Desmond Fitzgerald

Life
(1988-1947; orig. Thomas Joseph FitzGerald); b. Essex, England; son of Patrick Fitzgerald, an Irish labourer from S. Tipperary and Mary Anne [nee] Scollard from Co. Kerry; joined literary group known as Tour Eiffel in which incl. Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and others participated; changed name to Desmond; visited Ireland in 1910; met and m. Mabel Washington McConnell, dg. of a whiskey salesman from Belfast whom he met at an Irish language class, 1911 - with whom four children being Desmond, Pierce, Fergus and Garret [q.v.]; lived in France before moving to Kerry, 1913; joined Volunteers in 1914; imprisoned for anti-war speeches in 1915; settled in Wicklow and took part in the 1916 Rising, in managing rations and wounded in the GPO;

captured in his own attic some days after the surrender, having escaped through breached walls and gunfire; imprisoned with De Valera and released in 1918; elected for SF in Pembroke Constituency, Dublin; appt. first foreign minister of Irish Free State, 1921; offered Irish citizenship (passport) to James Joyce in Paris - which Joyce declined; became the father of Garret Fitzgerald, the Fine Gael Taoiseach; author of a play, The Passing, and love poems in the journal New Age; also a volume of poems published privately in France.

[ There is an amply article on Fitzgerald in Wikipedia which precludes however any mention of Joyce - online; accessed 31.10.2023.]

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Bibl. note: For incidental commentary, see Helen Carr, The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, HD and The Imagists (London: Jonathan Cape 2009).

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Desmond Fitgerald in 1929