Firing party at the funeral of Matt Brady, June 1942. Ó Brádaigh family collection.
Matt Brady’s Republicanism had several dimensions that combined an interest in history and culture and direct methods of physical force to bring about the Republic. His family and the people of Longford watched him act on each. At home, he spoke the few words of Irish that he knew. On the County Council, he supported changing the name Edgeworthstown to Mostrim, the area’s name prior to the arrival of the famous Edgeworth family. His support for the IRA was unwavering. In 1938 an IRA volunteer from Longford was killed in a premature explosion at the border. When a member of the County Council did not stand in silence for the deceased, Brady told him, “You should be ashamed.” He regularly served as chair of Longford’s 1916 commemorations. The first Easter Commemoration Rory Brady attended was in 1941, at Clonbroney, Ballinalee; he was there with his father, his sister Mary, and Hubert Wilson.
Matt Brady had also married a woman ahead of her time. Thirteen-year-old Mary, 10 year-old Rory, and 5-year-old Sein were in good hands. She was the family’s source of income and she was not afraid to stand up for herself. In the early 1930s, she was dissatisfied with the organization of the Board of Health. At one County Council meeting, which took place after Matt Brady and Sein F. Lynch had joined the council, she expressed her dissatisfaction and asked for change. When two councilors indicated that they were content with the organization, she challenged them, “I am not content at all. I have to sign things I know nothing about.” She explained that she could be held liable if illegal payments were made by the board. A councilor stated, “Nothing will satisfy Mrs. Brady until this Board gives her full control. Is that so, Mrs. Brady?” She replied, “Yes, I have stated that several times.” In her early 40s, she was still young and fit. She played for St. Ita’s Camogie Club of Longford; they were county champions from 1935 until Se6n was born in 1937. After Sein’s birth, she switched to referee. She was chair of the County Longford Camogie Board and an active member of the Irish Language Gaelic League. There was also a scholarly side to her. Matt Brady had introduced her to the poetry of his cousin, Pidraic Colum. In 1954, she offered a public lecture on this topic. She had her own Republican credentials and a keen interest in the North of Ireland. She was born in Belfast, where an aunt and her family were burned out and traumatized during the sectarian rioting of the early 1920s. She still had family in Donegal and they were Republican, too. In August 1942, Mary and Rory, in Dublin on holidays with their maternal grandmother, attended the large funeral of Father Michael O’Flanagan. O’Flanagan, vice president of Sinn Féin from 1917 and president of the organization in 1933–1935, had twice been “silenced" by the Catholic hierarchy, in 1917 and in 1925.
After Matt Brady’s funeral, May went back to work for the Board of Health and the children went back to school. They attended Melview, about two miles outside Longford. From the front of the school, the spire of St. Mel’s Cathedral is visible on a clear day; hence the name. Mary took Sein to school on his first day. The two older children watched out for Sein; he remembers them being very protective of him. Then, in August 1944, May Caffrey Brady married Patrick Twohig, a native of West Cork, Melview’s principal and one of its three teachers. Twohig had his 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