In January 1925, on his twenty-first birthday, MacBride married Catalina "Kid" Bulfin, a woman four years his senior who shared his political views.

According to historians Tom Mahon and James J. Gillogly, recently deciphered IRA messages from the 1920s reveal that the organisation's two main sources of funding were Clan na Gael and the Soviet Union.

[21] In addition to supplying the USSR with detailed information on Royal Navy ships and Royal Air Force aeroplane engines, MacBride provided Soviet agents with "a brief specification and a complete drawing" of ASDIC, an early sonar system for detecting submarines, at a covert meeting in Amsterdam during the autumn of 1926.

[23] In October 1926, MacBride sent a ciphered report from Paris to his IRA superiors about Soviet counterfeiting operations, saying, "Several bad Bank of England notes have been passed here lately.

At his trial, however, Cumann na nGaedheal politician Bryan Cooper testified as a witness for the defence that, at the time of Kevin O'Higgins' murder, both he and MacBride had been aboard a ferry travelling from Britain to Ireland.

[25] In September 1927, Krivitsky sent the IRA a message from Amsterdam, demanding to see MacBride immediately, claiming to have a "present" he was anxious to give away, and naming a cafe where the meeting could take place.

As MacBride was then imprisoned in Dublin, the IRA's chief of staff, Moss Twomey, replied that the request was "rather awkward and impossible to fulfill at the present".

[28] Towards the end of the 1920s, after many supporters had left to join Fianna Fáil, some members of the IRA started pushing for a more left-wing agenda.

After the IRA Army Council voted down the idea, MacBride launched a new movement, Saor Éire ("Free Ireland"), in 1931.

Tom Barry was appointed chief of staff to head up a military operation against the British, an action with which MacBride did not agree.

MacBride was unsuccessful in preventing the 1944 death by hanging of Charlie Kerins, who had been convicted based on fingerprint evidence of the 1942 ambush and murder of Garda Detective Sergeant Denis O'Brien.

In 1946, during the inquest into the death of Seán McCaughey, MacBride embarrassed the Irish State by forcing them to admit that conditions in Portlaoise Prison were inhumane.

On his ministerial accession, MacBride sent a telegram to Pope Pius XII offering: ...to repose at the feet of Your Holiness the assurance of our filial loyalty and our devotion to Your August Person, as well as our firm resolve to be guided in all our work by the teaching of Christ and to strive for the attainment of a social order in Ireland based on Christian principles.

While a Senator (1948–1951), Ireland was Irish representative to the Council of Europe assisting MacBride in the leading role he was to play in securing acceptance of the European Convention on Human Rights—signed in Rome on 4 November 1950.

[38][39] Whatever the merits of the scheme, or of Browne, MacBride concluded in a Cabinet memorandum: Even if, as Catholics, we were prepared to take the responsibility of disregarding [the Hierarchy's] views, which I do not think we can do, it would be politically impossible to do so .

He was among a group of lawyers who founded JUSTICE—the UK-based human rights and law reform organisation—initially to monitor the show trials after the 1956 Budapest uprising.

It was thought that, represented by man whose father had volunteered to fight alongside their forefathers, the Afrikaner leadership of Apartheid South Africa would find the UN's assurances in return for a withdrawal from Namibia more credible.

The other members were Richard Falk, Kader Asmal, Brian Bercusson, Géraud de la Pradelle, and Stefan Wild.

[50] Other international honours followed: the Lenin Peace Prize in 1975; the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1978;[51] and the UNESCO Silver Medal for Service (1980).

[53] Their efforts included a meeting, brokered by West Belfast priest Des Wilson, between Boal and Gerry Adams.

[54] In 1984, MacBride was one of four well-known Irish activists, two Catholic and two Protestants, who endorsed a set of fair-employment guidelines for American investment in Northern Ireland, intended to redress a history of sectarian discrimination.

Crime and Punishment broadly condemned the country's prisons, unreformed since independence, for failing to address the task of offender rehabilitation and consequently for its high degree of recidivism.

[58] In 1983, MacBride voted yes to the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution, enshrining the legal ban on abortion, and wrote a newspaper article two days before stating his position.