17 Facts About Cathal Goulding

Cathal Goulding was Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army and the Official IRA.

One of seven children born on East Arran Street in north Dublin to an Irish republican family, as a teenager Goulding joined Fianna Eireann, the youth wing of the Irish Republican Army.

Cathal Goulding was involved in 1945 in attempts to re-establish the IRA, which had been badly affected by the authorities in both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.

Cathal Goulding was among twenty-five to thirty men who met at O'Neill's pub, Pearse Street, to try to re-establish the IRA in Dublin.

Cathal Goulding organised the first national meeting of IRA activists after World War II, in Dublin in 1946.

Cathal Goulding took charge of the IRA's Dublin Brigade in 1951.

In so doing, Cathal Goulding became interested in the Russian Revolution.

Cathal Goulding was appointed IRA Quartermaster General in 1959, and in 1962 succeeded Ruairi O Bradaigh as IRA Chief of Staff.

In February 1966, together with Sean Garland, Cathal Goulding was arrested for possession of a revolver and ammunition; in total he spent sixteen years in British and Irish jails.

Cathal Goulding was instrumental in moving the IRA to the left in the 1960s.

Cathal Goulding argued against the policy of abstentionism and developed a Marxist analysis of Irish politics.

Cathal Goulding believed the British state deliberately divided the Irish working class on sectarian grounds, in order to exploit them and keep them from uniting and overthrowing their bourgeois oppressors.

Cathal Goulding remained Chief of Staff of what became known as the Official IRA until 1972.

Cathal Goulding was prominent in the various stages of Official Sinn Fein's development into the Workers' Party.

Cathal Goulding regarded Democratic Left as having compromised socialism in the pursuit of political office.

Cathal Goulding died of cancer in his native Dublin, and was survived by three sons and a daughter.

Cathal Goulding was cremated and his ashes scattered, at his directive, at the site known as "the Nine Stones" on the slopes of Mount Leinster.