seamus dubhghaill

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

Author Archives: Jim Doyle


by Leave a comment

Seán MacManus Elected Mayor of Sligo

Seán MacManus, Sinn Féin politician, is elected Mayor of Sligo on July 3, 2000. He is the national chairperson of the party from 1984 to 1990.

MacManus is born in 1950 near Blacklion, County Cavan, and moves to London in the 1960s to find work. There he meets and marries Helen McGovern, a native of Glenfarne, County Leitrim. In 1976, he returns to Ireland and settled in the Maugheraboy area of Sligo, County Sligo, so that their family of two boys can be educated in Ireland.

Still based in Maugheraboy, MacManus is involved in Irish Republican politics since the early 1970s and is secretary of the County Sligo Anti-H-Block Committee which campaigns in support of the republican prisoners hunger strikes of 1980/81. He becomes a member of the Sinn Féin Ard Comhairle (National Executive) in 1982 and remains there for over twenty years. He is elected as the first Sinn Féin National Chairperson from 1984 until 1990. After the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire in 1994 he is part of the first Sinn Féin delegation to meet with the British government in over seventy years. He is also involved in the protracted negotiations leading to the Good Friday Agreement.

First elected to Sligo Corporation (now Sligo Borough Council) in 1994, MacManus remains until its abolition in May 2014. He is also elected to Sligo County Council in 1999 and is re-elected in 2004, 2009 and 2014. He steps down from elected politics in February 2017 being replaced by his son, Chris MacManus.

On July 3, 2000, MacManus is elected Mayor of Sligo, the first Sinn Féin Mayor in the Republic of Ireland since the beginning of the Troubles in 1969. He is also elected mayor in 2003. Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams says the election of McManus is a sign of “Sinn Féin’s rise as an active campaigning alternative in politics in the 26 counties”.

MacManus has two sons. Chris MacManus, the youngest, is also an elected member of Sligo Borough Council (1999–2014) and Sligo County Council (2017–2020) and is an MEP since March 2020. His eldest son, Joseph MacManus, was an IRA volunteer who was killed in a firefight against an off-duty Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) soldier in Belleek, County Fermanagh, in February 1992.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Kathleen Cox, Artist, Sculptor & Mystic

Kathleen Cox, Irish artist, sculptor, and mystic, is born Christina Mary Kathleen Cox in Wo-Sung, China, on July 2, 1904. Cox is considered a pioneer of contemporary Irish pottery.

Cox is the eldest daughter of Dr. R. H. Cox, originally from Dundalk, County Louth, and the port health officer in Shanghai. He is also an amateur geologist and models in clay. In his retirement, he invents a periscope later used during World War I by the Royal Navy. The years living in China leave an impression on the young Cox, visually and culturally. The family returns to Ireland in 1911, first moving to Listowel, County Kerry, and later to Howth, County Dublin. She attends Alexandra College, and later the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1921. While there she studies sculpture under Oliver Sheppard and is considered one of his most talented students, winning the Royal Dublin Society Taylor prize for modelling in 1925, 1926, and 1927. The money from these prizes allows Cox to travel to Paris in 1929.

Cox exhibits in 1924 at the Tailteann exhibitions, and in 1925 submits textile designs to the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. She establishes a pottery studio at 7 Schoolhouse Lane, Dublin, with college friend Stella Rayner in 1929. The studio has the first electric kiln in Ireland. The first exhibited piece by Cox shown by the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is in 1930, with a pair of Madonna bookends, and portrait masks of the daughter of Dermod O’Brien, Brigid O’Brien, and writer Norris Davidson. Davidson is a friend and neighbour, who commissions her to design the poster for his 1929 film, Suicide. She exhibits with the RHA from 1931 to 1933, and the Tailteann 1932, while also holding exhibitions in her studio. During this period Hilda Roberts paints her portrait, Strange Spirit. Kathleen Cox in her studio. The theme of womanhood is prominent in her work, including in the sign of her studio.

In 1932, Cox begins producing a line of more commercial figurines, drawing influence from the Royal Doulton Burslem factory, where she works for a time. One such figurine is The Lavender Man (pictured), modelled on Michael Clifford, a Dublin street trader. In the mid 1930s, she develops a frustration with her work and with her lack of impact on the wider world. In attending the Chinese exhibition in London in 1935, it is confirmed to her that pottery should be practical rather than ornamental. It spurs her to destroy all her moulds and sell her kiln upon her return to Dublin.

Cox marries Alan Palmer in 1937, the couple has two daughters and relocate to England. Palmer is a conscientious objector during World War II, with the couple running a farm at Meopham, Kent, returning to London after the war.

Cox dies in early September 1972 in London. Some of her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland and with four works featured in the exhibition Not Just Pots: Contemporary Irish Ceramics of the 21st Century.

It is during the 1920s that Cox begins to question mainstream religion and becomes a vegetarian. Finding that her personal philosophy is similar to that of theosophy, she joins the movement and speaks at meetings. She is heavily influenced by the founder of the Order of the Great Companions, the Rev. William Hayes, who is living in Dublin in the 1930s. She writes and illustrates a children’s book on world religions, A story of stories, which she publishes under the pseudonym C.M. Kay in 1970.


by Leave a comment

Death of Thomas Francis Meagher

Thomas Francis Meagher, Irish nationalist and leader of the Young Irelanders in the Rebellion of 1848, drowns on July 1, 1867, after falling overboard from the steamboat G. A. Thompson into the Missouri River.

Meagher is born on August 3, 1823, at Waterford, County Waterford, in what is now the Granville Hotel on the Quay. He is educated at Roman Catholic boarding schools. When he is eleven, his family sends him to the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare. It is at Clongowes that he develops his skill of oratory, becoming at age 15 the youngest medalist of the Debating Society. After six years, he leaves Ireland for the first time, to study in Lancashire, England, at Stonyhurst College, also a Jesuit institution. He returns to Ireland in 1843, with undecided plans for a career in the Austrian army, a tradition among a number of Irish families.

Meagher becomes a member of the Young Ireland Party in 1845 and in 1847 is one of the founders of the Irish Confederation, dedicated to Irish independence. In 1848 he is involved, along with William Smith O’Brien, in an abortive attempt to mount an insurrection against English rule. Arrested for high treason, he is condemned to death, but his sentence is commuted to life imprisonment in Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania.

Meagher escapes in 1852 and makes his way to the United States. After a speaking tour of U.S. cities, he settles in New York City, studies law and is admitted to the bar in 1855. He soon becomes a leader of the Irish in New York and, from 1856, edits the Irish News.

At the outbreak of the American Civil War, Meagher becomes a captain of New York volunteers and fights at the First Battle of Bull Run in July 1861. He then organizes the Irish Brigade, and in February 1862 is elevated to the rank of brigadier general. After his brigade is decimated at the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, he resigns his commission, however in December he returns to command the military district of Etowah, with headquarters at Chattanooga, Tennessee.

At the close of the war, Meagher is appointed secretary of Montana Territory where, in the absence of a territorial governor, he serves as acting governor.

In the summer of 1867, Meagher travels to Fort Benton, Montana, to receive a shipment of guns and ammunition sent by General William Tecumseh Sherman for use by the Montana Militia. On the way to Fort Benton, the Missouri River terminus for steamboat travel, he falls ill and stops for six days to recuperate. When he reaches Fort Benton, he is reportedly still ill.

Sometime in the early evening of July 1, 1867, Meagher falls overboard from the steamboat G. A. Thompson, into the Missouri River. His body is never recovered. Some believe his death to be suspicious and many theories circulate about his death. Early theories included a claim that he was murdered by a Confederate soldier from the war, or by Native Americans. In 1913 a man claims to have carried out the murder of Meagher for the price of $8,000 but then recants. In the same vein, American journalist and novelist Timothy Egan, who publishes a biography of Meagher in 2016, claims Meagher may have been murdered by Montana political enemies or powerful and still active vigilantes. On the frontier men are quick to kill rather than adjudicate. A similar theory shown on Death Valley Days (1960) has him survive the assassination attempt because his aide had been mistakenly murdered when he accepted one of his trademark cigars, and Meagher uses his apparent death as leverage over his political opponents.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Mary Manning, Novelist, Playwright & Film Critic

Mary Manning Howe Adams, Irish novelist, playwright and film critic, is born in Dublin on June 30, 1905.

Raised in Dublin, Manning goes to school in Morehampton House and Alexandra College, Dublin. She gets her theatre training in Sara Allgood‘s teaching class in the Abbey Theatre.

Prior to her career as a writer and filmmaker, Manning works as a film critic throughout the 1920s and 30s. She works as a film critic for The Irish Statesman for a year during that time until it goes out of business. She is known to disapprove of Hollywood‘s “unimaginable stories and its stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and the Irish.” She also works as a writer for the Gate Theatre. She adapts the short story “Guests of the Nation” for a film directed by Denis Johnston. She also helps found the Dublin Film Society in 1930 and co-founds the Gate Theatre arts magazine Motley in 1932.

From 1914 to 1926, Ireland experiences a surge of new film styles being produced, consisting of historical melodramas and romantic comedies. Following this, 1930 to 1935 births a second wave of industry produced silent films that are intended to be less cliche compared to the first wave. The films produced under the second wave are much more experimental and deal less with the commercial appeals of the first wave. There’s minimal information on how Manning specifically contributed to the second wave, however, it is stated that she plays an important role producing five out of the six films to come out of that wave.

In 1935, Manning moves to Boston where she marries Harvard Law School professor Mark De Wolfe Howe. They have three daughters, Fanny, Susan and Helen. When her husband dies, she returns to Dublin in 1967 and lives in Monkstown, County Dublin, for another ten years. During this time she writes for various publications such as The Hibernia Magazine, The Irish Times and The Atlantic. She later returns to live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Manning is a founder of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works as drama director at Radcliffe College during World War II. She marries Faneuil Adams of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1980.

Manning dies at the age of 93 on June 27, 1999, at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


by Leave a comment

Edward Bruce Proclaimed Last High King of Ireland

Edward Bruce is proclaimed the last High King of Ireland on June 29, 1315. He is crowned in 1316. He reigns between 1315 and 1318. The English colonists in Ireland vehemently oppose him.

Bruce, the brother of the King of Scots, Robert the Bruce, leads a three-year military campaign, known as the Bruce campaign, against the Anglo-Norman lordship of Ireland. This invasion, which lasts from 1315 to 1318, ultimately gives rise to the two nations we recognize now as Ireland and Scotland.

In May 1315, a Scots army of up to six thousand soldiers lands on the Antrim coast. That June, near Carrickfergus, many Gaelic lords led by Donnell O’Neill of Ulster join Bruce. “All the Gaels of Ireland agreed to grant him lordship and they called him King of Ireland,” declares the Irish annals.

The invasion coincides with the Great European Famine (1315-1317), which brings hardship and disillusionment among Bruce’s followers. The annals ruefully comment, “falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.”

In February 1317, Dublin, the capital of the English royal administration in Ireland, comes close to being captured by the Bruce brothers. The brothers encamp at Castleknock within sight of the city walls. The panicking Dubliners burn the suburbs of the city. In order to re-fortify the city walls, they dismantle the Dominican priory north of the River Liffey and tear down the bridge across the river. The Bruce brothers do not lay siege to the city and instead move south to Munster.

In 1318, the invasion is brought to an end when, after marching south from Ulster for one last push, Bruce risks an open battle with an English army north of Dundalk at Faughart and is killed. His corpse is dismembered, and portions of it hung over the gates of various Irish towns. His decapitated head is brought to King Edward II of England by the victor, John de Bermingham, a minor Anglo-Irish baron who is elevated to the status of “Earl of Louth” for bringing the Bruce campaign in Ireland to an end.

A conference at Trinity College Dublin, in 2015, entitled The Irish-Scottish World in the Middle Ages, explores this key moment in the history of Ireland and Scotland. “The Bruce Invasion was a watershed moment in that story,” says Seán Duffy, Professor of Medieval Irish History and one of the organizers of the conference.

“Although Edward Bruce was defeated and killed in 1318, the effect of the invasion was far-reaching. The tide of Anglo-Norman expansion in Ireland turned back and the late Middle Ages saw the flowering of a Gaelic literary and cultural revival. Scotland, meanwhile, was galvanized by its victory over the English at Bannockburn which secured its path to independent nationhood.”

“Few peoples have as much in common as the Irish and the Scots. The very name Scotland is an ever-present reminder of that connection, because, in the Latin of the early Middle Ages, a Scotus was an Irishman, and the homeland of the Scoti was Ireland. That the name came to be applied to the northern part of Britain is testament to the strength of Irish influence on what we now know today as Scotland.”

(From: “On This Day: Edward Bruce, the last High King of Ireland, dies in 1318” by IrishCentral Staff, http://www.irishcentral.com, October 2022 | Pictured: Grave of Edward de Bruce, High King of Ireland, in Faughart Cemetery, County Louth)


by Leave a comment

Formation of An Taisce – The National Trust for Ireland

An Taisce – The National Trust for Ireland – a non-governmental organisation (NGO) active in the areas of the environment and built heritage in the Republic of Ireland, is established on June 28, 1948. It considers itself the oldest environmental and non-governmental organisation in the Republic of Ireland. Naturalist Robert Lloyd Praeger is its first president.

An Taisce is a membership organisation and charity, not a state or semi-state organisation. However, it receives government funding for specific programmes, such as Blue Flag beaches, Green Schools and the annual National Spring Clean, and it has a statutory role in certain planning and environmental processes in the country.

An Taisce’s range of expertise extends across the Republic of Ireland’s natural, built, and social heritage. It seeks to educate, inform, and lead public opinion on the environment, to advocate and influence policy, and to manage a small portfolio of heritage properties. It does not operate in Northern Ireland.

The Planning Acts provide for An Taisce, and about twenty other prescribed bodies, to be informed of all planning applications in areas of scenic beauty or high amenity significance or where architectural, archaeological or environmental issues need to be considered. Local authorities are required, in certain defined circumstances under the Planning & Development Regulations, to consult An Taisce on development proposals.

The organisation is split into three operational divisions:

  • The Environmental Education Unit operates nationwide programmes on behalf of the Irish government’s Department of the Environment, Community and Local Government, the National Transport Authority and the European Union, such as the Blue Flag water quality accreditation programme and Green Schools Programme that aims to promote higher environmental standards in schools.
  • The Environmental Advocacy Unit monitors roughly 5% of all planning (local authority development approval) applications made annually, making submissions on a small number of those received, and appealing about 300 decisions a year to An Bord Pleanála, the statutory planning appeals board. The Advocacy Unit also monitors environmental standards and co-ordinates policy formation from the elected advocacy committees amongst the membership.
  • The Properties Unit takes ownership of and looks after properties that have either historical significance or are environmentally sensitive. The trust properties are taken care of by both professional staff and volunteers who are involved with the day-to-day management of income generating properties such as Tailors’ Hall, which it also makes available for private hire, and the restoration of important resources such as the Boyne Navigation.

The organisation comprises over 5,000 members, with a range of membership fees. Some members are also organised in local organisations. Overall steering of the organisation is in the hands of a council, which in turn elects a board of management, and other internal policy and operational committees.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Anthony McIntyre, Former IRA Volunteer, Writer & Historian

Anthony McIntyre, a former Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteer, writer and historian, is born on June 27, 1957.

McIntyre is imprisoned for murder for 18 years in Long Kesh Detention Centre, spending four of those years on the dirty protest. Following his release from prison in 1992, he completes a PhD in political science at Queen’s University Belfast and leaves the republican movement in 1998 to work as a journalist and researcher. A collection of his journalism is published as a book in 2008, Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism.

McIntyre is involved with the Boston College oral history project on the Troubles entitled the Belfast Project, conducting interviews with former Provisional IRA members who, like himself, had become disillusioned with the direction the republican movement had taken, such as Brendan Hughes and Dolours Price, and former Ulster loyalist paramilitaries such as David Ervine. The interviews are the basis for the book Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland by Ed Moloney.

In 2011, McIntyre becomes embroiled in controversy when transcripts of the interviews, held by Boston College, are subpoenaed by the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) in relation to an investigation of the 1972 abduction and killing of Jean McConville. In March 2014, the PSNI announces that it is seeking to question McIntyre over newly released Belfast Project recordings, specifically in reference to the alleged role of Gerry Adams in the kidnapping and murder of Jean McConville.

McIntyre is a prominent critic of modern-day Sinn Féin and its leadership. He has spoken at Republican Sinn Féin party events. He is a co-founder of The Blanket, a journal which casts a critical eye on the Northern Ireland peace process.


by Leave a comment

Execution of James Dickey, Member of the Society of United Irishmen

James Dickey, a young barrister from a Presbyterian family in Crumlin, County Antrim, in the north of Ireland, is hanged at Corn Market, Belfast, on June 26, 1798. He is active in the Society of United Irishmen and is hanged with Henry Joy McCracken for leading rebels at the Battle of Antrim.

The Society of United Irishmen is formed in October 1791 by leading citizens in Belfast who seek a representative government in Ireland based on principles they believe have been modelled by the American and French Revolutions. At their first meeting they embrace the argument of Theobald Wolfe Tone for a “brotherhood of affection” between Irishmen of all religious persuasions. Tone argues that in Ireland the landed Anglican Ascendancy and the English appointed Irish executive employ division between Protestants and Catholics to balance “the one party by the other, plunder and laugh at the defeat of both.”

Despairing of reform, and in the hope of French assistance, in May 1798, the United Irishmen take up arms against the Dublin government and the British Crown. Beginning in Kildare, the insurrection spreads to other counties in Leinster before finally reaching the Presbyterian districts surrounding Belfast. On June 5, the Antrim societies of United Irishmen meet in Templepatrick where they elect textile manufacturer Henry Joy McCracken as their General. The next day McCracken issues a proclamation calling for the United army of Ulster to rise. The initial plan meets with success, as the towns of Larne, Ballymena, Maghera and Randalstown are taken and the bridge at Toome is damaged to prevent the government rushing reinforcements into Antrim from west of the River Bann.

According to the memoirs of James Burns from Templepatrick, Dickey commands the insurgents at Randalstown and kills Samuel Parker, a “traitor, with his own hands, while standing at his own door, where he went for the purpose.”

McCracken leads a body of about 6,000 rebels in an attack on Antrim town. As promised, Catholic Defenders turn out, but in the march upon the town tensions with the Presbyterian United Irish causes some desertions and a delay in McCracken’s planned assault. McCracken’s men are defeated, and his army melts away. On June 15, Dickey, together with McCracken, James Hope, James Orr and about fifty other rebel survivors from Antrim, arrive at Slemish, near Ballymena. There they set up camp for three weeks before leaving under threat of attack from Colonel Green of the Tay Fencibles.

Dickey is captured by the Sutherland fencibles on Divis, a hill northwest of Belfast. He is court-martialed and hanged at Corn Market, Belfast on June 26, 1798. Famously, before his hanging he refuses to wear a black hood saying to the hangman, “Sir, don’t cover my face!” According to local legend he shouts, “Don’t think gentlemen, I am ashamed to show my face among you, I am dying for my country!” However, a loyalist source hostile to the United Irish cause, Henry Joy of the Belfast News Letter, has Dickey on the scaffold recanting his commitment to the “brotherhood of affection” between Catholic and Protestant. He supposedly warned the assembled that had “the Presbyterians of the north succeeded in their [republican] designs, they would ultimately have had to contend with the Roman Catholics.” It is testament to the sentiment that in the north is to largely expunge the memory of his, and McCracken’s, sacrifice.

Dickey is 22 years old at the time of his execution. His head is placed on a spike outside the Market House on Belfast’s High Street.

Dickey’s brother, John Dickey of Crumlin, is also implicated in the rebellion. He is informed on by neighbours who had noticed that he was making pikes and attending secret meetings of the United Irishmen late at night. Arrested and court-martialed, he refuses the terms granted by the government to the “State Prisoners” in Dublin. He is transported to the West Indies for penal servitude but manages to escape and makes his way to the United States.


by Leave a comment

Death of Patrick Mayhew, British Barrister, Politician & Northern Ireland Secretary

Patrick Barnabas Burke Mayhew, Baron Mayhew of Twysden, PC, QC, DL, British barrister, politician and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who serves during a critical period in the Northern Ireland peace process, dies at his home in Kent, England, on June 25, 2016. He is a key figure in the December 1993 Downing Street Declaration which leads to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire on August 31, 1994

Mayhew is born on September 11, 1929. His father, George Mayhew, is a decorated army officer turned oil executive. His mother, Sheila Roche, descendant of members of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, is a relative of James Roche, 3rd Baron Fermoy, an Irish National Federation MP for East Kerry. Through his father, Mayhew is descended from the Victorian social commentator Henry Mayhew. He is educated at Tonbridge School, an all boys public school in Tonbridge, Kent.

Mayhew then serves as an officer in the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, studies law at Balliol College, Oxford, and is president of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) and of the Oxford Union. He is called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1955.

In 1963, Mayhew marries The Rev. Jean Gurney, and they have four sons.

Mayhew contests Dulwich at the 1970 United Kingdom general election, but the incumbent Labour Party member, Samuel Silkin, beats him by 895 votes. He is Member of Parliament (MP) for Tunbridge Wells from its creation at the February 1974 United Kingdom general election, standing down at the 1997 United Kingdom general election.

Mayhew is Under Secretary of Employment from 1979 to 1981, then Minister of State at the Home Office from 1981 to 1983. After this, he serves as Solicitor General for England and Wales from 1983 to 1987, and then Attorney General for England and Wales and simultaneously Attorney General for Northern Ireland from 1987 to 1992.

Mayhew is Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1992 to 1997, the longest anyone has served in this office.

Mayhew is one of only five Ministers (Tony Newton, Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker are the others) to serve throughout the whole 18 years of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. This represents the longest uninterrupted Ministerial service in Britain since Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, in the early 19th century.

Mayhew is knighted in 1983. On June 1997, he is given a life peerage as Baron Mayhew of Twysden, of Kilndown in the County of Kent. He retires from the House of Lords on June 1, 2015.

Mayhew suffers from cancer and Parkinson’s disease in his later years. He dies at the age of 86 on June 25, 2016, in his home in Kent.

Mayhew’s son, The Honourable Henry Mayhew, appears in the fourth episode of the series The Secret History Of Our Streets, discussing life in the Portland Road, Notting Hill, London. Another son, Tristram, co-founds the outdoor adventure company Go Ape. His son Jerome is the Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Broadland in Norfolk since December 2019.


by Leave a comment

Death of Newspaper Editor Douglas Gageby

(Robert John) Douglas Gageby, one of the pre-eminent Irish newspaper editors of his generation, dies on June 24, 2004, following a lengthy illness. His life is well documented and a book of essays about him, Bright Brilliant Days: Douglas Gageby and the Irish Times, written by many of his colleagues, some of whom had attained fame for their literary achievements, is published in 2006.

Gageby is born at 54 Upper Beechwood Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin, to Thomas Gageby, a Belfast-born civil servant. His mother, Ethel Elizabeth (née Smith), is a schoolteacher from County Cavan. The Gageby family moves to Belfast when he is about three years old as his father goes to work for the Northern Ireland Civil Service following partition. His paternal grandfather, Robert Gageby, stands as a Labour Party parliamentary candidate in Belfast North in 1910, and is a Belfast City Councillor for 20 years, first elected in 1898 as a trade union candidate supported by the Independent Labour Party.

Gageby is educated at Belfast Royal Academy and Trinity College Dublin, where he is elected a scholar in Modern Languages (French and German) in 1940. He is also actively involved with the student newspaper, Trinity News. He enlists in the Irish Army as a private soldier at the outbreak of World War II. He is commissioned later, and he serves as an intelligence officer. He reports from post-war Germany for The Irish Press and goes on to work under Conor Cruise O’Brien in the Irish News Agency. In 1954 he is the first editor of the Evening Press. In 1963 he becomes editor of The Irish Times, a post he holds until 1986, having been brought back from a short retirement in 1974. He is credited with moving The Irish Times from a Unionist organ into a successful Irish journal of record.

In 2003 it is revealed that a director, and later Chairman, of The Irish Times, Major Thomas Bleakley McDowell, had referred to Gageby as a “white nigger” for his views and role in the paper during the Northern Ireland civil rights movement‘s campaign in the 1960s. The comment appears in a letter from the British Ambassador to Dublin, Sir Andrew Gilchrist, to Kelvin White, head of the Irish Section of the British Foreign Office and is dated October 2, 1969. Gilchrist is referring to conversations which he had with McDowell where the latter professes himself to be fully behind the British government in the North and hostile to Gageby’s coverage of the civil rights movement. However, historian Mark O’Brien notes, “Despite his contacts with London, McDowell’s actions did not interfere with Gageby’s editorials on Northern Ireland”, due to the fact McDowell believes in editorial independence (even though McDowell strongly disagrees with Gageby’s nationalist views), and because Gageby is making the newspaper commercially successful. Under the 30 year rule, this letter is made available to newspapers on December 22 and 23, 1999, but no newspaper publishes it at that time.

The communiqué is later discovered by the historian Jack Lane and published in the Irish Political Review, a small magazine strongly antagonistic to The Irish Times, in January 2003. He brings it to the attention of The Irish Times editor, Geraldine Kennedy, on January 10, 2003, and she replies on January 15, 2003 saying she is “unable to confirm the veracity of it” and does not publish it. When, on January 26, 2003, the Sunday Independent (Ireland) publishes the story, The Irish Times finally follows the next day, January 27. Nonetheless, on April 24, 2004, Kennedy defends her position by saying, “The contents of the letter in question were published on January 27, 2003, as soon as its existence was drawn to my attention.”

Gageby dies on June 24, 2004, following a two year illness. His private funeral is conducted by Rev. Terence McCaughey, a family friend. The Irish Times endows an annual Douglas Gageby Fellowship for young journalists and a stand of trees is planted in his memory at Moynalty. His papers are presented to Dublin City University (DCU).

Gageby is married to Dorothy, daughter of Seán Lester, last Secretary General of the League of Nations. His daughter, Susan Denham, is the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ireland from 2011 to 2017.