Boland, Harry, 1887-1922

Harry Boland (27 April 1887 – 1 August 1922) was an Irish republican, politician, and revolutionary organiser who played a central role in the Irish separatist movement from the Easter Rising of 1916 through to the outbreak of the Irish Civil War in 1922. Born in Phibsborough, Dublin, into a Fenian family, he became an active member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Irish Volunteers, the Gaelic Athletic Association, and Sinn Féin, and was closely associated with both Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins during the revolutionary period. Boland took part in the Easter Rising of 1916 as part of the GPO garrison and was subsequently sentenced to ten years' penal servitude, serving time alongside de Valera in English prisons before being released under the general amnesty of June 1917. In the years that followed, he became one of the principal organisers of Sinn Féin's electoral machine, playing a key role in the party's landslide victory at the 1918 general election, in which he was himself elected MP for Roscommon South. He subsequently served as de Valera's special envoy to the United States, spending much of the Irish War of Independence in America organising political support and attempting to procure arms for the Irish Volunteers. Following a return to Ireland, Boland voted against the Anglo-Irish Treaty in January 1922 and, despite sustained efforts to prevent a split, took up arms on the anti-Treaty side when the Civil War broke out in June 1922. He was shot by National Army soldiers during an attempted arrest at the Grand Hotel, Skerries, Co. Dublin, on 31 July 1922, and died the following day in St. Vincent's Hospital, Dublin. He was 35 years old. His funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery drew vast crowds, and his death was widely mourned on both sides of the Civil War divide. Collins, who had been his closest friend and later his political opponent, was killed three weeks later and was buried in the same cemetery.