Although a successful businessman, with a growing family,Thady Cahill was not impervious to the groundswell of Irish nationalism in the years immediately following the Easter Rising of 1916.

In 1917, he revived the Gowlnacalley cumann of Sinn Féin and was elected as its President. In the run-up to the Conscription crisis of November 1918, he was elected Officer Commanding the Gowlnacalley Company of the North Tipperary
Brigade of the IRA. His brother, Senan, was Second-in-Command, but he subsequently left for Dublin at the personal request of Michael Collins, the intelligence and military genius of the Irish War of Independence.

In Dublin, Senan became a trusted member of Collins's famous 'Squad', the men who regularly assassinated the cream of Britain's intelligence operatives. Senan took part in the November 1921 Sunday morning assassination of fourteen such officers in their beds. Later that day, for relaxation, he went to Croke Park to see his native Tipperary play Dublin in a grand challenge Gaelic football match. He was one of a large number of civilians wounded
in the retaliatory attack by the Black and Tans. Later in 1921, Senan was killed in a hurried engagement with British forces in Talbot Street, in Dublin. His life and times are chronicled in the well-loved ballad 'The Murder of Senan Cahill'.

Earlier Chapters:
Episode 6: And lumps of hairy bacon...
Episode 5: With reinforced cotton gussets...
Episode 4: The bright lights of the Emergency...
Episode 3: A Tipperary Man on Mao"s Long March
Episode 2: An Abstemious Youth
Episode 1: In the Shadow of the Rock of Cashel...