Note from C. Burgess [Cathal Brugha], Dublin Castle Hospital, to Fr. Albert Bibby OFM Cap., Franciscan Capuchin Church, Church St. It reads: ‘I should be obliged if you dropped in here any time tomorrow or Friday to hear my confession. As there has been a new regulation made here with regard to the admission of the clergy it might be as well if you brought this card with you’. During the Rising Brugha was severely wounded by a hand grenade, as well as by multiple gunshot wounds, and was initially not considered likely to survive. He recovered over the next year, but was left with a permanent limp.
Two memorial cards for Peadar Healy (Peadar Ó hÉaluighthe), from Phibsboro in Dublin, who died on 23 April 1919. Healy was a captain in the 1st Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers and was a participant in the 1916 Rising. One of the cards (with Irish text) has a photographic print. It was produced by Brian na Banban, a pseudonym used by Brian O’Higgins (1882-1963), a founding member of the Volunteers and himself a 1916 veteran.
Memorial card for Liam Mellows, Rory O’Connor, Joseph (‘Joe’) McKelvey and Richard (‘Dick’) Barrett who were executed by firing squad in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin on 8 December 1922.
Memorial card for Captain Richard Coleman ‘who fought for the Freedom of Ireland, Easter, 1916, and died in Usk Prison, England, on December 9th, 1918’.
Letter to Tim Healy from various republican internees asking him intercede in a dispute with prison authorities. The manuscript provides background to the dispute. The letter is in two distinctive hands and is (copy) signed by ‘Michael Staines, Head Leader; James Murphy, leader, no. 1 room; Edward A. Morkan, leader, no. 2 room; R.J. Mulcahy, leader, no. 3 room; Thomas D. Sinnott, Leader no. 4 Room’. The letter reads: ‘Recently the military authorities in charge of the Camp here have adopted such an attitude of consistently vindictive injustice towards us that we are reluctantly compelled to believe that there must be some ulterior motive behind it. … We can do very little to help ourselves, cut off as we are from all the world, and strictly prohibited – officially – from sending out a single complaint’. In September 1917 Healy acted as counsel for the family of the dead Sinn Féin hunger striker Thomas Ashe. He was one of the few King’s Counsel to provide legal services to members of Sinn Féin in various legal proceedings in both Ireland and England after the 1916 Rising. This included acting for those illegally interned in 1916 in Frongoch in North Wales.
Letter to Fr. Albert Bibby OFM Cap. from [signature indecipherable], St. Brigid’s Clara, giving family news and referring to Fr. Albert’s exile in America. With cover annotated on reverse: ‘Fr. Albert died on Feb. 14th [1925]. Return this letter unread, Joseph’
