POBLACHT NA h-EIREANN
THE PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT
OF THE IRISH REPUBLIC

TO THE PEOPLE OF IRELAND

IRISHMEN AND IRISHWOMEN: In the name of God and of the dead
generations from which she receives her old tradition of nationhood,
Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes
for her freedom.

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, of 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 of 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.


1916

Signed on Behalf of the Provisional Government.

Thomas J. Clarke, Sean Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh, P.H. Pearse, Eamonn Ceannt,
James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett



Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgement that something else is more important than fear. ~Ambrose Redmoon