This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by William Murphy and Anne Dolan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 29 September 1888, Ireland
Died: 3 November 1947
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
Margaret Pearse’s daughters, Margaret Pearse (1878–1968) and Mary Brigid Pearse (1888–1947), both lived in the shadow of their brother Patrick. Margaret was born on 4 August 1878 at 27 Great Brunswick Street, and Mary Brigid was born on 29 September 1888, by which time the family had moved to Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount. They were both educated at the Holy Faith convent, Glasnevin, Dublin, and neither married nor consistently sought paid employment, but further resemblances are scarce and they were often on poor terms.
Robust, intelligent, and dogmatic, Margaret was close to Patrick. She shared his interest in education and together they travelled to Belgium in June 1905. In 1907 she founded an infant school at the family home in Leeson Park, and this may have encouraged Patrick to establish St Enda’s. Margaret was an important support at St Enda’s, running a preparatory school, teaching French, acting as matron and keeping in touch with the boys over the summer. Mary Brigid ‘was a pitifully delicate child, always ailing and nearly always confined to bed’ (Mary Brigid Pearse, 80); she may have been the model for the sickly boy in Patrick’s story ‘Eoineen na néin’. She was close to Willie, sharing his artistic inclinations. They established the Leinster Stage Society, for which she wrote some original pieces and adapted some Dickens for the stage. They had moderate success until a calamitous run at the Cork opera house in 1912.
The sisters reacted very differently to their brothers’ revolutionary activity. Margaret was supportive and gloried in their sacrifice, while Mary Brigid, who had gone to the GPO in an attempt to persuade them to come home, avoided the city centre in later life. Margaret helped her mother to run St Enda’s, taking on more and more of the teaching responsibilities. She inherited the school and grounds on her mother’s death and kept the enterprise limping along until 1935. Mary Brigid, while in many ways estranged from the family, remained financially dependent. She continued to write, having already one dreadful novel, The Murphys of Ballystack, published in 1917. She also wrote some children’s stories and contributed articles to magazines such as Our Boys: it published several articles by her on the childhood of her brother in 1926 and 1927. An extended version of these was published as The home life of Pádraig Pearse (1934). If this signalled that Mary Brigid was thoroughly reconciled to her brother’s place in history, then it was the cause of further division with Margaret, as they squabbled over royalties accruing from a brief autobiographical fragment of Patrick’s that formed part of the book. Mary Brigid made several broadcasts about Patrick’s life in 1939. She died suddenly 13 November 1947 at 6 Beaufort Villas, Rathfarnham, Co. Dublin.
Margaret became the public face of the Pearse family legacy. She was elected a TD, winning the eighth and final seat for Fianna Fáil in the constituency of Co. Dublin in 1933. She polled better, but lost out, when it became a five-seat constituency in 1937. She became a senator in 1938 and remained so (often on the taoiseach’s nomination) until her death. She had a close relationship with Éamon de Valera, serving on Fianna Fáil’s national executive and as an honorary treasurer for many years. She continued to live in the Hermitage, allowing it to house a Red Cross hospital during the second world war. In 1966 she received an honorary D.Litt. from the NUI, with other relatives of those executed in 1916. In the same year she announced that on her death she would leave the then decaying Hermitage to a religious foundation rather than the state, but was quickly persuaded to change her mind. She died 7 November 1968 at Linden convalescent home (where she spent her final years).