There is a mystery about who wrote the Proclamation. It is assumed that Patrick Pearse wrote a draft, with additions by James Connolly and other signatories, but nobody knows for certain. The opening lines with their appeal to history have the ring of Pearse about them while the later reference to the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland sounds like Connolly.

The document itself was printed in Liberty Hall the day before the Rising started. About 2,500 copies were run off on the presses that produced Connolly’s Workers Republic newspaper. Pearse read the Proclamation to a crowd of onlookers outside the GPO on Easter Monday and copies were posted up in the street or left around to be taken away by onlookers.

It is believed that about 40 copies of the original Proclamation still exist. One is on display in Leinster House, another in the National Library while the National Museum has acquired one in the past month. In recent years one was sold at auction for €390,000.

Watching from the balcony of the Metropole Hotel as Pearse read the Proclamation outside the GPO, L.G. Redmond-Howard, a nephew of John Redmond, noted that some members of the crowd took away copies as souvenirs as “they'd be worth a fiver each some day, when the beggars were hanged”.