Eimar O’Duffy was born 29 September, 1893, in Dublin.
His father, Kevin O’Duffy, was a prominent society dentist. Eimar attended
Belvedere College for at least the school year 1902-1903 and later attended the
Jesuit school at Stonyhurst. He also spent time at the Royal Military Academy
Sandhurst, which gave him a grounding in military affairs. In his witness
statement to the BMH, Bulmer Hobson recalled that, apparently, O’Duffy’s
interest in military matters started when he was a Cadet at Stonyhurst. Eimar
returned to Dublin at took a degree in dentistry at UCD. During his time at the
college, he showed strong interests in political and social affairs and he was
editor of the student magazine.
In O’Duffy’s novel, The Wasted Land, the central character, Bernard Lascelles, is a
semi-autobiographical representation of O’Duffy himself. Bernard is the son of
an Anglo-Irish physician and is educated in an England boarding school that
fails to indoctrinate him with the virtues of his class. Bernard then attends
UCD, exposed to the various threads of Irish nationalism and is part of the
intellectual milieu. This can be seen as representative of Eimar’s own
experiences as he turned against the expected path his father and class would
have expected of him—although he was qualified, he never practised medicine;
his father wanted him to join the British Army and Eimar was ostracised by his
family because of his refusal.
O’Duffy joined the IRB and the Irish Volunteers. He
was a contributor to the military column, ‘A Military Causerie,’ of the newspaper,
the Irish Volunteer.
In 1916, for example, ‘E. O’D.’ wrote about a variety
of matters—the importance of military scouts and their purposes; matters of
discipline; the importance of a special commander training course in Camden Row
and the low numbers of officers attending; care of the Volunteers’ rifles;
health matters such as smoking only in moderation and Volunteers having short
hair, as it was more becoming for a soldier. On 22 January, 1916, O’Duffy’s
article had a few general rules of military tactics:
Meanwhile,
there are a few general rules of tactic that apply to Volunteer activities as
much as to others. First, your enemy is seldom obliging enough to do what you
expect him to do. Second, if the enemy find you are not going to oblige him by
doing what he wants he will try to make you: don't let him. Third, if you
decide on a definite line of action, stick to it and don’t let minor
considerations lead you to abandon what you consider the right course. Fourth,
if you decide to act on the defensive, don't allow the killing of a few of your
scouts to draw you into a general attack. Fifth, certainly use your men as
cannon-fodder in war time; that's the way to win. But in peace time regard them
as potential soldiers whom you have to train, and treat them as such.
Eimar
could show his humour as well as his grasp of military matters in his articles
for the Irish Volunteer. The story
below was published 26 February, 1916:
I
hear that two Volunteers of a Munster Company were recently taken into custody by
a singularly competent military authority, who mistook them for deserters from
the British Army, the sole evidence against them, so to speak, being their
military walk and bearing. The pair have been insufferably pleased with
themselves ever since. I, however, feel that it is rather a slur on the
Volunteer movement that this kind of thing doesn’t happen every day. Surely
there are more than two Volunteers in the whole of Ireland with a soldierly
walk and swagger. I think nobody should be made a Squad leader till he has been
taken into custody at least once. But then I am an idealist.
O’Duffy
was also a dramatist and novelist. Two of his plays—The Phoenix on the Roof and The
Walls of Athens—were produced in the Irish Theatre produced of Hardwicke
Street, the theatre founded by Old Belvederians, Edward Martyn and Joseph Mary
Plunkett (Plunkett also profiled below), amongst others.
On
Holy Thursday, 20 April, 1916, Eoin MacNeill, Chief-of-Staff of the Irish
Volunteers, was informed that the IRB men of the organisation were planning to
use a general mobilisation of the Easter weekend to bring about a rebellion. In
his BMH witness statement Bulmer Hobson recounted that he, along with J.J.
O’Connell and Eimar O’Duffy went to Eoin MacNeill’s house on Holy Thursday
night, woke him up and told him of the plans for an impending, secret rising.
In Agnes
MacNeill’s witness statement to the BMH, she recounted the following:
He [Eoin MacNeill] did not know that there was
a rising arranged for Easter Sunday, although, no doubt, the possibility of an
armed rising was discussed at the meetings of the Executive. The first he knew
about it was when Bulmer Hobson. and someone else [O’Duffy? O’Connell?] called
on Friday before Easter when we were all in bed to tell him about it. They had
a long discussion and then went to Pearse to protest against going on with the
rising because the Volunteers were so unprepared and unequipped and they would
be simply slaughtered. But Pearse was very much under the influence of Connolly
who, with Plunkett and others, had been making secret preparations for a
rising.
MacNeill
sent O’Duffy to Belfast to dissuade the Irish Volunteers there from rising
there.
The
Ryan/ Ó Riain house at 48 Clonliffe Road was frequented by members of the
Fianna and the Irish Volunteers. Pádraig Ó Riain had founded the Fianna with
Countess Markievicz in Dublin. Cathleen, Pádraig’s sister, told the BMH that
These
[Liam Mellows, Con Colbert and Eamonn Martin] and many others, including
Casement, Eimar O'Duffy and Bulmer Hobson, were constant visitors to our house
and turned up to meals often. We had always a full house. At that time food was
cheap and meals were plentiful.
On
the evening of Good Friday, 1916, Gearóid Ua hUallacháin remembered seeing
Bulmer Hobson and Eimar O’Duffy at the Ó Riain household. He told the BMH that
when he was in Clonliffe Road
we
found Bulmer Hobson apparently very disturbed over the turn things had taken…I
understood Eimar O'Duffy and Pádraig Ó Riain were going to the North of Ireland
the following morning, which they did. I never got a satisfactory account of
what took place, but they certainly did no fighting.
Cathleen was sent to
Omagh on Easter Monday morning, on the nine o’clock train from Amiens Street
station in Dublin. She was sent to bring a large case of ammunition to the
town. When she arrived at Omagh, she went to Baxter’s Hotel and there she was
met by her brother, Pádraig, Eimar O’Duffy and Liam Boyd. She returned to
Dublin after a meal and found that the city was in rebellion.
O’Duffy supported Eoin MacNeill’s moderate approach to
the use and purpose of the Irish Volunteers. In The Wasted Island, Bernard states his view on the matter:
I regard the Volunteers as a defensive force, of more
value to stand up against political bullying than to take military action.
As Patrick Maume and Thomas
Charles-Edwards have written, Eoin MacNeill had hoped that John Redmond could
use the Irish Volunteers’ existence to pressurise the Liberals in government to
grant Home Rule. Perhaps this was also close to O’Duffy’s own stance.
If
The Wasted Island is taken as a
reflection of O’Duffy’s views of the Easter rising and of its leaders, he
appears critical of the ideology of the radicals. First published in 1919, it
held an unpopular view. As Robert Hogan wrote:
…the
view that the Rising was a tragic error made by misguided and hysterical
idealists was not one that most Irishmen would have sympathised with in 1919.
Austin
Mallow, a Pearse-like character in the novel, is a poet who is depicted as yearning
for martyrdom. In lectures and dramatic rhetoric, Austin Mallow uses similar
language to that of Pearse:
‘This
generation needs blood,’ he said. ‘We along amongst all the generations of
Irishmen have undergone no sufferings in the cause of freedom. We have
submitted tamely to the yoke; the mark of slavery is upon us; and only by blood
can it by wiped out.’
Although Bernard tried to respond to Mallow, ‘he
realised that he might as well argue with a lunatic.’
In another exchange with Mallow and his colleagues,
Bernard is not in agreement:
‘Do you seriously
expect to beat the British Army?’ he asked.
‘We do,’ said
Austin.
Bernard uttered an exclamation of derision and Barrett
interposed.
‘You don’t understand, he said. ‘We don’t expect to
win in a military sense, but we are confident of a moral victory.’
‘Hmph!’ ejaculated
Bernard.
Again, this was perhaps, in reality, O’Duffy’s own
views on the blood sacrifice and spirituality motifs of Pearse and others.
O’Duffy certainly became disillusioned with Irish nationalism and he grew
closer to his inclination to socialism.
O’Duffy’s later plays include Briciu’s Feast and Malachy
the Great, based on mythology and history respectively. In the 1920s, he
continued to write satire and historical fiction. He married Kathleen Cruise
O’Brien in 1920, with whom he had two children. In the years 1922-1923, he
co-edited several issues of the Irish
Review. O’Duffy worked for a time as a teacher and then for the Department
of External Affairs. He also worked for an American newspaper in England and in
Paris. In the 1930s, ill and short of money, he wrote some detective stories,
such as The Bird Cage. However, he
also wrote economic analyses Machinery: Captor or Liberator?, Consumer Credit and Life and Money, a study of
the great depression.
Eimar O’Duffy—an Old Belvederian who did not see
action in the Easter rising of 1916, but is a part of its story—died in Surrey
of a duodenal ulcer 21 March, 1935.
