Emmet's 200th anniversary commemorated

Irish and American relatives of Robert Emmet joined the Taoiseach on Saturday in a wreath-laying ceremony at the site where the revolutionary was executed exactly 200 years before.

A crowd of several hundred gathered outside St Catherine's Church on Dublin's Thomas Street to witness the commemoration, which also featured a description of the events of September 20th, 1803, given by the historian Dr Ruan O'Donnell. The "butcher's block" believed to have been used for beheading Emmet was the centre-piece of the ceremony.

The occasion was partly disrupted by bin charge campaigners protesting against the jailing of Socialist Party TD Mr Joe Higgins and his colleague Ms Clare Daly. There were angry verbal exchanges between some of those attending the commemoration and placard-carrying protesters, and although the protest was mostly silent, the Taoiseach was heckled as he laid a wreath.

Dr O'Donnell told those attending that Emmet had consciously defused the tense atmosphere surrounding his execution by not making inflammatory comments from the gallows. This was in line with a promise made to the Rev Thomas Gamble, a United Irishmen sympathiser who ministered to him in his final hours, and it helped ensure there was no unnecessary bloodshed.

Such were the crowds and so heavy was the security on the day, Dr O'Donnell said, that it took an hour-and-a-half for Emmet to be brought from Kilmainham Jail, barely a mile away, to the scene of his execution. The Thomas Street site was chosen, as was customary at the time, because of its associations with the condemned man's "crime," in the form of an armaments depot opposite.

The sight that awaited him was "deliberately shocking", Dr O'Donnell added. The hangman's rope was "greasy from the necks of others hanged before". And everything about the protracted execution was designed to "cow" those watching. Nevertheless Emmet went to his death calmly, helping the executioner with the noose, before performing what he had called his "final duty" to his country.

Among those who laid wreathes on Saturday were Mr Philip Emmet, from Co Wicklow, representing the Irish branch of the family, and Mr Richard Emmet, representing relatives in the US. Some 50 relatives attended, all of them descended from Thomas Addis Emmet, brother of the revolutionary.

Asked afterwards about the disruption caused by the refuse protest, Mr Philip Emmet said he was "an advocate of protest" but he found it "sad" that the campaigners had chosen this event to highlight their grievances.

Mr Emmet also suggested that his ancestor's epitaph should only be written "when Ireland can live at peace with itself at all levels, and that includes closing the gap between the rich and the poor". He added: "We might never get there, but I don't see the epitaph as a finite thing anyway. It could be an ongoing process." Mr Brian Cleary, the chairman of the Robert Emmet Association, also laid a wreath. Officers of the Army and FCA provided a guard of honour, and musical tributes included the playing of the Last Post, and a lament from a lone piper.