own political history, He was a member of both Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers and on Easter Monday, 1916, he was arrested by the RIC when he arrived in Longford by train from Dublin. In the period 1919–1921, he was a married man with young children and he was not on active service with the IRA, but he did help out. He was battalion engineer for the Drumlish IRA and worked with the brigade engineer on various projects; in fact, in 1919, he had attended the aeraiocht in Aughnacliffe and had traveled the same road home on which Matt Brady and Willie McNally encountered the RIC. After the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in 1921 he withdrew from politics. He initially supported the Treaty but over time he became disillusioned; in the late 1940s, he supported a Republican alternative to Fianna Fáil, Clann na Poblachta.
Twohig, a 57-year old widower with grown children, was for two years the teacher and stepfather of Rory Brady. Mary, three years older than Rory, and SeAn, five years younger, liked Twohig immediately. Rory, who was becoming a teenager, took a little longer, but he remembers Twohig now with affection, noting, “It was a difficult situation for both of us; the teacher getting married to your mother.” Patrick Twohig’s greatest influence on the Brady family involved the Irish language. Twohig, an award-winning teacher of the language, spoke Irish around the house, encouraged the children to do the same, and supported their interest in the language. Starting in 1945, Rory spent a month each summer in the Irishspeaking Gaeltacht in Spiddal, County Galway. Rory today believes that he owes his love of the Irish language to his stepfather.
At age 13, as he approached gaduation from Melview, Rory sought a scholarship to attend St. Mel’s College in Longford. The school, which was founded in 1865, was open to all students, but its main objective was providing priests for the local Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise. There were about 170 students—120 boarders and forty to fifty day students, scattered over five grades. The curriculum was demanding and the schedule firm; September to Christmas, after Christmas to Easter, and after Easter to summer, with no other breaks. Family members could visit boarding students for half an hour on Saturdays. Among the notable graduates of the school are John Wilson, class of 1942 and TAnaiste (deputy prime minister) in Albert Reynolds’s government; Bishop Colm O’Reilly, class of 1953; and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh.
Rory Brady was admitted to St. Mel’s in 1945 without a scholarship. He stayed at Melview another year, studied Latin with a tutor, and then earned the scholarship that paid half of his expenses. When he enrolled in 1946, he was immediately moved into the second-year curriculum. Eugene McGee’s St. Mel’s of Longford has a photograph of the entering class of 1946. In the photo, we see Rory Brady as a 14-year-old with jet black hair and arms crossed casually. He has grown to his adult height, five foot seven and a half, making him taller than most of the other children. Already shaving and stoutly built, there is a certain self-assuredness evident in the picture.
Rory Brady on entering St. Mel’s, back row, third from the right, 1946–1947. Ó Brádaigh family collection.
In her expost To Take Arms : My Ear with the IRA Prouisionals, Maria McGuire comments that Rory’s “mother took a second husband, a schoolteacher whom [he] disliked and so was not displeased at being sent away to boarding school.” But according to Rory, he had the option of attending as a boarder or as a day student; he was not sent out of the house. His decision to board was probably met with relief in the household, for at age 14 he had already developed a strong independent spirit. It was a St. Mel’s tradition and rite of passage, for instance, for second-year students to attend a formal ceremony in which they took a pledge not to drink liquor. In return, they received the Badge of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, to be worn on the lapel. Brady objected, not to the badge, but to the unfairness of not being given a choice in the matter. It was assumed that students would attend the ceremony and take the pledge. He refused to do either and was supported by his mother. He subsequently determined that he did want the badge and as a senior student went with the second-year boys and took the pledge. He obtained his Pioneer Badge on his terms, and he wore it proudly for almost forty years.
St. Mel’s was a hotbed of Irish football; the school won the All-Ireland Championship in 1948. Rory played football with his friends, but he was not on the school’s team. His heart was elsewhere. It was against the rules, but Mary Brady, who by then was a student at University College Dublin, sent him clippings of political events. He read them in the toilet, including accounts of the funerals of people such as Richard Goss, Patrick McGrath, and Charlie Kerins. McGrath was arrested after a shootout in which two police officers were shot dead. In 1940, he was executed by firing squad at Mountjoy. Charlie Kerins, the IRA’S chief of staff, was implicated in the killing of a Special Branch police sergeant. In 1944, he was hanged at Mountjoy. Their bodies were buried in prison yards until September 1948, when they were released and reinterred with proper Republican funerals.
In the library at St. Mel’s, he read the available Republican literature, including John Devoy’s Recollections of an Iirh Rebel. He was particularly interested in Devoy’s chapter on the Catholic Church and Fenianism. The chapter begins, “The hardest test the Fenians had to face was the hostility of the authorities of the Catholic Church.” Devoy summarizes his perspective on the Church and the Fenians with, “We’d have beaten the Bishops only for the English Government, and we’d have beaten the English Government but for the Bishops, but a combination of the two was too much for us.” Rory had purchased issues of Brian O’Higgins’s Wolfe Tone Annual and on a visit his mother brought them to him. One of O’Higgins’s Annuals carried a reference to Seán McCaughey, who died in Port Laoise Prison in 1946 after a horrific hunger and thirst strike. Brady wrote under the reference, “Died for Ireland on hunger strike.” Another student saw this. In study hall, where talking was forbidden, he sent a note reading, “He didn’t die for Ireland, he died to raise trouble.” Brady replied to the contrary. He pursued his interest in Republican politics when he was not at St. Mel’s. In the offices of the Longford Leader, he went through newspaper accounts of his father’s career. He also spoke with his mother about his father and about the Republican Movement. She encouraged his interest. For Christmas 1949, she gave him a copy of Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland, a classic account of guerrilla warfare and the Cork IRA in the 1920s. Her comment was, “This is what good Irishmen should be reading.” She also encouraged him to read Peadar O’Donnell’s work, including The Gates Flew Open. It had been banned by the state but she brought in a copy from Scotland. O’Donnell, who was from Donegal, was a key figure among a group of leftist Republicans of the 1930s.
Of the twenty-eight students in St. Mel’s class of 1950, eighteen went off to become priests. Rory had other plans. While at St. Mel’s, he had followed another split in the Republican Movement. Seán Mac Bride, the son of executed 1916 leader John MacBride and a former IRA chief of staff, had resigned from the IRA, although he remained sympathetic and continued to defend Republicans in court. In 1946, he formed the political party Clann na Poblachta. After what they had been through with de Valera, the faithful few who remained in the IRA expelled supporters of the new party. In the 1948 Free State election, Clann na Poblachta won ten seats and entered government as the junior partner to Fine Gael, with Mac Bride as minister for external affairs. It was the first non-Fianna Fáil Irish government since 1932. In 1949, the new government declared the 26-county state the Republic of Ireland. The IRA and Sinn Féin rejected this label and continued to call it the “Free State”; they reserved the term “Irish Republic" for the 32-County state they sought. Rory Brady agreed with them. For him, it was a Republic in name only, and the constitutional politics of Clann na Poblachta, like the constitutional politics of Fianna FG1 and Fine Gael, would not end partition and create a united and free Ireland. From his parents, and from his own studies, he knew his Irish history.
In the spring of 1950, he attended his first Easter Commemoration as an adult, at Cloonmorris Cemetery in County Leitrim, at the gravesite of James Joseph Reynolds. The event is noteworthy for a number of reasons. The movement’s paper, The United Irishman, was on sale. He signed up for a subscription; ten years later,
