seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA


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Birth of Beatrice Moss Elvery Campbell, Painter, Stained Glass Artist & Sculptor

Beatrice Moss Elvery Campbell, Lady Glenavy, painter, stained glass artist and sculptor, is born in Dublin on April 30, 1883.

Elvery is the second among seven children of William Elvery , merchant, and Theresa Elvery (née Moss), singer and music teacher, whose parents are English Quakers. Her father’s ancestors were silk merchants from Spain, called Alvarez. Her early childhood is spent in Carrickmines, County Dublin. In 1896 the family moves to Foxrock and she attends the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art. Her mother’s family is artistic – one aunt is the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair – and she and her sisters are talented artists and singers. Her younger sister, Dorothy Kay, becomes a noted portrait painter in South Africa. At the age of sixteen, she wins a three-week scholarship to study at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, London. Back in Dublin, she models for William Orpen, then teaching in the school. They become friends, and she regrets never studying painting under him. She concentrates on sculpture under John Hughes and has great success, winning the Taylor scholarship three years in a row (1901–03). The first year she wins, the judges, seeking evidence that she had worked unaided, asks her to model a head from life in their presence.

Elvery’s first exhibit in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is a bronze statuette of a boy in 1902. Thereafter she is a lifelong exhibitor with the RHA, showing almost annually until her death. Friendship with the older Sarah Purser introduces her to Dublin’s artistic milieu and to the arts and crafts movement. In the movement’s 1904 exhibition she shows ten items, including terracotta statuettes, a holy water stoup, and a plaster cast of a lectern, which is cast in bronze in Paris that year and placed in her former parish church in Carrickmines. The movement’s historian, Paul Larmour, calls this lectern “a remarkable piece of organic Art Nouveau . . . There is nothing else like it in Ireland.”

In 1904, after a brief period studying in Paris with her sister and fellow students Estella Solomons and Frances “Cissie” Beckett, Elvery takes lessons in stained glass from Alfred E. Child, and is then persuaded by Purser to join her Tower of Glass (An Túr Gloine) studio. She remains six years, executing windows for St. Stephen’s Church, Mount Street, Dublin; St. Nicholas Church, Carrickfergus; and a war memorial at the Church of Ireland church, Carrickmines. Although her work is generally well received, she does not rate her skill in the medium highly – “I never got the right feeling for glass or the detached, austere quality necessary for ecclesiastical art” – and her window for a Gort convent leads to a critical review of Purser’s studio by W. B. Yeats. She does not, however, confine herself to glass but also designs for silversmiths and illustrated books for children. For Iosagán agus Sgealta Eile (1907), by Patrick Pearse, she provides a black-and-white frontispiece and four colour illustrations. For the Cuala Press, run by Lily and Elizabeth Yeats, she designs calendars, Christmas cards, and fifteen hand-coloured prints, which continue to be issued until after World War II.

Elvery’s social life in Dublin is busy. An active member of the United Arts Club, she is called by Lady Gregory “the beautiful Miss Elvery,” and Orpen’s portrait, showing her long-necked, graceful, and vivacious, bears out this description. Tiring of glass, and wishing to become a painter, she leaves in 1910 for the Slade School of Fine Art in London. There Henry Tonks is less complimentary than her Dublin teachers. He finds her work facile: “The speed, the slickness, the skill. It is horrible!” Orpen also comes to this view: “her only fault was that the transmission of her thoughts from her brain to paper or canvas, clay or stained glass, became so easy to her that all was said in a few hours. Nothing on earth could make her go on and try to improve on her first translation of her thought.”

Back in Dublin, Elvery takes a studio in Kildare Street and teaches for a time in the Metropolitan School of Art, before her parents arrange a marriage with Charles Henry Gordon Campbell, eldest son of the future Lord Chancellor of Ireland, James Campbell. They marry on August 1, 1912, and move to London where he is called to the English bar. It is not initially a love match but they are well-suited – he likes artistic, Bohemian circles and they become friends with D. H. and Frieda Lawrence, the painter Mark Gertler, the publisher John Middleton Murry, and his wife, the writer Katherine Mansfield, who describes Campbell as “a queer mixture for she is loving and affectionate, and yet she is malicious.”

Campbell’s husband becomes secretary of the Department of Industry and Commerce in the Irish Free State and in 1922 the family moves to Clonard, Terenure, Dublin. His government position means that within six months the house is burned down by anti-Treatyites, who are, however, almost comically accommodating – local men, they express distress at the job and allow her to save the children’s Christmas presents. In 1931 she becomes Lady Glenavy after her husband succeeds to his father’s title, an important member of Dublin’s social and artistic scene. She helps establish the Dublin Drama League and assists Shelah Richards in the production of two plays in 1936. Her friendships are wide and varied and her conversation imaginative and engaged. Dressed in beige – what her son calls “variations on a theme of porridge” – she entertains constantly. Her house has what she terms a “caravanserai” character and is constantly full of people.

Appointed an associate of the RHA in 1932, Campbell becomes a full member in 1934 and takes her turn at teaching. She also joins the more radical Society of Dublin Painters and holds in February 1935 a one-person show at their premises, 7 Stephen’s Green, but she never shows with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, though her work is more avant-garde than that of most academicians. At its best in still lifes and figure compositions, her work has “a sense of drama and an enigmatic or near-surrealist appearance.” Brian Kennedy notes that she is the first Irish painter to go surrealist (though she never thinks of herself in this way) and although she is serious about her work – taking lessons at an advanced age from Patrick Hennessy  – she is also diffident. Her memoir does not trace her development as an artist and mentions only one work with approbation – The Intruder (exhibited at the RHA in 1932). Now in the National Gallery of Ireland, it depicts in bold, rich colours a female centaur beckoning a young man from a group of picnickers. It immediately attracts attention. Richard Orpen wants the academy to buy it, but they think it obscene.

About 1941 the Campbells move to a large Georgian house in Rathfarnham, and twenty years later they transfer to a smaller house in Sandycove. After her husband’s death in 1962, she publishes her memoirs, And Today We Will Only Gossip (1964). The title is well chosen as the book is not self-revelatory but full of characters she encountered. Monk Gibbon calls her a “unique mixture: of talent and diffidence; of gregariousness and contempt for the herd; of gentle consideration and a savage determination to wound. Only those who knew her well knew her at all; and even to them she remained something of a mystery” (The Irish Times, December 2, 1980).

Campbell dies in Dublin on May 21, 1970, and is survived by her two sons, the writer and humorist Patrick Campbell and the novelist Michael Campbell, and predeceased by her daughter, Bridget, an Irish international lacrosse player and talented scientist, who is killed by a bomb during the London blitz.

Campbell’s work is in inter alia the Ulster Museum, the National Gallery of Ireland, the Hugh Lane Gallery, and the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork, County Cork.

(From: “Campbell, Beatrice Moss” by Bridget Hourican and Pauric J. Dempsey, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “Bridgit – a picture of Miss Elvery (Beatrice Elvery),” oil on canvas by William Orpen, 1909)


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Birth of Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan, Dramatist & Novelist

Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan, Irish dramatist and novelist, is born on April 29, 1874, at 3 Gardiner’s Row, Dublin.

O’Riordan is the youngest child among two sons and three daughters of Daniel O’Connell O’Riordan, a barrister and justice of the peace (JP), and Katharine O’Riordan (née O’Neil), who is her husband’s first cousin. At age of four he witnesses his mother’s death in a carriage accident. His formal education, firstly as a day student at Belvedere College, Dublin (1881–85), and secondly as a boarder at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare (1887–88), is interrupted by ill health and periods of self-education at home, marked by omnivorous reading in his father’s library.

While engaged in military studies in Bonn, Germany (March–September 1890), preparatory to entering Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Great Britain, he falls from a horse during riding lessons, suffering a back injury that results in permanent spinal damage, thus precluding a military career.

Left with limited means after his father’s death, O’Riordan moves to London in 1891, where, after attempting suicide, he finds work as a stage actor with the Independent Theatre Society of J. T. Grein and other companies, both in London and touring the provinces, and is noted for his interpretations of Henrik Ibsen. Active in the Irish Literary Society, where he meets W. B. Yeats, he writes fiction under the pseudonym “F. Norreys Connell,” which he also adopts for his stage work.

O’Riordan’s early publications include In the Green Park (1894), a collection of connected short stories, The House of the Strange Woman (1895), a provocative novel of sexual promiscuity in upper-class London bohemia, boycotted by some booksellers as being “morally tainted,” and several books reflecting his deep interest in all things military, most notably The pity of war (1906), a collection of Kiplingesque short stories. Largely abandoning fiction for some years to concentrate on writing for the stage, he returns to Dublin for the first time in fourteen years to direct his controversial one-act play The Piper, which opens at the Abbey Theatre on February 13, 1908. It is jeered as a slander on Irish patriots in disturbances mildly reminiscent of the “Playboy” riots thirteen months previously. The audience on the third night is placated by Yeats, who in a speech from the stage interprets the play – in which a party of rebels in the 1798 rising disdain to set sentries as they argue interminably and discursively, only to be surprised and slaughtered by yeomanry – as a satirical allegory on the fruitless debate that followed the Parnellite split. The work can more usefully be read as a meditation on the propensity of democracy to disintegrate at moments of crisis into ineffectual and dillusory demagoguery. The Piper weathers the controversy to become a frequently performed staple of the Abbey Theatre repertoire during the 1910s.

After the death of John Millington Synge, O’Riordan serves briefly as managing director of the Abbey Theatre from March 25 to July 2, 1909, during which time he produces and directs two of his own one-act plays – Time on April 1, in which he also acts, and An Imaginary Conversation on May 13 – as well as the first revival of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World on May 27. Wearied by the repeated interferences in the theatre’s affairs by its financial backer, Annie Horniman, he resigns abruptly during her fit of pique when the actress Sara Allgood recites poetry at a private gathering of suffragettes.

O’Riordan scores a major triumph on the London stage with Captain Hannibal (1909), his adaptation of a novel by Stanley Weyman, on the proceeds of which he lives for many years. Settling permanently in London, in 1910 he purchases a house at 106 Meadvale Road, Ealing, his home for the rest of his life. Rejected by the British Army at the outset of World War I owing to his disability, after several failed attempts to secure war work he eventually goes to the front in 1918 in charge of YMCA rest huts at Étaples railway junction, where he befriends the doomed soldier poet Wilfred Owen.

O’Riordan achieves his most accomplished writing within a cycle of twelve novels, published under his own name, chronicling the experiences of several inter-connected Irish and English families from the Napoleonic Wars to the 1920s. First of the series to appear was Adam of Dublin (1920), a combined Bildungsroman and roman-à-clef of the literary revival, with vignettes of Dublin slum life, Belvedere College, and the early years of the Abbey Theatre. He follows his protagonist, Adam Quinn, through the sexual turmoil of adolescence, an itinerant acting career, and an unhappy marriage in three sequels: Adam and Caroline (1921), In London (1922), and Married life (1924). These four novels chronologically conclude the narrative of the completed cycle. The narrative commences with the “Soldier” tetralogy – Soldier Born (1927), Soldier of Waterloo (1928), Soldier’s Wife (1935), and Soldier’s End (1938) – a picaresque treatment of the multifarious and farflung experiences of David Quinn, a forebear of Adam, from an Irish childhood and English education, to the Battle of Waterloo, where he suffers horrible facial mutilation, through the Irish famine and the American Civil War, to his death at the hands of Versaillais troops during the suppression of the Paris commune. Judith Quinn (1939) and Judith’s Love (1940), about the disappointments in love and marriage of a late-Victorian Dublin woman, link the narratives of the “Adam” and “Soldier” tetralogies, while The Age of Miracles(1925) and Young Lady Dazincourt (1926) are chronologically contemporaneous with the latter “Adam” novels. Inconsistent in intention, and uneven in execution, the cycle is strongest in its evocative descriptions of Dublin, London, and other cities, with their varied social strata, in different historical periods, in the sharp-edged, witty dialogue, and in the juxtaposition of dazzling comedy and an ironic sense of tragedy.

O’Riordan continues to write successful, if lightweight, stage plays. His 1928 production of Napoleon’s Josephine features a stellar cast including Edith Evans. Among his published plays are Shakespeare’s End, and Other Irish Plays (1912), Rope Enough (1914), His Majesty’s Pleasure (1925), The King’s Wooing (1929), and Captain Falstaff and Other Plays (1935). The historical commentary Napoleon Passes (1933) reflects his abiding interest in the French emperor. President of the Irish Literary Society from 1937 to 1939, he resigns after failing to persuade his colleagues to repudiate Ireland’s wartime neutrality. Despite age, disability, and increasing reclusivity, throughout World War II he serves as an air raid warden from 1940 to 1945. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1945–48), he represents the society on the council of the newly formed National Book League, and is the society’s Tredegar lecturer in 1946. Charming and convivial, a witty and erudite conversationalist, he cultivates numerous literary friendships, and is an inveterate womaniser, enjoying countless intimate relationships, both sexual and platonic.

O’Riordan marries firstly Florence Derby in 1903, a nurse eight years his senior, with whom he has one son. They are estranged by the time of her death in 1923. In 1924, he marries secondly Olga Buckley, his lover since 1920, and secretary to the wife of G. K. Chesterton. They have two sons (both born before the marriage) and one daughter. Despite considerable contemporary celebrity and critical acclaim, his work compared to that of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, he has been ignored by posterity. The best of his writing, especially the “Adam” and “Soldier” novels, merit rediscovery.

O’Riordan dies at his London home on June 18, 1948, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. A special O’Riordan number of the Journal of Irish Literature (September 1985), edited by his daughter Judith, includes a portrait photograph, the text of The Piper, and a detailed chronology.

(From: “O’Riordan, Conal Holmes O’Connell (‘Norreys Connell’)” by Lawrence William White and Aideen Foley, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Charles Carrigan, Irish Republican

Charles (“Charlie”) Edward Carrigan (Irish: Cathal Éamonn O’Corragáin) an Irish republican, is born in Glasgow, Scotland, on April 28, 1882.

Carrigan is born to Irish parents in Glasgow, but moves to Denny, Stirlingshire, following the early death of his father. He is a trained tailor to trade but also attends classes in history and literature and is proficient in French and Latin, studies the Irish language, and is a Gaelic Leaguer.

Carrigan becomes president of his local branch of the United Irish League (UIL) in Denny in 1898 and later becomes a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). In 1905, he becomes the Chairman of Sinn Féin‘s first ever cumann in Scotland, the Éire Óg Craobh Cumann. In 1916, he is the official Scottish representative to the IRB.

Carrigan joins the Irish Volunteers in 1915 after the split from John Redmond’s National Volunteers. In January 1916, he and fellow IRB members from Glasgow travel to Dublin along with members of Fianna Éireann and Cumann na mBan and forms the Scottish Division of the Irish Volunteers. They are based at the home of Count George Noble Plunkett in Kimmage, County Dublin where they prepare for an insurrection against British rule in Ireland.

On Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the overseas contingents including the Scottish Division and the North American-based Hibernian Rifles participate in the Easter Rising.

On April 28, 1916, his 34th birthday, during an evacuation of the General Post Office (GPO) in Dublin under the command of The O’Rahilly, Carrigan is shot and killed by British soldiers on Moore Street. He is buried in the St. Paul’s section of Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.


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Death of Eavan Boland, Poet, Author & Professor

Eavan Aisling Boland, Irish poet, author, and professor, dies in Dublin on April 27, 2020. She is a professor at Stanford University, where she teaches from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland’s poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

Boland is born in Dublin on September 24, 1944. Her father, Frederick Boland, is a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted painter.

When she is six, Boland’s father is appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the family moves to London, where she has her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. Her dealing with this hostility strengthens her identification with her Irish heritage. She speaks of this time in her poem, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.”

At 14, Boland returns to Dublin to attend Holy Child Killiney in Killiney, County Dublin. She publishes a pamphlet of poetry in her first year at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), in 1962. She earns a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from TCD in 1966.

After graduating, Boland holds numerous teaching positions and publishes poetry, prose criticism and essays. She teaches at TCD, University College Dublin (UCD), and Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and is a member of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. She is also writer in residence at TCD, and at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin.

In 1969, Boland marries the novelist Kevin Casey. They have two daughters together. Her experiences as a wife and mother influence her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes. According to her friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi, she “loved gossip like fish love water.”

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland teaches at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she is a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University where she is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program. She divides her time between Palo Alto and her home in Dublin.

Boland’s first book of poetry is New Territory published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This is followed by The War Horse (1975) and In Her Own Image (1980). Night Feed (1982) establishes her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world. While she is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin in 1994, she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.

Several of Boland’s volumes of poetry have been Poetry Book Society choices in the United Kingdom, where she is primarily published by Carcanet Press. In the United States her publisher is W. W. Norton & Company.

Her poem “Quarantine” is one of ten poems shortlisted for RTÉ‘s selection of Ireland’s favourite poems of the last 100 years in 2015.

Former Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, quotes from her poem “The Emigrant Irish” in his address to the joint houses of the United States Congress in May 2008.

On March 15, 2016, United States President Barack Obama quotes lines from her poem “On a Thirtieth Anniversary” (from Against Love Poetry 2001) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day.

In March 2018, RTÉ broadcasts a documentary on Boland’s life as a poet called “Eavan Boland: Is it Still the Same?” In the same year, she is commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) to write the poem “Our future will become the past of other women” to be read at the United Nations (UN) and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of women gaining the vote in Ireland in 1918.

Boland co-edits The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). She also publishes a volume of translations in 2004 called After Every War (Princeton University Press). With Edward Hirsch, she co-edits “The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology of the Sonnet” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).

In 1976, Boland wins a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio. Her other awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Her collection In a Time of Violence (1994) receives a Lannan Award and is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

In 1997 Boland receives an honorary degree from University College Dublin. She also receives honorary degrees from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 1997, and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1999. She receives one from Bowdoin College in 2004. In 2004 she also receives an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin.

Boland receives the Bucknell Medal of Distinction 2000 from Bucknell University, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence by Centenary College of Louisiana in 2002, the Smartt Family prize from The Yale Review and the John Frederick Nims Award from Poetry magazine 2002. Her volume of poems Against Love Poetry is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her volume Domestic Violence (2007) is shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the United Kingdom. Her poem “Violence Against Women” from the same volume is awarded the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry for the best poem published in 2007 in Shenandoah magazine. In 2012, she wins a PEN Award for creative nonfiction with her collection of essays, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, published in 2012.

In 2016, Boland is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, she receives the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.

On May 25, 2018, Boland is elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She receives the Irish PEN Award for Literature in 2019. She is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, in 1994. During this time she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.

Boland dies in Dublin on April 27, 2020, at the age of 75. Later that year she is posthumously awarded the Costa Book Award for poetry for her final collection The Historians.

In 2024, Trinity College Dublin announces the renaming of the “denamed” former Berkeley Library as the Eavan Boland Library. This makes it the first building named after any woman on Trinity’s city centre campus. The name is made official in March 2025.

(Image credit: Maura Hickey)


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Founding of the Irish Texts Society

The Irish Texts Society (Irish: Cumann na Scríbheann nGaedhilge) is founded in London on April 26, 1898, to advance public education by promoting the study of Irish literature. It is a text publication society, issuing annotated editions of texts in Irish with English translations and related commentaries.

Douglas Hyde is the Society’s first president, Frederick York Powell is its first chairman and Norma Borthwick and Eleanor Hull are the secretaries.

As of 2009, the Irish Texts Society has published sixty-three items in its main series and twenty items in its subsidiary series. Other publications have included Patrick S. Dinneen‘s Irish-English Dictionary and the Historical Dictionary of Irish Placenames.

The Society holds an annual seminar at University College Cork (UCC), with the 27th event scheduled to take place on November 7, 2026.

Distinguished past members include Norma Borthwick, Rachel Bromwich, Myles Dillon, Patrick Dinneen, Idris Foster, Robin Flower, Eleanor Hull, Douglas Hyde, Gerard Murphy, Maurice O’Connell, Noel O’Connell.


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Birth of Malcolm Byrne, Fianna Fáil Politician

Malcolm Byrne, an Irish Fianna Fáil politician, is born in Gorey, County Wexford, on April 25, 1974. He serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Wicklow–Wexford constituency since the 2024 Irish general election. He previously serves as a Senator for the Cultural and Educational Panel from 2020 to 2024. He represents the Wexford constituency from 2019 to 2020.

Byrne is the eldest child from a family of five. He attends St. Joseph’s CBS secondary school in Gorey, later studying law at University College Dublin (UCD). He is secretary of the Kevin Barry Cumann while at UCD. He Is involved in student politics, serving as education officer for both UCD Students’ Union and the Union of Students in Ireland, and as an executive member of the European Students’ Union.

Byrne describes the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and the fall of the Berlin Wall as influencing his decision to enter politics.

Byrne is Head of Communications with the Higher Education Authority (HEA) until 2019, and has been Vice-President of the National Youth Council of Ireland. In 2014, he is named as one of the European 40 Under 40, in the European Young Leaders Programme.

When first elected to Gorey Town Council on the first count in the 1999 Irish local elections, he is its youngest member at the age of 25. He tops the poll again at the 2004 Irish local elections. He is first elected to Wexford County Council in the 2009 Irish local elections for the Gorey local electoral area, and elected Chairman following his 2014 re-election.

In January 2006, The Sun includes Byrne’s picture on the cover of its Irish edition beneath the headline “Bertie‘s FF Man in Gay Web Shame,” revealing that Byrne has a profile on the dating website Gaydar. He responds at the time, “I have not, nor have I ever, done anything illegal and I am not a hypocrite in any way. My views on gay rights issues are well known. I am not married with four children or anything like that, so there is no suggestion of hypocrisy.” His family and political career suffer as a result and he is not selected for candidacy in the 2007 Irish general election following this incident. He later describes how a journalist from The Gorey Echo first approaches him, “The first few questions were about roads. Then the journalist said, ‘Are you aware you have a profile on this dating website?'” When he confirms that the profile is his, he experiences a sleepless night before The Gorey Echo outs him locally: “I was ringing around people I knew and my parents were ringing around people … my grandmother didn’t know and a lot of my extended family and my friends didn’t know.” Gorey Echo group editor Tom Mooney defends the publication by saying he believes Byrne’s behaviour to be “unfitting of a public representative.”

Byrne is a candidate for Fianna Fáil in the 2016 Irish general election in the Wexford constituency, but does not win a seat.

Byrne contests the 2019 European Parliament election for Fianna Fail in the South constituency, having unexpectedly beaten Cork TD Billy Kelleher in the vote for the party’s nomination. However, Kelleher is later added to the ticket. Fianna Fáil then divides the constituency geographically, asking people in counties Carlow, Kilkenny, Laois, Offaly, Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow to vote for Byrne, and those in counties Cork, Kerry, Clare and Limerick to vote for Kelleher. Kelleher wins 11.69% of the first-preference votes (FPV) and is elected on the 17th count. Byrne wins 9.62% of the FPV, and is eliminated on the 16th count.

Byrne is elected as a TD at the 2019 Wexford by-election. Andrew Bolger is co-opted to Byrne’s seat on Wexford County Council following his election to the Dáil. His maiden speech is about housing solutions and the need to address the challenges facing Generation Rent. In an interview he says he can envisage a United Ireland where the 12th of July and Saint Patrick’s Day are public holidays and speaks about how Ireland needs to ensure Unionists feel at home in a new agreed state and that may mean addressing issues such as Ireland joining the Commonwealth.

Byrne loses his Dáil seat at the 2020 Irish general election, following what he calls “a dirty campaign.” His defeat after only 71 days makes him the TD with the second-shortest term of service, after the Anti H-Block TD Kieran Doherty, who dies on hunger strike in August 1981, only 52 days after his election.

On March 31, 2020, Byrne is elected to Seanad Éireann at the 2020 Seanad election. He is named as Fianna Fáil spokesperson on Higher Education, Innovation and Science by Taoiseach Micheál Martin in July 2020.

As a senator, Byrne is a vocal critic of human rights abuses in China. In February 2021, he becomes co-chair of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, along with Senator Barry Ward of Fine Gael. Byrne is a member of the cross-party Oireachtas Friends of Israel in the Oireachtas.

At the 2024 Irish general election, Byrne is elected to the Dáil. He is subsequently appointed Cathaoirleach of the Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence.

Byrne is openly gay. As of 2020, he is single and describes politics as “almost like an addiction,” which makes relationships difficult. He lives in Gorey.

In March 2025, Byrne is injured during the theft of his phone in London.


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Death of Tomás de Bhaldraithe, Irish Language Scholar

Tomás Mac Donnchadha de Bhaldraithe, Irish scholar notable for his work on the Irish language, particularly in the field of lexicography, dies in Dublin on April 24, 1996. He is best known for his English-Irish Dictionary, published in 1959.

De Bhaldraithe is born Thomas MacDonagh Waldron on December 14, 1916, in Ballincurra, County Limerick. He moves to Dublin with his family at the age of five. He is named after Thomas MacDonagh, one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, who had been executed after the Easter Rising earlier in the year. He adopts the use of the Irish language version of the name in both Irish and English. He receives his second-level education at Belvedere College in Dublin.

De Bhaldraithe’s stance on standard forms and spellings is supported by Éamon de Valera despite opposition from traditionalists in the Department of Education, and the work is widely seen as an important benchmark in Irish scholarship.

In 1942, de Bhaldraithe is appointed a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) in the department of Celtic Studies. In 1960 he is appointed professor of modern Irish language and literature in University College Dublin (UCD), where he develops an impressive archive of material on Irish dialects. Much of the material in this archive is later used as the basis of Niall Ó Dónaill‘s Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, published in 1978, for which he is consulting editor. Also during the 1970s, he translates the Irish language diary of Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin into English. It is then published by Mercier Press as “The Diary of an Irish Countryman.”

The language laboratory which de Bhaldraithe sets up in UCD is the first of its kind in any university in Ireland. His interest in seanchas (folklore) leads to his publication of Seanchas Tomás Laighléis in 1977, while his earlier work includes the ground-breaking study of the Cois Fharraige dialect (a variety of Connacht Irish), Gaeilge Chois Fharraige: Deilbhíocht. In later years he works extensively on the definitive Irish dictionary, Foclóir Stairiúil na Nua-Ghaeilge, which remains unfinished when he dies on April 24, 1996, but which is still in progress today.


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Birth of Bernadette Devlin, Civil Rights Leader & Politician

Bernadette Devlin, Irish civil rights leader and former politician, is born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, on April 23, 1947. She serves as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster in Northern Ireland from the 1969 Mid Ulster by-election on April 17, 1969 until February 1974.

Devlin is born into a Roman Catholic family and attends St. Patrick’s Girls Academy in Dungannon. She is studying Psychology at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 1968 when she takes a prominent role in a student-led civil rights organisation, People’s Democracy. She is subsequently excluded from the university.

Devlin stands unsuccessfully against James Chichester-Clark in the 1969 Northern Ireland general election. When George Forrest, the MP for Mid Ulster, dies, she fights the subsequent by-election on the “Unity” ticket, defeating Forrest’s widow Anna, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) candidate, and is elected to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. At age 21, she is the youngest MP at the time, and remains the youngest woman ever elected to Westminster until the 2015 United Kingdom general election when 20-year-old Mhairi Black succeeds to the title.

After engaging on the side of the residents in the Battle of the Bogside, Devlin is convicted of incitement to riot in December 1969, for which she serves a short jail term.

Having witnessed the events of Bloody Sunday, Devlin is infuriated that she is consistently denied the floor in the House of Commons by the Speaker Selwyn Lloyd, despite the fact that parliamentary convention decrees that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion would be granted an opportunity to speak about it. She slaps Reginald Maudling, the Home Secretary in the Conservative government, across the face when he states in the House of Commons that the paratroopers had fired in self-defence on Bloody Sunday.

Devlin helps to form the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), a revolutionary socialist breakaway from Official Sinn Féin, with Seamus Costello in 1974. She serves on the party’s national executive in 1975 but resigns when a proposal that the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) become subordinate to the party executive is defeated. In 1977, she joins the Independent Socialist Party, but it disbands the following year.

In 1971, Devlin gives birth to a daughter, Róisín, which costs her some political support because she is unmarried. She later marries Róisín’s father, Michael McAliskey, on her 26th birthday on April 23, 1973.

McAliskey stands as an independent candidate in support of the prisoners at Long Kesh prison in the 1979 European Parliament elections in Northern Ireland and wins 5.9% of the vote. She is a leading spokesperson for the Smash H-Block Campaign, which supports the hunger strikes of 1980 and 1981.

On January 16, 1981, McAliskey and her husband are shot by members of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), who break into their home near Coalisland, County Tyrone. She is shot fourteen times in front of her children. British soldiers are watching the McAliskey home at the time but fail to prevent the assassination attempt. The couple are taken by helicopter to a hospital in nearby Dungannon for emergency treatment and then transported to the Musgrave Park Hospital, Military Wing, in Belfast, under intensive care. The attackers, all three members of the South Belfast UDA, are captured by the army patrol and subsequently jailed.

In 1982, McAliskey twice fails in an attempt to be elected to the Dublin North–Central constituency of Dáil Éireann. In 2003, she is barred from entering the United States and is deported on the grounds that the United States Department of State has declared that she “poses a serious threat to the security of the United States,” apparently referring to her conviction for incitement to riot in 1969.

On May 12, 2007, McAliskey is the guest speaker at Éirígí‘s first Annual James Connolly commemoration in Arbour Hill, Dublin. She currently co-ordinates a not-for-profit community development organisation based in Dungannon, the South Tyrone Empowerment Programme, and works with migrant workers to improve their treatment in Northern Ireland.

During the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly election, McAliskey is an election agent for People before Profit‘s candidate in Foyle, Eamonn McCann. McCann is successfully elected.

During the campaigning for the 2024 European Parliament election in Ireland, McAliskey endorses Clare Daly in the Dublin constituency.


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Birth of Mervyn Archdall, Antiquarian & Church of Ireland Clergyman

Mervyn Archdall, Irish antiquarian and clergyman of the Church of Ireland, is born on April 22, 1723, in Dublin, elder son among two sons and three daughters of William Archdall, goldsmith, and his wife Henrietta, a widow who is the daughter of Henry Gonne, curate of Finglas. His father is Dublin assay master from 1736 until his death in 1751, and is a member of the gentry family from Castle Archdale, County Fermanagh.

Archdall is educated by Dr. Keenane, and enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1739. He graduates with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1744 and a Master of Arts (MA) in 1747, and is ordained in the Church of Ireland. He is curate of Howth from 1750 to 1753, and of Kilgobbin and Taney, also in Dublin, from 1753 to 1758, rector of Nathlash in the diocese of Cloyne from 1749 to 1758, and from 1756 domestic chaplain to Richard Pococke, Bishop of Ossory. In 1761 Pococke gives Archdall the livings of Agharney and Attanagh in Ossory which he holds until 1786, when he becomes rector of Slane in the Diocese of Meath. He is also prebendary of Cloneamary from 1762 to 1764 and of Mayne from 1764 to 1772, both in Ossory.

Archdall is interested, almost from his student days, in ancient history and antiquities, and for forty years he gathers material for a work similar to an earlier compilation, William Dugdale‘s Monasticon Anglicanum. He intends to publish two or more large folio volumes, but after Pococke’s death has no sponsor and has to pay for its publication himself causing him to cut back the scale of the project. Monasticon Hibernicum appears in 1786 as a quarto volume, though still of over 800 pages. Archdall attempts encyclopaedic coverage of the history of Ireland’s pre-reformation monasteries and abbeys. The work is ground-breaking and ambitious, though marred by mistakes and inadequacies. He receives help from friends, including scholars such as Pococke and Edward Ledwich, and with them and others is a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1786.

In 1789, Archdall publishes his second important work, a new edition of The Peerage of Ireland by John Lodge. Lodge’s original work in four volumes is expanded by Archdall into seven octavos, adding a good deal of material from his own research to update the genealogies, as well as incorporating manuscript additions unpublished by the original author. These had been left in a cipher or in a private form of shorthand which could not be decoded by any contemporary expert in Dublin, and Archdall is just about to abandon the attempt to read them when his second wife works on it and discovers the key.

Archdall’s first wife, Sarah Colles or Collis, whom he marries in Dublin on July 30, 1747, is said to have been a relative of Thomas Prior, though she may also – or instead – have been connected in some way to Pococke. The bishop is known to have educated Christopher Colles (1739–1816), who becomes an important engineer and entrepreneur in the United States. They have two sons and a daughter, the elder son dying young. Sarah dies on May 28, 1782. Archdall marries his second wife, Abigail Young, on November 25, 1782.

Archdall’s works are still of interest to historians and genealogists, and surviving copies are valuable collectors’ items. In an apologia in his preface to the Peerage he notes, “I have left that inaccurate which could not be exact, and that imperfect which cannot be completed.” He dies suddenly on August 6, 1791, and is buried in Slane churchyard.

(From: “Archdall, Mervyn” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Turlough O’Donnell, Irish Lawyer & Judge

Turlough O’Donnell, PC, Irish lawyer and judge, dies in Blackrock, County Louth, on April 21, 2017. He is a Lord Justice of Appeal of Northern Ireland from 1979 to 1989.

O’Donnell is born on August 5, 1924, in Newry, County Down, to a Catholic family, the son of Charles and Eileen O’Donnell. He is educated at Abbey Grammar School, Newry and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), where he takes a Bachelor of Laws (LLB). He is called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1947. He is appointed a Queen’s Counsel in 1964. As a lawyer, he defends Robert McGladdery, the last man to be hanged in Northern Ireland.

In 1971, O’Donnell is appointed a Justice of the High Court of Northern Ireland. In 1979, he is promoted a Lord Justice of Appeal and is sworn of the Privy Council, having declined the customary knighthood. He retires in 1989.

O’Donnell is one of the few senior Catholic judges on the Northern Irish bench and he frequently comes under threat. In 1979, he tries the Shankill Butchers and gives out 42 life sentences, a record in British legal history.

O’Donnell is Chairman of the Northern Ireland Bar Council from 1970 to 1971 and of the Council of Legal Education (Northern Ireland) from 1980 to 1990.

O’Donnell marries Eileen McKinley (died 2008) in 1954. They have two sons and two daughters. Of his sons, Turlough O’Donnell SC is Chairman of the General Council of the Bar of Ireland from 2016 to 2018, and Donal O’Donnell is directly appointed from the Irish Bar to the Supreme Court of Ireland in 2010, before becoming Chief Justice of Ireland in 2021.

O’Donnell dies in Blackrock on April 21, 2017. He is buried at Blackrock/Haggardstown Old Cemetery in Dundalk, County Louth.