On 26 January 1904, Pope Pius X received a telegram from Mary Barry O'Delaney, Irish nationalist and propagandist, announcing that the future King of Ireland had been born. The wires between Paris, Dublin and America buzzed that night and over the following days, as messages arrived from across the Irish nationalist community, saluting the birth of the ‘President of Ireland’. The child in whom so much hope was invested was John Seaġan MacBride (afterwards Seán), born in Paris to John MacBride and Maud Gonne. He was the only child of their marriage, which after less than a year was already displaying signs of irretrievable breakdown. Marked out from birth by his parents as one who would do great work for Ireland, his birth and early life in the heart of the republican aristocracy exposed him to a particular kind of radicalism: part old-school Fenian nationalism, part romantic mysticism, part cosmopolitan struggle against the wider forces of imperialism. MacBride's immediate family history provides an illuminating lens through which to examine the intersections between Irish republicanism, nationalism and culture at the turn of the twentieth century, intersections which definitively shaped the contours of his early life.

‘A great red-haired yahoo of a woman’ and a ‘drunken vainglorious lout’

Retaining custody of her son after her separation from her husband, Maud Gonne was the dominant figure in Seán MacBride's early life, a unique figure who combined the wealthy sophistication of upper-class English society with a decidedly bohemian non-conformity and a passionate attachment to the cause of Irish nationalism.