Diarmuid Ring

Track 1: Diarmuid Ring recalls his father, Tim Ring, a member of the IRB who worked closely with Cathal Brugha, and he describes a meeting with J.J. Kelly (‘Sceilg’), in which he was told about a secret mission his father and Cathal Brugha undertook in London in earlier days. He details the circumstances in which his cousin Rosalie Rice filed the telegram from the post office in Kenmare to Tim Ring and his brother Eugene at the cable station in Valentia which alerted America and Germany to the uprising in Ireland on Easter Monday 1916. Track 2: Diarmuid’s father contracted tuberculosis in Frongoch camp in Wales during his imprisonment there and he subsequently suffed ill-health until his death in 1936. An anecdote is told about Dermot’s great- grandfather, Tadhg Ring, who marched to Killarney to join the Iveragh Fenians. John W. O’Sullivan also present during this recording, comments on the drowning in 1916 near Killorglin of Con Keating, a local Volunteer, while on a failed mission to procure a transmitter from the Wireless School in Caherciveen, which was to have been used to contact the Aud. Track 3: Dermot explains that the message about the Rising that was sent to New York by the Ring brothers was a plain language code, as follows: “Mother operated on successfully today.” He also notes that three generations of Ring family worked at the cable station – his grandfather who began in 1875, his father and Diarmuid himself. Track 4: John W. O’Sullivan recalls J.J. Kelly, who over the years recounted many stories of the Troubles. He also explains that his cousin, Maurice O’Neill, was one of the last Republicans to be executed, in November 1942.