McNeela and D'Arcy remembered in Mayo

Rose Conway Walsh addressing the commemoration

REPUBLICANS from Mayo and from many parts of Ireland and Scotland gathered last Sunday, 30 September, to commemorate Volunteer Seán ‘Jack’ McNeela, from Ballycroy, who died on hunger strike in 1940 under the de Valera Fianna Fáil government.
Jack McNeela was sentenced to two years in jail for “conspiracy to usurp the functions of the government” in operating a pirate radio station. He and his comrade, Tony D’Arcy,  from Galway, died on a hunger strike of republican prisoners for political status in April 1940.
Rose Conway Walsh, Sinn Féin councillor from Belmullet and chair, said: “The time was long past to accord them due honour and their place  alongside  Mayo men Michael Gaughan and Frank Stagg, who died on hunger strike in England in the 1970s.”
Assembly deputy speaker Francie Molloy gave an outstanding oration, where he traced the history of the republican struggle.
He spoke of the part which Mayo has played in this long struggle, from Captain Boycott, the land wars, the Tan War, the re-organisation of the IRA in the 1930s, to take the war to the ‘belly of the beast’ in 1939.
He spoke of the regrouping of Sinn Féin in the 1960s, and the civil rights campaign. Frank Stagg and Michael Gaughan again challenged the British Government is England, this time in the 1970s. Collusion by the then Dublin Government, of Paddy ‘Cockroach’ Cooney and his Fine Gael/Labour government betrayed the Irish prisoners. They were left to die, as McNeela had been 30 years before that.
He ended his oration at this phase of the struggle for unification, which began with the civil rights campaign and became a mass movement which brought the British Army onto the streets and the ensuing armed struggle to get them out.  
“Now,” Francie Molloy said, “this same struggle is about making politics work - which means rebuilding everywhere a mass people’s movement to wipe out the border and win political sovereignty for our island by following the examples of Jack McNeela and Tony D’Arcy.”
After beautiful music and song by the graveside by Paul Hill from Galway on the accordion, people went back to Ballycroy Community Centre, where local republicans, held an exhibition, organised by Seando Moore, to mark the history of the hunger strikes and the honoured place occupied by people of  the West of Ireland.