February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
Cathal Brugha, the director of the Center of Management Science and Systems at University College Dublin, acknowledged that the famed patriot was recklessly brave (as he had been in 1916), and certainly, he would have viewed imprisonment as “unpalatable.”
But the amiable Brugha told me over coffee in Dublin last year, that both sides liked the most melodramatic version, which either confirmed him as a heroic martyr or as an irrational extremist. In any event, his grandfather was hit by a Free State bullet that severed the femoral artery in his leg, and he succumbed two days later, on July 5, 1922, in hospital.
Brugha’s other grandfather was Cork Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney, who died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison in 1920. More than 80 years on, the UCD professor encouraged his mother to tell her story, and the result is a lavishly illustrated volume Maire MacSwiney Brugha: History’s Daughter. In an essay in the book, Brugha touches an often forgotten aspect of the time – the divide within the anti-Treaty camp.
Interestingly, the same issue is explored in another fascinating account of the period Florence and Josephine O’Donoghue’s War of Independence, edited by American scholar John Borgonova. Florrie O’Donoghue (his forename was popular for males in Cork and Kerry) was a senior IRA intelligence officer when he met Josephine McCoy Brown, a WWI widow and the top Republican spy in British Army HQ in Cork City. Central to the couple’s love story was a secret, involving a child kidnapping, that they would keep from their family for 40 years.
In the penultimate chapter, Borgonova describes how O’Donoghue, though against the Treaty, was vigorously opposed to civil war. Brugha, likewise, despite his hard-line reputation politically, was an influential moderate within the anti-Treaty IRA faction hoping to find common ground with the pro-Treaty IRA, and he endeavored to rein in provocative militants like Rory O’Connor and Tom Barry.
Shortly after the war broke out, O’Donoghue resigned from the IRA – the same day, as it happens, that Brugha was shot. Borgonova speculates about what might have happened if Dan Breen, Frank Aiken, and other respected moderate anti-Treaty IRA officers whose hearts weren’t in the fight had followed his lead.
In 1940, with Ireland threatened with invasion, Tom Barry and Florrie O’Donoghue joined the Irish Army, Breen was a Fianna F_il TD, Aiken the defense minister, and Eamon de Valera, of course, was head of government.
That year, my great-grandfather, who greatly admired Michael Collins, died of a heart attack at home in Dublin. He was the father of eight adult children and still working as a railroad signalman. An elderly cousin revealed before her death in the 1990s that in fact he’d collapsed on the stairs after an argument with his wife over the Treaty. Supporting my great-grandmother – and de Valera – was their youngest child, a 24-year-old army officer on furlough. (The cousin, my great-grandmother’s niece, was then a nurse of about 30.)
My great-grandparents’ three eldest children — a daughter, their first-born, and two sons — had most likely learnt to avoid the contentious subject by that time. They had been “involved,” as they saying went, in the War of Independence, but when the Treaty was signed, the eldest supported it, and her next sibling in line, another Collins acolyte, became an officer in the new National (or Free State) army. Their 19-year-old brother took the Republican (or Irregular) side and would spend 13 months in the Curragh internment camp and participated in a mass hunger strike for better conditions. He was one of the thousands de Valera referred to in military defeat in April 1923 as the “Legion of the Rearguard.” He was also my mother’s father.
Like most of them he subsequently supported the Fianna F_il party, but in the latter part of his life — he died in 1958 – he voted Labor. This was partly because he’d wearied of Dev’s rhetoric when there was so much poverty about and partly because his hero was Big Jim Larkin, who founded and afterwards became a TD for the party. (Larkin, incidentally, was released from Sing Sing and deported from the U.S. the month the Civil War ended.)
My mother is today an energetic member of Fianna F_il, but is outnumbered by Labor and Green voters, as far as I’m aware — family members being left-leaning and liberal to varying degrees, and not particularly nationalist, if at all (except for my Maoist cousin, who’s English).
Prof. Cathal Brugha is a lifelong Fianna F_il supporter and sometime activist. He believes his famous grandfathers would have been members of the party had they survived the tumultuous revolutionary era, but would not have taken leading roles.
His father Ruair