Early Life
Neil Blaney was born in 1922 in the rural Fanad Peninsula in north County Donegal in Ireland. The eldest of a family of eleven, Blaney's father Neal had been a commander of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Donegal during the War of Independence and the Civil War. He served as both a TD and as a Senator between 1927 and 1948. It was from his father that Blaney got his strong republican views and his first introduction to politics. He was educated locally at Tamney on the rugged Fanad Peninsula and later attended Saint Eunan's College in Letterkenny as a boarder. Blaney later worked as an organiser with the Irish National Vintners and Grocers Association.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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