Ms Honor Ó Brolcháin:

I thank the Chairman for inviting us. I am a grand-niece of Mr. Joseph Plunkett, who was on the Moore Street site along with his two brothers, George and Jack. I am a member of the group of relatives of the seven signatories. The more I go to Moore Street, the more I find it extraordinary, emotional and deeply moving. This has been the experience every time we brought somebody there.

Every member of this committee should see the TG4 documentary "Iniúchadh Oidhreacht na Cásca", which must be one of the best documentaries ever to have been made in the country. It is beautifully researched and the only documentary that tells the entire story. It will shorten much of the committee's work if the members all watch it together.

My second recommendation is one that the members probably feel they do not need. I would like to take them on a journey from the door of the GPO, which was on fire, requiring 300 men to dash across Henry Street, under fire from snipers on the roof of the station, to where they got bottlenecked in Henry Place. Henry Place was packed when filled with an army of 300 men and their five leaders . They got stuck because of the sniper fire from the direction of the Rotunda. They had to wait and go across in batches as Joseph Plunkett signalled by dropping his sabre. Seventeen of them were wounded. They were exhausted and very thirsty because there was no water in the GPO while it was on fire. The buildings around it were heating it inordinately. The soldiers got to Mrs. Cogan's house, broke down the door and entered. She was cooking a ham and when she finished cooking it she gave it to them. The Pearse brothers, who were closer to each other than others were to either of them throughout their lives, slept on the table upstairs. They got up in the morning and everyone started burrowing through the houses in the way they had been trained to do; they were trained for urban warfare. Eventually, the whole terrace was filled with men, as were the yards behind. The leaders took their place in the middle as a place of safety. Joseph Plunkett sat at the end of James Connolly's bed. Connolly was in terrible pain owing to a gangrenous foot, which would have killed him had he not been shot first. Plunkett was also dying, in his case with tuberculosis.

Pearse looked out the window and saw, to his horror, the three members of the Dillon family, who were wrapped in sheets and carrying white flags, being shot down and killed by the artillery at the top of the street. He said no more civilians should be killed. He and the others got together, therefore, and agreed on a surrender. Ms Elizabeth O'Farrell walked up the street on her own into the mouth of the guns with the surrender note for the British. She walked down, and up and down again, and then back up with Pearse. Both were arrested.

Joseph Plunkett came out and stood in the middle of the street, on which there was nothing but bodies, and waited with his back to the guns for the men to line up. They all combed their hair, washed their faces and brushed down their uniforms. The Englishmen, the Liverpool men, and the Glasgowmen argued and were in tears in the belief that they would be shot immediately. They wanted to continue fighting. All lined up with their guns unloaded and marched in fours with their arms at the slope behind Willie Pearse and Joseph Plunkett, with Tom Clarke and Seán Mac Diarmada behind. They marched back down Moore Street the way they had come, back through Moore Lane, Henry Place and Henry Street. The marched up O'Connell Street where they laid down their arms outside the Gresham and then marched to the Rotunda where they were made lie on the ground overnight in the wet. The next battalion that arrived, Edward Daly's men, was made to lie on top of them. That was the beginning of the end of the British empire.

The site is a huge battlefield, extending all the way from Prince's Street to Parnell Square and beyond. If we can enhance it, we can do what makes people feel they are real and belong to the human race, and what makes them feel they have generations behind them. It would make them feel connected to the whole world, including Australia, America and Africa, whose inhabitants also had to get rid of the empire. The area to which I refer is very important and nothing should be done lightly. If the monument is not ready for 2016, it does not matter; doing it right is what counts. We owe this to ourselves, our forebears and future generations.