Tomás Mac Giolla was born on this day in Nenagh in 1924. He was elected President of Sinn Fein in 1962 and was the public face of the party throughout the 1960s.
Mac Giolla was born Thomas Gill at Fatheen House in Nenagh. Influenced by the wave of emotion during 1949 around the declaration of a republic, he became involved in the Anti-Partition League. In the early 1950s, he joined the IRA and then Sinn Fein. He, along with other leading republicans, was interned in July 1957 for two years. He later described internment as ‘probably the most important two years of my life…far more important than the National University.’ It was while interned that he began to use the Irish form of his name.
When the IRA border campaign ended in 1962, several veterans resigned and Mac Giolla became Sinn Féin president. Deeply involved in Sinn Féin activities, and frequently arrested, he was becoming more well-known publicly. When violence flared in Belfast in 1969, he declared that only the IRA could protect nationalists and if the “Free State army” could not defend people, they should give guns to the IRA to do so. The Northern crisis intensified the political divisions within republicanism, and by January 1970 the republican movement had split, with Mac Giolla now president of Official Sinn Féin. In 1978, Mac Giolla declared that the Provisionals were engaged in a war against the Irish people that was as bad as that waged by the Black and Tans.
As president of Official Sinn Féin he was important in the party's move towards electoral politics, aided by the addition of 'The Workers' Party' (SFWP) to their name during 1977. By 1982, his party was styled as the Workers’ Party (WP) and he was elected to the Dáil for Dublin West. Mac Giolla was re-elected in 1987 and stood down as leader in 1988 to make way for a younger replacement.
Brian Hanley, who wrote Mac Giolla’s entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, said of him: A high-profile figure in Irish politics for thirty years, Mac Giolla made a political evolution from traditional republican to socialist parliamentarian that mirrored that of the Official republican movement after the split in 1970. He played a major role in the emergence of his party as a factor in Irish political life, respected even by those critical of his politics.
Sources:
https://www.dib.ie/biography/mac-giolla-tomas-a9847
https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an-irish-diary/2024/01/04/official-position-brian-maye-on-tomas-mac-giolla/
