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.
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.
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 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 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.”
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 DevlinMP.
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 Countyby-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.
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 PresidentWoodrow 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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 IrelandKaren 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.
McGarry is born at 17 Pembroke Cottages, Dundrum, Dublin, on August 2, 1886. An active member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, he is a close friend of Bulmer Hobson and is frequently arrested or imprisoned by British authorities for his activities with the IRB during the early 1900s. He participates in the 1916 Easter Rising as an aide-de-camp to Tom Clarke and is sentenced to eight years penal servitude for his role in the failed rebellion.
McGarry is sent to Frongoch internment camp in Wales but is eventually released. He assists Michael Collins in his efforts to reorganise the Irish Republican Brotherhood and, at the Volunteer Executive Meeting held in late 1917, he is elected General Secretary of the Irish Volunteers.
On the night of May 17, 1918, McGarry is arrested, along with seventy-three other Irish nationalist leaders, and deported to England, where they are held in custody without charge. The day following their arrest, he and the others are charged with conspiring “to enter into, and have entered into, treasonable communication with the German enemy.” In his absence, Harry Boland is selected for the Supreme Council and becomes his successor as president of the IRB.
McGarry is only imprisoned a short time when he takes part in the famous escape from Lincoln Jail with Seán Milroy and Éamon de Valera on February 3, 1919. He and Milroy manage to smuggle out a postcard, a comical sketch of McGarry to his wife, allowing a copy of the key to their cell to be made. They are later assisted by Harry Boland and Michael Collins who await them outside the prison.
A month later, McGarry gives a dramatic speech at a Sinn Féin concert held at the Mansion House, Dublin, before going into hiding.
Throughout the Irish War of Independence, McGarry serves as a commander and is eventually elected to Second Dáil in the 1921 Irish elections as a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) representing Dublin Mid. He, like the majority of those in the Irish Republican Brotherhood, supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and is involved in debates against de Valera during the controversy, most especially discussing the status of Sinn Féin as a political entity.
McGarry is re-elected as a Pro-Treaty Sinn Féin TD in the 1922 Irish general election, siding with the Free State government during the Irish Civil War. Liam Lynch and other members of the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army plan the assassination of McGarry among other TDs supporting the Public Safety Bill. As one anti-Treaty volunteer tells Ernie O’Malley, “Seán McGarry was often drunk in Amiens Street and the boys wanted to shoot him and the Staters there, but I wouldn’t let them.”
On December 10, 1922, shortly before the first meeting of the Free State parliament, a fire is deliberately set by irregulars (anti-Treatyites) at McGarry’s family home. His seven-year-old son, Emmet, is badly burned and dies as a result. McGarry is one of four targeted by anti-Treatyites during the December Free State executions. De Valera publicly denounces the attack.
After retiring from politics, McGarry works for the Irish Hospitals Trust, writes articles for newspapers and journals, and engages in broadcasting. After residing from the mid-1920s at several addresses in Dún Laoghaire, from 1938 he lives at 25 Booterstown Avenue, Blackrock, Dublin. With his wife Tomasina he has two sons and one daughter. He dies suddenly on December 9, 1958, of a heart attack in his son’s home at 44 Richmond Avenue, Monkstown, County Dublin.
Varadkar says in appointing Coveney as Tánaiste he is “very conscious of the important role he plays as Minister of Foreign Affairs, as minister responsible for Brexit.” He adds, “I believe his appointment as Tánaiste and deputy prime minister will enhance his position in representing the government overseas in the negotiations currently under way.”
Frances Fitzgerald steps down from the role of Tánaiste on November 28, after new revelations about what she knew of the garda strategy and aggressive stance towards Maurice McCabe at the O’Higgins inquiry in 2015.
In a statement, Fitzgerald says, “Today I made the decision to tender my resignation to the Taoiseach, stepping down with immediate effect as Tánaiste and Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation. It has been the greatest honour of my life to serve in Government, but I believe it is necessary to take this decision to avoid an unwelcome and potentially destabilising general election at this historically critical time.
Fitzgerald adds, “Throughout my career I have always sought to act with integrity and responsibility, and that is why I have decided on this occasion to put the national interest ahead of my own personal reputation. I have always believed in fairness and equality and these principles have guided my work as Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, as Minister for Justice and Equality, and now as Minister for Business, Enterprise and Innovation.’
Fitzgerald concludes, “I would like to thank the Taoiseach for showing the same courage and determination to protect my good name that he displayed three years ago when he stood up and defended the reputation of Maurice McCabe. What I admire most about the Taoiseach is that he has always believed in doing what was right – not what was popular or politically expedient. I will always be grateful for his confidence and support and for giving me the opportunity to serve in a Government that is making a real difference in people’s lives at a critical time in our history.”
(From: “Simon Coveney appointed new Tánaiste after Frances Fitzgerald steps down over Maurice McCabe controversy” by Lauren Kelly and Deborah McAleese, The Irish Sun, November 30, 2017 | Photo Credit: RollingNews.ie)
seamus dubhghaill 