This is an interview with Michael Flannery recorded on January 14, 1991, at his home in Jackson Heights.

My name is Jane Muller and I am the interviewer. This is tape number one.

Michael Flannery was a legend to Irish Republicans in the United States

because of stories about fighting the British and the Irish War of Independence.

Stories like this.

You travel through the country mostly on foot.

So you set up an ambush.

You just put mines in the road and you lay an ambush behind the walls or the head shoes.

And when they came along, you just pressed the button and the mines blew the car

or the car was the only way we could attack the armored cars to blow them up,

to turn them over and then the fight started.

You killed them until they surrendered.

In these tapes, he describes his teenage days as an IRA volunteer.

He joined shortly after the failed 1916 rebellion and fought in the guerrilla war

that brought about the partition of Ireland and eventually led to the creation

of the Republic of Ireland and the South.

It's probably the most romanticized period of the IRA.

Flannery was young at the time and was only a frontline soldier.

But he was practiced in the art of guerrilla warfare and was a member of a flying column,

the infamous fighting unit that would hit British convoys and then disappear into the hillsides.

He'd lived the life of an Irish revolutionary.

When he came to the United States, this background made him famous in some Irish American communities.

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