How wonderfully bizarre.
Robert Briscoe (1894 –1969), former IRA member, Fianna Fail politician and first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin, stars as the special guest on the U.S. game show What’s My Line? in March 1958.
There’s a pretty interesting discussion on the Dublin Theatre Festival towards the end.
Amazing accents.
Briscoe was an interesting character. He was involved in all sorts of gun-running adventures with Charles McGuinness in Germany during 1921-22. In the 1930s he was credited with possessing huge power over de Valera by the wilder shores of Fine Gael, (actually scratch that, mainstream Fine Gael a lot of the time). I suspect his support for the most extreme faction of the Zionist movement in the 1940s- Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisonist Party, which partly spawned the Irgun and then the Stern Gang, would not find favour with most today. (Though the Irgun and Stern Gang both had a bit of a gra for the Tan War era IRA). Nobody in Fianna Fáil seems to have been bothered at the time.
Lads, I knew vaguely of this site for a long time but have just spent about 6 solid hours taking a proper look around. Brilliant stuff, keep up the good work!
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