Fine Gael is currently the third-largest party in Ireland in terms of members of Dáil Éireann and largest in terms of Irish members of the European Parliament. The party has a membership of 21,000 in 2017. Leo Varadkar succeeds Enda Kenny as party leader on June 2, 2017, and as Taoiseach on June 14. Kenny had been leader since 2002, and Taoiseach since 2011.
Fine Gael is generally considered to be more of a proponent of market liberalism than its traditional rival, Fianna Fáil. Apart from brief minority governments, Fine Gael has rarely governed Ireland without a coalition that also includes the Labour Party, a social-democratic, centre-left party. Fine Gael describes itself as a “party of the progressive centre” which it defines as acting “in a way that is right for Ireland, regardless of dogma or ideology.” The party lists its core values as “equality of opportunity, free enterprise and reward, security, integrity and hope.”
Having governed in coalition with the Labour Party between 2011 and 2016, and in a minority government along with Independent TDs from 2016 to 2020, Fine Gael currently forms part of an historic coalition government with its traditional rival, Fianna Fáil, and the Green Party. On June 27, 2020, Micheál Martin of Fianna Fáil is appointed as Taoiseach and forms a new government. Leo Varadkar serves as Tánaiste with both parties agreeing that in December 2022, Varadkar will serve again as Taoiseach.
Gallagher starts her singing in the Creeslough Hall with a local Céilí band started by Bill Gallagher. The Creeslough Hall is owned by Jim McCaffrey and Bridie makes many more visits to the Creeslough Hall in her home town throughout her long and successful career. Her talent is soon spotted in the 1950s by Billy Livingstone who is a talent scout for Decca Records. She goes to Belfast, which becomes her base, where she marries Robert (Bob) Livingstone (no relation to Billy Livingstone) and has two boys, Jim and Peter. Peter dies in a motor accident in 1976 and Jim later goes on to tour with her.
Gallagher shoots to fame in 1956 with her recording of “A Mother’s Love’s A Blessing” and achieves international acclaim with her legendary rendition of “The Boys From County Armagh.” During her career, which spans over six decades, she appears in many leading venues across the globe. She also makes songs such as “The Homes of Donegal” famous.
Gallagher holds the record for the largest number of people in attendance in the Royal Albert Hall in London, with over 7,500 people, a record that is never equaled as it goes on to become an all-seater venue. She becomes world-famous and travels all over the world, United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and is known as “The Girl from Donegal.” She plays in many of the world’s best known theatres, including London’s Royal Albert Hall, Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall in New York City. She sings mainly ballads or as they later became known as Country and Irish. One of her best known songs is “The Boys From The County Armagh,” which sells over 250,000 copies, the biggest-selling Irish single at that time.
Gallagher lives in Belfast for most of her life. She is honoured by the people of Creeslough on July 10, 2000 with an event to celebrate her career. Members of her family from Creeslough and Donegal attend the event along with her two sisters and their families who travel from Glasgow to be there along with an estimated crowd of 2,500 fans. A plaque paying tribute to her is unveiled. The following day she is honoured by Donegal County Council when they hold a Civic Reception for her. “Bridie blazed the trail for many artists who followed after her and I’m sure that many of them looked upon her as a role model as they started their careers in the music world,” council chairman Charlie Bennett says at the ceremony.
Gallagher dies at her home in Belfast on January 9, 2012 at the age of 87. Her burial takes place in her native Creeslough.
Forty-eight people die when a fire breaks out in a make-shift cinema on the upper floor of the village hall in Dromcollagher, County Limerick, on September 5, 1926.
The conversion of village halls into makeshift cinemas is a common practice in many rural villages in Ireland, right up to the 1940s. Prints are often borrowed from cinemas in larger towns or in Cork city and then bicycled over to smaller venues (sometimes surreptitiously).
During the Irish Free State period (1922-1937), the exhibition of films is still governed by legislation put in place by the British government in 1909. The Cinematograph Act 1909 stipulates that cinema owners must apply for a license to screen films, and that venues must observe strict safety standards. Such standards include encasing projectors in fireproof booths, ensuring that the highly unstable nitrate film, then the industry standard, be properly stored and handled, and fitting out venues with several fire exits. The regulations are generally observed by established cinemas, but they are often ignored by operators of ad hoc venues/makeshift conversions.
The consequences of such indifference to patron safety are tragically realized in the small town of Dromcollogher in West Limerick in 1926. Situated a few miles from the County Cork border, its population is around 500 at the time, hardly enough to sustain a full-time cinema. However, local hackney driver, William Forde, identifies a business opportunity that seems too good to pass up. Through a contact, Patrick Downey, who works as a projectionist in Cork city’s Assembly Rooms cinema, he arranges for a print of Cecil B. DeMille’s Biblical epic The Ten Commandments to be bicycled over for an unofficial one-off screening.
Forde rents the upstairs room of a venue on Church Street, later described by the Leinster Express as a wooden two-story structure and advertises his evening’s entertainment. He finds a readymade audience among the churchgoers that come out of the service in the adjacent Catholic Church and straight into the hall, many with their rosary beads still entwined in their hands. It is estimated that 150 people crowd into the room and ascend the ladder to the upstairs room. Though Forde has been informed by one local Garda that he cannot run a screening unless the venue is equipped with fire blankets and exits, he and Downey disregard the advice and, in a bid to reduce the weight for the cyclist bringing the reels from Cork, instruct that the fireproof metal cases be left behind in the city.
A generator hooked up to a lorry is used to power the borrowed projector, and candles to illuminate the makeshift box-office. It is one of those candles, placed in close proximity to an exposed film reel, which sparks off a series of small fires that quickly developed into an inferno. Some of those seated closest to the main exit manage to escape, but those nearer the screen find themselves trapped and iron bars that had been placed on the few windows in the hall windows seal their fate. Whole families are wiped out and the final death toll comes to 48. As newspapers of the time report, 1/10th of the town’s population is lost.
As for Forde and Downey, they are later charged with manslaughter, but the State chooses not to pursue the prosecutions. Forde apparently later immigrates to Australia and possibly accidentally poisons himself, and two others, while working as a cook in the Outback.
The “Dromcollogher Burning”, as it becomes known, holds the dubious honour of Ireland’s worst cinema fire. Sadly, it is not the last time safety regulations are disregarded in an entertainment venue: 75 years later the devastating Stardust Nightclub fire in Dublin also claims the lives of 48 patrons.
John Rocha, fashion designer of Chinese and Portuguese (Macanese) descent, is born in Hong Kong on August 23, 1953. He has been based mainly in Dublin since the late 1970s.
Rocha moves to Ireland after graduating from the Croydon School of Art, London. Known for his hand-crafting, beading and appliqué to garments, he first establishes a name for himself with his Chinatown label in Dublin in the 1980s and later designing clothing for both men and women in the Irish high street stores A Wear and their luxury stores Brown Thomas. He designs a range of cut crystal stemware and vases for Waterford Crystal in collaboration with glass designer Marcus Notley, until that firm’s closure in 2008. The brand relaunches in 2010 and Rocha’s crystal product ranges become available again.
By 1993, Rocha is named Designer of the Year at the British Fashion Awards. He runs his own “John Rocha,” “John Rocha Jeans,” “Rocha John Rocha” and “John Rocha Jewellery” labels alongside a diffusion clothing, homeware and accessories label for the department store Debenhams. He also designs the interiors of the Morrison Hotel in Dublin and the Orion Building in Birmingham. He is awarded the ‘Special Award’ at the Ernst & Young Irish Entrepreneur of the Year Awards 2008 which takes place in the City West Hotel in Dublin on October 23, 2008.
Rocha continues to produce a ‘pret-a-porter’ womenswear and menswear range which he showcases twice annually at the British Fashion Council sponsored London Fashion Week (February & September). His John Rocha lifestyle boutique opens on Dover Street, London, in 2006. His design business, operating as Three Moon Design, is located at Dublin’s Ely Place with a turnover of €200 million per year.
In 2014 Rocha showcases another Spring/Summer collection at London Fashion Week and announces his retirement from the event, stating, “At this point in my life I want to live by my calendar and not the Fashion Week calendar. Stopping allows me to do that.”
Rocha is made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002 for his contributions to the British fashion industry. In April 2015 he is awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Art & Design at The Asian Awards.
Carey is born in Dublin on February 23, 1919. As a schoolboy, he plays football for Home Farm F.C. As a youth, he also plays Gaelic football and is selected to represent Dublin GAA at minor level before he signs for St. James’s Gate F.C. at the start of the 1936–1937 season.
Carey is also the first non-UK player and the first Irishman to captain a winning team in both an FA Cup Final and the First Division. Like his contemporary Con Martin, he is an extremely versatile footballer and plays in nine different positions throughout his career. He even plays in goal for United on one occasion.
(Pictured: Manchester United captain Johnny Carey is carried on the shoulders of his teammates, after they win the FA Cup final of 1948 against Blackpool. Date: April 24, 1948)
McCourt is born to Malachy McCourt, Sr., who falsely claims to have been in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence, and Irish Catholic mother Angela Sheehan from Limerick. In the midst of the Great Depression, the family moves back to Ireland. Unable to find steady work in Belfast or Dublin and beset by his father’s alcoholism, the family returns to their mother’s native Limerick, where they sink even deeper into poverty.
In October 1949, at the age of 19, McCourt leaves Ireland, taking a boat from Cork to New York City. In 1951, he is drafted during the Korean War and sent to Bavaria for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US Army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks. Using his G.I. Bill education benefits, he talks his way into New York University by claiming he is intelligent and reads a great deal. He is admitted on one year’s probation provided he maintains a B average. He graduates in 1957 from NYU with a bachelor’s degree in English.
A New York city schoolteacher for more than thirty years, McCourt achieves literary fame later in life with his best-selling childhood memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood, Angela’s Ashes. With a first printing of just 25,000 copies, the book becomes an instant favourite with critics and readers and is perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
McCourt is also the author of ‘Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela’s Ashes and focusing on his life after returning to New York. He subsequently writes Teacher Man (2005) which details his teaching experiences and the challenges of being a teacher.
It is announced in May 2009 that McCourt has been treated for melanoma and that he is in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy. On July 19, 2009, he dies from the cancer, with meningeal complications, at a hospice in Manhattan, New York City.
The Purser family had come to Ireland from Gloucestershire in the eighteenth century. Purser is born in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) in County Dublin on March 22, 1848. She is raised in Dungarvan, County Waterford, one of the numerous children of Benjamin Purser, a prosperous flour miller and brewer, and his wife Anne Mallet. She is related to Sir Frederic William Burton, RHA (1816-1900), who is a son of Hannah Mallet. Two of her brothers, John and Louis, become professors at Trinity College Dublin. Her niece Olive Purser, daughter of her brother Alfred, is the first woman scholar at Trinity.
At thirteen Purser attends the Moravian school, Institution Evangélique de Montmirail, Switzerland where she learns to speak fluent French and begins painting. In 1873 her father’s business fails and she decides to become a full-time painter. She attends classes at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art and joins the Dublin Sketching Club, where she is later appointed an honorary member. In 1874 she distinguishes herself in the National Competition. In 1878 she again contributes to the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), and for the next fifty years becomes a regular exhibitor, mainly portraits, and shows an average of three works per show.
Purser becomes wealthy through astute investments, particularly in Guinness, for which several of her male relatives have worked over the years. She is very active in the art world in Dublin and is involved in the setting up of the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, persuading the Irish government to provide Charlemont House in Parnell Square to house the gallery.
Purser works mostly as a portraitist. Through her talent and energy and owing to her friendship with the Gore-Booths, she is very successful in obtaining commissions. When the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland commissions her to portray his children in 1888, his choice reflects her position as the country’s foremost portraitist. Various portraits painted by Purser are held in the National Gallery of Ireland.
Purser finances An Túr Gloine (The Tower of Glass), a stained-glass cooperative, at 24 Upper Pembroke and runs it from its inauguration in 1903 until her retirement in 1940. Michael Healy is the first of a number of distinguished recruits, such as Catherine O’Brien, Evie Hone, Wilhelmina Geddes, Beatrice Elvery and Ethel Rhind. She is determined the stained-glass workshop should adhere to true Arts and Crafts philosophy. An Túr Gloine archive is held in the Centre for the Study of Irish Art, National Gallery of Ireland.
Purser does not produce many items of stained glass herself. Most of the stained-glass works are painted by other members of the co-operative, presumably under her direction. Two early works are St. Ita (1904) for St. Brendan’s Cathedral, Loughrea and The Good Shepard (1904) for St. Columba’s College, Dublin. Her last stained-glass work is believed to be The Good Shepard and the Good Samaritan (1926) for the Church of Ireland at Killucan, County Westmeath.
Until her death Purser lives for many years in Mespil House, a Georgian mansion with beautiful plaster ceilings on Mespil Road, on the banks of the Grand Canal. Here she is “at home” every Tuesday afternoon to Dublin’s writers and artists. Her afternoon parties are a fixture of Dublin literary life.
Purser dies in Dublin on August 7, 1943, and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery beside her brothers John and Louis. Mespil House is demolished after her death and developed into apartments.
Purser is the second woman to sit on the Board of Governors and Guardians, National Gallery of Ireland, 1914-1943. She is made an Honorary Member of the Royal Hibernian Academy in 1890, becoming the first female Associate Member in 1923 and the first female Member in 1924. Also, in 1924 she initiates the movement for the launching of the Friends of the National Collection of Ireland. Archives relating to Sarah Purser are housed in the Centre for the Study of Irish Art, National Gallery of Ireland.
(Pictured: Portrait of Sarah Purser by John Butler Yeats, c. 1880–1885)
John Dillon, a Member of Parliament (MP) for over 35 years and the last leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the struggle to secure Home Rule by parliamentary means, dies in a Londonnursing home on August 4, 1927. Through the 1880s he is perhaps the most important ally of the greatest 19th-century Irish nationalist, Charles Stewart Parnell, but, following Parnell’s involvement as co-respondent in a divorce case, he repudiates Parnell for reasons of political prudence.
Dillon is a member of the British House of Commons during 1880–1883 and 1885–1918. For his vigorous work in the Irish National Land League, which seeks fixed tenure, fair rents, and free sale of Irish land, he is imprisoned twice between May 1881 and May 1882. He is Parnell’s fellow inmate in Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin from October 1881. For six months in 1888 he is imprisoned for aiding William O’Brien, author of the “plan of campaign” against high rent charges by English absentee landlords in Irish farming districts.
When Parnell is named co-respondent in Captain William Henry O’Shea’s divorce suit in 1890, Dillon and O’Brien at first affirm their support of him, but they finally decide that he will thenceforth be a liability as party leader. The party then splits, the anti-Parnellite majority forming the Irish National Federation, of which Dillon serves as chairman from 1896. In 1900, however, he agrees to join a reunited party under the Parnellite John Redmond.
During the prime ministry of Arthur James Balfour (1902–1905), Dillon comes to believe that the British Conservative government intends to grant Irish reforms without independence, thereby “killing Home Rule by kindness.” In 1905 he advises Irishmen to vote for Liberal Party candidates for Parliament, and, after the Liberals had taken office that year, he supports their reform program.
Throughout World War I Dillon vehemently opposes the extension of British military conscription to Ireland, both because that measure would strengthen the agitation by the more extreme nationalistSinn Féin party and because he never accepted the view that British imperial interests necessarily coincided with those of Ireland. After the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, he protests against the harsh measures that ensue and, in the House of Commons, makes a passionate speech in defense of the Irish rebels.
Upon Redmond’s death on March 6, 1918, Dillon, who had broken with him over Irish support for the British war effort, succeeds him as Irish Parliamentary Party leader. By that time, however, the party has been discredited and in the 1918 Irish general election Sinn Féin wins easily. On losing his House of Commons seat to Éamon de Valera, the future president of the Republic of Ireland, he retires from politics.
The bomb is in a grey Saab 9000 near the Ealing Broadway station, restaurants and pubs on Uxbridge Road, which explodes shortly after midnight, injuring seven people. Debris from the blast spreads more than 220 yards. The bomb is timed to target leaving karaoke pub-goers, but while most escape injury, the explosion still causes significant damage to property, estimated to be around £200,000. The adjacent Ealing Broadway shopping centre is also damaged by flooding arising from the water main under the car bomb being ruptured.
Experts regard the bomb to be designed to look spectacular on CCTV for the purposes of “armed propaganda” rather than to cause large numbers of injuries. However, anti-terrorist detectives claim that the attack is planned to be a massacre and to cause as much carnage as the Omagh bombing three years earlier.
In November 2001, three men, Noel Maguire, Robert Hulme and his brother Aiden Hulme, are arrested in connection with the Ealing, BBC and Birmingham bomb attacks. They are all later convicted at the Old Bailey on April 8, 2003. Robert and Aiden Hulme are each jailed for twenty years. Noel Maguire, whom the judge says played “a major part in the bombing conspiracy,” is sentenced to twenty-two years.
Two other men, James McCormack of County Louth and John Hannan of Newtownbutler, County Fermanagh, had already admitted the charge at an earlier hearing. McCormack, who plays the most serious part of the five, is jailed for twenty-two years. John Hannan, who is seventeen at the time of the incidents, is given sixteen years of detention.
Harper exhibits regularly in Ireland and abroad. His paintings are well known for their metaphoric themes, including boats, the human form, landscape and angels usually in painterly expressive form.
Harper is influenced by Francis Bacon and David Hockney which is apparent in his portrait work. In his treatment of the human head, the influence of Bacon is obvious as is the work of the Irish artist Louis Le Brocquy. He is also influenced by the Irish artist Patrick Collins. For Harper the actual act of painting is what matters as he sees the actual process as one of exploration and discovery. He says, “the process, the making excites me more than any end product.”
Harper represents Ireland at International Biennials in many countries throughout his career. He receives many national awards for his painting, including first prize for his work commemorating the 1916 Easter Rising at the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, the Carrols Open Award at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in Dublin and The Arts councils Bonn an Uachtarain de Hide at the Oireachtas Art Exhibition. More recently he is awarded the BulBulia Award at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 2008.
“Painting being a cultural and creative activity should be accessible to all. Though it may also confuse the viewer. I find this totally understandable and acceptable, as art should challenge our perception and established aesthetic.”
(Pictured: Skellig Arrival, acrylic on linen by Charles Harper)
seamus dubhghaill 