seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Category Archives: Literature & Poetry


by Leave a comment

Death of Nuala O’Faolain, Journalist & Writer

Nuala Brigid Anne O’Faolain, journalist and writer, dies in Blackrock, Dublin, on May 9, 2008. Her debut memoir, Are You Somebody?, published when she is in her mid-fifties, becomes a sensation in Ireland and a worldwide bestseller.

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.


by Leave a comment

Birth of Mannix Flynn, Politician, Author & Playwright

Gerard Mannix Flynn, an Irish Independent politician, author and playwright, is born in Dublin on May 4, 1957. He is serving as a Dublin City Councillor since May 2009. In addition to his work on Dublin City Council, he has also written the novel Nothing To Say in 1983 and the play James X in 2002.

At the age of eleven, Flynn is sent to St. Joseph’s Industrial School in Letterfrack, County Galway, for eighteen months. He is subjected to sexual and physical abuse there. He also spends time in Marlborough House Detention Centre, Daingean, County Offaly, St. Patrick’s Institution, Dublin, and is given five years at the age of fifteen and sent to Mountjoy Prison.

Flynn publishes the novel Nothing To Say in 1983. It is subsequently translated into German, Italian, and Polish. He founds his arts company, Farcry Productions, in 2004, which produces visual art, performance and installation work around taboo issues such as child sexual abuse, violence, and addiction.

In 2004, James X performed by Flynn wins The Irish Times Irish Theatre Award. An earlier version of this play entitled Talking to the Wall previously wins the Edinburgh Fringe award.

Flynn appears in the films Cal, When the Sky Falls and Excalibur and works as an actor in Scotland, London, Austria, and Dublin for twenty years.

Flynn is first elected to Dublin City Council in the 2009 Irish local elections as an independent candidate representing the South-East Inner City electoral area. He is re-elected to the revised Pembroke-South Dock electoral area in the 2014 Irish local elections.

Flynn tables a motion to move the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, a State company set up in 1991 as a regeneration agency for Temple Bar, under the direct control of Dublin City Council. The trust is subsequently found to be in breach of corporate governance and accountability in a number of public reports. He also expresses critical views of the way public money is spent as part of a Grafton Street regeneration project in Dublin.

Flynn supports tougher regulation around the amplification of busking on public streets, which leads to his office being vandalised in February 2015. He is involved in a number of challenges to cycle lane provision, with a High Court challenge against the Strand Road cycle lane COVID-19 mobility trial and is a spokesperson for a group opposed to this cycle lane trial. Critics accuse him of consistently voting against policies that would provide more active travel infrastructure and in favour of policies which negatively impact pedestrians and cyclists. His legal challenges to cycling provision have the potential to revert a number of cycle lanes which have been created back to servicing predominantly cars.

In 2015, Flynn resigns from the Dublin City Council Arts SPC over what he perceives as a lack of cohesive overall policy, strategy, and vision.

In 2016, Flynn protests against the Artane Band, due to its association with the Artane Industrial School. The band responds saying it has had no association with the former industrial school. His peaceful protest, which includes him protesting on a window sill in his Dublin City Council office, is criticised by some as “attention seeking” and a “publicity stunt full stop.”

In 2019, Flynn is involved in a protest march against plans to open the state’s largest homeless shelter in his ward. Protesters march northbound on Aungier Street blocking traffic and shouting slogans against the Peter McVerry trust for providing the services in conjunction with Dublin City Council. In 2020, he takes further legal action against the council, who are working in conjunction with the Peter McVerry Trust, so that he can ensure the homeless facilities will not be built in the area.

Flynn contests the 2011, 2016 and 2020 Irish general elections to Dáil Éireann unsuccessfully. He stands unsuccessfully as an independent candidate at the 2021 Dublin Bay South by-election, getting 879 first-preference votes (3.3%).

A 2019 documentary by Flynn, Land Without God, about the effects of clerical abuse on Flynn and his family, receives special mention for the Dublin Human Rights Film Award at the Dublin International Film Festival.


by 2 Comments

Birth of Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan, Dramatist & Novelist

Conal Holmes O’Connell O’Riordan, Irish dramatist and novelist, is born on April 29, 1874, at 3 Gardiner’s Row, Dublin.

O’Riordan is the youngest child among two sons and three daughters of Daniel O’Connell O’Riordan, a barrister and justice of the peace (JP), and Katharine O’Riordan (née O’Neil), who is her husband’s first cousin. At age of four he witnesses his mother’s death in a carriage accident. His formal education, firstly as a day student at Belvedere College, Dublin (1881–85), and secondly as a boarder at Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare (1887–88), is interrupted by ill health and periods of self-education at home, marked by omnivorous reading in his father’s library.

While engaged in military studies in Bonn, Germany (March–September 1890), preparatory to entering Royal Military Academy Sandhurst in Great Britain, he falls from a horse during riding lessons, suffering a back injury that results in permanent spinal damage, thus precluding a military career.

Left with limited means after his father’s death, O’Riordan moves to London in 1891, where, after attempting suicide, he finds work as a stage actor with the Independent Theatre Society of J. T. Grein and other companies, both in London and touring the provinces, and is noted for his interpretations of Henrik Ibsen. Active in the Irish Literary Society, where he meets W. B. Yeats, he writes fiction under the pseudonym “F. Norreys Connell,” which he also adopts for his stage work.

O’Riordan’s early publications include In the Green Park (1894), a collection of connected short stories, The House of the Strange Woman (1895), a provocative novel of sexual promiscuity in upper-class London bohemia, boycotted by some booksellers as being “morally tainted,” and several books reflecting his deep interest in all things military, most notably The pity of war (1906), a collection of Kiplingesque short stories. Largely abandoning fiction for some years to concentrate on writing for the stage, he returns to Dublin for the first time in fourteen years to direct his controversial one-act play The Piper, which opens at the Abbey Theatre on February 13, 1908. It is jeered as a slander on Irish patriots in disturbances mildly reminiscent of the “Playboy” riots thirteen months previously. The audience on the third night is placated by Yeats, who in a speech from the stage interprets the play – in which a party of rebels in the 1798 rising disdain to set sentries as they argue interminably and discursively, only to be surprised and slaughtered by yeomanry – as a satirical allegory on the fruitless debate that followed the Parnellite split. The work can more usefully be read as a meditation on the propensity of democracy to disintegrate at moments of crisis into ineffectual and dillusory demagoguery. The Piper weathers the controversy to become a frequently performed staple of the Abbey Theatre repertoire during the 1910s.

After the death of John Millington Synge, O’Riordan serves briefly as managing director of the Abbey Theatre from March 25 to July 2, 1909, during which time he produces and directs two of his own one-act plays – Time on April 1, in which he also acts, and An Imaginary Conversation on May 13 – as well as the first revival of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World on May 27. Wearied by the repeated interferences in the theatre’s affairs by its financial backer, Annie Horniman, he resigns abruptly during her fit of pique when the actress Sara Allgood recites poetry at a private gathering of suffragettes.

O’Riordan scores a major triumph on the London stage with Captain Hannibal (1909), his adaptation of a novel by Stanley Weyman, on the proceeds of which he lives for many years. Settling permanently in London, in 1910 he purchases a house at 106 Meadvale Road, Ealing, his home for the rest of his life. Rejected by the British Army at the outset of World War I owing to his disability, after several failed attempts to secure war work he eventually goes to the front in 1918 in charge of YMCA rest huts at Étaples railway junction, where he befriends the doomed soldier poet Wilfred Owen.

O’Riordan achieves his most accomplished writing within a cycle of twelve novels, published under his own name, chronicling the experiences of several inter-connected Irish and English families from the Napoleonic Wars to the 1920s. First of the series to appear was Adam of Dublin (1920), a combined Bildungsroman and roman-à-clef of the literary revival, with vignettes of Dublin slum life, Belvedere College, and the early years of the Abbey Theatre. He follows his protagonist, Adam Quinn, through the sexual turmoil of adolescence, an itinerant acting career, and an unhappy marriage in three sequels: Adam and Caroline (1921), In London (1922), and Married life (1924). These four novels chronologically conclude the narrative of the completed cycle. The narrative commences with the “Soldier” tetralogy – Soldier Born (1927), Soldier of Waterloo (1928), Soldier’s Wife (1935), and Soldier’s End (1938) – a picaresque treatment of the multifarious and farflung experiences of David Quinn, a forebear of Adam, from an Irish childhood and English education, to the Battle of Waterloo, where he suffers horrible facial mutilation, through the Irish famine and the American Civil War, to his death at the hands of Versaillais troops during the suppression of the Paris commune. Judith Quinn (1939) and Judith’s Love (1940), about the disappointments in love and marriage of a late-Victorian Dublin woman, link the narratives of the “Adam” and “Soldier” tetralogies, while The Age of Miracles(1925) and Young Lady Dazincourt (1926) are chronologically contemporaneous with the latter “Adam” novels. Inconsistent in intention, and uneven in execution, the cycle is strongest in its evocative descriptions of Dublin, London, and other cities, with their varied social strata, in different historical periods, in the sharp-edged, witty dialogue, and in the juxtaposition of dazzling comedy and an ironic sense of tragedy.

O’Riordan continues to write successful, if lightweight, stage plays. His 1928 production of Napoleon’s Josephine features a stellar cast including Edith Evans. Among his published plays are Shakespeare’s End, and Other Irish Plays (1912), Rope Enough (1914), His Majesty’s Pleasure (1925), The King’s Wooing (1929), and Captain Falstaff and Other Plays (1935). The historical commentary Napoleon Passes (1933) reflects his abiding interest in the French emperor. President of the Irish Literary Society from 1937 to 1939, he resigns after failing to persuade his colleagues to repudiate Ireland’s wartime neutrality. Despite age, disability, and increasing reclusivity, throughout World War II he serves as an air raid warden from 1940 to 1945. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (1945–48), he represents the society on the council of the newly formed National Book League, and is the society’s Tredegar lecturer in 1946. Charming and convivial, a witty and erudite conversationalist, he cultivates numerous literary friendships, and is an inveterate womaniser, enjoying countless intimate relationships, both sexual and platonic.

O’Riordan marries firstly Florence Derby in 1903, a nurse eight years his senior, with whom he has one son. They are estranged by the time of her death in 1923. In 1924, he marries secondly Olga Buckley, his lover since 1920, and secretary to the wife of G. K. Chesterton. They have two sons (both born before the marriage) and one daughter. Despite considerable contemporary celebrity and critical acclaim, his work compared to that of Charles Dickens and Honoré de Balzac, he has been ignored by posterity. The best of his writing, especially the “Adam” and “Soldier” novels, merit rediscovery.

O’Riordan dies at his London home on June 18, 1948, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. A special O’Riordan number of the Journal of Irish Literature (September 1985), edited by his daughter Judith, includes a portrait photograph, the text of The Piper, and a detailed chronology.

(From: “O’Riordan, Conal Holmes O’Connell (‘Norreys Connell’)” by Lawrence William White and Aideen Foley, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


by Leave a comment

Death of Eavan Boland, Poet, Author & Professor

Eavan Aisling Boland, Irish poet, author, and professor, dies in Dublin on April 27, 2020. She is a professor at Stanford University, where she teaches from 1996. Her work deals with the Irish national identity, and the role of women in Irish history. A number of poems from Boland’s poetry career are studied by Irish students who take the Leaving Certificate. She is a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

Boland is born in Dublin on September 24, 1944. Her father, Frederick Boland, is a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted painter.

When she is six, Boland’s father is appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the family moves to London, where she has her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. Her dealing with this hostility strengthens her identification with her Irish heritage. She speaks of this time in her poem, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.”

At 14, Boland returns to Dublin to attend Holy Child Killiney in Killiney, County Dublin. She publishes a pamphlet of poetry in her first year at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), in 1962. She earns a Bachelor of Arts (BA) with First Class Honors in English Literature and Language from TCD in 1966.

After graduating, Boland holds numerous teaching positions and publishes poetry, prose criticism and essays. She teaches at TCD, University College Dublin (UCD), and Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, and is a member of the International Writing Program (IWP) at the University of Iowa. She is also writer in residence at TCD, and at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin.

In 1969, Boland marries the novelist Kevin Casey. They have two daughters together. Her experiences as a wife and mother influence her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes. According to her friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi, she “loved gossip like fish love water.”

In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland teaches at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she is a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University where she is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program. She divides her time between Palo Alto and her home in Dublin.

Boland’s first book of poetry is New Territory published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This is followed by The War Horse (1975) and In Her Own Image (1980). Night Feed (1982) establishes her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world. While she is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin in 1994, she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.

Several of Boland’s volumes of poetry have been Poetry Book Society choices in the United Kingdom, where she is primarily published by Carcanet Press. In the United States her publisher is W. W. Norton & Company.

Her poem “Quarantine” is one of ten poems shortlisted for RTÉ‘s selection of Ireland’s favourite poems of the last 100 years in 2015.

Former Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, quotes from her poem “The Emigrant Irish” in his address to the joint houses of the United States Congress in May 2008.

On March 15, 2016, United States President Barack Obama quotes lines from her poem “On a Thirtieth Anniversary” (from Against Love Poetry 2001) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day.

In March 2018, RTÉ broadcasts a documentary on Boland’s life as a poet called “Eavan Boland: Is it Still the Same?” In the same year, she is commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) to write the poem “Our future will become the past of other women” to be read at the United Nations (UN) and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of women gaining the vote in Ireland in 1918.

Boland co-edits The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). She also publishes a volume of translations in 2004 called After Every War (Princeton University Press). With Edward Hirsch, she co-edits “The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology of the Sonnet” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).

In 1976, Boland wins a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio. Her other awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Her collection In a Time of Violence (1994) receives a Lannan Award and is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.

In 1997 Boland receives an honorary degree from University College Dublin. She also receives honorary degrees from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland, and Colby College in Waterville, Maine, in 1997, and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1999. She receives one from Bowdoin College in 2004. In 2004 she also receives an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin.

Boland receives the Bucknell Medal of Distinction 2000 from Bucknell University, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence by Centenary College of Louisiana in 2002, the Smartt Family prize from The Yale Review and the John Frederick Nims Award from Poetry magazine 2002. Her volume of poems Against Love Poetry is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her volume Domestic Violence (2007) is shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the United Kingdom. Her poem “Violence Against Women” from the same volume is awarded the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry for the best poem published in 2007 in Shenandoah magazine. In 2012, she wins a PEN Award for creative nonfiction with her collection of essays, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, published in 2012.

In 2016, Boland is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2017, she receives the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.

On May 25, 2018, Boland is elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She receives the Irish PEN Award for Literature in 2019. She is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, in 1994. During this time she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.

Boland dies in Dublin on April 27, 2020, at the age of 75. Later that year she is posthumously awarded the Costa Book Award for poetry for her final collection The Historians.

In 2024, Trinity College Dublin announces the renaming of the “denamed” former Berkeley Library as the Eavan Boland Library. This makes it the first building named after any woman on Trinity’s city centre campus. The name is made official in March 2025.

(Image credit: Maura Hickey)


by Leave a comment

Birth of Mervyn Archdall, Antiquarian & Church of Ireland Clergyman

Mervyn Archdall, Irish antiquarian and clergyman of the Church of Ireland, is born on April 22, 1723, in Dublin, elder son among two sons and three daughters of William Archdall, goldsmith, and his wife Henrietta, a widow who is the daughter of Henry Gonne, curate of Finglas. His father is Dublin assay master from 1736 until his death in 1751, and is a member of the gentry family from Castle Archdale, County Fermanagh.

Archdall is educated by Dr. Keenane, and enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1739. He graduates with a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1744 and a Master of Arts (MA) in 1747, and is ordained in the Church of Ireland. He is curate of Howth from 1750 to 1753, and of Kilgobbin and Taney, also in Dublin, from 1753 to 1758, rector of Nathlash in the diocese of Cloyne from 1749 to 1758, and from 1756 domestic chaplain to Richard Pococke, Bishop of Ossory. In 1761 Pococke gives Archdall the livings of Agharney and Attanagh in Ossory which he holds until 1786, when he becomes rector of Slane in the Diocese of Meath. He is also prebendary of Cloneamary from 1762 to 1764 and of Mayne from 1764 to 1772, both in Ossory.

Archdall is interested, almost from his student days, in ancient history and antiquities, and for forty years he gathers material for a work similar to an earlier compilation, William Dugdale‘s Monasticon Anglicanum. He intends to publish two or more large folio volumes, but after Pococke’s death has no sponsor and has to pay for its publication himself causing him to cut back the scale of the project. Monasticon Hibernicum appears in 1786 as a quarto volume, though still of over 800 pages. Archdall attempts encyclopaedic coverage of the history of Ireland’s pre-reformation monasteries and abbeys. The work is ground-breaking and ambitious, though marred by mistakes and inadequacies. He receives help from friends, including scholars such as Pococke and Edward Ledwich, and with them and others is a founder member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1786.

In 1789, Archdall publishes his second important work, a new edition of The Peerage of Ireland by John Lodge. Lodge’s original work in four volumes is expanded by Archdall into seven octavos, adding a good deal of material from his own research to update the genealogies, as well as incorporating manuscript additions unpublished by the original author. These had been left in a cipher or in a private form of shorthand which could not be decoded by any contemporary expert in Dublin, and Archdall is just about to abandon the attempt to read them when his second wife works on it and discovers the key.

Archdall’s first wife, Sarah Colles or Collis, whom he marries in Dublin on July 30, 1747, is said to have been a relative of Thomas Prior, though she may also – or instead – have been connected in some way to Pococke. The bishop is known to have educated Christopher Colles (1739–1816), who becomes an important engineer and entrepreneur in the United States. They have two sons and a daughter, the elder son dying young. Sarah dies on May 28, 1782. Archdall marries his second wife, Abigail Young, on November 25, 1782.

Archdall’s works are still of interest to historians and genealogists, and surviving copies are valuable collectors’ items. In an apologia in his preface to the Peerage he notes, “I have left that inaccurate which could not be exact, and that imperfect which cannot be completed.” He dies suddenly on August 6, 1791, and is buried in Slane churchyard.

(From: “Archdall, Mervyn” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


by Leave a comment

Death of Joseph Cooper Walker, Irish Antiquarian & Writer

Joseph Cooper Walker, Irish antiquarian and writer, dies on April 12, 1810, in Enniskerry, County Wicklow.

Walker is born in Dublin, son of Cooper Walker, merchant, and educated by Thomas Ball. He suffers from asthma, which prevents him from attending college. Instead he travels to Italy, where he possibly receives some private tuition in Latin, Greek, French, Italian, and Spanish. He takes a special interest in Italian literature and Irish antiquities, and on his return to Ireland (where he is employed in the Irish treasury as third clerk in the upper department) resides in an Italianate villa, St. Valerie, on the road from Bray to Enniskerry.

In 1785, Walker is elected one of the original members of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) and on March 17, 1786, is requested to sit on its committee of antiquities. In this capacity he submits several essays to the Academy’s Transactions. However, his best-known work is Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (1786). His interest in poetry, and in eighteenth-century vernacular survivals of the ancient bardic tradition, suggests important new contemporary and literary dimensions for what had previously been antiquarian and scholarly pursuits. He also breaks new ground by considering modern as well as historical Irish culture, and introduces it to an Anglo-Irish audience by providing English translations of Gaelic songs and poems.

The authorities Walker cites covers the entire range of Irish and Anglo-Irish scholarship on Irish antiquities. He includes excerpts from his correspondence with Charles O’Conor, Charles Vallancey, and Sylvester O’Halloran and carries out an extensive correspondence with Thomas Percy after he becomes Bishop of Dromore in 1782. He focuses on both poetry and music, which according to the popular eighteenth-century view has been the two traditional pursuits of the Irish bards. He presents a historical outline of their progress from the earliest times to the eighteenth century and ends with nine appendices, which are almost as lengthy as the main text. In these, his appreciation of what he considers to be the contemporary survivals of the ancient Irish bardic tradition is apparent in his including an account of Cormac Common, a blind eighteenth-century poet from Mayo, as well as a lengthy biographical notice of Turlough O’Carolan, together with translations of several of his songs. The book brings together many of the literary, scholarly, popular, Celtic, antiquarian, political, and musical dimensions of eighteenth-century Irish culture and prefigures the synthesis of literary modes, cultural theories, and musical styles that would occur in the literary productions of the United Irishmen.

Despite his linguistic skills, Walker has little knowledge of the Irish language, yet he (a member of the Anglo-Irish elite) is consistent in his praise of Gaelic culture, portraying it as sophisticated and literate and, although he highly romanticises his work, he does help to challenge negative appraisals of the Irish character. By the standards of the time it is a work of great erudition. However, today the book is judged to be of limited academic merit as Walker is severely hampered by a shortage of primary documents and by his limited grasp of the Irish language. This is illustrated by his ambiguous use of James Macpherson‘s volumes of Ossianic poems, published in the 1760s, which he quotes as authentic in the text while hinting in the footnotes that they are unreliable.

Charlotte Brooke translates three poems, and in return Walker encourages her to produce her Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789). Her work reflects Walker’s influence and she thanks him in the preface for affording her “every assistance which zeal, judgment and extensive knowledge, could give” as well as for prevailing on people to subscribe to her work and for being a subscriber himself. He is part of a literary circle that includes Edward Ledwich, Charles O’Conor, Edward Berwick, John Philpot Curran, and Henry Grattan. He also writes Historical essay on the dress of the ancient and modern Irish (1788), dedicated to his friend James Caulfeild, 1st Earl of Charlemont, for which he interviews the older generation, consults manuscripts, and even visits tombs to examine the clothing of corpses, and admits he has received copious aid from Elizabeth Rawdon, Countess of Moira. The English Review receives it warmly but Richard Gough, the reviewer for The Gentleman’s Magazine, states he is “much disappointed in the perusal of this high priced history.” Other works by Walker include “an historical essay on the Irish stage,” RIA Trans., ii (1788), Historical Memoir on Italian Tragedy (1799) and contributions to Vallancey’s Collectanea de rebus Hibernicis (Dublin, 1770–1804). In the 1790s he subscribes to Anthologia Hibernica: a monthly collection of science, belles lettres and history and in December 1794 submits an “Historical essay on the Irish stage” which surveys Irish drama from bardic times through to contemporary folk plays.

Walker dies on April 12, 1810, in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, leaving a fine gallery of pictures, a library containing Irish manuscripts, and a collection of antiquities. He is buried on April 14 in St. Mary’s Churchyard, Dublin. His memoirs of Alessandro Tassoni are published posthumously in London in 1815 (with a lengthy preface by his brother Samuel), as is the second edition of Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards (2 vols., Dublin, 1818).

(From: “Walker, Joseph Cooper” by Rosemary Ritchie, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


by Leave a comment

Death of Freeman Wills Crofts, Engineer & Mystery Author

Freeman Wills Crofts FRSA, Irish engineer and mystery author, remembered best for the character of Inspector Joseph French, dies in Worthing, West Sussex, England, on April 11, 1957.

A railway engineer by training, Crofts introduces railway themes into many of his stories, which are notable for their intricate planning. Although Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, and authors of the so-called golden age of detective fiction are more famous, he is esteemed by those authors, and many of his books are still in print.

Crofts is born at 26 Waterloo Road, Dublin. His father, also named Freeman Wills Crofts, is a surgeon-lieutenant in the Army Medical Services but dies of fever in Honduras before the young Freeman Wills Crofts is born. In 1883, his mother, Celia Frances (née Wise), marries the Venerable Jonathan Harding, Vicar of Gilford, County Down, later Archdeacon of Dromore, and Crofts is raised in the vicarage at Gilford. He attends Methodist College and Campbell College in Belfast. In 1912, he marries Mary Bellas Canning, daughter of the manager of the Coleraine branch of the Provincial Bank. They have no children.

In 1896, at the age of seventeen, Crofts is apprenticed to his maternal uncle, Berkeley Deane Wise, who is chief engineer of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway. In 1899, he is appointed Junior Assistant on the construction of the Londonderry and Strabane Extension of the Donegal Railway. In 1900, he becomes District Engineer at Coleraine for the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) Northern Counties Committee at a salary of £100pa, living at 11 Lodge Road in the town. In 1922, he is promoted to Chief Assistant Engineer of the railway, based in Belfast. He lives at “Grianon” in Jordanstown, a quiet village some six miles north of Belfast, where it is convenient for him to travel by train each day to the railway’s offices at York Road. One of the projects he works on is the design of the “Bleach Green Viaduct” in Whiteabbey, close to his Jordanstown home. This is a significant ten arch reinforced concrete viaduct approved in 1927 and completed in 1934. It carries a new loop line which eliminates the need for trains between Belfast and the northwest to reverse at Greenisland. He continues his engineering career until 1929. In his last task as an engineer, he is commissioned by the Government of Northern Ireland to chair an inquiry into the Bann and Lough Neagh Drainage Scheme.

In 1919, during an absence from work due to a long illness, Crofts writes his first novel, The Cask (1920), which establishes him as a new master of detective fiction. He continues to write steadily, producing a book almost every year for thirty years, in addition to a number of short stories and plays.

Crofts is remembered best for his fictional detective, Inspector Joseph French, who is introduced in his fifth book, Inspector French’s Greatest Case (1924). Inspector French always solves each of the mysteries presented him in a workmanlike, precise manner – this method sets him apart from most other fictional sleuths.

In 1929, Crofts abandones his railway engineering career and becomes a full-time writer. He settles in the village of Blackheath, near Guildford, in Surrey, and a number of his books are set in the Guildford area, including The Hog’s Back Mystery (1933) and Crime at Guildford (1935). Many of his stories have a railway theme, and his particular interest in the apparently unfalsifiable alibi often emphasizes the intricacies of railway timetables. Near the end of his life, he and his wife relocate to Worthing, West Sussex, in 1953, where they live until his death in 1957, the year in which his last book is published.

Crofts also writes one religious book, The Four Gospels in One Story, several short stories, and short plays for the BBC.

Crofts is a member, with Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie, of the Detection Club which meets in Gerrard Street. In 1939 he is elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.

Crofts is not only a railway engineer and writer, but also an accomplished musician. He is organist and choirmaster in Killowen Parish Church, Coleraine, St. Patrick’s Church, Jordanstown, and the parish church of St. Martin’s in Blackheath.

Crofts is esteemed, not only by his regular readers, but also by his fellow writers of the so-called Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Agatha Christie includes parodies of Inspector French alongside Sherlock Holmes and her own Hercule Poirot in Partners in Crime (1929).

Raymond Chandler describes Crofts as “the soundest builder of them all when he doesn’t get too fancy” (in The Simple Art of Murder). His attention to detail and his concentration on the mechanics of detection makes him the forerunner of the “police procedural” school of crime fiction. However, it has also given rise to a suggestion of a certain lack of flair – Julian Symons describing him as of “the humdrum school.” This may explain why his name has not remained as familiar as other more imaginative Golden Age writers, although he has fifteen books included in the Penguin Books “green” series of the best detective novels and 36 of his books are in print in paperback in 2000.


by Leave a comment

Death of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Irish Poet

Máirtín Ó Direáin, Irish poet, dies in Dublin on March 19, 1988.

Ó Direáin is born on November 26, 1910, in Inis Mór, Aran Islands, County Galway, the eldest of the three sons and one daughter of Seán Ó Direáin, a small farmer, and Mairéad Ní Dhireáin (widow of Labhrás Mac Confhaola), both of Inis Mór. His father dies in 1917, aged forty-three, leaving his mother to rear a family of four on less than 20 acres of land. Educated at the local national school, he leaves Aran to join the post office in Galway in January 1928.

Ó Direáin is involved with the Irish language movement during the late 1920s and 1930s, during which time he is secretary of the Galway branch of the Gaelic League and writes for and acts on the stage of the Taibhdhearc Theatre. In July 1937 he moves to Dublin to work as a clerical officer in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and later in the Department of Education. Inspired by a lecture given by the poet and Gaelic scholar Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, he begins writing poetry in Irish in the winter of 1938. Unlike Ó Donnchadha, however, who advocates and practises a poetry based on traditional Gaelic metres, he favours a rhythmically measured form of free verse. He publishes his first collection, Coinnle geala, in 1942, quickly followed by Dánta aniar (1943), both at his own expense. In 1949, a volume of selected poems, Rogha dánta, is one of the first books published by the newly founded Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill.

These books herald not just a new voice, but a new generation of modern poets in Irish, distinct in outlook and ambition from most of the revivalist poets who precede them. The leading figures of this generation, Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, all publish poems in various Irish language journals during the 1940s, though the latter two poets do not produce their first collections until the 1950s. Ó Direáin’s poetry is less thematically and linguistically adventurous than that of Ó Ríordáin (whom he nevertheless defends in print against the dogmatic criticism of Ó Ríordáin’s traditionalist detractors), and less consciously indebted to tradition than that of Mhac an tSaoi.

Ó Direáin’s early lyrics celebrate the traditional virtues of island life and mourn its passing because of increasing modernisation and population shifts toward the major cities. One of the best known of these poems, “Stoite“ (“Uprooted”), sets up a gloomy contrast between a traditional life in tune with nature’s rhythms, destined to endure in communal memory, and the fruitless urban existence of the contemporary office worker. This theme of uprootedness haunts his work throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period he publishes his two most significant collections, Ó Mórna agus dánta eile (1957) and Ár ré dhearóil (1962), both of which take their titles from ambitious, and uncharacteristically long, poems. Ó Mórna, a poem of which there are two published versions, charts the colourful life of a proud, amoral tyrant, a figure based loosely on traditional accounts of a hard-living nineteenth-century landlord’s agent from Aran. Ó Mórna represents, in the poet’s view, the timeless Übermensch whose will to power is boundless and awesome. Ár ré dhearóil (“Our wretched era”) is an excoriation of the loveless hedonism of a middle-class Dublin populated by lonely bachelors, bitter spinsters, and immoral, though free-spirited and well-educated, women. The poem, which ends with an ominous if oblique warning against the threat of nuclear annihilation, bears some comparison with T. S. Eliot‘s “The waste land.” Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats are key influences alongside the canonical figures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry. His strong social conscience is registered early on in poems such as “An Stailc“ (“The strike“). His life-long adherence to traditional nationalist values and his scornful attitude to what he perceives as the mercenary embrace of American-style capitalism in the changing economic climate of Ireland in the 1960s is most trenchantly voiced in poems such as “Éire ina bhfuil romhainn” (“Ireland in times ahead”) and “Mar chaitheamar an choinneal” (“As we spent the candle”).

Ó Direáin is an active member of the Irish language literary groups Cumann na Scríbhneoirí and Cumann na hÉigse, and publishes essays on a variety of topics throughout the 1940s and 1950s in magazines such as Ar Aghaidh, An Glór, Comhar and Feasta. A selection of mostly autobiographical essays, Feamainn Bhealtaine (1961), casts valuable light on the Aran of his youth and early adulthood. He is registrar for the National College of Art (1948–55), where he gets to know such prominent artists as Seán Keating, Maurice MacGonigal and Nano Reid, whose artwork adorns Rogha Dánta. From 1955 until his retirement from the civil service in 1975, he is a staff officer in the Department of Education. Cloch choirnéil appears in 1966, followed by Crainn is cairde (1970) and Ceacht an éin (1979).

The most comprehensive selection of Ó Direáin‘s poetry, Máirtín Ó Direáin: dánta 1939–1979 (1980), edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain, covers all but two final volumes, Béasa an túir (1984) and Craobhóg dán (1986), neither of which add much of major significance to his oeuvre. A bilingual selection, Selected poems: Tacar dánta (1984), includes translations by Tomás Mac Síomóin and Douglas Sealy. In 1969, Ó Direáin delivers a series of lectures on his own work at University College Dublin (UCD), later edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain as Ón ulán ramhar siar (2002), which provides useful background information on many individual poems. He receives the Irish American Cultural Institute (IACI) award in 1967 and is made a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1970. In 1977, he receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the National University of Ireland and the Ossian-Preis of the Freiherr von Stein Foundation in Hamburg. He is a full-time visiting lecturer in the department of Irish at University College Galway for the academic year 1978–79. He was also a member of Aosdána.

Ó Direáin marries Áine Colivet, a Dubliner of French extraction, in 1945. Their only child, Niamh, is born in 1947. He dies in Dublin on March 19, 1988.

A selection of Ó Direáin’s essays, An chuid eile díom féin, edited by Síobhra Aiken, and a bilingual volume of poems Máirtin Ó Direáin: Selected poems/ Rogha dánta, translated by Frank Sewell, are both published in 2018.

(From: “Ó Direáin, Máirtín” by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Dictionary of Irish Biography, www dib.ie, October 2009, last revised March 2021)


by 1 Comment

Birth of Michael O’Hanrahan, Irish Rebel

Michael O’Hanrahan (Irish: Mícheál Ó hAnnracháin), an Irish rebel who is executed for his active role in the 1916 Easter Rising, is born as Michael Hanrahan on March 17, 1877, in New Ross, County Wexford.

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.

In 1966, Wexford railway station is renamed Wexford O’Hanrahan Station in commemoration of O’Hanrahan, as is the road bridge over the River Barrow at New Ross. Two Gaelic games sports clubs are named after him: Geraldine O’Hanrahans GAA (New Ross) and O’Hanrahans GFC (Carlow).


by Leave a comment

Death of Robert Patterson, Naturalist & Poet

Robert Patterson, naturalist and poet, dies in Belfast on February 14, 1872.

Patterson is born in Belfast on April 18, 1802, the eldest son among three sons and a daughter of Robert Patterson, ironmonger, who supplies equipment for linen mills, and his wife Catherine Patterson (neé Clarke), who is from Dublin. He attends Belfast Royal Academy, and from 1814 is one of the first pupils of the Belfast Academical Institution. He is apprenticed in 1818 to his father, and takes over the business on his father’s death in 1831. Even as a boy, he devotes his leisure time to the study of natural history, and during summer holidays investigates the flora and fauna of the countryside and seaside resorts near Belfast. One of his brothers, William (1805–37), has similar interests.

At the age of 18, Patterson is a founder along with seven others, including James Lawson Drummond, James MacAdam and George Crawford Hyndman, of the Belfast Natural History Society in 1821 (from 1842 “and Philosophical” is added to the society’s name). He is the society’s president for many years, taking a leading role in setting up its museum in 1830–31, and over the years giving many lectures, mostly published in its proceedings. Like many contemporaries, he is an enthusiast for the study of phrenology, and lectures on the subject in Belfast in 1836.

In 1871, Patterson is presented with an illuminated address by the BNHPS for his work to promote the study of natural history, especially as a subject in education. He is the only recipient of the Society’s Templeton medal. Though still engaged in business, he makes a reputation as Belfast’s most distinguished amateur naturalist, publishing monographs such as Letters on the Insects Mentioned by Shakespeare (1838). During dredging excursions in Belfast Lough he discovers several forms of marine life new to Great Britain and Ireland. He is one of the earliest members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and secretary of its natural history section from 1839 to 1844. When the Association meets in Belfast in 1852, he acts as local treasurer. He corresponds with prominent naturalists, including Charles Darwin.

In 1843, Patterson publishes in The Zoologist magazine The Reptiles Mentioned by Shakespeare. His Zoology for Schools (2 volumes, 1846, 1848) is followed by First Steps in Zoology (2 volumes, 1849, 1851). A large volume, Zoological Diagrams, with colour illustrations, is published in 1853. All his books have a wide circulation, particularly in the national schools, and stimulates the study of zoology. In accordance with the will of his friend William Thompson, Patterson and James Ramsey Garrett begin to prepare the final volume of Thompson’s Natural History of Ireland for publication. Garrett dies in 1855 and Patterson completes the volume in 1856. He is elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) in 1856, and Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1859.

Patterson is in the vanguard of a generation of Ulster naturalists who through their work encourage the study of Irish flora and fauna and the establishment of field clubs and natural history societies. He also takes an active part in the public life of Belfast, and in philanthropy. He is a member of the unitarian congregation. He is one of the founders of the Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and is particularly interested in the Belfast Society for Promoting Knowledge (the Linen Hall Library), in the Botanic Gardens, and in his old school, Royal Belfast Academical Institution. As a Belfast harbour commissioner (1858–70), he brings commercial and environmental insights to decisions concerning port development.

Patterson marries Mary Elizabeth Ferrar in 1833. She is the daughter of a Belfast magistrate, William H. Ferrar, and writes poetry. Patterson also writes poetry, as well as hymns. Many of their poems are collected in Verses by Robert and Mary Patterson (1886), and they are represented in Selections from the British Poets, published for the use of national schools in 1849. They have five sons and six daughters. His second son, Robert Lloyd Patterson, is also a naturalist. Another son was William H. Patterson. His grandson Robert Patterson, editor of the Irish Naturalist, is secretary of the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society, secretary and president of the Belfast Naturalists’ Field Club and secretary of the Ulster Fisheries and Biology Association, which he founds. Robert M. Patterson, a grandson, is a prominent businessman and highly regarded amateur artist. Rosamond Praeger is a granddaughter, and Robert Lloyd Praeger  a grandson. The latter writes of his grandfather: “After seventy-five years I can still see him – a man of middle height, and rather formal manner, pursuing his country rambles on Saturday afternoons in black frock-coat and top hat, and pointing out to us delighted children lady-birds and tree-creepers.”

Patterson retires from business in 1865, and dies on February 14, 1872, at his residence in College Square North, Belfast. He is buried in Belfast City Cemetery, where there is a monument to his memory.

(From: “Patterson, Robert” by Andrew O’Brien, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “Robert Patterson” by Thomas Herbert Maguire, printed by M & N Hanhart lithograph, 1849, National Portrait Gallery)