the border of the two counties. Reynolds, who was killed in a premature explosion in 1938, had been one of the accused in the More O’Ferrall killing. His death had prompted the moment’s silence by the Longford County Council and Matt Brady’s statement that one of the councilors should be ashamed for not standing for the moment’s silence. Hubert Wilson was the chairperson, and a keynote speaker was John Joe McGirl, a 29-year-old publican from Ballinamore in Leitrim who was fast becoming prominent in the movement. A veteran of the IRA’S 1740s campaign and a key figure in the reorganization of the IRA in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was to become a close comrade of Brady for thirty-five years.
That summer, Brady attended summer school in the Gaeltacht for the last time. He met young men from Dublin who were active Republicans. As they spoke, the conversation drifted to politics and he found them like-minded, which was encouraging. That fall, he left for University College Dublin and the Republican Movement.
3
Off to College and into Sinn FLin and the IRA
1950–1954
IN THE FALL OF 1950 Rory Brady left Longford for Dublin, where he went into digs with a friend of his Aunt Bertha, who set up the arrangement. University College Dublin’s campus was located a bicycle ride away, just up from St. Stephen’s Green. It was a time for several key events in his life. He adopted the Irish form of his name, changing from Rory Brady to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh (his younger brother had already changed his name and was known at St. Mel’s, class of 1955, as Sein Ó Brhdaigh). Dublin, Ireland’s capital, was the site of the headquarters of Sinn Ftin, which he joined. The first Republican event in Dublin he attended was a céili (an evening of Irish dancing) that was held in a hall in Parnell Square in honor of Hugh McAteer, Liam Burke, and Jimmy Steele, three prominent IRA men who had recently been released from prison in Belfast and were among the last of thousands of prisoners in the 1940s.
Sinn Féin has a hierarchical structure that begins at the lowest level with a cumann (club), which is usually named after a deceased activist. Ó Brádaigh joined the Paddy McGrath Cumann, named for the man whose reburial he read about in 1948. Each cumann has five to ten members and meets weekly. Cumainn send two delegates to the Sinn FCin Ard Fheis (annual conference), which is usually held in Dublin. At the Ard Fheis, the delegates elect the Sinn Féin Officer Board and the party’s Ard Chomhairle (Executive). Even though he was one of its newest members, Ó Bddaigh attended the Ard Fheis, which was held at the Sinn Féin head office at 9 Parnell Square, as a delegate. On November 19, 1950, about seventy delegates took their seats in a large front room on the first floor of the building.
He saw several prominent activists firsthand at what was an historic Ard Fheis. Margaret Buckley, the party’s president since 1937, stepped down, although she remained on the Ard Chomhairle. She had been a member of the Irish Women Workers’ Union and a judge in the revolutionary Sinn Féin courts and was imprisoned in Mountjoy and Kilmainham jails for her Republican efforts. In 1938, she published her jail journal, The Jangle of the Keys. Because of his mother’s background, Ó Brádaigh found Buckley especially interesting. Paddy McLogan succeeded her as president. McLogan, Tony Magan, and Tomis Mac Curtiin were the “three Macs" who dominated the IRA and Sinn Féin in the early 1950s. McLogan’s assumption of the Sinn Féin presidency was in fact the result of a friendly coup organized by the IRA. As they picked up the pieces in the late 1940s, the IRA’S leadership realized that they needed a public political vehicle to complement their clandestine activities. After twenty years of estrangement, they adopted Sinn Féin as that vehicle. McLogan, Magan, and Mac Curtiin, and the IRA in general, were not interested in recognizing Leinster House or Stormont, and Sinn Ftin’s policy of abstentionism from those bodies and Westminster was consistent with IRA policy. IRA volunteers were “infiltrated" into Sinn Ftin; Sinn Féin welcomed them and became the political wing of the Irish Republican Movement.
Magan, McLogan, and Mac Curtiin were hard men who were dedicated to the cause. Each had impeccable credentials. McLogan was born in 1899 in South Armagh, in what became the Six Counties of Northern Ireland. He was on hunger strike at Mountjoy Prison with Thomas Ashe in 1917 and was later held under an assumed name in Belfast Jail while the police searched for him outside on a charge of murder. In the 1940s, he was interned in the Curragh Military Camp. He made his living as a publican in Port Laoise. McLogan is described as “placid in temperament and ice cold in contention, but easy to trust" and “the Father of Republicanism, the austerêlotter from a previous generation.” Deeply religious, he had met his wife on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Tony Magan, the IRA’S chief of staff, was in his late 30s. He was from County Meath and had joined the IRA in the 1930s; he was also interned in the Curragh. A bachelor and devout Catholic, he is described by J. Bowyer Bell as “a hard man, tightly disciplined, and utterly painstaking.” Tomis Mac Curtiin, the youngest of the three, was in his mid-30s. He was the son of Tomis Mac Curtiin, the Sinn Féin mayor of Cork who was murdered in 1920, allegedly by members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The younger Mac Curtiin was a member of the IRA’S Army Council and, in the late 1950s, of Sinn FCin’s Ard Chomhairle. He was on the 1940 hunger strike at Mountjoy. After the strike was called off, he was sentenced to be hanged for shooting dead a Special Branch detective. Because he was the son of a Republican martyr, he was given a last-minute reprieve and was transferred to Port Laoise Prison, in County Laois. In Port Laoise, he and his fellow prisoners refused to wear prison uniforms or follow the routine. They spent years in solitary confinement, naked, wearing only blankets. Their resistance culminated in the death, by a hunger and thirst strike, of Sedn McCaughey in 1946.
Two of the three Macs and other hard-liners who helped reorganize the IRA were not universally loved, at least not by their comrades in the Curragh. Uinseann Mac Eoin’s The IRA in the Twilight Years: 1923–1948 offers interviews with people interned with Magan and McLogan. Life in the camp was rough, and because they were internees-they were never charged with a crime-there was no release date in sight. Fianna Fdil exacerbated the situation by offering parole to prisoners who recognized the state and pledged to forgo future participation in the Republican Movement. Some prisoners accepted the offer. The camp split over the best approach: take a hard line and refuse compromise with the authorities versus go softly and get through it. Magan and McLogan were with the hard-liners. Depending upon one’s perspective, they were part of a group of disciplined orthodox soldiers or they were autocratic martinets. When the division came, the hard-liners made their choice and stuck with it. An ex-internee who was on the other side of the divide recalls saying hello to Magan. “F off" was the reply. Another ex-internee describes Paddy McLogan as “a gand man, but if Paddy ever went to heaven he would cause trouble there; it was in his nature to cause trouble.” Yet because of their steadfast position, people such as Magan and McLogan kept the movement alive after the 1940s campaign. Their convictions got them through the Curragh; their convictions helped them reorganize the IRA and Sinn Ftin. To young recruits such as Ó Brádaigh, the three Macs provided an example of how to sustain and lead the Republican Movement.
The IRA’S headquarters were also in Dublin. As he continued his studies and attended Sinn FCin meetings, Ó Brádaigh sought membership in that organization. He figured out who in Sinn FCin was also in the IRA and mentioned that he wanted to join. The next time he met the person, he asked “Did you do anything about that?” To an eager recruit, the process was slow. About six months after joining Sinn Ftin, he was admitted to a recruits class that had five or six other potential IRA members. The class was directed by Michedl “Pasha" Ó Donnabhdin (Michael O’Donovan), a staff member of the Dublin unit. His lectures covered things such as the Constitution of the IRA, the Army’s general orders, and Irish and Irish Republican history. His job was to separate the reliable from the unreliable. He reported on who was ready to move from recruit to volunteer and who was not. Some never moved out of recruits classes. Ó Brádaigh, who was courteous, well-educated, and obviously motivated, quickly moved from recruit to IRA volunteer. He formally pledged
