With the clandestine activities of the IRA finally in order, Ó Brádaigh took a more public role. At a Sinn Féin rally in Mullingar, on Sunday, June 7th, he made his first public appearance in two years. He remembers the event because it was his first in-person address to his constituents and because it was the seventeenth anniversary of his father’s untimely death. He was met on the outskirts of the town by the local brass and reed band and was escorted by a fleet of cars. As reported in the Roscommon Champion, he challenged Fianna Fáil on internment, “The men who came into power simply did this and they would continue to do it until the people said ’No.”’ He spoke in Longford that evening. A week later, he made his first public appearance in Roscommon at another Sinn FCin rally. His remarks reflected his commitment to the campaign: “I undertook to sit only in an All-Ireland Republican Parliament, and I do not believe that the battle for the freedom of this country can be fought in Leinster House, Stormont, or any other assembly set up here by English Act of Parliament. I believe this battle must be fought and won elsewhere.” The Curragh Camp was closed, but the threat of arrest remained. Predicting what was to come, he stated, “It is highly probable that I shall be sent back to jail.”
These public appearances served as a buildup to the most significant event on the Republican calendar, the annual commemoration of Wolfe Tone’s birth, on June 20th, 1763. The commemoration is held at Tone’s tomb at the family’s plot in the cemetery at Bodenstown in County Kildare, on or about the third Sunday in June. In 1959, it was held on Sunday, June 21st. Typically, the event draws people from all over Ireland and the diaspora in England, the United States, and sometimes Australia. The event serves as a direct link between the United Irishmen of the 1790s and contemporary Irish Republicans of many persuasions. In 1959, Fianna FG1 and Sinn FCin held commemorations at the tomb.
The commemoration generally begins with a parade from the nearby village of Sallins. In 1959, it was organized by Cathal Godding, who served as chief marshal. Included in the parade were uniformed members of Cumann na mBan and the Republican youth groups Na Fianna Éireann and Cumann na gcailini. Tomb Mac Giolla presided at the graveside. Broadly defined, the leadership of the Republican Movement is the Army Council of the IRA and the Ard Chomhairle of Sinn FCin. Each year, the leadership picks a prominent person to deliver the keynote address at Bodenstown. In 1959, it was Ruairí Ó Brádaigh.
The campaign had lost momentum and wrangling over the Curragh had taken its toll. The situation required a speech looking to the future. He delivered, beginning with, “We are assembled at this sacred place to do honour to the man whose remains rest here for over 160 years-Theobald Wolfe Tone.” Tone, “the greatest Irishman who ever lived,” had “defined Irish Nationhood" and had “outlined the basis on which would be built a free and upright Irish Nation.” Tone, who had pledged “’never to desist in his efforts’ to secure the freedom of Ireland,” had “laid the groundwork of the great National Uprising of 1798.” Thus, “His last mortal remains are laid here, and to this spot succeeding generations have come to do him honour and to derive inspiration to complete his unfinished work.” Since Tone’s time, the Republican Movement had striven in every generation to follow his programme, and “the present generation, to their everlasting credit, has not been an exception.… They will fight on till the goal is achieved.” He concluded with a quotation from Patrick Pearse, the 1916 rebel, “0 my brothers, were it not an unspeakable privilege, if, to our generation, it should be granted to accomplish that which Tone’s generation, so much worthier than ours, failed to accomplish?”
7
Marriage and Ending the Border Campaign
JUNE 1959—FEBRUARY 1962
AFTER THE COMMEMORATION at Bodenstown, the IRA went back to the campaign and Sinn FCin started working on the upcoming Westminster election, which was scheduled for October. The 1955 Westminster election had given the movement a tremendous lift, but by 1959 the situation had changed markedly. During an IRA military campaign, harassment increases and electioneering is especially difficult; the ban on Sinn FCin that the northern government imposed in December 1956 made campaigning all but impossible. Candidates could run only as generic “Republicans,” for example. In the fall of 1959, according to The United Irishman, Republican organizers were “dragged into police stations and beaten up.” When they tried to canvass an area they were stopped by the police, searched, let go, and then stopped and searched again and so on, every several hundred yards.
Sinn Fdin’s best chances were in Fermanagh-South Tyrone and MidUlster, where Phil Clarke and Tom Mitchell won in 1955 and where there were still Nationalist majorities. Mitchell, who was still in Crumlin Road Prison, was again nominated for Mid-Ulster. Another prisoner, Henry Martin, was nominated for Fermanagh-South Tyrone. The highs of 1955 were not repeated; Sinn FCin’s vote fell from 152,000 to 64,000 and Unionists were elected in each constituency. The Nationalist Party, which did not put forward candidates, blamed Sinn FCin’s “disastrous intervention" for the Unionist victories. Sinn FCin blamed it on “intimidation and the operation of the North’s Special Powers Act.” Unionists described Sinn FCin’s decreased vote “as a rejection of violence by the northern minority.” The election was a harbinger of things to come for the Republican Movement.
In contrast to the disappointing election results, Ó Brádaigh’s personal life was going well. While on the run, he had continued to call on Patsy O’Connor. After the Curragh was closed, he saw her more frequently, and they were wed on October 3, 1959, in the Church of the Sacred Heart in Roscommon. Ruairí’s best man was his brother Sein. Patsy’s first cousin, Mairead O’Connor, was bridesmaid. The bride and groom’s families attended, as did a number of people from the Republican Movement, including Dhithi O’Connell. While on the run earlier in the year, Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell had arrived unannounced at the home of Ruairí’s Uncle Eugene and Aunt Margaret in Dublin, where O’Connell met Deirdre Caffrey; their first date was the Ó Brádaigh-O’Connor wedding.
Patsy knew what she was getting into. Even though he had tried to conceal his activities, by 1959 everyone in Ireland knew that Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was a prominent member of the IRA. In fact, Ruairí’s involvement did make Patsy nervous. But she agreed with his politics, they had been informally engaged since 1956, and she wanted to marry him. Unemployed as a teacher, Ruairí was essentially working full-time, at no pay, for the Republican Movement. Because there was no end in sight to the campaign, they agreed that instead of getting their own place she would continue to live in a flat she shared with other women; their life together took a back seat to his politics. The biggest issue they faced involved not Ruairí’s activism but the treatment of married women under Irish law. When Patsy married, she forfeited the right to work full-time as a teacher. She applied for a “temporary" full-time position and was allowed to continue teaching while the Roscommon Vocational Educational Committee and the minister for education considered her request. After a brief honeymoon in West Cork and Kerry, Patsy returned to her flat and work. Ruairí returned to the IRA and continued to move from place to place. He was not on the run, but the police knew who he was and the threat of arrest was real.
The IRA was strongest in the border areas, and most of its activities were there. To expand the campaign, they tried to reorganize other areas, including the area around Lough Neagh in County Tyrone. On the night of November loth, Diithi O’Connell, J. B. O’Hagan, and a local Republican, Mark Devlin, were walking along a road outside Ardboe when they passed a parked laundry van. Later, the van drove by and parked on a side road, and RUC men and B Specials set up an ambush. As O’Hagan, O’Connell, and Devlin walked by, the police shouted at them to stop. O’Hagan and Devlin did, putting up their hands. O’Connell took off running and in a hail of bullets was shot six times, twice in the lower chest and superficially in four other places. He kept running through the rough countryside and finally arrived at a farmhouse, knocked on the door, and identified himself as “the police.” The lady of the house let him in and the RUC found him, exhausted, bloody, and seated by the fire. He lost his spleen,