The Proclamation on the GPO steps

It is six minutes to noon on Easter Monday, the twenty-fourth of April 1916, on the lower portico of the General Post Office in Sackville Street, central Dublin, in light spring sun. He is thirty-six years old. He is Patrick Henry Pearse, born at 27 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, on the tenth of November 1879, son of James Pearse the stone-cutter and Margaret Brady, called to the Irish bar in 1901, founder of St Enda's School in 1908, member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood since 1913, Commandant-General of the Army of the Irish Republic by the formal commission signed by his fellow IRB Supreme Council members yesterday evening at Liberty Hall.

On the granite steps below him, in the Volunteer uniform of mottled green-grey, are about a hundred and fifty men of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army who, in the past forty minutes, have taken the GPO under arms from the post-office staff and the detachment of unarmed Dublin Metropolitan Police constables. The flag of the Irish Republic (a green field with a gold harp, by Pearse's own design of 1915) is being raised on the flagstaff at the south end of the roof. The British Empire flag has come down.

He has, in his hand, the small printed copy of the Proclamation, run off the previous evening on the Liberty Hall press by the printer Christopher Brady on a thousand sheets of foolscap. The text is signed by the seven signatories in their own hands. He has folded the sheet in three to fit his coat pocket.

He thinks: the crowd on the street will not understand what they are hearing. The crowd is on the way to the races at Fairyhouse. The crowd thinks the men in uniform on the steps are the army on a parade.

He thinks: I will read the Proclamation in English because the English of the Proclamation is the form the country will read it in. The English Irish-language tradition is that the great public political documents are in the spoken English of the country, since the spoken Irish of the country is in retreat.

He thinks: I have, in signing the Proclamation, signed my own indictment for high treason. The Castle has the names of the signatories within the hour. The Castle will, in the next ten days, have me on the wall of Kilmainham.

He thinks: the principal political fact of this morning is that the Republic exists, in the formal sense, from the moment I read the line. The country has, by the political tradition of the previous hundred and twenty years, been arguing this point. The country will, in the next century, work out what the line means. The line is read this morning.

He steps to the top of the portico at noon precisely. The cathedral bell of the Pro-Cathedral is sounding. The crowd of about a hundred and fifty Dubliners stops on the pavement. He unfolds the printed sheet. He reads, in his public voice (the voice of the schoolmaster), the opening sentence: 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 takes three minutes and twenty seconds, by the watch of James Connolly who is on the portico behind him. The crowd on the street is, by the witness of the reporters of the Freeman's Journal the next morning, mostly silent. A few cheers. A few hisses. A man called Stephen MacKenna (a journalist of Pearse's acquaintance) is on the corner of Henry Street and shouts up the Republic! Most of the people in the street go on to the races. They are, by Connolly's later report to the Volunteer council, two hundred yards from the GPO before the meaning of what they have just heard catches up with them.

The Rising lasted six days, from Easter Monday to Saturday the twenty-ninth of April. The GPO was the central garrison; the Four Courts, the College of Surgeons, Boland's Mill, the South Dublin Union were the others. The fighting against British army and Royal Irish Constabulary forces resulted in about four hundred and eighty deaths (mostly civilian), the systematic destruction by British naval-artillery fire of much of central Sackville Street, and the surrender of the GPO garrison on the afternoon of Saturday the twenty-ninth. Pearse surrendered the army formally to Brigadier-General Lowe on Moore Street at half past two in the afternoon. He was held at Kilmainham, court-martialled at Richmond Barracks on the second of May, sentenced to death, and shot at three thirty in the morning of the third of May 1916, the first of the sixteen executed at Kilmainham. He was thirty-six years old. The Proclamation he read on the GPO steps is, in its 1916 original-printed form, in the National Library of Ireland; the tradition of the Irish state is that copies are read at every official commemoration of the Rising. The GPO building survived the bombardment, was rebuilt in 1929, and is, in its current form, both an operational post office and a permanent museum (GPO Witness History) of the Rising. The steps where Pearse read the Proclamation are, in the centenary year of 2016, the spot from which the Taoiseach Enda Kenny reread the Proclamation in full at noon on Easter Monday, one hundred years to the minute.