THE WEDDING OF MICHAEL O’BRIEN AND LILLIE CLANCY, TERENURE, CO DUBLIN, 22 NOVEMBER 1920
The wedding of Michael O’Brien (1891-1965) and Elizabeth (Lillie) Clancy (1896-1980) took place in St Joseph’s Church, Terenure, Co. Dublin on 22 November 1920, the day after Bloody Sunday. Both were from the agricultural hinterland to the north of Skibbereen, the groom from Curragh and the bride from Bauravilla in the parish of Caheragh. Like most of the men in the photograph, the groom was one of Collins’s circle and had been ‘on the run’ for some time. The fact that the wedding took place on the day it did, when every policeman in Dublin was looking for Collins and his associates, led some commentators to query the date when the picture made its first public appearance on the internet.
The photograph, by Brendan Keogh of Keogh Brothers of 124 St Stephen’s Green, first appeared on the web in March 2012 on the Facebook site of the Capuchin fathers, one of whose members, Fr Bonaventure Murphy OFSC (c.1880-1968), was the celebrant.
The wedding of Michael O’Brien (1891-1965) and Elizabeth (Lillie) Clancy (1896-1980) took place in St Joseph’s Church, Terenure, Co. Dublin on 22 November 1920, the day after Bloody Sunday. Both were from the agricultural hinterland to the north of Skibbereen, the groom from Curragh and the bride from Bauravilla in the parish of Caheragh. Like most of the men in the photograph, the groom was one of Collins’s circle and had been ‘on the run’ for some time. The fact that the wedding took place on the day it did, when every policeman in Dublin was looking for Collins and his associates, led some commentators to query the date when the picture made its first public appearance on the internet.
The photograph, by Brendan Keogh of Keogh Brothers of 124 St Stephen’s Green, first appeared on the web in March 2012 on the Facebook site of the Capuchin fathers, one of whose members, Fr Bonaventure Murphy OFSC (c.1880-1968), was the celebrant.
The main public interest in the photograph has been the presence of Michael Collins in the back row and indeed in Collins’s appearance; he is obviously avoiding the camera, looking at the ground, yet he could presumably have stepped out of the shot had he wanted. Collins later adopted the same pose when photographed at Tom Barry’s wedding to Leslie Price in 1921. This was not a mistrust of the photographer, as Keogh had been photographing republicans, both in groups and studio portraits since at least 1915 (when he covered the O’Donovan Rossa funeral at Glasnevin and its committee in the Rotunda Gardens), but rather a well-founded fear that the British authorities would circulate his image on a wanted list. It is now known that Collins successfully evaded capture on a number of occasions because of the absence of such a photograph. Many of the 1916 leaders had been photographed by Keogh prior to the rising, some, including Eamon de Valera, in uniform, and a number of these had been published in the media subsequently, including the Weekly Irish Times’s Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook (1916, reissued 1917). Keogh took a number of studio portraits of Diarmuid Lynch, two of which are reproduced in Eileen McGough’s biography. His studio portrait of the groom, Michael O’Brien, is reproduced here for the first time. According to photographic historians (ex info David Davison), the authorities became aware that Keogh also had at least one portrait of Collins on file but a raid on his studio failed to uncover it, the plates having been secreted away. Brendan Keogh (born c.1888) began business in his father’s house on Dorset Street in 1906 (where they retained a branch). His older brother John Leo Keogh, a commercial clerk, seems to have been a sleeping partner initially, but was a professional photographer by 1914. A selection of Keogh’s collection of revolutionary portraits, deposited in the National Library of Ireland on his retirement in 1959, may be viewed on the library’s website.
Michael O’Brien’s best man was Michael Francis (Mick) Lynch (1890-1956) of Granig who had been best man at the wedding, in 1914, of his brother Denis Lynch (1887-1973) to Alice Wyatt (1888-1968), which featured in the September newsletter. Alice and Denis are standing here in the back row, framed by the archway. Fr Bonaventure was later to be the celebrant at the wedding of the bride’s brother Joseph A.B. (Joe) Clancy (1898-1930) to Mary Teresa (Teddy) Quinn (1892-1945) in 1921 and the wedding of Teddy’s half-sister Carmel Quinn (1898-1960) to Mick Lynch in 1922 (both also held in Dublin). Joe (seated to the best man’s left) and Teddy (seated far left on the carpet in the foreground) were apparently introduced at this wedding. Teddy would have been well known to Mick and Denis Lynch as her older sister Kit had married their half-brother Diarmuid in April 1918 just before he was deported to the United States where she had joined him. At the time of the O’Brien/Clancy wedding, Teddy was apparently staying at Denis and Alice’s home in the Jones’s Road distillery, which Collins was using as a safe house, and she was asked to accompany him in a pony and sidecar across the city to Terenure as a decoy. They were reputedly stopped by a constable en route, Collins enquiring if they had caught the perpetrators of the shootings yet.
While a number of Dublin-based Capuchin friars are remembered for ministering to the 1916 leaders before their execution, Fr Bonaventure, a native of Carrignavar, Co Cork who joined the order in 1899, does not appear to have been one of them, as he was attached to their Cork house at Rochestown. The connection with him may well have been through the Lynches, Timothy Lynch’s first wife and mother of Diarmuid, Hannah Dunlea, also being from Carrignavar.
The bridesmaid was Sighle O’Donovan, then just sixteen, daughter of Julia Anne O’Donovan (c.1874-1967), the widowed aunt of the bride, who hosted the reception at her home, 16 Airfield Road, Rathgar. Julia is standing at the back left, beside Collins. To Collins’s left is his adjutant-general Gearóid O’Sullivan (1891-1948), who was Julia’s cousin. Four of Sighle’s siblings are in the foreground, with Eibhlin (b. 1905), next to Teddy Clancy and to her right, Seaghan (b.1909), Una (b.1910) and Tadhg (b.1911). Two other O’Donovan children are not in the photograph, Diarmuid (b. 1907) and Donough (b. 1908). Julia’s eldest daughter Hannah (Siobhan) had died of scarlet fever in 1914, aged eleven, just three years after her father had died from tuberculosis in 1911. Julia (known in the family as Ju) was one of three Barry sisters, daughters of John Barry (c.1837-1923), a farmer of Bauravilla and his wife Julia. The bride Lillie Clancy’s mother, Ellen (Nellie) was about ten years older, born about 1864, while the third sister, Hannah, was born about 1879. Their brother Patrick (Pat) Barry (c.1872-1958) is in the photograph, seated at the far right. In the 1901 census Julia and her sister Hannah were living at North Street, Skibbereen where they ran a pub. Julia married in the following year, 1902, Denis O’Donovan (b.1871), son of Denis, a flour merchant of Bridge Street, Skibereen (who also had a farm at Curragh). Hannah married in Skibbereen in 1909, James J. (Jim) Murray (c.1876-1924), a native of Co Waterford, who is in the photograph, standing at the extreme right, behind Pat Barry. Julia and Denis, who was in the butter trade, subsequently moved to Dublin and were living at Airfield Road by 1907. Following her husband’s death, Julia started her own business, J.A. O’Donovan and Company, which operated a couple of dairies in the city, including one in Rathgar, near her home. She was active politically and her home was used by volunteers both for meetings and as a safe house, for Collins and Gearóid O’Sullivan among others. According to her witness statement to the Bureau of Military History (W.S. 475) the two men had lunch there every Sunday ‘until the truce.’ She concluded: ‘I consider that we were very lucky to have escaped so well that nobody was caught in the house.’ On 22 November 1920 it became the ultimate safe house, and both Michael and Lillie gave 16 Airfield Road as their address in the marriage register, though their stay there was probably only an hour or two before they headed to the relative safety of Glendalough to begin their honeymoon. Julia’s home was known to the authorities who had previously raided it. It seems brave for the wedding party to pose in the street, albeit a cul-de-sac with no traffic, and one wonders if a lookout had been posted. Airfield Road has a pedestrian way through the blind end, which might well have served as an escape route for Collins if it was needed.
Lillie Clancy was born in 1896, the daughter of Ellen (née Barry) and Patrick Clancy (c.1854-1923) whose main activity was running a roadside pub at Bauravilla (still in business today), where the family lived, but who also described himself as a farmer and carpenter in the 1901 census. The premises at Bauravilla was reported in a 1921 newspaper notice to have been in the family for ‘close on two centuries’ but the mid-nineteenth century valuation books report that it was then operating as a forge rather than a public house. Patrick Clancy’s farm, running to over a hundred acres, was at Molnaskeha, north of Bauravilla on the main road from Skibbereen to Drimoleague, and included a two-storey residence with ‘eight acres of lawn’ in front. It was sold in February 1920. Lillie was the elder of two surviving children, two years older than her brother Joe. A third child had died in infancy. At the age of about twelve, she was sent to Dublin to boarding school at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham.
Michael O’Brien was born in 1891 the youngest son of Patrick O’Brien (born c.1847), who farmed at Curragh and his wife Catherine (Kate), née Fitzgerald (d. before 1901), daughter of Matthew Fitzgerald of The Abbey, Skibbereen. The censuses reveal that they were one of several Fitzgerald families in the townland of Abbeystrowery, to give it its full name. Michael’s parents married in 1875 and had six older children, daughters Mary (b.1876), Ellen (b.1879) and twins Annie and Rose (b.1885) and sons John (b.1878) and Jeremiah (b.1881). Michael went to boarding school at Blackrock College, Dublin where he progressed through scholarship, having received initial encouragement and support from a local priest, who identified his potential, and his uncle by marriage John Murphy, publican and proprietor of the West Cork Hotel in Skibbereen (built 1902), who was married to his aunt Annie, née Fitzgerald. The first printed reference to Michael traced is his attendance at the marriage of his cousin May Murphy, John and Annie’s eldest daughter, to Florence Ward in Skibbereen in 1910. In the 1911 census he is still at Blackrock where he had become a seminarian. Two of his sisters, Ellen and Annie, had followed a religious vocation and were nuns in the United States. In 1915 Michael was best man at the wedding of his brother John to Margaret Keohane of Ballintemple, Clonakilty. He left Blackrock around the time of the 1916 rising and, having obtained an arts degree, worked as a secondary teacher. He joined the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaelige) which probably, as with many others, brought him into contact with members of the Irish volunteers.
One important figure in both Gaelic League and republican circles, who was well known to him, was Peadar O’Hourihane (1873-1965) (Peadar Ó hAnnracháin), from 1901 a full-time teacher and organiser for the league in the south-west as well as being a contributor to the local Skibbereen newspaper, the Southern Star (Réalt an Deiscirt), which he later edited for a time. O’Hourihane was related to the Barry/Clancy families as was Gearóid O’Sullivan, who was a cousin of Collins. O’Sullivan, who came from Coolnagarrane, a townland just to the east of Curragh, was a national school teacher in Dublin from about 1912. In 1910 O’Hourihane ran an Irish-language summer school Colaiste Chairbre in Glandore House, the holiday home of the American lawyer and politician, Daniel F. Cohalan (1867-1946), a close associate of Diarmuid Lynch in New York. The school continued for a number of years, becoming radicalised as the Gaelic League grew more political after 1915 (when its founder Douglas Hyde resigned). O’Sullivan joined the 1st Dublin brigade of the volunteers and was Sean MacDiarmada’s aide-de-camp in the 1916 rising. O’Hourihane, who was a member of the Cork brigade, was arrested after the rebellion and was held with Mick Lynch and Gearóid O’Sullivan among others in Richmond Barracks in Dublin before being deported to internment in England, all being released by 1917. Nothing is known of Michael O’Brien’s political activities before early 1920 but he managed so far to evade arrest unlike O’Sullivan (now teaching in Carlow), who was picked up in Glandore while running a training camp at Colaiste Chairbre in August 1919 and sentenced to six months imprisonment. Released on parole on the grounds of ill-health in October, he went on the run. According to British intelligence files, O’Sullivan was ‘adjutant-general of the Fianna [IRA]’ at the time of the O’Brien/Clancy wedding. The only intelligence report located on Michael O’Brien was filed by a police sergeant on 1 January 1920 in which he reported, under the heading of ‘Dail Eireann Loan’ that ‘as regards the Skibbereen District…Michael O’Brien who is on the run was acting in the capacity of organizer for the loan some time ago’ (file reproduced in A.T.Q. Stewart, Michael Collins: the Secret File, Belfast, 1997).
In addition to the groom, Collins and O’Sullivan, the bride’s uncle Pat Barry was also on the run. Pat had moved from Cork to Donegal in the early 1900s to take up the post of manager at the co-operative creamery at Inver. He married, in 1909, Julia Ward, of Castletownshend, whose father was a naval pensioner, postmaster and farmer. They had three children, two boys and a girl, born in Donegal between 1911 and 1914. Julia unfortunately contracted Bright’s disease in 1918 and died, aged 37, in the following year. In early 1920 the Black and Tans burnt down the Inver creamery and subsequently, in October, a month before the O’Brien/Clancy wedding, occupied Pat Barry’s house, turning it into an auxiliary barracks. On one occasion while on the run he was staying in Julia O’Donovan’s when it was raided by the authorities, but they failed to recognise him and left. Pat Barry eventually returned to Donegal where, in September 1922, he remarried; his second wife was Mary McGee, a national school teacher from Frosses. The family moved to Limerick when he was offered ‘a lucrative appointment’ but moved back to Donegal in 1926 when the opportunity arose to purchase the creamery at Bruckless.
Jim Murray, standing behind Pat Barry in the photograph, was his brother-in-law, married to Hannah. Born near Lismore, Co Waterford, the son of an agricultural worker, Murray apparently moved to Skibbereen sometime in the 1890s where he joined the legal practice of Jasper Wolfe as a general clerk, rising to the post of managing clerk. Wolfe felt he had further potential and trained him as a solicitor. He returned to Lismore to open up his own practice but still acted for his relatives in Skibbereen. By the time of the wedding, Hannah’s elderly parents John and Julia Barry were living with them in Co Waterford.
The figures in the back row between Gearoid O’Sullivan and Denis Lynch were Mrs Catherine O’Keefe, a friend of Julia O’Donovan’s and Sean Hyde (b.1898), a native of Bandon and an associate of Collins about whom little has been written. He was a champion hurler, who, having played at club and county level in Cork, won an All-Ireland medal for Dublin in its victory over Tipperary in 1917. A veterinary student in the capital, he found that Dublin were short a full back and volunteered his services. Like Jim Murray, Catherine O’Keefe (born c.1879) was a native of Co Waterford. Mrs O’Keefe ran a shop at 21 Lower Camden Street. Born Catherine Power, daughter of James Power, a farmer, she was an ardent Gaelgoir and changed her name to Cáit Ní Paor. In 1910 she married Patrick O’Keefe, a farmer’s son from Nohavaldaly, Rathmore, Co Cork, who had been employed for some years as a sorter in the GPO. She filled out the 1911 census form in Irish, signing her name as head of the family as Cáit Paor. Presumably at the insistence of a pedantic enumerator, this was changed to Cáit Ua Cáoim, while her husband was also asked to sign, which he did in Irish, though in the house return form he was filed as Patrick O’Keefe. O’Keefe was subsequently identified by his employers as a member of the volunteers and, along with several others, issued with a warning letter. He was among a number of GPO employees to take part in the 1916 rising but although detained in military custody and suspended for ‘suspected complicity’ he was not dismissed (Stephen Ferguson, GPO Staff in 1916, Cork 2012). He was active in the war of independence and is described in a Dublin Castle file (now in the PRO Kew) as a member of the IRB and ‘important member of the IRA (rank unknown)’. This was updated by the British authorities in August 1922, during the period of the provisional government in Ireland, to report that he was actually a commandant and had been appointed deputy military governor of Mountjoy prison.
Apart from Michael O’Brien, most of the figures in the wedding photograph took the pro-Treaty side, Gearóid O’Sullivan being appointed adjutant-general to the national army. In October 1922 he married Maud Kiernan, sister of Collins’s fiancée Kitty Kiernan. It was to have been a double wedding, but Collins had been shot at Béal na Bláth on 22 August. Pat Barry served as a pro-Treaty county councillor in Donegal and ran for the Dáil. Interned in 1923, Michael subsequently studied law and was called to the bar in 1925.
FREDDIE O’DWYER
Freddie's article with illustrations is available in the November 2015 edition of the Newsletter. Click here to access
Update: November 2019
An interesting advertorial by Weir and Sons of Grafton Street, Dublin was published by the Irish Times in November 2019 (from the Weir and Sons Style Magazine, October 1919) and gives an additional insight to the wedding ceremony of almost a century ago. With thanks to Weir and Sons, The Irish Times, Jessie Collins, Duibhne Daly, Freddie & Emer O'Dwyer.
Michael O’Brien’s best man was Michael Francis (Mick) Lynch (1890-1956) of Granig who had been best man at the wedding, in 1914, of his brother Denis Lynch (1887-1973) to Alice Wyatt (1888-1968), which featured in the September newsletter. Alice and Denis are standing here in the back row, framed by the archway. Fr Bonaventure was later to be the celebrant at the wedding of the bride’s brother Joseph A.B. (Joe) Clancy (1898-1930) to Mary Teresa (Teddy) Quinn (1892-1945) in 1921 and the wedding of Teddy’s half-sister Carmel Quinn (1898-1960) to Mick Lynch in 1922 (both also held in Dublin). Joe (seated to the best man’s left) and Teddy (seated far left on the carpet in the foreground) were apparently introduced at this wedding. Teddy would have been well known to Mick and Denis Lynch as her older sister Kit had married their half-brother Diarmuid in April 1918 just before he was deported to the United States where she had joined him. At the time of the O’Brien/Clancy wedding, Teddy was apparently staying at Denis and Alice’s home in the Jones’s Road distillery, which Collins was using as a safe house, and she was asked to accompany him in a pony and sidecar across the city to Terenure as a decoy. They were reputedly stopped by a constable en route, Collins enquiring if they had caught the perpetrators of the shootings yet.
While a number of Dublin-based Capuchin friars are remembered for ministering to the 1916 leaders before their execution, Fr Bonaventure, a native of Carrignavar, Co Cork who joined the order in 1899, does not appear to have been one of them, as he was attached to their Cork house at Rochestown. The connection with him may well have been through the Lynches, Timothy Lynch’s first wife and mother of Diarmuid, Hannah Dunlea, also being from Carrignavar.
The bridesmaid was Sighle O’Donovan, then just sixteen, daughter of Julia Anne O’Donovan (c.1874-1967), the widowed aunt of the bride, who hosted the reception at her home, 16 Airfield Road, Rathgar. Julia is standing at the back left, beside Collins. To Collins’s left is his adjutant-general Gearóid O’Sullivan (1891-1948), who was Julia’s cousin. Four of Sighle’s siblings are in the foreground, with Eibhlin (b. 1905), next to Teddy Clancy and to her right, Seaghan (b.1909), Una (b.1910) and Tadhg (b.1911). Two other O’Donovan children are not in the photograph, Diarmuid (b. 1907) and Donough (b. 1908). Julia’s eldest daughter Hannah (Siobhan) had died of scarlet fever in 1914, aged eleven, just three years after her father had died from tuberculosis in 1911. Julia (known in the family as Ju) was one of three Barry sisters, daughters of John Barry (c.1837-1923), a farmer of Bauravilla and his wife Julia. The bride Lillie Clancy’s mother, Ellen (Nellie) was about ten years older, born about 1864, while the third sister, Hannah, was born about 1879. Their brother Patrick (Pat) Barry (c.1872-1958) is in the photograph, seated at the far right. In the 1901 census Julia and her sister Hannah were living at North Street, Skibbereen where they ran a pub. Julia married in the following year, 1902, Denis O’Donovan (b.1871), son of Denis, a flour merchant of Bridge Street, Skibereen (who also had a farm at Curragh). Hannah married in Skibbereen in 1909, James J. (Jim) Murray (c.1876-1924), a native of Co Waterford, who is in the photograph, standing at the extreme right, behind Pat Barry. Julia and Denis, who was in the butter trade, subsequently moved to Dublin and were living at Airfield Road by 1907. Following her husband’s death, Julia started her own business, J.A. O’Donovan and Company, which operated a couple of dairies in the city, including one in Rathgar, near her home. She was active politically and her home was used by volunteers both for meetings and as a safe house, for Collins and Gearóid O’Sullivan among others. According to her witness statement to the Bureau of Military History (W.S. 475) the two men had lunch there every Sunday ‘until the truce.’ She concluded: ‘I consider that we were very lucky to have escaped so well that nobody was caught in the house.’ On 22 November 1920 it became the ultimate safe house, and both Michael and Lillie gave 16 Airfield Road as their address in the marriage register, though their stay there was probably only an hour or two before they headed to the relative safety of Glendalough to begin their honeymoon. Julia’s home was known to the authorities who had previously raided it. It seems brave for the wedding party to pose in the street, albeit a cul-de-sac with no traffic, and one wonders if a lookout had been posted. Airfield Road has a pedestrian way through the blind end, which might well have served as an escape route for Collins if it was needed.
Lillie Clancy was born in 1896, the daughter of Ellen (née Barry) and Patrick Clancy (c.1854-1923) whose main activity was running a roadside pub at Bauravilla (still in business today), where the family lived, but who also described himself as a farmer and carpenter in the 1901 census. The premises at Bauravilla was reported in a 1921 newspaper notice to have been in the family for ‘close on two centuries’ but the mid-nineteenth century valuation books report that it was then operating as a forge rather than a public house. Patrick Clancy’s farm, running to over a hundred acres, was at Molnaskeha, north of Bauravilla on the main road from Skibbereen to Drimoleague, and included a two-storey residence with ‘eight acres of lawn’ in front. It was sold in February 1920. Lillie was the elder of two surviving children, two years older than her brother Joe. A third child had died in infancy. At the age of about twelve, she was sent to Dublin to boarding school at Loreto Abbey, Rathfarnham.
Michael O’Brien was born in 1891 the youngest son of Patrick O’Brien (born c.1847), who farmed at Curragh and his wife Catherine (Kate), née Fitzgerald (d. before 1901), daughter of Matthew Fitzgerald of The Abbey, Skibbereen. The censuses reveal that they were one of several Fitzgerald families in the townland of Abbeystrowery, to give it its full name. Michael’s parents married in 1875 and had six older children, daughters Mary (b.1876), Ellen (b.1879) and twins Annie and Rose (b.1885) and sons John (b.1878) and Jeremiah (b.1881). Michael went to boarding school at Blackrock College, Dublin where he progressed through scholarship, having received initial encouragement and support from a local priest, who identified his potential, and his uncle by marriage John Murphy, publican and proprietor of the West Cork Hotel in Skibbereen (built 1902), who was married to his aunt Annie, née Fitzgerald. The first printed reference to Michael traced is his attendance at the marriage of his cousin May Murphy, John and Annie’s eldest daughter, to Florence Ward in Skibbereen in 1910. In the 1911 census he is still at Blackrock where he had become a seminarian. Two of his sisters, Ellen and Annie, had followed a religious vocation and were nuns in the United States. In 1915 Michael was best man at the wedding of his brother John to Margaret Keohane of Ballintemple, Clonakilty. He left Blackrock around the time of the 1916 rising and, having obtained an arts degree, worked as a secondary teacher. He joined the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaelige) which probably, as with many others, brought him into contact with members of the Irish volunteers.
One important figure in both Gaelic League and republican circles, who was well known to him, was Peadar O’Hourihane (1873-1965) (Peadar Ó hAnnracháin), from 1901 a full-time teacher and organiser for the league in the south-west as well as being a contributor to the local Skibbereen newspaper, the Southern Star (Réalt an Deiscirt), which he later edited for a time. O’Hourihane was related to the Barry/Clancy families as was Gearóid O’Sullivan, who was a cousin of Collins. O’Sullivan, who came from Coolnagarrane, a townland just to the east of Curragh, was a national school teacher in Dublin from about 1912. In 1910 O’Hourihane ran an Irish-language summer school Colaiste Chairbre in Glandore House, the holiday home of the American lawyer and politician, Daniel F. Cohalan (1867-1946), a close associate of Diarmuid Lynch in New York. The school continued for a number of years, becoming radicalised as the Gaelic League grew more political after 1915 (when its founder Douglas Hyde resigned). O’Sullivan joined the 1st Dublin brigade of the volunteers and was Sean MacDiarmada’s aide-de-camp in the 1916 rising. O’Hourihane, who was a member of the Cork brigade, was arrested after the rebellion and was held with Mick Lynch and Gearóid O’Sullivan among others in Richmond Barracks in Dublin before being deported to internment in England, all being released by 1917. Nothing is known of Michael O’Brien’s political activities before early 1920 but he managed so far to evade arrest unlike O’Sullivan (now teaching in Carlow), who was picked up in Glandore while running a training camp at Colaiste Chairbre in August 1919 and sentenced to six months imprisonment. Released on parole on the grounds of ill-health in October, he went on the run. According to British intelligence files, O’Sullivan was ‘adjutant-general of the Fianna [IRA]’ at the time of the O’Brien/Clancy wedding. The only intelligence report located on Michael O’Brien was filed by a police sergeant on 1 January 1920 in which he reported, under the heading of ‘Dail Eireann Loan’ that ‘as regards the Skibbereen District…Michael O’Brien who is on the run was acting in the capacity of organizer for the loan some time ago’ (file reproduced in A.T.Q. Stewart, Michael Collins: the Secret File, Belfast, 1997).
In addition to the groom, Collins and O’Sullivan, the bride’s uncle Pat Barry was also on the run. Pat had moved from Cork to Donegal in the early 1900s to take up the post of manager at the co-operative creamery at Inver. He married, in 1909, Julia Ward, of Castletownshend, whose father was a naval pensioner, postmaster and farmer. They had three children, two boys and a girl, born in Donegal between 1911 and 1914. Julia unfortunately contracted Bright’s disease in 1918 and died, aged 37, in the following year. In early 1920 the Black and Tans burnt down the Inver creamery and subsequently, in October, a month before the O’Brien/Clancy wedding, occupied Pat Barry’s house, turning it into an auxiliary barracks. On one occasion while on the run he was staying in Julia O’Donovan’s when it was raided by the authorities, but they failed to recognise him and left. Pat Barry eventually returned to Donegal where, in September 1922, he remarried; his second wife was Mary McGee, a national school teacher from Frosses. The family moved to Limerick when he was offered ‘a lucrative appointment’ but moved back to Donegal in 1926 when the opportunity arose to purchase the creamery at Bruckless.
Jim Murray, standing behind Pat Barry in the photograph, was his brother-in-law, married to Hannah. Born near Lismore, Co Waterford, the son of an agricultural worker, Murray apparently moved to Skibbereen sometime in the 1890s where he joined the legal practice of Jasper Wolfe as a general clerk, rising to the post of managing clerk. Wolfe felt he had further potential and trained him as a solicitor. He returned to Lismore to open up his own practice but still acted for his relatives in Skibbereen. By the time of the wedding, Hannah’s elderly parents John and Julia Barry were living with them in Co Waterford.
The figures in the back row between Gearoid O’Sullivan and Denis Lynch were Mrs Catherine O’Keefe, a friend of Julia O’Donovan’s and Sean Hyde (b.1898), a native of Bandon and an associate of Collins about whom little has been written. He was a champion hurler, who, having played at club and county level in Cork, won an All-Ireland medal for Dublin in its victory over Tipperary in 1917. A veterinary student in the capital, he found that Dublin were short a full back and volunteered his services. Like Jim Murray, Catherine O’Keefe (born c.1879) was a native of Co Waterford. Mrs O’Keefe ran a shop at 21 Lower Camden Street. Born Catherine Power, daughter of James Power, a farmer, she was an ardent Gaelgoir and changed her name to Cáit Ní Paor. In 1910 she married Patrick O’Keefe, a farmer’s son from Nohavaldaly, Rathmore, Co Cork, who had been employed for some years as a sorter in the GPO. She filled out the 1911 census form in Irish, signing her name as head of the family as Cáit Paor. Presumably at the insistence of a pedantic enumerator, this was changed to Cáit Ua Cáoim, while her husband was also asked to sign, which he did in Irish, though in the house return form he was filed as Patrick O’Keefe. O’Keefe was subsequently identified by his employers as a member of the volunteers and, along with several others, issued with a warning letter. He was among a number of GPO employees to take part in the 1916 rising but although detained in military custody and suspended for ‘suspected complicity’ he was not dismissed (Stephen Ferguson, GPO Staff in 1916, Cork 2012). He was active in the war of independence and is described in a Dublin Castle file (now in the PRO Kew) as a member of the IRB and ‘important member of the IRA (rank unknown)’. This was updated by the British authorities in August 1922, during the period of the provisional government in Ireland, to report that he was actually a commandant and had been appointed deputy military governor of Mountjoy prison.
Apart from Michael O’Brien, most of the figures in the wedding photograph took the pro-Treaty side, Gearóid O’Sullivan being appointed adjutant-general to the national army. In October 1922 he married Maud Kiernan, sister of Collins’s fiancée Kitty Kiernan. It was to have been a double wedding, but Collins had been shot at Béal na Bláth on 22 August. Pat Barry served as a pro-Treaty county councillor in Donegal and ran for the Dáil. Interned in 1923, Michael subsequently studied law and was called to the bar in 1925.
FREDDIE O’DWYER
Freddie's article with illustrations is available in the November 2015 edition of the Newsletter. Click here to access
Update: November 2019
An interesting advertorial by Weir and Sons of Grafton Street, Dublin was published by the Irish Times in November 2019 (from the Weir and Sons Style Magazine, October 1919) and gives an additional insight to the wedding ceremony of almost a century ago. With thanks to Weir and Sons, The Irish Times, Jessie Collins, Duibhne Daly, Freddie & Emer O'Dwyer.