George Gilmore
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George Gilmore (1898 - 1985) was an Irish Republican Army leader. Gilmore was born in Portadown, Ireland (now Northern Ireland) and was leader of the South County Dublin Battalion of the IRA from 1915 to 1926.
He fought in the IRA in the Irish War of Independence and in the Irish Civil War on the Anti-Treaty IRA side. He was arrested for IRA activities 1926, released 1927, arrested 1931, and released again in 1932. In 1932 he was shot and wounded by the Garda Síochána in County Clare. He was one of the founders of the Republican Congress, a left wing socialist Irish Republican group, in 1934. The group broke up in 1935 over internal differences. He was later active in 1936-39 as a supporter of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War.
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George Gilmore (1898-1985) was a prominent Irish Republican Army leader and a respected republican socialist. He was born in Howth, Co. Dublin, Ireland on May 5, 1898. As a member of the Irish Volunteers, Gilmore played a minor role in the Easter Rising of 1916. He served in the Irish Republican Army during the War of Independence and fought in the Civil War on the Anti-Treaty side. From 1920, Gilmore played an active role in the South Dublin brigade of the IRA, becoming an O/C during the Cosgrave Free State government and a member of the Army Council of the IRA until March 1934.
In 1925 Gilmore was secretary to Sinn Fein Minister of Defense Sean Lemass. Unlike Lemass, Gilmore did not continue in constitutional politics but that same year, he was the mastermind of a coup on November 25, 1925 wherein he entered Mountjoy prison disguised as a police sergeant, freeing 19 republican prisoners in a break-out.
Gilmore was arrested for IRA activities a number of times in the 1920s and 1930s. One year after the 1925 coup, Gilmore was charged and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in Mountjoy for the prison break-out. After his release, Gilmore testified on June 21, 1928 before the Dail Eireann concerning the mistreatment he suffered as a political prisoner during his incarceration. He was charged and tried before the Military Tribunal on December 7, 1931 for being in possession of arms and for being a member of an illegal organization. Gilmore refused to plead and was sentenced to five years penal servitude at Arbour Hill military prison; during his imprisonment, as was his usual stand, Gilmore refused to wear prison clothes. He was released on March 10, 1932 with other political prisoners in the General Amnesty of that year. (Eight years later, the Military Tribunal was abolished.)
On August 14, 1932, after Gilmore and T.J. Ryan (O/C of West Clare) had issued allegations to the new Fianna Fail government against corrupt police, they were shot and wounded by detective officers near Kilrush, Co. Clare.
In March 1934 dissatisfied with IRA policies regarding Fianna Fail, Gilmore left the army to establish more socialistic programs. With Peadar O'Donnell, Michael Price and Frank Ryan, he formed the Irish Republican Congress, an anti-fascist, anti-imperialist and anti-Fianna Fail organization. As Gilmore said, "It was an attempt to gather together in action the forces necessary, in the situation that then existed, to create a movement capable of winning and maintaining the independence of Ireland as a republic." In six months, the Republican Congress split in two and within a year had lost much advocacy.
He also helped set up tenant leagues to improve slum conditions in Dublin in the 1930s. Gilmore did attempt to enter politics as a Republican Congress candidate in the June 1936 Dublin municipal election in which he secured 730 votes in Area No. 3 (of the total 32,617 polled). In 1938 he ran as an independent socialist candidate in a by-election in south county Dublin, losing by less than 200 votes. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Gilmore and other members of the Republican Congress lent support to the Irish unit of the International Brigades who fought the Franco fascist forces in Spain.
Gilmore persisted in his fight for the Tone-Connolly concept of a united Ireland, with his letter-writing to local newspapers and articles he wrote in republican publications. Regarding the pending war in Europe he wrote in 1938 that the IRA should take no action that would benefit Germany, urging the IRA to be "a friend of democracy instead of a tool for fascism." In the 1940s he continued to work with Peadar O'Donnel on left republican projects.
He was often a guest speaker in the 1960s at the newly formed Wolfe-Tone Society in Dublin and the Republican Club at Trinity College in the city. Gilmore's advice was sought by sections of the IRA during this decade. He continued to write and in 1966 Gilmore's pamphlet "Labour & The Republican Movement" was published as his pamphlet "The Relevance of James Connolly in Ireland To-Day," in 1970. In 1978 he wrote a more extensive work of his earlier booklet "The Irish Republican Congress (first publishd in 1935 and later in 1974).
Gilmore was a Protestant in the IRA that was nationally dominated by Catholics. Although his mother Francis (nee Angus) was born in Howth, his father Philip was born in Portadown, Co. Antrim, now Co. Armagh in Northern Ireland. The younger Gilmore, himself, spent much of his youth with his father's family in what he called, "the most orange part of Ireland." Opposed to sectarianism, Gilmore supported the Civil Rights Movement in the North in the late 1960s and 1970s.
George Gilmore died in Howth on June 20, 1985. His funeral service in St. Mary's (Church of Ireland) Church, Howth and burial in St. Fintan's Cemetery, Sutton on June 22 was attended by many dignitaries of artists, business men and women, politicians, former army comrades, other friends and family.
