Life
1920- ; b. and ed. Crescent College, Limerick; moved to England, returned to work at Shannon Airport; 25 plays, a musical, and scripts for radio and television; stage plays incl. Alas Poor Yorick (1953); Decision at Easter (Gate, 1959). dealing with tensions among Easter Rising leaders Rising; Mourn the Ivy Leaf (1960), on C. S. Parnell; The Stepping Stone (1963), on Michael Collins; also, Watershed (1967); A Beginning of Truth (1968), on contemporary politics; The Treaty Debates (1972), and Dev (1977; Co-Op Books, 1978, 76pp.), portrait of de Valera as rebel turned statesman. DIW DIL OCIL
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Works
Decision at Easter: A Play in Three Acts (Dublin: Progress House 1960) [n.p.]; Dev (Dublin: Co-op Books, 1978), 76pp.; Mourn
the Ivy Leaf: A Play of Parnell in Three Acts [Foreword by R. M. Fox] (Dublin: Progress House 1965), 72pp.; Watershed: A Play in Three Acts [New Irish Plays, ed. Robert Hogan] (Newark, Del: Proscenium Press 1981), 83pp.; And a Yellow Singing Bird: A Play in Two Acts (Dublin:
Elo Press, 1983), 90pp., 5 pls.; Beggar and Bloom: A Play in Two Acts (Glenageary: [private] 2000), 108pp.
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Commentary
Heinz Kosok, ‘The Easter Rising versus the Battle of the Somme: Irish Plays about the First World War as Documents of the Post-colonial Condition’, in Munira H. Mutran & Laura P. Z. Izarra, eds., Irish Studies in Brazil (Sao Paolo: Associação Editorial Humanitas 2005): ‘G. P. Gallivan in Decision at Easter [1959] was the first to take the daring step of bringing all the leaders of the Rising onto the stage, and it needed a highly apologetic foreword to the printed edition, emphasising that “the problems confronting the author were of a peculiar delicacy and difficulty”, because “the mental pictures of the executed leaders are sacrosanct”.’ (p.8; cites Ignatius Johns, ‘Foreword’, Decision at Easter, Progress Hse n.p.)
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