By Joseph E.A. Connell Jr
On 4 November 1922, Ernie O’Malley was captured after a shoot-out with National Army soldiers at the family home of Nell O’Rahilly Humphries, 36 Ailesbury Road, which had been his headquarters for six weeks. Severely affected by his wounds—he was hit over nine times—O’Malley was transferred from Portobello military hospital to Mountjoy Prison hospital on 23 December 1922. As he made clear in The singing flame, he was in grave danger of being one of the many executed for armed insurrection against the State and, additionally in his case, for killing a soldier. O’Malley believed that the authorities were waiting for him to recover sufficiently for an ‘elaborate trial’ to take place, a scenario in which he would refuse to recognise the court. Charges were preferred against him in January 1923.
While the Civil War ended with the cessation of hostilities and dumping of arms in May 1923, arrests by the Free State continued unabated. By October 1923 tension was at an all-time high in the prisons and camps because of conditions and with no release in sight. On 13 October 1923, Michael Kilroy, O/C of the IRA prisoners in Mountjoy, announced a mass hunger strike by 300 prisoners, and it soon spread to other jails. Within days 7,000 Republicans were on hunger strike. O’Malley noted that ‘practically all volunteered; some were exempted, including myself [because of his injuries], but I refused this concession’. After a week O’Malley and other senior officers were moved to Kilmainham Gaol.
Because of the large numbers on strike, at the end of October the government sent a delegation to Newbridge camp to speak with IRA leaders there. It soon became apparent that they were not there to negotiate the strikers’ demands but rather to give the prisoners the government’s message: ‘We are not going to force-feed you, but if you die we won’t waste coffins on you; you will be put in orange boxes and you will be buried in unconsecrated ground’. O’Malley wrote:
‘Any action was good, it seemed, and everyone was more cheerful when the hunger strike began. We listened to the tales of men who had undergone previous strikes and we, who were novices, wondered what it would be like. We laughed and talked, but in the privacy of our cells, some, like myself, must have thought what fools we were, and have doubted our tenacity and strength of will. I looked into the future of hunger and I quailed.’
O’Malley wrote that the strike ended with no promises of release: ‘we had been defeated again’.
In early January 1924, O’Malley was the last anti-Treaty inmate moved from Kilmainham Gaol. He was transferred to St Bricin’s military hospital, thence to Mountjoy Prison, where at first he spent some time in the hospital wing, and later to the Curragh. Despite official reservations, the prisoners began to be set free. O’Malley was the last anti-Treaty prisoner to be released. He left the Curragh, along with Seán Russell, on 17 July 1924, well over a year after the end of hostilities.
Joseph E.A. Connell Jr is the author of The Terror War: the uncomfortable truths of the Irish War of Independence (Eastwood Books, 2022).