Having organised and trained her manhood through her secret
revolutionary organisation, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and
through her open military organisations, the Irish Volunteers and the
Irish Citizen Army, having patiently perfected her discipline, having
resolutely waited for the right moment to reveal itself, she now seizes
that moment, and, supported by her exiled children in America and by
gallant allies in Europe, but relying in the first on her own strength,
she strikes in full confidence of victory.
We declare the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of
Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be
sovereign and indefeasible. The long usurpation of that right by a
foreign people and government has not extinguished the right, nor can it
ever be extinguished except by the destruction of the Irish people. In
every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national
freedom and sovereignty; six times during the past three hundred years
they have asserted it in arms. Standing on that fundamental right and
again asserting it in arms in the face of the world, we hereby proclaim
the Irish Republic as a Sovereign Independent State, and we pledge our
lives and the lives of our comrades-in-arms to the cause of its freedom,
or its welfare, and of its exaltation among the nations.
The Irish Republic is entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of
every Irishman and Irishwoman. The Republic guarantees religious and
civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens,
and declares its resolve to pursue the happiness and prosperity of the
whole nation and of all its parts, cherishing all the children of the
nation equally, and oblivious of the differences carefully fostered by
an alien government, which have divided a minority from the majority in
the past.
Until our arms have brought the opportune moment for the establishment
of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people
of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the
Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil
and military affairs of the Republic in trust for the people.
We place the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the
Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms, and we pray that
no one who serves that cause will dishonour it by cowardice, inhumanity,
or rapine. In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, by its valour and
discipline and by the readiness of its children to sacrifice themselves
for the common good, prove itself worthy of the august destiny to which
it is called.
Signed on Behalf of the Provisional Government,
THOMAS J. CLARKE,
SEAN Mac DIARMADA,
THOMAS MacDONAGH,
P. H. PEARSE,
EAMONN CEANNT,
JAMES CONNOLLY,
JOSEPH PLUNKETT.
THE PROCLAMATION OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC
(All of its signers were executed)]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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