Irish Nationalist
He joined the Irish Volunteers in 1914 and organised a Volunteers group in County Kerry. In 1915 FitzGerald was imprisoned for making a political speech. He was later expelled from Kerry and moved to County Wicklow. He fought at the General Post Office during the 1916 Rising and was imprisoned after the surrender.
FitzGerald's memoir of the 1916 rising inside the GPO mentions the sudden and unexpected mobilisation, followed by a description of conditions in the GPO, the rebels' headquarters. While many accounts place the rising as a form of blood sacrifice, FitzGerald discussed its wider rationale with the leader Patrick Pearse, and with Joseph Plunkett who had travelled to Germany in 1915 for assistance. They expected that Germany would win the First World War and that a rising of at least three days would allow Ireland to take a seat at the peace conference. Though declaring an Irish Republic in 1916, they considered it would probably be necessary to invite the Kaiser's youngest son Joachim to reign a reformed kingdom of Ireland after the war, where Irish would again become the vernacular.
He was released in 1918 when he was elected as a Sinn Féin MP for the Dublin Pembroke constituency. Following the assembly of the First Dáil in 1919, FitzGerald was appointed Director of Publicity for Dáil Éireann, editing the Irish Bulletin. During the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) the Bulletin managed to publicise the aims of the Irish Republic to the wider world with increasing success, and removed the likelihood of the conflict being widened, leading to the truce of July 1921. He was arrested again in March 1921, but was released following the truce. He was one of the TDs who were unsuccessful in persuading Éamon de Valera to join the negotiators of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that was signed on 6 December.
Read more about this topic: Desmond FitzGerald (politician)
Famous quotes containing the words irish and/or nationalist:
“Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.”
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