Letter from Patrick J. MacNally, Commandant, Collins’ Barracks, Cork, to Fr. Aloysius Travers OFM Cap. enclosing a typescript copy of his unfinished account of the Easter Week Rising. Comdt. MacNally also encloses a rough sketch of the Church Street area upon which he asks Fr. Aloysius to ‘mark roughly the positions of any barricades you saw … [and] houses that were occupied’. He also attaches ‘a sketch of the Bride Street area … to enable you to fix the corner where you stood at the surrender of Eamonn Ceannt’.
Two admission tickets to the first meeting of Dáil Éireann which took place in the Round Room of the Mansion House on 21 January 1919. In Irish: ‘Permit or ticket allowing bearer (unnamed) to attend the first assembly of Dáil Eireann on Tuesday 21 January 1919’. The tickets are signed by George Noble Plunkett.
Newspaper cuttings book compiled and annotated by Fr. Stanislaus Kavanagh OFM Cap. Printed stamp on inside front cover: ‘Franciscan Capuchin Library, Church Street, Dublin’. The pages have been numbered by Fr. Stanislaus. The cuttings includes (at pp 94-5) clippings of photographic prints of relating to the imprisonment of republican prisoners in Mountjoy Jail. One of the prints shows Fr. Augustine reciting the Rosary outside the Jail. 'Irish Independent', 15 Apr. 1920. Another print shows Fr. Augustine announcing the release of republican prisoners. 'Cork Examiner', 17 Apr. 1920.
Photocopies of letters from Capt. Rev. Dominic O’Connor OFM Cap., 21 Stationary Hospital, Salonika Forces, M[acedonian] E[xpeditionary] F[orce], and the Capuchin Friary, Fr. Mathew Quay, Cork, to his sister, [Sister Constantine O’Connor?], explaining his reasons for becoming an army chaplain. He wrote: ‘Well someone had to do the work and when those who had done all the recruiting were too cowardly to go there was nothing left except to have us who were anti-recruiters go and help the souls of the soldiers the others had sent out’. He later referred to conditions for the troops he is ministering to: ‘We have had more than half the troops down with malaria, dysentery, sandfly fever etc. and it is fortunate that there was no fighting here’. [c. 1915]. In reference to the political situation he later wrote: ‘There is no use in saying anything about the political situation. England seems set upon forcing conscription on us. And the Irish Nation is equally or rather more determined to oppose it. God protect us!’.
Letter from the Most Rev. Daniel Cohalan, Bishop of Cork, to Fr. Martin Hyland OFM Cap., Guardian, Rochestown Capuchin Friary, expressing his happiness that Fr. Dominic O’Connor OFM Cap. is back in Cork again. He notes that he ‘has been a good while in prison [and] previous to that he was a war chaplain’, and requests that he prepare for examination for the renewal of faculties to preach and to hear confessions. The examination will be a written test on moral and dogmatic theology. With copy reply from Fr. Edwin Fitzgibbon OFM Cap., Provincial Minister, asserting that ‘owing to the degrading and cruel treatments he suffered for the past thirteen or fourteen months at the hands of the British’ it would be unwise to ask Fr. Dominic to prepare for the aforementioned examination.
Letter from the Most Rev. Daniel Cohalan, Bishop of Cork, to Fr. Edwin Fitzgibbon OFM Cap., Provincial Minister, referring to the withdrawal of Fr. Dominic’s faculties due to his inability to take the examination for renewal of faculties. Bishop Cohalan also refers to his unease on reading an announcement in the papers that Fr. Dominic is to be appointed honorary chaplain to a brigade of the IRA. The Bishop wrote: ‘Now I put it to you that a lay body has no authority to confer an ecclesiastical honour from a lay authority’. He later asks Fr. Edwin: ‘Are you not conceding to a military brigade what belongs essentially to the church?’ With a copy reply from Fr. Edwin claiming that he knew nothing of Fr. Dominic's appointment as chaplain to the IRA until his attention was drawn to a report in the Cork newspapers.
Memorial cards for Fr. Dominic O’Connor OFM Cap. (with photographic print). ‘Capuchin Pastor of St. Mary of the Angels, Hermiston, Oregon. Civic Chaplain to Lord Mayor Thomas MacCurtain and Lord Mayor Terence MacSwiney, 1920. Died at Bend, Oregon, 17th Oct. 1935’.
Letters from R.G. Browne, Town Clerk, Urban District Council, Westport, and John Maher, Town Clerk, Cashel Urban District Council, offering their sympathies to the Capuchin Order on the death of Fr. Dominic O’Connor OFM Cap. The resolution from Cashel Urban District Council reads: ‘During the martyr struggle of Terence MacSwiney (Lord Mayor of Cork) in Brixton Prison, the late Father Dominic by his attention and fidelity to the noble sufferer and the cause for which he suffers, he has left to Ireland a name that links him with the bravest and most heroic we boast of’.
Photographic postcard print of Fr. Dominic O’Connor OFM Cap. with another Capuchin friar (possibly Fr. Hilary McDonagh OFM Cap.) dated 17 Mar. 1919; print of Fr. Dominic (full length and seated) attached to a greeting card with annotation: ‘To Helen, with best wishes, Fr. Dominic, OSFC, 1/1/19’; undated photographic print of Fr. Dominic (full length in Capuchin Franciscan habit).
A pamphlet dedicated by the author to Casement’s ‘dearest surviving friend on earth his loving sister Mrs Newman’. The text was written by John Clarke (1868-1934), a County Antrim-born nationalist and journalist who wrote numerous articles on Gaelic cultural revivalist subjects, frequently using the penname ‘Benmore’.
