Legible Letters

This chapter takes us to the other side of the bench to reveal a little-told, dimension of Patrick Pearse’s life and times. Forever crystallised in history as the revolutionary lawbreaker, this essay casts light on Pearse’s short-lived career as a barrister. In particular, it covers the case of McBride v. McGovern [May 1905] when Pearse sought to defend a Donegal man’s right to write his name on his cart in the Irish language and using an Irish typeface. McBride was being prosecuted for doing just this and for thus breaching a ‘Victorian statute of 1851 that required the owner of a cart who used it on a public road to have his name and residence painted conspicuously on the off side of that cart in legible letters’. It soon becomes clear that much was at stake in this seemingly trivial prosecution; in many ways, indeed, as Kenny puts it, in ‘contention was not only the legal status of a distinctive typeface for the Irish language but the very use of the language itself in law’. Long before his time at the General Post Office, Pearse is presented here as a thinker attuned to the performative quality of the courtroom and to the law as a form of ideological stage on which all kinds of modes of resistance might be acted out.