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Birth of William Joyce, Last Person Executed for Treason in the UK

William Brooke Joyce, an American-born fascist and Nazi propaganda broadcaster during World War II, is born on Herkimer Street in Brooklyn, New York, on April 24, 1906. He has the distinction of being the last person to be executed for treason in the United Kingdom.

Joyce is the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off Anglican Anglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.

The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.

Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.

In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.

Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 percent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.

In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.

On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.

The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.

In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.

In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.

Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.

Joyce is hanged by Albert Pierrepoint at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.

In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.

(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Ruth Coppinger, Socialist Party TD for Dublin West

Ruth Coppinger, Irish politician and member of the Socialist Party, and Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin West constituency, is born in Dublin on April 18, 1967.

Coppinger is a member of Fingal County Council for the Mulhuddart local electoral area from 2003 to 2014. She is co-opted to the council in 2003, replacing Joe Higgins, and is elected in 2004 and re-elected in 2009. She is an unsuccessful candidate for the Socialist Party at the 2011 Dublin West by-election.

Following victory in the 2014 Dublin West by-election, Coppinger joins her party colleague Joe Higgins in the Dáil. After being elected, she calls for a mass campaign of opposition to water charges being implemented by the Fine Gael–Labour Party coalition.

In November 2014, Coppinger calls for the gradual nationalisation of U.S. multinationals to prevent job losses. In response, Fianna Fáil’s jobs spokesperson Dara Calleary calls the idea “reckless and ludicrous,” as it would “place a massive burden on taxpayers and the public finances.”

In September 2015, Coppinger joins homeless families from Blanchardstown, in occupying a NAMA-controlled property as part of a campaign to raise awareness of the housing crisis. In October 2015, she joins families in their occupation of a show house in her constituency, to protest the lack of availability of affordable social housing. She also supports the tenants of Tyrrelstown, who are made homeless when a Goldman Sachs vulture fund sells their houses.

Coppinger is re-elected to the Dáil at the 2016 Irish general election, this time under the Anti-Austerity Alliance–People Before Profit banner. On March 10. 2016, at the first sitting of the 32nd Dáil, she nominates Richard Boyd Barrett for the office of Taoiseach, quoting James Connolly from a hundred years previously when she says, “The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system. It must go,” and declaring, “We will not vote for the identical twin candidates” of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil after they “imposed austerity.” On April 6, 2016, following the failure of the Dáil to elect a Taoiseach at that first sitting, she is nominated for the role of Taoiseach, becoming the first female nominee in the history of the state.

In 2018 Coppinger praises the MeToo movement for exposing patterns of abuse and systemic inequality. However, she also notes the limitations of achieving justice through traditional channels and calls for a stronger focus on combating intimate partner violence and societal tolerance of such abuse.

In April 2018, in the lead-up to the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, Coppinger, along with her colleague Paul Murphy, holds up a Repeal sign during leader’s questions and is reprimanded by the Ceann Comhairle. She is an advocate for abortion rights in Ireland, and is a founding member of ROSA, a movement for reproductive justice in Ireland. Earlier, in 2016, she tables the private members’ motion to repeal the Eighth Amendment.

In November 2018, Coppinger protests in the Dáil against the conduct of a rape trial in Ireland. During the trial, the defence team, as part of their argument that the sex had been consensual, states that the 17-year-old victim had worn a thong with a lace front. The defendant is subsequently found not guilty. During a sitting of the Dáil, Coppinger holds up a similar pair of underwear and admonishes the conduct of the trial, suggesting victim blaming tactics had been used and suggests this is a routine occurrence in Irish courts. She calls on Taoiseach Leo Varadkar to support her party’s bill that would increase sex education in Irish schools and provide additional training to the Irish judiciary and jurors on how to handle cases of rape. Varadkar responds that victims should not be blamed for what happens to them, irrespective of how they are dressed, where they are or if they have consumed alcohol.

In 2019 Coppinger sponsors a private member’s bill – the Domestic Violence (No-contact order) (Amendment) Bill 2019. The bill lapses with the dissolution of the Dáil and Seanad.

At the general election in February 2020, Coppinger is defeated in the Dublin West constituency. She unsuccessfully contests the 2020 Seanad election for the National University of Ireland constituency.

In June 2024, Coppinger is elected to Fingal County Council for the Castleknock local electoral area on the 7th Count. At the 2024 Irish general election, she is re-elected to the Dáil.

Coppinger is an advocate of secularism and believes in abolishing both the Angelus and the Dáil prayer, viewing them as relics of an outdated intertwining of religion and governance. She supports the separation of Church and State, criticising the Catholic Church‘s historical influence in education and health, as well as its financial privileges, including exemptions from accountability under regulations like SIPO. She has called for the requisitioning of Church lands and property, citing the Church’s failure to meet commitments to abuse victims and the necessity of addressing historical injustices.

On drug policy, Coppinger supports decriminalisation and endorses the Portuguese model, which treats addiction as a health issue rather than a criminal matter. She emphasises the hypocrisy of criminalising drug use while overlooking the societal harm caused by alcohol and advocates for expanding access to medicinal cannabis, criticising the political inertia in addressing this need.

In 2013, during referendum to abolish the Irish senate, Coppinger campaigns for a yes vote, calling the institution elitist and undemocratic. However, in 2020, following the loss of her Dáil seat, she runs unsuccessfully for a seat in the Senate. Challenged by the Irish Examiner on this, she states that so long as the Senate continues to exist, it should be used to further progressive causes.

Coppinger lives in Mulhuddart and is a secondary school teacher. Her eldest brother, Eugene Coppinger, serves on Fingal County Council from 2011 to 2019.


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Death of William Conway, Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church

William John Cardinal Conway, Irish cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church who serves as Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland from 1963 until his death, dies in Armagh, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, on April 17, 1977, after a short illness.

Conway is born on January 22, 1913, in Belfast, the eldest of four sons and five daughters of Patrick Joseph Conway and Annie Conway (née Donnelly). His father, a self-employed housepainter, also has a paint shop in Kent Street off Royal Avenue. His mother, who survives her son, is born in Carlingford, County Louth. He attends Boundary Street Primary School, St. Mary’s CBS (now St. Mary’s CBGS Belfast). His academic successes are crowned by a scholarship to Queen’s University Belfast. He decides to study for the diocesan priesthood. In 1933 he is conferred with an honours BA in English literature and goes on to read a distinguished course in theology at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

Conway is ordained on June 20, 1937, and awarded a DD (1938). On November 12, 1938, he enters the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, and in 1941 he receives the DCL degree at the Pontifical Gregorian University. When Italy enters World War II in June 1940, he returns to Belfast to take up duty in the Diocese of Down and Connor. He is appointed to teach English and Latin in St. Malachy’s College in Belfast, but after one year he is named professor of moral theology and canon law in Maynooth. He contributes regular ‘Canon law replies’ to the Irish Ecclesiastical Record, which are later collected as Problems in canon law (1950), the only book published by him.

In 1957 Conway becomes vice-president of Maynooth, and in 1958, he is named Ireland’s youngest bishop, Titular Bishop of Neve, and auxiliary bishop to Cardinal John D’Alton, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland. He is consecrated in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh on July 27, 1958. He serves as administrator of St. Patrick’s Church, Dundalk, for the next five years, gaining valuable pastoral experience, and also uses these years to familiarise himself with his new diocese, especially its geography. On the death of D’Alton, he is chosen to succeed him in September 1963, and is enthroned on September 25 in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh by the apostolic nuncio, Archbishop Sensi. At the end of 1964, Pope Paul VI chooses him as Ireland’s seventh residential cardinal, and he receives the red hat in the public consistory of February 22, 1965.

The thirteen-odd years of Conway’s ministry as primate are dominated firstly by the Second Vatican Council and secondly by the Troubles in Northern Ireland. His primary concern is the church, to steer it through testing times. He is a very active bishop in a diocese of 160,000 Catholics, with fifty-seven parishes and some 167 priests. He carries the burden alone until 1974 when he is given an auxiliary in the person of his secretary, Fr. Francis Lenny (1928–78). Two new parishes are created, five new churches are built, and many others are renovated to meet the requirements of liturgical reform. Twenty new schools are also provided. He attends all four sessions of the Vatican council (1962–65), as auxiliary bishop and as primate. On October 9, 1963, he addresses the assembly, making a plea that the council might not be so concerned with weightier matters as to neglect to speak about priests. He also makes contributions on the topics of mixed marriages, Catholic schools, and the laity. On the topic of education, he is convinced that integrated schools will not solve Northern Ireland’s problems.

Conway represents the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference at each assembly of the Synod of Bishops in Rome, at first with Bishop Michael Browne of the Diocese of Galway and Kilmacduagh, his former professor in Maynooth, and later with the Archbishop of Dublin, Dermot Ryan. With Cardinals Jean-Marie Villot and Pericle Felici, he is chairman of the first synod in 1969, a signal honour conferred on him by Pope Paul VI. He addresses the assembly, opposing the ordination of married men as a move that would release a flood of applications from around the world for dispensations from priestly celibacy. His experience of violence in Northern Ireland is reflected in contributions he makes to later synod assemblies, especially in 1971 and 1974.

Apart from the synod, Conway travels a few times each year to Rome for meetings of the three Roman congregations on which he is called to serve (those of bishops, catholic education, and the evangelisation of peoples) and the commission for the revision of the code of canon law. He also travels further afield in a representative capacity to the International Eucharistic Congress at Bogotá, also attended by Pope Paul VI, and to Madras (1972), where he acts as papal legate for the centenary celebrations in honour of St. Thomas. In 1966 he is invited by the bishops of Poland to join in celebrations for the millennium of Catholicism in that country but is refused an entry visa by the Polish government. In January 1973 he feels obliged to forgo participation in the Melbourne eucharistic congress because of the troubled situation at home. Within Ireland he accepts invitations to become a freeman of Cork and Galway (1965) and of Wexford (1966). In 1976 the National University of Ireland (NUI) confers on him an honorary LL.D.

Conway is acknowledged as an able and diligent chairman of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference. The core problem in the early years is how to lead the Irish church into the difficult new era that follows the council. He shows exceptional leadership qualities in the manner in which he promotes firm but gentle progress, avoiding sudden trauma and divisions. A major event in his term as Archbishop of Armagh, and one that gives him much satisfaction, is the canonization of Oliver Plunkett, his martyred predecessor, in the holy year 1975. He follows with great interest the final stages of the cause from 1968 and is greatly disappointed when grounded by his doctors six weeks before the event. He does however take part, concelebrating with Pope Paul VI at the ceremony on October 12, 1975. He also presides the following evening at the first mass of thanksgiving in the Lateran Basilica, receiving a tumultuous applause from the thousands of Irish present.

More than anything else, the Troubles in Northern Ireland occupy Conway during the second half of his term as archbishop and primate. He is the leading spokesman of the Catholic cause but never fails to condemn atrocities wherever the responsibility lay. He brands as ‘monsters’ the terrorist bombers on both sides. In 1971 he denounces internment without trial, and the following year he is mainly responsible for highlighting the ill-treatment and even torture of prisoners in Northern Ireland. He repudiates the idea that the conflict is religious in nature, emphasising its social and political dimensions, and is openly critical of the British government over conditions in Long Kesh Detention Centre, and of ‘the cloak of almost total silence’ surrounding violence against the Catholic community.

In January 1977 Conway undergoes surgery in a Dublin hospital, and almost immediately comes to know that he is terminally ill. It is the best-kept secret in Ireland until close to the end. On March 29, he writes to his fellow bishops informing them that the prognosis regarding his health is ‘not good, in fact . . . very bad,’ and that he is perfectly reconciled to God’s will. He is still able to work at his desk until Good Friday, April 8, 1977.

Conway dies in Armagh on Low Sunday night, April 17, 1977. Seven countries are represented at his funeral by six cardinals and many bishops. The apostolic nuncio, the bishops of Ireland, the president and Taoiseach, six Irish government ministers, and the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland are also among the mourners. The cardinal is laid to rest in St. Patrick’s Cathedral Cemetery, Armagh. The red hat received from Pope Paul VI is suspended from the ceiling of the Lady chapel, joining those of his four immediate predecessors.

(From: “Conway, John William,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, contributed by J. J. Hanley)


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Birth of Dónal McKeown, Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry

Dónal McKeown, Roman Catholic prelate from Northern Ireland who has served as Bishop of Derry since 2014, is born in Belfast on April 12, 1950.

McKeown is one of four children born to James McKeown and his wife Rose (née McMeel), and is baptised in St. Patrick’s Church, Belfast. He is brought up in Randalstown, County Antrim, where he plays Gaelic football and hurling with Kickhams GAC Creggan.

McKeown attends primary school at Mount St. Michael’s Primary School, Randalstown, and secondary school as a boarder at St. MacNissi’s College, Camlough, between 1961 and 1968, completing his O-Levels and A-Levels with special distinctions in Modern Languages. Two of his teachers at St. MacNissi’s College are his future brother bishops, Anthony Farquhar and Patrick Walsh.

McKeown begins studying for the priesthood at St. Malachy’s College, Belfast, in 1968, and obtains a bachelor’s degree with honours in German and Italian from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He teaches English at a school in Dieburg, Germany, between 1970 and 1971, and subsequently works as Northern Ireland correspondent for the Catholic media company Katholische Nachrichten-Agentur between 1971 and 1973.

McKeown completes a licentiate in sacred theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, between 1973 and 1978, during which he also works for Vatican Radio and as a correspondent for An Saol Mór, an Irish-language programme on RTÉ.

McKeown is ordained to the priesthood on July 3, 1977.

Following ordination, McKeown’s first pastoral assignment is as chaplain at Mater Infirmorum Hospital, before returning to Rome to complete his licentiate. He returns to the Diocese of Down and Connor in 1978, where he is appointed as a teacher at Our Lady and St. Patrick’s College, Knock, while also serving as assistant priest in Derriaghy. He returns to St. MacNissi’s College in 1983, where he continues his involvement with youth ministry and is given responsibility for organising the annual diocesan pilgrimage to Lourdes.

McKeown subsequently returns to St. Malachy’s College in 1987, where he teaches and serves as dean of the adjoining seminary, before succeeding Canon Noel Conway as president in 1995. During his presidency, he completes a Master of Business Administration at the University of Leicester in 2000, specialising in educational management.

McKeown has completed the Belfast Marathon on two occasions: as a priest with a team of 48 from Derriaghy in 1982, and as a bishop fundraising for a minibus for St. Malachy’s College in 2001.

McKeown is appointed auxiliary bishop-elect for the Diocese of Down and Connor and titular bishop of Cell Ausaille by Pope John Paul II on February 21, 2001, the first Irish bishop to be appointed in the third millennium. He is consecrated by the Bishop of Down and Connor, Patrick Walsh, on April 29 in St. Peter’s Cathedral, Belfast.

In response to a 2007 decision by Amnesty International to campaign for the legalisation of abortion in certain circumstances, McKeown supports the decision of Catholic schools in the diocese to disband their Amnesty International support groups, on the grounds that it is no longer appropriate to promote the organisation in their schools.

It is reported in an article in The Irish News that the mention of McKeown as a possible successor to Walsh as Bishop of Down and Connor is actively opposed by some priests in the diocese, who regard him as being “too soft” on the issue of integrated education. This opposition is branded a “Stop Donal” campaign.

McKeown also serves as a member of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference, with responsibility for the promotion of Catholic education, youth ministry, university chaplaincies and the promotion of vocations. His interests include the interface between faith and the empirical sciences, and working with Catholic schools in Norway, Denmark, Lithuania, Poland and Germany.

McKeown also serves as a member of the Irish Catholic Bishops’ Conference and its committee on education and chairs its committees on vocations and youth. He leads the youth of the diocese to World Youth Day in 2002 and 2005 and also travels to Rome with his brother bishops for their quinquennial visit ad limina in 2006. He is also a regular contributor on Thought for the Day on BBC Radio Ulster.

McKeown is appointed Bishop-elect of Derry by Pope Francis on February 25, 2014. He is installed on April 6 in St. Eugene’s Cathedral, Derry.

Following the appointment of Noël Treanor as Apostolic Nuncio to the European Union on November 26, 2022, McKeown is announced as Apostolic Administrator of Down and Connor on January 21, 2023. He serves in this role until the installation of Alan McGuckian, following his appointment as Bishop of Down and Connor on February 2, 2024.

McKeown starts a 33-day journey of prayer toward the Consecration to Jesus Christ through Mary on January 9, 2025. The prayer takes place online each evening at 7:00 p.m. The 33 days of prayer take place the week following the Baptism of the Lord until the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes on February 11.


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Birth of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Diplomat, Poet & Memoirist

Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Irish civil service diplomat, writer of Modernist poetry in the Dingle Peninsula dialect of Munster Irish, a memoirist, and a highly important figure within modern literature in Irish, is born Máire MacEntee in Dublin on April 4, 1922. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, she is, in the words of Louis de Paor, “one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish language poetry in the 1940s and 50s.” She has a lifelong passion for the Irish language and is one of the leading authorities on Munster Irish.

Mhac an tSaoi’s father, Seán MacEntee, is born in Belfast and is a veteran of the Irish Volunteers during the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, and of the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War. He is also a founding member of Fianna Fáil, a long-serving TD and Tánaiste in the Dáil. Her mother, Margaret Browne (or de Brún) of County Tipperary, is also an Irish republican and a distinguished Celticist who teaches courses in Irish literature in the Irish language at Alexandra College and University College Dublin (UCD).

Mhac an tSaoi is influenced by her stays in the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry with her uncle, Monsignor De Brún, at his parish of Dún Chaoin. Monsignor de Brún, similarly to his sister, is a distinguished linguist and Celticist, the literary translator of Homer, Dante Alighieri, Sophocles, and Jean Racine into Modern Irish, “and one of the most distinguished literary figures of his time.”

Mhac an tSaoi studies Modern Languages and Celtic Studies at UCD, before going to further research at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and at the University of Paris. She writes the famous work of Christian poetry in Munster Irish, Oíche Nollag (“Christmas Eve”), when she is only 15-years of age.

Mhac an tSaoi spends two years studying in post-war Paris (1945–47) before joining the Irish diplomatic service and is working at the Irish embassy in Madrid when she commits herself to writing poetry in Irish following her discovery of the works of Federico García Lorca.

She remains a prolific poet and is credited, along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, with reintroducing literary modernism into Irish literature in the Irish language, where it had been dormant since the 1916 execution of Patrick Pearse, in the years and decades following World War II. Her poetry draws on the vernacular spoken by the native Irish speakers of the Munster Gaeltacht of West Kerry during the first half of the twentieth century. Formally, she draws on the song metres of the oral tradition and on older models from the earlier literary tradition. In later work, she explores looser verse forms but continues to draw on the remembered dialect of Dún Chaoin and on a scholarly knowledge of the older literature.

Mhac an tSaoi is elected to Aosdána in 1996 but resigns in 1997 after Francis Stuart is elevated to the position of Saoi. She had voted against Stuart because of his role as an Abwehr spy and in radio propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany aimed at neutral Ireland during World War II.

In 2001, she publishes an award-winning novel A Bhean Óg Ón… about the relationship between the 17th-century County Kerry poet and Irish clan chief Piaras Feiritéar and Meg Russell, the woman for whom he composed some of the greatest works of love poetry ever written in the Irish language.

Her poems Jack and An Bhean Óg Ón are both featured on the Leaving Certificate Irish course, at both Higher and Ordinary Levels, from 2006 to 2010. Her literary translation of Rainer Maria Rilke‘s Duino Elegies from Austrian German into the Irish language is published in 2013.

Mhac an tSaoi marries Irish politician, writer, and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien in a Roman Catholic wedding Mass in Dublin in 1962. This makes her the stepmother to O’Brien’s children from his 1939 civil marriage. Her mother is deeply embarrassed by the exposure of the relationship and staunchly opposes the match, as she has long been a close friend of O’Brien’s Presbyterian first wife. Despite their subsequent marriage, the exposure of their extramarital relationship ends Mhac an tSaoi’s diplomatic and civil service career. They later adopted two children, Patrick and Margaret.

She then lives with her husband in New York City, where he becomes a professor at New York University (NYU) after the Congo Crisis destroys O’Brien’s diplomatic career. He is long blamed by the United Nations for the escalation of the Congo Crisis.

Mhac an tSaoi and her husband, who is then serving as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at NYU, are both staunchly opposed to the Vietnam War. They are both arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, during an allegedly violent protest outside a United States military induction centre in New York City on December 5, 1967. Afterward, during an interview with The New York Times, she accuses the NYPD of using excessive force both during and after her husband’s arrest.

She later returns with O’Brien to live in Dublin, where she attends another protest rally against the Vietnam War along O’Connell Street in 1969.

Mhac an tSaoi dies peacefully at the age of 99 on October 16, 2021, at home where she has been cared for by her daughter Margaret.


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Birth of Billy Whelan, Irish Footballer

William Augustine Whelan, known as Billy Whelan or Liam Whelan, Irish footballer who plays as an inside-forward, is born at 28 St. Attracta’s Road, Cabra, Dublin, on April 1, 1935. He dies at the age of 22, as one of eight Manchester United players who are killed in the Munich air disaster.

Whelan is the fourth of seven children born to John and Elizabeth Whelan. His father is an accomplished centre half-back for Dublin club Brunswick and is instrumental in winning the FAI Junior Shield in 1924. His mother is an avid Shamrock Rovers supporter. His father dies in 1943 when Whelan is just eight years old.

Whelan plays Gaelic games, winning a medal for St. Peter’s national school in nearby Phibsborough. After leaving school at the age of fourteen, he works in Cassidy’s, an outfitter on South Great George’s Street. He is an accomplished Gaelic footballer and hurler, but association football is his first love.

Whelan begins his career at the age of twelve when he joins Home Farm before joining Manchester United as an 18-year-old in 1953. He is capped four times for the Republic of Ireland national football team, including a surprising 4–1 victory against Holland in Rotterdam in 1956, but does not score. His brother John plays for Shamrock Rovers and Drumcondra and his eldest brother Christy plays for Transport.

Whelan makes his first appearance for Manchester United during the 1954–55 season and quickly becomes a regular first-team player. He goes on to make 98 first-team appearances in four seasons at United, scoring 52 goals. He is United’s top scorer in the 1956–57 season, scoring 26 goals in the First Division and 33 in all competitions as United wins their second successive league title and reaches the semi-finals of the 1957-58 European Cup. He also gives a commanding display in the 1957 FA Cup final despite losing 2–1 to Aston Villa. Such is the strength of the competition in the United first team that he is soon being kept out of the side by Bobby Charlton. He is a traveling reserve for United’s ill-fated European Cup match against Red Star Belgrade in Belgrade on February 6, 1958, and is one of eight players to die in the subsequent air crash that destroys Matt Busby‘s young team and claims twenty-three lives. Fellow Irishman Harry Gregg, United’s goalkeeper and a survivor and hero of the Munich air crash, recalls Whelan’s last words as the plane is attempting take-off for the third and final time as “Well, if this is the time, then I’m ready.”

Thousands attend Whelan’s funeral on February 12 in St. Peter’s Church, Phibsborough, Dublin, and line the streets as the funeral procession makes its way to his burial-place in Glasnevin Cemetery. In December 2006 Dublin Corporation unveils a commemorative plaque on a bridge at Faussagh Road, Cabra, which was renamed Liam Whelan Bridge.

Although of a cheerful disposition, Whelan is also modest and shy by nature, and a quietly devout Catholic. He has a particular dislike of swearing and tends to fix a look of pained disappointment on teammates who use bad language. Nobby Stiles admits that he “would rather be caught swearing by the pope than by Billy Whelan.” His religious devotion regularly fuels rumours that he is considering being a priest, although at the time of his death he is engaged to be married to Ruby McCullough.


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Birth of Patrick Kelly, Provisional Irish Republican Army Commander

Patrick Joseph Kelly, commander of the East Tyrone Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army during the mid-1980s, is born in Carrickfergus, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, on March 19, 1957. He holds the position until his death in a Special Air Service (SAS) ambush at Loughgall, County Armagh in May 1987.

Kelly is the oldest child in a Roman Catholic family of five. He lives in Carrickfergus until he is sixteen, at which time the family returns to live in Dungannon. His uncle is the Irish Republican activist and elected official Liam Kelly.

Kelly becomes a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army at the beginning of the 1970s and becomes one of the most experienced IRA men in County Tyrone. He is arrested in February 1982 based on testimony from an informant named Patrick McGurk but is released in October 1983 due to lack of evidence, after a trial that lasts fifteen minutes.

In 1985, Kelly becomes brigade commander in East Tyrone and begins developing tactics for attacking isolated Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) bases in his area. Under his leadership the East Tyrone Brigade becomes the most active IRA unit.

In 1986, Kelly attends the IRA Army Convention where the main topic of discussion is the principle of abstentionism. Gerry Adams and others argue that the abstentionist rule should be dropped and the Provisional movement should become involved in constitutional politics. Kelly votes against dropping the rule, and a rift with the majority of the IRA Army Council ensues.

Kelly is killed by the Special Air Service (SAS) on May 8, 1987, while he is participating in an attack on Loughgall police station, in which seven other IRA men, Pádraig McKearney, Declan Arthurs, Seamus Donnelly, Tony Gormley, Eugene Kelly, Jim Lynagh, and Gerard O’Callaghan, also die. His funeral in Dungannon is one of the largest in Tyrone during the Troubles.

Kelly is buried in Edendork Cemetery, two miles from his home in Dungannon.


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Birth of Charles O’Conor, Priest & Historical Author

Charles O’Conor, Irish priest and historical author, is born at Bellanagare, County Roscommon, on March 15, 1764. He is chaplain and librarian to the Marchioness of Buckingham and catalogues many manuscripts, including the famous Stowe Missal, now in the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in Dublin.

O’Conor is the second of six sons of Denis O’Conor and Catharine O’Conor (neé Browne), who also have six daughters. The O’Conors are Catholic, descendants of a princely family in the west of Ireland. His grandfather is the historian Charles O’Conor, his brother the historian Matthew O’Conor.

O’Conor is educated at the Pontifical Irish College, Rome, from 1779 to 1791 and is appointed parish priest of Kilkeevan, County Roscommon, in 1789. In 1796 he prepares for publication a memoir of his grandfather, the historian Charles O’Connor, which highlights the efforts made by him and other Irish Catholics of substance to obtain the constitutional repeal of the penal laws. The first volume is suppressed as dangerous to the family and the manuscript of the second is burned by O’Conor before reaching the printer. He destroys what he believes to be the whole run of the first volume and ten folios of the second, by casting them into a sewer, which communicates with the River Poddle. However, copies of the first volume survive in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Barrister at Law (BL).

In 1798 O’Conor is invited to become chaplain to Mary Nugent, the Marchioness of Buckingham, and to organize and translate a collection of Gaelic manuscripts at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, England. With him he brings papers of his grandfather to Stowe, including fifty-nine Gaelic manuscripts. There he writes Columbanus ad Hibernos (1810–13), a series of letters supporting the royal veto on Catholic episcopal appointments in Ireland. These are answered by Francis Plowden and see him suspended from duties of parish priest by John Troy, Archbishop of Dublin. In his duties as librarian, he edits the Annals of the Four Masters, and other chronicles from the Stowe Library as Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres (1814–26), an edition regarded as unreliable.

O’Conor experiences mental illness and by 1827 is suffering from the delusion that he is deliberately being starved by order of the Marquess of Buckingham. He leaves Stowe on July 4, 1827. The Nation (March 26, 1853) claims that he is thereafter a patient at Dr. Harty’s asylum in Finglas, Dublin, apparently along with John Lanigan, whom he knew in the Irish College. His family twice unavailingly demands that the paper’s editor issue a correction.

O’Conor dies on July 29, 1828, in his family’s house at Bellanagare. He is buried in Ballintober Cemetery, Castlerea, County Roscommon.


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The Break of Dromore

The Break of Dromore takes place on March 14, 1689, near Dromore, County Down in the early stages of the Williamite War in Ireland. It features Catholic Jacobite troops under Richard Hamilton and Protestant Williamite militia led by Hugh Montgomery and Arthur Rawdon.

The Protestant forces are taken by surprise and there is little fighting, reflected in the term “Break,” a Scottish word for rout. Victory secures eastern Ulster for the Jacobites but they fail to fully exploit their success.

While much of the Protestant population of east Ulster supports the claim of William III to thrones of Ireland, England and Scotland, the rest of Ireland, including the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell, and the army, support James II. As a result, war breaks out in Ireland after James is deposed in the Glorious Revolution. At the start of the conflict, the Jacobites are left in control of two fortified positions at Carrickfergus and Charlemont in territory which is predominantly Williamite in sympathy. The local Williamites raise a militia and meet in a council at Hillsborough. They make an ineffective assault on Carrickfergus. However, this is easily beaten off and a local Catholic cleric named O’Hegarty reports that the Williamite are badly armed and trained.

The Jacobite commander in the north is Richard Hamilton, an experienced soldier who serves with the French military from 1671 to 1685, when he is appointed a colonel in the Irish Army. In September 1688, he and his regiment are transferred to England. When James flees into exile, he is held in the Tower of London. Released on parole by William in February, he is sent to negotiate with Talbot but drops this mission once back in Ireland. Alexander Osbourne, a Presbyterian clergyman, is sent to offer the Hillsborough council a pardon in return for surrender but they refuse, reportedly encouraged by Osbourne. On March 8, Hamilton marches north from Drogheda with 2,500 men to subdue the Williamites by force.

On March 14 Hamilton crosses the River Lagan and attacks a 3,000 strong Williamite force under Lord Mount Alexander at Dromore. Alexander’s cavalry falls back in disorder following a charge by the Jacobite dragoons. Seeing this, Hamilton orders a general advance of his infantry and the Williamite foot flee toward Dromore itself. They are overtaken in the village by the Jacobite cavalry and slaughtered, roughly 400 being killed and the rest fleeing for their lives.

Lord Mount Alexander rides to Donaghadee and takes a ship to England, while many other Protestants leave for Northern England or Scotland. Hamilton’s men capture Hillsborough, along with £1,000 and large stocks of food but fail to pursue their opponents. This allows the bulk of the militia under Rawdon and Henry Baker to reach Coleraine, then make their way to Derry, where they take part in the successful defence of the city.


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Ireland Wins the Rugby Triple Crown for First Time

Ireland wins the rugby Triple Crown for first time on March 10, 1894. In rugby union, the Triple Crown (Irish: An Choróin Triarach) is an honour contested annually by the national teams of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales as part of the Six Nations Championship. If any one team manages to win all their games against the other three then they win the Triple Crown.

The history of the Ireland national rugby union team begins in 1875, when Ireland plays its first international match, a 0–7 loss against England. Ireland has competed in the Six Nations (formerly known as the Five Nations and originally known as the Home Nations) rugby tournament since 1883. Ireland has also competed at the Rugby World Cup every four years since its inception.

Dublin University is the first organised rugby football club in Ireland, having been founded in 1854. The club is organised by students who have learned the game while at English public schools. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century, and following the adoption of a set of official rules in 1868, rugby football begins to spread quickly throughout Ireland, resulting in the formation of several other clubs which are still in existence, including North of Ireland F.C. (1868), Wanderers F.C. (1869), Queen’s University RFC (1869), Youghal RFC (1869), Lansdowne F.C. (1873), Dungannon RFC (1873), County Carlow F.C. (1873), University College Cork RFC (1874) and Ballinasloe RFC (1875) which amalgamates with Athlone RFC to form Buccaneers RFC.

In 1874, the Irish Football Union. reconstituted as the Irish Rugby Football Union after unification with the North of Ireland Union, is formed by Dublin University Football Club, Wanderers F.C., Engineers F.C., Lansdowne F.C., Bray, Portora, Dungannon RFC and Monaghan. Ireland loses their first test match against England 0-7 at The Oval on February 15, 1875. Both teams field twenty players in this match, as is customary in the early years of rugby union. It was not until 1877 that the number of players is reduced from twenty to fifteen. Ireland’s first home game is also against England in the same year. It is held at the Leinster Cricket Club in Rathmines as Lansdowne Road is deemed unsuitable. The first match at Lansdowne Road is held on March 11, 1878, with England beating Ireland by 2 goals and 1 try to nil.

It is not until 1881 that Ireland first wins a test, beating Scotland at Ormeau Cricket Ground in Belfast. Ireland turns up two men short for their game in Cardiff in 1884 and has to borrow two Welsh players. The first victory Ireland has at Lansdowne Road takes place on February 5, 1887. It is also their first win over England, by two goals to nil. On March 3, 1888, Ireland records their first win over Wales with a goal, a try and a drop goal to nil.

In 1894, Ireland follows the Welsh model of using seven backs instead of six for the first time. After victory over England at Blackheath, Ireland wins back-to-back matches for the first time when recording their first win over Scotland on February 24, 1894. Ireland goes on to beat Wales in Belfast on March 10, 1894, and wins the Triple Crown for the first time.

In the 1890s, rugby is primarily a game for the Protestant middle class, the only Catholic in Edmund Forrest’s 1894 team is Thomas Crean. Of the eighteen players used in the three games, thirteen are from three Dublin clubs – Wanderers, Dublin University and Bective Rangers – and the remaining five are from Ulster. They go on to win the Home international championship twice more before the century is out (1896 and 1899), so that by 1901 all four of the Home Unions have tasted success at a game that is growing in popularity with players and spectators.

(Pictured: The 1894 Ireland Rugby Union team, Kildare Observer, Irish News Archives)