Patrick Pearse’s earliest spatial memory was of his family’s dim basement in inner city Dublin. Moving to ‘a room higher up, a bright room, with great spaces of floor’ he found ‘this rise towards the zenith … symbolic of a corresponding rise in our fortunes’. Inclined represent his life, work and politics as a spatial progression, he also moved his bilingual school St. Enda’s from Rathmines, where it was ‘too much in the suburban groove’, to an old Georgian mansion in the foothills of the Dublin mountains. He moved every summer to the Gaeltacht area of Rosmuc, Co. Galway, where he gave magic lantern lectures to the locals on many aspects of Ireland’s culture, history and landscape. This well-illustrated monograph book will trace Pearse’s spatial biography through the sites, designs and images he made his own and the vision of Ireland he tried so provocatively to curate.

This project has been funded by

University College Dublin Decade of Centenaries Award