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Ernie O’Malley: His life according to Harry F Martin and Cormac KH O’Malley Published in late 2021, Ernie O'Malley: A Life seeks to distil the life story of one of the most prominent figures of the Irish revolutionary period, and, later, a muchadmired writer. Ciarán Galway sits down with co-authors Harry F Martin and Cormac KH O’Malley – Ernie O’Malley’s son – to discuss the mercurial man. A native of Castlebar, County Mayo, Ernie O’Malley pursued medical studies in UCD before abandoning both his studies and his conservative and Anglocentric family home. Immersed in revolutionary fervour following the Easter Rising, he rapidly ascended the ranks of the IRA, ultimately becoming a commandant-general at the age of 23. Having survived both the War of Independence and the Civil War, during which time he endured captivity, torture, and escape, as well as severe battle wounds and a 41-day hunger strike, the second half of his life was no less interesting. Described variously as an ‘intellectual’ and a ‘renaissance man’, he rejected the postrevolution consensus of the Irish Free State, instead embarking on travels across Europe, America, and Mexico, traversing artistic communities in Provincetown, Greenwich Village, Carmel, Taos, Santa Fe, 110
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Mexico City, Woodstock, and Yaddo. Along the way, he became a contemporary of figures such as Edward Weston, Hart Crane, Katherine Ann Porter, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Jack B Yeats, Samuel Beckett, and John Ford, among others. At the same time, he undertook a tumultuous marriage with American heiress-sculptor Helen Hooker, the mother of his three children, Cathal, Etain, and Cormac. A respected writer, at the time of his death aged 59, much of O’Malley’s work was left unpublished. Reflecting on his most renowned account, On Another Man’s Wound, John McGahern wrote: “[It is] one classic work to have emerged directly from the violence that led to independence.”
Ciarán Galway (CG): Why did you
feel compelled to write a biography of Ernie O’Malley?
Harry F Martin (HFM): What drew
me to him was the incredible courage that he had, and the stamina to go through being wounded, tortured, etcetera, and never giving up. And that same drive, which took him through an unbelievably difficult warring period, including the tragic Civil War, and when he came out and there was nothing in Ireland for him, and nobody wanted these rebel kids anymore. He did not give up. He went on to have an incredibly interesting career as a writer, a friend of intellectuals, and a sponsor of the arts. He was just this dual character who draws you to him because he was so unusual. The warrior thing really compels you; the fact that he did not really care whether he lived or died.
Cormac O’Malley (CO’M): Harry drove the story with his passion for the character and I filled in on the factual side. Father had already written and between his two books on the War of Independence [On Another Man’s Wound] and the Civil War [The Singing Flame] – and the books that I had published of his letters, both in the Civil War and the rest of his life – we had a basic framework. What I was able to provide in between that was material that is not included in the letters, so that Harry got a better feeling for the characters. CG: How can you distil a multifaceted character like Ernie O’Malley into a single book? HFM: You do that with great effort. I had to keep getting rid of material all the time when I finally realised that both my co-author and my wife were right most of the time and all these extra pages that I had on Ernie had to come out. Then the real writing and learning begins, where you can say something concisely and you never tell the reader that he was a great guy, you let the reader find out. The most excruciating part of the writing was boiling down into the briefest possible explanation, what this terribly complex guy was like in the last half of his life. CG: How do you define Ernie O’Malley’s Irish republicanism? CO’M: He was initially taken up with the