Born Helen Ruth Gifford on November 9, 1880, in Phibsborough, Dublin, to Frederick Gifford, a solicitor, and Isabella Julia Gifford (née Burton), Gifford is the fifth child and second eldest daughter of the family of six daughters and six sons. Her father is a Catholic while her mother, a niece of the painter Frederic Burton, is rigorously Protestant. All the children are brought up in the Church of Ireland. The men, emigrate and remain unionist while the women are active nationalists. Most famous are the two youngest, the artistGrace Gifford, and the journalist and broadcaster Sidney Czira.
Gifford grows up in Rathmines and goes to school at Alexandra College. She trains as a domestic economy teacher and works for seven years at a series of positions in County Meath.
Gifford experiences the living conditions of the landless rural poor while lodging in labourers’ cottages during this time. As a result, she becomes a supporter of the campaigns of the land agitator and nationalist MPLaurence Ginnell.
During the 1913 Dublin lock-out Gifford assists James Larkin enter the Imperial Hotel, on August 31 to address the crowd. He enters in disguise, that of an elderly and infirm clergyman. She poses as his niece. She speaks to the hotel staff to prevent Larkin’s strong Liverpool accent giving away his identify. This is the speech which precipitates the “Bloody Sunday” police baton charge. Gifford goes on to be a founding member of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA). This group is attractive to many women due to the feminist beliefs of James Connolly.
Gifford gives lessons on camp cookery in Liberty Hall and finds jobs for recruits coming in from abroad. As a result of this work she, very fatefully, introduces Michael Collins to her future brother-in-law Joseph Plunkett who go on to serve together in the 1916 Easter Rising. Collins is Plunkett’s aide-de-camp.
Gifford is the only one of her sisters to actively participate in the rising itself. She is with the ICA’s St. Stephen’s Green contingent alongside Countess Markievicz. Throughout the week she supervises the garrison’s provisions in the Royal College of Surgeons building, commandeering food from shops and bread vans, and by courier from other garrisons. She also ensures the delivery of provisions to troops both in the college with her and in outlying posts. She is one of the women arrested at the surrender and jailed in Kilmainham Gaol. At the same time, in the same prison her sister Grace marries Joseph Plunkett hours before his execution. Only twelve women are detained after the main release of women prisoners on May 8, 1916. Gifford is one of those transferred to Mountjoy Prison until her release on June 4, 1916. Afterward she continues to be as involved in the campaigns.
After her time in prison, Gifford travels through England to the United States where she and other women veterans of Easter week lecture throughout America. While there she marries Joseph Donnelly, of Omagh, County Tyrone in 1918. In 1921 she and their year-old daughter Maeve leave him to return to Ireland.
Frederick Gifford dies in September 1917 and leaves Gifford £800. However, she is was not well off. She becomes a broadcaster and journalist for the national radio and the Irish press. Holding to her upbringing, she remains a staunch Protestant, unlike four of her sisters, who had married Catholics.
Gifford becomes devoted to preserving the historical record of the independence movement. Noticing the huge number of visitors for the 1932 Eucharistic Congress, she organises a small exhibition there of 1916 memorabilia for the National Museum of Ireland. She is irritated by the display of Catholic religious artifacts there. She campaigns for a permanent exhibition of recent Irish nationalist history. She coordinates a substantial body of material pertinent to nationalist organisations, the Easter Rising, and the Irish War of Independence, which now forms the core of the present collection.
Over the years Gifford is secretary of the Old IRA Association, a member of the Old Dublin Society, and a founder of the Kilmainham Gaol Restoration Society. She also looks after stray and neglected dogs and cats. She dies at the age of 90 on June 23, 1971, at the Gascoigne nursing home in Rathmines, Dublin.
(Pictured: Irish nationalist Nellie Gifford taken in Boston in 1917)
MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.
MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).
The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”
Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.
The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.
When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.
Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”
In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.
MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.
On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.
On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.
MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.
MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.
MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.
Devlin is born into a Roman Catholic family and attends St. Patrick’s Girls Academy in Dungannon. She is studying Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 1968 when she takes a prominent role in a student-led civil rights organisation, People’s Democracy. She is subsequently excluded from the university.
After engaging on the side of the residents in the Battle of the Bogside, Devlin is convicted of incitement to riot in December 1969, for which she serves a short jail term.
Having witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday, Devlin is infuriated that she is consistently denied the floor in the House of Commons by the Speaker Selwyn Lloyd, despite the fact that parliamentary convention decrees that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion would be granted an opportunity to speak about it. She slaps Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary in the Conservative government, across the face when he states in the House of Commons that the paratroopers had fired in self-defence on Bloody Sunday.
In 1971, Devlin gives birth to a daughter, Róisín, which costs her some political support because she is unmarried. She later marries Róisín’s father, Michael McAliskey, on her 26th birthday on April 23, 1973.
McAliskey stands as an independent candidate in support of the prisoners at Long Kesh prison in the 1979 European Parliament elections in Northern Ireland and wins 5.9% of the vote. She is a leading spokesperson for the Smash H-Block Campaign, which supports the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981.
On January 16, 1981, McAliskey and her husband are shot by members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), who break into their home near Coalisland, County Tyrone. She is shot fourteen times in front of her children. British soldiers are watching the McAliskey home at the time but fail to prevent the assassination attempt. The couple are taken by helicopter to a hospital in nearby Dungannon for emergency treatment and then transported to the Musgrave Park Hospital, Military Wing, in Belfast, under intensive care. The attackers, all three members of the South Belfast UDA, are captured by the army patrol and subsequently jailed.
In 1982, McAliskey twice fails in an attempt to be elected to the Dublin North–Central constituency of Dáil Éireann. In 2003, she is barred from entering the United States and is deported on the grounds that the United States Department of State has declared that she “poses a serious threat to the security of the United States,” apparently referring to her conviction for incitement to riot in 1969.
On May 12, 2007, McAliskey is the guest speaker at Éirígí‘s first Annual James Connolly commemoration in Arbour Hill, Dublin. She currently co-ordinates a not-for-profit community development organisation based in Dungannon, the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme, and works with migrant workers to improve their treatment in Northern Ireland.
Mac Airt first becomes involved in Irish republicanism as a boy when he joins the Fianna Éireann. His first imprisonment is in 1942 when he is sent to jail for illegal military foot drilling. He Is later interned during the IRA’s Border Campaign of 1956-1962.
Having retired at some earlier point, Mac Airt returns to the republican movement in 1969, throwing his lot in with the newly established Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) and their political arm Provisional Sinn Féin. Indeed, in early 1970 his Patrick Pearsecumann, which he sets up in the Clonard area of the Falls Road, is the first branch of Provisional Sinn Féin established in Belfast and proves central to the growth of the dissident party in the city. In August 1970, he Is appointed editor of the Belfast-based Republican News, succeeding Jimmy Steele who had died soon after being appointed editor. Despite his advancing age Mac Airt also becomes involved in the gun battles that rage between the republicans from Falls and loyalists from the neighbouring Shankill Road. As a consequence, he becomes one of the leaders of the nascent PIRA in Belfast. He is publicly named as a leading republican by General Anthony Farrar-Hockley who commands the British Army present during the clashes and with whom Mac Airt has held failed negotiations at the scene of conflict. He serves as Adjutant to Billy McKee, who is first commander of the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade. According to Brendan Hughes, Mac Airt’s Kane Street home doubles as Belfast Brigade headquarters at the early stage in the movement’s history.
On April 15, 1971, Mac Airt, along with Billy McKee, is arrested by the British Army when found in possession of a handgun. Both men are sentenced under the Explosive Substances Act 1883 and sent to Crumlin Road Gaol. In the prison the two men are recognised as the leaders of the republican prisoners, a role held by Gusty Spence on the loyalist side. They co-operate informally with Spence to maintain order until they agree to establish an official Camp Council. The make-up of this group sees Mac Airt and McKee representing the PIRA, Spence and an associate identified only as “Robert” representing the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ned McCreery and James Craig as Ulster Defence Association (UDA) delegates, with members of the Official IRA (OIRA) and Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) eventually added.
Mac Airt is involved in the talks held between republicans and clergymen from various Protestant churches held at Feakle, County Clare, on December 12, 1974. While the talks produced little, he Is one of those who maintains contact with the clergymen. Indeed, on January 19, 1975, one of the ministers, Rev William Arlow of the Irish Council of Churches (ICC), even introduces Mac Airt and his ally Jimmy Drumm to British government officials Michael Oatley and James Allan in an attempt to have the republican grievances heard.
Although a new generation of leaders emerges in the Provisional IRA and Sinn Féin, Mac Airt remains an influential veteran. He is close to Danny Morrison and Tom Hartley and helps to ensure the removal of Seán Caughey from the editorship of Republican News in 1975 and his replacement by Morrison.
In 1968, Mac Airt records two vocal songs, “Croppy Boy” and “Flag of the Fianna” on the LP record Irish Songs of Freedom produced for the Outlet Recording Co. Ltd, Belfast.
Mac Airt dies on January 8, 1992, at the age of 69. The President of Sinn Féin, Gerry Adams, delivers the graveside oration at his funeral, describing him as “a radical in the Connolly tradition.”
Johnson is born on May 17, 1872, in Liverpool, England. He works on the docks for an Irish fish merchant, spending much of his time in Dunmore East and Kinsale. It is this way that he picks up ideas about socialism and Irish nationalism, joining a Liverpool branch of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. In 1900 he starts work as a commercial traveller, then moves in 1903 with his family to Belfast where he becomes involved in trade union and labour politics.
In 1907, Johnson helps James Larkin organise a strike in the port, but has to watch in dismay as the strike, which begins with remarkable solidarity between labour, Orange, and nationalist supporters, collapses in sectarian rioting. At various times he is the president, treasurer and secretary of the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) which is, at the time, also the Labour Party in Ireland, until officially founded in 1912 by James Connolly and James Larkin. Johnson becomes Vice-President of the ITUC in 1913, and President in 1915.
Johnson sympathizes with the Irish Volunteers, many of whom are sacked from their jobs, for illegal activities. During the Easter Rising, he notes in his diary that people in Ireland paid little heed to the fate of the defeated revolutionaries. He succeeds as leader of the Labour Party from 1917, when the party does not contest the 1918 Irish general election. When the British government tries to enforce conscription in Ireland in 1918, he leads a successful strike in conjunction with other members of the Irish anti-conscription movement.
Johnson is later elected a TD for Dublin County to the Third Dáil at the 1922 Irish general election and remains leader of the Labour Party until 1927. As such, he is Leader of the Opposition in the Dáil of the Irish Free State, as the anti-treaty faction of Sinn Féin refuses to recognise the Dáil as constituted. He issues a statement of support for the Government of the 4th Dáil when the Irish Army Mutiny threatens civilian control in March 1924.
Johnson is the only Leader of the Labour Party who serves as Leader of the Opposition in the Dáil. He loses his Dáil seat at the September 1927 Irish general election, and the following year he is elected to Seanad Éireann, where he serves until the Seanad’s abolition in 1936.
In 1896 he meets Marie Tregay, then a teacher in St. Multose’s National school, outside Kinsale. A native of Cornwall, she has advanced political views. They marry in 1898 in Liverpool. Their only son, Frederick Johnson, is born in 1899, and becomes a well-known actor. Johnson dies on January 17, 1963, at 49 Mount Prospect Avenue, Clontarf, Dublin.
Each summer, Labour Youth holds the “Tom Johnson Summer School” to host panel discussions, debates and workshops.
Louisa (Louie) Bennett, suffragette, trade unionist, and peace activist, is born on January 7, 1870, in Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest daughter of James Cavendish Bennett, a prosperous auctioneer, and his wife Susan (née Bolger). She is brought up at Temple Hill, Blackrock, and educated at Alexandra College, and at an academy for young ladies in London, where she and her sisters form an Irish League. She goes on to study singing in Bonn, Germany. Already as a teenager she shows an interest in writing, her first literary effort being Memoirs of the Temple Road in the 80s. Afterward she publishes two unsuccessful romantic novels, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (1908), the latter set in County Down in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
Bennett turns her attention to women’s issues and by 1910 has become involved in the suffrage movement, initially through her reading of the suffrage monthly TheIrish Citizen. In 1911, she co-founds, with her life-long friend and colleague Helen Chenevix, the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, an umbrella organisation, which by 1913 has connected fifteen Irish suffrage societies and has established links with Europe and the United States. She and Chenevix are the organisation’s first honorary secretaries. She is also associated with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, for which she runs public speaking classes. However, as the divide between militants and opponents of the use of violence become more pronounced, Bennett, as a confirmed pacifist, who endorses what she calls “constructive, rather than destructive action,” distances herself from the league, and through her involvement in the production of TheIrish Citizen seeks to sideline the militants.
Bennett’s concerns are not limited to the question of women’s franchise. As founder of the Irish Women’s Reform League, she not only addressea the suffrage question, but examines many social issues concerning women. The league focuses on working conditions, monitors court cases involving women, and demands school meals and better education. She is among those who assist in the relief effort at Liberty Hall during the 1913 strike and lockout in Dublin, and she appeals for funds for strikers’ families through TheIrish Citizen. In the period that follows she maintains her links with the labour movement. She often opposes the direct, uncompromising approach of both James Connolly and Helena Molony, and argues that labour and women’s issues can only be hampered by any affiliation with nationalist politics. The aftermath of the Easter Rising, and in particular, the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, causes her to revise some of her views on nationalism. In late 1916 she accepts an invitation to reorganise the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), on the understanding that she would have complete independence from Liberty Hall. Assisted by Chenevix and Father John Flanagan, she re-creates the union along professional lines, and by 1918 its membership has risen dramatically from a few hundred to 5,300. She consistently defends its separatist stance, arguing that women’s concerns in a male-dominated union will always be of secondary importance.
Throughout World War I Bennett campaigns for peace, and she is selected as the Irish representative to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She leads the IWWU in its opposition to the attempted introduction of conscription in 1918, and in 1920 she travels to the United States to highlight Black and Tan atrocities (she later meets David Lloyd George and demands the removal of the Black and Tans from Ireland). As a member of the Women’s Peace Committee, she acts as a mediator during the Irish Civil War.
In 1925, Bennett is appointed to an Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) committee to promote a scheme of working class education with the assistance of the labour movement. Her interest in adult education later leads to her involvement with The People’s College. A member of the national executive of the ITUC (1927–32, 1944–50), she becomes the first female president of the congress in 1932. She serves a second presidential term in 1947. Her knowledge of labour issues is officially acknowledged by the Irish government in 1932, when she is sent as a representative to Geneva to put forward the case of Irish women workers. In 1938 she delivers a paper entitled Industrialism in an Agrarian Country to the International Relations Institute in the Netherlands.
Despite the depth of Bennett’s involvement with the union movement, she has ambitions outside trade unionism, and in 1938 she lets her name be put forward by the IWWU as a congress candidate for election to the senate, but this comes to nothing. In that year she is appointed to the government commission on vocational organisation (1938–43). In 1943, she is elected as a Labour Party member of the Dún Laoghaire borough council. As a councillor she consistently lobbies for improved housing and is instrumental in the establishment of Dún Laoghaire’s housing council in 1949. She had refused a labour nomination in the 1918 general election, but she stands for Dublin County Council and Dáil Éireann in 1944, in both cases unsuccessfully. She is the only Labour Party member to criticise the party’s support for the Fianna Fáil minority government of 1932, arguing that it is “never right or wise to co-operate with another party with fundamentally different principles.” As an elected member of the Labour Party executive, she represents Ireland at the International Labour Organization in Europe. She is also a representative at the League of Nations.
Throughout her public career Bennett consistently condemns colonialism, fascism, and armaments expenditure. She is possibly best remembered for her leadership in the laundry workers’ strike of 1945, during which IWWU members successfully fight for a fortnight‘s paid holiday. Her management of the IWWU, which lasts until 1955, is marked by determination and diplomacy, though she often uses threatened resignations as a means of controlling her colleagues. She died, unmarried, on November 25, 1956, in Killiney, County Dublin.
(From: “Bennett, Louisa (‘Louie’)” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009)
Byrne is born on November 23, 1900, in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, Dublin, the elder among one son and one daughter of Vincent Byrne, carpenter, of 33 Denzille Street (now Fenian Street), and his wife Margaret (née White). By 1911 the family is living with maternal relatives at 1 Anne’s Lane. Educated at St. Andrew’s national school, Westland Row, he is apprenticed as a cabinet maker under Thomas Weafer, a company captain in the Irish Volunteers, who is subsequently killed in the 1916 Easter Rising. At the age of fourteen, he joins the Irish Volunteers in January 1915, and is posted to the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade. His training includes lectures on street fighting by James Connolly. During the 1916 rising he serves with the 2nd Battalion in Jacob’s biscuit factory under Thomas MacDonagh. At the surrender he is slipped out a factory window to safety by a priest who is acting as an intermediary. Arrested in his home a week later, he is held in Richmond Barracks with other youngsters, all of whom are released after an additional week. Active in the post-rising reorganisation of the Dublin Brigade, he claims to have voted twenty times for Sinn Féin candidates in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland.
In November 1919, Byrne is recruited to an elite counter-intelligence squad of the Dublin Brigade, whose primary mission is the assassination of plainclothes detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s (DMP) political (‘G’) division. He participates in the attempted ambush of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, John French, at Ashtown, Dublin, on December 19, 1919, a combined operation of the Dublin and the 3rd Tipperary brigades. In March 1920, he leaves his civilian employment with the Irish Woodworkers, Crow Street, when the squad is constituted as a full-time, paid, GHQ guard, under direct orders from Michael Collins. Dubbed “The Twelve Apostles,” the squad also includes James Slattery, a workmate of Byrne since their apprenticeships. For the duration of the Irish War of Independence, Byrne takes part in the stakeouts and killings of police detectives and military intelligence agents. His witness statement to the Bureau of Military History recounts his participation in some fifteen such operations. On Bloody Sunday he commands an IRA detail that kills two of the “Cairo Gang“ agents in their boarding house at 38 Upper Mount Street on November 21, 1920. He takes part in The Custom House raid on May 25, 1921.
Owing largely to his devoted allegiance to Collins, Byrne supports the Anglo–Irish Treaty of December 1921, regarding it as a stepping stone to complete independence. Enlisting in the National Army, he serves in the Dublin Guard. Promoted five times from January 1922 to February 1923, he rises in rank from company sergeant to commandant. He is OC of the guard at the handover of Dublin Castle from British to Irish authority on January 16, 1922. During ensuing months he commands guard details at government buildings and the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. In March 1922, he foils an attempt by Anti-Treaty forces to seize the bank with the aid of mutinous soldiers within the building’s guard. Having displayed courage and presence of mind throughout the incident, he is promoted captain in the field. Resenting the role given to ex-British-army officers in the National Army, and feeling that the political elite of the Free State are betraying the national interest, he is among the group of officers involved in the failed army mutiny of 1924, and accordingly is forced to resign his commission on March 21. He then works as a carpenter on the industrial staff of the Office of Public Works (OPW), and in the post office stores, St. John’s Road, Kilmainham, Dublin, until his retirement.
Byrne is a founding member of both the Association of Dublin Brigades and the 1916–1921 Club. Long lived, and a willing raconteur with a colourful turn of phrase, he becomes probably the best known of Collins’s squad (of which he is the last surviving member), granting many interviews to journalists and historians. He expresses no misgivings about his role as a revolutionary hit man, arguing the necessity of the ruthless methods employed, which deterred potential informers, and eventually won the struggle by crippling British intelligence.
Byrne lives in Dublin at 59 Blessington Street, and later at 227 Errigal Road, Drimnagh. His last address is 25 Lein Road, Artane. His wife Eileen predeceases him. He dies on December 13, 1992, survived by two daughters and one son. He is buried at Balgriffin Cemetery, Balgriffin, County Dublin.
(From: “Byrne, Vincent (‘Vinnie’)” by Lawrence William White and Pauric J. Dempsey, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
O’Callaghan is born into a family with a Fenianparamilitary history. His paternal grandfather had taken the Anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War, and his father had been interned by the Irish Government at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare for IRA activity during World War II.
By the late 1960s, O’Callaghan ceases to practise his Catholic faith, adopts atheism and has become interested in the theories of Marxist revolutionary politics, which finds an outlet of practical expression in the sectarian social unrest in Northern Ireland at the time, centered on the activities of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In 1969, communal violence breaks out in Northern Ireland and believing that British imperialism is responsible, he joins the newly founded Provisional IRA at the age of 17.
Soon afterward, O’Callaghan is arrested by local Gardaí after he accidentally detonates a small amount of explosives, which cause damage to the homes of his parents and their neighbours. After demanding, and receiving, treatment as a political prisoner, he quietly serves his sentence.
After becoming a full-time paramilitary with the IRA, in the early to mid-1970s O’Callaghan takes part in over seventy operations associated with Irish Republican political violence including bomb materials manufacture, attacks on IRA targets in Northern Ireland, and robberies to provide funding for the organisation.
In 1976, O’Callaghan ends his involvement with the IRA after becoming disillusioned with its activities. He later recalls that his disenchantment with the IRA began when one of his compatriots openly hoped that a female police officer who had been blown up by an IRA bomb had been pregnant so they could get “two for the price of one.” He is also concerned with what he perceives as an undercurrent of ethnic hatred in its rank and file toward the Ulster Scots population. He leaves Ireland and moves to London. In May 1978, he marries a Scottish woman of Protestantunionist descent. During the late 1970s, he runs a successful mobile cleaning business. However, he is unable to fully settle into his new life, later recalling, “In truth there seemed to be no escaping from Ireland. At the strangest of times I would find myself reliving the events of my years in the IRA. As the years went on, I came to believe that the Provisional IRA was the greatest enemy of democracy and decency in Ireland.”
In 1979, O’Callaghan is approached by the IRA seeking to recruit him again for its paramilitary campaign. In response, he decides to turncoat against the organisation and becomes an agent within its ranks for the Irish Government. He decides to become a double agent even though he knows that even those who hate the IRA as much as he now does have a low opinion of informers. However, he feels it is the only way to stop the IRA from luring teenagers into their ranks and training them to kill.
Soon after being approached by the IRA to re-join, O’Callaghan returns to Tralee from London, where he arranges a clandestine meeting with an officer of the Garda Special Detective Unit in a local cemetery, at which he expresses his willingness to work with it to subvert the IRA from within. At this point, he is still opposed to working with the British Government. A few weeks later, he makes contact with Kerry IRA leader Martin Ferris and attends his first IRA meeting since 1975. Immediately afterward, he telephones his Garda contact and says, “We’re in”.
During the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison, O’Callaghan attempts to start his own hunger strike in support of the Maze prisoners but is told to desist by the IRA for fear it will detract focus from the prisoners. He successfully sabotages the efforts of republicans in Kerry from staging hunger strikes of their own.
In 1984, O’Callaghan notifies the Garda of an attempt to smuggle seven tons of AK-47assault rifles from the United States to Ireland aboard a fishing trawler named Valhalla. The guns are intended for the arsenal of the Provisional IRA’s units. As a result of his warning, a combined force of the Irish Navy and Gardaí intercept the boat that received the weaponry, and the guns are seized. The seizure marks the complete end of any major attempt by the IRA to smuggle guns out of the United States.
In 1983, O’Callaghan claims to be tasked by the IRA with placing 25 lbs. of Frangex in the Dominion Theatre in London, in an attempt to kill Prince Charles and Princess Diana who are due to attend a charity pop music concert there. A warning is phoned into the Garda, and the Royal couple are hurriedly ushered from the theatre by their police bodyguard during the concert. The theatre had been searched before the concert and a second search following the warning reveals no device.
In 1985, O’Callaghan is elected as a Sinn Féin councillor for Tralee Urban District Council, and unsuccessfully contests a seat on Kerry County Council.
After becoming disillusioned with his work with the Irish Government following the murder of another of its agents within the IRA, which it had failed to prevent despite O’Callaghan’s warnings of the threat to him, and sensing a growing threat to himself from the organisation which had become suspicious of his own behaviour, he withdraws from the IRA and leaves Ireland to live in England, taking his wife and children with him. His marriage ends in a divorce in 1987, and on November 29, 1988, he walks into a police station in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, where he presents himself to the officer on duty at the desk, confesses to the murder of Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) Greenfinch (female member) Eva Martin and the murder of D.I. Peter Flanagan during the mid-1970s, and voluntarily surrenders to British prosecution.
Although the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) offers him witness protection as part of the informer policy, O’Callaghan refuses it and is prosecuted under charges of two murders and 40 other crimes, to all of which he pleads guilty, committed in British jurisdiction with the IRA. Having been found guilty, he is sentenced to a total of 539 years in prison. He serves his sentence in prisons in Northern Ireland and England. While in jail, he publishes his story in The Sunday Times. He is released after being granted the royal prerogative of mercy by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996.
In 1998, O’Callaghan publishes an autobiographical account of his experiences in Irish Republican paramilitarism, entitled The Informer: The True Life Story of One Man’s War on Terrorism (1998).
In 2002, O’Callaghan is admitted to Nightingale Hospital, Marylebone, an addiction and rehab center where he undergoes a rehabilitation program for alcohol dependency. His identity and past activities are not revealed to the other patients. He lives relatively openly in London for the rest of his life, refusing to adopt a new identity. He is befriended in the city by the Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, and works as a security consultant, and also occasional advisor to the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) on how to handle Irish republicanism in general, and Sinn Féin in particular.
In 2006, O’Callaghan appears in a London court with regard to an aggravated robbery that occurs in which he is the victim.
In 2015, O’Callaghan publishes James Connolly: My Search for the Man, the Myth & his Legacy (2015), a book containing a critique of the early 20th century Irish revolutionary James Connolly, and what he considers to be his destructive legacy in Ireland’s contemporary politics.
O’Callaghan dies by drowning after suffering a heart attack at the age of 63 while in a swimming pool in Kingston, Jamaica, on August 23, 2017, while visiting his daughter. A memorial service is held in his memory on March 21, 2018, at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a Church of England parish church at the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, London. The service is attended by representatives from Ulster Unionist parties and the Irish Government.
In March 1917, Ryan passes his final medical examinations. That June he sets up medical practice in Wexford. In 1921, he moves to Dublin where he opens a doctor’s practice at Harcourt Street, specialising in skin diseases at the Skin and Cancer Hospital on Holles Street. He leaves medicine in 1925, after he purchases Kindlestown, a large farm near Delgany, County Wicklow. He lives there and it remains a working farm until his death.
In July 1919, Ryan marries Máirín Cregan, originally from County Kerry and a close friend of Sinéad de Valera throughout her life. Cregan, like her husband, also fought in the Easter Rising and is subsequently an author of children’s stories in Irish. They have three children together.
While studying at university in 1913, Ryan joins the Gaelic League at Clonmel. The company commander recruits the young Catholicnationalist, who becomes a founder-member of the Irish Volunteers and is sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) the following year. In 1916, he goes first to Cork to deliver a message from Seán Mac Diarmada to Tomás Mac Curtain that the Easter Rising is due to happen on Easter Sunday, then to Cork again in a 12-hour journey in a car to deliver Eoin MacNeill‘s cancellation order, which attempts to stop the rising. When he arrives back on Tuesday, he serves as the medical officer in the General Post Office (GPO) and treats many wounds, including James Connolly‘s shattered ankle, a wound which gradually turns gangrenous. He is, along with Connolly, one of the last people to leave the GPO when the evacuation takes place. Following the surrender of the garrison, he is deported to HM Prison Stafford in England and subsequently Frongoch internment camp. He is released in August 1916.
Ryan rejoins the Volunteers immediately after his release from prison, and in June 1917, he is elected Commandant of the Wexford Battalion. His political career begins the following year when he is elected as a Sinn Féin candidate for the constituency of South Wexford in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland. Like his fellow Sinn Féin MPs, he refuses to attend the Westminster Parliament. Instead he attends the proceedings of the First Dáil on January 21, 1919. As the Irish War of Independence goes on, he becomes Brigade Commandant of South Wexford and is also elected to Wexford County Council, serving as chairman on one occasion. In September 1919, he is arrested by the British and interned on Spike Island and later Bere Island. In February 1921, he is imprisoned at Kilworth Internment Camp, County Cork. He is later moved on Ballykinlar Barracks in County Down and released in August 1921.
In 1926, Ryan is among the Sinn Féin TDs who follow leader Éamon de Valera out of the party to found Fianna Fáil. They enter the Dáil in 1927 and spend five years on the opposition benches.
In 1947, after spending fifteen years as Minister for Agriculture, Ryan is appointed to the newly created positions of Minister for Health and Minister for Social Welfare. Following Fianna Fáil’s return to power at the 1951 Irish general election, he returns as Minister for Health and Social Welfare. Following the 1954 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil loses power and he moves to the backbenches once again.
Following the 1957 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil are back in office and de Valera’s cabinet has a new look to it. In a clear message that there will be a change to economic policy, Ryan, a close ally of Seán Lemass, is appointed Minister for Finance, replacing the conservative Seán MacEntee. The first sign of a new economic approach comes in 1958, when Ryan brings the First Programme for Economic Development to the cabinet table. This plan, the brainchild of T. K. Whitaker, recognises that Ireland will have to move away from self-sufficiency toward free trade. It also proposes that foreign firms should be given grants and tax breaks to set up in Ireland.
When Lemass succeeds de Valera as Taoiseach in 1959, Ryan is re-appointed as Minister for Finance. Lemass wants to reward him for his loyalty by also naming him Tánaiste. However, the new leader feels obliged to appoint MacEntee, one of the party elders to the position. Ryan continues to implement the First Programme throughout the early 1960s, achieving a record growth rate of 4 percent by 1963. That year an even more ambitious Second Programme is introduced. However, it overreaches and has to be abandoned. In spite of this, the annual growth rate averages five percent, the highest achieved since independence.
Ryan does not stand in the 1965 Irish general election, after which he is nominated by the Taoiseach to Seanad Éireann, where he joins his son, Eoin Ryan Snr. At the 1969 dissolution he retires to his farm at Kindlestown, County Wicklow, where he dies at age 77 on September 25, 1970. He is buried at Redford Cemetery, Greystones, County Wicklow. His grandson, Eoin Ryan Jnr, serves in the Oireachtas from 1989 to 2007 and later in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2009.
Born at 35 William Street in Wexford on September 17, 1886, Corish is the eldest child of carpenter Peter Corish and Mary Murphy. He is educated by the Christian Brothers in the town on George’s Street and leaves school at fourteen years old, which is not unusual at this time.
On September 29, 1913, at 27 years of age, he marries Catherine Bergin, daughter of labourer Daniel Bergin. They have six children, including Brendan.
Corish works as a fitter in the Wexford Engineering foundry the Star Iron Works. It is in this job that he witnesses the poor working conditions that industrial workers have to face all over the country. Many people of Ireland feel that this needs to change and so, in 1909, James Larkin forms the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU). Many important figures join the union including P. T. Daly, James Connolly and eventually Corish himself, who becomes a voice for the Wexford workers.
The Wexford lockout from 1911 to 1912 that ensues because of this union is the event that first brings public attention to Corish in his hometown. Wexford employers counter the ITGWU by locking out their employees. On a conciliation committee, Corish represents the workers of the town and becomes a leader of this local union. During the lockout, he is arrested, spending a night in jail, for expressing his anger to a recently employed non-union foundry worker.
When visiting Wexford to support the workers, ITGWU leader James Larkin and trusted members James Connolly and P. T. Daly are put up in the Corish household on William Street.
In February 1912, the dispute is resolved with the introduction of the Irish Foundry Workers’ Union of which Corish is secretary until 1915. His career as a tradesman however is over as he is blacklisted by all employers. This new union is absorbed by the ITGWU two years later. He remains a respected figure in the town, especially by the foundry workers, and continues as secretary in the ITGWU until 1921.
Corish first takes his seat in the Wexford Borough Council in January 1913, where he is given the title of “Alderman.”
In May 1916, Corish is arrested after being suspected of having involvement in the Easter Rising and is imprisoned in Stafford, England until June. He is often targeted because of his republican activism, receiving a life-threatening letter in 1920 regarding the killing of Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officers.
Corish is first elected to Wexford County Council in 1920 and later that year is appointed mayor of the town.
Corish is an Irish Labour Party representative. However, as the Labour Party in the southern 26 counties, later the Irish Free State, choose not to contest the 1921 Irish elections, Corish runs as a Sinn Féin candidate and is elected to Dáil Éireann for the Wexford constituency.
Corish supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and votes in favour of it. He also runs as a member of the Labour Party at the 1922 Irish general election. His involvement in the trade union movement and his clear speech-giving skills displayed during a visit from Michael Collins to Wexford that same year are what give him a fighting chance in the election. He is elected and serves in Dáil Éireann until his death in 1945.
He is a public supporter of the Garda Síochána, expressing his disagreement with the reductions in Garda pay and allowances in 1924 and 1929.
Corish is a recipient of the Honorary Freedom of the Borough of Wexford in early 1945 and dies later that year, on July 19, 1945, after serving as mayor and council member for 25 years. During exploratory surgery for stomach pain, the doctors of Wexford County Hospital realise that his condition is much worse than imagined and he dies at the age of 58 shortly thereafter. After appearing in the Dáil only a few days prior, his death is unexpected.
His death causes a by-election to the Dáil which is won by his son, Brendan Corish, who is later a leader of the Labour Party and Tánaiste. He serves as mayor up until his retirement in 1982. Another son, Des Corish, later also becomes mayor of the town. Corish’s granddaughter, Helen Corish, is mayor in 1990.
Corish Park is built in his honour in the early 1950s.
seamus dubhghaill 