John Daly(1845–1916)

John Daly was born at 4 Wickham Street, Limerick on 18 October 1845, third son of John Daly, a Limerick baker, and Margaret Hayes. The household was small Catholic working-class Limerick of the Famine generation: the family ran the Wickham Street bakery on a lower-middle-class income, the children were sent to the Christian Brothers' Sexton Street school for the free-of-charge Catholic-education of the post-Famine Limerick-Catholic working class, and the extended Daly family (his uncles, his mother's Hayes-family connections in the Limerick-Catholic small-business establishment of the period) was the foundational social ground that the subsequent political career was anchored on.

He was apprenticed at fifteen in 1860 to the family bakery, joined the Limerick branch of the Irish Republican Brotherhood at sixteen in 1861 on the recommendation of his uncle James Daly, and worked across the 1860s and 1870s as a Limerick IRB centre (a local-branch organiser, the foundation small operational unit of the post-1858 IRB organisational structure). He had a minor role in the abortive Munster movement of the 1867 March Rising, was briefly detained at the Limerick County Jail in March 1867 on the post-Rising arrests sweep but was released without charge in May 1867, and continued the IRB-organising-and-bakery-business double life across the 1870s.

The Land War of the 1879 to 1882 small period radicalised him. He took on the Limerick-IRB centre-of-centres position in 1881 at thirty-six, ran the Limerick-IRB Land-and-Labour political-organising work across the 1881 to 1883 period under the umbrella of the Michael Davitt-led Land League small political mass-movement, and moved at the 1883 Land-League collapse to the Clan na Gael Dynamite-Campaign organisational position. The small Dynamite Campaign (the 1881 to 1885 series of small dynamite-and-explosives attacks on small British public-institutional targets in London and the English provincial cities that the Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa-led American Clan na Gael had been funding from New York) was the Irish-American IRB-extreme-wing political programme of the period; Daly took the Limerick-and-Munster operational-organising role of the campaign in 1883 at thirty-eight.

He was arrested in Birkenhead on the evening of 11 April 1884 by the Liverpool Metropolitan Police on a surveillance-and-arrest operation against the Liverpool small Irish-immigrant Fenian network. The small arrest was made at the Birkenhead railway station on the Liverpool-to-Wrexham-line as he was leaving the Liverpool centre with a small briefcase containing six small dynamite-explosive devices intended (on the post-arrest interrogation and Liverpool-court evidence) for the simultaneous-explosion attack on six small London public-institutional targets that the post-1883 Dynamite Campaign had planned for the mid-May 1884 mass-attack. He was tried at the Warwickshire Assizes at Warwick on 30 July 1884, was convicted on the Treason-Felony charge, and was sentenced to penal servitude for life. He served the life sentence at the Chatham Convict Prison from August 1884, at the Portland Convict Prison from 1888, and at the Wakefield Convict Prison from 1894 across the twelve-year penal-servitude period to his release on the Gladstone-and-Asquith ministerial amnesty of August 1896.

He returned to Limerick in early September 1896 to a public reception at the Limerick Railway Station that the Limerick Catholic-Nationalist establishment had organised for the returning-political-prisoner welcome. He resumed the Wickham Street bakery business with the younger family that had run it across the twelve-year prison-period, took the Limerick-IRB centre-of-centres position in 1897 at fifty-two, and stood for and won the Limerick Town Council seat for the Brunswick Ward at the 1898 small Local Government Act elections. He was elected the Lord Mayor of Limerick at the first-meeting-of-the-1898-new-Council on 1 January 1899 at the age of fifty-three; he was the first IRB-affiliated person to hold the Lord Mayoralty of any small Irish city across the post-Famine Catholic-Emancipation small Irish-Catholic political establishment of the period. He held the Mayoralty for the two consecutive 1899 and 1900 small one-year terms.

The small Limerick-IRB-and-Tom-Clarke connection of the post-1900 period was the institutional legacy of his subsequent career. Tom Clarke (the Hurdy-Gurdy small Dynamite-Campaign IRB explosive-organiser whom Daly had served alongside at the Chatham and Portland prisons through the 1880s and 1890s) was Daly's small Limerick prison-correspondence-friend and small post-prison political-protege; Clarke married Daly's small niece Kathleen Daly at the Brooklyn small Catholic-Irish-American wedding-ceremony of 16 July 1901. The small Clarke-Daly small extended-family network was the foundational small Limerick-IRB extended-family-and-political-organising base from which the post-1907 small IRB Reorganisation of the Patrick Pearse-and-Sean MacDermott small IRB Supreme Council was run; Daly's small Limerick-Wickham-Street-house was the Limerick organisational-and-correspondence centre of the pre-1916 IRB organisational reorganisation. He died at the Wickham Street house on 30 June 1916, seventy years old, six weeks after the Tom Clarke execution at the Kilmainham Gaol stone-breakers' yard on 3 May 1916 (the first-of-the-fifteen small Easter-Rising executions of the Pearse-Clarke-MacDermott small leadership signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic). He is buried at the Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery in Limerick under the Limerick-IRB-Council memorial monument. The Daly name in the Irish-side catalogue is the patronymic of *Ó Dálaigh* (descendant of Dálach, the medieval *fer-dána* poetic-bardic surname of the medieval Westmeath-Galway hereditary-poet aristocratic tradition); he carried the Limerick-bakery-IRB variant of it through the Dynamite-Campaign-and-Chatham-Prison-and-Lord-Mayoralty Limerick-Nationalist career.