It was great to see how hopeful of the national cause he was up to his death. “I only wish to God I had half the physical strength he had when he was a young man. My father’s death knocked me about a good deal of course. I was away a great deal during the summer. “While I was getting massage the improvement was very noticeable but I have not been attending that for the past eight or nine months. My general health is good and if I were to keep on the treatment I’m on, the leg would be much better than it is,” he writes. I’m very much better but unfortunately still very lame. It reveals his feelings about his illness and his father’s death. In December 1913 he wrote to Joe McGarrity, a prominent republican in the United States, on paper from the IRB newspaper Irish Freedom, whose circulation manager Mac Diarmada was.

Donald died in 1913 although his father had been elderly, the news came as a surprise to Mac Diarmada. He inherited his radical tendencies from his father, Donald, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Land League. Seán Mac Diarmada, the eighth of 10 children, was born in Kiltyclogher, Co Leitrim. He lost the use of his right leg and spent the rest of his life with a walking stick. Overnight Mac Diarmada went from a vigorous man of 29 to one who looked like a “delicate, bearded, middle-aged man” walking on a crutch, according to Madge Daly, a cousin of Clarke’s wife, Kathleen. He spent four months in the Mater Misericordiae hospital. After organising opposition to the visit of King George V to Dublin in July 1911 he contracted polio, a rampant and feared disease at the time. Mac Diarmada was single and could devote all his energies to the task.īut Mac Diarmada suffered a calamity in 1911. So he entrusted to Mac Diarmada the role of promoting Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He had spent 15 years or so in British prisons and could not afford to return to jail.

They were ruthless in sidelining anybody who did not agree with their plans to stage a rising even when it had no chance of success.Ĭlarke, an older Fenian, had returned to Ireland from the United States in 1908. Their signatures appear first on the Proclamation. But, with Thomas Clarke, Mac Diarmada was a prime instigator of the Rising. He also had sound reasons not to commit his thoughts to print, as police frequently tailed him. Mac Diarmada was a doer, not a talker or a writer. The National Library of Ireland has 28,000 digitised items relating to their papers, but only 16 belong to Seán Mac Diarmada. Of the seven signatories to the Proclamation, all but one left vast paper trails of letters, diaries, photographs, speeches, newspaper articles and pamphlets.

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