Patrick Pearse (Dublin 1879 – Dublin 1916) was born in a modest middle-class milieu and from his school days onwards was an ardent supporter of the Gaelic League and its programme of reviving the Irish language. He studied Irish, English, and French at University College Dublin, and followed courses in law as well. He became an ardent propagandist for the Gaelic League from c.1900 on, and editor of its journal An claidheamh soluis (“The sword of light”) in 1903. His revivalism addressed not only the status of the language but also of music and other forms of folk culture, and most importantly, education. A late adept of Carlyle’s notions of hero-worship, he took inspiration from the legendary warriors of Gaelic antiquity and applied this as a pedagogical principle in what would eventually become his own school, St Enda’s, which opened in 1907. Teaching there was conducted bilingually in Gaelic and English, on the example of Belgian schools which Pearse had visited in 1905; a parallel venture for girls, St Ita’s, opened in 1910 but failed, and closed in 1912.
In his journalism and public oratory Pearse denounced British rule as the source of all Ireland’s evils, and glorified Ireland as a country once great in learning and stalwart morality and destined to become so once more after shaking off its moral and political anglicization. This was, in essence, a separatist intensification of Douglas Hyde’s original programme of cultural salvage and regenerative de-anglicization. By 1910, Hyde could no longer accept Pearse’s intensifying politicization of the Gaelic League, and resigned its presidency. Pearse in these years also made a name for himself with his verse and dramatic sketches, both in English and in Irish, aimed at amateur actors and intended to improve Irish-language literacy.
By 1913 Pearse became a militant separatist and was sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood after joining the Irish Volunteers, which the IRB had infiltrated. He publicly positioned himself as such in his much-publicized graveside oration for the old Fenian and IRB leader Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. He welcomed the outbreak of the World War as a cathartic experience for a decadent Europe, and increasingly stressed the need for heroic self-sacrifice. His mystique of sanctifying the national cause, almost in Eucharistic terms, by offering oneself up as a sacrificial victim (e.g. in his play The singer, 1915), led him to contemplate an armed rebellion, which, even if it had little chance of succeeding, would at least maintain an Irish tradition of periodic outbursts of armed resistance against British rule.
The planned rebellion took place, after long planning but amidst some last-minute confusion, on Easter Monday 1916. A “Provisional Government” representing various nationalist persuasions (with members from the cultural revival most strongly represented) proclaimed the independence of the Irish Republic in a text penned by Pearse, acting as its President, invoking at the same time a divine mandate, the sacred heritage of past resistance, and the right to self-government. The rebels held out at various Dublin strongholds for a few days; Pearse surrendered in late April and was tried and executed on 3 May. His death turned him into that which he had planned to be: a martyr; and as such his posthumous inspiration on subsequent Irish nationalism proved enormous. While his legacy is still a matter of debate in Ireland (which traces its present-day sovereignty back to his proclamation of 1916) and, especially, in Northern Ireland, Pearse undoubtedly represents one of the most remarkable examples of cultural revivalism radicalizing into armed separatism.
