Tied to a chair at Kilmainham

Some men are made into the founding image of a nation by the speech they give from the dock. Others are made into it by an act of administrative tidiness on the part of the government that means to be rid of them. The British command at Dublin in May 1916 believed it was concluding a small surgical operation. It was, instead, setting in stone the face of the republic it had spent four hundred years refusing to recognise.

THE COWGATE TO THE GPO

James Connolly was born on the fifth of June 1868 at 107 Cowgate, Edinburgh, to John Connolly of Monaghan, manure-cart driver for the corporation, and Mary McGinn of Carrickmacross. The Cowgate in those years was the Irish slum of the Scottish capital, a single street pressed under the bridges, where the tenements stank of the byre and the children left school at eleven for the bottling works or the printer's shop. He went into the British Army at fourteen on a false age, served seven years in Ireland with the King's Liverpool Regiment, and learned in barracks the Dublin he would later organise. He came out a self-taught man, reading Marx by lamplight, and by the turn of the century he had founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party, lectured in tenement halls from Cork to Belfast, and crossed twice to America to organise the longshoremen of New York. He came back in 1910 to a city where one in three families lived in a single room. He stood with Larkin through the Lockout of 1913, drilled the Irish Citizen Army in the yard of Liberty Hall to defend the strikers from the police, and on Easter Monday 1916 marched at the head of that army into the General Post Office on Sackville Street. He signed the Proclamation third of seven. He was the only signatory whose interest in an Irish Republic was, before anything else, an interest in the conditions of the Dublin working class.

THE WOUND IN THE GPO

On the twenty-seventh of April, a ricochet inside the GPO entered the front of his right ankle and took the bone apart. He went on commanding from a camp bed wheeled into the public office, dictating dispatches, smoking, holding the garrison together by force of personality through three more days of shellfire from the gunboat Helga on the Liffey. On the twenty-ninth, with the roof on fire and the wounded screaming, the order to surrender went out under Pearse's signature and his. He was carried out on a stretcher into Moore Street and from there, by lorry, to the Castle hospital and then across the river to the Royal Hospital Kilmainham, where the British Army had had him under medical guard for nine days. The ankle had gone gangrenous. The shoulder and the left arm were also open wounds. The court martial sat at his bedside. The verdict was death by shooting. The sentence was confirmed by General Maxwell on the eleventh of May.

THE UPPER ROOM

It is twenty past two on the morning of the twelfth of May, in the upper room of the Royal Hospital. Father Aloysius, a Capuchin from Church Street, kneels by the bed. An English military doctor stands at the foot. Lillie his wife has been up and gone again, sent away by the duty officer who came at midnight to tell him the firing-party would form at half past two. Their daughter Nora is with her in the cab back to the North Circular Road. The priest has read the Penitential Psalms and heard his confession. The priest has agreed to come down with him to the yard.

The duty officer comes up the stair with two stretcher-bearers and a wooden chair from the operating theatre. He is a Lieutenant of the Sherwood Foresters, called to the duty by drawing-of-lots, and he has not slept in two nights. He explains, awkwardly, that Mr Connolly will not be able to stand at the post, and that the chair has been brought so the firing-party may be done in the proper way without prolonging the matter. He apologises. He waits for an answer.

Connolly considers the chair. He was a soldier of the British Army from 1882 to 1889; he knows how a firing-party stands, how a condemned man stands at the post, the dressing of the line, the count. He knows that the ankle will not take the weight, that the shoulder will not hold him upright against a rope at the post, that the chair is, in the technical sense, the right answer. He knows also what the country will read in it in the morning. Pearse stood. MacDonagh stood. Plunkett stood with the rosary in his hand two hours after his wedding to Grace Gifford in the chapel. The country saw all of them stand. Connolly will be the one tied to a chair, the one who could not stand to be shot, and there is a kind of man in Ireland who will not forgive that. He looks at the priest. That, he thinks, is no concern of mine. He tells the officer the chair will do.

THE STONEBREAKERS' YARD

He is laid on the stretcher and carried down the stair, through the courtyard of the hospital, across to the side gate of Kilmainham Gaol, along the long corridor with the gaslights still on, and into the stonebreakers' yard. The dawn is not yet up. The chair has been placed against the wall opposite the firing-party of twelve. He is lifted from the stretcher 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 and steps back. The duty officer reads the warrant in a level voice. He asks, by the form of the duty, if the prisoner wishes to make a final declaration. Connolly answers, by Father Aloysius's deposition of the next month, I will pray for all brave men who do their duty according to their lights. The officer nods. The firing-party are told to dress their pieces. The order is given on the count of three. The execution is carried out at six minutes past three in the morning. He is the last of the sixteen.

THE CAB ON THE NORTH CIRCULAR ROAD

Lillie Connolly heard the volley from the cab on the North Circular Road. She had asked the driver to stop. She did not weep until the cab was moving again. She would not be told for seven years where the body had been taken; the grave at Arbour Hill, the mass pit of quicklime where the sixteen lay together, was not disclosed to the widows until 1923, by the government of the Free State. Nora, beside her in the cab, would write the story down forty years later for the Irish Press and would say only that her mother, who had buried two children already, said in the cab, He was a good man, Nora. He was a good husband.

THE COMMONS AND THE COUNTRY

In Westminster on the eleventh, John Dillon of the Irish Parliamentary Party rose in the Commons and told the government, in a voice that broke twice, that they were letting loose a river of blood between two races who, after three hundred years of hatred and strife, we had nearly succeeded in bringing together. The Prime Minister, Asquith, listened. The executions were halted the next day, but Connolly's was already done; the warrant had been signed the night before. Maxwell had been warned and had answered that the law must take its course. By the end of the week the recruiting sergeants in Dublin found the streets had gone cold against them. By the end of the year the Irish Parliamentary Party, the constitutional party of Parnell and Redmond, was a dead letter. The country had read the chair.

THE WALL THAT WILL NOT TAKE THE PAINT

The bodies were buried in quicklime at Arbour Hill and the grave is now a national monument with the Proclamation cut into the stone in Irish and English. 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 wooden surgical chair was broken up and burnt in the gaol furnace within a week of the execution; a replica chair stands on the spot today, with a small black cross on the flagstones. The Republic Connolly had set his name to in the Proclamation came in a form he would have recognised on the sixth of December 1922, and in another form on the eighteenth of April 1949. The Irish Citizen Army he founded survives in name in the trade-union halls of Dublin. The wall behind the chair has been painted, since the 1960s, on a regular cycle by the Office of Public Works to cover the marks; the marks have always come back through the next coat. Visitors of a certain political history leave a lily at the foot of the chair on the twelfth of May, and sometimes a folded paper with the line that was scratched in the plaster of a cell wall in the gaol by another prisoner that week: We die that the Republic may live.

Some founding images of a state are chosen by the state. The republic of Ireland did not choose this one. It was given to it, on the morning of the twelfth of May 1916, by a Lieutenant of the Sherwood Foresters who could not have known what he was doing when he carried a wooden chair up the stair of the Royal Hospital, and by the man in the bed who looked at the chair and understood exactly what would be made of it, and answered that it was no concern of his. The marks on the wall have not, in a hundred and ten years, taken the paint.