Clodagh Finn: A West Cork wartime heroine who fought against the Nazis

Angela ‘Ciss’ O’Mahony, born at Brade, Leap, in West Cork in 1922, never spoke about her work in Angers in western France but, many decades after the war, her brother Denis met people who said her warnings had saved members of their families from arrest and execution.

Ciss died just last year in London, without giving any details, but it is reasonable to assume her words of caution were based on information she gleaned while working at the town hall in Angers, a town that became the seat of a regional German military command centre during the Second World War.

Indeed, Ciss, then 21, and her family lived right in the middle of that command centre. They were lodged, with their aunt Mary (Pet), on the second and third floor of a house requisitioned by the Germans. The German military police occupied the first floor of their home, 10 rue Denis Papin, while the Gestapo headquarters ran its odious business in houses along two streets behind them.

Five of the nine O’Mahony children had been sent from West Cork to live in France with two single aunts, one in Angers and the other in Rennes in Brittany. In 1920s Ireland, it was seen as a way of giving them a better start in life. The O’Mahony siblings did enjoy better opportunities, but they also found themselves caught up in the Nazi occupation of France. For a time, it was far from certain that Angela O’Mahony would make her way out of it.

As her younger brother Denis recalled in his 2002 memoir, From West Cork to Anjou: “One morning in July ’43, at about 5am, the Gestapo called … We were herded into one room while they searched the house. My sister [Ciss] was missing. I offered to go to her room to wake her up. ‘She’s not here,’ said the German, ‘she is with us.’”

Denis’s blood ran cold. He had no idea that his older sister was involved in resistance work or what her imprisonment would mean. News of her arrest whipped around the town which responded with the kind of gratitude that speaks volumes about Angela O’Mahony’s clandestine work.

At school, Denis was treated with friendly sympathy. Callers to the house left food parcels; a pound of butter, a small bag of sugar, six unblemished potatoes in a string bag.

“C’est bien ce qu’elle a fait, votre soeur” (What your sister did was good), said one. Another woman, a reluctant cleaner at the Gestapo office, called to say Ciss was being held in one of the cells in the basement.

Around the same time, another Irish-passport holder, Mary O’Shaughnessy, was working to help Allied airmen get out of the town at great risk to herself. She hid one of them, a Sergeant Hillyard, in the attic of her employer, at Boulevard Foch, just a few minutes’ walk away from where Ciss was working.

Did these two Irishwomen know each other? It is impossible to say. I researched the latter for a book, with John Morgan, on the Irish in the Resistance. Its publication last week prompted Ciss’s niece, Ann Buckley, to get in touch. It was exactly what we hoped would happen. In shining a light on the quiet Irish heroes of the Second World War, we hoped others would be revealed.

And their names remembered. As Dr Buckley said: “There’s not a lot I can tell you about Ciss’s wartime experiences, but I don’t want her name to disappear, if I can help it.

“She died only last year, but never spoke to anyone about either her work with the underground movement or her personal experiences. Too painful, I’m sure, but also due to the need to maintain confidentiality for the protection of others.”

Yet there is ample evidence from the testimony of those in Angers that her work saved others from the fate that awaited her — internment at the Nazi prison Compiègne near Paris. Many were executed there or deported to Auschwitz, Ravensbrück, or other concentration camps.

Mary O’Shaughnessy was sent to Ravensbrück, a place of unimaginable cruelty, but Angela O’Mahony fell gravely ill and was sent to the military hospital, Val-de-Grâce, in central Paris. Interventions by the Irish minister at Vichy, Con Cremin, certainly played a significant role in preventing her deportation.

She was still gravely ill when Paris was liberated in 1944, but gradually recovered. As so many others did, she picked herself up and got on with it. She brought up her son Donald as a single parent in Paris and worked as an interpreter and in a variety of administrative roles.

She later married to become Ciss O’Roark and lived for a short time in the US, then returned to London, where she lived on her own for nearly 50 years.

“She was the feistiest person I’ve ever known,” her niece Ann Buckley says. “God knows what she saw and what she went through. And she never, ever showed any sign of being broken, which I found extraordinary.”

In her 90s, she was still making trips to France on her own, at some risk to her health, to visit her sister Josie and brother Jimmy, and to Cork to visit Imelda, and Denis’s family when they came over on holidays. The sudden death of her son Donald in 2004 was a cruel blow but she soldiered on, “going out when she could, and often against advice”, to quote her nephew, Denis’s son Patrick, who spoke of her enduring courage when she died in London on June 28, 2023.

She wasn’t the only O’Mahony to show fortitude at a time of war. When Ann Buckley asked her mother Imelda about the cold, the hunger, and the uncertainty of those times, she simply said: “Oh, it was just another wall to climb.”

“I’ve never forgotten that,” says Dr Buckley.

She has never forgotten what her aunt did either. Or indeed her uncle and her mother who also played important roles during the war.

Denis O’Mahony helped to save lives in the 1940s too. He volunteered as an interpreter with the 50-strong Irish team who helped to build a hospital in Saint-Lô, a town in Normandy so heavily bombarded during D-Day in June 1944 that 2,000 of its 2,600 buildings were reduced to rubble.

In 1945, the Irish Red Cross shipped tons of heavy equipment, ambulances, and hospital beds from Dublin to Cherbourg and started to build a hospital among the ruins.

Closer to home, Ann Buckley’s mother Imelda O’Mahony was appointed superintendent-in-charge of Operation Shamrock in Glencree, Co Wicklow, another rescue mission which helped 400 German and Austrian children badly affected by war.

That is a story for another day.

So, in the O’Mahony family, we find a resistance member, a hospital volunteer, and a refugee aid-worker. It is an impressive wartime record and one that reminds us of the consequences of the rise of fear-fuelled extremism and the far-right.

As Dr Buckley poignantly puts it: “Don’t let their names disappear.”