SEAN MAC DIARMADA

Description

SEAN MAC DIARMADA. IRISH REVOLUTIONARY. EXECUTED 1916.

Seán Mac Diarmada was one of the seven signatories of the Irish Proclamation.

Before his execution, Mac Diarmada wrote, “I feel happiness the like of which I have never experienced. I die that the Irish nation might live!”

Brief summery of Seán Mac Diarmada during the 1916 Easer Rising.
From the Wiki:

In September 1915 he joined the secret Military Committee of the IRB, which was responsible for planning the rising. Indeed Mac Diarmada and Clarke were the people most responsible for it. Due to his disability, Mac Diarmada took little part in the fighting of Easter week, but was stationed at the headquarters in the General Post Office (GPO), as one of the Provisional Republican Government.

Following the surrender, he nearly escaped execution by blending in with the large body of prisoners. He was eventually recognised by Daniel Hoey of G Division. Following a court-martial on 9 May, Mac Diarmada was executed by firing squad on 12 May at the age of 33. In September 1919 Hoey was shot dead by Michael Collins’s Squad.

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE EASTER RISING:

In 1916, in a rebellion known as the Easter Rising, a small group of uniformed and organized but poorly armed Irish patriots took on the might of the British Empire and sought to end 800 years of subjugation and oppression.
 Although totally outnumbered, for twelve extraordinary days in May 1916, they fought the British army to a standstill until finally forced to surrender as prisoners of war. 
Most were promptly executed without mercy and with their executions the Irish people, who initially had rejected them as hopeless dreamers and troublemakers, were so outraged by these brutal murders that they rose in huge numbers against the British and eventually succeeded, after years of armed struggle and massive help from the Irish diaspora in America, in ejecting the British and declaring independence.