Prof Cathal Brugha (UCD)

Grandson of Cathal Brugha and Terence MacSwiney

Prof Cathal Brugha

“My full name is Cathal Terence MacSwiney Brugha. I feel close to both of them.

“My father was a son of Cathal Brugha and my mother, Máire, was the only child of Terence MacSwiney. Most meals they talked about politics but they didn’t really talk about the past – they were always looking forward.

“When I was very, very young, people would have met me who would have been through the War of Independence and who were upset about the way things worked out. They would see me and they would cry.

“These were people who lived in this great idealism and then were upset that things didn’t work out as they should have. There was an expectation put on me by some that I would do something amazing to unite Ireland. I was five!

“Later on I remember being told: ‘If you were twice the man that you are you wouldn’t be half the man that your grandfather was.’ They had expected I would be going up to the North and starting battles up there. Finishing the job, as they saw it.

“There was a great respect for people in the first Dáil. These were people who emerged as leaders, there was nobody self-serving. It’s very hard to move from a military to political era. They did their best. They were trying to set a better foundation for the future.

Prof Cathal Brugha's mother Máire, with her parents Muriel and Terence MacSwiney

“I don’t think people nowadays really understand what it was like to be in a country where you had no control, where other people basically were in charge. I don’t think they would be looking forward now and disappointed with the way things went, not at all.

“They were austere people because it was an austere time, but they enjoyed art, plays, poetry, theatre and so on.

“My father was born in 1917 so he was there at his father’s grave when he was just about five. My mother was born in 1918; she’s over 90 and in great form. Her father died when she was two and she was then taken off to Germany. She never knew him, even by repute.

“In fact, for political reasons, she never had access to her father’s diaries. Some years ago we found them in the National Library. My wife read the diaries every week to my mother. She got to know about her father for the first time in a personal way then and he was different to what she expected.

“Like Cathal Brugha, he had discovered the Irish language and came into the movement from the cultural end. While they worked together, there were not many motions they actually proposed and seconded in the first Dáil, but one of them was to do with a ministry for Irish culture.

“They knew there was a likelihood that they would die. They were thinking about the bigger picture. A country with men like that won’t easily be put down.” – Mary Minihan