Burke is born in Moycullen, County Galway, a daughter of George Edmond Burke of Danesfield and his wife Theresa Quin. She becomes an activist in Irish industrial, charitable and cultural groups, serving as second president of the Camogie Association and first president of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association. She is also a noted literary hostess, whose salon at Earlsfort House is a centre of Dublin intellectual life for many years.
In 1883, Burke marries Arthur James Francis Plunkett, 11th Earl of Fingall, 4th Baron Fingall (1859–1929), state steward to the administration in Dublin Castle and one of the few Catholics to hold an Irish peerage, thus becoming Countess of Fingall.
A friendship with Máire Ní Chinnéide, forged through theatrical circles, leads to Burke-Plunkett accepting the patronage of Camogie Association of Ireland from 1910 to 1923. She also presents a cup and medals for the winners of the Dublin League. She serves largely in an honorary role, attending a few meetings of what is then known as Cualacht Luithchleas na mBan Gaedheal.
A liberal unionist, Burke-Plunkett becomes active in the promotion of Irish agriculture, industry and culture. She is a founder member of Horace Plunkett’s Irish co-operative movement, is the first president of the Society of United Irishwomen from 1912 to 1921, and of its successor, the Irish Countrywomen’s Association until 1942. She presides at suffragette meetings in Dublin, is a founder of the Irish Distressed Ladies Committee, and serves on the board of the Irish Industries Association. She is also the chairperson of the Irish Central Committee for the Employment of Women.
Burke-Plunkett dies on October 28, 1944, at Earlsfort House, her Dublin home, where she had held her famous Thursdays “at home” for many years. She is buried on the grounds of Killeen Castle, County Meath, following a Requiem Mass at University Church in Dublin.
Shanahan is involved in the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916. This leads to him having legal difficulties over the licence of his public house. He consults the lawyer and politician Tim Healy who comments:
“I had with me today a solicitor with his client, a Dublin publican named Phil Shanahan, whose licence is being opposed, and whose house was closed by the military because he was in Jacob’s during Easter week. I was astonished at the type of man – about 40 years of age, jolly and respectable. He said he ‘rose out’ to have a ‘crack at the English’ and seemed not at all concerned at the question of success or failure. He was a Tipperary hurler in the old days. For such a man to join the Rebellion and sacrifice the splendid trade he enjoyed makes one think there are disinterested Nationalists to be found. I thought a publican was the last man in the world to join a rising! Alfred Byrne, MP, was with him, and is bitter against the Party. I think I can save Shanahan’s property.”
Shanahan is elected for Dublin Harbour at the 1918 Irish general election, defeating Alfred Byrne. Like other Sinn Féin MPs, he does not take his seat at Westminster, but becomes a member of the revolutionary Dáil. He represents Dublin Harbour in the First Dáil from 1919 to 1921. He is arrested and detained in custody by the British government in April 1920 but is released in time to attend the next meeting of the Dáil on June 29, 1920.
During the Irish War of Independence, Billy Dunleavy recalls, “The IRA were the best men we ever had at that time. The Tans used to go around in the tenders with a wire over the top and if it was going by up there in Talbot Street they’d (IRA) say, ‘Get out of the way, quick!’ and they’d throw a hand grenade into the car. Now Phil Shanahan, he owned a pub over there on the corner, he was a great man and he used to hide them after they’d been out on a job. He had cellars and all the IRA men used to go there and hide their stuff.”
Joyce is brought up between Mary Street, in the city centre, and the GalwayGaeltacht. Galway is the ancestral home of both his mother’s and father’s families, and Patrick Weston Joyce, historian, writer and collector of Irish music, and Robert Dwyer Joyce, poet, writer and fellow collector of music, are numbered among his great granduncles. Recent poems such as “Trem Neul” see Joyce appropriate elements of the folk music gathered by Patrick Weston Joyce and engage ideas of lineage and transmission.
Joyce’s early books include Sole Glum Trek (1967), Watches (1969), Pentahedron (1972) and The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine: A Working of the Corrupt Irish Text (1976). The last of these is a version of the Middle-Irish Buile Shuibhne, well known from Seamus Heaney‘s later translation in Sweeney Astray (1983).
After a near-total silence for 20 years, Joyce resumes publishing in 1995 with stone floods, followed by Syzygy and Without Asylum (1998). In 2001, with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold is published, which gathers all of the poet’s major work from 1966 to 2000. In 2007, What’s in Store: Poems 2000–2007 appears, and in 2009 he publishes Courts of Air and Earth. His work appears in many anthologies, including Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and Irish Poetry and Patrick Crotty’s The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry.
Joyce’s poetry employs a wide range of forms and techniques, ranging from traditional to modern experimentalism. He has published notable versions from Chinese and from the middle-Irish, which he refers to as “workings” rather than “translations” to emphasise that they are poetic reimaginings in the tradition of Ezra Pound rather than “straight” translations.
A collected poems up to 2000, including his “workings” from the Irish and Chinese, is published as with the first dream of fire they hunt the cold (2001). He also experiments with web-based poetry projects such as the collaborative project OffSets. A collection of his post-with the first dream work, What’s in Store, is published in 2007. A separate collection of new and old translations from the Irish, entitled Courts of Air and Earth, is issued by Shearsman in 2009 and is shortlisted for the Popescu Prize for European Poetry in Translation 2009.
Joyce also publishes several papers on contemporary poetics, and lectures and gives public readings of his work throughout Ireland, the UK and the United States.
Awarded a Literary Bursary by the Irish Arts Council in 2001, Joyce is a Fulbright Scholar for the year 2002–03. In 2004 he is elected a member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists, and is the first writer to be awarded a fellowship by the Ballinglen Arts Foundation. He holds the Judith E. Wilson Fellowship for poetry to the University of Cambridge for 2009-10. In 2017 he is named by previous winner, the English poet Tom Raworth, as the latest recipient of the biennial N. C. Kaser prize for poetry.
Deane is born on December 2, 1879, in New Ross, County Wexford, and grows up in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin. His family lives close to the families of both Bram Stoker and his wife, Florence Balcombe, and his mother had been acquainted with Bram Stoker in her youth.
Deane enters the theater as a young man, first appearing in 1899 with the Henry Irving Company, of which Stoker is stage manager for many years. Even before he forms his own troupe in the early 1920s, he has been thinking about bringing Dracula to the stage. Stoker had attempted this in 1897 but the verdict from Irving consigned it to the waste-paper basket. Unable to find a scriptwriter to take on the project, Deane writes the play himself in a four-week period of inactivity while he is suffering with a severe cold. He then contacts Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, and negotiates a deal for the dramatic rights.
To stage the production, Deane is required to submit the completed script to the Lord Chamberlain for a license under the Theatres Act 1843. The play is censored to limit violence – for example, the count’s death cannot be shown to the audience – but is approved on May 15, 1924.
Deane re-imagines Count Dracula as a more urbane and theatrically acceptable character who could plausibly enter London society. It is Deane’s idea that the count should wear a tuxedo and stand-up collar, and a flowing cape which conceals Dracula while he slips through a trap-door in the stage floor, giving the impression that he has disappeared. He also arranges to have a uniformed nurse available at performances, ready to administer smelling salts should anyone faint.
Deane’s play premieres on August 5, 1924, at the Grand Theatre in Derby, England. Despite critics’ misgivings, the audiences love it. Although he originally intended to play the title role himself, Raymond Huntley plays the role of the Count and Deane fills the role of Van Helsing. It is a huge success and the production tours England for three years before settling in London, where it opens at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi on February 14, 1927. It later transfers to the Duke of York’s Theatre and then the Prince of Wales Theatre to accommodate larger audiences.
When the play crosses the Atlantic in 1927, the role of Dracula is taken by the then-unknown Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi. For its United States debut, Dracula is rewritten by the American playwright John L. Balderston. The show runs for a year on Broadway and for two more years on tour, breaking all previous records for any show put on tour in the United States. It is the Deane/Balderston interpretation upon which the classic Tod Browning film Dracula (1931) is based.
Greacen is the only child of Henry Greacen and his wife Elizabeth (née McCrea). His father comes from a Presbyterian farming background in County Monaghan and, at one time, holds a position as a creamery manager, but is a heavy drinker and fails in several businesses. Most of his childhood is spent with his maternal grandmother and aunts when his parents temporarily separate. He briefly attends two local primary schools in Belfast, but when his father receives insurance compensation after his Belfast business burned down, he takes his family to the Castleblayney area in County Monaghan and for a short time goes back to farming. He goes to a national school there, but after another fire destroys the farmhouse, the Greacens return to Belfast to run the Kenilworth, a tobacconist’s shop on the Newtownards Road. He attends Templemore primary school and then enters Methodist College Belfast in 1933.
Greacen mostly enjoys school, though he is too short-sighted to participate with success in any sport, and sometimes, because of his background, feels out of his depth among middle-class children. He is always ashamed of his father’s drunken outbursts and is terrified of the violent temper which accompanies them. Literature provides both a temporary escape and the promise of future success. His first poems are published in school magazines, and he decides at a young age to try to make a career as a writer. He fails examinations and interviews for positions in a bank and an insurance company and instead starts studying history and English at Queen’s University Belfast.
At Queen’s, as earlier at Methodist College, the interests which characterise Greacen’s later career are apparent. Largely thanks to meeting John Boyd, he develops sympathies with left-wing political ideas, as well as a deepened commitment to poetry. His youthful 1930s enthusiasm for Marxism disappears after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but up to his later years he describes himself as a socialist. The formation of enduring friendships and mutually supportive coteries, a phenomenon particularly characteristic of the Ulster literary scene of the period, continues to be of great importance throughout his life. He makes friends with almost all the significant figures in Belfast, especially Roy McFadden, John Hewitt and Sam Hanna Bell. At Queen’s, he and a friend take over in 1940 the editing of a student magazine, The Northman. They try with short-lived, limited success to make it a literary journal for the whole region, so as to enable aspiring poets to get work into print. His own early poems appear in The Bell, and he writes some pieces for the left-wing Irish Democrat newspaper. His poem The Bird (1941) is well reviewed and later appears in anthologies. In 1942 he publishes Poems from Ulster, a small anthology including work by his friends.
For several months, Greacen worships from afar a fellow student named Irene. When he fails to form a relationship with her, he stops going to lectures so that he does not have to see her and does not finish his degree. His McCrea relatives pay for him to go to Trinity College Dublin in 1943 to take a diploma in social work. He is glad to get away from wartime Belfast and never lives there again. At first, he enjoys Dublin, and again makes many friends, among them Brendan and Beatrice Behan, Blanaid Salkeld, Cecil ffrench Salkeld, Joseph and Mary O’Neill, Douglas Gageby, Arland Ussher and Hubert Butler. He and Patrick Kavanagh live in the same boarding house on Raglan Road for several months in 1945, but Kavanagh takes offence at a review in Horizon by Greacen of his poem The Great Hunger and calls him a “Protestant bastard.” Greacen is upset, as he had thought the review favourable, and is disappointed but not surprised when Kavanagh refuses to allow any of his poems to appear in the prestigious Faber and Faber book Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Greacen and Valentin Iremonger in 1949.
The collaborative compilation of anthologies of poetry is Greacen’s characteristic way of working. In 1942, he and Alex Comfort edit Lyra: An Anthology of New Lyric. With Roy McFadden, he edits Ulster Voices in 1943. He is sole editor of Northern Harvest in 1944 and, in the same year, he, Bruce Williamson and Valentin Iremonger publish their own work in On the Barricades. His own first solo collection, One Recent Evening, is also a 1944 imprint. In 1946, with support from Maurice Fridberg, a Jewish Dublin and London bookseller, his publishing company, New Frontiers Press, produces Irish Harvest, which, though designed on more ambitious lines, still consists chiefly of poems by his friends. He feels much more affinity with the modernism and social protest that he finds in contemporary English poetry, especially in the “new apocalypse” movement associated with Herbert Read, and later the “new romantics,” than with what he regards as the outmoded Celtic nationalism of W. B. Yeats and his followers. Like others of his contemporaries, he comes to resent the unquestioned shibboleths of life in Ireland, and particularly objects to the censorship of literature and film.
Consequently, when Greacen’s second small volume of poems, The Undying Day (1948), sells badly, and other avenues seem unpromising, he and his wife give up on Dublin and move to London. He finds a job with the United Nations Association, which suits his outlook and ideals. However, when he is made redundant, he has to take various jobs in adult education, in creative-writing courses, and in teaching English as a foreign language, in the City of London College, the City Literary Institute, and West London College. He retires in 1986. His involvement with the London literary world continues throughout his career, as he gets to know many of the leading figures, including Stephen Spender and T. S. Eliot, and he organises poetry readings and other projects, though he himself writes no poetry for more than twenty years. At one time he considers taking up journalism and continues to produce book reviews and articles in journals, as well as many letters to newspapers. He writes several, well-received short works of criticism, in particular, The Art of Noël Coward (1953) and The World of C. P. Snow (1962). After returning to Dublin in 1986, he writes an interesting memoir about his many friends and acquaintances, Brief Encounters: Literary Dublin and Belfast in the 1940s (1991) and Rooted in Ulster: Nine Northern Writers (2000).
Greacen marries Patricia Hutchins in Fisherwick Presbyterian Church in Belfast on April 10, 1946. She is from a Protestant family who has a small estate at Ardnagashel, near Bantry, County Cork, and is related to the botanist Ellen Hutchins. They have one daughter, Arethusa, but, after four years of separation, the marriage ends in divorce in 1966. He resents his wife’s conversion to vegetarianism and seems also to disapprove of her desire to achieve her own career goals. Probably also the depression he experiences throughout the 1950s contributes to the breakdown of the marriage, but he feels that twelve experiences in the early 1960s with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, under the guidance of a psychiatrist, had cured him. After the LSD treatments he feels that he is ready to begin working on an autobiography, Even Without Irene, published several years later in 1969. This comes out again in an enlarged version in 1995, and, still further augmented, as The Sash My Father Wore (1997).
Greacen begins to publish poetry again in his fifties, in A Garland for Captain Fox (1975). Poems about the career and friends of an imaginary, sophisticated adventurer do not always strike the exactly right note but are popular and mark a new beginning for him, who increasingly writes elegiacally about personalities, real and fictional, in more restrained diction and with careful irony. In interviews, he denies that Captain Fox is his own alter ego, but the interplay between the character of Fox and elements of his creator’s own life suggests a metaphor for the poet’s creative process, as well as reminding the reader of the poet friends whose support means much to his writing in real life. At the very least, Captain Fox becomes what could be called a character of virtual reality for his creator.
Greacen’s later poetry collections include Young Mr. Gibbon (1979), A Bright Mask (1985), Carnival at the River (1990), Collected Poems 1944–1994 (1995; awarded The Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry in that year), Protestant Without a Horse (1997), Captain Fox: A Life (2000), Lunch at the Ivy (2002), Shelley Plain (2002), and Selected and New Poems (2006).
On his return to Dublin in 1986, Greacen for a time shares a flat on Anglesea Road with Beatrice Behan, until he finds her dead in her bed in 1993. In later years he lives in a flat in Sandymount. He is elected to membership of Aosdána in 1986, and during his later years in Dublin enjoys the status of a senior figure in the world of literature. He gives readings in the United States, appears often on RTÉ radio programmes, and has poems republished in anthologies. There was even one poem displayed on the Dublin Dart suburban rail network, St. Andrew’s Day: An Elegy for Patricia Hutchins, perhaps his best work. Perhaps only a few of his poems have been lodged in the public memory, but it is appropriate, given the themes of his career, that his work will be read with most attention by poets and by scholars, and that his reputation in the future may largely be based on his friendships with other poets.
Beresford is educated at Trinity College, Dublin. From 1783, he serves as a storekeeper for the port of Dublin. He is subsequently appointed to a wealthy sinecure post of Inspector-General of Exports and Imports. He is returned by his father, Hon. John Beresford, for the family borough of Swords to the Irish House of Commons in 1790. In 1798 he is returned for Dublin City, helped by his position in the port, and as a partner in a leading Dublin bank and a member of Dublin Corporation.
During the Irish Rebellion of 1798, Beresford leads a yeoman battalion which fights against the rebels with a particular ferocity. He keeps a riding school in Dublin, which acquires an evil reputation as the chief scene of the floggings by which evidence is extorted from the United Irishmen. As such, he becomes identified as one of the leading opponents of the rebellion, and the rebels deliberately burn the banknotes issued by his bank. His reputation for persecuting political opponents survives throughout his political career.
Beresford takes a prominent part in the Irish House of Commons, where he unsuccessfully moves the reduction of the proposed Irish contribution to the imperial exchequer in the debates on the Act of Union. He is to the last an ardent opponent of the union, taking the opposite position to his father. He resigns his post at the port on January 25, 1799, so as not to be tainted by it or by the suggestion that his actions are motivated by a desire to retain it.
Under a provision of the Act of Union 1800 Beresford retains his seat in the 1st Parliament of the United Kingdom (1801–02) without a fresh election, and in the Union Parliament he is a supporter of William Pitt the Younger and later Henry Addington. He has to give up his Irish business interests to play a full part in Parliamentary business. He is re-elected at the 1802 United Kingdom general election, being top of the poll.
On June 3, 1803, Beresford is the only previous supporter of the government to desert them and support a censure motion moved by Peter Patten, making a speech in support which is regarded as “absurd” by the Chief Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant for Ireland. In March 1804, he is appointed to the Irish currency committee, and therefore resigns his seat by accepting the Escheatorship of Ulster, a sinecure office of profit under the Crown.
After the death of his father on November 5, 1805, Beresford returns to Parliament by winning the by-election to replace him as MP for County Waterford. Politically, he allies to a family faction of the Marquess of Waterford, under the leadership of Henry de La Poer Beresford. The faction aims at trying to stop the government from giving power in Ireland to the Ponsonby family. Beresford is the chief spokesman for his group in their meetings with Ministers.
Although expected to go into opposition in 1806, Beresford in fact supports the government, because a run on funds at his bank leaves him in need of government support for credit. His support leads to his re-election at the 1806 United Kingdom general election in a contested election. This is a controversial decision within the government, with the Duke of Bedford admitting that Beresford had been guilty of persecution but believing he is now loyal, while Lord Howick believes it unlikely that he can be relied upon.
Howick turns out to be correct. In 1807 Beresford does not support the government and becomes a supporter of the Duke of Portland before his accession to the premiership later that year. He is unopposed in the 1807 United Kingdom general election. However, he is erratic, and some of his speeches are reckoned as doing more harm than good to the government’s cause. He strongly supports government against the proposal that peace negotiations with France begin in 1809.
In January 1811, Beresford suffers a further severe financial crisis which prevents his attendance at Parliament for some months. In June he resigns his seat through appointment as Escheator of Munster, being succeeded by his kinsman, Major General Sir William Carr Beresford. The next year, he attempts to get a government appointment but is refused as he already has a good pension. He serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1814–15, where he is known for his “princely hospitality,” but thereafter withdraws from public life.
Beresford dies on July 20, 1846, at his house at Glenmoyle, County Londonderry.
(Pictured: Portrait of John Claudius Beresford, seated and wearing the chain of office of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, by William Cuming, August 1814)
The Tooreen ambush (also known as the Toureen ambush or Ballinhassig ambush) is an ambush carried out by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on October 22, 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. It takes place near Roberts Farm, Tooreen, near Ballinhassig in County Cork. The IRA ambushes two lorries of British soldiers, killing three and wounding four others. The British surrender and their weapons and ammunition are seized by the IRA. Later that night, British soldiers go on a rampage in nearby Bandon.
Up until the Tooreen ambush, the 3rd Cork Brigade had finished its training, but had not previously engaged in battle with British troops stationed in County Cork. The Tooreen ambush is one of the first major ambushes carried out by the West Cork Brigade under Tom Barry.
The Essex Regiment of the British Army is deployed to West Cork and has a reputation for violently raiding houses throughout the countryside and arresting people believed to be IRA volunteers. They are also alleged to torture their prisoners in order to get information on the whereabouts of the flying columns, so this makes them a despised enemy to the West Cork IRA.
The Essex Regiment is known to travel on the road from Bandon to Cork City every morning and return in the evenings. The road goes through the hamlet of Toureen which the Third West Cork Brigade is stationed at nearby and it is decided to ambush this column of the Essex Regiment as it makes its way to Cork city.
Thirty-two ambushers, twenty-one being riflemen of the Third West Cork Brigade, occupy ambush positions outside Toureen and lay in wait for the approaching Essex Regiment. The Regiment normally goes in two or three lorries to Cork City so the IRA places a homemade mine on the road for use against them.
Scouts signal the approach of two lorries which are coming down the road toward the ambush site. As the first lorry passes, the order to fire is given and a homemade three-pound bomb is thrown. The bomb lands inside the lorry but does not explode. The mine that is placed on the road also fails to detonate. As the volunteers open fire, the second lorry stops and the soldiers inside leap out and return fire, but the volunteers are hidden behind a large timber gate which gives them cover. The first lorry continues on to Cork Barracks. As the fight goes on, the officer in command of the British troops, Captain Dixon, is shot in the head and killed as is one of his men.
The remaining British soldiers surrender soon after, and the IRA men cease firing. The British soldiers are relieved of their weapons and ammunition, but otherwise unharmed. Fourteen rifles, bayonets, equipment, several Mills bombs, around 1,400 rounds of ammunition and a couple of revolvers are taken from them.
Two British soldiers, Lt. Dixon MC of the Suffolk Regiment and Pte. Charles William Reid of the Essex Regiment, are killed in the ambush. Five are wounded, including Sergeant Thomas Bennett RASC who dies in Cork on the following day. Six are unhurt except for shock. None of the IRA volunteers are killed or wounded during the ambush and aid is given to the wounded soldiers, while the dead are pulled away from the lorry and it is then set on fire by the volunteers. The two soldiers who are not hurt during the ambush are released along with their wounded and they return to their barracks.
Later that night, members of the Essex Regiment go on a violent rampage through Bandon, destroying property and seeking out anyone they believe to be connected to the ambush. It is believed that at least some of the rampaging soldiers are those released unharmed by the IRA earlier in the day. The reprisal attacks are indiscriminate and include attacks on homes and properties of business owners with “establishment” connections – including the Brennan family of Kilbrogan House.
A Military Court of Inquiry into the soldiers killed, is conducted on October 28, 1920. There are mixed references to these proceedings in The Irish Times and the Irish Independent, both of which contain errors.
Lt. Dixon is buried with full military honours in St. Paul’s Church in Dover, Kent, England. Sergeant Bennett is buried in St. Peter & St. Paul Church in his home village of Shorne, near Gravesend in Kent.
(Pictured: Plaque on a farm wall marking the location of the Tooreen ambush)
Flannery edits the Dominican bi-monthly journal entitled Doctrine and Life from 1958 to 1988, while at St. Saviour’s Priory, Dublin, where he also serves as prior from 1957 to 1960. He also edits the Religious Life Review. During and after the Second Vatican Council he makes available in English all the documents from the event.
From August 1969, Flannery is a member of the executive committee of the Northern Relief Coordination Committee, raising funds on behalf of the families of those interned without trial in Northern Ireland during the early 1970s.
Flannery embodies the post-Vatican II conception of the priest as a social catalyst engaged by the gospel, closer to his flock than to the clerical hierarchy. He has a great gift for friendship, is indefatigably interested in people, and courts religious affairs commentators and journalists at a time when the hierarchy ignores them, magnifying his influence.
Flannery dies of a heart attack on October 21, 2008, at Kiltipper Woods Care Centre, Dublin. Following a funeral mass at St. Saviour’s Priory, he is buried in the Dominican plot at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, on October 24, 2008.
Carroll marries clothing designer Helena Reilly in Glasgow in 1923. They have four children, actress Helena Carroll, musician and producer Theresa Perez, journalist Kathleen Carroll and son Brian Carroll who resides in London. He is grandfather to Helena Perez Reilly and great grandfather to Paul Vincent Reilly. His brother, Niall Carroll, is a film critic.
Carroll founds two theater groups in Glasgow: the Curtain Theatre company, with Grace Ballantine and Molly Urquhart, in 1933 and the Glasgow Citizens Theatre in 1943. He remains the director and playwright in residence of the Citizens Theatre until his death.
The Wayward Saint is made into an opera in Germany in the 1960’s and his daughter Theresa commissions and produces an opera of his Beauty is Fled from the collection Plays for My Children which opens at Phoenix Symphony Hall in the 1970s as part of Theresa’s “Children’s Opera Series.”
Carroll dies at the age of 68 from undisclosed causes in Bromley, Kent, England on October 20, 1968.
Rackard is born in Killane on January 6, 1927. He makes his first regular appearance for the Wexford senior team during the 1947 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship and is a regular member of the starting fifteen until his retirement before the 1957 All-Ireland championship. During that time he wins two All-Ireland medals, four Leinster medals and one National Hurling League medal. He is an All-Ireland runner-up on two occasions. His brothers, Nicky and Billy, also experience All-Ireland success with Wexford.
Rackard plays his club hurling with Rathnure and enjoys much success and is a four-time county club championship medalist in his lengthy career.
In 1948, Rackard is a key member of the defence as Rathnure reaches only their second championship decider ever. A 3–5 to 0–2 trouncing of reigning champions Ferns St. Aidan’s gives him his first championship medal. After failing to retain their title the following year, Rathnure is back in the county decider once again in 1950. Another convincing 5–10 to 2–6 defeat of old rivals Ferns St. Aidan’s gives him his second championship medal.
It is 1955 before Rathnure qualifies for another championship decider and four-in-a-row hopefuls Ferns St. Aidan’s provides the opposition once again. A close game develops, however, a 2–9 to 2–5 victory gives Rackard a third championship medal.
After a number of years out of the limelight, Rathnure reaches the county final once again in 1961. A fourth defeat of Ferns St. Aidan’s gives Rackard, who scores two goals from his full-forward berth, a fourth and final championship medal.
Rackard first comes to prominence on the inter-county scene as a member of the Wexford minor hurling team in the early 1940s. He enjoys little success in this grade but is called up to the senior team in 1947.
After losing the provincial final in 1950, Rackard is at centre-back the following year as Wexford faces Laois in the eastern decider. A 3–12 to 4–3 victory gives him his first Leinster medal as Wexford claims the provincial crown for the first time since 1918. The subsequent All-Ireland decider sees three-in-a-row hopefuls Tipperary providing the opposition. Nicky Rackard’s goal-scoring ability is quelled by Tipperary goalkeeper Tony Reddin, while Séamus Bannon, Tim Ryan and Paddy Kenny score key goals which power Tipperary to a 7–7 to 3–9 victory.
After back-to-back Leinster defeats over the next two years, Wexford faces Dublin in the 1954 decider. A huge 8-5 to 1–4 victory gives Rackard his second Leinster medal. A record crowd of 84,856 attend the subsequent All-Ireland decider with Cork providing the opposition. Wexford has a four-point lead with seventeen minutes left to play, however, history is against Wexford when Johnny Clifford scores the winning goal for Cork with just four minutes left. A 1–9 to 1–6 victory secures a third successive All-Ireland for Cork.
In 1955, Wexford continues their provincial dominance with Rackard collecting a third Leinster medal following a 5–6 to 3–9 defeat of Kilkenny in a replay of the Leinster final. Galway, who gets a bye into the final without picking up a hurley, provides the opposition and takes a halftime lead. A Tim Flood goal nine minutes from the end clinches a 3–13 to 2–8 victory and a first All-Ireland medal for Rackard. It is Wexford’s first All-Ireland triumph in forty-five years.
Rackard adds a National Hurling League medal to his collection in 1956 as Tipperary is bested by 5–9 to 2–14. The subsequent championship campaign sees Wexford reach the provincial final once again. A narrow 4–8 to 3–10 defeat of Kilkenny gives Rackard his fourth and final Leinster medal. Galway falls heavily in the All-Ireland semi-final, allowing Wexford to advance to an All-Ireland final meeting with Cork. The game goes down in history as one of the all-time classics as Christy Ring is bidding for a record ninth All-Ireland medal. The game turns on one important incident as the Wexford goalkeeper, Art Foley, makes a miraculous save from a Ring shot and clears the sliotar up the field to set up another attack. Nicky Rackard scores a crucial goal with two minutes to go giving Wexford a 2–14 to 2–8 victory. In spite of Cork’s loss, Wexford’s Nick O’Donnell and Rackard, in an unparalleled display of sportsmanship in any game, raise Christy Ring onto their shoulders and carry him off the field. Wexford wins the game and Rackard collects his second All-Ireland medal but there is no doubt in their minds that the real hero is Ring.
A farm accident in 1957 brings an end to Rackard’s inter-county career.
Rackard also has the honour of being selected for Leinster in the inter-provincial series of games and enjoys some success. In 1956 he lines out in his only inter-provincial decider. A 5–11 to 1–7 trouncing of Munster gives Rackard a Railway Cup medal.
In retirement, Rackard, along with his brothers, come to be regarded as one of the greatest hurling families of all-time. In 1984, the centenary year of the foundation of the Gaelic Athletic Association, he is named to the Hurling Team of the Century. In 1992, both Billy and Bobby Rackard’s brilliance is recognised when they are presented with the All-Time All Star Award for hurling. Rackard is also posthumously named on the Hurling Team of the Millennium in 1999.
(Pictured: The Rackard brothers from left Bobby, Nicky and Billy)
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