Remembering the Forgotten
Patrick Whelan
Finally finished this unusual commission to commemorate the sacrifice of a young man who died, aged 21, fighting for Irish freedom during the Easter Rising of 1916.
No one outside of his family descendants and local people in Ringsend, Dublin, where he lived his short life, know the story of Patrick Whelan as so many of the sacrifices of ordinary workers and of course, the great women fighters were airbrushed out of our history books with James Connolly the only worker represented on our pantheon of Irish freedom fighters.
No disrespect to all those brave men, from teachers, poets, idealists, and philosophers like Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, and the other Proclamation of Independence signatories to aristocratic radicals like Countess Markievicz and the heroic human rights founder Sir Roger Casement.
All came from more privileged backgrounds than the forgotten heroes of the Irish Citizens Army and the IRA, the majority came from ordinary middle-class, working-class, and rural backgrounds.
The focus on these heroes and also on the female fighters was transferred to the more acceptable dead heroes and their radical ideas of absolute equality for all, men, and women regardless of class, at a time when this was seen as dangerous and disturbing for the ruling class who managed to cling on to the reins of power despite the revolution.
Those values, stated clearly in the Proclamation, were simply ignored and anathema to church and state, and both then combined to present a version of history which emphasized the love of Ireland of the dead heroes and their blood sacrifice but not their printed cry for total equality for all, men, women, working-class, and even the aristocracy in the Irish Proclamation.
Conveniently the sacrifices of the rest were simply glossed over, their contribution diminished then hardly even acknowledged as time passed in a new sectarian Free State ruled by conservatives like DeVelera and Cosgrave with the church pulling on their coattails.
Even the brave, heroic priests who were with the fighters in the GPO and elsewhere were airbrushed out of the new state’s history books.
Patrick Whelan was a young radical ship-worker in Dublin’s docklands, from Ringsend, Dublin, who joined the IRA and was killed in action by a British sniper in Bolands Mills, where DeValera and his IRA fighters had taken cover, during the 1916 insurrection.
For me now he represents the ordinary workers that were the fighting backbone of the Irish Republican Army and lost to history. Personally, I had never heard of him when I was approached by an old friend in Dublin, Helen Larkin, and her family who wanted to commission this work.
All we had to go on was that tiny mass card photo made even muddier by a newspaper reproduction but over the week that followed slowly but surely, Patrick Whelan came back to life.
Kevin Barry
At this same time, I also decided to draw and paint another even younger hero, Kevin Barry, a Belvedere College Student aged only 18, who was captured by British forces during an IRA ambush in Dublin in
1921, tortured and executed later in Mountjoy prison.
I had drawn Barry many years earlier for a radical republican group but now I wanted a work that fitted, style-wise, into my ongoing series on Irish revolutionaries of that period.
With this work of Patrick Whelan underway I thought this was a fine opportunity to show how the likes of two very young men, from very different backgrounds, came to join the fight for Irish freedom and how both paid the ultimate price.
Partick was killed in action at Bolands Mills by a British army sniper, and Kevin was hanged.
