Illuminations: General Richard James Mulcahy – The Right Hand Man

Upon the outbreak of the Easter Rising, Mulcahy’s unit cut the communication lines to Belfast and Britain in north Co. Dublin on April 24, 1916. Mulcahy became isolated from his battalion and instead joined the Volunteers 5th (Fingal) Battalion led by Thomas Ashe, who made him his second-in-command in successful raids for arms and ammunition on the RIC barracks at Swords and Donabate.

A raid on the Ashbourne barracks on April 28, 1916, ended in the RIC’s surrender after ten of their number were killed. It was one of the few military victories of Easter Week.  Ashe’s force was the last to surrender, and he and Mulcahy were among the few Volunteer officers to emerge from the Rising with enhanced military reputations.

Following the surrender, Mulcahy was interned in Knutsford Prison in Cheshire from May 3 until June 17, and then was transferred to Frongoch internment camp in north Wales (Frongoch was known among the prisoners as “Sinn Féin’s University”). He was released on December 3, 1917, with the last batch of untried political prisoners.

On his release, Mulcahy immediately rejoined the republican movement and became commandant of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers. He was elected to the First Dáil in the 1918 general election for Clontarf. He was then named Minister for Defense in the new provisional government and later Assistant Minister for Defense.

In March 1918, Mulcahy became IRA Chief of Staff, a position he held until January 1922. Mulcahy managed to evade capture in the “German plot” arrests. This further enhanced his personal stature.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was never jailed again, notwithstanding the government putting a price of £10,000 on his head. He and Michael Collins were largely responsible for directing the military campaign against the British during the Irish War of Independence. Mulcahy became known as Collins’ “right hand man.” Collins’s death, on 22 August, 1922, pitched Mulcahy, who succeeded him as the national army commander-in-chief, into the limelight when he filled the leadership vacuum with a morale-raising funeral oration against reprisals.

During this period of political upheaval in 1919, Mulcahy married Mary Josephine (Min) Ryan. Min, was a member of the Cumann na mBan Executive, and was involved in nationalist activity at the time of the Rising. The Mulcahys had six children.

Mulcahy supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. Archive film shows that Mulcahy, as Minister of Defense, was the Irish officer who raised the Irish tricolor at the first hand-over of a British barracks to the National Army in January 1922.

Following the end of the Civil War, Mulcahy continued to be active in Irish politics. He was elected to the Dáil from 1918 to 1938, and from 1943 to 1961, and to the Seanad from March 1938 to June 1938. He served as leader of the Fine Gael Party from 1944 until 1959. 

He was appointed as Minister for Defense from January to April 1919 and from 1922 to 1924; Minister for Education 1948 to 1951 and from 1954 until 1957; Minister for the Gaeltacht (Irish speaking areas) from June 1959 until October 1956; and from 1927 to 1932 he served as Minister for Local Government and Public Health. He also served in the cabinets of W. T. Cosgrave and John A. Costello. 

Mulcahy resigned as leader of Fine Gael in October 1959 and retired from active politics at the next general election, in October 1961. He spent most of the following decade collating the voluminous collection of papers he had amassed throughout his career and in compiling tape recordings to complement them. These historic records and recordings are currently in the archives of University College Dublin.

General Richard Mulcahy died of cancer in Dublin on December 16, 1971, at the age of 85. He is buried inBallymoreen Cemetery, Thurles, Co. Tipperary.