Item 5 - Letter to Tim Healy from republican internees

9 pp; Manuscript

Letter to Tim Healy from various republican internees asking him intercede in a dispute with prison authorities. The manuscript provides background to the dispute. The letter is in two distinctive hands and is (copy) signed by ‘Michael Staines, Head Leader; James Murphy, leader, no. 1 room; Edward A. Morkan, leader, no. 2 room; R.J. Mulcahy, leader, no. 3 room; Thomas D. Sinnott, Leader no. 4 Room’. The letter reads:
‘Recently the military authorities in charge of the Camp here have adopted such an attitude of consistently vindictive injustice towards us that we are reluctantly compelled to believe that there must be some ulterior motive behind it. … We can do very little to help ourselves, cut off as we are from all the world, and strictly prohibited – officially – from sending out a single complaint’.
In September 1917 Healy acted as counsel for the family of the dead Sinn Féin hunger striker Thomas Ashe. He was one of the few King’s Counsel to provide legal services to members of Sinn Féin in various legal proceedings in both Ireland and England after the 1916 Rising. This included acting for those illegally interned in 1916 in Frongoch in North Wales.