John Daly(1845–1916)

John Daly was born at Wickham Street, Limerick, on 18 October 1845, third son of a Limerick baker. The household was Catholic working-class Limerick of the Famine generation; the children were sent to the Christian Brothers' Sexton Street school, and the extended Daly family was the social ground his political career was anchored on.

Apprenticed at fifteen to the family bakery, he joined the Limerick Irish Republican Brotherhood at sixteen in 1861 and worked across the 1860s and 1870s as a Limerick IRB centre, a local-branch organiser. He had a minor part in the 1867 Munster movement and continued the IRB-organising and bakery double life into the 1880s.

The Land War of 1879 to 1882 radicalised him. He took the Limerick-IRB centre-of-centres position in 1881 and ran the Limerick Land-and-Labour political organising under the Davitt-led Land League, moving at the League's collapse to the Clan na Gael organisational position.

He was arrested at Birkenhead in April 1884, tried at the Warwickshire Assizes that July, convicted on the treason-felony charge, and sentenced to penal servitude for life. He served twelve years at the Chatham, Portland and Wakefield convict prisons before his release on the Gladstone-Asquith amnesty of August 1896, the political-sacrifice years that made him the returning-prisoner figure of Limerick Catholic-Nationalism.

He came home to a public reception at Limerick Railway Station, resumed the bakery, and won a Limerick Town Council seat at the 1898 Local Government Act elections. He was elected Lord Mayor of Limerick on 1 January 1899 at fifty-three, the first IRB-affiliated person to hold the Lord Mayoralty of any Irish city, and held the office for the 1899 and 1900 terms. Tom Clarke, his prison-friend from Chatham and Portland and later the first of the 1916 signatories executed at Kilmainham, married Daly's niece Kathleen, and the Daly house at Wickham Street was the Limerick organisational centre of the pre-1916 IRB reorganisation. He died at Wickham Street on 30 June 1916, seventy years old, six weeks after Clarke's execution, and is buried at Mount Saint Lawrence Cemetery in Limerick. The Daly name, the patronymic Ó Dálaigh of the hereditary-bardic tradition, he carried from a Limerick bakery into the Lord Mayoralty and the Limerick-Nationalist foundation of the pre-1916 movement.