George Oliver Plunkett

George Oliver Plunkett (Irish: Seoirse Oilibhéar Pluincéid) (1894–1944), known to his contemporaries as Seoirse Plunkett, was a militant Irish republican. He was sentenced to death with his elder brother Joseph Plunkett and his younger brother John after the 1916 Easter Rising, but George's and John's sentences were commuted. He was released in 1917, fought in the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War, and was briefly IRA Chief of Staff during World War II.

Seoirse was born in 1894, in Dublin, where his parents lived at the time, the son of George Noble Plunkett, a papal count and curator of the National Museum and his wife, Josephine, née Cranny; the Plunkett and Cranny families were both housing developers.

George was named after his father and his collateral ancestor Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh, who was martyred in 1681. He was one of seven children; his siblings were Philomena (Mimi, 1886), Joseph (1887), Moya (Maria, 1889), Geraldine (Gerry, 1891), Fiona (1896) and John (Jack, 1897). Like Joseph he was sent to England to be educated at the exclusive Catholic public school Stonyhurst College, and is recorded there in the 1911 England Census, leaving him with an upper-class English accent.

George joined the Irish Volunteers in 1914 and in the Easter Rising of 1916 was a Captain in command of the "Kimmage Garrison". These men on the run (including Michael Collins) had been staying at George's mother's Larkfield estate in Kimmage, then a country area just southwest of Dublin city making bombs for the Rising. Famously on Easter Monday he waved down a tram with his revolver at Harold's Cross, near Kimmage, boarded it with his men (armed with shotguns, pikes and homemade bombs), took out his wallet and said, "Fifty-two tuppenny tickets to the city centre please". Arriving at Liberty Hall in style they were organised into four companies under George's command, almost as large as some of the IRA battalions. With a hundred other Volunteers they marched with James Connolly and Patrick Pearse to seize the General Post Office (GPO).

...
Wikipedia