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News of last week's cease-fire was greeted skeptically by Eire's Prime Minister Sean Lemass, himself an old I.R.A. hand, who as a 16-year-old was captured by the English, booted in the backside and told to "go home to Mum." But though the I.R.A. craftily hid its weapons and warned that it planned to "prepare for another situation," its leaders would find few fellow countrymen willing to die in 1962 for the Six Green Fields.
*Among them: Poets William Butler Yeats (who was an I.R.A. "morale officer") and Oliver St. John Gogarty; Playwrights Sean O'Casey and Brendan Behan; Novelists Sean O'Faolain, Liam O'Flaherty, Frank O'Connor.