Ernie O'Malley - Subsequent Life

Subsequent Life

By the time O'Malley recovered from his wounds, the Civil War was over and he was transferred to Mountjoy Prison. During this period of imprisonment, O'Malley went on hunger strike for forty-one days, in protest at the continued detention of IRA prisoners after the war. While on hunger strike, he was elected as a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for Dublin North at the 1923 general election. He did not contest the June 1927 general election. He was one of the last Republican prisoners to be released following the end of hostilities. At his family's suggestion, he took an extended vacation in Europe to recover his health, climbing mountains in the Pyrenees and Italy.

O'Malley returned to University College Dublin to continue his medical studies in 1926 where he was heavily involved in the university hillwalking club and Literary and Historical Society, but he left Ireland in 1928 without graduating. In 1928, he toured the USA on behalf of Éamon de Valera raising funds for the establishment of the new Irish Republican newspaper the Irish Press.

He spent the next few years travelling throughout the United States before arriving in Taos in New Mexico in 1930, where he lived among the native Americans for a time and began work on his account of the manuscript that would later become On Another Man's Wound. He fell in with Mabel Dodge Luhan and her artistic circle that included such figures as D. H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, Ella Young and Aaron Copland. Later that year he travelled to Mexico where he studied at the Mexico City University of the Arts and worked as a high school teacher. His US visa having expired, he slipped across the Rio Grande and returned to Taos where he worked as a teacher again until 1932 where he travelled to Depression-era New York, where he became well known in literary and artistic circles. At this time he met Helen Hooker, a wealthy young sculptor and tennis player, whom he would later marry.

In 1934, O'Malley was granted a pension by the Fianna Fáil government as a combatant in the Irish War of Independence. Now possessed of a steady income, he married Helen Hooker in London on 27 September 1935 and returned to Ireland. The O'Malleys had three children and divided their time between Dublin and Burrishoole in County Mayo. Hooker and O'Malley devoted themselves to the arts, she involved in sculpture and theatre, while he made his living as a writer. In 1936, On Another Man's Wound was published to critical and commercial acclaim. O'Malley remained in neutral Ireland during The Emergency, involving himself as a member of the Local Security Force. However, during the war years the O'Malleys' marriage began to fail. Helen began to spend more and more time with her family in the United States and, in 1950, "kidnapped" two of the couple's three children and took them to live with her in Colorado. She divorced her husband in 1952. O'Malley kept their other son and sent him to boarding school in England. Ironically, despite his Republican politics, O'Malley was great admirer of the English Public School system of education.

He was friendly with the director John Ford, and actor John Wayne, whom he advised during the making of the film The Quiet Man.

Throughout his life O'Malley endured considerable ill-health from the wounds and hardship he had suffered during his revolutionary days. As befitting a celebrated figure of the Irish War of Independence, he was given a state funeral after his death in 1957. A sculpture of Manannán mac Lir, donated by O'Malley's family, stands in the Mall in Castlebar, County Mayo.

O'Malley's political ideas were somewhat vague, apart from an absolute commitment to full Irish independence. He largely eschewed politics after the Civil War, describing himself as "a soldier" who "had fought and killed the enemies of my nation". He saw it as a "soldier's job to win the war and a politician's job to win the peace".