people and we do not subscribe to the policy of those who attempt to excuse death and injury to innocent civilians as the fortunes of war.” Tomas Mac Giolla, former president of Official Sinn Fein, draws on incidents like this, describing Ó Brádaigh as “a very cold kind of person in many ways like that. Lacking any sort of human compassion.” From an outsider’s perspective, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is the quintessential Irish nationalist who lives in the cloistered confines of the West of Ireland and clings to the myth that physical force can lead to a united, Gaelic, Catholic Ireland.
Yet there is more to Ruairí Ó Brádaigh. He did regret Angela Gallaghers death. He had spent about half of an hour on the phone with Shaw and the conversation had ranged from Dublin in 1920–1921 (when a number of civilians were killed) to Nicosia and activities in Cyprus to Saigon in Vietnam; the sound bite was the only part to be published. On the day Angela Gallagher died, Ó Bradaigh was 39 years old, married, and the father of six children—the oldest was 11 and the youngest was 18 months. He also told Shaw that what had happened was extremely regrettable, that nothing “would relieve the grief of the parents about the death of their child” and that “I would know how I would feel, and I have six children myself.”
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh is a complex man. While raising a family and pursuing a career, he also lived the public life of a revolutionary political figure and the very private life of a guerrilla soldier. He is a second-generation Irish Republican and a second-generation college graduate. He joined the IRA and Sinn Fein in the 1950s and became a major figure in each; his tenure on the IRA’s Army Council spans decades, he was the first president of Provisional Sinn Fein and is currently president of Republican Sinn Fein. He has lived most of his life in a small town in the West of Ireland, but he has also traveled the world—in support of the Republican cause and to examine other political systems for insight on how to achieve a lasting peace in Ireland. He is a conscientious Catholic, but his family background includes Swiss Protestants, and he publicly challenges the authority and the ethics of the Catholic hierarchy. Interpersonally, he is routinely described as polite and courteous, and countless articles have noted that he is a nonsmoking teetotaler. Even his political enemies comment on his humorous side. Tomas Mac Giolla also remembers Ó Bradaigh as “an individual you could get on with, have good fun with, and that.” He is known to refer to himself and fellow Irish Republicans as “madmen like us,” and in speaking about his children he is quick to laugh at how awkward it must be for future in-laws to meet for the first time a man vilified as one of the world’s chief terrorists.
This biography is an attempt to understand the complexity of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and modern Irish Republicanism. Aside from his own importance, Ó Brádaigh is the public face of a generation of Irish Republicans which, having fought in the IRA’s Border Campaign in the 1950s, founded the Provisional IRA and Provisional Sinn Fein in 1969/70 and the Continuity IRA and Republican Sinn Fein in 1986. Ó Brádaigh’s life is a window for understanding his generation of Irish Republicans and how they received the values of a previous generation and are transmitting those values to the next generation. He represents IRA and Sinn Fein members who, no matter what, will not “give up the gun” short of a declaration of an intention to withdraw from Northern Ireland by the British government. Because of people like him there will never be peace in Ireland without such a declaration—no matter the outcome of the current peace process.
Paula Backscheider, in Reflections on Biography, states that “getting to the person beneath, the core of the human being, is the biographer’s job.” Understanding the complexity of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and those like him requires an in-depth examination of the personal and political events that shaped his life. In presenting this life, I have tried to describe his actions and choices as he experienced them, to understand his decisions based on the context and information that he had at the time rather than with the benefit of hindsight. In this process, I have relied as much as possible on contemporary accounts of events, including direct quotations from him at the time of a particular event. These accounts are complemented by hours of interviews with Mr. Ó Brádaigh, as described under “Sources.” The reader will determine if the core of Mr. Ó Brádaigh has been revealed.
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh
Map of Ireland
1
Matt Brady and May Caffrey
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
