Joseph Mary Plunkett's wedding at Kilmainham

Some marriages are sacraments of beginning. A very few are sacraments of sealing, performed in the last room before the last room, where the vow is not a contract with the future but a refusal to let the present be the end of the sentence. They are the rarest kind, and they belong, by the logic of their making, to those who already know the hour.

THE HOUSE OF PLUNKETT

The Plunketts came into Ireland with the Norman tide and stayed. From Beaulieu and Killeen and Dunsany they furnished the Pale with barons, with abbots, with a martyred archbishop in Oliver Plunkett of Armagh, hanged at Tyburn in 1681 and canonised in 1975. By the late nineteenth century the line had thinned into the Dublin Catholic gentry: a townhouse on Upper Fitzwilliam Street, a country place at Kilternan, a papal countship granted to George Noble Plunkett in 1884 for services to the Holy See. Into this house, on the twenty-first of November 1887, was born Joseph Mary, the third child and second son, sickly from the cradle, schooled at the Jesuits' Belvedere and at Stonyhurst in Lancashire, by his early twenties a poet of the mystic strain, by his middle twenties an editor of the Irish Review, by twenty-six a member of the Supreme Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The glandular tuberculosis that had haunted him from boyhood was, by the winter of 1915, in his throat. The surgeons at the Mater cut a tracheotomy in October. His Stonyhurst physician in January 1916 gave him six months at the outside. He had, by that calendar, until July to bring a republic out of the ground.

EASTER

The rising went up on Easter Monday and came down on the Saturday following. Plunkett, director of military operations on paper, had drafted the plan of the city from a sickbed at the Metropole Hotel; he came into the General Post Office on the Monday afternoon leaning on Michael Collins's arm, a sword-stick in his hand, his throat bound. For five days he kept his feet. On the Saturday, the twenty-ninth of April, he walked out under the white flag with Pearse and Connolly. At Richmond Barracks on the second of May he was court-martialled in twenty minutes; he made no defence; the finding was death by shooting; the confirmation came down from Brigadier-General Maxwell that afternoon. He was moved to Kilmainham in the evening of the third of May. Three of his comrades, Pearse, MacDonagh, and Thomas Clarke, had been shot in the stonebreakers' yard at dawn. He had been engaged for fifteen months to Grace Evelyn Gifford, a Dublin Protestant cartoonist of Rathmines, second of the three Gifford sisters who would each marry into the Rising. They had set the wedding for Easter Sunday. She had been received into the Catholic Church on the seventh of April for the purpose. The Rising had postponed the wedding by a week. Now, at five o'clock on the third of May, Father Eugene McCarthy of the Capuchins on Church Street, hearing the prisoner's confession, was asked the question that any priest in the city would have been asked by such a man on such a night, and went out across the river to put it to the General commanding.

THE CHAPEL AT KILMAINHAM

The chapel is at the south end of the gaol, a whitewashed rectangle with a single altar and a row of pews. By half past eleven on the night of the third of May the room held five living souls: the celebrant in his brown habit, the bride in green wool with a small cross at her throat and her hair down, the bridegroom in the green-grey tunic of the Volunteers with a surgical dressing under his collar, a young second lieutenant of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers at the door, and a soldier with a fixed bayonet at the bridegroom's elbow. Candles, because the gas had been turned off in the chapel for the night. The ring had been bought at six o'clock that evening at Stoker's of Grafton Street, on the credit of Countess Plunkett's account; Father Eugene had blessed it in the sacristy five minutes before. There was no organ, no music, no flowers, no family. There was the form of the rite and there were the two voices saying the words.

NINE MINUTES

He had thought, on the walk from his cell along the upper landing and down the iron stair to the chapel, of the line he had written the year before, I see his blood upon the rose, and of how a man who had given a sentence like that to the world had no business being afraid of the small remaining quantity of his own. He had thought, too, of the schedule: four men every twenty-four hours since the third, himself in the second tranche of the second round, three thirty in the morning by the standing order. Then the door of the chapel opened and Grace was there in the green dress and the thinking stopped, because the question that had been running underneath the thinking for fifteen months, whether she would in the end have been wiser to have married a man with a future, was answered now by her presence in this room on this night, and the answer was the answer he had hoped for and not dared to assume. Father Eugene read the form. They said the words. He put the ring on her hand. The blessing of the rite. Nine minutes by the second lieutenant's pocket watch. The young officer, by Father Eugene's later memoir, did not move from the door. When it was done the priest said, in a level voice, that the army had granted the bride ten minutes in the chapel after the ceremony and that he, the priest, would sit in the entrance. The lieutenant looked at his watch and nodded. They sat on the bench inside the rail and held hands and did not weep. He gave her a notebook of his poems. He spoke two of them aloud, neither yet in print. By her own letter to her sister Muriel three weeks later, we did not find that we had very much to say. The ten minutes ended. The lieutenant came forward and said, I am sorry, Mrs Plunkett. She was put into a side-car at the gate and driven home to Rathmines at twenty past midnight.

THE CELL

At two in the morning Father Eugene, who had not slept, prevailed on the duty officer to bring her back. The cell was on the upper landing of the West Wing, eight feet by twelve, a plank bed and a stool and a high barred window. The standing order was that the door remain open and two soldiers stand inside the doorway for the duration of the visit. The clock at the gate-house was struck at two. They held hands across the stool. By her account the soldiers counted out the minutes aloud, one of them in a Nottingham accent, the other an Irishman from Tipperary who would not look at either of them. The ten minutes were the longest and the shortest she would know. She did not afterwards record what was said and it is not, by the dignity of the thing, the business of any later century to invent it. At ten past two the senior of the two soldiers said time, and she rose, and went out of the cell, and was taken down the iron stair and out at the gate, and did not see him again.

THE STONEBREAKERS' YARD

He was led out of the cell at twenty past three in the morning of the fourth of May 1916. The yard at the rear of the gaol is a rectangle of granite cobbles enclosed on three sides by the wall of the prison and on the fourth by the wall of the canal embankment. A wooden stake had been driven at the western end on the evening of the second of May and had not been taken up between executions. A firing party of twelve men of the Sherwood Foresters stood at the eastern end. He was tied to the stake, blindfolded, and at three thirty by the gate-house clock the order was given. He was twenty-eight years old. He had been married three hours and fifteen minutes. The body was taken in a sheet to the soldiers' yard at Arbour Hill, dropped into a pit of quicklime with the three of the morning before and the four who would follow him into the day, and covered without coffin or marker, as was the order for all fifteen.

THE RETURN

The republic Plunkett had drafted from his sickbed at the Metropole was proclaimed on the steps of the General Post Office on the Easter Monday and refused by the country on the Easter Tuesday and ratified by the country in the December of 1918, thirty-one months after the volley in the stonebreakers' yard, when Sinn Féin took seventy-three seats out of one hundred and five at the general election on a programme of which the Proclamation was the founding text. Grace Plunkett, née Gifford, lived until the thirteenth of December 1955. She did not remarry. She drew cartoons for the republican press through the War of Independence, was interned in Kilmainham herself in 1923 during the Civil War in the cell two doors from her husband's, and lived afterwards in modest rooms in South Richmond Street, in poor health, on a small state pension granted late. She gave the wedding ring to the Office of Public Works in 1955 for the museum that the gaol had become. The ring is in a glass case in the chapel today, at the spot where the ceremony was performed at half past eleven on the night of the third of May 1916. The chapel is whitewashed and small. The cell on the upper landing of the West Wing is left open. The stake in the stonebreakers' yard is marked with a plain wooden cross. In 1985 two Dublin songwriters, Frank and Sean O'Meara, wrote a ballad called Grace, accurate to the record, in which the bridegroom in the candlelight tells the bride, Now I know it's hard for you, my love, to ever understand / The love I bear for these brave men, the love for native land; the song has been recorded by the Wolfe Tones, by Jim McCann, by Sinéad O'Connor, by Rod Stewart, and is sung on the terraces of Croke Park on All-Ireland day. Some marriages are sacraments of sealing. They are the kind that outlast their three hours and fifteen minutes by a hundred years and counting, and they leave behind, in a whitewashed room at the south end of a gaol, a gold ring in a glass case, and on a quiet Wednesday morning when the museum opens, a single rose laid by a visitor on the rail.