An Excerpt from EASTER RISING: THE LAST WORDS OF PATRICK PEARSE

An excerpt from:

EASTER RISING: THE LAST WORDS OF PATRICK PEARSE

Act II

......We are fighting for our lives and we are willing to die if need be, as a sacrifice to that cause.

We are willing to die as thousands before us have died. When Cromwell came to Ireland, his aim was the complete extermination of the Irish people. His Puritan ministers charged the English army to, and I quote, "to kill all that were, young man and old, children and maiden". They swept across Ireland like the plague.

We are willing to die as millions did during the famine years of Queen Victoria. During her reign alone, one and a quarter million people starved to death when the potato crops failed. Entire families died in the fields with their mouths green from eating grass. Sometimes a child survived, but it is said, not totally in jest, that you can count all the orphans who survived the great hunger on one set of fingers and toes, and still have three fingers and a toe left over. Three and a half million were evicted from houses they or their fathers had built. All in all, over four million people were forced to flee the country they loved.

More and more, I realized that Ireland could rely only on force, in some form or another, because everything else had failed. Irishmen were simply struggling to keep alive and England deemed it a crime. Surely the people of Ireland deserve redemption after centuries of bondage. If some of us must die to achieve this redemption, so be it. Our purpose is to restore life to Ireland and if the resurrection of Ireland results from this Rising, from the sacrifice of our live, will have succeeded.

(Shots are heard.)

Outside, bullets splattered against the walls......


(Playwright's note: This section was suggested by the writings of Patrick Pearse and Maud Gonne.)
......BG Sinclair