Price and her sister, Marian, also an IRA member, are the daughters of Albert Price, a prominent Irish republican and former IRA member from Belfast. Their aunt, Bridie Dolan, is blinded and loses both hands in an accident while handling IRA explosives.
Price becomes involved in Irish republicanism in the late 1960s and she and Marian participate in the Belfast to Derrycivil rights march in January 1969 and are attacked in the Burntollet Bridge incident.
In 1971 Price and her sister join the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). In 1972 she joins an elite group within the IRA called “The Unknowns” commanded by Pat McClure. The Unknowns are tasked with various secretive activities and transport several accused traitors across the border into the Republic of Ireland where they are “disappeared.” She personally states that she had driven Joe Lynskey across the border to face trial. In addition, she states that she, Pat McClure and a third Unknown were tasked with killing Jean McConville, with the third Unknown actually shooting her.
Price leads the car bombing attacks in London on March 8, 1973, which injure over 200 people and is believed to have contributed to the death of one person who suffers a fatal heart attack. The two sisters are arrested, along with Gerry Kelly, Hugh Feeney and six others, on the day of the bombing as they are boarding a flight to Ireland. They are tried and convicted at the Great Hall in Winchester Castle on November 14, 1973. Although originally sentenced to life imprisonment, which is to run concurrently for each criminal charge, their sentence is eventually reduced to 20 years. She serves seven years for her part in the bombing. She immediately goes on a hunger strike demanding to be moved to a prison in Northern Ireland. The hunger strike lasts for 208 days because the hunger strikers are force-fed by prison authorities to keep them alive.
On the back of the hunger-striking campaign, Price’s father contests Belfast West at the February 1974 United Kingdom general election, receiving 5,662 votes (11.9%). The Price sisters, Hugh Feeney, and Gerry Kelly are moved to Northern Ireland prisons in 1975 as a result of an IRA truce. In 1980 she receives the royal prerogative of mercy and is freed on humanitarian grounds in 1981, purportedly suffering from anorexia nervosa due to the invasive trauma of daily force feedings.
After her release in 1980, Price marries Irish actor Stephen Rea, with whom she has two sons, Danny and Oscar. They divorce in 2003.
The Price sisters remain active politically. In the late 1990s, Price and her sister claim that they have been threatened by their former colleagues in the IRA and Sinn Féin for publicly opposing the Good Friday Agreement (i.e. the cessation of the IRA’s military campaign). she is a contributor to The Blanket, an online journal, edited by former Provisional IRA member Anthony McIntyre, until it ceases publication in 2008.
In 2001, Price is arrested in Dublin and charged with possession of stolen prescription pads and forged prescriptions. She pleads guilty and is fined £200 and ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.
In February 2010, it is reported by The Irish News that Price had offered help to the Independent Commission for the Location of Victims’ Remains in locating graves of three men, Joe Lynskey, Seamus Wright, and Kevin McKee. The bodies of Wright and McKee are recovered from a singular grave in County Meath in August 2015. It is unclear if Price played a role in their recovery. The remains of Joe Lynskey have not been recovered as of April 2021.
Price is the subject of the 2018 feature-length documentary I, Dolours in which she gives an extensive filmed interview.
In 2010, Price claims Gerry Adams had been her officer commanding (OC) when she was active in the IRA. Adams, who has always denied being a member of the IRA, denies her allegation. She admits taking part in the murder of Jean McConville, as part of an IRA action in 1972. She claims the murder of McConville, a mother of ten, was ordered by Adams when he was an IRA leader in West Belfast. Adams subsequently publicly further denies Price’s allegations, stating that the reason for them is that she is opposed to the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s abandonment of paramilitary warfare in favour of politics in 1994, in the facilitation of which Adams has been a key figure.
Oral historians at Boston College interview both Price and her fellow IRA paramilitary Brendan Hughes between 2001 and 2006. The two give detailed interviews for the historical record of the activities in the IRA, which are recorded on condition that the content of the interviews is not to be released during their lifetimes. Prior to her death in May 2011, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) subpoena the material, possibly as part of an investigation into the disappearance of a number of people in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. In June 2011, the college files a motion to quash the subpoena. A spokesman for the college states that “our position is that the premature release of the tapes could threaten the safety of the participants, the enterprise of oral history, and the ongoing peace and reconciliation process in Northern Ireland.” In June 2011, U.S. federal prosecutors ask a judge to require the college to release the tapes to comply with treaty obligations with the United Kingdom. On July 6, 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit agrees with the government’s position that the subpoena should stand. On October 17, 2012, the Supreme Court of the United States temporarily blocks the college from handing over the interview tapes. In April 2013, after Price’s death, the Supreme Court turns away an appeal that seeks to keep the interviews from being supplied to the PSNI. The order leaves in place a lower court ruling that orders Boston College to give the Justice Department portions of recorded interviews with Price. Federal officials want to forward the recordings to police investigating the murder of Jean McConville.
Price dies in her Malahide, County Dublin, home on January 23, 2013, from a toxic effect of mixing prescribed sedative and anti-depressant medication. Her body is found the following day. The inquest returns a verdict of death by misadventure. She is buried at Milltown Cemetery in West Belfast.
Barrett is born on December 17, 1889, in Knockacullen (Hollyhill), Ballineen, County Cork, the son of Richard Barrett, farmer, and Ellen Barrett (née Henigan). Educated at Knocks and Knockskagh national schools, he enters the De La Salle College, Waterford, where he trains to be a teacher. Obtaining a first-class diploma, he first teaches at Ballinamult, County Waterford but then returns to Cork in early 1914 to take up a position at the St. Patrick’s Industrial School, Upton. Within months he is appointed principal of Gurrane National School. Devoted to the Irish language and honorary secretary of KnockavillaGAA club, he does much to popularise both movements in the southern and western districts of Cork. He appears to have been a member of the Cork Young Ireland Society.
Through planning and participating in raids and gunrunning episodes, Barrett comes into close contact with many GHQ staff during the Irish War of Independence, thereby ensuring his own rapid promotion. He is an active Irish Republican Army (IRA) brigade staff officer and occasionally acts as commandant of the West Cork III Brigade. He also organises fundraising activities for the purchase of weapons and for comrades on the run. In July 1920, following the arrest of the Cork III Brigade commander Tom Hales and quartermaster Pat Harte, he is appointed its quartermaster. He is arrested on March 22, 1921, and imprisoned in Cork jail, later being sent to Spike Island, County Cork.
As one of the senior officers held in Spike Island, Barrett is involved in many of the incidents that occur during his time there. After the truce is declared on July 11, 1921, some prisoners go on hunger strike, but he calls it off after a number of days on instructions from outside as a decision had been made that able-bodied men are more important to the cause. In November, Barrett escapes by rowboat alongside Moss (Maurice) Twomey, Henry O’Mahoney, Tom Crofts, Bill Quirke, Dick Eddy and Paddy Buckley.
Following the Irish War of Independence, Barrett supports the Anti-Treaty IRA‘s refusal to submit to the authority of Dáil Éireann (civil government of the Irish Republic declared in 1919). He is opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and calls for the total elimination of English influence in Ireland. In April 1922, under the command of Rory O’Connor, he, along with 200 other hardline anti-treaty men, take over the Four Courts building in the centre of Dublin in defiance of the new Irish government. They want to provoke British troops, who are still in the country, into attacking them. They hope this will restart the war with Britain and reunite the IRA against their common enemy. Michael Collins tries desperately to persuade O’Connor and his men to vacate the building. However, on June 28, 1922, after the Four Courts garrison had kidnapped J. J. O’Connell, a general in the new National Army, Collins’s soldiers shell the Four Courts with British artillery to spark off what becomes known as the Battle of Dublin. O’Connor surrenders following two days of fighting, and Barrett, with most of his comrades, is arrested and held in Mountjoy Gaol. This incident marks the official outbreak of the Irish Civil War, as fighting escalates around the country between pro- and anti-treaty factions.
After the death of Michael Collins in an ambush, a period of tit-for-tat revenge killings ensues. The government implements martial law and enacts the necessary legislation to set up military courts. In November, the government begins to execute Anti-Treaty prisoners, including Erskine Childers. In response, Liam Lynch, the Anti-Treaty Chief of Staff, gives an order that any member of the Dáil who had voted for the ‘murder legislation’ is to be shot on sight.
On December 7, 1922, Teachta Dála (TD) Sean 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. An emergency cabinet meeting is allegedly held the next day to discuss the assassination of Hales. It is proposed that four prominent members of the Anti-Treaty side currently held as prisoners be executed as a reprisal and deterrent. The names put forward were Barrett, O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Joe McKelvey. It is alleged that the four are chosen to represent each of the four provinces – Munster, Connacht, Leinster and Ulster respectively, but none of the four is actually from Connacht. The executions are ordered by Minister for JusticeKevin O’Higgins. At 2:00 AM on the morning of December 8, 1922, Barrett is awoken along with the other three and informed that they are all to be executed at 8:00 that morning.
Ironies stack one upon the other. Barrett is a member of the same IRA brigade as Hales during the Anglo-Irish War, and they were childhood friends. O’Connor had been best man at O’Higgins’ wedding a year earlier. The rest of Sean Hales’ family remains staunchly anti-Treaty, and publicly denounces the executions. In reprisal for O’Higgins’ role in the executions, the Anti-Treaty IRA kills his father and burns his family home in Stradbally, County Laois. O’Higgins himself dies by an assassin’s hand on July 10, 1927.
The executions stun Ireland, but in terms of halting the Anti-Treaty assassination policy, they have the desired effect. The Free State government continues to execute enemy prisoners, and 77 official executions take place by the end of the war.
Barrett is now buried in his home county, Cork, following exhumation and reinternment by a later government. A monument is erected by old comrades of the West Cork Brigade, the First Southern Division, IRA, and of the Four Courts, Dublin, garrison in 1922 which is unveiled on December 13, 1952, by the TánaisteSeán Lemass.
After experiencing the political and social turmoil in Ireland after the 1913 Dublin lock-out and the 1916 Easter Rising, Byrne becomes an active member of the Postal Trade Union. In 1918 he loses his position as a telegraph operator in Limerick’s general post office because of his political activities, his attendance at the funeral of John Daly and an anti-conscription meeting at Limerick Town Hall in 1918. In 1919, he holds the rank of battalion adjutant of 2 Battalion, Mid Limerick Brigade of the IRA.
After a raid on Byrne’s home by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), Byrne is arrested and charged for the possession of a revolver with corresponding ammunition and binoculars in front of a court-martial. Because he does not recognize the legitimacy of British Officers holding court over an Irish citizen, he denies entering a plea or even participating in the trial itself. Ignoring his protests, the court finds him guilty and sentences him to twelve months in prison and hard labour. Directly after the verdict is spoken, he is transferred to Limerick Prison to start his sentence.
As a prisoner, Byrne and sixteen other republican prisoners started a campaign, demanding status as political prisoners. As this is denied, they began barricading themselves in their cells, singing republican songs and damaging the interior and furniture of the cells. These protests are so loud that after a short while, onlookers and supporters start gathering outside the prison in support of the prisoners. The RIC reacts to these developments with physical violence and solitary confinement. As a last resort, in February 1919, the prisoners go on hunger strike to continue their protest. After his health deteriorates because of the hunger strike, in mid-March 1919, he is transferred to the Limerick Union Hospital, where he is placed in an ordinary ward under armed guard.
On April 6, 1919, two IRA companies under the lead of John Gallagher (D Company) and Michael Stack (E Company), the only two who bring arms to the rescue attempt, go into the hospital disguised as ordinary visitors and attempt a rescue operation. Around twenty volunteers go to the station on which Byrne is lying and after a signal whistle is blown, attack and attempt to overwhelm the two RIC officers that are posted as guards. The RIC officers quickly realize the attempt and RIC constable James Spillane shoots at Byrne, who wants to stand up from his bed, from close range, hitting him in the lung. Michael Stack, in response, shoots at constable James Spillane, injuring him, and his colleague constable Martin O`Brien, killing him.
The volunteers leave the hospital with the gravely injured Byrne, but the escape car and driver have in the meantime been ordered to another IRA operation. Instead, they stop a horse carriage at Hasset’s Cross. The occupants of the carriage, John Ryan and his wife of Knockalisheen, Meelick, County Clare, bring the bleeding and injured Byrne to their house, put him to bed and call for medical and clerical assistance. Dr. John Holmes arrives and examines Byrne, finding a large bullet wound on the left side of his body, which has perforated his lung and his abdomen. Byrne dies from his wounds in the evening of April 7, 1919.
After Byrne’s body is discovered by the authorities, the RIC place Limerick under martial law and declare it a “Special Military Area.” In response, the trade unions in Limerick start a “general strike against British militarism.” This strike is called the “Limerick Soviet” by foreign journalists who report from Limerick.
On the evening of April 8, 1919, Byrne’s funeral is held. He is not able to be buried in his IRA uniform, because the RIC had removed it from him. Nevertheless, the funeral procession is accompanied by huge crowds and his remains, which lay in state in front of the high altar in St. John’s Cathedral, are visited by thousands from Limerick and surrounding areas.
The first of four paramilitary bombings in the centre of Dublin between November 26, 1972, and January 20, 1973, takes place in the Burgh Quay area of the city on Sunday, November 26, 1972. A total of three civilians are killed and 185 people are injured in the four bombings.
The bombings occur at the end of what is the bloodiest year in the entire 30-year-old religious-political conflict known as the Troubles, which had erupted at the end of the 1960s. Many of the bombs that detonate in Northern Ireland and the ingredients used to make them (mostly stolen from Irish construction sites provided to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by local sympathisers) originate from the Republic of Ireland, where the IRA Southern Command, headquartered in Dublin, is located and tasked in recruiting and training volunteers and manufacturing weapons for operations in the North and to provide shelter for fleeing IRA members from British security forces who are not permitted to enter the country.
No group ever claims responsibility for the attacks and nobody is ever charged in connection with the bombings. The November 26 bombing in Burgh Quay is possibly carried out by former associates of the Littlejohn brothers who are Secret Intelligence Service provocateurs, in a successful attempt to provoke an Irish government clampdown against the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), while the other three bombings are possibly perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries, specifically the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), with British military or intelligence assistance.
The first of the four bombs explodes at 1:25 a.m. on November 26, 1972, outside the rear exit door of the Film Centre Cinema, O’Connell Bridge House, during a late night showing of a film. The bomb goes off in the laneway connecting Burgh Quay with Leinster Market injuring 40 people, some very badly, including facial, leg and serious bowel wounds. There are 156 patrons and three employees inside the cinema at the time of the blast, although there are no fatalities. The force of the explosion hurls customers out of their seats and onto the floor. There is much panic as people, fearing a second bomb might explode in their midst, rush to escape from the crowded cinema. Shops and buildings in the immediate vicinity receive extensive damage.
The area is sealed off by the Garda Síochána and they launch an investigation. A ballistic officer determines that the explosion’s epicentre had been on a doorstep outside an emergency door leading to the laneway. However, no trace of the bomb or explosives used are ever found at the scene. The Gardaí interviews a number of witnesses who came forward alleging to have seen the bombers in the laneway prior to the explosion and although photofits of the suspects are drawn up, the bombers are never apprehended. The Garda believes the bombing was carried out by republican subversives, including former associates of the Littlejohn brothers.
The night following the bombing an eight-man IRA unit unsuccessfully attempts to free Provisional IRA Chief of StaffSeán Mac Stíofáin, who had been taken to Dublin’s Mater Hospital for treatment due to adverse effects of his hunger and thirst strike on his health. The ward in which he is kept is under heavy police guard. The armed IRA unit exchanges shots with two members of the Garda Special Branch. One detective, two civilians and one IRA volunteer suffer minor injuries from gunfire.
(Pictured: The O’Connell Bridge House, 2 D’Olier Street, Dublin, where a bomb was detonated outside the rear exit door of the Film Centre Cinema)
O’Sullivan is a member of the Irish Republican Army and is one of three IRA men to die on hunger strike in 1923. IRA VolunteersJoseph Whitty from Wexford dies on September 2, 1923, and Denny Barry from Riverstick, County Cork, dies on November 20, 1923, in the Curragh Camp hospital. Whitty, Barry and O’Sullivan are three of the twenty-two Irish Republicans in the 20th century who die on hunger strike.
O’Sullivan is born in Denbawn, County Cavan, in 1882, the eldest of eight children. His father, Michael Sorohan, emigrates to the United States but returns to take over the family farm. O’Sullivan works on the family farm but wins a scholarship provided by the local newspaper, The Anglo-Celt, to Monaghan Agricultural College. From there he wins another scholarship to the Royal Albert College in Dublin and attends the college as a full-time student from 1907 to 1909. He graduates as one of the top students in his year and is also elected head of the student union, the highest elected position in the college. In addition, he is secretary of the college hurling team which is undefeated after fourteen games in 1909.
In 1909, O’Sullivan gets a job as an agricultural instructor in the Mallow area of County Cork. In addition to educating and advising local farmers on crops and new techniques, he also judges local agricultural shows.
O’Sullivan is a captain in the IRA in the intelligence unit during the Irish War of Independence. He begins his intelligence activities in 1917 using the code name W.N. – the last 2 letters of his first and last name.
During the Irish Civil War O’Sullivan is officer commanding (OC) Administration in the North Cork area and later in the IRA’s 1st Southern Cork Division, where he had been appointed by Liam Lynch. He dedicates his life to the establishment of an Irish Republic: “His ideal and his goal was a Republic, and he went straight ahead working to achieve it. Nothing else bothered him.” After the signing of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, he joins the anti-treaty side during the Irish Civil War.
During the Irish Civil War, O’Sullivan is arrested by Free State forces and interned in Mountjoy Prison. In 1923, after the end of the war, thousands of interned Irish republicans protest being held without trial, poor prison conditions and being treated as convicts rather than political prisoners. On October 13, 1923, Michael Kilroy, the OC of the IRA prisoners in Mountjoy Prison, announces that 300 men will go on hunger strike. This action starts the 1923 Irish hunger strikes. Within days, thousands of Irish republican prisoners are on hunger strike in multiple prisons and internment camps across Ireland. The mass hunger strike of 1923 starts at midnight on October 14, 1923. Previously, the Free State government had passed a motion outlawing the release of prisoners on hunger strike. However, because of the large numbers of Republicans on strike, at the end of October, the Government sends a delegation to speak with the IRA leadership. On November 23, 1923, the day after o’Sullivan’s death, the 41-day hunger strike is called off, setting in motion a release program for many of the prisoners. However, some are not released until as late as 1932.
O’Sullivan dies at the age of 41 on November 22, 1923, in St. Bricin’s Military Hospital, Dublin, after 40 days on hunger strike. He is buried in the republican plot in Saint Gobnait’s Cemetery, Goulds Hill, Mallow, County Cork, on November 27, 1923. His funeral cortège is reported to be a mile in length.
O’Sullivan’s name is commemorated on a statue that stands outside Cavan Courthouse in Farnham Street, Cavan, County Cavan.
O’Connor is the eldest son of Thomas O’Connor, an Athlone shopkeeper, and his wife Teresa (née Power), the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Connaught Rangers. He is educated at The College of the Immaculate Conception in Athlone, and Queen’s College Galway, where he wins scholarships in history and modern languages and builds up a reputation as an orator, serving as auditor of the college’s Literary and Debating Society.
O’Connor enters journalism as a junior reporter on Saunders’ Newsletter, a Dublin journal, in 1867. In 1870, he moves to London and is appointed a sub-editor on The Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War. He later becomes London correspondent for the New York Herald. He compiles the society magazine Mainly About People (M.A.P.) from 1898 to 1911.
O’Connor is elected Member of Parliament for Galway Borough in the 1880 United Kingdom general election, as a representative of the Home Rule League, which is under the leadership of William Shaw, though virtually led by Charles Stewart Parnell, who wins the party’s leadership a short time later. At the next general election in 1885, he is returned both for Galway Borough and for the Liverpool Scotland constituencies, which has a large Irish population. He chooses to sit for Liverpool and represents that constituency in the House of Commons from 1885 until his death in 1929. He remains the only British MP from an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected to a constituency outside of the island of Ireland. He continues to be re-elected in Liverpool under this label unopposed in the 1918, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections, despite the declaration of a de factoIrish Republic in early 1919, and the establishment by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty of a quasi-independent Irish Free State in late 1922.
From 1905, O’Connor belongs to the central leadership of the United Irish League. During much of his time in parliament, he writes a nightly sketch of proceedings there for The Pall Mall Gazette. He becomes “Father of the House,” with unbroken service of 49 years, 215 days. The Irish Nationalist Party ceases to exist effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter he effectively sits as an independent. On April 13, 1920, he warns the House of Commons that the death on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe will galvanise opinion in Ireland and unite all Irishmen in opposition to British rule.
O’Connor founds and is the first editor of several newspapers and journals: The Star, the Weekly Sun (1891), The Sun (1893), M.A.P. and T.P.’s Weekly (1902). In August 1906, he is instrumental in the passing by Parliament of the Musical Copyright Act 1906, also known as the T.P. O’Connor Bill, following many of the popular music writers at the time dying in poverty due to extensive piracy by gangs during the piracy crisis of sheet music in the early 20th century. The gangs often buy a copy of the music at full price, copy it, and resell it, often at half the price of the original. The film I’ll Be Your Sweetheart (1945), commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, is based on the events of the day.
O’Connor is appointed as the second president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1916 and appears in front of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry (1916), set up by the National Council of Public Morals where he outlines the BBFC’s position on protecting public morals by listing forty-three infractions, from the BBFC 1913–1915 reports, on why scenes in a film may be cut. He is appointed to the Privy Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world’s oldest journalists’ organisation. It continues to honour him by having a T.P. O’Connor charity fund.
In 1885, O’Connor marries Elizabeth Paschal, the daughter of a judge of the Supreme Court of Texas.
Ó Brádaigh is born into a middle-class republican family. His father, Matt Brady, is an IRA volunteer who is severely wounded in an encounter with the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in 1919. His mother, May Caffrey, is a Cumann na mBan volunteer and a 1922 graduate of University College Dublin (UCD). His father dies when he is ten and is given a paramilitary funeral led by his former IRA colleagues. His mother, prominent as the Secretary for the County Longford Board of Health, lives until 1974. He is educated at Melview National School at primary level and attends secondary school at St. Mel’s College, leaving in 1950, and graduates from University College Dublin in 1954. That year he takes a job teaching Irish language at Roscommon Vocational School in Roscommon. He is a deeply religious Catholic who refrains from smoking or drinking.
Ó Brádaigh joins Sinn Féin in 1950. While at university, in 1951, he joins the Irish Republican Army. In September 1951, he marches with the IRA at the unveiling of the Seán Russell monument in Fairview Park, Dublin. A teacher by profession, he is also a Training Officer for the IRA. In 1954, he is appointed to the Military Council of the IRA, a subcommittee set up by the IRA Army Council in 1950 to plan a military campaign against Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) barracks in Northern Ireland.
On August 13, 1955, Ó Brádaigh leads a ten-member IRA group in an arms raid on Hazebrouck Barracks, near Arborfield, Berkshire, England, a depot for the No. 5 Radar Training Battalion of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. It is the biggest IRA arms raid in Britain. Most, if not all, of the weapons are recovered in a relatively short period of time. A van, traveling too fast, is stopped by the police and IRA personnel are arrested. Careful police work leads to weapons that had been transported in a second van and stored in London.
The IRA Border Campaign commences on December 12, 1956. As an IRA General Headquarters Staff (GHQ) officer, Ó Brádaigh is responsible for training the Teeling Column in the west of Ireland. During the Campaign, he serves as second-in-command of the Teeling Column. On December 30, 1956, he partakes in the Teeling Column attack on RUC barracks in Derrylin, County Fermanagh. RUC Constable John Scally is killed in the attack and is the first fatality of the new IRA campaign. Ó Brádaigh and others are arrested by the Garda Síochána across the border in County Cavan the day after the attack. They are tried and jailed for six months in Mountjoy Prison. A leading abstentionist, upon his arrest he refuses to recognize the authority of the Irish government and refuses to renounce violence in exchange for his release.
Upon completing his prison sentence, Ó Brádaigh is immediately interned at the Curragh Camp along with other republicans. On September 27, 1958, he escapes from the camp along with Dáithí Ó Conaill. While a football match is in progress, the pair cuts through a wire fence and escapes from the camp under a camouflage grass blanket. This is an official escape, authorised by the officer commanding (OC) of the IRA internees, Tomás Óg Mac Curtain. He is the first Sinn Féin TD on the run since the 1920s.
In October 1958, Ó Brádaigh becomes the IRA Chief of Staff, a position he holds until May 1959, when Seán Cronin is elected as his replacement. He is arrested in November 1959, refuses to answer questions, and is jailed in Mountjoy Prison under the Offences against the State Act. He is released in May 1960 and, after Cronin is arrested, again becomes Chief of Staff. Although he always emphasises that it is a collective declaration, he is the primary author of the statement ending the IRA Border Campaign in 1962. At the IRA 1962 Convention he indicates that he is not interested in continuing as Chief of Staff.
After Ó Brádaigh’s arrest in December 1956, he takes a leave from teaching at Roscommon Vocational School. He is re-instated and begins teaching again in late 1962, just after he is succeeded by Cathal Goulding in the position of Chief of Staff of the IRA. He remains an active member of Sinn Féin and is also a member of the IRA Army Council throughout the decade.
Ó Brádaigh opposes the decision of the IRA and Sinn Féin to drop abstentionism and to recognise the Westminster parliament in London, the Stormont parliament in Belfast and the Leinster House parliament in 1969/1970. On January 11, 1970, along with Seán Mac Stíofáin, he leads the walkout from the 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis after the majority votes to end the policy of abstentionism, although the vote to change the Sinn Féin constitution fails to receive the required two-thirds majority. The delegates who walk out reconvene at the Kevin Barry Hall in Parnell Square, Dublin, and establish Provisional Sinn Féin.
Ó Brádaigh is voted chairman of the Caretaker Executive of Provisional Sinn Féin. That October, he formally becomes president of the party. He holds this position until 1983. In his presidential address to the 1971 Provisional Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, he says that the first step to achieving a United Ireland is to make Northern Ireland ungovernable. He apparently also serves on the Army Council or the executive of the Provisional Irish Republican Army until he is seriously injured in a car accident on January 1, 1984.
On May 31, 1972, Ó Brádaigh is arrested under the Offences Against the State Act and immediately commences a hunger strike. A fortnight later the charges against him are dropped and he is released. With Dáithí Ó Conaill he develops the Éire Nua policy, which is launched on June 28, 1972. The policy calls for a federal Ireland.
On December 3, 1972, Ó Brádaigh appears on the London Weekend TelevisionWeekend World programme. He is arrested by the Gardaí again on December 29, 1972, and charged in the newly established Special Criminal Court with Provisional IRA membership. In January 1973 he is the first person convicted under the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1972 and is sentenced to six months in the Curragh Camp.
On December 10, 1974, Ó Brádaigh participates in the Feakle talks between the IRA Army Council and Sinn Féin leadership and the leaders of the Protestant churches in Ireland. Although the meeting is raided and broken up by the Gardaí, the Protestant churchmen pass on proposals from the IRA leadership to the British government. These proposals call on the British government to declare a commitment to withdraw, the election of an all-Ireland assembly to draft a new constitution and an amnesty for political prisoners.
The IRA subsequently calls a “total and complete” ceasefire intended to last from December 22, 1974, to January 2, 1975, to allow the British government to respond to proposals. British government officials also hold talks with Ó Brádaigh in his position as president of Sinn Féin from late December to January 17, 1975.
On February 10, 1975, the IRA Army Council, unanimously endorses an open-ended cessation of IRA “hostilities against Crown forces,” which becomes known as the 1975 truce. The IRA Chief of Staff at the time is Seamus Twomey of Belfast. It is reported in some quarters that the IRA leaders mistakenly believe they had persuaded the British Government to withdraw from Ireland and the protracted negotiations between themselves and British officials are the preamble to a public declaration of intent to withdraw. In fact, as British government papers now show, the British entertain talks with the IRA in the hope that this would fragment the movement further and score several intelligence coups during the talks. This bad faith embitters many in the republican movement, and another ceasefire does not happen until 1994.
In late December 1976, along with Joe Cahill, Ó Brádaigh meets two representatives of the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (ULCCC), John McKeague and John McClure, at the request of the latter body. Their purpose is to try to find a way to accommodate the ULCCC proposals for an independent Northern Ireland with the Sinn Féin’s Éire Nua programme. It is agreed that if this can be done, a joint Loyalist-Republican approach can then be made to request the British government to leave Ireland. Desmond BoalQC and Seán MacBrideSC are requested and accepted to represent the loyalist and republican positions. For months they have meetings in various places including Paris. The dialogue eventually collapses when Conor Cruise O’Brien, then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and vociferous opponent of the Provisional IRA, becomes aware of it and condemns it on RTÉ Radio. As the loyalists had insisted on absolute secrecy, they feel unable to continue with the talks as a result.
In the aftermath of the 1975 truce, the Ó Brádaigh/Ó Conaill leadership comes under severe criticism from a younger generation of activists from Northern Ireland, headed by Gerry Adams, who becomes a vice-president of Sinn Féin in 1978. By the early 1980s, Ó Brádaigh’s position as president of Sinn Féin is openly under challenge and the Éire Nua policy is targeted in an effort to oust him. The policy is rejected at the 1981 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis and finally removed from the Sinn Féin constitution at the 1982 Ard Fheis. At the following year’s Ard Fheis, Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill resign from their leadership positions, voicing opposition to the dropping of the Éire Nua policy by the party.
On November 2, 1986, the majority of delegates to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis vote to drop the policy of abstentionism if elected to Dáil Éireann, but not the British House of Commons or the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont, thus ending the self-imposed ban on Sinn Féin elected representatives from taking seats at Leinster House. Ó Brádaigh and several supporters walk out and immediately assemble at Dublin’s West County Hotel and set up Republican Sinn Féin (RSF). As an ordinary member, he had earlier spoken out against the motion (resolution 162) in an impassioned speech. The Continuity IRA becomes publicly known in 1996. Republican Sinn Féin’s relationship with the Continuity IRA is similar to the relationship between Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA when Ó Brádaigh was Sinn Féin’s president.
Ó Brádaigh believes RSF to be the sole legitimate continuation of the pre-1986 Sinn Féin, arguing that RSF has kept the original Sinn Féin constitution. RSF readopts and enhances his Éire Nua policy. His party has electoral success in only a few local elections.
Ó Brádaigh remains a vociferous opponent of the Good Friday Agreement, viewing it as a programme to copperfasten Irish partition and entrench sectarian divisions in the north. He condemns his erstwhile comrades in Provisional Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA for decommissioning weapons while British troops remain in the country. In his opinion, “the Provo sell-out is the worst yet – unprecedented in Irish history.” He condemns the Provisional IRA’s decision to seal off a number of its arms dumps as “an overt act of treachery,” “treachery punishable by death” under IRA General Army Order Number 11.
In July 2005, Ó Brádaigh hands over a portion of his personal political papers detailing discussions between Irish Republican leaders and representatives of the British Government during 1974–1975 to the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway.
In September 2009, Ó Brádaigh announces his retirement as leader of Republican Sinn Féin. His successor is Des Dalton. He is also a long-standing member of the Celtic League, an organization which fosters cooperation between the Celtic people and promotes the culture, identity and eventual self-determination for the people, in the form of six sovereign states, for the Celtic nations – Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Scotland, Isle of Man and Ireland.
After suffering a period of ill-health, Ó Brádaigh dies on June 5, 2013, at Roscommon County Hospital. His funeral is attended by 1,800 mourners including Fine Gael TD Frank Feighan and is policed by the Garda Emergency Response Unit and Gardaí in riot gear, for “operational reasons,” a show of force believed to have been to deter the republican tradition of firing a three-volley salute of shots over the final place of rest during the graveyard oration. As a result, there are some minor scuffles between gardai and mourners.
Seán MacManus, Sinn Féin politician, is elected Mayor of Sligo on July 3, 2000. He is the national chairperson of the party from 1984 to 1990.
MacManus is born in 1950 near Blacklion, County Cavan, and moves to London in the 1960s to find work. There he meets and marries Helen McGovern, a native of Glenfarne, County Leitrim. In 1976, he returns to Ireland and settled in the Maugheraboy area of Sligo, County Sligo, so that their family of two boys can be educated in Ireland.
Still based in Maugheraboy, MacManus is involved in Irish Republican politics since the early 1970s and is secretary of the County Sligo Anti-H-Block Committee which campaigns in support of the republican prisoners hunger strikes of 1980/81. He becomes a member of the Sinn Féin Ard Comhairle (National Executive) in 1982 and remains there for over twenty years. He is elected as the first Sinn Féin National Chairperson from 1984 until 1990. After the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire in 1994 he is part of the first Sinn Féin delegation to meet with the British government in over seventy years. He is also involved in the protracted negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement.
First elected to Sligo Corporation (now Sligo Borough Council) in 1994, MacManus remains until its abolition in May 2014. He is also elected to Sligo County Council in 1999 and is re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014. He steps down from elected politics in February 2017 being replaced by his son, Chris MacManus.
On July 3, 2000, MacManus is elected Mayor of Sligo, the first Sinn Féin Mayor in the Republic of Ireland since the beginning of the Troubles in 1969. He is also elected mayor in 2003. Sinn Féin PresidentGerry Adams says the election of McManus is a sign of “Sinn Féin’s rise as an active campaigning alternative in politics in the 26 counties”.
MacManus has two sons. Chris MacManus, the youngest, is also an elected member of Sligo Borough Council (1999–2014) and Sligo County Council (2017–2020) and is an MEP since March 2020. His eldest son, Joseph MacManus, was an IRA volunteer who was killed in a firefight against an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier in Belleek, County Fermanagh, in February 1992.
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 communistMember 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 FéinTeachta 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)
Lehane is the only surviving child of Denis Lehane, an excise officer originally from County Cork, and his wife Mary (née Connolly), a native of the Falls Road, Belfast. He grows up in an Irish-speaking household. Joseph Connolly, the senator, is his uncle on his mother’s side, while Michael O’Lehane, the trade unionist, is his uncle on his father’s side. His family emigrates to Hartlepool, in County Durham, England, in 1912, and then to Dublin in 1920. He is educated at Synge Street CBS and University College Dublin (UCD), where he studies Law and qualifies as a solicitor. He marries Marie O’Neill in 1937, and they have a son and two daughters.
As a solicitor, Lehane takes to defending members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the Irish Courts. In 1927 he obtains permission for IRA prisoners to speak privately to their solicitors from the Irish High Court. He is active in other republican and nationalist circles. He is a member of the Moibhí Branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, and by the 1930s appears to become active in the IRA itself. In 1931 he is involved in Saor Éire, an attempt by the Irish left-wing to create a communist political party that would be linked to the IRA.
Lehane is a member of the IRA’s arms committee and in 1935 he is sentenced to 18-months’ imprisonment by the Military Tribunal for his membership of the IRA.
Lehane is an actor and has a keen interest in Irish language theatre. A committed Irish speaker, Lehane is at home in it, whether on radio, stage or in street conversation. He is one of the leading actors of the Irish Language Theatre Company between 1943 and 1958. He is a member of Dublin City Council and of the Citizens for Civil Liberties committee.
In 1977, the remains of Frank Ryan, one of the leading left-wing Republicans of the 1930s, are repatriated from East Germany, and Lehane delivers the eulogy.
seamus dubhghaill 