The guard of honour from the Defence Forces Cadet School in the Curragh at the Stonebreaker's Yard on Easter Monday.
On Easter Monday morning, the Capuchin Friary Church in Church Street, Dublin, played host to the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and Chamber Choir Ireland in their most moving rendering of Mozart’s The Great Requiem.
In her introduction, Liz Nolan of RTÉ Lyric fm remarked how fitting it was that this musical work was being broadcast in this particular church to a capacity audience on that day as its friars had played such significant roles in the events of Easter Week 1916, and also because the altar and the reredos behind the altar had been built by the father of Patrick Pearse.
The music too was well-chosen, as Mozart had set to music and incorporated into his masterpiece the great medieval hymn on the Day of Judgement, Dies Irae, Dies Illa, composed by Bro. Thomas of Celano, himself a Franciscan friar, who wrote the biography of St Francis, the founder of the Capuchin brotherhood, shortly after the saint’s death in 1226.
Witness
The previous day, at the invitation of the State, I had accompanied the Provincial of the Irish Capuchins, Fr Adrian Curran OFM Cap., to the Stonebreakers’ Yard at Kilmainham Goal to witness the solemn commemoration of the deaths of the leaders of the Easter Rising.
Although the sun shone brightly, it was bitterly cold in the bleak yard where the executions took place.
No matter how impressive was the smartly-performed drill of the guard of honour drawn from the Defence Forces Cadet School in the Curragh, the playing of the Army No.1 Band and the lone piper and the assembled dignitaries, nothing could lift the sense of menace – Dies Irae, Dies Illa, Day of Wrath, That Day (of Doom) – that pervaded the scene of the ritualised killings that had taken place there a hundred years before.
Over a 10-day period Pearse, Clarke, MacDiarmada and the other leaders, ending with Connolly, were brought out into that small yard, blindfolded and following crisply given orders were each cut down with a volley of bullets.
As I stood there I tried to put myself into the place of my confreres of 100 years ago, Frs Aloysius Travers, Columbus Murphy, Augustine Hayden, Albert Bibby and Sebastian O’Brien who, after ministering to the leaders in their cells, were allowed to accompany most of them as they went to their deaths.
However, I was there on another account too that Easter Sunday morning. One Sunday evening over 60 years ago my father had brought me on a walk to Kilmainham Goal. The building was closed and had fallen into dereliction.
Founders
My father took me to the road entrance of the Stonebreakers’ Yard and lifted me up to look into the yard through a crack in the high wooden gate. He wanted me to see where the founders of our Republic had died. He died himself two years later; my mother attributed his early death to the hardships he had endured during the War of Independence in 1920/21. Last Easter Sunday morning, I wore his War of Independence medal with pride.
As well as paying honour to my Capuchin confreres, I also felt that I was there for my father and all those men and women, not only those of 1916, but countless others who across the centuries had kept An Tine Beo burning and who have disappeared without trace in the nation’s memory.
I needed the uplifting rendering of Mozart’s solemn Requiem the following day; for me it was a cathartic experience. I felt myself released from the brooding horror of the Stonebreakers’ Yard through the soaring voices and surging music of Mozart’s great work.
I walked out of the church afterwards into Smithfield Square and The Haymarket, into the bright Easter sunshine and mingled with the teaming crowds of my fellow-citizens milling around the entertainments provided, who were intent on enjoying life, freedom and that identity others had won for us at such great cost.
In the scene before me, I think the poets, playwrights, mystics and men and women of action of 1916 who, in the words of the Irish poet, Tom Kettle, killed at the Somme in September of that very year, “Died… for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed, and for the secret Scripture of the poor”, would have recognised that their vision for us has been realised in our land.