IF you ever take a short detour off Tsar Boris III Boulevard in Sofia, and if your grasp of Cyrillic script is good, you might be surprised to see a street named after somebody called “Piars O’Mahoni”. The reference is, as it sounds, to an Irishman, and this is not the only monument to him in Europe. In his native country, in keeping with local tradition, he is also commemorated by a GAA club: Navan O’Mahony’s. And in another part of Ireland – Wicklow – there is a living tribute to his life’s work, of which more later.
But the exotically-spelled street in Sofia is an apt reminder of the further-flung adventures of a man whose long and fascinating life embraced two wives, three religions, and at least four names, including the Balkanised version.
His longest name was the one he was born under in north Kerry in 1850: Pierce Charles de Lacy O’Mahony. As such, he was the well-to-do grandson of an MP who had been a close friend of Daniel O’Connell. Another ancestor had dropped the “O” from the family surname and converted to Protestantism. So the young Pierce grew up Anglican and was generally known as Pearse Mahony, by which title he in turn became an MP and an intimate of the leading nationalist politician of his own time: Parnell.
He held the Irish Party’s seat in North Meath for several years until 1892 when, in the wake of the great split, he stood by Parnell and lost a bitter election to Michael Davitt. Thereafter, he never sat in parliament again, although he remained an active Home Ruler. By an odd coincidence, the year 1850 and the same general corner of Munster – in this case Bruff, Co Limerick – produced another man, James Bourchier, who would also in time have a street in Sofia named after him. Maybe it was something in the water.
At any rate, while travelling in Eastern Europe circa 1903 with his second wife Alice, O’Mahony witnessed the plight of refugee children who had been orphaned in a doomed uprising against the Turks. This became one of the causes of his life.
Together, the couple founded the St Patrick’s Orphanage in Sofia. And they were still there when, in 1906, Alice died suddenly, leaving O’Mahony a widower for the second time.
His engagement with Bulgaria nevertheless continued. He later tried to use his influence to keep the (by then independent) country from siding with Germany in the first World War and, despite failing, lobbied afterward to have Bulgaria exempted from reparations. In the process, he became a member of the Orthodox Church.
But he was no less involved with his native Ireland. He had also now adopted an old clan title “The O’Mahony”. And through another branch of the family, he was deeply – if indirectly – involved in one of the scandals of the century: the theft of the Irish crown jewels. Committed in 1907, the crime remains officially unsolved. But a 1908 inquiry blamed negligence by the jewels’ custodian, Sir Arthur Vicars,O’Mahony’s half-brother. Thereafter it became yet another of the Kerryman’s campaigns to have his relative’s name cleared.
Writing in The Irish Timesin 1968, the veteran IRB man Bulmer Hobson recalled how when he was a young man, working as a political journalist and eager for anti-establishment propaganda, he had sought the full story of the robbery – unprintable in Ireland at the time – from O'Mahony.
The “charming and courteous old man” identified the thieves as Frank Shackleton, ne’er-do-well brother of the explorer Ernest, and an army captain from Kingstown called Richard Gorges. According to O’Mahony, the two had attended a party in the castle on the night in question, plied Vicars with whiskey, and stolen the jewels, which they later pawned for £20,000 in Amsterdam. Their guilt was well known, he added, but under questioning they had threatened to expose embarrassing details about wild parties in the Castle and the authorities backed off. Hobson published his scoop in the US and claimed the facts were later confirmed to him in person by one of the thieves, Gorges, when the latter turned up in his D’Olier Street office in 1912, ostensibly seeking to advise Hobson of a cunning plan by which republicans could capture every army barracks in Dublin without a fight.
Like many others, O’Mahony was caught off guard by 1916 and its aftermath. He had campaigned for Irish recruitment in the war and, in 1918, stood for the old nationalist party in Wicklow – where he then lived – losing to Sinn Féin. Later, angered by British policies in Ireland, he returned his CBE and resigned official positions as deputy lieutenant and justice of the peace.
But the IRA’s 1921 assassination of Vicars cast a gloom over O’Mahony’s declining years. He was by then accustomed to wearing full Gaelic regalia on public appearances, including feathered beret and saffron kilt, and was sometimes accompanied by a piper. Reversing the decision of his ancestors, he also converted to Catholicism shortly before his death in 1930.
I mentioned earlier that his legacy today extends beyond a street-name in Sofia and a GAA club in Meath. To wit, after setting up the Bulgarian orphanage, he continued to take an interest in the lives of those who went there. He even brought several orphans to Ireland and funded their education. One of these was the late Eftim Ivanoff who studied agriculture and became a farmer in Wicklow, where his sons, Ivan, Boris, Philip, and a large extended family remain today.