There was an even more famous Hugh O'Flaherty than the former Supreme Court Judge currently in the news. This was his uncle, Monsignor Hugh Joseph O'Flaherty, known as the Scarlet Pimpernel for his exploits in Rome during the second World War. A Curia official from 1922, Mgr O'Flaherty was appointed secretary to the Vatican's Nuncio to Italy in 1941 and among his responsibilities was visiting POW camps. He ran a Vatican escape line for those on the run from the Gestapo but had the odd game of golf with the foreign minister Count Galeazzo Ciano, Mussolini's son-in-law, as a cover for his underground activities, and with the British envoy Sir d'Arcy Godolphin Osborne, to plan tactics which included billeting prisoners in safe houses during the German occupation. Major Sam Derry, who wrote The Rome Escape Line, says the group had 3,400 POWs on its books at the end of the war.
Monsignor O'Flaherty, of whom many a tale is told of black markets, false-bottomed carts and other priestly derringdo, is buried in Cahirciveen.