Patrick Gallagher, My Story

Abstract

‘This is a new kind of book to come out of Ireland, and it is written by a new kind of Irishman.’¹ Thus begins Peadar O’Donnell’s introduction to the first edition of the autobiography of Patrick Gallagher (1871–1966), which he hails as the testimony of a pioneering social radical, ‘a human document alive with an infectious gaiety and hope’. Gallagher came from the same socio-economic background as O’Donnell and Michael MacGowan and, like them, was steeped in the oral storytelling tradition of post-Famine Donegal. In 1881 he left his native Cleendra in the Rosses to work as a spalpeen in the Lagan, the farming region east of Letterkenny, and six years later crossed to Scotland, where he worked as a farm hand and miner, principally in Lanarkshire and Roxburghshire. It was in Scotland that Gallagher and his wife Sally, whom he married in 1898, first experienced the benefits of co-operativism and saw its potential to regenerate the rural Irish economy. On returning to Ireland at the turn of the century, he set about planning a co-operative venture and in 1906 founded the Templecrone Co-operative Society, which earned him the nickname ‘Paddy the Cope’. His struggles to assert the principles of co-operativism against the powerful vested interests of rural merchants and shopkeepers is the subject of much of his autobiography; hence O’Donnell’s admiration for it as an account of anti-capitalist regional activism.

With a foreword by E. P. McDermott (Dungloe: Templecrone Co-operative Society, n.d. [1945]). Revised edn. 328pp.; pp. 79–86.