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Tag Archives: Comhairle na Poblachta


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Birth of Joe Clarke, Irish Republican Politician

Joseph Christopher Clarke (Irish: Seosamh Ó Clérigh), Irish republican politician, is born on December 22, 1882, in Rush, Dublin.

Clarke is the son of William Clarke, merchant seaman, and Margaret Clarke (née Austin). Educated locally, he leaves school at the age of eleven and begins work as a kitchen porter, later becoming a boot-shop assistant, a harness maker and a van driver. Influenced by a series of lectures at the Oliver Bond Club, Parnell Square, and by the writings of Arthur Griffith, he commits himself to the republican cause, joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1913 and subsequently the Irish Volunteers.

Clarke works for the Sinn Féin Bank and is active in the 1916 Easter Rising. On Easter Monday morning, on April 24, 1916, he is one of thirteen volunteers who hold the Mount Street Bridge for nine hours against the overwhelming forces of the Sherwood Foresters regiment of the British Army. When captured, he is shot in the head, but survives, and is instead imprisoned in Liverpool Prison, Wakefield Prison and then Frongoch internment camp.

On his return to Ireland, Clarke acts as the courier for the First Dáil and serves as an usher at the first meeting of the First Dáil. He is interned from January 1921. Released in 1923, he acts as caretaker of the Sinn Féin headquarters on Harcourt Street and founds the Irish Book Bureau. Although the Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin rejects participation in the Dáil, they continue to contest local elections, and Clarke sits on Dublin City Council.

Although jailed many times between 1922 and 1940, Clarke remains an active republican campaigner, supporting the Irish Republican Army (IRA) initiatives of the 1940s and 1950s, taking a prominent role at republican meetings, and publicising the conditions of republican prisoners.

Clarke is a founder member of Comhairle na Poblachta in 1929. In 1937, he works with Brian O’Higgins to establish the Wolfe Tone Weekly as a light-hearted party newspaper. In August 1939, he is interned at Arbour Hill Prison, then later at Cork County Jail.

Although Clarke had served under Éamon de Valera during the Easter Rising, the two become implacable opponents. He is ejected from an official commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the First Dáil for interrupting de Valera’s speech in order to raise the complaints of the Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC). He vows to outlive de Valera and succeeds in this endeavour by outliving him a year.

Clarke is elected as a Vice-President of Sinn Féin in 1966. In the split of 1970, he supports the provisional wing, remaining Vice-President. In 1973 he is deported from Britain upon his arrival at Heathrow Airport.

Despite crippling arthritis, Clarke continues his work, refusing an IRA pension as he considers himself still on active service. He dies on April 22, 1976, at St. James’s Hospital, Dublin, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery close to the republican plot.

Clarke marries Anne, daughter of Thomas Hughes, sawyer, on July 25, 1909. They have two sons and one daughter. After her death, he marries Elizabeth Delaney on May 30, 1949.

The Dublin South West Inner City cumann of Sinn Féin is named for Clarke.

(Pictured: Joe Clarke selling Easter Lilies on Dublin’s O’Connell Street in 1966)


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Death of Sinn Féin Leader Margaret Buckley

Margaret Buckley, Irish republican and leader of Sinn Féin from 1937 to 1950, dies on July 24, 1962.

Originally from Cork, Buckley joins Inghinidhe na hÉireann, which was founded in 1900, taking an active role in the women’s movement. She is involved in anti-British royal visit protests in 1903 and 1907 and is among the group that founds An Dún in Cork in 1910. In 1906, she marries Patrick Buckley, described as “a typical rugby-playing British civil servant.” After his death she moves into a house in Marguerite Road, Glasnevin, Dublin. Later, she returns to Cork to care for her elderly father.

Arrested in the aftermath of 1916 Easter Rising, she is released in the amnesty of June 1917 and plays a prominent role in the reorganisation of Sinn Féin. She is involved in the Irish War of Independence in Cork.

After the death of her father, Buckley returns to Dublin. In 1920, she becomes a Dáil Court judge in the North city circuit, appointed by Austin Stack, the Minister for Home Affairs of the Irish Republic. She opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and is interned in Mountjoy Gaol and Kilmainham Gaol, where she goes on a hunger strike. She is released in October 1923. During her imprisonment, she is elected Officer Commanding (OC) of the republican prisoners in Mountjoy, Quartermaster (QM) in the North Dublin Union and OC of B-Wing in Kilmainham. She is an active member of the Women Prisoners’ Defence League, founded by Maud Gonne and Charlotte Despard in 1922.

In 1929, she serves as a member of Comhairle na Poblachta which unsuccessfully attempts to resolve the differences between Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). She is also an organiser for the Irish Women Workers’ Union.

At the October 1934 Sinn Féin ardfheis, Buckley is elected one of the party’s vice-presidents. Three years later, in 1937, she succeeds Cathal Ó Murchadha, who is a former Teachta Dála (TD) of the second Dáil Éireann, as President of Sinn Féin at an ardfheis attended by only forty delegates.

When she assumes the leadership of Sinn Féin, the party is not supported by the IRA, which had severed its links with the party in the 1920s. When she leaves the office in 1950, relations with the IRA have been resolved. As President she begins the lawsuit Buckley v. Attorney-General, the Sinn Féin Funds case, in which the party seeks unsuccessfully to be recognised as owners of money raised by Sinn Féin before 1922 and held in trust in the High Court since 1924.

In 1938, her book, The Jangle of the Keys, about the experiences of Irish Republican women prisoners interned by the Irish Free State forces is published. In 1956, her Short History of Sinn Féin is published.

Buckley serves as honorary vice-president of Sinn Féin from 1950 until her death in 1962. She is the only member of the Ard Chomhairle of the party not to be arrested during a police raid in July 1957.

Margaret Buckley dies on July 24, 1962, and is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery in Cork.