Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin

Who was Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin?

Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin was an Irish far right politician. He was born on 2 January 1910 into a comfortable middle-class Catholic family living in the Protestant-dominated Stranmillis district of Belfast. Ó Cuinneagáin was an intelligent and studious youth who distinguished himself in the classroom, gaining the third place nationwide in the Irish civil service examinations in 1927 and earning matriculation to Queen's University, Belfast.

He was inspired by one of his former teachers at St Malachy's, Patrick Lenihan, to begin taking evening classes in Irish and adopted the Irish form of his name, changing it from Cunningham to Ó Cuinneagáin. His command of the Irish language gained him a position in 1933 as an editorial writer with the Republican weekly An tÉireannach.

He founded Ailtirí na hAiséirghe which had some influence for a short time in the 1940s. The party's aims included the banning of English spoken in public, the total revival of the Irish language across Ireland, the removal of Jews from Irish society, the rejection of Partition and the installation of a Catholic-based dictatorship. The party received support from politicians like Oliver J. Flanagan, Dan Breen and Ernest Blythe. Ailtirí na hAiséirghe held its last formal meeting in 1958, though the party newspaper continued to appear until the early 1970s.