seamus dubhghaill

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

Category Archives: Northern Ireland


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Seamus Heaney Awarded Nobel Prize in Literature

seamus-heaney

Seamus Heaney, poet, playwright, translator, and lecturer, is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature on October 15, 1995.

Heaney is born in April 1939 near Castledawson, County Derry, Northern Ireland, where his family engages in farming and selling cattle. His education includes studies at Queen’s University Belfast, where he also serves as a lecturer in the late 1960s. He makes his debut as a poet then, but continues to divide his time between his own writing and academia. He works at Carysforth College in Dublin, at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and at Oxford University.

Heaney’s poetry is often down-to-earth. For him, poetry is like the earth – something that must be plowed and turned. Often he paints the gray and damp landscape from the British Isles. Peat moss has a special place in his poetry. The poems often are connected with daily experiences, but they also derive motifs from history, all the way back to prehistoric times. Heany’s profound interest in the Celtic and the pre-Christian as well as in Catholic literary tradition has found expression in a number of essays and translations.

Heaney is awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 for what the Nobel committee describes as “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He is on holiday in Greece with his wife, Marie, when the news breaks. No one, not even journalists or his own children, can locate him until he appears at Dublin Airport two days later, though an Irish television camera traces him to Kalamata. Asked how it feels having his name added to the Irish Nobel pantheon featuring William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, and Samuel Beckett, Heaney responds, “It’s like being a little foothill at the bottom of a mountain range. You hope you just live up to it. It’s extraordinary.” He and Marie are immediately whisked straight from the airport to Áras an Uachtaráin for champagne with President Mary Robinson.


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Harland & Wolff Cranes Listed as Historic Monuments

samson-and-goliathSamson and Goliath, the twin shipbuilding gantry cranes situated in the shipyard of Harland & Wolff at Queen’s Island, Belfast, are listed on October 9, 2003, as historic monuments to ensure their preservation. The cranes, which are named after the Biblical figures Samson and Goliath, dominate the Belfast skyline and are landmark structures of the city.

The cranes are constructed by the German engineering firm Krupp, with Goliath being completed in 1969 and Samson in 1974. Goliath, the smaller of the cranes, stands 315 feet tall, while Samson stands 348 feet in height. Goliath sits slightly further inland closer to Belfast City. At the time Harland & Wolff is one of the largest shipbuilders in the world. The announcement that they are to be built is an important event at the time.

Each crane has a span of 459 feet and can lift loads of up to 840 tonnes to a height of 230 feet, making a combined lifting capacity of over 1,600 tonnes, one of the largest in the world. Prior to commissioning, the cranes are tested up to 1,000 tonnes, which bends the gantry downwards by over 12 inches. The dry dock at the base of the cranes is the largest in the world measuring 1,824 feet × 305 feet.

At its height, Harland & Wolff boasts 35,000 employees and a healthy order book, but in the years following the construction of the cranes, the workforce and business declines. The last ship to be launched at the yard to date is a roll-on/roll-off ferry in March 2003. Since then the yard has restructured itself to focus less on shipbuilding and more on design and structural engineering, as well as ship repair, offshore construction projects and competing for other projects to do with metal engineering and construction. Initially there is concern that the now largely redundant cranes would be demolished. However, on October 9, 2003 they are scheduled as historic monuments under Article 3 of the Historic Monuments and Archaeological Objects (Northern Ireland) Order 1995.

Northern Ireland Office Minister of the time Angela Smith states, “These cranes are an essential part of our city, our roots and our culture.” The cranes are not, technically, “listed buildings,” but are recognised by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency as buildings of “architectural or historic interest.”

Shipbuilding has ceased in Belfast, but the cranes are retained as part of the existing dry dock facility within the restructured shipyard, situated adjacent to the Titanic Quarter, a business, light industrial, leisure, and residential development on land now surplus to the heavy industrial requirements of the shipyard on Queen’s Island. They are kept in working order and used for heavy lifting by Harland & Wolff in its other activities.


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Birth of Professor James Francis “Frank” Pantridge

frank-pantridge

Professor James Francis “Frank” Pantridge, physician and cardiologist from Northern Ireland, is born in Hillsborough, County Down, on October 3, 1916. Pantridge transforms emergency medicine and paramedic services with the invention of the portable defibrillator.

Pantridge is educated at Friends’ School Lisburn and Queen’s University Belfast, graduating in medicine in 1939. During World War II he serves in the British Army and is commissioned into the Royal Army Medical Corps as a lieutenant on April 12, 1940. He is awarded the Military Cross during the Fall of Singapore, when he becomes a POW. He serves much of his captivity as a slave labourer on the Burma Railway. When he is freed at the end of the war, Pantridge is emaciated and has contracted cardiac beriberi. He suffers from ill-health related to the disease for the remainder of his life.

After Pantridge’s liberation he works as a lecturer in the pathology department at Queen’s University, and then wins a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where he studies under Dr. F.N. Wilson, a cardiologist and authority on electrocardiography.

Pantridge returns to Northern Ireland in 1950 and is appointed as cardiac consultant to the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast and professor at Queen’s University, where he remains until his retirement in 1982. There he establishes a specialist cardiology unit whose work becomes well known.

By 1957, Pantridge and his colleague, Dr. John Geddes, introduce the modern system of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) for the early treatment of cardiac arrest. Further study leads Pantridge to the realization that many deaths result from ventricular fibrillation which needs to be treated before the patient is admitted to hospital. This leads to his introduction of the mobile coronary care unit (MCCU), an ambulance with specialist equipment and staff to provide pre-hospital care.

To extend the usefulness of early treatment, Pantridge goes on to develop the portable defibrillator, and in 1965 installs his first version in a Belfast ambulance. It weighs 70 kg and operates from car batteries. By 1968 he has designed an instrument weighing only 3 kg, incorporating a miniature capacitor manufactured for NASA.

His work is backed up by clinical investigations and epidemiological studies in scientific papers, including an influential 1967 The Lancet article. With these developments, the Belfast treatment system, often known as the “Pantridge Plan”, becomes adopted throughout the world by emergency medical services. The portable defibrillator becomes recognised as a key tool in first aid, and Pantridge’s refinement of the automated external defibrillator (AED) allows it to be used safely by members of the public.

Although he is known worldwide as the “Father of Emergency Medicine,” Frank Pantridge is less acclaimed in his own country, and is saddened that it takes until 1990 for all front-line ambulances in the United Kingdom to be fitted with defibrillators.

He died in Hillsborough at the age of 88 on Boxing Day, December 26, 2004. He never married.


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The Founding of Saor Éire

saor-eire

Saor Éire, a left-wing political organisation, is established on September 26, 1931 by communist-leaning members of the Irish Republican Army, with the backing of the IRA leadership. Notable among its founders is Peadar O’Donnell, former editor of An Phoblacht and a leading left-wing figure in the IRA. Saor Éire describes itself as “an organization of workers and working farmers.”

It is believed that the support of the then IRA chief of staff Moss (Maurice) Twomey is instrumental in the organisation’s establishment. However, Tim Pat Coogan claims that Twomey is doubtful about the organisation, worrying about involvement in electoral politics and possible communist influence.

During its short existence Saor Éire uses the republican publication An Phoblacht, under the editorship of Frank Ryan, to report on its progress and to promote its radical, left-wing republican views.

On the weekend of September 26-27, 1931, Saor Éire holds its first conference in Dublin at Iona Hall. One hundred and fifty delegates from both the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland attend the conference against a background of police raids on the houses and offices connected with Saor Éire and An Phoblacht. Seán Hayes is chairman, while David Fitzgerald acts as secretary.

The conference elects an executive of Hayes, Fitzgerald, Sean McGuinness, May Laverty, Helena Molony, Sheila Dowling, Sheila Humphreys, D. McGinley, Mick Fitzpatrick, Seán MacBride, Michael Price, Peadar O’Donnell, Mick Hallissey, M. O’Donnell, Patrick McCormack, Tom Kenny, L. Brady, Nicholas Boran, John Mulgrew and Tom Maguire. George Gilmore and Frank Ryan are also involved.

The constitution elaborates upon the aims by describing a two-phase programme. The first phase is described as being one of organisation and propagandising in order to organise a solid front for mass resistance to the oppressors. This is to build upon the day-to-day resistance and activity towards “rents, annuities, evictions, seizures, bank sales, lock-outs, strikes and wage-cuts.” This challenge, it is believed, would lead to power passing from the hands of the imperialists to the masses. The second phase is one of consolidation of power through the organisation of the economy and a workers’ and working farmers’ republic.

Ideologically Saor Éire adheres to the Irish socialist republicanism developed by James Connolly and Peadar O’Donnell. As a consequence of the heavy influence of O’Donnell, Saor Éire strongly advocates the revival of Gaelic culture and the involvement of the poorer rural working communities in any rise against the Irish capitalist institutions and British imperialism.

The organisation is attacked by the centre-right press and the Catholic Church as a dangerous communist group, and is quickly banned by the Free State government. The strength of reaction against it prevents it from becoming an effective political organisation. O’Donnell and his supporters attempt a similar initiative two years later with the establishment of the Republican Congress in 1933.


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The Battle of the Diamond

daniel-winter-homestead

The Battle of the Diamond, a planned confrontation between the Catholic Defenders and the Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys, takes place on September 21, 1795, near Loughgall, County Armagh. The Diamond, which is a predominantly Protestant area, is a minor crossroads in County Armagh, lying almost halfway between Loughgall and Portadown.

In the 1780s, County Armagh is the most populous county in Ireland, and the center of its linen industry. Its population is equally split between Protestants, who dominate in the northern part of the county, and Catholics, who dominate in the south. Sectarian tensions increase throughout the decade and are exacerbated by the relaxing of some of the Penal Laws, failure to enforce others, and the entry of Catholics into the linen industry at a time when land is scarce, and wages are decreasing due to pressure from the mechanised cotton industry.

By 1784, sectarian fighting breaks out between gangs of Protestants and Catholics. The Protestants re-organise themselves as the Peep o’ Day Boys, with the Catholics forming the Defenders. The next decade sees an escalation in the violence between the two and the local population as homes are raided and wrecked.

On the morning of September 21, the Defenders, numbering around 300, make their way downhill from their base, occupying Daniel Winter’s homestead, which lay to the northwest of The Diamond and directly in their line of advance. News of the advance reaches the Peep o’ Day Boys who quickly form at the brow of the hill where they have made their camp. From this position, they gain three crucial advantages: the ability to comfortably rest their muskets allowing for more accurate shooting, a steep uphill location which makes it hard for attackers to scale, and a direct line-of-sight to Winter’s cottage, which the Defenders have made their rallying point.

The shooting begins and, after Captain Joseph Atkinson gives his weapon and powder to the Peep o’ Day Boys, he rides to Charlemont Garrison for troops to quell the trouble. There is no effective unit stationed in the garrison at the time, despite the fact a detachment of the North-Mayo Militia is stationed in Dungannon and a detachment of the Queen’s County Militia is at Portadown.

The battle is short, and the Defenders suffer “not less than thirty” fatalities. James Verner, whose account of the battle is based on hearsay, gives the total as being nearly thirty, while other reports give the figure as being forty-eight, however this may be taking into account those that die afterwards from their wounds. A large number of Defenders are also claimed to have been wounded. One of those claimed to have been killed is “McGarry of Whiterock,” the leader of the Defenders. The Peep o’ Day Boys on the other hand, in the safety of the well-defended hilltop position, suffered no casualties.

In the aftermath of the battle, the Peep o’ Day Boys retire to James Sloan’s inn in Loughgall, and it is here that James Wilson, Dan Winter, and James Sloan found the Orange Order, a defensive association pledged to defend “the King and his heirs so long as he or they support the Protestant Ascendancy.” The first Orange lodge of this new organisation is established in Dyan, County Tyrone, founding place of the Orange Boys.

(Pictured: Daniel Winter’s home near Loughgall)


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Birth of Chaim Herzog, Sixth President of Israel

chaim-herzog

Chaim Herzog, Israeli politician, general, lawyer, and author who serves as the sixth President of Israel between 1983 and 1993, is born in Cliftonpark Avenue in Belfast on September 17, 1918.

Herzog is raised predominantly in Dublin, the son of Ireland’s Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog and his wife Sara. Herzog’s father, a fluent speaker of the Irish language, is known as “the Sinn Féin Rabbi” for his support of the First Dáil and the Irish Republican cause during the Irish War of Independence. Herzog studies at Wesley College, Dublin, and is involved with the Federation of Zionist Youth and Habonim Dror, the Labour-Zionist movement, during his teenage years.

The family emigrates to Mandatory Palestine in 1935 and Herzog serves in the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt. He goes on to earn a degree in law at University College London, and then qualifies as a barrister at Lincoln’s Inn.

Herzog joins the British Army during World War II, operating primarily in Germany as a tank commander in the Armoured Corps. There, he is given his lifelong nickname of “Vivian” because the British could not pronounce the name, “Chaim.” A Jewish soldier had volunteered that “Vivian” is the English equivalent of “Chaim.”

Herzog returns to Palestine after the war and, following the end of the British Mandate and Israel’s Declaration of Independence in 1948, operates in the Battles of Latrun during the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He retires from the Israel Defence Forces in 1962 with the rank of Major-General.

After leaving the army, Herzog opens a private law practice. He returns to public life when the Six-Day War breaks out in 1967, serving as a military commentator for Kol Israel radio news. Following the capture of the West Bank, he is appointed Military Governor of East Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria.

In 1972 Herzog is a co-founder of Herzog, Fox & Ne’eman, which becomes one of Israel’s largest law firms. Between 1975 and 1978 he serves as Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, in which capacity he repudiates UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, the “Zionism is Racism” resolution, and symbolically tears it up before the assembly.

Herzog enters politics in the 1981 elections, winning a Knesset seat as a member of the Alignment. Two years later, in March 1983, he is elected to the largely ceremonial role of President. He serves two five-year terms before retiring in 1993. He dies on April 17, 1997, and is buried on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem. His son, Isaac Herzog, has led the Israeli Labour Party and the parliamentary Opposition in the Knesset since 2013.


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Anne Letitia Dickson Elected UPNI Leader

anne-letitia-dickson

Anne Letitia Dickson is elected leader of the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland (UPNI) on September 15, 1976, becoming the first woman to lead a political party in Ireland.

Born in London on April 18, 1928, Dickson moves with her family to Northern Ireland at an early age and is educated at Holywood and Richmond Lodge School. After service as the Chair of the Northern Ireland Advisory Board of the Salvation Army she becomes actively involved in politics for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). Elected as chair of the Carrick Division Unionist Association she later becomes a member of the Newtownabbey Urban District Council, serving as Vice-Chair from 1967 to 1969.

Dickson is then elected as an Ulster Unionist politician for the Carrick constituency in the Parliament of Northern Ireland at Stormont as a supporter of Prime Minister Terence O’Neill. After the dissolution of the Stormont Parliament, she is elected in the 1973 Assembly election for South Antrim as an Independent Unionist candidate having resigned from the Ulster Unionist Party in 1972.

After the Ulster Unionist party split in 1974 over the Sunningdale Agreement, Dickson joins the newly formed Unionist Party of Northern Ireland along with other supporters of former Northern Ireland prime minister Brian Faulkner. She retains her seat in South Antrim in the 1975 constitutional convention election. After the retirement of Brian Faulkner in 1976 she becomes leader of the Unionist Party of Northern Ireland, becoming the first woman to lead a major political party in Northern Ireland.

In 1979 Dickson contests the Belfast North constituency in the Westminster election, polling 10% of the vote, the best performance by a UPNI candidate in Northern Ireland, however her intervention is sufficient to split the moderate Unionist vote resulting in the seat being gained by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP).

The Unionist Party of Northern Ireland disbands in 1981 after poor results in the local government elections and Dickson retires from active politics. Subsequently she is chair of the Northern Ireland Consumer Council from 1985 to 1990.


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Founding of the “Belfast News Letter”

belfast-news-letter

The Belfast News Letter, one of Northern Ireland‘s main daily newspapers and the oldest English language general daily newspaper still in publication, is founded on September 1, 1737.

The Belfast News Letter is originally printed in Joy’s Entry in Belfast. The Joys are a family of Huguenot descent who add much to eighteenth-century Belfast, noted for their compiling materials for its history. Francis Joy, who founds the paper, had come to Belfast early in the century from the County Antrim village of Killead. In Belfast, he marries the daughter of the town sovereign and sets up a practice as an attorney. In 1737, he obtains a small printing press which is in settlement of a debt and uses it to publish the town’s first newspaper at the sign of “The Peacock” in Bridge Street. The family later purchases a paper mill in Ballymena and are able to produce enough paper not only for their own publication but for the whole province of Ulster.

Originally published three times weekly, the Belfast News Letter becomes a daily in 1855. The title is now located at two addresses – a news section in Donegall Square South in central Belfast, and a features section in Portadown, County Armagh. Before the partition of Ireland, the Belfast News Letter is distributed island wide.

The newspaper’s editorial stance and readership, while originally republican, is now strongly unionist. Its primary competitors are the Belfast Telegraph and The Irish News. The Belfast News Letter has changed hands several times since the mid-1990s, and since 2005 is owned by the Johnston Press holding company Johnston Publishing (NI). The full legal title of the newspaper is the Belfast News Letter, although the word “Belfast” no longer appears on the masthead.

Historical copies of the Belfast News Letter, dating back to 1828, are available to search and view in digitised form at the British Newspaper Archive.


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Death of Paddy Devlin, Northern Ireland Labour Activist

paddy-devlin

Paddy Devlin, Irish social democrat and Labour activist, former Stormont Member of Parliament (MP), a founder of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), and member of the 1974 Power Sharing Executive, dies in Belfast’s Mater Hospital on August 15, 1999, after a long illness.

Devlin is born into a highly political household in the Pound Loney in the Lower Falls of West Belfast on March 8, 1925, and lives in the city for almost all his life. His early activism is confined to Fianna Éireann and then the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and as a result he is interned in Crumlin Road Gaol during the World War II. He leaves the republican movement upon his release.

After the war, and in search of work, he spends some time in Portsmouth working as a scaffolder and in Coventry working in the car industry. In Coventry he becomes interested in Labour and trade union politics and briefly joins the British Labour Party.

Returning to Belfast in 1948 Devlin helps establish the Irish Labour Party there after the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) splits on the issue of partition. He later beats Gerry Fitt to win a seat on the city council. Later Catholic Action claims the Irish Labour Party is infested with communists and ensures the party is effectively wiped-out causing Devlin to lose his seat.

In the mid 1960s Devlin joins the revived NILP and beats Harry Diamond for the Falls seat in Stormont. Devlin then goes on, with Fitt, John Hume, Austin Currie, and others to found the SDLP in 1970. He is later involved, at the request of William Whitelaw, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, in ensuring safe passage for Gerry Adams for talks with the British government in 1973. He is a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, 1973 and Minister of Health and Social Services in the power-sharing Executive from January 1, 1974, to May 28, 1974.

In 1978 Devlin establishes the United Labour Party, which aims to be a broad-based Labour formation in Northern Ireland. He stands under its label for the European Parliament in 1979 but polls just 6,122 first preferences (1.1% of those cast) and thereby loses his deposit.

In 1987 Devlin, together with remnants of the NILP and others, establishes Labour ’87 as another attempt at building a Labour Party in Northern Ireland by uniting the disparate groups supporting labour and socialist policies but it too meets with little or no success. In 1985 he loses his place on Belfast City council.

Devlin suffers from severe diabetes and throughout the 1990s suffers a series of ailments as his health and sight collapse.


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IRA Announces End of 36-Year Armed Campaign

ira-ends-armed-campaignThe Irish Republican Army (IRA) issues a statement on July 28, 2005, announcing the end of its 36-year armed campaign and its resumption of disarmament. The campaign of armed conflict has a cost 3,500 lives, 1,800 of them at the hands of the Provisionals.

The IRA says its members have been ordered to pursue peaceful means and not to “engage in any other activities whatsoever” – a reference to the low-level paramilitary activities which have angered not just unionists, but the London and Dublin governments. The IRA gives no indication that it will disband.

Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams calls it an “emotional day” and, flanked by senior members of Sinn Féin, speaks directly to IRA volunteers by saying, “National liberation struggles have different phases – a time for struggle, a time for war, and also a time to engage, to put the war behind us all – this is that time.” He declares the IRA statement means the group is now committed to “purely peaceful and democratic methods” and calls it “a direct challenge to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to decide if they want to put the past behind them and make peace with the rest of the people of the island.”

The DUP reserves judgment, although an initial “holding statement” on their website from the party leader, Rev. Ian Paisley, criticises the failure to declare clearly they will end all criminal activity.

Taoiseach Bertie Ahern says the British and Irish governments have worked for 11 years for this outcome. He says, “The war is over, the IRA’s armed campaign is over, paramilitarism is over and I believe that we can look to the future of peace and prosperity based on mutual trust and reconciliation and a final end to violence.”

Praising the “clarity” of the IRA statement, British Prime Minister Tony Blair says, “This may be the day when finally, after all the false dawns and dashed hope, peace replaces war, politics replaces terror on the island of Ireland.”

The IRA statement follows the release the previous night of IRA bomber Sean Kelly by the British government “on the expectation” of a move by the terrorist group.