Clodagh Finn: Wartime love story of Tipperary soldier and Harlem nurse

Salaria Kea O’Reilly and with husband Tipperary ambulance driver (and poet) John Patrick O’Reilly. Pictures courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives

He was an ambulance driver and International Brigades volunteer from Co Tipperary. She was an African-American nurse, discriminated against in her own country but welcomed with open arms at the American hospital in Madrid during the Spanish Civil War.

It was love at first sight, at least for the Thurles man who wooed her with poetry. “I couldn’t take my eyes off her,” he said later. They married in 1937, in the middle of one of the worst conflicts of the last century, and they spent the rest of their lives fighting racism and discrimination.