The Personals by Brian O'Connell

Author:Brian O'Connell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-08-04T16:36:00+00:00

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The story behind the medals takes me from the Isle of Man to the west coast of Ireland, where a man named Peter had heard rumours when he was growing up about his grandfather’s past, but he says, as in many families, it wasn’t something that was spoken about often. If it was discussed, children were certainly never present.

He knew for example that his grandfather had lost half of one of his fingers when he was in an internment camp called Ballykinlar. He was also aware that his grandfather had remained an unapologetic Republican until his death in 1977, but apart from that, his grandfather never spoke directly to him about his early life. ‘From what I can gather, when families got together at Christmas or came home from England, the adults talked about the past,’ Peter tells me. ‘Most of my grandfather’s children moved to England to work and my father was the only one that stayed here in Ireland. My father came from a big family and he is 83 years old now, but most of his siblings are dead.’

Even when his aunts and uncles were alive, Peter doesn’t ever remember a big family discussion about their father and his past. The one inescapable link was the medals as well as an old diary which was locked in a press for the best part of 50 years. Through them, Peter came to know that his grandfather, Jack, from Tubbercurry, County Sligo, had been an active member of the IRA in the 1920s. He was interned at Ballykinlar Prison Camp in 1921 with about 1,000 others. He knows that his grandfather’s autograph book contains the signatures of some active IRA members. One of them, he says, was a well-known attempted escapee who was shot while trying to escape, and there’s some suggestion that Eamon de Valera signed the diary, though he hasn’t been able to locate his signature.

Peter doesn’t know how the family came to be on the Republican side in the War of Independence. He doesn’t know much about his great-grandparents either. Their surname, which he prefers to keep private, is from the Sligo area. He thinks maybe there are Hungarian connections somewhere along the line. He knows that many of the family were anti-treaty and their Republicanism has carried on to the present generation. Peter and his father attended the Easter Rising commemoration most years, and living quite close to the border, they remain steadfast in their belief that a united Ireland is possible.

‘A lot of my father’s friends would have been active,’ he says. ‘I remember cards being played in the house and a lot of well-known Republican Tubercurry names involved. As for my grandfather, he must have been very active, but what he was doing exactly, I don’t know. He was up to something and interned for it. I know his job outside of the IRA would have been as a lorry driver and working in transport. Maybe that’s a clue to what he did in the IRA at a time when there was a lot of guns being moved about.

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