LITMIR.BIZ

      ANGLO-IRISH WARS in the seventeenth century consolidated English power over Irish affairs and placed a minority but loyal Irish Protestant elite in control of the majority Irish Catholic population. The Protestant Ascendancy ruled Ireland from their base in Dublin, but their greatest numbers were in the northeast portion of the province of Ulster. It was here that the Plantation of English and Scottish settlers into Ireland in the seventeenth century was most successful. In the 1790s, anti-English agitation in Ireland, as organized by the United Irishmen, adopted a Republican political philosophy. They tried to unite Catholic, Protestant, and Dissenter to establish an Irish Republic. They rebelled in 1798 and failed. Rebellions against English and British power in Ireland continued into the nineteenth century: by remnants of the United Irishmen in 1803, by the Young Irelanders in 1848, and by the Fenians at various points in the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. These rebellions were complemented by largescale social protest movements that also challenged the status quo. In 1829, agitation led by Daniel O’Connell resulted in Catholics being granted the right to hold seats in Parliament. In the 1870s and 1880s, Charles Stewart Parnell and others involved in the Land League forced landlords, if only slowly, to return lands confiscated from the Irish people in the seventeenth century. Parnell, leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster, was also a key proponent of a Home Rule for Ireland Bill. If enacted, the bill would not create an Irish Republic, but it would limit the power of the Protestant Ascendancy and give Irish people significantly more control over Irish affairs.

      It was into this context that Matt Brady was born in 1890 in North County Longford in the townland of Gelsha, near Ballinalee. He was the youngest of eight children, and in a time of high infant mortality, only he and his siblings Hugh and Mary Kate lived to adulthood. Then, as now, the area was filled with trees, bushes, small farms, and little villages. Matt’s father, Peter Brady, was married to Kate Clarke and worked a twenty-acre farm. Folklore has it that the Bradys were driven from Ulster by Orangemen. They were in North Longford by at least the 1840s, when Peter’s uncle died of typhus during the famine. Peter Brady was active in local politics and is remembered for buying newspapers and reading them to his neighbors, giving them the news on Parnell, the Fenians, and other events. He was active in the Land League, and at one point he chose to go to jail rather than pay a fine for agitation.

      County Longford is strategically located in the Irish midlands where the provinces of Leinster, Ulster, and Connacht come together, and it has a long military history. In the 1640s, General Owen Roe O’Neill, who was home from the Spanish Army, trained his Army of Ulster at the juncture of the three provinces. In 1798, a French expedition, under the command of Jean-Joseph Amable Humbert, invaded Ireland in support of the United Irishmen. Humbert landed at Killala in County Mayo and marched his troops through Mayo, Sligo, and Leitrim and into Longford, where he confronted British General Lake in what became known as the Battle of Ballinamuck. It is estimated that 500 insurgents fell in the battle. As Humbert described it, he was “at length obliged to submit to a superior force of 30,000 troops.” The French were taken prisoner; the Irish were slaughtered. Among those captured and hanged were the United Irishmen Bartholomew Teeling and Matthew Tone, the brother of Wolfe Tone, who is considered the founding father of Irish Republicanism.

      The effects of Ballinamuck weighed on the local peasantry and small farmers, who had risen against the Crown and paid a high price for it, and on the local elites, who feared it might happen again. Seán Ó Donnabhhin, an Irish scholar who worked on an ordnance survey in North Longford, described the people of the area in an 1837 letter from Granard as “poor, and what is worse, kept down by the police.” One of the few Irish soldiers to survive the battle was Brian O’Neill. People like him kept the memory of the battle alive, and it became a symbol of local resistance to British injustice. O’Neill’s grandnephew, James O’Neill, was born on March 1, 1855, and over the course of his long life he was a keeper of the flame of Ballinamuck, a direct link between 1798 and decades of political activity in Longford, until his death in 1946. A contemporary of Peter Brady, he was involved in the Land League, was president of the Drumlish and Ballinamuck United Irish League, and was later active in Sinn FCin with Matt Brady.

      In 1913, Matt Brady moved from Gelsha to Longford town and became a rate collector for the County Council. The town developed on the Camlin River; in 1913 a main feature was two military barracks, one for cavalry and the other for artillery. The barracks indicated Longford’s strategic location and a tradition of resisting the Crown’s authority. It was a prosperous town, and architecturally it was and is dominated by the facade and tower of St. Mel’s Cathedral. The foundation stone for St. Mel’s was laid in May 1840, but the building was not completed until the 1890s. In 1914, after Matt’s brother Hugh left for the United States, Matt continued his work for the county and maintained the small farm at Gelsha. World politics would soon set in motion events that would directly affect both Matt Brady and Longford.

      When it became apparent that Home Rule would pass in Westminster, anti-Home Rule Unionists in Ulster organized the Ulster Volunteer Force and began drilling. The Irish Republican Brotherhood, heirs of the Fenians, countered this by forming the Irish Volunteers. When World War I began, Unionists supported the war effort and the Ulster Volunteer Force joined the British Army en masse. John Redmond, Parnell’s successor as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, encouraged the Irish Volunteers to do the same, splitting the Volunteers.

      In August 1914, the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s Supreme Council met and determined that Ireland’s honor would be tarnished if no fight was made for an Irish Republic during the world war. The Irish Republican Brotherhood planned a rebellion to

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