Michael Collins in Cleary's Upper Dorset Tenement
This is an edited version of an article published in the Melbourne Age Newspaper in 1996.
'Michael Collins? He used to jump grandpa Dan Cleary's back fence at 21 Upper Dorset Street. Hope you're not carrying ammunition, Mick, grandpa Cleary would say. Didn't help during the Civil War though, Collins' men put grandpa's daughters Auntie Maire and Auntie Nellie Cleary straight in gaol for refusing to inform on republicans. They were only girls, it was terrible. Nellie never recovered', Joan Cleary said as we parted company at Dublin airport.
It was from safe houses such as Cleary's that Collins mounted his war against the British high command in occupied Ireland. According to family legend Collins regularly passed through 21 Upper Dorset Street. Maire and Nellie Cleary - first cousins of my own grandfather - prayed every day for an end to British rule.
I met them only once, in the Christmas of 1973 in a flat in the Dublin fire station in Upper Dorset Street. Under the watchful eye of the Sacred Heart and a string of crucifixes they took me on a remarkable journey through the life and times of Michael Collins and Ireland's fight for freedom and how she'd been scouting for the IRA on the morning of the Easter Rebellion.
As Maire recounted the names of the famous republicans - Countess Markievicz, Ireland's first female Parliamentarian, Dail Minister Sean MacEntee - who'd been secreted out of 21 Upper Dorset Street disguised as a woman, said Joan Cleary - and General Liam Lynch - to name but a few who'd been in the tenement - I tried to imagine what these two old women must have been like in their youth in a Dublin where the Black and Tans and the British Army were a law unto themselves. When I came across the family photo, it was no surpise to see Maire wearing a distinctively decorated bonnet. She was different.
When she produced a contemporary newspaper article detailing the gaoling of 'The Cleary Sisters' by Michael Collins' Free State provisional government then proceeded to condemn the connivance of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in destroying the republic and the igniting a savage Civil War, I understood the depth of their courage and of their animosity towards the British Empire.
'I disliked the British so much for what they did in Ireland I didn't care if they lost the war against Germany...as for Collins, he should never have signed that treaty. The IRA could have fought on. It's terrible to think of the good men that were lost in the Civil War. I blame Collins for that but the British government was so dishonest,' Mary had told me. .
While Maire walked the anti-treaty path, her cousin Donncadh OhAhannagain went Free State. However, not long after the killing of IRA man Dannie Shinnick during an attack on O'Hannigan's Free State battalion at Glenacurrane, only a mile from his own home, on 28 September 1922 he resigned from the army. A fluent Irish speaker - as was his mother Nora Cleary - OhAnnagain had used his gardening and horticulture shop in Mitchelstown as a centre for Volunteer activities and gun smuggling prior to the Easter rebellion. As an IRA man he'd sworn allegiance to the republic and led the East Limerick Brigade into battle against the Black and Tans and the British Army in ambushes throughout East Limerick.
The Cleary women had followed Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the IRA and former Galtee Mountain neighbour of OhAnnagain in opposing the Treaty. Maire paid for that decision with 8 months in gaol. By the time Maire was released in September 1923 - Nellie spent only a week in Kilmainham - Lynch had joined Collins in the roll call of dead, killed by Free Staters a few miles from his home. The words of their neice Joan Cleary offer an interesting spin on the times. 'Well, as Maire used say, why was Collins never arrested by the British, when so many of his comrades were?'
The warrior woman, Maire Cleary (second from the left) with her niece Rose McGrath and two of her sisters in the late 1970s.
Inspector O'Driscoll bit Miss Cleary's (sic Clery's) finger during the hunger strike in April 1923 at Kilmainham.
Daniel Cleary's wife Honora in the backyard of the tenement in Upper Dorset Street with her daughter Nora. The lane out back led to Vaughan's Hotel, a Michael Collins haunt during the War of Independence. The family is adamant Collins jumped the back fence to avoid the British patrols.
Vaughan's Hotel (number 29 above the door) with Granby Lane to the right, which ran past Daniel Cleary's back fence.
