Jeff Flood

Today in 1798, Theobald Wolfe Tone stood before a court martial at the Royal Barracks in Dublin and made an iconic speech, in the uniform of a French officer, that would echo through history. Outside, the cursed rebellion of that summer lay it tatters, its other leaders hanged or shot or driven into exile. Tone had been taken a month earlier at Buncrana, after the French flagship Hoche was battered into surrender off Lough Swilly. Sir George Hill, a Trinity man who'd known him from ages before, recognised Tone among the French officers. Tone had spent years in Paris persuading the Directory to back an Irish republic. His vision was simple and dangerous. Replace the labels of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter with the common name of Irish. In the dock he didn’t deny the charge of treason, telling the court that from his earliest youth he'd seen the connection with England as the curse of the Irish nation, and that while it lasted the country could never be free or happy. His one request was to be shot as a soldier rather than hanged like a felon. Cornwallis refused him. So on the night before the execution Wolfe Tone cut his own throat with a penknife. John Philpot Curran, famous barrister and a friend of Tone's, went to the Court of King's Bench and argued that a military tribunal had no right to try a civilian while the civil courts were open. The judge, Lord Kilwarden, granted a writ of habeas corpus ordering Tone's execution delayed, but the army ignored it. The self inflicted wound did not kill him quickly. Tone lingered in agony for about a week, and the story goes he joked to the prison surgeon that he was a bad anatomist. He died on 19 November, aged 35. He's buried in the churchyard at Bodenstown, Co. Kildare, a place of pilgrimage ever since. Pearse delivered a famous oration there in 1913, and his dream that the people of this island should govern it themselves, united not by creed but by a shared home and a shared future, will one day come true.