Writing Sample Documentation Release

Home , Patrick Pearse

writing_sample Documentation Release

Joshua Whitehurst

Feb 14, 2018

Contents

1 Project Description 1

2 Table of Contents 3

3 Indices and tables 13

i ii CHAPTER 1

Project Description

This is my writing sample for graduate school applications. I focus on Irish revolutionary history, particularly the way that Patrick Pearse utilized cultural images and memory to motivate his compatriots and justify his actions against the English in the Easter Rising of 1916. Please follow the links to the What Is This? section and learn more about the project and the document itself, including contact information for the author and a warning to those interested in citations. The Body of the Essay take you to separate sections of the document itself; it is kept separate to preserve the integrity of the footnotes and to make it more agreeable on more devices and browsers since the manuscript is over 15 pages long.

1 writing_sample Documentation, Release

2 Chapter 1. Project Description CHAPTER 2

Table of Contents

2.1 What Is This?

2.1.1 The Site Itself

This website hosts the paper I wrote for Matt Knight’s Irish Rebels and Revolutionaries seminar. It’s my best work so far, and so I am putting it out onto the internet as an example of my academic work and as an exercise in my developing computer skills. I used GitHub and Atom for the under-the-hood work, Read the Docs for hosting, and Sphinx for formatting (with a little Python 3.6 thrown in). I want to be able to put my own links and webpages down on applications and resumes, and so this is a ﬁrst step in that direction.

2.1.2 Requests

If you would like to know more about the process I used, my notes, or my sources, please feel free to send me an email at [email protected] or a message on GitHub.

2.1.3 Is this a historical resource?

Perhaps you are a student looking for sources for your paper. If so, welcome! This is not the droid you’re looking for. You should treat this paper like a wikipedia article; I used real, published resources to write this essay, and so you can utilize my sources to make similar points in your own work. If you do want to just snag my exact words, beware this: since Google knows where to ﬁnd these words, Google will lead your plagiarism checker or instructor straight to my doorstep. You’re much better off accessing the same sources and drawing your own conclusions. If, however, you think you need to quote me, your instructor needs to know what you’re doing and the quality of the sources you’re using. If your instructor approves of this paper as a quotable resource, please attribute my work appropriately; depending on your style guide, you may need to take special care to avoid citing me as a published resource (perhaps as an interview or blog post would be best).

3 writing_sample Documentation, Release

2.1.4 Support

Since this isn’t much of a coding project or tool, you shouldn’t have any issues, per se. However, if you ﬁnd that something is not working correctly, please reach out to me at [email protected] with any questions, and I may be able to help you resolve your issue. If you notice issues from an editing perspective or something else you could ﬁx yourself, please utilize GitHub’s functionality for collaborative projects (fork the source, push your edits). If you simply take issue with my conclusions, I encourage you to reach out to me or publish your response.

2.1.5 License

The project is licensed under the MIT license.

2.1.6 Where To Go From Here

Check out this table of contents to jump right in to the documents.

Introduction

Patrick Pearse was a bad revolutionary. He was a commander in chief with no military experience. He seemed aloof when tasked with logistical errands during the shelling of Dublin. He trudged ahead with his plans to rise despite enormous public backlash from his allies in the Irish Volunteers, particularly Eoin MacNeill, who sent a countermanding order to stop the Rising before it even began. Pearse and his comrades were executed by the British, leaving Dublin in ruins. And one hundred years later in the Republic of Ireland, a nation constituting twenty-six counties joined together in total independence from English rule, the people commemorated the Rising with the largest military parade in the history of the Republic.1 There was a long and bloody path from Patrick Pearse’s doorstep to that huge military parade. While that path still requires the detailed and careful study of historians to understand so fresh a memory, it is useful to step back into the path Pearse himself took to Easter 1916, and how he brought any men along with him to so grim a martyrdom, so triumphant a failure. When Patrick Pearse adopted the heroes of Ireland’s long and storied past, he brought into a new understanding and relevance ﬁgures such as Cú Chulainn and Gráinne Ní Mháille from the distant past. In eulogizing O’Donovan Rossa and Wolfe Tone, Pearse adopted the real heroes of old rebellions and made their voices work for his new rebellion. He painted a cruel picture of an English system of education and government which served explicitly to subjugate and humiliate the Irish, forming the perfect villain for his heroes to struggle against. He utilized widespread cultural memories to create his own liturgy, weaving culture and language into a nationalism which provided all the ingredients of zealous praxis. He showed his people an image of Ireland free and proud, and pointed them toward the bloody sacriﬁce they would need to make to achieve that Ireland once again. Patrick Pearse adopted and expanded upon the Gaelic Revival, images of Ireland’s heroes, and reductive images of Ireland’s enemies and problems to justify, support, and motivate his violent militant nationalism; and it is this work which contributed to the cultural success of 1916’s Easter Rising despite its military failure.

1 “Thousands Attend Easter Rising Parade.” BBC.

4 Chapter 2. Table of Contents writing_sample Documentation, Release

How Pearse Adopted and Created Images of Ireland’s Cultural Heroes

To Patrick Pearse1, one hero stood out from the populated cast of Ireland’s finest sons and daughters: Sétanta, known famously as Cú Chulainn2, which means the “Hound of Culann”. Cú Chulainn features prominently in the Ulster Cycle, and his strength and agility were unmatched among men. He adhered to a strict code of honor and exhibited fierce loyalty in every tale. He proved the ideal hero to Pearse and the boys at St Enda’s school. Pearse utilized Cú Chulainn’s image and his boyhood adventures to educate his young pupils at St Enda’s in what he considered the finest virtues of Irish manhood3. This understanding of manhood had a major effect on the boys at St. Enda’s, and on the movement for cultural nationalism. At St. Enda’s, Cú Chulainn featured prominently in the education of the boys. “The front hall in Cullenswood House was dominated by a fresco of the boy hero taking arms while around the mural was an inscription of [Cú Chulainn’s] famous choice between life and fame: “I care not though I live but one day and one night if only my name and deeds live after me.””4 Pearse utilized Cú Chulainn’s emotional power and powerful example “of learning, gallantry, heroism, bravery and artistic sensibility wrapped up within a concept of the Warrior Boy Poet”5 to create his own class of warrior-boy-poets. Pearse was at the time of founding St. Enda’s the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, a newspaper run by the Gaelic League. His work at St. Enda’s was an extension of his interest in cultural nationalism and educating a generation of warrior-boy-poets to carry Ireland into independence.6 While not all his supporters at the Rising in 1916 were educated by Pearse or even by his students, “St. Enda’s boys were a regular fixture in Dublin’s social and cultural life in the early years of the twentieth century and were considered, without exception, as emblematic of the potential of Irish manhood.”7 Pearse was able to use St. Enda’s as a model for educating nationalists in a deeply pervasive manner; from the ground up. While it may seem sinister to some to focus efforts of cultural reform toward the education of children, there are real and pertinent reasons for doing so. For one thing, Pearse wanted to encourage bilingualism as a feature of the revivalist movement. On the topic of Cú Chulainn’s role, Pearse sought to create at St. Enda’s the sort of tutelage Cú Chulainn and the ancient Irish enjoyed in their education. Pearse spoke of fosterage, a system in which “to the Old Irish the teacher was ‘aite’, fosterer; the pupil, was ‘dalta’, foster-child; the system was ‘aiteachas’, fosterage.”8 He wanted to

1 2. It is with great consideration that Patrick Pearse is named so in this paper as opposed to his Gaelic name, Padraic Mac Piarais. This is because while Pearse so vigorously fought for a free Ireland with a unique and valuable cultural identity, he remained a British subject to his death (despite his best efforts) and the original language of this paper is English. It is the position of this author that Pearse’s military failure in Easter 1916 to secure an independent Ireland gives reason to use his English name so long as the work is published in English, though justiﬁcations for using his Gaelic name are well-reasoned and taken as such.

2 3. Cú Chulainn was never a British subject and symbolizes for Pearse and others in the cultural nationalism movement an Irishness utterly unique and separate from Britain, and so his Gaelic name is used over the English “Cuhullin”.

3 4. Alan Zelenetz, “Education and the Gael: Pádraig Pearse’s ‘Scoil Éanna,’” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 18/19 (1998): 445–56. p. 450

4 5. Elaine Sisson, “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn,” accessed November 29, 2017, http://www.ucd.ie/ scholarcast/scholarcast2.html. p. 6

5 6. Sisson, “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn.”, p. 7

6 7. Sisson, “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn.”, p. 6

7 8. Sisson, “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn.”, p. 6

8 9. Patrick Pearse, “The Murder Machine,” accessed November 29, 2017, http://www.cym.ie/documents/themurdermachine.pdf.

2.1. What Is This? 5 writing_sample Documentation, Release

foster ideals of manhood in these boys, and teaching young boys at a school is the precise time to foster ideals; striking as the iron is hot, as it were. His use of gendered values is not, as Elaine Sisson explains, a monochromatic view of masculinity or even femininity. Cultural nationalists throughout the 19th century rejected imperialistic images of men depicted as “rough-hewn Fenian Gaels” as well as images of a cowering feminine Ireland cleaving to Britain for protection from the Fenian.9 Patrick Pearse attempted to reclaim the image of Irish manliness through Cú Chulainn and made strides into reclaiming Ireland’s femininity through invoking the famous pirate queen, Gráinne Ní Mháille. Understanding the femininity of Ireland according to cultural nationalists is difficult; as Sisson points out, “The female image of nationalist Ireland is largely an image of dispossession, of disenfranchisement and of victimized oppression,”10 and that does not paint a complete picture. This focus on Ireland’s feminine helplessness forms a highly effective foil for the revitalized understanding of the Irish man as powerful, Celtic, and heroic. Ireland herself is a maiden in need of saving, and the Celtic man is her savior in this discourse. On the other hand, Gráinne Ní Mháille’s appearance in Patrick Pearse’s rewrite of the old marching song An Dord Feinne paints a different picture. As if standing in for Ireland, Gráinne Ní Mháille – here called by her nickname, Gráinne Mhaol – is pictured coming back across the sea to fight off the oppression of England: Gráinne Mhaol is coming from over the sea, The Fenians of Fál as a guard about her, Gaels they, and neither French nor Spaniard, And a rout upon the Galls!11 Gráinne Ní Mháille brings a cadre of Gaels under her command to free Ireland; here is not a cowering woman in need of saving, but a powerful woman not unlike the Countess Markievicz who commanded men during the Rising. Pearse was able to extend his reach beyond understandings of masculinity in his efforts to teach the boys of St. Enda’s about Cú Chulainn; through his poetry, he gave breath and agency to a powerful female voice who cried for a free Ireland. While Pearse gave Gráinne Ní Mháille breath through his poetry, he was also able to breath life into long-dead lungs; through an act of prosopopoeia, Pearse’s graveside eulogy of O’Donovan Rossa and his speech at the site of Wolfe Tone’s grave reawakened and repurposed two more voices for Ireland’s freedom. Patrick Pearse utilized “the episte- mology of the graveside oration, itself an on-going trope of the republican movement in all shades of expression,”12 to captivate a particularly nationalist and very attentive crowd at the graveside of O’Donovan Rossa. Pearse was able to seize upon the opportunity to reclaim O’Donovan Rossa’s death from “a place of mourning, of public memorializing, where the focus is necessarily on the past” while simultaneously maintaining a “linguistic swerve towards a vision of the future which the dead person might wish to see enacted.”13 Pearse used the opportunity of O’Donovan Rossa’s death and the resulting gathering to advocate for a vision of Ireland Rossa may not have necessarily shared with Pearse. However, as O’Brien notes, “It is as if there is a specific valence in speaking from the grave of a respected patriot, and that the words are somehow more powerful when delivered from this location”14 which allowed Pearse to become “almost a mouthpiece for the dead patriot.”15 Patrick Pearse took a dead patriot in O’Donovan Rossa and reimagined

9 10. Sisson, “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn.” p. 3

10 11. Sisson, “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn.” p. 3

11 12. Patrick Pearse, “The Dord Feinne,” accessed November 29, 2017, https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E950004-021.html. ln 17-20

12 13. Eugene O’Brien, “Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O’Donovan Rossa and Tone,” Nordic Irish Studies 13, no. 1 (2014): 1–17. p. 1

13 14. O’Brien, “Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O’Donovan Rossa and Tone.” p. 1

14 15. O’Brien, “Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O’Donovan Rossa and Tone.” p. 1

15 16. O’Brien, “Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O’Donovan Rossa and Tone.” p. 1

6 Chapter 2. Table of Contents writing_sample Documentation, Release the world Rossa would have wanted, then sought unity from his audience in pursuit of that goal. Pearse did something similar with Wolfe Tone’s grave. When Pearse eulogized Wolfe Tone, he invoked dead patriots no less than at Rossa’s grave. The image of Rossa as a patriot who fought for freedom, and who was therefore forced to live out his days in exile, and whose body was carried across the United States back to Ireland in an elaborate and incredibly long funeral procession, represented a symbol ripe for exploitation. Pearse seized on that opportunity and reused that formula when he spoke at Wolfe Tone’s grave. Pearse advanced his own brand of independence which differs from the variants espoused by the two dead patriots, but the focus did not need to be on those differences. O’Brien points out that “what is being offered here is a form of revealed truth, a truth which is validated by the deaths of Irish patriots. It is their death, as opposed to their ideas, that is stressed as a motive force.”16 Pearse took Tone and Rossa into the same cast of Irishmen as Cú Chulainn and Gráinne Ní Mháille; symbols taken from a past which may not directly have advocated the same causes for which Pearse fought so bitterly, but served effectively to ﬂesh out a cultural movement in need of heroes. These heroes all had a common enemy; the foreign oppressor.

How Pearse Created a Reductive Image of England as a Cultural Villain

Cú Chulainn fought off the armies of Queen Maebh of Connacht; Gráinne Ní Mháille struggled against her overlords in Elizabethan England for control of her lands and the safety of her sons; Wolfe Tone and O’Donovan Rossa fought the English system of government in Ireland. These foreign oppressors – Connachtmen and Englishmen alike – have their complexities which were of little interest to Pearse. Pearse created a nearly monolithic enemy when he spoke of the English. In The Murder Machine Pearse does not mince words when he speaks of the English: A French writer has paid the English a very well deserved compliment. He says that they never commit a useless crime. When they hire a man to assassinate an Irish patriot, when they blow a Sepoy from the mouth of a cannon, when they produce a famine in one of their dependencies,1 they have always an ulterior motive. They do it not for fun. Humorous as these crimes are, it is not the humour of them, but their utility, that appeals to the English.2 In this opening salvo of the provocatively titled Murder Machine, Pearse clearly paints his villain in the drama of Ireland’s history of rebellion. Academic debate continues into the twenty-ﬁrst century regarding the causes of the Famine and the English response to that event, but Pearse issues this condemnation of those actions clearly and unequivocally. Pearse would go on to blame the English entirely for what he considered the waning of Ireland’s manhood. Pearse was a poet, a revolutionary, and an educator. The Murder Machine was an education-themed pamphlet intended to persuade the reader that the English had destroyed education in Ireland and only a bilingual, cultural nationalist school could hope to correct that wrong. Pearse explained in his pamphlet that at the time of writing in 1914 there existed no education system in Ireland at all because what the English had set up in Ireland lacked the characteristics of education: “Education should foster; this education is meant to repress. Education should inspire; this education is meant to tame. Education should harden; this education is meant to enervate.”3 Pearse directly ties the English efforts in this false education to the enslavement4 of Ireland’s people. He also makes clear that he believes that true education would be too powerful for colonial subjects to receive and remain colonial: “The English are too wise a people to attempt to educate the Irish in any worthy sense. As well expect them to arm us.” Pearse elaborates on the idea of rejecting English attempts at education and emasculation, furthering his position that education can, and

16 17. O’Brien, “Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O’Donovan Rossa and Tone.” p. 5

1 Pearse is here referring to the Irish Potato Famine, also called An Gorta Mor. He would be dead for nearly 36 years before the Bengal Famine, a similar situation to the Irish Famine regarding deliberately slow and lackluster governmental action which resulted in the needless deaths of so many colonial subjects. 2 Pearse, “The Murder Machine.” 3 Pearse, “The Murder Machine.” 4 Pearse is not referring to the same variety of chattel slavery experienced by African slaves in the United Kingdom and United States. The meme which surged in popularity during the far-right revisionism of the 2016 US Presidential Election is an equivocation with no merit. Liam Hogan’s excellent work on debunking this pervasive myth can be found here: https://medium.com/@Limerick1914/ all-of-my-work-on-the-irish-slaves-meme-2015-16-4965e445802a

2.1. What Is This? 7 writing_sample Documentation, Release should, be weaponized in the ﬁght against the tyranny of English rule in Ireland. Pearse effectively painted a picture of England so starkly anti-Irish that no Irish person could stomach supporting their rule in Ireland. He demonstrated the colonial status of Ireland’s citizens through the education they received and encouraged his readers to ﬁnd their education elsewhere; particularly in the stories and symbols Pearse himself utilized to reclaim Irish history for his own purposes.

How Pearse Employed Cultural Memory as a Common Foundation of Knowledge

Pearse’s dramatic and poetic works carried with them a clear endorsement of the cultural nationalist movement. A member of the Gaelic League, an avowed apolitical organization focused solely on the revival of Gaelic culture and language, Pearse had ample opportunity to utilize his creative abilities in service of his revolutionary interests. Even though the Gaelic League considered its work apolitical, Pearse did not come to believe in that mission. Pearse wrote in Gaelic and in English, though his preference was to the former. He wrote Mise Éire in Gaelic in a lamenting tone, as an old woman – the personification of Ireland – begging her sons to rise to her defense. He wrote this in 1914, two years before the Rising. He referenced the Hag of Beare and Cú Chulainn as a call-back to the way Ireland used to be, at least in Pearse’s revision, and how that former happiness could be achieved with the shedding of blood and valiant action.1 That shedding of blood became a theme in Pearse’s brand of militant cultural nationalism; Séamus Murphy, an Irish Jesuit at Loyola University Chicago, offers a model of Pearse’s work as a liturgy not unlike the Catholic liturgy upon which Pearse was raised. “. . . Liturgy [is] representational and symbolic, presenting image and rite to the congregation or audience, moving their emotions in catharsis and/or elevation, shaping their image of the world, and calling them to anamnestic action of remembrance and reenactment.”2 Pearse incorporated liturgical elements in his writings and political activities, especially in the lead up to the Rising. This transformation of essentially cultural – as well as eventually and by extension, political – language into a liturgical format offered Pearse enormous power in the motivation and justification of his actions at Easter week 1916. Pearse utilized his abilities as a poet and playwright to call upon cultural memories shared by many Irish people; whether that be the might of Cú Chulainn or the ships of Gráinne Mhaol, the oppression of the British and the tragedy of Wolfe Tone, the martyrdom in exile of poor Rossa or the enslaving education system in colonial Ireland; for every character Pearse crafted a place in the liturgy. And that liturgy required a ritual of blood sacrifice. The concept of blood sacrifice existed in Pearse’s ideology before the Rising. In the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, Pearse and the other signers listed out their reasoning for their revolution, particularly the necessity of blood sacrifice to achieve that end; “In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which it is called.”3 In this liturgy of nationalism the ritual of blood sacrifice must be completed in order to “prove [Ireland] worthy” of the cause of nationhood which Pearse ascribes it. Pearse and the other signers of the Proclamation divined a destiny of nationhood which every one of their heroes fought for – from Cú Chulainn to Gráinne Mhaol to Tone to Rossa – and for which their mighty and treacherous enemy – the English and their culture and education system which makes slaves of all – will gleefully spill Irish blood as they had for a thousand years.

Language and Culture

Patrick Pearse’s ability as a liturgist was certainly tied to his passion as an educator, as Zelenetz so summarizes from Ó Buachalla and Le Roux, two authors whose focus was on Pearse’s educational work and on his biography, respectively: Séamas Ó Buachalla entitled his 1980 edition of Pearse’s educational writings A Signiﬁcant Irish Edu- cationalist, thus paying a solid enough, if stolid, compliment that is seconded, though somewhat more

1 Robert Fitzroy Foster, The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland (OUP Oxford, 1989). p. 284 2 Seamus Murphy, “Dark Liturgy, Bloody Praxis: The 1916 Rising,” Studies 105, no. 417 (n.d.), https://dialogueireland.ﬁles.wordpress.com/ 2016/05/1916_dark_liturgy.pdf. p. 13 3 Ireland (Provisional government, 1916), Thomas James Clarke, Sean MacDiarmada, Padraic Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Mary Plunkett, and Irish Republican Brotherhood. Poblacht Na hEireann = The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland. [Dublin]: [publisher not identiﬁed], 1916.

8 Chapter 2. Table of Contents writing_sample Documentation, Release

extremely, by Louis Le Roux, Pearse’s 1930s French biographer (or hagiographer, to be, perhaps, more accurate). Le Roux concludes with characteristic hyperbole that “had [Pearse] accomplished nothing more than [his work in Irish education] he would have remained nevertheless the most remarkable man of his time.”7 Without going so far as Le Roux does to make of Pearse a second Saint Patrick, we, nonetheless, ought to pay his words some heed, because the simple fact is that Pearse spent a greater portion of his brief thirty-six years concerned with Gaelic school games than with gun-running from Germany.1 Patrick Pearse was primarily a school teacher, poet, and dramatist. He participated in the organization, the execution, and the punishment for a revolution, to be sure; however, most of his rather short life was spent in the classroom either as pupil or master. Ó Buachalla’s compliment in the form of a book title is a most appropriate designation, as Pearse’s opinions on education were carefully constructed. While it may appear that Pearse had an ulterior motive to educating the boys at St. Enda’s in the tradition of Cú Chulainn – that he would somehow brainwash them into serving an unjust cause which he believed in so mightily – it should be noted that Pearse’s ideas on education were rooted in what he and many other thinkers of his time considered a worthy ideal: freedom through education. It was through the education Pearse provided at St. Enda’s that each young boy could grow into the sort of Irish nationalist Pearse wished roamed the streets of every village and parish in Ireland, one connected to a long and rich history, full of story and heroism, heroes and kings. In his capacities within the Gaelic League, Pearse advocated for making Irish mandatory at the new Catholic universities, including the National University of Ireland and the Catholic University, St Stephen’s Green, to reinvigorate a love of Irish in every educated man who was educated in Ireland. He believed that the love of Irish and love of country existed within every Irish man and woman, but that systematic English oppression had stamped it out. In fact, he ques- tioned whether one of the new Catholic universities and their resistance to making Irish mandatory just represented a “desire to see Ireland become a ‘cultured English province.’”2 Pearse fought so hard for compulsory Irish because he believed that any university in Ireland would operate as a “nerve-centre for the whole education system of Ireland.”3 A university in Ireland would educate lawyers to defend Gaels in courts, scholars to study Gaelic culture, and most importantly teachers to impart the wisdom and understanding of Ireland’s unique and powerful Gaelic culture on to students the nation over. And Pearse fully believed that before Ireland could enjoy any political freedom, an “intel- lectual freedom must precede”4 it. Pearse felt that the “ﬁrst care of every race struggling to maintain their national existence is to educate their people on national lines and through the medium of their own language.”5 He would live out that belief in his work at St. Enda’s. St. Enda’s was meant to be a bilingual school teaching Irish as a subject as well as other subjects in Irish. This was meant to help bring on an intelligentsia of Irish-ﬂuent poets, actors, lawyers, and scholars. Pearse took his cues from the bilingual schools in Belgium where two culturally distinct languages were increasingly necessary for citizens to do business and communicate. Teaching his boys to read and write both English and Irish as useful and important languages allowed Pearse to teach Irish culture in a way unavailable to a purely English-speaking pupil. Learning the tales of Cú Chulainn in Modern Irish carried much more cultural weight to Pearse and his boys than to learn them in English. To speak the words of Sétanta in Sétanta’s own tongue bore with the act some of the weight of Sétanta’s very own voice. To remember Ireland Gaelic was to remember her free.

Remembering Ireland free

The Proclamation of the Republic of Ireland carries in its third paragraph the theme of Ireland’s long historical right to nationhood. While securing the right of self-deliberation and independence for Ireland and her people, the signers declared that the people of Ireland held that right irrespective of the tyranny imposed upon them; in fact, that right has been asserted before: “In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty: six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms.”1 Pearse forcefully inserted

1 Zelenetz, “Education and the Gael: Padraig Pearse’s Scoil Eanna.” p. 446 2 Brendan Walsh, “Frankly and Robustly National: Padraig Pearse, the Gaelic League and the Campaign for Irish at the National University,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103, no. 411 (2014): 318?30. p. 319 3 Pearse, Patrick. “The New University: Irish Essential for Matriculation.” An Claidheamh Soluis. August 22, 1908. 4 Pearse, Patrick. “The University and the Schools.” An Claidheamh Soluis. December 19, 1908. 5 Pearse, Patrick. “The University and the Schools.” An Claidheamh Soluis. December 19, 1908. 1 Ireland (Provisional government et al., Poblacht Na hEireann = The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland.

2.1. What Is This? 9 writing_sample Documentation, Release his cultural narrative of Irish history into a political document to point to the foundation upon which he could “[Stand] on that fundamental right and again [assert] it in arms in the face of the world.”2 The power of the cultural memory which Pearse had helped to develop in the Gaelic Revival and the Gaelic League justified Easter week and motivated the participants to the end of Irish nationhood. Guns were necessary, but they did not all arrive; men were necessary, but they did not all arrive; and though these failures did impede the military feasibility of the operation at hand, it served to move the theme of blood-sacrifice “from the background to centre-stage in the minds of the leaders. . . Pearse had long preached blood-sacrifice.”3 The day had come for blood sacrifice. The ritual of nationhood would get its holy festival in the form of Easter week 1916. Pearse drove his audience and his men to believe that the Ireland he had helped them remember – free, Gaelic, independent – could be attained only in bloody rebellion.

Conclusion

In the timeless past, the mythical hero Cú Chulainn is said to have defended all of Ulster from the raids of the Connachtmen all on his own; in the late 12th century, Strongbow and King Henry II would arrive to begin a long and terrible reign of English cruelty in Ireland; in 1649, Oliver Cromwell began his bloody conquest of Ireland as reparation for rebellions among Gaelic lords which would earn him the epitaph “The Butcher”; in 1798, Wolfe Tone died in British custody after attempts at revolution for Ireland; and carrying what he considered the torch of Ireland’s defense into 1916, Padraic Pearse read aloud the Proclamation of the Irish Republic on the steps of the General Post Office. It was within that document that Pearse and his comrades made clear their justification and goal to free Ireland, listing Ireland’s reasons for independence; by referencing these past grievances with the full intention to remove England’s influence from Ireland, Pearse invoked the deep and strong roots of Gaelic sovereignty. Pearse had been working through much of his life to build a cultural movement which could sustain the military movement he championed that Easter Monday. He and other cultural nationalists utilized newspapers and pamphlets, poetry and theater, speeches and eulogies to awaken the memory of Ireland as she once was – free of tyranny, free of England – within her men and women. Their military efforts that Easter week were fruitless; the rebels were soundly defeated and all the leaders of ‘16 were executed. But that rebellion began the chain of events which would see the formation of the Free State in 1922 and eventually the creation of the Republic of Ireland in 1949, a sovereign state free of English rule. Did guns and bayonets achieve that feet? Surely, many Irish and English died in the conflicts surrounding and caused by Easter 1916. Pearse’s works and their popularity, however, seem to indicate that it was the culture Pearse advanced which won the Uprising long after Pearse himself was dead.

Bibliography

1. Foster, Robert Fitzroy. The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland. OUP Oxford, 1989. 2. Ireland (Provisional government, 1916), Thomas James Clarke, Seán MacDiarmada, Padraic Pearse, James Connolly, Thomas MacDonagh, Éamonn Ceannt, Joseph Mary Plunkett, and Irish Republican Brotherhood. Poblacht Na h’Éireann = The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland. [Dublin]: [publisher not identified], 1916. 3. Murphy, Seamus. “Dark Liturgy, Bloody Praxis: The 1916 Rising.” Studies 105, no. 417 (n.d.). https:// dialogueireland.files.wordpress.com/2016/05/1916_dark_liturgy.pdf. 4. O’Brien, Eugene. “Visioning Ireland: Pearse, Prosopopoeia and the Remembering of O’Donovan Rossa and Tone.” Nordic Irish Studies 13, no. 1 (2014): 1–17. 5. O’Leary, Philip. “‘What Stalked through the Post Office?’: Pearse’s Cú Chulainn.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 3 (1983): 21–38. 6. Pearse, Patrick. “The Dord Feinne.” Accessed November 29, 2017. https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E950004-021. html. 2 Ireland (Provisional government et al., Poblacht Na hEireann = The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic to the People of Ireland. 3 Murphy, “Dark Liturgy, Bloody Praxis: The 1916 Rising.” p. 14

10 Chapter 2. Table of Contents writing_sample Documentation, Release

7. ———. “The Murder Machine.” Accessed November 29, 2017. http://www.cym.ie/documents/ themurdermachine.pdf. 8. ———. “The New University: Irish Essential for Matriculation.” An Claidheamh Soluis. August 22, 1908. 9. ———. “The University and the Schools.” An Claidheamh Soluis. December 19, 1908. 10. Sisson, Elaine. “Scholarcast 2: The Boy as National Hero: The Legacy of CúChulainn.” Accessed November 29, 2017. http://www.ucd.ie/scholarcast/scholarcast2.html. 11. Walsh, Brendan. “‘Frankly and Robustly National’: Padraig Pearse, the Gaelic League and the Campaign for Irish at the National University.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 103, no. 411 (2014): 318–30. 12. Zelenetz, Alan. “Education and the Gael: Pádraig Pearse’s ‘Scoil Éanna.’” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium 18/19 (1998): 445–56. 13. “Thousands Attend Easter Rising Parade.” BBC News, March 27, 2016, sec. Europe. http://www.bbc.com/ news/world-europe-35905248.

2.2 The Body of the Essay

You can ﬁnd a link to each of the sections here.

2.2.1 Introduction

2.2.2 How Pearse Adopted and Created Images of Ireland’s Cultural Heroes

2.2.3 How Pearse Created a Reductive Image of England as a Cultural Villain

2.2.4 How Pearse Employed Cultural Memory as a Common Foundation of Knowl- edge

2.2.5 Language and Culture

2.2.6 Remembering Ireland free

2.2.7 Conclusion

2.2.8 Bibliography

2.2. The Body of the Essay 11 writing_sample Documentation, Release

12 Chapter 2. Table of Contents CHAPTER 3

Indices and tables

• genindex • modindex • search