Electronic edition compiled by Audrey Murphy
Funded by University College, Cork and
Professor Marianne McDonald via the CELT Project
2. Second draft.
Extent of text: 1121 words
Distributed by CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.
Text ID Number: E900006
Availability [RESTRICTED]
Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only.
CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
The whole text.
Text has been proof-read and parsed using SGMLS.
Constructive criticism and corrections are welcome and will be credited to scholars making them.
The electronic text represents the edited text.
Quotations are rendered q.
Soft hyphens are silently removed. When a hyphenated word (hard or soft) crosses a page-break or line-break, this break is marked after the completion of the hyphenated word.
div0=the whole text. Page-breaks are marked.
Dates are standardized in the ISO form yyyy-mm-dd.
Place names, organisational names, and personal names are not tagged.
The n attribute of each text in this corpus carries a unique identifying number for the whole text.
The title of the text is held as the first head element within each text.
div0 is reserved for the text (whether in one volume or many).
A canonical reference can be constructed from the page number of the text.
Created: Irish Commandants. (June 1917)
Beatrix Färber (ed.)
Beatrix Färber (ed.)
Julianne Nyhan (ed.)
Peter Flynn (ed.)
Beatrix Färber (ed.)
Peter Flynn (ed.)
Mavis Cournane (ed.)
Donnchadh Ó Corráin (ed.)
Audrey Murphy (ed.)
Audrey Murphy (ed.)
The following address was drafted on June 18th, 1917, by Republican Commandants who arrived on that day from England, where they had been prisoners since 1916. It was brought to the United States by Dr. Patrick McCartan and publicly received at the Capitol by Secretary Tumulty.
Gentlemen:
We, the undersigned, who have been held in English prisons and have been dragged from dungeon to dungeon, in heavy chains, cut off, since Easter Week, 1916, from all intercourse with the outside world, have just had an opportunity of seeing the printed text of the message of the United States of America to the Provisional Government of Russia.
We see that the President accepts as the aim of both countries ‘the carrying of the present struggle for the freedom of all peoples to a successful consummation’. We, also, see that the object of President Wilson's own government is ‘the liberation of peoples everywhere from the aggressions of autocratic force’. ‘We are fighting,’ writes the President to the Government of Russia, ‘for the liberty, self-government, and undictated development of all peoples, and every feature of the settlement that concludes this war must be conceived and executed for that purpose. Wrongs must first be righted, and then adequate safeguards must be created to prevent their being committed again. Remedies must be found as well as statements of principle that will have a pleasing and sonorous sound . . . No people must be forced under a sovereignty under which it does not wish to live.’
We trust that such remedies—in preference to any governmental professions whatsoever—will be held to include the right of each people, not merely to rely on other peoples to support their claim to national liberty, but what the Governments and peoples of other nations will, we trust, regard as even more sacred, the right of each people to defend itself against external aggression, external interference and external control. It is this particular right that we claim for the Irish people, and not content with statements of principle, though these themselves may be made a pretext for our oppression, we are engaged and mean to engage ourselves in practical means for establishing this right.
Without awaiting the issue of the war or the settlement that may conclude the war, we ask of the Government of the United States of America, and the Governments of the free peoples of the world, to take immediate measures to inform themselves accurately and on the
We, the undersigned, are officers (just released from English prisons) of forces formed independently in Ireland to secure the complete liberation of the Irish Nation.