Letter reveals insight into Diarmuid Lynch’s incarceration

Like many other prisoners after the Rising, Diarmuid Lynch had to have correspondence to family and loved ones smuggled out of prisons and military barracks.

The words pictured here are the first section of a long note he wrote on a fragment of paper bag two days after his court martial on May 19, 1916. He had previously got five other despatches out from Richmond Barracks, where he was initially held before being identified and court-martialled.

It is one of many such documents in the possession of Bríd Duggan, daughter of the recipients — Diarmuid’s half-brother Denis Lynch, a distillery manager in Dublin, and his wife Alice.