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

Monthly Archives: February 2024


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Birth of Thomas Paterson, Historian & Museum Curator

Thomas George Farquhar Paterson, local historian, folklore collector and museum curator, is born on February 29, 1888, in or near Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Paterson is the eldest child in a family of seven sons and one daughter born to John and Rachel (née Farquhar) Paterson. His parents had emigrated from County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. Their first three children are born in Canada, but the family returns to Ireland in the early 1890s, to the family farm in Cornascreeb, five miles south of Portadown, County Armagh. Also known as George, he attends Aghory national school, and leaves at age 14 to be apprenticed to a grocer in Portadown. In 1911, he takes a position in Couser’s, the leading grocery and wine merchant’s business in Armagh. In time becoming the manager, he is acquainted with the local gentry and clergy.

However, the grocery trade is never Paterson’s main interest. From an early age, he is fascinated by the history and folklore of his native place. He becomes an expert on the genealogy of the gentry as well as of the farming families around Armagh, and also collects material on many aspects of Armagh life. His notebooks eventually contain well over a million words of notes on history, archaeology, dialect, folkways and natural history, as well as drawings and plans of traditional houses, fireside accoutrements and farm implements. His knowledge of history, archaeology and natural history is widely recognised, and in 1931 Armagh County Council asks him to become honorary curator of the small museum established by the Armagh Natural History and Philosophical Society. Four years later, he leaves Couser’s and becomes full-time curator of the museum, re-named the Armagh County Museum. He greatly augments and improves the collections, and in the late 1950s oversees the enlargement of the building. His life’s work culminates in the opening of the new building in 1962. He retires a year later at the age of 75.

Paterson’s work wins the respect of scholars, including Emyr Estyn Evans, a lifelong friend, and material that he records has been cited in a wide variety of books and journal articles. Over one hundred citations are listed in a posthumous bibliography in 1972, and since then hundreds of scholarly works have drawn on his published and unpublished material. His manuscripts are in Armagh County Museum, where they form an important resource.

Paterson publishes a book, Country Cracks: Old Tales from the County of Armagh (1939), and a very large number of articles in newspapers and journals, especially in Seanchas Ardmhacha, Ulster Journal of Archaeology and Ulster Folklife. He sometimes uses the pseudonym “Cornascreeb.” He greatly assists researchers interested in the Armagh background of Alexander Campbell and his father Thomas Campbell and is made an honorary member of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paterson is a founder member of the committee that re-establishes the Ulster Journal of Archaeology. He is active in local history societies, and for many years is a member of the Ancient Monuments Advisory Council. He records many local sites for the register of ancient monuments. He is a member of the Northern Ireland committee of the National Trust and seeks to preserve Armagh’s architectural heritage and local industrial archaeology. He donates much important archive material to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. He describes and collects folk artefacts, at least thirty years before most academic historians are interested in such objects, and he is a foundation trustee of the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra, County Down. He is also a member of the first board of the Institute of Irish Studies in Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), from 1965.

Membership of the Royal Irish Academy is an honour not often accorded to someone who has not had a university education, still less to someone who leaves school at the age of 14, but Paterson is elected MRIA in 1941. He is conferred with an honorary MA by QUB in 1944. His service on many public bodies is acknowledged by the award of an Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Paterson never marries and dies in Armagh on April 6, 1971. Hundreds of people contribute to a memorial fund. Some of the money subscribed is used to purchase nineteenth-century drawings for the county museum, and in 1975 the memorial committee also publishes Harvest home: the last sheaf: a selection from the writings of T. G. F. Paterson relating to County Armagh, edited by Emyr Estyn Evans.


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Birth of Irish Hurler Dillon Quirke

Dillon Quirke, Irish hurler who plays for Tipperary Senior Hurling Championship club Clonoulty–Rossmore and at inter-county level with the Tipperary senior hurling team, is born in Rossmore, County Tipperary, on February 28, 1998.

Quirke, whose father, Dan Quirke, won an All-Ireland medal at under-21 level in the All-Ireland Under-21 Hurling Championship, first plays as a schoolboy in various juvenile competitions at Rossmore National School before later lining out as a student at CBS Thurles. He lines out in all grades and is a member of the CBS Thurles senior team that beats St. Francis’ College to win the Dr. Harty Cup in 2015, before losing the subsequent All-Ireland Post-Primary Schools Croke Cup final to St. Kieran’s College.

Quirke begins his club career at juvenile and underage levels with Clonoulty–Rossmore. He wins consecutive divisional championship titles with the club’s minor team in 2014 and 2015, before winning a Tipperary U21AHC title after a defeat of Thurles Sarsfields in the final. He scores two points from play when Clonoulty–Rossmore beats Nenagh Éire Óg in the 2018 Tipperary Senior Hurling Championship final.

Quirke begins a two-year association with the Tipperary minor hurling team in advance of the 2015 Munster Minor Hurling Championship. He is an unused substitute for the Munster final defeat of Limerick, and again for the All-Ireland final defeat by Galway. Again eligible for the minor grade in 2016, he wins a second successive Munster Minor Hurling Championship medal from the substitutes’ bench after a 17-point defeat of Limerick in the Munster final. He later wins an All-Ireland Minor Hurling Championship medal on the field after coming on as a substitute in the 1–21 to 0–17 defeat of Limerick.

After a year away from the inter-county scene, Quirke is called up to the Tipperary under-21 hurling team for the 2018 Munster Under-21 Hurling Championship. After lining out at left wing-back in Tipperary’s 2–23 to 1–13 defeat by Cork in the Munster final, he is in the same position when the result is reversed and Tipperary beats Cork in the subsequent 2018 All-Ireland Under-21 Hurling Championship final.

Quirke is one of twelve under-21 players called up to the senior team‘s pre-season training panel in November 2018, however, he is later released from the panel. He is later recalled to the senior panel and makes his first appearance in a 2–14 to 0–18 defeat by Limerick in the first round of the 2020 National Hurling League. Later that season, he makes his championship debut when he comes on as a 73rd-minute substitute for Jason Forde in an All-Ireland qualifier defeat of Cork. By 2022, he is a regular member of the starting fifteen and starts all four games in Tipperary’s unsuccessful Munster Championship campaign.

On August 5, 2022, Quirke collapses and dies while playing a Tipperary Senior Hurling Championship match for his club against Kilruane MacDonagh’s at Semple Stadium. The match is abandoned after he is taken to Tipperary University Hospital. Tipperary GAA postpones the weekend’s matches as a mark of respect. President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Micheál Martin pay tribute. A vigil is held at his home club on August 6. Tributes are also paid on television ahead of the camogie finals on August 7.

Quirke’s funeral is held on August 9 in Clonoulty. His inter-county and club teammates, as well as the opposition Kilruane MacDonagh’s team from the fateful match, provide a guard of honour as the cortege makes its way from the GAA Clubhouse through the village to St. John the Baptist Church for the Requiem Mass. The coffin is draped in the colours of his club side as well as his county and is brought into the church by his Clonoulty-Rossmore teammates.


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Death of Charles Donnelly, Poet & Republican Political Activist

Charles Patrick Donnelly, Irish poet, republican and left-wing political activist, is killed on February 27, 1937, fighting on the republican side during the Spanish Civil War.

Donnelly is born in Killybrackey, near Dungannon, County Tyrone, on July 10, 1914, into a family of cattle breeders. His father, Joseph Donnelly, sells his farm in 1917 and the family moves to Dundalk and opens a greengrocer‘s shop. Joseph Donnelly becomes quite prosperous, running his shop, dealing cattle and buying and selling property in the Dundalk area. In addition to Charles, the Donnellys have five other sons and two daughters. His mother, Rose, dies in 1927, when he is 13 years old.

Donnelly receives his early education in the Christian Brothers school in Dundalk. When he is fourteen in 1928, the family moves again, this time to Dublin, where his father purchases a house on Mountjoy Square in the north inner city. He enrolls in O’Connell School on North Frederick Street but is expelled after only a few weeks. He spends the next few months wandering the streets of Dublin during school time before his father discovers what had happened. Also at this time, he meets and is befriended by radical political activists from the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Communist Party of Ireland and the left-Republican group Saor Éire.

Donnelly’s father and aunts get him an apprenticeship with a carpenter, but he gives this up after a year to enroll in University College Dublin (UCD) in 1931, where he studies Logic, English, History and the Irish language. In university he begins writing poetry and prose for student publications but fails his first-year examinations. At this time, he also becomes deeply involved in radical left-wing and republican politics. He drops out of university in 1934, having failed his first-year exams three times and joins the radical group, the Republican Congress. There he befriends veteran republicans Frank Ryan and George Gilmore. He also becomes involved in a romantic relationship with another republican activist, Cora Hughes, Éamon de Valera‘s goddaughter and later partner of George Gilmore. In July 1934, he is arrested and imprisoned for two weeks for his role in picketing a Dublin bakery with other Congress members. After this, his father expells him from the family home and he spends a period sleeping in parks around Dublin.

The Republican Congress splits at its first annual meeting in September 1934, but the 20-year-old Donnelly is elected to the National Executive of the truncated organisation. Thereafter, he writes for the Congress newspaper on political and social questions. In January 1935, he is again arrested for assaulting a Garda at a Congress demonstration and is imprisoned for a month. In February 1935, he leaves Ireland for London. In the British capital he forms the first Republican Congress branch in London and becomes its first chairman. He finds employment variously as a dishwasher in pubs and cafes and as a reporter with an international news agency. While in London he remains a regular contributor to the Republican Congress newspaper and various left-wing publications. Together with two other poets, Leslie Daiken and Ewart Milne, he is one of the founders of a duplicated publication called Irish Front, the London journal of the Republican Congress. Daiken admits that many of the Irish Front editions are written almost entirely by Donnelly.

Eoin McNamee recalls Donnelly as “a frail looking Dublin man with a Tyrone background…he was something of an intellectual and clearly the theorist of the Irish Republican Congress in London at that time. He was well versed in Marxism, wrote for the Congress and Communist press, and frequently appeared on left-wing public platforms.”

In July 1936, on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Donnelly urges the Republican Congress to send fighters to the International Brigades. He himself returns to Dublin with the intention of organising such a force. By the end of 1936, he has gone again to London and joins the Brigades. He reaches Spain on January 7, 1937, and at Albacete, meets up with an Irish contingent, led by Frank Ryan, known as the Connolly Column, who had come to Spain to fight on the Republican side. He and his comrades are attached to the American Lincoln Battalion. On February 15, after receiving only rudimentary military training, the Lincoln Battalion is thrown into the Battle of Jarama, near Madrid. Donnelly reaches the front on February 23, where he is promoted to the rank of field commander. On February 27, his unit is sent on a frontal assault on the Nationalist positions on a hill named Pingarrón. The object of the attack is to take the enemy trenches and ultimately to drive them across the Jarama River. He and his unit are pinned down by machine gun fire all day. In the evening, the Nationalists launch a counterattack.

A Canadian veteran recalls, “We ran for cover, Charlie Donnelly, the commander of an Irish company is crouched behind an olive tree. He has picked up a bunch of olives from the ground and is squeezing them. I hear him say something quietly between a lull in machine gun fire: Even the olives are bleeding.” The line later becomes famous.

A few minutes later, as his unit retreats, Donnelly is caught in a burst of gunfire. He is struck three times, in the right arm, the right side and the head. He collapses and dies instantly. His body lay on the battlefield until it is recovered by fellow Irish Brigadier Peter O’Connor on March 10. He is buried at Jarama in an unmarked grave with several of his comrades.

Written by Donnelly’s brother Joseph, a collection of his work, Charlie Donnelly: the Life and Poems, is published in 1987 by Dedalus Press. On the eve of the 71st anniversary of his death, February 26, 2008, he is commemorated with the unveiling of a plaque at his alma mater, UCD, attended by 150 people. The commemoration, organised jointly by a group of UCD students and the Donnelly family, is hosted by the School of English and also includes a lecture by Gerald Dawe on Donnelly’s life and poetry. In April 2008, the UCD branch of the Labour Party is renamed the Charlie Donnelly Branch in his honour.

Donnelly’s friend Blanaid Salkeld commemorates him in her poem “Casualties,” writing “That Charlie Donnelly small and frail/ And flushed with youth was rendered pale/ But not with fear, in what queer squalor/ Was smashed up his so-ordered valour.” A 1976 documentary about the Civil War by Cathal O’Shannon is entitled Even the Olives are Bleeding.

Donnelly is survived by a brother, Joseph, who manages to get many of his poems published in 1987; only five or six are published during his lifetime. Discussing his work, Colm Tóibín says it “mixed an Audenesque exactitude with a youthful romanticism… his poem “The Tolerance of Crows” belongs in any anthology of modern poetry.” In 1992, Donnelly has work included in Dedalus Irish Poets: An Anthology from Dedalus Press.

In 1992 New Island Books publishes Even the Olives Are Bleeding: The Life and Times of Charles Donnelly by Joseph O’Connor. The book is launched by future Irish President Michael D. Higgins.

Donnelly is commemorated in the Christy Moore song Viva La Quinta Brigada.


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Government Imposes Temporary Ban on Livestock Marts

On Monday, February 26, 2001, the Irish Government imposes a temporary ban on the country’s 120 livestock marts as the devastating foot-and-mouth disease spreads and threatens to become an epidemic in Great Britain. Strict procedures are also implemented in airports around Ireland to keep the disease out of the country. All marts along the border counties have been suspended since the previous Friday, February 23.

Joe Walsh, the Minister for Agriculture and Food, announces the emergency measure on Sunday night. The total suspension comes into force immediately and is intended to dramatically reduce the number of livestock movements. The ban is to remain in place for at least a fortnight.

In a related move, Central Statistics Office staff undertaking survey work are instructed not to enter farm premises until further notice.

The Government orders emergency staff to ports and airports on Sunday as the foot-and-mouth outbreak nears epidemic proportions in Britain and Continental countries begin the wholesale slaughter of thousands of animals imported from the United Kingdom.

In an atmosphere of mounting alarm, the Irish Farmers’ Association demands a ban on movement of all animals including racehorses to Britain and for the thorough disinfection of “every foot and tyre” entering Ireland from the UK. Horses and horseboxes arriving at British racecourses are already being disinfected and Sunday’s meeting at Newcastle is abandoned because of its proximity to one of the affected areas. Additional measures are expected to be announced.

Irish rugby fans are asked not to travel to Cardiff on Saturday, March 3, to minimise the risk of spreading the disease, and it seems likely the Government will urge punters to stay away from the Cheltenham Festival if, indeed, the festival goes ahead as scheduled. The Jockey Club says it will follow the Government’s request, but the decision angers the British government, which may order the meeting to be cancelled.

Five new cases of the disease are confirmed in Britain on Sunday, bringing the total to 12 confirmed cases with two suspected outbreaks. The suspected outbreak of most concern to Ireland is at Welsh Country Foods, an abattoir on Anglesey. It remains cordoned off.

British Ministry of Agriculture officials continue tests on the suspect sheep found at the plant over the weekend. Final results of the tests are not available until Monday morning.

A 10-mile exclusion zone is ordered around the Gaerwen plant, which is located adjacent to the Menai Suspension Bridge. However, both exporters and the Farmers’ Union of Wales believe the foot-and-mouth virus is, in fact, present in the plant, which is located less than 15 miles from Holyhead.

British veterinarians are alarmed at the increase in new cases. An epidemic is to be declared if the number of new cases reaches more than 30 per day.

(From: “All marts closed in threat of epidemic” by Ralph Riegel, Irish Independent, http://www.independent.ie, February 26, 2001)


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The Coolavokig Ambush

The Coolavokig ambush (Irish: Luíochán Chúil an Bhuacaigh) is carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on February 25, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. It takes place at Coolavokig, on the road between Macroom and Ballyvourney, County Cork. A 60-man flying column of the IRA’s 1st Cork Brigade under Seán O’Hegarty, ambushes a 70-man convoy of the Auxiliary Division under Major Seafield Grant, sparking a four-hour battle. Ten Auxiliaries are killed, including Major Grant, and others wounded. The IRA column leaves the area when British reinforcements arrive. After the ambush, British forces stop carrying out raids and patrols in the area.

The IRA flying column had been attempting to ambush the Auxiliaries for two weeks but had always missed them. As they occupy the ambush position over a few days, their position becomes known and a force of seventy Auxiliaries and seven Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) constables move against them, heavily armed with rifles, machine guns and grenades. The sixty-two IRA volunteers include units from the 1st, 7th, and 8th battalions of the 1st Cork Brigade, and are divided into four sections. Apart from commander Seán O’Hegarty, the main IRA officers are Dan “Sandow” O’Donovan and Dan Corkery. The IRA is armed with sixty rifles, several shotguns and revolvers, and two Lewis guns, but significantly, no grenades. The British forces, traveling in eight lorries and two cars, also carry four Irish hostages with them.

Around 8:00 a.m. on February 25, IRA scouts signal the approach of the British force. The British are forewarned about the IRA position however, and approach with caution, when a republican leaving his post turns to run back and is seen from the leading lorry. When half of the lorries come into the ambush position the IRA opens fire. According to An Cosantóir, one lorry immediately turns around and speeds back to Macroom.

Rifles and a Lewis machine gun from the IRA’s No. 1 section, and ten rifles from the No. 4 section, open fire, as they are the only republican units that have a field of fire on the lorries. They then drop to the ground to avoid return fire. Sections No. 2 and No. 3 swing around to the east, on a hillside, in an attempt to encircle the British northern flank, but they can get no closer than 500 yards.

The Auxiliaries are quickly losing ground and taking casualties. Major Grant is killed while rallying his forces. The British forces retreat into two nearby cottages. The IRA closes in and as they are preparing to bomb the cottages, large numbers of RIC reinforcements approach and begin encircling the area. After fighting a half-hour rear guard action, the IRA flying column retreats toward the northwest. The engagement at Coolavokig lasts four hours, until soldiers of the Manchester Regiment arrive.

It later transpires that the Auxiliary forces are just part of a large round-up operation planned for that day which includes 600 British Army troops from Cork, Ballincollig, Bandon, Clonakilty, Skibbereen, Bantry, Dunmanway, Millstreet, Macroom, and Killarney. After the ambush, British forces cease raiding and patrolling the area west of Macroom, effectively handing it over to IRA control. They are reluctant to enter the area, and only do so later with a strong force of 2,000 men.

The IRA suffers no casualties. However, the number of British casualties has been disputed to this day. The British claim that only Major (Auxiliary Commandant) James Seafield-Grant was killed during the ambush, and that two other Auxiliaries later died of their wounds. The IRA claims that between 14 and 16 members of the British force were killed. The Digest of Service for the 1st Battalion, Manchester Regiment, records that on March 18, 1921, a party proceeds to Coolavokig to destroy houses believed to have been used by the IRA.


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Birth of Dermot Earley, Military Official in Ireland & the United Nations

Lieutenant-General Dermot Earley DSM, high-ranking military official in Ireland and with the United Nations, is born on February 24, 1948, in Castlebar, County Mayo. He is the Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces from 2007 to 2010.

Earley is educated at Gorthaganny National School, where his father Peadar is a principal teacher, and later attends St. Nathy’s College in Ballaghaderreen, County Roscommon.

Earley first joins the Roscommon minor football team in 1963, at the age of fifteen. In that year, his side reaches the Connacht minor final, losing to Mayo. Two years later, in 1965, he lines out in a second Connacht minor decider. Five-in-a-row hopefuls Mayo are beaten by Roscommon, giving him a Connacht Minor Football Championship title. Roscommon are later defeated in the All-Ireland semi-final. He also plays under-21 hurling with Roscommon. In 1969, he plays in the All-Ireland under-21 final where Roscommon faces Kildare, however Kildare wins on the day.

Earley is only seventeen years-old when he makes his senior debut for Roscommon in 1965. Over the next fifteen years, Roscommon wins four Connacht Senior Football Championship titles. In 1985, he sustains a fractured jaw in the Connacht semi-final against Galway, with many expecting it to end his career. He confounds everybody and lines out in the Connacht final against Mayo two weeks later. In spite of kicking six points, Mayo still triumphs by 2–11 to 0–8. At the age of thirty-seven, he decides to retire from inter-county football.

During the 1990s, Earley manages both the Roscommon county football team (1992-94) and the Kildare county football team (1994-96).

After completing his Leaving Certificate in 1965, Earley joins the Defence Forces as a cadet and is commissioned in 1967. His first posting is as a platoon commander in the Recruit Training Depot at the Curragh Camp and, in 1969, he is appointed an Instructor at the Army School of Physical Culture (ASPC). Two years later, in 1971, he obtains a specialist diploma in physical education at St. Mary’s College, Twickenham.

Earley’s service record includes overseas service with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in 1975, Adjutant to the 52nd Infantry Battalion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). From 1987 to 1991, he serves as deputy military adviser to UN secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and Battalion Commander of the 81st Infantry Battalion UNIFIL in 1997. While serving with the UN up to 1991 he is a member of negotiating teams dealing with the Iraqis and Kuwaitis and is a key adviser during the setting up of the UN’s mission in Kuwait – Unikom. He is involved in negotiating an end to the Angolan Civil War. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Defence Studies, London (2001), and holds a Master of Arts (Hons) in peace and development studies from the University of Limerick (1999). He undertakes the Ranger Course in the Defence Forces, which leads to the establishment of special operations training and the establishment of the Army Ranger Wing (ARW). He is the last serving member of that course.

Earley is appointed school commandant of the ASPC. In 1991, he is appointed an instructor at the Command and Staff School of the Military College and in 1994-95 he helps establish the United Nations Training School Ireland (UNTSI) in the Military College.

Earley is promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1995. He commands the 27 Infantry Battalion on the Irish border. He is promoted to colonel in 2001. In December 2003, he is made brigadier general and is appointed major general in March 2004 when he receives his final appointment. He replaces Lieutenant General James Sreenan. He becomes chief of staff in April 2007, leading the Army, Air Corps and Naval Service.

On April 18, 2010, Earley indicates he plans to retire from the Defence Forces due to ill health. He is awarded a Distinguished Service Medal with Honour from Taoiseach Brian Cowen. His resignation is accepted on June 9, 2010, and one of his previous deputies, Major General Sean McCann, is appointed Chief of Staff.

Earley dies of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) on June 23, 2010, at the age of 62. His Newbridge funeral on June 24, 2010, is attended by Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Irish government ministers and leading GAA figures, while former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave issues a statement calling him “one of the great figures of this country.”


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Death of Stephen Fuller, IRA Volunteer & Fianna Fáil Politician

Stephen Fuller, Fianna Fáil politician who serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Kerry North constituency from 1937 to 1943, dies on February 23, 1984, in Tralee, County Kerry.

Fuller is born on January 1, 1900, in Kilflynn, County Kerry. He is the son of Daniel Fuller and Ellie Quinlan. His family is from Fahavane, in the parish of Kilflynn.

Fuller serves in the Kilflynn Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column during the Irish War of Independence. He is First Lieutenant in the Kerry No.1 Brigade, 2nd Battalion. He opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and continues to fight with the anti-Treaty IRA during the Irish Civil War. Military records from the 1930s show, in his own hand, that he is in communication with Dublin regarding confirmation of membership in July 1922 and therefore eligible for war pensions. He becomes the most senior Kilflynn member upon the death of Captain George O’Shea.

In 1923, Fuller is captured by Free State troops and imprisoned in Ballymullen Barracks in Tralee by the Dublin Guard who had landed in County Kerry shortly before. On March 6, 1923, five Free State soldiers are blown up by a booby-trapped bomb at Baranarigh Wood, Knocknagoshel, north Kerry, including long-standing colleagues of Major General Paddy Daly, GOC Kerry Command. Prisoners receive beatings after the killings and Daly orders that republican prisoners be used to remove mines.

On March 7, nine prisoners from Ballymullen Barracks, six from the jail and three from the workhouse, are chosen with a broad geographical provenance and no well-known connections. They are taken lying down in a lorry to Ballyseedy Cross. There they are secured by the hands and legs and to each other in a circle around a land mine. Fuller is among them. His Kilflynn parish comrade Tim Tuomey is initially stopped from praying until all prisoners are tied up. As he and other prisoners then say their prayers and goodbyes, Fuller continues to watch the retreating Dublin Guard soldiers, an act which he later says saved him. The mine is detonated, and he lands in a ditch, suffering burns and scars. He crosses the River Lee and hides in Ballyseedy woods. He is missed amongst the carnage as disabled survivors are bombed and shot dead with automatic fire. Most collected body parts are distributed between nine coffins that had been prepared. The explosions and gunfire are witnessed by Rita O’Donnell who lives nearby and who sees human remains spread about the next day. Similar reprisal killings by the Dublin Guard follow soon after Ballyseedy.

Fuller crawls away to the friendly home of the Currans nearby. They take him to the home of Charlie Daly the following day. His injuries are treated by a local doctor, Edmond Shanahan, who finds him in a dugout. He moves often in the coming months, including to the Burke and Boyle families, and stays in a dugout that had been prepared at the Herlihys for seven months.

A cover-up begins almost immediately. Paddy Daly’s communication to Dublin about returning the bodies to relatives differs significantly from Cumann na mBan statements, which Daly complains about as simple propaganda, and later that of Bill Bailey, a local who had joined the Dublin Guard, who tells Ernie O’Malley that the bodies were handed over in condemned coffins as a band played jolly music. Fuller is named amongst the dead in newspaper reports before it is realised that he had escaped. Daly then sends a communication to GHQ that Fuller is reported as having become “insane.” The Dublin Guard scours the countryside for Fuller. The official investigation into the killings is presided over by Daly himself, with Major General Eamon Price of GHQ and Colonel J. McGuinness of Kerry Command. It blames Irregulars for planting the explosives and exonerates the Irish Army soldiers, and this is read out in the Dáil by the Minister for Defence, Richard Mulcahy.

Contrary statements to the Irish Army’s submissions are effectively ignored. Lieutenant Niall Harrington of the Dublin Guard, describes the evidence to the court and the findings as “totally untrue,” explaining that the actions were devised and executed by officers of the Dublin Guard. He contacts Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Justice and Vice-President, a family friend, to deplore the findings. O’Higgins speaks to Richard Mulcahy, who does nothing. In a separate incident, Free State Lieutenant W.McCarthy, who had been in charge of about twenty prisoners, says that five of them had been removed in the night. They were reportedly shot in the legs then blown up by, in his words, “…a Free State mine, laid by themselves.” He resigns in protest. A Garda Síochána report into the events is also dismissed and is not made public for over 80 years.

Fuller leaves the IRA after the Civil War and follows a career as a farmer in Kerry. He joins Fianna Fáil, the political party founded by Republican leader Éamon de Valera in 1926 after a split from Sinn Féin. He is elected to the 9th Dáil on his first attempt, representing Fianna Fáil at the 1937 Irish general election, as the last of three Fianna Fáil TDs to be elected to the four seat Kerry North constituency. He is re-elected to the 10th Dáil at the 1938 Irish general election, when Fianna Fáil again wins three out of four seats, but loses his seat at the 1943 Irish general election to the independent candidate Patrick Finucane. He returns to farming thereafter.

Fuller never once mentions the Ballyseedy incident from a political platform and states later that he bore no ill-will towards his captors or those who were involved in his attempted extrajudicial killing. He does not want the ill feeling passed on to the next generation. He speaks publicly about the events in 1980, a few years before his death, on Robert Kee‘s groundbreaking BBC series Ireland: A Television History.

Fuller dies in Edenburn Nursing Home, Tralee, on February 23, 1984. He is buried near the Republican plot in Kilflynn where colleagues O’Shea, Tuomey and Timothy ‘Aero’ Lyons are buried.

Fuller’s son Paudie establishes the Stephen Fuller Memorial Cup for dogs of all ages, contested annually on the family farm.

Fuller’s fame largely rests on one night at Ballyseedy. To trace him through the rural society from which he and his fellow Volunteers originated and in which his life was spent, however, gives a fuller understanding of the devastating effects of the conflicts of 1916–23 on a tightly knit rural and small-town society, dominated by extended families of farmers and their service-industry relatives, and of how that society remembered and forgot those traumas.

(Pictured: Stephen Fuller’s grave in Kilflynn, by St. Columba’s Heritage Centre)


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Death of Valerie Place, Nurse & Overseas Aid Worker

Valerie Place, Irish nurse and overseas aid worker, is killed on February 22, 1993, while serving in Somalia. She is the second western aid worker to be killed there during the conflict and famine in the early 1990s.

Place is born at 20 St. Brendan’s Crescent, Walkinstown, Dublin, on March 24, 1969. She is the third child of Patrick Place, coachbuilder, and his wife Margaret (née Byrne). She has three brothers and two sisters. She attends St. Paul’s secondary school, Greenhills, Dublin, and is trained as a nurse at St. James’s Hospital, Dublin, from 1987 to 1990. She works for a period with Caring and Sharing Association (CASA).

Place goes to Somalia in September 1992 as a volunteer worker on a two-year contract with Concern Worldwide, Ireland’s largest aid and humanitarian agency. Concern has been part of the international emergency response in Somalia since May 1992. She is one of seventy Irish aid workers based in seventeen locations across Somalia. She is the supervisor of a feeding station for 2,500 children and an adjoining school in Mogadishu. The aid workers work with local guards, and later the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) of 30,000 troops to secure the areas for the distribution of humanitarian relief. The task force struggles to protect the aid convoys from attacks from armed groups.

Place is traveling in a party, which includes Rev. Aengus Finucane, on February 22, 1993, to attend the opening of a school in Wanlewein for 1,200 when the party is ambushed. She is fatally wounded when her car, the last in the convoy, is ambushed at Afgooye. She is airlifted to a military hospital in Mogadishu by a United States Air Force helicopter but dies within minutes of her arrival there. Her funeral at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Greenhills, Dublin, is attended by 2,000 people, including Irish President Mary Robinson, who had met Place during her visit to Somalia in October 1992.

At the time of her death, Place is the second western aid worker killed in Somalia, after the death of Sean Devereux in January 1993. Her death causes demands that the task force do more to protect aid workers and to disarm the Somali factions, as well as prompting fresh criticism of the United Nations mandate in its failure to support military intervention with political initiatives. As the situation worsens, American troops withdraw in March 1994, and the United Nations disengages in March 1995.

The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs founds the Valerie Place commemorative scholarship in March 1993, which brings Somali teachers and nurses to train in Ireland. In June 1997, St. James’s Hospital school of nursing unveils a portrait and a classroom dedicated to her memory. There is also a mural to Place in Mogadishu (pictured above).


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The Founding of Córas na Poblachta

Córas na Poblachta (English: Republican System), a minor Irish republican political party, is founded on February 21, 1940.

The idea for a new party is discussed at a meeting in Dublin on February 21, 1940, attended by 104 former officers of the pro- and anti-Treaty wings of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The inaugural meeting of the new party takes place on March 2, 1940. Simon Donnelly, who had fought in Boland’s Mill under Éamon de Valera in the 1916 Easter Rising, the former leader of the Dublin section of the IRA, and former chief of the Irish Republican Police (IRP), is elected as president of a central committee of fifteen members. Other leaders are Seán Fitzpatrick, another Irish War of Independence veteran; Con Lehane, who had recently left the IRA; Séamus Gibbons; Tom O’Rourke; Seán Dowling, one of Rory O’Connor‘s principal lieutenants in the Irish Civil War; Colonel Roger McCorley, one of the principal IRA leaders in Belfast during the Irish War of Independence who had taken the Irish Free State side in the Irish Civil War; Frank Thornton, one of Michael Collins‘ top intelligence officers; Roger McHugh, a lecturer in English at University College Dublin (UCD) and later professor; Captain Martin Bell and Peter O’Connor.

Also in attendance at the first meeting is Seamus O’Donovan, Director of Chemicals on IRA Headquarters Staff in 1921 and architect of the IRA Sabotage Campaign in England by the IRA in 1939–40. Indeed, O’Donovan proposes several of the basic resolutions. Additionally, the meeting is attended by Eoin O’Duffy and several former leaders of the Irish Christian Front.

Many members of the Irish far-right join Córas na Poblachta including Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, who becomes the leader of the party’s youth wing Aicéin and goes on to found Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, Alexander McCabe, Maurice O’Connor and Reginald Eager from the Irish Friends of Germany, George Griffin, Patrick Moylett, his brother John and Joseph Andrews of the People’s National Party, Dermot Brennan of Saoirse Gaedheal, and Hugh O’Neill and Alexander Carey of Córas Gaedhealach. As a result, the party assumes a pro-German and antisemitic attitude which is frequently expressed in party functions, and Gardaí suspects Córas na Poblachta members of daubing the walls of Trinity College Dublin in antisemitic slogans following the visit of British politician Leslie Hore-Belisha to Ireland in 1941.

Socialist republicans Nora Connolly O’Brien and Helena Molony take an interest in the group. Reflecting divisions within the IRA, a minority of the party’s leaders sympathise with communism rather than fascism.

The main aim of Córas na Poblachta is the formal declaration of a Republic. It also demands that the Irish language be given greater prominence in street names, shop signs, and government documents and bank notes. It proposes to introduce national service in order that male citizens understand their responsibilities. The party’s economic policy is the statutory right to employment and a living wage. It proposes breaking the link with the British pound, the nationalisation of banks and the making of bank officials into civil servants. In the area of education, the party espouses free education for all children over primary age as a right, and university education when feasible. It also calls for the introduction of children’s allowances. In addition, Córas na Poblachta advocates for “the destruction of the Masonic Order in Ireland” and during its founding meeting reporters are told that the party will be ready to take over the government of Ireland “on either a corporate or fascist basis.”

The party has close ties with the Irish nationalist and pro-fascist party Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, whose leader, Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, had led Córas na Poblachta’s youth wing Aicéin until its independence is terminated in 1942. There is talk of a merger, however, while the majority of the party’s executive committee, noted by G2 to be made up of “four ex-Army men, old IRA, ex-Blueshirts and a number of IRA who had been active up until comparatively recently”, desires a combination of Ireland’s extreme nationalist movements, the three most prominent leaders, Simon Donnelly, Sean Dowling and Roger McCorley, oppose one due to the fear that the party will be submerged in a joint organisation. Ó Cuinneagáin is dismissive of Córas na Poblachta’s prospects and discussions between him and the party’s leaders reinforce their fears that Ó Cuinneagáin seeks an outright takeover by Ailtirí na hAiséirghe. Proposals for a merging of the two parties are dropped though they continue to maintain cordial relations and co-operate in the 1943 Irish general election.

The party is not successful and fails to take a seat in a by-election held shortly after the party’s foundation. The party slowly falls apart, and Tim Pat Coogan notes that: “Dissolution occurred because people tended to discuss the party rather than join it.” Importantly, the party is not supported by the hardcore of republican legitimatists, such as Brian O’Higgins, who views the IRA Army Council as the legitimate government of an existing Irish Republic. Indeed, in March 1940, O’Higgins publishes a pamphlet entitled Declare the Republic lambasting the new party as making what he regards as false promises that will be compromised on following the party’s election to the Oireachtas.

Córas na Poblachta fields candidates in the 1943 Irish General Election but none are elected, receiving a total of 3,892 votes between them.

Although a failure, Tim Pat Coogan argues Córas na Poblachta was the “nucleus” of the Clann na Poblachta party which emerges to help take power from Fianna Fáil in 1948.

(Pictured: IRA veteran Simon Donnelly who serves as President of Córas na Poblachta)


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Death of Christopher Nolan, Irish Poet & Author

Christopher Nolan, Irish poet and author, dies of asphyxiation in Dublin on February 20, 2009.

Nolan is born to parents Joseph and Bernadette Nolan in Mullingar, County Westmeath on September 6, 1965. Due to asphyxiation at birth, he is born with permanent impairment of his nerve-signaling system, a condition now labelled dystonia. Because of these complications, he is born with cerebral palsy and can only move his head and eyes. Due to the severity of the cerebral palsy, he uses a wheelchair. In an interview, his father, Joseph, explains how, at the age of 10, he is placed on medication that “relaxed him so he could use a pointer attached to his head to type.” To write, he uses a special computer and keyboard. In order to help him type, his mother holds his head in her cupped hands while he painstakingly picks out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead.

Nolan communicates with others by moving his eyes, using a signal system. When he is young, his father tells him stories and reads passages from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D. H. Lawrence to keep his mind stimulated. His mother strings up letters of the alphabet in the kitchen, where she keeps up a stream of conversation. His sister, Yvonne, sings songs and acts out skits. His mother states that “he wrote extensively since the age of 11 and went on to write many poems, short stories and two plays, many of which were published.” Many of the writings are compiled for his first publication, the chapbook Dam-Burst of Dreams.

Upon becoming a teenager, Nolan receives his education from the Central Remedial Clinic School, Mount Temple Comprehensive School and at Trinity College, Dublin. His first book is published at the age of fifteen. He is also awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters in the UK, the medal of excellence from the United Nations Society of Writers, and a Person of the Year award in Ireland. He writes an account of his childhood, Under the Eye of the Clock, published by St. Martin’s Press, which wins him the UK’s Whitbread Book of the Year Award in 1987 at the age of 21. He soon drops out of Trinity College to write a novel entitled The Banyan Tree (1999).

Nolan spends more than a decade writing The Banyan Tree. According to The New York Times, the book is a multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in Nolan’s native county of Westmeath. The story is seen through the eyes of the aging mother. It is inspired, he tells Publishers Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” A review of the book is done in The New York Times by Meghan O’Rourke. She reviews the book and relates it to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the story the protagonist leaves his mother in Ireland while he moves on to travel the world. Nolan, however, gives the reader a version of the mother’s story. “And so, in the end, one suspects that he wants Minnie’s good-natured, commonplace ways to stand as their own achievement, reminding us that life continues in the places left behind.”

At the age of 43, while working on a new novel, Nolan dies in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin at 2:30 a.m. on February 20, 2009. His death is the result of a piece of salmon becoming trapped in his airway. Nothing from the novel he was working on has been released since his death.

Upon hearing the news of Nolan’s death, President of Ireland Mary McAleese says, “Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work, his achievements all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy.”