Dublin's General Post Office, site of the Easter Rising 110 years ago. Credit: Photo by author.

I am ready. For years I have waited and prayed for this day. We have the most glorious opportunity that has ever presented itself of really asserting ourselves. Such an opportunity will never come again. Will we be freemen, or are we content to remain as slaves, and idly watch the final extermination of the Gael?

Patrick Pearse (Pádraig Mac Piarais in his native tongue) wrote the words above just days before Ireland’s Easter Rising of 1916. They were quoted in America six weeks after that fateful attempt to throw off British rule in an article on “The Irish Insurrectionary Poets,” three wordsmiths who signed the “Proclamation of the Irish Republic” in 1916 and gave their talents to that cause: Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett. 

I write now from Dublin, where a group of staff, readers and friends of America are finishing up a pilgrimage (part of an ongoing program: next is Quebec and then Lourdes!) to this land of saints and scholars. Among the stops on our journey (not gonna lie, there were a lot of churches) have been visits to some of the iconic sites of Irish history and of the Rising, an event that despite its short-term failure nevertheless kicked the cause of Irish independence into high gear and is remembered today as a pivotal moment in the establishment of the Irish Republic. 

We toured the General Post Office in Dublin, where the Rising was centered; Kilmainham Gaol, where the leaders of the plot were imprisoned and then executed in the aftermath; the Museum of Literature Ireland, where the words of the above poets and so many other Irish writers are preserved and remembered; Glasnevin Cemetery, where many heroes of the Irish Republic rest; and much more. Our timing was also good: Last Friday was the 110th anniversary of the Rising. 

The group that seized the General Post Office on O’Connell Street in Dublin on April 24, 1916, lasted six days before being forced to surrender. Their cause was not a popular one at first, either in Dublin or elsewhere, in part because the British mercilessly shelled Dublin’s city center in response and out of revenge. In W. B. Yeats’s famous poem “Easter, 1916,” he asks a question that was likely on more than a few minds in the days following: “Was it needless death after all?” 

Museum Of Literature Ireland. Photo by author.

But the British response—to summarily execute 15 of the Rising’s leaders, including James Connolly (who, so badly injured he couldn’t stand, was simply tied to a chair and executed anyway) and all three of the aforementioned poets—soon turned the tide of public opinion against the colonizers and in favor of Ireland’s advocates for independence. Why not, when the alternative was to see Irish boys die on the fields of France for a country murdering your own priests and poets and politicians in cold blood? 

The editors of America (who, in truth, were never great fans of the British—see this charming and jesuitical tale of the visit of Éamon de Valera to the magazine’s offices) wrote soon after: “The mildest American opinion about these executions is that England has made a tactical mistake, the most severe, that she has committed an atrocious crime.” Even British sympathizers on our side of the pond reluctantly agreed that, in the words of The Saturday Evening Post in the days following the executions, “time will show the Irish executions to have been a blunder in public policy.”

Yeats’s own poem ends with a famous tribute to the fallen of 1916:

We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;   
And what if excess of love   
Bewildered them till they died?   
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride   
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Six years later, the British recognized the Irish Free State; after more decades of struggle and strife, most of Ireland officially became an independent republic in 1949 and left the British Commonwealth behind. It is not uncommon today to hear speculation in North and South about an eventual reunification of the entire island under one flag. It would have been a wild conceit only a few decades ago, and something profound to consider when visiting the graves of Daniel O’Connell, Michael Collins and so many others who saw such a day as more than a dream. 

On the topic of Irish dreamers, Pearse remains my favorite, not least because in addition to his poetry and his patriotism, he was also considered by many to be a religious mystic of sorts. What is it that Walt Whitman sang of himself? I contain multitudes? The same was true of Pearse, though he never would have said it. More than one contemporary (and historian) also described the erstwhile schoolmaster and editor as childlike in his idealism and unswerving devotion to his causes, including that of Irish self-determination.

Note, however, that Pearse—a devoted Irish nationalist and a devoted Christian—did not use the rhetoric of domination that we hear proud Christian nationalists use in the United States today to justify war and the wanton destruction of our enemies. Yes, Pearse saw the cause of Irish independence as a religious matter, and yes, he surely thought he and his fellow patriots had God on their side. But the Christ to whom he prayed sounds rather different from the warrior deity invoked by Pete Hegseth and others in their lust for dominion and apocalypse. Here is Pearse in his famous poem “The Rebel”:

And now I speak, being full of vision;
I speak to my people, and I speak in my people’s name to the masters of my people.
I say to my people that they are holy, that they are august, despite their chains,
That they are greater than those that hold them, and stronger and purer,
That they have but need of courage, and to call on the name of their God,
God the unforgetting, the dear God that loves the peoples
For whom He died naked, suffering shame.
And I say to my people’s masters: Beware,
Beware of the thing that is coming, beware of the risen people,
Who shall take what ye would not give.
Did ye think to conquer the people,
Or that Law is stronger than life and than men’s desire to be free?

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is by the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama: “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.