Doran tours with Benson and other managements, and plays in the West End before setting up his own company in 1920. He leads it for eleven years, before leaving Britain to work in India. On his return he works on stage and makes occasional television appearances.
Doran is the son of Charles Jenkins Doran. He is educated in Cork and privately. In 1899, he makes his stage debut as a member of Frank Benson’s touring company, in Julius Caesar at the Theatre Royal, Belfast. He remains with Benson for two and a half years, during which he makes his London debut, as Captain MacMorris in Henry V at the Lyceum Theatre.
In October 1910, returning to England, Doran plays La Tribe in Count Hannibal at the New Theatre, after which he is Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Garrick Theatre to the Falstaff of Asche. For the next ten years he plays in new, ephemeral works, interspersed with classics. Among his roles in the latter are Constantine Levin in Anna Karenina (1913), Douglas in Henry IV, Part 1and the Constable of France in Henry V (1914) in London, and a variety of Shakespeare parts at the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (1919).
In February 1920, Doran begins touring with his own Shakespearean company, playing Hamlet, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Brutus in Julius Caesar, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Prospero in The Tempest, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Falstaff, Henry V, and Jaques in As You Like It. He has a keen eye for rising talent, and among his recruits are Noel Streatfeild, Cecil Parker, Ralph Richardson, Edith Sharpe, Norman Shelley, Abraham Sofaer, Francis L. Sullivan and Donald Wolfit.
In 1931, Doran goes to India as director of Shakespeare’s plays at the State Theatre in Jhalawar and then on to Bombay where he performs primarily in Shakespeare on the radio. He returns to England in 1937. His last London appearance is in Song of Norway (1949). His last Shakespearean role in the theatre is Time in The Winter’s Tale (1951). He continues to act on stage in other parts until 1954. He appears on BBC Television as a senator in Othello in 1950 and Adabashev, the tragedian in Curtain Down in 1952.
Doran dies in Folkestone on the south coast of England on April 5, 1964, at the age of 87. An article on him published by Emory University in 2003 sums up his career thus:
On stage in one role or another, Doran’s fifty-seven years in the theatre made him a major force in the profession, particularly in his productions of Shakespeare. Such was his energy and enthusiasm that he kept alive for a few more years the actor-manager system when the major talents, men like Tree, Benson, and Irving, had dissolved their companies. Doran was indeed the last of his theatrical breed.
Mitchel is born Jane Verner around 1820 near Newry, County Down. At the time she, her brother and her mother, Mary Ward, are living with Captain James Verner (1777–1847), who is from a prominent Armagh family, and is involved in the Orange Order, going on to become Orange deputy grandmaster of Ireland in 1824. Although James Verner raises Mitchel, she is not believed to be his child. She attends Miss Bryden’s School for Young Ladies in Newry.
Mitchel meets her husband, John Mitchel, when she is fifteen. The couple elopes in November 1836, but do not marry as James Verner pursues them to Chester and brings her home to Ireland. They elope again in 1837, and are married at Drumcree Church, County Armagh, on February 3. At this point, Mitchel is disowned by James Verner, and goes to live with her in-laws at Dromalane, County Down. They then move to Banbridge in 1839 where her husband practises law. The couple goes on to have six children, three daughters and three sons.
The couple moves to Dublin in October 1845 when John Mitchel becomes the assistant editor of The Nation. They live at 8 Ontario Terrace, Rathmines, where they meet Young Irelanders. She is a full supporter of her husband’s nationalism. She aids in his work with The Nation, reading other newspapers, keeping and filing reference clippings, going on to become an editor and anonymous contributor to the United Irishman from February 1848. John Mitchel is convicted of treason for inciting insurrection in May 1848, and is sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. Mitchel urges his fellow Young Irelanders to fight his removal, and denounces them when they fail to come out in support of him.
Due to her standing in the nationalist community, £1,450 is raised to support her and her family. For three years, Mitchel lives in Newry and Dublin, before she joins her husband in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in June 1851, where they settle in the village of Bothwell. Their youngest child, Isabel, is born there in 1853.
The Mitchels travel around the island with her husband, visiting fellow Irish exiles, becoming fond of William Smith O’Brien in particular.
When John Mitchel escapes in July 1853, Mitchel travels with her children to join him in Sydney, from where they sail to the United States. They live for a time in Brooklyn, New York, from 1853 to 1855, rekindling friendships with old friends who are fellow Young Ireland exiles.
In May 1855, the family moves to a remote farm at Tucaleechee Cove in Tennessee. She fears that the isolation and life in a primitive log cabin will be detrimental to their children’s education, and at her behest the family moves to Knoxville, Tennessee, in September 1856. From here, John Mitchel runs a pro-slavery newspaper, the Southern Citizen.
The family moves again in December 1858 to Washington, D.C. Mitchel supports her husband in the Southern cause, albeit with some reservation. Nothing, she says, will induce her “to become the mistress of a slave household.” Her objection to slavery is “the injury it does to the white masters.”
Mitchel accompanies her husband to Paris in September 1860, and in opposition to some of the family, she supports her daughter Henrietta’s conversion to Catholicism and entrance into a convent. She remains in Paris and Ireland with her daughters, while her husband and sons assist the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Without letting her husband know, she resolves to return to America when she hears of her youngest son, William’s, death at Gettysburg in July 1863. She sails with her daughters, Mary and Isabel, as Henrietta had died earlier the same year. While their ship runs a blockade by the Union, the ship is shelled, runs aground, and catches fire near the coast of North Carolina. She and her daughters are unhurt, but lose all of their possessions. By December 1863, she has joined her husband in Richmond, Virginia, remaining their for the rest of the Civil War. Their eldest son, John, is killed in action in July 1864.
The family returns to New York after the war, and John Mitchel sets up another paper, The Irish Citizen (1867–72). Due to lack of funding for the Irish American press and her husband’s ill health results in the family falling into poverty. This is alleviated by a testimonial raised by William and John Dillon in 1873. Mitchel is widowed in March 1875, going on to receive $30,000 from nationalist sympathisers. She invests this money in a photolithographic firm she and her son, James, run. She dies at home in Bedford Park, New York, on December 31, 1899. She is buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York, with her plot marked with a large Celtic cross. She is survived by two of her children, James (1840–1908) and Mary (1846–1910).
O’Hegarty is born to John and Katherine (née Hallahan) Hegarty. His parents’ families emigrate to the United States after the Great Famine, and his parents are married in Boston, Massachusetts. His father is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
O’Hegarty is educated at North Monastery CBS, where he forms an enduring friendship with Terence MacSwiney. In 1888, his father dies of tuberculosis at the age of 42. Left destitute, his mother pawns her wedding ring to pay for an advertisement looking for work, and eventually becomes a cook.
O’Hegarty serves at the main Postal Sorting Office in Mount Pleasant, London, from 1902 to 1913. Along with J. J. Walsh, he spends three years at King’s College London, studying for the Secretary’s Office. While he succeeds in his studies, Walsh does not and returns to Ireland. O’Hegarty becomes the IRB representative for South East England and joins the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin and becomes a strong advocate of the Irish language. In 1905, he is elected secretary of the local Dungannon Club, which draws in as members Robert Lynd, Herbert Hughes and George Cavan. In 1907, as Sinn Féin’s London Secretary, he approves and signs the membership card of Michael Collins, later becoming friend and mentor to Collins.
O’Hegarty has to return to Ireland for a break due to overwork in 1909 and gives up some of his work for the Gaelic League. However, he takes over as editor of the IRB publication, Irish Freedom. It is in this publication that he famously writes, concerning the visit of King George V to Ireland in 1911: “Damn your concessions, England: we want our country!” In 1912, at the height of the Playboy riots, he writes four articles entitled “Art and the Nation” in Irish Freedom, which take a very liberal and inclusionist approach to Anglo-Irish literature and art in general but invokes the wrath of many of the paper’s readers.
In 1913, he is re-posted to Queenstown (present-day Cobh) as postmaster. He continues editing nationalist newspapers such as Irish Freedom (founded in 1910 and suppressed in December 1914 on account of its seditious content) and An tÉireannach and joins the Irish Volunteers. At the outbreak of war he is moved to Shrewsbury, probably on account of his political activities. In 1915, he marries Wilhelmina “Mina” Smyth, a schoolteacher and suffragist, and is then moved to Welshpool, Montgomeryshire. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, he is opposed to physical force. In 1918, he refuses to take the British Oath of Allegiance and resigns his position in the Post Office.
O’Hegarty feels that the Abbey Theatre is “doing good for Ireland” and supports W. B. Yeats against attacks from Arthur Griffith and like-minded Nationalists. He opposes the extremist views of D. P. Moran, who seeks a Roman Catholic Irish-speaking Ireland.
O’Hegarty is Secretary of the Irish Department of Post and Telegraphs from 1922 to 1945. He is elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1954.
O’Hegarty’s son, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, is a founder of the Irish-language publishing house Sáirséal agus Dill. His daughter Gráinne, a harpist, marries Senator Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats.
Deegan studies architecture at Cooper Union. He marries Violet Secor (1889-1969) and has one son, William Secor Deegan (1909-85). At the age of 35 he serves in World War I as a staff officer in the 105th Field Artillery, rising to the rank of major.
Deegan later joins the United States Army Corps of Engineers as a major, where he supervises the construction of military bases in the New York area under the command of GeneralGeorge Washington Goethals. After the war he helps organize the American Legion in 1919, advancing to State Commander in 1921. In 1922 he is considered a strong candidate to become national commander of the Legion at their convention in New Orleans but is defeated due to his strong advocacy for admitting Black veterans into the organization. Advocacy for the rights of Black people is a strong theme throughout Deegan’s career, including during his position as Tenement House Commissioner.
Deegan works as an architect at a number of distinguished firms, including McKim, Mead & White, Post, Magnicke and Franke, and Starrett and van Vleck. Later in life he holds a number of political positions, most of them in the Bronx. He is President of the Bronx Chamber of Commerce until the chamber grows critical of MayorJimmy Walker, at which point he resigns. In 1928, Mayor Walker appoints him Tenement House Commissioner of New York City, a post he holds for the rest of his life, and in 1930, chairman of the Mayor’s Committee on Receptions to Distinguished Guests, or “official greeter,” a job in which he is preceded by his friend Rodman Wanamaker and eventually succeeded by Grover Whalen.
On April 25, 1915, west of Cape Helles, Gallipoli, Ottoman Empire, Kenealy is 28 years old when he performs an act of bravery for which he is awarded the Victoria Cross. Three companies, and the Headquarters of the 1st Bn. Lancashire Fusiliers, in effecting a landing on the Gallipoli Peninsula to the west of Cape Helles, are met by a very deadly fire from hidden machine guns which causes a great number of casualties. The survivors, however, rush up to and cut the wire entanglements, notwithstanding the terrific fire from the enemy, and after overcoming supreme difficulties, the cliffs are gained and the position is maintained. Among the many very gallant officers and men engaged in this most hazardous undertaking, Capt. Willis, Serjt. Richards, and Pte. Kenealy are selected by their comrades as having performed the most signal acts of bravery and devotion to duty.
Kenealy is one of the six members of the regiment elected by their colleagues in the regiment for the award, and described in the press as “six VC’s before breakfast.” Lieutenant-General Sir Ian Hamilton, the overall Allied army commander at Gallipoli, orders that the beach be renamed Lancashire Landing because of his conviction that “no finer feat of arms has ever been achieved by the British Soldier – or any other soldier – than the storming of these beaches.”
Shortly afterward, Kenealy is promoted to corporal and then lance sergeant. He is seriously wounded in the Battle of Gully Ravine on June 28, 1915, and dies the following day. He is buried at Lancashire Landing Cemetery on the Gallipoli Peninsula.
Maolra Seoighe (English: Myles Joyce), is an Irish man who is wrongfully convicted and hanged on December 15, 1882. He is found guilty of the Maumtrasna Murders and is sentenced to death. Though he can only speak Irish, the case is heard in English without any translation service. He is posthumously pardoned in 2018.
Seoighe is the most prominent figure in a controversial trial in 1882 that takes place while Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. Three Irish language speakers are condemned to death for the murder of a local family (John Joyce, his wife Brighid, his mother Mairéad, his daughter Peigí and son Mícheál) in Maumtrasna, on the border between County Mayo and County Galway. It is presumed by the authorities to be a local feud connected to sheep rustling and the Land War. Eight men are convicted on what turns out to be perjured evidence and three of them condemned to death: Maolra Seoighe (a father of five children), Pat Casey and Pat Joyce.
Covering the incident, The Spectator writes the following:
“The Tragedy at Maumtrasna, investigated this week in Dublin, almost unique as it is in the annals of the United Kingdom, brings out in strong relief two facts which Englishmen are too apt to forget. One is the existence in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men; and the other is their extraordinary and exceptional gloominess of temper. In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands, and in one or two mountain districts, dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians.”
The court proceedings are carried out in a language the accused do not understand (English), with a solicitor from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), who does not speak Irish. The three are executed in Galway by William Marwood for the crime in 1882. The role of John Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, who is then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, is the most controversial aspect of the trial, leading most modern scholars to characterise it as a miscarriage of justice. Research carried out in The National Archives by Seán Ó Cuirreáin, has found that Spencer “compensated” three alleged eyewitnesses to the sum of £1,250, equivalent to €157,000 (by 2016 rates).
As of 2016, nobody has issued an apology or pardon for the executions, though the case has been periodically taken up by various political figures. The then MP for Westmeath, Timothy Harrington, takes up the case, claiming that the Crown Prosecutor for the case George Bolton, had deliberately withheld evidence from the trial. In 2011, two sitting members of the House of Lords, the Liberal Democrat life peers David Alton and Eric Lubbock, request a review of the case. Crispin Blunt, ToryParliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice, states that Seoighe was “probably an innocent man,” but he does not seek an official pardon.
Seoighe’s final words are: “Feicfidh mé Iosa Críost ar ball beag – crochadh eisean san éagóir chomh maith. … Ara, tá mé ag imeacht … Go bhfóire Dia ar mo bhean agus a cúigear dílleachtaí.” (I will be seeing Jesus Christ soon – he too was also unjustly hanged … I am leaving … the blessings of God on my wife and her five orphans.)
On April 4, 2018, Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, issues a pardon on the advice of the government of Ireland saying “Maolra Seoighe was wrongly convicted of murder and was hanged for a crime that he did not commit”. It is the first presidential pardon relating to an event predating the foundation of the state in 1922 and the second time a pardon has been issued after an execution. Seoighe’s case is not an isolated one, and there are strong similarities with the case of Patrick Walsh who was hanged in the Galway jail on September 22, 1882, just three months before Seoighe for the murders of Martin and John Lydon. The same key players and political factors are active in both cases and his conviction is just as questionable as that of Seoighe.
In September 2009, the story is featured on RTÉ‘s CSI programme under an episode entitled CSI Maamtrasna Massacre. A dramatised Irish language film regarding the affair, entitled Murdair Mhám Trasna, produced by Ciarán Ó Cofaigh is released in 2017.
Marrinan becomes ill with infantile paralysis at the age of five, and as a result is tutored privately. He has no formal training in art but is largely influenced by his reading matter, particularly the American comic strips of Bud Fisher. The variety of facial expressions that Fisher can achieve, with only a pencil, intrigues and inspires him. Likewise, the images evoked by Celtic mythology and religious art also contributes to his visual language, and many hours are spent in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery studying the paintings in their collection.
Marrinan exhibits with the Ulster Academy of Arts from an address at 524 Donegall Road, Belfast, entering “The Wee Gate, Earl Street, Belfast” (1931) and “The Painter’s Father” and the “Apache” (1934), which is judged “picture of the year.” He last exhibits with a landscape, “Connemara,” along with four other works in 1949.
Marrinan paints and sketches portraits of many notable Irish figures, among which is the charcoal drawing of northern Fenian Robert Johnston (1934; National Gallery of Ireland) and a sketch of the Donegal storyteller Niall Duffy (University College Dublin). His literary portraits include one of Brian Friel. He holds a one-man show in 1951 at 55a Donegall Place, Belfast, where he exhibits a bust of John McLaverty. He takes an interest in sculpture although painting and drawing remain his preferred form of expression. Important commissions are for a memorial portrait (completed 1952) of Éamonn Ceannt for Ceannt Barracks officers’ mess, Curragh Camp, County Kildare, and for a portrait of Vice-brigadier Peadar Clancy for Clancy Barracks, Dublin. He paints two memorial portraits of PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, one of which is in the Irish Club, London.
Marrinan is an honorary member of the Royal Ulster Academy and exhibits with them every year from 1950 onward, showing a portrait of Mrs. Padraig Marrinan in 1967 (no other details of his marriage are known). He is preparing for an exhibition to be held at the Irish Club, London, in 1974, but dies on October 25, 1973, at Tyrone County Hospital in Omagh. He is then living at James Street, Omagh.
(From: “Marrinan, Padraig H.” by Ruth Devine, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “The River Lee, Cork City, Ireland” by Padraig Marrinan, oil on canvas)
Lyons is born in to Margaret (née Sullivan) and Timothy Lyons senior, who is listed on his birth certificate as a cottier. He is the oldest of six siblings. Prior to the Irish Civil War, he works as a labourer. He fights with the IRA’s Kilflynn Company during the Irish War of Independence. He is described as being slight, “adventurous” as a column leader and a marksman who shoots at small birds. He shoots a British officer in an ambush led by captain George O’Shea at Shannow Bridge where the Kilflynn road joins the R557, forcing a retreat. He gains the nickname “Aeroplane” or “Aero” because of the way he suddenly appears and his last-minute escapes. Because of regular searches by Black and Tans, his father fears the family home will be burnt out and asks him to leave.
After the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Lyons fights against Free State forces . At the time of his death he is commandant. He is involved in fighting in Listowel and Limerick, is captured near Athea, jailed in Limerick and released in late 1922 with an undertaking not to rejoin the fight. Notwithstanding this, the column continues to operate, generally around Causeway and Ballyduff.
On April 15, 1923, Lyons’ column attacks a Free State raiding party in Meenoghane, County Kerry. The raiding party receives reinforcements. He and his men are eventually surrounded at nearby Clashmealcon on April 16 by Michael Hogan’s 1st Western Division. They descend the rugged, Atlantic cliffs to the caves and hide in Dumfort’s Cave. He shoots out searchlights with his Lee-Enfield rifle and two Free State soldiers are shot dead from the cave. The situation is under Army Emergency Powers. With no escape for the men hiding, troops try to blast them out by dropping mines and smoke them out with petrol-soaked turf.
On April 16, James McGrath, the brother of Thomas McGrath, one of Lyons’s men, is arrested and taken to the cliffs in order to enter the cave and persuade the men to surrender. On the night of April 17-18, Thomas McGrath and Patrick O’Shea, his first cousin, fall trying to scale the cliffs to escape and drown. After offering to surrender himself on the morning of the April 18, Lyons falls several metres onto rocks from a rope that is provided by National Army troops. He is then shot multiple times by troops from the cliff top and is not recovered.
Three of Lyons’ men who surrender, Edmond Greaney, James McEnery and British deserter-turned-republican Reginald Stephen Hathaway, are executed in Ballymullen Barracks by gunshot on April 25, for breaking their undertaking not to take up arms against the Free State, attacking troops at Clashmealcon, burning the Civic Guard station at Ballyheigue, stripping the same Civic Guards and robbing the post office at Ballyduff.
Lyons’ decomposing body, minus a leg, is washed up on May 5, identifiable by a boot. He is buried alongside George O’Shea and Timothy Tuomey (both killed at Ballyseedy) in the Republican plot at Kilflynn Church (now St. Columba’s Heritage Centre).
(Pictured: Kilflynn IRA Flying Column, 1922. Back (L to R): Denis O’Connell (Lixnaw), Stephen Fuller (Kilflynn), William Hartnett (Mountcoal), Tim Twomey (Kilflynn). Front (L to R): Terry Brosnan (Lixnaw), John McElligott (Leam, Kilflynn), Danny O’Shea (Kilflynn), Timothy (Aero) Lyons (Garrynagore), Tim Sheehy (Lyre), Pete Sullivan (Ballyduff), Paddy Mahony (Ballyegan, Battalion O.C.).)
Plunkett is educated expensively: at a primary school in Nice, making him fluent in French and Italian, then at Clongowes Wood College, and, from 1872, at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where his generous allowance allows him to study renaissance and medieval art. He enrolls at King’s Inns in 1870 and the Middle Temple in 1874, but is not called to the bar until 1886. While there he befriends Oscar Wilde and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. In 1877, he endows a university gold medal for Irish speakers and publishes a book of poems, God’s Chosen Festival, and the following year he issues a pamphlet, The Early Life of Henry Grattan. He also writes articles for magazines, editing a short-lived one, Hibernia, for eighteen months from 1882. In 1883, he donates funds and property to the nursing order of the Little Company of Mary (Blue Sisters), and on April 4, 1884, Pope Leo XIII makes him a count.
On June 26, 1884, Plunkett marries Mary Josephine Cranny (1858–1944). The couple has seven children: Philomena (Mimi) (b. 1886), Joseph (b. 1887), Mary Josephine (Moya) (b. 1889), Geraldine (b. 1891), George Oliver (b. 1894), Fiona (b. 1896), and Eoin (Jack) (b. 1897).
In 1894, Plunkett part-edits Charles O’Kelly‘s memoir The Jacobite War in Ireland. By 1900, when he publishes the standard biography Sandro Botticelli, he is supplementing his income by renewed artistic studies, which until 1923 finances his lease of Kilternan Abbey, County Dublin. His Pinelli (1908) is followed by Architecture of Dublin, and, in 1911, by his revised edition of Margaret McNair Stokes‘s Early Christian Art in Ireland. In 1907, he becomes director of the National Museum of Ireland, where he increases annual visits from 100 to 3,000.
Joseph Plunkett swears his father into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in April 1916, sending him secretly to seek German aid and a papal blessing for the projected Easter rising. After its defeat, Plunkett is sacked by the National Museum of Ireland and deported with the countess to Oxford, and the following January he is expelled by the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). This earns him nomination as the surviving rebels’ candidate in the North Roscommon by-election. He returns to Ireland illegally on January 31, 1917, and wins the seat easily three days later. Pledging abstention from attendance at Westminster in accordance with Sinn Féin policy, he initiates a Republican Liberty League, which coalesces with similar groups such as Sinn Féin. In October this front becomes the new Sinn Féin, committed to Plunkett’s republic rather than to the “king, lords and commons“ of Arthur Griffith. Plunkett and Griffith become the new party’s vice-presidents, under Éamon de Valera.
On May 18, 1918, Plunkett is interned again. Released after Sinn Féin’s general election landslide (in which he is returned unopposed), he presides, Sinn Féin’s oldest MP, at the planning meeting for Dáil Éireann on January 17, 1919, and at its opening session on January 21. On the 22nd he is made foreign affairs minister by Cathal Brugha, an appointment reaffirmed by de Valera on April 10. He criticises his president for advocating a continuing Irish external relationship with Britain, and fails to organise an Irish foreign service. In February 1921, de Valera makes Robert Brennan his departmental secretary and a ministry takes shape, while Plunkett publishes a book of poems, Ariel. After uncontested “southern Irish“ elections to the Second Dáil, de Valera moves his implacable foreign minister from the cabinet to a tailor-made portfolio of fine arts. Plunkett’s Dante sexcentenary commemoration is overshadowed by news of the Anglo–Irish Treaty. Opposing this, Plunkett cites his oath to the republic and its martyrs including his son. He leaves his ministry on January 9, 1922.
Plunkett chairs the anti-treaty Cumann na Poblachta, which loses the June general election, though he is returned again unopposed. In the Irish Civil War the treatyites intern him and the republicans appoint him to their council of state. In the August 1923 Irish general election, his first electoral contest since 1917, the interned count tops the poll in County Roscommon. He is released in December.
When de Valera forms Fianna Fáil in 1926, Plunkett stays with Sinn Féin, and loses his deposit in the June 1927 Irish general election. A year later he publishes his last poetry collection, Eros. He runs for a new Cumann Poblachta na hÉireann in a County Galway by-election in 1936, but loses his deposit again. On December 8, 1938, with the other six surviving abstentionist Second Dáil TDs, he transfers republican sovereignty to the IRA Army Council.
Plunkett is a big man with a black beard which whitens steadily after his fiftieth birthday. He is always formally pleasant and courteous. His oratory is described by M. J. MacManus as “level, cultured tones . . . [more] used to addressing the members of a learned society than to the rough and tumble of the hustings” (The Irish Press, March 15, 1948). Theoretically and practically, he is more scholar than politician. His portrait is on display at the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI).
Plunkett dies from cancer on March 12, 1948, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, survived by his children Geraldine (wife of Thomas Dillon), Fiona, and Jack. His grandson Joseph (1928–66), son of George Oliver Plunkett, inherits the title.
(From: “Plunkett, Count George Noble” by D. R. O’Connor Lysaght, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Corrigan is the son of a dealer in agricultural tools. He is educated in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, which then has a department for secular students apart from the ecclesiastical seminary. He is attracted to the study of medicine by the physician in attendance, and spends several years as an apprentice to the local doctor, Edward Talbot O’Kelly. He studies medicine in Dublin later transferring to Edinburgh Medical School where he receives his degree as MD in August 1825.
Corrigan returns to Dublin in 1825 and sets up a private practice at 11 Ormond Street. As his practice grows, he moves to 12 Bachelors Walk in 1832, and in 1837 to 4 Merrion Square West. Apart from his private practice, he holds many public appointments. He is a physician to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the Sick Poor Institute, the Charitable Infirmary Jervis Street (1830–43) and the House of Industry Hospitals (1840–66). His work with many of Dublin’s poorest inhabitants leads to him specialising in diseases of the heart and lungs, and he lectures and published extensively on the subject. He is known as a very hard-working physician, especially during the Great Famine of Ireland. At the 1870 Dublin City by-election he is elected a LiberalMember of Parliament for Dublin City. In parliament he actively campaigns for reforms to education in Ireland and the early release of Fenian prisoners. He does not stand for re-election in 1874. His support for temperance and Sunday closing (of pubs) antagonises his constituents and alcohol companies
In 1847, Corrigan is appointed physician-in-ordinary to the Queen in Ireland. Two years later he is given an honorary MD from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1846, his application to become a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) is blocked. In 1855, he gets around this opposition by sitting the college’s entrance exam with the newly qualified doctors. He becomes a fellow in 1856, and in 1859 is elected president, the first Catholic to hold the position. He is re-elected president an unprecedented four times. There is a statue of Corrigan in the Graves’ Hall of the college by John Henry Foley.
Corrigan is President of the Royal Zoological Society of Ireland, the Dublin Pathological Society, and the Dublin Pharmaceutical Society. From the 1840s he is a member of the senate of the Queen’s University and in 1871 becomes its vice-chancellor. In 1866, he is created a baronet, of Cappagh and Inniscorrig in County Dublin and of Merrion Square in the City of Dublin, partly as a reward for his services as Commissioner of Education for many years. He is a member of the board of Glasnevin Cemetery and a member of the Daniel O’Connell Memorial Committee. Armand Trousseau, the French clinician, proposes that aortic heart disease should be called Corrigan’s disease.
The Corrigan Ward, a cardiology ward in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin is named in his honour. Part of his family crest is also part of the Beaumont Hospital crest.
Corrigan marries Joanna Woodlock, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and sister of the Bishop Dr. Bartholomew Woodlock, in 1827. They have six children, three girls and three boys. Hus eldest son, Captain John Joseph Corrigan, Dragoon Guards, dies on January 6, 1866, aged 35 years and is interred at the Melbourne General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia.
Corrigan dies at Merrion Square, Dublin, on February 1, 1880, having suffered a stroke the previous December. He is buried in the crypt of St. Andrews Church on Westland Row, Dublin. His grandson succeeds him to the baronetcy.
seamus dubhghaill 