Plunkett · 1916
Joseph Mary Plunkett's wedding at Kilmainham
Joseph Mary Plunkett, the youngest of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, poet, son of a papal count, was twenty-eight years old and dying of glandular tuberculosis when he came out of the General Post Office at the surrender on the twenty-ninth of April 1916. He had a tracheotomy scar at his throat. He had perhaps three months of natural life left to him. He had been engaged for the past year to Grace Gifford, a Dublin Protestant cartoonist who had converted to Catholicism in early 1916 with the deliberate purpose of being able to marry him. They had planned to wed on Easter Sunday, the twenty-third of April; the Rising had postponed it. Court-martialled at Richmond Barracks on the second of May, Plunkett was sentenced to death and removed to Kilmainham Gaol on the evening of the third of May. Through the late afternoon his Capuchin chaplain Father Eugene McCarthy obtained, by personal appeal to Brigadier-General Maxwell, permission for the marriage to be performed in the prison chapel that night. Grace bought the wedding ring at a shop in Grafton Street at six. The ceremony was at half past eleven at night in the prison chapel, by candlelight, with a single soldier as witness. After the ceremony she was sent home. She was brought back at two in the morning for ten minutes with the bridegroom in his cell, in the presence of a guard, the door open. He was shot in the prison yard at three thirty in the morning of the fourth of May. They had been married three hours and fifteen minutes.
It is a quarter to midnight on the night of the third of May 1916, in the small chapel at the south end of Kilmainham Gaol, Inchicore, Dublin, in candlelight. He is twenty-eight years old. He is Joseph Mary Plunkett, born on the twenty-first of November 1887 to George Noble Plunkett (count of the papal nobility, by Vatican grant of 1884) and Josephine Cranny, schooled at Belvedere College and Stonyhurst, journalist, poet, theatre director, sometime editor of the Irish Review. He is in the green-grey uniform of the Irish Volunteers in which he came out of the General Post Office four days ago. There is a long surgical dressing across the front of his throat where, in the previous October, the surgeons at the Mater Hospital had cut a tracheotomy to drain the abscesses of the tubercular infection that has been with him in advanced form for three years. He has, in the assessment of his Stonyhurst doctor of January 1916, perhaps six months remaining to him under the most favourable conditions.
He is engaged in the wedding ceremony of the Catholic rite. Father Eugene McCarthy, of the Capuchin Friary in Church Street, in the brown habit, is the celebrant. Grace Evelyn Gifford, twenty-eight years old, of Rathmines, second of three Gifford sisters who would each marry a 1916 leader, is the bride; she is in a green woollen dress with a cross at the throat, no veil, her hair down. The single witness, a young second lieutenant of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers whose name has been preserved by no party at the wedding, stands at the door of the chapel.
He thinks: I have been engaged to Grace for fifteen months. We had set the wedding for Easter Sunday. The Rising postponed it. I had not realised when I came out of the GPO last Saturday that this was the postponement.
He thinks: Grace bought the ring this afternoon at six o'clock at Mr Stoker's shop in Grafton Street, on the credit of my mother's account. I have not seen the ring until five minutes ago when Father Eugene blessed it.
He thinks: I will be shot at three or four in the morning. The schedule of the executions has been four every twenty-four hours since the third of May. I am in the second tranche of the second round.
He thinks: Grace is twenty-eight. Grace converted to Catholicism in February for this. Grace will leave the chapel in fifteen minutes a widow of, by the law of the country, three hours.
He thinks: Grace will write the song.
Father Eugene reads the form of the marriage. The two say the words. Plunkett puts the ring on her hand. Father Eugene gives the blessing of the rite. The whole ceremony has run nine minutes. The young second lieutenant at the door has not moved.
Father Eugene says, in plain English: the army has given Mrs Plunkett ten minutes after the ceremony to remain in the chapel. I will sit in the entrance. The second lieutenant, by Father Eugene's later memoir, looks at his pocket watch and nods. Plunkett and Grace sit on the bench inside the chapel for ten minutes. By Grace's letter to her sister Muriel three weeks later, she did not weep. He did not weep. They held hands. He gave her a notebook of poems. He recited two of his own, neither yet published. The ten minutes ended.
The second lieutenant came forward and said, by Grace's letter, I am sorry, Mrs Plunkett. Grace was taken out of the chapel and out of the prison and home to Rathmines in a side-car at twenty minutes past midnight.
She was brought back to the prison at two o'clock in the morning, by Father Eugene's intervention with the duty officer, for ten further minutes with the prisoner in his cell. The cell was on the upper landing of the West Wing, eight feet by twelve. The order was that the door remain open and that two soldiers stand at the door for the duration of the visit. They held hands. They did not, by Grace's letter, find any further words.
Joseph Mary Plunkett was led out of his cell at twenty past three in the morning of the fourth of May 1916, taken down the iron stair into the stonebreakers' yard at the rear of the gaol, tied to a stake, blindfolded, and shot by a firing party of twelve men of the Sherwood Foresters at three thirty. He was the youngest of the seven Proclamation signatories at the time of the executions. He had been married three hours and fifteen minutes. The cell, the chapel, and the stonebreakers' yard are now a national museum (Kilmainham Gaol Museum) in the care of the Office of Public Works of Ireland. The wedding ring he placed on Grace's hand at twenty to midnight is, by the gift of Grace Plunkett to the Museum in 1955, in a glass case in the chapel today, at the spot where the ceremony was performed. The Wolfe Tones song Grace, written by Frank and Sean O'Meara in 1985, is the most-played piece of Irish republican music of the late twentieth century, has been recorded by Rod Stewart, Sinéad O'Connor and Jim McCann among many others, and is, by the songwriter's own statement, deliberately accurate to the historical record. 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 / But when this love of country dies, before God I will, before God I will / Through every fight I'll always live for you, my own dear Grace. The chapel is, on a quiet Wednesday morning when the museum opens, a whitewashed room with a candle stand. Visitors leave roses for Grace.