Kilmainham is now the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Kilmainham Gaol is a national museum and the stonebreakers' yard is the most-visited room in it. The chair he was tied to was a wooden surgical chair from the Royal Hospital and was, by the tradition, broken up shortly after the execution and burnt in the gaol's furnace. A replica chair is on the spot in the yard today. The wall behind it has, since the 1960s, been painted regularly to cover the bullet-marks from the day; the bullet-marks have always come back through the next coat. The custom of visitors of certain political histories is to leave a lily or a folded note at the foot of the chair on the twelfth of May. The note typically contains the line that was carved into the wall of the cell where he had been held, by another prisoner, before he was moved to the hospital. We die that the Republic may live. Whether Connolly himself wrote the line is uncertain; tradition holds that he did. The Republic he had set his name to in the Proclamation of the GPO came in the form he would have recognised on the sixth of December 1922, twenty-seven years before the manner of his death had become, in the popular memory, the founding image of the State.