AOH Home of the Brooklyn Irish
Baile na nGael
Tuesday, June 2, 2026
Posted by Jim on May 24, 2026
May 24·
“We have suffered from occupation. We fought against it for 800 years, and it’s in our DNA to recognize injustice when we see it.” – Liam Cunningham
Ireland’s history left a long memory. Centuries of hardship shaped a people who understood what occupation, loss, and injustice looked like.
History should not only be remembered. It should teach us to recognise injustice wherever it appears.
Posted by Jim on May 20, 2026
| Patsy O’Hara | |
|---|---|
| Peatsaí Ó hEadhra | |
| Born | 11 July 1957 Brandywell, Derry, Northern Ireland |
| Died | 21 May 1981 (aged 23) HM Prison Maze, Northern Ireland |
| Resting place | Derry City Cemetery |
| Known for | Died after 61 days during the 1981 Irish Hunger Strike |
| Political party | Official Sinn Féin (1971–1973)Irish Republican Socialist Party (from 1975) |
| Military career | |
| Paramilitary | Fianna Éireann (1970–1975)Irish National Liberation Army (1975–1981) |
| Rank | Officer Commanding |
| Conflict | The Troubles |
Patsy O’Hara (Irish: Peatsaí Ó hEadhra; 11 July 1957 – 21 May 1981[1]) was an Irish republican hunger striker and member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). O’Hara was one of 10 Irish republicans who died in the 1981 hunger strike.[2]
O’Hara was born in Bishop Street, Derry, Northern Ireland. He joined Official IRA-aligned faction of Na Fianna Éireann in 1970, and in 1971, one of his brothers Sean was interned in Long Kesh.[1] In early 1971 he joined the local Official Sinn Féin cumann in the Bogside.[3] In late 1971, at the age of 14, he was shot and wounded by a soldier while manning a barricade.[1][4] Due to his injuries, he was unable to attend the civil rights march on Bloody Sunday but watched it go by him in the Brandywell, and the events of the day had a lasting effect on him.[1]
In October 1974, O’Hara was interned in Long Kesh, and on his release in April 1975 he joined the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP) and INLA.[4] He was arrested in Derry in June 1975 and held on remand for six months.[1] In September 1976, he was arrested again and once more held on remand for four months.[4]
On 10 May 1978, he was arrested on O’Connell Street, Dublin, Republic of Ireland under section 30 of the Offences Against the State Act, and was released 18 hours later.[4] He returned to Derry in January 1979 and was active in the INLA. On 14 May 1979, he was arrested and was convicted of possessing a hand grenade. He was sentenced to eight years in prison in January 1980.[4]
He became Officer Commanding of the INLA prisoners at the beginning of the first hunger strike in 1980, and he joined the 1981 hunger strike on 22 March.[5] During the hunger strike, O’Hara and other hunger strikers were given golden crucifixes by Pope John Paul II.[6]
On Thursday, 21 May, at 11:29 pm, he died after 61 days on hunger strike, at the age of 23.[3][7] Despite a plea from his mother two days before his death, O’Hara expressed his desire not to receive the medical intervention needed to save his life.[7] His corpse was found to be mysteriously disfigured prior to its departure from prison and before the funeral, including signs of his face being beaten, a broken nose, and cigarette burns on his body.[3][5] Raymond McCreesh, a member of the Provisional IRA, also died on 21 May 1981 during the hunger strike.[3] Following his death, INLA member Kevin Lynch took his place on the hunger strike.[7]
His mother Peggy O’Hara, was an independent candidate in the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election in the Foyle constituency.[8] She was not elected, but she was one of the more successful dissident republican candidates opposed to the new policy of the Sinn Féin leadership of working with the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), and won 1,789 votes. On the eve of the election, over 330 former republican prisoners wrote a letter to the Derry Journal endorsing her campaign.[9][10][11]
O’Hara’s brother, Anthony O’Hara, was also a prisoner in Long Kesh[12] and stood as a candidate during the 1981 general election for the Dublin West constituency. He received 3,034 votes (6.49% of the vote) but failed to take a seat.[13][14]
His sister, Elizabeth O’Hara, took part in a tour in the United States by NORAID. Some in NORAID objected to O’Hara’s involvement stating her brother was a “communist” and that it would tarnish their image among Irish-Americans at the time. However, Malachy McCreesh and Seán Sand, relatives of other hunger strikers, refused to participate unless O’Hara was allowed to accompany them.[15][16] A meeting of the IRSP Ard-Chomhairle following the tour revealed that all the money collected was distributed to Provisional prisoners families, with none going to INLA prisoners families.[15] O’Hara also allowed filmmaker Mickey Rourke to use the story of her brother in a film to help NORAID, however Denis Donaldson disrupted this effort and ultimately the film ceased development.[17] She later married Kevin Kelly and became a multi-millionaire.[18]
Posted by Jim on
Raymond McCreesh (Irish: Réamonn Mac Raois, 25 February 1957 – 21 May 1981) was an Irish volunteer in the South Armagh Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA).[1][2] In 1976, he and two other IRA volunteers were captured while attempting to ambush a British Army observation post. McCreesh was one of the ten Irish republicans who died during the 1981 Irish hunger strike in the Maze Prison.[3][4] McCreesh was one of 22 Irish republicans (in the 20th century) who died on hunger-strike.[5]
Raymond Peter McCreesh, the seventh in a family of eight children, was born in St Malachy’s Park, Camlough, on 25 February 1957.[6] He was born into a strong Irish republican family, and was active in the republican movement from the age of 16. McCreesh attended the local primary school in Camlough, St Malachy’s, and later attended St Colman’s College in Newry.[6] Raymond first joined Fianna Éireann, the IRA’s youth wing, in 1973, and later that year he progressed to join the Provisional IRA South Armagh Brigade.[6] McCreesh had worked for a short time as steelworker in a predominantly Protestant factory in Lisburn. However, as sectarian threats and violence escalated, he switched professions to work as a milk roundsman in his local area of South Armagh: an occupation which greatly increased his knowledge of the surrounding countryside, as well as enabling him to observe the movements of British Army patrols in the area.[6]
On 25 June 1976, McCreesh (aged 19) and three other IRA volunteers attempted to ambush a British Army observation post (OP) in South Armagh.[6] It lay opposite the Mountain House Inn, on the Newry–Newtonhamilton Road.[6] As the armed, masked and uniformed IRA volunteers approached the OP, they were spotted by British paratroopers on a hillside. The paratroopers opened fire on the volunteers, who scattered. Two of them, McCreesh and Paddy Quinn, took cover in a nearby farmhouse. The paratroopers surrounded the house and fired a number of shots into the building.[6][7] After some time, McCreesh and Quinn surrendered and were taken to Bessbrook British Army base.[6] The third volunteer, Danny McGuinness, had taken cover in a disused quarry outhouse but was captured the next day.[6] The fourth member of the unit managed to escape despite being shot in the leg, arm and chest. Local Catholic priests facilitated their surrender.[6][8][9][10][11]
On 2 March 1977, McCreesh and Quinn were sentenced to fourteen years in prison for the attempted murder of British soldiers, possession of a rifle and ammunition, and a further five years for IRA membership.[3][4] The rifle that McCreesh had in his possession when captured was one of those used in the Kingsmill massacre on 5 January 1976, when 10 Protestant civilians were shot dead.[12]
McCreesh was sent to the Maze Prison. He joined the blanket protest and took part in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. He died on 21 May, after 61 days on hunger strike.[13]
One of the soldiers who captured McCreesh, Lance Corporal David Jones, was later killed by Francis Hughes, who died during the same hunger strike.[6] Another Irish Republican Volunteer Patsy O’Hara died on the same day (21 May 1981) as McCreesh while on hunger strike in Maze Prison (Long Kesh).
A Newry playground was named after McCreesh after a motion led by Sinn Féin, SDLP and independent representatives on Newry and Mourne District Council was passed. Unionists were unhappy with this and appealed to the Equality Commission which called for an equality impact assessment in 2008. The council sub-committee responsible for the assessment decided that naming the park after McCreesh complies with their legal requirement to “promote equality of opportunity and good relations between persons of different religious belief and political opinion”.[14]
In 2013, it was announced that the decision to name the park after McCreesh would be formally investigated by the Equality Commission for Northern Ireland. It said its investigation would consider whether the council had failed to have due regard to the need to promote equality and good relations between people of different religious beliefs and political opinion.[12] Nothing came of the investigation.
Posted by Jim on
Alejandro O’Reilly as painted by Goya.
May 19, 2026 by Geoffrey Cobb
Researching the Irish in the New Orleans, I discovered their huge role in the city’s history and culture, a role too large for one article — and that an article in two parts was required on the Crescent City Irish.
Like many American cities, the Big Easy has a massive St. Patrick’s Day, but its celebration incorporates many of the elements of Mardi Gras. The parade moves through the Irish Channel area and the Garden District, featuring marching bands, green clad participants and floats. Just like Mardi Gras, celebrants throw good luck souvenirs to the boisterous crowds lining the parade route including green beads, cabbages, carrots, and chocolate moon pies. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade in New Orleans dates way back to 1809, but the Irish presence there was even earlier.
The French, of course, settled New Orleans, but few people know that the city was once Spanish and governed by Irishman Alejandro O’Reilly, who served as the second Spanish governor of Louisiana from 1769 to 1770. One of the many Wild Geese who left Ireland to serve Catholics Monarchs on the continent, O’Reilly was born in 1722 in Baltrasna, Co. Meath. Known as “Bloody O’Reilly” for his violent punishment of rebels against the Spanish crown, he also reformed land ownership laws, built roads and levees and instituted a number of reforms. O’Reilly soon befriended one of the town’s richest merchants, another Irishman, Oliver Pollock, a native of Derry, whose warehouses supplied the Spanish garrison. Pollock profited from his friendship when O’Reilly named him as purchasing agent in New Orleans for the American rebels during the revolutionary war, a lucrative post that made Pollock even richer.
Under Napoleon, the city would revert back to French control, but in 1803, New Orleans became part of the United States when the Emperor sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. In 1813, the city’s Irish residents formed their own militia, the Republican Greens, who fought during the War of 1812 in one of their few victories when General Andrew Jackson, whose parents arrived in the U.S. from Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, defeated the British army in the battle of New Orleans in 1815, making Jackson a hero and helping him get elected as America’s seventh president.
In the years before the Civil War, New Orleans grew wealthy as a transshipment point for the immensely profitable cotton crop, harvested by enslaved African Americans. Irishmen Daniel Clark, James Workman, and Kenneth Laverty became rich plantation owners and cotton traders. Tipperary man, Maunsell White, a veteran of the Battle of New Orleans, arrived in New Orleans as penniless teenager, but became a millionaire commodity trader and real estate investor who built himself a stately mansion on Julia Street and married into an elite French family, the Larondes.
The newly wealthy Irish did not forget their homeland. The Hibernian Society, the first Irish charitable and social club, was established four years later. In 1828, locals formed the Friends of Ireland and raised $1,500 to send to Daniel O’Connell, founder of the Catholic Association in Ireland, in support of his campaign for Catholic emancipation. By 1833, the Irish were wealthy and powerful enough to establish their own church, the beautiful St. Patrick’s, which still stands and is a national landmark.
Irish Americans from New York City, aware of the city’s wealthy port, arrived and quickly monopolized the waterfront as longshoremen and began the city’s first unions. In the 1850s, Irish steamboat workers staged a strike and shut down the port of New Orleans on several occasions, refusing to work or allow anyone else to cross the picket lines. Captains and cotton dealers were forced to negotiate with the strikers, and the strikers saw their higher wage demands met. The transplanted waterfront Irish Americans also left a fascinating linguistic legacy. The speech of New Orleans natives is much closer to Brooklynese speech than to the southern drawl thanks to these Yankee transplants. Natives still say “New Awlins,” work as “woik” and boil as “berl.”
Irish famine refugees, who began to arrive in the Crescent City in the late 1840s, found cheap passage to New Orleans on cotton ships returning from Liverpool. The Irish, though settled in a city, where housing was scarce and enslaved people did most skilled labor, making Irish labor unnecessary in a number of areas.
For many poor Irish immigrants, the only work open to them was dangerous work slave owners considered too risky for their valuable enslaved property. The Irish dug the city’s many canals, which went through dangerous, mosquito-infested malarial swamps. These poor Irish laborers settled in an area still called the Irish Channel, centered around Adele Street and stretching only two blocks from St. Thomas Street to Tchoupitoulas Street. The Irish poor lived in slums and were particularly susceptible to the epidemics that periodically swept the city. Many Irish labored on the New Basin Canal, a dangerous project that claimed thousands of lives. The first labor strike occurred in the 1830s, during the building of the New Basin Canal, when the Irish demanded and won better wages.
New Orleans was booming, though and many Irish workers pulled themselves and their families out of poverty. By 1850, the New Orleans census showed Irish males were represented in nearly every field—from medicine to education, to engineering. Increasingly becoming integrated into the city, New Orleans’s Irish community provided the largest number of recruits to the Confederate army when the Civil War erupted. The 6th Louisiana Infantry, “The Emeralds,” was Composed almost entirely of the city’s Irish dockworkers and fought heroically in major engagements including the First Battle of Manassas, Antietam, and Gettysburg. The famed Confederate “Louisiana Tigers” featured two Irish companies, “The Sarsfield Guards,” under Captain John O’Hara, and “The Southern Celts,” under chief of police, Stephen O’Leary.
By the start of the Civil War, the Irish had played a huge role in the development of New Orleans, but they would write more glorious chapters in the city’s later history.
Posted by Jim on May 19, 2026
| Chaos in Westminster A letter from Ireland a Chara, Last week, in Britain, voters went to the polls, and the headlines have been dominated by questions about the future of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer after a disastrous set of results for his Labour Party.These were elections to local councils and to the devolved parliaments in Scotland and Wales.The parliaments in Scotland and Wales, like the Assembly in the North of Ireland, are not sovereign and only exercise powers within their jurisdictions that have been agreed by the Parliament at Westminster in London, which also holds the purse strings.In these elections, the British Labour Party lost a substantial number of council seats and, for the first time, lost control of the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) to the pro-independence party Plaid Cymru. The Scottish National Party consolidated its position as the largest party in its Parliament.Currently in the North of Ireland, Sinn Féin is the largest party, and the Government is led by its Vice President, Michelle O’Neill.The political map of Britain has changed, and the future of the “United Kingdom” is in doubt, as the governments in Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland are now firmly rooted in the concept of self-determination and independence.Neither Scotland nor Wales has a legal right to self-determination and are held in a “union” with no way out unless agreed by the predominantly English Parliament in London.The North of Ireland is different: under the Good Friday Agreement, we have both the right to self-determination and the mechanism, i.e., Unity Referendums. At any time, unity referendums can be triggered, and in a second caveat, they must be triggered when constitutional change is likely. On occasion, commentators have misread the provisions that a unity referendum can be called only when the governments believe change is likely.That is not the case, and in 2002, David Trimble, who negotiated the Agreement as leader of the Ulster Unionist party, called for a referendum to “consolidate the unionist vote.”It is important to clarify this position because the big election winners across England were Reform, the party of Nigel Farage, who led the Brexit campaign. Despite winning a significant number of seats in Scotland and Wales, Reform is at its heart an English Nationalist party.They have previously aligned with the extremes of Unionism in the North of Ireland and have little understanding of, and even less respect for, the Good Friday Agreement.It is entirely plausible that a future Farage government could spring a hasty unity referendum to try to consolidate unionist support and bin the Agreement’s provisions.A Reform Government is a real risk factor and yet the Irish Government refuses to plan or prepare for such a scenario.In 1962, Dean Acheson, the US Secretary of State, said that, ‘Great Britain had lost an Empire but not yet found a role.’ Today, we see that played out; Britain is no longer a global military, economic, or political player. Its empire is gone, its internal union is in tatters, and its politics are in freefall. There have been six British Prime Ministers since the 2016 Brexit referendum.Ireland cannot be spectators. Our national interest is served by planning, preparing, and advocating for unity. No part of our nation should be left to the chaos of Britain.Have a great weekend. Is mise,Ciarán Ciarán Quinn is the Sinn Féin Representative to North America |