FitzGerald joins Fine Gael, attaching himself to the liberal wing of the party. and in 1969 is elected to Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. He later gives up his university lectureship to become Minister for Foreign Affairs in the coalition government of Liam Cosgrave (1973–77). When the coalition government is resoundingly defeated in the 1977 Irish general election, Cosgrave yields leadership of Fine Gael to FitzGerald. In his new role as Leader of the Opposition and party leader, he proceeds to modernize and strengthen the party at the grass roots. He briefly loses power in 1982 when political instability triggers two snap elections.
By the time of the 1981 Irish general election, Fine Gael has a party machine that can easily match Fianna Fáil. The party wins 65 seats and forms a minority coalition government with the Labour Party and the support of a number of Independent TDs. FitzGerald is elected Taoiseach on June 30, 1981. To the surprise of many, FitzGerald excludes Richie Ryan, Richard Burke and Tom O’Donnell, former Fine Gael stalwarts, from the cabinet.
On May 5, 2011, it is reported that FitzGerald is seriously ill in a Dublin hospital. Newly elected Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny sends his regards and calls him an “institution.” On May 6 he is put on a ventilator. On May 19, after suffering from pneumonia, he dies at the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin at the age of 85.
In a statement, Irish PresidentMary McAleese hails FitzGerald as “a man steeped in the history of the State who constantly strove to make Ireland a better place for all its people.” Taoiseach Enda Kenny pays homage to “a truly remarkable man who made a truly remarkable contribution to Ireland.” Henry Kissinger, the former United States Secretary of State, who serves as an opposite number to FitzGerald in the 1970s, recalls “an intelligent and amusing man who was dedicated to his country.”
FitzGerald’s death occurs on the third day of Queen Elizabeth II‘s state visit to the Republic of Ireland, an event designed to mark the completion of the Northern Ireland peace process that had been “built on the foundations” of FitzGerald’s Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher in 1985. In a personal message, the Queen offers her sympathies and says she is “saddened” to learn of FitzGerald’s death.
On his visit to Dublin, United States PresidentBarack Obama offers condolences on FitzGerald’s death. He speaks of him as “someone who believed in the power of education; someone who believed in the potential of youth; most of all, someone who believed in the potential of peace and who lived to see that peace realised.”
FitzGerald is the author of a number of books, including Planning in Ireland (1968), Towards a New Ireland (1972), Unequal Partners (1979), All in a Life: An Autobiography (1991), and Reflections on the Irish State (2003).
O’Faolain is born in Dublin on March 1, 1940, the second of nine children of Tomás O’Faolain and Kathleen O’Sullivan. Originally a schoolteacher and Army lieutenant, under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan, her father becomes a prominent social diarist for the Evening Press in Dublin. He is distant from his children and engages in extra-marital affairs which produce at least two half-siblings. Despite earning as much money as the newspaper’s editor, Douglas Gageby, he does not share his income with his family. The family lives in poor conditions, frequently going hungry. Her mother becomes an alcoholic, going to the pub every day at 4 p.m. and not returning home until midnight.
O’Faolain attends convent school in Dublin but is expelled at the age of fourteen after going home from dances with a married man. She then goes to a boarding school in County Monaghan, whose austere environment and strict educational standards benefit her. From there, she studies English literature at University College Dublin (UCD), where she runs in a social circle that includes Mary Lavin, John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. Although she drops out of her studies temporarily and spends time working menial jobs in England, with financial assistance from Lavin and others, she graduates in 1961. On scholarships, she studies medieval English at the University of Hull before completing a postgraduate degree in 19th-century English literature at the University of Oxford. She then returns to Dublin to work at UCD as an academic in the English literature department, which brings her into contact with the bohemian Dublin literary scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1970, O’Faolain moves to London to work for the BBC. She is a producer at the Community Programme Unit, which seeks to allow members of the public to create programmes for national broadcast on human interest topics like transgender people, anti-pornography protests, and community organising in the Bogside. She also makes programmes with the arts faculty of the Open University, and teaches evening classes at Morley College. During this period, she shows little interest in Ireland, regarding the country as backward and unsophisticated, but a visit to the Merriman Summer School in County Clare in 1974 sparks new enthusiasm. In 1977, she moves back to Dublin to work for the public broadcaster, RTÉ, where she becomes a colleague of female journalists like Doireann Ní Bhriain, Marian Finucane, and Nell McCafferty – later her partner – who are making programmes about Irish society with a feminist bent. She Is the producer of Women Today, a pioneering radio programme, from 1983 to 1986. One series she works on, Plain Tales, a televised interview programme in which women speak directly to camera about their life experiences, wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985.
O’Faolain has an interest in books from an early age, and credits voracious reading for helping her through a difficult childhood. She works as a book reviewer for The Times. Between 1990 and 1993, she co-presents Booklines, a television programme about books for RTÉ, a programme she says “nobody ever watched because it was on terribly late at night.”
In 1986, Conor Brady, the editor of The Irish Times, offers O’Faolain a newspaper column after hearing her being interviewed by Gay Byrne on the radio. Brady is struck by her ability to “infuse ordinary people’s everyday activities with value and interest.” The column becomes a major success and she is awarded journalist of the year in 1986.
O’Faolain acts as a roving commentator for The Irish Times, covering the 1994 Cregg Wood murders in County Clare, and visiting Northern Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Following periods of leave while she works on her books, she leaves the paper in 2002, and writes a column in the Sunday Tribune from 2005 until her death.
O’Faolain never marries and has no children. Although she writes about her relationships with men and women, she does not identify as bisexual, though others have described her as such. She suffers from alcoholism. After Are You Somebody?, she divides her time between Ireland and New York City. During the final years of her life, she is in a relationship with a Brooklyn-based lawyer, John Low-Beer, whom she meets on Match.com.
O’Faolain is diagnosed with metastatic cancer while living in New York City in early 2008. She experiences a strange feeling in the right side of her body and presents at the emergency department of a hospital, where she is told that she has primary tumours in her lungs which has spread to her brain and liver, and that her cancer is incurable. She refuses chemotherapy.
O’Faolain returns to Ireland and is interviewed by her friend, Marian Finucane, on her radio show about her terminal illness on April 12, 2008. Both O’Faolain and Finucane are in tears during the interview, which is recorded in Galway, where she is undergoing radiotherapy. She tells Finucane: “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life”. Her frank discussion of her illness leads to the interview being preceded by a warning that her comments may be upsetting to others with life-threatening conditions. She says that she does not believe in God or an afterlife, but as in the song “Thíos i Lár an Ghleanna,” she is asking for help she knows will not come from a god she does not believe in. The interview has a major public impact in Ireland. After Finucane’s death in 2020, the Irish Independent describes it as “one of the most extraordinary [interviews] in the history of Irish broadcasting.”
In the final weeks of her life, O’Faolain travels Europe with close friends and family, staying in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and visiting the Berlin State Opera and the Prado Museum in Madrid for the first time. She dies in a hospice in Blackrock, Dublin, late on May 9, 2008. Her funeral takes place in the Church of Our Lady of the Visitation in Fairview in north Dublin on May 13. Her ashes are buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery in north Dublin with her maternal grandparents, Terence and Marion O’Sullivan, and her brother, Dermot Phelan.
Mitchel is born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Derry, on November 3, 1815, the son of a Presbyterian minister. At the age of four, he is sent to a classical school, run by an old minister named Moor, nicknamed “Gospel Moor” by the students. He reads books from a very early age. When a little over five years old, he is introduced to Latin grammar by his teacher and makes quick progress. In 1830, not yet 15 years old, he enters Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) and obtains a law degree in 1834.
In the spring of 1836, Mitchel meets Jane Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner. Though both families are opposed to the relationship, they become engaged in the autumn and are married on February 3, 1837, by the Rev. David Babington in Drumcree Church, the parish church of Drumcree.
Mitchel works in a law office in Banbridge, County Down, where he eventually comes into conflict with the local Orange Order. He meets Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy during visits to Dublin. He joins the Young Ireland movement and begins to write for The Nation. Deeply affected by the misery and death caused by the Great Famine, he becomes convinced that nothing will ever come of the constitutional efforts to gain Irish freedom. He then forms his own paper, United Irishmen, to advocate passive resistance by Ireland’s starving masses.
In May 1848, the British tire of Mitchel’s open defiance. Ever the legal innovators in Ireland, they invent a crime especially for the Young Irelanders – felony-treason. They arrest him for violating this new law and close down his paper. A rigged jury convicts him, and he is deported first to Bermuda and then to Australia. However, in June 1853, he escapes to the United States.
Mitchel works as a journalist in New York City and then moves to the South. When the American Civil War erupts, he is a strong supporter of the Southern cause, seeing parallels with the position of the Irish. His family fully backs his commitment to the Southern cause. He loses two sons in the war, one at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and another at the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1864, and another son loses an arm. His outspoken support of the Confederacy causes him to be jailed for a time at Fort Monroe, where one of his fellow prisoners is Confederate PresidentJefferson Davis.
In 1874, the British allow Mitchel to return to Ireland and in 1875 he is elected in a by-election to be a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom representing the Tipperary constituency. However, his election is invalidated on the grounds that he is a convicted felon. He contests the seat again in the resulting by-election and is again elected, this time with an increased vote.
Unfortunately, Mitchel, one of the staunchest enemies to English rule of Ireland in history, dies in Newry on March 20, 1875. He is buried in his parents’ grave in the unitarian cemetery, High Street, Newry, where a monument is later erected by his widow. He is also commemorated by a statue in Newry. Thirty-eight years later, his grandson, John Purroy Mitchel, is elected Mayor of New York City.
O’Hanrahan is the son of Richard Hanrahan, a cork cutter, and Mary Williams. His father appears to have been involved in the 1867 Fenian rising. The family moves to Carlow, County Carlow, where he is educated at Carlow Christian Brothers School and Carlow College Academy. On leaving school he works various jobs including a period alongside his father in the cork-cutting business. In 1898, he joins the Gaelic League and in 1899 founds the League’s first Carlow branch and becomes its secretary. Also in 1899 he helps found a working men’s club in Carlow. By 1903 he is in Dublin, where he is working as a proofreader for the Gaelic League printer An Cló Cumann. He publishes journalism under the by-lines “Art” and “Irish Reader” in several nationalist newspapers, including Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteer. He is the author of two novels, A Swordsman of the Brigade (1914) and When the Norman Came (published posthumously in 1918).
In 1903, O’Hanrahan becomes involved in Maud Gonne’s and Arthur Griffith‘s campaign against the visit of King Edward VII to Ireland. The encounter with Griffith leads O’Hanrahan to join the newly formed Sinn Féin. He also becomes a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). In November 1913, he joins the Irish Volunteers. He is later employed as an administrator on the Volunteers headquarters staff. He is made quartermaster general of the 2nd Battalion. He and the commandant of the 2nd Battalion, Thomas MacDonagh, become close friends.
During the Easter Rising O’Hanrahan is second in command of Dublin’s 2nd Battalion under MacDonagh. He fights at Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, though the battalion sees little action other than intense sniping throughout Easter week, as the British Army largely stays clear of the impregnable factory dominating the road from Portobello Barracks on one side and Dublin Castle on the other. When the situation becomes desperate O’Hanrahan tells MacDonagh they “were inviting destruction of the factory by incendiary shells, and also of the surrounding thickly populated area.” MacDonagh orders a break-out amidst the chaos and confusion. O’Hanrahan leads “with some difficulty” the garrison out of the factory through New Bride Street gate.
O’Hanrahan is executed by firing squad on May 4, 1916 at Kilmainham Gaol. His brother, Henry O’Hanrahan, is sentenced to penal servitude for life for his role in the Easter Rising. After his execution, his mother and three sisters open a shop near Mountjoy Prison where they develop a secret line of communications between prisoners and their visitors.
Williams is born on May 4, 1838, in Coleraine, County Londonderry. He claims to be descended on his father’s side from Worcestershireyeomen living in the parishes of Tenbury and Mamble. On his mother’s side he descends from Scottish settlers who planted Ulster in 1610. He is educated at Belfast Academy in Belfast under Dr. Reuben John Bryce and at a Greenwich private school under Dr. Goodwin. Later on, he goes to the southern United States for his health and takes part in a filibustering expedition to Nicaragua, where he sees some hard fighting and reportedly wins the reputation of a blockade runner. He is separated from his party and is lost in the forest for six days. Fevered, he discovers a small boat and manages to return to the nearest British settlement. He serves in the London Irish Rifles and has the rank of sergeant.
Williams returns to England in 1859, where he becomes a volunteer, and a leader writer for the London Evening Herald. In October 1859, he begins a connection with The Standard which lasts until 1884. From 1860 until 1863, he works as a first editor for the London Evening Standard and from 1882 until 1884, as editor of The Evening News.
Williams is best known for being a war correspondent. He is described as an admirable war correspondent, a daring rider as well as writer. For The Standard, he is at the headquarters of the Armée de la Loire, a French army, during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. He is also one of the first correspondents in Strasbourg, where the French forces are defeated. In the summer and autumn of 1877, he is a correspondent to Ahmed Muhtar Pasha who commands the Turkish forces in Armenia during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and 1878. He remains constantly at the Turkish front, and his letters are the only continuous series that reaches England. In 1878, he publishes this series in a revised and extended form as The Armenian Campaign: A Diary of the Campaign on 1877, in Armenia and Koordistan, which is a large accurate record of the war, even though it is pro-Turkish. From Armenia, he follows Muhtar Pasha to European Turkey and describes his defence of the lines of Constantinople against the Imperial Russian Army. He is with General Mikhail Skobelev at the headquarters of the Imperial Russian Army when the Treaty of San Stefano is signed in March 1878. He reports this at the Berlin Congress.
At the end of 1878, Williams is in Afghanistan reporting the war, and in 1879 publishes the Notes on the Operations in Lower Afghanistan, 1878–9, with Special Reference to Transport.
In 1887, Williams meets with then General of the United States Army, Philip Sheridan, in Washington, D.C. to update the general on European affairs and the prospects of upcoming conflicts.
Williams is said to possess a voice of thunder and expresses with terrific energy. He conducts a lecture tour of the United States where he describes the six campaigns, illustrated by limelight photographs. His audience in Brooklyn, New York, is described by The New York Times as highly delighted by his lecture about the hardships and adventures. His presentation is “a feast for the eyes and ears and was highly appreciated by the large audience assembled.” He later tours England, Scotland, and Ireland speaking about his then seven campaigns.
Williams also writes fiction, including his book John Thaddeus Mackay, a tale about religious tolerance and understanding. With the sanction of Commander in Chief, Field MarshalGarnet Wolseley, he edits a book Songs for Soldiers for the March The Camp and the Barracks to improve morale and relieve boredom. Included in the book are a number of songs that he composed. He also writes about ecclesiastical questions, and contributes articles and stories to different periodicals.
Williams is a strong adherent to Wolseley’s military views and policy, and has considerable military knowledge. He also publishes military subjects in several publications such as the United Service Magazine, the National Review, and other periodicals. In 1892, he publishes Life of Sir H. Evelyn Wood, which is controversial as he defends the actions of Wood after the Battle of Majuba Hill in 1881. In 1902, he publishes a pamphlet, entitled Hush Up, in which he protests against the proposed limited official inquiry into the South African War and calls for an investigation.
Early in his career, Williams shares an office with friend and colleague Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, who later becomes Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. They have a standing tradition of always sending out for two beers with payment alternating between each man. Many years later, Williams is in the lobby of the House of Lords and Gascoyne-Cecil approaches him with an outstretched hand and asks, “By the way, Mr. Williams, whose turn is it to stand the beer?”
In 1884, the steamer carrying Williams and colleague Frederic Villiers of The Graphic overturns in the Nile River. Their rescue leads Williams to later commission a unique ivory and gold mitre for the Bishop of London as a thank-offering to God for his safe return from Khartoum.
Williams receives a personal invitation from King Edward VII to attend the funeral of his mother, Queen Victoria.
Both of Williams‘a sons became journalists. Frederick is a noted parliamentary reporter, writer, and historian in Canada. Francis Austin Ward Williams practices journalism in Sydney, Australia.
In the Nile Campaign of 1884-85, application is made to the War Office with the support of the Commander in Chief Lord Wolseley for medals for Willams and correspondent Bennet Burleigh. Williams has been twice requested to take command of some of the men by senior officers on the spot. The Secretary of War is unable to grant the recognition under the rules of the day but writes a letter saying that he regrets that this must be his decision.
Williams is a recipient of the Queen’s Sudan Medal, an award given to British and Egyptian forces which took part in the Sudan campaign between 1896 and 1898.
Field Marshall Garnet Wolseley recognizes the contributions of Williams on the battlefield. He says in a speech that from “Charles Williams, he had at various times received the greatest possible help in the field.”
Williams dies in Brixton, London, on February 9, 1904. He is buried in Nunhead Cemetery in London. His son, journalist Fred Williams, first learns of his father’s death on the wire service he is monitoring at his newspaper in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Williams’s funeral is well attended by the press as well as members of the military including Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood. Colleague Henry Nevison writes a long reflection on Williams. It includes, “On the field he possessed a kind of instinctive sense of what was going to happen. When I went to big field-days with him he was already an elderly man, and much broken down with the hardships of a war correspondent’s life; but he invariably appeared at the critical place exactly at the right moment, and I once heard the Duke of Connaught, who was commanding, say, ‘When I see Charlie Williams shut up his telescope, I know it’s all over.’ And now he is gone, with his rage, his generosity, his innocent pride, his faithful championship of every friend, and his memories of so many a strange event. His greatest joy was to encourage youth to follow in his steps, and the world is sadder and duller for his going.”
In 1849, O’Donoghue, together with William Smith O’Brien, Terence MacManus, Thomas Francis Meagher and many others, are on board the prisoner transport ship The Swift for a six-month, 14,000-mile journey under difficult conditions on which some fellow prisoners do not survive.
On January 26, 1850, “Using materials he had begged and borrowed” as one account gives it, O’Donoghue starts publishing in Hobart a weekly newspaper named The Irish Exile, aimed mainly at fellow Irish prisoners and deportees and considered to be the first Irish Nationalist paper to be published in Australia.
The paper features Irish ballads and poetry, articles about Irish history, and a regular column by John Martin reporting on the situation of the Repeal Movement, a campaign to repeal the Acts of Union 1800 under which the Irish Parliament had been abolished. There is also local news of the Irish deportee community, then numbering in the thousands, and of Hobart daily life in general.
O’Donoghue uses The Irish Exile to publish excerpts of his journal aboard The Swift, which are reprinted in Australian, British and Irish newspapers. Brisbane‘s The Moreton Bay Courier, reprinted from Dublin’s The Nation, finds that the journal “will show how severely the tyrannical government of England visited the offences of the Ballingarry cabbage-tree heroes. The studies of Messrs. O’Brien, Meagher (afterwards O’), and O’Donoghoe, will amuse the reader”. While in Van Diemen’s Land, The Examiner, the daily newspaper of Launceston, Tasmania, reprints London‘s The Examiner‘s view that “a singularly large amount of mercy has been shown to those grown-up children who made the escapade from Dublin to raise the standard of Irish rebellion at Ballingarry. One of the worthies, Mr. Patrick O’Donoghue, has published an account of his deportation; and certainly a more pleasureable [sic] voyage could not have been under taken at the expanse of government. A roomy cabin, a capital library, a fair dinner, with a couple of glasses of wine, and cigars upon deck, from the dietary and the entertainment of the political exiles.”
Publication of the paper is not in itself illegal, but is highly displeasing to the Governor, Sir William Denison, who finds that the paper can be suppressed by arresting O’Donoghue and charging him with having “left his allocated district.” He is sentenced to one year’s work in a chain gang – a time spent at hard labour, living in a convict station and wearing a convict uniform, mainly in the company of non-political prisoners such as “rapists, muggers and thieves.”
In March 1851, O’Donoghue is released and taken back to Hobart. Undeterred, he immediately restarts his paper, prominently featuring an extensive personal account of his year with the chain gang. The governor reacts by sending him again to a chain gang, at a more distant location this time – the Cascades Penal Station. Three months later the governor orders him released from there and sent to Launceston.
On the way there, O’Donoghue succeeds in escaping from his guards with the help of fellow-prisoners, who manage to smuggle him on board the ship Yarra Yara, on its way to Melbourne. There, he successfully hides from the British authorities and, with further help from Irish sympathisers, manages to get to San Francisco, where some of his fellows such as MacManus and Meagher have also ended up.
O’Donoghue dies in New York City on January 22, 1854, shortly before the arrival of his wife on a ship from Ireland. The time spent in the chain gang may have contributed to undermining his health. The other escaped state prisoners do not attend his funeral, although Michael Doheny and Michael Cavanagh, fellow Young Irelanders who are living in New York City at the time, are in attendance.
The local Sinn Féin branch in Carlow is named after O’Donoghue.
After lecturing at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin, from 1941 to 1944, Slevin enters the civil service. Despite no prior interest in heraldry, he is selected via competition to assist the newly installed Chief Herald, Dr. Edward MacLysaght, in the genealogical office, Bedford Tower, Dublin Castle. After serving as Deputy Chief Herald (1944–54), he succeeds MacLysaght as Chief Herald of Ireland, becoming the longest-serving occupant of the office (1954–81).
One of three national heralds named to a vexillogical committee to devise a common emblem for the Council of Europe, Slevin persuades his colleagues to eschew religious iconography, such as the Christian cross, as inappropriate. His own design of a circle of twelve golden stars on an azure field is selected by the committee in 1954, and formally accepted by the council in December 1955. With blue chosen as a colour common to the flags of many European countries, the twelve stars represent not individual states but such associations as the zodiac and a clock face, suggesting ideals of universality, harmony, and evolution through time. Adopted in 1985 for the flag of the European Community (latterly the European Union), his design attracts wide acclaim in heraldic circles, leading to his being awarded membership of the Académie Internationale d’Héraldique.
During Slevin’s tenure as Chief Herald, several hundred patents of arms are issued to Irish public bodies, including civic and municipal authorities, and to individuals of Irish descent worldwide. On behalf of the Irish government, he confirms the Irish connections of such notables as United StatespresidentsKennedy, Nixon, and Reagan, French president Charles de Gaulle, and Princess Grace of Monaco. His coat of arms for President Kennedy, combining the ancient arms of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families, wins renown as a masterpiece of heraldic design. While possessing a keen sense of graphic impact, he is not a great draughtsman, and he employs the noted heraldic painter Myra Maguire to execute the designs that he creates. He oversees expansion of genealogical office services, instituting an advisory service and team of research assistants for the growing numbers – especially within emigrant communities abroad – seeking to trace Irish ancestry. He establishes a committee to catalogue churchyard memorial inscriptions as an archival resource, meant to redress the loss of state records in the 1922 Four Courts fire.
Slevin wins first prize in successive years in the 1950s for entries in the Oireachteas drama competition, both plays being subsequently produced at the Abbey Theatre. He writes a detective novel in Irish, and contributes numerous articles to learned journals, chiefly on medieval heraldry and Anglo-Irish families. Erudite and possessed of great presence, courtesy, and wit, he is an engaging speaker.
Resident in south County Dublin, Slevin is active in amateur dramatics, local history societies, and the ecumenical movement. His recreation is long country walks. He marries Millicent Nolan in 1950 and they have three sons. He dies on January 18, 1997.
(From: “Slevin, (John) Gerard” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 (last revised February 2025))
Bowman works mostly as a freelance journalist. He co-presents a radio show, The Rude Awakening, on Dublin’s FM104 with Scott Williams, George Hellis and Margaret Callanan for two years between 1993 and 1994 before joining the Sunday Independent newspaper as a columnist. He later presents television programmes on RTÉ, such as the quiz show Dodge the Question.
Bowman dies in a fall at his home on Fitzgerald Street in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, on March 6, 2000. He is found lying in the kitchen near the foot of the stairs. His death is believed to be the result of a fall down the stairs or from a stool, which is found nearby. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Glasnevin, County Dublin. Tributes are paid to him by party political leaders. He is survived by his parents, his sister Emma, his brothers Abie and Daniel and his only son Saul Philbin Bowman.
TaoiseachBertie Ahern says that he is deeply saddened on learning the news of Bowman’s death. His thoughts and prayers he says are with his family at this very sad time.
The leader of the Labour Party, Ruairi QuinnTD, expresses his shock and sadness on hearing of the death. He says that Bowman was without doubt one of the bright lights of Irish journalism. He extends his deepest sympathies to Bowman’s son, Saul, and to his parents John and Eimer.
The Fine Gael leader, John Bruton, says that few people he knew brought a smile to the face of anyone they met more readily. He says that his infectious good humour and iconoclastic attitude to life conveyed itself to all with whom he came into contact. He adds that Bowman will be missed for many years to come.
The editor of the Sunday Independent, Aengus Fanning, says that Bowman was one of the most brilliant journalists of his generation.
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.
Macardle is born in Dundalk, County Louth, on March 7, 1889, into a wealthy brewing family famous for producing Macardle’s Ale. Her father, Sir Thomas Callan Macardle, is a Catholic who supports John Redmond and the Irish Home Rule movement, while her mother, Lucy “Minnie” Macardle, comes from an English Anglican background and is politically a unionist. Lucy converts to Catholicism upon her marriage to Thomas. Macardle and her siblings are raised as Catholics, but Lucy, who is politically isolated in Ireland, “inculcated in her children an idealised view of England and an enthusiasm for the British empire“. She receives her secondary education in Alexandra College, Dublin—a school under the management of the Church of Ireland—and later attends University College Dublin (UCD). Upon graduating, she returns to teach English at Alexandra where she had first encountered Irish nationalism as a student. This is further developed by her first experiences of Dublin’s slums, which “convinced her that an autonomous Ireland might be better able to look after its own affairs” than the Dublin Castle administration could.
Between 1914 and 1916, Macardle lives and works in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. There, her encounters with upper-class English people who express anti-Irish sentiment and support keeping Ireland in the British Empire by force further weakens her Anglophilia. Upon the outbreak of World War I, she supports the Allies, as does the rest of her family. Her father leads the County Louth recruiting committee while two of her brothers volunteer for the British Army. Her brother, Lieutenant Kenneth Callan Macardle, is killed at the Battle of the Somme, while another brother, Major John Ross Macardle, survives the war and earns the Military Cross. While Macardle is a student, the Easter Rising occurs, an experience credited for a further divergence of her views regarding republicanism and her family.
On January 19, 1919, Macardle is in the public gallery for the inaugural meeting of the First Dáil and witnesses it declare unilateral independence from the United Kingdom, which is ultimately the catalyst for the Irish War of Independence.
By 1919 Macardle has befriended Maud Gonne MacBride, the widow of the 1916 Easter Rising participant John MacBride, and together the two work at the Irish White Cross, attending to those injured in the war. It is during this period she also becomes a propagandist for the nationalist side.
Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, Macardle takes the anti-treaty side in the ensuing Irish Civil War. Alongside Gonne MacBride and Despard, she helps found the Women Prisoners’ Defence League, which campaigns and advocates for republicans imprisoned by the newly established Irish Free State government. It is also during this same time that she begins working alongside Erskine Childers in writing for anti-treaty publications An Phoblacht and Irish Freedom.
In October 1922, Despard, Gonne MacBride and Macardle are speaking at a protest on O’Connell Street, Dublin against the arrest of Mary MacSwiney, a sitting Teachta Dála, by the Free State when Free State authorities move to break it up. Rioting follows and Free State forces open fire, resulting in 14 people being seriously wounded while hundreds of others are harmed in the subsequent stampede to flee. Following the event, Macardle announces she is going to pursue support of the Anti-treaty side full-time in a letter to Alexandra College, which ultimately leads to her dismissal on November 15, 1922. In the following days Macardle is captured and imprisoned by the Free State government and subsequently serves time in both Mountjoy Prison and Kilmainham Gaol, with Rosamond Jacob as her cellmate. During one point at her time in Kilmainham, Macardle is beaten unconscious by male wardens. She becomes close friends with Jacob and shares a flat with her in Rathmines later in the 1920s.
The Irish Civil War concludes in the spring of 1923, and Macardle is released from prison on May 9.
Following the Irish Civil War, Macardle remains active in Sinn Féin and is drawn into the camp of its leader Éamon de Valera and his wife Sinéad. She travels alongside the de Valeras as they tour the country and she is a frequent visitor to their home. As the trust between Macardle and de Valera develops, de Valera asks her to travel to County Kerry to investigate and document what later becomes known as the Ballyseedy massacre of March 1923, in which a number of unarmed republican prisoners are reportedly killed in reprisals. She obliges, and by May 1924 she has compiled a report that is released under the title of The Tragedies of Kerry.” Immediately upon the release of the report, the Minister for DefenceRichard Mulcahy sets up an inquiry in June 1924 to carry out a separate investigation by the government. However, the government’s inquiry comes to the conclusion there had been no wrongdoing committed. Her book The Tragedies of Kerry remains in print and is the first journalistic historical account of the Irish Civil War from those on the republican side detailing Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and various other incidents that occur in Kerry during this time.
In 1926, Éamon de Valera resigns as President of Sinn Féin and walks out of the party following a vote against his motion that members of the party should end their policy of abstentionism against Dáil Éireann. De Valera and his supporters, including Macardle, form the new political party Fianna Fáil in May 1926, with Macardle immediately elected to the party’s National Executive|Ard Chomhairle, one of six female members out of twelve on the original party National Executive, the others being Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kathleen Clarke, Countess Constance Markievicz and Linda Kearns. Macardle is made the party’s director of publicity. However, she resigns from Fianna Fáil in 1927 when the new party endorses taking their seats in Dáil Eireann. Nevertheless, her views remain relatively pro-Fianna Fáil and pro-de Valera.
Macardle recounts her civil war experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). She continues as a playwright for the next two decades. In her dramatic writing, she uses the pseudonymMargaret Callan. In many of her plays a domineering female character is always present. This is thought to be symbolic of her own relationship with her own mother. Her parents’ marriage had broken up as her mother returned to England and her father raised the children with servants in Cambrickville and they were sent away for school. This female character holds back the growth and development of the younger female character in Dorothy’s plays and writings.
By 1931, Macardle takes up work as a writer for The Irish Press, which is owned by de Valera and leans heavily toward supporting Fianna Fáil and Irish republicanism in general. In addition to being a theatre and literary critic for the paper, she also occasionally writes pieces of investigative journalism such as reports on Dublin’s slums. In the mid-1930s she also becomes a broadcaster for the newly created national radio station Radio Éireann.
In 1937, Macardle writes and publishes the work by which she is best known, The Irish Republic, an in-depth account of the history of Ireland between 1919 until 1923. Because of the book, political opponents and some modern historians consider her to have been a hagiographer toward de Valera’s political views. In 1939 she admits, “I am a propagandist, unrepentant and unashamed.” Overall, however, the book is well-received, with reviews ranging from “glowing” to measured praise. She is widely praised for her research, thorough documentation, range of sources and narration of dramatic events, alongside reservations about the book’s political slant. The book is reprinted several times, most recently in 2005. Éamon de Valera considers The Irish Republic the only authoritative account of the period from 1916 to 1926, and the book is widely used by de Valera and Fianna Fáil over the years and by history and political students. She spends seven years writing the book in a cottage in Delgany, County Wicklow, and it is a day-by-day account of the history of the events in Ireland from 1919 to 1923 recorded in painstaking detail together with voluminous source material.
In 1937, de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government is able to create a new Constitution of Ireland following a successful referendum. However, there is widespread criticism of the new Constitution from women, particularly republican women, as the language of the new Constitution emphasises that a woman’s place should be in the home. Macardle is among them, deploring what she sees as the reduced status of women in this new Constitution. Furthermore, she notes that the new Constitution drops the commitment of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic to guarantee equal rights and opportunities “without distinction of sex” and writes to de Valera questioning how anyone “with advanced views on the rights of women” can support it. DeValera also finds her criticising compulsory Irish language teaching in schools.
While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the late 1930s, Macardle acquires a considerable affinity with the plight of Czechoslovakia being pressed to make territorial concessions to Nazi Germany. Believing that “Hitler‘s war should be everybody’s war,” she disagrees with de Valera’s policy of neutrality. She goes to work for the BBC in London, develops her fiction and, in the war’s aftermath, campaigns for refugee children – a crisis described in her book Children of Europe (1949). In 1951, she becomes the first president of the Irish Society of Civil Liberties.
Macardle dies of cancer on December 23, 1958, in a hospital in Drogheda, at the age of 69. Though she is somewhat disillusioned with the new Irish State, she leaves the royalties from The Irish Republic to her close friend Éamon de Valera, who had written the foreword to the book. De Valera visits her when she is dying. She is accorded a state funeral, with de Valera giving the oration. She is buried in Sutton, Dublin.
seamus dubhghaill 