Cormac Kevin Hooker O'Malley (born 20 July 1942, Dublin) is an Irish-American author and historian. The third child of Irish republican Ernie O'Malley and American sculptor Helen Hooker, [1] O'Malley was brought up in County Mayo and later educated in England before moving to the United States to live with his mother after his father's death in 1957. He attended Harvard, enrolled in the US Navy and later graduated from Columbia Law School. [2] O'Malley resides in Stonington, Connecticut. He was married to Moira Kennedy from 1971 until her death in 2018 and they had two children, daughter Bergin (1977) and son Conor (1979). [3] [4]
Although he was unaware of his father's militant past until after the latter's death in 1957, [5] O'Malley has edited his father's three memoirs on the militant Irish nationalist struggle from 1916 to 1924: On Another Man’s Wound, The Singing Flame and Raids and Rallies, and owns the copyright to these works. The second and third of these works were published when, in 1972, he was given his father's manuscript on the civil war period. [6] In 2021 he co-authored a biography on his father, Ernie O'Malley: A Life. [7] [8]
He is also the custodian of the many papers left by his father and mother and has been active in promoting his family's heritage through books, film, seminars and lectures. [9] [2] [10] He has entrusted his father's nationalist struggle papers to UCD Archives and those of a non-nationalist nature to NYU Archives of Irish America. [11]
A former research associate at Trinity College Dublin, [4] O'Malley has been prominent in Irish American cultural exchange, including serving as Glucksman Ireland House Board of Advisors President. He was organiser of the 2014 symposium on Ernie O'Malley and Modern Ireland and Revolution at Glucksman Ireland House. He was also the producer for A Call to Arts, a 2020 documentary on his parents' journey through the arts. [12]
Of O'Malley a colleague observed: "Cormac O’Malley has enabled a dynamic corpus of scholarship on Ireland and on the transatlantic ties that bind Ireland and the U.S." [2]