Maud Gonne and Famines in the 1890s irishamerica.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishamerica.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Comments
On this day, May 5, in 1916, Easter Rising leader John MacBride was executed for his role in the rebellion.
The Easter Rising took place over the course of five days in Dublin in 1916 and forever changed the course of Irish history. To commemorate this anniversary, writer and historian Dermot McEvoy produced 16 profiles of the Irish Rebel leaders who were executed one hundred and one years ago and who, gradually, have come to be seen as heroes.
Between May 3 and 14, 1916 fifteen leaders of the Rising were court-martialed by the British Army under General John Maxwell and convicted. IrishCentral will look at the leaders - from James Connolly to Joseph Mary Plunkett - and share their stories.
On This Day: Easter Rising leader Thomas Clarke was executed
On This Day: Easter Rising leader Thomas Clarke was executed
The moments that defined Thomas Clarke s life and why he is such an important figure in Irish history
Facebook Comments
Thomas Clarke, a key member of the Irish revolutionary and a leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. was among the rebel leaders executed on May 3, 1916.
Thomas J. Clarke was born in 1858 on the Isle of Wight but grew up in County Tyrone.
At age 20 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and his career as an indefatigable Irish revolutionary began. After a skirmish with police, he was forced to flee to America where he became a citizen of the United States in the City of Brooklyn in 1883. (He was the only American citizen involved in the 1916 Rising executed by the British.)
Comments
The poem that defined the era of the Easter Rising is Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats. Here, Irish Ambassador to the US Daniel Mulhall explains in an essay who are the unlikely heroes Yeats is memorializing.
Yeats s great poem Easter 1916 is not a bad place to start when seeking an understanding of that transformative era for modern Ireland. Yeats, writing in the immediate aftermath of the Rising, spotted that Ireland had been changed utterly by the events of Easter week. His description of the Rising as a terrible beauty summed up his ambivalent attitude as did his question: