Patrick Pearse, Leader of the Easter Revolt
Irish Romanticism and the Desire for Martyrdom
Most historians agree that the Irish Easter Revolt of 1916 was doomed before it started. The British forces decisively outgunned and outnumbered the Irish rebels, who did not enjoy popular support. Irish military hopes were pinned on an arms shipment from Germany, Britain’s chief opponent in the ongoing World War. Unfortunately for the insurgents, British intelligence decoded German messages about the shipment and headed off the ship carrying the arms, the Aud. The Aud’s captain scuttled the ship to avoid capture. The chance of either overpowering or surprising the British was gone. Yet the Irish rose anyway. Why?
Pearse and his Martyr Complex
Much of the blame must fall on Patrick Pearse, the nationalist leader of the revolt. Pearse was a teacher and poet and although the British executed him immediately after the uprising, he left behind poems and writings containing clues to his logic. Pearse described the slavery he felt his people had been living in and proclaimed his belief that the love of liberty was stronger than British law. He also expressed his masochistic desire to fight, lamenting “I could have borne stripes on my body rather than this shame of my people."
Sean Farrell Moran agreed in his 1994 psychological biography of Pearse, Patrick and the Politics of Redemption. Moran added that Pearse felt an intense need to do something great with his life, and martyrdom for Irish nationalism allowed him the opportunity. It also freed Pearse of the burden of his unsuccessful writing career.
Home Rule and the Desire for Sacrifice
Leon O’Broin, an Irish historian, shows how the Home Rule Bill convinced Pearse and the IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) of the necessity for self-sacrifice. The Home Rule Bill passed in 1914, after 21 years of political wrangling. Irish nationalists were so pleased by having Home Rule that they overlooked how much control the bill gave the British government. The British did this on purpose to assuage the fears of Ulster Unionists concerned by the thought of falling under Catholic Irish rule.
The bill had the side effect of angering extreme nationalists like Pearse, whose inflexible views alienated many Irish. Even in the IRB, Pearse was considered a radical, as most members were in favor of constitutional methods of gaining increased independence. Pearse was actually denied membership in the IRB for four years because of his position on British proposals for limited self-government. When the loss of the arms aboard the Aud afforded Pearse one last chance to stop a clearly futile rebellion, Pearse would not, believing that nationalists who were satisfied with the Home Rule Bill needed to be shocked from their moderation by the sacrifice of Pearse and the other IRB leaders.
If Pearse seems unfit to be a leader, it may be because he was. Although progressive and devoted, he was more a thinker than a leader. Even his most rabid supporters describe him as a “romantic” but write off his idiosyncrasies as a part of Irish politics. Critics like J. Bowyer Bell, a professor at Columbia University and writer on international terrorism, have been harsher. Bell refers to Pearse and his closest advisers as “well known eccentrics.” Owen Dudley Edwards, a professor at the University of Edinburgh, found that these eccentrics might have led the rebels into underestimating British resolve.
Bad as Pearse's leadership may have been, he convinced enough Irish fighters to follow him to create a small revolt. The insurgents were badly outgunned and they were beaten and arrested in a week. The best that can be said for Pearse's Easter Rising is that the next generation of Irish nationalists learned from the failure. Those fighters saw the futility of fighting the British army face to face and used guerrilla tactics to win Irish independence.
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