Lemass is the son of Seán Lemass, a Fianna Fáil TD and fourth Taoiseach of Ireland, and Kathleen Lemass (née Hughes). He is named after his uncle, a victim of the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s. He is educated at Catholic University School, Leeson Street in Dublin and later at Newbridge College in Newbridge, County Kildare. Against his father’s wishes, rather than attend university, he undertakes business training and later becomes an executive member and branch secretary of the Irish Commercial Travellers’ Association.
Lemass follows his father into politics in 1955, when he is elected to Dublin City Council. He is elected to Dáil Éireann in a by-election in Dublin South-West the following year. The by-election is a loss for Fine Gael, who is in government at the time, and whose TD had held the seat for a number of years.
Lemass is active in a number of political councils and other groupings. From 1966 to 1968, he is a member of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe. He is also a member of the Irish-British Parliamentary Group and the Irish-French Parliamentary Group.
In 1969, Lemass is appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, with responsibility for the Office of Public Works. In his first year at the Department, he serves under his brother-in-law, Charles Haughey, and later under George Colley.
When Fianna Fáil loses office in 1973, Lemass is named spokesperson for physical planning and the environment. He holds that position until January 1975, when he is dropped from the front bench.
Lemass’s political career, a career in which he is invariably judged in comparison to his father, is cut short when he dies suddenly in Dublin on April 13, 1976. He is buried at Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin. His widow enters the Dáil following his death.
Miller begins his career with Celtic and is later loaned to the Danish sports club Aarhus Gymnastikforening in 2001. He returns to Celtic Park and breaks into the first-team squad during the 2003–04 season. Rejecting the offer of a new contract from Celtic, he joins Manchester United in 2004 on a free transfer under the Bosman ruling. Loaned to Leeds United during the 2005–06 season, he makes 22 first-team appearances for Manchester United.
Miller represents the Republic of Ireland team internationally, making his debut in 2004 against the Czech Republic. He earns 21 caps over the next five years, scoring one international goal.
On January 15, 2015, he joins League of IrelandCork City club, choosing his hometown club over several offers in Asia. He makes his debut on March 7 as the season begins with a 1–1 draw at Sligo Rovers. He is a regular in his only season at Turners Cross, in which the team finishes as runners-up in the league and the FAI Cup to Dundalk. On January 19, 2016, he chooses to leave the team.
A benefit football match is played on September 25, 2018, with the intention of raising funds for Miller’s family and charities. The Gaelic Athletic Association permits the game to be played at Páirc Uí Chaoimh in Cork, which would not normally be allowed under GAA rules. The match, between a Manchester United XI and a team composed of former Celtic and Republic of Ireland players, ends with the United XI winning on penalties following a 2–2 draw.
Reynolds is educated at Summerhill College in Sligo, County Sligo and works for a state transport company before succeeding at a variety of entrepreneurial ventures, including promoting dances and owning ballrooms, a pet-food factory, and newspapers. In 1974 he is elected to the Longford County Council as a member of Fianna Fáil. He enters Dáil Éireann, lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, in 1977 as a member representing the Longford-Westmeath parliamentary constituency and becomes Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in Haughey’s Fianna Fáil government (1979–81). He is subsequently Minister of Industry and Commerce (1987–88) and Minister for Finance (1988–91) in Haughey’s third and fourth governments. He breaks with Haughey in December 1991. On January 30, 1992, Haughey retires as leader of Fianna Fáil at a parliamentary party meeting. Reynolds easily defeats his rivals Mary O’Rourke and Michael Woods in the party leadership election and succeeds Haughey as Taoiseach on February 11, 1992.
The Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democratscoalition that Reynolds inherits breaks up in November 1992 but, after the general election later that month, he surprises many observers by forming a new coalition government with the Labour Party in January 1993. He plays a significant part in bringing about a ceasefire between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and unionist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland in 1994, but he is less effective in maintaining his governing coalition. When this government founders in November 1994, he resigns as Taoiseach and as leader of Fianna Fáil, though he remains acting prime minister until a new government is formed the following month. He unsuccessfully seeks his party’s nomination as a candidate for the presidency of Ireland in 1997. He retires from public life in 2002.
McGlinchey is one of eleven siblings born into a staunchly republican home in Ballyscullion Road, Bellaghy, in rural south County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. His father owns a garage and some of his father’s police customers later die at McGlinchey’s hands. His mother Monica is a devout Catholic. He is educated at the local school. When he was sixteen, he begins an apprenticeship in his father’s garage. About this time, he is joining the numerous civil rights marches that are taking place in the county. His precise reasons for doing so are unclear, but speculation is that he is reacting to events around him and the idea of participating in marches offers glamour and a close identification with his own community.
In 1971, McGlinchey is interned without charge for ten months in Long Kesh Detention Centre. Not long after his release the following year, he is imprisoned again on arms charges. On July 5, 1975, during his imprisonment, he marries Mary O’Neil, daughter of Patrick O’Neil from Toomebridge. Together they have three children.
Following his release, McGlinchey joins Ian Milne and future Provisional IRA hunger strikersFrancis Hughes and Thomas McElwee and wages a campaign of shooting and bombing throughout the county and beyond. Together, they later join the Provisional IRA. The gang spends the late 1970s on the run, carrying out operations and evading both the British Army and the Garda Síochána. Following a mailvan robbery, the latter force arrests McGlinchey in County Monaghan in 1977 for carjacking a Garda patrol vehicle and threatening the officer with a pistol, although he claims that the gun is actually a wheel brace. He fails to make bail at Dublin‘s Special Criminal Court after a Garda Superintendent argues that McGlinchey would fail to attend court if bailed. He is convicted and sent to the maximum-security Portlaoise Prison. In 1982, while serving his prison sentence, he clashes with the prison’s IRA leadership and is either expelled by them for indiscipline or leaves the organisation due to strategic differences.
Following his departure from the IRA and his release from prison, McGlinchey joins the INLA. Due to his experience, he rises through the ranks, becoming chief of staff by 1982. Under his leadership, the INLA, which had previously had a reputation for disorganisation, becomes extremely active in cross-borderassassinations and bombings. These include many individual assassinations and woundings, but also massacres such as the Droppin Well bombing of 1982 in which both civilians and soldiers die. There are some failed operations, and McGlinchey, who believes this is the result of an informer within the ranks, devotes much time and energy to finding the cause. Those suspected of betraying the organisation are treated brutally, often by McGlinchey personally. As a result of this resurgence of activity and his high profile, the press nicknames him “Mad Dog.” Under his tenure the Darkley massacre is carried out, ostensibly by another group but using a weapon supplied by McGlinchey. In late 1983, while still on the run, he gives an interview with the Sunday Tribune newspaper in which he condemns the Darkley killings but also lays out his political philosophy and plans for the future.
By 1984, McGlinchey has fallen out with members of a powerful Republican family from South Armagh over what he considers missing funds. Men loyal to this family are subsequently killed by McGlinchey’s unit, which includes his wife. In March of the same year, he is captured in Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare, following a gunfight with the Gardaí. At this time, he is wanted in Northern Ireland for the shooting of an elderly woman, but republicans have traditionally been able to avoid extradition by claiming their offences were political. The bloody war in the north is leading the Republic of Ireland to re-evaluate its position, however, and he becomes the first republican to be extradited to Northern Ireland. Although convicted and sentenced there to life imprisonment, this is overturned in 1985. As a result, he is returned to the Republic, where he is sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on firearms charges. While he is incarcerated, his wife is shot dead at her Dundalk home.
McGlinchey is released in March 1993 and claiming to have no further involvement with the INLA, moves to Drogheda. He survives an assassination attempt soon after his release from prison, but in February 1994, his enemies catch up with him. At around 9:30 on the evening of Thursday, February 10, 1994, he visits and dines with friends of his in Duleek Road, near his home. He leaves about forty minutes later, intending to take a video back to a shop in Brookville, on the north side of town. At around 11:00 p.m. he and his 16-year-old son Dominic are returning home, when he pulls up to make a phone call from a public kiosk on Hardman’s Gardens, near Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Almost immediately and despite the presence of four witnesses, a red Mazda pulls up alongside him. While his son watches from the car, three men get out and beat McGlinchey. Once he is on the ground the men, who are armed with three pump action shotguns and a pistol, fire into him fourteen times. The attack finishes with a coup de grâce to the head, although he is already dead. His last words are reputed to be “Jesus, Mary help me.” His son yells for an ambulance.
The following day, an autopsy is carried out in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, which indicates McGlinchey had been hit in the neck, skull, the left upper chest, the left arm, and both legs. His inquest is held in Drogheda two weeks later, suspended and then reopened in November 1996. Gardaí forensic officers tell the coroner that they had compared the shell casings they had found with the database, but no matches have been made to other known weapons. The officer notes that no such information has been received from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The shotguns used are impossible to trace ballistically, but it is ascertained that the Mazda was registered in the north. His and his wife’s killers have never been found.
McGlinchey’s funeral is held on February 13, 1994, in Bellaghy, with no republican accoutrements. There is no INLA colour guard, and only an Irish tricolor draped over the coffin. Over 1,500 people attend and are watched closely by 200 RUC. Police armoured vans are held on the perimeter. He is buried alongside his wife and their young daughter Máire. His coffin is carried from the McGlinchey family home to St. Mary’s Church by pallbearers who are swapped out from the crowd every 40-yards or so. Martin McGuinness is among them, as is Bernadette McAliskey and her daughter Róisín. His sons carry the coffin for the final yards.
McGlinchey’s posthumous reputation ranges from being a “psycho” to his enemies to being an inspiration to those who followed him. Commentators have speculated on what he would have contributed to Irish politics had he lived. Some have suggested that he would have contributed to the Northern Ireland peace process, while others have argued that dissident republicans, opposed to that process, would have found him a willing rallying point. He remains an influence on Irish fiction and music, with both Edna O’Brien and Martin McDonagh producing acclaimed pieces based on his life and career. He is also featured in popular songs.
In 1968, O’Malley enters politics upon the sudden death of his uncle Donogh who, at that the time, is the sitting Minister for Education. He is chosen after Donogh’s widow, Hilda, still in shock at the sudden death of her husband, turns down the opportunity to contest the by-election necessitated by his death.
O’Malley is subsequently elected as a Fianna Fáil TD for the Limerick East constituency in the by-election. Perhaps the first sign of the defiance that would define his career materialises during the 1969 Irish general election when Hilda asks her nephew to step aside and allow her to contest in the Limerick East constituency as the main Fianna Fáil candidate. He refuses and places third in the four-seat constituency, with his aunt, running as an independent, coming in fifth.
Following the general election, O’Malley is appointed Parliamentary Secretary to both Minister for DefenceJim Gibbons and TaoiseachJack Lynch and serves as Government Chief Whip. In his role as a confidante of Lynch, the political lines within Fianna Fáil that put him on a collision course of over twenty years with Charles Haughey, are drawn. He plays a central role in the Arms Crisis prosecutions of Haughey and Neil Blaney in 1970. After their acquittals, the stage is set within Fianna Fáil for a long-term power struggle that eventually results in O’Malley’s expulsion from the party in 1984.
In the meantime, O’Malley’s next position within Lynch’s government comes when he is made Minister for Justice after Mícheál Ó Móráin is forced to resign due to ill-health. One of the most significant aspects of his legacy transpires during his tenure as Minister for Justice from 1970 to 1973. In response to the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland, he tries and fails to introduce internment without trial for republicans within the State. He is, however, successful in reintroducing the Offences Against the State Act, which enables convictions for Irish Republican Amy (IRA) membership on the word of a Garda Superintendent, and the Special Criminal Court, a non-jury court presided over by three judges which tries cases of terrorism and serious organised crime.
In 1982, after Fianna Fáil loses its majority but stays in government by virtue of a confidence and supply agreement with Sinn Féin – The Workers Party and two independents, O’Malley is appointed Minister for Trade, Commerce and Tourism, but with the death of Colley and the loss of O’Donoghue’s seat, he becomes increasingly isolated within Fianna Fáil.
After the party whip is removed from him in 1984, amidst inter-party wrangling over the New Ireland Forum, O’Malley is expelled from the party the following year, the final straw being his famous “I stand by the Republic” speech in which he announces his intention to abstain on a vote regarding the liberalisation of the sales of contraceptives, which Fianna Fáil opposes.
O’Malley’s animus for Haughey does not stop him from entering coalition with Fianna Fáil after the 1989 Irish general election, with him once again appointed Minister for Industry and Commerce. While in government, he finally witnesses the downfall of Haughey in 1992, when he is forced to resign over the emergence of new evidence concerning his tapping of journalists’ phones in the 1980s. The coalition with Fianna Fáil does not last long under new Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, with the Government collapsing after Reynolds accuses O’Malley of dishonesty during the Beef Tribunal.
O’Malley retires as leader of the Progressive Democrats in 1993, and the party moves into opposition, only to re-enter government with Fianna Fáil in 1997, where it remains upon O’Malley’s retirement from politics in 2002.
While the Progressive Democrats no longer exist, they are generally credited with the breaking up of the Fianna Fáil versus Fine Gael dichotomy of Irish politics that had dominated since the founding of the Free State. Since 1922, Irish governments have tended to be either single-party Fianna Fáil cabinets, be they minority or majority, or Fine Gael-led coalitions, typically involving the Labour Party. A Fine Gael-Labour coalition is in power at the time of the founding of the Progressive Democrats, and a single-party government or clear majority has not been won in Ireland since.
O’Malley dies in Dublin on July 21, 2021, at the age of 82, having been in poor health for some time. He is predeceased by his wife, Pat, and survived by their six children, four daughters including the former TD Fiona O’Malley, and two sons.
Perhaps O’Malley’s greatest legacy is the political reality of Ireland today: the low-tax, pro-business economic policies of the Progressive Democrats have been the dominant ideology in the State since the 1990s. Sinn Féin, the party most affected by his measures as Minister for Justice, no longer vote against the retention of the Offences Against the State Act and Special Criminal Court.
St. John is the eldest of six children born to Tommy and Lottie Mooney. He is educated at Scoil Muire Gan Smál and Synge Street CBS. He emigrates to Ontario, Canada in 1958 where he takes what labouring jobs he can find. Within six months he meets a woman named Gert Gorman who has an electrical contracting company in the United States. She and her husband sponsor him to move to Washington, D.C., where he is able to work as an electrician. He marries his sweetheart, Susie Bourke, who is from a well-known Dublin theatrical family with links to both the Gaiety and the Olympia theatres. They have two sons, Kieron and Brian. He travels widely and becomes involved in the peace movement and the civil rights movement. He remains in the United States until 1970, returning to settle in Collins Avenue in north Dublin.
The Dublin city that St. John returns to is a changed place from the one he had grown up in and proves to be the spur that inspires his songwriting. He chooses “St. John” as his nom de plume, inspired by a middle name he had been given while at school when all the boys in his class were assigned saints’ names. In 1975, he is running a theatre in Petticoat Lane on Marlborough Street, and while fixing an alarm outside a window on the first floor, the ledge on which he is leaning gives way, resulting in a bad fall. He breaks his elbow and hip and spends six months in the hospital recuperating. It is during this time that he takes to songwriting in earnest.
St. John is an extrovert who loves people. He is a voracious reader with a particular interest in Irish history. His son Kieron recalls his father writing “The Rare Aul Times” during this recovery period and singing it to his family. The Dublin City Ramblers is the first band to cover the song, but it is Danny Doyle’s version that achieves a real breakthrough, spending eleven weeks in the Irish Singles Chart, reaching No. 1 in 1978.
In 1978, St. John writes “The Fields of Athenry,” a tale of a man exiled to Botany Bay for stealing food to feed his family during the Famine. It has been recorded by several artists, charting in the Irish Singles Chart on a number of occasions. A recording by Paddy Reilly, which is released in 1982, remains in the Irish charts for 72 weeks.
St. John pays close attention to the melding of lyric and melody and has particular form in writing memorable melodies that sound timeless, resonating deeply with listeners across all walks of life. His songs sometime express regret for the loss of old certainties, for example, the loss of Nelson’s Pillar and the Metropole Ballroom, two symbols of old Dublin, as progress makes a “city of my town.”
St. John describes his chosen craft with affection. “Songs are magic carpets. They can tell a story over and over again without boring the pants off the listener and maybe take us out of ourselves for a few moments of peaceful escapism. With easy to remember melody lines, the words can tell of times and events in our daily lives that are worth noting or remembering.”
St. John’s songbook consists of hundreds of compositions, including “The Ferryman,” “Waltzing on Borrowed Time” and “The Furey Man” and are recorded by over 2,500 artists. He is a founding member of the Irish Music Rights Organisation (IMRO) and is always generous and supportive of younger writers, some of whom he continues to mentor well into his 80s.
St. John is surprised and delighted at the affiliation that emerges between “The Fields of Athenry” and rugby and football sporting events. He is present in Croke Park in 2007 when Ireland beats England in the Six Nations, and where the song is sung three times over. It is a song often heard in Anfield in Liverpool, and at Glasgow Celtic games, and reverberates around the stadium at Chicago’s Soldier Field when Ireland beats the All Blacks on November 5, 2016.
St. John wins several awards, including the Irish Music Rights Organisation “Irish Songwriter of the Year.”
St. John lives life to the fullest, and while he suffers ill health in his later years with both diabetes and Parkinson’s disease, he never loses his zest for life. His son Kieron describes his father with affection as a man who had nine lives and lived them all to the fullest. He lives independently at home until his admission to Beaumont Hospital in Dublin. He dies peacefully there at the age of 90 on March 12, 2022. After his funeral, Paddy Reilly and Glen Hansard perform “The Fields of Athenry” at Beaumont House in Dublin as a tribute.
Ervine is born in Ballymacarrett, Belfast on December 28, 1883. He is considered to be the founding father of modern Northern Irish drama.
Although accepted to study at Trinity College, Dublin, circumstances force Ervine to leave school at the age of 15 to begin working in an insurance office.
Two years later, Ervine immigrates to London, where he discovers a love for the theatre. He begins his writing career with Mixed Marriage (1911), an Ulster tragedy, and produces three plays between 1911 and 1915. In 1915, after a meeting with William Butler Yeats in London, he becomes the director of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. It is, however, not a happy appointment as his personality and politics clash with the management of the theatre.
Ervine then joins the Royal Dublin Fusiliers and fights in Flanders, losing a leg in the conflict. Returning home, he feels increasingly alienated by nationalism and more attracted to the unionism of his family background. He becomes a vehement detractor of the south, describing Ireland in a letter to George Bernard Shaw as brimming with “bleating Celtic Twilighters, sex-starved Daughters of the Gael, gangsters and gombeen men.”
Ervine is a distinctively Ulster orientated writer, focusing on a naturalistic portrayal of rural and urban life. His most famous and popular work amongst his Northern Irish audience is Boyd’s Shop (1936), which becomes one of the Ulster Group Theatre’s stalwart productions. The play is a classic of the homely yet sincere Ulster genre and centres around the struggles of the folk that Ervine grew up with in his grandmother’s shop on the Albertbridge Road. Ervine creates in Boyd’s Shop a template for Ulster theatre that is to dominate until the advent of Samuel Thompson‘s Over the Bridge.
Ervine’s reactionary unionism and anti-southern hatred becomes more pronounced as he ages and eclipses his more subtle characteristics and abilities as a writer. Although many of his novels and plays are at times clouded by his prejudices, they are also very often capable of tremendous feeling and humanity showing he is a writer of note.
St. John Greer Ervine dies at the age of 87 at Fitzhall, Ipling, Sussex on January 24, 1971.
Daly is born in Dublin in 1888. He fights in the 1916 Easter Rising under the command of his namesake Edward Daly, leading the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. He is later wounded in the particularly vicious fighting near the Linenhall. He is subsequently interned in Frongoch internment camp for his part in the rebellion until 1918, when he is released as part of a general amnesty for Irish prisoners.
During the Irish War of Independence, Daly serves as leader of the “Squad,”Michael Collins‘ assassination unit.
Daly and the men under his command are responsible for the killing of many British intelligence officers, in particular District Inspector Redmond, who had been putting increasing pressure on the Squad. Daly himself personally kills several people, including Frank Brooke, director of Great Southern and Eastern Railway, who serves on an advisory council to the British military, in June 1920. He does not directly lead any of the attacks on Bloody Sunday but is on standby in one of the Squad’s safe houses. In the aftermath, November 23, 1920, he is arrested and interned in Abercorn Barracks in Ballykinler, County Down.
Daly is released on parole from Ballykinler in March 1921, the British apparently being unaware of his senior position within the Dublin Brigade of the IRA. After his release, he, along with Emmet Dalton, is also involved in the attempt to free Seán Mac Eoin from Mountjoy Prison on May 14, 1921. He and his men hijack a British Army Peerless armoured car in Clontarf at the corporation abattoir, while it is escorting a consignment of meat to a barracks and shoot dead two soldiers in the process. The plan involves Dalton and Joe Leonard impersonating two British army officers and using forged documents to “transfer” MacEoin to Dublin Castle. They gain entry to Mountjoy but are discovered before they can free MacEoin and have to shoot their way out. They later abandon the armoured car after removing the Hotchkiss machine guns and setting fire to what they can. Toward the end of the war, in May 1921, the two principal fighting units of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, the “Squad” and the “Active Service Unit” are amalgamated after losses suffered in the burning of the Custom House. Daly is named Officer Commanding (OC) of this new unit, which is named the Dublin Guard.
After the Anglo-Irish Treaty splits the IRA, Daly and most of his men side with the pro-treaty party, who go on to found the Irish Free State. He is appointed to the rank of brigadier in the newly created Irish National Army, which is inaugurated in January 1922. When the Irish Civil War breaks out in June 1922, he commands the Free State’s troops who secure Dublin, after a week of fighting.
In August 1922, during the Irish Free State offensive that re-takes most of the major towns in Ireland, Daly commands a landing of 450 troops of the Dublin Guard at Fenit, County Kerry, which goes on to capture Tralee from the anti-treaty forces. Acting with severe brutality in Kerry, he comments that, “nobody had asked me to take kid-gloves to Kerry, so I didn’t.” As the Civil War develops into a vicious guerrilla conflict, he and his men are implicated in a series of atrocities against anti-treaty prisoners, culminating in a series of killings with land mines in March 1923. Daly, and others under his command, claim that those killed were accidentally blown up by their own mines. Statements by the Garda Síochána, two Free State lieutenants on duty, W. McCarthy and Niall Harrington, and one survivor, Stephen Fuller, maintain the claims are fabricated.
Daly resigns from the Free State army in 1924 after an incident in Kenmare, County Kerry, concerning the daughters of a doctor. A court martial is held but collapses as no one is prepared to give evidence. He volunteers his services for the Irish Army again in 1940 and is appointed as a Captain to the non-combatant Construction Corps.
Daly is a carpenter by trade. He marries Daisy Gillies in 1910. His brother James (Seamus) marries Daisy’s sister Nora, a Cumann na mBan activist, in a joint wedding ceremony. After Daisy’s death in 1919, Daly marries Bridget Murtagh, also a Cumann na mBan activist, in 1921. Murtagh and Nora O’Daly carry out intelligence gathering for the planned attack on the Magazine Fort in 1916. She is a sister of Elizabeth Murtagh, the first wife of Commandant Michael Love who serves with Daly in the Collins Squad of the IRA, in the Irish Free State Army of the 1920s and during the Emergency period. Murtagh dies in childbirth in 1930. Daly subsequently marries Norah Gillies, his first wife’s niece.
On his death on January 16, 1957, Daly is buried with full military honours in Mount Jerome Cemetery. He is survived by his brothers, Comdt Seamus O’Daly and Capt Frank O’Daly, his sons Patrick and Colbert, and his daughters Brede and Philomena.
Armstrong is born on January 12, 1924, at Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, one of three sons among six children of James Charlton Armstrong, housepainter and decorator, and his wife Margaret (née Howard). Soon after his birth the family moves to Belfast. He attends Strandtown Primary School. He attends Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in the early 1940s, where he initially studies political science and later architecture. Having an interest in art, which had been fostered by his father, he takes classes for a short time in the early 1940s at the Belfast School of Art. It is there he meets Gerard Dillon, who introduces him to George Campbell and Daniel O’Neill. He is largely self-taught as an artist. It is his close association with Dillon and Campbell, both some years his senior, that proves to be the most important factor in his development. In Belfast in the early 1940s they associate with the Russian artist Daniel Nietzche, who emphasises to them the importance of personal expression.
After leaving university Armstrong works at the Belfast Gas Office. At this point he is the main support for his widowed mother. Having saved some money, he leaves his job in 1946 to attempt to fulfil his ambition to paint full-time, producing a set of etchings with George Campbell, which are published by Walsh Studios. The following year he takes work as a designer for Ulster Laces in Portadown, County Armagh. In 1957, he leaves for London in the hopes of finding greater opportunities as an artist. His friends Campbell and Dillon are already living there, and he takes lodgings with Dillon’s sister at Abbey Road, north London. Though he continues to paint, he is unable to earn a living and so again has to take other work, this time in a Labour Exchange office. However, he is beginning to gain recognition. In 1957, he is awarded a traveling scholarship by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which enables him to travel to Spain. He continues to visit Spain throughout the 1960s, often to see Campbell, who spends much time there.
In 1961 he has his first solo exhibition at the CEMA gallery in Belfast. He comes to live in Dublin in 1962, his work having already been exhibited there at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1957 and 1958. He continues to exhibit there annually from 1961 to 1965. During the 1960s and early 1970s his work is regularly included in the Oireachtas exhibition, at which he is awarded the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal in 1968. He also shows his work with the Ritchie Hendriks Gallery and the Tom Caldwell Gallery in Dublin. Ultimately, he is to have over seventy solo exhibitions throughout his career. By 1969, when he is elected an associate member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), he has established himself as one of the leading landscape painters in Ireland. In 1972 he becomes a full member of the RHA. He exhibits there regularly until 1977.
It is during this period that some of Armstrong’s best work is produced. While landscape is his predominant theme, he never sees himself as a painter of particular views, rather he responds to the abstract qualities of a scene. He sees elements such as the sea, rocks or sky as a series of interlocking textures to be rendered expressively in oil paint. The western coastline of Ireland is a vital source of inspiration for him. Roundstone, County Galway, is a favoured base for painting trips in the company of Dillon and Campbell, who by this time are also living in Dublin.
In 1981, a retrospective exhibition of Armstrong’s work is organised by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He is represented in many major public and corporate collections in Ireland. From 1971 he lives at 28 Chelmsford Avenue, Ranelagh, Dublin, in a house he shares with Gerard Dillon.
Armstrong dies unmarried on January 13, 1996, in Dublin. The contents of his studio are sold on February 3, 1998.
(From: “Armstrong, Arthur” by Rebecca Minch, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009, revised November 2013 | Pictured: “Near Ballyhubbock,” oil on board by Arthur Armstrong RHA)
After the death of Brendan Doris in 2006, Martin McGuinness pays tribute to the Doris family as “a well-known and respected republican family [who] have played a significant role in the republican struggle for many years.”
O’Neill becomes involved in republican politics in her teens, assisting her father with constituency work in his role as a Dungannon councillor. She joins Sinn Féin after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, at the age of 21, and starts working as an advisor to Francie Molloy in the Northern Ireland Assembly, holding this role until 2005.
O’Neill automatically relinquishes her office following Paul Givan‘s resignation as first minister on February 3, 2022. Sinn Féin becomes the largest party after the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election, putting O’Neill in line to become the First Minister of Northern Ireland, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader to become the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. However, she remains to be officially sworn in as First Minister because, as part of its opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, the DUP has refused to nominate a deputy First minister and there is therefore no functioning executive of Northern Ireland.
In August 2022, O’Neill is asked in a BBC interview whether it was right during the Troubles for the Provisional IRA “to engage in violent resistance to British rule.” She is criticised for her response, “I think at the time there was no alternative, but now thankfully we have an alternative to conflict, and that is the Good Friday Agreement – that is why it’s so precious to us all.”
In May 2023, O’Neill attends the coronation of King Charles, saying, “Well obviously I wanted to be here. We live in changing times, and it was the respectful thing to do, to show respect and to be here for all those people at home, who I had said I would be a first minister for all. Attendance here is about honouring that and fulfilling my promise.”
seamus dubhghaill 