Early Life: IRA Border Campaign
Born into a middle class family in Bray, County Wicklow, he was educated at Christian Brothers College, Monkstown. He left school at 15 and became a mechanic and later car salesman in Dublin.
At the age of 16 he joined Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Army. Within a year, he was commanding an active service unit of the IRA in south County Londonderry during the Border Campaign, where his leadership skills and his burning down of the courthouse in Magherafelt earned him the nickname of "the Boy General". The most publicised actions of his unit included the destruction of bridges and the burning of Magherafelt courthouse. He was arrested in Glencree, County Wicklow, in 1957 and sentenced to six months in Mountjoy Prison. On his release, he was immediately interned in the Curragh prison camp for two years.
He spent his time in prison studying. He was particularly inspired by his studies of the Vietnamese struggle for independence. He became a member of the escape committee which engineered the successful escapes of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh and Dáithí Ó Conaill, among others. Costello would later refer to this time as his "university days".
Read more about this topic: Seamus Costello
Famous quotes containing the words early, border and/or campaign:
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Swift while the woof is whole,
turn now my spirit, swift,
and tear the pattern there,
the flowers so deftly wrought,
the border of sea-blue,
the sea-blue coast of home.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“Dianne’s not one of the boys, but she’s not one of the girls, either.”
—Marcia Smolens, U.S. political campaign aide. As quoted in Dianne Feinstein, ch. 15, by Jerry Roberts (1994)