Film to record story behind only Irish man ever to be deported

JIMMY GRALTON is the only Irishman to be deported from Ireland in the history of the state, (80 years ago), and he’s also the focus of a film being shot in Co Leitrim at the moment by Ken Loach, which is a companion piece to his 2006 Palme d’Or winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Gralton, played by Irish actor Barry Ward in the movie, was born in 1886, one of seven children on a rush-covered, 25-acre farm in Effernagh, Co Leitrim, a few miles from Carrick-on-Shannon. After school, he drifted into the British army, and worked for a spell on the docks in Liverpool, down the coal mines in Wales, and spent years circumnavigating the world as a stoker on a tramp steamer. He settled in the US, becoming a citizen in 1909, a legal status that was used for his deportation as “an undesirable alien” years later.

He returned to Co Leitrim in June 1921, the truce in the War of Independence safeguarding him from arrest from his desertion of the British Army years earlier. Shortly after arrival, he built a new hall on his father’s land to replace the Temperance Hall in Gowel that had been burned down by the Black and Tans.