Pierce McCan

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Pierce McCan^[1] or Peirce McCann (2 August 1882 – 6 March 1919) was an Irish Sinn Féin politician.

Contents 1 Career 2 Recognition as martyr 3 References 4 Sources

[edit] Career

He was born in County Wexford. He was a founder member of Sinn Féin in 1905. He joined the Gaelic League in 1909 and was a member of the Irish Volunteers from 1914 onwards. He was arrested after the Easter Rising and imprisoned in Reading gaol. He was selected as a Sinn Féin candidate for the Tipperary East constituency in the forthcoming 1918 general election. He was arrested in May 1918 under the premise of the so-called German Plot and while incarcerated was elected as a Sinn Féin MP for Tipperary East.^[2] In January 1919, Sinn Féin MPs refused to recognise the Parliament of the United Kingdom and instead assembled in the Mansion House, Dublin as a revolutionary parliament called Dáil Éireann. McCan never sat in Dáil Éireann and died in prison in 1919, a victim of the influenza epidemic of that year.

[edit] Recognition as martyr

On 10 April 1919 Cathal Brugha told the First Dáil: "Before I formally move the motion, as I have mentioned the name of Pierce McCann, I would ask the Members of the Dáil to stand up as a mark of our respect to the first man of our body to die for Ireland, and of our sympathy with his relatives. We are sure that their sorrow is lightened by the fact that his death was for the cause for which he would have lived, and that his memory will ever be cherished in the hearts of the comrades who knew him, and will be honoured by succeeding generations of his countrymen with that of the other martyrs of our holy cause."^[3]

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Robert Brennan (1950), Allegiance.
• Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly: A Founder of Modern Ireland, J. Anthony Gaughan (ed), 1996.