SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1987)

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20th Century Ireland - Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1987)

Peadar O'Donnell was born in Meenamore, County Donegal. He was educated locally and trained as a teacher at St.Patrick's College, Dublin. In 1918 O'Donnell joined the staff of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in Dublin and with the outbreak of the War of Independence he joined the IRA and quickly rose through the ranks. He took the republican side in the Civil War and was in the Dublin Four Courts with Liam Mellows and fellow republicans when they were attacked by the Free State Army. After their surrender O'Donnell, then a Colonel Commandant in the IRA, was imprisoned for two years. In Mountjoy Gaol O'Donnell was in charge of Communications in 'C' Wing where he commenced a 41 day hunger-strike. He was transferred to Finner Camp, Donegal, Arbour Hill and Kilmainham Gaols, Dublin and the Harepark Internment Camp, Kildare from where he escaped in March, 1924. The next year O'Donnell published his first novel Storm (1925) which was followed by The Islanders (1928), both of which depicted the poverty on the Donegal seaboard. In the late 1920's O'Donnell edited An t'Oglach and An Phoblacht.
In the 1930's O'Donnell published The Big Windows (1930) and an autobiographical novel about his Civil War experiences entitled The Gates Flew Open (1932) which he dedicated 'To the Unbreakables; the men and women who milled the stampede of 1922'. In 1934 O'Donnell, together with George Gilmore and Frank Ryan, founded Republican Congress to work for the establishment of a workers' and peasants' socialist republic. As a result of his activities in Republican Congress O'Donnell was again imprisoned in Mountjoy Gaol.
During the Spanish Civil War O'Donnell supported the anti-fascist International Brigades and travelled to Catalonia as recounted in Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937). In 1946 O'Donnell became editor of The Bell, the most significant literary magazine in mid-20th century Ireland and remained its editor until it ceased publication in 1954. In 1963 O'Donnell published There Will Be Another Day. He condemned America's involvement in Vietnam and was outspoken on political issues throughout the rest of his long life. The extract below is from The Gates Flew Open (1932).©

Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1987)

The first hunger was, I found, a rather terrific onslaught. There were times when I stood with my back to the wall and laughed aloud at myself. Hungry! - I was as full of it as Paul was of tickles; it wasn't pain, and yet it had some of the qualities of pain. It made you remember you had a stomach but not in the way toothache makes you remember your teeth.
It is not so annoying as itch but it fills one more. I achieved a wonderfully useful feat that I was unaware of myself for a long time; I ceased to associate my hunger with any desire for food. What I mean is, that when food was left on my table I could look at it without any impulse to eat food any more than I had an impulse to eat the table. But I drank hot water and salt. I got one fad, however, and I got it right off. I wanted pepper in the water. I always put pepper in the water in the Lough Derg Pilgrimage. And pepper I got. Paul wouldn't touch pepper, but I insisted that hot water with pepper and salt was soup. So we joked and wrote letters home and laughed at our hunger.
This hunger-strike was to last forty-one days and to be crowded with a mental activity such as I never achieved or suffered in any period of my life. Forty-one days is a long time to be hungry. There is an idea abroad that after ten or twelve days the hunger is dulled and there is little further suffering. I do not think that that is so; I knew that I was hungry all along but my attitude towards my hunger underwent a change: I came to look at it as a way I was feeling and got rather used to it. A couple of times I let it loose to associate it in my mind directly with food, and it nearly dragged me out of the bed. I think that in every case where a man voluntarily takes a course that is leading towards his own destruction, he steals forward juking*. I was hungry for thirty days, very hungry, and even the forty-first day, when it was called off, you should have seen me let down the first egg-flip.
Very early I got to know cases where men tried to flirt with being on hunger-strike. It just can't be done. A powerful force like hunger won't be toyed with. After a week or so our jailers decided they would break up the Mountjoy ensemble and distribute us in wisps over the other prisons...
It became clear to us the first day in Kilmainham that we had been lucky in our transfer, for the Governor here had a good sporting sense of the risks he should take out of respect for himself, and he considered it due to himself to be decent to men in our position.
Laundry was allowed in and out freely and that was a wonderful boon. In Mountjoy, under McManus and a Captain Fitzpatrick from Clones, there were petty tyrannies associated with the passing in and out of laundry that left the majority of prisoners without a change of clothing. This made the hunger-strike there terrible, for the most frightful thing about a hunger-strike is the vermin that arise on the slightest chance. I've cursed vermin in many an odd corner of this country and Britain but mostly they were little things that nipped and then ran like hell. But hunger-strike kind don't nip, they pull at a man and then make a noise when they gallop. Men lost their reason temporarily in Mountjoy in sheer horror of their own verminous bodies.
The secret post from the outside came in regularly, for this prison seemed to be wide open, and often we had two or three posts a day. The country was rising wonderfully and huge demonstrations were defying state terrorism, we were told. Dublin was splendid as usual, and Dublin thousands made us feel they were near us by singing outside the gates.
The first time I heard the voice of the throng was an event that certainly insisted on recording itself. I had been lying reading Thomas á Kempis and my mind accepted the chanting of a hymn outside without in anyway being aware of its origin. It just drifted in there and boomed in a distant way that challenged no sharp awareness. Perhaps it was that it fitted so easily through the thoughts natural to the reading matter that the singing merely gave tone to my thoughts. I was so aglow with an exciting contentment that I shut the book to drift with my mind and then I became aware of the singing. It is a moment that I cannot recall without an inner warmth yet. Š Searc's Web Guide 1997-2007
* Juking is an Hiberno-English term meaning 'to look furtively'.

20th Century Irish Writers
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