Brian O'Higgins

Brian O'Higgins ( _ga. Brian Ó hUigínn; 1 July 1882 – 3 March 1963) was an Irish Sinn Féin politician. He was President of Sinn Féin from 1931–1933. He was elected unopposed as a Sinn Féin MP for Clare West in the 1918 general election. In January 1919, Sinn Féin MPs who had been elected in the Westminster elections of 1918 refused to recognise the Parliament of the United Kingdom and instead assembled in Dublin as a revolutionary parliament called Dáil Éireann. He was re-elected as an anti-Treaty Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) at the 1921, 1922 and 1923 elections. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty and voted against it. He lost his seat at the June 1927 general election.

O'Higgins was born in Kilskyre, Co. Meath to a family with strong Fenian and Parnellite traditions. He moved to Dublin as a teenager and became active in the Gaelic League. Throughout his lifetime he composed large amounts of verse in Irish and English on political and devotional themes; some of his ballads such as "A Stor Mo Croi" and "Charlie Kerins" are still recorded and sung. From the late 1920s he ran a successful business publishing greeting cards, calendars etc decorated with Celtic designs and O'Higgins' own verses. From 1938 to 1962 he published the Wofle Tone Annul which gave popular accounts of episodes in Irish history from an ultra-republican viewpoint. He was a devout Catholic and critical of those who believed republicans should be socialists. Several of his children became Catholic priests and religious.

In December 1938, O'Higgins was one of a group of seven people, who had been elected to the Second Dáil in 1921, who met with the IRA Army Council under Seán Russell. At this meeting, the seven signed over what they believed were the authority of the Government of Dáil Éireann to the Army Council. Henceforth, the IRA Army Council perceived itself to be the legitimate government of the Irish Republic and, on this basis, the IRA and Sinn Féin justified their rejection of the states of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland and political abstentionism from their parliamentary institutions.

ee also

*Irish republican legitimatism

External links

* [http://www.electionsireland.org/candidate.cfm?ID=1115 Brian O'Higgins' Electoral History] (ElectionsIreland.org)