When writing isn't quite enough: The lessons of Joseph Plunkett

It seems like the most obvious place to start with Joseph Mary Plunkett is at the end – his last day in Kilmainham jail.

That’s where Plunkett, one of the seven signatories on the Proclamation of the Republic, married his fiancée Grace Gifford in the jail’s chapel the night before his execution. It’s a tragic story, one that has been immortalized in legend and song.

But like many great stories, the ending isn’t the most important part – just the last bit we get to. There’s so much more to Plunkett than the way he died or even the cause for which he died.

Born into a well-off Catholic family (his father was a count), Plunkett benefited from an elite education in England that laid the groundwork for his writing skills and taught him several languages. (While setting up the scaffolding for the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, he used those language skills to solicit support from other Europeans.)

Plunkett also suffered from tuberculosis for much of his life and, by 1916, was dying. Still, he pulled himself off his deathbed to help plan and command the rebellion. For Plunkett, I get the sense that the term “cause” is too simple. This was a matter of being liberated from a government that was not theirs – was not Irish. And so if it took a declaration of independence, gunshots and the price of their own blood to wake their fellow Irish men and women from their complacency, then so be it.

“I am very happy I am dying for the glory of God and the honor of Ireland,” Plunkett said just before facing the firing squad.

Plunkett's second book of poems was published posthumously.

Perhaps what is most fascinating to me, though, is Plunkett’s progression of activism. He started as writer and poet. And as he was becoming more fiercely nationalist, he got more involved with The Irish Review, a poetry and literary journal his friend and fellow proclamation signatory Thomas MacDonagh had helped launch in 1911. When he became its editor, Plunkett made the journal more political. I imagine he thought he could show his neighbors a path to civil rebellion through the power of writing facts and opinions.

By happenstance, I found in a Galway store Plunkett's final book, published in 1916. It ends with an essay called “Obscurity and Poetry,” which he wrote for the February 1914 edition of The Irish Review. In it, he gives us a glimpse of his philosophy of how influential he believed art and writing could be.

“The artist's task, however, is make others see; for all Art is revelation. This he does chiefly by the great instrument of inspiration, Choice. He chooses the portion or phase of Truth that he is to reveal, and he chooses the veils that he must impose in order to make that truth visible.”

I always believed, as a journalist, the most powerful right was that of a free press to inform the masses and allow them to figure it all out for themselves. But I’m increasingly coming to the realization that, alas, information is not always enough. It certainly wasn’t for Plunkett and the others. They believed they had no other choice but to act on their principles – not just plainly state them – and then defend them fiercely.

- Ryan Alessi (to see more of my musings, adventures and misadventures from Ireland, I am posting on my travel blog, "Gone to the Winchester".)