Redemption - Leon Uris [294]
and
The fear that stabbed me. Shooting down the first president of the Irish Republic on this day was shoving it in our face. A year ago he had stirred the nation with an awakening eulogy over the grave of an old Fenian sent back from America.
Padraic Pearse was taken to the wall in Stonebraker’s Yard and only then saw Tom Clarke’s and MacDonagh’s bodies, still and lifeless at the foot of the wall.
Down he went in a volley: the mystic Gael, the writer of excellent verse, the Royal University graduate, the lifelong educator.
A short and terse announcement came at the end of the day from Dublin Castle that Pearse, Clarke, and MacDonagh had been found guilty of treason by a military tribunal and executed by a firing squad.
* * *
Ah, you can envision what went on now with so many others under death sentence, can ye not? Irishmen doing their Irish thing, that last writing of defiance…or simply expressing the love they were leaving for their family…visits, not knowing if they were last visits…priests intoning…other priests daring to speak out from the pulpit for the first time in protest…
Dawn came with chilled hearts and breaths held…and then, the crackling volley of gunfire…again.
May 4, 1916
That’s the day they killed Joe Plunkett, another academic, born of aristocracy. Joe Mary Plunkett had been dying of tuberculosis but left his hospital bed to join the Rising and do whatever a man in his condition could do.
He married the sister of Tom MacDonagh’s wife in Kilmainham just prior to their shooting him.
and
Ned Daly who commanded so well at Four Courts but had the misfortune of being Tom Clarke’s brother-in-law.
and
Willie Pearse, similarly afflicted with the curse of being Padraic Pearse’s brother.
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Michael O’Hanrahan, a literary man. His will and sole possession, the copyright of his first published book.
May 5, 1916
John MacBride had his very own day. He was a symbol of long-standing hatred, selected for revenge.
Old John was on no one’s war council, just an Irish rover with a drinking problem who had somehow won and wed one of Ireland’s great beauties, Maud Gonne, an actress like my mother. They had separated.
In his earlier rovings, John MacBride had fought on the side of the Boers against the British and was given the rank of major.
The British had never forgotten or forgiven that he had taken up arms against them a decade earlier. He went to his maker with bravado, snarling that he had looked into British rifle barrels before. His death was particularly pointless and nasty.
For a moment the executions stopped. They were creating a foul stench on the face of sweet justice. Asquith, the British prime minister, assured the ineffective John Redmond that he himself was shocked at the carnage; he promised to slow things down.
The Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote a scathing article in England that the Irishmen recently shot had been killed in cold blood after surrender.
The first stirrings of outside resentment.
May 8, 1916
The British executed Eamonn Ceannt, a handsome Irish lad who loved and lived his Irishness by speaking the ancient language, playing the pipes, and dancing the jigs and reels. His exclusive military background was that of working in the City Treasurer’s office.
and
Michael Mallin, a silk weaver with four kids and another on the way who had once drummed in the British Army in India. He was second in command to the Countess Markievicz at St. Stephen’s Green and the College of Surgeons.
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Con Colbert, a bakery clerk and one of eleven children. He was a proud drill instructor in the Home Army who didn’t have the worst of it during the Rising, seizing and commanding Watkin’s Brewery.
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Sean Heuston, a twenty-five-year-old lad from Limerick whose religious family proudly included a nun and a priest. He had captured the Mendacity Hospital.
May 9, 1916
To give things a nationwide caution, Thomas