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Denis McCullough (24 January 1883 – 11 September 1968) was a prominent Irish nationalist political activist in the early 20th century, who served as President of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) from 1915 to 1916.
McCullough was a separatist nationalist from an early age. Both his father and grandfather were in the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), as was his brother. When he was 17, his father had him inducted into the IRB at the side door of a pub by a man who seemed to view the ritual as an unpleasant distraction to a night of drinking.F.S.L. Lyons. Ireland Since the Famine, Fontana Publishing, 1973; OCLC 800472120, 2 volumes (880 pages), p. 315 The event disillusioned McCullough with the IRB, and he took it upon himself to revitalise the organisation, with assistance from, among others, Bulmer Hobson and Seán Mac Diarmada. The trio founded the Dungannon Clubs as a non-sectarian, republican, separatist organisation (it was later absorbed into Sinn Féin), for recruitment. They worked to remove "armchair republicans" from positions of power. Their cause prospered with the return of veteran Fenian Tom Clarke to Ireland in 1907.
McCullough stated in his application for an Irish military pension in 1937 that, 'I brought out my men in Belfast and mobilised them at Coalisland to cooperate with the Tyrone Volunteers in accordance with orders from Pearse and Connolly received by me. Their orders were to bring all available men and arms across Ulster to Connaught to join Mellows there. They were insistent, especially James Connolly, that we were to "fire no shot in Ulster". I thought these orders were mad ones but determined to carry out orders if possible'. Dennis McCullough Military Pension Application
McCullough led Volunteers in his area to Dungannon, County Tyrone, from where they would link up with Liam Mellows in Connacht. Although the Volunteer's Chief of Staff Eoin MacNeill issued a countermanding order, cancelling orders for the rising, McCullough took 150 Volunteers and Cumman na mBan by train from Belfast to Dungannon, where he found the local volunteers under Patrick McCartan did not want to leave their home area. McCullough therefore decided to return to Belfast. During the abortive Rising, he accidentally shot himself in the hand. He was arrested that week and taken to Richmond Barracks, Dublin. He spent several months interned at Frongoch internment camp and imprisoned in Reading Gaol.Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins: The Man Who Made Ireland (17 May 2002), Palgrave Macmillan, p. 55. / Profile, UCD archives; accessed 16 June 2014.
On his release he married Agnes McCullough, a sister of James Ryan, Josephine Ryan and Phyllis Ryan and sister-in-law to their husbands Seán T. O'Kelly and Richard Mulcahy.
It has been argued that as president of the Irish Republican Brotherhood at the time of the Easter Rising, the title President of the Irish Republic was by rights his, and not Patrick Pearse's. However, as he had no real role in the planning of the insurrection, and was not in the vicinity of Dublin, where it was clear the leadership would need to be, it is understandable that Pearse was given the title instead. McCullough's decision not to fight in the Easter Rising lost him his pre-eminent position among Belfast republicans. One, Sean Cusack, later said that he told McCullough, "we all felt he had, to some extent, let us down".
In early 1922 he was sent by Michael Collins to America to liaise between the IRB and its American sister organisation Clan na Gael.McCullough Pension file
In 1922, he supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, despite its acceptance of the Partition of Ireland, as a way of keeping the republican movement united and focused on the north. He later said of the split in the southern movement, "while they were making up their minds about the Treaty, their people in the north were being killed day by day. They could not stand up the terror in Ulster unless they had a united organisation behind them".Alan F. Parkinson, Belfast's Unholy War: The Troubles of the 1920s, Four Courts Press (17 October 2004), pp. 219-220. /. He was unaware that Michael Collins continued to covertly arm the IRA in Ulster until August 1922, partly to protect nationalists there and partly to try to bring down the Northern Irish state. Irish Independent, 22 August 2010; accessed 16 June 2014.
After the Treaty, in early 1922 he was sent by George Gavan Duffy to the United States to make contact with Irish republican organisations there. He later settled in Dublin in the new Irish Free State.
He was an unsuccessful Sinn Féin candidate at the 1918 general election for the Tyrone South constituency. On 20 November 1924, McCullough stood as the Cumann na nGaedheal candidate at a by-election in the Donegal constituency, following the resignation of Cumann na nGaedheal TD Peter Ward. He was elected to the 4th Dáil, but did not stand again at the next general election, held in June 1927.
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