Patterson is born on October 5, 1938, in Clonmel, County Tipperary. As a boy Patterson performs with his local parish choir and is involved in maintaining the annual tradition of singing with the “Wrenboys.” He sings in the local St. Mary’s Choral Society and at a production of The Pirates of Penzance performed with both his parents. His interests extend beyond music and as a boy he represents Marlfield GAAhurling club, plays tennis at Hillview and golf at the Mountain Road course. He quits school at an early stage to work in the printing business of his mother’s family. He moves to Dublin in 1961 to enroll at the National Academy of Theatre and Allied Arts where he studies acting while at the same time receiving vocal training from Hans Waldemar Rosen. In 1964, he enters the Feis Ceoil, a nationwide music competition, in which he wins several sections including oratorio, lieder and the German Gold Cup.
Patterson gives classical recitals around Ireland and wins scholarships to study in London, Paris and in the Netherlands. While in Paris, he signs a contract with Philips Records and releases his first record, My Dear Native Land. He works with conductors and some of the most prestigious orchestras in Europe including the London Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris. He also gains a reputation as a singer of Handel, Mozart, and Bach oratorios and German, Italian and French song. He has a long-running programme on RTÉ titled For Your Pleasure.
In the early 1980s Patterson moves to the United States, making his home in rural Westchester County, New York. A resurgence of interest in Irish culture encourages him to turn towards a more traditional Irish repertoire. He adds hymns, ballads, and traditional as well as more popular tunes to his catalogue. In March 1988, he is featured host in a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration of music and dance at New York City’s famous Radio City Music Hall. He also gives an outdoor performance before an audience of 60,000 on the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Patterson is equally at home in more intimate settings. His singing in the role of the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John Passion is given fine reviews. Further recordings follow, of Beethoven arrangements, Irish songs, Berlioz songs, Purcell songs and others, all on the Philips label.
Patterson performs sold-out concerts from London’s Royal Albert Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall, and with his family he presents two concerts at the White House, for presidents Ronald Reagan in 1982 and Bill Clinton in 1995. He records over thirty albums in six languages, wins silver, gold and platinum discs and is the first Irish singer to host his own show in Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Rising to greater prominence with the new popularity of Celtic music in the 1990s, Patterson sees many of his past recordings reissued for American audiences, and in 1998 he stars in the PBS special Ireland in Song. His last album outsells Pavarotti.
In 1999, Patterson learns he has a brain tumor. He has several operations in the following year and his condition appears to stabilise. He is diagnosed with a recurrence of his illness on May 7, 2000. He briefly recuperates and resumes performing. His last performance is on June 4, 2000, at Regis College in the Boston suburb of Weston, Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter he is admitted to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York where he lapses into a coma and dies on June 10, 2000, at the age of 61.
O’Connor is born on June 7, 1874, at Worcester, Massachusetts, the eldest of three sons and two daughters of Andrew O’Connor, a stonecutter from Lanarkshire, Scotland, who becomes a professional sculptor, and Marie Anne O’Connor (née McFadden), of County Antrim. Educated in Worcester public schools, at the age of 14 he becomes apprenticed to his father, helping him to design monuments for cemeteries. He is employed in the early 1890s on sculptural work for the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair), being active in the studio of William Ordway Partridge, and assisting Daniel Chester French on his colossal Statue of the Republic, a landmark of the 1893 Columbian exposition.
Moving to London (1894–98), O’Connor works on bas-reliefs in the studio of the painter John Singer Sargent, who uses him as a model for his mural Frieze of Prophets for the Boston Public Library. His first independent work, Sea Dreams, a relief of a head, is exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1896. Returning to the United States (1898–1903), he becomes a studio assistant of French, through whom he receives his first public commission, for the Vanderbilt Memorial Doors for St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church, Manhattan, New York, a project completed in 1902 to wide critical acclaim. He also executes the tympanum and lateral friezes.
Around 1900, O’Connor marries an artist’s model named Nora, by whom he has a daughter. In 1902, he hires as studio model Jessie Phoebe Brown from New Jersey and of County Down parentage. The following year he elopes with her to Paris, where they marry and have four sons, the youngest of whom, Patrick O’Connor, becomes an artist and gallery curator. Jessie continues for many years as his primary model, sitting for the heads of both female and male figures, O’Connor coarsening the features for the latter.
During his years in Paris (1903–14), O’Connor is influenced by the work of Auguste Rodin, whom he befriends. Among his pupils in Paris is the American sculptor and heiress Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney. He continues to fulfil numerous commissions for funerary and public monuments in the United States, an example of the former being the Recuillement in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, near Tarrytown, New York. From 1906 he exhibits annually at the Salon in Paris, where he is the first foreigner to win a second-class medal, for his bronze statue of Gen. Henry Lawton. Included in his only exhibition at the Royal Hibernian Academy (1907) is a bronze relief of the prophet Nehemiah adapted from a panel of the Vanderbilt doors. The relief is subsequently included in his one-man show at the Galerie Hébrard, Paris in 1909.
In 1909, O’Connor wins a competition open to sculptors of Irish descent to execute a monument to Commodore John Barry, the County Wexford-born “father of the American navy,” for Washington, D.C. His design includes a frieze depicting events in Irish history, flanked by a group of three nude Irish emigrants entitled Exile from Ireland, and another group representing the Genius of Ireland, which includes a female figure of the “Motherland.” Probably owing to opposition from the Barry family to the depiction of their ancestor as a rough-and-ready sailor, the commission is not completed. His marble statue of Gen. Lew Wallace (author of Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ), a plaster of which is exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1909, is placed by the state of Indiana in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol, Washington, D.C. Another marble, Peace by Justice, is commissioned as a gift from the United States to the Peace Palace in The Hague in 1913.
Returning to Paris in the mid-1920s, O’Connor becomes the first foreigner to win a gold medal at the Salon des Artistes in 1928, for the marble sculpture Tristan and Iseult, now held in the Brooklyn Museum, New York. The French government makes him a Chevalier of the National Order of the Legion of Honour in 1929. In 1926 he had exhibited a plaster group, Monument aux morts de la Grande Guerre, at the Salon in Paris. The sculpture is requested in 1932 by the people of Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin, as a memorial to Christ the King, O’Connor obligingly altering the interpretation of his iconography. Imposed on a “Tree of life” are three figures of Christ, representing in turn “Desolation,” “Consolation” and “Triumph.” Cast in bronze, throughout World War II the statue remains hidden in Paris to avoid its being melted down for the valuable metal. Transported to Dún Laoghaire in 1949, due to clerical opposition to its unconventional iconography, it is not at first erected, but for years lay on its side in a garden in Rochestown Avenue until its eventual unveiling in 1978 as Triple Cross in Haigh Terrace, where it stands in Moran Park. His other chief work in Ireland is a bronze statue of Daniel O’Connell in the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. Inspired by Rodin’s famous Monument to Balzac, the work is executed at his studio in a converted stable at Leixlip Castle, County Kildare in 1931–32.
During the 1930s, O’Connor lives and works in London and Ireland, where he has residences at Glencullen House, County Wicklow, and 77 Merrion Square, Dublin. He dies at the latter address on June 9, 1941, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His own bronze relief, Le feu sacré, marks the grave. A portrait painting, executed by his son Patrick in 1940, is in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, which also holds twenty-six sculptures presented by O’Connor late in his life, and posthumously by his family. The collection includes a marble self-portrait bust of 1940, a bronze of the Lafayette cast by the gallery in 1984 from a reduced plaster model presented by the artist, and a bronze group entitled The Victim, on view in Merrion Square Park, from an uncommissioned and uncompleted war memorial conceived by O’Connor under the general title Le Débarquement. The National Gallery of Ireland has the Desolation maquette for the Triple Cross. A centenary exhibition of his work is held at Trinity College Dublin in 1974. His widow dies in Dublin in 1974.
(From: “O’Connor, Andrew” by Lawrence William White and Carmel Doyle, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Born John Gerard Smyth, upon joining the Norbertine Roman Catholic religious order in 1945, he changes his name to Brendan. The Norbertines, also known as the “Premonstratensians,” are aware of Smyth’s crimes as early as the late 1970s, yet they do not report him to either the Garda Síochána or the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). He is moved from parish to parish and between dioceses and countries whenever allegations are made. In some cases, the order does not inform the diocesan bishop that Smyth has a history of sexual abuse and should be kept away from children. He abuses children in parishes in Rhode Island and North Dakota and at one time works in Boston and is suspected of similar actions while on pastoral work in Wales and Italy. Norbertine Father Bruno Mulvihill makes several attempts to alert church authorities about the abuse committed by Smyth.
Smyth’s first conviction follows the reporting to police of his abuse of four siblings in Belfast’s Falls Road. After his arrest in 1991, he flees to the Republic of Ireland, where he spends the next three years on the run, staying mostly at Kilnacrott Abbey. This leads to the collapse of the Fianna Fáil–Labour Party coalition government in December 1994 when the poor handling of an extradition request from the RUC by the Irish Attorney General‘s office leads to a further delay of Smyth’s trial. An award-winning UTVCounterpoint programme on the scandal by journalist Chris Moore, followed by a book, accuses the head of the Norbertines and the Archbishop of Armagh of mishandling the case, and the Norbertines of negligence and a failure to tell others of Smyth’s crimes, enabling him to sexually abuse large numbers of children for 40 years.
Smyth dies in prison of a heart attack at the age of 70 on August 22, 1997, after collapsing in the exercise yard, one month into a 12-year prison sentence. The Norbertines hold his funeral before dawn and cover his grave with concrete to deter vandalism. He is buried in Kilnacrott Abbey, which is later put up for sale with 44 acres of land, including the grave.
On October 27, 2005, the title “Reverend” is removed from his gravestone following a campaign by one of Smyth’s victims.
Reviewers of the case differ as to whether there is a deliberate plot to conceal Smyth’s behaviour, incompetence by his superiors at Kilnacrott Abbey, or some combination of factors. Cahal Daly, both as Bishop of Down and Connor, a diocese where some of the abuse takes place, and later as Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, is recorded as having been privately furious at the Norbertine “incompetence.” Smyth’s activities are investigated by the Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry, finding that: “…despite knowing his history of abusing children, the Norbertine religious order moved Smyth to different dioceses where he abused more children…”
In 2010, Daly’s successor as Roman Catholic Archbishop of Armagh, Cardinal Seán Brady, faces “huge pressure to resign” after he admits that in 1975, he witnessed two teenage boys sign oaths of silence after testifying in a Church inquiry against Smyth. Survivor groups see this as evidence of collusion, but Brady says he “did not have the authority” to turn Smyth in. On March 17, 2010, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, calls for Brady to resign.
In 2013, some of Smyth’s alleged Rhode Island victims between 1965 and 1968, both male and female, call for the Diocese of Providence to investigate Smyth. As of 2019, he is among those listed by the Diocese of Providence as being “credibly accused” of committing sex abuse.
Module 6 of the 2014-2016 Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry is dedicated to Smyth’s crimes in Northern Ireland.
A two-part dramatisation of the Smyth case, Brendan Smyth: Betrayal of Trust, is broadcast by the BBC on March 13, 2011, with Ian Beattie in the title role and Richard Dormer as Chris Moore.
(Pictured: Father Brendan Smyth, Our Lady of Mercy, East Greenwich, Rhode Island, USA, c. 1965)
Talbot is born on May 2, 1856, at 13 Aldborough Court, Dublin, the second eldest of twelve children of Charles and Elizabeth Talbot, a poor family in the North Strand area. He is baptized in St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral on May 5. His father and all but the oldest of his brothers is heavy drinkers. In 1868, he leaves school at the age of twelve and goes to work in a wine merchant’s store. He very soon begins “sampling their wares,” and is considered a hopeless alcoholic by age thirteen. He then goes to the Port & Docks Board where he works in the whiskey stores. He frequents pubs in the city with his brothers and friends, spending most or all of his wages and running up debts. When his wages are spent, he borrows and scrounges for money. He pawns his clothes and boots to get money for alcohol. On one occasion, he steals a fiddle from a street entertainer and sells it to buy drink.
One evening in 1884, 28-year-old Talbot, who is penniless and out of credit, waits outside a pub in the hope that somebody will invite him in for a drink. After several friends had passed him without offering to treat him, he goes home in disgust and announces to his mother that he is going to “take the pledge” (renounce drink). He goes to Holy Cross College, Clonliffe, where he takes the pledge for three months. At the end of the three months, he takes the pledge for six months, then for life.
Having drunk excessively for 16 years, Talbot maintains sobriety for the following forty years of his life. There is evidence that his first seven years after taking the pledge are especially difficult. He finds strength in prayer, begins to attend daily Mass, and reads religious books and pamphlets. He repays all his debts scrupulously. Having searched for the fiddler whose instrument he had stolen, and having failed to find him, he gives the money to the church to have Mass said for him.
Even when his drinking is at its worst, Talbot is a hard worker. When he joins Pembertons, the building contractors, as a hod-carrier, his work-rate is such that he is put first on the line of hodmen to set the pace. Later, in Martin’s timber yard, he takes on the meanest and hardest jobs. He is respectful to his bosses but not obsequious, and on occasion stands up for a fellow worker. On September 22, 1911, he joins the builder’s labourers branch of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU). When the Dublin Lockout of 1913 leads to sympathy strikes throughout the city, the men of Martin’s, including Talbot, come out. At first, he refuses his strike pay, saying that he had not earned it. Later he accepts it but asks that it be shared out among the other strikers. After his death a rumour is put about that he was a strike-breaker in 1913, but all the evidence contradicts this.
From being an indifferent Catholic in his drinking days, Talbot becomes increasingly devout. He lives a life of prayer, fasting, and service, trying to model himself on the sixth century Irish monks. He is guided for most of his life by Michael Hickey, Professor of Philosophy at Holy Cross College. Under Hickey’s guidance his reading becomes wider. He laboriously reads scripture, the lives of saints, the Confessions of Saint Augustine, and the writings of Francis de Sales and others. When he finds a part difficult to understand, he asks a priest to clarify it.
Hickey also gives Talbot a light chain, much like a clock chain, to wear as a form of penance. He becomes a Third Order Franciscan in 1890 and is a member of several other associations and sodalities. He is a generous man. Although poor himself, he gives unstintingly to neighbours and fellow workers, to charitable institutions and the Church. He eats very little. After his mother’s death in 1915, he lives in a small flat with very little furniture. He sleeps on a plank bed with a piece of timber for a pillow. He rises at 5:00 a.m. every day so as to attend Mass before work. At work, whenever he has spare time, he finds a quiet place to pray. He spends most of every evening on his knees. On Sundays he attends several Masses. He walks quickly, with his head down, so that he appears to be hurrying from one Mass to another.
Talbot is on his way to Mass on Trinity Sunday, June 7, 1925, when he collapses and dies of heart failure on Granby Lane in Dublin. Nobody at the scene is able to identify him. His body is taken to Jervis Street Hospital, where he is undressed, revealing the extent of his austerities. A chain had been wound around his waist, with more chains around an arm and a leg, and cords around the other arm and leg. The chains found on his body at death are not some extreme penitential regimes but a symbol of his devotion to Mary, Mother of God, that he wished to give himself to her totally as a slave. His story quickly filters through the community, and there are many spectators when his funeral takes place at Glasnevin Cemetery on June 11, 1925. In 1972, his remains are removed to a tomb in Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Seán McDermott Street, Dublin, in the area where he spent his life.
There is a small plaque in Granby Lane at the site of Talbot’s death. Prior to the current plaque on the Eastern side of the lane, a small brass cross was inlaid in a stone wall on the Western side of the lane.
O’Faolain does not begin school until she is eight years old as her mother, Irish writer and teacher Eileen Gould, has little time for nuns. Following her schooling, she completes an arts degree at University College Dublin (UCD) and then further studies at the Sapienza University of Rome and the Sorbonne in Paris. A formidable student and strikingly beautiful, she makes a strong impression on those who meet her.
In search of love, literature and freedom from 1950s Ireland, the young O’Faolain remains abroad working variously as a translator, language teacher, editor and writer in London. She makes lifelong friends who speak highly of her generosity, loyalty and kindness. As well as maintaining a strong interest in politics throughout her life, she attains a black belt in karate and attends karate classes until her early 70s.
In her 2013 memoir, O’Faolain recounts a number of her adult loves before she meets and marries Lauro Martines in Florence in 1957. The couple lives in Florence for a year while Martines completes a travelling fellowship from Harvard University. They then move to Portland, Oregon, where their son Lucien is born in 1959. While in the United States, she teaches French at Reed College in Portland. The family returns to live in Florence from 1962-66 while her husband carries out research. When he is offered a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1966, they move back to the United States. However, not keen to live full-time in the United States, they purchase a house in Hampstead in 1970 and later in central London where she spends a good deal of time. From the 1990s onwards, she and Lauro spend more and more time in London, and they visit Ireland more during these years. Lucian, a painter and picture repairer, lives in London.
O’Faolain’s novels include No Country for Young Men, which is nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980, Women in the Wall (1975), The Obedient Wife (1982) and The Judas Cloth (1992) which is set in 19th-century Italy. Her first collection of short stories, We Might See Sights and Other Stories, is published in 1968, followed by Man in the Cellar (1974), Melancholy Baby (1978) and Daughters of Passion (1982). And with her husband, she edits Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (1973).
O’Faolain’s writings are suffused with themes of clerical intrigue, women’s role in society, power, faith and sexuality. She says once that she is more detached from her characters than her father was. “He was fond of his characters whereas I was more impatient of mine… The fact that he often forgave their foolishness showed that he was fond of Ireland itself, where he lived for the most of his life. I instead left it and found I was happier elsewhere.”
As a writer, O’Faolain is not particularly well-known in Ireland. Following the publication of her memoir in 2013, she is asked by The Irish Times journalist Arminta Wallace if it bothers her that her name does not often figure in lists of famous Irish writers, perhaps because she did not live here. She replies, “Not only do I not live here but when my last book came out someone wrote an article naming me as a ‘forgotten writer’… which was not a cheerful read. It wasn’t in any way offensive, but it wasn’t very comforting…I suppose I didn’t write enough. You mustn’t let too many years go by between books – and I did that.”
O’Faolain dies at the age of 88 in London on October 27, 2020, following a long illness. Her papers, which include manuscripts of her writing and a significant correspondence between her and her father, are donated to UCD in 2018. At the time, archivists expect them to be available to researchers by 2022.
Diarmaid Ó Súilleabháin, Irish language writer whose chosen theme is contemporary urban life, dies on June 5, 1985. He is acknowledged as an important Irish language modernist. He is also active in the Irish republican movement and a member of Sinn Féin.
Ó Súilleabháin is born on the Beara Peninsula in County Cork on July 29, 1932. His mother, Máire Áine Ní Dhrisceoil, is a primary school teacher and his father, John O’Sullivan, is a small farmer. He marries Úna Ní Chléirigh on October 28, 1954, and they have two sons and three daughters.
Best known now for his literary work, Ó Súilleabháin writes ten novels, two of them for teenagers. Maeldún (1972) is a pioneering Irish novel that explores sexuality. He writes seven unpublished plays but most of them are shown in Damer Hall and the Peacock Theatre. Three plays that he writes include Bior, Ontos and Macalla and he writes a collection of short stories, Muintir (1970). A story from Muintir called ‘D’ is translated into English and adapted for the stage by Vivian McAlister and is performed by the Dublin University Players in May 1977.
Like Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, Ó Súilleabháin “challenged the critical orthodoxy by openly proclaiming that their standards could not be those of the Gaeltacht and by demanding a creative freedom that would acknowledge hybridity and reject the strictures of the linguistic purists.” He and Máirtín Ó Cadhain are considered the two most innovative Irish language authors to emerge in the 1960s. He often writes in a stream of consciousness, and his style influences younger writers. His writing “explores the problem of recovering idealism and cultural wholeness in an increasingly shallow and materialistic Irish society.” He is elected as a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and wins more literary prizes than any other living Irish author.
Ó Súilleabháin writes a collection of poetry, Cosa Gréine, which is published and launched in Dublin in 2013, twenty-eight years after his death.
Ó Súilleabháin is an active Irish republican, particularly in publicizing the republican struggle, and is a member of Sinn Féin’s ruling body beginning in 1971. He spends short periods in prison because of activities related to his political beliefs.
The regiment’s 916 men are organized into 10 companies designated with the letters A–I and K. Most of the companies are organized in Orleans Parish, although Company D is from Tensas Parish, Company C from St. Landry Parish, and Company A from Union Parish and Sabine Parish. The unit’s first colonel is Isaac Seymour, its first lieutenant colonel is Louis Lay, and its first major is Samuel L. James. Over half of the unit’s men with known places of birth are born outside of the United States, primarily from Ireland. In its early days, the unit has a reputation for being disorderly and hard to control. Seymour has to publicly rebuke several officers in late 1861 for drunkenness.
On May 23, 1862, the regiment sees action in the Battle of Front Royal and captures two Union battle flags in a skirmish at Middletown the next day. May 25 sees the regiment engage in the First Battle of Winchester, where MacArthur is killed, and on June 9 it fights in the Battle of Port Republic, in which 66 of its men are killed or wounded. MacArthur’s role as major is then filled by Nathaniel G. Offutt. After Port Republic, Jackson’s men are transferred to the Virginia Peninsula to take part in the Seven Days Battles, and the 6th Louisiana skirmishes at Hundley’s Corner on June 26 before fighting in the Battle of Gaines’ Mill the next day. Seymour leads the brigade at Gaines’ Mill, since Richard Taylor is ill. The Louisianans, known as the Louisiana Tigers, become bogged down in Boatswain’s Swamp, are repulsed with loss, and withdraw from the battle. Seymour is killed during the charge and is replaced by Strong. Offutt takes over Strong’s position as lieutenant colonel, and William Monaghan becomes colonel.
Moving north with Jackson in August, the regiment fights in the Manassas Station Operations at Bristoe Station, Virginia on August 26 and Kettle Run, Virginia the following day. At Kettle Run, the regiment holds off a Union advance while the 8th Louisiana burns a bridge, and then the two regiments, joined by the 60th Georgia Infantry Regiment and the 5th Louisiana Infantry Regiment, fight against the Union Army‘s Excelsior Brigade and the brigade of Colonel Joseph Bradford Carr. It then fights in the Second Battle of Bull Run on August 29-30, 1862. At Second Bull Run, it is part of the brigade of Colonel Henry Forno. On the first day of the battle, Forno’s brigade helps repulse James Nagle‘s Union brigade. On the morning on 30 August 30, it is sent to the rear for supplies and does not rejoin the fighting that day.
After Second Bull Run, the 6th Louisiana fights in the Battle of Chantilly on September 1, 1862, where the Louisiana brigade is routed with the 5th, 6th, 8th, and 14th Louisiana regiments suffering the heaviest casualties in the Confederate army, and on September 17 sees action in the Battle of Antietam. At Antietam, the regiment is part of Harry T. Hays‘s brigade. During the fighting, Hays’s brigade charges toward the Miller’s Cornfield and is cut to pieces, with the brigade suffering 61 percent casualties. The 6th Louisiana loses 52 men killed or wounded, including Colonel Strong, who is killed and replaced with Offutt. All 12 officers of the 6th Louisiana that see action at Antietam are killed or wounded. Monaghan becomes lieutenant colonel and is replaced as major by Joseph Hanlon. Offutt in turn resigns on November 7 and is replaced by Monaghan. Hanlon becomes lieutenant colonel, and Manning is promoted to major. The regiment is held in reserve at the Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, and is not directly engaged, although it does come under Union artillery fire.
An inspection in January 1863 rates the 6th Louisiana as having “poor” discipline and moderately good at performance in drills. Along with the 5th Louisiana Infantry, the regiment contests a Union crossing of the Rappahannock River on April 29, 1863. Union troops are able to force a crossing, and the 6th Louisiana has 7 men killed, 12 wounded, and 78 captured. It then fights in the Second Battle of Fredericksburg on May 3, 1863, where 27 of the unit’s men are captured. While part of the regiment is captured, most of the unit is able to withdraw from the field in better condition than the other Confederate units positioned near it. It then fights at the Battle of Salem Church the next day. Altogether, the 6th Louisiana Infantry sustains losses of 14 killed, 68 wounded, and 99 captured at the Battle of Chancellorsville. It next sees combat on June 14, 1863, in the Second Battle of Winchester, where it joins its brigade of other Louisiana units in capturing a Union fort.,
At the Battle of Gettysburg on July 1-3, 1863, the 6th Louisiana is still in Hays’ brigade. On July 1, the brigade is part of a Confederate charge that sweeps the Union XI Corps from the field, although it is less heavily engaged than some of the other participating Confederate brigades. Entering the town of Gettysburg, the brigade captures large numbers of disorganized Union troops. On the evening of the following day, the brigade is part of a failed attack against the Union position on Cemetery Hill. It then spends July 3, the final day of the battle, skirmishing. The Confederates, who are defeated at Gettysburg, withdraw from the field on July 4. The regiment takes 232 men into the fighting at Gettysburg and suffers 61 casualties.
Back in Virginia, the 6th Louisiana fights in the Bristoe campaign in October 1863 and is overrun in the Second Battle of Rappahannock Station on November 7, losing 89 men captured. In the spring of 1864, it fights in Ulysses S. Grant‘s Overland Campaign. On May 5, 1864, in the Battle of the Wilderness, the regiment helps repulse a Union attack, after Hays’ brigade had been repulsed and badly bloodied earlier in the battle. It then fights in the Battle of Spotsylvania Court House on May 9-19, 1864. On May 12, the regiment is part of its brigade’s fighting at the Mule Shoe. The brigade is badly wrecked at the Mule Shoe, and only 60 men are present at the 6th Louisiana’s roll call the next morning. From June through October, it is detached as part of Jubal Early‘s command to fight in the Valley campaigns of 1864. Monaghan is killed in battle in late August and is not replaced as colonel. At the Battle of Cedar Creek in October 1864, one company of the 6th Louisiana sees both men present shot. After the battle, the 5th, 6th, and 7th are consolidated into a single company when the brigade is reorganized due to severe losses. Taking part in the Siege of Petersburg, the 6th Louisiana’s survivors fight at the Battle of Hatcher’s Run on February 6, 1865, and at the Battle of Fort Stedman on March 25.
The 6th Louisiana’s remnants end their military service when Robert E. Lee‘s Confederate army surrenders on April 9, after the Battle of Appomattox Court House. At the time of the surrender, the 6th Louisiana has been reduced to 52 officers and men. Over the course of its existence, 1,146 men serve in the unit. Of that total, 219 are combat deaths, 104 die of disease, one man drowns, five die accidentally, one man is executed, and at least 232 desert. Desertions are particularly heavy in three companies that primary consist of men born outside of the United States.
(Pictured: National colors of the “Orleans Rifles” or Company H, Sixth Louisiana Infantry Regiment during the American Civil War)
Mallet is the son of factory owner John Mallet. He is educated at Trinity College, Dublin, entering it at the age of 16 and graduating in science and mathematics in 1830 at the age of 20.
Following his graduation, Mallet joins his father’s iron foundry business and helps build the firm into one of the most important engineering works in Ireland, supplying ironwork for railway companies, the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, and a swing bridge over the River Shannon at Athlone. He also helps manufacture the characteristic iron railings that surround Trinity College, and which bear his family name at the base.
In 1838 Mallet becomes a life member of the Royal Geological Society of Ireland and serves as its President from 1846–1848. From 1848–1849 he constructs the Fastnet Rock lighthouse, southwest of Cape Clear.
On February 9, 1846, Mallet presents to the Royal Irish Academy his paper On the Dynamics of Earthquakes, which is considered to be one of the foundations of modern seismology. He is also credited with coining the word “seismology” and other related words which he uses in his research. He also coins the term epicentre.
From 1852 to 1858, Mallet is engaged in the preparation of his work, The Earthquake Catalogue of the British Association (1858) and carries out blasting experiments to determine the speed of seismic propagation in sand and solid rock.
On December 16, 1857, the area around Padula, Italy is devastated by the Great Neapolitan earthquake which causes 11,000 deaths. At the time it is the third largest known earthquake in the world and has been estimated to have been of magnitude 6.9 on the Richter Scale. Mallet, with letters of support from Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, petitions the Royal Society of London and receives a grant of £150 to go to Padula and record at first hand the devastation. The resulting report is presented to the Royal Society as the Report on the Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857. It is a major scientific work and makes great use of the then new research tool of photography to record the devastation caused by the earthquake. In 1862, he publishes the Great Neapolitan Earthquake of 1857: The First Principles of Observational Seismology in two volumes. He brings forward evidence to show that the depth below the Earth’s surface, from where the impulse of the Neapolitan earthquake originated, is about 8–9 geographical miles.
One of Mallet’s papers is Volcanic Energy: An Attempt to develop its True Origin and Cosmical Relations, in which he seeks to show that volcanic heat may be attributed to the effects of crushing, contortion, and other disturbances in the crust of the earth. The disturbances leading to the formation of lines of fracture, more or less vertical, down which water would find its way, and if the temperature generated be sufficient volcanic eruptions of steam or lava would follow.
Pat Falvey, Irish high-altitude mountaineer, expedition leader, polar explorer, entrepreneur, author, corporate/personal trainer/coach, and motivational speaker, is born in Cork, County Cork, on June 2, 1957. He is the first person to complete the Seven Summits twice, with the summiting of Mount Everest reached from both the Tibetan (1996) and Nepalese sides (2004). He is expedition leader of the team that sees Clare O’Leary become the first Irish woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 2004. Other extreme expeditions that he makes include walking to the South Pole, crossing South Georgia island, and traversing the Greenland ice sheet. He starts his first business at 15 years of age and has since had businesses in property development, finance, construction, insurance, tourism, and film production. He has been a motivational speaker since the 1990s.
Raised on the north side of Cork city, Falvey starts mountain climbing in his late twenties, having worked as a builder and property developer from his late teens onward. Following the economic recession of the mid-1980s in Ireland, he loses most of his wealth and discovers mountaineering in his late 20s.
Falvey begins his climbing career with hill walking and climbing on the MacGillycuddy’s Reeks in County Kerry. He then devotes himself to training to become a high-altitude mountaineer. He trains initially with the Cork Mountaineering Club, at Tiglin in County Wicklow and becomes a member of Kerry Mountain Rescue, climbing very frequently in Ireland, Scotland, France and the Himalayas.
In June 1994, Falvey climbs Denali, also known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska, reaching the first summit in his Seven Summits attempt. This is followed by Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (January 1995), Mount Everest via the Northeast Ridge (June 1995), Aconcagua in Argentina (December 1995), Mount Elbrus in Russia (March 1996), Vinson Massif in Antarctica (January 1997) and Mount Kosciusko in Australia (February 1997). He is the first Irish man (and the 32nd person in the world) to complete the Seven Summits.
Falvey is the expedition leader of the first Irish team to reach the summit of Cho Oyu in China and Nepal without oxygen, on May 20, 1998. He reaches the summit of Ama Dablam in Nepal on November 3, 1999. In 2003, he is the expedition leader of the first Irish team to reach the summit of Mount Everest via the South-Southeast Ridge, with team members Ger McDonnell and Mick Murphy reaching the summit. On May 18, 2004, he reaches the summit of Everest via the South-Southeast Ridge, and leads the expedition that sees the first Irish woman, Dr. Clare O’Leary, reach the top of Everest.
Falvey and O’Leary complete the Seven Summits on December 16, 2005, when he becomes the first person to complete the Seven Summits twice by climbing Mount Everest from both the Tibetan and Nepalese sides.
In 2006, Falvey leads a group of 32 across the South Georgia Traverse on South Georgia island in honour of Polar explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Kerryman Tom Crean, in the Beyond Endurance Antarctic expedition. He leads the first Irish traverse of Greenland in 2006. In January 2008, he leads a four-person Irish expedition to the South Pole. In April 2009, he and O’Leary do a “symbolic” walk to the North Pole, completing the final four-day trek to the Pole.
Falvey joins the Kerry county football team as a “sports performance coach” in 2021. Manager Peter Keane says, “You take us in this country with five million people and we have had some unbelievable adventurers like Shackleton and Crean; you look at someone like Pat who has climbed Everest twice from two different sides, managed to climb the Seven Summits twice, and I am looking to see if he can bring something different in here.”
Falvey’s publications include Reach for the Sky (The Collins Press, 1997), A Journey to Adventure: Stories I never thought I’d tell (The Collins Press, 2007), The Summit: How Triumph Turned to Tragedy on K2’s Deadliest Days (Beyond Endurance Publishing with The O’Brien Press, 2013), You Have the Power: Explore the Mindset You Need to Realise Your Dreams (Beyond Endurance Publishing, 2016) and Accidental Rebel (Beyond Endurance Publishing, 2018).
O’Byrne is the son of James Burns, a farmer, and his wife Isabella (née Arnett). His biographer states that his parents came from County Wicklow, which would imply that their name had been anglicised from the form “O’Byrne,” which their son readopts. He never marries and spends most of his life living with his unmarried sister Teresa. He has other siblings, as he is survived by four nieces and two nephews.
O’Byrne’s childhood is spent in the Balmoral district of south Belfast in a comfortable but slightly precarious middle-class Catholic environment. Although sparse in direct autobiographical references, his writings contain references to excursions around the Malone and Stranmillis areas, with particular reference to the Botanic Gardens. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College. After leaving school, he manages a spirit grocery on the Beersbridge Road in east Belfast and is active in the Sexton Debating Society, named after Thomas Sexton, then home rule MP for Belfast West, and led by Joseph Devlin, who remains a lifelong friend despite their later political differences. He also studiess music with Carl Hardebeck, acquiring an extensive knowledge of Irish folk music and becoming an accomplished singer of Irish tunes in Hardebeck’s arrangements.
O’Byrne subsequently joins the Belfast Gaelic League, becoming a leading member, though he never masters the Irish language. He moves in the literary and antiquarian circles around Francis Joseph Bigger, whose friendship becomes central to his career and self-definition. He is a regular participant in Bigger’s soirées and establishes friendships with many prominent political and cultural figures, among them Roger Casement and Alice Milligan. Although he is usually seen as a specifically northern writer, he draws extensively on a wider Irish tradition of defensively self-glorifying Catholic-nationalist antiquarianism, including the works of W. H. Grattan Flood and Archbishop of Tuam, John Healy, a major source for his later pamphlet on Saint Patrick and for the descriptions of Ulster monasteries in As I Roved Out: A Book of the North (1946).
In 1900, O’Byrne publishes a collection of verses, A Jug of Punch, of which no copies are known to survive, and in 1905 collaborates with Cahir Healy on another collection, The Lane of the Thrushes, which applies Celtic revival imagery to rural Ulster. He publishes another collection, The Grey Feet of the Wind, in 1917. The manuscript of his unpublished Collected Poems (1951) is in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.
In 1902, O’Byrne gives up the spirit grocery to work full time as a journalist, singer, and storyteller. He appears at a wide variety of concerts, where he cuts a striking figure in Gaelic dress with saffron kilt. He provides musical interludes at productions by the Ulster Literary Theatre, and his recitation of Eleanor Alexander’s humorous piece on the battle of Scarva inspires Harry Morrow’s celebrated satirical play Thompson in Tir-na-nOg (1912). In 1913, he founds and manages the Celtic Players, a theatre company which stages some plays of his own composition, including The Dream of Bredyeen Dara, possibly a nativity story incorporating Saint Brigid of Kildare.
During World War I O’Byrne achieves immense cross-community success with a weekly dialect column in the Unionist paper Ireland’s Saturday Night, describing the domestic activities of “Mrs. Twigglety” and her working-class friends. At the same time, he has abandoned his earlier support for Devlin’s home rule politics to embrace physical-force republicanism under the influence of Denis McCullough. During Casement’s imprisonment and trial, he carries on an intense correspondence with him, comforting him, urging him to convert to Catholicism, and sending him religious icons. Some commentators have detected homoerotic undertones in their exchanges, though this is a matter of opinion.
After the Easter Rising of 1916, O’Byrne is active in the reconstituted Irish Republican Army (IRA), and in 1919–20 he smuggles arms from Belfast to Dublin. In August 1920, he emigrates to the United States, where he goes on a six-month lecture tour to raise funds for victims of the Belfast pogroms. He allegedly raises $100,000 and funds the construction of Amcomri Street in west Belfast. He spends the next eight years in the United States as a speaker and entertainer, contributing to American Catholic publications. He develops an abiding fondness for Chicago and considers applying for American citizenship. At one point he corresponds with the film star Rudolph Valentino, who admires his verses on Italian themes.
O’Byrne returns to Belfast in September 1928 with the intention of opening a bookshop in Dublin, but this has to be abandoned after the loss of his savings in the Wall Street crash of October 1929. He settles into respectable semi-poverty in Cavendish Street, off the Falls Road, and remains a presence on the fringes of Belfast literary life. In 1930, he founds the Cathal O’Byrne Comedy Company, which performs plays of his own composition, notably the slight comedies The Returned Swank and The Burden, drawing on The Drone, by Samuel Waddell. In 1932, he sings at a concert in the Dublin Mansion House held to mark the Eucharistic Congress. He writes extensively for Catholic publications in Ireland and elsewhere, in particular the Capuchin Annual, Irish Monthly, and Irish Rosary, and publishes several pamphlets with the Catholic Truth Society (CTS). The sensibility displayed in these writings has much in common with that of Brian O’Higgins, Aodh de Blácam, Daniel Corkery and Gearoid Ó Cuinneagáin.
O’Byrne also publishes The Gaelic Source of the Brontë Genius (1932), Pilgrim in Italy (1930), and the story collection From Far Green Hills (1935), which retells gospel episodes in the style of an Irish storyteller with elements of Wildean orientalist exoticism. Pilgrim in Italy is published by the Three Candles Press of Colm Ó Lochlainn, an old friend through the Bigger circle, as is his last story collection, Ashes on the Hearth (1948), a series of slight reveries in which the narrator, wandering the back streets of Dublin, relives such resonant moments as the last days of James Clarence Mangan.
O’Byrne is best remembered, however, for As I Roved Out (1946), a collection of 128 articles on Belfast history originally published from the late 1930s in the Belfast Irish News. It displays considerable knowledge of Belfast history, drawn from lifelong reading and from conversations with Bigger, and can be seen as at once the summation of and a lament for the northern branch of the Irish revival associated with such figures as Bigger and Alice Milligan. The pieces, moving out from central Belfast to surrounding rural districts are held together by the storyteller surveying the landscape. Surveys of Belfast by journalistic flâneurs are not unprecedented, O’Byrne dismisses the mercantile and unionist establishment of Belfast as hopelessly materialistic and oppressive, casting himself and, by implication, his Catholic/nationalist readers as internal exiles forced into the side streets of history, treasuring a martyred religious faith and gazing back wistfully to the bright and fleeting hope represented by the Society of United Irishmen and the cultural revival. The book is punctuated by expressions of anger against the whole heritage of the Ulster plantation. The economic success of the planters is attributed solely to their plunder of the natives. The textile industry is discussed solely in terms of exploitation and starvation wages. Shipbuilding is dismissed with a remark that ships were built in Ulster long before the planters arrived. Finally, the history of Belfast is summed up in the confrontation between the Belfast merchant, ancestor of the unionist “establishment,” and would-be slave-trader Waddell Cunningham and the United Irishman and self-declared “Irish slave” William Putnam McCabe.
There are numerous contemptuous references to the Sabbatarianism and respectable dullness of late Victorian Belfast, contrasted with the lively artistic activities of the volunteer period. The book is reprinted three times in O’Byrne’s lifetime and is seen by nationalists as an underground classic. Its image of Belfast layered with fragmentary and hidden memories has been drawn on by authors as diverse as Ciaran Carson and Gerry Adams, and in the early twenty-first century O’Byrne is commemorated as one of the city’s significant writers. A plaque is placed on his Cavendish Street house in 2004. It is ironic that his reputation should rest on his memorialisation of Belfast, for he denounced it as “interminable miles of mean streets . . . one of the ugliest cities in the world.”
O’Byrne is believed by some, though not all, of his acquaintances to be homosexual. This view is supported by references to the descriptions of male beauty (based on Gaelic saga models) which recur in his writings and by the expressions of longing which permeate his work (which might also reflect a wider sense of loneliness or cultural displacement). His last years, 1954–57, are spent in the Nazareth Nursing Home in Ormeau Road, Belfast, where he dies on August 1, 1957, a month after suffering a stroke. His funeral is crowded, and his gravestone describes him as “singer, poet and writer who brought joy into the lives of others.”
(From: “O’Byrne, Cathal” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
seamus dubhghaill 