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Category Archives: Politics & Government


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Ahern & Blair Push for Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement

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At an informal European Union summit near Bonn on February 26, 1999, Taoiseach Bertie Ahern and British Prime Minister Tony Blair agree to push for implementation of the Good Friday Agreement by the March 10 deadline.

As EU delegates discuss the Union’s budget and Europe‘s farming subsidies, the two prime ministers vow to battle on with the peace deal’s outstanding problems.

“We’re very clear on what we have to do in the Good Friday agreement … we have just got to keep pushing the thing forward as well as we possibly can,” says Blair.

Both Ahern and Blair say the way forward on the outstanding deadlocked issue of paramilitary disarmament is through the official decommissioning commission. Chaired by former Canadian General John de Chastelain, the international commission is working to take arms out of the province’s political arena.

The republican party Sinn Féin insists it is fully cooperating with the commission, which is implementing the final deadline for the handover of arms in May 2000. But some Ulster Unionists oppose further peace moves because of the Irish Republican Army‘s (IRA) failure to begin disarming.

According to Ahern and Blair, the following few weeks will be a key time to try and finalise disarmament issues.

“During the month of March … we can conclude the central aspects,” says Blair.

However, in a separate development on February 26, the chairman of the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin’s Mitchel McLaughlin, warns that pressure on disarmament could cause irreparable damage to the fragile peace process. He adds that disarmament should not become a litmus test for progress.

“Those who are now demanding prior decommissioning before we move to setting up the executive are reneging on the Good Friday Agreement,” says McLaughlin in an interview with BBC Radio.

(From BBC News Online Network, Friday, February 26, 1999 | Pictured: Bertie Ahern with Tony Blair at the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in April 1998)


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The First Dungannon Convention

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The first Dungannon Convention of the Ulster Volunteers on February 15, 1782, calls for an independent Irish parliament. This is the parliament that Henry Grattan also campaigns for and later becomes known as “Grattan’s parliament.”

The Irish Volunteers are a part-time military force whose original purpose is to guard against invasion and to preserve law and order when regular troops are being sent to America during the American Revolutionary War. Members are mainly drawn from the Protestant urban and rural middle classes and the movement soon begins to take on a political importance.

The first corps of Volunteers is formed in Belfast and the movement spreads rapidly across Ireland. By 1782 there are 40,000 enlisted in the Volunteers, half of them in Ulster. Strongly influenced by American ideas, though loyal to the Crown, the Volunteers demand greater legislative freedom for the Dublin Parliament.

The Dungannon Convention is a key moment in the eventual granting of legislative independence to Ireland.

At the time, all proposed Irish legislation has to be submitted to the Privy Council of the United Kingdom for its approval under the great seal of England before being passed by the Parliament of Ireland. English Acts emphasise the complete dependence of the Irish parliament on its English counterpart and English Houses claim and exercise the power to legislate directly for Ireland, even without the agreement of the parliament in Dublin.

The Ulster Volunteers, who assemble in Dungannon, County Tyrone, demand change. Prior to this, the Volunteers received the thanks of the Irish parliament for their stance but in the House of Commons, the British had ‘won over’ a majority of that assembly, which led to a resistance of further concessions. Thus, the 315 volunteers in Ulster at the Dungannon convention promised “to root out corruption and court influence from the legislative body,” and “to deliberate on the present alarming situation of public affairs.”

The Convention is held in a church and is conducted in a very civil manner. The Volunteers agree, almost unanimously, to resolutions declaring the right of Ireland to legislative and judicial independence, as well as free trade. A week later, Grattan, in a great speech, moves an address of the Commons to His Majesty, asserting the same principles but his motion is defeated. So too is another motion by Henry Flood, declaring the legislative independence of the Irish Parliament.

However, the British soon realise they can resist the agitation no longer. It is through ranks of Volunteers drawn up outside the parliament house in Dublin that Grattan passes on April 16, 1782, amidst unparalleled popular enthusiasm, to move a declaration of the independence of the Irish parliament. After a month of negotiations, legislative independence is granted to Ireland.

(Pictured: The original Irish Parliament Building which now houses the Bank of Ireland, College Green, opposite the main entrance to Trinity College, Dublin)


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Birth of Stephen Lucius Gwynn, Writer & Politician

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Stephen Lucius Gwynn, journalist, biographer, author, poet, Protestant Nationalist politician, and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is born on February 13, 1864, in St. Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, Dublin, where his father John Gwynn, a biblical scholar and Church of Ireland clergyman, is a warden.

Gwynn spends his early childhood in rural County Donegal, which shapes his later view of Ireland. He is educated at St. Columba’s College and goes on to Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as scholar, in 1884 he is awarded first-class honours in classical moderations and in 1886 literae humaniores. During term holidays he returns to Dublin, where he meets several of the political and literary figures of the day.

After graduating Gwynn moves to France where he works as a schoolmaster for ten years. In December 1889 he marries his cousin Mary Louisa Gwynn. They have four sons and two daughters. Having dabbled in journalism since his student days, he moves to London in 1896 to pursue a career as a writer. He soon becomes a prominent figure in literary and journalistic circles.

In 1904 the Gwynns return to Ireland to live in Raheny, County Dublin. In November 1906 he wins a seat for Galway Borough, which he represents as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party until 1918. During this time, he also becomes active with the Gaelic League and the Irish Literary Revival.

At the outbreak of World War I, Gwynn gives his support to John Redmond that Irishmen should enlist in the British forces. At the age of fifty-one he enlists as a private in the 7th Leinster Regiment and is later commissioned lieutenant in the 6th Battalion Connaught Rangers, attached to the 16th (Irish) Division. He is promoted to captain in 1915 and serves with his battalion at the battles of Ginchy and Guillemont during the Somme offensive and also at Messines in 1917, leaving the front line shortly afterwards.

Gwynn is appointed to the Dardanelles Commission in 1916, an investigation into the unsuccessful 1915 Gallipoli Campaign.

After the war Gwynn continues with his writing and political life. He receives honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland in 1940 and the University of Dublin in 1945. He dies on June 11, 1950, at his home in Terenure, Dublin and is buried at Tallaght cemetery.


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Death of Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire

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Robert Hobart, 4th Earl of Buckinghamshire and former Member of Parliament (MP) for Portarlington and Armagh Borough, dies from a fall from his horse in St. James’s Park, London on February 4, 1816. He is styled Lord Hobart from 1793 to 1804.

Hobart is born at Hampden House on May 6, 1760, the son of George Hobart, 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire and Albinia, daughter of Lord Vere Bertie, younger son of Robert Bertie, 1st Duke of Ancaster and Kesteven. He is educated at Westminster School, London, and later serves in the American Revolutionary War. He acts as aide-de-camp to successive lord lieutenants of Ireland from 1784 onwards.

Hobart is a Member of Parliament (MP) in the Irish House of Commons for Portarlington from 1784 to 1790 and thereafter for Armagh Borough from 1790 to 1797. He sits also in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom for the rotten borough of Bramber in 1788, a seat he holds until 1790, and then for Lincoln from 1790 to 1796. In 1793 he is invested a member of the Privy Council, and appointed Governor of Madras. In 1798 he is recalled to England by the President of the Board of Control responsible for Indian affairs, Henry Dundas, and summoned to the House of Lords through a writ of acceleration in his father’s junior title of Baron Hobart.

Hobart later serves as Secretary of State for War and the Colonies from 1801 to 1804 when it is said he had “a better grasp of the local or colonial conditions, and a more active spirit than did some of his successors.” He is Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1805 and again in 1812, Postmaster General from 1806 to 1807 and President of the Board of Control from 1812 to 1816. Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, is named after him.

Hobart marries firstly Margaretta, daughter of Edmund Bourke, in 1792. They have one son, who dies in infancy, and a daughter, Lady Sarah, who marries Prime Minister Lord Goderich and is the mother of George Robinson, 1st Marquess of Ripon. After Margaretta’s death in 1796 he marries secondly the Hon. Eleanor Agnes, daughter of William Eden, 1st Baron Auckland, in 1799. There are no children from this marriage.

Robert Hobart dies at Hamilton Place, London, on February 4, 1816 at the age of 55, after falling from his horse. He is succeeded in the earldom by his nephew, George. Lady Buckinghamshire dies in October 1851, at the age of 74.


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Laying of the Foundation Stone of Parliament House

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The foundation stone of Parliament House in College Green is laid on February 3, 1729, by Thomas Wyndham, 1st Baron Wyndham, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Parliament House is initially home to the Parliament of Ireland and later houses the Bank of Ireland. It is the world’s first purpose-built bicameral parliament house. The current parliament building is Leinster House.

The building is home to the two Houses of Parliament, serving as the seat of both chambers, the House of Lords and House of Commons, of the Parliament of the Kingdom of Ireland for most of the 18th century until that parliament is abolished by the Acts of Union 1800, when Ireland becomes part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.

In the 17th century, parliament settles at Chichester House, a town house in Hoggen Green (later College Green) formerly owned by Sir George Carew, Lord President of Munster and Lord High Treasurer of Ireland, which had been built on the site of a nunnery disbanded by King Henry VIII at the time of the dissolution of the monasteries. Carew’s house, named Chichester House after its later owner Sir Arthur Chichester, is a building of sufficient importance to have become the temporary home of the Kingdom of Ireland’s law courts during the Michaelmas law term in 1605. Most famously, the legal documentation facilitating the Plantation of Ulster is signed there on November 16, 1612.

Chichester House is in a dilapidated state, allegedly haunted and unfit for official use. In 1727 parliament votes to spend £6,000 on a new building on the site. It is to be the world’s first purpose-built two-chamber parliament building.

The then ancient Palace of Westminster, the seat of the English before 1707 and, later, British Parliament, is a converted building. The House of Commons‘s odd seating arrangements is due to the chamber’s previous existence as a chapel. Hence MPs face each other from former pews.

The design of the new building, one of two purpose-built Irish parliamentary buildings (along with Parliament Buildings, Stormont), is entrusted to an architect, Edward Lovett Pearce, who is a member of parliament and a protégé of the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, William Conolly of Castletown House. During construction, Parliament moves into the Blue Coat Hospital on Dublin‘s Northside.

The original, domed House of Commons chamber is destroyed by fire in the 1790s, and a less elaborate new chamber, without a dome, is rebuilt in the same location and opened in 1796, four years before the Parliament’s ultimate abolition.

Pearce’s designs come to be studied and copied both at home and abroad. The Viceregal Apartments in Dublin Castle imitate his top-lit corridors. The British Museum in Bloomsbury in London copies his colonnaded main entrance. His impact reaches Washington, D.C., where his building, and in particular his octagonal House of Commons chamber, is studied as plans are made for the United States Capitol building. While the shape of the chamber is not replicated, some of its decorative motifs are, with the ceiling structure in the Old Senate Chamber and old House of Representatives chamber (now the National Statuary Hall) bearing a striking resemblance to Pearce’s ceiling in the House of Commons.

(Pictured: Architectural drawing of the front of Parliament House by Peter Mazell based on the drawing by Rowland Omer, 1767)


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Ahern Meets Paisley in County Antrim

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Taoiseach Bertie Ahern visits Ballymena on February 1, 2008, to meet Northern Ireland First Minister Ian Paisley in his County Antrim constituency. Paisley says the Taoiseach’s visit to north Antrim is a historic day, and Ahern says his visit is another tangible benefit of the ongoing peace process.

Ahern and Paisley discuss political and economic developments in Northern Ireland and increasing cross-Border co-operation. The Taoiseach says he is honoured to visit the north Antrim heartland of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) leader.

“I do not believe even a year back it could have been envisaged we would have been together here,” Ahern says. “It is an honour to be here with the First Minister to talk about progress.”

Paisley jokes that Ahern and his entourage had held a prayer meeting in their helicopter hoping that they would not be pelted with snowballs by him, a reference to his famous protest when former Taoiseach Seán Lemass visited Stormont in 1965.

When asked about welcoming the Fianna Fáil leader to his constituency Paisley quips, “What I am saying is he is in under my control. This is a good day for work. It is a good day for our province. It is a good day for the whole of Ireland because we need help from outside. We cannot live on our own.”

Ahern and Paisley meet again the following week at the Dublin Chamber of Commerce AGM dinner where Paisley has been invited to be a guest speaker.

The engagement is the latest visit to the Republic by the DUP leader since the Assembly was restored in Stormont the previous May. The Taoiseach invites Paisley to the historic Battle of the Boyne battle site in County Louth in July where the DUP leader presents a 17th-century musket to Ahern.

In October 2007, Paisley addresses the Trinity College Historical Society in Dublin and also attends an event in the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland in the city in November.

(From The Irish Times, Friday, February 1, 2008)


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Birth of Sir Arthur Philip du Cros

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Sir Arthur Philip du Cros, British industrialist and politician, is born in Dublin on January 26, 1871.

Du Cros is the third of seven sons of Harvey du Cros. He is brought up in modest circumstances. His father, later a well-known manufacturer, is at the time only a bookkeeper with an income of £170 a year. He attends a national school in Dublin and then enters the civil service at the lowest grade. In 1892 he joins the Pneumatic Tyre and Booth’s Cycle Agency Ltd, of which his father is now the chairman, and is made a joint managing director in 1896 when it is floated as a public company.

In 1895 du Cros marries Maude Gooding, the daughter of a Coventry watch manufacturer. They have two sons and two daughters before a divorce in 1923.

In 1901 du Cros founds the Dunlop Rubber Company, converting 400 acres of land in Birmingham to produce and manufacture tires, with the area henceforth being known as Fort Dunlop. The firm eventually diversifies into making other rubber products as well as tires, and du Cros selects plantations in Malaya and Sri Lanka for the company, which by 1917 owns 60,000 acres of rubber-producing land.

In 1906 du Cros enters politics, unsuccessfully contesting the seat of Bow & Bromley as a Conservative Party candidate, a seat his brother is elected to in 1910. In 1908 he is elected Member of Parliament for Hastings, a position his father had held immediately before.

In 1909 du Cros forms, and is director of, the Parliamentary Aerial Defence Committee to ensure funding for military aeronautical development, of which he is a strong proponent. During World War I he works for the Ministry of Munitions on an honorary basis, buying two motorised ambulance convoys out of his own money and helping raise an infantry battalion, being a former captain of the Royal Warwickshires and for some years being the honorary colonel of the 8th battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In 1916 he is created a baronet. He continues to represent Hastings until 1918, when he is elected as a Member of Parliament for Clapham, a position he resigns four years later.

His later career is awash with financial impropriety. He finds it difficult to distinguish between personal and company assets, using company funds to sponsor family investments and appointing family members to senior position with no regard for merit. He also participates in financial manipulation, being a close associate of James White, a financial expert who specialises in share rigging and whose actions leave Dunlop, had already lost influence within the company, close to collapse in 1921. He is quietly removed after the 1921 crash.

Arthur du Cros dies at home near Watford, Hertfordshire on October 28, 1955, at the age of 84. He is interred in Finstock, Oxfordshire.


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Birth of Lionel Cranfield Sackville, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland

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Lionel Cranfield Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset, English political leader and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, is born in Dorset, United Kingdom on January 18, 1688.

Sackville is the son of Charles Sackville, 6th Earl of Dorset and 1st Earl of Middlesex, and the former Lady Mary Compton, younger daughter of James Compton, 3rd Earl of Northampton. Styled Lord Buckhurst from birth, he succeeds his father as 7th Earl of Dorset and 2nd Earl of Middlesex in 1706 and is created Duke of Dorset in 1720.

Perhaps because he had been on a previous diplomatic mission to Hanover, Sackville is chosen to inform George I of his accession to the Crown in August 1714. George I initially favours him and numerous offices and honours are given to him: Privy Councillor, Knight of the Garter, Groom of the Stool, Lord Steward, Governor of Dover Castle and Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. At George I’s coronation he carries the sceptre. At the coronation of George II, he is Lord High Steward and carries St. Edward’s Crown. He quarrels with the King in 1717 and is told his services are no longer required, but he is made a Duke three years later.

Sackville serves twice as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, from 1731 to 1737 and again from 1751 to 1755. In 1739, at the foundation of the Foundling Hospital, he is one of that charity’s original governors. His first term as Lord Lieutenant is uneventful. His second takes place at a time of acute political tension between the two main factions in the Irish Government, one led by Henry Boyle, the Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, the other by George Stone, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh. Sackville, now heavily influenced by his son George Sackville, makes the mistake of openly backing the archbishop. He is unable to oust Boyle from power and is accused of being the archbishop’s tool. He becomes extremely unpopular, leading to his eventual recall.

Sackville’s last years are uneventful, apart from a riot in 1757 caused by the passage of the Militia Act to raise an army for the Seven Years’ War, in which he narrowly escapes injury. He dies at Knole, a country house in west Kent, on October 9, 1765, and is buried at Withyham in East Sussex.

(Pictured: Oil on canvas Portrait of Lionel Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset (1688-1765) by Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723), 1719, currently displayed at Commonwealth Secretariat, Marlborough House, London)


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Birth of Eileen Christine Desmond, Labour Party Politician

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Eileen Christine Desmond (née Harrington), Irish Labour Party politician who serves as Minister for Health and Minister for Social Welfare from 1981 to 1982, is born in Kinsale, County Cork on December 29, 1932. She serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 1965 to 1969, 1973 to 1981 and 1981 to 1987. She serves as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Munster constituency from 1979 to 1984. She is a Senator for the Industrial and Commercial Panel from 1969 to 1973.

Harrington is educated locally at the Convent of Mercy in Kinsale, where she is one of only two girls in her class to sit the Leaving Certificate examination. Before entering politics, she works as a civil servant with the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. She marries Dan Desmond in 1958.

Desmond is first elected to Dáil Éireann in a by-election on March 10, 1965, due to the death of her husband who had been a Teachta Dála (TD) since 1948. Her victory in the Cork Mid constituency leads Taoiseach Seán Lemass to dissolve the 17th Dáil and call a general election. She is elected for the second time in a year but loses her seat at the 1969 general election. However, she is then elected to the 12th Seanad on the Industrial and Commercial Panel, where she serves until her re-election to the 20th Dáil at the 1973 general election.

Desmond is elected to the European Parliament at the 1979 European Parliament election for the Munster constituency. However, her time in Europe is short-lived, as she returns to domestic politics when she is offered a position as Minister and the chance to impact upon national legislation. At the 1981 general election she switches her constituency to Cork South-Central. A Fine Gael–Labour Party coalition comes to power, and she is appointed Minister for Health and Social Welfare.

Desmond’s cabinet appointment is historic, as she is only the second woman to be a member of cabinet since the foundation of the state in 1922, and the first in any Fine Gael or Labour Party cabinet. Countess Markievicz had held the cabinet post of Minister for Labour in the revolutionary First Dáil in 1919, but only one woman had held cabinet office after the foundation of the state, Máire Geoghegan-Quinn of Fianna Fáil who was appointed as Minister for the Gaeltacht in 1979.

Desmond retires from full-time politics at the 1987 general election for health reasons. She dies suddenly in Cork, County Cork on January 6, 2005.


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Birth of Sir John Parnell, 2nd Baronet

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Sir John Parnell, 2nd Baronet, an Anglo-Irish Member of Parliament, is born on December 25, 1744.

A Church of Ireland landowner, his family had originally migrated to Ireland from Congleton in Cheshire. Although not from an Irish Roman Catholic background, Parnell, the only son of Sir John Parnell, 1st Baronet, is renowned in Irish history for his efforts to bring about a more emancipated country. He is the great-grandfather of Charles Stewart Parnell, known as the uncrowned king of Ireland and best known for opposing the Acts of Union 1800 between the two kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland.

From a line of politically astute ancestors who had moved to Ireland in the 17th century, Parnell rises to the highest positions in Irish politics as Commissioner of the Revenue (1780), Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland (1787), and Lord of the Treasury (1793).

Parnell first serves in the Parliament of Ireland as one of the members for Bangor, from 1767 to 1768. He later sits for Queen’s County from 1783 until the Union with Great Britain creates the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. After the Union, he gains a seat in the Parliament of the United Kingdom for a short time as member for Queen’s County but dies suddenly in London in December 1801.

Henry Grattan describes Parnell as “an honest, straightforward, independent man, possessed of considerable ability and much public spirit; as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he was not deficient, and he served his country by his plan to reduce the interest of money. He was amiable in private, mild in disposition, but firm in mind and purpose. His conduct at the Union did him honour, and proved how warmly he was attached to the interests of his country, and on this account, he was dismissed.”

(Pictured: Oil painting on canvas, The Right Hon. Sir John Parnell, 2nd Bt (1744–1801) by Pompeo Girolamo Batoni (Lucca 1708 – Rome 1787))