Diarmuid O'scannlain SR 11214, Oral History, by Michael O’Rourke
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Diarmuid O'Scannlain SR 11214, Oral History, by Michael O’Rourke United States District Court Oral History Project 2008 June 20 - 2010 April 10 O’SCANNLAIN: Diarmuid O'Scannlain MOR: Michael O'Rourke Transcribed by: His, 2009 Audit/edit by: Janice Dilg, 2010; Eilizabeth Provost, 2010 Reviewed by Diarmuid O’Sannlain, 2015 Session 1 2008 June 20 MOR: I'm here with Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain today, beginning his oral history. Judge O'Scannlain, I wanted to start by asking you about your background. Both your parents came from Ireland? OSCANNLAIN: Yes, I'm a first generation Irish American. [clearing throat] My father came to this country in the 1920s, originally. My mother came with him after they were married in Ireland in 1936. My father was born in Sligo, which is a county in the west of Ireland. My mother was born in Derry, in the city of Derry, which is also a county; Derry City, Derry County is in the north of Ireland and still part of the U.K. It's the Northern Ireland separate entity. MOR: Your father was involved with the IRA [Irish Republican Army] from a very early period of his life. OSCANNLAIN: He was. Dad was born in 1900, and remarkably his father was a The Oregon Historical Society allows use of this Oral History Interview according to the following license: In Copyright – Educational Use Permitted http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC-EDU/1.0/ O'Scannlain SR 11214 member of the Royal Irish Constabulary; that's the RIC, which was the British police force that was in control of Ireland up until “The Troubles” began and Ireland won its independence. Dad became very much involved in the movement for independence. He was a very serious Gaelic speaker but didn't have much formal schooling, having grown up on the farm. In the process he got very actively involved with elements that were dedicated to Irish independence, and in due course was a member of the Irish Republican Army and rose to cadre, which involved another organization, but it was inside the IRA, called the IRB, the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In that regard, he became involved with Éamon De Valera, who eventually became Prime Minister of a newly independent Republic of Ireland and president of the country before he died. But Dad, in his role with the Irish Republican Brotherhood, was assigned the task at a fairly young age of obtaining arms for the movement. He was sent to Manchester, England, where he was able to acquire arms through dealings with German agents. We're talking now about 1918, 1919, close to the hostilities of World War I. It was a high-risk occupation to be caught inside Britain consorting with German agents, but that was his role, and he regrettably got caught in the act and was sent back to Mountjoy Prison in Dublin, from which he escaped. He and a cell mate were able to tunnel out, and went up to the north of Ireland to Derry City—at that time it was called Londonderry, of course—and in the process first met, as it turns out, my mother. So this would be somewhere around 1919, 1920, something like that. My mother used to tell the story of the Black and Tans coming to the front door of their house on Westland Avenue of Derry City, and she would say with a very sincere face, "Oh, there's nobody here, there are no fugitives in this house," and of course they were upstairs in the attic, and she was feeding them every day, sending food up. 2 O'Scannlain SR 11214 Eventually things cooled down enough for him to get back into circulation. MOR: He met your mother in the context of her providing shelter for him? OSCANNLAIN: Yes! Absolutely. Her father was the head of the IRA in Derry. He was a tobacconist; they owned a tobacco store, cigarettes and that sort of thing, newspapers, but was acclaimed after “The Troubles” were over for playing a very important role in that part of the country. In 1921, the British government offered Ireland a treaty, which was somewhat controversial. The people lined up on both sides, either to accept it or not. De Valera and my dad were opponents of the treaty because the treaty offered freedom or independence under a free state concept for only twenty-six out of the thirty-two counties of Ireland. The British would keep the north. On the other side was Michael Collins, who was the emissary that went to Lloyd George and negotiated the treaty, and he thought it was the best that could be done, so he supported it. The signing of the treaty precipitated a civil war, and my father and De Valera were on one side, and Michael Collins was on the other. If you ever saw the movie Michael Collins, there a scene in it in which there is a battle being fought at the Four Courts, and on the interior of the Four Courts were my father and De Valera, and on the outside shelling the place was Collins. Collins prevailed, and as a result my father was interned again, this time by Irish Free State forces under Collins, and sent to a place called the Curragh, which is in Kildare, just below Dublin, and so for his troubles he was imprisoned twice. After the amnesty in 1923, all of the political prisoners were released, but my father, being on the losing side of the civil war, felt that there was no future for him in Ireland, so somewhere between '23 and '24, '25, somewhere in that period, he left Ireland for Canada. 3 O'Scannlain SR 11214 He was very skilled as a carpenter, so he had jobs in construction. Eventually he came into this country; we're not sure whether it was legal or not, and I think of that when I sit on immigration cases. But he came in through Detroit and eventually found his way to New York, where he was reasonably successful, between his skill in construction and eventually deciding to buy a business, which he was able to do before World War II. But at the height of his economic success, which would probably be in the middle '30s, right after the Depression, but by about 1934, '35 somewhere in there, he was able to go back to Ireland and renew his acquaintanceship with Moira Hegarty, my mother. After that lengthy courtship they were married in a suburb of Belfast in 1936, and Dad brought Mom back to New York, where they settled, and I was born in 1937. Dad had, by that time, acquired a travel business, which he was able to buy from one of the people he got to know, William O'Dwyer, who later became Mayor of New York City. So Bill O'Dwyer and my dad were good friends. The travel business was doing very, very well until about 1939, when things started to go awry in Europe, and of course by 1941 it was all over. Dad was conscripted into service as a carpenter, in which he spent most of World War II. He was probably in his forties at that point. He spent most of World War II building Quonset huts for the United States Navy in a town called Quonset in Rhode Island. MOR: You mentioned the phrase “lengthy courtship.” Are you counting the time from 1920, then, through '32? OSCANNLAIN: Oh, yes. We've assumed that somewhere along the lines of fourteen or fifteen years, but that would have been typical of Ireland in those days. I mean people had very, very long courtships. MOR: So there was already a romantic spark in the air, maybe, at the time that she provided shelter for him? 4 O'Scannlain SR 11214 OSCANNLAIN: I'm sure that the thought occurred to one or the other at some point. MOR: Then you grew up speaking Gaelic for the first four or five years? OSCANNLAIN: I mentioned earlier that Dad was a very serious Gaelic speaker, and he actually was eligible to wear what's called the fainné. The fainné is just a little round gold circle which is worn on the lapel, and that certifies that one is an accomplished Gaelic speaker, and Dad was very proud of that. In fact, that was one of the things that I'm sure enhanced the romance with my mother, because my mother was also a Gaelic speaker. She was a schoolteacher. She went to Queens University—at that time it was called Queens College—in Belfast and got a teaching certificate. It would be something short of a bachelor's degree today. She was a schoolteacher in a town outside of Belfast, but she was a serious Gaelic student, and they decided as a convention that they would only speak Gaelic inside the house, so there they are living in New York City speaking Gaelic to each other. I come along, and that was the language I was brought up on until about the age of, what, four or five I suppose, when I started to mix with other children and had to do something about communicating with them. So that's how I got to speak Gaelic. I retained quite a lot of it through grade school, but after a while Mom and Dad just didn't do that so much anymore, and there was less of an environment in which you'd have a reason to keep it up.