Athy born Thomas Condon, first President of Irish Tourist Board

The Anniversary of the outbreak of the Easter 1916 Rising passed with little fanfare this year. If the commemoration seemed more muted than previous years, it was probably a reflection of an element of cultural exhaustion. The State funded and promoted Decade of Commemorations 2013 to 2023 brought a renewed vigour to the study of the revolutionary period but a downturn in interest was bound to follow given the plethora of publications and events over those ten years. By 1925 the nascent Irish Free State faced into an economic depression with food shortages across the country. There was no official Declaration of any national crisis, but times were difficult enough that the Free State Government allocated £250,00 in relief funds that same year. The year prior, 1924 the Irish Tourist Association was formed with a view “ to promoting tourism to the benefit of the nation”. This tourism body was brought to my attention when I recently acquired a pamphlet (published by the ITA) titled “Irish Curiosities – A collection of Strange, Fascinating, Puzzling or Picturesque Oddities of Ireland’. Despite the intriguing title, much of the “curiosities” featured there were the standard tourist fare you could expect to find at the time in the country. Among the Kildare antiquities was featured was what was described as the ‘Earl’s Table’. This is the famous rent table, of the Earls of Kildare originally at Maynooth Castle and later at Kilkea Castle which will be a star exhibit in the Shackleton Museum which opens at end of the summer. The Irish Tourist Association was subsequently taken over by the State and relaunched as the Irish Tourist Board in 1939. Its first chairperson was the Athy born Thomas Condon. Condon was born in Athy on the 16th May 1883, the son of Thomas Condon, a Sergeant in the Royal Irish Constabulary. He was one of eight children of Thomas Condon and his wife Helena, Sergeant Condon spent most of his later service in the R.I.C. in Laois and Kildare. The family would suffer tragedy with the loss of their daughter Helena who died in the Police Barracks in Graigue in County Laois at the age of three months while in 1885 their daughter Mary died at the age of fourteen in Ballylinan. Thomas’s father died at Ballylinan in August 1883, 3 months after his son’s birth, at the age of forty-four and the family later moved to Waterford. With his schooling completed Thomas joined the Civil Service in Dublin and later married Margaret Maguire, a teacher from Co. Leitrim. Thomas had six children, one of whom was Colm Condon, would become the Attorney General of Ireland under the governments of Sean Lemass and Jack Lynch At some point Thomas became involved in the nationalist revolutionary movement as a member of the Irish Volunteers. He was one of the sixty or so men involved in the assault on the Royal Irish Constabulary Barracks in Ashbourne led by Thomas Ashe during the Easter Rising of 1916. It was one of the few successful actions by the Irish Volunteers. Thomas was subsequently imprisoned in Wandsworth in London. The men of 1916 shared their prison with conscientious objectors to the Great War and serving British soldiers who had fallen foul of the army authorities. Thomas had an older brother David born in 1877. David enlisted in the Royal Engineers in the British Army in 1901 but left the army in 1908. On the outbreak of the Great War, he was recalled to the colours and served as a Company Quarter Master with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers going to France in December 1915. After being wounded, he was transferred to the Labour Corp and was discharged from the army at the end of the war as a company sergeant major. He is commemorated on the Newtownards and District War Memorial as a war casualty as his death, in 1922, was attributed to war related causes. The paths trod by Thomas Condon and his brother David where quite different and reflected the divisions in Irish families during the revolutionary period. This was not unusual. Kevin O’Higgins, the Stradbally born, Minister for Justice from 1922 until his assassination in 1927, had two brothers, Jack and Michael, both serving in the British Army during the First Word War, one of whom Michael was killed. It is a reminder that our shared histories remain complicated and challenging but none the less one of the by products of the decade of commemorations was the new maturity applied to the studies of both sides in the revolutionary era. After his release from prison Thomas spent much of his life in County Meath where he sat as a County Councillor on Meath County Council from 1934 to 1954. He was also an independent member of Seanad Eireann from 1938 to 1944. In 1939 he was appointed the First President of the Irish Tourist Board, the successor to the Irish Tourist Association. He died in Ashbourne, County Meath on the 12th of September 1963