The Proclamation on the GPO steps

A republic is not founded by the men who hold the ground. It is founded by the man who is willing to stand in the open air and say the word aloud, knowing that the saying of it has already written the warrant for his own death. Everything before the saying is preparation. Everything after is consequence. The act itself takes about three minutes.

THE SCHOOLMASTER

Patrick Henry Pearse was born at 27 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, on the tenth of November 1879, in the rooms above his father's monumental stonecutting yard. James Pearse was a Birmingham Englishman who carved saints for Catholic churches; Margaret Brady was a Dublin woman of County Meath stock who carried the Irish of the midlands in her family memory. The son took both inheritances and pressed them into one tool. He was called to the bar in 1901, edited An Claidheamh Soluis for the Gaelic League from 1903, founded Scoil Éanna at Cullenswood and then at the Hermitage in Rathfarnham in 1908, a bilingual boys' school where Cuchulainn was painted in fresco above the assembly hall and the boys learned Greek, Irish, and the trades of their hands. He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1913 and was on its Supreme Council by 1914. In the graveside oration for the old Fenian O'Donovan Rossa in August 1915 he had already, in public, sounded the note of what was now to come: the fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace. The fortnight before Easter he wrote the Proclamation in his study at the Hermitage, candle and pen, the boys asleep down the corridor. On the Saturday before, he carried it down to Liberty Hall and revised it in committee with Connolly, MacDonagh, Clarke, MacDiarmada, Ceannt, and Plunkett. The seven signed it. Christopher Brady ran a thousand sheets off the press on Sunday night, foolscap, the type set hot under gaslight.

EASTER MONDAY MORNING

Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916. The sun was out over Dublin, weak spring light, the wind off the Liffey carrying the smell of stout from the Guinness barges. The city was on the way to the races at Fairyhouse. Trams ran up Sackville Street as far as Nelson's Pillar; the Pro-Cathedral was unlocking for the afternoon devotions. At a quarter past eleven the Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army formed up at Liberty Hall under Connolly's command and marched the short distance up Abbey Street to Sackville Street and the General Post Office. The post-office staff and the small detachment of unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police on duty inside the building were ordered out at bayonet point; the front windows were broken out with rifle butts; sandbags went up at the sills. By a quarter to noon the green-grey uniforms held the granite portico, and the green field with the gold harp, the flag of Pearse's own 1915 design, was being raised on the south flagstaff. The Union flag came down. Pearse stood on the steps under the columns with the small folded sheet in his coat pocket. He took it out. Three folds, foolscap, still smelling of the press.

A SECOND OF TIME IN DUBLIN

He understood, with the cold clarity of a man who has rehearsed a sentence for a year, what the next three minutes contained. The crowd was thin. A hundred and fifty Dubliners had stopped on the pavement, most on their way to Fairyhouse, most thinking the uniforms on the steps were a parade. He could read the Proclamation in Irish, the language he had spent his adult life trying to put back into the mouths of Irish children, or he could read it in English, the language the country would in fact read it in tomorrow morning when the Freeman's Journal and the Irish Times came off the press. He chose English, because the country it was addressed to was the country that actually existed, not the country he had been building in the classrooms at the Hermitage. He understood, also, the legal arithmetic of what was in his hand. He had signed the sheet third of the seven, under Clarke and MacDiarmada, above Connolly and MacDonagh and Ceannt and Plunkett. The Castle would have the names by the close of business. The court martial would follow the surrender as a stone follows a dropped hand. Kilmainham was ten days away at the outside. He had set this clock himself, in his own handwriting, in his own study, at his own desk, and he was now to wind it. The bell of the Pro-Cathedral began to sound the hour. He stepped forward to the top of the lower portico. He unfolded the sheet. He read, in the public voice the schoolmaster used for assembly, the opening line: Irishmen and Irishwomen, in the name of God and of the dead generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.

THE READING

Three minutes and twenty seconds, by the watch of James Connolly on the portico behind him. He read through the five paragraphs without hurry. The Republic guarantees religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens, and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the nation equally. The names of the seven were read last, in the order signed. The crowd on the pavement was mostly silent. A few cheers came from the corner of Henry Street where the journalist Stephen MacKenna stood and shouted up the Republic! A few hisses came from further down. Most of the Dubliners on the pavement looked at one another, looked at the broken windows of the GPO, looked at the green flag at the south end of the roof, and walked on towards the trams and the racecourse. They were two hundred yards down Sackville Street, by Connolly's later report, before what they had heard caught up with them. Pearse folded the sheet, returned it to his coat pocket, and went back inside the building. Tom Clarke shook his hand in the front hall.

THE WEEK

From the Monday to the Saturday the city burned. The Four Courts, the College of Surgeons, Boland's Mill, Jacob's biscuit factory, the South Dublin Union, the outposts at Mount Street Bridge: a ring of garrisons holding against the Dublin Fusiliers, the Sherwood Foresters, the Royal Irish Regiment, and, by Wednesday, the naval gunboat Helga shelling Liberty Hall and the line of Sackville Street from the river. The roof of the GPO took fire on Friday afternoon. The garrison evacuated under cover of dark through the back of Henry Place into the houses of Moore Street, burrowing wall to wall with picks. Connolly was on a stretcher, the ankle smashed by a sniper's round at Princes Street. About four hundred and eighty people died in the six days, the greater part of them civilians caught in the crossfire of streets they had grown up on. On the Saturday afternoon, the twenty-ninth of April, at half past two, Pearse walked out of a grocer's shop on Moore Street under a white flag and surrendered the Army of the Irish Republic formally to Brigadier-General Lowe at the top of Parnell Street. He handed over his sword, his pistol, his pouch, and the unread half-loaf of bread he had been carrying in his coat pocket since Friday.

KILMAINHAM

He was held at Kilmainham Gaol in a stone cell off the west corridor. The court martial sat at Richmond Barracks on the second of May; the charge was the waging of war against His Majesty the King; the verdict was death. He wrote four letters in the last hours: to his mother, to his brother Willie (who would be shot the following morning in the same yard), to his sister Margaret, and to the nation at large. We seem to have lost, he wrote to his mother, but we have not lost. To refuse to fight would have been to lose; to fight is to win. We have kept faith with the past, and handed on a tradition to the future. He was taken into the stonebreakers' yard at half past three in the morning of the third of May 1916 and shot by a firing party of the Sherwood Foresters. He was thirty-six years old. He was the first of the sixteen.

THE LINE HELD

The country that walked past the steps on the way to Fairyhouse on Easter Monday was not the country that came out for the funerals of the sixteen, nor the country that voted Sinn Féin into seventy-three of one hundred and five Irish seats in the general election of December 1918, nor the country that fought the Tan War from 1919 to 1921, nor the country that ratified the Treaty in January 1922 and held its first Dáil under the tricolour in Leinster House. The Proclamation read on the GPO steps in three minutes and twenty seconds did the slow work of the next six years on its own clock. A republic is not founded by the men who hold the ground; it is founded by the man willing to stand in the open and say the word aloud. The original printed sheet, foolscap, the ink of the seven names still legible, is in the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street. At noon on Easter Monday in the centenary year of 2016, the Taoiseach Enda Kenny stood on the same granite portico under the same columns and read the same five paragraphs in the same public voice, one hundred years to the minute, to a crowd that this time understood, on the second word, what they were hearing.