Clodagh Finn: Ireland’s singing star who saved lives during Second World War

In a few nail-biting pages, O’Connor captures the scene so vividly that the reader is right there with Delia; “blood throbs in her temples” as she makes her furtive way through the quieter streets of the city to avoid SS patrols while her patient moans in agony as the car bounces over cobbles.

If that doesn’t draw you into this best-selling marvel of historical fiction, then nothing will. It is a glorious read, but also one with deep resonance. As anti-refugee sentiment is being stoked around the country, is there a better time to remind ourselves of the Irish people who risked their lives to save others during World War ll?

The work of Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty is already very well known. The Irish Vatican official, who organised a vast rescue network that saved thousands, is a household name. And rightly so.

It is a joy, however, to see that Joseph O’Connor introduces Delia Murphy Kiernan to a wider public. Mention her name and many will recall a woman once described as Ireland’s first home-grown singing star who, in the 1930s and 40s, laid the foundation for the Irish Folk Revival.

Prisoners of war

But, as she said herself, she was also deeply involved in the underground network that helped prisoners of war and others escape from Rome during the German occupation of the city from late 1943 to June 1944.

“I was in the thick of it,” she said, speaking after the death of her husband Dr TJ Kiernan, who was Irish ambassador to Rome at the time. He barely knew of her activities, if at all. In her biography, I’ll live till I die, however, author Aidan O’Hara casts a fascinating light on a woman who was, to use her own words, “determined to save the hides of others and not get caught”.

At first, she wrestled with her conscience and prayed for guidance about what she should do to help Monsignor O’Flaherty.

“What else could it be but charity to help those in trouble with the Nazis?... The Germans had splashed posters warning that anyone found sheltering an Allied prisoner of war (POW) would be shot. I doubt if they would have shot the wife of the Irish Minister, but they might not have hesitated with others in our group.”

The incident described at the start of Joseph O’Connor’s book really happened, although with a different POW. Delia recalled picking up a Scottish soldier with peritonitis and driving him to a convent hospital that the Nazis were using for their sick and wounded.

She collected Fr ‘Spike’ Buckley on the way and drove both priest and patient “in what must have been one of the fanciest ambulances in Rome — my roomy limousine with diplomatic licence plates, and the tricolour of Ireland fluttering from the fender.”

The priest carried the patient into the operating theatre covered in a priest’s cassock. Delia drove around the city for a few hours as he underwent his operation and afterwards, on the instructions of O’Flaherty, took him to the home of Henrietta Chevalier, a Maltese woman who played a key role in the Monsignor’s rescue operation.

'I risked my neck'

Delia Murphy Kiernan’s role was also important but has been under-recognised. As she said herself: “I risked my neck and Her Excellency’s immunity because a voice inside of me said it was my duty to help.”

One of her most daring exploits was ‘removing’ boots from the Wehrmacht shoe repair depot right under the noses of the Germans. Shoes were scarce and the increasing numbers of escaping prisoners of war desperately needed them.

When she got word from ‘Golf’ [Hugh O’Flaherty’s code name] that help was needed, Delia went to the depot and managed to persuade the Italian shoemaker to part with several pairs. 

“While my driver transferred the ‘booty’ into the back of the diplomatic car, I engaged the German office staff opposite in idle conversation, making sure they looked anywhere but out of their window,” she later recalled.

That is one of several episodes recounted by Aidan O’Hara in his illuminating biography of a woman whose bravery during World War ll is little known and whose fame as a major influence in the cultural life of Ireland is starting to fade.

Those of a certain age remember her songs — ‘The Spinning Wheel’, ‘If I Were A Blackbird’ and ‘Three Lovely Lassies From Bannion’ — her early broadcasts on Raidió Éireann and her recordings with HMV.

She collected hundreds of songs from Travellers in her native Mayo and spent time in the Claddagh in Galway adding more seafaring songs and ballads to an already rich repertoire.

She was the woman who made the come all ye respectable, or as Luke Clancy of the Clancy Brothers put it more poetically: “Her main contribution was that she made us feel that we could respectably sing our own songs.”

Before her husband was posted to Rome as Irish Ambassador to the Holy See in late 1941, Delia was credited with saving lives during a show in Belfast by convincing the crowd to stay in the Ulster Hall as Luftwaffe bombs fell on the city on 15 April 1941. She stayed calm and sang on.

Joseph O’Connor refers to that incident in his book with this killer line:

I was singing in Belfast the night the Luftwaffe firebombed the theatre. That’s what you call a mixed review.

It might be an imagined line, but it is the kind of witticism that may have come from her mouth. She described herself as a woman who, throughout her lifetime, had “her own troublesome and romantic self to deal with” ... and said she was “forever ... giggling, diddling and fiddling”.

Her nephew, Leo Cullen, recalls a woman who wasn’t afraid to say what she thought. His father described her as “amusing”, with some understatement. Leo’s mother, Angela, Delia’s younger sister, was also a HMV-recorded artist, but she died as a young woman after the birth of her fifth child in 1955.

Delia, however, would go on to become what Leo describes as “the standard-bearer for women singers”. He muses that it must have been very frustrating for her not to be able to continue her career while in the milieu of restrictive diplomatic life in wartime Europe. 

All the same, she fulfilled several roles while there, Cullen continues. She was a mother of four (Blon, Nuala, Colm, and Orla), an ambassador’s wife who ran an open house at the embassy and a member of the underground escape network. Here’s hoping her presence in Joseph O’Connor’s book will bring her life and work to a new audience.