Ernie O’Malley: A relentless man both in his IRA work and in his writings

Ernie O’Malley: A Life

Author: Harry F Martin with Cormac KH O’Malley

ISBN-13: 9781785373909

Publisher: Merrion Press

Guideline Price: €18.95

“As a youngster,” wrote Ernie O’Malley from a Dublin prison in 1923, “I had the inborn hate of things English, which I expect all Irishmen inherit.”

By this time, O’Malley had been a prominent IRA man in the 1919-21 War of Independence and a leading anti-Treatyite in the subsequent Civil War. Wounded, captured and imprisoned by the Free State during the latter conflict, his 1923 letter was written shortly after he had ended a 41-day hunger strike in jail.

For O’Malley’s was an extraordinary life. As this very readable book by Harry Martin with Cormac O’Malley shows, the Mayo-born man was an Irish rebel who became a talented writer. In particular, O’Malley’s 1936 IRA memoir On Another Man’s Wound remains a brilliantly compelling account of Irish republican activism.

A medical student turned revolutionary, O’Malley was involved in organisational work and also in brutally combative action in the Irish revolution, first against the UK authorities in Ireland and then against his former comrades in the new Irish Free State. As such he experienced combat, injury, bereavement, imprisonment and – as noted – a courageous and lengthy hunger strike.

But his life after the Irish revolution was no less striking. He travelled widely in Europe, the US and Mexico, meeting many fascinating people as he developed into a writer and bohemian intellectual. So O’Malley’s life, admiringly recounted in this biography, was one involving revolutionary association with Michael Collins, Richard Mulcahy, Liam Lynch and Dan Breen. But it also involved intriguing friendships with painter Jack Yeats, poets Hart Crane and Robinson Jeffers, photographers Edward Weston and Paul Strand, film director John Ford, and actors John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara.

O’Malley’s importance in the Irish revolution derives both from his significant role during 1916-23 itself as well as his valuably thoughtful later reflections on those years. The publication of many of those reflections, and the preservation of extensive unpublished materials relating to his father, owe much to the commitment of Cormac O’Malley.

In this book, Harry Martin refers to Cormac (the youngest of O’Malley’s three children) as the “guardian of his father’s flame” and “the keeper of Ernie’s legacy”. This seems fair. Over many years Cormac has assiduously gathered invaluable materials on the basis of which his father’s experiences can be analysed, and this book draws on such resources in a sympathetic narrative of its subject’s life.

That life was dramatic after as well as during the IRA years. O'Malley experienced damaging libel actions against him in the 1930s, and his 1935 marriage to the wealthy American artist Helen Hooker painfully fractured in subsequent years. 
O'Malley himself was complex. Shy, intelligent, sensitive, artistic and bookish, he was often isolated and committedly uncompromising. He could certainly be a difficult man. Yet he possessed some devotedly dedicated friends, and he had a convivial dimension too.

When I was researching my own book on O’Malley, the late Maureen O’Hara told me that he had been “a lovely man to be around, a lovely man to talk to”. When O’Malley spent time with Hart Crane in Mexico in 1931, their friendship involved some powerful sessions, as O’Malley himself noted in his diary: “Hart is a hard drinker: fifteen litres of beer the other day then I passed out.”

O’Malley was relentless in all that he did, and this was true of his writing as well as his IRA work. In a letter from 1934 he observed: “I yet have the feeling of not justifying my existence when I don’t write something; maybe I’ll get rid of that, but it seems to me an ethical code and perhaps my only one.”

He had certainly been relentless and uncompromising in his politics. As he phrased it in his own candid description of his 1921 IRA thinking, “the people of this country would have to give allegiance to it or if they wanted to support the Empire they would have to clear out and support the Empire elsewhere”.

Such hard-edged attitudes, along with O’Malley’s equation during the revolution of anti-separatism with anti-Irishness, left little room for political compromise. Some readers of this welcome new book might have preferred more analysis of such themes. There could also have been more detailed discussion of complex and contested episodes from the Irish revolution, such as the 1920 Kilmichael ambush or the 1922 killing of Henry Wilson, incidents somewhat glanced over in this account.

But the book will be enjoyed by those keen to hear a well-told, gently written tale of an enduringly fascinating Irish figure.

Richard English is director of the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice at Queen’s University Belfast