Patrick Pearse’s Legacy

I recall that when I was twelve years old in sixth class, I asked my teacher, Owen O’Sullivan, why Patrick Pearse was not canonized by the Catholic Church. I pointed out that he was a brave idealist who died as a martyr for his country. In addition, Pearse was a devout Catholic who drew his inspiration from Christ, who also died to save his people. What more, I wondered, did the man have to do to have his exemplary sanctity recognized by Rome?

Today, I view Pearse and his 1916 rebellion very differently. After the military debacle that is called “The Easter Rising,” the poet William Butler Yeats commented very presciently about the uprising in one of his poems when he wrote that “A Terrible Beauty is Born!” He correctly foresaw that Pearse’s blood sacrifice would motivate many idealistic young men and women to kill and be killed in the name of the idealized republic declared at the GPO.

Pearse had no popular mandate for his revolution. He was told by Eoin McNeill, his commander in the Irish Volunteers, not to go ahead with his plans for an armed uprising. However, he felt that he and his comrades were following a higher philosophy, striking a blow for Ireland that they hoped would raise the spirit of the people, who would then rebel and revolt en masse against the British.

Now, democratic principles were well established in Ireland by the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of the previous millenium, Daniel O’Connell and, especially, Charles Parnell, had achieved major political progress for Ireland in Westminster. They were able to move forward by using various astute parliamentary tactics in the London parliament and by maintaining a strong support base in successive elections throughout most of Ireland.

Agitation for land reform was central to the nationalist political agenda in the 19th century. Under Parnell, who was wholeheartedly supported by Michael Davitt, the dynamic leader of the Land League, major political progress was made in this area. In fact, after the passage of a number of reforms in Westminster, culminating with the Wyndham Act in 1903, nearly all the changes sought by Davitt were achieved. It should be stressed that these important reforms were achieved without resorting to violence.

The repeal of the Act of Union of 1801 was the other major goal of O’Connell and later, Parnell. The Irish Parliamentary Party used their power very astutely in Westminster to press their case for a Home Rule bill that would return political power to a Dublin parliament. Finally, they were successful, prior to the start of the First World War, but the government in Westminster postponed implementing the Irish Home Rule Bill until, what they called,the Great War was over.

The agitation for Home Rule was supported by nearly all Irish nationalists, including Patrick Pearse and the IRB. A parliament in Dublin, with limited power, was never seen as a final solution by Irish nationalists of any hue; rather, it was viewed as offering a major step towards full independence – what Michael Collins memorably called in the later Treaty debate “the freedom to achieve freedom.”



Protestants, who were very strong numerically in the province of Ulster, formed the Ulster Volunteers, whose sole objective was to reject any allegiance to a Dublin parliament. In their eyes Home Rule would be Rome Rule, and they would die to prevent that. So, Westminster moved reluctantly to set up two parliaments in Ireland, one in Dublin and one in Belfast.

Ironically, Pearse praised the determination and stubbornness of the Ulster loyalists for resisting by threatened force the imposition of the preferred British solution, one parliament in Dublin for the whole island. And, it should be noted that even the most extreme Republicans, including Pearse, never advocated imposing a united Ireland of any kind by confronting the Ulster Volunteers by force.

The events of Easter 1916 changed the dynamics of Irish politics. The executions by the British of so many brave and idealistic Irishmen after the Rising were largely responsible for swinging the country away from the Irish Parliamentary Party and into supporting the Sinn Fein Party, which did very well in the 1918 election.

I often wonder what would have happened if Pearse had obeyed McNeill’s command and called off the insurrection. It is very likely that Home Rule would have been implemented and that this, over time, with the demise of imperialism throughout the world, would have led to more and more freedom, ending up, almost inevitably, with the full measure which evolved in the South of Ireland about thirty years after Pearse’s death.

Surely, this scenario would have been preferable to the divisions, the killings and the mayhem that dominated Irish political history in the 20th century. The parliamentary approach, the constitutional road, that was followed so successfully in the 19th century could have served Ireland very well in the 20th century also. Was the birthing of Pearse’s “Terrible Beauty” in 1916 worth it?