Life
1875-1916 [born Micheal Joseph Rahilly; The O’Rahilly]; b. Ballylongford,
Co. Kerry, 1875; son of wealthy shopkeeper; ed. Clongowes; studied medicine;
travelled to America due to ill-health; m. in New York; returned to Ireland
in 1909; became Sinn Féin and Gaelic League worker; invited Eoin
MacNeill to write article entitled ‘The North Began’ in An
Claidheamh Soluis (1 Nov. 1913); asked MacNeill to lead Irish Volunteers
on behalf of Bulmer Hobson and others; chairman of arms committee that
organised the Howth gun-running; envisaged using Óglaigh na hEireann
as a defence force; Director of Arms of secessionist Volunteers after
Redmond’s call for enlistment, Sept. 1914; supported MacNeill’s
use of Volunteers as pressure group; not a member of the IRB and unaware
of Rising plans; did not favour blood-sacrifice; supported MacNeill’s
countermand and spent Sunday carrying it to Limerick, but joined rebels
at GPO having failed to avert their action; asked what he thought of the
1916 Rising, he said, ‘it is madness, but it is glorious madness’;
wounded fatally in the face leading a charge against barricade in Moore
St. on the Friday of Easter Week. DIB DIH
Criticism
Pádraig Ó Snodaigh [Oliver Snoddy], Ua Rathghaille (Baile Atha
Cliath: Foillseacháin Poblachtacha 1967), rep. Dublin: United Irishman,
[1970]).
Oliver Snoddy, ‘Notes on Literature in Irish Dealing with the Fight for Freedom’, Éire-Ireland, 3, 2 (Summer 1968), pp. 138-48.
Aodhagán O’Rahilly, Winding the Clock, O’Rahilly and the 1916 Rising (Dublin: Lilliput 1991), 254pp.; same reviewed by Brendan Ó Cathaoir, Irish Times (Aug. 1991), [q.p.].
Notes
Yeats’s poem ‘The O’Rahilly’: ‘Sing of
the O’Rahilly, / Do not deny his right; / Sing a "the"
before his name; / Allow that he, despite / All those learned historians,
/ Established it for good; / He wrote out that word himself, / He christened
himself with blood.;[...] ‘Then on Pearse and Connolly / He fixed
a bitter look, / Because I helped to wind the clock I come to hear it
strike.’; ... ‘What remains to sing about / But of the death
he met / Stretched under a doorway / Somewhere off Henry Street; / They
that found him found upon / The door above his head / "Here died
the O’Rahilly / R.I.P." writ in blood.’ (Jan. 1937).
Augustine Martin's edition, Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London: Vintage 1992), contains the following note regarding Yeats's ‘The O’Rahilly’: ‘The O’Rahilly (1875-1916 who styled himself in the old Gaelic manner as head of the O’Rahilly sept in Kerry was one of the more romantic figures of the Easter Rising. he led the charge up Moore Street - off henry Street - when the garrison in the GPO had to abandon the building. When shot he is siad to have signed his name in blood on the nearby wall. he "travelled half the night2 from Kerry to reach Liberty Hall in time for the Rising. When he arrived he remarked that as he had helped to wind the clock he wanted to be there to hear it strike.’ (p.510.)
Arnold Bax O’Rahilly described as a ‘strikingly handsome young man always dressed in a saffron kilt’ (A. N. Jeffares, A New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, 1984, p.389; bibl. Bax, Farewell My Youth, p.100)
[ top ]
Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)