A set of rosary beads that belonged to Joseph Plunkett. He gave them to Sergeant William Hand, a soldier of the Sherwood Foresters and a member of the firing squad that executed Plunkett. Some time later Hand gave it to his cousin, Dora, before he went to fight in France. He was killed in battle there on 21st March 1918.

Plunkett, Joseph Mary (1887–1916) was one of three poets involved in the Easter rising. Born into the catholic branch of a prominent Irish family he had the most comfortable upbringing of all the eventual leaders of the 1916 rebellion. He was educated at some of the most prestigious Catholic schools in Ireland, France and England, most notably the Jesuits-run Belvedere and Stonyhurst Colleges in Dublin and Lancashire respectively. He was very close to teacher, fellow-poet and signatory Thomas MacDonagh who encouraged him to publish his work.

Several of Plunkett’s immediate family were also involved in the Easter rising and the subsequent republican movement. His father George was a papal count and, in 1916 carried messages to Roger Casement in Berlin, proceeding on to Rome where he pleaded the Irish nationalist cause with Pope Benedict XV. His eldest sister Philomena (‘Mimi’) Plunkett (1886–1926), served as courier in 1916 between the IRB military council and Clan na Gael leaders in New York, and afterwards was secretary of Cumann na mBan. From 1912 Plunkett shared one of the family’s many properties with another sister, Geraldine, later moving to Larkfield in Kimmage, Co. Dublin, a house that was used as a weapons store, explosives factory and training base for English and Scottish volunteers who came to Ireland to support the rebellion. Plunkett was dogged by ill-health from 1912 but it did not stop him travelling to Germany to assist Roger Casement in procuring arms and ammunition for delivery to Ireland on the SS Aud on April 20, 1916, and to New York to brief Clan na Gael leader John Devoy on plans for the rising.

Four months before Easter 1916 Plunkett became engaged to MacDonagh's sister-in-law, illustrator and caricaturist Grace Gifford, who came from a well-to-do Dublin protestant family. The couple were to be married on Easter Sunday but in the early days of April Plunkett became seriously ill and had to undergo surgery. By Good Friday (April 21) he had recovered enough to move into the Metropole hotel next to the General Post Office that would become the rebels’ stronghold in the week to come. Plunkett served in this garrison throughout Easter Week, with Michael Collins as his aide-de-camp, and signed the proclamation of the republic. Following the surrender the mystic poet-revolutionary was arrested, court-martialled and imprisoned in Kilmainham jail where he and Gifford were married just hours before his execution by firing squad on May 4, 1916.