Revolutionary petrels in Dublin

A sound sculpture staged at Dublin’s GPO Witness History Visitor Centre is entitled ‘Women of 1916 — Stormy Petrel/Guardeall’, writes Richard Collins

Thirty-three old-style loudspeakers take turns broadcasting the quietly-spoken words of the female couriers who acted as ‘human telegraphs’ during the Rising. When threatened with capture by the enemy, a ‘stormy petrel’ messenger might swallow the note she carried. Others memorised the messages in advance, so that no incriminating material, such as the text of the newly-released Proclamation, could be found on their person.

‘In 1916, the stormy petrel was an international symbol of revolution and the anti-colonial imagination’ declares the exhibit’s booklet, a work of art in itself. During the political turbulence of the 19th and early 20th centuries, this avian Che Guevara came to symbolise the romantic revolutionary. Gorky’s ‘Song of the Stormy Petrel’ celebrates the bird’s courage. ‘The stormy petrel is what I am’ declared the melancholy Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, philosophical outsider and progenitor of Existentialism.