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From: "conaught" <>
Subject: [MAYO] Easter Week Series #20
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 18:40:09 -0700


Austin Stack (1879-1929), a rebel born in Kerry on December 7, 1879, joined
the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1908. He served as commandant of the
Kerry Brigade of the Irish Volunteers in 1916. The government arrested and
sentenced him to death. They commuted his sentence to penal servitude but
released him in June 1917. At different times between 1919 and 1922, he
served as Minister for Home Affairs, Finance and Defense. He took part in
the Civil War in opposition to the Treaty of 1921.
He went on a hunger strike for forty-one days before being released from
prison in 1923. On August 10, 1925, he married Una Gordon, a wealthy widow
who kept a "safe house" for Republicans during the War of Independence.
He never recovered his health from his hunger strike and he died in a Dublin
hospital April 27, 1929.

© 2001
Ellen Naliboff

All rights reserved

Selected references:

Boylan, Henry, A Dictionary of Irish Biography, Third Edition, Gill &
Macmillan, Dublin, 1998.

Connolly, S.J., editor, The Oxford Companion to Irish History, Oxford
University Press, 1998.

Foster, R.F., Modern Ireland, 1600-1972, Penguin Books, 1988.

Fry, Peter and Fiona Somerset, A History of Ireland, Barnes & Noble, New
York, 1988

Llywelyn, Morgan, 1921, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, 2001.










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