Padraig Pearse

paky wrote: »

I was just looking at Padraig Pearses court matial address on the National Libray of Ireland's 1916 exhibit. Its quite an address, he comes across as a great orator but what I wanted to know was Pearse as influential in person as he was in writing?
Alot of stuff I briefly read about Pearse is that he was a romantic and a weak individual. Is this true?

Madam, - I would like to draw your readers' attention to inaccurate references to the first family of James Pearse, father of Patrick Pearse, in an otherwise interesting and informative piece by James Fitzgerald on the new exhibition in the Pearse Museum, formerly St Enda's, Rathfarnham (The Irish Times, December 30th).
James Pearse had in fact two surviving children from his first marriage, Emily and James Vincent and not "two extra daughters by his first wife".
James Vincent was my grandfather. I was a frequent visitor to St Enda's and spent my holidays there in the 1940s with Patrick Pearse's sister Senator Margaret Pearse, my godmother. Both Emily's and …



http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-24775963.html

Monumental sculpture workshop, of 27 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin. After the death of JAMES PEARSE his business was carried on for a few years under the name James Pearse & Sons by his younger son, the sculptor William Pearse (1881-1916), with some assistance from his more famous elder son, the lawyer, teacher and patriot Patrick Pearse (1879-1916). The business was still extant in 1908 but probably came to an end soon afterwards, as William began to become involved in teaching art at his brother's schools. Both Patrick and William were executed for their part in the Easter Rising of 1916.

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Building: CO. MAYO, BALLINA, CATHEDRAL OF ST MUIREDACH (RC) Date: 1892;1893;1894; Nature: Lady altar, 1892; communion rails, 1893; font, 1894; Holy Family altar, 1900. Refs: Designs formerly in office archives of W.H. Byrne & Son
Building: CO. MEATH, TRIM, PATRICK STREET, CHURCH OF ST PATRICK (RC) Date: 1901 Nature: Reredos. Refs: Christine Casey & Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North Leinster (1993), 518
Building: CO. DUBLIN, DUBLIN, WILLIAM STREET NORTH, CHURCH OF ST AGATHA (RC) Date: 1907;1908 Nature: William Malone and Pearse & Sons sign agreements to carry out high altar design (by W.H.Byrne?), 1907, altar rails and side altar, 1908. Refs: IAA, W.H. Byrne & Son drawings collection, Acc. 2006/142
Building: CO. DUBLIN, DUBLIN, WILLIAM STREET NORTH, CHURCH OF ST AGATHA (RC) Date: 1908 Nature: Design for side altar by Pearse & Sons and William Malone. Refs: Drawing in W.H. Byrne & Son collection
Building: CO. DUBLIN, DUBLIN, WESTLAND ROW, ST ANDREW'S CHURCH (RC) Date: 1912p Nature: Statue of Mater Dolorosa in mortuary chapel by William Pearse. Refs: Catholic Dublin: a guide (1932); Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists: 20th Century (1996), 389
Building: CO. DONEGAL, LETTERKENNY, CATHEDRAL OF ST EUNAN (RC) Date: ? Nature: Pulpit and altar rail by 'Pearse & Co'. Refs: Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North West Ulster (1979), 343
Building: CO. LIMERICK, LIMERICK, CATHEDRAL PLACE, CATHEDRAL OF ST JOHN (RC) Date: ? Nature: Reredos by William Pearse. Refs: Theo Snoddy, Dictionary of Irish Artists: 20th Century (1996), 389
Building: CO. MEATH, KILMESSAN, CHURCH OF THE NATIVITY OF MARY (RC) Date: ? Nature: Altar furniture. Refs: Christine Casey & Alistair Rowan, The Buildings of Ireland: North Leinster (1993), 364

The present High Altar in Youghal was erected in 1886 and was made by Pearse of Dublin. An account oft he event is to be found in the quondam Cork Examiner for 14 November 1886. The Telford organ was first played for High Mass celebrated by Bishop Keane on 23 May 1858.

The diaries that split Padraig Pearse's family apart
The publication of Pearse's diaries by his sister Mary Bridget in 1934 led to a life-long rift with her older sister Margaret, writes Harry McGee
A BITTER dispute over the personal diaries of Patrick Pearse led to a lifelong estrangement between the two sisters of the executed Easter Rising leader.

Pearse's youngest sister, Mary Bridget, published The Home Life of Patrick Pearse in 1934 which was based on Patrick's personal diaries about his childhood. However, her decision to publish the book outraged her sister Margaret, who claimed that his diary belonged to both of them. It led to a protracted legal dispute between the sisters which, at one stage, necessitated the intervention of Eamon de Valera who suggested arbitration. The dispute deteriorated the already hostile relationship between the two women and neither were reconciled at the time of Mary Bridget's death 13 years later.

The two sisters and their mother, Margaret, are the subjects of a Léargas documentary for RTE which traces the lives of the three women and their relationships with Patrick and his brother Willie, both executed in the wake of the 1916 rising.

The programme ? which features contributions from Pearse biographer Ruth Dudley Edwards as well as historians Séamus Ó Buachalla, Pádraig Ó Snodaigh and Pat Cooke, curator of St Enda's, the Pearse museum in Rathfarnham, Dublin ? examines the myth that surrounded his mother Margaret, especially, after his death.

Contributors contend that the popular image of Pearse's mother after 1916 ? an almost classical vision of pious suffering ? was one that was not of her making but rather of her son's. Awaiting his execution, Pearse wrote poetry and letters, purporting to be in her voice. Cooke says that the words of the mother grieving her two dead sons ? evoking a vision of Cáitlín Ní hUallacháin grieving for Ireland ? belonged directly to Patrick and not to her.

Contemporary accounts say that she spent the week following the execution wandering the streets of Dublin looking for her two sons. However, the letters enabled her to cope after the execution with their admonition to be proud and not sad. Thereafter, Margaret became a living symbol of her dead sons, becoming a member of the Senate and travelling to the US to raise funds for St Enda's school.

The Pearse family was a classic Victorian family, upwardly mobile in Dublin at the turn of the century. Margaret was 18 when she became the second wife of James Pearse, a stone sculptor from Liverpool. Margaret was not an intellectual but she had a warm and loving personality. From an early age it was clear that Patrick, born in 1879, was the most gifted member of the family and the roles of his mother and siblings became supportive ones for his endeavours.

Mary Bridget, who suffered from depression, did not endear herself to nationalists after she reportedly told Patrick to come home and not be foolish during the siege in the GPO.

After his death, his mother effectively changed from being housekeeper to manager of St Enda's, a role later taken on by Margaret Jnr. The school closed in 1935 but Margaret remained living alone in the enormous tumbledown house for many years. She died in 1968.

The extent of the rift between the sisters can be seen in correspondence during the dispute in the 1930s when Mary Bridget wrote to Margaret saying: "Your case is not worrying me. It is yourself who is worrying me. Why don't you leave me alone and stop harrying me."
February 3, 2002

http://www.tribune.ie/article/2002/feb/03/the-diaries-that-split-padraig-pearses-family-apar/

CDfm wrote: »

Was that this guy

To what has been handed down to the family, Patriag,(Patrick) William(Willie )Margaret Anne, and Mary Bridget - by James and Margaret of a second Marriage. The first marriage was to Emily Fox, she had two children to James, James Vincent and Mary Emily., after the birth of Mary Emily she died, thus causing James to seek a new wife...I am not sure of this but it was said that she died in childbirth, leaving the question wide open to wonder whether Mary Emily & Mary Bridget are one and the same , relatives dispute this, however it is one part of the family history I have put aside and left and I do not ever mention it when others bring it up because it has caused too many problems in the past when my father and his brothers were alive,and again, it has done so again in the descending generations. I have been working on this family history for 20 years, and I just cannot believe people think the way they do, so best to leave well enough alone.

The younger James Vincent returned to England after the uprising, leaving father to carry many works in Ireland in memory of his sons. He had his favourite,young Willie. It is said that he never forgave himself for what happened. I suppose he thought that he could have done more, as we all do even today, you have to admit many of us think the same way when put in a similar situation of something that has happened in our lives.

Margaret apparently ended up in Politics, I have never followed it through... I have never forgotten the situation I was put in one night at a St. Patricks Day celebration by an Irish Priest. I was taking photos for the the job I was in , however he knew part of the history, and then he turned around to the people seated, mind you this was a few hundred had turned out for the occasion, and over the microphone he is a lady who is a descendant of the uprising in Ireland, I have never forgotten it , because you could have cut the air with a knife, immediately he realized he had done the wrong thing, it was plain to see I was not welcome.
.

William (Willie)James Pearse born November 15,1881 at 27 Great Brunswick Street, Dublin, he was the younger brother of Patrick Pearse.
William inherited his father's artistic abilities and became a sculptor. He was educated at the Christian Brothers School, Westland Row. He studied at the Metropolitan Shcool of Art in Dublin under Oliver Sheppard. He also studied art in Paris. While attending the Kensington School of Art he gained notice for several of his artworks. Some of his sculptures were to be found in:

Limerick Cathedral, St. Eunan's, Letterkenny and several Dublin churches including Terenure His well known figure of "The Mater Dolorosa" in Mortuary Chapel, St. Andrews Westland row appears a tragic and prophetic masterpiece. Throughout the countryside you may find his sculptures of the Dead Christ and the Immaculate Conception. The O'Mulrennan Memorial in Glasnevin and a memorial to Father Murphy in Wexford are also his works.

Residents of a house 16 in Spencer Street (North Dock, Dublin)
Show all information
Surname Forename Age Sex Relation to head Religion
Pearse Agnes 6 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse Emily 12 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse Margaret 4 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse Florence 10 Female Daughter R Catholic
Pearse James 34 Male Head of Family R Catholic
Pearse Henry 1 Male Son R Catholic
Pearse James 8 Male Son R Catholic
Pearse Mary 35 Female Wife R Catholic

Residents of a house 363 in Sandymount Avenue (Part of) (Pembroke East & Donnybrook, Dublin)
Show all information
Surname Forename Age Sex Relation to head Religion
Pearse William James 19 Male Brother Roman Catholic
Pearse Patrick Henry 21 Male Head of Family Roman Catholic
Pearse Margaret 44 Female Mother Roman Catholic
Pearse Mary Brigid 16 Female Sister Roman Catholic
Pearse Margaret Mary 22 Female Sister Roman Catholic
Doody Honor 65 Female Visitor Roman Catholic

In 1877, James married his Irish-born second wife, Margaret Brady, a nineteen year old girl who worked in a local stationer’s shop he frequented. Her family originally hailed from an Irish-speaking district of County Meath and had been forced by the disastrous effects of the Great Famine to migrate to the Dublin in search of work. There they had become moderately successful eventually coming to hold several pieces of property in a working class area of the city, where Margaret was born. She was several years younger than her husband when he met her and despite her family’s initial reluctance to see her marry someone so recently widowed, with two children and somewhat older than her the wedding eventually went ahead.

Though they seemed to have had a close relationship one would expect that there must have been some difficulties between the children of James Pearse’s first and second wives. With their mother gone at a relatively early age the two children of Emily Susanna Pearse were suddenly given a new mother and soon new half-sisters and brothers (and eventually even a new ‘Irish’ spelling for their surname). These things must have been traumatic for the children of James’s first wife.

Furthermore their father blamed their late mother for the death in childhood through ‘neglect’ of one of their two deceased siblings, which cannot have helped things. Nevertheless all the evidence we have indicates that Margaret was a good mother to her two step-children and that the half-siblings remained in close contact throughout their lives even after the older two had left the family home, James Pearse to a career and marriage in Britain where he remained for the rest of his life and Emily Pearse to a marriage with Alfred McGloughlin, the son of her father’s close friend John McGloughlin and a life in Dublin. Her son, Alfred McGloughlin Jr, became a close childhood companion of Pádraig’s.

The family had a strong Republican tradition rooted in their Irish speaking character. Pádraig’s great-great-grandfather, Uaitéar Ó Brádaigh (Walter Brady), had fought in the 1798 Rising as a member of the Irish Republican and revolutionary Society of the United Irishmen, who were led by local Presbyterian and Republican radicals. Uaitéar’s brother had been executed by British after fighting in the bloody Battle of Tara (in which Uaitéar himself had probably fought), and was buried in the famous Croppies’ Grave at Tara, while another brother was captured and hanged by the Yeomanry, a feared British and Loyalist militia in Ireland. Uaitéar’s son, also named Uaitéar (Walter Brady Junior), was forced with his large family from their home at An Obair in 1848, one of the worse years of the Great Famine and also the year of the Young Irelander Rising, another Irish Republican insurrection that sprang out in several areas of the country and lasted until 1849. It is probable that Uaitéar’s son, Pádraig Ó Brádaigh (the grandfather of Pádraig Mac Piarais, who spoke only Irish), was a member of the Irish Confederate Clubs as the Young Irelanders were officially known, in his youth

One of the earliest biographies of Pádraig was by the renowned Breton nationalist writer and journalist Louis N. Le Roux who was in exile in Ireland during the latter part of the Irish Revolution and mixed widely in Irish Republican circles. His popular French language biography of Pádraig, ‘L'Irlande militante: la vie de Patrick Pearse, avec une introduction historique et 15 photographies’, was published in 1932 and was based on numerous personal interviews and research he carried out after returning to live in Ireland in 1930, where he lodged with Kathleen Clarke, the widow of Tom Clarke, the dominant leader of the Easter Rising ...........– tragically he was killed in London during a World War II air raid). There Pádraig and Éibhlín’s relationship is stated as a simple matter-of-fact:

‘It is true that before he reached his 30th year he had felt attracted towards a young girl - Éibhlín Nichols - a UCD graduate, as ardent a patriot as himself, and as true a Gael and as fair as any colleen could be. Her courage was equal to his own and, she, too, was drawn towards him. The young woman was an expert swimmer and she one day dived into the sea at the Blasket Islands to save a girl from drowning. Through her gallant act the girl was saved, but she herself perished in the stormy and treacherous waves. At her funeral some of the bystanders bore away the memory of the grief in the face of Pearse and the tears in his eyes.’

Another witness to the romance between Pádraig and Éibhlín was Geraldine Plunkett Dillon, the sister of Seosamh Pluincéid (Joseph Plunkett).

...... Grace Evelyn Gifford, in a cell in Mountjoy Gaol on the eve of his execution by firing squad in 1916 while Tomás Mac Donnchadha was married to Grace’s sister Muriel Gifford in 1912, both girls coming from an Anglo-Irish family with a Catholic father and Protestant mother and raised as Protestants (Tomás was introduced to his future wife by a close suffragette friend). Geraldine Plunkett Dillon and her bother grew up in Ráth Maonais (Rathmines, Co. Dublin) not far from where Éibhlín grew up and Geraldine knew Éibhlín and the Nicolls family very well, and later stated that Éibhlín’s brother Seoirse had admitted to her that Pádraig had proposed to Éibhlín but that she had turned him down because,

‘she did not want to abandon her mother to the problems…in her home’.

Though we cannot know for sure what the problems were it seems likely that there was a drink problem in the family (so Geraldine certainly presumed) and that she did not wish to leave her mother to deal with that problem alone. One possible victim of this problem may have been Éibhlín’s father, who was certainly associated with the temperance movement at the time of her death. In a statement made by Fr Paul, a member of the Capuchins of Church Street at the memorial meeting for Éibhlín held in the Mansion House on 8 September and presided over by the Lord Mayor:

‘He said he only knew the young lady by her successes as a scholar; but it was a satisfaction to him to know that one of his best and oldest friends was her worthy father, Mr. A. J. Nicolls, and the Fr Matthew Hall might be said to be in a large extent associated with his honoured name in his exertions to perpetuate the good work of Fr Matthew.'

I was born in the city of Dublin on 10 November, 1879. My father was an Englishman. My grandfather and grandmother on my father's side were, I assume, born in London, but my grandfather's family was certainly of Devonshire origin. The three children of the marriage (my father and his elder and younger brothers) were born in London, my father's birthday being the 8 December, 1839. While the children were young the family removed to Birmingham. My father was a sculptor, and had, as it were, only drifted to Ireland; but Ireland was to become his home, and, through his children, his name was to become an Irish name.

It had long been her desire that my mother's first boy - for my mother was her favourite niece, as my grandfather was her favourite brother - should be called after that beloved brother. So it was decided that my name should be Patrick. The name of Henry was added, after my father's youngest brother..

On my mother's side I can go back to a great-great grand-father, Walter Brady of Nobber in the county Meath, a Cavanman by origin. He fought in '98, and one of his brothers was hanged by the Yeos; another lies buried in the Croppy's Grave at Tara. His son, Walter, my great grandfather, married Margaret O'Connor, who had five sons, and three daughters - Catherine, Phil, Anne, Patrick, Larry, Christy, John and Margaret.

I remember, my grand-uncle Phil as a patriarchal man, whom I regarded with awe on account of his mighty age. My grand-uncle Christy was the youngest of the brothers. He had beautiful horses, and drove with all the pride of a Meath yeoman's son to Baldoyle and Fairyhouse. He had wide fields, which I remember white and fragrant with hawthorn. To spend a day at Uncle Christy's was always an event in our lives. He had married a Wicklow woman - a double Keogh - and great was their generosity, and great the cheer of their table and hearth. I know many Irish words which I first learned from my Uncle Christy, his voice had a ring, and his eyes a humour that I have never known in any other man's.
My grandfather was a very different man to my uncle Christy. He was taller and gentler, and less successful in life. His place was smaller, and his cattle and horses were fewer. The bad year of '79 - the year in which I was born - hit him hard., But his temper was so placid, his manhood so true ands fine, that far greater reverses than those which came to him could not have brought any bitterness into his life, or have affected the charitableness of his spirit. He never to my knowledge, said a hard word about anybody.
My grandfather had married Brigid Savage, a Fingal woman, who was the best step-dancer of her day in the North County. Their children were Walter, Brigid, Catherine and Margaret. This Margaret, daughter of Patrick son of Walter, son of Walter, was my mother. Of my grandfather I shall speak again, for I spent part of my childhood in his house; and I shall have to speak too, of his youngest sister, Margaret, my fosterer and teacher.

Before my half-sister had gone away she had taught my sister Maggie and me our letters., We both learned quickly; so quickly that I have no recollection of any effort on my part, or of any difficulty that beset my path through the Spelling Book. Soon I knew it all; from the alphabet in which A was the Ass, and K was the King, and Q was the Queen, and X was Xerxes, and Z was the Zebra, down to the Boy and the Wolf - a story which frightened me, and which I disliked because it was in very small print. When my half-sister sent us the great scrapbook, we were able to read the legends under all the pictures with the greatest ease, and then to learn them by name as well as by sight - Prince Greatheart and the Giant Despair and all their heroic or gigantic kin.

About this time my half-sister (for my father was a widower with a son James and a daughter Emily when he married my mother) was married to Alfred MacGloughlin, an architect. Her wedding was a very magnificent affair. My sister was her little bridesmaid, and I was her little page. I held up her train as she walked from the carriage into the church.
At the wedding breakfast we had apple pie. I thought they ought not to have put us children at a separate table;' but when Auntie Margaret came to sit with us, I was content. Willie made an outcry, during the meal, for pie, and I felt wounded when they laughed at him. I was always wounded when Willie was slighted or ill-used.

wolfpawnat wrote: »

Wow CDfm, fair dues on the research!

Denerick wrote: »

That is simply not true. Maybe 1% of the book is 'pyschobabble'.

From boyhood he was single-minded and dedicated beyond the norm. A Pearse with a wife and family would have been obliged to concentrate more on reality than on romance

Would Pearse have had the same yearning for immortality if he had had children? Or even the nieces and nephews denied him because of the strange inwardness of the Pearse family. None of the four children went into the Church, and yet none of them married or, apparently, had any normal sexual relationships. Pearse's three siblings seem to have sublimated their sexuality by helping their big brother with his cultural and educational causes

Mary Bridget, who suffered from depression, did not endear herself to nationalists after she reportedly told Patrick to come home and not be foolish during the siege in the GPO.

Denerick wrote: »

@ CDfm,

I really wish Ruth Dudley Edwards didn't write her stupid columns in the Daily Mail and in the Indo. It makes it ever more difficult to enjoy her biography of Pearse (Which I have always found interesting, a little explosive, but contrary to general opinion actually rather fair)

How to publish, and be damned


Sunday Apr 15 2001
Letters to Colum Kenny's grandfather show Patrick Pearse's pragmatism over An Macaomh and its debtTWO unpublished letters have lain among my family's papers for 90 years. They show Patrick Pearse to have been a practical man when it came to the realities of publishing.
The future Irish political martyr, who was to die in the Rebellion that broke out on Easter Sunday 1916, worked for many years as a teacher and writer. But he was also a businessman, forever struggling to make ends meet running St Enda's School in south Dublin and financing various publications that contained a romantic, nationalist view of Irish life.
When it came to paying for his publications Pearse worked with one of my grandfathers, the late Kevin J Kenny, who had founded the first Irish advertising service in the last decade of the 19th century. Among other activists with whom my grandfather worked commercially were Arthur Griffith and Joseph Mary Plunkett. Plunkett also died in 1916.
Between contending images of Patrick Pearse as a poetic idealist or as a dangerous romantic, there is little enough room to glimpse the man as a pragmatic organiser. But the two letters he wrote in 1910 to my grandfather reveal Pearse's attention to detail in the mundane matter of financing An Macaomh (Youth). This was the magazine of St Enda's, the Irish-language school he founded in Rathfarnham two years earlier.
Previously unpublished, the letters show Pearse guiding Kenny towards potential advertisers, people with whom St Enda's did business or whose sons were at the school. "We must make this issue pay," Pearse told his agent in December 1910. He added that "no time is to be lost" and urged my grandfather to, "for God's sake, make the best use you can of these two days ... ".
A few weeks earlier, Pearse had admitted to his friend Seán T O'Ceallaigh, the future president of Ireland, that "I need money badly at the moment". The hero of 1916 was chronically in debt.
Pearse's key role in the formation of this state was explained last week in a new documentary on the patriot, made independently for RTÉ by Mint Productions. Even staunch critics of Pearse's nationalist legacy, such as Conor Cruise O'Brien, were prepared to acknowledge the quality of his commitment to education and to the Irish language.
One of the ironies of the new state, although ostensibly founded on foot of the 1916 Rebellion, was that it ignored Pearse's more radical ideas on education. His school in Rathfarnham was let die by Dev. Much later, St Enda's became a museum.
It was from St Enda's ("Telephone: 8 Rathfarnham") that he wrote to my grandfather on December 7, 1910. He was worried that the school's publication might falter after a promising start:
A chara, We must print off An Macaomh on Monday or Tuesday next, so as to have it on [COLOR=#009900 ! important]sale[/COLOR] before Aonach na Nolag is over and before the boys go home for vacation. I hope you have made good progress with adverts and hand in copy as you get it to Dollard [the printer]. Make a great effort this time to have adverts up to mark. Last issue would have paid if adverts had been anything like they were in first issue. We must make this issue pay. No time is to be lost. Yours P.H.Pearse.
[P.S.] You should get advts. from William Magee, Grocer, 7 Rathmines Tce., W. Landy, Bakeries, Rathfarnham, and Meyers & Co., Furniture Removers, Ironmongers, etc., 44 Highfield Rd., with all of whom we are dealing largely this year; try also P.Horan, Tailor, 63 Dame St., who has three boys here. Also McCabes, Fishmongers, Rathmines Road, and L.Nugent, Irish Creamery, Lr.Baggot St., with whom we deal.
Five days later, Pearse had received the proofs of some articles from the printer but was still anxious about his finances. He wrote again to Kevin J. Kenny:
A chara, Enclosed have been sent to me. You had better return them to Dollard, corrected. I have only corrected the obvious mistakes in the Irish, not read them through carefully, so you will have to do this. For God's sake make the best use you can of these two days, and have as many adverts as possible by to-morrow night. Try Eastman's, Rathmines, and Purcell, Cigar Merchant, 16 N. Earl St. Make a good show. It will be a good number. P.H.Pearse.
IN leaving my grandfather to sort out the practical problems of correcting proofs and raising cash, Pearse allowed himself time to concentrate on his ideals. Those ideals, expressed by Pearse and others so nobly in the Proclamation of Easter Sunday 1916, later left the new State with a legacy of aspirations against which to measure actual political achievements.
Last week on TV the current Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, spoke of how he and "people like me" are motivated by Patrick Pearse and the other heroes of 1916. Cynical viewers might have responded with a quip of my late grandfather, which was that if Pearse were alive today he would be spinning in his grave.
* Dr Colum Kenny is a senior lecturer in Communications at DCU




Read more: http://www.independent.ie/lifestyle/independent-woman/celebrity-news-gossip/how-to-publish-and-be-damned-507744.html#ixzz1FXDhARiy

2: The Monto
The largest and most famous European Red-Light district in 19th century Europe �The Monto� was mainly situated in Montgomery Street, now Foley Street. According to the Enclyclopaedia Britannica the prostitutes of The Monto were �even more forward than those of Algiers�. It was popular with both Kings and Rebels, King Edward VII supposedly lost his virginity there and seemingly Patrick and Willie Pearse liked to wander through its streets dressed as women. (!) James Joyce situated a whole chapter of Ulysses in the area, listing the various prices of the girls on offer. What a martyr to his research that man was! Politicians of course were regular clients. During the early years of the Free State it was said that �when the Senate is open The Monto is full�. But eventually Holy Catholic Ireland intervened in the form of the Legion of Mary. Piously they paraded up and down the streets pinning pictures of the Virgin Mary on all the Brothel doors while their founder, Frank Duff recited the rosary. It worked. For the next sixty years we had no sex in Ireland. Honest.

Dublin Castle was the focal point of British rule in Ireland. Here is the Castle Yard as it was in the early 20th century.
(NLI: EAS 1703 )
And yet, in 1911, the notion of national independence seemed a distant illusion beside the reality of British rule. At the heart of the city stood the huge stone fort of Dublin Castle, constructed following a 1204 decision of King John, and the focal point of British rule in Ireland. Ireland had lost its parliament through the Act of Union in 1800 and all political power in Ireland flowed through the gates of the castle. In 1911 the Castle was presided over by the Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Aberdeen, and run by the Chief Secretary, Augustine Birrell. The great administrative importance of the Castle and the government offices which stood in the most prestigious streets of the city defined the colonial nature of Dublin’s existence.
The iconic streets of Bloomsday (16 June 1904, the date on which James Joyce set Ulysses and Leopold Bloom’s epic tour of Dublin) were already being lost. The city was changing as the suburbs grew in scale and importance. Nothing transformed the physical appearance of Dublin as profoundly as the evolution in transport. Trams, horses and bicycles still dominated transport in Dublin but the private motor car was growing in importance.
Sackville Street c.1890-1910. It was here that John Redmond unveiled a monument to Charles Stewart Parnell in October 1911.
(NLI: LROY 1662 )

Dublin was also a port city, though not in the manner of Belfast, Liverpool or Glasgow. On 1 April 1911 the Titanic was launched from the Harland and Wolff Shipyards in Belfast; no project of this scale could be undertaken in Dublin. There was no major ship-building industry, no vast industrial sector, no sense of a place driven by the impulses of manufacturing entrepreneurs and their workforce.
There was, of course, industry and innovation,, like Sir Howard Grubb’s telescope-making factory at Observatory Lane in Rathmines, but never on the scale of comparable cities in other parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Administration and commerce, rather than industry, were what drove the city’s economy. Dublin port was more a transit point for British goods imported to Ireland and for the agricultural export trade of the city’s rural hinterland, not least the cattle boats that left at least seven times a day, as part of the eighty weekly sailings to England.
Urban living: A dilapidated tenement room in the Coombe area in 1913.
(RSAI, DD, No.83)

Alongside the cattle on many of those boats were emigrants leaving a country unable to offer even the possibilities of a basic existence. Some were Dubliners, many were from the Irish countryside and were merely passing through the city, certain in the knowledge that there was simply no work available to them. Behind them they left the brutal reality of daily life for tens of thousands who lived in tenement slums, starved into ill-health, begging on the fringes of society. In parts, Dublin was incredibly poor. A notoriously high death-rate was attributable, at least in part, to the fact that 33% of all families lived in one-roomed accommodation. The slums of Dublin were the worst in the United Kingdom, dark, disease-ridden and largely ignored by those who prospered in other parts of the city.
Even for those with work, life was precarious. Trade unions attempted to organise against the backdrop of low wages and chronic over-supply of labour. On 27 May 1911 James Larkin first published The Irish Worker, the paper of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, which had enlisted 18,000 men into its ranks in just two years.
On 27 May 1911 Jim Larkin, pictured here, first published The Irish Worker, the paper of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (NLI)

Labour was growing increasingly militant, but its opponents were powerful and equally determined to resist change. William Martin Murphy founded the Dublin Employers’ Federation on 30 June. Murphy owned railways, tramways, Clery’s Department Store and, critically, the Irish Independent. The power of the employers was obvious as two major strikes during 1911, one by bakers, the other by railway workers, ended in abject defeat. As the Dublin economy continued to stagnate, strikes followed one after the next, and the greatest labour dispute in Irish history, the 1913 Lockout, was just around the corner.
A well-dressed crowd attend the Great Exhibition, Herbert Park, 1907.
(NLI: Clar 66)

Dublin politics were not often about poverty, however. Of increasing political importance were the expanding Catholic middle classes, gaining steady prominence in the city’s professional and administrative ranks. Throughout the nineteenth century, power in Dublin slowly shifted from the Protestant ascendancy to an emerging Catholic elite, who were apparently nationalist in aspect. This nationalism, however, was ambiguous in its politics and in its culture.
As the centre for British rule in Ireland for eight centuries, Dublin was the focal point of the substance and symbols of British culture. This culture – its literature, its newspapers, its sports, its music, its entertainment – was adopted with little modification by many amongst the middle classes, eager for advancement, unashamed by pursuit of prosperity.
Dublin was home to Patrick Pearse, whose work as a writer and educationalist was central to the Gaelic revival of the early 20th century.
(NLI, 'Political and Famous Figures,' Box VI)

In opposition to this, a resurgent nationalist culture was asserting itself uncertainly. Based on the premises (or perceived premises) of peasant life and traditions, revival of the Irish language, Irish dress, Irish music and Irish games, this was a resurgence which did not play easily with urban life. Dublin could not be easily accommodated in any vision which idealised rural life. And yet, Dublin lay at the heart of this Gaelic revival, home to Patrick Pearse and many of the writers, educationalists and intellectuals who recast the idea of Ireland as a sovereign Gaelic nation, free from the control of its imperial master.
Their vision was often rural, but it was not provincial. The revivalists were acutely aware of what was happening beyond Irish shores, in Europe and in North America. All told, culture in the city was profoundly modern, even an inspiration for modernism. This was the city where James Joyce and William Butler Yeats had lived and worked, and where Samuel Beckett, 5 years old in 1911, would later study. Yeats, indeed, would continue to spend a great deal of time in Dublin in the following decades. And it was also the city of Sean O’Casey and the site for the endeavours of Lady Gregory. The Abbey Theatre had been established by Gregory and Yeats in 1904. The culture of Dublin was diverse, not narrow.
The contested nature of culture in the capital was replicated in its politics. 1911 brought events which illustrated the breadth of its divisions. In July King George V spent six days in Dublin on a royal visit to the city. The King and the royal party, led by the 8th Royal Hussars on horseback, travelled from the harbour in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) to Dublin Castle, as thousands lined the streets to view his procession.
But, also in 1911, a Wicklow-born Protestant who was originally a strong supporter of the British Empire, Robert Erskine Childers, published his treatise, The Framework of Home Rule, which advocated the restoration of a parliament to Dublin. Childers would later be shot by firing squad by Government forces during the civil war, fought over a treaty which he was unwilling to support.
By contrast, in September 1911, the unionist leader, Sir Edward Carson, born in Dublin and still an MP elected to the House of Commons by Trinity College, told an Orange Order meeting at Craigavon House: “We must be prepared … the morning Home Rule passes, ourselves to become responsible for the government of the Protestant province of Ulster.”
And finally, in October 1911, a large crowd turned up in Sackville Street (now O’Connell St.) to see a monument unveiled to the great nationalist politician, Charles Stewart Parnell. The monument was unveiled by John Redmond, leader of the Irish national party, and its inscription was plain in its independent intent:
John Redmond addressing a home rule meeting at Parnell Monument, 1912.
(NLI: INDH 1)

“No man has a right to fix the
Boundary to the march of a nation.
No man has a right
To say to his country
Thus far shalt thou
Go and no further.”
In the ferment of its politics, the vibrancy of its culture, the vertical divide of its religions, and the extraordinary disparity in its wealth, Dublin bore all the hallmarks of a city on the edge of enormous change. And the dynamic behind that change was the 477,196 people who lived in the city of Dublin and its county hinterland.

http://www.census.nationalarchives.ie/exhibition/dublin/main.html