Austin Stack – TD for West Kerry
The oldest of the four men to represent Kerry in the Dáil in 1919, Austin Stack was once described by Éamon de Valera as ‘the honestest, the bravest, and the purest Republican in Ireland’.25 Stack’s entered politics after high-profile activism in his native county in the period after the foundation of the Irish Volunteers and during the Easter Rising. He was born Augustine Mary Moore Stack on 7 December 1879 in Ballymullen, Tralee, to William Moore Stack and his wife, Nanette O’Neill. His first employment was as a clerk in the office of solicitor John O’Connell and he later worked as an income tax collector in south and west Kerry. In his youth, he was a member of the Young Ireland Society and the Irish National Foresters, due to the influence of his father, who had been a Fenian leader and a member of the Land League. His mother had been jailed for her involvement in the Land League. Stack came to prominence on the playing field when he captained Kerry to the All-Ireland senior football title of 1904 (which was played in 1906). He had founded the John Mitchels club in Tralee with Maurice McCarthy and was its first club captain and secretary. His father William Moore Stack had been a founder member of the GAA in Kerry.26 The young Stack’s administrative skills saw him serve as Kerry GAA county board secretary from 1904 to 1908 and chairman from 1914 to 1917.
One of the most high-profile figures of the revolutionary period in Kerry, Stack was active in the Irish Republican Brotherhood from 1908 and became its linchpin in the county in the years before the Rising. He joined the Irish Volunteers upon the inception of the group in 1913. He attended the meeting in Tralee at which the local company was formed on 10 December. By the middle of 1914, he was the leader of the Volunteers in Tralee. They met at the old roller-skating rink at the Basin in the town. Following the split in the organisation in the autumn of 1914, Stack supported Eoin MacNeill and he was elected to the central executive of the Irish Volunteers. As preparations were made for the Easter Rising in April 1916, Stack became the key organiser in Kerry. During a visit to Tralee on 27 February 1916, Pádraig Pearse briefed Stack on plans to land arms from Germany for the Rising at Fenit. Stack remained secretive in his preparations, involving only Paddy Cahill, a future Kerry TD. They mobilised the Tralee Volunteers at the Rink on Easter Sunday. On hearing that Roger Casement had been arrested and that the arms landing had failed, he went, unarmed, to the RIC Barracks where Casement was being held and was immediately arrested. He was sentenced to death (later commuted to a prison term) and led prisoners on a number of hunger strikes.
While in jail in Belfast, Stack was elected Sinn Féin MP for West Kerry in December 1918. In a letter to his brother, which was read to a large rally on Denny Street in Tralee weeks before the election, Stack stated that the anticipated Sinn Féin victory in the poll had to be ‘of a decisive character in order to show that the constituency is solid for complete independence as against sham Home Rule legislatures which England may be offering us in settlement’.27 The sitting Irish Parliamentary Party MP, Thomas O’Donnell, stood aside, leaving Stack as the only contender. Upon handing in the nomination papers on his behalf, Stack’s solicitor, J.D. O’Connell, told those gathered that Stack ‘would not sit in the Imperial Parliament; he is to sit in your own Parliament – in your Irish Parliament in Dublin’.28 The new MP was in jail in Manchester when the First Dáil met. Nine months later, he escaped from jail, along with Piaras Béaslaí and others, and returned to Ireland.
Piaras Béaslaí, the first TD for East Kerry (National Library of Ireland).
North Kerry’s first TD, James Crowley and his wife, Clementine Burson.
West Kerry TD, Austin Stack, the first Kerry native to serve in an Irish government.
Fionán Lynch who was the first TD to represent South Kerry (Lynch family).
Austin Stack made history by becoming the first Kerry man to hold a cabinet position in an Irish government. From November 1919 to January 1922, he was Minister for Home Affairs, his primary duty being the establishment of a new legal administrative system. He oversaw the administration of the ‘Republican Courts’ or Dáil courts. During this period, Stack’s secretary solicitor was Daniel J. Browne from Listowel, later secretary to the Minister for Justice and Local Appointments Commissioner. Stack accompanied Éamon de Valera to post-Truce talks with British prime minister David Lloyd George in London. He was the only Kerry TD to oppose the Anglo-Irish Treaty and campaigned vehemently against it. As his biographer, Fr Anthony Gaughan, noted, for Stack, ‘the Anglo-Irish treaty was a disaster. Between its signing (6 December 1921) and the outbreak of the Civil War (28 June 1922) he was one of its principal opponents, doing all in his power to prevent it from being ratified, and later campaigning against it not only in Ireland but among Irish-American supporters of Sinn Féin in the USA’.29 Historian Diarmaid Ferriter states that Stack ‘came to epitomise republican opposition’ to the agreement.30 He told the Dáil debate that the accord was a ‘rotten document’.31 He invoked the memory of his father, William, who had fought in the 1867 Fenian rebellion:
I was nurtured in the traditions of Fenianism. My father wore England’s uniform as a comrade of Charles Kickham and O’Donovan Rossa when as a ’67 man he was sentenced to ten years for being a rebel, but he wore it minus the oath of allegiance. If I, as I hope I will, try to continue to fight for Ireland’s liberty, even if this rotten document be accepted, I will fight minus the oath of allegiance and to wipe out the oath of allegiance if I can do it. Now I ask you has any man here the idea in his head, has any man here the hardihood to stand up and say that it was for this our fathers have suffered, that it was for this our comrades have died on the field and in the barrack yard.32
Stack remained an unequivocal supporter of Éamon de Valera. When de Valera resigned as president of the Dáil following the vote on the Treaty, Stack told the Dáil that he was ‘ready to commit suicide the moment Mr de Valera let us down – and I am’.33 He travelled to the US with Valentia native and Louth TD J.J. O’Kelly (‘Sceilg’) in March 1922 to lobby against the Treaty. In June 1922, he was returned to the Third Dáil as one of seven TDs for Kerry–Limerick West. Stack, along with other anti-Treaty deputies, formed a ‘republican cabinet’ in which he was Minister for Finance. He was arrested by the Free State Army in County Tipperary in April 1923 and a hunger strike during this term of imprisonment caused lasting damage to his health. In 1923, Kerry refused to play the All-Ireland final against Dublin in protest against his imprisonment.34
Following his release from prison in 1924, he continued to campaign for Sinn Féin at home and abroad and was elected joint secretary at the party Ard Fheis in November 1924. He declined to join Fianna Fáil in 1926 and was the only Sinn Féin TD elected in Kerry at the June 1927 general election. He was not a candidate at the second election of 1927 (September), which marked the end of his political career. He died on 27 April 1929 at the Mater Hospital in Dublin. He had married Una ‘Winnie’ Gordon in 1925 and had begun to take legal studies, with the aim of becoming a barrister. A GAA club in his native Tralee is named after him. A stand in Austin Stack Park was named after him on 1 May 1932 and the entire grounds were named after him on 4 June 1944. A bust of Stack is located in the Dáil chamber in Leinster