Irish Republican revolutionary, philosopher, poet, playwright, Irish language and cultural revivalist, patriot, Terence James MacSwiney died in Brixton Prison on 25th Oct 1920 after 74 days on hunger strike.
“If I die I know the fruit will exceed the cost a thousand fold. The thought of it makes me happy. I thank God for it. Ah, Cathal, the pain of Easter week is properly dead at last.”
Terence MacSwiney wrote these words in a letter to Cathal Brugha on September 30, 1920, the 39th day of his hunger strike. The pain he refers to is that caused by his failure to partake in the 1916 Easter Rising. Contradictory orders from Dublin and the failure of the arms ship, the Aud, to land arms in Tralee left the Volunteers in Cork unprepared for insurrection.
He was born on 28 March 1879 into a staunchly nationalist, Cork Catholic family at 23 North Main Street, Cork, County Cork, one of eight children of John and Mary MacSwiney. His father, John MacSwiney, of Cork, had volunteered in 1868 to fight as a papal guard against Garibaldi, had been a schoolteacher in London and later opened a tobacco factory in Cork. Following the failure of this business, he emigrated to Australia in 1885 leaving Terence and the other children in the care of their mother and his eldest daughter.
MacSwiney’s mother, Mary Wilkinson, was an English Catholic with strong Irish nationalist opinions.
MacSwiney is educated by the Christian Brothers at the North Monastery school in Cork but leaves at fifteen to help support the family. He becomes an accountancy clerk but continues his studies and matriculates successfully. He continues in full-time employment while he studies at the Royal University (now University College Cork), graduating with a degree in Mental and Moral Science in 1907.
In 1899 he joined the Gaelic League and remained an active supporter of the Irish language throughout his life, establishing Irish language classes with Tomás MacCurtain, and co-founding the Cork Celtic Literary Society which adopted a broad nationalist programme, and the Cork Dramatic Society with the writer and academic Daniel Corkery.
MacSwiney was a teacher, poet and playwright, and his play The Revolutionist, was described by historian Patrick Maume as “an important statement of MacSwiney’s philosophy of self-sacrifice”.
The Corkman believed that the sacrifice of the few could unite a people and mobilise the nation for freedom. In his collection of political writings, Principles of Freedom, he wrote “It is love of country that inspires us; not hate of the enemy …’”
Described as a sensitive poet-intellectual, MacSwiney’s writings in the newspaper Irish Freedom bring him to the attention of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. He is one of the founders of the Cork Brigade of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and is President of the Cork branch of Sinn Féin. He founds a newspaper, Fianna Fáil, in 1914, but it is suppressed after only 11 issues.
In April 1916, he is intended to be second in command of the Easter Rising in Cork and Kerry but stands down his forces on the order of Eoin MacNeill.
Following the rising, MacSwiney is imprisoned by the British Government under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and was imprisoned in Frongoch internment camp in Wales and later in Bromyard internment camps until his release in June 1917.
While he was still in Bromyard that he marries Muriel Murphy of the Cork distillery-owning family. Terence and Muriel had one child, Máire, born in 1918. Máire would later marry Ruairí Brugha, son of another famous Republican, Cathal Brugha.
In November 1917, he is arrested in Cork for wearing an Irish Republican Army (IRA) uniform, and inspired by the example of Thomas Ashe, goes on a hunger strike for three days prior to his release.
In the 1918 Irish general election, MacSwiney is returned unopposed to the first Dáil Éireann as Sinn Féin representative for Mid Cork, succeeding the Nationalist MP D. D. Sheehan.
After the murder of his friend Tomás Mac Curtain, the Lord Mayor of Cork on March 20, 1920, he is elected as Lord Mayor. A deeply religious man, during his acceptance speech made when he was elected Lord Mayor of Cork, he said of Ireland’s long fight for freedom: “It is not those who can inflict the most, but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.”
He was elected not only by the ballot box but with the blood of his predecessor, Tomás Mac Curtain. Mac Curtain had been Cork City’s first mayor to be elected by running on a Republican ticket, and he had won it despite the continual suppression of the party’s platform by British authorities.
In reprisal for his success, Mac Curtain was gunned down in his own bedroom at dawn by a squad of masked men—later revealed to be Crown Forces in disguise.
They had burst into Mac Curtain’s home and fired point-blank into the sleeping mayor as his wife and children cowered nearby. Due to the enforced curfew and martial law, his panicked children risked their lives by running to fetch the doctor for their mortally wounded father.
Mac Curtain died in the arms of his pregnant wife who found the soulful courage to remind him “this is for Ireland, Tomás.” It was his thirty-sixth birthday.
Tomás Mac Curtain (1884-1920)
The gory warning cloaked in this assassination was clear: the citizenry of Cork should think twice before electing any more free thinkers. No trial followed; the British Parliamentary inquest blamed “masked and unknown men,” but bragging by local British officials for having orchestrated it fuelled outrage.
When the Mayor of nearby Limerick was similarly assassinated in front of his family a mere two months later, shockingly the British Parliament agreed it was a perturbing coincidence, but declined further inquiry.
On August 12, 1920, MacSwiney is arrested in Cork for possession of “seditous articles and documents,” and also possession of a cipher key. He is summarily tried by a court on August 16 and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment and was shipped to London’s Brixton Prison for incarceration, making a mockery of the supposed justice system in place in his native land. MacSwiney declared before the tribunal, ‘I have decided the term of my imprisonment. Whatever your government may do, I shall be free, alive or dead, within a month.’
At Brixton MacSwiney immediately joined his fellow Irish Republican prisoners on hunger strike, with the aim of demanding Britain acknowledge him and his fellows as political prisoners.
This was no new tactic for the Irish, following a long tradition of fasting against injustice prevalent in ancient Ireland. and was met with no mercy at the hands of English guards. With MacSwiney being a duly elected Lord Mayor and the most high-profile striker at Brixton, he became an international celebrity, his emaciated features broadcast in newspapers from Dublin to Delhi.
It was of the utmost importance for the British to break his spirit and force a retraction from him; the ordeal proved harrowing. Force-fed through tubes that tore his throat, MacSwiney endured convulsions and delirium, indignities and veiled threats towards the welfare of his wife and infant child. Undaunted herself by these threats, Muriel MacSwiney travelled to London with her baby daughter Máire, pleading for clemency at Westminster’s gates and joining the crowds that swelled outside Brixton Prison, chanting Gaelic hymns to encourage the strikers.
Enthralled by MacSwiney breaking all previous records for a prisoner going without food, the international press afforded the case so much coverage that Ireland’s War of Independence and the cause of Irish freedom as suddenly parachuted onto the world stage ,and worldwide media attention. Crowds gathered to pray and protest at Brixton prison and King George V privately appealed to the British government for clemency and was even considering over-ruling Prime Minister Lloyd George and enduring a constitutional crisis. .
Messages of support poured in from around the world – a telegram sent from the mayor of New York to Lloyd George urged him to end the “the imprisonment of Lord Mayor MacSwiney whose heroic fortitude in representing even unto death the opinions of the citizens who elected him has won the admiration of all the peoples who believe in rule of the people by the people”.
10,000 people protested in Glasgow. The British newspaper The Observer noted “the majority of public opinion and of the press in Great Britain is unquestionably for the Lord Mayor’s release”.
As the hunger strike continued, the British government was threatened with a boycott of English goods by North America, and four countries in South America appealed to the Pope to intervene in the standoff.
Terence MacSwiney drew his final breath after 74 days kept as a political prisoner. At age forty-one, the poet-turned-revolutionary slipped away in the arms of his brother and a prison chaplain, his body a skeletal testament to an unyielding will. His last words to a priest by his side were, “I want you to bear witness that I die as a soldier of the Irish Republic.”
MacSwiney’s death was no quiet surrender; it served as a lurid exclamation mark in Ireland’s gruesome War for Independence, a death that reverberated across the Atlantic.
Pictures of MacSwiney’s beautiful widow Muriel MacSwiney clutching her infant child upon collecting her husband’s body circulated in papers across the globe, and incited outrage that shamed an empire.
Protests were held as far away as India and Chicago and widespread condemnation of the death and treatment of Terrence MacSwiney and his colleagues on hunger strike were issued around the world.
Yet it was across the Atlantic that his sacrifice kindled the fiercest flame. Irish America, with its millions of descendants nursing old grievances, erupted in solidarity. New York City declared a day of mourning on October 26; Broadway theaters dimmed their lights, factories sounded sirens, and at noon, every citizen paused in silence—a “city frozen in grief,” as the New York Times reported.
Vigils blazed for weeks: in Boston’s Fenway Park, 50,000 gathered under torchlight, reciting the Rosary; Chicago’s Holy Name Cathedral hosted masses where priests thundered against British “barbarism.”
Funds poured in—over $1 million (a fortune then) for the Irish cause, funneled through the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland. In Pittsburgh, 5,000 crammed the Lyceum Theater on Halloween night, 1920, to hear eulogies for MacSwiney.
MacSwiney's body lay in St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark in London where 30,000 people file past it. Fearing large-scale demonstrations in Dublin, the authorities divert his coffin directly to Cork. MacSwiney’s coffin arrived in Cork and escorted it to City hall where it laid in State.
On the 31st of October after funeral mass in Cork Cathedral, up to 100,000 lined the streets as MacSwiney was taken to the republican plot and buried beside his friend Tomás MacCurtain. Arthur Griffith then President of Sinn Féin delivered the graveside oration.
MacSwiney left no grand monument—only a legacy of suffering transmuted into strength. “That we shall win our freedom I have no doubt,” he had mused in prison, “that we shall use it well I am not so certain.”
His coffin bore the inscription “Murdered by the Foreigner in Brixton Prison” in Gaelic, directly showing his ties to Irish republicanism, culture, and anti-British sentiment.
Hailed as a martyr for Ireland for his courage and bravery, in daring to defy England. His hunger strike raised awareness of the political situation in Ireland. His death also hastened the Anglo-Irish Treaty which came about one year later, forcing Britain into peace talks and paving the way to an independent Irish Republic. He also left a body of writing that encompassed poetry, political philosophy and ideas for Ireland's economic development.
MacSwiney's life and work had a particular impact in India. Jawaharlal Nehru took inspiration from MacSwiney's example and writings, and Mahatma Gandhi counted him among his influences. A Indian revolutionary Bhagat Singh https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2023/03/marking-revolutionary-freedom-fighter.html was an admirer of Terence MacSwiney and wrote about him in his memoirs.
Other figures beyond India who counted MacSwiney as an influence include Ho Chi Minh who was working in London at the time of MacSwiney's death and said of him, "A nation that has such citizens will never surrender". On 1 November 1920, the Catalan organization CADCI held a demonstration in Barcelona, where the poet and politician Ventura Gassol delivered an original poem extolling MacSwiney.
Terence MacSwiney became a symbol for many Irish Nationalists. His decision to go on a hunger strike and later death cemented the use of food and hunger strike as a form of resistance against the British. The British might be able to control the location and treatment of the Irish prisoners, but the Irish prisoners’ refusal to eat signifies the reassertion of direct control over their bodies, directly defying the British.
MacSwiney’s actions and words “articulated a philosophy of self-sacrifice that would help define the emerging traditions of Irish republican martyrdom”. This element of self-sacrifice was seen throughout the psyche of IRA members like Brendan Hughes, Bobby Sands, and Dolours Price. Bobby Sands and Dolours Price are particularly good examples of how far they took the idea of self-sacrifice as they actually went on hunger strike, with Bobby Sands paying the ultimate price of death.
Irish republican Bobby Sands https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2021/05/remembering-bobby-sands.html also defied England by going on hunger strike in 1981. His goal: to be recognized as a political prisoner. After weeks of fasting, his hunger strike led to his death provoking an international outcry just as it did for MacSwiney in 1920.
MacSwiney’s impact on Bobby Sands can be seen through the entries in Sands’ prison diary which documents his first seventeen days on hunger strike. He starts with invoking the ideas of martyrdom and sacrifice associated with MacSwiney, writing: “I believe I am but another of those wretched Irishmen born of a risen generation with a deeply rooted and unquenchable desire for freedom” (Sands). This shows how Sands believes that his role is to continue the struggle and sacrifice himself like MacSwiney did for the cause of Irish freedom.
Sands continues to invoke MacSwiney throughout his diary, writing that MacSwiney is “in my thoughts” as he continued the process of his hunger strike (Sands).
Towards the end of his prison diary and hunger strike, Sands writes: “I have poems in my mind, mediocre no doubt, poems of hunger strike and MacSwiney, and everything that this hunger-strike has stirred up in my heart and in my mind, but the weariness is slowly creeping in, and my heart is willing but my body wants to be lazy, so I have decided to mass all my energy and thoughts into consolidating my resistance” (Sands).
This is particularly telling of MacSwiney’s impact on Sands in many ways. Sands is imitating MacSwiney not only through writing poetry but also through hunger strike, showing how Sands truly did want to emulate MacSwiney in more ways than one. Thinking about MacSwiney reminded Sands of the purpose of his hunger strike and gave him the strength to continue his resistance, showing MacSwiney’s impact on future generations of Republicans.
Sources and Further Reading
Principles of Freedom (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1921) - Terence MacSwiney
Despite Fools' Laughter. Poems by Terence MacSwiney; edited by B. G. MacCarthy (Dublin: M. H. Gill and Son, 1944).
Enduring the Most: The Life and Death of Terence MacSwiney by Francis J. Costello,
Terence MacSwiney: The Hunger Strike that Rocked an Empire by Dave Hannigan,
The Art and Ideology of Terence MacSwiney by Gabriel Doherty and Fiona Brennan
O’Farrell, Fergus. 2018. “Brixton Remembers One of Ireland’s Most Famous Hunger Strikers.” The Irish Times. Oct. 18.
Perlman, Jason. “Terence MacSwiney: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Hunger Strike.” 2007.
Sands, Bobby. “Prison Diary.” The Bobby Sands Trust.
Scull, Maggie. 2020.aggie. 2020. “The Three Funerals of Terence MacSwiney.” The Irish Times. Oct. 24.
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