Ernie O'Malley: A Life

ERNIE

O’MALLEY

To my eternally helpful, loving wife Susan, and to

Cormac O’Malley, guardian of his father’s flame.

From an emigrant Irish family, Harry F. Martin graduated from Harvard University and Law School. His career included time as a Wall St lawyer, and an officer in the US International AID programme. He was CEO of Merrill Lynch Bank, London, an Arab consortium bank in NYC, and the shareholder entity that owns Cargill, America’s largest family company. He lectures on literary and historical subjects.

Cormac K.H. O’Malley was born in Ireland but went to the USA to live with his American artist mother, Helen Hooker, when his father died in 1957. Apart from his career in international corporate law, he has focused on the literary and artistic heritage of both his parents, including the publication of books not published during their lifetimes.

ERNIE

O’MALLEY

A Life

HARRY F. MARTIN

with

CORMAC K.H. O’MALLEY

First published in 2021 by

Merrion Press

10 George’s Street

Newbridge

Co. Kildare

Ireland

www.merrionpress.ie

© Harry F. Martin and Cormac K.H. O’Malley, 2021

978-1-78537-390-9 (Paper)

978-1-78537-392-3 (Ebook)

A CIP catalogue record for this book is

available from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

Typeset in Sabon LT Std 11.5/16

Unless otherwise stated, all images are taken from the Cormac O’Malley Papers and are used courtesy of Cormac K.H. O’Malley.

Merrion Press is a member of Publishing Ireland.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abbreviations

Foreword by Richard English

Acknowledgements

Author’s Preface: My Irish Grandfather

1 Boyhood to Easter Rising, 1897–1916

2 Ireland Prepares for War, 1916–1918

3 War of Independence, 1919–1921

4 Truce to Civil War, 1921–1922

5 Ireland’s Civil War, June 1922–May 1923

6 Post-Jail: Ireland and Europe, 1924–1928

7 Creative Journey: America and Mexico, 1928–1935

8 Dublin: Husband, Author, Libel Defendant, 1935–1939

9 Mayo: Irish Arts Sponsor, Marriage Difficulties, Kidnapping, 1940–1950

10 Last Years: Quiet Man, Comrade Interviews, 1950–1957

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

ABBREVIATIONS

Blake Papers Collection of Frances-Mary Blake Papers, UCDA

Cathal C. Hooker O’Malley

CBS Christian Brothers School

COMPP Cormac O’Malley Private Papers

EOMP-AIA060 Collection of Ernie O’Malley Papers at NYUL

EOMP-UCDA Collection of Ernie O’Malley Papers

IPP Irish Parliamentary Party

IRA Irish Republican Army

NYUL New York University Library

RIC Royal Irish Constabulary

UCD University College Dublin

UCDA University College Dublin Archives

FOREWORD

Ifirst encountered Ernie O’Malley’s writings in the 1980s. Research into Irish republicanism meant reading many activist memoirs, but none of the others possessed the compelling power of O’Malley’s 1936 book On Another Man’s Wound . I read and re-read it zealously as a PhD student, and indeed for years afterwards. And when I had the privilege of meeting O’Malley’s son Cormac, I began to explore the incredibly rich legacy of materials that had been left to the scholarly and wider world by this early-twentieth-century Irish republican figure. Much of that legacy has been preserved because of Cormac’s impressively committed work over the years; in this new book with Harry F. Martin, he again makes a valuable contribution to the O’Malley story.

It’s a very different book from my own Ernie O’Malley: IRA Intellectual and – as usual – it’s good to have diverse voices of interpretation and understanding on the bookshelf. As Harry Martin’s authorial Preface makes clear, Ireland has a precious place in his own family too. And O’Malley’s significance here in Ireland remains clear. This is the case both because of his role in the 1916–23 Irish Revolution, and also because of his important and revealing writings and papers, which remain of enduring relevance to the understanding of those fractious years. Martin’s book, however, also rightly attends to Ernie O’Malley’s non-Irish years and connections, to his cultural, intellectual and personal interactions in the USA and beyond. The story is one that features Edward Weston, Paul Strand and Hart Crane, as well as Michael Collins, Liam Lynch and Dan Breen.

It was often enough a turbulent life, even after O’Malley’s Irish Republican Army years. To the injury, bloodshed, imprisonment and hunger strike of the Irish Revolution were added post-Revolutionary libel, ill health and painful marital collapse. But Harry Martin deals fondly with his subject, and the lightly written narrative tells its story with obvious affection for the man at its centre. The account in this book draws on fascinating published and unpublished sources. It will be enjoyed by sympathetic admirers of O’Malley, and also by those who are keen to hear a gently told story of someone who lived at the centre of one of Irish history’s most significant periods.

Richard English

Queen’s University Belfast

April 2021

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My special thanks to our publisher, Conor Graham, whose continued support and belief in our book made it possible. Patrick O’Donoghue’s useful edits and constructive additions made this a better book. Richard English, for his continued support and fine 1998 biography of Ernie; our invaluable editorial advisors, Stuart Vyse, Patrick J. Mahoney, David Leeming and Jason Knirck; Cathal O’Malley, for frank family recollections; Mary Feehan, for her valuable, early tough love and guidance; Mary-Francis Blake, RIP, for her devotion to Ernie; Cormac O’Malley, for everything.

In recognition of the following consummate commentators, among others, on Ernie’s warring period and later life in Ireland: Nicholas Allen, John Crowley and fellow editors of The Atlas of the Irish Revolution; Gavin Foster; R.F. Foster; Glucksman Ireland House, New York University; Peter Hart, RIP; Michael Hopkinson; J.J. Lee; Des MacHale; Fearghal McGarry; Jerry O’Callaghan; John O’Callaghan; Meda Ryan; and Charles Townshend.

Harry F. Martin

Thanks to Harry Martin for his deep dedication and insights in presenting my father’s story. My gratitude to those Harry has not already recognised who helped us with this book: Síobhra Aiken, Anthony P. Behan, Mary Burke, Marion R. Casey, CBS O’Connell Schools and its Allen Archives, James S. Donnelly, Conor Graham, Tim Horgan, Timothy V. Johnson, Peter Katz, Roísín Kennedy, Tanya Kiang, Lynn Kidney, Kilmainham Jail Museum staff, Trish Lambe, Margaret Leeming, Ivan Lennon, Pascal Letellier, Críostóir MacCárthaigh, Patrick J. Mahoney, Kate Manning, Eve Morrison, Miriam Nyhan, Ruan O’Donnell, Colette O’Flaherty, Eunan O’Halpin, Shannon O’Neill, Denis Tinsley and R. Bryan Zehngut-Willits. A special thanks to my family: my beloved late wife Moira, and my children Bergin and Conor, who were so supportive from the start.

Cormac K.H. O’Malley

AUTHOR’S PREFACE

MY IRISH GRANDFATHER

My grandfather, Dominick Martin, left his home in Galway and shipped out of Queenstown, Cork to Boston on the Cunard liner Samaria on 29 April 1890. Thirty years old, he was listed on the ship’s manifest as ‘labourer – reads and writes’. Six years later, in Lynn, Massachusetts, he married Nellie Callahan, 21 years old, listed on their marriage certificate as a ‘domestic from Ireland’.

He built a small construction firm and bought two acres of land with an old wooden house in Lynn. Beside the house, in a field surrounded by a stone wall, he planted potatoes. We grandchildren loved digging up the potatoes. Dominick and Nellie had seven children, and there are now close to one hundred of their Irish American descendants here in the United States.

We were brought to grandfather’s house to see him on holidays. He would sit in his wooden chair set in the kitchen corner with his black, twisted shillelagh cane balanced against it. He would beckon us over, and we were sometimes frightened when he asked us questions about what we were doing.

When I was 16 years old, my father somehow arranged for me to go to a boarding school in Massachusetts. This horrified grandfather, who thought I was going to be corrupted by the ‘English on the hill’ who sent their children to such schools. Irish immigrant families like ours certainly did not. I stood in front of his chair while he gripped my knees with his strong hands. He was then 89 years old.

‘I have two things to tell ye, Mickey,’ he said, ‘and I want you to never forget them.’ He called all his grandsons Mickey. ‘First, nothing is good enough for your friends, but nothing, nothing, is bad enough for your enemies. Did you hear me?’ ‘Yes, grandfather,’ I answered. ‘The second goes along with the first. Never let any man ride over ye.’ I have tried to follow his advice throughout my life.

CHAPTER 1

BOYHOOD TO EASTER RISING,

1897–1916

When he joined the Irish Volunteers in 1916 at 19 years of age, it’s likely he was known as Earnan Ó Máille. When travelling around Ireland as an organiser in 1918–20, local men called him the staff captain from Dublin. To the British who captured and tortured him in late 1920, he remained Bernard Stewart, the alias he used. The Free State soldier who saved a severely wounded Ernie from being summarily executed by another soldier in November 1922 called him O’Malley. ‘That’s O’Malley,’ he said, ‘and you’d better leave him alone while I’m here.’ Travelling in Europe in 1925–6 with a false British passport after being released from an Irish Free State prison, he called himself Cecil Edward Smyth-Howard. Afterwards, in America, when newspapers and prospective publishers of his first book addressed him as ‘General’, he replied, ‘I’m not a general now.’ To his friends, the poet Hart Crane, the movie director John Ford and the painter Jack Yeats, or his American heiress wife Helen, he was simply Ernie. At his 1957 state funeral with military honours in Dublin, he was described as ‘Our Irish hero’.

Ernie was born on 26 May 1897. He was the second child of Luke and Marion Malley, a conservative Victorian-era couple from Castlebar, County Mayo in the west of Ireland. He had ten brothers and sisters. Ernie and two of his brothers, Charlie and Dessie, called themselves O’Malley, whereas the rest of the family went by the last name Malley. Their mother and father were serious parents who gave them the best educations they could and brought them up to be responsible people. However, they were not particularly warm, emotionally supportive or outgoing. They expressed little interest in Irish nationalism, although they may have favoured Home Rule for Ireland. Ernie believed, for all he heard from them on these issues, that his family might as well have been living in Wales. They were not literary people, nor did they express much interest in Irish history.

Luke Malley had been a legal assistant and then an administrative officer to the Crown Solicitor for County Mayo. This was a respectable position in the British system, which ruled Ireland through a series of official posts primarily manned by Irishmen loyal to them. Three years before Ernie was born, the Malleys moved into a fine three-storey house on the main street of Castlebar, just across from the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) police station. The RIC officers and men, most of whom were Irishmen like Ernie’s father, provided a key element of local support for British rule in Ireland. They often tipped their hats to Luke when they passed him on the street.

The Malleys home in Castlebar had a back garden area for flowers and vegetables, with a pony and trap to take them on local excursions. They also rented a house for the family in the summer that looked out over Clew Bay on the Mayo coast near Westport. It was there, as a boy, that Ernie grew to love the ocean, to feel comfortable sailing small boats on the bay and fishing, and to visit the people who lived on Achill Island just off the coast. He enjoyed these activities throughout the rest of his life.

During this period, Ernie and his older brother Frank played pirates using a rowboat. They captured prisoners, including their sister and other local children, followed maps to dig up treasure, did what they thought real pirates would do, and acted out sea stories they had heard. It was a delightful childhood by the sea.

The Malleys were part of the respectable Castlebar community and raised their children as Roman Catholics. Ernie remained committed to his religion all of his life. At one point his mother had hoped he would go into the priesthood, a normal route for a bright Irish boy in a large family. His father and mother both had siblings in various religious orders, but Ernie successfully resisted their efforts. The Malley family attended Mass on Sundays in the new Castlebar church erected in 1901 where his mother’s parents, the Kearneys, had dedicated a stained-glass window in memory of her grandparents, Patrick and Mary Kilgir of Castlebar. Ernie’s mother Marion came from a family with one hundred acres of land, which gave her meaningful status.

According to Ernie, Castlebar was a ‘shoneen town’. A shoneen was a little John Bull – that is, anyone who imitated the manners and ways of the English as represented by the anglicised Irish. In his estimation, this community had turned away from the culture of the original Irish people. Luke and Marion did not create a family environment conducive to producing sons who might later fight to drive the British from Ireland. They would never have expected that one of their boys would become a famous leader of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in his early twenties.

Ernie later regretted that his family did not speak Irish at home, even though it was taught at school. When he became dedicated to understanding the significance of Irish culture and history, he realised this lack of fluency presented limitations in his quest. When young men like Ernie became convinced of the Irish nationalist cause, they sought out their own culture, its language, literature, dances and folklore. They complained that the Irish people had not been able to fully develop the uniqueness of their culture because Ireland had been dominated by a foreign power, the British, for centuries. These occupiers stifled the appreciation of ancient Irish heroic tales. This made it more challenging for Ernie and other leaders of the Irish independence movement to convince their countrymen that they had a heritage worth preserving and fighting for.

Ernie was brought up as a Roman Catholic and continued in his faith, although he was not always a consistent, faithful practitioner. He wrote, ‘My recollections of home life are not always pleasant, all due to lack of religion, for growing boys are not naturally religious, and if mother and fathers do not show the good example it is hard for the young people to learn to love their God.’¹

Later, as an active IRA soldier captured by the Free State, Catholic priests often refused to give him communion. In spite of this, he remained a Roman Catholic for the rest of his life. In jail he read religious materials and attended Mass when he could. Ernie was married in the Roman Catholic Church and sent his children to Roman Catholic schools. He was also willing to criticise the Church when he thought it necessary.

One compelling person in Ernie’s early life who brought him back to his Gaelic roots from the pressures of shoneenism was Mary Anne Jordan, known as Nannie, the Malleys’ Irish-speaking family nurse. She took care of Ernie, Frank and the other children when they were young. Nannie had a special status in the Malley family. She regaled the children with ghost stories that kept their heads under the blankets. She encouraged them to explore nearby land owned by peculiar, old Lord Lucan, who benignly patrolled it on his tricycle. The brothers looked for green-coated leprechauns under the trees, hoping to hear the sound of their silver hammers, while they also hoped to see fairies dancing their rings in the glades. Nannie defended the children when challenged by their parents. She made a lasting impression on Ernie.

Nannie’s most important contribution to Ernie’s development of nationalistic feeling for Ireland as a boy were the stories she told his older brother and himself about ancient Irish heroes. He remembered one in particular. It was their favourite. This was the epic of the fabled cattle raid, the Táin Bó Cúailnge. It not only inspired him but also mirrored Ernie’s own later experiences fighting against the British. He remembered this tale:

Maeve, soldier queen of Connaught, arrogant and womanly and strong, had a long pillow talk with her husband, Ailell. Disputing their belongings, jewel by jewel, shield by shield, Maeve was a bull short. In the hostile North was a great brown bull she must have. She gathered her troops and off with her for the country of the Ultonians, Ulster. Then began the famous cattle raid, the Táin. Nannie described the fight at the ford between Cuchulain, defender of the Ultonians, and Maeve’s champion, Ferdia of the Firbolgs. The two had been trained in arms together [and] had taken vows of friendship and brotherhood. Day after day they fought … When evening came they kissed each other, exchanged wound herbs and salves, and sent presents of food and drink. At last Ferdia fell in death and we cried. Was he not from Erris in our own county of Mayo, and was it not sad to see two brave friends fight to the death of one?²

His mother wished to maintain the family’s social status by ensuring that Ernie did not associate with the wrong kind of local children. Ernie and his siblings were directed to keep to themselves after school. This isolation may have contributed to the social awkwardness that limited Ernie later in life. He and Frank were even told not to play football with the local boys, although they did whenever they could get away with it. Ernie later wrote, ‘Few [children] were good enough for us … Many with whom we were not supposed to mix passed our tests … Our chief admiration was for a boy who could use stilts and a tomboy who could walk on her hands. The most interesting of all our illicit acquaintances was a beggar woman, who was double-jointed.’³

Ernie’s descriptions of his boyhood in Mayo demonstrate the keen observational abilities he developed as a boy. He appreciated colourful scenes present in rural villages: ‘On market days we could sense the roughness of country people. Awkward men drinking pints of frothy porter … Shawled, barefooted women selling eggs and yellow, strong, salty butter in plaited osier baskets … Old women with pleated frills to their white caps … rosy girls in tight-laced boots, which some had put on at the entrance to the town.’⁴

The Irish mourning ritual observed in rural Ireland, known as keening, fascinated Ernie. Women wailed and beat their long wild hair as they walked after the casket procession. Townspeople lifted their hats, shopkeepers respectfully closed the shutters of their stores, and no one walked closer than three steps behind the corpse. A box of clay pipes with tobacco or snuff was left outside the church door when the body was lying inside. He absorbed the dramatic scene of death in the countryside with a sense of awe and wonderment.⁵

The Malleys belonged to the stratified social life of smaller towns in the provinces. Its distinctions made an impression on Ernie – they seemed silly to him, and he subjected them to his critical view. Some of his observations might have come from one of Dickens’s novels: ‘Gentility flourished easily in Ireland; very little wealth nourished it. In the towns tuppence-ha’penny looked down on tuppence, and throughout the country the grades in social difference were as numerous as the layers of an onion.’⁶

His curiosity led Ernie to insights about the relationship between men and women, including the notion of who really directed the family. He observed how his mother could turn his father around by pillow talk, so by morning he had changed to adopt her point of view, forgetting the firm position he had taken only the night before. The boy noticed the effective, quiet matriarchal domination exercised by mothers and grandmothers in Irish households.

Although his family moved him away from country life in the west of Ireland early in life, Ernie had been brought up in rural County Mayo and retained a respect for country people for all of his life. He recognised their inherent kindness to children, supporting and watching over them in the villages. It was impressed upon him at this early age that one had to respect and understand the differences of the local people in the various Irish counties, something he never forgot. Initially, as a child, he had been awed when Nannie described the fierce mountainy men who lived in certain areas of Ireland. This was soon reinforced when he first encountered mountainy men who came down to villages for the weekend market days.

In 1906, when Ernie was 9 years old, his father moved the family to Dublin, where Luke expected to have a more important civil service position. This job didn’t materialise immediately, but he was eventually appointed as a senior clerk in the Congested Districts Board. The family moved into a comfortable house large enough for their growing family at 7 Iona Drive. This was in Glasnevin, a new development designed to accommodate Dublin’s growing middle class. His mother, Marion, nevertheless became concerned that her family in Dublin did not enjoy the same social position they had enjoyed in smaller Castlebar.

The Malley parents had always focused on their children’s education and continued to do so to the best of their ability. They committed their children to private secondary education in Dublin, and five of the boys, including Ernie, went on to university. The boys first went to the O’Connell Christian Brothers School (CBS) on North Circular Road. This school was founded in 1820 for Catholic boys in Dublin who might otherwise not have received an education.

Funds were sometimes short for the Malley family, considering the number of children to be educated. There were times when Ernie went without books he needed. Although he knew his father would say yes if he was asked for them, he also knew his father really couldn’t afford the additional expense. Ernie sometimes couldn’t see the blackboard on the school wall and needed glasses, but he realised they were expensive and was afraid to mention his problem. Instead he learned to memorise the assignment when the teacher first announced it verbally, or to do the math problems from the teacher’s initial oral description. He was beginning to demonstrate what a resourceful young man he could be, even when deprived of needed resources.

The choice of the Christian Brothers School was important for Ernie, guiding him in his early teens towards the republican principle that Ireland deserved to be free from British rule. CBS and its teachers had developed an independent nationalist spirit. The school did not depend on government funding, so its teachers could select and write their own books. They had freedom of expression, and Irish history and culture was an important part of the curriculum. This included a strong interest in Irish nationalism, which Ernie began to embrace.

It was during this period at CBS that Ernie learned about Irish history. In the narrative he was taught, Ireland had been invaded and suppressed by a series of invaders, Vikings, Welsh, Flemings, English and lowland Scots. From Tudor times, continued attempts were made by the British invaders to subdue the country. Native Irish control of their own land and law was broken down by the English system. They suffered from severe subjugation of their Catholic religion, their language and their education.

Oliver Cromwell’s Parliamentarian force reconquered Ireland in 1649–52 after a decade-long war. Many Irish men, women and children were slaughtered and viciously oppressed by Cromwell’s army. Land was confiscated from Catholic landowners and granted to Protestant Adventurers and members of Cromwell’s New Model Army. However, after the land acts of the late nineteenth century, even though some large Protestant landholdings remained, Irish Catholic farmers owned 60 to 70 per cent of the land in Ireland.

This long history of Ireland’s political and cultural domination made a deep impression on Ernie as a young man. It sowed the seeds for a life-changing decision that he would make after the Easter Rising of 1916.

Ernie was only 14 years old when his parents asked him, in 1911, to take a younger sister and brother to see King Edward’s procession during his visit to Dublin. This was the first time he would openly demonstrate his disdain for the British, illustrating not only how his political feelings had developed at this young age, but also his confidence in carrying out a public act of defiance. ‘We stood in the front rank of the waiting people. I said we would keep our hats on. Scarlet-coated Life Guards with shining helmets cantered past; but we alone of the crowd looked at the carriage with hats on. To show my intense conviction I spelt King with a small letter. I did not like the English.’⁷

Although