Keating is the youngest of six surviving children of Michael Keating, baker, and his wife Johanna, a native of County Kerry. He was educated at a local school and was an active member of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), playing football and hurling. After the 1916 Easter Rising, he leaves school at the age of thirteen to join the Irish Volunteers, which later becomes the IRA, serving in the 4th Cork Brigade. He is arrested by British troops in November 1920 and badly beaten. He spends a month in the Cork jail and is then interned for a year in Ballykinlar internment camp until December 1921. While interned he participates in several hunger strikes and makes several escape attempts. Following his release, he opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and serves in the Fianna Cork 4th Brigade on the Republican side under Seán Moylan during the Irish Civil War.
Keating emigrates to New York City in 1927 and becomes involved in Irish cultural organizations and Democratic party politics. He is a founder of American Friends of Irish Neutrality, which opposes Irish involvement in World War II, ostensibly fearing it will result in British re-occupation of Ireland.
Following World War II, Keating is chairman of the executive council of the 1947 Irish Race Convention and president of the American League for an Undivided Ireland, lobbying in support of the Fogarty Amendment, which unsuccessfully attempts to tie the release of Marshall Plan funds to British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.
Between the 1940s and 1960s, Keating serves as president of the County Corkmen Association, president of the United Irish Counties Association, and president of the Irish Institute. In 1956, he serves as Grand Marshal of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Keating serves in various positions under New York City mayors William O’Dwyer, Vincent R. Impellitteri, and Robert F. Wagner, Jr., rising to the position of Deputy Mayor, under Wagner. He is reportedly the first to publicly introduce future President Kennedy as “the next President of the United States” at an Irish Institute event in 1957. He is appointed Regional Director of the United States Postal Service by President Kennedy and serves in that position from 1961 until his retirement in 1966.
In retirement, Keating returns to Kanturk and continues to advocate for the reunification of Ireland. Keating dies at his home in Kanturk on July 2, 1976, and is buried in a local cemetery with military honors. He represents an emigrant political and social milieu which is often treated dismissively by later, more cosmopolitan Irish commentators, but his career reflects not only his own considerable talents but the ways in which this milieu sustains a generation of immigrants, and the contribution of Irish America to Irish development in the post-war decades.
MacEoin is born Vincent O’Rahilly McGuone to Malachy McGuone, owner of the Central Hotel in Pomeroy and a wine and spirit merchant, and Catherine (née Fox). He has three siblings. Both of his parents are nationalists, and name all their children after leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. Under the First Dáil in 1918, his father is appointed a judge. This results in him being interned on the prison ship Argenta on Larne Lough from 1922 to 1923. The family moves to Dublin after his release. His father dies in 1933, which leads to his wife running a workingmen’s café in East Essex Street. The family later lives on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook.
MacEoin attends boarding school at Blackrock College and is then articled to the architectural practice of Vincent Kelly in Merrion Square. As an active republican, he lives in a house on Northumberland Road from late 1939 to May 1940 where he helps in the production and distribution of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) weekly newspaper, War News. The IRA is banned by the Irish government in 1936, and its bombing campaign in Britain in 1939 is viewed by the government as a threat to Irish neutrality. MacEoin is among a group of republicans arrested in June 1940 and imprisoned in Arbour Hill Prison for a year. Once released, he is rearrested and interned at the Curragh for three years. He is sentenced to 3-months imprisonment in October 1943 for possession of incriminating documents. He is also charged with possession of ammunition, but testifies he was given the rounds against his will and never appears to have engaged in any violence. During his internment, he is taught the Irish language by Máirtín Ó Cadhain and is exposed to the socialist views of his fellow inmates. It is at this time that he adopts the Irish form of his name, Uinseann MacEoin.
While imprisoned in the 1940s, MacEoin continues his studies by correspondence and qualifies as an architect in 1945 at University College Dublin (UCD). His designs for a memorial garden in 1946 to those who died during the Irish War of Independence are commended. In 1959, he designs the site in Ballyseedy, County Kerry, for a monument by Yann Goulet commemorating those killed in the Irish Civil War and members of the IRA from Kerry who died. In 1948, he qualifies in town planning and takes up a position with Michael Scott‘s architectural practice. He works for a short time with Dublin Corporation, with their housing department, before establishing his own practice in 1955.
During the 1950s, MacEoin is a contributing editor on interior design in Hugh McLaughlin‘s magazine Creation, becoming editor of Irish Architect and Contractor in 1955. He enters into a partnership with Aidan Kelly in 1969 as MacEoin Kelly and Associates. In the early 1970s, he designs a shopping and housing development outside Dundalk, called Ard Easmuinn. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he continues as an influential architectural journalist, founding and editing Build from 1965 to 1969, and later Plan. His company, Pomeroy Press, publishes Plan along with other serials such as Stream and Field. He writes a large proportion of the copy in these periodicals, much under his own name, but he also uses pseudonyms, in particular in Plan as “Michael O’Brien.” He writes about his strong views on social housing, national infrastructure, and foreign and slum landlords, often libelously.
Despite his republican and socialist views, MacEoin is a staunch advocate for the preservation of Georgian Dublin, and campaigns for their preservation. On this topic, he writes letters to newspapers, takes part in television and radio discussions, writes comment pieces and editorials, speaks at public hearings, and takes part in direct protests such as sit-ins in buildings including those on Baggot Street, Pembroke Street, Hume Street, and Molesworth Street. He is also an active member of the Irish Georgian Society, and he campaigns actively against the road widening schemes in Dublin the 1970s and 1980s.
MacEoin and his wife purchase five Georgian houses on Mountjoy Square and three on Henrietta Street in the 1960s, all almost derelict. They refurbish them and lease them out, under the company name Luke Gardiner Ltd. He renames the 5 Henrietta Street property James Bryson House. His architectural practice moves into one of the Mountjoy Square houses. Along with fellow campaigners, Mariga Guinness and Deirdre Kelly, this demonstrates that these buildings can be salvaged and are not the dangerous structures other architects and developers claim them to be. He also purchases and saves Heath House, near Portlaoise, County Laois, living there toward the end of his life. He offers free conservation and architectural advice to community groups and is a volunteer on the renovation works on projects including Tailors’ Hall.
MacEoin remains politically active, joining Clann na Poblachta, the Wolfe Tone Societies (WTS), the Dublin Civic Group, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. To what extent he is involved in republican or IRA activities after 1945 is not clear. However, in March 1963, he is called a witness to a case in Scotland involving a Glasgowbookmaker by the name of Samuel Docherty and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Docherty claims the bank owes him £50,000. MacEoin testifies that in February 1962 he had travelled with £50,000 in cash from Dublin to lodge to Docherty’s account in the Royal Bank of Scotland in Belfast, as a loan. When asked about the origin of this large sum of money, he states it was supplied by another person but does not divulge that person’s name. This immediately triggers the court’s suspicions, and the judge warns MacEoin he will be contempt of court if he does not name the supplier of the money. He is placed in police custody for the day, and eventually he agrees to give the name in writing in confidence to the judge. The judge ultimately rules that Docherty is guilty of attempted fraud and perjury and that MacEoin’s involvement reeks of criminality. However, no further action is ever brought forward against Docherty or MacEoin.
In Sinn Féin‘s 1971 Éire Nua social and economic programme, MacEoin writes the chapter on “Planning,” and attends meetings in Monaghan in the early 1970s on the Dáil Uladh, a parliament for the 9-county Ulster province. In 1981, during the republican hunger strikes, one of his Mountyjoy Square houses is used as the national headquarters of the National H-Block Committee. Following the 1986 Sinn Féin split, he supports Republican Sinn Féin. He is a founding member of the Constitutional Rights Campaign in 1987, a group which aims to protect the rights of Irish citizens in the European Economic Community (EEC), having campaigned against Ireland joining the EEC in the early 1970s. In 1978, he is sentenced to two weeks in Mountjoy Prison for non-payment of a fine issued for not having a television licence. He had refused to buy one to protest the lack of Irish language programming.
As an environmentalist, MacEoin opposes private car ownership, and advocates for cycleways and the redevelopment of the railway lines. He writes about the “greenhouse effect” as early as 1969. As a hill walker and mountaineer, he claims to be the first Irishman to register successful climbs of all 284 Scottish peaks, known as the Munros, in 1987. He also climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees.
MacEoin writes three books on his memories, and those of his former comrades: Survivors (1980), on the lives of leading Irish republicans, Harry (1986), a part biography part autobiography of Harry White, and The IRA in the twilight years 1923–48 (1997). He also publishes a novel, Sybil: a tale of innocence (1992) with his publishing house, Argenta, under the name Eoin O’Rahilly. He also interviews and records dozens of Republicans as part of his research for his books. These recordings are later converted into a digital oral history archive held in trust by the Irish Defence Forces.
MacEoin marries Margaret Russell in 1956 in Navan, County Meath. They have a daughter and two sons.
MacEoin dies in a nursing home in Shankill, Dublin, on December 21, 2007. His estate at the time of his death is valued at over €3 million. His son, Nuada, takes over his father’s architectural practice.
Barry returns to Bandon in early 1919. He describes in his guerilla days in Ireland a Damascus-like conversion to Irish nationalism on hearing of the Easter Rising while with the Mesopotamian expeditionary force, but he is only accepted into the IRA with considerable caution. Initially tested in intelligence and training work, in mid-1920 he takes charge of the new brigade flying column, which is used both to train officers and to stage offensive actions.
Barry adapts his military experience successfully to the demands of guerrilla warfare, becoming the most famed of column leaders during the Irish War of Independence. In his memoirs, he pours scorn on the obsession of many with military titles and orthodox procedure, complaining of a “paper army.” He stresses the need for spontaneity, initiative, and knowledge of local conditions. “The reality,” he writes, “was a group of fellows, mostly in caps and not-too-expensive clothing, wondering how to tackle their job and where they would sleep that night or get their supper.” (The Reality of the Anglo–Irish War (1974)). He well realises that the war’s character does not permit any close control from the IRA’s GHQ in Dublin, hence increasing the importance of local leaders. His tactics put strong emphasis on speed of movement and on the need to attack the enemy at his weakest point. The column’s ambush successes are small in number but among the best-remembered of the war. He admits, however, that his own and his column’s lack of experience with mines frequently weakened their offensives.
The column’s first successful ambush is at Tooreen on October 22, 1920, followed on November 28 by the dramatic ambushing of a patrol of auxiliaries at Kilmichael while travelling from their Macroom base. A column of thirty-six men, divided into three sections, kill sixteen auxiliaries, with one captured and later shot, suffering two fatalities of their own. Controversy has raged since over whether a false surrender by the British force caused the brutality of some of the deaths. Together with the Bloody Sunday killings of a week earlier in Dublin, Kilmichael has a profound effect on the British military and political establishment, with the declaration in December of martial law for much of Munster and the implementation of wide-ranging internment, together with the authorisation of official reprisals.
After a short period in hospital with a heart condition, in early 1921 Barry leads unsuccessful attacks on Kilbrittain, Innishannon, Drimoleague, and Bandon barracks. The seizure of Burgatia House, outside Rosscarbery, in early February, and the successful resistance made there to British troops, wins much publicity but has little military significance. He is a leading figure in the brutal final stage of the war in the first six months of 1921, which sees widespread shooting of suspected spies and destruction of loyalist property. By March 1921, his flying column, with 104 men, is easily the largest in Ireland, and an explosives expert, Capt. McCarthy, has joined them.
The protracted engagement between Barry’s column and encircling British forces at Crossbarry on March 19, 1921, comes at a time when large-scale sweeps are making life increasingly difficult for the IRA. It consists of a daring and courageous breakout. Crossbarry is the largest action of the war, and Barry is to regard it as even more important than Kilmichael. Soon afterwards, Rosscarbery barracks is successfully attacked by a Barry-led party, representing one of the few successful such initiatives in 1921. Isolated triumphs, however, cannot hide the fact that pressure is increasing on the column, and he becomes increasingly critical of inactive regions. He is later to say that all County Kerry does during the war is to shoot one decent police inspector at Listowel Racecourse and a colleague of his. He is strongly critical also of the lack of assistance from GHQ and of the divisionalisation policy. He visits Dublin in May, travels around with Michael Collins, and is present when two American officers demonstrate the Thompson submachine gun. He is more aware than most of his 1st Southern Division colleagues of the scarcity of arms and ammunition at the war’s end.
During the truce, Barry becomes liaison officer for Munster, riling the British by insisting on his military rank, and criticising the IRA liaison men in Dublin for being overly deferential. He joins the overwhelming majority of the Cork IRA in opposing the Anglo–Irish Treaty but plays a characteristically maverick role throughout the treaty split. His independent attitude is heightened by his dislike of Liam Lynch, the republican IRA’s Chief of Staff, and his continuing respect for Michael Collins. He shows impatience at the long-drawn-out peace initiatives. In March 1922, therefore, he advocates armed confrontation with pro-treaty units over the occupation of barracks in Limerick, and on June 18 he submits a resolution, which only narrowly fails, at the army convention, giving British troops seventy-two hours to leave Dublin.
At the beginning of the Irish Civil War, Barry is arrested entering the Four Courts disguised as a woman. He escapes from an internment camp at Gormanston in early September 1922. For the rest of the war his actions mirror its confused nature. In late October 1922, he leads successful raids on the small towns of Ballineen and Enniskean, and later on Inchigeelagh and Ballyvourney. In December his column takes Carrick-on-Suir, demonstrating the weakness of the Free State army, but his talk of advancing on the Curragh and of large-scale actions does not materialise. There is no evidence that he is acting in accordance with any coordinated plan. By February 1923, he realises that the Republican IRA cause is hopeless and he is involved with Fr. Tom Duggan in efforts to get 1st Southern Division to declare a ceasefire. He journeys to Dublin to put pressure on the intransigent Lynch in this connection, telling Lynch, “I did more fighting in one week than you did in your whole life.”
Barry avoids capture in roundups after the war, remaining on the run until 1924. Unlike many republicans, he does not turn to constitutionalism, remaining strongly militaristic. He is always an unreconstructed republican, though by no means a naive one. In 1924 he becomes attached to Cleeves Milk Co., based in Limerick and Clonmel, and from 1927 to retirement in 1965 is general superintendent with the Cork harbour commissioners. He strongly advocates preserving the independence of the IRA army executive during the republican split of 1925–27. He is instrumental in continuing the drilling of IRA members and is a strong supporter of armed opposition to the Blueshirts.
During the 1930s Barry is arrested at various times for possession of arms and seditious utterances. He promotes an attack against a Freemasons’ meeting in Cork in 1936 and gives the orders for the killing on March 4 of that year of Vice-AdmiralHenry Boyle Somerville. He is opposed to the use by Frank Ryan of IRA volunteers to support the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and to the proposals of Seán Russell for a bombing campaign in England. To maintain the link with traditional republicanism, he is elected IRA chief of staff in 1937. His plan, however, for the seizure of Armagh city, as part of a direct northern offensive, quickly collapses due to a leak of information, and he soon resigns his position. He forcefully attacks the bombing of English cities in 1938, regarding attacks on innocent civilians as immoral and counterproductive. He enlists in the National Army on July 12, 1940, only to be demobilised a month later. In 1946, he stands as an independent candidate in a by-election in the Cork Borough constituency, finishing at the bottom of the poll. He is more comfortable the following year touring the United States on an anti-partition platform.
In 1949 his Guerilla Days in Ireland is published. It proves a best-seller and has frequently been reprinted. It is well written in a forceful and direct style, one memoir needing no assistance from a ghost writer. Age does not mellow him: lawyers and bank managers are threatened by him over matters relating to his own column, and in 1974 he publishes a fierce pamphlet, angry at perceived slights in the Irish War of Independence memoir of Liam Deasy. He does strive to achieve a public reconciliation with Collins’s memory by unveiling the memorial to Collins at Sam’s Cross in 1966. On the outbreak of the Northern Ireland crisis in the late 1960s, he takes a militant line, castigating the argument that the Six Counties can be brought into the Republic by peaceful means, and asking when had peaceful means existed there. At the memorial meeting in Carrowkennedy, County Mayo, in 1971, he claims that there is a perfect right at the opportune time to take the Six Counties by force. He remains opposed to IRA bombing of civilian targets.
Barry dies in Cork on July 2, 1980. He is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery, Cork. Early in the truce of 1921 he marries Leslie Price, one of the most active of Cumann na mBan members during and after the rising. They have no children.
While Barry always remains an influential figure in republican circles, he will be remembered best as the pioneer of guerrilla warfare, the hero of Kilmichael and Crossbarry. His military flair, individualism, and ruthlessness are well suited to the 1919–21 conflict. After that, his strained relations with colleagues and his lack of flexibility reduce his importance. While his life after the revolutionary era appears anti-climactic, he retains much of his charisma. In later years, he is ever willing to remind politicians and historians how far Ireland has retreated from republican ideals. He is often prickly and autocratic yet could be generous to old colleagues of either side of the treaty split. He is arguably the most intelligent but also the most intolerant of the revolutionary leaders.
(From: “Barry, Thomas Bernadine (‘Tom’)” by M. A. Hopkinson, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Lucas is commissioned as a second lieutenant into 2nd Battalion, the Royal Berkshire Regiment, on May 7, 1898. He serves with the battalion in South Africa during the Second Boer War from 1899 to 1902, taking part in operations in the Orange Free State from February to July 1900, in Transvaal from July to November 1900, and later in Cape Colony south of the Orange River. He is promoted to lieutenant on August 1, 1900, while in South Africa. After the end of the war in June 1902, he and the rest of the 2nd battalion is sent to Egypt, where they arrive on the SS Dominion in November 1902. He later serves in the Egyptian Army and Sudan Civil Service.
On June 30, 1919, Lucas is appointed a deputy lieutenant of Hertfordshire. He is made Commander of 17th Infantry Brigade in Ireland, and of Fermoy Barracks, on October 30, 1919. On June 26, 1920, during the Irish War of Independence, he is captured by the IRA while he is fishing on the Munster Blackwater near Fermoy along with Colonels Tyrell and Danford. After Danford is wounded during an unsuccessful attempt to escape from a moving car the same day, the volunteers free Tyrell to attend to Danford’s wounds. Both Colonels are subsequently taken to a military hospital at Fermoy.
Lucas is subsequently held in West Limerick and East Clare.
A letter from his wife, announcing the birth of their child, and addressed simply “to the IRA”, is delivered to him and his captors allow a subsequent exchange of letters between the couple. His letters home remain in the possession of his descendants and are shown on an episode of the BBC Television programme Antiques Roadshow.
The IRA moves Lucas to East Limerick from where he escapes four weeks later. It is believed his captors purposely relax the guard to allow him to escape rather than be faced with the possibility of executing him. While being transferred from Pallas Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks to Tipperary military barracks in a routine army patrol they are ambushed, and Lucas receives a slight injury.
Lucas becomes Assistant Adjutant General at Aldershot Command in 1924 and serves with the staff at General Headquarters, British Army of the Rhine from 1927 before he retires to Stevenage in 1932. He dies on April 7, 1956, and is buried in Graveley, Hertfordshire. His wife, Joan Holdsworth, whom he marries in October 1917, dies on September 6, 1979, and is also buried in Graveley, Hertfordshire.
In 2014, Barbara Scully, a granddaughter of George Power, one of the IRA volunteers involved, publishes his recollections to his family of the kidnap in The Irish Times. This brings a friendly reply from Lucas’ granddaughter, Ruth Wheeler, in which she states that Lucas risked a court-martial for stating that during his kidnap and time in captivity he was treated as “a gentleman by gentlemen” and was held by “delightful people.”
Ireland’s Defence Forces have published online Bureau of Military History witness statements by the IRA volunteers involved in the kidnap, as well as those who guarded General Lucas while he was held as a prisoner of war.
In 2020 Lucas’s granddaughter, Ruth Wheeler, and other members of the Lucas family publish online the letters he wrote and received while in captivity. Limerick Councillor Emmett O’Brien and other local people in March 2019 announce an intent to re-enact the capture, imprisonment, and release of Lucas on the anniversary in 2020.
(Pictured: Cuthbert Henry Tindall Lucas, bromide print by Walter Stoneman, 1919, National Portrait Gallery)
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)
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 CatholicIrish 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)
The Custom House in Dublin is occupied and then burned in an operation by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on May 25, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. At the time, the Custom House is the headquarters of the Local Government Board for Ireland, an agency of the British administration in Ireland, against which the IRA is fighting in the name of the self-proclaimed Irish Republic. The operation, involving over 100 IRA volunteers, is a propaganda coup for the republicans but a military disaster for the IRA in the Irish capital. A force of British Auxiliaries quickly arrives, and a gun battle erupts. Five IRA volunteers, John Doyle, Edward Dorins, Daniel Head, Captain Patrick and Lieutenant Stephen O’Reilly, are killed, along with three civilians. Approximately 80 volunteers are captured.
The operation is the largest action in Dublin by rebels since the Easter Rising of April 1916.
The Irish War of Independence is a guerrilla campaign by the IRA in support of the Irish Republic. The conflict enters its bloodiest phase in the first six months of 1921. In Dublin, a total of 309 people are killed in the conflict and several hundred more wounded.
Dublin is garrisoned by over 10,000 British troops and 1,600 police including 400 men of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Auxiliary Division. Most IRA actions in the city consist either of assassinations of selected police, military or administration figures by the Squad, or ambushes on British forces by one of the four Active Service Units (ASU) of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, together comprising about 100 men. These are usually rapid and fleeting attacks using grenades and handguns, followed by a quick getaway. There are strict orders given to IRA units to avoid prolonged engagements with the better-armed British forces.
However, this policy is reversed after a meeting of the Ministry of Dáil Éireann in May 1921 where the President of the Republic, Éamon de Valera, calls for a spectacular public show of force by the IRA, to reinforce the idea that it is an army representing an Irish government. For this reason, it is decided to attack and burn the Custom House, which, although an important government building, is not defended by the British military. Michael Collins is against the attack but is overruled.
Michael O’Kelly, Lieutenant E Company, 2nd Battalion, Dublin Brigade, recalls plans to “deliver a smashing blow to England.” Two large scale operations – to capture Beggars Bush Barracks, or to destroy the Customs House are initially considered. The Custom House is eventually chosen. IRA member Vincent Byrne says that the operation is “one of many under review.”
In the early afternoon of May 25, 1921, roughly 120 non-uniformed IRA Volunteers begin to gather around the Custom House in groups of two or three. Three quarter of those involved belonged to the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade under Tom Ennis. Only a minority of them are experienced guerrilla fighters and they are armed only with pistols and a limited amount of ammunition. At 1:00 p.m., they rush the Custom House and overpower the police guard. A lorry pulls up outside the building with tins of petrol and bales of cotton, which are then sprinkled throughout the building. The IRA Volunteers herd all the staff into the main hall. The caretaker of the building, Francis Davis, is shot dead when he tries to call the police.
However, at about 1:10 p.m., a watching policeman notifies British forces and 60 Auxiliaries in three lorries and an armored car quickly arrive on the scene. IRA Volunteers from the 1st, 3rd and 4th battalions are positioned outside the building to stop the enemy from approaching.
Four Auxiliaries are wounded in a gun battle with one of these IRA protection teams outside the building. Other Auxiliaries fire into the building with rifles and Lewis machine guns, exchanging fire with the IRA fighters inside. A number of IRA Volunteers and civilians are killed or wounded by the Auxiliaries. As fighting rages outside, IRA Volunteers inside the building are ordered to set it alight.
The ammunition of the IRA Volunteers quickly runs out and the firefight ends within 30 minutes. Some Volunteers are shot as they try to run away. Tom Ennis, in command of the operation, escapes but is hit twice in the leg. Many others are arrested along with civilians as they come out of the now burning Custom House with their hands up. The Fire Brigade, which had been delayed from responding by other IRA companies in the city, arrives too late to put out the fire.
British military forces composed of units from the Wiltshire Regiment arrive and take over the operation from the Auxiliaries at this point. A total of 111 people are arrested, of whom 70–80 are IRA volunteers.
The Custom House burns for five days and is all but completely destroyed by the fire. With it are destroyed many centuries of local government records. The Irish Bulletin, official gazette of the Irish Republic, reports:
“A detachment of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Army was ordered to carry out the destruction of the Custom House in accordance with a decision arrived at after due deliberation of the ministry of Dáil Éireann. We in common with the rest of the nation regret the destruction of historical buildings. But the lives of four million people are a more cherished charge than any architectural masterpiece. The Custom House was the seat of an alien tyranny.”
From the republican point of view, the operation is successful for its propaganda value, but it is a heavy blow in terms of the numbers lost, both killed and arrested. Following the operation, the Dublin Brigade and The Squad are amalgamated into the Dublin Guard. However, the operation does not totally impede the IRA’s campaign in Dublin. The Dublin Brigade carries out 107 attacks in the city in May and 93 in June, showing a decline but not a dramatic one.
The memoir of Harry Colley, Adjutant of the Dublin IRA, estimates the numbers in the five Dublin battalions at 1,400 in early 1921.
The armed conflict is brought to an end on July 11, 1921, and negotiations are opened which produces the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December of that year. The Custom House is re-built after the end of the war.
Irish local government records from the 1600s had been brought from rural parts of Ireland to the Custom House for safekeeping, and these are lost in the blaze. At the time, The New York Times subtitles their report on the fire as “Priceless Records Lost.” Some genealogists still lament the loss of these historical records.
(Pictured: The Custom House in flames, taken on May 25, 1921)
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.
Hackett is born into a working-class family in Dublin on July 25, 1893, the daughter of John Hackett, a hairdresser, and Roseanna Dunne. According to the 1901 census, she is living with her widowed mother and five other family members in a tenement building on Bolton Street in Dublin. The available documents suggest that her father dies when she is still very young. She joins the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) when it is established in 1909 by James Larkin, which marks the beginning of her lifelong activity in trade unionism. By 1911 she is living with her family in a cottage on Old Abbey Street, and her mother has remarried to Patrick Gray.
Hackett fights for many decades for the rights of workers. Through her affiliation and work with the ITGWU, the IWWU and the Irish Citizen Army, she helps carve out and secure modern-day working conditions. Her career begins as a packer in a paper store, then becoming a messenger for Jacob’s biscuits. At that time the working conditions in the factory are poor.
On August 22, 1911, Hackett helps organise the withdrawal of women’s labour in Jacob’s factory to support their male colleagues who are already on strike. With the women’s help, the men secure better working conditions and a pay rise. Two weeks later, at the age of eighteen, she co-founds the IWWU with Delia Larkin. During the 1913 lock-out she helps mobilise the Jacob’s workers to come out in solidarity with other workers. They, in turn, are locked out by their own employers. This does not stop her work to help others, and she, along with several of her IWWU colleagues, set up soup kitchens in Liberty Hall to help feed the strikers. However, in 1914 her Jacob’s employers sack her over her role in the lock-out.
Hackett begins work as a clerk in the printshop in Liberty Hall, and it is here she becomes involved with the Irish Citizen Army. She is involved in preparations for the 1916 Rising, working in a union shop, helping with printers, and making first-aid kits and knap-sacks.
If other members of the ITGWU were looking for James Connolly, Hackett aids in bringing them to him. She “worked as canvasser and traveler and was called on to carry out many confidential jobs.”
Hackett takes up first aid training provided by Dr. Kathleen Lynn for six months before the Rising and attends night marches organised by the Irish Citizen Army. According to her own account, she says, “A week before Easter, I took part in the ceremony of hoisting the challenge flag over Hall.” Like other girls and women who are involved in the Rising, she carries messages and guns and prepares uniforms and food for Irish Republican Army (IRA) members “and sometimes risky work.”
Three weeks before the Easter Rising, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) raid a shop where Hackett is working. She is alone when they come, and they are looking for a copy of “Gael.” She says to them, “wait until I get the head” and she calls for Connolly. The police are stopped by Connolly and Helena Molony who are armed, and Hackett immediately hides everything, so that when the police come back, they cannot get anything.
Through her experience of working in the printshop, Hackett helps to print the Proclamation of the Irish Republic. She is in the printing room in Liberty Hall as a trusted messenger in 1916 when the Proclamation is printed, and it is the first time she is allowed in. Three men are there when she enters the room and one comes over to her, shakes her hand and congratulates her. It makes her very proud, especially since no one else is allowed to get in. She subsequently tells family members of handing it still wet to James Connolly before it is read by Patrick Pearse outside the entrance to the General Post Office (GPO).
Hackett is an active member of the Irish Citizen Army. On Easter Tuesday, under the command of Constance Markievicz, she takes part in the 1916 Rising and is located in the area of St. Stephen’s Green and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. This position is heavily attacked with guns, short of first aid and “looked like a death trap.” However, after moving from an initially overlooked position in St. Stephen’s Green, it is one of the last positions to surrender. In the Royal College, as a first-aid practitioner, she is allowed entry to the lecture room sanctioned to the Red Cross only. Another first-aider, Aider Nora O’Daily, later reports that during those days, “I have a very kind remembrance of Little Rosie Hackett of the Citizen Army, always cheerful and always willing; to see her face about the place was a tonic itself.”
After surrendering, the rebels are taken to Dublin Castle. Hackett is imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol for ten days.
In 1917, on the anniversary of Connolly’s death, Hackett, together with Helena Molony, Jennie Shanahan and Brigid Davis, print and hang a poster detailing the anniversary. After the first poster displayed by the ITGWU members is taken down by the police, they work to ensure that their poster will stay on Liberty Hall much longer by staying on top of the roof to defend it. They barricade the door using a ton of coal and nails on the windows. The poster is hanging there until 6:00 p.m. and thousands of people can see it.
After the Rising, Hackett returns to the IWWU which, at its strongest, organises over 70,000 women. After the 1945 laundry strike, they win an extra week of paid holidays for the workers. She attends many important labour union events such as the opening of the new Liberty Hall on May 2, 1965, and Arbour Hill memorial services. Until her retirement, she runs the trade union shops resulting in over five decades of active participation in the Irish trades union movement work to improve conditions for Irish workers. In 1970 she is awarded a gold medal for fifty years of ITGWU membership.
In the 1970s, Walter McFarlane, then branch secretary of the ITGWU, awards an honorary badge for Hackett’s fifty years contribution to the union.
Hackett never marries and lives in Fairview, Dublin, with her brother Tommy until her death on May 4, 1976. She is buried at St. Paul’s plot in Glasnevin Cemetery next to her mother and stepfather. At her burial, she is honoured with a military salute and her coffin is covered with the Irish flag. After her passing, her legacy is remembered in the union’s newspaper, a tale of the strife of Hackett together with the rest of Dublin’s working class, for which she fought to change.
In May 2014, the Rosie Hackett Bridge is officially opened by the Lord Mayor of Dublin. The Hackett Bridge Campaign began in October 2012, led by three women Angelina Cox, an active member of Labour Youth, Jeni Gartland and Lisa Connell. The final shortlist of contending names for the new bridge were Rosie Hackett, Kathleen Mills, Willie Bermingham, Bram Stoker and Frank Duff.
In April 2015, a plaque is unveiled on Foley Street by the North Inner City Folklore Project to commemorate the women of the Irish Citizen Army. The plaque lists Hackett as a member of the St. Stephen’s Green/College of Surgeons garrison during the 1916 Easter Rising.
McEnery is born on April 28, 1892, to Henry McEnery and Margaret (née Stack) at 4 Slieveawaddra, Drommartin, County Kerry. His mother and father are national teachers, and his father is also a farmer. Some of his older siblings become teachers and his brother is a Catholic priest.
McEnery marries Johannah (Hannah) Donnelly at Causeway, County Kerry, on April 13, 1918. Their only child, Henry, known as “Sunny,” is born on June 11, 1920.
McEnery joins the Irish Volunteers and is a lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, North Kerry. As in the Volunteers, in the IRA he is a lieutenant, 3rd Battalion, in the Kerry No.1 Brigade (also of North Kerry). He is part of Timothy “Aeroplane” Lyons‘s column, which is involved in the burning of a Civic Guard station at Ballyheigue and a robbery of the Ballyduff post office. He is captured and imprisoned by the National Army and claims under interrogation that he was forced to join Lyons’s column under fear of death, accused of being a traitor. Despite giving an undertaking, he would not resume militant activity, he rejoins Lyons’s column following his release.
On April 16, McEnery takes part in the column’s ambush on a Free State raiding party at Meenoghane. The National Army’s 1st Western Division supplies reinforcements quickly and pursues the column to Clashmealcon, where the members hide in Dumfort’s Cave on the Atlantic cliffs with no possible escape. Two National Army troops are shot and killed by Lyons when trying to enter the cave. Two of the column’s men fall and drown after trying to scale the cliff at night. McEnery surrendered with Reginald Walter Stenning and Edmond Greaney. They are taken to Ballymullen Barracks in Tralee. Lyons falls from a rope and is shot while lying on the rocks below.
On April 18, McEnery and his two remaining colleagues are charged with the Ballyheigue burning, the Ballyduff robbery, stripping civic guards at Ballyheigue, attacking National troops at Clashmealcon and armed opposition to the government. They are tried and sentenced to death by Paddy Daly, OC of the National Army in Kerry. The following day, Daly asks for confirmation of the sentences, which duly arrive. McEnery is shot at 8:00 a.m. on April 25, three days before his 31st birthday. He is initially interred at the gaol. A death entry is made in the register the following month, incorrectly giving his age as 28. His body is finally released, along with those of others executed, to relatives on October 28 of the following year, when hundreds gather outside the gaol.
McEnery is buried alongside executed colleagues in the republican plot at Rahela Cemetery, Ballyduff. Hannah McEnery is granted £250 from the Irish White Cross and their son Henry £1 per week until working age. In 1932, pending new legislation, she applies for an allowance because of her dependency on McEnery and is awarded £67 and 10 shillings per annum (increased to £250 in the 1950s), and £18 per annum for their son.
McEnery is counted as one of “the seventy-seven,” a term made popular amongst republicans after the writing of Dorothy Macardle in memory of those executed by Free State troops.
seamus dubhghaill 