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From: "conaught" <>
Subject: [MAYO] Easter Week Series #21
Date: Fri, 20 Apr 2001 18:41:49 -0700


Cathal O'Shannon (1889-1969), was a trade unionist and journalist for the
Peasant, Sinn Féin and other fugitive nationalist papers and the Gaelic
League organ, An Claidheamh Solus.
He mobilized with a hundred Volunteers at Coalisland, Co. Tyrone on Easter
Sunday, 1916. They dispersed when there were no orders from Dublin. The
British arrested and interned him until the General Amnesty of 1917. Later,
they arrested and imprisoned him in England for urging Irish independence.
He was released after a hunger strike of seventeen days.
In 1921 he campaigned as a Volunteer and as a trade union officer until the
Treaty of 1921. He was a leader of the efforts by Labour Party members to
mediate between the Republicans and the Irish Free State sides during the
Civil War. He remained active as a trade union official until his retirement
in 1969. He died in Dublin on October 4, 1969.

© 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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