Pádraic Pearse - The Coming Revolution

Copyright 2020

First Printing 2020

This particular collection was compiled by the publisher, all rights reserved.

The content of this work is in the public domain.

The foreword is the intellectual property of its author.

Cover art by Anita Hudojnik

The publisher can be contacted at

Antelopehillpublishing.com

COLLECTED WORKS OF

PDRAIC H. PEARSE

POLITICAL WRITINGS

A ND SPEECHES

WITH SELECT POEMS

FOREWORD BY SAM OHARA

ANTELOPE HILLS PUBLISHING

P D R A I C H. P E A R S E

C O N T E N T S

FOREWORD BY SAM OHARA

THE PROCLAMATION OF THE24th April, 1916

IRISH REPUBLIC

They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools! they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.

PDRAIC H. PEARSE

GRAVESIDE ORATION FOR ODONOVAN ROSSA

1st August, 1915

The character of Pdraic Pearse haunts the conscience of modern Ireland more than it cares to admit.

A primary architect in the events of Easter 1916 and arguably the father of the Irish Republic, his historic and cultural legacy is surprisingly ignored if not outright maligned.

While Washington of Gabridali retain a place of pride in their respective nations, Pearse is even refused the honour of a stature by contemporary Irish elites.

An Ireland with one eye on the previous northern troubles, basking in neoliberal largesse is naturally apprehensive of a poet who trained child soldiers for battle, a poet who had as his life s goal the creation of a prelapsarian Gaelic nation by armed force and who was willing to sacrifice his life for it.

Intellectuals deride him as a proto-fascist relic and point to the intellectual lineage from Pearse to the Provisional IRA. Marxists half-heartedly attempt to claim him as their own due to his apparent embrace of socialism following his alliance with the patriot socialist James Connolly. The 26 county Irish state paid some degree of lip service to Pearse right up until the emergence of the Provisional IRA in the 1960s when it became expedient to marginalize him.

A segment of Irish Catholicism even accuses Pearse of de facto paganism, with attempts to create his own personal Calvary on the streets of Dublin.

Pearse exists to-day, despite his historical impact as a rather forlorn figure, misunderstood by an Ireland he thought could have had a much more radical future.

Only through a nationalist lens does the historical place and mission of Pearse become apparent, as well as why he presents a danger to the powers-that-be to-day just as much as in 1916.

Against centuries of the slow unwinding of Gaelic civilisation , and against the behemoth of liberal modernity personified by the British Empire, Pearse emerges as an almost quixotic figure. The very soul of Ireland was rotting in his mind. Not through British domination alone, but through the cultural devaluation generated by it.

Through his work as a Gaelic activist on the Western seaboard in Gaeltacht towns like Rosmuc , Pearse became infatuated with a living tradition typified for the Irish-speaking peasantry. It was this tradition, imperiled by the onset of modernity, that sought to eradicate residual elements of Gaelic culture through economic rationalization.

Against this seeming cultural death spiral, only an act of defense could nurture a genuine national rebirth, a concept at the heart of Pearse and his project. Born of mixed heritage to an Irish peasant mother and an English artisan father, Pearse played a salient role in both cultural and physical force nationalism of his day.

An accomplished writer and Gaelic activist, he spearheaded a radical brand of educational reform at his school in Scoil anna. Fusing traditions of Irish monasticism and Gaelic folk tales with the latest ideas in educational theory, many of his students would partake in the events of Easter Week. Defined strictly against the utilitarian theories of the British schooling model, the school played host to a radical testing ground for Pearse and his philosophy. It was an Irish-speaking school where boys were versed in the tales of Na Fianna, ancient aristocratic warbands that governed Ireland, and even practiced with rifles.

Further afield, the Ireland of Pearses day was approaching a crisis point, the advent of a Catholic bourgeois in the 19th century propelling the prospect of Home Rule and awaking from its slumber the forces of Unionist reaction. The centuries-long process of Anglicanism was gathering pace with modernity, with the prospect of bourgeois nationalism in the form of Home Rule not addressing the root cause in Pearse s mind.

With the beginning of the First World War, Pearse reveled in the emergence of militant nationalism across Europe. With it came the prospect to smash the imperial apparatus governing Ireland and for a small radical vanguard to assert itself on the national stage.

Through the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a radical faction within the nationalist movement, he helped choreograph the Easter Rebellion in April 1916. Famously doomed from the start, rebels hopelessly took up strategic positions primarily in Dublin with Pearse commanding operations from the central stronghold at the Dublin s General Post Office. After a week of heavy street fighting and the destructions of swaths of inner city, Dublin nationalist forces surrendered unconditionally, with Pearse and other ringleaders executed soon after.

While initially derided as militarily incompetent, it triggered a remarkable volte-face in Irish public opinion. The rebels who were jeered by Dubliners as they were marched off to internment came home heroes only a few months later.

The Rising is very much as Pearse affair right down to the famous Proclamation largely written by the poet himself. What better way to respond to the malaise of Anglo-Saxon modernity than to mimic the heroism of C Chulainn on the streets of Dublin.