Tom Maguire (28 March 1892 – 5 July 1993) was an Irish republican who held the rank of commandant-general in the Western Command of the Irish Republican Army and led the South Mayo flying column.
Tom Maguire of Cross, Co. Mayo was a remarkable man. As General Officer Commanding the Second Western Division of the Second Western Division of the Irish Republican Army, he was a guerilla leader in the 1919-1923 phase of the War of Independence.
In May 1921, he led an ambush on a Royal Irish Constabulary patrol in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, killing four. Maguire's flying column then made for the Partry Mountains. The long held account of the following action claimed that the column were surrounded by over 700 crown forces guided by aeroplanes. Maguire was wounded and his adjutant killed, but the column managed to escape with no further casualties. British casualties were not revealed but were long believed to have been high. Some recent research however has raised the possibility that less than forty British soldiers were in the vicinity and that Maguire's column was forced to abandon their weapons with only one British officer was wounded.
In 1921, he was elected a member of the Second Dáil Éireann for South Mayo-South Roscommon. Following on the defection of Cumann na nGaedheal/Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, who accepted partition and the Leinster House assembly, the All-Ireland Dáil continued to function. It had among its members some brilliant men and women, who have been largely written out of history by those who abandoned the Republican ideal.
Maguire was involved in numerous other engagements including the Kilfall ambush.
In the 1921 elections to Dáil Éireann, Maguire was returned unopposed as Teachta Dála (TD) for County Mayo as a Sinn Féin candidate. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and apart from saying "Níl" ("no" in English) when the vote was called, did not participate in any substantial way in the Dáil treaty debates. He was returned unopposed in the 1922 general election. In the 1923 general election, Maguire faced a contest and succeeded in securing the second of five seats in the Mayo South constituency, winning 5,712 votes (a share of 17.82 percent). He was a member of the army executive which commanded rebel troops during the Irish Civil War. Maguire was captured by Free State forces and was told that he would be executed, but his life was spared, possibly because of his prominence as a Republican. While in prison his brother, Sean Maguire, aged 17, was executed by the Free State.
Maguire remained a TD until 1927. He had initially indicated a willingness to contest the June 1927 general election as a Sinn Féin candidate but withdrew after the Irish Republican Army threatened to court-martial any member under IRA General Army Order 28, which forbade its members from standing in elections. (Despite this ban, IRA officers Seán Farrell (Leitrim–Sligo) and Dr John A. Madden (Mayo North) contested the election, the latter successfully).
Maguire subsequently drifted out of the IRA. In 1932, a Mayo IRA officer reported that Maguire, now firmly aligned with Sinn Féin, refused to call on men to join the IRA when speaking at republican commemorations. When challenged on this, Maguire claimed that, as the IRA “were no longer the same as they used to be”, he disagreed with the organisation.
In December 1938, Maguire was one of a group of seven people, who had been elected to the Second Dáil in 1921, who met with the IRA Army Council under Seán Russell. At this meeting, the seven signed over what they believed were the authority of the Government of Dáil Éireann to the Army Council. Henceforth, the IRA Army Council perceived itself to be the legitimate government of the Irish Republic and, on this basis, the IRA and Sinn Féin justified their rejection of the states of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and political abstentionism from their parliamentary institutions. According to J. Bowyer Bell, in the Secret Army, "With the possible exception of Tom Maguire, who went along, the Dáil members felt that the IRA request gave them the moral recognition so long denied by all factions and that their conditional devolution of power would in turn give the IRA the moral basis for the impending campaign" of 1939-1945.
Tom Maguire was steadfast in his allegiance to the Republic proclaimed in 1916 and established by the will of the people of all Ireland in 1919. He died in 1993 at the age of 101 years. His life story is the story of the struggle for Irish freedom and democracy during almost all of the twentieth century.
When the majority of IRA and Sinn Féin decided to abandon abstentionism in the 1969/70 split, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill sought and secured Maguire's recognition of the Provisional IRA as the legitimate successor to the 1938 Army Council. Likewise in the aftermath of the 1986 split in the Republican Movement, Maguire signed a statement in 1986 but was issued posthumously in 1996, he conferred this "legitimacy" on the Army Council of the Continuity IRA (who provided a firing party at Maguire's funeral in 1993). In The Irish Troubles, J. Bowyer Bell describes Maguire's opinion in 1986, "abstentionism was a basic tenet of republicanism, a moral issue of principle. Abstentionism gave the movement legitimacy, the right to wage war, to speak for a Republic all but established in the hearts of the people."
Although the 1938 conferring has been crucial to the ideology of republican legitimatists, its validity was rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Irish people in 1938, 1969, and 1986. In 1986 "a delegation from the [Gerry] Adams leadership" asked for his support, but Maguire rejected them. Republican Sinn Féin is the only party in Ireland which subscribes to the view that the seven-member Army Council of the Continuity IRA is the legitimate government of the Irish people.
Tom Maguire is often mistakenly cited as having been the last surviving member of the Second Dáil at the time of his 1969 statement and at the time of his death in 1993.
However, anti-Treaty Second Dáil TD Eamon de Valera lived until 1975 and pro-treaty Carlow-Kilkenny TD, Gearóid O'Sullivan, was the last surviving member of the Second Dáil, living over a year longer than Maguire. O'Sullivan died in August 1994 at the age of 103. However republicans would argue that they had broken their pledges to the Irish Republic thus leaving Maguire as the sole surviving member. The last IRA veteran of the Tan War/Irish War of Independence, Dan Keating, died in 2007.
No comments:
Post a Comment