WHYTE'S in association with CHRISTIE'S - The Ernie O'Malley Collection MONDAY 25 November 2019

16 The Malley family lived in Castlebar with their seven children; after their move to Dublin in 1906, where Luke Malley worked for the Congested Districts Board, four more were born. Second of the eleven children, Ernest ‘Ernie’ Bernard Malley did not add the O’ prefix to his name until he joined the Irish Volunteers in late 1916. His family life in Mayo and Dublin was quiet and conservative, both politically and socially. His home had no ‘national soul’. During the summers on the shore near Westport, Co. Mayo, and through the tales told by the children’s nanny, Mary Anne Jordan, Ernie and his siblings gained a great sense of the folklore and the people in the West of Ireland. This influence lasted throughout Ernie’s life. In Dublin Ernie and his brothers attended the North Richmond Street Christian Brothers School. At the outbreak of the First WorldWar in 1914 his brothers, Frank and Albert, joined the Royal Dublin Fusiliers, a regiment of the British Army and fought in Europe. Ernie won a scholarship in 1915 to University College Dublin (UCD) where he pursued medicine. When the Easter 1916 Rebellion occurred, Ernie read the Proclamation at Nelson’s Pillar and was inspired by such words as ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland’. That evening he and a friend took up a rifle and pursued what he called his ‘responsibility of action’. Later that year he joined the Irish Volunteers. In March 1918 Ernie went ‘on the run’ full time. Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy used him to organise and train many of the sixty-five loosely structured Irish Republican Army brigades around Ireland, which he would visit, before moving on. In February 1920 he was involved in the first attack on a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks at Ballytrain, Co. Monaghan. Later that spring he continued to lead other barracks attacks in Co. Tipperary on Hollyford, Rearcross, and Drangan. That September, he and Liam Lynch attacked a regimental headquarters in Mallow, Co. Cork. Ernie became known for his courage and decisive action. In December 1920 he was captured in Kilkenny and was severely tortured in Dublin Castle but managed to escape from Kilmainham Jail in February 1921. He was then appointed Commanding Officer of the Second Southern Division overseeing over 7,000 men in Tipperary, Limerick and Kilkenny. The Truce in July 1921 took him by surprise. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed in December, because of his view on concessions on Irish sovereignty and the oath of allegiance to A Short Biography of Ernie O’Malley (1897-1957) By his son Cormac K. H. O’Malley Ellison Street, Castlebar, where the Malleys lived, circa 1905. Bust of Ernie O’Malley by Helen Hooker, 1934.