Griffith purchases and drains the bogland at Pollagh, part of the Bog of Allen. A peat fueled power station is built which drives an excavator and excess peat is taken via the Grand Canal for sale in Dublin. The site is sold to the Turf Development Board in 1936 who use it as a basis for all of their later peat fueled power stations. The area is now a nature reserve.
Griffith receives a knighthood in 1911 and becomes vice-president of the Royal Dublin Society in 1922. He serves as Honorary Professor of Harbour Engineering at Trinity College, his alma mater, and receives an honorary M.A.I. degree from the University of Dublin in 1914. From 1922 he is an elected member of the Seanad Éireann, the Irish Free State senate, until its abolition in 1936. In the 1930s he and Sarah Purser endow the Purser Griffith Travelling Scholarship and the Purser Griffith Prize to the two best performing students in European Art History at University College Dublin.
Griffith dies at Rathmines Castle in Dublin on October 21, 1938.
Catinat, advancing from Fenestrelle and Susa to the relief Pinerolo, defended by René de Froulay, Comte de Tessé, and which the Duke of Savoy is besieging, takes up a position in formal order of battle north of the village of Marsaglia, near Orbassano. Here, on October 4, the Duke of Savoy attacks him with his entire army, front to front, but the greatly superior regimental efficiency of the French, and Catinat’s minute attention to details in arraying them, gives the new marshal a victory that is a worthy pendant to Neerwinden.
During the battle, Irish dragoons are reported to have “overthrown squadrons, sword in hand,” but elsewhere on the battlefield, Prince Eugene of Savoy overruns a French line and advances to the second line, held by Irish regiments. There Eugene’s advance is broken, and his troops are soon put to rout. The impetuous Irish then pursue without orders. Seeing this development, the French commander orders a general advance and the allied army breaks and runs. Official French reports speak of the “extreme valor” of the Irish that day.
The Piedmontese and their allies lose approximately 12,000 killed, wounded and prisoners, as against Catinat’s 1,800. Among the Irish killed in this great victory are Brigadier Francis O’Carroll of the dragoons and Colonel Daniel O’Brien, 4th Viscount Clare. One very young officer of the Irish Brigade who survives the fight is Lieutenant Peter Lacy.
Marsaglia is, if not the first, at any rate, one of the first, instances of a bayonet charge by a long deployed line of infantry. Hussars figure here for the first time in Western Europe. A regiment of them had been raised in 1692 from deserters from the Austrian service. It is also notable as one of the first major battles to see the new Irish Brigade in action for the French army.
(Pictured: Marshal Nicholas Catinat at the Battle of Marsaglia, October 4, 1693, painting by Eugène Devéria, 1837, Museum of the History of France)
Maclaine is born in County Monaghan in 1724, second son among two sons and one daughter of the Rev. Lauchlin Maclaine, a Presbyterian minister from Scotland, and Elizabeth Maclaine (née Milling). His brother, Archibald Maclaine, later becomes a minister. Educated locally, he is reckless, headstrong, and dismissive of his parents’ attempts to make him respectable. When his father dies he squanders his inheritance on a dissolute lifestyle and is forced to find work in London.
Maclaine considers joining the Irish Brigade in the French Royal Army, but is told that he would make little progress with them unless he becomes a Roman Catholic, which he is unwilling to do. Instead he enlists in Lord Albemarle‘s horse troops. Again his propensity for fast living costs him dearly, and he suffers a thrashing after he is discovered having an affair with an officer’s wife.
Around 1746 Maclaine marries the daughter of a publican on Oxford Road, London, and with her dowry of five hundred pounds establishes himself as a grocer and chandler in Welbeck Street, Cavendish Square. His wife dies in 1748, leaving one daughter.
Frustrated by his lack of opportunities, Maclaine decides to embark on a life of crime. Together with William Plunkett, an Irish apothecary who had attended to his wife, he decides to find a rich heiress to marry. Pretending to be a high-living gentleman, with Plunkett as his liveried servant, he exhausts all his money dancing and gambling but has little success in his quest. Undaunted, he now turns his hand to robbery and becomes a highwayman. This proves extremely profitable and he takes lodgings at St. James’s Street, where he passes himself off as an Irish squire, with Plunkett again in attendance.
A dashing, handsome man, Maclaine soon becomes a popular figure in London. His most infamous adventure occurs in November 1749 when he robs the famous diarist and politician Horace Walpole at Hyde Park. For the first and only time in his career, he fires a shot, as one of his pistols discharges accidentally, scorching Walpole’s face. He later insists that he would have committed suicide if he had killed his victim. Walpole’s retort is that he would be satisfied if Maclaine just allowed himself to be hanged. Overcome with guilt, Maclaine afterwards sends two letters to Walpole apologising for the injury and suggesting a duel if he wants satisfaction. Walpole wisely ignores the correspondence.
After visiting his brother at The Hague, where he impresses with his extravagant gifts and lifestyle, Maclaine again decides to seek an heiress. Together with Plunkett, who is visiting Ireland, he sets his sights on a woman with an income of £40,000, but the scheme comes to nothing.
Returning to his career as a highwayman, Maclaine commits a number of daring robberies in the summer of 1750. On June 26, 1750, he and Plunkett hold up the coach of the Earl of Eglinton on Hounslow Heath, which proves to be his undoing. One passenger makes public a list of his stolen possessions, and when Maclaine sells some of the items on July 19 the crime is traced to him. On July 27 he is arrested and immediately breaks down in prison, confessing everything. Weeping in his cell, he consistently blames Plunkett, who evaded capture, for leading him astray.
Maclaine’s trial on September 13 attracts enormous interest, especially from women who are enamoured of his romantic image. The jury finds him guilty without leaving the box. Sentenced to death, he attempts to read a plea for mercy but loses his nerve and is only able to speak a few words. After a few minutes of embarrassed silence he cries, “My lord, I can go no further.” His brother denounces him, and from his cell he writes a number of letters expressing regret for his actions.
Maclaine is executed at Tyburn on October 3, 1750, having informed a minister that he went to his execution “without being daunted but rather with eagerness.” A great crowd attends the execution, before whom he maintains a steady composure, and his last words to them are, “O God, forgive my enemies, bless my friends and receive my soul!” A later publication tells that, as the cart is about to be drawn from under him, a witness hears him say, “I must never more behold this beauteous sun! Do thou, O sun of righteousness, shine on my departing soul.” After his death an enduring legend develops around the story of “the gentleman highwayman” and “the ladies’ hero.”
On October 2, 1975, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), a loyalistparamilitary group, carries out a wave of shootings and bombings across Northern Ireland. Six of the attacks leave 12 people dead (mostly civilians) and around 45 people injured. There is also an attack in the small village of Killyleagh, County Down. There are five attacks in and around Belfast which leave people dead. A bomb which explodes near Coleraine leaves four UVF members dead. There are also several other smaller bombs planted around Northern Ireland, sixteen in total, but other than causing damage they do not kill or injure anyone.
There is a rise in sectarian killings during the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) truce with the British Army, which begins in February 1975 and officially lasts until February 1976. Loyalists, fearing they are about to be forsaken by the British government and forced into a united Ireland, increase their attacks on Irish Catholics/Irish nationalists. Loyalists kill 120 Catholics in 1975, the vast majority civilians. They hope to force the IRA to retaliate and thus end the truce. Some IRA units concentrate on tackling the loyalists. The fall-off of regular operations causes unruliness within the IRA and some members, with or without permission from higher up, engage in tit-for-tat killings.
The first attack of the day takes place at Casey’s Bottling Plant in Belfast. The UVF group, which is alleged to have been led by Shankill Butchers leader Lenny Murphy, enters the premises by pretending to have an order to be filled before launching the attack. Four employees are shot and killed in the attack, sisters Frances Donnelly (35), Marie McGrattan (47) and Gerard Grogan (18) all die that day, with a fourth, Thomas Osborne (18), dying of his wounds three weeks later. Murphy personally shoots all except Donnelly who is killed by his accomplice William Green. The two sisters are forced to kneel on the ground and are shot in the back of the head.
In the next attack Thomas Murphy (29), a Catholic photographer from Belfast, is killed in a booby-trap bomb and gun attack, when two UVF gunmen enter his premises on Carlisle Circus (close to both the loyalist Shankill Road and republican New Lodge areas of Belfast) and shoot him in the chest, before planting a duffel bag bomb in his shop. The resulting explosion injures several people including a female passer-by who loses her leg.
Next the UVF carries out a gun and bomb attack on McKenna’s Bar near Crumlin, County Antrim, which kills a Catholic civilian John Stewart (35) and injures scores of people.
In Killyleagh, County Down, a no-warning bomb explodes outside a Catholic-owned bar, The Anchor Inn. Irene Nicholson (37), a Protestant woman, is killed as she is passing by while the attack is being carried out. Three UVF members are later arrested for this attack in Bangor and one of them claims the attack was “a small one to scare them.”
Next Ronald Winters (26), a Protestant civilian, is shot dead by the UVF in his parents’ house on London Road, Belfast.
Later that night four UVF members are killed as they drive along a road in Farrenlester, near Coleraine, when the bomb they are transporting explodes prematurely.
The following day, October 3, the UVF is once again made a proscribed terrorist organisation. Secretary of State for Northern IrelandMerlyn Rees had unbanned the UVF in May 1974, the same day the ban on Sinn Féin was lifted, a move never extended to the IRA. Despite this the UVF are still able to kill Catholic civilians at will for the remainder of 1975 and for most of 1976 also.
O’Rahilly is the eighth child of Thomas Francis Rahilly of Ballylongford, County Kerry and Julia Mary Rahilly (née Curry) of Glin, County Limerick. He changes his name to ‘O’Rahilly’ by deed poll in 1920. His fourteen siblings included Celtic scholars Thomas Francis and Cecile, and a first cousin is The O’Rahilly, killed during the 1916 Easter Rising. Educated at St. Michael’s College, Listowel, Blackrock College, and UCC, he undergoes a long period (1901–14) of training as a member of the Society of Jesus, but eventually leaves during the final stages of preparation for the priesthood, because of temperamental unsuitability. Appointed an assistant lecturer in the Department of Mathematics and Mathematical Physics in October 1914, he becomes the dominant figure in the institution within six years. He becomes Professor of Mathematical Physics on June 1, 1917 and registrar on February 11, 1920, before vacating these offices when he becomes president (1943–54).
O’Rahilly’s early career in UCC is set against the background of the revolutionary period, and he becomes predominantly identified, within and without the college, with the rise of post-1916 Sinn Féin. At UCC he leads the nationalist interest that ousts the perceived pro-British old regime, personified by Sir Bertram Windle, who resigns from the presidency in 1919. O’Rahilly is flamboyant, extrovert, disputatious and dynamic. During the low-key, unassertive presidency (1919–43) of Patrick J. Merriman, O’Rahilly as registrar is heir-presumptive and acts as de facto president. All in all, the whirlwind age of O’Rahilly lasts for almost four decades.
O’Rahilly is a volatile and bristling polymath of inexhaustible energy. The vast range of his scholarly interests – politics, sociology, finance, Christology, mathematical physics, history – arouse astonishment and envy. One critique of his work Money (1941) ends with the reflection that the book would enable people to relieve rural tedium by laughing the winter nights away. His contemplated multi-volume life of Christ prompts a National University colleague to observe that a life of O’Rahilly by Christ would be much more interesting. He, who is vain but not stuffy, is not offended by such descriptions of him as “a cross between Thomas Aquinas and Jimmy O’Dea,” but is not pleased by the jibe that he has the best mind of the twelfth century, since he considers himself a very modern man indeed.
There are some negative and even frivolous aspects of O’Rahilly’s UCC presidency. He has a strong appetite for the hurly-burly of academic politics and, it is said, enters no controversy that he does not aggravate. He has the reputation of being a bully and exploiter in his dealings with junior academic staff, but he can be kind, helpful, and extraordinarily generous to staff and students with problems. His zeal for vigorously promoting a Roman Catholic ethos in a nominally pluralist institution is frequently paternalistic and extends to acts of petty supervision, particularly perhaps over women students. This is the kind of atmosphere that prompts a visiting examiner to describe the UCC of the 1940s as “a convent run by a mad reverend mother.”
All this being said, O’Rahilly is one of the most vibrant and effective presidents in the history of the National University. His initiatives include extensive improvements in the library, of which he is director, and the institution of student health and restaurant services. He founds the electrical engineering department and the Cork University Press, which he believes would provide a publication outlet for the researches of his colleagues, particularly those concerned with native learning. He strengthens UCC’s links with the city and the province, and these are significantly expressed through the provision of adult education courses, an area where O’Rahilly is particularly innovative and pioneering.
As a young academic, O’Rahilly becomes caught up in the struggle for independence. He serves on Cork Corporation in the heroic age of Tomás Mac Curtain and Terence MacSwiney, and spends a patriotic period in jail and on the run. He represents Cork Borough (1923–24) in Dáil Éireann for Cumann na nGaedheal but resigns his seat in 1924. He is a constitutional adviser to the Irish delegation at the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations in 1921, argues publicly for the acceptance of the treaty, and helps to draft the Constitution of the Irish Free State. His links with the local labour and trade-union movement are long and close, and at national level he serves as Irish government chief representative in successive sessions of the International Labour Organization conference in Geneva. He is also a member of government commissions on banking and vocational organisation. After retirement he goes to reside at Blackrock College, where he is ordained a priest on December 18, 1955, and becomes a domestic prelate (monsignor) in 1960.
O’Rahilly dies at the age of 84 in Dublin on August 1, 1969.
No other layman of his day so self-confidently assumes a central role in so many areas of Catholic life – philosophy, sociology, theology, scriptural studies. The controversies in which be becomes involved are a source of interest and pride to UCC students. Their president is a pugnacious polemicist (who jousts with such eminences as H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw), a man of stature, and a formidable Catholic intellectual.
(From: “O’Rahilly, Alfred” by John A. Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)
In 1726, the Synod expels ministers, grouped together as the Synod of Antrim, who refuse to subscribe to the Westminster Confession of Faith. Later there is a further secession by those who, insisting on the sole kingship of Christ, reject the Confession. In 1763 they organise a distinct Reformed Presbyterian Church, and in 1811 establish their own provincial synod. In 1746, some of the more doctrinaire Calvinists withdraw, forming the Secession Synod.
Within the mainline Synod there is a continuing distinction between ‘Old Light‘ supporters of theological orthodoxy and ‘New Light‘ elements more inclined to defer to conscience rather than doctrine. In the first decades of the 19th century, positions harden with New Light ministers adopting a Unitarian or Arian skepticism regarding the doctrine of the Trinity. In 1829, when the leading conservative evangelical, Henry Cooke, succeeds in pressing the General Synod for a firm declaration of Trinitarian belief they withdraw to form their own Remonstrant Synod.
The departure of the latitudinarian party makes possible a reconciliation with the earlier Seceders. Purged of its heterodox elements, in 1840 the Synod of Ulster joins with the Secession Synod to form the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland.
Doyle fights in the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and takes the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War (1922-23) and is subsequently interned among numerous others. Together with two fellow-detainees, Timothy Coughlin and Bill Gannon, he takes part in forming a secret “vengeance grouping.” The three vow that once free of imprisonment they will take revenge on their opponents, whom they consider traitors to the Irish cause.
Most such private revenge pacts are broken up by the IRA leadership when it reorganises following 1924, but Doyle and his two fellow conspirators persist and carry through their deadly aim. On July 10, 1927, the three surprised O’Higgins on his way to Mass at the Booterstown Avenue side of Cross Avenue in Blackrock, Dublin, and shoot him down.
O’Higgins is especially hated by IRA members for having ordered the executions of seventy-seven of their fellows during the Civil War, an act for which he outspokenly takes responsibility and refuses to express any remorse. Moreover, he is a dominant member of the Irish Free State government, and the conspirators have good reasons to believe that his death would weaken it.
The three make their escape and are not apprehended. However, Timothy Coughlin is shot to death by police informer Sean Harling on the night of January 28, 1928, on Dublin’s Dartry Road, under circumstances which remain controversial up to the present. A second IRA man is known to have been with Coughlin that night, in surveillance of Harling’s home, and escapes unharmed. It is believed that Doyle is that second man, though this point, as many other details of this still rather mysterious affair, remains not quite certain.
Doyle is among the beneficiaries of the amnesty issued by Éamon de Valera when he comes to power in 1932, under which numerous IRA men are released from prison and the charges against others dropped. In later times Doyle openly admits his part in the killing of O’Higgins, and indeed takes pride in it, without fear of prosecution.
With the end of the IRA’s alliance with de Valera and the increasing confrontation between them, Doyle, now a veteran highly respected in the IRA circles, becomes deeply involved in the organisation’s 1940s campaigns. Harry, the memoirs of IRA man Harry White, make repeated admiring references to “Archie Doyle of Dublin, the Tan War veteran who had fought through it all.”
During the IRA’s Northern campaign, Doyle is said to have participated in the abortive raid on the British barracks at Crossmaglen, County Armagh, on September 2, 1942, in retaliation for the execution of Tom Williams earlier that morning. The IRA unit, some twenty men in a commandeered lorry and accompanying car, is discovered by a passing Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) patrol near the village of Cullaville. Doyle is mentioned in White’s memoirs as having “jumped out of the car, Thompson in hand, and started shooting at the RUC.” Since the element of surprise is lost, the attack on the barracks has to be cancelled.
A week later, on September 9, White mentions Doyle as having commanded the assassination of Sergeant Denis O’Brien, Irish Special Branch detective and himself a former IRA man, near Dublin. It is a highly controversial affair, opposed by the IRA GHQ in Belfast as damaging to the Northern campaign, and precipitates a massive manhunt by the Irish police. It is IRA Chief of StaffCharlie Kerins who is caught two years later, charged with the O’Brien assassination and eventually executed for it. White, however, claims that it is Doyle who actually commands that action, on Kerins’s orders. Doyle, who openly spoke of his part in killing O’Higgins, seems far more reticent about this part of his career.
In 1943 Doyle is assigned as the IRA’s Quartermaster General in Belfast.
On July 1, 1943, Doyle is mentioned as having participated, together with Kerins and with Jackie Griffith, in an operation of “fund-raising” for the hard-pressed IRA (i.e., robbery). The three men arrive on bikes at the gates of Player Wills factory on the South Circular Road, Dublin, and with scarves around their faces stop at gunpoint a van loaded with some £5,000 for wages and drive away with the van and the money.
Griffith is shot down by the police in Dublin less than a week later, in what is charged to be an extrajudicial assassination, and Kerins is caught in 1944 and executed, becoming a major IRA martyr. Doyle, however, continually survives decades of a very dangerous way of life and manages to die of old age. He dies in St. James’s Hospital in Dublin in 1980.
Larry Cunningham, Irish country music singer, who is one of the leading figures of the Irish showband scene in the 1960s and 1970s, dies in Dublin on September 28, 2012, following a lengthy illness. He is regarded as a “trailblazer” and “legend” in the music industry.
Cunningham is born in Clooneen, Mullinalaghta, County Longford on February 13, 1938. He grows up in a farming family of seven children. After leaving school at the age of sixteen, he goes to England and works as a carpenter, playing Irish traditional music and Gaelic football during his spare time. In 1958 he returns to Ireland. Still working as a carpenter, he soon joins the part-time Gowna-based Grafton Showband, but leaves it in 1961 to become fully professional as the lead singer of the Mighty Avons, based in Cavan. That band initially specialises in covers of Jim Reeves songs and similar country material.
The band’s first taste of fame comes when they are supporting Jim Reeves during the Irish leg of his European tour in 1963. When Reeves walks off the stage during a concert in Lifford in protest at the poor condition of the supplied piano, the Avons, as they later become popularly called, take over and entertain the crowd, to much subsequent publicity and acclaim.
In December 1964, Cunningham and the Mighty Avons have a Top-10 hit with the song Tribute to Jim Reeves, which also enters the British charts and is played on Top of the Pops, both firsts for an Irish artist, which further boosts their career. Their major hit is Lovely Leitrim in September 1965, which stays at number one in the charts for four weeks. As well as regularly touring Ireland to large crowds, the Avons make many appearances on television, and often played in Britain, the United States, and other places.
In late 1969, Cunningham leaves the Mighty Avons and merges with Edenderry band The Fairways to form Larry Cunningham and the Country Blue Boys, leaving Gene Stuart to front the Avons. He continues having success with his new band, but after his marriage to Beatrice Nannery in February 1972 he gives up regular touring in favour of occasional concerts and recording. He continues to have top-10 hits until the mid-1970s, and still performs occasionally for the remainder of his life. In recent years, audio and video compilations of his music have been released, as well as a biography.
Cunningham dies in Dublin on September 28, 2012, following a lengthy illness. Among those to pay tribute are U.S. country singer Robert Mizzell who says, “I am so saddened to hear of the passing of country legend Larry. I admired his talent and quick humour. My thoughts are with his family, friends, and the fans who loved the big deep voice that rattled the radio waves.”
Neeson and Richardson win £50,000 ($85,370) in libel damages over newspaper allegations that their marriage is on the rocks. The couple sues the Daily Mirror publishers MGN for libel and malicious falsehood after the tabloid paper claimed Natasha Richardson was filing for divorce behind her husband’s back and that their marriage was a sham.
The story is published in August 1998 in London, Scotland, the Irish Republic and Northern Ireland – where Neeson was born and where his family still live.
A High Court judge in London hears that the actors – married for four years with two young sons – were shocked by the allegations which caused “an explosion of publicity worldwide.”
Neeson, who is nominated for an Academy Award for his role in the film Schindler’s List, is told about the article by his mother. She phones him in great distress from Northern Ireland after seeing the headlines while out shopping.
The actors’ solicitor, Mark Thomson, tells Mr. Justice Gray that the couple then spent several days attempting to deal with the destructive aftermath of the articles denying the allegations to friends and family.
Mirror Group Newspapers accepts “unequivocally” that the story is entirely false and apologises for the embarrassment, hurt and distress caused to the couple. “We entirely accept that there is absolutely no truth in the allegations about Mr. Neeson and Miss Richardson and that the allegations should never have been published. We apologise unreservedly to Mr. and Mrs. Neeson and their family for the distress and embarrassment they have been caused. We have agreed not to repeat the allegations and to pay substantial damages to them, which they are donating to the victims of the Omagh bombing.”
The information came from a source thought to be reliable, but it was clearly a mistake for the reporter to rely on that source, says solicitor Martin Cruddace.
The son of a shipyard worker, McWhirter is raised in a large extended family on the Shankill Road in Belfast. He and his extended family spend the war years and then weekends and the summers at their seaside bungalow in Carnalea, now a suburb of Bangor, County Down. In 1957 he begins a “combined scholarship” studying English and Spanish at Queen’s University Belfast, and education at Stranmillis University College, Belfast. His tutor at Queen’s is the poet Laurence Lerner, and he is a classmate with the future literary critic Robert Dunbar and the poets Seamus Heaney and Seamus Deane.
McWhirter is associated with PRISM International magazine from 1968 to 2005. He is the author and editor of numerous books and the recipient of many awards. His first book of poetry, Catalan Poems, is a joint winner of the first Commonwealth Poetry Prize with Chinua Achebe‘s Beware, Soul Brother. He is made a life member of the League of Canadian Poets in 2005 and is also a member of the Writers’ Union of Canada and PEN International. In March 2007, he is named Vancouver’s inaugural Poet Laureate for a two-year term.
McWhirter currently writes full-time and lives in Vancouver with his wife. They have two children and three grandchildren.
seamus dubhghaill 