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Death of Stephen Lucius Gywnn, Writer & Politician

Stephen Lucius Gwynn, Irish journalist, biographer, author, poet and Protestant Nationalist politician, dies on June 11, 1950, at Terenure, Dublin. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) he represents Galway Borough as its Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1918. He serves as a British Army officer in France during World War I and is a prominent proponent of Irish involvement in the Allied war effort. He founds the Irish Centre Party in 1919, but his moderate nationalism is eclipsed by the growing popularity of Sinn Féin.

Gwynn is born in St. Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, where his father John Gwynn (1827–1917), a biblical scholar and Church of Ireland clergyman, is warden. His mother, Lucy Josephine (1840–1907), is the daughter of the Irish nationalist William Smith O’Brien. He is the eldest of ten children (eight brothers and two sisters). Shortly after his birth the family moves to Ramelton in County Donegal to the parish where his father has been appointed parson. He later becomes Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

Gwynn spends his early childhood in rural County Donegal, which is to shape his later view of Ireland. He attends Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as scholar, in 1884 he is awarded first-class honours in classical moderations and in 1886 literae humaniores. During term holidays he returns to Dublin, where he meets several of the political and literary figures of the day.

After graduating, Gwynn spends ten years from 1886 tutoring as a schoolmaster, for a time in France, which creates a lifelong interest in French culture, as expressed in his Praise of France (1927). By 1896 he has developed an interest in writing, becoming a writer and journalist in London focused on English themes, until he comes into contact with the emerging Irish literary revival, when he serves as secretary of the Irish Literary Society.

This is the beginning of a long and prolific career as a writer covering a wide range of literary genres, from poetry and biographical subjects to general historical works. The eighteenth century is Gwynn’s particular specialism. He writes numerous books on travel and on the topography of his own homeland, as well as on his other interests: wine, eighteenth-century painting and fishing.

Gwynn returns to Ireland in 1904 when he enters politics. In the 1906 Galway Borough by-election he wins a seat for Galway Borough, which he represents as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party until 1918. During this period, he is active in the Gaelic League and is one of the few Irish MPs to have close links to the Irish literary revival. Along with Joseph Maunsel Hone and George Roberts he founds the Dublin publishing house of Maunsel and Company. He is opposed to the demand for the Irish language to be a compulsory subject for matriculation. He supports the campaign which wins the establishment of a Catholic university when he serves on the Irish University Royal Commission in 1908. During the debate on the third Home Rule Bill, and at the request of his party leader John Redmond, he writes The case for Home Rule (1911) and is in charge of much of the party’s official publicity and its replies to criticism from Sinn Féin.

On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Gwynn strongly supports Redmond’s encouragement of Irish nationalists and the Irish National Volunteers to support the Allied and British war effort by enlisting in Irish regiments of the Irish Divisions, especially as a means to ensure the implementation of the suspended Home Rule Act at the end of an expectedly short war. Now over fifty, he enlists in January 1915 with the 7th Leinster Regiment in the 16th (Irish) Division. In July he is commissioned as a captain in the 6th (Service) Battalion, Connaught Rangers and serves with them on the Western Front at Messines, the Somme and elsewhere.

Gwynn is one of five Irish Nationalist MPs who enlist and serve in the army, the others being John L. Esmonde, Willie Redmond, William Redmond and D. D. Sheehan, as well as former MP Tom Kettle. Together with Kettle and William Redmond, he undertakes a recruitment drive for the Irish divisions, co-operating with Kettle on a collection of ballads called Battle Songs for the Irish Brigade (1915). He is made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in July 1915. In 1916, he is appointed to the Dardanelles Commission.

Recalled to Ireland in late 1917 to participate in the Irish Convention chaired by Sir Horace Plunkett, Gwynn sides with the Redmondite faction of the Irish Party in supporting a compromise with the southern unionists in an attempt to reach consensus on a Home Rule settlement which would avoid partition. On the death of Redmond in March 1918, he takes over as leader of the moderate nationalists in the Convention. He opposes the threat of compulsory military service during the Conscription Crisis of 1918, though as a member of the Irish Recruiting Council he continues to support voluntary recruitment, encountering intense opposition led by Sinn Féin.

Gwynn forms the Irish Centre Party in 1919 and stands unsuccessfully as an Independent Nationalist for Dublin University in the 1918 Irish general election. The party merges with Plunkett’s Irish Dominion League to press for a settlement by consent on the basis of dominion status, but Gwynn subsequently breaks with Plunkett due to his willingness to accept partition as a temporary compromise. The polarities which divide Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War increasingly sideline his brand of moderate cultural nationalism. Although he supports the newly emergent nation, he equally condemns some of the excesses, such as the burning of houses belonging to Free State senators.

Gwynn’s personal life also becomes complicated at this stage and around 1920. He has a romantic association with married artist Grace Henry who is perhaps the best-known female artist in Ireland at the time. During this period, he and Grace travel in France and Italy and at various stages in his life she painted portraits of him including a very distinguished looking one of him in his late 60s or early 70s. Their relationship contributes significantly to the separation of Henry from her artist husband Paul Henry in 1930.

During the 1920s, Gwynn also devotes himself to writing, covering political events as Irish correspondent to The Observer and The Times. Later in his career, he writes some substantial works, and together with his son Denis Gwynn (The Life of John Redmond, 1932) does much to shape the retrospective image and self-justification of John Redmond. In the mid-1930s he authors three books with a connecting theme of fishing with the artist Roy Beddington serving as illustrator: The Happy Fisherman (1936), From River to River (1937), and Two in a Valley (1938).

Gwynn is awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the National University of Ireland in 1940, and a Litt.D. by the University of Dublin in 1945. The Irish Academy of Letters awards him the Gregory Medal in April 1950. In his literary writings he stands for a humanism and tolerance, which qualities, due to political upheavals, were relatively rare in the Ireland of his day.

Gwynn dies on June 11, 1950, at his home in Terenure, Dublin, and is buried at Tallaght Cemetery, south County Dublin.

Gwynn marries his cousin Mary Louisa (d. 1941), daughter of Rev. James Gwynn. She later converts to Catholicism. They have three sons and two daughters who are brought up in her religion, of whom Aubrey (1892–1983) becomes a Jesuit priest and professor of medieval history at University College Dublin (UCD). Their second son, Denis Rolleston (1893–1971), is professor of modern Irish history at University College Cork (UCC).

Gwynn’s brother Edward John (1868–1941) becomes provost of Trinity College and another brother Robert Malcolm becomes its senior dean. His sister Lucy Gwynn is the first woman registrar of Trinity. A third brother, Charles, has a successful career in the British Army and retires as a Major General. Younger brothers Lucius and Jack are noted cricketers.


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Birth of Cathal O’Byrne, Antiquarian, Writer & Entertainer

Cathal O’Byrne, an antiquarian, writer, and entertainer, is born on June 1, 1876, in Kilkeel, County Down.

O’Byrne is the son of James Burns, a farmer, and his wife Isabella (née Arnett). His biographer states that his parents came from County Wicklow, which would imply that their name had been anglicised from the form “O’Byrne,” which their son readopts. He never marries and spends most of his life living with his unmarried sister Teresa. He has other siblings, as he is survived by four nieces and two nephews.

O’Byrne’s childhood is spent in the Balmoral district of south Belfast in a comfortable but slightly precarious middle-class Catholic environment. Although sparse in direct autobiographical references, his writings contain references to excursions around the Malone and Stranmillis areas, with particular reference to the Botanic Gardens. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College. After leaving school, he manages a spirit grocery on the Beersbridge Road in east Belfast and is active in the Sexton Debating Society, named after Thomas Sexton, then home rule MP for Belfast West, and led by Joseph Devlin, who remains a lifelong friend despite their later political differences. He also studiess music with Carl Hardebeck, acquiring an extensive knowledge of Irish folk music and becoming an accomplished singer of Irish tunes in Hardebeck’s arrangements.

O’Byrne subsequently joins the Belfast Gaelic League, becoming a leading member, though he never masters the Irish language. He moves in the literary and antiquarian circles around Francis Joseph Bigger, whose friendship becomes central to his career and self-definition. He is a regular participant in Bigger’s soirées and establishes friendships with many prominent political and cultural figures, among them Roger Casement and Alice Milligan. Although he is usually seen as a specifically northern writer, he draws extensively on a wider Irish tradition of defensively self-glorifying Catholic-nationalist antiquarianism, including the works of W. H. Grattan Flood and Archbishop of Tuam, John Healy, a major source for his later pamphlet on Saint Patrick and for the descriptions of Ulster monasteries in As I Roved Out: A Book of the North (1946).

In 1900, O’Byrne publishes a collection of verses, A Jug of Punch, of which no copies are known to survive, and in 1905 collaborates with Cahir Healy on another collection, The Lane of the Thrushes, which applies Celtic revival imagery to rural Ulster. He publishes another collection, The Grey Feet of the Wind, in 1917. The manuscript of his unpublished Collected Poems (1951) is in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

In 1902, O’Byrne gives up the spirit grocery to work full time as a journalist, singer, and storyteller. He appears at a wide variety of concerts, where he cuts a striking figure in Gaelic dress with saffron kilt. He provides musical interludes at productions by the Ulster Literary Theatre, and his recitation of Eleanor Alexander’s humorous piece on the battle of Scarva inspires Harry Morrow’s celebrated satirical play Thompson in Tir-na-nOg (1912). In 1913, he founds and manages the Celtic Players, a theatre company which stages some plays of his own composition, including The Dream of Bredyeen Dara, possibly a nativity story incorporating Saint Brigid of Kildare.

During World War I O’Byrne achieves immense cross-community success with a weekly dialect column in the Unionist paper Ireland’s Saturday Night, describing the domestic activities of “Mrs. Twigglety” and her working-class friends. At the same time, he has abandoned his earlier support for Devlin’s home rule politics to embrace physical-force republicanism under the influence of Denis McCullough. During Casement’s imprisonment and trial, he carries on an intense correspondence with him, comforting him, urging him to convert to Catholicism, and sending him religious icons. Some commentators have detected homoerotic undertones in their exchanges, though this is a matter of opinion.

After the Easter Rising of 1916, O’Byrne is active in the reconstituted Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in 1919–20 he smuggles arms from Belfast to Dublin. In August 1920, he emigrates to the United States, where he goes on a six-month lecture tour to raise funds for victims of the Belfast pogroms. He allegedly raises $100,000 and funds the construction of Amcomri Street in west Belfast. He spends the next eight years in the United States as a speaker and entertainer, contributing to American Catholic publications. He develops an abiding fondness for Chicago and considers applying for American citizenship. At one point he corresponds with the film star Rudolph Valentino, who admires his verses on Italian themes.

O’Byrne returns to Belfast in September 1928 with the intention of opening a bookshop in Dublin, but this has to be abandoned after the loss of his savings in the Wall Street crash of October 1929. He settles into respectable semi-poverty in Cavendish Street, off the Falls Road, and remains a presence on the fringes of Belfast literary life. In 1930, he founds the Cathal O’Byrne Comedy Company, which performs plays of his own composition, notably the slight comedies The Returned Swank and The Burden, drawing on The Drone, by Samuel Waddell. In 1932, he sings at a concert in the Dublin Mansion House held to mark the Eucharistic Congress. He writes extensively for Catholic publications in Ireland and elsewhere, in particular the Capuchin Annual, Irish Monthly, and Irish Rosary, and publishes several pamphlets with the Catholic Truth Society (CTS). The sensibility displayed in these writings has much in common with that of Brian O’Higgins, Aodh de Blácam, Daniel Corkery and Gearoid Ó Cuinneagáin.

O’Byrne also publishes The Gaelic Source of the Brontë Genius (1932), Pilgrim in Italy (1930), and the story collection From Far Green Hills (1935), which retells gospel episodes in the style of an Irish storyteller with elements of Wildean orientalist exoticism. Pilgrim in Italy is published by the Three Candles Press of Colm Ó Lochlainn, an old friend through the Bigger circle, as is his last story collection, Ashes on the Hearth (1948), a series of slight reveries in which the narrator, wandering the back streets of Dublin, relives such resonant moments as the last days of James Clarence Mangan.

O’Byrne is best remembered, however, for As I Roved Out (1946), a collection of 128 articles on Belfast history originally published from the late 1930s in the Belfast Irish News. It displays considerable knowledge of Belfast history, drawn from lifelong reading and from conversations with Bigger, and can be seen as at once the summation of and a lament for the northern branch of the Irish revival associated with such figures as Bigger and Alice Milligan. The pieces, moving out from central Belfast to surrounding rural districts are held together by the storyteller surveying the landscape. Surveys of Belfast by journalistic flâneurs are not unprecedented, O’Byrne dismisses the mercantile and unionist establishment of Belfast as hopelessly materialistic and oppressive, casting himself and, by implication, his Catholic/nationalist readers as internal exiles forced into the side streets of history, treasuring a martyred religious faith and gazing back wistfully to the bright and fleeting hope represented by the Society of United Irishmen and the cultural revival. The book is punctuated by expressions of anger against the whole heritage of the Ulster plantation. The economic success of the planters is attributed solely to their plunder of the natives. The textile industry is discussed solely in terms of exploitation and starvation wages. Shipbuilding is dismissed with a remark that ships were built in Ulster long before the planters arrived. Finally, the history of Belfast is summed up in the confrontation between the Belfast merchant, ancestor of the unionist “establishment,” and would-be slave-trader Waddell Cunningham and the United Irishman and self-declared “Irish slave” William Putnam McCabe.

There are numerous contemptuous references to the Sabbatarianism and respectable dullness of late Victorian Belfast, contrasted with the lively artistic activities of the volunteer period. The book is reprinted three times in O’Byrne’s lifetime and is seen by nationalists as an underground classic. Its image of Belfast layered with fragmentary and hidden memories has been drawn on by authors as diverse as Ciaran Carson and Gerry Adams, and in the early twenty-first century O’Byrne is commemorated as one of the city’s significant writers. A plaque is placed on his Cavendish Street house in 2004. It is ironic that his reputation should rest on his memorialisation of Belfast, for he denounced it as “interminable miles of mean streets . . . one of the ugliest cities in the world.”

O’Byrne is believed by some, though not all, of his acquaintances to be homosexual. This view is supported by references to the descriptions of male beauty (based on Gaelic saga models) which recur in his writings and by the expressions of longing which permeate his work (which might also reflect a wider sense of loneliness or cultural displacement). His last years, 1954–57, are spent in the Nazareth Nursing Home in Ormeau Road, Belfast, where he dies on August 1, 1957, a month after suffering a stroke. His funeral is crowded, and his gravestone describes him as “singer, poet and writer who brought joy into the lives of others.”

(From: “O’Byrne, Cathal” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Helen Maybury Roe, Librarian & Antiquarian

Helen Maybury Roe, Irish librarian and antiquarian and a champion of medieval Irish art and iconography, dies on May 28, 1988, at Grove Nursing Home in Killiney, County Dublin.

Born on December 18, 1895, Roe is the daughter of William Ernest Roe and Anne Lambert Sheilds of Mountrath, County Laois. Her grandfather is Francis Henry Sheilds of Parsonstown (now Birr, County Offaly), owner of the King’s County Chronicle. She is sent first to the local primary school and then to the Preston School in Abbeyleix. Although she attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD), she does not begin her career due to the outbreak of World War I. She joins the St. John’s Ambulance Brigade and serves at the Cambridge Military Hospital and at Aldershot Barracks. In the immediate aftermath, she continues her medical career with the Military Hospital in Bray, County Wicklow. She also spends time touring in Europe visiting museums and beginning her appreciation for medieval art. She is raised Protestant and has done her duty as part of the aristocracy by serving in the war. But the soldiers treat her as Irish and abuse her especially during the Easter Rising of 1916. The result is that she supports nationalism from that point forward. She goes back to TCD and completes her degree in modern languages in 1921. She finally completes her MA in 1924 and begins a teaching career. She spends time working in the Royal School, Dungannon, and Alexandra College, Milltown, Dublin.

In 1926, Roe’s parents need her, and she returns home. She then becomes the County Librarian in Laois. While working as a librarian she is able to study further and, as a rare person with a car, she tours sites and visits schools. One result of her presentations to schools is to inspire Ireland’s first female archaeologist, Ellen Prendergast. In 1940, she retires from the library and moves to Dublin where she is able to buy a house and garden. Apart from her antiquarian work, she is a regular supporter of charities and is honorary secretary of The Queen’s County Protestant Orphan’s Society and actively involved in The Dublin University Mission to Chota Nagpur, India.

Roe becomes a regular contributor to various journals and newspapers including Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, An Leabharlann, Béaloideas, Seanchas Ard Mhacha, Carloviana, the The Irish Press and the Leinster Express. From 1965 until 1968 she serves as the president of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, the first woman to be elected to the position. She is elected to be a member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1984. She continues touring and lecturing into her nineties.

Roe lives at Santry, Dublin, and later at Oak House, Sussex Road, Dublin. She dies on May 28, 1988, at Grove Nursing Home, Killiney, County Dublin, and is buried beside her parents at St. Peter’s Churchyard, Mountrath, County Laois.

The Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland have an annual lecture in her honour and have named one of their lecture rooms after her.


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Birth of Ernie O’Malley, Republican Revolutionary & Writer

Ernest Bernard (Ernie) O’Malley, Irish republican revolutionary and writer, is born on May 26, 1897, in Ellison Street, Castlebar, County Mayo, the second child among nine sons and two daughters of Luke Malley, solicitor’s clerk, of County Mayo, and Marion Malley (née Kearney) of County Roscommon. Christened Ernest Bernard Malley, his adoption of variations on this name reflects his enthusiasm for a distinctively Irish identity – an enthusiasm that lay at the heart of his republican career and outlook.

In 1906, O’Malley’s family moves to Dublin, where he attends the Christian Brothers‘ School, North Richmond Street. In 1915, he begins to study medicine at University College Dublin (UCD). Having initially intended to follow his older brother into the British Army, he rather joins the Irish Volunteers in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, as a member of F Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade. He becomes a leading figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence which the Easter Rising helps to occasion. In 1918, having twice failed his second-year university examination, he leaves home to commit himself to the republican cause. He is initially a Volunteer organiser with the rank of second lieutenant, under the instruction of Richard Mulcahy, operating in Counties Tyrone, Offaly, Roscommon, and Donegal. His work in 1918 involves the reorganisation, or new establishment, of Volunteer groups in the localities.

In August 1918, O’Malley is sent to London by Michael Collins to buy arms. During 1919 he works as an IRA staff captain attached to General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin, and also trains and organises Volunteers in Counties Clare, Tipperary, and Dublin. He has a notable military record with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and is a leading figure in attacks on Hollyford barracks in County Tipperary (May 1920), Drangan barracks in County Kilkenny (June 1920), and Rearcross barracks in County Tipperary (July 1920). His IRA days thus involve him with comrades such as Dan Breen, Séumas Robinson, and Seán Treacy. In December 1920, he is captured in County Kilkenny by Crown forces. He escapes from Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol in February 1921, to take command of the IRA’s 2nd Southern Division, holding the rank of commandant-general.

O’Malley’s republican commitment has political roots in his conviction that Ireland should properly be fully independent of Britain, and that violence is a necessary means to achieve this end. But the causes underlying his revolutionism are layered. Family expectations of respectable, professional employment combined with a religious background and an enthusiasm for soldiering provide some of the foundations for his IRA career. As an IRA officer he enjoys professional, military expression for a visceral Catholic Irish nationalism. He also finds excitement, liberation from the frequent dullness of his life at home, defiant rebellion against his non-republican parents, an alternative to his stalled undergraduate career, and, in political and cultural Irish separatism, a decisive resolution of the profound tension between his anglocentrism and his anglophobia.

O’Malley rejects the 1921 Anglo–Irish Treaty as an unacceptable compromise. He spends the 1921 truce period training IRA officers in his divisional area, in preparation for a possible renewal of fighting. He is, in the event, to be a leading anti-treatyite in the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. In the Four Courts in 1922, at the start of the latter conflict, he is captured on the republicans’ capitulation on June 30 but then manages to escape from captivity. Subsequently he is appointed assistant Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA and also becomes part of a five-man anti-Treaty army council, along with Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy, Frank Aiken and Thomas Derrig.

O’Malley is dramatically captured and badly wounded by Free State forces in Dublin in November 1922. Imprisoned until July 1924, he is during the period of his incarceration elected as a TD for Dublin North in the 1923 Irish general election and is also a forty-one-day participant in the republican hunger strike later that year. Following release from prison, he returns home to live with his parents in Dublin. He decides not to focus his post-revolutionary energy on a political career. During 1926–28 and 1935–37 he unsuccessfully tries to complete his medical degree at UCD, but increasingly his post-1924 efforts are directed toward life as a Bohemian traveler and writer. He spends much of 1924–26 on a recuperative journey through France, Spain, and Italy; and 1928–35 traveling widely in North America. During 1929–32 he spends time in New Mexico and Mexico City. In Taos, New Mexico, he mixes with, and is influenced by, writers and artists as he works on what are to become classic autobiographies of the Irish revolution: On Another Man’s Wound (1936) and The Singing Flame (1978).

O’Malley meets Helen Hooker, daughter of Elon and Blanche Hooker, in Connecticut in 1933. They marry in London in 1935, each rejecting something of their prior lives in the process: he, his Irish republicanism, through marriage to somebody entirely unconnected with that world; she, her wealthy and respectable upbringing, through liaison with a Catholic, Irish, unemployed, bohemian ex-revolutionary. They settle first in Dublin then, from 1938 onward, primarily in County Mayo. Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, is his main base until 1954, when he moves to Dublin. Three children are born to the O’Malleys: Cahal (1936), Etáin (1940), and Cormac (1942). Sharing enthusiasm for the arts, he and Helen enjoy several years of intimacy. However, by the mid-1940s their relationship has frayed. In 1950, Helen kidnaps (the word is used by both parents and by all three children) the couple’s elder two children and takes them to the United States. From there she divorces O’Malley in 1952. Cormac remains with his father.

O’Malley’s post-American years are devoted to a number of projects. He writes extensively, including work for The Bell and Horizon. He is involved with the film director John Ford in the making of his Irish films, including The Quiet Man (1952). He gives radio broadcasts on Mexican painting for BBC Third Programme (1947), and on his IRA adventures for Radio Éireann (1953). In the latter year he suffers a heart attack, and his remaining years are scarred by ill health. He dies of heart failure on March 25, 1957, in Howth, County Dublin, at the house of his sister Kathleen. Two days later he is given a state funeral with full military honours. He is buried in the Malley family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

O’Malley exemplifies some important themes in modern Irish political and intellectual history. His powerful memoirs form part of a tradition of writing absorbedly about Ireland, while under idiosyncratic emigrant influences which lend the writing much of its distinctiveness. His aggressive republicanism exemplifies a persistent but ultimately unrealisable tradition of uncompromising IRA politics. His unflinching single-mindedness is the condition for much courageous and striking activity, but also lay behind his infliction and his suffering of much pain. Literary, intellectual, and defiantly dissident, he is the classic bohemian revolutionary. His historical significance lies in his having been both a leading Irish revolutionary and the author of compelling autobiographical accounts of those years. His memoirs are distinguished from their rivals on the shelf by subtlety, self-consciousness, and literary ambition. In particular, his preparedness to identify motives for Irish revolutionary action, beyond the terms of ostensible republican purpose, renders his writing of great value to historians. Similarly, the large body of archival material left in his name (especially, perhaps, the papers held in UCD archives, and those in the private possession of his children) leaves scholars in his debt. The most striking and evocative visual images of O’Malley are, arguably, the set of photographic portraits taken in 1929 by Edward Weston and held at the University of Arizona‘s Center for Creative Photography (CCP). These capture with precision his reflective concentration, his piercing earnestness, and his troubled intensity.

(From: “O’Malley, Ernest Bernard (‘Ernie’)” by Richard English, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Photograph of Ernie O’Malley taken by Helen Hooker, New York City, 1934)


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The “German Plot”

On Friday, May 17, 1918, the British government orders the arrest and imprisonment of all leading members of Sinn Féin, claiming they were involved in a plan to import arms from Germany. The British cover for these arrests is a bogus “German Plot,” which has since been thoroughly discredited.

The “German Plot” is a spurious conspiracy that the Dublin Castle administration in Ireland claims to exist between the Sinn Féin movement and the German Empire in May 1918. Allegedly, the two factions conspire to start an armed insurrection in Ireland during World War I, which would divert the British war effort. The administration uses these claims to justify the internment of Sinn Féin leaders, who are actively opposing attempts to introduce conscription in Ireland and more Irishmen being used as cannon fodder in service to their oppressors.

The “plot” originates on April 12 when the British arrest Joseph Dowling after he is put ashore in County Clare by a German U-boat. Dowling is a member of the Irish Brigade, one of several schemes by Roger Casement to get German assistance for the 1916 Easter Rising. Dowling now claims that the Germans are planning a military expedition to Ireland. William Reginald Hall and Basil Thomson believe him and convince the authorities to intern all Sinn Féin leaders. One hundred fifty are arrested on the night of May 17–18 and taken to prisons in England, including Éamon de Valera, Arthur Griffith, Constance Markievicz and W. T. Cosgrave. The introduction of internment and conscription reflects a decision of the British cabinet to take a harder line on the Irish Question following the failure of the Irish Convention.

Historian Paul McMahon characterises the “Plot” as “a striking illustration of the apparent manipulation of intelligence in order to prod the Irish authorities into more forceful action.” Republicans are tipped off about the impending arrests, allowing some to escape capture while others choose to be taken in order to secure a propaganda victory. The internment is counterproductive for the British, imprisoning the more accommodating Sinn Féin leadership while failing to capture members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood who are more committed to physical force republicanism.

The British live to regret one man who slips through their fingers that spring. Michael Collins uses the months he might have spent in an English prison assembling and consolidating his control of an intelligence organisation and putting it on a more focused military footing that soon makes the Empire squeal.

Even at the time, the proposition that the Sinn Féin leadership are directly planning with the German authorities to open another military front in Ireland is largely seen as spurious. Irish nationalists generally view the “German Plot” not as an intelligence failure but as a black propaganda project to discredit the Sinn Féin movement, particularly to an uninformed public in the United States. McMahon comments that this belief is mistaken, and that the authorities acted honestly but on the basis of faulty intelligence. It is still a matter of study and conjecture what impact it had on U.S. foreign policy regarding the 1919 bid for international recognition of the Irish Republic.

(Pictured: Dublin Castle, Dame Street, Dublin)


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Political Prisoner Francis Hughes Dies on Hunger Strike

Francis Joseph Sean Hughes, a volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) and an Irish political prisoner, dies on hunger strike in Long Kesh Detention Centre on May 12, 1981. He is the most wanted man in Northern Ireland until his arrest following a shoot-out with the British Army in which a British soldier is killed. At his trial, he is sentenced to a total of 83 years’ imprisonment.

Hughes is born in Bellaghy, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on February 28, 1956, into a republican family, the youngest of four brothers in a family of ten siblings. His father, Joseph, had been a member of the Irish Republican Army in the 1920s and one of his uncles had smuggled arms for the republican movement. This results in the Hughes family being targeted when internment is introduced in 1971, and his brother Oliver is interned for eight months without trial in Operation Demetrius. He leaves school at the age of 16 and starts work as an apprentice painter and decorator.

Hughes is returning from an evening out in Ardboe, County Tyrone, when he is stopped at an Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) checkpoint. When the soldiers realise he comes from a republican family, he is badly beaten. His father encourages him to see a doctor and report the incident to the police, but he refuses, saying he “would get his own back on the people who did it, and their friends.”

Hughes initially joins the Official Irish Republican Army but leaves after the organisation declares a ceasefire in May 1972. He then joins up with Dominic McGlinchey, his cousin Thomas McElwee and Ian Milne, before the three decide to join the Provisional Irish Republican Army in 1973. He, Milne and McGlinchey take part in scores of IRA operations, including daylight attacks on Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) stations, bombings, and attacks on off-duty members of the RUC and UDR. Another IRA member describes the activities of Hughes:

“He led a life perpetually on the move, often moving on foot up to 20 miles for one night then sleeping during the day, either in fields and ditches or safe houses; a soldierly sight in his black beret and combat uniform and openly carrying a rifle, a handgun and several grenades as well as food rations.”

On April 18, 1977, Hughes, McGlinchey and Milne are travelling in a car near the town of Moneymore when an RUC patrol car carrying four officers signals them to stop. The IRA members attempt to escape by performing a U-turn but lose control of the car which ends up in a ditch. They abandon the car and open fire on the RUC patrol car, killing two officers and wounding another, before running off through the fields. A second RUC patrol comes under fire while attempting to prevent the men from fleeing, and despite a search operation by the RUC and British Army the IRA members escape. Following the Moneymore shootings, the RUC name Hughes as the most wanted man in Northern Ireland, and issue wanted posters with pictures of Hughes, Milne and McGlinchey. Milne is arrested in Lurgan, County Armagh, in August 1977, and McGlinchey later in the year in the Republic of Ireland.

Hughes is arrested on March 17, 1978, at Lisnamuck, near Maghera in County Londonderry, after an exchange of gunfire with the British Army the night before. British soldiers manning a covert observation post spot Hughes and another IRA volunteer approaching them wearing combat clothing with “Ireland” sewn on their jackets. Thinking they might be from the Ulster Defence Regiment, one of the soldiers stands up and calls to them. The IRA volunteers open fire on the British troops, who return fire. A soldier of the Special Air Service (SAS), Lance Corporal David Jones, is killed and another soldier wounded. Hughes is also wounded and is arrested nearby the next morning.

In February 1980, Hughes is sentenced to a total of 83 years in prison. He is tried for, and found guilty of, the murder of one British Army soldier (for which he receives a life sentence) and wounding of another (for which he receives 14 years) in the incident which leads to his arrest, as well as a series of gun and bomb attacks over a six-year period. Security sources describe him as “an absolute fanatic” and “a ruthless killer.” Fellow republicans describe him as “fearless and active.”

Hughes is involved in the mass hunger strike in 1980 and is the second prisoner to join the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike in the H-Blocks at the Long Kesh Detention Centre. His hunger strike begins on March 15, 1981, two weeks after Bobby Sands began his hunger strike. He is also the second striker to die, at 5:43 p.m. BST on May 12, after 59 days without food, refusing requests from the IRA leadership outside the prison to end the strike after the death of Sands. The journey of his body from the prison to the well-attended funeral near Bellaghy is marked by rioting as the hearse passes through loyalist areas. His death leads to an upsurge in rioting in nationalist areas of Northern Ireland.

Hughes’s cousin Thomas McElwee is the ninth hunger striker to die. Oliver Hughes, one of his brothers, is elected twice to Magherafelt District Council.

Hughes is commemorated on the Irish Martyrs Memorial at Waverley Cemetery in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, and is portrayed by Fergal McElherron in the film H3.


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Murder of Gerard “Jock” Davison, Former Provisional IRA Commander

Gerard “Jock” Davison, a former commander of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Belfast and later a supporter of Sinn Féin’s peace strategy, is shot dead in the city shortly after 9:00 a.m. on May 5, 2015, in the Markets area of south Belfast at the junction of Welsh Street and Upper Stanfield.

One of the first operations Davison is involved in is the shooting of Irish People’s Liberation Organisation (IPLO) Belfast Brigade commander Sammy Ward on October 31, 1992, during the Night of the Long Knives in Belfast.

Davison, the former IRA man, who more recently is a community worker in the working-class Markets area of Belfast, is questioned about the murder of 33-year-old Robert McCartney in January 2005. He is released without charge. He always denies ordering the murder of the father of two following an argument outside Magennis’s Bar in the city centre.

On May 5, 2015, around 9:00 a.m., Davison is shot numerous times at Welsh Street in the Markets area of south Belfast. While police do not identify who killed him, Kevin McGuigan, a former subordinate of Davison’s, is named as the chief suspect after he is also shot dead, reportedly by members of the Provisional IRA, on August 12, 2015.

On the evening of the killing, The Guardian’s Henry McDonald reports: “Davison is the most senior pro-peace process republican to have been killed since the IRA ceasefire of 1997. Security sources said it was highly unlikely that any Ulster loyalist group was behind the murders, adding that the killers may instead have come from within the nationalist community, possibly from people who had a longstanding grudge against the victim.”

Alasdair McDonnell, the Belfast South Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) Westminster candidate, condemns the shooting, saying, “This is a horrendous crime and those responsible have shown no regard for anyone that could have been caught in the middle of it during the school rush hour. My thoughts and prayers are with the individual’s family at this traumatic time.” He adds, “People here want to move on from the violence of the past. This community will reject those who bring murder and mayhem to our streets. I would appeal to anyone with any information to bring it forward as soon as possible.”

Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams says, “People will be appalled by this morning’s murder in the Markets area of south Belfast. This brutal act will be condemned by all sensible people. There can be no place today for such actions. I would urge anyone with any information to bring that forward to the PSNI (Police Service of Northern Ireland).”

Following his arrest in Fuengirola in August 2021, it is revealed Gerry ‘The Monk’ Hutch is to be questioned in relation to a weapon used in Davison’s murder.


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Roger Casement’s Efforts to Gain German Military Aid Ends

During World War I, Roger Casement makes efforts to gain German military aid for the 1916 Easter Rising. His journey on the German submarine SM U-19 comes to an end on April 21, 1916.

In April 1916, Germany offers the Irish 20,000 Mosin–Nagant 1891 rifles, ten machine guns and accompanying ammunition, but no German officers. It is a fraction of the quantity of the arms Casement had hoped for, with no military expertise on offer. The weapons leave Germany bound for Ireland on a German cargo vessel named the SS Libau, disguised as a Norwegian vessel, Aud-Norge.

Casement confides his personal papers to Dr. Charles Curry, with whom he has stayed at Riederau on the Ammersee, before leaving Germany. He departs with Robert Monteith and Sergeant Daniel Beverley (Bailey) of the Irish Brigade in a submarine, initially the SM U-20, which develops engine trouble, and then the SM U-19, shortly after the Aud sails. According to Monteith, Casement believes the Germans are toying with him from the start and providing inadequate aid that will doom a rising to failure. He wants to reach Ireland before the shipment of arms and to convince Eoin MacNeill, who he believes is still in control, to cancel the rising.

Casement sends John McGoey, a recently arrived Irish American, through Denmark to Dublin, ostensibly to advise what military aid is coming from Germany and when, but with Casement’s orders “to get the Heads in Ireland to call off the rising and merely try to land the arms and distribute them.” McGoey does not reach Dublin, nor does his message. His fate is unknown until recently. Evidently abandoning the Irish Nationalist cause, he joins the Royal Navy in 1916, survives the war, and later returns to the United States, where he dies in an accident on a building site in 1925.

About 2:00 a.m. on the morning of April 21, 1916, three days before the rising begins, Robert Monteith, Daniel Bailey (calling himself Beverly), and Casement climb into a small boat for the trip to shore at Banna Strand in Tralee Bay, County Kerry. Their boat, now in the Imperial War Museum in London, capsizes before they reach shore.

Monteith helps an exhausted Casement to safety on shore. Casement is convinced that the Rising cannot be successful without a large number of German troops, and the best he has been able to obtain is one boatload of arms. Suffering from a recurrence of the malaria that had plagued him since his days in the Congo, and too weak to travel, Monteith and Bailey leave Casement at the ruins of McKenna’s Fort, an ancient ring fort in Rahoneen, Ardfert, now renamed Casement’s Fort, and head for Tralee.

About 1:30 p.m., Casement is discovered by two Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officers. He nearly talks his way out of being arrested, but a 12-year-old boy at the scene points out a piece of paper Casement had tossed away as the police approach. On that paper is a German code list. He is arrested on charges of high treason, sabotage and espionage against the Crown. He manages to send word to Dublin about the inadequate German assistance.

The Kerry Brigade of the Irish Volunteers might have tried to rescue Casement over the next three days, but its leadership in Dublin holds that not a shot is to be fired in Ireland before the Easter Rising is in train and therefore orders the Brigade to “do nothing.” A subsequent internal inquiry attaches “no blame whatsoever” to the local Volunteers for failing to attempt a rescue. Casement is taken to Brixton Prison and placed under special observation for fear of an attempt of suicide as there is no staff at the Tower of London to guard suicidal cases.

Casement’s trial at bar opens at the Royal Courts of Justice on June 26, 1916, before the Lord Chief Justice (Viscount Reading), Justice Horace Avory, and Justice Thomas Horridge. Refusing to agree to a “guilty but insane” plea, he is subsequently found guilty and sentenced to be hanged. He unsuccessfully appeals against his conviction and death sentence.

On the day of his execution by hanging at Pentonville Prison, August 3, 1916, Casement is received into the Catholic Church at his request. He is attended by two Catholic priests, Dean Timothy Ring and Father James Carey, from the East London parish of SS Mary and Michael. The latter, also known as James McCarroll, says of Casement that he was “a saint … we should be praying to him [Casement] instead of for him.” At the time of his death he is 51 years old.

Casement’s body is buried in quicklime in the prison cemetery at the rear of Pentonville Prison, though his last wish was to be buried at Murlough Bay on the north coast of County Antrim, in present-day Northern Ireland. Finally, in 1965, his remains are repatriated to Ireland. His remains lay in state at the Garrison Church, Arbour Hill (now Arbour Hill Prison) in Dublin for five days, close to the graves of other leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, although he would not be buried beside them. After a state funeral, the remains are buried with full military honours in the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, alongside other Irish republicans and nationalists. The President of Ireland, Éamon de Valera, who is then in his mid-eighties and the last surviving leader of the Easter Rising, attends the ceremony, along with an estimated 30,000 others.


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John Boland Becomes First Irish Olympic Gold Medal Winner

On March 30, 1896, an Irishman wins an Olympic gold medal for the first time when John Mary Pius Boland triumphs in tennis at the first modern Olympics, which take place in Athens, Greece. In addition to being a gold medalist tennis player, he is an Irish Nationalist politician and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and as member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) for South Kerry from 1900 to 1918.

Boland is born on September 16, 1870, at 135 Capel Street, Dublin, to Patrick Boland, businessman, and Mary Donnelly. Following the death of his mother in 1882, he is placed with his six siblings under the guardianship of his uncle, Nicholas Donnelly, auxiliary bishop of Dublin.

Boland is educated at two private Catholic schools, the Catholic University School, Dublin, and Birmingham Oratory in Birmingham, England, where he becomes head boy. His secondary education at the two schools help give him the foundation and understanding to play an influential role in the politics of Great Britain and Ireland at the beginning of the 20th century, when he is a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which pursues constitutional Home Rule.

In 1892, Boland graduates with a BA from London University. He studies for a semester in Bonn, Germany, where he is a member of Bavaria Bonn, a student fraternity that is member of the Cartellverband. He studies law at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating with a BA in 1896 and MA in 1901. Although called to the Bar in 1897, he never practises.

Boland is the first Olympic champion in tennis for Great Britain and Ireland at the first modern Olympics, which take place in Athens in 1896. He visits his friend Thrasyvoulos Manos in Athens during the Olympics, and Manos, a member of the organising committee, enters Boland in the tennis tournament. He promptly wins the singles tournament, defeating Friedrich Traun of Germany in the first round, Evangelos Rallis of Greece in the second, Konstantinos Paspatis of Greece in the semifinals, and Dionysios Kasdaglis of Greece in the final.

Boland then enters the doubles event with Traun, the German runner whom he had defeated in the first round of the singles. Together, they win the doubles event. They defeat Aristidis and Konstantinos Akratopoulos of Greece in the first round, have a bye in the semifinals, and defeat Demetrios Petrokokkinos of Greece and Dimitrios Kasdaglis in the final. When the Union Jack and the German flag are run up the flagpole to honour Boland and Traun’s victory, Boland points out to the man hoisting the flags that he is Irish, adding “It [the Irish flag]’s a gold harp on a green ground, we hope.” The officials agreed to have an Irish flag prepared.

Following a visit to County Kerry, Boland becomes concerned about the lack of literacy among the native population. He also has a keen interest in the Irish Language.

Boland’s patriotic stand is well received in nationalist circles in Ireland. This and a lifelong friendship with John Redmond gain for him an invitation to stand as a candidate for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the safe seat of South Kerry, which he holds from 1900 to 1918. He is unopposed in the general elections of 1900 and 1906, and the first of 1910. In the second election of 1910 he is challenged by a local man, T. B. Cronin, who stands as an independent nationalist in the interest of William O’Brien. Boland stands down at the 1918 United Kingdom general election.

In 1908, Boland is appointed a member of the commission for the foundation of the National University of Ireland (NUI). From 1926 to 1947, he is General Secretary of the Catholic Truth Society. He receives a papal knighthood, becoming a Knight of St. Gregory in recognition for his work in education. In 1950, he is awarded an honorary Doctor of Law by the NUI.

Boland marries Eileen Moloney at SS Peter and Edward, Palace Street, Westminster, on October 22, 1902, the daughter of an Australian Dr. Patrick Moloney. They have one son and five daughters. His daughter Honor Crowley succeeds her husband Frederick Crowley upon his death sitting as Fianna Fáil TD for South Kerry from 1945 until her death in 1966. His daughter Bridget Boland is a playwright who notably writes The Prisoner and co-writes the script for Gaslight, and, among other books, co-authors Old Wives’ Lore for Gardeners with her sister, Maureen Boland.

Boland dies at his home, 40 St George’s Square, in London on Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1958.


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Death of Kathleen Napoli McKenna, Nationalist Activist & Journalist

Kathleen Napoli McKenna, Irish nationalist activist and journalist closely associated with Arthur Griffith, dies in Rome, Italy, on March 22, 1988.

McKenna is born Kathleen Maria Kenna on September 9, 1897, in Oldcastle, County Meath. Her parents are William, a draper and hardware merchant, and Mary Kenna (née Hanley). She is the eldest child of seven, with three sisters and three brothers. She and her siblings add “Mc” to their surname as teenagers. Her maternal grandfather, a Fenian, miller and land agitator, is a strong influence on her. Agnes O’Farrelly is her paternal great aunt. She attends the Oldcastle Endowed School and goes on to pass the National University of Ireland (NUI) matriculation examination. She attends University College Dublin (UCD) briefly, but the family’s circumstances prevent her from completing her course.

McKenna’s father had been an active member of the Irish National Land League and the Meath Labour Union. He is one of the organisers of a short-lived local newspaper, Sinn Féin – Oldcastle Monthly Review, in 1902. Both her parents are members of Conradh na Gaielge. Arthur Griffith and Brian O’Higgins frequently visit the family home. Denounced by the local parish priest, Fr. Robert Barry, her father’s business goes into decline. The family leaves Oldcastle and moves to Dundalk in August 1915, and to Rugby, Warwickshire, England, in March 1916. In Rugby, her father teaches typing and shorthand, and her mother works in an ammunition factory. She works as a secretary for an engineering firm. Members of the family return to Ireland from 1919 to 1922, and by the time of her father’s death in 1939, he is living back in Oldcastle.

McKenna spends some holidays in Ireland and, during a visit to Dublin in the summer of 1919, she presents herself to the Sinn Féin offices in Harcourt Street. She has a letter of introduction from her father to Griffith, which emphasises her willingness to work for Irish independence. For her holidays, she works in the Sinn Féin press bureau and is employed as one of the first “Dáil girls” of the clandestine government. She is informed that if a planned news bulletin comes through, she will be summoned back to Dublin. In October 1919, she receives that summons and, after a typing test on November 11, she joins the Irish Bulletin under Minister for Publicity, Desmond FitzGerald, and director of publicity, Robert Brennan. She also becomes a member of the Conradh na Gaielge Parnell branch.

The Irish Bulletin is published five times a week, circulating the misdeeds of the British government in Ireland. McKenna edits and mimeographs a summary of “acts of aggression” from British forces in Ireland weekly, compiled by Anna Kelly. Frank Gallagher does most of the writing, edited by FitzGerald, and later Erskine Childers. Though she is sometimes described as the Bulletin‘s editor, she is more akin to an editorial assistant. R. M. Smyllie later recalls that she was in regular contact with the media. She types out each issue on a wax stencil in a typewriter which is used to create mimeograph copies, and then circulated to England. In the beginning, about 30 recipients, mostly London journalists, receive the Bulletin but by October 1920 it has grown to 600, and by July 1921 over 1,200. She also keeps the accounts, takes dictation of statements, and at times works up articles from notes given to her by Griffith or others. She also acts as a confidential messenger, couriering between Dáil departments and Irish Republican Army (IRA) leaders such as Michael Collins. Through this, she meets Moya Llewelyn Davies.

The Bulletin becomes a symbol of the underground government and a target for British forces. This necessitates the frequent moving of the operation from one Dublin hideout to another. She fears that if she were captured, she would break under interrogation. When FitzGerald is arrested, he is asked about “the girl wearing a green tam” in reference to McKenna’s tam-o’-shanter hat which prompts her to change her choice of hat. Despite the capture of a number of the Bulletin staff, as well as the capture of the office files and equipment on March 26, 1921, it never misses an issue.

McKenna’s sister Winifred also works as a secretary to the clandestine government. Her brother, Tadhg (Timothy), is a member of Sinn Féin and in Greenore, County Louth, is involved in trade union affairs. He is detained, beaten, and interned in March 1921. He is later an activist with the Irish Labour Party. Her brother William is a messenger for the Irish government during this period and during the Irish Civil War serves in the Free State Army.

After the truce in 1921, McKenna is assigned to the Dáil cabinet secretarial staff at the Mansion House, where she continues to work in the publicity department. She travels as Griffith’s private secretary to London as part of the Irish delegation to the treaty negotiations in October 1921. She is an admirer of both Griffith and Collins and is a firm supporter of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. She works as Griffith’s secretary until just before his death and also does some secretarial work for Collins during the negotiations. One of her sisters is anti-Treaty, and she later recalls that she lost friends due to her support of the treaty.

When the Irish Free State government is established, McKenna becomes a private secretary to a number of Ministers for External Affairs, including FitzGerald, Kevin O’Higgins and W. T. Cosgrave. In 1924, she is a private secretary to the Boundary Commission, as well as one of a pair of secretaries who travels with the Irish delegation to the London Imperial Conference in 1924. From 1927 to 1931 she is James Dolan‘s secretary and parliamentary secretary to the Minister for Industry and Commerce. Before its closure in 1924, she writes a number of articles for the Freeman’s Journal.

McKenna marries Vittorio Napoli in 1931. He is a captain, and later a general, in the Italian royal grenadier guards. They meet when she is on holiday in Italy in 1927. For the first five years of their marriage, they live in the port of Derna in Cyrenaica, Libya, while her husband is stationed there. A son and daughter are born there. From September 1939 to June 1940, the family lives in Albania, but after Italy enters World War II, she and the children move to Viterbo. Her husband is taken prisoner in Greece in September 1943, and is detained in Germany and Poland. He returns to Italy in September 1945. Viterbo had been heavily bombed, and after Allied troops arrive, McKenna works as a translator and gives English language lessons to support her family. Her husband remains in the army, and they remain in Viterbo until 1956, later moving to Rome.

After the war, McKenna writes articles for the Irish Independent and other publications from Ireland, the United States and New Zealand, including The Irish Press, Irish Travel, Standard, Word, and Writer’s Digest. Sometimes she writes under her own name, as well as her pen name Kayn or Kayen MacKay. As the wives of Italian officers do not traditionally work, the money she earns from this is kept for travel and other leisure activities. This money allows her to visit her family in Ireland in 1947 for the first time since 1932. After their retirement, she and her husband visit Ireland regularly, and travel around Italy.

McKenna applies for an Irish military pension in 1950/51 and 1970, receiving references in support of her claim from Gallagher. As she had not served in a military organisation, her claims are rejected. As an Irish War of Independence veteran, she is awarded free travel in 1972, which is later extended to her husband. In her later years, she becomes concerned about the inaccuracies in the history around the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. She gives two talks to Radio Éireann in 1951, speaking about her time with the Irish Bulletin. Copies of these recordings are now held by the Bureau of Military History. During her lifetime, extracts of her memoir are published in the Capuchin Annual and The Irish Times. She drafted and redrafted these memoirs from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. A version edited by her daughter and niece is published in 2014 as A Dáil girl’s revolutionary recollections.

McKenna dies on March 22, 1988, in Rome. She is buried with an Irish flag which she had kept with her. A large collection of her papers is held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI). In 2010, 2011 and 2016, some of her memorabilia is sold in Dublin.