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Author Archives: Jim Doyle


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Ulster Volunteer Force Attacks Across Northern Ireland

On October 2, 1975, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a loyalist paramilitary group, carries out a wave of shootings and bombings across Northern Ireland. Six of the attacks leave 12 people dead (mostly civilians) and around 45 people injured. There is also an attack in the small village of Killyleagh, County Down. There are five attacks in and around Belfast which leave people dead. A bomb which explodes near Coleraine leaves four UVF members dead. There are also several other smaller bombs planted around Northern Ireland, sixteen in total, but other than causing damage they do not kill or injure anyone.

There is a rise in sectarian killings during the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) truce with the British Army, which begins in February 1975 and officially lasts until February 1976. Loyalists, fearing they are about to be forsaken by the British government and forced into a united Ireland, increase their attacks on Irish Catholics/Irish nationalists. Loyalists kill 120 Catholics in 1975, the vast majority civilians. They hope to force the IRA to retaliate and thus end the truce. Some IRA units concentrate on tackling the loyalists. The fall-off of regular operations causes unruliness within the IRA and some members, with or without permission from higher up, engage in tit-for-tat killings.

The first attack of the day takes place at Casey’s Bottling Plant in Belfast. The UVF group, which is alleged to have been led by Shankill Butchers leader Lenny Murphy, enters the premises by pretending to have an order to be filled before launching the attack. Four employees are shot and killed in the attack, sisters Frances Donnelly (35), Marie McGrattan (47) and Gerard Grogan (18) all die that day, with a fourth, Thomas Osborne (18), dying of his wounds three weeks later. Murphy personally shoots all except Donnelly who is killed by his accomplice William Green. The two sisters are forced to kneel on the ground and are shot in the back of the head.

In the next attack Thomas Murphy (29), a Catholic photographer from Belfast, is killed in a booby-trap bomb and gun attack, when two UVF gunmen enter his premises on Carlisle Circus (close to both the loyalist Shankill Road and republican New Lodge areas of Belfast) and shoot him in the chest, before planting a duffel bag bomb in his shop. The resulting explosion injures several people including a female passer-by who loses her leg.

Next the UVF carries out a gun and bomb attack on McKenna’s Bar near Crumlin, County Antrim, which kills a Catholic civilian John Stewart (35) and injures scores of people.

In Killyleagh, County Down, a no-warning bomb explodes outside a Catholic-owned bar, The Anchor Inn. Irene Nicholson (37), a Protestant woman, is killed as she is passing by while the attack is being carried out. Three UVF members are later arrested for this attack in Bangor and one of them claims the attack was “a small one to scare them.”

Next Ronald Winters (26), a Protestant civilian, is shot dead by the UVF in his parents’ house on London Road, Belfast.

Later that night four UVF members are killed as they drive along a road in Farrenlester, near Coleraine, when the bomb they are transporting explodes prematurely.

The following day, October 3, the UVF is once again made a proscribed terrorist organisation. Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Merlyn Rees had unbanned the UVF in May 1974, the same day the ban on Sinn Féin was lifted, a move never extended to the IRA. Despite this the UVF are still able to kill Catholic civilians at will for the remainder of 1975 and for most of 1976 also.


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Birth of Alfred O’Rahilly, Scholar, University President & Priest

Alfred O’Rahilly, academic with controversial views on both electromagnetism and religion, is born on October 1, 1884, in Listowel, County Kerry. He briefly serves in politics, as a Teachta Dála (TD) for Cork, and is later the president of University College Cork (UCC). He also becomes a priest following the death of his wife, his first cousin, Agnes O’Donoghue.

O’Rahilly is the eighth child of Thomas Francis Rahilly of Ballylongford, County Kerry and Julia Mary Rahilly (née Curry) of Glin, County Limerick. He changes his name to ‘O’Rahilly’ by deed poll in 1920. His fourteen siblings included Celtic scholars Thomas Francis and Cecile, and a first cousin is The O’Rahilly, killed during the 1916 Easter Rising. Educated at St. Michael’s College, Listowel, Blackrock College, and UCC, he undergoes a long period (1901–14) of training as a member of the Society of Jesus, but eventually leaves during the final stages of preparation for the priesthood, because of temperamental unsuitability. Appointed an assistant lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics in October 1914, he becomes the dominant figure in the institution within six years. He becomes Professor of Mathematical Physics on June 1, 1917 and registrar on February 11, 1920, before vacating these offices when he becomes president (1943–54).

O’Rahilly’s early career in UCC is set against the background of the revolutionary period, and he becomes predominantly identified, within and without the college, with the rise of post-1916 Sinn Féin. At UCC he leads the nationalist interest that ousts the perceived pro-British old regime, personified by Sir Bertram Windle, who resigns from the presidency in 1919. O’Rahilly is flamboyant, extrovert, disputatious and dynamic. During the low-key, unassertive presidency (1919–43) of Patrick J. Merriman, O’Rahilly as registrar is heir-presumptive and acts as de facto president. All in all, the whirlwind age of O’Rahilly lasts for almost four decades.

O’Rahilly is a volatile and bristling polymath of inexhaustible energy. The vast range of his scholarly interests – politics, sociology, finance, Christology, mathematical physics, history – arouse astonishment and envy. One critique of his work Money (1941) ends with the reflection that the book would enable people to relieve rural tedium by laughing the winter nights away. His contemplated multi-volume life of Christ prompts a National University colleague to observe that a life of O’Rahilly by Christ would be much more interesting. He, who is vain but not stuffy, is not offended by such descriptions of him as “a cross between Thomas Aquinas and Jimmy O’Dea,” but is not pleased by the jibe that he has the best mind of the twelfth century, since he considers himself a very modern man indeed.

There are some negative and even frivolous aspects of O’Rahilly’s UCC presidency. He has a strong appetite for the hurly-burly of academic politics and, it is said, enters no controversy that he does not aggravate. He has the reputation of being a bully and exploiter in his dealings with junior academic staff, but he can be kind, helpful, and extraordinarily generous to staff and students with problems. His zeal for vigorously promoting a Roman Catholic ethos in a nominally pluralist institution is frequently paternalistic and extends to acts of petty supervision, particularly perhaps over women students. This is the kind of atmosphere that prompts a visiting examiner to describe the UCC of the 1940s as “a convent run by a mad reverend mother.”

All this being said, O’Rahilly is one of the most vibrant and effective presidents in the history of the National University. His initiatives include extensive improvements in the library, of which he is director, and the institution of student health and restaurant services. He founds the electrical engineering department and the Cork University Press, which he believes would provide a publication outlet for the researches of his colleagues, particularly those concerned with native learning. He strengthens UCC’s links with the city and the province, and these are significantly expressed through the provision of adult education courses, an area where O’Rahilly is particularly innovative and pioneering.

As a young academic, O’Rahilly becomes caught up in the struggle for independence. He serves on Cork Corporation in the heroic age of Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence MacSwiney, and spends a patriotic period in jail and on the run. He represents Cork Borough (1923–24) in Dáil Éireann for Cumann na nGaedheal but resigns his seat in 1924. He is a constitutional adviser to the Irish delegation at the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921, argues publicly for the acceptance of the treaty, and helps to draft the Constitution of the Irish Free State. His links with the local labour and trade-union movement are long and close, and at national level he serves as Irish government chief representative in successive sessions of the International Labour Organization conference in Geneva. He is also a member of government commissions on banking and vocational organisation. After retirement he goes to reside at Blackrock College, where he is ordained a priest on December 18, 1955, and becomes a domestic prelate (monsignor) in 1960.

O’Rahilly dies at the age of 84 in Dublin on August 1, 1969.

No other layman of his day so self-confidently assumes a central role in so many areas of Catholic life – philosophy, sociology, theology, scriptural studies. The controversies in which be becomes involved are a source of interest and pride to UCC students. Their president is a pugnacious polemicist (who jousts with such eminences as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw), a man of stature, and a formidable Catholic intellectual.

(From: “O’Rahilly, Alfred” by John A. Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


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First Meeting of the General Synod of Ulster

The first recorded meeting of the Presbyterian General Synod of Ulster is held at Antrim, County Antrim, on September 30, 1691.

The Synod (or General Synod) of Ulster is the forerunner of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. It comprises all the clergy of the church elected by their respective local presbyteries (or church elders) and a section of the laity.

In 1726, the Synod expels ministers, grouped together as the Synod of Antrim, who refuse to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Later there is a further secession by those who, insisting on the sole kingship of Christ, reject the Confession. In 1763 they organise a distinct Reformed Presbyterian Church, and in 1811 establish their own provincial synod. In 1746, some of the more doctrinaire Calvinists withdraw, forming the Secession Synod.

Within the mainline Synod there is a continuing distinction between ‘Old Light‘ supporters of theological orthodoxy and ‘New Light‘ elements more inclined to defer to conscience rather than doctrine. In the first decades of the 19th century, positions harden with New Light ministers adopting a Unitarian or Arian skepticism regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1829, when the leading conservative evangelical, Henry Cooke, succeeds in pressing the General Synod for a firm declaration of Trinitarian belief they withdraw to form their own Remonstrant Synod.

The departure of the latitudinarian party makes possible a reconciliation with the earlier Seceders. Purged of its heterodox elements, in 1840 the Synod of Ulster joins with the Secession Synod to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.


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Birth of Archie Doyle, Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army Member

Archie Doyle, one of three anti-Treaty members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who assassinated the Irish Minister for Justice Kevin O’Higgins, is born on September 29, 1903. He has a long subsequent career in the organisation’s ranks.

Doyle fights in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and takes the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War (1922-23) and is subsequently interned among numerous others. Together with two fellow-detainees, Timothy Coughlin and Bill Gannon, he takes part in forming a secret “vengeance grouping.” The three vow that once free of imprisonment they will take revenge on their opponents, whom they consider traitors to the Irish cause.

Most such private revenge pacts are broken up by the IRA leadership when it reorganises following 1924, but Doyle and his two fellow conspirators persist and carry through their deadly aim. On July 10, 1927, the three surprised O’Higgins on his way to Mass at the Booterstown Avenue side of Cross Avenue in Blackrock, Dublin, and shoot him down.

O’Higgins is especially hated by IRA members for having ordered the executions of seventy-seven of their fellows during the Civil War, an act for which he outspokenly takes responsibility and refuses to express any remorse. Moreover, he is a dominant member of the Irish Free State government, and the conspirators have good reasons to believe that his death would weaken it.

The three make their escape and are not apprehended. However, Timothy Coughlin is shot to death by police informer Sean Harling on the night of January 28, 1928, on Dublin’s Dartry Road, under circumstances which remain controversial up to the present. A second IRA man is known to have been with Coughlin that night, in surveillance of Harling’s home, and escapes unharmed. It is believed that Doyle is that second man, though this point, as many other details of this still rather mysterious affair, remains not quite certain.

Doyle is among the beneficiaries of the amnesty issued by Éamon de Valera when he comes to power in 1932, under which numerous IRA men are released from prison and the charges against others dropped. In later times Doyle openly admits his part in the killing of O’Higgins, and indeed takes pride in it, without fear of prosecution.

With the end of the IRA’s alliance with de Valera and the increasing confrontation between them, Doyle, now a veteran highly respected in the IRA circles, becomes deeply involved in the organisation’s 1940s campaigns. Harry, the memoirs of IRA man Harry White, make repeated admiring references to “Archie Doyle of Dublin, the Tan War veteran who had fought through it all.”

During the IRA’s Northern campaign, Doyle is said to have participated in the abortive raid on the British barracks at Crossmaglen, County Armagh, on September 2, 1942, in retaliation for the execution of Tom Williams earlier that morning. The IRA unit, some twenty men in a commandeered lorry and accompanying car, is discovered by a passing Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) patrol near the village of Cullaville. Doyle is mentioned in White’s memoirs as having “jumped out of the car, Thompson in hand, and started shooting at the RUC.” Since the element of surprise is lost, the attack on the barracks has to be cancelled.

A week later, on September 9, White mentions Doyle as having commanded the assassination of Sergeant Denis O’Brien, Irish Special Branch detective and himself a former IRA man, near Dublin. It is a highly controversial affair, opposed by the IRA GHQ in Belfast as damaging to the Northern campaign, and precipitates a massive manhunt by the Irish police. It is IRA Chief of Staff Charlie Kerins who is caught two years later, charged with the O’Brien assassination and eventually executed for it. White, however, claims that it is Doyle who actually commands that action, on Kerins’s orders. Doyle, who openly spoke of his part in killing O’Higgins, seems far more reticent about this part of his career.

In 1943 Doyle is assigned as the IRA’s Quartermaster General in Belfast.

On July 1, 1943, Doyle is mentioned as having participated, together with Kerins and with Jackie Griffith, in an operation of “fund-raising” for the hard-pressed IRA (i.e., robbery). The three men arrive on bikes at the gates of Player Wills factory on the South Circular Road, Dublin, and with scarves around their faces stop at gunpoint a van loaded with some £5,000 for wages and drive away with the van and the money.

Griffith is shot down by the police in Dublin less than a week later, in what is charged to be an extrajudicial assassination, and Kerins is caught in 1944 and executed, becoming a major IRA martyr. Doyle, however, continually survives decades of a very dangerous way of life and manages to die of old age. He dies in St. James’s Hospital in Dublin in 1980.


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Death of Larry Cunningham, Irish County Music Singer

Larry Cunningham, Irish country music singer, who is one of the leading figures of the Irish showband scene in the 1960s and 1970s, dies in Dublin on September 28, 2012, following a lengthy illness. He is regarded as a “trailblazer” and “legend” in the music industry.

Cunningham is born in Clooneen, Mullinalaghta, County Longford on February 13, 1938. He grows up in a farming family of seven children. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he goes to England and works as a carpenter, playing Irish traditional music and Gaelic football during his spare time. In 1958 he returns to Ireland. Still working as a carpenter, he soon joins the part-time Gowna-based Grafton Showband, but leaves it in 1961 to become fully professional as the lead singer of the Mighty Avons, based in Cavan. That band initially specialises in covers of Jim Reeves songs and similar country material.

The band’s first taste of fame comes when they are supporting Jim Reeves during the Irish leg of his European tour in 1963. When Reeves walks off the stage during a concert in Lifford in protest at the poor condition of the supplied piano, the Avons, as they later become popularly called, take over and entertain the crowd, to much subsequent publicity and acclaim.

In December 1964, Cunningham and the Mighty Avons have a Top-10 hit with the song Tribute to Jim Reeves, which also enters the British charts and is played on Top of the Pops, both firsts for an Irish artist, which further boosts their career. Their major hit is Lovely Leitrim in September 1965, which stays at number one in the charts for four weeks. As well as regularly touring Ireland to large crowds, the Avons make many appearances on television, and often played in Britain, the United States, and other places.

In late 1969, Cunningham leaves the Mighty Avons and merges with Edenderry band The Fairways to form Larry Cunningham and the Country Blue Boys, leaving Gene Stuart to front the Avons. He continues having success with his new band, but after his marriage to Beatrice Nannery in February 1972 he gives up regular touring in favour of occasional concerts and recording. He continues to have top-10 hits until the mid-1970s, and still performs occasionally for the remainder of his life. In recent years, audio and video compilations of his music have been released, as well as a biography.

Cunningham dies in Dublin on September 28, 2012, following a lengthy illness. Among those to pay tribute are U.S. country singer Robert Mizzell who says, “I am so saddened to hear of the passing of country legend Larry. I admired his talent and quick humour. My thoughts are with his family, friends, and the fans who loved the big deep voice that rattled the radio waves.”


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Neeson & Richardson Donate Libel Payout to Omagh Bombing Victims

On September 27, 1998, film star couple Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson announce they will donate a five-figure libel payout to a memorial fund for the victims of the Omagh bomb massacre that occurred in Northern Ireland on August 15, 1998, killing 29 people.

Neeson and Richardson win £50,000 ($85,370) in libel damages over newspaper allegations that their marriage is on the rocks. The couple sues the Daily Mirror publishers MGN for libel and malicious falsehood after the tabloid paper claimed Natasha Richardson was filing for divorce behind her husband’s back and that their marriage was a sham.

The story is published in August 1998 in London, Scotland, the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland – where Neeson was born and where his family still live.

A High Court judge in London hears that the actors – married for four years with two young sons – were shocked by the allegations which caused “an explosion of publicity worldwide.”

Neeson, who is nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the film Schindler’s List, is told about the article by his mother. She phones him in great distress from Northern Ireland after seeing the headlines while out shopping.

The actors’ solicitor, Mark Thomson, tells Mr. Justice Gray that the couple then spent several days attempting to deal with the destructive aftermath of the articles denying the allegations to friends and family.

Mirror Group Newspapers accepts “unequivocally” that the story is entirely false and apologises for the embarrassment, hurt and distress caused to the couple. “We entirely accept that there is absolutely no truth in the allegations about Mr. Neeson and Miss Richardson and that the allegations should never have been published. We apologise unreservedly to Mr. and Mrs. Neeson and their family for the distress and embarrassment they have been caused. We have agreed not to repeat the allegations and to pay substantial damages to them, which they are donating to the victims of the Omagh bombing.”

The information came from a source thought to be reliable, but it was clearly a mistake for the reporter to rely on that source, says solicitor Martin Cruddace.


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Birth of George McWhirter, Writer, Teacher & Vancouver’s First Poet Laureate

George McWhirter, Irish-Canadian writer, translator, editor, teacher and Vancouver‘s first Poet Laureate, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on September 26, 1939.

The son of a shipyard worker, McWhirter is raised in a large extended family on the Shankill Road in Belfast. He and his extended family spend the war years and then weekends and the summers at their seaside bungalow in Carnalea, now a suburb of Bangor, County Down. In 1957 he begins a “combined scholarship” studying English and Spanish at Queen’s University Belfast, and education at Stranmillis University College, Belfast. His tutor at Queen’s is the poet Laurence Lerner, and he is a classmate with the future literary critic Robert Dunbar and the poets Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane.

After graduating, McWhirter teaches in Kilkeel and Bangor, County Down, and in Barcelona, Spain, before moving to Port Alberni, British Columbia, Canada. After receiving his M.A. from the University of British Columbia (UBC), where he studies under Michael Bullock and J. Michael Yates, he stays on to become a full professor in 1982 and head of the Creative Writing Department from 1983 to 1993. He retires as a Professor Emeritus in 2005.

McWhirter is associated with PRISM International magazine from 1968 to 2005. He is the author and editor of numerous books and the recipient of many awards. His first book of poetry, Catalan Poems, is a joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe‘s Beware, Soul Brother. He is made a life member of the League of Canadian Poets in 2005 and is also a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and PEN International. In March 2007, he is named Vancouver’s inaugural Poet Laureate for a two-year term.

McWhirter currently writes full-time and lives in Vancouver with his wife. They have two children and three grandchildren.


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Birth of Charles Maturin, Clergyman, Playwright & Novelist

Charles Robert Maturin, also known as C. R. Maturin, an Irish Protestant clergyman ordained in the Church of Ireland and a writer of Gothic plays and novels, is born in Dublin on September 25, 1780. His best-known work is the novel Melmoth the Wanderer.

Maturin is descended from Huguenots who found shelter in Ireland, one of whom is Gabriel Jacques Maturin who becomes Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, after Jonathan Swift in 1745. He attends Trinity College Dublin. Shortly after being ordained as curate of Loughrea, County Galway, in 1803, he moves back to Dublin as curate of St. Peter’s Church. He lives in York Street with his father William, a Post Office official, and his mother, Fedelia Watson. He marries the acclaimed singer Henrietta Kingsbury on October 7, 1804.

Maturin’s first three works are Gothic novels published under the pseudonym Dennis Jasper Murphy and are critical and commercial failures. They do, however, catch the attention of Sir Walter Scott, who recommends Maturin’s work to Lord Byron. With their help, his play Bertram is staged in 1816 at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane for 22 nights, with Edmund Kean starring in the lead role as Bertram. Financial success, however, eludes Maturin, as the play’s run coincides with his father’s unemployment and another relative’s bankruptcy, both of them assisted by the fledgling writer. To make matters worse, Samuel Taylor Coleridge publicly denounces the play as dull and loathsome, and “melancholy proof of the depravation of the public mind,” going nearly so far as to decry it as atheistic.

The Church of Ireland takes note of these and earlier criticisms and, having discovered the identity of Bertram‘s author after Maturin had shed his nom de plume to collect the profits from the play, subsequently bar his further clerical advancement. Forced to support his wife and four children by writing on his curate salary of £80-90 per annum, compared to the £1000 he made for Bertram, he switches back from playwright to novelist after a string of his plays meet with failure. He produces several novels in addition to Melmoth the Wanderer, including some on Irish subjects and The Albigenses, a historical novel which features werewolves. Various poems have also been ascribed to Maturin on dubious grounds and appear to be the work of others. The prize-winning “Lines on the Battle of Waterloo” is published in 1816 under the name of the university graduate John Shee. “The Universe” appears with Maturin’s name on the title page in 1821 but is now thought to be almost completely the work of James Wills.

The exaggerated effectiveness of Maturin’s preaching can be gauged from the two series of sermons that he publishes. On the occasion of the death of Princess Charlotte, he declares, “Life is full of death; the steps of the living cannot press the earth without disturbing the ashes of the dead – we walk upon our ancestors – the globe itself is one vast churchyard.” A contemporary account records that there had seldom been seen such crowds at St Peter’s. “Despite the severe weather, people of all persuasions flocked to the church and listened spellbound to this prince of preachers. In his obituary it is said that ‘did he leave no other monument whereon to rest his fame, these sermons alone would be sufficient.'”

Maturin dies in Dublin on October 30, 1824. A writer in the University Magazine later sums up his character as “eccentric almost to insanity and compounded of opposites – an insatiable reader of novels; an elegant preacher; an incessant dancer; a coxcomb in dress and manners.”

A sister of Maturin’s wife marries Charles Elgee, whose daughter, Jane Francesca, becomes the mother of Oscar Wilde. Thus, Charles Maturin is Oscar Wilde’s great-uncle by marriage. Wilde discards his own name and adopts the name of Maturin’s novel, Melmoth, during his exile in France.

Maturin’s eldest son, William Basil Kingsbury Maturin, follows him into the ministry, as do several of his grandsons. One of these, Basil W. Maturin, dies in the sinking of RMS Lusitania on May 7, 1915. The second son is Edward Maturin, who emigrates to the United States and becomes a novelist and poet there.


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Westlife Becomes First Act with 6 Consecutive No. 1 Singles in British Pop History

On September 24, 2000, Westlife, an Irish pop vocal group formed in Sligo in 1998, makes British pop history by becoming the first act to have six consecutive number one singles.

Kian Egan, Mark Feehily and Shane Filan, all schoolmates in Summerhill College in Sligo, participate in a school production of Grease with fellow Sligo men Derrick Lacey, Graham Keighron, and Michael Garrett. They considered it as the start of Westlife. The sextet forms a pop vocal group called Six as One in 1997, which they later rename IOYOU. The group is managed by choreographer Mary McDonagh and two other informal managers. McDonagh first encounters Egan as a six-year-old student at her weekly dance classes, and comes to know Filan and Feehily in their early teens as they star in shows such as Oliver! and Godspell for Sligo Fun Company.

Louis Walsh, the manager of fellow Irish boy band Boyzone, comes to know the group after Filan’s mother Mae contacts him, but the group fails to secure a BMG record deal with Simon Cowell. Cowell tells Walsh, “You are going to have to fire at least three of them. They have great voices, but they are the ugliest band I have ever seen in my life.” Lacey, Keighron, and Garrett are told they will not be part of the new group, and auditions are held in Dublin where Nicky Byrne and Brian McFadden are recruited. McFadden is part of an R&B group called Cartel before this.

The new group, formed on July 3, 1998, is originally named Westside, but as another band is already using that name, the group is renamed Westlife. They manage to secure a major record deal the second time around under BMG with all other record labels competing. They sign a four million pound record deal with RCA Records. Westlife’s first big break comes in 1998 when they open for Boyzone and Backstreet Boys concerts in Dublin.

Westlife has released twelve studio albums. They rise to fame with their debut international self-titled studio album, Westlife (1999). It is followed by Coast to Coast (2000), World of Our Own (2001), Unbreakable – The Greatest Hits Volume 1 (2002), and Turnaround (2003), which continues the group’s success worldwide. The group then releases their cover albums Allow Us to Be Frank (2004) and The Love Album (2006) and the studio albums Face to Face (2005) and Back Home (2007). After a hiatus of studio recording for almost one year in 2008, they release the studio albums Where We Are (2009), and Gravity (2010), and the compilation album Greatest Hits (2011). After eight years, the quartet group releases their eleventh studio album, Spectrum (2019), followed by their twelfth studio album, Wild Dreams (2021).

Westlife is the act with the most Number 1 debuts on the UK Singles Chart, with all 14 of their chart-toppers landing there in their first week. They have the most singles certifications for a pop band on the UK number one singles artists chart since The Beatles. According to the British Phonographic Industry (BPI), Westlife has been certified for 13.1 million albums, 1.3 million video albums, and 10.4 million singles, with a total of more than 24 million combined sales in the United Kingdom (UK). They are also currently ranked 19th with the most number-one albums of all time and sixth-highest band in the list. The group has accumulated 14 number-one singles as a lead artist as well as having eight number-one albums in the United Kingdom, making them Ireland’s and non-British act’s (since Elvis Presley) most prolific chart-toppers. In 2012, the Official Charts Company lists Westlife 34th among the biggest-selling singles artist, 16th amongst the biggest selling groups, and 14th with most top ten hits — all the highest for a boy band and a pop group in British music history. They are also the biggest selling album group of the 2000s, and three of their studio albums are part of the 50 fastest-selling albums of all time in the UK.

Westlife has the most consecutive number one studio albums in a decade in the UK and Ireland for a band, since The Beatles, and for a pop band and act since ABBA. Also in Ireland, they have 11 number one albums with a total of 13 top two albums, 16 number one singles, as well as 34 top fifty singles. They have sold over 55 million records and are holders of the following Guinness World Records: first to achieve seven consecutive number-one singles in the UK; most public appearances in 36 hours by a pop group; most singles to debut at number one on the UK chart; and top-selling album group in the United Kingdom in the 21st century.

Westlife is one of the most successful music groups of all time, among the highest-profile acts in 2000s popular culture in most territories worldwide, and one of the few boy bands to have continued success after their commercial peak. On the best-selling boy bands of all time list, they are currently tenth worldwide along with the biggest-selling boy band from Ireland in history globally. They have received numerous accolades including one World Music Award, two Brit Awards, four MTV Video Music Awards, and four Record of the Year Awards. As a live act, Westlife has sold 5.5 million concert tickets worldwide from their fourteen concert tours so far. They hold the record for the most shows played at The SSE Arena, Belfast and Wembley Arena. This makes them the biggest arena act of all-time in the United Kingdom. They sell out Croke Park in Dublin in a record-breaking five minutes. Their fourteenth, and latest concert tour is called The Wild Dreams Tour.


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Birth of Thomas Kilroy, Playwright & Novelist

Thomas F. Kilroy, Irish playwright and novelist, is born on September 23, 1934, in Green Street, Callan, County Kilkenny. He is a difficult writer to categorize, having written plays ranging from the conventional The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche to more technically innovative and avant-garde works such as Talbot’s Box and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. Nevertheless, common thematic concerns run throughout many of his plays, including the issue of personal and cultural—specifically, Irish versus English—identity and the mythologizing of the past. Best known as a playwright, he is also the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Big Chapel (1971).

Kilroy is the son of Thomas and Mary (née Devine) Kilroy. He attends St. Kieran’s College and plays hurling for the school team, captaining the senior team in 1952. He studies at University College Dublin, where his first play, The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche, is produced to great success at the Olympia Theatre. In his early career he is play editor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the 1980s, he sits on the board of Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980, and is Director of its touring company.

In 1978, Kilroy is appointed Professor of English at University College Galway, a post from which he resigns in 1989 to concentrate on writing.

In 2008, Kilroy receives the Irish PEN Award, given to honour an Irish-born writer who has made an outstanding contribution to Irish literature.

While some of Kilroy’s plays hit a lighter note than others, the common thread in most of them is his attempt to address some of the social upheavals that have occurred in Ireland in the past and present. This has been a concern of his since he was in his twenties and wrote in the 1959 essay “Groundwork for an Irish Theatre” that his contemporaries were “inclined to shirk the painful, sometimes tragic problems of a modern Ireland which is undergoing considerable social and ideological stress.” Although he has not been one of Ireland’s most prolific playwrights, his plays may certainly be considered important contributions to the modern stage.

Kilroy now lives in County Mayo and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and Aosdána.

The Thomas Kilroy Collection, his personal archive, is deposited at the James Hardiman Library at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway). Kilroy addresses the launch event in March 2011, which is attended by, amongst others, Brian Friel and the future President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins.