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

Category Archives: Politics & Government


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Birth of John Hume, Northern Ireland Nationalist Politician

John Hume KCSG, Irish nationalist politician from Northern Ireland, is born into a working-class Catholic family in Derry, County Londonderry, on January 18, 1937. He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the recent political history of Ireland and is credited as being the thinker behind many political developments in Northern Ireland, from the power sharing Sunningdale Agreement to the Anglo-Irish Agreement and the Good Friday Agreement. He wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998 alongside the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), David Trimble.

Hume is the eldest of seven children of Samuel Hume, a former soldier and shipyard worker, and Anne “Annie” (née Doherty), a seamstress. He has a mostly Irish Catholic background, though his surname derives from one of his great-grandfathers, a Scottish Presbyterian who migrated to County Donegal. He attends St. Columb’s College and goes on to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the leading Catholic seminary in Ireland and a recognised college of the National University of Ireland, where he intends to study for the priesthood. Among his teachers is Tomás Ó Fiaich, the future cardinal and Primate of All Ireland.

Hume does not complete his clerical studies but does obtain an M.A. degree in French and history from the college in 1958. He then returns home to his native Derry, where he becomes a teacher at his alma mater, St. Columb’s College. He is a founding member of the Credit Union movement in the city and is chair of the University for Derry Committee in 1965, an unsuccessful fight to have Northern Ireland’s second university established in Derry in the mid-1960s.

Hume becomes the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions at age 27. He serves in the role from 1964 to 1968. He once says that “all the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.”

Hume becomes a leading figure in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s along with people such as Hugh Logue. He is a prominent figure in the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee. The DCAC is set up in the wake of the October 5, 1968, march through Derry which had caused much attention to be drawn towards the situation in Northern Ireland. The purpose of the DCAC is to make use of the publicity surrounding recent events to bring to light grievances in Derry that had been suppressed by the Unionist Government for years. The DCAC, unlike the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), is aimed specifically at a local campaign, improving the situation in Derry for everyone, and maintaining a peaceful stance. The committee also has a Stewards Association that is there to prevent any violence at marches or sit-downs.

Hume becomes an Independent Nationalist member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland in 1969 at the height of the civil rights campaign. He is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 and serves as Minister of Commerce in the short-lived power-sharing Executive in 1974. He stands unsuccessfully for the Westminster Parliament for the Londonderry constituency in October 1974, and is elected for Foyle in 1983.

In October 1971, Hume joins four Westminster MPs in a 48-hour hunger strike to protest at the internment without trial of hundreds of suspected Irish republicans. State papers that have been released under the 30-year rule that an Irish diplomat eight years later in 1979 believes Hume supported the return of internment.

In 1977, Hume challenges a regulation under the Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act (Northern Ireland) 1922 which allows any soldier to disperse an assembly of three or more people. The Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, Robert Lowry, holds that the regulation is ultra vires under Section 4 of the Government of Ireland Act 1920 which forbids the Parliament of Northern Ireland to make laws in respect of the army.

A founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), Hume succeeds Gerry Fitt as its leader in 1979. He also serves as one of Northern Ireland’s three Members of the European Parliament and serves on the faculty of Boston College, from which he receives an honorary degree in 1995.

Hume is directly involved in secret talks with the British government and Sinn Féin, in an effort to bring Sinn Féin to the discussion table openly. The talks are speculated to lead directly to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.

The vast majority of unionists reject the agreement and stage a massive and peaceful public rally in Belfast City Centre to demonstrate their distaste. Many Republicans and nationalists also reject it, as they see it as not going far enough. Hume, however, continues dialogue with both governments and Sinn Féin. The “Hume–Adams process” eventually delivers the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire which ultimately provides the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday agreement is brokered.

On February 4, 2004, Hume announces his complete retirement from politics and is succeeded by Mark Durkan as SDLP leader. He does not contest the 2004 European Parliament election where his seat is won by Bairbre de Brún of Sinn Féin, nor does he run in the 2005 United Kingdom general election, in which Mark Durkan retains the Foyle constituency for the SDLP.

Hume and his wife, Pat, continue to be active in promoting European integration, issues around global poverty and the Credit Union movement. He is also a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reformation of the United Nations.

In 2015, Hume is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s. He dies in the early hours of August 3, 2020, at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83. On his death, former Labour Party leader and prime minister Tony Blair says, “John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past.” The Dalai Lama says on Twitter, “John Hume’s deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering… It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow.”

(Pictured: John Hume with U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995)


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The 23rd Government of Ireland is Formed

The 23rd Government of Ireland is formed on January 12, 1993, following the 1992 Irish general election to the 27th Dáil held on November 25, 1992. It is a coalition of Fianna Fáil, with leader Albert Reynolds as Taoiseach, and the Labour Party, with leader Dick Spring as Tánaiste. It is the first time that these two parties are in government together. On each previous occasion Labour was in government, it was a junior coalition party with Fine Gael. The government lasts for 675 days from its appointment until its resignation on November 17, 1994, and continues to carry out its duties for an additional 28 days until the appointment of its successor, giving a total of 703 days.

The 27th Dáil lasts until 1997, but the first government falls in 1994 following the breakdown of relations between the two parties. It is succeeded in December 1994 by the 24th Government, a coalition of Fine Gael, with leader John Bruton as Taoiseach, Labour, with Dick Spring serving again as Tánaiste, and Democratic Left, led by Proinsias De Rossa. This is the only time a government with a new coalition of parties is formed within a single Dáil term.

The 27th Dáil first meets on December 14, 1992. In the debate on the nomination of Taoiseach, Fianna Fáil leader and outgoing Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, Fine Gael leader John Bruton and Labour Party leader Dick Spring are each proposed. None of these proposals are passed by the Dáil: Reynolds receives 68 votes in favour with 94 against, Bruton receives 55 in favour to 107 against, and Spring receives 39 in favour to 122 against. Reynolds resigns as Taoiseach and continues in a caretaker capacity.

On January 12, 1993, Albert Reynolds and John Bruton are again proposed for the nomination of the Dáil for the position of Taoiseach, and on this occasion, the nomination of Reynolds is successful by 102 votes to 60. Reynolds is then appointed as Taoiseach by President Mary Robinson.

After his appointment as Taoiseach by the president, Reynolds proposes the members of the government, and they are approved by the Dáil. They are appointed by the president on the same day.

Harry Whelehan SC is appointed by the president as Attorney General on the nomination of the Taoiseach. He resigns as Attorney General on November 11, 1994, on his nomination as President of the High Court, a position he serves in for only two days. Following Whelehan’s resignation, Eoghan Fitzsimons SC is appointed by the president as Attorney General on the nomination of the Taoiseach.

The Government on the nomination of the Taoiseach appoints Noel Dempsey to the post of Minister of State at the Department of the Taoiseach with special responsibility as Government Chief Whip. The Government on the nomination of the Taoiseach appoints the other Ministers of State as well.

After the sum of European Structural and Investment Funds allocated to Ireland is lower than previously announced, a motion of no confidence is proposed in the government. This is then debated on October 28, 1993, as a motion of confidence in the government, proposed by the Taoiseach. It is approved by a vote of 94 to 55.

In November 1994, following the resignation of Attorney General Harry Whelehan, it emerges that he had failed to expedite the extradition of Fr. Brendan Smyth to Northern Ireland for sexual offences committed against children. The appointment of Whelehan to the court despite this leads to a motion of no confidence in the government. Reynolds responds on November 16 by proposing a motion reaffirming the confidence of the Dáil in the Taoiseach and the Government.

On the following day, November 17, Labour withdraws from the government and Reynolds resigns as Taoiseach. The motion of confidence in the government is withdrawn. Reynolds and the Fianna Fáil ministers continue to carry on their duties until their successors are appointed on December 15.


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Birth of Captain Otway Cuffe

Captain Otway Cuffe, benefactor, Gaelic revivalist, twice mayor of Kilkenny and a founder of businesses and organisations to profit the local people, is born in London on January 11, 1853.

Cuffe is born the Honourable Otway Frederick Seymour Cuffe to John Cuffe, 3rd Earl of Desart, and Lady Elizabeth Lucy Campbell. He has an older sister and two older brothers. After the death of his eldest brother William Ulick, 4th Earl of Desart, his seecond eldest brother, Hamilton, becomes the 5th Earl of Desart. As the 5th Earl has no male heirs himself, Cuffe is nominally his heir. However, as he also dies without heirs, the line becomes extinct upon the death of the 5th Earl.

Cuffe marries Elizabeth St. Aubyn on July 22, 1891. She is the daughter of John St. Aubyn, 1st Baron St. Levan of St. Michael’s Mount, Cornwall, England, and Lady Elizabeth Clementina Townshend. When he becomes the heir to the Kilkenny-based title he moves to Ireland and lives nearby the main house, in Sheestown Lodge, Kilkenny, County Kilkenny. He has been in the British Army, serving as aide-de-camp to Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn, in 1880–81. He is Groom of the Privy Chamber to Queen Victoria from 1893 until her death in 1901 and Gentleman Usher to both King Edward VII from 1901 until his death in 1910 and King George V until 1911. His rank in the army is Captain in the Rifle Brigade.

Dedicated to ensuring a strong Irish identity in the area, Cuffe works with his sister-in-law, Ellen Cuffe, Countess of Desart. He joins Conradh na Gaeilge soon after his arrival in Kilkenny. He is elected president of its Kilkenny branch in 1904 and remains so until his death. He is replaced by Lady Desart. Together they open the theatre in Kilkenny in 1902 and he is the first President of the Kilkenny Drama Club. He also performs on stage.

Cuffe is first elected Mayor of Kilkenny in 1907 and again in 1908. With Lady Desart, he builds the Kilkenny Woollen Mills, Desart Hall, the Talbot’s Inch model village and the Kilkenny Woodworkers factory. He lays the foundation stone for Kilkenny’s Carnegie library. He is also President of the Irish Industrial Association.

Cuffe is a friend of William Morris whom he had met on a trip to Iceland. He believes in the Arts and Crafts movement and tries to implement it in the projects which he drives. He is also a friend and supporter of Standish James O’Grady and helps him found the weekly radical conservative paper The All-Ireland Review and runs it between 1900 and 1906.

In 1911, Cuffe becomes ill and is forced to move to warmer climates until he recovers. He decides to go to the south of Europe but then a visit to Australia seems appropriate. However, on the journey there he contracts pneumonia and dies at Fremantle in Western Australia on January 3, 1912. He is buried at Perth, carried to his grave by Kilkenny hurlers. The Kilkenny Moderator calls his death “a thunderbolt to the people of Kilkenny.” He is remembered as a visionary who made a permanent impact on the physical landscape of Kilkenny.


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Birth of Michelle O’Neill, Vice President of Sinn Féin

Michelle O’Neill (née Doris), Irish politician who serves as deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland between 2020 and 2022, is born in Fermoy, County Cork, Republic of Ireland, on January 10, 1977. She has been serving as Vice President of Sinn Féin since 2018 and is the Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Mid Ulster since 2007.

O’Neill comes from an Irish republican family in Clonoe, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. Her father, Brendan Doris, was a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner and Sinn Féin councillor. Her uncle, Paul Doris, is a former national president of the Irish Northern Aid Committee (NORAID). A cousin, Tony Doris, was one of three IRA members killed by the British Army‘s Special Air Service (SAS) in the Coagh ambush in 1991. Another cousin, IRA volunteer Gareth Malachy Doris, was shot and wounded during the 1997 Coalisland attack.

After the death of Brendan Doris in 2006, Martin McGuinness pays tribute to the Doris family as “a well-known and respected republican family [who] have played a significant role in the republican struggle for many years.”

O’Neill attends St. Patrick’s Girls’ Academy, a Catholic grammar school in Dungannon, County Tyrone. She subsequently begins to train as an accounting technician, before pursuing a political career.

O’Neill becomes involved in republican politics in her teens, assisting her father with constituency work in his role as a Dungannon councillor. She joins Sinn Féin after the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, at the age of 21, and starts working as an advisor to Francie Molloy in the Northern Ireland Assembly, holding this role until 2005.

O’Neill serves on the Dungannon and South Tyrone Borough Council from 2005 to 2011. She serves as the first female Mayor of Dungannon and South Tyrone from 2010 to 2011. In the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election she is elected to represent Mid Ulster in the Northern Ireland Assembly. In 2011, she is appointed to the Northern Ireland Executive by deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness as Minister for Agriculture and Rural Development. In 2016, she is promoted to Minister of Health. In January 2020, she becomes deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland after the New Decade, New Approach (NDNA) agreement restores the power sharing executive.

O’Neill automatically relinquishes her office following Paul Givan‘s resignation as first minister on February 3, 2022. Sinn Féin becomes the largest party after the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election, putting O’Neill in line to become the First Minister of Northern Ireland, and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader to become the deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland. However, she remains to be officially sworn in as First Minister because, as part of its opposition to the Northern Ireland Protocol, the DUP has refused to nominate a deputy First minister and there is therefore no functioning executive of Northern Ireland.

In August 2022, O’Neill is asked in a BBC interview whether it was right during the Troubles for the Provisional IRA “to engage in violent resistance to British rule.” She is criticised for her response, “I think at the time there was no alternative, but now thankfully we have an alternative to conflict, and that is the Good Friday Agreement – that is why it’s so precious to us all.”

In May 2023, O’Neill attends the coronation of King Charles, saying, “Well obviously I wanted to be here. We live in changing times, and it was the respectful thing to do, to show respect and to be here for all those people at home, who I had said I would be a first minister for all. Attendance here is about honouring that and fulfilling my promise.”

Under O’Neill’s leadership, Sinn Fein has led most opinion polls for the next United Kingdom general election.


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Death of Seán MacEntee, Fianna Fáil Politician

Seán Francis MacEntee (Irish: Seán Mac an tSaoi), Fianna Fáil politician, dies on January 9, 1984, in Booterstown, Dublin. He serves as Tánaiste (1959-65), Minister for Social Welfare (1957-61), Minister for Health (1957-65), Minister for Local Government and Public Health (1941-48), Minister for Industry and Commerce (1939-41), and Minister for Finance (1932-39 and 1951-54). He serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 1918 to 1969. At the time of his death, he is the last surviving member of the First Dáil.

MacEntee is born as John McEntee at 47 King Street, Belfast, on August 23, 1889, the son of James McEntee, a publican, and his wife, Mary Owens, both of whom are from Monaghan. James McEntee is a prominent Nationalist member of Belfast Corporation and a close friend of Joseph Devlin MP.

MacEntee is educated at St. Mary’s Christian Brothers’ Grammar School, St. Malachy’s College and the Belfast Municipal College of Technology where he qualifies as an electrical engineer. His early political involvement is with the Irish Socialist Republican Party in Belfast. He quickly rises through the ranks of the trade union movement becoming junior representative in the city’s shipyards. Following his education, he works as an engineer in Dundalk, County Louth, and is involved in the establishment of a local corps of the Irish Volunteers in the town. He mobilises in Dundalk and fights in the General Post Office garrison in the Easter Rising in 1916. He is sentenced to death for his part in the rising. This sentence is later commuted to life imprisonment. He is released in the general amnesty in 1917 and is later elected a member of the National Executives of both Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers in October 1917. He is later elected Sinn Féin Member of Parliament (MP) for South Monaghan at the 1918 Irish general election.

An attempt to develop MacEntee’s career as a consulting engineer in Belfast is interrupted by the Irish War of Independence in 1919. He serves as Vice-Commandant of the Belfast Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). He is also a member of the Volunteer Executive, a sort of Cabinet and Directory for the Minister for Defence and the HQ Staff, however, he remains one of the few Sinn Féiners from the north. On August 6, 1920, he presents ‘a Memorial’ lecture to the Dáil from the Belfast Corporation. He tells the Dáil it is the only custodian of public order, that a Nationalist pogrom is taking place, and he advises them to fight Belfast. The Dáil government’s policy is dubbed Hibernia Irredenta or “Greening Ireland.” He is asked to resign his South Monaghan seat after voting against a bunting celebration in Lurgan to mark the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.

In April 1921 MacEntee is transferred to Dublin to direct a special anti-partition campaign in connection with the May general election. It remains Michael Collins‘s policy, he declares, that the largely Protestant shipyard workers of Belfast are being directed by the British, urging all Irishmen to rejoin the Republic. Correspondingly the Ulster Unionist Council rejects the call for a review of the boundary commission decision made on Northern Ireland. But when Ulstermen choose James Craig as Premier, Collins denounces democracy in the north as a sham. It is on the partition of Ireland issue that MacEntee votes against the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. During the subsequent Irish Civil War, he commands the IRA unit in Marlboro Street Post Office in Dublin. He later fights with Cathal Brugha in the Hamman Hotel and is subsequently interned in Kilmainham and Gormanstown until December 1923.

After his release from prison, MacEntee devotes himself more fully to his engineering practice, although he unsuccessfully contests the Dublin County by-election of 1924. He becomes a founder-member of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and is eventually elected a TD for Dublin County at the June 1927 Irish general election.

MacEntee founds the Association of Patent Agents in 1929, having gained his interest in Patents when he worked as an assistant engineer in Dundalk Urban District Council. He values his status as a Patent Agent as he maintains his name on the Register for over 30 years while he holds Ministerial rank in the Irish Government, although he is not believed to have taken any active part in the patent business, which is carried on by his business partners.

In 1932, Fianna Fáil comes to power for the very first time, with MacEntee becoming Minister for Finance. In keeping with the party’s protectionist economic policies his first budget in March of that year sees the introduction of new duties on 43 imports, many of them coming from Britain. This sees retaliation from the British government, which in turn provokes a response from the Irish government. This is the beginning of the Anglo-Irish Trade War between the two nations, however, a treaty in 1938, signed by MacEntee and other senior members brings an end to the issue.

In 1939, World War II breaks out and a cabinet reshuffle results in MacEntee being appointed as Minister for Industry and Commerce, taking over from his rival Seán Lemass. During his tenure at this department, he introduces the important Trade Union Act (1941). In 1941, another reshuffle of ministers takes place, with him becoming Minister for Local Government and Public Health. The Health portfolio is transferred to a new Department of Health in 1947. Following the 1948 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil returns to the opposition benches for the first time in sixteen years.

In 1951, Fianna Fáil are back in government, although in minority status, depending on independent deputies for survival. MacEntee once again returns to the position of Minister for Finance where he feels it is vital to deal with the balance of payments deficit. He brings in a harsh budget in 1951 which raises income tax and tariffs on imports. His chief aim is to cut spending and reduce imports, however, this comes at a cost as unemployment increases sharply. The increases are retained in his next two budgets in 1952 and 1953. It is often said that it is his performance during this period that costs Fianna Fáil the general election in 1954. The poor grasp on economics also does his political career tremendous damage as up to that point he is seen as a likely successor as Taoiseach. Seán Lemass, however, is now firmly seen as the “heir apparent.”

In 1957, Fianna Fáil returns to power with an overall majority with MacEntee being appointed Minister for Health. The financial and economic portfolios are dominated by Lemass and other like-minded ministers who want to move away from protection to free trade. He is credited during this period with the reorganisation of the health services, the establishment of separate departments of health and social welfare, and the fluoridation of water supplies in Ireland. In 1959, he becomes Tánaiste when Seán Lemass is elected Taoiseach.

Following the 1965 Irish general election, MacEntee is 76 years old and retires from the government. He re-emerges in 1966 to launch a verbal attack on Seán Lemass for deciding to step down as party leader and Taoiseach. The two men, however, patch up their differences shortly afterwards. MacEntee retires from Dáil Éireann in 1969 at the age of 80, making him the oldest TD in Irish history.

MacEntee dies in Dublin on January 9, 1984, at the age of 94. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.


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Éamon de Valera’s Trip to the United States Ends

Éamon de Valera returns to Ireland on December 23, 1920, ending his trip to the United States.

In June 1919, de Valera arrives in the United States for what is to be an 18-month visit. He has recently escaped from Lincoln Gaol in England in sensational fashion, after a duplicate key is smuggled into the jail in a cake and he escapes dressed as a woman. A few months later he is a stowaway aboard the SS Lapland from Liverpool bound for America.

De Valera’s plan is to secure recognition for the emerging Irish nation, tap into the huge Irish American community for funds, and to pressurize the U.S. government to take a stance on Irish independence. Playing on his mind is the upcoming Versailles conference where the nascent League of Nations is preparing to guarantee “existing international borders” – a provision that will imply Ireland remaining within the United Kingdom.

De Valera also has a challenge in winning over President Woodrow Wilson, who is less than sympathetic to Ireland’s cause.

De Valera’s interest in America is of course personal. He is born in New York City on October 14, 1882, and his U.S. citizenship is one of the reasons he is spared execution after the 1916 Easter Rising.

At first de Valera keeps a low profile in America. Though he is greeted by Harry Boland and others when he docks in New York City, he first goes to Philadelphia and stays with Joseph McGarrity, the County Tyrone-born leader of Clan na Gael and a well-known figure in Irish America. He also quietly pays a visit to his mother in Rochester, New York.

De Valera’s first major engagement is on June 23, 1919, when he is unveiled to the American public at a press conference in the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Crowds throng the streets around the hotel, and de Valera proclaims, “I am in America as the official head of the Republic established by the will of the Irish people in accordance with the principle of self-determination.”

De Valera then embarks upon a tour across America. Vast crowds turn out to see the self-proclaimed “president of the Irish republic.” In Boston an estimated crowd of 70,000 people hear him talk in Fenway Park. In San Francisco he unveils a statute of Irish revolutionary hero Robert Emmet in Golden Gate Park.

Later in the year, de Valera holds a huge rally in Philadelphia, where he is welcomed by the mayor at Independence Hall. He also visits smaller towns and cities across the United States, and his trip garners huge press coverage – an invaluable boon for his campaign to heighten awareness of the Irish issue in America.

But difficulties soon emerged during de Valera’s visit. He becomes embroiled in a bitter split among Irish Americans. He finds himself at odds with Judge Daniel Cohalan and John Devoy, central figures in the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) association. Part of the dispute centers around money. De Valera had settled on an idea for a bond sale as a way of raising money for the cause – investors would be given bond certificates that would be exchangeable for bonds of the Irish Republic once it gets international recognition. But Cohalan and Devoy, who have already raised thousands through the Friends of Irish Freedom, are opposed, concerned about the scheme’s legality for one.

De Valera’s claim in an interview that Irish-British relations can be analogous to the relationship between Cuba and America also enrages the Cohalan-Devoy camp, who accuse him of surrendering the idea of full Irish sovereignty.

De Valera’s increasingly acrimonious relationship with Cohalan and Devoy spills over into the 1920 Republican and Democratic conventions. Against the advice of Cohalan and Devoy, he advances a resolution about Irish independence which is rejected 12-1 at the Republican convention in June of that year. A rival resolution by Cohalan squeezes through but ultimately is overturned. Similarly, he fails to secure the inclusion of the Irish issue in the Democratic Party’s policy platform during the Democrats’ convention in San Francisco.

De Valera leaves the United States in December 1920 with mixed results. Though he has raised millions of dollars through the bond sale, he has made little progress in co-opting official America to Ireland’s cause. Much as division is to characterise the next chapter of his political career in Ireland, de Valera’s sojourn in America leaves Irish America more divided than it has ever been.

(From: “Éamon de Valera’s US trip that left Irish America divided” by Suzanne Lynch, The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, June 1, 2019 | Pictured: Éamon de Valera (center) in New York with Friends of Irish Freedom’s Judge Daniel Cohalan and John Devoy in July 1919, Topical Press Agency/Getty)


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Birth of Daniel F. Cohalan, Irish American Lawyer & Politician

Daniel Florence Cohalan, American lawyer and politician of Irish descent, is born December 21, 1867, in Middletown, Orange County, New York, the eldest of five sons of Timothy E. Cohalan and Ellen Cohalan (née O’Leary), both Irish immigrants.

Cohalan graduates from Manhattan College in 1885, takes a master’s degree in 1894, and is given an honorary LL.D. in 1911. He is admitted to the bar in 1888, and practices law in New York City. In September 1889, he removes to the Bronx, practices law there, and enters politics, joining Tammany Hall, becoming an adviser to party boss Charles F. Murphy and later to John F. Curry. He is Grand Sachem of the Tammany Society from 1908 to 1911.

Cohalan is active in Democratic Party politics by 1900, drafting state party platforms and serving as a delegate to the national conventions in 1904 and 1908.

On May 18, 1911, Cohalan is appointed by Gov. John Alden Dix to the New York Supreme Court, to fill the vacancy caused by the election of James Aloysius O’Gorman as U.S. Senator from New York. In November 1911, he is elected to succeed himself. On December 28, 1923, he tenders his resignation, to become effective on January 12, 1924, claiming that the annual salary of $17,500 is not enough to provide for his large family.

Cohalan is a close associate of Irish revolutionary leader John Devoy and is influential in many Irish American societies including Clan na Gael. He helps to form the Sinn Féin League in 1907 and is a key organiser of the Irish Race Convention and the Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) on March 4-5, 1916. He is involved with the financing and planning of the Easter Rising in Dublin and is instrumental in sending Roger Casement to Germany in 1914. He is Chairman of the Irish Race Convention held in Philadelphia on February 22-23, 1919, and active in the Friends of Irish Freedom (1916–34).

When the United States enters World War I, Cohalan’s earlier work to obtain German assistance for Ireland becomes a liability, but he urges Irish Americans to support the war effort and to insist that self-determination for Ireland be included among the war aims. He opposes the peace treaty and the League of Nations and leads an Irish American delegation to the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearings, contributing to the defeat of the treaty in the Senate.

Cohalan strongly opposes President Woodrow Wilson‘s proposals for the League of Nations, on the basis that the Irish Republic had been denied a policy of self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. In 1920, he works for the nomination of Hiram W. Johnson as the Republican Party candidate for president. His quarrels with Franklin D. Roosevelt begin in 1910, and he fights Roosevelt’s nomination for president in 1932 and 1936. He breaks with both Éamon de Valera and Irish American leader Joseph McGarrity in late 1919 on Irish American political direction.

In the aftermath of the Anglo–Irish Treaty, Cohalan and the FOIF back Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and the Irish Free State. He visits Ireland in 1923 and supports William T. Cosgrave in the election of that year.

Cohalan dies at his home in Manhattan, New York, on November 12, 1946, and is buried on November 15 at the Calvary Cemetery in Woodside, Queens, New York. The Daniel F. Cohalan papers are in the possession of the American Irish Historical Society, New York.

State Senator John P. Cohalan (1873–1950) is one of Cohalan’s eleven siblings, and church historian Monsignor Florence Daniel Cohalan (1908–2001) is one of his nine children.


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Land League Organizer Michael Davitt Released from Dartmoor Prison

Michael Davitt, Irish republican and agrarian agitator, is paroled from Dartmoor Prison on December 19, 1877, having served seven and a half years of a fifteen-year sentence, following pressure from the Home Rule League for an amnesty for all Irish political prisoners.

Davitt is born in Straide, County Mayo, on March 25, 1846. He is the founder of the Irish National Land League, which organizes resistance to absentee landlordism and seeks to relieve the poverty of the tenant farmers by securing fixity of tenure, fair rent, and free sale of the tenant’s interest.

Davitt is the son of an evicted tenant farmer. After their eviction, the family emigrates to England. In 1856, at the age of 10, he starts work in a cotton mill, where he loses an arm in a machinery accident a year later. In 1865, he joins the revolutionary Fenian Brotherhood, an international secret society that seeks to secure political freedom for Ireland. He becomes secretary of its Irish analogue, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), in 1868. Arrested in Paddington Station in London for sending firearms to Ireland on May 14, 1870, he is sentenced to 15 years in Dartmoor Prison and there lays plans to link Charles Stewart Parnell’s constitutional reform with Fenian activism to achieve political-agrarian agitation.

Paroled from prison in 1877, Davitt rejoins the IRB and goes to the United States, where the Fenian movement originated. There he is deeply influenced by Henry George’s ideas about the relationship between land monopoly and poverty.

Back in Ireland, using funds raised by John Devoy and Clan na Gael in the United States, Davitt wins Parnell’s cooperation in organizing the Land League in 1879, which leads, however, to his expulsion from the supreme council of the IRB in 1880. He is elected member of Parliament for North Meath in 1882 but is disqualified as he is a convict. He is also imprisoned for seditious speeches in 1881 and 1883.

Because of his public championing of Henry George’s theories of land reform, Parnell repudiates him. Davitt actively defends the Nationalists before the Parnell Commission, which meets between 1887 and 1889. When the Irish party splits in 1890 over Parnell’s involvement in Capt. William Henry O’Shea’s divorce case, Davitt is among the first to oppose Parnell’s continuance as leader.

Davitt is elected to Parliament in 1892 and 1893 but is unseated in both cases. He is elected again, for South Mayo in 1895, but resigns in 1899 in protest against the Second Boer War.

Davitt dies in Elphis Hospital, Dublin on May 30, 1906, at the age of 60, from blood poisoning. The fact that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland attends his funeral is a public indication of the dramatic political journey this former Fenian prisoner has taken. There is no plan for public funeral, and hence Davitt’s body is brought quietly to the Carmelite Friary, Clarendon Street, Dublin. However, the next day over 20,000 people file past his coffin. His remains are taken by train to Foxford, County Mayo, and buried in the grounds of Straide Abbey at Straide, near his place of birth.

Davitt’s book, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (1904), is a valuable record of his time.


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The 1918 Irish General Election & Rise of Sinn Féin

The 1918 Irish general election is the part of the 1918 United Kingdom general election which takes place in Ireland on December 14, 1918. It is a key moment in modern Irish history because it sees the overwhelming defeat of the moderate nationalist Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), which had dominated the Irish political landscape since the 1880s, and a landslide victory for Sinn Féin. Sinn Féin had never previously stood in a general election but had won six seats in by-elections in 1917–18. The party vows in its manifesto to establish an independent Irish Republic. In Ulster, however, the Irish Unionist Alliance (IUA) is the most successful party.

In 1918, a system called plural voting is in place in both Britain and Ireland. Plural voting is a practice whereby one person might be able to vote multiple times in an election. Property and business owners can vote both in the constituency where their property lay and that in which they live, if the two are different. In the newly formed Irish Free State this system is ended by the Electoral Act 1923 and is abolished in the United Kingdom by the Representation of the People Act 1948. Plural voting remains in effect in Northern Ireland until 1969.

The 1918 election is held in the aftermath of World War I, the Easter Rising and the Conscription Crisis. It is the first general election to be held after the Representation of the People Act 1918. It is thus the first election in which women over the age of 30, and all men over the age of 21, can vote.

Sinn Féin is founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905. He believes that Irish nationalists should emulate the Ausgleich of Hungarian nationalists who, in the 19th century under Ferenc Deák, had chosen to boycott the imperial parliament in Vienna and unilaterally establish their own legislature in Budapest.

Griffith initially favours a peaceful solution based on “dual monarchy” with Britain, that is two separate states with a single head of state and a limited central government to control matters of common concern only. However, by 1918, under its new leader, Éamon de Valera, Sinn Féin has come to favour achieving separation from Britain by means of an armed uprising if necessary and the establishment of an independent republic.

In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, the party’s ranks are swelled by participants and supporters of the rebellion as they are freed from British gaols and internment camps. At its 1917 Ardfheis (annual conference) de Valera is elected leader, and the new, more radical policy is adopted.

Prior to 1916, Sinn Féin had been a fringe movement having a limited cooperative alliance with William O’Brien‘s All-for-Ireland League and enjoyed little electoral success. However, between the Easter Rising of that year and the 1918 general election, the party’s popularity increases dramatically. This is due to the failure to have the Home Rule Bill implemented when the IPP resists the partition of Ireland demanded by Ulster Unionists in 1914, 1916 and 1917, but also popular antagonism towards the British authorities created by the execution of most of the leaders of the 1916 rebels and by their botched attempt to introduce Home Rule on the conclusion of the Irish Convention linked with military conscription in Ireland (see Conscription Crisis of 1918).

Sinn Féin demonstrates its new electoral capability in four by-election successes in 1917 in which George Noble Plunkett, Joseph McGuinness, de Valera and W. T. Cosgrave are each elected, although it loses three by-elections in early 1918 before winning two more with Patrick McCartan and Arthur Griffith. In one case there are unproven allegations of electoral fraud. The party benefits from a number of factors in the 1918 elections, including demographic changes and political factors.

In the aftermath of the elections, Sinn Féin’s elected members refuse to attend the British Parliament in Westminster, and instead form a parliament in Dublin, Dáil Éireann (“Assembly of Ireland”), which declares Irish independence as a republic. The Irish War of Independence is conducted under this revolutionary government which seeks international recognition and sets about the process of state-building. The next election is part of 1921 Irish elections.

(Pictured: L to R, Éamon de Valera of Sinn Féin, Sir Edward Carson on the Irish Unionist Alliance, and John Dillon of the Irish Parliamentary Party)


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Birth of Naomi Long, Northern Irish Politician

Naomi Rachel Long MLA (née Johnston), a Northern Irish politician who serves as Minister of Justice in the Northern Ireland Executive from January 2020 to October 2022, is born in east Belfast, Northern Ireland, on December 13, 1971. She has served as leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland (APNI) since 2016 and a Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Belfast East since 2020.

Long attends Mersey Street Primary and Bloomfield Collegiate School. She graduates from Queen’s University Belfast with a degree in civil engineering in 1994, works in a structural engineering consultancy for two years, holds a research and training post at Queen’s University for three years, and then goes back into environmental and hydraulic engineering consultancy for four years.

Long first takes political office in 2001 when she is elected to Belfast City Council for the Victoria ward. In 2003, she is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly for Belfast East, succeeding her fellow party member John Alderdice. In 2006, she is named deputy leader of her party. In the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election, she more than doubles the party’s vote in the constituency, being placed second ahead of the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). The overall UUP vote, however, is 22%. At 18.8%, her vote share is higher than that for Alderdice in 1998.

On June 1, 2009, Long is elected as Lord Mayor of Belfast, defeating Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) candidate William Humphrey by 26 votes to 24 in a vote at a council meeting. She becomes the second woman to hold the post, after Grace Bannister (1981–82).

On May 6, 2010, Long defeats Peter Robinson, First Minister of Northern Ireland and leader of the DUP, to become Member of Parliament (MP) for Belfast East in the House of Commons. She becomes the first MP elected to Westminster for the Alliance Party (previously, Stratton Mills, a former Ulster Unionist Party MP, had changed parties to Alliance). She also becomes the first Liberal-affiliated MP elected to Westminster in Northern Ireland since James Brown Dougherty in Londonderry City in 1914. Despite the close relationship between the Alliance Party and the Liberal Democrats, she does not sit with the coalition government nor take the coalition whip and is not a member of the Liberal Democrats.

On December 10, 2012, Long receives a number of death threats, and a petrol bomb is thrown inside an unmarked police car guarding her constituency office. This violence erupts as a reaction by Ulster loyalists to the decision by Alliance Party members of Belfast City Council to vote in favour of restricting the flying of the Union flag at Belfast City Hall to designated days throughout the year, which at the time constitutes 18 specific days.

In 2015, Long loses her seat in the Commons to Gavin Robinson of the DUP, as a result of a five-party unionist pact in the constituency which sees the UUP, UK Independence Party (UKIP), Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) and Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) all stand aside in favour of Robinson.

In January 2016, Long announces that she will return as an Assembly candidate in the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly election having been nominated in place of incumbent Judith Cochrane. She is subsequently elected on the first count with 14.7% of first-preference votes. Following her return to the Assembly, she assumes positions on the Committee for Communities, the All-Party Group on Fairtrade, the All-Party Group for Housing, and chairs the All-Party Group on Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics.

In August 2016, Long calls for Sinn Féin‘s Máirtín Ó Muilleoir to stand aside as Minister of Finance during an investigation of the Stormont Finance Committee’s handling of its Nama inquiry, while Ó Muilleoir is a committee member. This follows allegations that his party had “coached” loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson prior to his appearance before the committee.

In November 2016, Long criticises Sinn Féin and the DUP for delaying the publication of a working group report on abortion, which recommends legislative changes in cases of fatal foetal abnormality, calling on the Executive “to act without further delay to help women who decide to seek a termination in these very difficult circumstances.”

On October 26, 2016, Long is elected Alliance leader unopposed following the resignation of David Ford. In the first manifesto released under her leadership, she affirms her commitment to building a “united, open, liberal and progressive” society. Her party’s legislative priorities are revealed to include the harmonisation and strengthening of equality and anti-discrimination measures, the introduction of civil marriage equality, development of integrated education and a Northern Ireland framework to tackle climate change.

In the 2017 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Long tops the poll in Belfast East and is returned to the Assembly with 18.9% of first-preference votes. The election is widely viewed as a success for Alliance, with the party increasing its vote share by 2 percentage points and retaining all of its seats in a smaller Assembly. The party subsequently holds the balance of power at Stormont.

Alliance targets two seats in Belfast South and Belfast East in the 2017 United Kingdom general election. During the campaign, Long reaffirms her support for a People’s Vote, marriage equality, Votes at 16 and greater transparency surrounding political donations. She also pledges to oppose any rollback of the Human Rights Act 1998.

Following the collapse of talks to restore devolution in February 2018, Long reiterates her view that the pay of MLAs should be cut in the absence of a functioning Executive. In March 2018, Alliance launches its “Next Steps Forward” paper, outlining a number of proposals aimed at breaking the deadlock and Stormont. At the 2019 Alliance Party Conference, she accuses Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Karen Bradley of an “appalling dereliction of duty” over the ongoing stalemate, saying that she had made “no concerted effort to end this interminable drift despite it allegedly being her top priority.”

In the 2019 Northern Ireland local elections, Alliance sees a 65% rise in its representation on councils. Long hails the “incredible result” as a watershed moment for politics in Northern Ireland.

Long is elected to the European Parliament as a representative for Northern Ireland in May 2019 with 18.5% of first-preference votes, the best ever result for Alliance. She is subsequently replaced in the Assembly by Máire Hendron, a founding member of the party and former deputy lord mayor of Belfast. She then replaces Hendron in the Assembly with effect from January 9, 2020.

In 2019, Long becomes the first Northern Ireland politician to have served at every level of government.

On January 11, 2020, following the restoration of the Northern Ireland Assembly after three years of stalemate, Long is elected Minister of Justice in the Northern Ireland Executive. On January 28, she announces that she will progress new domestic abuse legislation through the Assembly which will make coercive control a criminal offence in Northern Ireland. In June 2020, she commissions a review into the support available for prison officers following concerns about absence rates. That same month, she announces her intention to introduce unexplained wealth orders in Northern Ireland to target paramilitary and criminal finances.

In November 2020, Long says she is seriously reconsidering her position within the Executive following the DUP’s deployment of a cross-community vote to prevent an extension of COVID-19 regulations. She tells BBC News, “I have asked people to desist from this abuse of power because it will make my position in the executive unsustainable.”

In March 2022, Long tells the Alliance Party Conference that “some politicians are addicted to crisis and conflict and simply not up to the job of actually governing.” Long leads Alliance into the 2022 Northern Ireland Assembly election on a platform of integrated education, health reform, a Green New Deal, tackling paramilitarism and reform of the Stormont institutions.

Long is a member of Bloomfield Presbyterian Church. Following the Church’s decision to exclude those in same-sex relationships from being full members, she expresses “great concern” and states that she “didn’t know” if she would remain a member herself. She is married to Michael Long, an Alliance councillor on Belfast City Council and former Lord Mayor of Belfast, and son of the engineer Professor Adrian Long. Long and her husband are the first husband and wife to have both served as Lord Mayors of Belfast.