Whether Patrick Sweeney actually fought in the International Brigades is the great mystery surrounding this elusive character. His French police record stated that he had, which is why he ended up in Buchenwald along with hundreds of Spanish Republicans, but proof of Sweeney’s presence in Spain is very thin. He does not appear in the various lists of UK and Irish volunteers contained in the 545 collection of International Brigade papers held at the Russian State Archive, nor in the British Secret Service’s ‘List of Persons who fought in Spain’ drawn up at the time—although one does find a Joseph (Patrick’s middle name) Sweeney, marked as ‘returned from fighting in International Brigades, 26 May 1938’. The account of his exploits in Spain that he supplied to the French police is riddled with chronological inconsistencies—but that could be ascribed to faulty recollection or even problems of translation/transcription.
In 1941 his case was taken up by Mary Elmes, an Irishwoman working for an American Quaker organisation in internment camps in southern France. Elmes wrote to the Irish legation in October 1941 to highlight Sweeney’s plight and his claim to Irish nationality, stating that the Mayo man had ‘previously—as a member of the International Brigades—spent eight months at Gurs’. A stay in Gurs, a French camp specifically established to deal with Spanish refugees, would be conclusive proof that Sweeney had fought in the Spanish Civil War. Alas, all camp records for the period have been lost.
Seán Murphy in the Irish legation, who met Sweeney in Paris in 1939, was sceptical that Sweeney had fought in Spain. Murphy wrote to Dublin four years later that his dealings with Sweeney ‘did not indicate that much reliability could be placed on the truthfulness of his statements’. Sweeney never mentioned Spain in his voluminous correspondence with the legation and it is telling that he was placed in Section ‘A’ of Le Vernet, where common criminals were housed, rather than Section ‘B’, which was reserved for political prisoners.
Why Sweeney would have wanted to spin a story about the Spanish Civil War to the French if he had never been there is another mystery. Perhaps, along with the name of Genty/Ginty that he invented for himself, it was a way to throw a spanner into French investigations into his misdeeds. If so, it cost him dearly.