Liam Mellows. Conor McNamara
‘I am no “informer”’, Gaelic American, 10 November 1917
2. ‘A “new Irish plot”’, Gaelic American, 10 November 1917
3. ‘To fight for unconquered Ireland is a sin’, Gaelic American, 17 November 1917
Letters to the Hearn Family, Westfield, Massachusetts, 1917–20
1. ‘Principle and liberty are more than the breath of life’, 28 May 1917
2. ‘Ireland’s time is God’s time’, 19 July 1917
3. ‘To eat their hearts out in exile’, 24 January 1919
4. ‘Thoroughly exhausted’, 25 March 1919
5. ‘The old man can never be the same to me’, 9 March 1920
6. ‘Hoping against hope’, 1 September 1920
Chapter 8. ‘I die for the truth. Life is only for a little while’, Final Letters, 1922
1. Last Letter to the Hearn Family, Massachusetts, 8 December 1922
2. Last Letter to ‘My Dear Comrades in Mountjoy’, 8 December 1922
3. Last Letter to ‘My Dearest Mother’, 8 December 1922
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for the professional support of the staff at a number of libraries and institutions in Ireland and the United States: the Dublin City Library, Irish Studies Section, at Pearse Street; Tamiment Library, New York University; the New York Public Library; the National Library of Ireland; and University College Dublin Archives. The digitised archives at the Bureau of Military History, Cathal Brugha Barracks, Dublin, and Villanova University have been invaluable.
At Irish Academic Press, Conor Graham and Fiona Dunne are exceptionally supportive and a pleasure to work with. I am indebted to friends and fellow historians, Brian Hanley, John Cunningham, Tony Varley and Martin O’Donoghue for sharing their knowledge of Irish republicanism. My thanks to Luke Callinan for his help with translation. For his unstinting support, I will always be very grateful to my friend, Lorcan Collins. I am very thankful to Seona MacReamoinn, Alessandra Nania and everyone at the University of Minnesota, Dublin Programme, for their friendship and support. Marie Mannion, heritage officer at Galway County Council, continues to show what local authorities can achieve in regard to public history. Mary Harris and Dan Carey at NUI Galway have been most supportive over the last number of years. To my parents and to the extended Meagher family, New York, I am most thankful. I am grateful to my wife, Meredith, for putting up with all of this.
Conor McNamara
Athenry, Co. Galway
April 2019
CHAPTER 1
Behold the Mysteries of Faith: Liam Mellows, A Life in Search of the Heroic
On a wet afternoon in October 1924, the body of Liam Mellows reposed alongside ten of his republican comrades in the Carmelite Church, Whitefriar Street, in Dublin’s south-inner city.1 He would shortly depart on his final journey to be laid to rest among the Jordans, his mother’s people in Castletown, Co. Wexford. Mellows would have appreciated the choice of location as the Carmelite Priory in New York had been his refuge during four years of turmoil while exiled in the United States.2 Over the previous days, with no advance notice, the bodies of the seventy-seven republicans executed by the Free State in 1922–3 were exhumed and handed over to their families to be laid to rest among those who loved them, the defeated of the Irish Civil War.3
Following Mass, the hearses formed up in front of the church while throngs of onlookers crammed the surrounding streets; similar scenes were being enacted in towns and villages across Ireland. A republican guard of honour flanked the coffins, followed by small groups of relatives, clergy and sympathisers. At 2.45 p.m. the motorcade began its silent procession through the rain-drenched streets and north to Glasnevin Cemetery, the scale of the crowds forcing the authorities to close the city to traffic.4 The hearse carrying Mellows’ remains broke off early from the procession and made its way through the south of the city and on towards the Wexford countryside. Countess Markievicz would later deliver the graveside eulogy while the National Army surrounded the mourners to prevent a final salute by the Irish Republican Army to their fallen commander.
Liam Mellows was a central figure in the republican movement in both Ireland and the United States from his first involvement with the Fianna Éireann republican boy scouts in 1911, until his execution at the height of the Civil War in December 1922. A full-time organiser for the Fianna, a movement that was to provide a coterie of officers for the republican movement, he championed the concept of national salvation through an insurrection of the young. A member of the first executive of the Irish Volunteers in November 1913, he was appointed a national organiser and was at the forefront of the organisation’s preparations for the 1916 Rebellion. Dispatched to Galway in October 1914, he was to lead over 500 Volunteers in the doomed Galway Rising, where he commanded an army bereft of desperately needed rifles from the ill-fated German steamship, the Aud. It was the first bitter disappointment among a litany of personal disasters that was to follow.
In the aftermath of the rebellion, Mellows spent four years as a representative of the Irish Volunteers in New York where he was tasked with helping secure money, arms and political support for revolution in Ireland. Styled ‘Commandant Mellows’, his time in the United States was unhappy and he suffered emotionally, confined to his bed and malnourished at one point; jailed in the infamous Tombs Prison while his comrades in Clan na Gael dithered over his bail; vilified and shunned by the American Fenians, and worst of all, labelled an informer in 1917 by no less than the Mayor of New York, John P. Mitchel, grandson of the famed nineteenth-century revolutionary and Young Ireland leader, John Mitchel.
Upon his return to Ireland in November 1920, Mellows became a member of the GHQ of the Irish Volunteers and was responsible for the procurement of arms during the War of Independence. The role entailed dangerous liaisons with European arms dealers and supporters in Britain. Distrustful of Michael Collins, who he felt was undermining him, the position demanded absolute secrecy and his activities during this period remain shrouded in mystery. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence, Mellows was one of the most influential opponents of the agreement. His role in occupying the Four Courts with the anti-Treaty IRA leadership in April 1922 was central to the events that led to the outbreak of the Civil War. Captured in the bombardment of the building in June, his execution in December, alongside Richard Barrett, Joseph McKelvey and Rory O’Connor in Mountjoy Jail, in retaliation for an attack on two pro-Treaty members of Parliament in which TD Sean Hales was killed, was among the most divisive acts of the new state. During the decades that followed the disastrous Civil War, Mellows and his comrades in the Four Courts Executive of the IRA were frequently singled out for blame for their role in instigating the conflict.5
Elected a member of Parliament for two constituencies in the 1918 general election, and again for Galway in the uncontested election of May 1921, Mellows never pretended to be a politician; he loathed politics and, above all else, espoused physical force as the engine of the Irish revolution.6 Like his idol, Patrick Pearse, Mellows was unmarried, puritanical in habits and ruminated profoundly over his own actions, putting the cause of the republic before all else. While he was a senior figure among the revolutionary elite, he remained an outsider within the coterie of leading militants. A gifted but reluctant public speaker, he published his writings anonymously, heaping credit upon his subordinates while privately suffering profound self-doubt.
Beginnings and Reinvention
Born in Hartshead Military Barracks in Ashton-Under-Lyne, Lancashire, in 1892, to Sergeant William Mellows of Callan, Co. Kilkenny, and his wife Sarah Jordan of Monalug, Co. Wexford, Liam Mellows’ life was a triumph of reinvention. Christened William Joseph, after both his father and grandfather, and known as Willie to his family, he adopted the Irish version of his Christian name in adolescence. Liam’s father, William, attested at the Curragh Camp with the 20th Regiment of Foot in 1871, spending thirty-two