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In January, the Council hosted a lecture & cocktail reception to mark the U.S. Book
Launch of "No Surrender Here!' The Civil War Papers of Ernie O'Malley 1922-1924".
The book, published in Ireland by Lilliput Press, is an impressive volume by Cormac
O'Malley, Ernie O'Malley's son and co-author Anne Dolan. It has an introduction
by Professor J.J. Lee of University College Cork.
The Council event was held at The Metropolitan Club in January and included showing
clips of part of a then just-released documentary on Ernie O'Malley premiered this
year on TG4, the Irish Gaelic-language television channel.
Cormac O'Malley has been a member of this Council for many years. He was born in
Dublin and came to New York in 1957 when his father died. After Harvard, the U.S.
Navy, Columbia Law School, and ten years' private international law practice, Cormac
joined Bristol-Myers Squibb's international law department in 1981 and lived in
Brussels, London and New York.
Since 1999, Cormac has been an international legal consultant concentrating on U.S.
investments in Ireland. He has also published four of his father's unpublished works.
He has been President of Glucksman Ireland House at New York University for five
years.
Just over a month after the 1921 truce that ended Ireland's fight with England,
Ernie O'Malley found himself in a civil war against many of the men he had once
fought with, against those who accepted the new Irish Free State. The book is the
first comprehensive collection of letters, memoranda and orders detailing this period
of chaos and confusion, intransigence and idealism, which gripped Ireland from June
1922 to May 1923. These documents detail the war as it was fought, without the benefit
of hindsight and occasional artistry that marks the memoirs of many of the men involved,
not least O'Malley's own carefully-crafted narratives, On Another Man's Wound and
The Singing Flame, published decades later.
This collection documents one man's attitude to war and his difficult acceptance
of peace, his experience of capture, imprisonment, hunger strike and finally release.
In the letters included in 'No Surrender Here!' the voices of the leadership and
the rank & file are captured faithfully: the detached and often inappropriate orders
from above, and the confusion of men who, in some cases without boots on their feet,
know that theirs is a hopeless cause. Letters to friends and family also reveal
the more personal costs of war.
After the Civil War in Ireland, Ernie O'Malley spent quite some time in the United
States, first in New York and later in Taos, New Mexico where he enjoyed a coterie
of friends that included Georgia O'Keeffe and Ernest Hemingway among others.
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