"The inborn hate of things English": Ernie O'Malley and the Irish Revolution 1916-1923

Past & Present, May, 1996 by Richard English

I

In August 1937 Lennox Robinson wrote to Ernie O'Malley informing him that his name had been proposed (by Sean O'Faolain) and seconded (by Frank O'Connor) for membership of the Irish Academy of Letters.(1) In his autobiography My Father's Son, O'Connor recalled that after a meeting of the Academy at which he and O'Faolain had been trying to get O'Malley elected they had gone to the house of W. B. Yeats: "Yeats greeted us with his Renaissance cardinal's chuckle and asked: `What do you two young rascals mean by trying to fill my Academy with gunmen?'"(2) O'Malley might well have enjoyed such an exchange. "I don't mind being called a gunman", he wrote to Desmond Ryan in 1936; "we were, I suppose, though we didn't use that term ourselves".(3) This article is about a gunman.

Born in County Mayo in 1897, O'Malley moved with his family to Dublin while he was still a child and enrolled as a medical student at the National University of Ireland in 1915. Powerfully influenced by the 1916 Easter Rebellion (which he likened to "a thunderclap"),(4) O'Malley became a leading figure in the Irish Republican Army (I.R.A.) during the Anglo-Irish War of 1919-21 (between Irish republican forces and those of the British crown) and the Civil War of 1922-3 (between those republicans who accepted the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, and those who felt that this Treaty compromised Irish sovereignty and should therefore be rejected). Badly wounded upon his capture by Free State forces in November 1922, he was imprisoned until 1924, during which time he was elected to the fourth Dail, or parliament, in August 1923 -- albeit only on the fourteenth count, and without reaching the quota(5) -- and participated in the republican hunger strike which took place later in the year. Upon his release he was, in his own words, "considered a hopeless invalid".(6) The "hopeless invalid" received a military service pension for his industrious soldiership during the Irish Revolution. But his post-Revolutionary patriotism was expressed in non-military fashion. Travelling widely after the conflict in Europe and America, O'Malley became something of a bohemian, and wrote a brilliant account of his Anglo-Irish War experiences, On Another Man's Wound, published in 1936. This was followed after his death in 1957 by the publication of further Revolutionary memoirs: The Singing Flame (1978) and Raids and Rallies (1982). These texts established O'Malley as arguably the most imaginatively gifted of his generation of Irish Revolutionary autobiographers -- indeed, as one of the most significant figures in Irish politics during the Anglo-Irish War and its aftermath. His leading military role-he reached the position of Assistant Chief of Staff of the I.R.A. during the Civil War -- combines with his invaluable accounts of inner-circle Irish republicanism and his uniquely rich archival legacy to make him an historical figure of major importance to students of modern Ireland.(7) This article interrogates much unexplored source material in addressing two key questions concerning the revolutionary Ernie O'Malley: Why did this man do what he did during the Irish Revolution? And how does our understanding of the roots and nature of these activities illuminate our reading of the Revolutionary period and, more widely, of early twentieth-century Irish history?

II

If one accepts Linda Colley's argument that Britishness was built on the strongly connected foundations of Protestantism, profits and war,(8) then it is not difficult to trace the contours of the nationalist Irishness which developed so powerfully in the early twentieth century. In broad terms, the perceived marginality of Catholic Ireland within the United Kingdom provided the soil from which the new nationalism could grow. The political demarcation between the more Protestant north-east of the island -- where Irish nationalism failed to gain the day -- and the rest of the island owed much to a religiously coloured sense of history, identity and allegiance. Irish republicanism in the 1916-23 period was a form of Catholic nationalism; Revolutionary patriotism was imbued with notions of divine sanction, ritual endorsement, (supposedly) efficacious sacrifice and suffering, an anti-materialistic spirituality and a conviction that national and religious redemption were mutually interwoven.(9) Important here is the sentiment expressed by O'Malley's Revolutionary associate C. S. Andrews that "[w]e Catholics varied socially among ourselves but we all had the common bond, whatever our economic condition, of being second-class citizens".(10) Moreover, most of southern, Catholic Ireland had failed to experience that dramatic industrial success which occurred in Ulster during the nineteenth century and played a crucial part in welding north-eastern unionists to the British connection. Cormac O Grada has recently provided a thorough discussion both of the "success of the northeast" and of the reasons "why most of Ireland failed to industrialize in the nineteenth century".(11) The important point for this discussion is, as Mary Daly has put it, that "[w]hile Ireland's economic performance under the Union was not the sole factor fuelling the movement for independence, it is hardly a coincidence that Ulster, the most successful province under the Union, rejected independence".(12) Similarly, Terence Denman has clearly shown that (and explained why) there was considerable disaffection from the British war effort within Catholic Ireland even before 1916.(13)