Born: 2 October 1932, Longford Died: 5 June 2013, Roscommon Organisation: Irish Republican Army (IRA); Sinn Féin; Republican Sinn Féin (RSF) Role: IRA Chief of Staff; President of Sinn Féin (1970–83); founding President of Republican Sinn Féin (1986–2009); Teachta Dála, Longford–Westmeath (1957–61) County: Longford
Ruairí Ó Brádaigh was among the most significant and enduring figures in twentieth-century Irish republicanism, his active life spanning more than half a century. Twice IRA Chief of Staff during the Border Campaign, president of Sinn Féin through the formative years of the Provisional movement, and founding president of Republican Sinn Féin, he was a lifelong abstentionist and the foremost modern exponent of the republican “legitimist” tradition.
Family and early life. He was born Peter Roger Casement Brady on 2 October 1932, his middle names honouring the executed 1916 figure Roger Casement. The republican roll of honour and most accounts give his birthplace as Longford, where the family lived; the Dictionary of Irish Biography places it in Dublin. Both his parents were republican veterans. His father, Matt Brady, an IRA Volunteer severely wounded in an encounter with the Royal Irish Constabulary in 1919, served as an Independent Republican on Longford County Council from 1934 to 1942 and never fully recovered from his injuries, dying at fifty-one in 1942. His mother, May (née Caffrey), was a Cumann na mBan veteran, a University College Dublin commerce graduate of 1922, and secretary to the County Longford Board of Health. Ó Brádaigh was educated at St Mel’s College in Longford and at UCD, where he took a commerce degree and a qualification to teach Irish, and in 1954 he became a teacher of Irish at Roscommon Vocational School, settling in Roscommon town.
The IRA and the Border Campaign. Ó Brádaigh joined Sinn Féin in 1950, at eighteen, and the IRA the following year while still a student, organising units in Longford and reporting to the Chief of Staff, Tony Magan; his particular responsibility was training volunteers in the handling of weapons and explosives. Elected a delegate to the IRA’s Army Convention in 1953 and to its Executive in 1955, he led the assault party that raided the British army armoury at Arborfield in Berkshire on 13 August 1955, seizing some fifty-five Sten guns and tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition, though much of the haul was soon recovered by police. When the IRA launched its Border Campaign, Operation Harvest, in December 1956, Ó Brádaigh took part in the attack on Derrylin RUC barracks; arrested, he was interned in the Curragh internment camp, from which he escaped on 24 September 1958 in company with Dáithí Ó Conaill. Arrested again in Roscommon in 1959 and refusing to account for his movements, he served six months in Mountjoy before his release in 1960.
Chief of Staff and Teachta Dála. In 1957, while imprisoned, Ó Brádaigh was elected an abstentionist Sinn Féin TD for Longford–Westmeath, declining on principle to take his seat in what republicans regarded as a partitionist parliament. He became IRA Chief of Staff in October 1958; when Seán Cronin took over the following year, Ó Brádaigh served as adjutant-general, before resuming as Chief of Staff from 1960 to 1962. As the campaign foundered he was the principal author of the statement that formally ended it in 1962, and he stood down from the leadership, returning to teaching that autumn after Cathal Goulding succeeded him. He remained on the IRA Army Council through the 1960s and chaired Roscommon Sinn Féin, and in the British general election of 1966 he polled over ten thousand votes as a republican candidate in Fermanagh and South Tyrone without being elected.
The 1969–70 split and the Sinn Féin presidency. Through the 1960s the IRA leadership under Goulding moved toward Marxism and away from abstentionism. When the movement split amid the crisis of 1969–70, Ó Brádaigh, with Ó Conaill and others, rejected the proposals to recognise the Leinster House, Stormont and Westminster parliaments. On 11 January 1970 he was among those who walked out of the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis after a majority, though short of the two-thirds needed to change the constitution, voted to end abstentionism; the dissenters reconvened at the Kevin Barry Hall in Parnell Square and established a caretaker executive, of which Ó Brádaigh was made chairman. That October he became president of (Provisional) Sinn Féin, a post he held until 1983. In his presidential address of 1971 he called for “a phased withdrawal of British troops over a number of years”, to avoid, as he put it, “a Congo situation”.
Éire Nua and the search for a settlement. With Ó Conaill, Ó Brádaigh was the principal author of Éire Nua, the movement’s federalist programme for a decentralised Ireland of four provincial parliaments, including a nine-county Ulster assembly intended to reassure the Protestant population. He was central to the movement’s contacts of the mid-1970s. In December 1974 he took part in the Feakle talks between the republican leadership and Protestant churchmen, which, though broken up by the Garda Síochána, led the clergy to carry IRA proposals to the British government and helped bring about the IRA truce of 1975, during which Ó Brádaigh himself held talks with British officials. Working notes he kept of secret meetings with British representatives in 1975–76, later donated to the library of University College Galway, recorded that the British side had spoken of withdrawal as a realistic outcome. In late 1976, with Joe Cahill, he opened a remarkable secret dialogue with loyalist representatives, seeking to reconcile a loyalist proposal for an independent Northern Ireland with Éire Nua, with Desmond Boal and Seán MacBride retained to represent the two sides; the talks, conducted partly in Paris, collapsed after they were exposed and denounced by the government minister Conor Cruise O’Brien.
The hunger strikes and the eclipse of his leadership. During the H-Block hunger strikes of 1980–81 Ó Brádaigh travelled widely to put the prisoners’ case to audiences at home and abroad. It was Ó Conaill, with Ó Brádaigh’s backing, who proposed the candidacy of Bobby Sands in the 1981 Fermanagh and South Tyrone by-election, over the objections of the rising leadership around Gerry Adams. As that leadership gained ground, the Éire Nua policy was rejected at the 1981 Ard-Fheis and removed from the Sinn Féin constitution in 1982, and at the 1983 Ard-Fheis Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill resigned their leadership positions in protest, Ó Brádaigh being succeeded as president by Adams.
The 1986 split and Republican Sinn Féin. The final breach came on 2 November 1986, when the Sinn Féin Ard-Fheis voted to end abstentionism toward Leinster House. Ó Brádaigh had spoken against the motion, arguing that the first allegiance of Irish men and women was owed to “the sovereign Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916”, and warning that engagement with the partitionist institutions had, four times since 1922, ended only in failure and the strengthening of the state. On the motion’s passing he led some 130 delegates out of the hall to reconvene elsewhere as Republican Sinn Féin, of which he became president. The split was given legitimist sanction by Tom Maguire, the last survivor of the executive of the Second Dáil, whose recognition Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill had earlier secured for the Provisionals and who now transferred it to the Continuity Army Council; that body, which developed into the Continuity IRA, emerged from the same milieu, and the Dictionary of Irish Biography suggests Ó Brádaigh remained associated with it, though RSF presented itself as a separate political party. Under his leadership RSF readopted Éire Nua, and he became an unyielding opponent of the peace process, condemning the Good Friday Agreement as a means of copper-fastening British rule and denouncing the Provisional IRA’s decommissioning of weapons as, in his words, “the worst yet, unprecedented in Irish history”.
Writer, Irish-language advocate and later life. A lifelong devotee of the Irish language, which he spoke at every opportunity and in which he raised his children, Ó Brádaigh was also a prolific writer. His works included the pamphlets What is Irish Republicanism? and Restore the Means of Production to the People (both 1970) and Our People, Our Future (1973), and the book Dílseacht: The Story of General Tom Maguire and the Second (All-Ireland) Dáil (1997); from 1987 he contributed the long-running “50 Years Ago” series to the RSF newspaper Saoirse. He was the subject of an authorised biography by the American academic Robert W. White (2006). He retired as president of Republican Sinn Féin in 2009, becoming its patron and being succeeded by Des Dalton. Married to Patsy O’Connor, he had six children. Ó Brádaigh died on 5 June 2013, aged 80.
Legacy. Admirers regarded Ó Brádaigh as the embodiment of an unbroken republican principle across six decades, the keeper of the legitimist faith; to others he represented a tradition that refused to accept the settlement most republicans came to support. Either way, he was among the last direct links between the IRA of the 1950s and the divisions of the modern conflict, and the central figure in the strand of republicanism that rejected the peace process.
Selected Events:
Related Sections:
 1950-1959: Reorganisation and Resistance |  1960-1969: From the Border Campaign to the Split |  Provisional Sinn Féin 1970-2005 |
 Republican Sinn Féin |  Saoirse – Irish Freedom |
Selected Documents:
50 Years Ago:
50 Years Ago was a month by month history of the Republican Movement by Ruairí Ó Brádaigh which originally appeared in the RSF newspaper Saoirse. The series ran monthly for 25 years covering the history of Republicanism from 1938 until 1963.
 50 Years Ago (1950) |  50 Years Ago (1951) |  50 Years Ago (1952) |
 50 Years Ago (1953) |  50 Years Ago (1954) |  50 Years Ago (1955) |
 50 Years Ago (1956) |  50 Years Ago (1957) |  50 Years Ago (1958) |
 50 Years Ago (1959) |
Sources:
- Robert W. White, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh: The Life and Politics of an Irish Revolutionary (Indiana University Press, 2006).
- Patrick Maume, “Ó Brádaigh, Ruairí,” Dictionary of Irish Biography.
- Saoirse and An Phoblacht/Republican News.