Rice joins the Irish Volunteers in 1913 but does not take part in the 1916 Easter Rising. For a time, he shares lodgings in Rock Street, Tralee, with Austin Stack, and like Stack he is a Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) member, playing hurling with Kenmare. At the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), he becomes Officer Commanding of the 5th Battalion of the Kerry No. 2 Brigade. He also holds the post of second in command of that brigade, under Humphrey Murphy. On April 26, 1921, he attends the meeting in Kippagh, County Tipperary, that sees the establishment of the First Southern Division. After the truce, Murphy is transferred to command Kerry No. 1 Brigade, and Rice becomes commanding officer of Kerry No. 2.
Rice opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and leads the brigade throughout the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). When Michael Collins comes to Killarney on April 22, 1922, to speak in favour of the agreement, he is met at the train station by a group of fifty men, led by Rice, who attempt to prevent him from speaking. The meeting goes ahead despite several attempts by the group to stop it. During the civil war he leads his men into Limerick, briefly seizing Rathkeale, but for the most part they are on the defensive. In September he commands a force of seventy republicans to take Kenmare. This is a rare and morale-boosting success. When the First Southern Division council meets on February 26-28, 1923, he is one of only two senior officers, among a group of eighteen, who feel that it is worth fighting on.
Shortly after the civil war, Rice marries Nora Aherne, a Cumann na mBan member; they have one son, George. After the war he continues to be active in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin. He attends IRA executive meetings in 1923 and is involved in attempts to reorganise the IRA in 1924. He is a delegate to the Sinn Féin ardfheis in 1926, opposing the proposal of Éamon de Valera that abstention be a matter of policy rather than principle. He is elected as a Sinn Féin TD for the Kerry South constituency at the 1957 Irish general election. He does not take his seat in the Dáil due to the Sinn Féin policy of abstentionism. He is one of four Sinn Féin TDs elected at the 1957 Irish general election, the others being Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, John Joe McGirl and Eighneachán Ó hAnnluain. During his time as a TD, he campaigns against the Special Powers Act, which grants the Irish state extra abilities to deal with and punish suspected members of the IRA. He is defeated at the 1961 Irish general election.
In 1966, Rice and fellow Kerry Republican John Joe Sheehy are expelled from Sinn Féin, as are many others, by the new Marxist-Leninist party leadership that had recently come into power. This move both foreshadows and fuels the split in 1969/1970 of both the IRA and Sinn Féin, which leads to the creation of the Marxist-Leninist Official IRA and the more traditional but still left-wing Provisional IRA, and in parallel Sinn Féin – The Workers’ Party and “Provisional” Sinn Féin. Rice gives his support to the Provisionals.
Rice drives an oil lorry for a time and then becomes manager of the Tralee branch of Messrs Nash, mineral-water manufacturers and bottlers. He remains in this position until his retirement in 1965. He dies on July 24, 1970, at his son’s residence in Oakview, Tralee.
Rice’s sister, Rosalie, is a member of Cumann na mBan during the 1916 Easter Rising and is arrested for sending a telegram alerting the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in the United States to the rising. His cousins Eugene and Timothy Ring are members of the IRB and are also involved with the telegram. His grandfather, Timothy Ring, was a Fenian who fought in the uprising. Two of his cousins are members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) who both help the republican side during the Irish revolutionary period.
The 1916 Easter Rising is a watershed in O’Donoghue’s life. In December 1916, he joins the Cork branch of the Irish Volunteers. In early 1917, he is elected unanimously First Lieutenant of the Cyclist Company and as a result devotes all his spare time to Volunteer work. He begins writing weekly for two years for TheIrish World newspaper. By May 1917, he is sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and in October, Tomás Mac Curtain appoints him head of communications of the Cork Brigade. He replaces Pat Higgins as Brigade Adjutant in February 1917. He is a key organiser in the sensational jailbreak of Captain Donnchadh Mac Niallghuis on Armistice Day 1918 and takes personal responsibility for his protection. Michael Collins is the last officer from Volunteers General Headquarters to visit Cork shortly after Christmas 1919, until the truce in 1921.
O’Donoghue builds up an intelligence network and agents which includes his future wife, Josephine Marchment. She is head female clerk at the 6th Division Headquarters at Victoria Barracks, Cork, and passes on secret British Army correspondence to him. He recruits people to open letters, tap phone lines and intercept telegrams. The Irish Republican Army has 2,000 active members in Cork which are also used for intelligence gathering. By March 1920, after killing a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Inspector, he is on the run and serving full-time in the IRA. In November of that year, the Cork Brigade kills six British Army officers and executes five Cork civilians on suspicion of spying.
After two and a half years of fighting, a truce is agreed upon on July 11, 1921. When the Dáil approves the Anglo-Irish Treaty, in January 1922, the IRA splits into pro- and anti-Treaty camps. Over the coming months and after being elected to the army’s executive as Adjutant General, O’Donoghue warns of the dangers of an Irish Civil War. In June 1922, he resigns from the army’s national executive and a month later, on July 3, 1922, from the army. Civil war does break out on June 28, 1922, between pro- and anti-Treaty factions, much to his dismay.
During the Irish Civil War, O’Donoghue remains neutral and tries to organise a truce to end the fighting. In December 1922, he forms a group called the “Neutral IRA”, along with Seán O’Hegarty, composed of pro-truce IRA men. He claims he has 20,000 members in this group. He campaigns for a month’s truce between the two sides, so that a political compromise could be reached. However, his efforts come to nothing and in March 1923, he winds up the “Neutral IRA,” judging that its objectives cannot be achieved. The Irish Civil War ends on May 24, 1923.
O’Donoghue serves as major in the Irish Army from 1939-1946. He forms a Supplementary Intelligence Service that is to remain behind enemy lines in the event of an invasion. He also teaches guerrilla warfare tactics to new army recruits.
O’Donoghue marries Josephine Brown (née Marchment) in April 1921, and they have four children. The couple also adopts two children from Josephine’s first marriage, including Reggie Brown, whom O’Donoghue kidnaps from his grandparents in Wales in 1920. He becomes a rate collector and remains outside politics.
In later years O’Donoghue becomes a respected historian. While in the army he edits An Cosantóir, the Irish Army’s magazine. He convinces Éamon de Valera to establish the Bureau of Military History to record personal accounts from the Irish War of Independence. He is a recording officer until 1948. His most famous work is his biography on Liam Lynch, entitled No Other Law.
The London Stock Exchange bombing occurs at 8:49 a.m. on the morning of July 20, 1990, with the explosion of a 5 to 10 lb. (2.3 to 4.5 kg) bomb of high explosives inside the London Stock Exchange building on Threadneedle Street in the City of London, England, planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). The building and surrounding area are evacuated after the IRA gives a telephone warning 40 minutes prior to the explosion, and thus nobody is wounded. As many as 300 people are evacuated from the building alone. The bomb’s strength blows a 10-foot hole inside the Stock Exchange Tower and causes massive damage to the visitors’ gallery on the first floor, which is frequently used by foreign tourists and schoolchildren and had been scheduled to open ten minutes after the explosion. The bomb is placed in the men’s toilets behind the gallery. The gallery and public viewing area is forced to close in 1992.
The bombing comes on the eighth anniversary of the July 20, 1982, Hyde Park and Regent’s Park bombings which killed eleven soldiers and wounded 53 people. The IRA launches a renewed campaign in London in 1990. During May, a soldier at an army recruiting centre is killed by a bomb in Wembley, while five are injured in a similar explosion in Eltham. In June 1990, bombs at the Honourable Artillery Company (HAC) and the Carlton Club injure 19 and 20 people respectively.
Scotland Yard‘s anti-terrorist chief George Churchill-Coleman says eight phone calls from the same man with an Irish accent are made between 8:02 a.m. and 8:20 a.m. to the City of London Police, the London Fire Brigade, Reuters, the Financial Times, The Salvation Army and the Stock Exchange itself. The caller telephones Reuters just after 8:00 a.m. and says, “This is the IRA. The bomb is due to go off in half an hour at the stock exchange.” The caller then gives a code word that the police say is known to them and used by the IRA to show that its threats are serious, and says, “Clear the building.”
The Stock Exchange’s chairman, however, says after the attack, “If the purpose of this callous act was to bring the City to a halt, they have failed singularly.” The explosion has little impact on stock trading since that is being carried out by computers elsewhere.
A spokesman for Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher says she is “appalled when people leave explosive devices in this manner in public areas.” On October 12, 1984, a bomb planted by the IRA at the Grand Brighton Hotel in Brighton, where the Conservative Party is holding its annual conference, kills five people and comes close to killing Thatcher.
In 1992, the IRA bombs the Baltic Exchange building in the city.
(Pictured: The Stock Exchange Tower in 1983, taken from the top of the National Westminster Tower (now Tower 42), clearly showing the symbolic coffin shape of the building)
The Provisional IRA, officially known as the Irish Republican Army (Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann) and informally as the Provos, is an Irish republicanparamilitary force that seeks to end British rule in Northern Ireland, facilitate Irish reunification and bring about an independent republic encompassing all of Ireland. It is the most active republican paramilitary group during the Troubles. It argues that the all-island Irish Republic continues to exist, and it sees itself as that state’s army, the sole legitimate successor to the original IRA from the Irish War of Independence (1919-21). It is designated a terrorist organisation in the United Kingdom and an unlawful organisation in the Republic of Ireland, both of whose authority it rejects.
The Provisional IRA emerges in December 1969, due to a split within the previous incarnation of the IRA and the broader Irish republican movement. It is initially the minority faction in the split compared to the Official IRA but becomes the dominant faction by 1972. The Troubles begin shortly before when a largely Catholic, nonviolent civil rights campaign is met with violence from both Ulster loyalists and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), culminating in the August 1969 riots and deployment of British soldiers. The IRA initially focuses on defence of Catholic areas, but it begins an offensive campaign in 1970 that is aided by external sources, including Irish diaspora communities within the Anglosphere, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. It uses guerrilla tactics against the British Army and RUC in both rural and urban areas and carries out a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and England against military, political and economic targets, and British military targets in mainland Europe. They also target civilian contractors to the British security forces. The IRA’s armed campaign, primarily in Northern Ireland but also in England and mainland Europe, kills over 1,700 people, including roughly 1,000 members of the British security forces and 500–644 civilians.
The Provisional IRA issues the following statement to news media on the morning of July 19, 1997:
“On August 31, 1994, the leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann (Gaelic for Irish Republican Army) announced a complete cessation of military operations as our contribution to the search for a lasting peace.
After 17 months of cessation, in which the British government and the (pro-British Protestant) unionists blocked any possibility of real or inclusive negotiations, we reluctantly abandoned the cessation.
It is the root cause of division and conflict in our country. We want a permanent peace and therefore we are prepared to enhance the search for a democratic peace settlement through real and inclusive negotiations.
So, having assessed the current political situation, the leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann are announcing a complete cessation of military operations from 12 o’clock midday on Sunday the 20th, July 1997.
We have ordered the unequivocal restoration of the ceasefire of August 1994. All IRA units have been instructed accordingly.”
Keating is the youngest of six surviving children of Michael Keating, baker, and his wife Johanna, a native of County Kerry. He was educated at a local school and was an active member of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), playing football and hurling. After the 1916 Easter Rising, he leaves school at the age of thirteen to join the Irish Volunteers, which later becomes the IRA, serving in the 4th Cork Brigade. He is arrested by British troops in November 1920 and badly beaten. He spends a month in the Cork jail and is then interned for a year in Ballykinlar internment camp until December 1921. While interned he participates in several hunger strikes and makes several escape attempts. Following his release, he opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and serves in the Fianna Cork 4th Brigade on the Republican side under Seán Moylan during the Irish Civil War.
Keating emigrates to New York City in 1927 and becomes involved in Irish cultural organizations and Democratic party politics. He is a founder of American Friends of Irish Neutrality, which opposes Irish involvement in World War II, ostensibly fearing it will result in British re-occupation of Ireland.
Following World War II, Keating is chairman of the executive council of the 1947 Irish Race Convention and president of the American League for an Undivided Ireland, lobbying in support of the Fogarty Amendment, which unsuccessfully attempts to tie the release of Marshall Plan funds to British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
Between the 1940s and 1960s, Keating serves as president of the County Corkmen Association, president of the United Irish Counties Association, and president of the Irish Institute. In 1956, he serves as Grand Marshal of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Keating serves in various positions under New York City mayors William O’Dwyer, Vincent R. Impellitteri, and Robert F. Wagner, Jr., rising to the position of Deputy Mayor, under Wagner. He is reportedly the first to publicly introduce future President Kennedy as “the next President of the United States” at an Irish Institute event in 1957. He is appointed Regional Director of the United States Postal Service by President Kennedy and serves in that position from 1961 until his retirement in 1966.
In retirement, Keating returns to Kanturk and continues to advocate for the reunification of Ireland. Keating dies at his home in Kanturk on July 2, 1976, and is buried in a local cemetery with military honors. He represents an emigrant political and social milieu which is often treated dismissively by later, more cosmopolitan Irish commentators, but his career reflects not only his own considerable talents but the ways in which this milieu sustains a generation of immigrants, and the contribution of Irish America to Irish development in the post-war decades.
Barry returns to Bandon in early 1919. He describes in his guerilla days in Ireland a Damascus-like conversion to Irish nationalism on hearing of the Easter Rising while with the Mesopotamian expeditionary force, but he is only accepted into the IRA with considerable caution. Initially tested in intelligence and training work, in mid-1920 he takes charge of the new brigade flying column, which is used both to train officers and to stage offensive actions.
Barry adapts his military experience successfully to the demands of guerrilla warfare, becoming the most famed of column leaders during the Irish War of Independence. In his memoirs, he pours scorn on the obsession of many with military titles and orthodox procedure, complaining of a “paper army.” He stresses the need for spontaneity, initiative, and knowledge of local conditions. “The reality,” he writes, “was a group of fellows, mostly in caps and not-too-expensive clothing, wondering how to tackle their job and where they would sleep that night or get their supper.” (The Reality of the Anglo–Irish War (1974)). He well realises that the war’s character does not permit any close control from the IRA’s GHQ in Dublin, hence increasing the importance of local leaders. His tactics put strong emphasis on speed of movement and on the need to attack the enemy at his weakest point. The column’s ambush successes are small in number but among the best-remembered of the war. He admits, however, that his own and his column’s lack of experience with mines frequently weakened their offensives.
The column’s first successful ambush is at Tooreen on October 22, 1920, followed on November 28 by the dramatic ambushing of a patrol of auxiliaries at Kilmichael while travelling from their Macroom base. A column of thirty-six men, divided into three sections, kill sixteen auxiliaries, with one captured and later shot, suffering two fatalities of their own. Controversy has raged since over whether a false surrender by the British force caused the brutality of some of the deaths. Together with the Bloody Sunday killings of a week earlier in Dublin, Kilmichael has a profound effect on the British military and political establishment, with the declaration in December of martial law for much of Munster and the implementation of wide-ranging internment, together with the authorisation of official reprisals.
After a short period in hospital with a heart condition, in early 1921 Barry leads unsuccessful attacks on Kilbrittain, Innishannon, Drimoleague, and Bandon barracks. The seizure of Burgatia House, outside Rosscarbery, in early February, and the successful resistance made there to British troops, wins much publicity but has little military significance. He is a leading figure in the brutal final stage of the war in the first six months of 1921, which sees widespread shooting of suspected spies and destruction of loyalist property. By March 1921, his flying column, with 104 men, is easily the largest in Ireland, and an explosives expert, Capt. McCarthy, has joined them.
The protracted engagement between Barry’s column and encircling British forces at Crossbarry on March 19, 1921, comes at a time when large-scale sweeps are making life increasingly difficult for the IRA. It consists of a daring and courageous breakout. Crossbarry is the largest action of the war, and Barry is to regard it as even more important than Kilmichael. Soon afterwards, Rosscarbery barracks is successfully attacked by a Barry-led party, representing one of the few successful such initiatives in 1921. Isolated triumphs, however, cannot hide the fact that pressure is increasing on the column, and he becomes increasingly critical of inactive regions. He is later to say that all County Kerry does during the war is to shoot one decent police inspector at Listowel Racecourse and a colleague of his. He is strongly critical also of the lack of assistance from GHQ and of the divisionalisation policy. He visits Dublin in May, travels around with Michael Collins, and is present when two American officers demonstrate the Thompson submachine gun. He is more aware than most of his 1st Southern Division colleagues of the scarcity of arms and ammunition at the war’s end.
During the truce, Barry becomes liaison officer for Munster, riling the British by insisting on his military rank, and criticising the IRA liaison men in Dublin for being overly deferential. He joins the overwhelming majority of the Cork IRA in opposing the Anglo–Irish Treaty but plays a characteristically maverick role throughout the treaty split. His independent attitude is heightened by his dislike of Liam Lynch, the republican IRA’s Chief of Staff, and his continuing respect for Michael Collins. He shows impatience at the long-drawn-out peace initiatives. In March 1922, therefore, he advocates armed confrontation with pro-treaty units over the occupation of barracks in Limerick, and on June 18 he submits a resolution, which only narrowly fails, at the army convention, giving British troops seventy-two hours to leave Dublin.
At the beginning of the Irish Civil War, Barry is arrested entering the Four Courts disguised as a woman. He escapes from an internment camp at Gormanston in early September 1922. For the rest of the war his actions mirror its confused nature. In late October 1922, he leads successful raids on the small towns of Ballineen and Enniskean, and later on Inchigeelagh and Ballyvourney. In December his column takes Carrick-on-Suir, demonstrating the weakness of the Free State army, but his talk of advancing on the Curragh and of large-scale actions does not materialise. There is no evidence that he is acting in accordance with any coordinated plan. By February 1923, he realises that the Republican IRA cause is hopeless and he is involved with Fr. Tom Duggan in efforts to get 1st Southern Division to declare a ceasefire. He journeys to Dublin to put pressure on the intransigent Lynch in this connection, telling Lynch, “I did more fighting in one week than you did in your whole life.”
Barry avoids capture in roundups after the war, remaining on the run until 1924. Unlike many republicans, he does not turn to constitutionalism, remaining strongly militaristic. He is always an unreconstructed republican, though by no means a naive one. In 1924 he becomes attached to Cleeves Milk Co., based in Limerick and Clonmel, and from 1927 to retirement in 1965 is general superintendent with the Cork harbour commissioners. He strongly advocates preserving the independence of the IRA army executive during the republican split of 1925–27. He is instrumental in continuing the drilling of IRA members and is a strong supporter of armed opposition to the Blueshirts.
During the 1930s Barry is arrested at various times for possession of arms and seditious utterances. He promotes an attack against a Freemasons’ meeting in Cork in 1936 and gives the orders for the killing on March 4 of that year of Vice-AdmiralHenry Boyle Somerville. He is opposed to the use by Frank Ryan of IRA volunteers to support the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and to the proposals of Seán Russell for a bombing campaign in England. To maintain the link with traditional republicanism, he is elected IRA chief of staff in 1937. His plan, however, for the seizure of Armagh city, as part of a direct northern offensive, quickly collapses due to a leak of information, and he soon resigns his position. He forcefully attacks the bombing of English cities in 1938, regarding attacks on innocent civilians as immoral and counterproductive. He enlists in the National Army on July 12, 1940, only to be demobilised a month later. In 1946, he stands as an independent candidate in a by-election in the Cork Borough constituency, finishing at the bottom of the poll. He is more comfortable the following year touring the United States on an anti-partition platform.
In 1949 his Guerilla Days in Ireland is published. It proves a best-seller and has frequently been reprinted. It is well written in a forceful and direct style, one memoir needing no assistance from a ghost writer. Age does not mellow him: lawyers and bank managers are threatened by him over matters relating to his own column, and in 1974 he publishes a fierce pamphlet, angry at perceived slights in the Irish War of Independence memoir of Liam Deasy. He does strive to achieve a public reconciliation with Collins’s memory by unveiling the memorial to Collins at Sam’s Cross in 1966. On the outbreak of the Northern Ireland crisis in the late 1960s, he takes a militant line, castigating the argument that the Six Counties can be brought into the Republic by peaceful means, and asking when had peaceful means existed there. At the memorial meeting in Carrowkennedy, County Mayo, in 1971, he claims that there is a perfect right at the opportune time to take the Six Counties by force. He remains opposed to IRA bombing of civilian targets.
Barry dies in Cork on July 2, 1980. He is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery, Cork. Early in the truce of 1921 he marries Leslie Price, one of the most active of Cumann na mBan members during and after the rising. They have no children.
While Barry always remains an influential figure in republican circles, he will be remembered best as the pioneer of guerrilla warfare, the hero of Kilmichael and Crossbarry. His military flair, individualism, and ruthlessness are well suited to the 1919–21 conflict. After that, his strained relations with colleagues and his lack of flexibility reduce his importance. While his life after the revolutionary era appears anti-climactic, he retains much of his charisma. In later years, he is ever willing to remind politicians and historians how far Ireland has retreated from republican ideals. He is often prickly and autocratic yet could be generous to old colleagues of either side of the treaty split. He is arguably the most intelligent but also the most intolerant of the revolutionary leaders.
(From: “Barry, Thomas Bernadine (‘Tom’)” by M. A. Hopkinson, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Lucas is commissioned as a second lieutenant into 2nd Battalion, the Royal Berkshire Regiment, on May 7, 1898. He serves with the battalion in South Africa during the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902, taking part in operations in the Orange Free State from February to July 1900, in Transvaal from July to November 1900, and later in Cape Colony south of the Orange River. He is promoted to lieutenant on August 1, 1900, while in South Africa. After the end of the war in June 1902, he and the rest of the 2nd battalion is sent to Egypt, where they arrive on the SS Dominion in November 1902. He later serves in the Egyptian Army and Sudan Civil Service.
On June 30, 1919, Lucas is appointed a deputy lieutenant of Hertfordshire. He is made Commander of 17th Infantry Brigade in Ireland, and of Fermoy Barracks, on October 30, 1919. On June 26, 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, he is captured by the IRA while he is fishing on the Munster Blackwater near Fermoy along with Colonels Tyrell and Danford. After Danford is wounded during an unsuccessful attempt to escape from a moving car the same day, the volunteers free Tyrell to attend to Danford’s wounds. Both Colonels are subsequently taken to a military hospital at Fermoy.
Lucas is subsequently held in West Limerick and East Clare.
A letter from his wife, announcing the birth of their child, and addressed simply “to the IRA”, is delivered to him and his captors allow a subsequent exchange of letters between the couple. His letters home remain in the possession of his descendants and are shown on an episode of the BBC Television programme Antiques Roadshow.
The IRA moves Lucas to East Limerick from where he escapes four weeks later. It is believed his captors purposely relax the guard to allow him to escape rather than be faced with the possibility of executing him. While being transferred from Pallas Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks to Tipperary military barracks in a routine army patrol they are ambushed, and Lucas receives a slight injury.
Lucas becomes Assistant Adjutant General at Aldershot Command in 1924 and serves with the staff at General Headquarters, British Army of the Rhine from 1927 before he retires to Stevenage in 1932. He dies on April 7, 1956, and is buried in Graveley, Hertfordshire. His wife, Joan Holdsworth, whom he marries in October 1917, dies on September 6, 1979, and is also buried in Graveley, Hertfordshire.
In 2014, Barbara Scully, a granddaughter of George Power, one of the IRA volunteers involved, publishes his recollections to his family of the kidnap in The Irish Times. This brings a friendly reply from Lucas’ granddaughter, Ruth Wheeler, in which she states that Lucas risked a court-martial for stating that during his kidnap and time in captivity he was treated as “a gentleman by gentlemen” and was held by “delightful people.”
Ireland’s Defence Forces have published online Bureau of Military History witness statements by the IRA volunteers involved in the kidnap, as well as those who guarded General Lucas while he was held as a prisoner of war.
In 2020 Lucas’s granddaughter, Ruth Wheeler, and other members of the Lucas family publish online the letters he wrote and received while in captivity. Limerick Councillor Emmett O’Brien and other local people in March 2019 announce an intent to re-enact the capture, imprisonment, and release of Lucas on the anniversary in 2020.
(Pictured: Cuthbert Henry Tindall Lucas, bromide print by Walter Stoneman, 1919, National Portrait Gallery)
A man with an Irish accent telephones the Press Association with a warning given just six minutes before the device explodes. London police say a recognised IRA codeword is given. The bomb explodes in a corner of Westminster Hall at about 8:30 a.m. on June 17, 1974. The IRA in a telephoned warning says it planted the bomb that weighed approximately 20 lbs. (9.1 kg). The explosion is suspected to have damaged a gas main and a fire spreads quickly through the centuries-old hall in one of Britain’s most security-tight buildings. An annex housing a canteen and a number of offices is destroyed, but the great hall itself receives only light damage. The attack signals the start of a renewed IRA bombing campaign in England that is to last until late 1975 and is to claim the lives of dozens of people. The most notorious attacks of the bombing campaign are the Guildford pub bombings on October 5, 1974, that kill five and injure sixty, and the Birmingham pub bombings on November 21, 1974, which kill twenty-one people and injured one hundred eighty.
The year 1974 ends with the IRA killing twenty-eight people (twenty-three civilians and five British soldiers) in bombing operations in England. Twenty-one people are killed in the Birmingham pub bombings and a further seven are killed in the Guildford and Woolwich Pub bombings. Nearly three hundred people are injured from these bombings alone. The IRA calls off their bombing campaign in February 1975 but restarts it on August 27, 1975, with the Caterham Arms pub bombing which injures over thirty people. A week later, the IRA carries out the London Hilton bombing which kills two and injures over sixty.
Ernest Bernard (Ernie) O’Malley, Irish republican revolutionary and writer, is born on May 26, 1897, in Ellison Street, Castlebar, County Mayo, the second child among nine sons and two daughters of Luke Malley, solicitor’s clerk, of County Mayo, and Marion Malley (née Kearney) of County Roscommon. Christened Ernest Bernard Malley, his adoption of variations on this name reflects his enthusiasm for a distinctively Irish identity – an enthusiasm that lay at the heart of his republican career and outlook.
In 1906, O’Malley’s family moves to Dublin, where he attends the Christian Brothers‘ School, North Richmond Street. In 1915, he begins to study medicine at University College Dublin (UCD). Having initially intended to follow his older brother into the British Army, he rather joins the Irish Volunteers in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, as a member of F Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade. He becomes a leading figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence which the Easter Rising helps to occasion. In 1918, having twice failed his second-year university examination, he leaves home to commit himself to the republican cause. He is initially a Volunteer organiser with the rank of second lieutenant, under the instruction of Richard Mulcahy, operating in Counties Tyrone, Offaly, Roscommon, and Donegal. His work in 1918 involves the reorganisation, or new establishment, of Volunteer groups in the localities.
In August 1918, O’Malley is sent to London by Michael Collins to buy arms. During 1919 he works as an IRA staff captain attached to General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin, and also trains and organises Volunteers in Counties Clare, Tipperary, and Dublin. He has a notable military record with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and is a leading figure in attacks on Hollyford barracks in County Tipperary (May 1920), Drangan barracks in County Kilkenny (June 1920), and Rearcross barracks in County Tipperary (July 1920). His IRA days thus involve him with comrades such as Dan Breen, Séumas Robinson, and Seán Treacy. In December 1920, he is captured in County Kilkenny by Crown forces. He escapes from Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol in February 1921, to take command of the IRA’s 2nd Southern Division, holding the rank of commandant-general.
O’Malley’s republican commitment has political roots in his conviction that Ireland should properly be fully independent of Britain, and that violence is a necessary means to achieve this end. But the causes underlying his revolutionism are layered. Family expectations of respectable, professional employment combined with a religious background and an enthusiasm for soldiering provide some of the foundations for his IRA career. As an IRA officer he enjoys professional, military expression for a visceral CatholicIrish nationalism. He also finds excitement, liberation from the frequent dullness of his life at home, defiant rebellion against his non-republican parents, an alternative to his stalled undergraduate career, and, in political and cultural Irish separatism, a decisive resolution of the profound tension between his anglocentrism and his anglophobia.
O’Malley rejects the 1921 Anglo–Irish Treaty as an unacceptable compromise. He spends the 1921 truce period training IRA officers in his divisional area, in preparation for a possible renewal of fighting. He is, in the event, to be a leading anti-treatyite in the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. In the Four Courts in 1922, at the start of the latter conflict, he is captured on the republicans’ capitulation on June 30 but then manages to escape from captivity. Subsequently he is appointed assistant Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA and also becomes part of a five-man anti-Treaty army council, along with Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy, Frank Aiken and Thomas Derrig.
O’Malley is dramatically captured and badly wounded by Free State forces in Dublin in November 1922. Imprisoned until July 1924, he is during the period of his incarceration elected as a TD for Dublin North in the 1923 Irish general election and is also a forty-one-day participant in the republican hunger strike later that year. Following release from prison, he returns home to live with his parents in Dublin. He decides not to focus his post-revolutionary energy on a political career. During 1926–28 and 1935–37 he unsuccessfully tries to complete his medical degree at UCD, but increasingly his post-1924 efforts are directed toward life as a Bohemian traveler and writer. He spends much of 1924–26 on a recuperative journey through France, Spain, and Italy; and 1928–35 traveling widely in North America. During 1929–32 he spends time in New Mexico and Mexico City. In Taos, New Mexico, he mixes with, and is influenced by, writers and artists as he works on what are to become classic autobiographies of the Irish revolution: On Another Man’s Wound (1936) and The Singing Flame (1978).
O’Malley meets Helen Hooker, daughter of Elon and Blanche Hooker, in Connecticut in 1933. They marry in London in 1935, each rejecting something of their prior lives in the process: he, his Irish republicanism, through marriage to somebody entirely unconnected with that world; she, her wealthy and respectable upbringing, through liaison with a Catholic, Irish, unemployed, bohemian ex-revolutionary. They settle first in Dublin then, from 1938 onward, primarily in County Mayo. Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, is his main base until 1954, when he moves to Dublin. Three children are born to the O’Malleys: Cahal (1936), Etáin (1940), and Cormac (1942). Sharing enthusiasm for the arts, he and Helen enjoy several years of intimacy. However, by the mid-1940s their relationship has frayed. In 1950, Helen kidnaps (the word is used by both parents and by all three children) the couple’s elder two children and takes them to the United States. From there she divorces O’Malley in 1952. Cormac remains with his father.
O’Malley’s post-American years are devoted to a number of projects. He writes extensively, including work for The Bell and Horizon. He is involved with the film director John Ford in the making of his Irish films, including The Quiet Man (1952). He gives radio broadcasts on Mexican painting for BBC Third Programme (1947), and on his IRA adventures for Radio Éireann (1953). In the latter year he suffers a heart attack, and his remaining years are scarred by ill health. He dies of heart failure on March 25, 1957, in Howth, County Dublin, at the house of his sister Kathleen. Two days later he is given a state funeral with full military honours. He is buried in the Malley family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
O’Malley exemplifies some important themes in modern Irish political and intellectual history. His powerful memoirs form part of a tradition of writing absorbedly about Ireland, while under idiosyncratic emigrant influences which lend the writing much of its distinctiveness. His aggressive republicanism exemplifies a persistent but ultimately unrealisable tradition of uncompromising IRA politics. His unflinching single-mindedness is the condition for much courageous and striking activity, but also lay behind his infliction and his suffering of much pain. Literary, intellectual, and defiantly dissident, he is the classic bohemian revolutionary. His historical significance lies in his having been both a leading Irish revolutionary and the author of compelling autobiographical accounts of those years. His memoirs are distinguished from their rivals on the shelf by subtlety, self-consciousness, and literary ambition. In particular, his preparedness to identify motives for Irish revolutionary action, beyond the terms of ostensible republican purpose, renders his writing of great value to historians. Similarly, the large body of archival material left in his name (especially, perhaps, the papers held in UCD archives, and those in the private possession of his children) leaves scholars in his debt. The most striking and evocative visual images of O’Malley are, arguably, the set of photographic portraits taken in 1929 by Edward Weston and held at the University of Arizona‘s Center for Creative Photography (CCP). These capture with precision his reflective concentration, his piercing earnestness, and his troubled intensity.
(From: “O’Malley, Ernest Bernard (‘Ernie’)” by Richard English, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Photograph of Ernie O’Malley taken by Helen Hooker, New York City, 1934)
The Custom House in Dublin is occupied and then burned in an operation by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on May 25, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. At the time, the Custom House is the headquarters of the Local Government Board for Ireland, an agency of the British administration in Ireland, against which the IRA is fighting in the name of the self-proclaimed Irish Republic. The operation, involving over 100 IRA volunteers, is a propaganda coup for the republicans but a military disaster for the IRA in the Irish capital. A force of British Auxiliaries quickly arrives, and a gun battle erupts. Five IRA volunteers, John Doyle, Edward Dorins, Daniel Head, Captain Patrick and Lieutenant Stephen O’Reilly, are killed, along with three civilians. Approximately 80 volunteers are captured.
The operation is the largest action in Dublin by rebels since the Easter Rising of April 1916.
The Irish War of Independence is a guerrilla campaign by the IRA in support of the Irish Republic. The conflict enters its bloodiest phase in the first six months of 1921. In Dublin, a total of 309 people are killed in the conflict and several hundred more wounded.
Dublin is garrisoned by over 10,000 British troops and 1,600 police including 400 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Auxiliary Division. Most IRA actions in the city consist either of assassinations of selected police, military or administration figures by the Squad, or ambushes on British forces by one of the four Active Service Units (ASU) of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, together comprising about 100 men. These are usually rapid and fleeting attacks using grenades and handguns, followed by a quick getaway. There are strict orders given to IRA units to avoid prolonged engagements with the better-armed British forces.
However, this policy is reversed after a meeting of the Ministry of Dáil Éireann in May 1921 where the President of the Republic, Éamon de Valera, calls for a spectacular public show of force by the IRA, to reinforce the idea that it is an army representing an Irish government. For this reason, it is decided to attack and burn the Custom House, which, although an important government building, is not defended by the British military. Michael Collins is against the attack but is overruled.
Michael O’Kelly, Lieutenant E Company, 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade, recalls plans to “deliver a smashing blow to England.” Two large scale operations – to capture Beggars Bush Barracks, or to destroy the Customs House are initially considered. The Custom House is eventually chosen. IRA member Vincent Byrne says that the operation is “one of many under review.”
In the early afternoon of May 25, 1921, roughly 120 non-uniformed IRA Volunteers begin to gather around the Custom House in groups of two or three. Three quarter of those involved belonged to the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade under Tom Ennis. Only a minority of them are experienced guerrilla fighters and they are armed only with pistols and a limited amount of ammunition. At 1:00 p.m., they rush the Custom House and overpower the police guard. A lorry pulls up outside the building with tins of petrol and bales of cotton, which are then sprinkled throughout the building. The IRA Volunteers herd all the staff into the main hall. The caretaker of the building, Francis Davis, is shot dead when he tries to call the police.
However, at about 1:10 p.m., a watching policeman notifies British forces and 60 Auxiliaries in three lorries and an armored car quickly arrive on the scene. IRA Volunteers from the 1st, 3rd and 4th battalions are positioned outside the building to stop the enemy from approaching.
Four Auxiliaries are wounded in a gun battle with one of these IRA protection teams outside the building. Other Auxiliaries fire into the building with rifles and Lewis machine guns, exchanging fire with the IRA fighters inside. A number of IRA Volunteers and civilians are killed or wounded by the Auxiliaries. As fighting rages outside, IRA Volunteers inside the building are ordered to set it alight.
The ammunition of the IRA Volunteers quickly runs out and the firefight ends within 30 minutes. Some Volunteers are shot as they try to run away. Tom Ennis, in command of the operation, escapes but is hit twice in the leg. Many others are arrested along with civilians as they come out of the now burning Custom House with their hands up. The Fire Brigade, which had been delayed from responding by other IRA companies in the city, arrives too late to put out the fire.
British military forces composed of units from the Wiltshire Regiment arrive and take over the operation from the Auxiliaries at this point. A total of 111 people are arrested, of whom 70–80 are IRA volunteers.
The Custom House burns for five days and is all but completely destroyed by the fire. With it are destroyed many centuries of local government records. The Irish Bulletin, official gazette of the Irish Republic, reports:
“A detachment of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Army was ordered to carry out the destruction of the Custom House in accordance with a decision arrived at after due deliberation of the ministry of Dáil Éireann. We in common with the rest of the nation regret the destruction of historical buildings. But the lives of four million people are a more cherished charge than any architectural masterpiece. The Custom House was the seat of an alien tyranny.”
From the republican point of view, the operation is successful for its propaganda value, but it is a heavy blow in terms of the numbers lost, both killed and arrested. Following the operation, the Dublin Brigade and The Squad are amalgamated into the Dublin Guard. However, the operation does not totally impede the IRA’s campaign in Dublin. The Dublin Brigade carries out 107 attacks in the city in May and 93 in June, showing a decline but not a dramatic one.
The memoir of Harry Colley, Adjutant of the Dublin IRA, estimates the numbers in the five Dublin battalions at 1,400 in early 1921.
The armed conflict is brought to an end on July 11, 1921, and negotiations are opened which produces the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December of that year. The Custom House is re-built after the end of the war.
Irish local government records from the 1600s had been brought from rural parts of Ireland to the Custom House for safekeeping, and these are lost in the blaze. At the time, The New York Times subtitles their report on the fire as “Priceless Records Lost.” Some genealogists still lament the loss of these historical records.
(Pictured: The Custom House in flames, taken on May 25, 1921)
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