#OnThisDay 1803 Robert Emmet, accused of high treason, was hanged & beheaded in front of St Catherine’s Church on Thomas St. Dublin. From the scaffold Emmet said,
‘‘My friends, I die in peace and with sentiments of universal love and kindness towards all men’.
However, it is Emmet’s speech from the dock at his trial that is his most famous. The abbreviated version goes;
“Let no man write my epitaph…When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written”.
The Irish at War 