Mac Caba (McCabe), Alasdair (‘Alec’) (1886–1972), teacher, revolutionary, politician, and founder of the Educational Building Society, was born 5 June 1886 in Keash, Co. Sligo. Educated at Keash national school and Summerhill College, Sligo, he won a scholarship to St Patrick's College of Education, Drumcondra, Dublin, qualifying as a primary schoolteacher; later obtained a diploma in education from UCD; and was appointed principal of Drumnagranchy national school, Co. Sligo in 1907.
Initiated into the IRB in 1913, he represented Connacht on the supreme council. Dismissed from his teaching post in 1914 for disrupting a recruiting meeting in Sligo, but reinstated by Bishop Patrick Morrisroe of Achonry after a boycott by parents in his support, he was dismissed permanently in 1915 when arrested at Sligo station and charged with possessing explosives, of which he was subsequently acquitted (1916). Failing to organise the Irish Volunteers in Sligo during the Easter rising, he went on the run, reemerging in 1917 to campaign for Count George Noble Plunkett (qv) in the Roscommon North by-election. Sentenced (1917) to six months imprisonment in Belfast and Mountjoy for land agitation, released after a thirty-day hunger strike but subsequently rearrested and imprisoned in Lincoln jail (1918), he was elected MP for Sligo South in the 1918 general election, and served on the dáil committee on foreign affairs. Elected to Sligo county council for Ballymote in June 1920 and imprisoned in the Curragh (June 1920–July 1921), he was elected unopposed to the second dáil for Sligo–Mayo East in June 1921 and became editor of the Irish Yearbook in 1922. A commandant in the national army in the west during the civil war, he recaptured Collooney and Ballymote from republican forces in July 1922. Reelected pro-treaty TD for Sligo–Mayo East and Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Leitrim–Sligo in the general elections of 1922 and 1923 respectively, he resigned from Cumann na nGaedheal (March 1924) and from Dáil Éireann (October 1924) as part of the ‘national group’, in opposition to the treatment of the army mutineers, his ostracisation from the IRB after 1922, government cuts in old-age pensions, free trade, spending on the governor general's office, and internal borrowing. He retired from politics after failing to secure the Sinn Féin nomination for the subsequent by-election.
Returning to teaching in St Canice's CBS, North Circular Road, Dublin, after briefly operating an auctioneering business in Sligo, he became aware of the need for building societies to help people buy houses. In 1932 he published a pamphlet suggesting the establishment of a building society for teachers, which resulted in the foundation of the Educational Building Society (EBS) in 1935. Supported by the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, it grew rapidly and opened to the general public in 1941. Continuing to teach while managing the EBS in the evenings, when the workload increased he retired from teaching in the 1940s to become full-time managing director, a position he held till 5 June 1970. A member of the Blueshirts during the 1930s and the Irish Friends of Germany during the second world war, he was interned in 1940–41 because of his pro-German sympathies, which he claimed resulted from the desire to ‘see the very life-blood squeezed out of England’ (Keogh, Jews in Ireland, 167).
Full forward on the Sligo senior gaelic football team, he also played rugby and soccer and was Sligo's representative on the FAI and a patron of the League of Ireland. In 1970 the Alasdair McCabe prize was endowed at the UCD architecture school, to be ‘awarded annually for distinguished academic work directly connected with housing progress and development’ (Ir. Times, 5 May 1970). He lived at 33 Oakley Road, Ranelagh, with his wife, son, and three daughters, and died in Dublin 31 May 1972, leaving an estate valued at £24,329. There is a bronze bust of him in the headquarters of the EBS, Westmoreland St., Dublin.