The proclamation read Sunday outside Syracuse City Hall was first delivered over a century ago by a man who would be executed just nine days later.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, Patrick Pearse stood before the General Post Office in Dublin, Ireland, and proclaimed the island’s independence after centuries of British rule. Pearse and six other men declared themselves the provisional government of the Irish Republic, guaranteeing religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens.

That declaration commenced a short-lived rebellion with a long-lasting legacy, the Easter Rising. 

The Irish Citizen Army, led by James Connolly, the Irish Volunteers, and other paramilitary organizations seized strategically important buildings across Dublin, but British forces besieged the city and swiftly quelled the revolt. The fighting killed hundreds of people and injured thousands more. 

In the aftermath, the British executed Pearse, Connolly, and 14 other leaders for their roles in the rebellion, seemingly silencing the Irish independence movement. But the movement, and the execution of the 16 leaders, spurred national sympathy that led to the 1919-1921 Irish War of Independence. That war eventually resulted in 26 of the island’s 32 counties forming the Republic of Ireland, while the six counties of Northern Ireland remain in the United Kingdom.

The uprising lasted less than a week, but its legacy lives on 110 years later.

Since 2019, the City of Syracuse has commemorated the 1916 Irish rebellion with a flag-raising ceremony and reading of the proclamation of the Irish Republic at City Hall.

“It’s the passion behind it, the consideration for others. It begins with ‘regarding Irishmen and Irish women,’” said Michael Lehmann. “It really is an inclusive declaration against those in power at the time.”

British forces held the leaders of the Easter Rising in Kilmainham Gaol, which was decommissioned in 1924 and now serves as a museum. It is pictured here. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current

Lehmann, a founding member of the CNY Irish Coalition and former president of the Syracuse Ancient Order of Hibernians, helped coordinate with former Mayor Ben Walsh’s office to organize the first annual commemoration. 

This year, Mayor Sharon Owens presided over the commemoration and recognized former Mayor James K. McGuire, who led local fundraising efforts to help Irish nationalists overseas.

Owens declared the day Central New York Irish Coalition Irish Freedom Day, and, like other speakers, endorsed a unified Ireland.

“Syracuse shall always offer the hand in support of Irish unity,” Owens said. 

Robert Searing, curator of history at the Onondaga Historical Association, said American support for the Irish dates back to the founding of the United States, when Irishmen signed the Declaration of Independence.

That support was omnipresent during the Easter Rising, Searing said, including in Syracuse. McGuire, the former mayor, was a “vocal and vociferous Irish nationalist who gets himself in a lot of hot water nationally,” Searing said.

McGuire, nicknamed the “boy mayor of Syracuse,” was such a staunch supporter for the cause of Irish nationalism that he published two books on the role that Germany could play in liberating Ireland from English rule. That courted a Congressional investigation and an FBI file, Searing said, but neither stopped the “boy mayor” from supporting the cause from abroad.

In the Easter Rising’s wake, McGuire helped raise funds for relief efforts in Dublin, where civilians and cityscape  reeled from British bombardment. McGuire was also a friend of Eamon de Valera — an American-born Irish nationalist involved in the Easter Rising, spared from execution because of his nationality.

De Valera was a prominent and controversial leader in the Irish republican movement, and eventual president of Ireland, who frequently traveled between the U.S. and Ireland through the 1910’s and ‘20’s.

Eamon de Valera, then-president of the Republic of Ireland, pictured alongside the New York State Federation of Labor Committee in Syracuse, New York. Credit: Photo provided by Brian Crowley, curator at the Kilmainham Gaol Museum

Before that, Pearse and other leaders bounced between the U.S. and Ireland before the rising to raise funds, organize support and foster an already strong bond with Ireland. The proclamation Pearse read at the start of the rising references the significance of this American assistance, proudly asserting “support by her exiled children in America.”

When Pearse and de Valera visited Syracuse and other Irish American hotbeds, they found ardent supporters of the national Irish cause, some of whom had only recently emigrated to the U.S. from Ireland themselves.

Many of those Irish immigrants forged in their children a fervent reverence for the land their parents left, and a strong belief in the enduring connections between both nations.

Those descendants include Rep. John Mannion, whose grandfather in 1916 emigrated to the United States, fought in World War I, and found a home in Tipperary Hill. 

The Easter Rising’s legacy endures as an inspiration for people in other countries fighting to win their sovereignty, Mannion said, and in the U.S., to maintain it.

“That was a moment in time where the people opposed an oppressive, wealthy empire,” Mannion said. “What does it say to this moment in time? I think democracy, sovereignty and autonomy is an ongoing battle in many ways, and we’re seeing that in our own country right now.”

Searing sees similarities in the fallout of the Easter Rising and the aftermath of the shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis of by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents earlier this year.

“The state recognized, much like the English, when [General John] Maxwell killed everybody and gave de Valera his dispensation, they realized that they went too far now,” Searing said. “The analog is perfect here, in my opinion.”

While Good and Pretti were not leaders of an armed rebellion, Searing believes they are products of the same forces that drove those involved in the Easter Rising to take a stand against what they perceived as tyranny.

“These are regular people who are activated by events. Are they revolutionaries? I think they might be,” Searing said. “And they lose their life, and that becomes a galvanizing moment.”

That galvanizing moment inspired a tribute song from Ireland’s best selling band of all time, U2, which sang about the shooting of Good on “American Obituary.”

The Easter Rising’s leaders are themselves the subjects of Irish folk songs whose popularity persists today.

“The Foggy Dew” mourns the “glorious dead” of the “springing of the year”; “Come Out Ye Black and Tans” recounts the “sneers and jeers” of the British “when the leaders of ‘16 were executed”; and several songs bearing James Connolly’s name memorialize the slain labor leader, shot in a chair, his ill-dressed, infected wounds “all bleeding and bare.”

“In Ireland, if you get a really good song, that helps a lot,” said Brian Crowley, the curator of the Kilmainham Gaol Museum. That former prison housed the rising’s leaders, who were executed in Kilmainham’s courtyard.

After crushing the rebellion, British forces held the rising’s leaders in Kilmainham and executed them in the prison’s courtyard.

The Kilmainham Gaol courtyard where British forces executed the Easter Rising’s leaders. 15 leaders were killed at the cross nearest the camera, while the cross on the other end of the courtyard symbolizes where James Connolly , too injured to stand for his execution, was propped on a chair and shot to death. Credit: Patrick McCarthy | Central Current

Crowley said that the rebellion’s leaders themselves invoked the lineage and legacies of their predecessors, what Crowley called an “apostolic succession of Irish revolutionaries,” in the centuries-long fight for Irish self-determination. Pearse, an Irish language activist, in his writings was positioning the rising that was to come within that tradition of Irish revolutions.

Though the rising’s leaders are collectively memorialized, Crowley said some individual stories seem to have forged particular connections to public imagination. 

Crowley referenced “Grace,” a song penned in 1985 which relays the true story of doomed leader Joseph Plunkett, the youngest signatory of the proclamation, who was married to Grace Gifford in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol just hours before British soldiers executed him.

The tragic wedding and subsequent execution helped shift public opinion toward the rebels. Just as Plunkett and Gifford’s love story generated contemporary sympathy, Crowley said the ballad in their honor drove even greater interest in the Kilmainham Gaol chapel among visitors to the museum.

“A lot of it has to do with the fact that in the 1980s the song came out that became really popular about them, and people have heard of them,” Crowley said.

In Syracuse, a city that regularly celebrates its abundant Irish heritage with parades, festivals and more, Lehmann said the Easter Rising commemoration offers a chance to reflect on a more solemn yet significant moment in Irish history.

They read the names, including those of a long series of Irish political prisoners who have died on hunger strike, from Wolfe Tone in 1798 to Bobby Sands and his six comrades in 1981.

Lehmann recalled the first time he read the proclamation, and the encouragement he received from Geordy Austin, a fellow Hibernian and CNY Irish Coalition founder who passed away in 2024.

“He said, ‘when you read it, make sure at the end you read the names,’” Lehmann said. “The names are just as important as the message.”

There was no foggy dew Sunday morning, just a bold blue sky to meet the ascendent tricolor as the echoes of the six-day Easter Rising continued to reverberate from Dublin to Syracuse and beyond.

So did the names:

“Thomas J. Clarke

Seán Mac Diarmada

Thomas MacDonagh

Padraig Pearse

Eamonn Ceannt

James Connolly

Joseph Plunkett”

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Patrick McCarthy is a staff reporter at Central Current covering government and politics. A graduate of Syracuse University’s Maxwell and Newhouse Schools, McCarthy was born and raised in Syracuse and...