Eoin McNamee

Eoin McNamee (1961 in Kilkeel, County Down) is an Irish writer.

He has written two novellas: The Last of Deeds (Dublin, Raven Arts Press, 1989), which was shortlisted for the 1989 Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award for Irish Literature, and Love in History (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992).

His novels are Resurrection Man (London, Picador, 1994), which detailed the bloodletting of the Ulster Volunteer Force gang, the Shankill Butchers; Booker-nominated The Blue Tango (London, Faber & Faber, 2001), which examined the murder of Lancelot Curran's 19-year-old daughter; The Ultras (Faber & Faber, 2004), about the killing of Robert Nairac; 12:23, based on the final days of Diana, Princess of Wales (Faber & Faber, June 2007); Orchid Blue (Faber & Faber, 2010), which looked at the last hanging in Ireland, in Crumlin Road gaol, of Robert McGladdery for the murder of 19-year-old Pearl Gamble, near Newry, in 1961; and Blue Is the Night (published in 2014), which deals with the involvement of Lancelot Curran in a murder trial in the Northern Ireland of the late 1940s. Blue Is the Night won the 2015 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

Eoin McNamee (Irish Republican)

Eoin Mcnamee (MacNamee) was a long-time IRA member and former head of its Northern Command. McNamee died in August 1986. On June 11, 1939, McNamee was charged with being a member of the I.R.A. and sentenced to six months in Crumlin Road Jail, Belfast. In April 1942, a new IRA Army Council was elected and McNamee was named Adjutant General. During World War II, it is believed that McNamee met with a German agent in Ireland. Later in his life, he lived in the Chicago area of the US where he is supposed to have acted as the go-between for the IRA leadership and its weapons suppliers in the U.S.

A Republican Club is named in his honor: Eoin McNamee Sinn Féin Cumann, Kildress, Co. Tyrone. A monument to his memory stands at a quiet cross road in the Sperrin Mountains of his native County Tyrone.

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