Patrick Pearse

Patrick Henry Pearse (1879–1916)
Writer, educationalist, and revolutionary

Extract from RIA Dictonary of Irish Biography by J. J. Lee

Pearse was already a visionary, but in what he dismissed as the political wasteland of 1897 it was in cultural rather than political terms he expounded his vision of a distinctive Irish future: ‘The morning will come, and its dawn is not far off. But it will be a morning different from the morning we have looked for. The Gael is not like other men; the spade, and the loom, and the sword are not for him. But a destiny more glorious than that of Rome, more glorious than that of Britain awaits him; to become the saviour of idealism in modern intellectual and social life, the regenerator and rejuvenator of the literature of the world, the instructor of the nations, the preacher of the gospel of nature-worship, hero-worship, God-worship.’ (ibid, 221). ...

Within education his passion was Irish language teaching through bilingual techniques. ...he turned towards establishing his own school from 1906, which he eventually realised with the opening of St Enda's in Cullenswood House on Oakley Road in 1908. ...The struggle to sustain St Enda's may have influenced whatever psychological factors drove Pearse towards an increasingly assertive expression of an Irish right to independence. ...drifting further into politics, initially supporting home rule, and then, as unionist forces in Ulster increasingly barred the way, towards the idea of rebellion. The pledge of Ulster unionists to resist home rule, by rebellion if necessary, in the Solemn League and Covenant of September 1912, proved intoxicating for Pearse.

As he came to the conclusion throughout 1913 that a willingness to take up arms might be necessary, he sought to establish relations with the main existing organisation committed to the idea of rebellion, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), whose leadership, particularly Tom Clarke (qv), Seán Mac Diarmada (qv), and Bulmer Hobson (qv), would have to be convinced that his prominent support for home rule did not denote lack of true revolutionary fibre. ...In order to dispel the image of him as a ‘harmless’ cultural nationalist, he virtually set about reinventing himself in a manner likely to appeal to the ‘hard men’ of the IRB. He exulted at the sight of arms in Orange hands, taking up the theme of Eoin MacNeill's (qv) phrase that ‘the North began’ when the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) began to challenge the monopoly of British gun power in Ireland earlier in the year. But he went far beyond MacNeill in extolling bloodshed as a spiritual value in itself, in some of the most sanguinary phrases in his entire work: ‘I am glad that the Orangemen have armed, for it is a goodly thing to see arms in Irish hands. I should like to see the A.O.H. armed. I should like to see the Transport Workers armed. I should like to see any and every body of Irish citizens armed. We must accustom ourselves to the thought of arms, to the sight of arms, to the use of arms. We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood. There are many things more horrible than bloodshed; and slavery is one of them’ (Collected works. Political writings, 98).