Swanzy lives at 31 Railway Street and attends Morning Service at the Cathedral. At 1:06 p.m. as he is walking past the entrance to the Northern Bank (now Shannon’s Jewelers), he is shot by the IRA and dies at the scene.
In February 1921, a memorial is erected in the north wall of the Cathedral by his mother and sister. The brass tablet mounted in Irish Oak bears the following inscription:
“In proud and loving memory of Oswald Ross Swanzy DI Royal Irish Constabulary who gave his life in Lisburn on Sunday, August 22, 1920, and his gallant comrades who, like him, have been killed in the unfaltering discharge of their duty and in the service of their country. Be thou faithful unto death and I will give you a crown of life.”
In his book, Police Casualties in Ireland 1919 to 1922, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Inspector Richard Abbott says the decision to kill Swanzy is taken by Michael Collins himself who believes the officer had been the leader of the party of unidentified men who killed Tomás Mac Curtain, the Lord Mayor of Cork and Commandant of Cork Number One Brigade of the IRA.
With the help of RIC Sergeant Matt McCarthy, who had provided Collins with information in the past, Swanzy is traced to Lisburn. The Intelligence Officer of B Company of the IRA’s First Cork Battalion, Sean Culhane, is then sent to Belfast to link up with local IRA activists. On the day of the attack, Culhane and a number of Belfast IRA men leave the city in a taxi and make their way to Lisburn.
Culhane and Roger McCorley, a Belfast member of the IRA, walk up to Swanzy and shoot him at close range. They, along with their accomplices, then run in pairs along Castle Street with another man in the middle of the road. They continue to fire as they make their way to the taxi which is waiting outside the Technical College.
The vehicle starts to move off before McCorley reaches it and he is forced to throw himself into the car. As he does so he lands in a heap on the back floor of the car and accidentally fires a round from his revolver inside the taxi.
A member of the public notes the taxi’s number as it leaves Lisburn and the driver is arrested later that afternoon. He tells police he works for the Belfast Motor Cab and Engineering Co. at Upper Library Street. At 11:45 a.m., he says he had been sent to the Great Northern Railway Station in Great Victoria Street to collect a fare who wanted to “take a run along the County Down coast.” The taxi driver is later tried for the killing of Swanzy but is found not guilty.
The IRA killing of Detective Inspector Swanzy leads to bitter sectarian rioting in Lisburn. A number of Catholics are murdered and others assaulted and terrorised as their homes and businesses are burned by mobs on the rampage. Journals kept at the time recall how groups of people wait at Lambeg to attack Catholics fleeing the town on the main Belfast Road. This forces many to leave Lisburn by way of the mountain route into the city as columns of smoke rise into the air above the town.
Workers at local mills are also called upon to sign the following declaration: “I…. …hereby declare I am not a Sinn Féiner nor have any sympathy with Sinn Féin and do declare I am loyal to king and country.” Violence also sweeps across Belfast in the wake of the Market Square attack.
A total of 22 people are killed in one week and on August 24 the authorities swear in a number of special constables to try to regain control of the situation. This is the first time since the start of the IRA campaign in 1919 that Special Constables have to be used.
(From: “Assassination of Detective Inspector Oswald Ross Swanzy,” Lisburn.com)
The Bachelor’s Walk massacre occurs in Dublin on July 26, 1914, when a column of troops of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers is accosted by a crowd on Bachelor’s Walk following the Howth gun-running operation. After some verbal baiting, the troops attack “hostile but unarmed” protesters with rifle fire and bayonets, resulting in the deaths of four civilians and injuries to in excess of 30 more. The four killed are Mary Duffy (50), Patrick Quinn (50), James Brennan (18) and Sylvester Pidgeon (40) who succumbs to his wounds on September 24. One of those shot is Luke Kelly, the father of folk singer Luke Kelly.
The events follow the landing of 1,500 rifles and ammunition, purchased for the Irish Volunteers in Hamburg, Germany, in May 1914. In a counter operation to the Unionistsrunning guns into Ulster, Erskine Childers lands the cargo in Howth, County Dublin, and a thousand rifle-carrying Irish Volunteers marched into Dublin. The quantity is negligible when compared to the far greater numbers of weapons landed and distributed by the Ulster Volunteers, completely without hindrance, but the reaction this time is severe from the British ruling authorities.
The incident proves a moment of political opportunity for Irish nationalists as it sharply brings out the different treatment for the Unionists and for unarmed Dublin civilians. Patrick Pearse declares, “The army is an object of odium, and the Volunteers are the heroes of the hour. The whole movement, the whole country, has been re-baptised by bloodshed for Ireland.”
Murdoch is the daughter of Irene Alice (née Richardson) and Wills John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant, comes from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down. In 1915, he enlists as a soldier in King Edward’s Horse and serves in France during World War I before being commissioned as a second lieutenant. Her mother trains as a singer before Iris is born and is from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Her parents first meet in Dublin when her father is on leave and are married in 1918. Iris is the couple’s only child. When she is a few weeks old the family moves to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class clerk. She is a second cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch.
From 1947 to 1948 Murdoch studies philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. She meets Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge but does not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College professorship before she arrives. In 1948 she becomes a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she teaches philosophy until 1963. From 1963 to 1967 she teaches one day a week in the General Studies department at the Royal College of Art.
In 1956 Murdoch marries John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, whom she had met in Oxford in 1954. The unusual romantic partnership lasts more than forty years until Murdoch’s death. Bayley thinks that sex is “inescapably ridiculous.” She in contrast has “multiple affairs with both men and women which, on discomposing occasions, Bayley witnesses for himself.”
Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, is published in 1954 and is selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. She had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. She goes on to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well as poetry and drama.
Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, is published in 1995. She is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997 and dies on February 8, 1999, in Oxford, England. There is a bench dedicated to her in the grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she enjoyed walking.
Maturin is born on February 15, 1847, at All Saints’ vicarage, Grangegorman, Dublin, the third of the ten children of the Rev. William Basil Maturin and his wife, Jane Cooke (née Beatty). The Maturins, a prominent Anglo-Irish family of Huguenot ancestry, have produced many influential Church of Ireland clergymen over the generations, the most notable being Maturin’s grandfather, the writer Charles Robert Maturin. His own father, whose tractarian convictions are considered too “high church” for many in Dublin, is a somewhat controversial figure in the church. Religion plays a huge part in the Maturin children’s lives. Two of his brothers enter the church and two sisters become nuns. As a young man, he assists in training the choir and playing the organ at his father’s church. Educated at home and at a Dublin day school, he goes on to attend Trinity College Dublin (TCD), from where he graduates BA in 1870.
Though he initially intends to make a career in the army as an engineer, a severe attack of scarlet fever around 1868, and the death of his brother Arthur, changes his outlook on life, and he decides to become a clergyman. He is ordained a deacon in 1870 and later that year goes as a curate to Peterstow, Herefordshire, England, where his father’s friend Dr. John Jebb is rector. He subsequently joins the Society of St. John the Evangelist, entering the novitiate at Cowley, Oxford, in February 1873. As a Cowley father he is sent in 1876 to establish a mission in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he works as an assistant priest and, from 1881, as rector of Saint Clement’s Church. Though he proves to be an effective clergyman and popular preacher, his growing religious doubts and increasing interest in Catholicism results in his returning to Oxford in 1888. Then follows a six-month visit in 1889–90 to a society house in Cape Town, South Africa. He returns to Britain, where he preaches, and conducts retreats around the country and occasionally on the continent. In 1896 he produces the first in a series of religious publications, Some Principles and Practices of Spiritual Life.
Maturin’s continuing religious anxieties eventually lead to his conversion to Catholicism on March 5, 1897, at the JesuitBeaumont College outside London. He then studies theology at the Canadian College, Rome, and is ordained there in 1898. Following his return to England he lives initially at Archbishop’s House, Westminster, and undertakes missionary work. He then serves at St. Mary’s, Cadogan Street, in 1901. He becomes parish priest of Pimlico and, in 1905, having joined the newly established Society of Westminster Diocesan Missionaries, organises the opening of St. Margaret’s chapel on St. Leonard’s Street, where huge crowds come to hear his sermons. As a Catholic priest, he returns to Ireland on several occasions, and frequently preaches at the Carmelite church, Clarendon Street, Dublin. His attempt, at the age of sixty-three, to enter into monastic life at the Benedictinemonastery at Downside, in 1910, proves unsuccessful. He returns to London and begins working in St. James’s, Spanish Place, while maintaining his preaching commitments. He continues to write, publishing Self-Knowledge and Self-Discipline (1905), Laws of the Spiritual Life (1907) and his autobiographical The Price of Unity (1912), in which he traces his gradual move toward Catholicism. His sermons, like his approach when hearing confessions, are said to have much appeal for their integrity. Despite his influence as a preacher, he seems often feel that his life and vocation lack real purpose and at times he suffers from depression.
After a brief visit to the United States in 1913, Maturin accepts the post of Catholic chaplain at the University of Oxford in 1914. He travels to New York in 1915 and, after preaching there throughout the spring, boards the RMS Lusitania in May to return to England. The liner is torpedoed and sinks on May 7, 1915, off the southern coast of Ireland. He assists his fellow passengers in the last minutes, and it is presumed that he refuses a life jacket, as they are in short supply. His body washes ashore. A service is held for him at Westminster Cathedral.
Maturin’s friend Wilfrid Philip Ward edits a collection of his spiritual writings, Sermons and Sermon Notes, in 1916.
(From: “Maturin, Basil William” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
In a letter to his family written on April 30, 1916, Thomas MacDonagh recalls “I was astonished to receive by a messenger from P.H. Pearse, Commandant General of the Army of the Irish Republic, an order to surrender unconditionality to the British General. I did not obey the order as it came from a prisoner. I as then in supreme command of the Irish Army, consulted with my second in command and decided to confirm the order. I knew that it would involve my death and the deaths of other leaders. I hoped that it would save many true men among our followers, good lives for Ireland. God grant it has done so and God approve our deed. For my self I have no regret. The one bitterness that death has for me is the separation it brings from my beloved wife Muriel, and my beloved children, Donagh and Barbara. My country will then treat them as wards, I hope. I have devoted myself too much to National work and too little to the making of money to leave them a competence. God help them and support them, and give them a happy and prosperous life. Never was there a better, truer, purer woman than my wife Muriel, or more adorable children than Don and Barbara. It breaks my heart that I shall never see my children again, but I have not wept or murmured. I counted the cost of this and am ready to pay it. Muriel has been sent for here. I do not know if she can come. She may have no one to take the children while she is coming. If she does.”
MacDonagh and Pearse are contemporaries of one another: poets, progressive educators, Gaelic revivalists. They are men who gird for battle “with a revolver in one hand and a copy of Sophocles in the other.” Each man commands a unit of Irish Volunteers during the Easter Rising, which takes place the week of April 24-30,1916. MacDonagh occupies Jacob’s biscuit factory and Pearse the General Post Office (GPO), from which he issues the surrender at the end of the week.
McDonagh and Pearse are signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a document issued by the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army at the beginning of the Easter Rising, proclaiming Ireland’s independence from the United Kingdom. The reading of the proclamation by Pearse outside the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin‘s main thoroughfare, marks the beginning of the Rising.
Pearse’s and MacDonagh’s signatures on the Proclamation are a fatal endorsement for them and for each of the other five men to lend it their signatures. After being court-martialed, both Pearse and MacDonagh, along with Thomas Clarke, are executed by firing squad at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin on May 3, 1916, the first of the rebels to be executed.
(Pictured: Thomas McDonagh (left) and Patrick Pearse)
McLaughlin is one of ten children of Patrick McLaughlin, butcher and cattle dealer, and Annie McLaughlin (née Doherty). He starts singing in local churches in the Bogside at the age of seven, and as a teenager adds two years to his age to enlist in the Irish Guards, later serving abroad with the Palestine Police Force, before returning in the late 1930s to join the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC).
Known as The Singing Bobby, McLaughlin becomes a local celebrity before starting to work in the UK variety circuit, where he also plays summer seasons in English seaside resorts. The renowned Irish tenor John McCormack (1884–1945) advises him that his voice is better suited to a lighter repertoire than the operatic one he has in mind and urges him to find an agent. He finds the noted impresario Jack Hylton (1892–1965) who books him but is unable to fit his full name on the bill, thus Joseph McLaughlin becomes Josef Locke.
Locke makes an immediate impact when featured in “Starry Way,” a twenty-week summer show at the Opera House Theatre in Blackpool, Lancashire, England in 1946 and is rebooked for the following summer, then starring for three seasons at the Blackpool Hippodrome. He appears in ten Blackpool seasons from 1946 to 1969, not the nineteen seasons he later claims.
Locke makes his first radio broadcast in 1949 and subsequently appears on television programmes such as Rooftop Rendezvous, Top of the Town, All-star Bill and The Frankie Howerd Show. He is signed to the Columbia label in 1947, and his first releases are the two Italian songs “Santa Lucia” and “Come Back to Sorrento.”
In 1947, Locke releases “Hear My Song, Violetta,” which becomes forever associated with him. It is based on a 1936 tango “Hör’ mein Lied, Violetta” by Othmar Klose and Rudolf Lukesch. The song “Hör’ mein Lied, Violetta” is often covered, including by Peter Alexander and is itself based on Giuseppe Verdi‘s La traviata. His other songs are mostly a mixture of ballads associated with Ireland, excerpts from operettas, and familiar favourites.
In 1948, Locke appears in several films produced by Mancunian Films, usually as versions of himself. He plays himself in the film Holidays with Pay. He also appears as “Sergeant Locke” in the 1949 comedy What a Carry On!
In 1958, after Locke has appeared in five Royal Variety Performancetelecasts, and while he is still at the peak of his career, the British tax authorities begin to make substantial demands that he declines to meet. Eventually he flees the country for Ireland, where he lays low for several years. When his differences with the taxman are eventually settled, he relaunches his career in England with tours of the northern variety clubs and summer seasons at Blackpool’s Queen’s Theatre in 1968 and 1969, before retiring to County Kildare, emerging for the occasional concert in England. He later appears on British and Irish television, and in November 1984 is given a lengthy 90-minute tribute in honour of the award he is to receive at the Olympia Theatre commentating his career in show business on Gay Byrne‘s The Late Late Show. He also makes many appearances on the BBC Television‘s long running variety show The Good Old Days.
In 1991, the Peter Chelsom film Hear My Song is released. It is a fantasy based on the notion of Locke returning from his Irish exile in the 1960s to complete an old love affair and save a Liverpool-based Irish night-club from ruination. Locke is played by Ned Beatty, with the singing voice of Vernon Midgley. The film leads to a revival in Locke’s career. A compilation CD is released, and he appears on This Is Your Life in March 1992. He performs in front of the Prince and Princess of Wales at the 1992 Royal Variety Performance, singing “Goodbye,” the final song performed by his character in the film. He announces prior to the song that this will be his final public appearance.
Locke dies at the age of 82 at a nursing home in Clane, County Kildare on October 15, 1999, and is cremated at Glasnevin Cemetery. He is survived by his wife, Carmel, and a son.
On March 22, 2005, a bronze memorial to Locke is unveiled outside the City Hotel on Queen’s Quay in Derry by Phil Coulter and John Hume. The memorial is designed by Terry Quigley. It takes the form of a spiraling scroll divided by lines, representing a musical stave. The spiral suggests the flowing melody of a song and is punctuated by images illustrating episodes in his life, including Locke in police uniform, Blackpool Tower, Carnegie Hall, and the musical notes of the opening lines of “Hear My Song.”
A biography of the singer, entitled Josef Locke: The People’s Tenor, by Nuala McAllister Hart is published in March 2017, the centenary of his birth. The book corrects many myths that the charismatic Locke circulated about his career.
O’Malley is one of eight surviving children of Joseph O’Malley, civil engineer, and his wife, Mary “Cis” (née Tooher). Born into a wealthy middle-class family, he is educated by the Jesuits at Crescent College and later at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare. He later studies at University College Galway (UCG), where he is conferred with a degree in civil engineering in 1943. He later returns to Limerick, where he works as an engineer before becoming involved in politics.
O’Malley plays rugby at provincial level for Munster, Leinster and Connacht and at club level for Bohemians and Shannon RFC. His chances at an international career are ruined by the suspension of international fixtures during World War II. It is at a rugby match in Tralee that he first meets Dr. Hilda Moriarty, who he goes on to marry in August 1947.
Although O’Malley runs as a Fianna Fáil candidate, he is born into a politically active family who supports Cumann na nGaedheal until a falling-out with the party in the early 1930s. He first becomes involved in local politics as a member of Limerick Corporation. He becomes Mayor of Limerick in 1961, the third O’Malley brother to hold the office (Desmond from 1941-43 and Michael from 1948-49). He is a strong electoral performer, topping the poll in every general election he runs in.
O’Malley is first elected to Dáil Éireann as a Fianna Fáil TD for Limerick East at the 1954 Irish general election. Fianna Fáil is not returned to government on that occasion. He spends the rest of the decade on the backbenches. However, his party is returned to power in 1957. Two years later, the modernising process begins when Seán Lemass takes over from Éamon de Valera as Taoiseach. Lemass introduces younger cabinet ministers, as the old guard who has served the party since its foundation in 1926 begin to retire.
In 1961, O’Malley joins the government as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance. He is part of a new, brasher style of politician that emerges in the 1960s, sometimes nicknamed “the men in the mohair suits.” It is expected that this generation of politician, born after the Irish Civil War, will be a modernising force in post-de Valera Ireland.
Although his sporting background is in rugby and swimming, it is association football which O’Malley gets involved in at a leadership level, becoming President of the Football Association of Ireland despite never having played the sport.
Following Fianna Fáil’s retention of power in the 1965 Irish general election, O’Malley joins the cabinet as Minister for Health. He spends just over a year in this position before he is appointed Minister for Education, a position in which he displays renowned dynamism. Having succeeded Patrick Hillery, another dynamic young minister, he resolves to act swiftly to introduce the recommendations of an official report on education.
As Minister for Education, O’Malley extends the school transport scheme and commissions the building of new non-denominational comprehensive and community schools in areas where they are needed. He introduces Regional Technical Colleges (RTCs), now called Institutes of Technology, in areas where there is no third level college. The best example of this policy is the University of Limerick, originally an Institute of Higher Education, where O’Malley is credited with taking the steps to ensure that it becomes a university. His plan to merge Trinity College Dublin and University College Dublin arouses huge controversy, and is not successful, despite being supported by his cabinet colleague Brian Lenihan. Access to third-level education is also extended, the old scholarship system being replaced by a system of means-tested grants that give easier access to students without well-off parents.
Mid-twentieth century Ireland experiences significant emigration, especially to the neighbouring United Kingdom where, in addition to employment opportunities, there is a better state provision of education and healthcare. Social change in Ireland and policies intending to correct this deficit are often met with strong resistance, such as Noël Browne‘s proposed Mother and Child Scheme. As a former Health Minister, O’Malley has first-hand experience of running the department which had attempted to introduce this scheme and understood the processes that caused it to fail, such as resistance from Department of Finance and John Charles McQuaid. This influences his strategy in presenting the free-education proposal.
Shortly after O’Malley is appointed, he announces that from 1969 all education up to Intermediate Certificate level will be without cost, and free buses will bring students in rural areas to their nearest school, seemingly making this decision without consulting other ministers. However, he does discuss it with Lemass. Jack Lynch, who, as Minister for Finance, has to find the money to pay for the programme, is not consulted and is dismayed at the announcement.
By announcing the decision first to journalists and on a Saturday (during a month when the Dáil is in recess), the positive public reaction tempers resistance to the idea before the next cabinet meeting. O’Malley’s proposals are hugely popular with the public, and it is impossible for the government to go back on his word.
Some Irish commentators consider that O’Malley’s extension of education, changing Ireland from a land where the majority are schooled only to the age of 14 to a country with universal secondary-school education, indirectly leads to the Celtic Tiger boom of the 1990s-2000s when it is followed for some years by an extension of free education to primary degree level in university, a scheme that is launched in 1996 by the Labour Party and axed in 2009 by Fianna Fáil’s Batt O’Keeffe.
In 1967, O’Malley appoints Justice Eileen Kennedy to chair a committee to carry out a survey and report on the reformatory and industrial school systems. The report, which is published in 1970, is considered ground-breaking in many areas and comes to be known as the Kennedy Report. The Report makes recommendations about a number of matters, including the Magdalene laundries, in relation to which they are not acted upon. The report recommends the closure of a number of reformatories, including the latterly infamous reformatory at Daingean, County Offaly.
O’Malley’s reforms make him one of the most popular members of the government. He is affectionately known as “the School Man” for his work in education. His sudden death in Limerick on March 10, 1968, before his vision for the education system is completed, comes as a shock to the public. He is buried with a full Irish state funeral.
Following O’Malley’s death, his widow, Hilda O’Malley, does not run in the subsequent by-election for the seat he has left vacant. It is won narrowly by their nephew Desmond O’Malley. Hilda seeks the Fianna Fáil nomination for the 1969 Irish general election, but Fianna Fáil gives the party nomination to Desmond, as the sitting TD. Hilda runs as an Independent candidate in that election. After what proves a bitter campaign against her nephew, she fails to get the fourth seat in Limerick East by just 200 votes.
On a cold December day in 1919, a group of young IRA volunteers wait at a public house near the Ashtown gate of Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Some are from Dublin, members of Michael Collins’ recently created assassination unit, the Squad. Others are from farther afield, like Dan Breen and Seán Treacy from County Tipperary and Martin Savage from County Sligo.
They are waiting for Sir John French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the most senior British official in the land. He is returning from a visit to the west of Ireland and has alighted at Ashtown train station before returning by car to his official residence, the Viceregal Lodge, in the Phoenix Park.
The IRA men have a signaler in a tree and when French’s car approaches, they attempt to block the road with a farm cart. However, they are too late to block the Lord Lieutenant’s car which sweeps through the impromptu barricade. Shots are fired and one policeman is wounded but French himself emerges unscathed.
A second car, which the IRA believes to contain French, bears the brunt of the volunteers’ revolver fire and grenades. Though the car is badly damaged, there are no casualties.
The third car in the convoy contains French’s military escort and the soldiers inside the vehicle return fire, killing one of the attackers, Martin Savage. Some of the volunteers attempt to recover his body but the Crown forces’ fire is too heavy. Savage’s body is left on the scene as the IRA party flees on bicycles back to the city.
The Irish Times, for one, expresses outrage at the attack, “the attempted assassination of the greatest of Irishmen” which it says will “shock Ireland” and force Sinn Féin, victorious in the election of the previous year, to reflect on whether it wants to be associated with “outrage and assassination.” “There will now be many throughout the world ready to attribute the character of a murder society to the whole new Irish movement.”
Many in Ireland are even less sympathetic to hear of the escape of the Lord Lieutenant. The Irish Catholicbishops issue a statement the next day condemning not the attack but British rule in Ireland, which they characterise as “rule of the sword, utterly unsuited to a civilised nation.”
The attack is, in hindsight, a turning point, moving the standoff over Irish independence toward all out guerrilla warfare, but also, in a way, symbolising the eclipse of French and of his vision for what the country should be.
Sir John French’s health declines in 1920 and though he holds the position of Lord Lieutenant until April 1921, his central role in Irish affairs is eclipsed by new Chief Secretary for Ireland Sir Hamar Greenwood. He wants to retire to his estates in Ireland in 1922 but is told it is simply too dangerous for him. During the Irish Civil War (1922-23), his country house at Drumdoe, County Roscommon, is raided by armed men who carry off much of the furniture.
(From: “Today in Irish History: 19 December 1919, The Attempted Assassination of Sir John French” by John Dorney, The Irish Story, http://www.theirishstory.com, December 18,2019 | Pictured: L to R, Sir John French and Martin Savage)
John James Bernard (J. B.) Malone, an Irish hillwalking enthusiast who popularises the pastime through his television programmes and books, is born on December 13, 1913, in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. He is responsible for the establishment of the Wicklow Way as a recognised walking trail, having first proposed it in 1966.
Malone is born to James Bernard Malone and his wife, Agnes (née Kenny), both from Dublin. He is raised mainly in England and completes his secondary education at the Marist Brothers College, Grove Ferry, Kent.
Malone moves to Ireland in 1931 where he finds employment in a builders’ providers firm and an insurance company before joining the Irish Army in 1940. There he becomes a cartographer in the intelligence section. In 1947, having left the army, he goes to work at the Department of Posts and Telegraphs as a draughtsman. He remains employed in the Irish civil service until his retirement in 1979. Also in 1947, he marries Margaret Garry, and they have three children.
Malone starts hillwalking in 1931 when he climbs Montpelier Hill to visit the ruins of the Hell Fire Club. Later, while on leave during his military career, he develops a detailed knowledge of walking routes throughout the hills of County Wicklow. He sits on the Board of An Taisce in Ireland from 1970 to 1974.
Following his retirement from the civil service, Malone is appointed as a field officer with the Long-Distance Walking Routes Committee of Cospóir, the Irish Sports Council. There, he negotiates rights of way with landowners to enable his vision of the Wicklow Way to become a reality. He first proposes a guided walking route through the Wicklow hills in 1966, although he had first raised the idea as early as 1942.
From 1938 to 1975 Malone contributes a regular column to the Evening Herald entitled Over the Hills. Between 1967 and 1968 he writes the column Know your Dublin, illustrated by Liam C. Martin. The column features information on a Dublin landmark and is later compiled into a book published in 1969.
During the 1960s, Malone presents a television documentary series on RTÉ entitled Mountain and Meadow, in which, accompanied by a cameraman, he introduces viewers to a variety of hill walks in Wicklow and surrounding counties. In 1980, he presents a one-hour TV programme on the newly opened Wicklow Way.
From 1950 to 1988, Malone writes several books on hillwalking in the Dublin Mountains and the Wicklow Mountains.
In 1980, Malone is made an honorary life member of An Óige, the Irish Youth Hostel Association (IYHA), in recognition of his contribution to promoting the Irish countryside.
Following his death in 1989, Malone’s contribution to hillwalking in Ireland is marked by the erection of the J.B. Malone Memorial Stone plaque in his honour on a section of the Wicklow Way overlooking Lough Tay.
In October 2014, on the 25th anniversary of Malone’s death, the South Dublin Libraries hold an exhibition on his life and work.
(Pictured: The John James Bernard Malone memorial, on the Wicklow Way overlooking Lough Tay and Luggala)
Eileen Quinn, age 24 and within two months of the birth of her fourth child, is shot by Galway police on November 1, 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), while holding her nine-month-old child in her arms and sitting on the lawn in front of her farmhouse at Kiltartan near Gort, bleeding to death later that night. She leaves three children, the eldest of whom is not yet four years old.
Afraid of ambushes, police have begun to “reconnoiter by fire,” shooting blindly into woods and possible ambush sites. Quinn is near one such site when the police open fire, and she is hit by a stray bullet.
At the time of the shooting, her husband Malachy Quinn, who is a farmer, is in Gort. Another messenger going to Ardrahan for Dr. Foley is, it is reported, wounded by a bullet. Uniformed men pass into Gort subsequently firing shots. When the lorry passes the house where the dying woman lay, the terror-stricken occupants flee by the back way.
Rev. Fr. John Considine, C.C., Gort, gives a graphic description of Quinn’s last moments.
“It is too awful, too inhuman, to contemplate.” These are Father Considine’s opening remarks concerning the tragedy. Pressed to explain what occurred, he says, “I have read of Turkish atrocities; I have read of the death of Joan of Arc; I have read of the sufferings of Nurse Cavell, and as I read those things I often felt my blood boil and I often prayed that the good God might change the minds and hearts of those cruel monsters.”
“Little did I then dream that I should witness a tragedy, an atrocity more hideous, more revolting, more frightful, more brutal, more cruel than any of those things, and here in our own little peaceful parish of Gort. My God, it is awful! About three o’clock on Tuesday, Malachy Quinn weeping bitterly, called for me. Father, says he, ‘I have just heard that my wife had been shot. Will you run down immediately?’ I procured a motor car and hurried to the scene. At the gateway there we beheld a large pool of blood. In the yard another pool, and the porch leading to the kitchen was covered with blood. I entered the room. Oh, God! what a sight. There lay the poor woman, the blood oozing out through her clothes.”
“She turned her eyes towards me and said, ‘Oh, Father John, I have been shot.’ ‘Shot!’ I exclaimed. ‘Yes,’ she replied. By whom, I asked. ‘Police’ she answered.”
Quinn then becomes weaker, Father Considine explains, and on rallying exclaims, “Father John, will you do something for me?” He tries to console her and administers the Last Sacrament.
“When I finished, she whispered to me, bring me Malachy, bring him to me, I hear him crying. I have something to tell him. I did so. What a scene. Then she became weak and fainted off. Gradually she became worse.”
“I sent word immediately to the Head Constable at Gort. He arrived with police and military. All seemed shocked at the tragedy. I asked him to go in and see the woman. He and his men felt the trial too much, as he answered, ‘I cannot.’ No trace of the bullet could be found.”
Continuing, Father Considine says Quinn is sitting on the lawn with her child when the lorry passes from which the fatal shot is fired. The bullet pierces her stomach and the child she is holding falls from her arms. She crawls over the wall into the yard, and then crawls to the porch to tell her servant that she has been shot. “Take in the little children!” she exclaims.
From 3:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. she lingers on in pain. Occasionally she clasps Father Considine’s hand and pulls him toward her, and says, “I’m done, I’m done!” At 10:30 her condition becomes worse, and they kneel by her bedside to recite the Rosary and prayers for the dying. She tries to join but is too weak.
At 10:45 p.m. the little children begin to cry, and with them the crowded house bursts into tears. As Father Considine reads the last prayer of the Ritual she looks around, then closes her eyes and dies.
Irish public opinion is outraged when a military court of inquiry subsequently returns a verdict of “death by misadventure.” Soon afterward, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Headquarters and the Chief of Police issue orders against wild firing from motor vehicles.
seamus dubhghaill 