Complex, tortured Pearse

Pádraig Pearse was born in 1879 on 27 Great Brunswick Street in Dublin – known today as Pearse Street. His father, from Birmingham, was a mason who raised Patrick, his brother Willie and sister Margaret in a comfortable middle-class environment.

"His father was very well read, and they had a vast library at home," says biographer Ruth Dudley Edwards, author of A Triumph of Failure. "He would have been surrounded by books. Yet, at school, he was ridiculed for being British due to a slight Birmingham accent. Pearse was a tortured soul. He was always grappling with his identity, and the need to prove his Irishness."

Pearse's father died in 1900, and the influence of his Irish- speaking mother, Margaret, instilled in him a love of Irish language and mythology. In 1896, at the age of 16, he joined the Gaelic League and in 1903 he began editing its newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis.

"His central goal was to make Ireland Irish," says Dr Joost Augusteijn, author of Patrick Pearse: The Making of a Revolutionary. "And to do that, he thought you had to speak it."

In 1900 Pearse graduated with a BA in modern languages and was called to the bar in 1901. Aided by Willie, he set up a bilingual school in Ranelagh, St Enda’s, in 1908. In 1910 the school moved to Rathfarnham.

“He was very selfless,” says Dudley Edwards. “And he truly cared about language, education and his country. He was a progressive teacher, and a very fine one, although he indoctrinated his pupils.”

Adds Augusteijn: “He’s an extremely complex and interesting character. Pearse was a progressive, European modernist force in designing child-centred education. He called the 19th- century education system a murder machine because it killed individualism.

“Pearse is not a simple man to understand,” he says. “ He was involved in the Gaelic League, his school, and the political and revolutionary movements. He created a body of thinking that is intriguing, if at times strange.

“It is true that blood sacrifice – dying to save Ireland, just as Jesus died to save the world – was very much celebrated in his children’s stories, and even in the prospectus in his school. Yet the 1916 Rising was a genuine attempt to win. And in 1912, he had supported Redmond’s Home Rule Bill as a means to an end, much like Michael Collins in 1921.”

Although Pearse joined John Redmond and Eoin MacNeill at a rally in support of Home Rule in March 1912, he signed up to the Irish Volunteers in November 1913. By 1914, when Home Rule was suspended, he had grown increasingly militant in his thinking. In August 1915 Pearse delivered a rousing oration at the funeral of veteran Fenian O’Donovan Rossa, presaging his declaration of a republic outside the GPO on Easter Monday, 1916.

“He was a shy, reticent person, and not a fluent orator, but he was so very intensely passionate that he mesmerised many who heard or read him,” says Augusteijn.

“Pearse is important because he’s seen as the foundation stone of the Irish State and of republicanism,” says Augusteijn. “Independence wouldn’t have been granted in the way it was granted in 1921 if it wasn’t for 1916, in which Pearse was the figurehead. Pearse also wanted the people to own Ireland’s natural resources, and was ahead of his time in being in favour of women’s suffrage.”

Dudley Edwards views his legacy as more problematic. “Pearse introduced a toxic thread through Irish nationalism. There was always physical violence before nationalism, but Pearse legitimised it and wrote its Gospel. He was a brilliant propagandist. And we’ve had a century of it ever since.”