Patrick Pearse
Revolutionary, 1879-1916

Patrick Henry Pearse (Pádraic or Pádraig Mac Piarais) was born on 10 November 1879 at 27 Great Brunswick (now Pearse) Street, Dublin.
His father was an English stonemason, his mother came from Co Meath. Pearse developed a love of the Irish language at the Christian Brothers school in Westland Row, and joined the Gaelic League in 1896, soon going on to its executive.
He graduated from the Royal University in 1901, and was called to the Bar, but seldom practised. Instead, he helped his younger brother Willie run the family business and taught Irish at University College, Dublin. In 1903, he became editor of the Gaelic League's journal, An Claidheamh Soluis.
In 1908, Pearse opened a bilingual school for boys, St Enda's, in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines. In 1910, he moved to larger premises at The Hermitage, Rathfarnham, where Robert Emmet had courted Sarah Curran; his first school became St Ita's, for girls, but financial problems forced its closure.

Pearse delivered a notable oration at the Emmet commemoration in 1911, and envisaged dying in an Irish revolution. With Eoin MacNeill and others, he formed the Irish Volunteers in November 1913; a month later, he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In a famous oration in 1915, at the burial of the Fenian O'Donovan Rossa, he ended "the fools, the fools, the fools, they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace".

When the Easter Rising began on 24 April 1916, Pearse read the proclamation of the Irish Republic outside the General Post Office in Sackville (now O'Connell) Street Dublin. He became president of the provisional government and commander-in-chief of the republican army. Five days later, Pearse agreed to an unconditional surrender. On 3 May 1916, following a court-martial, he was executed by a firing squad in Kilmainham Jail. Willie Pearse was one of fourteen others shot dead.

Visit:
St Enda's, Grange Road, Rathfarnham, now a Pearse museum;
Kilmainham Jail museum, Dublin;
Pearse's summer cottage, near Rosmuc (8 1/2 miles/ 13.5 km S of Maam Cross, Co Galway).
Read:
Ruth Dudley Edwards, Patrick Pearse (1977).