Seán MacBride

Seán MacBride (26 January 1904 – 15 January 1988) worked as an Irish republican activist, politician, and diplomat. He held the posts of Minister for External Affairs between 1948 and 1951, led Clann na Poblachta from 1946 to 1965, and was the IRA’s Chief of Staff from 1936 to 1937.

Nobel Peace Prize and other international honours

From 1947 to 1957, he also served as a Teachta Dála (TD). Moving beyond Irish domestic politics, MacBride helped establish or took part in several major international bodies of the 1900s, among them the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and Amnesty International. His honors included the Nobel Peace Prize in 1974, the Lenin Peace Prize for 1975–1976, and the UNESCO Silver Medal for Service in 1980.

Early life

MacBride was born in Paris in 1904. His mother, Maud Gonne, was a key figure in Irish nationalist and republican circles—she helped found Inghinidhe na hÉireann and Cumann na mBan—and later, during the 1930s, became a vocal follower of Major C.H. Douglas’s social credit theories and was openly anti-Semitic. His father, Major John MacBride, had commanded the Irish Transvaal Brigade against the British in the Second Boer War.

Within a year of Seán’s birth, the family moved to Dublin. After taking part in the Easter Rising, John MacBride was court-martialed by the British and executed in May 1916. French was Seán’s first language, and he kept—or, as some claimed, put on—a French accent in English for his entire life. He began his education at the Jesuit Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague in Paris and stayed there until his father’s execution in 1916, after which he was sent to Mount St Benedict’s in Gorey, County Wexford, and briefly to Downside School.

MacBride entered politics during the 1918 Irish general election, campaigning for Sinn Féin. The next year, at age 15, he lied about his age to join the Irish Volunteers, which fought as part of the Irish Republican Army, and participated in the Irish War of Independence. He opposed the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty and was imprisoned by the Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War.

Anti-Treaty IRA, cooperation with the Soviets

After his release in 1924, MacBride studied law at University College Dublin and resumed his IRA activities. For a short time, he worked as Éamon de Valera’s personal secretary, traveling with him to Rome to meet various dignitaries. On his twenty-first birthday in January 1925, he married Catalina “Kid” Bulfin, a woman four years older who shared his political views; she was the daughter of nationalist publisher and travel-writer William Bulfin. Before returning to Dublin in 1927 to become the IRA’s Director of Intelligence, MacBride worked as a journalist in Paris and London.

According to historians Tom Mahon and James J. Gillogly, recently decoded IRA messages from the 1920s show that the organization’s two main funding sources were Clan na Gael and the Soviet Union. The messages also indicate that, before becoming Director of Intelligence, MacBride was involved in espionage activities in Great Britain for GRU spymaster Walter Krivitsky, whom the ciphered IRA communications referred to only by the code name “James.” Besides supplying the USSR with detailed information on Royal Navy ships and Royal Air Force aeroplane engines, MacBride gave Soviet agents “a brief specification and a complete drawing” of ASDIC—an early sonar system for detecting submarines—at a secret meeting in Amsterdam in the autumn of 1926. He also helped the GRU by providing forged passports to Soviet intelligence operatives at risk of capture.

In October 1926, MacBride sent a ciphered report from Paris to his IRA superiors about Soviet counterfeiting operations, noting that “several bad Bank of England notes have been passed here lately. These are said to emanate from Russia.” Soon after returning to Dublin in 1927, he was arrested and charged with murdering politician Kevin O’Higgins, who had been assassinated near his home in Booterstown, County Dublin. At trial, Cumann na nGaedheal politician Bryan Cooper testified for the defense that both he and MacBride had been aboard a ferry from Britain to Ireland at the time of the murder.

MacBride was then charged as a subversive and interned in Mountjoy Prison. In September 1927, Krivitsky sent the IRA a message from Amsterdam demanding to see MacBride immediately, claiming to have a “present” he was eager to give away and naming a cafe for the meeting. Because MacBride was imprisoned in Dublin, the IRA’s chief of staff, Moss Twomey, replied that the request was “rather awkward and impossible to fulfill at the present.” Instead, Twomey and two other senior IRA members traveled to Amsterdam and met Krivitsky. In 1929, an Irish section of the League Against Imperialism was formed, with MacBride as its secretary; aimed at creating a “mass anti-imperialist movement,” the organization had the support of the Comintern.

Toward the end of the 1920s, after many supporters had left to join Fianna Fáil, some IRA members pushed for a more left-wing agenda. When the IRA Army Council voted this down, MacBride launched a new movement, Saor Éire (“Free Ireland”), in 1931. Though non-military, Saor Éire was declared unlawful along with the IRA, Cumann na mBan, and nine other groups. MacBride became the security services’ number-one target.

In 1936, Moss Twomey was sent to prison for three years, and MacBride replaced him as IRA chief of staff. At that time, the movement was in disarray, with conflicts among several factions and personalities. Tom Barry was appointed chief of staff to lead a military operation against the British, an action MacBride disagreed with.