Page 313 - Demo

Chapter NiNe 313
The block on which Emmet was savagely beheaded was taken for the purpose from a local butcher and may be viewed today in the Collins Barrack Museum, Dublin. There were 22 people executed by the British as a result of their participation in Robert Emmet’s failed rebellion. Half of these were hanged on the same temporary gallows as Emmet, apparently the gallows was fashioned from barrels and planks with a 12 ft high crossbeam. Others were hanged from the balcony gallows at Kilmainham Gaol and one, Felix Rourke, was hanged outside his own door in Rathcoole.
Robert Emmet’s sweetheart, Sarah Curran, lived the remainder of her life grief-stricken and broken-hearted at the loss of her lover. She was immortalized by Emmet’s friend, the great Irish poet Thomas Moore, in his song “She is far ftom the land where her young hero sleeps” - Moore also immortalised Emmet in the song “The Minstrel Boy.”
As already mentioned, contrary to the so called promises made to the Irish Catholics, the Act of Union did not do away with the disabilities under which the now newly discordant Catholics sufered. Rigorous religious assessments prevented the wealthier Catholics from sitting in Parliament, from illing government, civil, or military positions, from becoming magistrates, and from becoming King’s Counsels. They were neither one thing nor the other, allowed to vote but unable to assume any position of importance or leadership. Ap- parently, King George 111 thought that giving his approval to any legislation which might dilute these assessments of his Catholic subjects, was a violation of his coronation oath, al- lied to which, opinion in Britain, both in and out of Parliament was also strongly in favour of keeping Catholicism well checked.
At this time, of the 658 members who constituted the House of Commons, only 100 represented Irish constituencies, so clearly, the destiny of Ireland was now no longer to be decided by Irishmen of any creed.
This then was the terrible situation in which the Catholics found themselves at the dawn of the nineteenth century. But, in their struggle for Emancipation, they were about to re- ceive the guidance and leadership of a very able man, a celebrated barrister and esteemed orator, one whose fearless personality, like no other, dominated 50 years of Irish history, perhaps the greatest Irishman of the nineteenth century - Daniel O’Connell.