John Joseph Plunkett

Considering the centenary of 1916 being with us, and the short lived connection of CUS and John Joseph Plunkett, we have extracted and condensed the following...

Joseph Mary Plunkett

The short CUS and Marist connection.

Joseph Mary Plunkett was born in November 1887. He was the eldest son of a George Noble Plunkett, a Papal Count, and lived his young life in Fitzwilliam Street, Dublin.

He was a descendant of the martyred Saint Oliver Plunkett. His grandparents were in the leather trade and later into the construction trade, thus affording their son George and their grandson Joseph a very affluent upbringing. His father later was curator of the National Museum

The majority of those who lived around Fitzwilliam Square and Fitzwilliam Street would have been wealthy, Protestant and largely Unionist whilst literally a stone’s throw away in the lanes behind the grand houses many people lived in poverty and squalor with few facilities. Violence and chaos was a regular occurrence amongst those living there . All of this had a considerable effect on a young Joseph Plunkett.

In 1898 at the age of 11, Joseph started in CUS – His time in CUS was quite short as just four months later he contracted pneumonia & pleurisy. Pneumonia proved fatal for many young people at the time and Joe was not expected to survive. However his mother, though without formal training, had an interest in nursing and with the aid of their staff, Joe began to recover.

To finalise his recovery Joseph and his mother planned to go to Rome for the winter, but when they got as far as Paris, she changed her mind and put Joseph into Marist school in the Parisian suburb of Passy.

He returned to Ireland in 1900 after a harsh winter in Paris that did not do his health much good and continued his education in Belvedere before boarding at Stoneyhurst in England and then studying in UCD. At Universtiy he kept very much to himself and was not noted for his academic prowess though English was the one subject he did well in.

From his late teens he developed a keen interest in poetry and worked very hard at it, hoping that someday his works would be published. His hope of being published ensured he put a date on his works and combined with his meticulously kept diaries, his writings give an insight to his life leading up to his involvement in the Irish Republican Brotherhood.

A devoted nationalist he joined the Gaelic league and developed a close friendship with the poet Thomas MacDonagh and with him launched the newspaper the Irish Review. He joined the Irish Volunteers when it was formed in 1913. In 1915 Plunkett was inducted into the IRB and he travelled to Berlin to help Roger Casement secure German support for a rebellion. He was appointed to the IRB military council but fell ill in early 1916. Despite his illness, he took his place in the GPO and signed the Proclamation.

He was sentenced to death but married his financé, Grace Gifford, in his cell in Kilmainham Gaol on the night before his execution on May 4th. His two brothers George and Jack fought also in 1916 were sentenced to death but had their sentences commuted while two of his sisters Philomena and Fiona played a role in the preparations for the Rising. His father’s victory in the North Roscommon by-election in 1917 was the first tangiable sign that the Rising had had a deep impact on Nationalist opinion.

Writer, traveller, reader, experimenter, thinker, dancer, lover of women, theatre director, editor, linguist, philosopher, negotiator and military tactician. A short life filled with experience.