Revolution hero’s documents now in public domain

THE personal papers of a leading Cork figure from Ireland’s revolutionary period are available to the public for the first time.

Diarmaid (Jeremiah) L Fawsitt was born in 1884, near Blarney Street, and he would become a nationalist, a republican, a journalist, a civil servant, and a judge.

Fawsitt was a personal friend of murdered Cork Lord Mayor Tomás Mac Curtain, and he was also a friend to Michael Collins.

In his lifetime, he was active in cultural, industrial, and nationalist circles, including the Celtic Literary Society, Sinn Féin, the Gaelic League, Cork National Theatre Society, and especially, the Cork Industrial Development Association.

In November 1913 he attended the inaugural meeting of the Irish Volunteers in Dublin and was inducted into the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In December of that year he was one of the co-founders of the Cork Corps of the Irish Volunteers, at City Hall, later becoming chairperson of the executive.

During the War of Independence, Arthur Griffith sent Fawsitt to the USA, as consul and trade commissioner of the Irish Republic. He served as a technical advisor for the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921-22.

In later years he was a senior civil servant in the Department of Industry and Commerce, before becoming a judge of the Circuit Court. Diarmaid Fawsitt died in 1967.

In 2019, Fawsitt’s archive of over 2,000 documents, consisting of correspondence, diaries, photographs, news clippings, articles, speeches, and lectures, was donated by his family to the Cork City and County Archives Service, which has completed processing and listing it.

A detailed descriptive list has been compiled over a two-year period by archivists, and this has now been printed and published thanks to funding from Cork City Council and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

The archive is now available at http://corkarchives.ie/