Maurice Twomey (; 10 June 1897 – October 1978) was an Irish republican and the longest serving chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).
Early life
Twomey was born in 1897 in Clondulane, near Fermoy, County Cork, Ireland and was educated by the Congregation of Christian Brothers. The son of a labourer at Hallinan's flour mill in the town, Twomey went to work there at the age of 14 where he rose to the position of works manager. In 1914 he became active in the Irish Volunteers.
Character
Twomey was a dedicated and well respected Irish Republican who successfully dealt with factions within the Irish Republican movement. "He was dedicated to Irish freedom and nothing else mattered to him. Compromise was not in his vocabulary."
War of Independence
By 1918 he was adjutant of the Fermoy Battalion and a year later became an adjutant of the Cork No. 2 Brigade. He took part in an ambush of British troops in Fermoy in September 1919, one of the first attacks on British soldiers in Ireland since the 1916 Easter Rising and one of the first of the Irish War of Independence.
During 1920 he helped direct IRA intelligence in his brigade area. He was staff commandant of Liam Lynch's 1st Southern Division when he was captured and imprisoned on Spike Island during 1921. He managed to escape from the prison by rowing boat along with Dick Barrett, Tom Crofts and Bill Quirke.
Civil War
Twomey opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, although he was critical of the tactics adopted by the anti-Treaty forces headquartered in the Four Courts. He was influenced by Oscar Traynor's opinion that the garrison would destroy the Republic during June 1922. The Four Courts episode had showed the leadership that it was out of touch with the reality of the awesome power of artillery. Twomey concurred with Liam Mellows that if a government was to be formed in the interest of labour, it must be a republic.
During the Irish Civil War, Twomey became adjutant general on the staff of Liam Lynch, IRA Chief of Staff, and was with the commander when he was killed in the Knockmealdowns mountains on 10 April 1923. Twomey was imprisoned in the same month in Dublin.
IRA Chief of Staff
During 1924 he became involved in the reorganisation of the IRA, inspecting its southern divisions that summer and its northern units during 1925. First elected onto the IRA Executive at the November 1925 IRA General Army Convention, he became a full-time IRA activist. He disguised this by describing his profession as "journalist", justified somewhat by his regular contributions to the IRA weekly newspaper, An Phoblacht. During 1926 he was acting IRA chief of staff in the absence of Andrew Cooney, and in 1927, he was confirmed in that position.
In the summer of 1925, the anti-treaty IRA had sent a delegation led by Pa Murray to the Soviet Union for a personal meeting with Joseph Stalin, in the hopes of gaining Soviet finance and weaponry assistance. A secret pact was agreed where the IRA would spy on the United States and the United Kingdom and pass information to Red Army military intelligence (GRU) spymasters in New York City and London in return for £500 a month. The pact was originally approved by Frank Aiken, who left soon after, before being succeeded by Cooney and Twomey who kept up the secret espionage relationship.
Twomey was not himself an ideological Marxist-Leninist (though there were some communists in the IRA at this time such as Peadar O'Donnell), he saw the arrangement purely as a means to gain the IRA badly needed funding. Twomey also repeatedly accused the Soviets of being "shifty" and "out to exploit us." Nevertheless, London-based IRA spymaster Seán MacBride passed specifications of "submarine detection sonar and aeroplane engines for bombers, military journals and manuals, and gas masks" to the USSR through Berlin-based GRU operative Walter Krivitsky, whom ciphered IRA communications referred to only by the code name "James". Meanwhile, the IRA's main spymaster in America "Mr. Jones", whom historians Tom Mahon and James J. Gillogly have identified as Daniel "Sandow" O'Donovan, passed "reports of the army’s chemical weapons service, state-of-the-art gas masks, machine-gun and aeroplane engine specifications, and reports from the navy, air service and army" to the Soviet GRU.