Armagh Conference to Reflect on Northern Voices of the Irish Revolution
Published in Issue 5 (September/October 2015), News, Volume 23
A group supporting IRA hunger strikers in Crumlin Road Jail, Belfast, 1920. Patrick Diamond (back row, second from the right) from south Derry was an O’Kane interviewee. (Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library & Archive)
A newly digitalised collection of 50-odd interviews with Ulster veterans of the Irish Volunteers and pre-Truce IRA, carried out by Fr Louis O’Kane some 50 years later, provides the inspiration for a one-day conference in Armagh in November 2015—‘Reflections on the Revolution in Ulster: the Irish Volunteer movement in the North, 1913–23’.
Northern participants’ reluctance to have their memories recorded was understandable. Embitterment about partition and abandonment by the Irish Free State, combined with close scrutiny from the unionist authorities, made them instinctively wary of the motives of authorities. After 1954, contemporary events spelt the end of the Bureau of Military History’s collection of testimonies from northern residents.
Veteran voices stayed muted until Fr Louis O’Kane came along. His first historical venture was Lower Killevy, Ireland: outlines of their history (1955), which purposely emphasised the local narrative as a microcosm of the national. His primary interest, however, lay in the revolutionary period, to which he was a teenage witness in his native Magherafelt. He initiated an ambitious oral history project that perhaps no one else could undertake: to interview old Irish Volunteers and IRA veterans all around Ulster. Having served in parishes all over the archdiocese—in south Derry, east Tyrone, south Armagh and Louth—he had built up a network of contacts throughout. His friendly manner, his contemporary status with the interview subjects, his republican sympathies and above all his status as a priest won the trust of veterans that their taped words would be safe with him.
In 1963, while working in Loughgilly parish in south Armagh, O’Kane began his project in earnest. Using an early Grundig portable tape-recorder, he interviewed local men such as Eddie Boyle and John ‘Ned’ Quinn, as well as Dublin-based former IRB centres Séamus Dobbyn and Liam Gaynor (both Belfast natives). He would later move on to prominent Armagh men John McCoy and Charles McGleenan, and several Louth men from the IRA’s Fourth Northern Division.
From 1966 to 1973 O’Kane stepped up the pace of his project, recording more frequent interviews, despite an increased workload as parish priest of Aghaloo, Co. Tyrone. He focused now on foot soldiers of the IRA’s Second Northern Division in Tyrone and his own south Derry especially. Among these were Major Tom Morris, a Great War veteran who returned with guns to arm the Bellagherty company; Cumann na mBan member Alice McSloy; and Rory Graham, a Protestant from east Belfast who describes feeling like ‘a sort of a white blackbird’ upon joining the Volunteers in 1917. During this period O’Kane travelled further, to Donegal to record Dr J.P. McGinley, and around Connacht to meet Ulster exiles in Sligo, Roscommon and Galway. Several southern-based interviewees were former Garda or Irish army officers who had fled the north in 1922. Some of their disclosures reveal as much about the intricacies and intrigues of life in the Free State as of the preceding period.
In 1968 O’Kane interviewed one of his most notable subjects, Kathleen Clarke, while she was visiting from England. Although not from Ulster, Clarke’s crisply spoken words are certainly of relevance to the province, not least when she lambasts Eoin MacNeill’s ‘treachery’ and Roger Casement’s role as a pensioned knight of the British Empire who ‘knew very little about Ireland’ and ‘went off to Germany and started things that the revolutionary group here didn’t want’.
The onset of the ‘Troubles’ in 1969 led O’Kane to extend the scope of his collection. Every morning, noon and evening for the next four years he recorded RTÉ and BBC radio bulletins on tapes labelled ‘News from the Sick Counties’. O’Kane also became more careful about the security of his recorded interviews, moving them from his parochial house in Aughnacloy to a trunk in another priest’s home in Monaghan. O’Kane was still busy recording and collecting when he died quite suddenly in August 1973. That trunk, containing in excess of 200 old reel-to-reel tapes, plus a miscellany of revolutionary documents, photographs and artefacts, lay in a convent in Magherafelt for most of two decades. It was then transferred to Armagh, residing in Ara Coeli, the archbishop’s house, until the Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich Memorial Library and Archive opened in 1999.
For some 40 years the collection was largely unknown beyond relatives of the interviewees, and otherwise only a few well-informed and determined academics got to listen to the fragile old reels. The Department of Foreign Affairs’ provision of a €20,000 grant in 2013 enabled the digitalisation of all the recordings and the opening up of access to users of the archive. The current Irish Volunteers Centenary Project, assisted by the Heritage Lottery Fund, will deliver outreach events in O’Kane’s former parishes in counties Tyrone, Armagh, Derry and Louth between autumn 2015 and spring 2016.
‘Reflections on the Revolution in Ulster’, Ó Fiaich Library and Archive, Armagh, Saturday 14 November 2015, www.ofiaich.ie, 048-37522981.
Dónal McAnallen is Outreach Officer with the Cardinal Ó Fiaich Library and Archive, Armagh.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.