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Famous Like Me > Actor > M > Tom Maguire

Profile of Tom Maguire on Famous Like Me

 
Name: Tom Maguire  
   
Also Know As:
   
Date of Birth: 7th September 1869
   
Place of Birth: Milford, Connecticut, USA
   
Profession: Actor
 
 
From Wikipedia, the free Encyclopedia

Tom Maguire (1892–1993) was an Irish republican who held the rank of commandant-general in the Western Command of the IRA. He was the longest living survivor of the Second Dáil of the Irish Republic.

In May 1921, he led an ambush on a Royal Irish Constabulary patrol in Tourmakeady, County Mayo, killing four. Maguire's flying column then made for the Partry Mountains. In the subsequent British army dragnet, his adjutant Michael O'Brien was killed. Maguire was wounded, but managed to escape.

In the 1921 elections to Dáil Éireann, Maguire was returned unopposed as Teachta Dála (TD) for Mayo as a Sinn Féin candidate. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and apart from saying "Níl" ("no" in English) when the vote was called, did not participate in any substantial way in the Dáil treaty debates. He was returned unopposed in the 1922 general election. In the 1923 general election, Maguire faced a contest and succeeded in securing the second of five seats in the Mayo South constituency, winning 5,712 votes (a share of 17.82 percent).

Maguire remained a TD until 1927. He had initially indicated a willingness to contest the June 1927 general election as a Sinn Féin candidate but withdrew after the Irish Republican Army threatened to court-martial any member under General Army Order 28, which forbade its members from standing in elections. (Despite this ban, IRA officers Seán O’Farrell (Leitrim-Sligo) and Dr John A. Madden (Mayo North) contested the election, the latter successfully).

Maguire subsequently drifted out of the IRA. In 1932, a Mayo IRA officer reported that Maguire, now firmly aligned with Sinn Féin, refused to call on men to join the IRA when speaking at republican commemorations. When challenged on this, Maguire claimed that, as the IRA “were no longer the same as they used to be”, he disagreed with the organisation.

Maguire and republican legitimitism

In December 1938, Maguire was one of a group of seven people, who had been elected to the Second Dáil in 1920, who met with the IRA Army Council under Seán Russell. At this meeting, the seven signed over what they believed were the "executive powers of Government of Dáil Éireann" to the Army Council to "hold in trust". Henceforth, the IRA Army Council percieved itself to be the legitimate government of the Irish Republic and, on this basis, the IRA and Sinn Féin justified their rejection of the states of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and political abstentionism from their parliamentary institutions. When the majority of IRA and Sinn Féin decided to abandon abstentionism in the 1969/70 split, Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill sought and secured Maguire's recogntion of the Provisional IRA as the legitimate successor to the 1938 Army Council. Likewise in the aftermath of the 1986 split in the Republican Movement (Ireland), Maguire once again rowed into the argument, and in a statement signed in 1986 but issued posthumously in 1994, he conferred this "legitmacy" on the Army Council of the Continuity IRA.

It is important to note that although the 1938 conferring has been crucial to the ideology of republican legitimitists, its validity is rejected by the overwhelming majority of the Irish people. The miniscule and insignificant Republican Sinn Féin, which has no public political representation, is the only party in Ireland which continues to subscribe to the view that the unelected seven-member Army Council of the Continuity IRA is the legitimate government of the Irish people.

See Also

  • Second Dáil
  • Republican Sinn Féin
  • Continuity IRA
Image:Small_shamrock.png This Irish biographical article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Tom Maguire