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

Author Archives: Jim Doyle


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Birth of Patrick Guiney, American Civil War Soldier

Patrick Robert Guiney, American Civil War soldier, is born in Parkstown, County Tipperary, on January 15, 1835.

Guiney is the second and eldest surviving son of James Roger Guiney, who is descended from Jacobites, and Judith Macrae. His father, impoverished after a failed runaway marriage, brings with him on his second voyage to New Brunswick his favourite child Patrick, not yet six years old. After some years, his mother and younger brother, William, rejoin her husband, recently crippled by a fall from his horse. They settle in Portland, Maine. The young Guiney works as a wheel boy in a rope factory, and at the age of fourteen apprenticed to a machinist in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but stays only a year and a half before returning to Portland.

Guiney hopes to better himself through education and attends the public grammar school. He matriculates at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His depleting finances cause him to leave after about a year, despite the fact that the college president offers to make some arrangement for him to stay, which his honor would not allow him to accept. His book-loving father having meanwhile died, he goes to study for the Bar under Judge Walton, and is admitted in Lewiston, Maine, in 1856, taking up the practice of criminal law.

In politics he is a Republican. For the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he wins its first suit. In 1859 he marries in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, Janet Margaret Doyle, related to James Warren Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. They have one son, who dies in infancy, and one daughter, the poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney. Home life in Roxbury and professional success are cut short by the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Familiar with the manual of arms, Guiney enlists for example’s sake as a private, refusing a commission from Governor John A. Andrew until he has worked hard to help recruit the 9th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. By June 1861, he is a captain. In July 1862, the first colonel having died from a wound received in action, Lieutenant Colonel Guiney succeeds him to the command. He wins high official praise, notably for courage and presence of mind at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill in Hanover County, Virginia. Here, after three successive color-bearers had been shot down, he himself reportedly seizes the flag, throws aside coat and sword-belt, rises white-shirted and conspicuous in the stirrups, inspires a final rally, and turns the fortune of the day.

Guiney fights in over thirty engagements, including the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the Battle of Chancellorsville.

The 9th Massachusetts is present at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in second brigade first division V Corps on July 1, 1863. Col Jacob B. Sweitzer the brigade commander, detaches Guiney’s regiment for picket duty. Consequently, the regiment misses the second day’s fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg.

In 1864, through the Battle of the Wilderness, Guiney frequently has been in command of his brigade, the second brigade, first division, V Corps. After many escapes from dangerous combats without serious injury, he is shot in the face by a sharpshooter at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864. The Minié ball destroys his left eye, and inflicts, it is believed, a fatal wound. During an interval of consciousness, however, he insists on an operation which saves his life. He is honorably discharged and mustered out of the U.S. Volunteers on June 21, 1864, just before the mustering out of his old regiment.

On February 21, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominates Guiney for the award of the honorary grade of brevet brigadier general, to rank from March 13, 1865, for gallant and meritorious services during the war. The U.S. Senate confirms the award on April 10, 1866.

Kept alive for years by nursing, Guiney runs unsuccessfully for the United States Congress on a sort of “Christian Socialist” platform, is elected assistant district attorney (1866–70), and acts as consulting lawyer (no longer being able to plead) on many locally celebrated cases.

Guiney’s last exertions are devoted to the defeat of the corruption and misuse of the Probate Court of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, of which he had become registrar (1869–77). He dies suddenly on March 21, 1877, in Boston and is found kneeling against an elm in the little park near his home. General Guiney is Commandant of the Loyal Legion, Major-General Commandant of the Veteran Military League, member of the Charitable Irish Society of Boston, and one of the founders and first members of the Catholic Union of Boston. He also publishes some literary criticism, a few graphic prose sketches and some verse.


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Death of Pearse Hutchinson, Poet, Broadcaster & Translator

Pearse Hutchinson, Irish poet, broadcaster and translator, dies of pneumonia in Dublin on January 14, 2012.

Hutchinson is born in Glasgow, Scotland, on February 16, 1927. His father, Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, is Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow and is interned in Frongoch internment camp in 1919–21. His mother, Cathleen Sara, is born in Cowcaddens, Glasgow, of emigrant parents from County Donegal. She is a friend of Constance Markievicz. In response to a letter from Cathleen, Éamon de Valera finds work in Dublin for Harry as a clerk in the Labour Exchange, and later he holds a post in Stationery Office.

Hutchinson is five years old when the family moves to Dublin and is the last to be enrolled in St. Enda’s School before it closes. He then goes to school at Synge Street CBS where he learns Irish and Latin. One of his close friends there is the poet and literary critic John Jordan. In 1948 he attends University College Dublin (UCD) where he spends a year and a half, learning Spanish and Italian.

Having published some poems in The Bell in 1945, Hutchinson’s poetic development is greatly influenced by a 1950 holiday in Spain and Portugal. A short stop en route at Vigo brings him into contact for the first time with the culture of Galicia. Later, in Andalusia, he is entranced by the landscape and by the works of the Spanish poets Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados and Luis Cernuda.

In 1951 Hutchinson leaves Ireland again, determined to live in Spain. Unable to get work in Madrid, as he had hoped, he travels instead to Geneva, where he gets a job as a translator with the International Labour Organization, which brings him into contact with Catalan exiles, speaking a language then largely suppressed in Spain. An invitation by a Dutch friend leads to a visit to the Netherlands, in preparation for which he teaches himself the Dutch language.

Hutchinson returns to Ireland in 1953 and becomes interested in the Irish language poetry of writers such as Piaras Feiritéar and Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh and publishes a number of poems in Irish in the magazine Comhar in 1954. The same year he travels again to Spain, this time to Barcelona, where he learns the Catalan and Galician languages, and gets to know Catalan poets such as Salvador Espriu and Carles Riba. With the British poet P. J. Kavanagh, he organises a reading of Catalan poetry in the British Institute.

Hutchinson goes home to Ireland in 1957 but returns to Barcelona in 1961 and continues to support Catalan poets. An invitation by the publisher Joan Gili to translate some poems by Josep Carner leads to the publication of his first book, a collection of thirty of Carner’s poems in Catalan and English, in 1962. A project to publish his translation of Espriu’s La Pell de brau (The Bull-skin), falls through some years later. Some of the poems from this project are included in the collection Done into English.

In 1963, Hutchinson’s first collection of original poems in English, Tongue Without Hands, is published by Dolmen Press in Ireland. In 1967, having spent nearly ten years altogether in Spain, he returns to Ireland, making a living as a poet and journalist writing in both Irish and English. In 1968, a collection of poems in Irish, Faoistin Bhacach (A Lame Confession), is published. Expansions, a collection in English, follows in 1969. Friend Songs (1970) is a new collection of translations, this time of medieval poems originally written in Galician-Portuguese. In 1972 Watching the Morning Grow, a new collection of original poems in English, comes out, followed in 1975 by another, The Frost Is All Over.

In October 1971, Hutchinson takes up the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds, on the recommendation of Professor A. Norman Jeffares. There is some controversy around the appointment following accusations, later retracted, that Jeffares had been guilty of bias in the selection because of their joint Irish heritage. He holds tenure at the University for three years, and during that time contributes to the University’s influential poetry magazine Poetry & Audience.

From 1977 to 1978 Hutchinsonn compiles and presents Oró Domhnaigh, a weekly radio programme of Irish poetry, music and folklore for Ireland’s national network, RTÉ. He also contributes a weekly column on the Irish language to the station’s magazine RTÉ Guide for over ten years. A collaboration with Melita Cataldi of Old Irish lyrics into Italian is published in 1981. Another collection in English, Climbing the Light (1985), which also includes translations from Irish, Italian and Galician, is followed in 1989 by his last Irish collection, Le Cead na Gréine (By Leave of the Sun). The Soul that Kissed the Body (1990) is a selection of his Irish poems translated into English. His most recent English collection is Barnsley Main Seam (1995). His Collected Poems is published in 2002 to mark his 75th birthday. This is followed in 2003 by Done into English, a selection of many of the translated works he produced over the years.

A co-editor and founder of the literary journal Cyphers, Hutchinson receives the Butler Award for Irish writing in 1969. He is a member of Aosdána, the state-supported association of artists, from which he receives a cnuas (stipend) to allow him to continue writing. He describes this as “a miracle and a godsend” as he is fifty-four when invited to become a member and is at the end of his tether. A two-day symposium of events is held at Trinity College Dublin, to celebrate his 80th birthday in 2007, with readings from his works by writers including Macdara Woods, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan and Sujata Bhatt. His most recent collection, At Least for a While (2008), is shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award.

Hutchinson lives in Rathgar, Dublin, and dies of pneumonia in Dublin on January 14, 2012. His extensive archive is in the library of Maynooth University. Its opening on May 24, 2015, is accompanied by the inauguration of an annual Pearse Hutchinson seminar and the launch of a collection of unpublished Hutchinson poems, Listening to Bach.

Some critics argue that Hutchinson’s concern with simplicity and Ireland’s place in the comparative history of human oppression too often deteriorates into banality, didacticism, and regurgitation of sentimental revivalist tropes. Even these, however, acknowledge his occasional greatness, while his champions argue that his achievement has not yet been fully recognised and absorbed.


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Birth of Éamonn Mac Thomáis, Irish Republican Author & Historian

Éamonn Mac Thomáis, author, broadcaster, historian, Irish Republican, advocate of the Irish language and lecturer, is born Edward Patrick Thomas in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines on January 13, 1927. He presents his own series on Dublin on RTÉ during the 1970s and is well known for guided tours and lectures of his beloved Dublin.

Mac Thomáis comes from a staunch Republican family. His father, a fire-brigade officer, dies when he is five years old and his family moves to Goldenbridge, Inchicore, Dublin. He leaves school at thirteen to work as delivery boy for White Heather Laundry, learning Dublin neighbourhoods with great thoroughness. He says he found work to help his mother pay the rent. He later works as a clerk and is appointed credit controller for an engineering firm.

Mac Thomáis joins the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army as a young man and is active in the preparations for and prosecution of the 1956-62 border campaign. He is interned in Curragh Camp during the campaign and in December 1961 is sentenced to four months imprisonment under the Offences Against the State Act.

At the November 1959 Ardfheis Mac Thomáis is elected to the Ardchomhairle of Sinn Féin and edits and contributes to the Sinn Féin newspaper United Irishman. He is a close friend of Tomás Mac Giolla and is deeply affected by the 1970 split in Sinn Féin. He takes the Provisional side, opposing Mac Giolla.

Mac Thomáis takes over as editor of An Phoblacht in 1972. In July 1973, he is arrested and charged with IRA membership at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin. He refuses to recognise the court, but he gives a lengthy address from the dock. The following month he is sentenced to 15-months imprisonment. Within two months of completing his sentence he is again before the court on the same charge and again receives a 15-month sentence. Editors of six left-wing and Irish-language journals call for his release, as do a number of writers, and hundreds attend protest meetings – to no avail. He serves his full sentence.

Tim Pat Coogan, editor of The Irish Press, claims the charges against Mac Thomáis are politically motivated to a large degree as his activities are confined strictly to the newspaper An Phoblacht. Under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, due to his membership in Sinn Féin in the 1970s he is removed from his position in making some of the RTÉ historical programmes. As a historian he makes numerous contributions to various historical publications such as the Dublin Historical Review.

From 1974 Mac Thomáis writes a number of books on old Dublin. They sell well and remain in print for over 20 years. He also starts a number of walking tours of Dublin, which prove very popular.

Mac Thomáis dies in Dublin on August 16, 2002. He is buried in the republican plot in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, next to Frank Ryan.

Mac Thomáis’s son Shane, also a historian, runs similar walking tours and is resident historian at Glasnevin Cemetery before his death in 2014.


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Death of John Joe Sheehy, Republican Activist & Sportsperson

John Joseph Sheehy, Irish political/military activist and sportsperson, dies on January 12, 1980. He participates in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and Irish Civil War (1922-23) in the Irish Republican Army (IRA), where he is a senior figure in County Kerry. He also gains fame as a successful Gaelic footballer representing the Kerry county football team.

Sheehy is born in Tralee, County Kerry, on October 16, 1897. In 1914 he joins Fianna Éireann, the republican boy scouts, and later the Irish Volunteers. He commands the Boherbue company of the IRA, and later the Tralee company. His brother Jimmy is killed in the British Army in the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

Sheehy sides against the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922, like most of the IRA in Kerry. In the Irish Civil War, when Free State troops land in Kerry as part of a seaborne offensive, he is in command of the Anti-Treaty garrison in Tralee. After the Army takes the town, he retreats, burning the barracks there. As the conflict becomes a guerrilla affair, he finds himself in charge of three flying columns, or around 75 men in total, in the Ballymacthomas area. He and Tom McEllistrim are in charge of an attack on Castlemaine in January 1923. 

Just after the Irish Civil War, when Sheehy is still on the run, he manages to play football for Kerry. Kerry captain Con Brosnan, though a member of the Free State army, guarantees his safe passage. He pays into Munster and All-Ireland finals, slips off his street clothes, plays, and then at the final whistle, disappears back into the crowd. In 1936 he is in New York and is able to smuggle a large number of Thompson submachine guns back to Ireland.

In February 1941 Sheehy is arrested and interned in the Curragh Camp for two years. He is arrested again and charged with making “seditious speeches” on May 11, 1946, the day that IRA hunger striker Seán McCaughey dies. He is found guilty and sentenced to four months imprisonment.

Sheehy plays Gaelic football with his local club, John Mitchels, and is a member of the senior Kerry county football team from 1919 until 1930. He also plays hurling with Tralee Parnells. He captains Kerry to the All-Ireland title in 1930. He plays in the Railway Cup hurling final in 1927 and is captain of the football team the same year and wins other medals in 1931. Three of his sons – Seán Óg, Niall and Paudie – all win All-Ireland titles with Kerry in the 1960s.

Sheehy remains a staunch supporter of Sinn Féin and is critical of the moves to end abstention by the party in the late 1960s. He sides with the Provisionals in the split at the 1970 Ardfheis and remains active in Provisional Sinn Féin until his death, supporting the IRA’s guerrilla campaign. He dies in Tralee on January 12, 1980, and is given a republican funeral at his own request. His funeral oration is given by Dáithí Ó Conaill, vice-president of Sinn Féin.


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Birth of Mildred Anne Butler, Animal & Genre Painter

Mildred Anne Butler, Irish artist who works in watercolour and oil of landscape, genre and animal subjects, is born on January 11, 1858, in Kilmurry, a Georgian house near Thomastown, County Kilkenny.

The youngest daughter of Captain Henry Butler, a grandson of the Edmund Butler, 11th Viscount Mountgarret, and Clara Butler (née Taylor) of the Newarke, Leicester, England. Her father is himself an enthusiastic painter, known for his publication South African sketches: illustrative of the wildlife of a hunter on the frontier of Cape Colony (1841). Her early artistic efforts are mainly copies of romantic subjects, but the influence of the London artist Paul Jacob Naftel, with whom she begins corresponding in the early 1880s, proves to be crucial to her artistic development. Studies with William Frank Calderon, an expert in animal painting, are also significant. She subsequently spends the summers of 1894 and 1895 in Newlyn, Cornwall, England, with the Irish artist Norman Garstin, who introduces her to contemporary French painting.

In 1885, Butler makes her first visit to the continent, traveling through France, Switzerland, and Italy. From 1905 to 1914 she travels regularly to Europe, most particularly Aix-les-Bains and Wiesbaden, during which time she produces genre views of French and German villages. After 1914 her life at the family home is interrupted only by visits to London exhibitions. She is best known for her paintings of Kilmurry and its environs, many of which display an interest in botany. Much of her work is dominated by detailed representations of animals and birds, often drawn from photographs and stuffed specimens.

Butler’s career as an exhibitor begins in 1882 with the Irish Fine Arts Society, later known as the Water Colour Society of Ireland (WCSI), with which she has a long association. She exhibits regularly with the society from 1892 onward and is a member of its committee for many years. She is also closely associated with the Dudley Museum and Art Gallery in London. Her work is first shown there in 1888, and on this evidence, she is elected to their society. The purchase by the Chantrey bequest for the Tate Gallery of The Morning Bath for £50 in 1896 is a high point in her career. The first painting by a woman to be selected by the council, its purchase is followed by almost consistently good press reviews for her work. The Athenaeum of May 5, 1897, writes: “The young lady knows how to look at her subjects with the eyes of a well-trained artist.”

Butler also comes to the attention of the American artistic press. She contributes to the portfolio of drawings given by the Society of Lady Artists to Princess May on her marriage to the Duke of York in 1893, while in 1922 her work is included in the portfolio presented to Princess Mary on her marriage. Her patrons include Queen Alexandra, and the grand duke of Hesse, who purchases two of her paintings after she is invited to exhibit in Hesse Darmstadt in 1911. In 1914 she is made a member of the Union Internationale des Beaux Arts, and in 1921 her paintings are shown in Japan. She regularly exhibits with the Belfast Ramblers, the Royal Ulster Academy, the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), the Society of Lady Artists, and the Royal Watercolour Society, of which she is made an associate member in 1896, and a full member in 1937.

In her later years, severe rheumatism prevents Butler from painting. She has a keen interest in music. She survives all five of her siblings, and inherits Kilmurry, where she dies on October 11, 1941. She is buried at Thomastown, County Kilkenny. Her paintings are represented in the collections of the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin City Gallery the Hugh Lane, the Ulster Museum, and the Tate, London.

(From: “Butler, Mildred Anne” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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The Killing of Richard Jameson, Businessman & Loyalist

Richard Jameson, Northern Irish businessman and loyalist, who serves as the leader of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force‘s (UVF) Mid-Ulster Brigade, is killed on January 10, 2000, outside his home in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, during a feud with the rival Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). Following his death, the feud between the UVF and LVF escalates into a series of retaliatory killings. These go on intermittently until the LVF disbands in 2005.

Jameson is born in Portadown to a Protestant Church of Ireland family in about 1953, one of five sons. He has a twin brother, Stuart. A former reservist in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) (1973-81), he works as a manager in the Jameson Group, a building firm which is a family-owned business. The building firm is regularly awarded government contracts to carry out work for the security forces and it is for this reason that his brother David loses a leg in a 1991 Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing attack. He is a member of the Orange Order‘s Drumherriff Star of Erin LOL 8 Portadown district.

It is not known exactly when Jameson becomes a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) nor the leader of its Mid-Ulster Brigade. The Portadown unit of the Mid-Ulster Brigade had been officially stood down by the Brigade Staff in Belfast in August 1996 when it carried out an unauthorised sectarian killing while the UVF were on ceasefire. The Mid-Ulster Brigade’s commander at the time, Billy Wright, was expelled from the UVF. Wright brazenly defies a Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) order to leave Northern Ireland or face execution by establishing the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), taking most of the Portadown Mid-Ulster UVF with him. The units of the Mid-Ulster Brigade that remain loyal to the Brigade Staff continue to operate and Jameson becomes commander. He is said by The Guardian to be a “staunch supporter of the Good Friday Agreement.”

In the weeks prior to his killing, Jameson is in a violent street altercation with LVF member Muriel Gibson, whom he accuses of involvement in drugs and slaps forcefully in the face. This is followed by a fracas at the Portadown F.C. Social Club on December 27, 1999, where LVF members are commemorating the death of their comrade Billy Wright, shot and killed inside the Maze Prison by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) exactly two years previously. When he enters the club, several LVF men begin to push and jostle him and challenge him to a fight, telling him to hit them instead of women. Deeply offended, he leaves and soon returns with a UVF gang armed with pickaxe handles and baseball bats. In the violent brawl that ensues, twelve people, including three LVF prisoners out on Christmas parole, receive severe injuries. The LVF leaders subsequently make the decision that Jameson is to pay for the attack with his life.

One of the LVF members, who lives near Dungannon, gets in touch with a family of north Belfast loyalists who had been members of the UVF but who had left after Wright’s expulsion. From these former UVF members the LVF obtains the gun with which to shoot Jameson. On the evening of January 10, 2000, Jameson returns from work and drives his Isuzu Trooper jeep into the driveway outside his home on the Derrylettiff Road near Portadown. Waiting in ambush, a single gunman suddenly approaches from the passenger side of the parked jeep. Before Jameson can emerge from the vehicle and with the engine still running, the gunman opens fire through the window with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, shooting Jameson five times in the head and chest. His assassin escapes to a nearby getaway car. He is rushed to Craigavon Area Hospital but dies of his wounds minutes after his arrival. The RUC immediately begins a murder inquiry. Within hours of the killing, the UVF Brigade Staff convene an emergency meeting at “the Eagle,” their headquarters on the Shankill Road, where they compile a list of all those they believe to be involved in Jameson’s death and plan their retaliation against the LVF.

Among those who condemn the killing is Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble who releases the following statement: “This is exactly the sort of thing we thought we had finally put behind us. I’m shocked by the news.”

Jameson’s funeral is held on January 13 at the Tartaraghan Parish Church and attended by several thousand mourners including Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leaders David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson. Drumcree Orangeman Harold Gracey and Gary McMichael, the son of slain Ulster Defence Association (UDA) brigadier John McMichael, also attend as does local politicians representing the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The service is officiated by Reverend David Hilliard who speaks out against vengeance and describes Jameson as a “man admired and loved by many” and who “had been so cruelly murdered.” He is buried in the adjacent churchyard.

Despite Reverend Hilliard’s pleas and LVF leader Mark “Swinger” Fulton‘s claim that his organisation had nothing to do with Jameson’s shooting, the UVF/LVF feud intensifies. In the immediate aftermath members of Jameson’s family are filmed angrily defacing LVF murals in Portadown. A month after his killing, two Protestant teenagers, Andrew Robb (19) and David McIlwaine (18), are savagely beaten and repeatedly stabbed to death in a country lane outside Tandragee, County Armagh by a local UVF gang. The young men, believed to have been LVF members, are targeted by their UVF killers after they leave a nightclub together in search of a party. However, neither teenager is part of any paramilitary organisation and only Robb had tenuous links to the LVF. It is reported in the Belfast Telegraph that according to court hearings Robb had made disparaging remarks about Jameson’s death. Two of the UVF men, Stephen Leslie Brown and Noel Dillon, are infuriated by the comments and afterward Brown drives the victims to Druminure Road where he, Dillon and another man carry out the double killing. One of Jameson’s brothers, Bobby, is among the mourners at David McIlwaine’s funeral. The West Belfast Brigade of the Ulster Defence Association, whose brigadier Johnny Adair is close to the LVF, briefly becomes involved in the feud after Adair attends Andrew Robb’s funeral and joins LVF members at the Drumcree conflict. After the UVF track down Jameson’s killer to the Oldpark area of Belfast and attempt to shoot him, he is taken away under the protection of the West Belfast Brigade. The tit-for-tat killings continue intermittently until 2005 when the UVF makes a final assault against the LVF, leaving four members dead and the LVF leadership with no alternative but to order its military units to permanently disband.

Jameson’s family has persistently denied that he was a UVF member. They maintain that he was a vigilante who was murdered in retaliation for the firm stand he had taken against drug dealing in the Portadown area. The late PUP leader David Ervine expressed the same opinion the day after the killing by stating, “Mr. Jameson had been murdered by drug dealers masquerading as loyalists because he had been a bulwark in his community against dealers.” Ervine also described him as having been a “fine and honourable man, widely respected in the community.” Northern Ireland security sources, however, have repeatedly named Jameson as the Mid-Ulster UVF commander. He is listed as a UVF member in the CAIN: Sutton Index of Deaths, an online University of Ulster-sponsored project which chronicles the Northern Ireland conflict. It also emerges that for several days prior to his killing, he had been working at the Ballykinler British Army base. Immediately after his murder by the LVF, his family begins an anti-drug campaign in Portadown by putting up posters and handing out leaflets to passing motorists.


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The Capture of Alcoy During the War of Spanish Succession

Elements of the Irish Brigade of France under Daniel O’Mahony help capture the town of Alcoy, Spain on January 9, 1708, during the War of Spanish Succession.

O’Mahony comes from a distinguished Munster family. One brother, Dermod, had been a colonel and another, Daniel, a captain in the Irish Jacobite army that left Limerick for the continent in 1691 in what is known as the Flight of the Wild Geese. Daniel is also a brother-in-law of another famous officer of the Irish Brigade of France, the Marshal James FitzJames, 1st Duke of Berwick. Holding the rank of major, O’Mahony achieves great fame for his part in the Battle of Cremona, where the Irish Brigade foils Prince Eugene of Savoy‘s surprise attack on the city in 1702, and has steadily risen through the ranks.

During the War of Spanish Succession, many officers and units of the Irish Brigade serve in Spain fighting the Allies’ attempt to place Archduke Charles, son of Habsburg (Austrian) Emperor Leopold I, on the Spanish throne. In the early part of 1707, O’Mahony commands an unsuccessful attempt to capture the town of Alcoy with a force of about 1,800 men. On January 2, 1708, he arrives at the gates of the city again, but this time he commands a force of over 6,000, including the Irish battalions of Dillon, Berwick and Bourke.

By January 4, O’Mahony’s six guns have breached the walls of Alcoy, but the Allied garrison fights well and repulses attempts to take it on the 5th and 7th with much loss of life on the Franco-Spanish side. With no relief in sight, the garrison’s situation is hopeless. O’Mahony accepts the garrison’s surrender on January 9.

Daniel O’Mahony is one of the finest commanders of all The Wild Geese. After Alcoy he serves in Sicily and then back in Spain again. He is created a Count of Castile and promoted to lieutenant general. One of the Count’s sons, James, also reaches the rank of lieutenant general in the Spanish army and the other, Dermod, becomes the Ambassador of Spain to Austria.

(Pictured: The flag of the Duke of Berwick’s regiment of the Irish Brigade of France)


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Birth of Edmund Henry Pery, 1st Earl of Limerick

Edmund Henry Pery, 1st Earl of Limerick PC, Irish peer and politician styled Lord Glentworth between 1794 and 1800 and Viscount Limerick until 1803, is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on January 8, 1758.

Pery is the son of William Cecil Pery, 1st Baron Glentworth, and his first wife, Jane Walcott, daughter of John Minchin Walcott. He is educated at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He marries Alice Mary Ormsby, the daughter of Henry Ormsby of County Mayo, by his wife Mary Hartstonge, in 1783, and they have at least eight children. Alice Mary is the heiress of her uncle, Sir Henry Hartstonge, 3rd Baronet, who leaves her substantial property in the south of Ireland.

Pery is elected to the Parliament of Ireland as the Member of Parliament for Limerick City in 1786 and holds the seat until 1794, when he inherits his father’s barony and takes his seat in the Irish House of Lords. As a politician, he is a vocal Unionist. He holds the office of Keeper of the Signet and Privy Seal of Ireland between 1795 and 1797. In 1797, he is invested as a Privy Counsellor. He subsequently holds the office of Clerk of the Crown and Hanaper of Ireland between 1797 and 1806. In 1800, he is created Viscount Limerick of the City of Limerick.

Following the Acts of Union 1800, Pery becomes an Irish representative peer, sitting in the House of Lords between 1801 and 1844. He is created Earl of Limerick in the Peerage of Ireland on January 1, 1803, in recognition of his vocal and persistent support for the Union. In addition, he is created Baron Foxford of Stackpole Court in the Peerage of the United Kingdom on August 11, 1815, giving him and his descendants a permanent seat in the House of Lords. During this part of his life, he lives at South Hill Park, Berkshire, England.

Pery dies on December 7, 1844, at Bracknell, Bracknell Forest Borough, Berkshire, England. He is buried at St. Mary’s Cathedral, Limerick. His wife, Alice Mary, dies on June 13, 1850, in Marylebone, City of Westminster, Greater London, England. She is buried alongside her husband in Limerick.

Pery’s eldest son and heir, Henry Hartstonge Pery, Viscount Glentworth, predeceases him on August 7, 1834, and thus Pery is succeeded in his titles by Henry’s eldest son, William Henry Tenison Pery. One of Pery’s daughters, Theodosia, marries the Whig politician and Chancellor of the Exchequer, Thomas Spring Rice, 1st Baron Monteagle of Brandon.


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Birth of Simon Donnelly, Irish Republican Army Volunteer

Simon John Donnelly, a member of the Irish Republican Army is born at 7 Aungier Street, Dublin, on January 7, 1891. He is a founder member of both Córas na Poblachta and Clann na Poblachta, Irish republican political parties formed in 1940 and 1946 respectively.

Donnelly is the son of Timothy Donnelly, a master plumber, and Mary Brennan. He is the sixth of eight surviving children. The 1911 Census lists him living with his family at 34 Wexford Street. Apprenticed as a plumber, he becomes involved in the Irish Volunteers. During the Easter Rising of 1916 he is the commander of C Company of Éamon de Valera‘s command in Boland’s Mill.

Donnelly is Vice-Commandant of the 3rd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA during the Irish War of Independence. On February 10, 1921, he is arrested. Four days later he escapes from Kilmainham Gaol along with Ernie O’Malley and Frank Teeling. Returning to his command in the IRA, he is appointed chief of the Irish Republican Police (IRP) in mid-1921 as part of an attempt to enforce law and order in those areas of the country where the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) have been forced out.

Donnelly takes the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War and takes part in the Battle of Dublin (June 28 – July 5, 1922).

Donnelly founds the National Association of the Old IRA in an attempt to mend some of the rifts in the Republican Movement. He is a member of the provisional National Executive of the Republican Prisoners’ Release Association.

On March 2, 1940, Donnelly is one of the founders of Córas na Poblachta and serves as its president. He becomes a founding member of Clann na Poblachta in 1946.

As one of the most senior surviving veterans of the Easter Rising, Donnelly plays a prominent role in the 50th anniversary commemorations in 1966. He dies in Dublin on December 7 of that year.