Florence and Josephine O’Donoghue’s War of Independence: A Destiny That Shapes Our Ends
BORGONOVO, John (Editor) [Foreward by J. J. Lee].
Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2006. xix, 252 pages. Illustrated. Paperback.
“Historian and IRA leader Florence O’Donoghue describes his experiences as head of intelligence in Cork city during the Irish War of Independence. He candidly assesses the leaders of this period, including Tomas MacCurtain, Sean O’Hegarty, Terence MacSwiney, and Michael Collins, and critically examines the evolution of the Irish Volunteer citizen soldiers. He also details his wife’s role as the top IRA spy in Cork’s British Army headquarters, working for the rebels in exchange for the return of her eldest son, lost in a bitter custody battle. After O’Donoghue kidnapped the child, the two collaborators eventually fell in love and were secretly married in the spring of 1921.
Forty years later, the couple presented their story to their children to explain the family secret that had haunted their domestic lives. The first part of the book is Florence and Josephine’s account of their activities in the Anglo-Irish War, written in 1961; the second part is composed of 47 letters in diary form, written by O’Donoghue to his wife while he was ‘on the run’ during the final ten weeks of the war, from May to July 1921. They provide a rare snapshot of the daily life of fugitive IRA guerrillas, and an insight into two people who followed their hearts to find ‘a destiny that shapes our ends’.”
ISBN: 0716533715
Publisher’s website: www.iap.ie
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