From 1546 to 1549, Weston is a principal of Broadgates Hall (afterwards Pembroke College), and at the same time deputy reader in civil law at the university, under Dr. John Story. He is not a clergyman, and his later appointment to two lucrative deaneries greatly troubles his conscience.
On January 12, 1559, Weston is created Dean of the Arches and is a commissioner for administering the oaths required of ecclesiastics under the Act of Uniformity 1558. He is consulted in regard to the Queen’s Commission issued on December 6, 1559, for confirming Matthew Parker as Archbishop of Canterbury and is included in a commission issued on November 8, 1564, to inquire into complaints of piratical depredations committed at sea on the subjects of the King of Spain.
The Lord Deputy of Ireland, Sir Henry Sidney, requests that Weston be nominated for the post of Lord Chancellor of Ireland in succession to Hugh Curwen, Archbishop of Dublin, in April 1566. After a year, on June 10, 1567, Queen Elizabeth I tells Sidney that after good deliberation she has made the “choice for the supply of room of Chancellor by naming thereunnto our trusty well-beloved Doctor Weston, dean of the arches here, a man for his learning and approved integrity thoroughly qualified to receive and possess the same” and “that for some increase of his living whilst he remaineth in our service there she was pleased to give unto him the Deanery of St. Patrick’s, whereof the Bishop of Armagh, Adam Loftus, is now dean and yet to leave it at our order, as we know he will.”
Weston arrives in Dublin early in August and is sworn into office on August 8, 1567. He is conscientious in performing his duties, and greatly respected for his integrity, although ill-health (he is plagued by gout and gallstones) hampers his effectiveness. He is appalled by the laziness and inefficiency of many of the Irish judges and urges Elizabeth I to replace them with Englishmen wherever possible. He is equally shocked at the poverty and ignorance of many of the Protestant clergy in Ireland. His zeal for reform leads him, though a layman, to become an effective leader of the Church of Ireland for a few years. He cooperates with Adam Loftus, now Archbishop of Dublin, in purging the Archdiocese of Dublin of crypto-Catholics, but is opposed to the persecution of the Roman Catholic majority, or any efforts to forcibly convert them.
Weston dies on May 20, 1573, and is buried beneath the altar in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, “leaving behind him an excellent character for uprightness, judgment, learning, courtesy, and piety.”
Weston marries Alice Jenyngs, daughter of Richard Jenyngs of Great Barr, Staffordshire. They have a son, John, and three daughters, of whom most of known of Alice, who marries firstly Hugh Brady, Bishop of Meath, by whom she has numerous children including Luke and Nicholas, and secondly Sir Geoffrey Fenton, by whom she is the mother of Catherine, who marries Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork, and of Sir William Fenton.
FitzGerald joins Fine Gael, attaching himself to the liberal wing of the party. and in 1969 is elected to Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. He later gives up his university lectureship to become Minister for Foreign Affairs in the coalition government of Liam Cosgrave (1973–77). When the coalition government is resoundingly defeated in the 1977 Irish general election, Cosgrave yields leadership of Fine Gael to FitzGerald. In his new role as Leader of the Opposition and party leader, he proceeds to modernize and strengthen the party at the grass roots. He briefly loses power in 1982 when political instability triggers two snap elections.
By the time of the 1981 Irish general election, Fine Gael has a party machine that can easily match Fianna Fáil. The party wins 65 seats and forms a minority coalition government with the Labour Party and the support of a number of Independent TDs. FitzGerald is elected Taoiseach on June 30, 1981. To the surprise of many, FitzGerald excludes Richie Ryan, Richard Burke and Tom O’Donnell, former Fine Gael stalwarts, from the cabinet.
On May 5, 2011, it is reported that FitzGerald is seriously ill in a Dublin hospital. Newly elected Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny sends his regards and calls him an “institution.” On May 6 he is put on a ventilator. On May 19, after suffering from pneumonia, he dies at the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin at the age of 85.
In a statement, Irish PresidentMary McAleese hails FitzGerald as “a man steeped in the history of the State who constantly strove to make Ireland a better place for all its people.” Taoiseach Enda Kenny pays homage to “a truly remarkable man who made a truly remarkable contribution to Ireland.” Henry Kissinger, the former United States Secretary of State, who serves as an opposite number to FitzGerald in the 1970s, recalls “an intelligent and amusing man who was dedicated to his country.”
FitzGerald’s death occurs on the third day of Queen Elizabeth II‘s state visit to the Republic of Ireland, an event designed to mark the completion of the Northern Ireland peace process that had been “built on the foundations” of FitzGerald’s Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher in 1985. In a personal message, the Queen offers her sympathies and says she is “saddened” to learn of FitzGerald’s death.
On his visit to Dublin, United States PresidentBarack Obama offers condolences on FitzGerald’s death. He speaks of him as “someone who believed in the power of education; someone who believed in the potential of youth; most of all, someone who believed in the potential of peace and who lived to see that peace realised.”
FitzGerald is the author of a number of books, including Planning in Ireland (1968), Towards a New Ireland (1972), Unequal Partners (1979), All in a Life: An Autobiography (1991), and Reflections on the Irish State (2003).
O’Riordan is born at 37 Pope’s Quay, Cork, County Cork, on November 11, 1917, the youngest of five children. His parents come from the West Cork Gaeltacht of Ballingeary–Gougane Barra. Despite his parents being native speakers of the Irish language, it is not until he is interned during World War II that he learns Irish.
As a teenager, O’Riordan joins the republican youth movement, Fianna Éireann, and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Much of the IRA at the time is inclined toward left-wing politics. A lot of its activity at the time involves street fighting with the quasi-fascistBlueshirt movement, and he fights the Blueshirts on the streets of Cork in 1933–34. He Is friends with left-wing inclined republicans such as Peadar O’Donnell and Frank Ryan, and in 1934, he follows them into the Republican Congress – a short-lived socialist republican party.
O’Riordan joins the Communist Party of Ireland (1933) in 1935 while still in the IRA and works on the communist newspaper The Irish Workers’ Voice. In 1937, following the urgings of Peadar O’Donnell, several hundred Irishmen, mostly IRA or ex-IRA men, go to fight for the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War with the XVth International Brigade. They are motivated in part by enmity towards the 800 or so Blueshirts, led by Eoin O’Duffy who went to Spain to fight on the “nationalist” side in the Irish Brigade. He accompanies a party led by Frank Ryan. In the Republic’s final offensive of July 25, 1938, he carries the flag of Catalonia across the River Ebro. On August 1 he is severely injured by shrapnel on the Ebro front. He is repatriated to Ireland the following month, after the International Brigades are disbanded.
In 1938, O’Riordan is offered an Irish Army commission by the Irish Free State but chooses instead to train IRA units in Cork. As a result of his IRA activities during World War II, he is interned in the Curragh Camp from 1939 until 1943 where he is Officer Commanding of the Cork Hut and partakes in Máirtín Ó Cadhain‘s Gaelic League classes as well as publishes Splannc (Irish for “Spark”, named after Vladimir Lenin‘s newspaper). He is secretary of the “Connolly group,” composed of leftist internees. Following his release from internment, he terminates his IRA membership.
In 1944, O’Riordan is founding secretary of the Liam Mellows Branch of the Labour Party. This branch becomes infamous for what is regarded during the period as its controversial nature and becomes an intractable enemy of Branch Chair Timothy Quill. The branch is initially established by former members of the Curragh Camp’s Communist Group, including Bill Nagle and Jim Savage. During this time, the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU) disaffiliates from the Labour Party and the National Labour Party is established on the basis that communists have infiltrated the party. Quill, who is made branch chair by the Labour Party, allegedly has O’Riordan and his fellow members expelled, with the branch being dissolved. O’Riordan later accuses Quill of antisemitism and both Quill and Timothy J. Murphy of “red-baiting.” In 2001, he claims that any attempt to raise the issue of defence of communist Spain “was shouted down at Labour Party Conferences.” In 1945, he is a founding secretary of the Cork Socialist Party.
O’Riordan subsequently works as a bus conductor in Cork and is active in the ITGWU. He stands as a Cork Socialist Party candidate in the 1946 Cork Boroughby-election, placing third behind Fianna Fáil‘s Patrick McGrath and Fine Gael‘s Michael O’Driscoll with 3,184 votes. Afterward, he moves to Dublin where he lives in Victoria Street with his wife Kay, and continues to work as a bus conductor and remains active in the ITGWU.
In 1948, O’Riordan is a founding secretary of the Irish Workers’ League and general secretary thereafter, and of its successor organisation the Irish Workers’ Party from 1962 to 1970.
O’Riordan meets and befriends folk musician Luke Kelly, and the two develop a “personal-political friendship.” Kelly endorses him for election, and holds a rally in his name during campaigning in 1965.
In all O’Riordan runs for election five times, campaigning throughout for the establishment of a socialist republic in Ireland but given Ireland’s Catholic conservatism and fear of communism, he does so without success. He does, however, receive playwright Seán O’Casey‘s endorsement in 1951. O’Casey writes: “Mr. O’Riordan is his own message. He has nothing to sell but his soul. But he hasn’t done that, though he will be told he’ll lose it by holding on to it.”
O’Riordan’s participation in the Spanish Civil War is always an important part of his political identity. In 1966, he attends the International Brigades’ Reunion in Berlin and is instrumental in having Frank Ryan’s remains repatriated from Germany to Ireland in 1979.
O’Riordan is a member of the Irish Chile Solidarity Committee and attends the 1st Party Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1984. He also campaigns on behalf of the Birmingham Six and attends their appeal trial in 1990. He serves between 1970 and 1983 as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) and from 1983 to 1988 as National Chairman of the party publishing many articles under the auspices of the CPI. Hus staunchly pro-Soviet direction of the party leads to a number of members leaving to form the EurocommunistIrish Marxist Society.
O’Riordan’s last major public outing is in 2005 at the re-dedication of the memorial outside Dublin’s Liberty Hall to the Irish veterans of the Spanish Civil War. With other veterans, he Is received by President of IrelandMary McAleese. He is also presented with Cuba’s Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Consul Teresita Trujillo to Ireland on behalf of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
In 1969, according to Soviet dissident Vasili Mitrokhin, O’Riordan is approached by IRA leaders Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello with a view to obtaining guns from the Soviet KGB to defend Irish republican areas of Belfast during the communal violence that marked the outbreak of the Troubles. Mitrokhin alleges that O’Riordan then contacts the Kremlin, but the consignment of arms does not reach Ireland until 1972. The operation is known as Operation Splash.
In the meantime, the IRA has split into the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA and it is the latter faction who receives the Soviet arms. Mitrokhin’s allegations are repeated in Boris Yeltsin‘s autobiography. After the split in the Republican movement, O’Riordan unsuccessfully attempts to bring about a reunification of the two sides.
O’Riordan’s book, Connolly Column: The Story of the Irishmen who fought for the Spanish Republic, 1936–1939, published in 1979, deals with the Irish volunteers of the International Brigade who fought in support of the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). An updated version of the book is reprinted in 2005 and is launched by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr. Michael Conaghan at a book launch at SIPTU headquarters, Liberty Hall. The book is the inspiration for Irish singer-songwriter Christy Moore‘s famous song Viva la Quinta Brigada.
In 1991, O’Riordan’s wife, Kay Keohane of Clonakilty, County Cork dies at their home at the age of 81. He continues to live in their family home before moving to Glasnevin in 2000 to be close to his son Manus who lives nearby. In 1999, he describes himself as an atheist and believes that communism will rise again. He lives there until falling ill in November 2005 and is taken to the Mater Hospital. His health rapidly deteriorates and he quickly develops Alzheimer’s disease. Soon afterward he is moved to St. Mary’s Hospital in the Phoenix Park where he spends the final few months of his life, before his death at the age of 88 on May 18, 2006. Then Labour Party leader Ruairi Quinn praises O’Riordan after his death, saying, “As leader of the Labour Party I had the honour of ensuring he received a special citation at our 2001 national conference. Michael O’Riordan stood out against the tide of Irish conservatism and clerical domination that kept Ireland backward and isolated in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.”
O’Riordan’s funeral at Glasnevin Crematorium is attended by over a thousand mourners. Following a wake the previous night at Finglas Road, hundreds turn up outside the house of his son and traffic grinds to a halt as family, friends and comrades – many of whom are waving the red flag of the Communist Party of Ireland – escort O’Riordan to Glasnevin Cemetery. A secular ceremony takes place led by Manus O’Riordan (Head of Research at SIPTU) with contributions from O’Riordan’s family, Communist Party general secretary Eugene McCartan and IBMT representative Pauline Frasier.
The siege of Enniskillen takes place at Enniskillen in Fermanagh, in present day Northern Ireland, in 1594 and 1595, during the Nine Years’ War. In February 1594, the English capture Enniskillen Castle from the Irish following a waterborne assault and massacre the defenders after they surrender. From May 1594, an Irish army under Hugh Maguire and Cormac MacBaron O’Neill besiege the English garrison in the castle, and in August they defeat an English relief force in the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits. A second relief force is allowed to resupply the garrison, but the castle remains cut off. Eventually, in May 1595, the English garrison surrenders to the Irish and are then massacred.
Enniskillen Castle sits on the River Erne and commands the strategic bottleneck between Upper and Lower Lough Erne. On January 25, 1594, English Captain John Dowdall arrives at Enniskillen by boat with three infantry companies. They dig trenches in which they place light cannons and musketeers, but the cannons are too small to make much of an impact on the castle walls. On January 30, Captain George Bingham arrives with 300 men.
They launch a waterborne assault on the castle. While musketeers in boats and artillery on land fire at the castle, a large boat holding 67 men anchors at a vulnerable part of the walls. They make a breach in the wall with pickaxes, forcing the Irish to take shelter in the keep. Dowdall threatens to destroy the castle with gunpowder if the garrison does not surrender. An Irish witness claims there are 36 fighting men and 40 women and children in the castle, while Dowdall claims there are 200. After they surrender, Dowdall has them put to the sword and claims to have killed 150. Captain Thomas Lee, who is present, describes this as a great dishonor to the Queen as the defenders had surrendered “uppon composicion, And your majesties worde being past to the poore beggars that kept it, they were all notwithstandinge dishonourably putt to the sworde in a most miserable state.”
Dowdall writes on February 2 to the Lord Deputy of Ireland that he has captured the castle from the “rebel” Hugh Maguire. An English garrison is left in place. A detailed coloured illustration of the siege is made shortly after.
On May 17, 1594, now acting with the covert support of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, Hugh Maguire and Cormac MacBaron O’Neill lay siege to Enniskillen which is now isolated in hostile country. Their army consists of 1,400 foot soldiers and 600 horsemen. It quickly grows with support arriving from Hugh Roe O’Donnell. The English commander, James Eccarsall, has only 50 foot soldiers and 24 horsemen to defend the castle, along with some light artillery. Eccarsall launches a sortie by boat but has to retreat under heavy fire. Irish fortifications cut off access by river and the castle is attacked nightly. Many of the garrison fall sick due to food shortages and exhaustion brought on by incessant skirmishing with the Irish.
On August 7, Maguire and his allies defeat an English relief force for Enniskillen at the Battle of the Ford of the Biscuits. A second relief force commanded by the Lord Deputy of Ireland, William Russell, is sent by another route. Although it is not attacked by the Irish, none of Russell’s scouts or messengers reach the castle nor return. Russell relieves the beleaguered garrison by August 30 with six months supplies, then withdraws. Following this, there is a truce, but “subterfuge and deception were the hallmarks of this stage of the war.”
Maguire raises the clan and the castle is again attacked in January 1595 (Third Siege of Enniskillen). This time, forty selected men dressed in chain mail and armed with Lochaber axes attack at night. His men overrun the outer defences but the garrison holds out in the tower. The Irish withdraw but take with them the garrison’s three boats, preventing the English from patrolling the Erne and cutting them off.
The garrison’s plight is not lost on the authorities in Dublin, but the Crown does not have enough troops for a relief force, and Lord Deputy Russell considers withdrawing the garrison. A report to the Lord Deputy of Ireland suggests that Clan Maguire plans to bring down the walls with gunpowder. In May 1595, the garrison agrees to surrender Enniskillen to the Irish in exchange for their lives. However, the entire garrison is then massacred. Russell claims that the garrison had surrendered on terms to Cormac MacBaron O’Neill, who then reneged upon his word and had the surrendered garrison executed en masse. This is inconsistent with the treatment of other English garrisons, such as the Blackwater Fort, who are granted liberal terms to leave their position in February 1595. However, the Enniskillen garrison may also have been slain as retaliation for Dowdall’s similar violation of the surrender terms and massacre of Clan Maguire’s defenders of the castle and their families in the year before.
Whyte is born on April 30, 1928, in Penang, Malaysia. His father is manager of a rubber plantation on the mainland. His family leaves Malaysia and returns to Europe when he is three, eventually settling in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland. The Whytes are a well-known County Down family recorded in the area since at least 1713. The family is said to have come to Ireland from South Wales with Strongbow in 1170 and settled in Leinster. He is educated locally, at Ampleforth College and Oriel College Oxford, from which he takes a degree in Modern History in 1949. Continuing studies some two years later he is awarded a B.Litt degree for further research, which is to form the nebula of his first book which is published in 1958.
Whyte undertakes national service during the 1950s and works as a history teacher in his old school before being appointed lecturer in Modern History at Makerere University, Uganda. In 1962, he returns to Ireland having been appointed first “lecturer in empirical politics” at the then expanding University College Dublin (UCD). In 1966, he weds fellow academic Dr. Jean Murray and moves to Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) to undertake further studies.
In his book, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long?, Whyte’s successor as Professor of Politics at UCD, Tom Garvin, gives an account as to the clerical politics prevalent at the time at UCD which causes Whyte’s untimely departure:
A little later, in 1966, McQuaid provoked, possibly unintentionally, the resignation of John Whyte, a distinguished Catholic political scientist, from University College Dublin’s Department of Ethics and Politics. This resignation and move to Belfast on Whyte’s part in 1966 almost certainly was the unintended result of an extraordinary piece of clerical interference and bullying that rebounded upon McQuaid and on UCD. Whyte was in the midst of writing his standard history of the Catholic Church in independent Ireland, later published in 1969; at McQuaid’s apparent instigation, his professor and head of Department attempted to forbid him from continuing with this work. The irony was that the resultant scholarly book, finished in Belfast rather than Dublin, deeply underestimated clerical power in the Irish state and gave the Catholic Church a rather easy ride. Another irony was that Whyte, as a Roman Catholic historian and political scientist, was apparently rather favoured by McQuaid. However in 1966 bishops didn’t know they needed friends. Whyte was to come back to UCD and was professor of Ethics and Politics between 1984 and 1990. In a very real sense, McQuaid was the patriarchal and eccentric governor of Dublin Archdiocese, where one-third of the stat’s population lived; he attempted to run an urban society of a million people as though it were a large feudal community.
At Queen’s, Whyte spends seventeen years as lecturer and reader, and from 1982 Professor of Irish Politics during which he seeks to bring together political scientists from across the island and develop an All-Ireland political science fellowship. From 1973 to 1974 he works at as a research fellow at Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs, and in 1975 he helps lead a team of researchers investigating the Northern Ireland conflict, then at its height. He also works as research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies during the late 1970s and is elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1977, serving as Vice-President from 1989 to 1990.
In 1984, Whyte returns to University College Dublin, then faced with stringent fiscal cuts and wider problems in Irish third-level education. In his second period at UCD, he leads the Department, which he now heads, through a troubled period of financial cuts while supervising a reorganisation of the undergraduate curriculum. In his last years at UCD he completes his seminal work, the widely regarded Interpreting Northern Ireland. He finishes correcting the proofs and compiling the index of this work only a week before his death. While en route to an academic conference at Airley House, Virginia, he collapses at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, is taken to a local hospital, and dies there on May 16, 1990. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and one daughter.
Following his death, Whyte’s family, friends, and colleagues set up the John Whyte Trust Fund to continue Whyte’s work, honour his memory and encourage “informed dialogue and interaction at graduate level among people who are likely to be leaders and opinion-shapers.” To date the fund has awarded one fully paid scholarship and a number of part-paid scholarships as well as essay prizes annually. The fund also hosts an annual John Whyte Memorial Lecture. Speakers have included Paul Bew and Brendan O’Leary.
MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.
MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).
The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”
Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.
The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.
When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.
Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”
In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.
MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.
On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.
On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.
MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.
MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.
MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.
Christy O’Connor Snr, an Irish professional golfer born Patrick Christopher O’Connor, dies in Dublin on May 14, 2016. He is one of the leading golfers on the British and Irish circuit from the mid-1950s.
O’Connor wins over twenty tournaments on the British PGA and finishes in the top 10 in The Open Championship many times. Later he has considerable success in senior events, twice winning the World Senior Championship. In team events he plays in ten successive Ryder Cup matches and plays in fifteen Canada Cup/World Cup matches for Ireland, winning the Canada Cup in 1958 in partnership with Harry Bradshaw.
O’Connor is born in Knocknacarra, a village in Galway, on December 21, 1924. He catches his first glimpse of golf at the nearby Galway Golf Club, and from the age of 10 spends most of his spare time there. His foray into professional golf begins with caddying, first at Galway and then over at Tuam Golf Club.
In 1951, O’Connor turns professional with Tuam members funding his first tournament at The Open Championship at Royal Portrush Golf Club in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, that same year. His 19th-place finish garners a membership invitation from Bundoran Golf Club in Bundoran, County Donegal, which he accepts.
O’Connor’s first professional win is at the Swallow-Penfold Tournament held in 1955, the first £1,000 prize to be offered in British golf. He goes on to win the 1956 and 1959 British Masters. In 1958, he helps Ireland to win the Canada Cup in Mexico City playing with Harry Bradshaw. A year later, he moves to Dublin and joins The Royal Dublin Golf Club. Throughout the 1960s he wins at least one professional event during each year on the British Tour, a level of consistent success matched by very few other players. He rarely plays professional tournaments outside Britain or Ireland, at one stage saying he forwent playing at the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, because he could not afford to participate.
The only major championship O’Connor plays is The Open Championship. He plays the event twenty-six times between 1951 and 1979. His best performance comes at the 1965 Open Championship where he ties for second place with Brian Huggett, two behind five-time winner Peter Thomson. He easily outplays international stars like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, and Gary Player. He receives an astonishing twenty invitations to play in the Masters Tournament but rejected all of them, citing prohibitive financial costs.
O’Connor plays in every Ryder Cup from 1955 to 1973, setting a record of ten appearances in the event which stands until it is surpassed by Nick Faldo in 1997. He is the Irish professional champion on ten occasions, including in 1978 (at the age of 53), and is twice (1961 and 1962) recipient of the Harry Vardon Trophy for leading the British Tour’s “Order of Merit.”
In the 1966 Carroll’s International at The Royal Dublin Golf Club, O’Connor finishes 2-3-3 (eagle-birdie-eagle) to win the tournament by two strokes. At the par-4 16th, he drives the green and holes a 20-foot putt. He then holes a 12-foot putt at the 17th and, at the par-5 18th, hits a 3-iron to eight feet and holes the putt. A plaque by the 16th tee commemorates the achievement. In 1970, he wins the John Player Classic, at the time its £25,000 first prize is the richest offered in golf (in 1970, even The Open Championship winner receives just a little over £5,000), making him the season’s leading money-winner, although not “Order of Merit” leader, which is decided by a points system not directly related to prize money.
Later in his career, O’Connor becomes the leading “senior” (over-50s) professional player of his day, just before the lucrative U.S.-based Senior PGA Tour, now known as the PGA Tour Champions, takes off. He wins the PGA Seniors Championship six times and the World Senior Championship in 1976 and 1977. He is elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2009 in the Veterans category.
O’Connor meets his wife, Mary Collins, in Donegal while he is a member of Bundoran Golf Club. They marry in 1954 and have six children together. During his early career he is known simply as Christy O’Connor, but his nephew of the same name also becomes a prominent golfer, and from that point forward they are referred to as Christy O’Connor Senior and Christy O’Connor Junior, respectively. He is known as “Himself” among his golfing peers. He dies at the age of 91 in Dublin’s Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, on May 14, 2016.
In 1910, Elvery moves to South Africa to marry Hobart Kay, FRCS. By 1916 they have settled in Port Elizabeth.
Kay is a founder member of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1924 she is elected a member of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. She paints and makes etchings, and in 1926 her etching Romance is bought by Mary of Teck, Queen of the United Kingdom, at the Dominion Artists’ Exhibition in London. She travels widely in South Africa and sketches as she goes, and is also commissioned to make many portraits of mayors of Port Elizabeth, many of them lost when the City Hall burns down in 1977. During World War II she is commissioned by the government to record the war on the home front, and some of her work is held in the South African National Museum of Military History. From 1927 to 1945 she produces two to four illustrations each week for The Outspan.
Kay’s largest painting is the 1937 work Surgery, showing a patient undergoing abdominal surgery (a cholecystectomy). She portrays herself as the scrub nurse and her husband Hobart as the surgeon. In preparation for this painting she visits three hospitals and observes at least two operations, making 27 pages of preliminary sketches of people and equipment used in surgery. During World War II she paints further medical paintings: Operation in a Base Hospital and Blood to Save Lives.
Kay holds one-woman exhibitions from 1922 to 1955, and retrospective exhibitions of her work are held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 1965 and 1982.
In her early days at Port Elizabeth, Kay is a keen sailor and is described as “for a time the fastest spinnaker-hand in South Africa.”
Kay has three daughters and one son. Her daughter Joan Wright (1911-91) teaches painting at the Port Elizabeth Technical College School of Art and Design, and her daughter Marjorie Reynolds writes and publishes a biography of her mother in 1989, and a further book about the Elvery family in 1991, and also donates her mother’s collection of works and archives to the Iziko South African National Gallery as “The Kay Bequest” in 1992.
The Catholic Association is the latest in a series of similar associations formed over the previous ten years or so, none of which had prospered. Like the other associations, this new association is composed mainly of the middle class elite: an annual subscription amounting to a guinea, an amount equivalent to what an average farmer would pay for six months’ rent. In 1824, the Catholic Association begins to use the money that it has raised to campaign for Catholic emancipation.
In 1824, the association creates a new category of associate members at the cost of a penny per month, the so-called Catholic Rent. The reasoning behind the creation of this new membership category is to stimulate a swelling in association numbers. This new, cheaper category ensures Catholics from a poorer background can join, and thus the association’s initial class-based entry barriers are removed. The Catholic rent transforms the association and Catholic political advocacy more broadly. In terms of the association, the rent catalyzes a transformation in a number of ways. Firstly, as previously mentioned, it gives the Catholic Association a constant source of money, which enables O’Connell to run a consistent campaign. Secondly, it facilitates easy calculation of total association membership numbers so that O’Connell can say with confidence that he has the support of so many people. This is important as it can be used to apply pressure against the British government. Third, and perhaps most importantly, however, it announces the arrival of mass mobilization politics, being the first such populist movement in Europe. O’Connell decides to add this additional membership level, at a reduced price of a penny a month, deliberately. The benefits are clear. With the membership subscription set at a relatively cheap price, a large number of the peasant and working classes can join. Affordability ensures large numbers. In effect, it becomes a universal Catholic organization that is transparent and populist. The fact that each member contributes financially to the association also ensures that they are more deeply involved in pushing the cause of Catholic emancipation. People want value for their money. Thus, this ensures a cheap method for O’Connell to get the message of Catholic emancipation spread throughout Ireland.
The Catholic Association’s funds are diffused widely in a variety of areas. Some is spent campaigning for Catholic emancipation, defraying the costs of sending petitions to Westminster, and training of priests. Following the 1826 election campaign, funds are used to support the members of the organization who had voted against their landlords. The money is used for those who have been evicted from land by the landlords because of their connection to the Catholic organization or for those who were boycottingabsentee landlord. For the Catholic peasants that are in this situation, the future would be grim as they would be unable to continue the boycott without food and money, and they would be unable to lease land from any landlord as the peasants would be boycotted against in return. The Catholic Association’s funds are used to support these boycotts so that they can continue and live well enough to have enough food to survive.
The Catholic Association is originally aristocratic in its composition, and some of the gentry (such as Richard Lalor Sheil) hold relatively conservative views. However, O’Connell holds an enormous influence over society and largely dictates the policies it pursues. It is radical in nature but also extremely loyal to the Crown in appearance. This had been the strategy of the previous major Catholic group, the Catholic Committee of the 1790s, which achieved major Catholic Relief in 1793.
Since the aims of the Catholic Association are fairly moderate and the organization remains loyal to the monarch, British MPs are conceptually more willing to pass Catholic emancipation. The matter had been discussed in London since the Acts of Union 1800, when Prime MinisterWilliam Pitt and most of his colleagues resign from the cabinet when emancipation is denied by the king. Henry Grattan continues to support the cause, and Catholic emancipation had been passed by the House of Commons previously by a majority of six, but it is rejected in the House of Lords and generally by King George III, who reigns until 1820.
The biggest strength of the Catholic Association is that the Catholic Church helps in the collection of the Catholic rent. Catholic priests also hold sermons in favor of Catholic emancipation. This means that it is easy for the members to pay the Catholic rent, and it will attract more members as the message of Catholic emancipation is being spread throughout Ireland. Sir Robert Peel believes the alliance of the Catholic Association and the Catholic Church is a “powerful combination.”
In 1826, the Catholic Association begins to use its funds to support pro-emancipation MPs in elections. They use their money and manpower to campaign for the candidate to be elected into parliament to pressure the government from within to pass Catholic emancipation.
The turning point comes in 1828, when two factors come into play. The first is that the Catholic Church takes over the collection of the Catholic Rent and effectively the Catholic Association itself. The other is that by 1828, O’Connell’s reputation has increased dramatically. He is an internationally recognized figure and is seen as one of the leading figures in liberal thinking. This successful campaign leads on to, but is distinguished from, his later efforts to end the union with Britain, to increase the franchise, and to end the payment of tithes. His particular talent is to push the emancipation process along in an organized way.
In May 1828, the Sacramental Test Act 1828 repeals the Test Acts 1673 & 1678 against non-AnglicanProtestants. This gives non-Catholic non-conformists greater political freedom and equality in Britain. The repeal has two effects: it gives Catholics hope that a similar act will be passed that will include Catholics; it also alienates Catholics, as they have become the only Christians not to have political freedom and equality.
In May 1828, William Huskisson resigns from the cabinet, and William Vesey-Fitzgerald is chosen as the President of the Board of Trade. According to the law, there is to be a by-election in his constituency of Clare. O’Connell decides to exploit a loophole in the Acts of Union 1800. It requires MPs to take the Oath of Allegiance, but the oath is not required of candidates for election. He stands in the by-election and wins. Since he is a Catholic, he cannot take his seat in parliament. Demand rises to allow him to become an MP for Clare, as it does not have representation.
Sir Robert Peel and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, see that if O’Connell is not allowed to take his seat, then there could be a revolution in Ireland. While using non-violent methods, O’Connell hints that he will get more Catholics elected to force the situation. In an emotive speech, he says, “They must crush us or conciliate us.”
Peel decides to change the government’s approach and submits the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 in February 1829. The bill is passed. It is a momentous victory for O’Connell and the Catholic middle class, and he becomes known as “the liberator” and the “uncrowned king of Ireland.” However, the simultaneous enactment of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829 restricts the franchise in the county constituencies in Ireland. The archive of the Catholic Association is housed with the archives of Dublin Diocese in Holy Cross College, Dublin.
(Pictured: “Daniel O’Connell: The Champion of Liberty” poster published in Pennsylvania, 1847)
John William Nixon, MBE, a unionistpolitician and police leader in Northern Ireland, dies on May 11, 1949, at his home in Woodvale House, Ballygomartin Road, Belfast. He is allegedly responsible for several sectarian atrocities, including the McMahon killings and the Arnon Street killings. Eyewitnesses to the Arnon street killings claim they can identify the police involved and allege that their leader is District Inspector Nixon. It is widely believed that Nixon’s “murder gang” within the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) hunted down and murdered Catholics as reprisals for the killing of police.
Nixon is born on June 1, 1877, in Graddum, a townland located between the village of Kilnaleck and the hamlet of Crosskeys in County Cavan. He becomes a district inspector in the RIC, and transfers to its successor in the newly created region of Northern Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). By 1922, he is responsible for controlling access to the Roman Catholic Ardoyne and Marrowbone areas of Belfast, and works closely with the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC).
Irish nationalist writer and activist Michael Farrell alleges that during this period Nixon leads the Cromwell Club, an unofficial organisation of security officials responsible for killing several Catholic civilians. These allegations are not independently confirmed and during his lifetime Nixon successfully sues the Derry Journal and a book publisher for libel. He is appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 1923 “… for services rendered by him during the troubled period.”
In 1924, Nixon, long a member of the Orange Order, makes a political speech at an Orange lodge. This contravenes RUC regulations, and he is dismissed on the orders of Sir James Craig, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland.
Nixon holds his seat until his death on May 11, 1949, at home in Woodvale House, Ballygomartin Road, Belfast. He denies the murder allegations against him until the end of his life.
(Pictured: Captain John William Nixon (right) with Northern Ireland Prime Minister James Craig and Colonel Spencer, attending a conference with Michael Collins at City Hall, Dublin in February 1922)
seamus dubhghaill 