"We Knew Where Our Sympathies Were": Social and Economic Views in On Another Man's Wound

Finding the Free State a land unfit for heroes, Ernie O'Malley went into a self-imposed exile, first to the Continent and then to North America. While in America from 1928 to 1935, O'Malley wrote his memoirs of the Irish Revolution and published the first part On Another Man's Wound in 1936. The book won immediate acclaim and remains the most powerful personal account of the Irish war for independence. O'Malley's story moves from the mundane to the intense—from comments on the flora of Ireland to the suspenseful stories of his capture, torture, and escape from the British, from remarks on the diet of the rural Irish to his ordering the execution of three captured British officers. Beyond offering insight into the revolution's violence and key personalities, Another Man's Wound does much to reveal the mentality of an Irish republican; O'Malley's socioeconomic views are best understood when placed within the wider context of republican ideals.

O'Malley's memoirs begin with his childhood in County Mayo, in what he describes as a "shoneen town," where the middle class, including his family, had aped the English and despised "the older Gaelic civilization of the people."¹ O'Malley writes of being insulted when the poor called him by his name, ÓMáille, in Irish. His parents never spoke of Ireland, and what he learned about Ireland came from his nurse who filled his head with Irish legends. While his civil servant father exchanged greetings with the local Royal Irish Constabulary, his nurse disapproved of the young O'Malley talking to the "peelers." He constructs a dichotomy between his Anglicized middle-class family and the rural poor, represented by his nurse, who remained Irish. The subtext of his childhood is the republican concept that genuine Irish culture and the nation were best represented in the harsh poverty of rural Ireland, that is, by those who had not sold their Irishness for mere material comforts.

O'Malley's family moved to Dublin when he was nine years old.² There, he observed the tumultuous events that gripped the capital from 1913 to 1916: the Lockout Strike, the formation of the Irish Volunteers and Irish Citizen Army, the gunrunning at Howth, the outbreak of the Great War, the Easter Rising. His memories of the 1913 Dublin Lockout are instructive: "Twenty thousand men starved slowly for six months whilst they fought the masters, the Irish Parliamentary Party and separatist opinion. . . . The lockout showed the terrible conditions under which Dublin workers had to live, and for a while the slums stank" (OAMW 35). O'Malley witnessed "Bloody Sunday," remembering:

Police swept down from many quarters, hemmed in the crowd and used their heavy batons on anyone who came in their way. I saw women knocked down and kicked. I scurried up a side street; at the other end the police struck people as they lay injured on the ground, struck them again and again. I could hear the crunch as the heavy sticks struck unprotected skulls. I was in favour of the strikers.

(OAMW25)

He writes of listening to the speeches of Larkin and Connolly, asserting that while Larkin was a great orator, it was the calmer words of Connolly that people remembered.

After his conversion to republicanism during the 1916 Rising, O'Malley recalls that he read everything he could that the executed leaders had written: "I reconstructed their works and their ideals. I bought everything that breathed their spirit: Connolly's Labour in Irish History, a vigorous work, overthrowing national idols. . . ." (OAMW44) He seems, however, to place Connolly's Marxist history of Ireland in the same category as the poems of Pearse, MacDonagh, and Plunkett, while discerning between those who were inspired by Gaelic League's cultural nationalism and those who fought...