Darrell Figgis

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Edward Darrell Figgis (1882–27 October 1925) was an Irish writer, Sinn Féin activist and independent politician.

He was born at Rathmines in Dublin but spent some of his childhood in India. As a young man he worked in London as a tea importer. In 1910 Figgis (with the help of G.K. Chesterton who wrote the introduction to his first book of verse) joined the Dent publishing company, subsequently establishing his own publishing company in which he republished the works of William Carleton and others. He moved to Achill Island in 1913 to write.

He joined the Irish Volunteers in Dublin in 1913 and was deeply implicated in the Kilcoole gun-running of 1914 by Irish Republicans. He with Roger Casement and Eoin MacNeill conspired to buy rifles in Germany. He travelled with Robert Erskine Childers to Belgium to make the purchase, and chartered a tug. In July, the guns were transferred to yachts sailed by Childers and Conor O'Brien, and then landed in Howth, Dublin, by Childers and Kilcoole, County Wicklow by O'Brien.

Although he did not participate in the 1916 Easter Rising, he was arrested and interned by the British authorities between 1916 and 1917 in Reading Gaol. After his release, he returned to Ireland and was elected an honorary secretary of Sinn Féin.

In May 1918, he was arrested for his part in the alleged German Plot and deported.

In 1918, he became editor of newspaper The Republic and from September 1919 to 1921 was secretary of the Inquiry into Industrial Resources.[1]

During the War of Independence (1919-1921), a British officer named Captain Cyril Crawford "condemned" Figgis and Peadar Keaney to be hanged at Carrick on Shannon.[2] He even ordered rope for the purpose, but another officer intervened and Keaney and Figgis were set free.

Figgis supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He was extremely critical of the Collins/de Valera pact for the June 1922 elections which was designed to avoid a split in the Sinn Féin party. On May 25 1922 he attended a meeting of the executive council of the Farmers' Union and representatives of business interests and encouraged them to put forward candidates in constituencies where anti-Treaty candidates may otherwise head the poll. As Figgis was a member of the Sinn Féin Ard Chomhairle at the time, he was expelled from the party.

In the June 1922 and August 1923 general elections he ran and was elected an independent Teachtaí Dála (member of parliament) for the Dublin County constituency. He was deputy chair of the committee (which included Alfred O'Rahilly) which drafted the Constitution of the Irish Free State.

In 1924, after learning that her husband had a mistriss, Figgis's wife Millie committed suicide. A year later and after the death of his mistriss, Rita North, (allegedly after an unsuccessful abortion)[3] Figgis himself committed suicide in London.

[edit] Works

A Vision of Life (1909) poems
Shakespeare: A Study (1911)
The Crucibles of Time (1911) poems
Studies and Appreciations (1912)
Broken Arcs (1912) novel
Queen Tara (1913) play
Jacob Elthorne (1914) novel as Michael Ireland
The Mount of Transfiguration (1915) poems
AE (George W. Russell). A Study of a Man and a Nation (1916)
The Gaelic State in the Past & Future, or, "The Crown of a Nation" (1917)
A Chronicle of Jails (1917)
Bye-Ways of Study (1918) essays
Children of Earth (1918) novel as Michael Ireland
The Historic Case for Irish Independence (1918)
Carleton's Stories of Irish Life (1918/9) by William Carleton, editor
A Second Chronicle of Jails (1919)
Bogach Bán (1922) poem
Planning for the Future (1922) address to the Architectural Association of Ireland
The House of Success (1922) novel as Michael Ireland
The Irish Constitution Explained (Dublin: Mellifont Press, 1922)
The Return of the Hero (1923) novel, as Michael Ireland
The Paintings of William Blake (1925)
John Milton and Darrell Figgis [editor]
Comus: A Mask with Eight Illustrations By William Blake (1926) John Milton, editor
Recollections of the Irish War (1927)