11

Desmond Ryan (ed.), Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (1917)

Patrick Pearse exerted several strains of influence on twentieth-century Ireland. He came to be celebrated as an educationalist but was not an influential one. As the main author of the 1916 Proclamation, he influenced constitutional understandings of Irish nationhood but because of his passionate advocacy of ‘blood sacrifice’ he has often been portrayed as a dangerous and destabilising influence on the nation state of which he is officially a founding father. His key writings from 1912 to 1916 – pamphlets including ‘The Murder Machine’ on education, ‘Peace and the Gael,’ ‘The Coming Revolution’, ‘The Separatist Idea’ and ‘The Sovereign People’ – were first anthologised in 1917 by Desmond Ryan, a former pupil of Pearse’s and a teacher at St Enda’s, the school founded by Pearse.1

‘The Murder Machine’ that Pearse attacked was ‘the English education system in Ireland’, a grotesque and wicked system aimed at debasing the Irish. Its machinery, Pearse argued, was a lifeless thing without a soul: ‘A machine vast, complicated, with a multitude of far-reaching arms, with many ponderous presses, carrying out mysterious and long-drawn processes of shaping and moulding’. Into it was fed the raw human material of Ireland to be compressed and remoulded. The machine sought to ‘grind’ the most able for the English civil service and the so-called liberal professions, leaving those who could not be so refashioned bruised and shapeless.

Under the modern system, he argued, the teacher was a mere civil servant. The modern child was coming to regard his teacher as an official paid by the State to render him certain services; services which it was in his interest to avail of, since by doing so he would increase his earning capacity later on. Under such utilitarian conditions the relationship between both was no more sacred than accepting the services of a dentist or a chiropodist. This turned the time-honoured tradition of master and disciple – in which he included the schools of Ancient Greece, Christ and his disciples, the Medieval scholastics, the Munster poets and nineteenth-century hedge schools – on its head. He also extolled the virtues of the Montessori system with its emphasis on the spontaneous efforts of children rather than the dominating will of the teacher. In all his examples of ‘best practice’ (a term he would have despised) the role of the teacher was to inspire and foster the individual talents of his pupils, whatever these might be. The idea of a compulsory curriculum was anathema. Schools should be free to shape their own programmes and teachers to impart something of their own personalities to their work. The ‘Murder Machine’ served as a manifesto for St Enda’s:

When we were starting St. Enda’s I said to my boys: ‘We must re-create and perpetuate in Ireland the knightly tradition of Cuchulainn, “better is short life with honour than long life with dishonour”; “I care not though I were to live but one day and one night, if only my fame and my deeds live after me”; the noble tradition of the Fianna, “we, the Fianna, never told a lie, falsehood was never imputed to us”; “strength in our hands, truth on our lips, and cleanness in our hearts”; the Christ-like tradition of Colmcille, “if I die it shall be from the excess of the love I bear the Gael”’.2

In ‘Peace and the Gael’, written in December 1915, Pearse had exulted in the cleansing carnage of the Great War:

The last sixteen months have been the most glorious in the history of Europe. Heroism has come back to the earth. On whatever side the men who rule the peoples have marshalled them, whether with England to uphold her tyranny of the seas, or with Germany to break that tyranny, the people themselves have gone into battle because to each the old voice that speaks out of the soil of a nation has spoken anew. Each fights for the fatherland. It is policy that moves the governments; it is patriotism that stirs the peoples. Belgium defending her soil is heroic, and so is Turkey fighting with her back to Constantinople.

It is good for the world that such things should be done. The old heart of the earth needed to be warmed with the red wine of the battlefields. Such august homage was never offered to God as this, the homage of millions of lives given gladly for love of country.3

War, he continued, was a terrible thing but not an evil thing: ‘Ireland had not known the exhilaration of war for over a hundred years.’ And when war came to Ireland, ‘she must welcome the Angel of God’. Winning through it, ‘we (or those of us who survive) shall come unto great joy’. Only a war that destroyed the Pax Britannica in Ireland could bequeath to the next generation the Peace of the Gael.

‘No’, James Connolly replied, ‘we do not think that the old heart of the earth needs to be warmed with the red wine of millions of lives. We think anyone who does is a blithering idiot.’4 Ryan described Pearse as looking hurt when he read this. Pearse’s defence of his lyrical appeals to the sword and his gospel of blood sacrifice was that he sincerely believed in them and was willing to stake his own life on their truth. His political writings from 1912 to 1916 documented his embrace of the ideal of a Christ-like sacrifice for the sake of Irish freedom. There was, Ryan recalled in his 1934 memoir Remembering Sion, a disconcerting side to Pearse. No honest portrait could hide ‘a Napoleonic complex which expressed itself in a fanatical glorification of war for its own sake, an excess of sentiment which almost intoxicated him both on the platform and in private ventures, a recklessness in action and the narrow outlook of a very respectable Dubliner who has never left his city or family circle for long’. Although his ideal was the sword, he could not, according to Ryan, have cut a loaf of bread to save his life. Nor could he ‘for all his lyrics of smoking battlefields bear the sight of human suffering without squirming’.5

In ‘The Sovereign People’, his final testament on the subject of Irish freedom dated 31 March 1916 (‘For my part, I have no more to say’) Pearse proclaimed a new testament of revolutionary Irish nationalism with four prophets: Theobald Wolfe Tone, Thomas Davis, James Fintan Lalor and John Mitchel. Of these, ‘The Sovereign People’ most extensively quoted and paraphrased Lalor, in particular, his 1848 essay ‘The Rights of Ireland’ published in The Irish Felon, a newspaper founded to take the place of Mitchel’s The United Irishman after this was proscribed and Mitchel imprisoned.6 Much of Pearse’s contribution to the 1916 Proclamation of an Irish Republic which he co-authored with Connolly drew on Lalor’s writings. This declared the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, a resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the whole nation and, famously, to cherish all children of the nation equally.

Pearse’s writings were peppered with sentences beginning ‘I assert’, ‘I insist’, or ‘I claim’. ‘The Sovereign People’ insisted upon nationality as a spiritual fact; but nationhood required physical freedom, and physical power. Without such freedom the nation droops, withers and ultimately perhaps dies; only a very steadfast nation, a nation of great spiritual and intellectual strength like Ireland, can live for more than a few generations in its absence, and without it even so stubborn a nation as Ireland would doubtless ultimately perish. Pearse declared that the sovereignty of the Irish nation extended to all the material possessions of the nation, its soil and all its resources, all wealth and all wealth-producing processes within the nation. No individual right to private right to property, he insisted, held sway over the public right of the nation. But the nation was under a moral obligation to exercise its public right so as to secure strictly equal rights and liberties to every man and woman within the nation. It was for the nation to determine to what extent private property might be held by its members, whether the railways and waterways were to be in public ownership or whether all sources of wealth were to be its property. There was nothing divine or sacrosanct in any of these arrangements; they were matters of purely human concern, matters for discussion and adjustment between the members of a nation, matters to be decided upon finally by the nation as a whole; and matters in which the nation as a whole might revise or reverse its decision whenever it seemed good in the common interest to do so. This was the essence of what he meant by national sovereignty. He defined Irish freedom as the exercise of this freedom by all the people:

The people, if wise, will choose as the makers and administrators of their laws men and women actually and fully representative of all the men and women of the nation, the men and women of no property equally with the men and women of property; they will regard such an accident as the possession of ‘property’, ‘capital’, ‘wealth’ in any shape, the possession of what is called ‘a stake in the country’, as conferring no more right to represent the people than would the accident of possessing a red head or the accident of having been born on a Tuesday. And in order that the people may be able to choose as a legislation and as a government men and women really and fully representative of themselves, they will keep the choice actually or virtually in the hands of the whole people; in other words, while, in the exercise of their sovereign rights they may, if they will, delegate the actual choice to somebody among them, i.e., adopt a ‘restricted franchise’, they will, if wise, adopt the widest possible franchise – give a vote to every adult man and woman of sound mind. To restrict the franchise in any respect is to prepare the way for some future usurpation of the rights of the sovereign people. The people, that is, the whole people, must remain sovereign not only in theory, but in fact.7

Much of this built word for word on Lalor’s 1848 essay although the emphasis on female franchise was an unsurprising addition. Pearse did not prescribe how the Irish people should govern themselves but, like Lalor, was emphatic that self-government required control and ownership of the land and resources of Ireland. As put by Lalor and endorsed by Pearse:

The principle I state, and mean to stand upon, is this: that the entire ownership of Ireland, moral and material, up to the sun and down to the centre, is vested of right in the people of Ireland; that they, and none but they, are the land-owners and law-makers of this island; that all laws are null and void not made by them, and all titles to land invalid not conferred or confirmed by them, and that this full right of ownership may and ought to be asserted by any and all means which God has put in the power of man. In other, if not plainer words, I hold and maintain that the entire soil of a country belongs of right to the entire people of that country, and is the rightful property, not of any one class, but of the nation at large, in full effective possession, to let to whom they will, on whatever tenures, terms, rents, services, and conditions they will; one condition, however, being unavoidable and essential, the condition that the tenant shall bear full, true, and undivided fealty and allegiance to the nation, and the laws of the nation whose lands he holds, and own no allegiance whatsoever to any other prince, power, or people, or any obligation of obedience or respect to their will, orders, or laws. I hold, further, and firmly believe, that the enjoyment by the people of this right of first ownership of the soil is essential to the vigour and vitality of all other rights, to their validity, efficacy, and value; to their secure possession and safe exercise. For let no people deceive themselves, or be deceived by the words, and colours, and phrases, and forms of a mock freedom, by constitutions, and charters, and articles, and franchise. These things are paper and parchment, waste and worthless. Let laws and institutions say what they will, this fact will be stronger than all laws, and prevail against them – the fact that those who own your lands will make your laws, and command your liberties and your lives. But this is tyranny and slavery; tyranny in its widest scope and worst shape; slavery of body and soul, from the cradle to the coffin – slavery with all its horrors, and with none of its physical comforts and security; even as it is in Ireland, where the whole community is made up of tyrants, slaves, and slave-drivers.8

Lalor, for Pearse, was the immediate intellectual ancestor of the democratic aspect of Irish nationalism. Davis inspired its spiritual and imaginative elements, the Gaelic League cultural nationalism that was the main vehicle of Pearse’s patriotism – in poetry, plays and polemics and as an educationalist – until he abandoned constitutionalism for the gospel according to Mitchel. Mitchel, according to Pearse, was the author of the last ‘apocalyptic’ testament of Irish nationality: ‘the fieriest and the most sublime’. Mitchel ‘was of the stuff of which great prophets and ecstatics have been made. He really did converse with God; he did really deliver God’s word to man, delivered it fiery-tongued.’ Pearse’s final article, ‘The Sovereign People’, his own last testament, offered the following synthesis:

And just as all the four have reached, in different terms, the same gospel, making plain in turn different facets of the same truth, so the movements I have indicated are but facets of a whole, different expressions, and each one a necessary expression, of the august, though denied, truth of Irish Nationhood; nationhood in virtue of an old spiritual tradition of nationality, nationhood involving Separation and Sovereignty, nationhood resting on and guaranteeing the freedom of all the men and women of the nation and placing them in effective possession of the physical conditions necessary to the reality and to the perpetuation of their freedom, nationhood declaring and establishing and defending itself by the good smiting sword. I who have been in and of each of these movements make here the necessary synthesis, and in the name of all of them I assert the forgotten truth, and ask all who accept it to testify to it with me, here in our day and, if need be, with our blood.9

Pearse’s political tracts are now most readily found on Sinn Fein and republican splinter group websites or encountered second-hand as quoted fragments. They have been the focus of ongoing scholarly criticism anxious about the potential political influence of Pearse’s emphasis on violence and blood sacrifice. The definitive essay here has been ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’ by Francis Shaw SJ, published in the Jesuit journal Studies at the height of the Northern Ireland crisis.10 Shaw was distressed by Pearse’s misappropriation of Christ’s sacrifice, his presumption that nationalism and holiness were identical and by how cheaply he appeared to hold life. From ‘The Coming Revolution’ he quoted Pearse as writing, ‘We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing.’ Shaw’s essay was meant to have been published in a 1966 issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising but was held back as being too controversial. The generation of 1916, now a gerontocracy, had run the country for decades. Ireland had yet to find itself, as it did a few years later, under the shadow of a new generation of gunmen.

BF

Notes

1Desmond Ryan (ed.), Collected Works of Padraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (Phoenix: Dublin and Belfast, 1917).

2Ibid., p.39.

3Ibid., p.216.

4James Connolly, Workers Republic, (25 December 1915).

5Desmond Ryan, Remembering Sion (London: Arthur Barker, 1934), p.122.

6See Pearse in Ryan, Political Writings and Speeches, p.350.

7Ibid., p.342.

8Ibid., pp.335–6.

9Ibid., p.371.

10Francis Shaw SJ, ‘The Canon of Irish History: A Challenge’, Studies, 61, 242 (Summer 1972), p.113.