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Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. Robert W. White
Читать онлайн.Название Ruairí Ó Brádaigh
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780253048325
Автор произведения Robert W. White
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
Like most college graduates, he applied for jobs “all around the place.” He received two offers, one from a school in Athlone and the other from Roscommon Vocational School. He chose the job in Roscommon because it was closer to Longford than Athlone and the bus service suited his needs. He wanted to be close to his twice-widowed mother and to stay involved with the Longford IRA. He moved home and, starting in the fall of 1954, took a bus to Roscommon, spending the week there. By this time, Sein was attending St. Mel’s as a day pupil. Because jobs were scarce, Mary was teaching in a primary school in Birmingham, England. Longford, which is in the province of Leinster, is lush with trees and vegetation, like much of the Irish midlands. Roscommon, only twenty miles away, is in the province of Connacht and is on the edge of the west of Ireland. From Roscommon to the Atlantic, trees and vegetation give way to hills and rocks, small sheep farms and stone walls, and fewer and fewer people.
The IRA leadership, which was apprised of Ó Brádaigh’s career plans, put him in touch with Tommy McDermott, who had been in the IRA in London when Terence MacSwiney died on a hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920. At the age of 18, McDermott had marched in MacSwiney’s funeral in London. He initially took the Treaty side in the Civil War, but when the executions started, MacDermott took his rifle and deserted to the anti-Treaty side. Never married, he was interned in the Curragh in the 1940s. Ó Brádaigh viewed McDermott as a lodestone, a role model who attracted the next generation of Republicans. According to Ó Brádaigh, he was a person who “went through it all, took all the hard knocks, and in good times and in bad he didn’t change his views or his principles to suit the tide of the time.” People such as McDermott stood out and “immediately attracted all the disenchanted.” They were very important for the maintenance of the IRA in lean times.
Ruairí Ó BrMaigh on graduating from University College Dublin, 1954. This photo accompanied several articles that appeared in the United Irishman of the 1950s. Ó Brádaigh family collection.
McDermott, who by this time was in his early 50s, was the South Roscommon commanding officer; Ó Brádaigh, who was in his early 20s, complemented him as the South Roscommon training officer. Together, they built up the IRA in the area. One of their recruits was Sein Scott, who joined the IRA in 1955. Scott approached McDermott and through him met Ó Brádaigh. According to Scott, McDermott was “a very, very sincere man.… He was very dedicated, and he wasn’t prepared to deviate … one iota from what he believed.” McDermott saw that “the British were in the country [and] there was only one way that they were going to leave, through force. He was an absolutely committed soldier.” Scott found Ó Brádaigh “a lovely fella. Very energetic, full of action, very approachable. Ó Brádaigh had sincerity written all over his face. Anything that he said you knew that he meant it.” As a training officer, Scott found him “very dedicated.” He “was good at his job; “he expected you to pay attention, as any good teacher would.”
By the mid-1950s, Ó Brádaigh was involved in training camps outside Longford and Roscommon. These camps, like the IRA conventions, enabled volunteers from various parts of the country to meet each other. Scott’s comments were echoed by an IRA veteran from Belfast, who first met Ó Brádaigh at a training camp in the Wicklow Mountains in the mid-1950s. This volunteer found him “very forceful.”
4
Arms Raids, Elections, and the Border Campaign
1955–1956
AS TOMMY MCDERMOTT and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh were building up the IRA in Longford and Roscommon, similar progress was under way throughout the country. In order to get weapons and publicity, the IRA raided British Army barracks in the Six Counties of Northern Ireland (Antrim, Armagh, Derry, Down, Fermanagh, and Tyrone) and in England. The first raid was in June 1951 at Ebrington Barracks in Derry; it netted rifles, machine guns, and ammunition. A raid in England in July 1953 went less well. Three volunteers, Cathal Goulding, Manus Canning, and Sein Stephenson, sneaked into Felstead School Officers’ Training Corps in Essex and loaded a van with rifles and machine guns, including a Browning machine gun and an anti-tank gun. The van, which was overloaded and traveling poorly, aroused the curiosity of police. The IRA team was stopped, arrested, and subsequently sentenced to eight years in prison. The loss of Goulding was especially important, as he was in the thick of the IRKS reorganization.
The failure at Felstead was followed by a successful raid on Gough Barracks in Armagh. An IRA training officer, Leo McCormack, noticed that there were no magazines or ammunition in the guns of the barracks guards. He passed this information on to general headquarters in Dublin, who investigated further. The raid was primarily planned by Charlie Murphy, Tony Magan’s adjutant general. Among other things, Murphy had SeAn Garland from the Dublin IRA enlist in the British Army at Gough Barracks, which enabled Garland to supply inside information. In June 1954, the IRA seized an armed sentry whose weapon was not loaded, replaced him with a uniformed and fully armed IRA man, and backed up a truck to the armory. The truck was filled with weapons and driven off through the gate, picking the IRA sentry up on the way out (Garland remained behind, “deserting" back to the IRA later). In October 1954, the IRA raided the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers barracks in Omagh, scaling the walls at 3:30 A.M. A sentry, with a knife to his throat, screamed out and raised the alarm. Shots were exchanged and two IRA volunteers, Joe Christle and Joe Mac Liathiin, were shot. Five British soldiers were wounded. The camp’s lights were turned on and the IRA, including Christle and Mac Liathbin, retreated. IRA men jumped into waiting cars that sped off, leaving a number of volunteers behind who were captured by the local police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and the B Specials, Northern Ireland’s armed militia. After the Omagh raid, the IRA leadership, aware that their activities in the north would raise concerns with the Dublin government, instituted General Order No. 8, which directed volunteers about to be caught with arms in the south to dump them or destroy them. It proscribes defensive action. It was a pragmatic decision, taken by people leading an organization that had almost been destroyed by Fianna Fáil in the 1940s. Throughout the 1950s, the leadership was at pains to not antagonize the Dublin government.
Map of Northern Ireland
Concurrent with this military activity, the leadership also built up Sinn FCin. Paddy McLogan, Michael Traynor, and another Republican, Frank MacGlynn, drew up far-reaching amendments to its Constitution which were accepted at the 1950 Ard Fheis. Sinn Féin remained committed to the Irish Republic that had been proclaimed in 1916, but it also sought to establish “social justice, based on Christian principles, by a just distribution and effective control of the Nation’s wealth and resources.” As it was in the 1930s, when Matt Brady supported those accused of killing Richard More O’Ferrall, a fundamental element of Irish Republicanism is a commitment to social change in favor of people who have been underprivileged, oppressed, and victimized by the powers that be, whether they be landlords, employers, or Irish and British politicians. There is among Republicans a gut-level understanding that a commitment to social justice is embedded in their fight for national liberation. This commitment resonated with Ó Brádaigh. His father publicly supported the underdog, and Ruairí had chosen a career teaching teenaged students in a vocational school rather than the university-bound children of wealthy people. As part of Sinn FCin’s political development, the party put forth an abstentionist candidate in a 1954 by-election in Louth for a vacancy in the DGlILeinster House. Ó Brbdaigh, among others, worked for Sinn FCin in the election.
Because it is an all-Ireland political party, Sinn Féin was keenly interested in building a constituency in the North. Unionists-who are largely Protestant and support the union between Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom-constituted roughly two-thirds of the northern population. Nationalists-who are largely Catholic and support a united and free Ireland-constituted roughly one-third of the population and suffered at the hands of Unionists, who