At the founding of the Irish Volunteers Pearse believed they were being given the chance to rectify the mistakes of the past, writes Frank Bouchier-Hayes
Ninety years ago today, a momentous event occurred in Dublin which changed the course of Irish history. On November 25th, 1913, a meeting was held to inaugurate the Irish Volunteers at the Rotunda Rink in Dublin.
According to Bulmer Hobson, at the time chairman of the Dublin Centres Board of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), 3,000 men signed the enrolment forms on that night.
Hobson played a central role in the organising of the meeting, having broached the idea of starting an Irish volunteer organisation as early as July 1913 with fellow IRB members. A few months later it was decided that the time had come, but it was imperative that the part played by the IRB would not be made known.
Eoin MacNeill's article "The North Began", which appeared in An Claidheamh Soluis, the official organ of the Gaelic League, in early November 1913, provided them with, as Hobson puts it, the "necessary opening".
Pearse, though not at this time a member of the IRB, seized upon the section of MacNeill's article where he bemoaned the disbanding of the Volunteers of 1782 and heartily agreed with MacNeill's warning that "the opportunity of rectifying a capital error of this sort does not always come back again to nations".
He was drawing the lesson that the time had come for the South to arm itself as a defensive measure should the implementation of Home Rule be resisted by the Ulster Volunteers.
Pearse's response to MacNeill's article is, however, mainly remembered for an extraordinary statement that always retains the capacity to shock its readers: "We may make mistakes in the beginning and shoot the wrong people; but bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing and the nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood."
MacNeill, professor of early and medieval Irish history in University College Dublin and staunch supporter of John Redmond, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was the ideal choice in the eyes of Hobson and his fellow brethren to front a public movement of this type.
The O'Rahilly, a committed nationalist who also managed An Claidheamh Soluis, was then contacted. He readily agreed to the formation of a National Volunteer Force and received a positive response from MacNeill, who accepted an invitation to preside at the first organisational meeting.
According to Hobson, the fact that MacNeill "was a great intellectual figure, able, clear-headed, sincere and well liked, that he quarrelled with nobody and could pour oil on the most troubled waters", rendered him "an ideal chairman in the early stages of the movement and enabled him to keep the volunteer committee and the volunteers together in circumstances of great difficulty in the year that followed the start of the movement".
Hobson took charge of the arrangements for the inaugural meeting. Having been first refused permission by the Lord Mayor, Lorcan Sherlock, for the use of the Mansion House, he succeeded in gaining the use of the large concert hall in the Rotunda which held about 500 people. As interest grew, he decided also to seek permission to use the Rotunda Rink, a large temporary building in the grounds of the Rotunda Gardens. The rink was at the time the largest hall in Dublin and was capable of holding about 4,000.
MacNeill, in his address in the rink, argued strongly for a National Force of Volunteers at a time when Irish concerns were being regulated by "a majority of British representatives owing their position and powers to a display of armed force".
To allow such a state of affairs to continue unopposed denuded them of "even the modicum of civil rights left to us by the Union", rendered the franchise a mockery and "we ourselves become the most degraded nation in Europe".
Pearse began by dramatically describing the previous hundred years in Ireland as "the hopeless attempt of a mob to realise itself as a nation" and went on to declare that today they were being given the chance to rectify the mistakes of the past. He called for Irishmen of every class, creed and political belief to work together to defend the "rights common to Irishmen and Irishwomen".
Pearse also claimed that "Ireland armed would, at any rate, make a better bargain with the Empire than Ireland unarmed."
In the event, on the proposal of Piaras Béaslaí, with the approval of MacNeill and Pearse, the volunteers agreed as their Irish name Óglaigh na hÉireann, which the Irish Army reaffirmed as its official name in the 1954 Defence Act.
That the IRA should also have laid claim to the title is a matter of no small regret.
• Frank Bouchier-Hayes is a local historian who specialises in the 1913- 1923 period in Irish history.