The Raid and What Went With It

Abstract

My bed was along the north wall of the room, and Sean O’Casey’s bed was more or less in the middle. There was a door in the south wall. I think that there would have been about three feet between the head of Sean’s bed and the centre of the room when we slept, and there would have been the same distance between his feet and the door.² There was a sort of small library in the corner to the right of the door with Sean’s and my books settled there. I never measured the room so I am guessing, but it is not a wild guess. The way we arranged ourselves, there wasn’t an inch wasted. Sean’s bed was collapsible, so he was able to put it between the two windows on the east wall of the room. During the day it wasn’t necessary to move my bed out of its place. It was easy to arrange the two beds. Sean usually unfolded his bed first; then all we had to do was shake out the beds and straighten the covers. We usually went to bed about eleven o’clock at night, but then we would talk for an hour or so till midnight.

Late in 1920 Sean O’Casey moved into a room at Mountjoy Square which he shared with Micheal Maoláin (Michael Mullen), an Inishmaan man livinginDublin. See David Krause (ed.), ‘O’Casey Chronology’, The Letters of Sean O’Casey, I (New York: Macmillan, 1975) p. xxv. ‘An Ruathar Ud agus a nDeachaigh Leis’, O’Maoláin’s account of his life with O’Casey and the Black and Tan raid that took place on Good Friday, 1921, was published in Irish in Feasta (Bealtaine, 1955) pp. 2–4, 6, 22, 24–5.

O’Maoláin is of interest to O’Casey ans because he was the inspiration for Seumas Shields. See ‘The late Mr. O’Maoláin was the original for Seumas Shields in The Shadow of a Gunman’ [David Krause, Sean O’Casey: The Man and His Work, New York: Macmillan, 1960 p. 292]; ‘Davoren is not the only character in the play to carry aspects of the playwright onto the stage; even Seumas Shields, although patently modeled after Michael Mullen, contains O’Casey characteristics’. [Bernard Benstock, Sean O’Casey, Lewisburgh: Bucknell University Press, 1970, p. 35].