Joseph Plunkett

Joseph Plunkett (Dublin, 1887 - Dublin, 1916) was an Irish republican, poet and journalist. As a leader of the Easter Rising of 1916, he was one of the seven signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. His story matters because it links the literary life of early twentieth-century Ireland with the struggle for independence, carried out during the First World War.

He was born into a wealthy Dublin family; his father had been made a papal count. Plunkett contracted tuberculosis as a young man and spent time in the warmer Mediterranean and North Africa, where he studied Arabic language and literature and even wrote poetry in Arabic. He was schooled by the Jesuits in Dublin and later at Stonyhurst in England, where he picked up some military training. He took an interest in the Irish language, in Esperanto, of which he was one of the founders of the Irish association, and in theatre. A lifelong friendship with Thomas MacDonagh, a fellow poet, drew him into the Irish Volunteers.

In 1915 he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was sent to Germany to help secure a promise of arms to support a rising. He belonged to the IRB military committee that planned the Easter Rising, and much of his plan was followed. Ill and recently operated on for a swelling in his neck, he went to the General Post Office still bandaged, too weak to take a fully active part. After the surrender he was court-martialled and sentenced to death. Hours before his execution he married Grace Gifford in the prison chapel of Kilmainham Gaol.

His poetry, small in volume and largely published after his death, deals with religion and patriotism. His sister Geraldine, his literary executor, published a collection of his poems in June 1916. His memory survives mainly through the Rising: a railway station in Waterford and a barracks at the Curragh bear his name, and the ballad "Grace", written by Seán and Frank O'Meara, imagines his final hours and remains widely performed.