Search Results for 'Conor McNamara'

The recording and publishing of previously unheard and unwritten stories of Galway’s central role in the voluntary period from 1913 to 1923 is being described as a legacy project of the County’s Decade of Commemoration programme, which draws to a close this week.

Clifden was not the only town to experience the terror of British forces running wild, shooting, and setting fire to buildings. The previous year, July 19 1920, Tuam suffered a similar experience as Clifden, only mercifully no resident was killed on that occasion.

Dr Conor McNamara, the Athenry native who is today one of the foremost historians of modern Ireland, has been appointed Galway County Council Historian-in-Residence for 2021.

ON SUNDAY June 27 1920, a small group of Connaught Rangers, from C Company of the 1st Battalion, based at Wellington Barracks, Jalandhar, the Punjab, announced they were refusing to obey orders.

On December 7 1922, Pádraic Ó Máille TD and his friend Sean Hales TD of Cork, walked out of a hotel on Ormonde Quay, by Dublin’s river Liffy. They just had lunch, and were on their way back to the Dáil in Leinster House, a short drive away. Ó Máille, Galway city and Connemara’s first TD, had been appointed Leas Ceann Comhairle (deputy speaker). As they reached their car a gunman stepped forward and opened fire. Both men were hit, but Hales was bleeding profusely. Although seriously injured Ó Máille managed to get Hales into the car and drove to the nearest hospital, where he collapsed, and died.

After an initial welcome to New York, where Mellows was feted as a hero of the Rising, it all went sour. Despite warnings from the influential Clan na Gael to tone his rhetoric down, Mellows continued his war against Britain. He was kicked out of Clan na Gael by its leaders, the veteran Fenian John Devoy, and the ambitious Judge Cohalan, when he publicly campaigned against Irish Americans joining the army, to fight with Britain and her allies on the battlefields of France at the climax of World War I. This totally opposed the efforts of Clan na Gael not to isolate itself from mainstream American politics.

After the collapse of the Galway Rising, Easter 1916, its leader Liam Mellows managed to get to New York where he was embraced by the the influential American Fenian network, Clan na Gael, who regarded him as ‘the most capable man who had so far arrived in America’.

Early on Easter Monday morning, April 24 1916, the Galway Volunteers sprang into action. It was a chaotic beginning to the rebellion which hoped to see a nation-wide rising of fully armed and committed men and women seizing control of the country. We know, however, the capture of the ship Aud, with its weapons, explosives and ammunition, off the Kerry coast on Good Friday, prompted the Dublin leadership to cancel the Rising. The order was ignored by Padraic Pearse and others, who had the benefit of arms imported into Howth two years previously. They took over key positions throughout Dublin city, which they held for six days.

Early on Easter Monday morning, April 24 1916, the Galway Volunteers sprang into action. It was a chaotic beginning to the rebellion which hoped to see a nation-wide rising of fully armed and committed men and women seizing control of the country. We know, however, the capture of the ship Aud, with its weapons, explosives and ammunition, off the Kerry coast on Good Friday, prompted the Dublin leadership to cancel the Rising. The order was ignored by Padraic Pearse and others, who had the benefit of arms imported into Howth two years previously. They took over key positions throughout Dublin city, which they held for six days.

Unlike the men executed after the 1916 Rising, there was little of the same idealisation given to the hundreds of men and women who died in the War of Independence, or, more emphatically, those executed during the regretable Civil War.