Mallin, (Ó Mealláin), Séamus

by Brian Hughes

Mallin, (Ó Mealláin), Séamus (1903–82), republican, engineer and civil servant, was born James Laurence Mallin on 21 February 1903 in 24 Upper Wellington Street, Dublin, the eldest of five children (three sons and two daughters) of Michael Mallin (qv), trade unionist, socialist and silk weaver, and Agnes Mallin (née Hickey). Like many of their social standing, the Mallins lived at several addresses in Dublin city during Séamus's early years: Upper Wellington Street (1904–8), Blessington Street, Capel Street (both 1908), Hamilton Street (1908–10) and Meath Street (1910–13). In August 1913 the family moved to Finglas where Michael Mallin hoped to establish a chicken farm. A near fatal bout of Bright's disease forced him to sell up and the family returned to the city the following year. In October 1914 Michael Mallin was appointed chief of staff of the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) under James Connolly (qv). Séamus often accompanied his father on route marches and training exercises with the ICA and when, on one occasion, he suffered a bullet wound to the foot after a rifle was accidentally discharged, was jokingly dubbed the first casualty of the revolution.

Séamus was twelve years old when his father took up his position as commandant of the St Stephen's Green/Royal College of Surgeons garrison during the 1916 rising. He spent Easter week at his aunt's home in Chapelizod, Co. Dublin, and retained vivid memories of his last meeting with his father in Kilmainham jail on 7 May 1916, the eve of his execution. Immediately after the rising, Agnes (Una) Mallin was assisted in raising her young family by dependants' funds and the White Cross. Through the influence of P. T. Keohane, editor of the Catholic Bulletin, the education of her eldest sons – Séamus and Seán – was financed by an anonymous American benefactor. Séamus was a student first at St Enda's in Rathfarnham and later a border at Knockbeg College, Co. Carlow. In 1924 the family moved to a new home at 105 McCaffrey's Estate, Mount Brown, and later to 28 North Circular Road, Dublin.

Still a teenager in 1922, Mallin joined the anti-treaty IRA in the aftermath of the split over the Anglo-Irish treaty. He had begun studying for an engineering degree in UCD but on 23 October 1922, aged nineteen, was arrested by national army troops in Kilmainham. Tried on 11 November for possession of a revolver without proper authority – an offence liable to the death penalty – Mallin was sentenced to five years' penal servitude. Cahir Davitt (qv), judge advocate general of the national army in 1922, was later informed by Diarmuid O'Hegarty (qv) that Mallin had avoided execution 'mainly because he was the son of Michael Mallin executed in 1916' (BMH WS 1,751). Interned in the Hare Park camp in the Curragh, Co. Kildare, he was one of over seven thousand republican prisoners who participated in a hunger strike from mid-October 1923. By the time the strike was called off on 23 November, Mallin had been without food for twenty-eight days.

Released on 7 June 1924, he resumed his studies in UCD, receiving a BE in 1926. His first appointment after graduating was with the Shannon hydroelectric scheme where he worked on transmission lines. In 1932 he left Ireland to take up a post surveying the topography and ecology of Venezuela. His mother Agnes spent much of the 1920s seriously ill with tuberculosis, first contracted in 1924. Mallin was still travelling in South America and uncontactable when she died, aged fifty-six, in April 1932 and he was unable to attend her funeral.

Mallin returned to Dublin in late 1932 and began work with Dublin County Council. Laurence Kettle (qv), an electrical engineer with the council, and a prisoner in the Royal College of Surgeons in 1916, was said to have had an influence in the appointment. Moving on to work for the Irish Sugar Company and the Dublin Port Milling Company, Mallin secured an appointment in the engineering department of the Office of Public Works in 1939. Later that year he moved to the fisheries section of the Department of Agriculture and was its head engineer on retirement in 1969. Fisheries saw Mallin's longest, and greatest, impact on public life. He was appointed chairman of the Irish Sea Fisheries Association and, when that body was replaced by Bord Iascaigh Mhara in 1952, became its first president, a position he held for a decade. He was a member of the Irish delegation at the first and second UN law of sea conferences (1956–8 and 1960), aimed at deciding and regulating national fishing boundaries. A popular and respected engineer, fisheries expert and diplomat, Mallin retained an advisory role to the Irish deputation at the third UN law of the sea conference in 1973.

Mallin was an Irish language enthusiast, often writing and speaking publicly in Irish. Conversant in several other languages, he also shared a love of the arts and helped found An Cumann Ealaíon with lifelong friend Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh (qv). He remained an active and vocal republican, and in 1936 ran as an independent republican candidate in the Dublin municipal elections, campaigning for the release of republican prisoners and speaking out against the 1936 Constitution Amendment Act, the government ban on the IRA. Like the other republican candidates, Mallin polled poorly and received 630 votes from a valid tally of 21,556. He then became a member of the short-lived, pro-IRA, Cumann Poblachta na h-Éireann. Though he regularly offered orations at 1916 commemorative events around the country in the 1930s, Mallin complained to the Department of the Taoiseach in 1941 that he had never been invited to the official state 1916 commemorations and had yet to visit his father's grave in Arbour Hill. An Irish Times obituary recalled how he 'was too full of the joy of life to wallow in the patriotism of martyrology. Instead he lived for his country as his father died for it … He transcended the tragedy of his father's death' (2 July 1982). The six articles Mallin composed on his father's life, published in Inniu in 1966, eschewed politics, hagiography or justification for the 1916 rising and instead focussed on personal reflections and family memories of his father.

On 11 October 1933 in Cork Séamus Mallin married Sophie Stockley (d. 1994), daughter of the scholar and republican Professor William Frederick Stockley (qv) and his second wife Marie Germaine (née Kolb). They had two sons, Michael and Seán, and three daughters, Germaine, Una and Annette. He died, aged seventy-eight, on 14 June 1982 at the family home in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, and is buried at Deansgrange cemetery.