By Robert Schmuhl
The U.S. was the only nation other than Ireland mentioned in the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic
With the first battles of insurrection waged that April 24 and the General Post Office (GPO) in downtown Dublin now occupied by rebel forces, P. H. Pearse stood under the portico of the GPO to tell passersby—and the world—the reasons for the earlier gunfire and combat. Reading a formal proclamation declaring “The Provisional Government of the Irish Republic,” Pearse, the president of the just-named Republic, used present-tense verbs and bold language to make his case: “Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom.” The second sentence he read that Easter Monday in 1916 notes that his kindred fighters, assembled from members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers, and the Irish Citizen Army, were “supported by her exiled children in America” and, somewhat more vaguely, “by gallant allies in Europe.”
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