seamus dubhghaill

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Death of Teresa Brayton, Irish Republican & Poet

Teresa Brayton, an Irish republican and poet who uses the pen name T. B. Kilbrook, dies in Kilbrook, a small village near Kilcock, County Kildare, on August 19, 1943.

Brayton is born Teresa Coca Boulanger in Kilbrook, the youngest daughter and fifth child of Hugh Boylan and Elizabeth Boylan (née Downes). Her family are long-time nationalists, with her great grandfather previously leading a battalion of pikesmen at the Battle of Prosperous.

Brayton later becomes a notable member of Irish national parties, the United Irish League and Cumann na mBan. She is described as “a patriot, but never in the vulgar sense a politician” in The Irish Times. She is closely associated with leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, and writes poems in honour of Irish patriots including Charles Stewart Parnell, Roger Casement and Patrick Pearse.

Brayton is educated from the age of 5 in Newtown National School. She writes her first poem at the age of twelve, and soon after wins her first literary award. Later on, she trains to be a teacher, and then becomes an assistant teacher to her older sister Elizabeth in the same school she received her education.

Brayton’s father is a tenant farmer, and from a young age she witnesses the effects of the land wars in Ireland. She is a supporter of Parnell, the Irish National Land League and the Irish Home Rule movement. Her work is largely influenced by her family history and Irish nationalism.

In September 1895, Brayton emigrates to the United States at the age of 27. She first lives in Boston, Chicago, and later moves to New York City. She meets Richard H. Brayton, a French-Canadian who works as an executive in the Municipal Revenue Department, who she then marries. She looks after their home and focuses on her career as a freelance journalist. She lives in the United States for 40 years and becomes well known in Irish American circles as a prominent figure in the Celtic Fellowship. It was in the United States that her reputation is established.

In the 1880s, Brayton begins her career as a poet, writing poetry for both national and provincial Irish newspapers, including Young Ireland and the King’s County Chronicle. She uses the pseudonym “T. B. Kilbrook” while contributing to these papers.

Brayton continues writing under the pseudonym until moving to the United States, where she becomes an acclaimed writer and continues to contribute to papers including the Boston newspaper The Pilot, New York Monitor and Rosary Magazine. Her target audience is the Irish immigrant population of the United States. After establishing herself she releases her poetry in collections including Songs of Dawn (1913) and The Flame of Ireland (1926).

Brayton makes return trips to Ireland regularly and develops a relationship with nationalist peers, and the leaders of the Easter Rising. Upon returning to the United States, she becomes an activist for the Irish Republic and participates in organising the distribution of information to the Irish population through pamphlets and public speaking. Her contribution is acknowledged by Constance Markievicz. Her patriotism to Ireland admit her to the Celtic Fellowship in America, where she shares her poetry at events.

Brayton’s best-known poem is “The Old Bog Road,” which is later set to music by Madeline King O’Farrelly. It has since been recorded and released by many Irish musicians including Finbar Furey, Daniel O’Donnell and Eileen Donaghy, among many others. Many more of her best-known ballads include, The Cuckoo’s Call, By the Old Fireside and Takin’ Tea in Reilly’s.

Brayton makes her permanent return to Ireland at the age of 64 following the death of her husband in 1932 and continues her career as a journalist writing for Irish newspapers and publishes religious poetry in the volume Christmas Verses in 1934. A short story called The New Lodger written by Brayton is published by the Catholic Trust Society in 1933. She dedicates much of her work to the exiled Irish living in the United States, incorporating themes of nostalgia, the familiarity of home and religion throughout her poetry.

Initially upon moving back to Ireland, she lives for a few years with her sister in Bray, County Wicklow. She then moves to Waterloo Avenue, North Strand, County Dublin. Here, she witnesses the bombing of the North Strand on May 31, 1941 during World War II. Shortly after the bombing, she eventually settles back in Kilbrook, where she was born, and lives there for the rest of her life. She spends a brief period of time in the Edenderry Hospital before her death. During her stay there she becomes a good friend with Padraig O’Kennedy, the “Leinster Leader,” who is able to reveal to her something that is linked to a family member of his. A copy of her The Old Bog Road which had been set to music and autographed by her while she was living in the United States. She had it sent to O’Kennedy’s eldest son and on it she wrote the words: “To the boy who sings the Old Bog Road so sweetly.”

Two years after her return to Kilbrook, on August 19, 1943, Brayton dies in the same room where her mother had given birth to her over 75 years previously. She is buried at the Cloncurry cemetery in County Kildare. Her funeral is attended by many, including the then Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera.

From the vivid imagery she speaks of in her poetry, Brayton, both a poet and a novelist, is described by some as “the poet of the homes of Ireland.” Such scenes include the vivid imagery of the fireside chats, the sound of her latch lifting as neighbours in to visit at night from her poem “The Old Boreen” and about her home cooking and work from “When the Leaves Begin to Fall.” Such images can be compared to most Irish households and can depict a vivid picture to those reading her poetry.

Brayton’s poetry leaves a lasting sense of Irish beauty and community. This can be seen in such poems as “A Christmas Blessing” where she speaks of “taking and giving in friendship” during Christmas. Since her passing she has continued to keep an audience from overseas from Boston and New York primarily, this as a result of the reminder her poems give to Irish exiles of Irish traditions and music which was close to them. While her poems are more often serious, some portray an almost comical undertone tone. In an article in The Irish Times, her poetry is also said to have a racy feel to them.


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Birth of Sidney Czira, Journalist, Broadcaster, Writer & Revolutionary

Sidney Sarah Madge Czira (née Gifford), journalist, broadcaster, writer and revolutionary, known by her pen name John Brennan, is born in Rathmines, Dublin, on August 3, 1889. She is an active member of the revolutionary group Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland) and writes articles for its newspaper, Bean na h-Éireann, and for Arthur Griffith‘s newspaper Sinn Féin.

Gifford is the youngest of twelve children of Frederick and Isabella Gifford. Isabella Gifford (née Burton), is a niece of the artist Frederic William Burton, and is raised with her siblings in his household after the death of her father, Robert Nathaniel Burton, a rector, during the Great Famine.

Gifford’s parents—her father is Catholic and her mother Anglican—are married in St. George’s Church, a Church of Ireland church on the north side of Dublin, on April 27, 1872. She grows up in Rathmines and is raised as a Protestant, as are her siblings.

Like her sisters, the socialist Nellie Gifford, Grace Gifford, who marries Joseph Plunkett, and Muriel Gifford, who marries Thomas MacDonagh, she becomes interested and involved in the suffrage movement and the burgeoning Irish revolution.

Gifford is educated in Alexandra College in Earlsfort Terrace. After leaving school she studies music at the Leinster House School of Music. It is her music teacher, in her teens, who first gives her her first Irish national newspaper, The Leader. She begins reading this secretly and then starts reading Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, Sinn Féin.

Gifford is a member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a women’s political organisation active from the 1900s. It is founded by Maud Gonne and a group of working-class and middle-class women to promote Irish culture and help to alleviate the shocking poverty of Dublin and other cities at a time when Dublin’s slums are unfavourably compared with Calcutta‘s. Gifford, who is already writing under the name “John Brennan” for Sinn Féin, is asked to write for its newspaper Bean na h-Éireann. Her articles vary from those highlighting poor treatment of women in the workplace to fashion and gardening columns, some written under the pseudonym Sorcha Ní hAnlúan.

She also works, along with her sisters, in Maud Gonne’s and Constance Markievicz‘s dinner system in St. Audoen’s Church, providing good solid dinners for children in three Dublin schools – poor Dublin schoolchildren often arrive at school without breakfast, go without a meal for the day, and if their father has been given his dinner when they arrive home, might not eat or might only have a crust of bread that night.

In 1911, Gifford is elected (as John Brennan) to the executive of the political group Sinn Féin.

Gifford is a member of Cumann na mBan (The Irish Women’s Council) from its foundation in Dublin on April 2, 1914. Its members learn first aid, drilling and signalling and rifle shooting, and serve as an unofficial messenger and backup service for the Irish Volunteers. During the fight for Irish Independence the women carry messages, store and deliver guns and run safe houses where men on the run can eat, sleep and pick up supplies.

In 1914, Gifford moves to the United States to work as a journalist. Through her connection with Padraic Colum and Mary Colum, whom she had met through her brother-in-law Thomas MacDonagh, she meets influential Irish Americans such as Thomas Addis Emmet and Irish exiles like John Devoy, and marries a Hungarian lawyer, Arpad Czira, a former prisoner of war who is said to have escaped and fled to America. Their son, Finian, is born in 1922.

Czira writes both for traditional American newspapers and for Devoy’s newspaper, The Gaelic American. She and her sister Nellie found the American branch of Cumann na mBan, and she acts as its secretary. Both sisters tour and speak about the Easter Rising and those involved. She is an active campaigner for Irish independence and against the United States joining the war against Germany, seen as a war for profit and expansion of the British Empire, and so to the disadvantage of the work for Irish independence. She helps Nora Connolly O’Brien to contact German diplomats in the United States.

In 1922, Czira returns to Ireland with her son. As a member of the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League, she is an activist against the ill-treatment of Republican prisoners during the Irish Civil War. She continues to work as a journalist, though she is stymied in her work, as are the women of her family and many of those who had taken the anti-Free State side. In the 1950s her memoirs are published in The Irish Times, and she moves into work as a broadcaster and produces a series of historical programmes.

Czira dies in Dublin on September 15, 1974, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.


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Death of Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Revolutionary & Labour Activist

Madeleine ffrench-Mullen, Irish revolutionary and labour activist who takes part in the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, dies in Dublin on May 26, 1944.

Ffrench-Mullen is born on December 30, 1880, in Malta, where her father, St. Lawrence ffrench-Mullen, a Royal Navy surgeon, is stationed. She has two brothers, St. Lawrence Patrick Joseph (1890–1891) and Douglas (1893–1943).

Ffrench-Mullen’s interest in politics starts young. Her father is a committed Parnellite and their Dundrum home is a campaign headquarters. She is a radical feminist and republican during her life. Like many others of the time, she regards it as a woman’s right to vote. She joins the suffrage movement, and meets women with a similar worldview and values. The women’s suffrage movement is included in the Movements of Extremists reports of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Ffrench-Mullen goes on to join Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a radical nationalist women’s group founded by Maud Gonne in 1900. The organisation develops into Cumann na mBan in 1913. Suffragist values are central to Cumann na mBan’s goal of standing side-by-side with men in the fight for the Irish Republic. Some members see this as women regaining the rights that had belonged to them in pre-invasion Gaelic civilisation. She is on the socialist wing of the moment, holding to the ideals of universal social equality of the syndicalist James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army (ICA).

During the 1916 Easter Rising, ffrench-Mullen serves as a lieutenant in the Irish Citizen Army. She sees action with the St. Stephen’s Green and Royal College of Surgeons garrison. In St. Stephen’s Green she is in command of the 15 Citizen Army women who set up a medical station and field kitchen. While occupying St. Stephen’s Green, she and her comrades come under sustained heavy fire from the Shelbourne Hotel and buildings on the north side of the Green. After the surrender of the College of Surgeons garrison, ffrench-Mullen is one of the 77 women who had fought in the Rising who are imprisoned, among them her life partner Kathleen Lynn. While in captivity ffrench Mullen is moved three times, spending time in Richmond Barracks, Kilmainham Gaol and Mountjoy Prison. She is released on June 5, 1916.

Ffrench-Mullen meets Kathleen Lynn through Inghinidhe na h-Éireann. In 1915, she moves into Lynn’s home in Belgrave Road, Rathmines, where they live together for thirty years, until ffrench-Mullen’s death in 1944.

Ffrench-Mullen records in her prison diary in 1916 that she can face prison without fear once Lynn (whom she refers to as “the Doctor”) and she are together. Katherine Lynch of the Women’s Studies Centre at University College Dublin (UCD) describes them as partners, calling them part of a network of lesbians living in Dublin—which includes Helena Molony, Louie Bennett and Elizabeth O’Farrell—who meet through the suffrage movement and later become involved with the national and trade union movement. These women are featured, along with Eva Gore-Booth and others, in a 2023 TG4 documentary about “the radical queer women at the very heart of the Irish Revolution”: Croíthe Radacacha (Radical Hearts).

In 1919, Madeleine ffrench-Mullen and Kathleen Lynn establish Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital, also known as Teach Ultan, which is a female-run hospital for infants at 37 Charlemont Street, Dublin. The hospital focuses on children’s health and wellbeing, an area that is perceived at the time as women’s concern. In the aftermath of World War I many health problems have arisen including a rise in venereal diseases such as syphilis, carried from soldiers returning home from war. Many of Ireland’s infants of the time suffer from congenital syphilis (inherited disease from mother at birth), and this is a driving factor in the opening of St Ultan’s hospital. Tuberculosis is endemic in Ireland during its time as a British colony. Against steadfast opposition by the State and the Catholic Church, Lynn and ffrench-Mullen establish a vaccination project, vaccinating thousands of impoverished children who would have died of tuberculosis without their vaccines. Their success leads to the foundation of Ireland’s BCG vaccine programme, which has vaccinated all babies since the 1950s.

Ffrench-Mullen dies at the age of 63 in a Dublin nursing home on May 26, 1944. She is interred with her parents as well as her younger brothers (whom she outlives) in the ffrench-Mullen family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery. Her funeral takes place on the same day as the 1944 Irish general election.


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Death of Leslie Mary de Barra, Irish Nationalist & Republican

Leslie Mary de Barra (née Price), Irish nationalist and republican active during the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, dies in Cork, County Cork, on April 9, 1984. She becomes Director of Cumann na mBan and goes on to be chairman and President of the Irish Red Cross.

She is born Leslie Mary Price in Dublin on January 9, 1893, to Michael and Mary Price. Her father is a blacksmith, and she is one of six children. She wants to be a teacher and by 1911 has become a Monitress, a common way for girls to get into the teaching profession. Two of her brothers are involved in the Irish Volunteers and she is a member of Cumann na mBan. In advance of the Easter Rising, with the confusion over orders and lack of information, she states that she “did not question anything” as, with all that was happening, there are often odd events in her house. But they all wait for the mobilisation orders for the Rising.

De Barra’s role during the republican rebellion in Ireland, Easter 1916, is to act as a courier carrying messages and ammunition between the main headquarters in the General Post Office (GPO) and other posts. She does her role well during the Rising and gains the respect of many Irish Republicans. On the orders of Seán Mac Diarmada, one of the principal leaders of the rising, she and fellow Cumann na mBan member Bríd Dixon are promoted in the field and treated as officers. She later admits that the job was stressful. She is stationed both in the GPO and in the Hibernian Bank. It is while she is in the bank that she comes closest to death, standing beside Captain Thomas Weafer while he is shot. Another soldier who goes to his aid is also shot. She barely has time to grab Captain Weafer before he dies. She is the person sent to fetch a priest for the dying and wounded soldiers on the Thursday. By Friday evening, she is in the GPO and is with the group evacuated with Louise Gavan Duffy. Once they reach the hospital on Jervis Street, she parts company from Duffy and heads to Jacob’s factory to see how the rebels are getting on there. She is also arrested and held in Broadstone Station but quickly released.

By 1918, de Barra represents West Cork in the Cumann na mBan convention and becomes a member of the executive committee. She leaves her teaching career to focus fully on the organisation required by the republican movement in 1918. She travels the country by train and by bicycle to get women to join the local branches of the Cumann and take part in the activities needed by the movement. She is tasked by the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) General Headquarters to set up specific lines of communication between Dublin and the Provincial commands. Within the year the organisation has grown from 17 to over 600 branches. She is Director of the organisation during the period up to the end of the war.

De Barra marries Tom Barry on August 22, 1921, in Cork during the Truce period in the lead up to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. At the wedding are men who later end up on opposite sides. Both Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins are guests. Her husband is staunchly Anti-Treaty even though he has been friends with Collins. Although her husband is a staunch republican and a major figure in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, while she is serving in the GPO in Dublin during the rising, he is in Mesopotamia serving in the British Army in World War I.

In later years de Barra is central to the Irish Red Cross. Initially she gets involved by organising the care of children orphaned by World War II. She represents the Irish Red Cross at conferences in Toronto, Oslo, Monaco, New Delhi, Geneva, Vienna, The Hague, Athens, Istanbul and Prague. She and her husband handle refugees from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Through the Red Cross she is able to ascertain the status of Irish held by the Spanish during the Spanish Civil War, as officially Ireland remains neutral and cannot get involved. She is Chairman of the Irish Red Cross from 1950 to 1973.

De Barra is instrumental in the setting up of the Voluntary Health Insurance organisation in the late 1950s. In 1962, with the Red Cross she launches the “Freedom from hunger” campaign in Ireland which later becomes the organisation Gorta. She serves as chairman of Gorta also.

In 1956, a memorial to 1916 is unveiled in Limerick. It is designed by Albert Power and the commemoration of the Rising is held in May 1956 and the monument is unveiled by de Barra. In 1963 she is awarded an honorary degree from University College Dublin (UCD) along with Éamon de Valera and others.

In 1971, de Barra is part of a series to look back on the events leading to Irish Independence and her story is broadcast by Raidió Teilifís Eireann. In 1979 she wins the Henry Dunant Medal which is the highest award of the Red Cross Movement.

De Barra and her husband live on St. Patrick’s Street in Cork from the 1940s until his death in 1980. She dies in Cork on April 9, 1984, and is buried with her husband in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery. She is remembered today in the Leslie Bean de Barra Trophy awarded for the Cork Area Carer of the Year.


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Birth of Irish Artist Estella Solomons

Estella Frances Solomons, one of the leading Irish artists of her generation, is born into a prominent Jewish family in Dublin on April 2, 1882. She is noted for her portraits of contemporaries in the republican movement and her studio is a safe house during the Irish War of Independence.

Solomons is born to Maurice Solomons and poet Rosa Jane Jacobs. Her father is an optician whose practice in 19 Nassau Street, Dublin, is mentioned in Ulysses. Her father is also the Vice-Consul of Austria-Hungary. The Solomons family, who came to Dublin from England in 1824, are one of the oldest continuous lines of Jews in Ireland.

Solomons grandmother, Rosa Jacobs Solomons, who is born in Kingston upon Hull in England, is the author of a book called Facts and Fancies (Dublin 1883). Her brother, Bethel Solomons, a renowned physician, a master of the Rotunda Hospital and Irish international rugby player, is mentioned in Finnegans Wake. Her brother Edwin is a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. Her younger sister Sophie is a trained opera singer. A portrait of Sophie, by her cousin the printmaker Louise Jacobs, survives in the Estella Solomons archives in the Library of Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

In 1898, at the age of 16, Solomons enters the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she wins a significant prize. Her classmates include future Irish artists including Mary Swanzy, Eva Hamilton and William J. Leech. She also attends the Chelsea School of Art from 1903 to 1906. A visit to the tercentenary exhibition of the work of Rembrandt in Amsterdam in 1903 impacts her creative practice and possibly influences her adoption of printmaking as her principal vehicle of expression. She studies under two of Ireland’s leading artists, Walter Osborne, who is another major influence, and William Orpen. With her friends Cissie Beckett (aunt of Samuel Beckett) and Beatrice Elvery, she goes to study in Paris at Académie Colarossi. On her return she exhibits in Leinster Hall, Molesworth Street, with contemporaries such as Beatrice Elvery, Eva Hamilton and Grace Gifford. Her work is also included in joint exhibitions with other artists at Mills Hall and the Arlington Gallery, London. She also exhibits at her Great Brunswick Street studio in December 1926.

Solomons illustrates Padraic Colum‘s The Road Round Ireland (1926) and DL Kelleher’s The Glamour of Dublin in 1928. Originally published after the devastation of the 1916 Easter Rising, the later edition features eight views of familiar locations in the city centre including Merchant’s Arch and King’s Inns. Her etching “A Georgian Doorway” is included in Katherine MacCormack’s Leabhar Ultuin in 1920. This publication features illustrations by several prominent Irish artists and is sold in aid of the new Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital in Charlemont Street, Dublin, that had been founded by two prominent members of Cumann na mBan, Dr. Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen.

Solomons paints landscapes and portraits, including of artist Jack Yeats, politician Arthur Griffith, poet Austin Clarke, and writers James Stephens and George Russell (Æ).

Solomons is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in July 1925, but it is not until 1966 that she is elected an honorary member. Her work is included in the Academy’s annual members’ exhibition every year for sixty years.

Solomons is married to poet and publisher Seumas O’Sullivan, whose birth name is James Sullivan Starkey. Her parents oppose the relationship as O’Sullivan is not of the Jewish faith. They marry in 1925, when she is 43 and he 46, after her parents have died. She collaborates with her husband on The Dublin Magazine (1923–58), the renowned literary and art journal, of which O’Sullivan is editor for 35 years. She provides vital financial support to the magazine, particularly in sourcing advertising, which is difficult in the tough economic climate of the new Free State. She is helped in this endeavour by poet and writer, Kathleen Goodfellow, a lifelong friend. When Solomons and O’Sullivan are looking to move from their house in Rathfarnham because of a damp problem, Goodfellow offers them the house beside her own on Morehampton Road for a nominal rent. Two of Solomons’ portraits of Goodfellow are in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo.

Solomons joins the Ranelagh branch of Cumann na mBan at the same time as Goodfellow. They are taught first aid, drilling and signaling by Phyllis Ryan. She is active before and during the Irish War of Independence. She conceals ammunition in the family vegetable garden before delivering it to a Sinn Féin agent. Her studio at Great Brunswick Street is used as a safe house by republican volunteers. During this time, she paints the portraits of a number of revolutionaries, some of which she has to later destroy to avoid incriminating them. Her work includes a portrait of Frank Aiken when we was chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Solomons takes up a teaching position at Bolton Street College, Dublin. In 1939, she organises an exhibition in Dublin to help refugee artists from Europe.

Solomons dies on November 2, 1968, and is buried in Woodtown Cemetery, Rathfarnham. Her friend Kathleen Goodfellow gifts the Morehampton Road Wildlife Sanctuary, where Solomons liked to paint, to An Taisce. Two plaques have subsequently been erected there, one in memory of Solomons and one for Goodfellow.

Some of Solomons works are held in the Niland Collection, at The Model gallery in Sligo and in the National Gallery of Ireland. Her archives, which include artwork and photographs (and prints by Louise Jacobs), and the archives of The Dublin Magazine are in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.


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Birth of Peadar O’Donnell, Irish Republican Politician & Writer

Peadar O’Donnell, Irish republican, socialist activist, politician, writer and one of the foremost radicals of 20th-century Ireland, is born on February 22, 1893, in Meenmore, near Dungloe, County Donegal.

O’Donnell is the youngest among six sons and three daughters of Biddy and James O’Donnell. He is greatly influenced by his upbringing in the Rosses, in northwest Donegal, one of the poorest and most remote parts of Ireland. His father, a popular local fiddler, earns a living through his smallholding, seasonal labouring in Scotland, and winter work in a local corn mill. His mother, who comes from a radical labour and nationalist political background, works in a local cooperative store. He attends Rampart national school and Roshine national school, near Burtonport, where he is a monitor for four years. In 1911 he wins a scholarship to attend St. Patrick’s College in Drumcondra, Dublin, and returns in 1913 to the Rosses, where he spends two years teaching on the islands of Inishfree. In 1915 he is appointed head of Derryhenny national school, near Dungloe, and the following year becomes principal of a national school on the island of Arranmore, where he begins to write.

O’Donnell had long been concerned by the poor conditions of the local ‘tatie-hokers’ (potato pickers) who migrate annually to Scotland. In the summer of 1918, he travels there to help organise the Scottish Farm Servants’ Union. While there he is influenced by left-wing radicals such as Willie Gallacher, later a communist Member of Parliament (MP), and Emanuel ‘Manny’ Shinwell, later Baron Shinwell. In September 1918, against a background of rising labour militancy, he leaves teaching to become a full-time organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) in the west Ulster area. The following year he organises one of Ireland’s first “soviets” when the attendants and nurses of the Monaghan District Lunatic Asylum occupy the grounds and appoint O’Donnell as governor until their demands are met.

In early 1919 O’Donnell joins the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Monaghan, resigning from the ITGWU for full-time IRA service in late 1920. He leads the 2nd Battalion, Donegal IRA, from the summer of 1920. In December 1920 he goes “on the run” and leads a flying column in west Donegal until May 1921, when he is wounded. Regarded as insubordinate and militarily inexperienced, he is unpopular among the other senior officers of the 1st Northern Division. He, in turn, is disappointed by the lack of social radicalism among the nationalist leadership. He opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty, is placed in command of the minority anti-treaty 1st Northern Division and is a member of the IRA executive that occupies the Four Courts in Dublin in defiance of the provisional government.

Arrested in June 1922, O’Donnell shares a prison cell with Liam Mellows and influences his radical “Notes from Mountjoy,” an important document for subsequent left-wing republicans. He spends the next two years in various prisons and internment camps. His execution is widely expected to follow those of December 8, 1922. In August 1923, he is elected as a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for Donegal in the general election called after the end of the Irish Civil War. He goes on hunger strike for forty-one days in late 1923 and succeeds in escaping from the Curragh in March 1924. In June 1924, while on the run, he marries Lile O’Donel, a wealthy Cumann na mBan activist who had smuggled communications for republican prisoners. O’Donel, a radical and member of the Communist Party, is the daughter of Ignatius O’Donel, a prominent landowner from Mayo. They have no children but raise their nephew, Peadar Joe, as their own son after the death in New York of O’Donnell’s brother Joe.

O’Donnell begins writing seriously while in jail and remains a prolific writer, journalist, and editor until the 1960s. His first novel, Storm, set in the Irish War of Independence, is published in 1925. One of his most highly regarded books, Islanders, is published in 1928. Adrigoole, like Islanders a story of poverty and starvation in rural Ireland, is published the following year. The Knife (1930) and On the Edge of the Stream (1934) soon follow. The most significant of his later novels is probably The Big Windows (1954). Foremost among his qualities as a writer is his empathy for the people, life, and landscape of rural Ireland. But his novels have been criticised for their slow pace, excessive detail, and didactic nature. He claims his writing is incidental to his political activism. His trilogy of autobiographical non-fiction, The Gates flew Open (1932), Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1936), and There Will Be Another Day (1963), which respectively concern the Irish Civil War, his activism during the Spanish Civil War, and his role in the land annuities agitation, remain highly regarded. His other important literary achievement is with The Bell, an innovative literary and political magazine which plays a useful dissenting role in an insular and conservative period. He founds The Bell with the writer Seán Ó Faoláin in 1940 and edits it from 1946 until it ceases publication in 1954.

O’Donnell exercises an influential role in the interwar IRA, particularly through his editorship of An Phoblacht (1926–29), which he attempts to divert from militarism to socialist agitation. His ultimate aim is for a thirty-two-county socialist republic. His most successful campaign is organising small farmers against the payment of land annuities to the government in the late 1920s and early 1930s. This campaign is later adopted by Fianna Fáil and contributes to their electoral success in 1932. He is less successful in radicalising the IRA. After the failure of Saor Éire, a left-wing IRA front which provokes clerical and popular hostility against the IRA, increasing tensions between the IRA’s left-wing and the leadership lead O’Donnell, along with Frank Ryan and George Gilmore, to split from the IRA to establish the short-lived Republican Congress in 1934.

Although O’Donnell claims he was never a Communist Party member, he plays a central role in forging links between republicans and the revolutionary left both in Ireland and internationally and invariably supports the communist party line at critical junctures. After the failure of Republican Congress, he takes up the cause of the Spanish republic. His championing of unpopular causes such as communism and Spain entail a good deal of frustration. He is physically attacked at political meetings and in 1932, despite having never visited the Soviet Union, loses a high-profile libel action against the Dominican Irish Rosary, which claim he had studied in Moscow‘s Lenin College. He is banned from entering the United States for several decades, although he maintains: “My relations with all the great powers continue to be friendly.”

O’Donnell continues to support radical campaigns until his death. He is an outspoken advocate of Irish emigrants. He is prominent in the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and serves as its president in the early 1960s. He is a leading protester against the Vietnam War and a supporter of African anti-colonial movements such as that against apartheid. In later years he is involved in the “Save the west” campaign, highlighting the problems of the west of Ireland.

After several months of ill-health following a heart attack, O’Donnell dies in Dublin, aged 93, on May 13, 1986. He leaves instructions that there are to be “no priests, no politicians and no pomp” at his funeral, and those wishes are granted. He is cremated in Glasnevin Cemetery and his ashes are buried at his wife’s home in Swinford, County Mayo. Although he once remarked that every cause he fought for was a failure, he is now regarded as one of the most influential socialist republican theorists and an important voice of dissent in twentieth-century Ireland.

(From: “O’Donnell, Peadar” by Fearghal McGarry, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


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Birth of Máire Ní Chinnéide, Language Activist & Playwright

Máire Ní Chinnéide (English: Mary or Molly O’Kennedy) Irish language activist, playwright, first president of the Camogie Association and first female president of Oireachtas na Gaeilge, is born in Rathmines, an affluent inner suburb on the Southside of Dublin, on January 17, 1879.

Ní Chinnéide attends Muckross Park College and the Royal University of Ireland (later the National University of Ireland) where she is a classmate of Agnes O’Farrelly, Helena Concannon, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. She learns the Irish language on holiday in Ballyvourney, County Cork, and earns the first scholarship in Irish language from the Royal University of Ireland, worth £100 a year, which is spent on visits to the Irish college in Ballingeary.

She studies in the school of Old Irish established by Professor Osborn Bergin and is strongly influenced by the Irish Australian professor O’Daly. She later teaches Latin through Irish at Ballingeary and becomes proficient in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

She spends the last £100 of her scholarship on a dowry for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the Irish civil service, with whom she lives originally in Glasnevin and then in Dalkey.

She is a founder member of the radical Craobh an Chéitinnigh, the Keating branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, composed mainly of Dublin-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.

In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women’s hurling teams, the rules of camogie (then called camoguidheacht), first appears in Banba, a journal produced by Craobh an Chéitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Conradh na Gaeilge Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men’s hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Ní Chinnéide and Cáit Ní Dhonnchadha, like Ní Chinnéide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist, are credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ní Dhonnchadha’s scholarly brother Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who drew up its rules. She is on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan, County Meath, in July 1904, becomes an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905, is elected president of the infant Camogie Association.

Ní Chinnéide later serves as Vice-President of Craobh an Chéitinnigh, to Cathal Brugha. She is active in Cumann na mBan during the Irish War of Independence and takes the pro-treaty side during the Irish Civil War and attempts to set up a woman’s organisation “in support of the Free State” alongside Jennie Wyse Power.

She first visits the Blasket Islands in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who dies tragically young. In the summer of 1934, she puts the idea into Peig Sayers‘s head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ní Chinnéide “she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically.” Peig answers that she has “nothing to write.” She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it has been forgotten.

Ní Chinnéide suggests Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File (“The Poet”), but Peig “only shook her head doubtfully.” At Christmas, a packet arrives from the Blaskets with a manuscript, she transcribes it word for word and the following summer brings it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig. She then edits the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig becomes well known as a prescribed text on the Leaving Certificate curriculum in Irish.

Ní Chinnéide has an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage, Casadh an tSugáin by Douglas Hyde in 1901. She is later author of children’s plays staged by An Comhar Drámuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the Peacock Theatre, of which Gleann na Sidheóg and An Dúthchas (1908) are published. She is a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1923). She is president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.

She soon becomes interested in writing children’s plays, including Gleann na Sidheóg (Fairy Glen, 1905) and Sidheoga na mBláth (Flower Fairies, 1909. Although there is little information available on the staging of her first play, by the time her second children’s play, Sidheóga na mBláth, is published in An Claidheamh Soluis in December 1907, “Éire Óg” (“Young Ireland”) branches of Conradh na Gaeilge have been established in conjunction with adults’ branches. Patrick Pearse in particular voices the expectation that this play will be staged by many “Éire Óg” branches “before the New Year is very old,” thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play’s publication, it is staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ní Chinnéide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.

Ní Chinnéide dies on April 25, 1967, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

In 2007 the camogie trophy (Máire Ní Chinnéide Cup) for the annual inter-county All-Ireland Junior Camogie Championship is named in her honour.

(Pictured: Máire Ní Chinéide at her graduation, photograph from Banba, 1903)


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Death of Máirín Cregan, Playwright & Novelist

Máirín Cregan, Irish nationalist who is involved in the 1916 Easter Rising and Irish War of Independence, dies in Dublin on November 9, 1975. She makes her name writing for children, as well as writing plays and novels for adults.

Mary Ellen Cregan is born in Killorglin, County Kerry, on March 27, 1891, to Morgan Cregan and Ellen O’Shea. Her father is a stonemason from Limerick. The family are strong believers in the Gaelic revival movement and Cregan herself learns the Irish language and performs songs at Gaelic League concerts. Although she goes to primary school locally, she goes away to secondary school to St. Louis Convent in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan. After finishing school, she becomes a teacher, working in Goresbridge, County Kilkenny from 1911 to 1914.

In September 1914 Cregan goes to Dublin to study music in the Leinster School of Music, under Madame Coslett Heller. It is while she is in Dublin that she becomes friends with the Ryan family, who are strong nationalists as well as interested in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin. She begins to sing for concerts which are fundraisers for the Irish Volunteers. The last concert is just two weeks before the Easter Rising.

During Easter week Cregan is sent to Tralee with “automatics and ammunition” by Seán Mac Diarmada. While she is carrying a violin case of munitions, she is also carrying details for the wireless technology needed for communicating with the SS Aud, the boat which is carrying more weapons for the rebellion. The communications with the SS Aud go wrong when the car carrying the Volunteers goes off a pier and the occupants are drowned. She is still in the area to assist with the surviving Volunteer, who unfortunately knows nothing of the details for the SS Aud. She is not easily able to get back to Dublin, because owing to the Rising the city is cut off. By the time she gets back, her friends have been arrested.

When Cregan is going to school in Dublin she is also working in a school in Rathmines. Like many of the teachers, she loses her job after the rising because of her connection to the rebels. However, she is able to get new positions over the next few years in both Ballyshannon and Portstewart until she marries. In Ballyshannon she experiences the early expressions of support and sympathy, but Portstewart is a Unionist enclave with many houses flying union flags on polling day in 1918.

Cregan is a member of Cumann na mBan and with them is active during the Irish War of Independence. She is given a medal for her participation. On July 23, 1919, she marries Dr. James Ryan in Athenry, County Galway. His entire family had been deeply involved in the Easter Rising, as well as the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. They have three children, Eoin, who becomes a Senator, Nuala (Colgan) and Seamus.

The family is initially based in Wexford during the War. The house is often raided when the British soldiers are looking for her husband and Cregan herself is arrested in February 1921 for refusing to put up martial law posters. Later the family sells the house and remains mobile while she works for the Sinn Féin government, and her husband is in prison. It is during this time that she works as a courier to the continent and to London. After the war, they purchase Kindlestown House in Delgany, County Wicklow, where they remain for the rest of their lives.

Cregan works as a journalist for The Irish Press and The Sunday Press. Her political awareness and involvement mean that her work there is on political articles.

Cregan’s first book for children is Old John and gains her considerable international success and attention. Sean Eoin is also published in Irish and is illustrated by Jack Butler Yeats. Her work is also aired on the BBC and RTÉ. Rathina wins the Downey Award in the United States in 1943. She also writes two plays: Hunger strike (1933), based on experience of her husband’s involvement in such a strike, which is broadcast on Radio Éireann on May 5, 1936, and Curlew’s call (1940).

Cregan dies on November 9, 1975, in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, and is buried in Redford cemetery near her home in County Wicklow.

(Pictured: Máirín Cregan and her husband, Dr. James Ryan)


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Death of Louise Gavan Duffy, Educator & Irish Language Enthusiast

Louise Gavan Duffy, educator, Irish language enthusiast and a Gaelic revivalist, dies in Dublin on October 12, 1969. She sets up the first Gaelscoil in Ireland. She is also a suffragist and Irish nationalist who is present in the General Post Office, the main headquarters during the 1916 Easter Rising.

Duffy is born in Nice, France, on July 17, 1884, the daughter of the Irish nationalist Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the founders of The Nation and his third wife, Louise (née Hall) from Cheshire, England. Her mother dies when she is four. She is then raised in Nice by her Australian half-sisters from her father’s second marriage. It is a well-to-do and culturally vibrant home where she is exposed to political figures and ideas.

Duffy’s brother George Gavan Duffy, one of the signatories to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, is an Irish politician, barrister and judge. Her half-brother Sir Frank Gavan Duffy is the fourth Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, sitting on the bench from 1913 to 1935. Another brother works most of his life as a missionary in the French colony of Pondicherry.

Duffy’s first visit to Ireland is in 1903, at the age of 18, when her father dies and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. This is when she first hears Irish spoken. She finds a grammar book in a bookshop and becomes curious. Her father was not an Irish speaker, though her grandmother in the early 1800s was likely fluent.

Duffy spends the years between 1903 and 1907 between France and England. She takes courses through Cusack’s College in London so that she can matriculate.

Duffy decides to continue her studies in Dublin but cannot afford to move until she receives a small inheritance from her grandmother on the Hall side of the family. Once in Ireland in 1907, at the age of 23, she begins her university studies, taking arts. She lives in the Women’s College, Dominican Convent, as women are not allowed to attend lectures in the Royal University of Ireland. She goes occasionally to the Gaeltacht to learn Irish. Graduating in 1911 with a Bachelor of Arts from University College Dublin (UCD), she is one of the first women to do so.

Given the lack of teachers, even without a full qualification, Duffy then teaches in Patrick Pearse‘s St. Ita’s school for girls in Ranelagh. She studies with the Dominicans again in Eccles Street, gaining a Teaching Diploma from Cambridge University.

A supporter of women’s suffrage, Duffy speaks at a mass meeting in Dublin in 1912 in favour of having the Home Rule bill include a section to grant women the vote. She also joins the Irish republican women’s paramilitary organisation Cumann na mBan, as a founding member in April 1914, serving on the provisional committee with Mary Colum, as a co-secretary.

Duffy is aware that being a suffragist and a nationalist are not necessarily the same thing, realising her involvement in Cumann na mBan is in support of nationalism. When St. Ita’s closes due to funding problems in 1912, she takes the opportunity to complete her qualifications. After receiving her Cambridge teacher’s diploma in 1913, she returns to UCD to study for a Master of Arts degree.

Duffy is in fact working on her master’s thesis during the Easter break in 1916 when the rumour comes to her that the Rising has begun in Dublin city centre. She walks to the Rebel headquarters in the GPO where she tells Pearse, one of the leaders, that she does not agree with the violent uprising.

Duffy spends all of Easter week working in the GPO kitchens with other volunteers like Desmond FitzGerald and a couple of captured British soldiers, ensuring the volunteers are cared for. The women in the GPO are given the opportunity to leave under the protection of the Red Cross on the Thursday as the shelling of the building has caused fires, but almost all of them refuse. In the end, she is among the second group of the people to leave the GPO on the Friday, tunnelling through the walls of the buildings to avoid coming under fire.

Duffy’s group makes it to Jervis Street Hospital where they spend the night. The next day, Saturday, Pearse formally surrenders. She heads for Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, another volunteer position, on the morning after the surrender, to see what is happening. There she finds a holdout of volunteers who are unaware of the surrender or that the fighting is over.

After 1916 Duffy is elected to the Cumann na mBan’s executive and in 1918 is one of the signatories to a petition for self-determination for Ireland which is presented to President Woodrow Wilson by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. During her time in the GPO, she had collected names of the volunteers and promised to take messages to their families. This possibly influences her in being involved in the National Aid Association and Volunteers Dependants Fund. In the aftermath of the rebellion there are 64 known dead among the volunteers, while 3,430 men and 79 women are arrested. Families need support. These organisations are able to arrange funding from the United States.

In 1917, Duffy co-founds and runs Scoil Bhríde, as a secondary school for girls in Dublin through the medium of Gaelic. It is still in operation as a primary school. Her co-founder is Annie McHugh, who later marries Ernest Blythe. The end of the Rising leads to the Irish War of Independence (1919-21). During this time, she is mostly focused on the school. However, it is raided by the military and Duffy later admits it is in fact used for rebel meetings and to safeguard documents. In October 1920, the Irish leader Michael Collins meets Archbishop Patrick Clune there in secret. In an effort to support the nationwide boycott of the police, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), in 1920, she has a leaflet sent to all branches of Cumann na mBan which states in part that the RIC are the “eyes and ears of the enemy. Let those eyes and ears know no friendship.”

The war ends with the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. The result is the Irish Civil War which lasts until 1923. Duffy is a supporter of the Treaty, which her brother had signed, and as such she leaves Cumann na mBan and joins Cumann na Saoirse, in which she is instrumental in founding as an Irish republican women’s organisation which supports the Pro-Treaty side.

Once the civil war is over, Duffy leaves the political arena and returns to education. She especially needs to focus on funding in the early years of the school. She works with UCD’s Department of Education from 1926, once Scoil Bhríde is recognised as a teacher training school. She publishes educational documents like School Studies in The Appreciation of Art with Elizabeth Aughney and published by UCD in 1932.

Until her retirement, Duffy also lectures on the teaching of French. She retires as principal in 1944.

Once retired, Duffy gives much of her time to the Legion of Mary and to an association which works with French au pairs in Dublin. In 1948 she is awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the National University of Ireland.

Recognising the importance of her first-hand experience and with a good political understanding, Duffy records her memories of the events in which she has taken part. In 1949, she gives an account of her life in relation to nationalist activities to the Bureau of Military History. She is involved in a Radio Éireann broadcast in 1956 about the women in the Rising. In 1962, she takes part in the RTÉ TV program Self Portrait broadcast on March 20, 1962. In March 1966 she gives a lecture in UCD to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rising which is published in The Easter rising, 1916, and University College Dublin (1966).

Duffy dies, unmarried, on October 12, 1969, aged 85, and is interred in the family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.

In 2014, An Post issues a stamp to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Cumann na mBan. In 2016, for the centenary, a documentary is produced, discussing seven of the women, including Duffy, who were involved in the Easter Rising.


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The Founding of Na Fianna Éireann

Na Fianna Éireann (The Fianna of Ireland), known as the Fianna (“Soldiers of Ireland”), an Irish nationalist youth organization, is founded by Constance Markievicz on August 16, 1909, with later help from Bulmer Hobson. Fianna members are involved in setting up the Irish Volunteers and have their own circle of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). They take part in the 1914 Howth gun-running and, as Volunteer members, in the 1916 Easter Rising. They are active in the Irish War of Independence, and many take the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War.

An earlier “Fianna” is organised “to serve as a Junior Hurling League to promote the study of the Irish Language” on June 26, 1902, at the Catholic Boys’ Hall, Falls Road, in West Belfast, the brainchild of Bulmer Hobson. Hobson, a Quaker influenced by suffragism and nationalism, joins the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1904 and is an early member of Sinn Féin during its monarchist-nationalist period, alongside Arthur Griffith and Constance Markievicz. Hobson later relocates to Dublin and the Fianna organisation collapses in Belfast. Markievicz, inspired by the rapid growth of Robert Baden-Powell‘s Boy Scouts, forms sometime before July 1909 the Red Branch Knights, a Dublin branch of Irish National Boy Scouts. After discussions involving Hobson, Markievicz, suffragist and labour activist Helena Molony and Seán McGarry, the Irish National Boy Scouts change their name to Na Fianna Éireann at a meeting in 34 Lower Camden Street, Dublin, on August 16, 1909, at which Hobson is elected as president, thus ensuring a strong IRB influence, Markievicz as vice-president and Pádraig Ó Riain as secretary. Seán Heuston is the leader of the Fianna on Dublin’s north side, while Cornelius “Con” Colbert is the leader on the south side. The Fianna forms as a Nationalist alternative to Powell’s Scouts with the aim to achieve the full independence of Ireland by training and teaching scouting and military exercises, Irish history, and the Irish language.

The Fianna finds its first years difficult and by 1912 has barely 1,000 members and a skeleton structure outside of the cities of Dublin, Cork, Belfast and Galway. But in the next couple of years the momentum of events carries the Fianna forward. It is involved in initiating the militarisation of the IRB, the launch of the Irish Volunteers and showing solidarity with the striking Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). It is also crucial to the success of the Howth and Kilcoole gun-running operations. Alongside these headline-grabbing activities, the Fianna continues with classes, drilling, camps and protests and reaps the benefits of an expanding membership and structure. When the fighting starts, the Fianna are not found wanting either. In 1916, Na Fianna members are present in all areas that mobilise and fight alongside all the other Republican organisations. They continue to fight throughout the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War. Seeing comrades being killed in action or executed or suffering imprisonment does not dim their enthusiasm for the fight. In Na Fianna Éireann’s March 1922 Árd Fheis, the 187 delegates representing 30,000 members vote unanimously to reject the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

The Fianna are declared an illegal organisation by the government of the Irish Free State in 1931. This is reversed when Fianna Fáil comes to power in 1932 but re-introduced in 1938. During the splits in the Republican movement of the later part of the 20th century, the Fianna and Cumann na mBan support Provisional Sinn Féin in 1969 and Republican Sinn Féin in 1986. The Fianna have been a proscribed organisation in Northern Ireland since 1920.

While the events in which the Fianna members are involved over the revolutionary years have a special place in Irish history, the specific role of the Fianna is absent from most written histories. This, allied with the failure to adequately commemorate the organisation’s centenary, marks a kind of revisionism of omission.