Between Two Hells by Diarmaid Ferriter

Author:Diarmaid Ferriter [Ferriter, Diarmaid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788161749
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2021-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Michael Flannery, another civil war veteran who endured imprisonment and emigrated with IRA assistance in 1927, did not, however, reconcile himself to the independent Irish state. He established NORAID in 1970 to raise funds for the republican campaign in Ireland and this organisation was much influenced not just by the Troubles in Northern Ireland but also American ethnic politics. In its early years it was mostly made up of Irish-born republicans and some felt initially it was ‘just a bunch of Irish civil war vets’ before it expanded with second- and third-generation Irish-Americans in the early 1980s.10 Flannery always regarded the Irish state as illegitimate; he was put on trial in the 1980s for IRA gunrunning and acquitted. In some respects, the older NORAID activists were repeating the civil war charge of betrayal and indifference from the south of Ireland when it came to the republican demand for Irish unity.

Not all the post-civil war emigration was forced. The turmoil of 1922–3 generated an incurable restlessness, an inability to plant roots and a compunction to wander. Many of the emigrants were no doubt haunted and traumatised. George Lennon, born into a middle-class family in Waterford and who was barely out of his teens when he co-founded the west Waterford flying column active service unit of the IRA in the War of Independence (during which he suffered beatings and imprisonment and was on the run), found himself in the evacuated military barracks in Waterford at the start of the civil war. A reluctant presence there, he abandoned both it and the civil war in July 1922 (see Chapter 4), later referring to a complete nervous breakdown at that point. Almost fifty years on, he was back for a holiday in Ireland, still ‘searching for lost times’.11

His pension file includes over ten changes of address; by 1925 he informed the Pensions Board he was ‘unable to get continuous employment … and my private resources are now exhausted’.12 Lennon emigrated to New York and returned in the late 1930s to Ireland, where he tried various jobs, including with the Irish Tourist Board, only to leave again. He received both a military service pension of £120 and a disability pension after appeal. He had informed the Department of Defence from Bermuda in 1939 that it was necessary ‘to come to this climate to spend the winter months’.13 By 1945 he told the Department of Finance ‘it is essential for me to live in the US for at least some years for health and business reasons’.14 In 1940 a medical assessor noted he ‘has no confidence in himself ’, and this was traced directly back to the civil war: ‘feeling generally nervous and in particular that he does not feel able for responsibility since 1922. He states that he has suffered from several nervous breakdowns in the intervening years and that he has not been employed since 1935.’

An updated medical report in 1944 suggested he was suffering from ‘reactive depression (psychasthenia) and pulmonary disease attributable to military service in IRA’, and he was estimated to have an 80 per cent disability.

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