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Patsy Ó Brádaigh's biography -
recipient of the Pearl Flannery Award
 Patsy
O’Connor was born in Roscommon town, in the west of Ireland. Her
parents were both Roscommon people. Her father Luke had been
attached to the 3rd. Battalion South Roscommon
Brigade I.R.A. 1917-22 ( cf. “They Put the Flag A-Flyin’:
Roscommon
Volunteers 1916-1923”, Kathleen Hegarty-Thorne, Generation
Organisation, 2005 p.408
www.generationpublishing.com ). He also played with
Roscommon’s Senior Gaelic Footballers
during 1910's and won a Connacht
championship medal in 1916.
Her mother, Barbara Haggard of Mote Park, had been a nurse in
New York in the late 20’s and returned to Ireland to marry Luke
O’Connor. Patsy is one of three children born to the O’Connors.
The family had moved to Galway city by the 1940s and Patsy
attended school at the Convent of Mercy and later University
College Galway.
After graduating
Patsy took up a teaching position with the Vocational Education
Committee in her native Roscommon in 1953. A year later
Longfordman Ruairí Ó Brádaigh also began teaching in the same
school. Ruairí was to become a central figure in the IRA Border
Campaign which began in late 1956. By March of 1957 Ruairí Ó
Brádaigh was in jail and had also been elected T.D. for
Longford-Westmeath for Sinn Féin. Patsy was a regular visitor to
Ruairí in Mountjoy Jail. In October 1959 Ruairí and Patsy were
married. Her husband was by now ‘essentially working full-time,
at no pay, for the Republican Movement’ ( ‘Ruairí Ó Brádaigh:
Life and Times of an Irish Revolutionary’, Robert W. White,
Indiana University Press, 2006, p.93 ). This situation of her
husband being committed on a full-time basis with the Republican
Movement continued, with the exception of the years 1962-71,
until the mid-1980’s. Patsy has 6 children, born during the 60’s
and brought up in Roscommon in the following decades, while she
herself supported her husband.
The 1970s saw
Ruairí immersed in Ireland’s struggle for her freedom while
Patsy worked part-time as a teacher and her children grew to
teenagerhood. Patsy also cared for many elderly relatives in the
Roscommon town area. When her husband, then President of Sinn
Féin, his brother, Seán Ó Brádaigh, Director of Publicity, and
Joe Cahill were arrested in 1972 on bogus charges, all three
went on hunger strike. Patsy arranged for two Cumann na mBan
women to go to Roscommon and take care of her six children and
her elderly aunt, then she and Mary Ó Brádaigh-Delaney, sister
of Ruairí and Seán, went to Dublin and started a hunger strike
themselves. They located in a caravan parked near the gate of
Mountjoy Prison. They were emulating the action of Eithne
MacSwiney at the same prison gate in 1922 while her sister Mary
was on hunger strike inside. After several weeks all were
released when the charges were thrown out of court.
The following year
1973, with new legislation allowing a person to be jailed on the
mere opinion of a police chief superintendent, Ruairí was
imprisoned for six months by the Special non-jury Court. When
the leader of the Dublin Government, Jack Lynch, visited
Roscommon in the course of a general election campaign, Patsy
organised a women’s picket on him while he was in a local hotel.
The Roscommon Champion called the picket a “Ladies’
Committee”. Patsy delivered a protest letter to Jack Lynch and
spoke to the news media in their own terms.
In January
1974, Ruairi was stopped at Shannon Airport and banned from
visiting the United States. He was going to speak at the annual
Noraid dinner in New York. At short notice Patsy travelled in
his place and addressed the dinner attendance on the plight of
Dolours and Marion Price and others then on hunger strike in
prison in England. Thirty three years later her husband is still
unjustly banned from entering the United States.
Patsy shares her
husband’s love of the Irish language and culture and came to act
as Cisteoir (Treasurer) of An Cumann Gaelach (Roscommon’s Gaelic
Society) and also as an active parent in the Revivalist Irish
Language Summer College in Ros Muc, Connemara where all her
children spent their summers. The H-Block prison struggle of the
late 1970s became a national and world-wide campaign. Patsy and
her children were to the fore, on a local level, in assisting
the relatives as they travelled Ireland in Blankets alerting the
Irish people to the plight of Irish political prisoners in Long
Kesh.
In Roscommon, as
their children became adults and left home to study and work,
Patsy involved herself in the Credit Union Movement, on the
Board of Directors from
1986 to date
and a voluntary
worker in the local branch also from 1986 to the present-day. In
1984 Ruairí, Patsy and four teenagers (two of her own daughters
and two friends) were involved in a traffic accident, which
resulted in a lengthy spell in hospital.
Patsy has a great
interest in Environmental matters – recycling, composting, etc
and also in health and fitness especially yoga, alternative
medicines, homeopathy and reflexology. Strong religious beliefs
are held which manifest themselves both in her weekly help with
the Church in Roscommon and through her concern for people and
her attitude to life in general.
Today Patsy’s family, including 15 grandchildren, have all
returned to live in Ireland. Patsy herself continues to support
Ruairí in all his efforts as President of Republican Sinn Féin,
attending the annual ArdFheis where Ruairí delivers his address
to the membership. In 2006, like most years over the last
half-century, it was typed and edited by Patsy, using her
secretarial
teaching skills.
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