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Death of Stephen Fuller, IRA Volunteer & Fianna Fáil Politician

Stephen Fuller, Fianna Fáil politician who serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Kerry North constituency from 1937 to 1943, dies on February 23, 1984, in Tralee, County Kerry.

Fuller is born on January 1, 1900, in Kilflynn, County Kerry. He is the son of Daniel Fuller and Ellie Quinlan. His family is from Fahavane, in the parish of Kilflynn.

Fuller serves in the Kilflynn Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column during the Irish War of Independence. He is First Lieutenant in the Kerry No.1 Brigade, 2nd Battalion. He opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and continues to fight with the anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War. Military records from the 1930s show, in his own hand, that he is in communication with Dublin regarding confirmation of membership in July 1922 and therefore eligible for war pensions. He becomes the most senior Kilflynn member upon the death of Captain George O’Shea.

In 1923, Fuller is captured by Free State troops and imprisoned in Ballymullen Barracks in Tralee by the Dublin Guard who had landed in County Kerry shortly before. On March 6, 1923, five Free State soldiers are blown up by a booby-trapped bomb at Baranarigh Wood, Knocknagoshel, north Kerry, including long-standing colleagues of Major General Paddy Daly, GOC Kerry Command. Prisoners receive beatings after the killings and Daly orders that republican prisoners be used to remove mines.

On March 7, nine prisoners from Ballymullen Barracks, six from the jail and three from the workhouse, are chosen with a broad geographical provenance and no well-known connections. They are taken lying down in a lorry to Ballyseedy Cross. There they are secured by the hands and legs and to each other in a circle around a land mine. Fuller is among them. His Kilflynn parish comrade Tim Tuomey is initially stopped from praying until all prisoners are tied up. As he and other prisoners then say their prayers and goodbyes, Fuller continues to watch the retreating Dublin Guard soldiers, an act which he later says saved him. The mine is detonated, and he lands in a ditch, suffering burns and scars. He crosses the River Lee and hides in Ballyseedy woods. He is missed amongst the carnage as disabled survivors are bombed and shot dead with automatic fire. Most collected body parts are distributed between nine coffins that had been prepared. The explosions and gunfire are witnessed by Rita O’Donnell who lives nearby and who sees human remains spread about the next day. Similar reprisal killings by the Dublin Guard follow soon after Ballyseedy.

Fuller crawls away to the friendly home of the Currans nearby. They take him to the home of Charlie Daly the following day. His injuries are treated by a local doctor, Edmond Shanahan, who finds him in a dugout. He moves often in the coming months, including to the Burke and Boyle families, and stays in a dugout that had been prepared at the Herlihys for seven months.

A cover-up begins almost immediately. Paddy Daly’s communication to Dublin about returning the bodies to relatives differs significantly from Cumann na mBan statements, which Daly complains about as simple propaganda, and later that of Bill Bailey, a local who had joined the Dublin Guard, who tells Ernie O’Malley that the bodies were handed over in condemned coffins as a band played jolly music. Fuller is named amongst the dead in newspaper reports before it is realised that he had escaped. Daly then sends a communication to GHQ that Fuller is reported as having become “insane.” The Dublin Guard scours the countryside for Fuller. The official investigation into the killings is presided over by Daly himself, with Major General Eamon Price of GHQ and Colonel J. McGuinness of Kerry Command. It blames Irregulars for planting the explosives and exonerates the Irish Army soldiers, and this is read out in the Dáil by the Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy.

Contrary statements to the Irish Army’s submissions are effectively ignored. Lieutenant Niall Harrington of the Dublin Guard, describes the evidence to the court and the findings as “totally untrue,” explaining that the actions were devised and executed by officers of the Dublin Guard. He contacts Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Justice and Vice-President, a family friend, to deplore the findings. O’Higgins speaks to Richard Mulcahy, who does nothing. In a separate incident, Free State Lieutenant W.McCarthy, who had been in charge of about twenty prisoners, says that five of them had been removed in the night. They were reportedly shot in the legs then blown up by, in his words, “…a Free State mine, laid by themselves.” He resigns in protest. A Garda Síochána report into the events is also dismissed and is not made public for over 80 years.

Fuller leaves the IRA after the Civil War and follows a career as a farmer in Kerry. He joins Fianna Fáil, the political party founded by Republican leader Éamon de Valera in 1926 after a split from Sinn Féin. He is elected to the 9th Dáil on his first attempt, representing Fianna Fáil at the 1937 Irish general election, as the last of three Fianna Fáil TDs to be elected to the four seat Kerry North constituency. He is re-elected to the 10th Dáil at the 1938 Irish general election, when Fianna Fáil again wins three out of four seats, but loses his seat at the 1943 Irish general election to the independent candidate Patrick Finucane. He returns to farming thereafter.

Fuller never once mentions the Ballyseedy incident from a political platform and states later that he bore no ill-will towards his captors or those who were involved in his attempted extrajudicial killing. He does not want the ill feeling passed on to the next generation. He speaks publicly about the events in 1980, a few years before his death, on Robert Kee‘s groundbreaking BBC series Ireland: A Television History.

Fuller dies in Edenburn Nursing Home, Tralee, on February 23, 1984. He is buried near the Republican plot in Kilflynn where colleagues O’Shea, Tuomey and Timothy ‘Aero’ Lyons are buried.

Fuller’s son Paudie establishes the Stephen Fuller Memorial Cup for dogs of all ages, contested annually on the family farm.

Fuller’s fame largely rests on one night at Ballyseedy. To trace him through the rural society from which he and his fellow Volunteers originated and in which his life was spent, however, gives a fuller understanding of the devastating effects of the conflicts of 1916–23 on a tightly knit rural and small-town society, dominated by extended families of farmers and their service-industry relatives, and of how that society remembered and forgot those traumas.

(Pictured: Stephen Fuller’s grave in Kilflynn, by St. Columba’s Heritage Centre)


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The Dromkeen Ambush

The Dromkeen ambush takes place on February 3, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence, at Dromkeen, County Limerick, when the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambushes a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) patrol, killing eleven policemen.

In late January, Richard O’Connell, commander of the Mid Limerick Brigade flying column, along with Captains Sean Lynch and Morgan Portley, begin planning an ambush of an RIC convoy from the Pallas RIC headquarters. Observing their activities for several months, local Volunteer John Purcell, of Caherconlish, finds that the first Thursday of each month they send a convoy to Fedamore with the payroll for RIC constables there, about eleven miles away. They also seem to use the same route each time. Such predictability is often a fatal flaw in a guerrilla war. The ambush is set for February 3.

The ambush is carried out by the flying columns of the East Limerick and Mid Limerick Brigades of the IRA, some forty riflemen, under the command of Donnocha O’Hannigan, commander of East Limerick Brigade flying column, and Richard O’Connell, commander of the Mid Limerick Brigade flying column.

The ambush location is well selected. The lorries are to come from the west. There is a severe right-hand turn at Dromkeen House, where the road turns east for several hundred yards in a straight line, to an intersection that splits to the north and south. O’Hannigan puts D. Guerin, Sean Stapleton, and Maurice Meade, all of East Limerick Brigade, at the corner to be the lookouts for the convoy. There are low stonewalls along both sides of most of the road. About halfway down its length there is a cemetery and an old, ruined church on the south side.

O’Hannigan spreads his men along both sides of the road, behind the walls and in several homes along the road and sets up barricades on the forks on the eastern end of the ambush, set back so the driver will not see them until they get to the intersection. He takes up a command position in an old, ruined cottage at the intersection. In addition to O’Hannigan, John MacCarthy, David Clancy and a few other East Limerick Volunteers are in the ruined cottage.

At approximately 2:30 p.m. the lookouts near Dromkeen House let them know the lorries are approaching. The plan is to let the lead lorry reach the barricade before they open fire, expecting them to be widely spaced. They are closer together than expected, however, and the men lining the road and near Dromkeen House open fire first at the second lorry when it is near the ruins of the old church to prevent it being getting beyond them. Michael Hennessy, of the Kilfinane Company of the East Limerick Brigade, in a spot near one of the walls, later says he killed the driver of the second lorry, Constable Sidney Millin, on his first shot. Millin may have had his foot on the brake at that moment, as the lorry almost immediately stops in the middle of the road.

The sound of the firing causes the lead lorry to speed up. Turning to the left and seeing one barricade, the driver tries to turn to the right, but is going too fast. He runs into the wall and then slams into a donkey cart with a bog of flour in it, sending a cloud of flour into the air and coming to a halt.

The cloud of flour, along with the fact that they are the only RIC members in civilian clothes, apparently saves the lives of two RIC men, Constable Cox and District Inspector Sanson, who was in charge of the convoy, who are thrown clear of the cab. By the time the cloud of flour clears, two men in civilian clothes are seen running through the field. Given that Crown Forces have been known to have civilian hostages in their lorries, O’Hannigan had his men hold their fire for fear of killing a hostage, and the two escape. Many of the Volunteers later speak of Sanson with scorn for abandoning his men.

All the Volunteer participants say the firing only lasts about ten minutes, with the RIC and Black and Tans able to mount very little resistance before all eleven left in the two lorries are either dead or wounded. Of the three remaining in the first lorry, one is apparently killed very quickly by rifle fire and several grenades. The other two manage to get out and take cover but are quickly hit.

Two constables managed to get underneath the second lorry. They put up a short resistance before both are hit and killed by Volunteers Johnny Vaughan and Seán Carroll, who move into positions along the road. The only Volunteer casualty is Liam Hayes, who is later a general in the Free State Army. He has part of his left thumb and part of a finger shot off, probably by friendly fire. As the firing ends, the Volunteers come out from cover to collect the arms from the dead and wounded.

It has been claimed that three of the RIC dead were executed after they had surrendered. Particular suspicion for this alleged killing of prisoners has fallen on Maurice Meade, a former British soldier who was captured by the Germans in World War I and had joined Roger Casement‘s Irish Brigade. In reprisal, British forces burn ten homes and farms in the area.

In February 2009, up to 2,000 people turn out for the unveiling of a memorial to the ambush.

(From: “The Dromkeen Ambush: Down Into the Mire in County Limerick” by Joee Gannon, The Wild Geese, http://www.thewildgeese.irish, November 2017 | Pictured: The East Limerick Flying Column)


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The Tooreen Ambush

The Tooreen ambush (also known as the Toureen ambush or Ballinhassig ambush) is an ambush carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on October 22, 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. It takes place near Roberts Farm, Tooreen, near Ballinhassig in County Cork. The IRA ambushes two lorries of British soldiers, killing three and wounding four others. The British surrender and their weapons and ammunition are seized by the IRA. Later that night, British soldiers go on a rampage in nearby Bandon.

Up until the Tooreen ambush, the 3rd Cork Brigade had finished its training, but had not previously engaged in battle with British troops stationed in County Cork. The Tooreen ambush is one of the first major ambushes carried out by the West Cork Brigade under Tom Barry.

The Essex Regiment of the British Army is deployed to West Cork and has a reputation for violently raiding houses throughout the countryside and arresting people believed to be IRA volunteers. They are also alleged to torture their prisoners in order to get information on the whereabouts of the flying columns, so this makes them a despised enemy to the West Cork IRA.

The Essex Regiment is known to travel on the road from Bandon to Cork City every morning and return in the evenings. The road goes through the hamlet of Toureen which the Third West Cork Brigade is stationed at nearby and it is decided to ambush this column of the Essex Regiment as it makes its way to Cork city.

Thirty-two ambushers, twenty-one being riflemen of the Third West Cork Brigade, occupy ambush positions outside Toureen and lay in wait for the approaching Essex Regiment. The Regiment normally goes in two or three lorries to Cork City so the IRA places a homemade mine on the road for use against them.

Scouts signal the approach of two lorries which are coming down the road toward the ambush site. As the first lorry passes, the order to fire is given and a homemade three-pound bomb is thrown. The bomb lands inside the lorry but does not explode. The mine that is placed on the road also fails to detonate. As the volunteers open fire, the second lorry stops and the soldiers inside leap out and return fire, but the volunteers are hidden behind a large timber gate which gives them cover. The first lorry continues on to Cork Barracks. As the fight goes on, the officer in command of the British troops, Captain Dixon, is shot in the head and killed as is one of his men.

The remaining British soldiers surrender soon after, and the IRA men cease firing. The British soldiers are relieved of their weapons and ammunition, but otherwise unharmed. Fourteen rifles, bayonets, equipment, several Mills bombs, around 1,400 rounds of ammunition and a couple of revolvers are taken from them.

Two British soldiers, Lt. Dixon MC of the Suffolk Regiment and Pte. Charles William Reid of the Essex Regiment, are killed in the ambush. Five are wounded, including Sergeant Thomas Bennett RASC who dies in Cork on the following day. Six are unhurt except for shock. None of the IRA volunteers are killed or wounded during the ambush and aid is given to the wounded soldiers, while the dead are pulled away from the lorry and it is then set on fire by the volunteers. The two soldiers who are not hurt during the ambush are released along with their wounded and they return to their barracks.

Later that night, members of the Essex Regiment go on a violent rampage through Bandon, destroying property and seeking out anyone they believe to be connected to the ambush. It is believed that at least some of the rampaging soldiers are those released unharmed by the IRA earlier in the day. The reprisal attacks are indiscriminate and include attacks on homes and properties of business owners with “establishment” connections – including the Brennan family of Kilbrogan House.

A Military Court of Inquiry into the soldiers killed, is conducted on October 28, 1920. There are mixed references to these proceedings in The Irish Times and the Irish Independent, both of which contain errors.

Lt. Dixon is buried with full military honours in St. Paul’s Church in Dover, Kent, England. Sergeant Bennett is buried in St. Peter & St. Paul Church in his home village of Shorne, near Gravesend in Kent.

(Pictured: Plaque on a farm wall marking the location of the Tooreen ambush)


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Death of John Ford, Irish American Film Director

John Ford, American film director of Irish descent and one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation, dies in Palm Desert, California, on August 31, 1973.

Ford is born John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894, at Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He is the fourth son among five sons and six daughters of Seán Feeney, Roman Catholic farmer and saloonkeeper, and Barbara ‘Abby’ Feeney (née Curran). His father had emigrated to the United States from Spiddal, County Galway, and his mother from Kilronan, Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands.

From an early age Ford has an interest in painting and sailing, and in July 1914 moves to California, where his older brother Francis is an actor with a small film company. Adopting the name ‘Jack Ford,’ he learns his trade as a filmmaker and acts in a number of silent films. Reveling in his Irish heritage, he makes his director’s debut with The Tornado (1917) and follows it with more than forty movies over the next six years. On July 3, 1920, he marries Mary McBryde Smith, a former officer in the army medical corps. They meet at a party thrown by the director Rex Ingram and have one son and one daughter.

In 1921 Ford visits Ireland for the first time and later claims to have travelled on the same boat that brought Michael Collins back from the treaty negotiations. He meets his relatives at Spiddal, falls in love with the countryside, and becomes a fervent Irish nationalist. It is later claimed that he brought over funds for his cousin Martin Feeney, a member of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column.

Returning to Hollywood, Ford becomes friends with the retired marshal Wyatt Earp and makes a number of commercially successful films, now as ‘John Ford’. In 1926 he directs The Shamrock Handicap, a horse-racing yarn partly set in Ireland. In 1928 he shoots Mother Machree, a movie about Irish emigration, starring Victor McLaglen, a regular collaborator. McLaglen also stars in Hangman’s House, made the same year, Ford’s first major movie about Ireland.

In 1934 Ford purchases a luxury yacht which he names the Araner after the Aran Islands. He also begins shooting The Informer, a film set in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and based on a short novel by Liam O’Flaherty. The picture is a major box office success and wins four Academy Awards, including Best Director. O’Flaherty is so impressed with the film that he dedicates his next book, Famine, to Ford.

In 1934 Ford visits Ireland for the second time, and approaches Seán O’Casey about directing a version of The Plough and the Stars. Released in 1936, the film stars Barry Fitzgerald as Fluther, but it is reedited by the studio, much to Ford’s fury, and is a commercial and critical flop.

Stagecoach, shot in 1938, is one of Ford’s masterpieces. It was a western starring his protégé, John Wayne, and marks the beginning of his golden decade. In 1940 and 1941 he wins Best Director Oscars successively for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. With American entry into World War II, he serves in the U.S. Navy, and makes important documentaries such as The Battle of Midway (1942).

In 1952 Ford returns to Ireland to film The Quiet Man, starring Wayne, McLaglen, and Maureen O’Hara. Shot at Ashford Castle, County Mayo, the picture becomes one of the most popular Irish films of all time. He is immensely proud of the work and is in tears leaving Ireland. The following year he makes Mogambo, with Clark Gable, Grace Kelly and a young English actor, Donald Sinden, who later recalls that Ford berated him personally for all the problems of Ireland from the time of William of Orange. Ford’s strong sense of Irishness is central to his character and is crucial for any understanding of his work. Back in Ireland in 1956, he shoots The Rising of the Moon, a portmanteau film for which he takes no salary, starring Tyrone Power, Cyril Cusack, and Noel Purcell. A minor film, it makes no impact at the box office.

Two of Ford’s finest movies are made in his later years. The Searchers (1956) is a powerful study of vengeance, while The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is an elegiac revisionist western which concludes with the famous line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Struck with cancer in his final years, Ford dies on August 31, 1973 at his home in Palm Desert, California, and is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City. His will disinherits his son, Michael Patrick Roper, and leaves everything to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

When asked to name the finest American directors, Orson Welles replies simply, “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” An alcoholic, Ford is a difficult and often tyrannical director, but he makes films of extraordinary power and vision. He ranks as one of the greatest filmmakers of the twentieth century. As Frank Capra concludes, “John is half-tyrant, half-revolutionary; half-saint, half-Satan; half-possible, half-impossible; half-genius, half-Irish.”

(From: “Ford, John,” contributed by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


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Death of Peadar O’Donnell, Irish Republican & Socialist Activist

Peadar O’Donnell, Irish republican, socialist activist, politician, writer and one of the foremost radicals of 20th-century Ireland, dies in Dublin on May 13, 1986.

O’Donnell is born on February 22, 1893, in Meenmore, near Dungloe, County Donegal, 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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The Tourmakeady Ambush

The Tourmakeady Ambush or Battle of Tourmakeady occurs on May 3, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. The South Mayo Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), commanded by Commandant Tom Maguire ambushes a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC)/Black and Tan re-supply patrol in the village of Tourmakeady, County Mayo, in the west of Ireland in order to destroy the patrol and to cause the closure of Derrypark RIC Barracks, seven miles to the south.

A car transporting police officers is leading the two-vehicle convoy. It is shot at as it travels out of the village, causing the Crossley Tender behind to stop close to the local hotel. RIC Constables Christopher O’Regan and William Power, Sergeant John Regan and Black and Tans Constable Hubert Oakes all die in the ambush. British forces are able to take refuge in the hotel, where they call for reinforcements.

Following the ambush, the Flying Column takes to the nearby Partry Mountains and are subsequently engaged by British troops from the Border Regiment. IRA Adjutant (South Mayo Brigade) Michael O’Brien sustains fatal injuries when he is shot while trying to assist the injured Brigade leader, Commandant Maguire. Another IRA Volunteer, Pádraig Feeney, is also killed that afternoon.

On May 3, 1921, in reprisal for the ambush, Crown forces burn several commercial establishments and homes in the area. Extensive searches and reprisals follow in the area over the next week.

Monuments commemorating Michael O’Brien and Pádraig Feeney have since been erected in County Mayo.

(Pictured: The South Mayo Flying Column of the Irish Republican Army, taken at Moore Hall in Muckloon, County Mayo, during the summer of 1921)


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Birth of Andrew Cooney, Irish Republican & Medical Doctor

Andrew Cooney, Irish republican and medical doctor, is born on April 22, 1897, in Ballyphillip, Nenagh, County Tipperary.

Cooney is the second of three children of John Cooney and Mary Ann Cooney (née Gleeson), middling farmers. While his grandfather, Patrick Cooney, from nearby Garrykennedy, is reputed to have been a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and an Irish National Land League activist, his father does not have any inclination towards radical politics. He is educated at Lissenhall national school and St. Joseph’s CBS, Nenagh. In October 1916, he commences studies in medicine at University College Dublin (UCD) just as the Irish War of Independence is getting underway. He plays briefly with the College’s hurling club.

In 1917, Cooney joins the Third Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). A year later he is jailed for two months in Mountjoy Prison and Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, for illegal drilling. Joining the IRB at the end of 1918, he assists in the December 1918 election by protecting candidates and acts as a guard at sittings of the First Dáil. On June 26, 1920, he plays a major role in the attack on Borrisokane Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks. He takes part in the Bloody Sunday operations of November 21, 1920, at 28 Upper Pembroke Street where a number of British agents are killed and attends Croke Park afterwards. He then goes on the run as a full-time Volunteer and serves with the Dublin Brigade active service unit (ASU).

After the Anglo-Irish truce of July 1921, Cooney is appointed Officer Commanding (O/C) of the 1st Kerry Brigade, IRA, reorganising it and forming a flying column. Opposing the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, he does not immediately break with GHQ, who sends him to organise the 1st Eastern Division. Later in January 1922, the Chief of Staff, Eoin O’Duffy, asks him to become O/C of the 3rd Eastern Division, but later rescinds the appointment. In March 1922 he is appointed O/C of the 1st Eastern Division of the anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War.

That same year he is captured by Free State forces and interned in Mountjoy Prison, where he becomes O/C of the prisoners in C Wing. He accepts responsibility for an attempted escape bid on October 10, 1922, in which a fellow prisoner, Peadar Breslin, is killed and another man is wounded. After sojourns in Newbridge and Arbour Hill Prison, he is moved with the other leaders to Kilmainham Gaol, where he spends forty-one days on hunger strike. Removed to Harepark Camp, the Curragh, on January 1, 1924, he is among the last to be released on May 29, 1924.

Cooney succeeds Frank Aiken as Chief of Staff of the IRA on November 18, 1925. Central to the reorganisation scheme he puts in place is the need to secure American funds for the IRA and to combat Frank Aiken’s fundraising work in the United States since December 1925 on behalf of the embryo Fianna Fáil organisation. Receiving permission on April 21, 1926, he departs on a fund-raising trip to the United States but returns to Ireland in October. He resigns as chief of staff in favour of Maurice Twomey but retains his position as chairman of the IRA executive until November 21, 1927, when he obtains leave to complete his medical studies.

After internship in the Mater Hospital, Dublin, Cooney finds temporary employment in London, but remains in touch with GHQ. On September 27, 1929, he marries the German-educated Frances (‘Frank’) Brady, daughter of a wealthy Belfast linen family and former Cumann na mBan activist and hunger-striker. The marriage is not a success. Failing to secure employment due to police harassment and the loyalty test then in force, he and his wife are obliged to emigrate to London, where he practises as a GP, still maintaining his IRA links. Their only child, Seán, is born there in 1931. He returns to Ireland in August 1932, after Fianna Fáil’s accession to power.

An intimate friend of Maurice Twomey, who is still Chief of Staff, Cooney remains in the upper echelons of the IRA and attends its conventions. Signifying his standing in republican circles, he is chosen to unveil, inter alia, the Fenian memorial in Glasnevin Cemetery and the Seán Treacy plaque in Talbot Street, Dublin, and is a regular speaker at commemorations. In March 1940, he attempts to intercede with Éamon de Valera on behalf of hunger-striking republicans, and is later arrested, but released.

After the discovery of a German spy ring in the hospitals commission’s subsidiary, the Dublin Hospitals Bureau, Cooney is forced to resign in April 1942 on refusing to take a loyalty pledge to the state. He returns to private practice. He becomes active in the unsuccessful campaign to save Charlie Kerins, Chief of Staff, from being hanged in 1944. In anticipation of emigrating, he finally resigns from the IRA in 1944, though military and police surveillance continue until March 1945.

In August 1945, Cooney joins the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, working with displaced persons in the American zone in Germany, and gains rapid promotion. After joining the International Refugee Organisation (UNRRA’s successor) on July 1, 1947, he becomes the chief medical officer of an area including the American sector of Berlin and containing 150,000 displaced persons. He later holds a similar post in Bavaria.

Appointed a part-time member of the hospitals commission by the inter-party government in September 1949 and in severe financial straits, Cooney emigrates alone to the United States on December 2, 1950, and never returns. While employed in a tuberculosis sanatorium in New Jersey, he obtains by examination his licence to practise medicine in Maryland on January 14, 1954. Admitted a member of the American College of Chest Physicians, again by examination, on November 23, 1954, he secures, at the age of 57, his first ever permanent post in medicine, in a similar hospital in Pikesville, Maryland. His republican activities continue through Clan na Gael during his U.S. years, and he is a frequent speaker at commemorative events.

Cooney suffers a stroke in December 1961 that confines him to a wheelchair. He dies at the age of 71 on August 4, 1968, at Carroll County General Hospital, Carroll County, Maryland. He is buried in Youghalarra, Nenagh, County Tipperary.

(Pictured: Liam Lynch with some of his Divisional Staff and Officers of the Brigades, including the 1st Southern Division, who attend as delegates to the Army Convention at the Mansion House, Dublin, on April 9, 1922. Cooney is first on the right in the 3rd row back.)


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Death of Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army

Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), is mortally wounded by Irish Free State troops in County Tipperary on April 10, 1923, as they try to avoid capture. He is transported to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Clonmel but dies there that night.

Lynch is born on November 9, 1893, in Barnagurraha, Anglesboro, County Limerick, the fifth child among six sons and a daughter of Jeremiah Lynch, farmer, and Mary Lynch (neé Kelly). The family is politically active. His father’s brother, John, had taken part in the Fenian Rising of 1867 and his mother had been joint secretary of the Ballylanders branch of the Ladies’ Land League.

Lynch attends Anglesboro national school (1898–1909). In 1910 he moves to Mitchelstown, County Cork, to take up a three-year apprenticeship in the hardware store of P. O’Neill on Baldwin Street. He remains there until the autumn of 1915. While in Mitchelstown he is a member of the Gaelic League and the Ancient Order of Hibernians. He also joins the Irish Volunteers. In 1914, when that organisation splits, he does not immediately join the militant rump. He then moves to Fermoy, County Cork, where he works in the store of Messrs J. Barry & Sons Ltd. His move coincides with a period of inactivity as neither Volunteer faction is very active nor is he known. Consequently, he does not take part in the 1916 Easter Rising, but it is a turning point for him. On May 2, 1916, he watches as the Kent family are led through Fermoy, having been captured by British soldiers. Richard Kent dies from a wound sustained that day and Thomas Kent is executed a week later. Lynch becomes a committed Volunteer at this point.

Once committed, Lynch’s enthusiasm and aptitude ensures that he quickly attains positions of responsibility. From early 1917 he is first lieutenant in the small Fermoy company. In September 1917, the Irish Volunteers in east Cork are reorganised. Nine local companies are formed into the Fermoy battalion, and he is elected adjutant. In April 1918, at the height of the conscription crisis, he briefly quits his job to concentrate on organising the Volunteers. In May he is lucky to escape arrest during the sweep that accompanies the “German plot.” When the immediate danger ends, he returns to Barry & Sons.

In January 1919, at the beginning of the Irish War of Independence, the Volunteer organisation in Cork undergoes a major restructuring. Three brigades are established, and Lynch becomes brigade commandant of Cork No. 2. In April he visits Irish Republican Army GHQ in Dublin to discuss plans and to seek arms. It is a frustrating experience as the GHQ has few guns and are cautious about action. Throughout the summer of 1919 he presses GHQ to authorise attacks on British targets as a method of acquiring arms and to prevent boredom and stagnation setting in among his men. Finally, GHQ sanctions attacks if the primary aim is the capture of arms. In response, on September 7, 1919, twenty-five men from the Fermoy company, led by Lynch, ambush fourteen British soldiers on their way to service in the Wesleyan church in Fermoy. Fifteen rifles are captured, one soldier killed, and three wounded. Lynch is shot in the shoulder, probably by one of his own men. As a result, he has to leave his job and hides out in Waterford for a time. A series of arrests follow, among those is Lynch’s close friend, Michael Fitzgerald, who dies on hunger strike in Cork County Gaol in 1920.

Lynch spends the early months of 1920 at GHQ in Dublin. During this time, he is offered the position of deputy chief of staff, but turns it down, preferring to return to Cork. Although not an articulate speaker, he impresses those he meets. His organisational talents, attention to detail, ability to inspire, and intolerance for those who waste meetings endlessly discussing side issues, are noted. He has a low tolerance for politicians and at all times considers the military wing of the movement to be of primary importance. He is engaged to Bridie Keyes, but marriage is postponed pending a final settlement of hostilities.

On June 26, 1920, Lynch, Seán Moylan, and two colleagues capture Major-General Cuthbert Lucas while he is fishing on the Munster Blackwater. He gives a false name when he is arrested on August 12, 1920, at City Hall, Cork, with Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, and ten others. All but MacSwiney are released four days later. He then sets about organising a flying column within the brigade. Ernie O’Malley arrives from headquarters to train the men. This column achieves a major coup on September 28, 1920, when they briefly capture the British Army barracks at Mallow, leaving with a large booty of rifles, ammunition, and two machine guns. The British respond to this increase in activity and the war settles into a pattern of ambush and counter-ambush. The Mallow battalion suffers severe losses in February 1921 and Lynch himself narrowly escapes when four are killed during an encounter at Nadd in March 1921.

In early 1921 Lynch seeks to encourage greater cooperation between the various brigades in the south. Senior brigade officers meet on three occasions to discuss cooperation and a plan to import arms from Italy. The importation project fails, but the First Southern Division is formed on April 26, 1921, bringing eight brigades from Cork, Kerry, Waterford, and west Limerick together. He is elected divisional commandant, making him the most powerful officer outside GHQ. His influence is further increased by his appointment as Southern Divisional Centre and Supreme Council member of the clandestine Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in March 1921.

Lynch is wary when the truce is called in July 1921. He works hard to maintain order in his division and to achieve a state of readiness in case the negotiations fail. For him the Anglo-Irish Treaty is a failure. When the Supreme Council of the IRB meets on December 10, 1921, he is the only voice against the agreement. He is among the officers who insist that an army convention should be called to discuss the treaty, effectively asserting that the army no longer accepts a position subordinate to the Dáil. The army, he believes, is the army of the Republic, and no civilian body can order it to abandon the Republic. The provisional government tries to ban this convention, but it goes ahead on March 26, 1922, and elects an army executive. Lynch is elected Chief of Staff. Between March and June, he works hard to prevent a civil war. He believes unity can be maintained, even under the Treaty, if a republican constitution can be enacted. He also cooperates with Michael Collins in promoting Irish Republican Army (IRA) activity in Ulster. In his adherence to the idea of a republic, the practicalities of politics have little impact on his consciousness, and he is dismissive of the popular support for the Treaty. He is horrified at the thought of civil war but fails to see that his position is leading almost inexorably in that direction. Distrusted as too moderate by Liam Mellows and Rory O’Connor, he is locked out of the Four Courts for a time.

When the Four Courts are attacked, Lynch immediately leaves his headquarters at the Clarence Hotel to travel south. He is briefly detained, before reaching Kingsbridge Station, and has a meeting with Eoin O’Duffy. He is disgusted when Free State figures later claim that he was released, having promised not to take arms against the government. The most plausible explanation of the incident appears to be that O’Duffy interpreted Lynch’s comments, merely indicating disappointment that a war had started, as constituting a statement of intent not to involve himself.

Lynch’s initial actions seem designed to avoid full-scale conflict. He does not order an attack on Dublin, nor does he attempt to seize Limerick. He chooses a containment strategy, seeking to hold a line from Limerick to Waterford for the republican forces. This fails, as the government sends troops in from the rear by sea. The republicans have no urban base when Lynch abandons Fermoy on August 11, 1922. He continues to meet individuals who seek a way to end the war, but intransigence has set in, and he insists that armed struggle will only end with a republic or absolute defeat. As early as August many republicans believe the war is lost and urge a reassessment of tactics, but Lynch rejects all such calls. Operating from secret headquarters in Santry, he orders the shooting of pro-Treaty politicians in retaliation for the execution of republican prisoners.

Under war conditions it is impossible for the army executive to meet regularly, and this leaves Lynch in almost complete control. As the pro-surrender lobby grows within the republican forces, he delays a meeting of the executive, claiming with some justification that it is too dangerous. He leaves Santry and attends a meeting of the Southern Division Council in the last days of February 1923. Sixteen of the eighteen officers there tell him that the military position is hopeless. This forces the calling of an executive meeting on March 6, 1923. No agreement is reached. He strongly favours fighting on, but a motion from Tom Barry, calling for an immediate end to hostilities, is barely rejected. Another meeting is arranged for April 10. On that morning a group, including Lynch and Frank Aiken, suddenly find themselves in danger of capture in a farmhouse on the slopes of the Knockmealdown Mountains in County Tipperary. They flee and are pursued. During the chase Lynch is shot in the abdomen. It seems clear that he is shot by the pursuing Free State soldiers, although Irish historian Meda Ryan has considered the theory that he may have been shot by one of his own in order to remove the major stumbling block to surrender. His colleagues are forced to abandon him, and he is captured. Initially the Free State troops believe they have caught Éamon de Valera. He is taken first to a public house in Newcastle, County Tipperary, and then to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Clonmel, but dies from his wound at 8:45 p.m. that evening. His last request is to be buried beside Michael Fitzgerald in Kilcrumper Cemetery, Fermoy, County Cork. On hearing of Lynch’s death, Ernie O’Malley writes, “You who were a living force are now a battle cry.” O’Malley is wrong, however, as the peace faction within republicanism is strengthened by his death and Aiken orders the suspension of activities on April 27.

In 1935, a massive memorial, consisting of a 60-foot-tall round tower, guarded by four bronze Irish Wolfhounds, is erected at Goatenbridge, County Tipperary, near the site of his capture. It is unveiled on April 7, 1935. Separate annual commemorations are held at Goatenbridge and Kilcrumper. Three biographies have been written and the Liam Lynch memorial pipe band is based in his native Anglesboro. The Lynch family possess a substantial collection of private correspondence.


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Birth of Seán Hales, Political Activist & Member of Dáil Éireann

Seán Hales, Irish political activist and member of Dáil Éireann from May 1921 to December 1922, is born in Ballinadee, Bandon, County Cork, on March 30, 1880.

Hales is born John Hales, eldest child of five sons and four daughters of Robert Hales, a farmer, and Margaret (née Fitzgerald) Hales. He is educated at Ballinadee national school and Warner’s Lane school, Bandon. After leaving school he goes to work on his father’s farm. He plays hurling with Valley Rovers GAA club and is the Munster champion in the 56-lb. weight-throwing competition. From an early age he follows in his father’s footsteps and becomes involved in the republican movement.

Hales joins the Irish Volunteers in 1915 and becomes captain of the Ballinadee company in 1916. Arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act after the 1916 Easter Rising, he is imprisoned in Frongoch internment camp in Wales. After his release, in April 1917 he becomes executive of the short-lived Liberty League promoted by Count George Plunkett. When the League merges with Sinn Féin, he helps reorganise the Volunteers. With his brothers, Tom, William, and Donal, he continues his father’s fight on behalf of evicted tenants and becomes involved with the anti-British Bandon People’s Food Committee and the anti-landlord Unpurchased Tenants’ Association. He helps in the Sinn Féin takeover of The Southern Star newspaper and is a member of the new board of directors. In 1919 he becomes battalion commander of the first (Bandon) battalion 3rd Cork Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, the name by which the Irish Volunteers increasingly became known. He leads the attack on Timoleague Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks in February 1920, and the ambush of an Essex Regiment patrol at Brinny in August 1920. The military patrol at Brinny manages to surprise the ambushers and Lieutenant Tim Fitzgerald of Bandon is the first Volunteer to be killed in action in west Cork. Hales then commands the assault on two truckloads of British troops at Newcestown Cross in which a British officer is killed and several soldiers are wounded.

Hales is appointed section commander of the west Cork flying column in 1920 and takes part in the major action at Crossbarry on March 19, 1921. In retaliation for the burning of the Hales home in March 1921, he leads a contingent of Volunteers and burns Castle Bernard, the residence of the Earl of Bandon. The occupant, Lord Bandon, is held hostage until General Strickland, the British OC in Cork, guarantees he will not execute Volunteers in Cork prison. The British authorities yield and there is an end to the policy of executing prisoners of war in the Cork area.

At the 1921 Irish elections, Hales is elected to the Second Dáil as a Sinn Féin member for the Cork Mid, North, South, South East and West constituency.

At the 1922 Irish general election, Hales is elected to the Third Dáil as a pro-Treaty Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for the same constituency. He receives 4,374 first preference votes (7.9%). Shortly afterward, the Irish Civil War breaks out between the pro-Treaty faction, who are in favour of setting up the Irish Free State and the anti-Treaty faction, who would not accept the abolition of the Irish Republic.

On December 7, 1922, Hales is killed by anti-Treaty IRA men as he leaves the Dáil. Another TD, Pádraic Ó Máille, is also shot and badly wounded in the incident. His killing is in reprisal for the Free State’s execution of anti-treaty prisoners. In revenge for Hales’ killing, four republican leaders, Joe McKelvey, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Richard Barrett, are executed the following day, December 8, 1922.

Hales is given a military funeral to the family burial place at St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Bandon.

According to information passed on to playwright Ulick O’Connor, an anti-Treaty IRA volunteer named Owen Donnelly of Glasnevin is responsible for the killing of Hales. Seán Caffrey, an anti-treaty intelligence officer told O’Connor that Donnelly had not been ordered to kill Hales specifically but was following the general order issued by Liam Lynch to shoot all deputies and senators they could who had voted for the Public Safety Act (September 28, 1922) which established military courts with the power to impose the death penalty.

A commemorative statue of Hayes is unveiled at Bank Place in Bandon in 1930.


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Birth of Mike Quill, Irish-American Trade Unionist

Michael Joseph “Red Mike” Quill, one of the founders of the Transport Workers Union of America (TWU), a union founded by subway workers in New York City that expands to represent employees in other forms of transit, is born on September 18, 1905, in Gortloughera, near Kilgarvan, County Kerry.

Quill is the seventh among five sons and three daughters of John Daniel Quill, farmer, of Gortloughera, and Margaret Quill (née Lynch), of Ballyvourney, County Cork. He attends Kilgarvan national school until early adolescence. The family has strong republican sympathies, and he serves with an Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column during the Irish Civil War.

In 1926, Quill emigrates to New York City. After a series of brief jobs, in 1929 he secures employment with the Interborough Rapid Transit Company (IRT) as a subway station change-maker. Attracted to socialism and militant industrial unionism by his reading of James Connolly, in 1933 he is one of a small group of workers seeking to initiate a trade union independent of the IRT’s complacent company union. Comprised largely of ex-IRA men linked by membership of Clan na Gael and the leftist Irish Workers’ Clubs, his group soon joins forces with a New York transit-industry organising effort by the Communist Party, resulting in the launch in April 1934 of the Transport Workers Union (TWU).

With a convivial personality and a flair for oratory, Quill quickly emerges as one of the union’s most effective organisers. During 1935 he leaves his IRT job to work full-time as union organiser. In December 1935 he is elected TWU president, a position he holds until his death. By autumn 1936 the TWU has established a solid base on the IRT and intensifies organisation on New York’s other transit lines: subways, buses, elevated trains, and trolleys. In May 1937 the TWU affiliates with the incipient Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). After winning, mostly by large majorities, a series of union representation elections in May–June 1937, the TWU negotiates closed-shop contracts with various New York transit companies, obtaining for its 30,000 members substantial wage increases and benefits and a work-week reduction to forty-eight hours. The ethnic profile of the TWU, which is colloquially nicknamed “the Irish union,” reflects that of New York’s transit workforce, about half of which is Irish born.

First elected to the New York City Council in November 1937 as candidate of the American Labor Party, Quill serves on the body intermittently until 1949. After 1940 he leads the TWU into expansion outside New York, organising in mass transit in other cities, in airlines, and in railroads. Despite modest membership numbers (135,000 by the mid-1960s), the TWU is the United States‘ largest transit union, and Quill maintains a high public profile, owing to his union’s situation in a key economic sector, its base in the country’s largest city, and the colourful and the controversial features of his personality and politics. The 1940 municipal buy-out of New York’s private subway companies and subsequent evolution of a unified civically operated transport system precipitates a lengthy TWU struggle to establish collective bargaining rights and procedures for the transport workforce as public employees. This campaign, by setting precedents for public-sector union organisation nation-wide, marks Quill’s most enduring legacy to the American labour movement.

Quill denies repeated charges that he is a Communist, while retorting that he would “rather be called a Red by the rats than a rat by the Reds.” Communists hold influential positions at all levels in the TWU until the union’s December 1948 convention, when, after months of rancorous conflict over policy, he secures the expulsion from union office of all Communist Party members. His own politics, nevertheless, remain conspicuously leftist in the America of the 1950s and 1960s, as he condemns both the McCarthyite anti-Red witch-hunt and the Vietnam War. Elected a CIO vice-president in 1950, he eschews redefinition as “a labour statesman,” and advocates a national labour party and nationalisation of major industries. A strenuous opponent of racial discrimination by employers and within trade-union structures, he actively supports the black civil rights movement. He is the only top CIO official to oppose its 1955 merger with the conservative, craft-dominated American Federation of Labor (AFL), which he accuses of “the three Rs” of raiding, racketeering, and racism.

Quill’s final battle is his most dramatic. On January 1, 1966, he defies public-sector anti-strike legislation and a court injunction and leads TWU Local 100 into the first total subway-and-bus strike in New York City history, paralysing traffic for twelve days. Arrested on January 4, Quill, who has a history of serious heart disease, collapses during admission to prison and is transferred to hospital under police custody. On January 13 the strike is settled with a 15 percent wage increase, the highest of Quill’s TWU presidency. On January 28, several days after discharge from hospital, he dies of heart failure in his home. He is interred at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York, after a funeral Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, his casket draped by the Irish tricolor.

Speaking after his death, Martin Luther King Jr. eulogises Quill with the following: “Mike Quill was a fighter for decent things all his life—Irish independence, labor organization, and racial equality. He spent his life ripping the chains of bondage off his fellowman. When the totality of a man’s life is consumed with enriching the lives of others, this is a man the ages will remember—this is a man who has passed on but who has not died. Negroes had desperately needed men like Mike Quill who fearlessly said what was true even when it offended. That is why Negroes shall miss Mike Quill.”

Quill marries Maria Theresa O’Neill of Cahersiveen, County Kerry, in 1937. They have one son. Maria dies in 1959. He then marries Shirley Garry (née Uzin) of Brooklyn, New York, his long-serving administrative assistant, in 1961. They have no children. The Michael J. Quill Centre at Ardtully, Kilgarvan, County Kerry, houses a commemorative museum.

(From: “Quill, Michael Joseph” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie | Pictured: Irish-American Trade Unionist Mike Quill during a visit to the White House in 1938)