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This is a letter from Patrick Henry Pearse (1879-1916) to an unknown person. In this letter, Pearse advises his correspondent that the idea of bringing an (unnamed) organisation 'with branches, etc.' into existence at the present time is unworkable, and that it would be more advisable to found 'a small, central body in the nature of an information bureau', which could 'educate public opinion' through pamphlets and so on.Pearse was a writer, a teacher, and a revolutionary nationalist. A strong critic of the soulless by-rote approach to learning he termed the 'murder machine', Pearse was the founder in 1908 of St. Enda's College, a bilingual school for boys with an ethos based around the needs and imaginations of the children themselves. He was a key member of the military council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and was one of the signatories of the proclamation of the Irish republic (largely his own writing), which he read outside the GPO after the outbreak of the Easter Rising. As president of the provisional government, it was Pearse who called the surrender. He was executed on 3 May 1916.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).