seamus dubhghaill

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


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Birth of Lydia Mary Foster, Writer & Teacher

Lydia Mary Foster, Irish writer and teacher, is born on June 18, 1867, in Newmills, County Tyrone, in what is now Northern Ireland. She writes three books drawing on the experiences of growing up in rural Ulster in the 19th century in the Kailyard school genre.

Foster is the fourth of the six children of Presbyterian minister of Newmills congregation, James Foster, and Lydia (née Harkness). She has three brothers and two sisters. She is educated at home and is later sent to board at Miss Black’s school in Holywood, County Down. She, with her sisters Jane and Bessie, move to Belfast to establish a girls’ school, the Ladies’ Collegiate School, in the Balmoral suburbs, first at Myrtlefield Park, at 434 Lisburn Road, and then in Maryfield Park. This is after Bessie graduates from Trinity College Dublin in 1896 having studied modern languages. Their school teaches boys and girls, both day pupils and boarders. Foster and Jane teach music, and possibly other subjects as well. Their brother Henry, who works in Belfast, lives with them. All four of the siblings attend the Malone Presbyterian Church and are members of the temperance movement. Throughout her life, Foster remains attached to Newmills, visiting regularly and laying the foundation stone for the new manse in 1910. Her brother, Nevin, is the only one of the six siblings to marry and is an Irish ornithological expert.

The school closes after the deaths of Bessie in December 1917 and Jane in October 1918. The death of Henry in December 1922 leaves Foster alone, and having lost her hearing almost completely, she is in difficult circumstances. To support herself, she begins to write literary sketches and dialect verse for a number of publications such as the Northern WhigIreland’s Own, and the annual miscellany Ulster Parade. A selection of these writings are published as a volume, Tyrone Among the Bushes, in 1933. She also writes plays, but these are not collected or produced. She is best known for her three books which are set in rural County Tyrone around the time of Foster’s parents and her childhood. The books, The Bush that Burned (1931), Manse Larks (1936), and Elders’ Daughters (1942) are published by Quota Press in Belfast and are seen as part of the Scottish Kailyard school genre of writing. The Bush that Burned details the story of a young man becoming a minister despite opposition, and is widely read in Ulster and beyond. Aodh de Blácam references the book as evidence that there is little difference between rural Ulster Protestants and their Catholic counterparts. Manse Larks recounts a rural childhood of six siblings growing up in the minister’s house. Foster’s fondness for animals is clear from the book, she is a supporter of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA), and her companion in later years is a dog named Stewart. Elders’ Daughters explores the experiences, romantic dreams and misadventures of young women subject to paternal authority in rural County Tyrone.

As Foster’s health declines and after the Belfast Blitz of April 1941, she goes to live with a married niece in Hollowbridge House near Royal Hillsborough, County Down. It is to this niece that she dictates the last chapters of Elders’ Daughters. She dies at Hollowbridge House on December 13, 1943. She is buried at Newmills Presbyterian Church, with her parents and siblings.


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Death of Fr. Des Wilson, Irish Catholic Priest & Church Dissident

Father Des Wilson, Irish Catholic priest and church dissident who in the course of the Northern Ireland Troubles embraces ideas and practice associated, internationally, with liberation theology, dies in his native Belfast on November 5, 2019. He believes the Word of God can never be silent in the face of oppression, injustice and suffering. He seeks to apply the ideas of liberation theology to the North, supporting and empowering marginalised communities, and acting as a voice for the voiceless.

Wilson is born in Belfast on July 8, 1925, the youngest of five sons to William Wilson, a publican and native of County Cavan, and his wife Emma (née McAvoy), a native of south County Down. He spends his earliest years above his father’s pub in Belfast, before the family moves to a house in the suburbs.

Wilson attends primary school locally, then receives secondary education at St. Malachy’s College. During his time there Belfast is blitzed in April and May 1941. Almost 1,000 are killed. The carnage he sees is a factor in his deciding on the priesthood.

After secondary school Wilson enters the seminary at St. Malachy’s, while studying English and Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast. He proceeds to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, being ordained on June 19, 1949, for the Diocese of Down and Connor.

After ordination Wilson serves as chaplain in Belfast’s Mater Infirmorum Hospital, then spends 15 years in St. Malachy’s as spiritual director. Former pupils remember him as fair, and able to play jazz excellently on the organ.

Wilson lives out his beliefs, spending half a century in Belfast’s Ballymurphy estate, among the North’s most deprived, and one of the areas which suffers worst from the Troubles. There he plays a role in community development, establishing projects to provide employment in the area. He suffers, finding himself for years outside the official Catholic Church.

Wilson plays a significant role in providing adult education. He wants an education that does not just provide qualifications and open career paths but is psychologically liberating.

Life changes in 1966 when Wilson is moved to St. John’s Parish in West Belfast as a curate. Having come from a comfortable background in Ballymurphy, he is shocked by the poverty, the poor housing and the treatment of women. Unusual for a priest at the time, he moves into a terraced house in the estate. He finds the Catholic Church unable to respond to the multiple problems people are facing. That inability worsens as the Troubles erupt.

Wilson’s personal probity is so recognised that he is accepted as a mediator in feuds between the Provisional Irish Republican Army and Official Irish Republican Army in the 1970s and is able to broker permanent peace. He also helps bring about the ceasefires in the 1990s.

Wilson does not shirk unpopular stances. In the 1970s he refuses to condemn the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Later he says the conviction of former Real Irish Republican Army leader Michael McKevitt for directing terrorism is unsafe. He also publicly visits and supports a Ballymurphy couple which has a very bitter falling out with Sinn Féin, leading to a picket on their home.

By 1975 relations with his bishop has broken down and Wilson resigns but continues ministering in Ballymurphy. Forbidden to say Mass in a church, his pay cut off, he says Mass in his house. He suffers hardship, living from savings, some earnings from writing, broadcasting and lecturing, and help from Quaker and Presbyterian friends. By the early 1980s his Ballymurphy home becomes too small for the many classes he organises. His classes are rehoused and expanded as the Conway Education Centre in a vacant mill. He is able to offer a range of vocational and non-vocational courses with almost 1,000 students. In the mid-1980s his relationship with the Dioceses of Down and Connor is re-established, and he is allowed to continue his ministry.

Personally, Wilson has great gifts of head and heart and is incapable of rancour. A strong belief is that it is important to share food to talk, as happened in Biblical times. Thus, a lunch would last an afternoon.

Wilson dies on November 5, 2019, in Belfast. Instead of wreaths, he asks mourners to donate to the Ballymurphy Massacre Memorial Garden. The garden is dedicated to the victims of the Ballymurphy massacre of August 1971, which saw the killing in the district of eleven civilians by soldiers of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment. The victims include Fr. Hugh Mullan, who had been a student of Wilson’s at St. Malachy’s. He was shot while going to the aid of a wounded man.

Following a Requiem Mass at Corpus Christi Church in Ballymurphy, Wilson is buried in Milltown Cemetery. Senior Sinn Féin politicians Gerry Adams and Michelle O’Neill are among those who take turns carrying his coffin.

(From: “Fr Des Wilson obituary: Priest who fought oppression and injustice in North,” The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, December 7, 2019)


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The Beginning of the Belfast Blitz

A Luftwaffe bomb kills thirteen people in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on the night of April 7, 1941. Ultimately, the city is devastated by air raids. Seven hundred people are killed and 400 seriously injured in what becomes known as the Belfast Blitz. The Blitz consists of four German air raids on strategic targets in Belfast, in April and May 1941 during World War II.

There had been a number of small bombings, probably by planes that missed their targets over the River Clyde in Glasgow or the cities of North West England. On March 24, 1941, John MacDermott, Minister for Public Security, writes to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, John Andrews, expressing his concerns that Belfast is so poorly protected. “Up to now we have escaped attack. So had Clydeside until recently. Clydeside got its blitz during the period of the last moon. There [is] ground for thinking that the … enemy could not easily reach Belfast in force except during a period of moonlight. The period of the next moon from say the 7th to the 16th of April may well bring our turn.” MacDermott is proved right.

The first deliberate raid takes place on the night of April 7. It targets the docks. Neighbouring residential areas are also hit. Six Heinkel He 111 bombers, from Kampfgruppe 26, flying at 7,000 feet, drop incendiaries, high explosive and parachute mines. By British mainland blitz standards, casualties are light. Thirteen die, including a soldier killed when an anti-aircraft gun at the Balmoral show-grounds misfires. The most significant loss is a 4.5-acre factory floor for manufacturing the fuselages of Short Stirling bombers. The Royal Air Force (RAF) announces that Squadron Leader J.W.C. Simpson shot down one of the Heinkels over Downpatrick. The Luftwaffe crews return to their base in Northern France and report that Belfast’s defences are “inferior in quality, scanty and insufficient.” This raid overall causes relatively little damage, but a lot is revealed about Belfast’s inadequate defences.

On Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1941, spectators watching a football match at Windsor Park notice a lone Luftwaffe Junkers Ju 88 aircraft circling overhead. That evening over 150 bombers leave their bases in northern France and the Netherlands and head for Belfast. There are Heinkel He 111s, Junkers Ju 88s and Dornier Do 17s. At 10:40 p.m. the air-raid sirens sound. Accounts differ as to when flares are dropped to light up the city. The first attack is against the city’s waterworks, which had been attacked in the previous raid. High explosives are dropped. Initially it is thought that the Germans had mistaken this reservoir for the harbour and shipyards, where many ships, including HMS Ark Royal are being repaired. However, that attack is not an error. Three vessels nearing completion at Harland & Wolff are hit as is its power station. Wave after wave of bombers drop their incendiaries, high explosives and landmines. When incendiaries are dropped, the city burns as water pressure is too low for effective firefighting. There is no opposition. In the mistaken belief that they might damage RAF fighters, the anti-aircraft batteries cease firing. But the RAF does not respond. The bombs continued to fall until 5:00 a.m.

Outside of London, with some 900 dead, this is the greatest loss of life in a night raid during the Blitz. A stray bomber attacks Derry, killing fifteeen. Another attacks Bangor, County Down, killing five. By 4:00 a.m. the entire city seems to be in flames. At 4:15 a.m., John MacDermott, the Minister of Public Security, manages to contact Minister of Agriculture Basil Brooke seeking permission to seek help from the Irish government. Brooke notes in his diary, “I gave him authority as it is obviously a question of expediency.” Since 1:45 a.m. all telephones have been cut. Fortunately, the railway telegraphy link between Belfast and Dublin is still operational. The telegram is sent at 4:35 a.m. asking the Irish Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, for assistance.

By 6:00 a.m., within two hours of the request for assistance, 71 firemen with 13 fire tenders from Dundalk, Drogheda, Dublin, and Dún Laoghaire are on their way to cross the Irish border to assist their Belfast colleagues. In each station volunteers are requested, as it is beyond their normal duties. In every instance, all step forward. They remain in Belfast for three days, until they are sent back by the Northern Ireland government. By then 250 firemen from Clydeside have arrived.

Taoiseach Éamon de Valera formally protests to Berlin. Frank Aiken, the Irish Minister for the Co-ordination of Defensive Measures, is in Boston, Massachusetts, at the time. He gives an interview saying, “the people of Belfast are Irish people too.”

There is a second massive air raid on Belfast on Sunday, May 4-5, 1941, three weeks after the Easter Tuesday raid. Around 1:00 a.m., Luftwaffe bombers fly over the city, concentrating their attack on the Harbour Estate and Queen’s Island. Nearby residential areas in east Belfast are also hit when “203 metric tonnes of high explosive bombs, 80 land mines attached to parachutes, and 800 firebomb canisters containing 96,000 incendiary bombs” are dropped. Over 150 people die in what becomes known as the “Fire Blitz.” Casualties are lower than at Easter, partly because the sirens sound at 11:45 p.m. while the Luftwaffe attack more cautiously from a greater height. St. George’s Church in High Street is damaged by fire. Again, the Irish emergency services cross the border, this time without waiting for an invitation.

(Pictured: Rescue workers search through the rubble of Eglington Street in Belfast, Northern Ireland, after a German Luftwaffe air raid, May 7, 1941)


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Birth of George Campbell, Artist & Writer

George Campbell, Irish artist and writer, is born on July 29, 1917, in Arklow, County Wicklow. Although he grows up in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he spends much of his adult life living and painting in Spain and Dublin.

Campbell is the son of Matthew Arthur Campbell (1866-1925), caterer, and Gretta Campbell (née Bowen) (1880-1981). He attends boarding school at Masonic Orphan Boys’ School at Clonskeagh, Dublin, before moving to Belfast to live with his widowed mother and family.

Campbell is working in an aircraft factory at the time of the Belfast Blitz, and begins to paint, taking the bomb-damage as his subject. He is one of the founders of the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943. In the same year, along with his brother Arthur (1909-94), he publishes a sixteen page book entitled Ulster in Black and White, that includes drawings from the two brothers and their close contemporaries Maurice Wilks and Patricia Webb. Owing to the success of the original publication, the brothers then publish Now in Ulster (1944), an anthology of short stories, essays and poetry by young Belfast writers.

Campbell holds a joint exhibition at the William Mol Gallery, Belfast, with his brother Arthur in 1944. In the same year he also shows with Gerard Dillon at the Portadown gallery of John Lamb. In 1946 he shows with the Victor Waddington Gallery in Dublin, where he is to return on a number of occasions. The Council for the Encouragement of Art and Music hosts a solo exhibition in 1949 where he is to show twice more, in 1952 and 1960. He wins £500 at the first Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) Open Painting Competition at the Ulster Museum in 1962. Campbell also shows in one-man exhibitions with the Arts Council of Northern Ireland in 1966 and 1972.

After the war Campbell becomes increasingly interested in Spain. In 1946 he comes to know Spaniards who had settled in Dublin, and when in London paints visiting Spanish dancers in their traditional costume. He first visits Spain in 1951, encouraged by his friendship with Gerard Dillon and “an interest in bohemian characters.” He lives there for six months almost every year throughout much of the following twenty-five years.

Campbell makes stained glass windows for the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St Nicholas in Galway. He also plays flamenco guitar. A member of the Royal Hibernian Academy, he wins the Douglas Hyde Gold Medal in 1966 and the Oireachtas Prize for Landscape in 1969. The Spanish government makes him a Knight Commander of Spain in 1978.

Campbell dies in Dublin on May 18, 1979, and is buried at St. Kevin’s Cemetery in Glendalough, County Wicklow. He is survived by his wife Margaret, his mother, and two brothers, Arthur and Stanley. After his death the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and An Chomhairle Ealáion join with the Instituto Cervantes to initiate the George Campbell Memorial Travel Award. In May 2017, Arklow Municipal District Council unveils two plaques at St. Patrick’s Terrace, Arklow, marking Campbell’s birthplace and the centennial of his birth.

Campbell’s work forms part of many private and public art collections, including Queen’s University Belfast, Ulster Museum, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Hugh Lane Gallery, The National Self-Portrait Collection of Ireland, and Municipal Museum of Antequera, Málaga.

(Pictured: “Three Nuns” by George Campbell)


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Birth of Novelist & Screenwriter Brian Moore

brian-moore

Brian Moore, novelist and screenwriter who is acclaimed for the descriptions in his novels of life in Northern Ireland after World War II, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on August 25, 1921. He has been described as “one of the few genuine masters of the contemporary novel.”

Moore is born into a large Roman Catholic family. His father, James Bernard Moore, is a prominent surgeon and the first Catholic to sit on the senate of Queen’s University Belfast. His mother, Eileen McFadden Moore, a farmer’s daughter from County Donegal, is a nurse. His uncle is the prominent Irish nationalist, Eoin MacNeill, founder of Conradh na Gaeilge and Professor of Irish at University College Dublin. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College, Belfast. He leaves the college in 1939, having failed his senior exams.

Moore is a volunteer air raid warden during World War II and serves during the Belfast Blitz in April and May 1941. He goes on to serve as a civilian with the British Army in North Africa, Italy and France. After the war ends, he works in Eastern Europe for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration.

In 1948 Moore emigrates to Canada to work as a reporter for the Montreal Gazette and becomes a Canadian citizen. While eventually making his primary residence in California, he continues to live part of each year in Canada up to his death.

Moore lives in Canada from 1948 to 1958, where he meets his first wife, Jacqueline (“Jackie”) Sirois, a French Canadian and fellow journalist. They marry in 1952. He moves to New York City in 1959 to take up a Guggenheim Fellowship and remains there until his divorce in October 1967. He then moves to the west coast of the United States, settling in Malibu, California, with his new wife Jean Denney, a former commentator on Canadian TV. There he teaches creative writing at UCLA.

Moore writes his first novels in Canada. His earliest novels are thrillers, published under his own name or using the pseudonyms Bernard Mara or Michael Bryan. His first novel outside the genre, Judith Hearne, remains among his most highly regarded. The book is rejected by ten American publishers before being accepted by a British publisher. It is made into a film, with British actress Maggie Smith playing the lonely spinster who is the book/film’s title character.

Other novels by Moore are adapted for the screen, including Intent to Kill, The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, Black Robe, Cold Heaven, and The Statement. He co-writes the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock‘s Torn Curtain, and writes the screenplay for The Blood of Others, based on the novel Le Sang des autres by Simone de Beauvoir.

Some of Moore’s novels feature staunchly anti-doctrinaire and anti-clerical themes, and in particular he speaks strongly about the effect of the Church on life in Ireland. A recurring theme in his novels is the concept of the Catholic priesthood. On several occasions he explores the idea of a priest losing his faith. At the same time, several of his novels are deeply sympathetic and affirming portrayals of the struggles of faith and religious commitment, Black Robe most prominently.

Moore dies at his Malibu home, which is celebrated in Seamus Heaney‘s poem Remembering Malibu, on January 11, 1999, from pulmonary fibrosis. His widow, Jean, lives on in the house until it is destroyed in 2018 in the Woolsey Fire.

At the time of his death, Moore is working on a novel about the 19th-century French symbolist poet Arthur Rimbaud. His last published work before his death is an essay entitled “Going Home.” It is a reflection inspired by a visit he made to the grave in Connemara of his family friend, the Irish nationalist Bulmer Hobson. The essay is commissioned by Granta and published in The New York Times on February 7, 1999.

In 1996, the Brian Moore Short Story Awards is launched by the Creative Writers Network in Northern Ireland and is open to all authors of Irish descent. Previous judges have included Glenn Patterson, Lionel Shriver, Carlo Gébler and Maeve Binchy.

In 1975 Moore arranges for his literary materials, letters and documents to be deposited in the Special Collections Division of the University of Calgary Library, an inventory of which is published by the University of Calgary Press in 1987. His archives, which include unfilmed screenplays, drafts of various novels, working notes, a 42-volume journal (1957–1998), and his correspondence, are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.


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Opening of Assembly’s College, Belfast

assemblys-college-belfast

Assembly’s College, Belfast, opens for the training of Presbyterian clergy on December 5, 1853.

The Renaissance Revival style building with its grand Doric porch and Baroque attic is designed by Sir Charles Lanyon, the architect of the main building at Queen’s University Belfast and built with Scrabo stone at a cost of £5,000. Jean-Henri Merle d’Aubigné of Geneva participates in the opening ceremony alongside Henry Cooke, President of the Faculty. The five other professors in the new college are John Edgar, Robert Wilson, William Dool Killen, James G. Murphy and William Gibson.

There is a large influx of students in the wake of the 1859 Ulster revival and the south wing with its dining hall and student accommodations is added in 1869. Princeton Theological Seminary has an important influence in the shaping of the ethos of the College during this period as the Reverend Roberts Watts, who is appointed Professor of Systematic Theology in 1866, hopes to make “Belfast another Princeton.” The north wing with its wood-panelled chapel is designed by John Lanyon, son of original architect, and completed in 1881. The first degrees under the Royal Charter are conferred in 1883. However, the death of Watts in 1895 marks the beginning of the end of the Princetonian influence. A partial union takes place between the faculties in Belfast and Magee in 1922.

The newly formed Parliament of Northern Ireland meets in Assembly’s College from 1921 until 1932 while Stormont is being built with the House of Commons meeting in the Gamble Library and the Senate in the College chapel. During this period the College conducts classes in a house and provides library resources in a house on University Square. In 1926 the College becomes a Recognised College of Queen’s University. During this period the College comes under criticism for its embrace of theological liberalism. This culminates in a charge of heresy being brought against Professor James Ernest Davey in 1926-27. The College officially reopens in October 1932 and the inaugural lecture is delivered by the Scottish Historian Robert Rait.

Between 1941 and 1948 the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the city police, use the College as its own headquarters are bombed in the Belfast Blitz. In 1953, to mark the College’s centenary year, Prof. Davey is elected Moderator of the General Assembly.

In 1976 theological teaching at Magee College in Derry, County Londonderry, ceases and the two colleges amalgamate in 1978. The new college, constituted by an Act of Parliament, is named Union Theological College.

Today Union Theological College offers a full range of courses in Theology. The professors at the College constitute the Presbyterian Theological Faculty Ireland (PTFI) which was granted a Royal Charter in 1881 to confer academic degrees. The PTFI still awards degrees, diplomas and certificates. The majority of students are enrolled for degrees and diplomas, undergraduate and postgraduate, through the Institute of Theology of the Queen’s University of Belfast, in particular the BTh, BD, MTh and PhD.


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German Bombing of North Strand, Dublin

north-strand-bombing

Four German bombs are dropped on north Dublin at approximately 2:00 AM on May 31, 1941. One bomb falls in the Ballybough area, demolishing the two houses at 43 and 44 Summerhill Park, injuring many but with no loss of life. A second bomb falls at the Dog Pond pumping works near the zoo in Phoenix Park, again with no casualties but damaging Áras an Uachtaráin, the official residence of the Irish President. A third bomb makes a large crater in the North Circular Road near Summerhill, again causing no injuries. A fourth bomb falls in North Strand destroying seventeen houses and severely damaging about fifty others, the worst damage occurring in the area between Seville Place and Newcomen Bridge. The raid claims the lives of 28 people, injures 90, destroys or damages approximately 300 houses, and leaves 400 people homeless.

The first bombing of Dublin during World War II occurs early on the morning of January 2, 1941, when German bombs are dropped on the Terenure area of south Dublin. This is followed, early on the following morning of January 3, 1941, by further German bombing of houses on Donore Terrace in the South Circular Road area of south Dublin. A number of people are injured, but no one is killed in these bombings.

After the war, what becomes West Germany accepts responsibility for the raid, and by 1958 it has paid compensation of £327,000. Over 2,000 claims for compensation are processed by the Irish government, eventually costing £344,000. East Germany and Austria, which are both part of Nazi Germany in 1941, make no contribution. The amounts are fixed after the 1953 London Agreement on German External Debts, allowing maximum compensation.

Several reasons for the raid have been asserted over time. German Radio, operated by the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, broadcasts that “it is impossible that the Germans bombed Dublin intentionally.” Irish airspace has been violated repeatedly, and both Allied and German airmen are being interned at the Curragh Camp. A possible cause is a navigational error or a mistaken target, as one of the pathfinders on the raid later recounts. Numerous large cities in the United Kingdom are targeted for bombing, including Belfast, which like Dublin, is across the Irish Sea from Great Britain. War-time Germany’s acceptance of responsibility and post-war Germany’s payment of compensation are cited as further indications that the causation is error on the part of the Luftwaffe pilots.

Another possible reason is that in April 1941, Germany has launched the Belfast blitz, which results in Belfast being heavily bombed. In response, Ireland sends rescue, fire, and emergency personnel to Belfast to assist the city. Éamon de Valera, the Taoiseach, formally protests the bombing to the German government, as well as making his famous “they are our people” speech. Some contend that the raid serves as a warning to Ireland to keep out of the war. This contention is given added credibility when Colonel Edward Flynn, second cousin of Ireland’s Minister for Coordination of Defensive Measures, recalls that Lord Haw Haw has warned Ireland that Dublin’s Amiens Street Railway Station, where a stream of refugees from Belfast is arriving, will be bombed. The station, now called Connolly Station, stands a few hundred metres from North Strand Road, where the bombing damage is heaviest. Flynn similarly contends that the German bombing of Dundalk on July 4 is also a pre-warning by Lord Haw Haw as a punishment for Dundalk being the point of shipment of Irish cattle sold to the United Kingdom.