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Letter from Padraig Pearse to Joseph McGarrity

Letter from Padraig Pearse to Joseph McGarrity detailing the arms landed at Howth. Pearse also discusses John Redmond and the split in the Irish Volunteers, and emphasises the importance of the American Commitee in arming the Irish Volunteers throughout the whole of Ireland.

Manuscript in ink. Letter addressed from Turlough, Rosmule, Co. Galway. Physical description: 1 item (4 pages).

Pearse, Patrick Henry (1879–1916), writer, educationalist, and revolutionary, was born 10 November 1879 at the family home, 27 Great Brunswick Street (latterly Pearse St.) Dublin.

Already convinced of the centrality of the Irish language to a distinctive Irish identity, he joined the Gaelic League in 1896. His father's commercial success allowed him to enrol for a BA (RUI) in Irish, English, and French at UCD, while also taking law courses at King's Inns and TCD, 1898–1901.

Education remained his abiding passion. 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. St Enda's proved a remarkable experiment, above all because of the inspirational personality of Pearse himself and his commitment to a child centred approach to education to which many of the pupils responded enthusiastically.

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. More certainly, his attitude towards politics began to change as home rule became a possibility from 1911.

Always ambitious, over the next two years he became increasingly militant, his writings more polemical. In December 1913, he was finally admitted to the IRB.

The military council of the IRB planned a rising to begin on Easter Sunday, 23 April, under cover of a mobilisation order by Pearse for Volunteer manoeuvres, which the IRB intended to turn into rebellion. About ten times as many Volunteers were to be involved, with far greater firepower, as was in fact the case on Easter Monday.

Pearse was chosen as the president of the republic they intended to proclaim. How that happened remains unclear. Clarke, the senior figure among them, was the first signatory of the proclamation of the republic, and the presumptive president. Pearse's appointment may have been due to the belief that public relations would be crucial during a rising whose duration, even then, no one could foresee, and that Pearse was the supreme communicator among the signatories, whereas Clarke's talents lay more in conspiracy than in communication. The following day, Pearse duly read out the proclamation of the republic after the rebels seized the General Post Office, which became their HQ. Mainly his own composition, the proclamation stands as the final published statement of his ideals.

After he had hesitated about surrendering initially, the sight of the shedding of innocent blood seems to have revolted Pearse as much as the rhetoric of blood had excited him. Earlier in the week, however appalled by the looting, he refused to follow his own injunction to shoot captured looters. Now, after seeing three civilians with a white flag shot down, Pearse surrendered, in the hope of saving civilians and his followers, on 29 April. Sentenced to death on 2 May after a trial in which his bearing won the admiration of the presiding English officer, he played out his presidential role to the full, summoning shades of MacDara in proposing himself as the sole sacrifice. He was executed at 3.30 a.m. on 3 May.

(Biographical details: J. J. Lee. 'Pearse, Patrick Henry'. Dictionary of Irish Biography.)