An Irish Rebel Honoured

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31440, 5 August 1967, Page 21

An Irish Rebel Honoured

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KENNETH ANTHONY)

When an Irish poet and patriot named Padraig Pearse led a rebellion in favour of Home Bule for Ireland at Easter, 1916, he selected as

bis headquarters the General Post Office in Dublin. In some ways it was an appropriate choice, for from as early as 1866 Irish revolutionaries had been preparing their own stamps in readiness for the republic of their dreams. In the early years of the.

l present century the Sinn Fein movement produced stamp- ■ like labels intended, no doubt, i both for publicity purposes ■ and as a means of raising ! money. These were often affixed to ' letters alongside the ordinary British stamps then current il—until the Post Office complained that they were stamps “used for advertising and other purposes,” and ordered that the practice should cease. During the Easter Rising itself three more propaganda labels appeared, so designed that they could be folded over and used as flags in buttonholes. Pearse was therefore well acquainted with the value of stamps as propaganda. But in his short and desperate defence of Dublin Post Office he could little have Imagined that just 50 years later stamps with his own portrait on them would be freely and officially sold by an independent Eire, and in that very post office. Perhaps the greatest tragedy of the Easter Rising was the time it took place. A few years earlier the British public might have regarded the leaders merely as troublesome Irish politicians; but in the atmosphere of 1916, with the First World War raging, many looked on the rebels as nothing less than traitors to the Allied cause. So Pearse, with other ringleaders, was court-martialled by the British authorities and shot But in the long run his martyrdom made Irish independence all the more certain. In 1966 Eire honoured his memory with the stamp illustrated here—one of a set portraying the seven signatories to the 1916 proclamation announcing the first “provisional government of Ireland.”

Only six years after Pearse’s death that government became a reality, and promptly applied its own overprints to British stamps to tell the world of the formation of the Irish Free State.