Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Characters from an . . . . Irish past
T his week marks the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, the armed insurrection in Dublin by Irish rebels who wanted to throw off the yoke of British rule and establish Ireland as an independent nation.
Among those rebels was my grandfather, William Oman, his role not only enshrined in family lore but in the history books and on a plaque on the wall of Dublin City Hall. All of 16, he sounded “fall-in” with his bugle on Easter Monday to muster the rebels, the official beginning of the Rising.
I was aware of the involvement of other Omans in the action that the British quickly put down. But they were fleeting figures for me, a first-generation American who was raised an Air Force brat and has since spent the past 40 years in Arkansas, forging a newspaper career, getting married and raising my son. My mom is from Ireland and I have a brother who lives there, along with aunts and uncles and more than two dozen first cousins. Going to Ireland is like going home.
Still, like many other Irish families before and since their nation’s bloody birth, the Omans have scattered all over the world. So the many thousands converging in Dublin to commemorate the Rising will include members of my family to honor our ancestors’ role in it.
I won’t be there, but the anniversary, along with social media, has allowed me to more fully appreciate the participation of my grandfather and other Omans and their kin in the Rising, the subsequent war for independence, and the civil war that ensued. More importantly, I have come to know a wider part of my family.
No one has been more integral to my journey than Niall Oman, grandson of my Uncle Paddy, my dad’s oldest brother. Niall is a history teacher, a guide of the famous Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin on weekends, and a talented chronicler of our family history.
A couple of summers ago I met him in person. He took me on a tour of Glasnevin to show me where William is buried as well as the final resting places for William’s father and grandfather. More than 200 Omans are buried at Glasnevin, Niall told me.
He reminded me that my grandfather had played “The Last Post” after Patrick Pearse’s famous oration at the funeral of O’Donovan Rossa, a prominent member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, in 1915. The Rising was being planned at the time of Rossa’s death. His funeral was used as a call to arms.
Pearse, one of three leaders of the Rising and executed for his role, ended his speech with words
Recalling the Easter Rising
that still stir: “They think that they have pacified Ireland. They think that they have purchased half of us and intimidated the other half. They think that they have foreseen everything, think that they have provided against everything; but the fools, the fools, the fools!—they have left us our Fenian dead, and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”
William didn’t help plan the Rising, but he knew something big was about to happen, what he described as a “scrap,” according to a statement he provided to the Irish military later as part of his documentation for a pension from the new Irish republic.
He was diagnosed with appendicitis not long before the Rising was to begin and underwent an operation by one of the many women prominent among the rebels, Dr. Kathleen Lynn. She treated my father, John, for tuberculosis when he was a child, making house calls on a bicycle.
Before going under the knife, William wanted to be sure he wasn’t going to miss the “scrap.” He approached James Connolly, another leader who would be executed, to ask him to “postpone the scrap for a few weeks,” according to the statement. My grandfather was a member of the Irish Citizen Army, which Connolly had established.
Connolly “remarked that it was a very modest request and inquired why I had made it,” William continued. “I informed him of my consultation with Dr. Lynn and the outcome of it. He told me to go ahead, that I had nothing to worry about and that I would be all right. From that conversation, I understood I would be out of the hospital in time for the scrap.”
By Good Friday 1916, William had recovered enough to stand guard alone outside a shop on Amiens Street “where the leaders of the Rising met to consider their plan of action in the wake of the loss of a shipment of weapons,” according to a recent article in Dublin afternoon newspaper The Herald, based on Niall’s research.
After sounding the “fall-in” at Liberty Hall on Easter Monday morning 1916, William went on to fight with the City Hall Garrison, Jacob’s Factory Garrison and College of Surgeons Garrison. He was in G Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin IRA.
“At City Hall he engaged British soldiers coming out of Ship Street Barracks,” according to the article. “He recalled: ‘When I attempted to move out a few yards from where we stood, I was fired on by a single sniper.’ With their position untenable, Bill held off the British
soldiers whilst his comrades escaped.”
He later was chased by a “mob of enraged Dubliners” and escaped by hiding in his grandmother’s home.
When the Rising was over, William was jailed, but released early because of his tender age.
Then there was William’s uncle, Robert Oman, who saw action in some of the heaviest fighting during the Rising and later commanded an Irish Republican Army unit that included William during the war of independence.
“During the latter, he was chased by the Black and Tans through Store Street,” recounted one faded press clipping of Bob, known by his comrades as the “escape artist.”
“Entering a grain store, he dumped his gun in a barrel of grain, donned a workman’s apron and walked out past his pursuers. It was the first of many exciting escapes, but in the end his luck failed and he was captured. His treatment during internment in Frongoch, Gormanston and Mountjoy, especially during hunger strikes, undermined his health.”
He would spend his final 28 years in a hospital. “They were great days, and I wouldn’t have missed them for anything,” Bob told a newspaper reporter from his hospital bed.
I tracked down his grandson, Dermot Alford, who is as proud of his grandfather as I am of mine. Funny
thing is that Dermot grew up across the street from Paddy Oman in the Blackpitts section of Dublin and remembered my grandfather visiting his eldest son.
“I have been researching my grandfather’s role in the Rising for many years and have attempted on a number of occasions to put it in print, but every time I read over my work I end up scrapping it,” Dermot told me. “It never seems good enough.”
The involvement of the Omans in the Rising includes William’s brother, George, also in Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army.
George saw action during Easter Week at Liberty Hall, the General Post Office and the Imperial Hotel. But I haven’t been able to track down any descendants yet.
After the Rising, George established a jewelry and watch repair shop. It was the same occupation his father and grandfather had.
Two of my uncles, Ultan and Peter, remember their father giving them broken watches he collected from neighbors. They would deliver them by bicycle or bus to George for repair.
When my mom and dad became engaged, my mom recalled Granddad urging them to pick out a ring from George’s collection. My mom said she looked over his collection and ultimately decided to pick one out at a regular jewelry store, leaving her future father-in-law disappointed.
My favorite connection is Sean O’Mara, a graphics designer and accomplished mountaineer who lives
in London. His grandmother is one of my grandfather’s sisters, Mary. Though we have quite a family tree put together by my Aunt Peggy, I had overlooked Mary’s branch.
Mary died in 1934, a year after my dad was born. By that time, she was married to Patrick O’Mara.
There’s no official record that Patrick participated in the Rising, but speculation exists that he did. His brother, Peadar O’Mara, was a participant. Patrick was on the scene as a gunman during the war of independence and the civil war.
Finally, we have my granddad’s younger brother, Michael. He was too young to be a rebel, but served in a unit comprised of young boys, akin to the Boy Scouts.
“Part of the duties of the Fianna Scouts were to decoy the troops away from the regular training grounds of the IRA,” Michael said in an article in a Canadian union publication chronicling his life. “We would all gather together and hike off to the country, and the police were more or less obligated to follow us to ensure we didn’t engage in any illegal activities.
“But the real purpose of the hike was to draw the police away from the places the IRA was training.”
Michael had immigrated to Canada and raised a family. Two of his sons wound up in America. A grandson of Michael in England, Anthony Oman, provided me a copy of the article. Michael was 17 when he saw action in the Irish Civil War on the side of the anti-treaty forces.
He was hiding out in a relative’s
home when members of the Irish Free State Criminal Investigation Department were used to “unofficially execute suspicious persons whom they did not want to bother sending to trial,” according to the article.
He was taken into custody, surprised he wasn’t shot on the spot, questioned and then released.
“Later I learned the only reason I was released was that an influential priest had personally asked for my release, and he told me later that I was in grave danger of being executed,” Michael recalled.
But Anthony said his father recently told him the story was cleaned up for publication and omitted the role my grandfather played in Michael’s release.
“My dad says he toned that down slightly for the article,” Anthony told me. “He said that his brother William went to the priest and said get a message to them that if anything happens to Michael he would shoot every Free State CID [Criminal Investigation Department] man he saw on the streets.”
That side of my grandfather was the opposite of how Dermot remembered him growing up. In his neighborhood, William Oman was known as the Bishop, Dermot recalled, “because of his children’s church connections.”
In an era when an Irish Catholic family considered it a blessing to have a child join a religious order, five of William’s 11 children entered religious vocations. Four daughters became nuns and a son became a priest. All five eventually were assigned to America by their religious orders, and all have celebrated 50 years of consecrated life.
Anthony, who has never been to Ireland and was surprised at the extent of the Omans still there, marveled at the exploits of our ancestors, with his witty Irishness shining through.
“We definitely come from some strong characters. Ireland would probably still be under the crown if it wasn’t for the Omans,” Anthony said.
He was joking. But families have interesting characters in their past, and it might take someone else to appreciate those interesting characters long before we do.
I remember a fictional account of Ireland during the period of the Rising titled A Star Called Henry, published in 1999. It was written by novelist Roddy Doyle. American readers might remember his book The Commitments, which was turned into a minor hit movie of the same name.
At one point, Doyle’s protagonist, Henry Smart, was put in place of my grandfather at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral. The author wrote that William Oman was ill that day. Another mention in the book regarding my grandfather annoyed my dad.
My dad fired off a letter to the author. I cannot imagine what he told Doyle, but I remember Doyle writing back that the Omans “were an interesting family, and you should write about them.”
Indeed.