Thursday 12 October 2017

Extract from Ernie O'Malley Interview with Liam Langley

During the period 1948-1951Ernie O’Malley conducted interviews with around 400 of his former colleagues from the revolutionary period concerning their experiences during the time. The handwritten transcripts of these interviews are contained in 53 notebooks which are held in the UCD achives.  Liam Langley gave a number of interviews to O’Malley, the following is an extract from one of the interviews.  It is concerned with imprisonment post 1916.
Galway Jail Record

‘In 1916  in Richmond Barracks  I met Austin and Terry Mac.  Austin Stack was in another room.  He was terribly worried about the the volunteers, Con Keating, Daniel Sheehan and Charlie Monahan who had been drowned in the car in KerryDesmond Fitzgerald was also there he  was well dressed.  He was complaining about the untidy condition of the Galway men and about their being uncouth, but Liam Mellows had already warned me of what to expect from Desmond Fitzgerald.  Joe Mac Bride I met there, and we became good friends, we went to Wakefield together. For a week we had free association, but 4 of us were picked out and were put into solitary confinement in a basement in another wing of the goal.  Conor Deere of Goulds Cross Clonoulty Tipperary, Joe MacBride, Terry Mac Sweeney and myself.

Some Kerry chaps came along who seemed to know that I was an IRB centre for a fellow was brought along for me to take into the brotherhood and I gave him the oath.  He was Vincent O’Doherty now in Howth.  He was shifted after a few weeks.  In the exercise ring we had to keep a few paces apart, and we were not allowed to talk.  One evening when it was very silent; and very hard after the free association  in Galway (100 prisoners there) Richmond and Wakefield, Terry MacSweeney came in to me with an egg which he had boiled.   The four men of us were put in front in the train under a guard, away from others,
In Frongoch we were isolated, put into the ‘clink’ which was a roughly built building with 6 cells 3 each side and a passage in the centre.  In the North Camp, there were others Dinny MacCullagh* in solitary confinement. Donnacha O’Buchalla was amongst the chefs in the kitchen.  Joe Connolly, brother of Sean, was there also.

Terry Mac Sweeney and I were sent to No 4 Distillery which was a terrible hole for there was always noise off a generating plant on the first floor of the grain loft.  The machinery racked our nerves and there was a glaring light on all night with sentries shouting at night at intervals. 

We were sent up in batches to an Advisory Committee in London,  Pim, Shankey and others were on it.  We were brought to Wormwood Scrubs.  The Scrubs was a terrible place and we got little black loaves of bread, with straw sticking out of them.  They brought a few back to Frongoch as a souvenir.  The Commission seemed to have a lot of information about my movements.  ‘This man Liam Mellows stayed with you when he came to Tuam’, they said I was in Athenry on Easter Monday.  I was.  They didn’t know any more about my movements after that.  When exactly I went to Athenry,  I didn’t know what/when was coming off for Liam (Mellows) had told me that he would let me know what was coming off.  There were 100 I.R.B. in North Galway then.  Liam left word with old James Roche an old Fenian, that he’d be back to me, but I didn’t see him before the rising.  My second in command in the Fianna (Tuam) met with an accident and I sent/saw him to Jervis St Hospital on the Saturday before Easter Week and he was there all that week.


29th June: I served mass in Wormwood Scrubs.  In the camp we were with the rest but us four were taken out and sent on to Reading.’