Born to James Pearse, an English stonecarver who found first work and later a new faith as an artisan embellishing Catholic edifices in Dublin, and Margaret Brady, whose family had fled the famine in Co. Meath and eked out a living in the same city, Patrick was the second of four children. The Gothic revival in architecture brought a demand for James' commissions, and the Pearse family lived comfortably. Patrick and his younger brother, Willie, were together educated at the Christian Brothers School, Westland Row, where Patrick received his first classes in Irish; this became his focal interest.
While still a teenager, he joined the nascent Gaelic League, which under the efforts of Douglas Hyde, Fr. Eugene O'Growney and Eoin MacNeill had begun to promote revived Irish language and literature. Even before matriculation at the Royal University and the King's Inns as a law student, Pearse was teaching Irish at Westland Row. In 1901, he took a BA in modern languages after courses at University College, Dublin and he was at the same time called to the Bar. Although he claimed to be ashamed of his law degree, he never dropped his legal title, and as the lexicographer Fr. Patrick Dinneen took malicious delight in pointing out, the letters B-A-B-L seemed invariably to follow those of P.H. Pearse.
Yet Pearse shared with Dinneen and other League members a passion for the Irish tongue. Even his only law case--in 1905--concerned the painting of Irish names on carts. All his teaching and writing aimed to reverse the trends sapping the Gaeltacht. Emigration bled the west of Ireland of its Irish-speaking natives; poverty and ignorance became the traits attributed to those who would perpetuate their ancient language. Pearse determined to rediscover what he idealized as "kindly faced, frieze-coated peasants," and to master not the adopted tongue of Dublin revivalists but rather the Connaught dialect itself. This he managed so well that, however naive it may seem to his critics then as now, Pearse could submit anonymous stories to the journal he eventually edited and have them received (if not by Conamara folk then city readers) as the efforts of a hitherto unknown writer from the Gaeltacht! From 1903 to 1909, Pearse's involvement in the League's An Claidheamh Soluis ("The Sword of Light") helped establish literary criteria for pioneers of a modern contribution to Irish.
The extent of political involvement proper to Gaelic League, moreover, would also widen Pearse's impact upon what Hyde had phrased in a seminal 1892 lecture as "The Necessity of De- Anglicizing the Irish People." In his six years as an editor, Pearse became committed to the language revival. All other issues for Pearse at this stage, became secondary to cultural nationalism. Political autonomy he regarded as desirable yet not essential to Ireland. Clerical appeasement he judged as negligible when the national seminary, Maynooth, demoted Irish courses to an elective rather than a compulsory course. Educational support he withheld as necessary to pressure the National University to make Irish an "essential" subject for matriculation. And emigration should be rejected; better to be humble toilers at home than pompous nabobs abroad.
But written protests could not assure the transmission of native ideals to those who wished for a Gaelic nation. In Dublin, Pearse founded and headed an "Irish-Ireland" school which would seek to not only instruct pupils in the language but shape their love for "chivalry and self sacrifice," "charity towards all," "a love of inanimate nature," and not only patriotism but "a sense of civic social duty," So he phrased his beliefs in the prospectus of St. Enda's in 1908. The growing determination for a youth to be inculcated so as "to spend their lives working hard and zealously for their fatherland and, if it should ever be necessary, to die for it "appeared only the Irish- language version of this prospectus; such an ethos appealed, for now, primarily to Pearse's romantic temperament. Yet as his biographer Ruth Dudley Edwards notes, "Its effect was to manifest itself in more practical ways."
Running the school, penning stories, essays, and pamphlets, supporting his relatives, mother and siblings left Pearse little financial means to support his efforts, pay his teachers or rally its people to the Irish Irelanders' cause. He became so interested in political matters that he briefly launched his own newspaper, An Barr Buadh ("The Trumpet of Victory") in 1912 as the home Rule Bill stirred up again debate about how the Irish should answer the latest English proposals for self-determination. Pearse's maverick stance endeared him neither to Sinn Fiin or the republican movement; the Bill, in his view, would allow the Gaelic nationalists at least the removal of one of their manacles. Gradually, Pearse blended traditional Christian and militant conceptions into a radical perspective which blurred Patrick with Sarsfield, Colm Cille with Wolfe Tone. Not only a political cause but "a practical desire for revolution began to reinforce his mystical yearnings for martyrdom," in Dudley Edwards phrase.
Shy and melancholy, Pearse's ebullience emerged only on rare occasions. Many regarded the dreamer of rebellion as a fanatic. Pearse in 1913 recalled "that laughing gesture of a young man that is going into battle or climbing to a gibbet." He helped organize the Irish Volunteers: the public side of the outlawed Irish Republican Brotherhood, and both organizations would soon transform Pearse's visions reality. The IRB and the labor movements attracted Pearse's nationalism although he resisted their socialist influences. And just as the Irish debated their course, so did their American cousins to whom, in 1914, Pearse was sent on a fund raising tour by Clan-na-Gael, the former Fenian supporters who now aided the I.R.B. New Yorkers rallied, yet most Irish Americans stayed skeptical. Every generation brought promises of revolution from across the Atlantic; many remained unswayed by rhetoric. But Pearse collected needed funds for St. Enda's, his creditors, and the nationalist cause.
Pearse organized a secessionist faction of volunteers which split with John Redmond after that Home Rule spokesman called for Irish support for the English war effort. Dramatic and poetic productions continued from Pearse as well, and his pamphlet "The Murder Machine" condemned the repressive educational tactics favored by nearly every teacher. Pearse pleaded for freedom in not only the school but for the nation, not only the instructor but for the administrators of both curricula and government. His political and ideological aspirations combined as he focused upon the opportunities Irish rebels might seize as England preoccupied itself with the European conflict. With a handful of other IRB members, Pearse planned insurrection.
Yet, German aid proved largely illusory, arms and men scarce, and amidst the urban and rural, pro- and anti- British assisting, radical and conservative factional disputes, Pearse still determined to revolt despite a lack of mass support. His 1915 oration at the funeral of O'Donovan Rassa defied those in Dublin Castle and all who collaborated or, by their indifference or acquiescence, helped keep the Union Jack planted in Irish soil: "Life springs from death; and from the graves of patriot men and women spring living nations." Pearse ended his exhortation by reminding all that "while Ireland, holds these graves, Ireland, unfree shall never be at peace." More than for a dead Fenian, Pearse's speech appealed rather to the ambitions of a few revolutionaries ready to add their own graves to the struggle for a free Ireland.
In-fighting among nationalists slowed any action towards such a goal. In his political and literary essays, Pearse seemed to favor imagery of religious and personal self-sacrifice. Nationalism, perhaps, became Pearse's true faith. In frenetic activity he committed his written legacy in pamphlets, poems, plays, and stories hastily composed by the beginning of April 1916, when preparations for the Easter Rising commenced. The IRB, however, received conflicting intelligence about arms shipments, troop readiness, and orders to act were countermanded by others. But, with the motive of "the good of my country," Pearse decided to command the "operations" on April 24th, Easter Monday.
The story of the Rising has often been recounted, as has the proclamation by "the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic." or Poblacht na h-Eireann, "to the People of Ireland," Lacking military experience, Pearse now defended the heart of Dublin from not only British reinforcements but its own slum-dwellers, who began to loot the high-class shops of Sackville Street. Little rousing of Volunteers outside the city occurred, and by the second day of the Rising it was clear no national rebellion would happen. Still, Pearse read a second manifesto on the Post Office steps to a crowd who dwindled even as he still spoke to "every Irishman and Irishwoman worthy of the name." The British forces closed their attack in the following days, cutting off the Republican pockets of resistance. Reality still could not erase Pearse's vision: "when we are all wiped out, people will blame us for everything, condemn us," But, "in a few years they will see the meaning of what we tried to do." Michael Collins would later criticize "the issue of memoranda couched in poetic phrases" and "of actions worked out in a similar fashion." Yet Pearse was not a soldier but a believer fighting for Ireland. Quixotic as his fight proved, it would stir Collins and many countrymen to repeat the puny efforts of Easter Week on a grand scale, incorporating fewer proclamations, less eloquence, more espionage, and many attacks by "flying columns" of Irish fighting a guerrilla war against veterans of both the European and Dublin battlegrounds.
Surrender of the General Post Office late Friday by Pearse and a general surrender on Saturday drew an end to the Rising, as his brother Willie carried the white flag. From Kilmainham prison, letters and poems record Patrick's devotion to spirited, patriotic, practical, and political affairs. After a British court-martial, both brothers died on May 3rd 1916, shot along with other leaders of the Provisional Republic.
St. Enda's survived Pearse by nearly two decades yet never achieved the lofty goals envisioned by its founder. His mother and his sister Margaret thrived, some said, on the hagiographical treatment afforded Willie and Pat. Crowds who had jeered as the prisoners were taken away by the British troops soon praised "the First President of Ireland." Upon the establishment of the Free State, his legacy was worshipped by an educational system which put little of his ideas into practice. As a catalyst of "Irish-Ireland," Pearse's posthumous impact gave, in Dudley Edwards' judgement, not only "his contemporaries the key to a new self-respect," but "also the key to a Pandora's Box of troubles quite alien to his view of the world." But, even as Pearse failed to revive a Gaelic nation, he succeeded in ensuring that "my fame and my deeds live after me."
Sources:
The standard biography, Ruth Dudley Edwards' Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure 1977. (Swords, Co. Dublin: Poolbeg Press, 1990.) See also his friend Desmond Ryan's accounts, which helped build the Pearse legend; Roy Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (Allen Lane/Penguin, 1988) for context; bilingual selections of poetry and prose can be found in Desmond Maguire's five adapted stories (Mercier Press, 1968) and Seamus Deane's Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry: Field Day with W.W. Norton, 1990) Volume Three. Peter de Rosa's "true-fiction" Rebels: The Irish Rising of 1916 (Bantam\Doubleday 1990) and Thomas Flanagan's The Tenants of Time (Dutton, 1988) for the Fenians and The End of the Hunt for the Collins era (1994) recreate the intrigues through a seamless conversion of fact through characters enlivened by imagination, something Pearse would have undoubtedly appreciated.
by J.L. (that is , John Lancaster) O'Fionnain Murphy
Los Angeles, California
