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A note from Diarmuid Lynch (1876-1950) written during from Richmond Barracks. The Kit mentioned in the note is Kathleen Quinn, Lynch's fiancee who visited him on the day of his court martial. Lynch's note was written on the back of a ten shilling note. Diarmuid Lynch was born in January 1878 to a substantial tenant farmer in Tracton parish, in South County Cork. At the age of 18 he emigrated for work, initially to London and thereafter to New York. In the USA he pursued his interests in Gaelic culture and the Irish language, coming under the influence of John Devoy, Diarmuid O' Donovan Rossa and other ardent Fenian disciples.Of great natural ability he was elected President of the New York Gaelic League and president of the Philo- Celtic Society. Diarmuid returned to live in Ireland in 1907, both were convinced that Ireland's freedom from British Rule must be worked for on home ground.From 1911 Lynch was a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB and one of that organisation's main recruiting officers. He was present at crucial meetings in Hardwicke Street on Holy Saturday night and at Liberty Hall on Easter Sunday morning when the Military Committee decided to go ahead with the planned Rising on the following morning. Lynch was present in the GPO for all of that week, being aide de camp to James Connolly. Following his court martial on May 18th he was condemned to be shot but his American citizenship was one factor in his sentence being commuted to 10 years hard labour.
The data in these XML files was generated based on a data dump from the Magellan database (https://github.com/Maynooth-Center-for-Digital-Humanities/Magellan). Each database record has been converted to a JSON file (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/json). The element section of the JSON file contains the TEI-encoded contents of the letters. The TEI XML has been cleaned and made well-formed using a Python script (https://github.com/letters1916static/letters-data/tree/main/src).