This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Terry Clavin. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Born: 3 March 1881, Ireland
Died: 23 March 1969
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: Katherine Gibbons
Katherine (Kitty) O’Doherty (1881–1969), advanced nationalist, was born at Tyrrellspass, Co. Westmeath, on 3 March 1881, the daughter of Edward Gibbons , RIC sergeant, and his wife Anne (née Crossan). The family lived at Collinstown, Co. Westmeath. Her brother, a priest, was chaplain in a public school in Yorkshire and arranged for her to be educated there where she became fluent in German. After studying at the Loreto convent in Navan, and then in a teacher training college in Belfast, she worked as a national school teacher in Dublin until 1912. She and Séamus O’Doherty married in 1911.
A supporter of radical and nationalist causes, Kitty was a member of the Gaelic League and active in the suffragette movement, being friendly with Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. During the 1913 lock out she assisted the workers, helping out in the soup kitchens organised by Countess Markievicz. Soon after its formation in 1914, she joined Cumann na mBan, becoming quartermaster of the Ard Craobh branch, for long the only one. She admitted that although they drilled regularly, they had no guns and dowdy uniforms.
Séamus joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and was involved in the planning of the 1916 rising, storing arms in his house; Kitty was also active ferrying weapons around Dublin and organising fund-raising concerts for the Volunteers. Though detectives watched their house, Séamus’s work as a travelling salesman provided cover as he liaised with fellow conspirators throughout the country. Prior to the rising the IRB military council ordered him to detain Bulmer Hobson – a prominent IRB member who opposed the planned insurrection on tactical grounds – under armed guard until the rebellion had commenced. After releasing Hobson on the evening of Easter Monday, he reported to the GPO where Tom Clarke instructed him to lie low and reconstruct the IRB after the rising was crushed.
He avoided arrest in the aftermath of the rising and benefiting from the support of Clarke’s widow (Kathleen Clarke), re-assembled a temporary supreme council of the IRB in May 1916. During this period the council meetings were held in his home at 32 Connaught Street, Phibsborough. In September his authority as caretaker leader of the supreme council was acknowledged by John Devoy, secretary of Clan na Gael. Aware that many who had fought in the rising were grumbling that virtually all the volunteers outside Dublin had failed to participate, he conducted an inquiry, which exonerated the officers in question.
Meanwhile during 1916–17 Kitty worked full-time in a voluntary capacity as a secretary and trustee of the National Aid Society Office, a well-funded charity that provided relief to the families of republicans either imprisoned or killed after the 1916 rising. Partly due to her, Michael Collins was appointed the paid secretary of the organisation in February 1917, an important step in his ascent up the ranks of the republican movement. The O’Doherty household became a meeting place (and later a safe house) for republicans.
In 1917–18 Séamus contributed anti-conscription material to two underground journals and hid arms and ammunition in his house with which to resist conscription. He was arrested in May 1918 following the so-called ‘German plot’, spending a period in jail; as a result he did not, as intended, stand as a candidate in the 1918 parliamentary elections. That same year Kitty ran as a Sinn Féin candidate in a Dublin corporation election, missing out by four votes; soon after she was elected a poor law guardian. Arrested again in June 1919, Séamus was charged by court martial with possession of a rifle and ammunition found during a raid on his house. He was imprisoned in Mountjoy jail where, in protest at the authorities’ refusal to grant them political status, he was one of a number of republican prisoners to go on a hunger strike that autumn. After nineteen days he was released and transferred on 30 October to the Mater hospital; though in poor health he discharged himself later that day and went home.
Despite the likelihood of re-arrest, he declined to go on the run. In late November, a bullet narrowly missed him as he entered his house, a response to the IRA’s killing of a detective the previous July. Although this detective had led the raid on his house that resulted in his arrest, O’Doherty had no part in this assassination and was troubled by the IRA’s recourse to ruthless guerrilla tactics during 1919. Fearing another attempt on his life and hoping that diplomatic efforts in America could bear fruit, he left for Philadelphia in December. His family joined him in August 1920.
In Philadelphia he worked for a firm of church furnishers and contributed articles to the Irish Press, an Irish-American newspaper that was edited by his old friend Patrick McCartan and provided a republican commentary on events in Ireland. In 1920 he succeeded as editor of the Irish Press, which closed down in May 1922 due to lack of funds. Meanwhile Kitty, who had busied herself contributing and editing articles for the Irish Press, established an American branch of Cumann na mBan (though under another name), participated in anti-British protests and organised supplies of medicines, food and clothing to be sent to distressed families in Ireland.
Séamus was horrified by the partitioning of Ireland in 1921 and the immediate descent of the new state into civil war in 1922; he tried to remain above the fray while leaning somewhat towards the anti-treaty viewpoint. Kitty, due to a strong sense of personal loyalty towards Éamon de Valera, whom she knew prior to the 1916 rising through his wife (Sinéad de Valera), supported the anti-treaty cause more emphatically, travelling to Ireland in summer 1922 to deliver $50,000 to the hard-pressed republican forces. In 1923–4, she ghost-wrote Dan Breen’s autobiography, My fight for Irish freedom, based on her conversations with Breen and on notes he provided, in the process moderating his bloodthirsty statements. It proved one of the most popular first-hand accounts of the 1919–21 Anglo–Irish war.
In August 1923 the O’Dohertys returned to Dublin where Séamus resumed work as a commercial representative for C. J. Fallon Ltd (1923–30) and Messrs Bull Ltd (1930–40). Ceasing all involvement in political affairs and retaining friendships on both sides of the civil war divide, he opposed all post-1923 manifestations of physical force republicanism. He declined an invitation to join the Fianna Fáil party in 1932 and the offer of a senior appointment in the stationery office by the Fianna Fáil government in 1934.
Contrastingly, Kitty remained a devoted adherent of de Valera. She was present at the La Scala theatre in Dublin in May 1926 for the formation of Fianna Fáil, and was subsequently an energetic member of the party’s Glasnevin cumann. In 1957, and in collaboration with de Valera, she wrote and published an account of de Valera’s time in America during 1919–20: Assignment America: de Valera’s mission to the United States is a dry, factual narrative that outlines de Valera’s justifications for his actions during a controversial period of his career.
Séamus and Kitty had four sons and two daughters and lived latterly in Claude Road, Drumcondra. Séamus died in the Mater Hospital, Dublin, on 23 August 1945, and Kitty in a convalescent home in Blackrock, Co. Dublin, on 23 March 1969. They were buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. Some of Séamus’s personal papers and memorabilia are in the National Archives of Ireland (NAI 2000/58). Séamus’s brother Joseph O’Doherty was an IRA officer in counties Donegal and Derry during the Anglo–Irish war (1919–21) and subsequently a dáil deputy, first for Sinn Féin (1922–7) and then for Fianna Fáil (1933–7). Kitty’s sister Mother Columba of Loreto Convent in Navan wrote the popular republican ballad ‘Who fears to speak of Easter week?’ immediately after the 1916 rising.