St. Mel’s was a hotbed of Irish football; the school won the All-Ireland Championship in 1948. Rory played football with his friends, but he was not on the school’s team. His heart was elsewhere. It was against the rules, but Mary Brady, who by then was a student at University College Dublin, sent him clippings of political events. He read them in the toilet, including accounts of the funerals of people such as Richard Goss, Patrick McGrath, and Charlie Kerins. McGrath was arrested after a shootout in which two police officers were shot dead. In 1940, he was executed by firing squad at Mountjoy. Charlie Kerins, the IRA’S chief of staff, was implicated in the killing of a Special Branch police sergeant. In 1944, he was hanged at Mountjoy. Their bodies were buried in prison yards until September 1948, when they were released and reinterred with proper Republican funerals.
In the library at St. Mel’s, he read the available Republican literature, including John Devoy’s Recollections of an Iirh Rebel. He was particularly interested in Devoy’s chapter on the Catholic Church and Fenianism. The chapter begins, “The hardest test the Fenians had to face was the hostility of the authorities of the Catholic Church.” Devoy summarizes his perspective on the Church and the Fenians with, “We’d have beaten the Bishops only for the English Government, and we’d have beaten the English Government but for the Bishops, but a combination of the two was too much for us.” Rory had purchased issues of Brian O’Higgins’s Wolfe Tone Annual and on a visit his mother brought them to him. One of O’Higgins’s Annuals carried a reference to Seán McCaughey, who died in Port Laoise Prison in 1946 after a horrific hunger and thirst strike. Brady wrote under the reference, “Died for Ireland on hunger strike.” Another student saw this. In study hall, where talking was forbidden, he sent a note reading, “He didn’t die for Ireland, he died to raise trouble.” Brady replied to the contrary. He pursued his interest in Republican politics when he was not at St. Mel’s. In the offices of the Longford Leader, he went through newspaper accounts of his father’s career. He also spoke with his mother about his father and about the Republican Movement. She encouraged his interest. For Christmas 1949, she gave him a copy of Tom Barry’s Guerrilla Days in Ireland, a classic account of guerrilla warfare and the Cork IRA in the 1920s. Her comment was, “This is what good Irishmen should be reading.” She also encouraged him to read Peadar O’Donnell’s work, including The Gates Flew Open. It had been banned by the state but she brought in a copy from Scotland. O’Donnell, who was from Donegal, was a key figure among a group of leftist Republicans of the 1930s.
Of the twenty-eight students in St. Mel’s class of 1950, eighteen went off to become priests. Rory had other plans. While at St. Mel’s, he had followed another split in the Republican Movement. Seán Mac Bride, the son of executed 1916 leader John MacBride and a former IRA chief of staff, had resigned from the IRA, although he remained sympathetic and continued to defend Republicans in court. In 1946, he formed the political party Clann na Poblachta. After what they had been through with de Valera, the faithful few who remained in the IRA expelled supporters of the new party. In the 1948 Free State election, Clann na Poblachta won ten seats and entered government as the junior partner to Fine Gael, with Mac Bride as minister for external affairs. It was the first non-Fianna Fáil Irish government since 1932. In 1949, the new government declared the 26-county state the Republic of Ireland. The IRA and Sinn Féin rejected this label and continued to call it the “Free State”; they reserved the term “Irish Republic" for the 32-County state they sought. Rory Brady agreed with them. For him, it was a Republic in name only, and the constitutional politics of Clann na Poblachta, like the constitutional politics of Fianna FG1 and Fine Gael, would not end partition and create a united and free Ireland. From his parents, and from his own studies, he knew his Irish history.
In the spring of 1950, he attended his first Easter Commemoration as an adult, at Cloonmorris Cemetery in County Leitrim, at the gravesite of James Joseph Reynolds. The event is noteworthy for a number of reasons. The movement’s paper, The United Irishman, was on sale. He signed up for a subscription; ten years later, he would edit the paper. The event was a joint Leitrim-Longford effort because the cemetery straddles 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,