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Birth of Proinsias Mac Aonghusa, Journalist, Writer & Presenter

Proinsias Mac Aonghusa (English: Francis McGuinness), Irish journalist, writer, television presenter and campaigner, is born into an Irish-speaking household on June 23, 1933, in Salthill, Galway, County Galway. He becomes one of the most noted Irish language broadcasters and journalists of the 20th century.

Mac Aonghusa is the son of Criostóir Mac Aonghusa, a writer and Irish language activist, and Mairéad Ní Lupain, a nurse and native Irish speaker. The eldest of four siblings, he grows up speaking Irish as his first language and allegedly does not learn English until the age of eleven. His parents are left-wing Irish republicans who support Fianna Fáil and associate with the like-minded Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Peadar O’Donnell. His parents split when he is ten years of age. His mother takes his siblings away to Dublin while he and his father remain in Rosmuc, a remote village and part of the Galway Gaeltacht. As a teenager he is educated at Coláiste Iognáid (also known as St. Ignatius College), a bilingual school in Galway.

Upon leaving school, Mac Aonghusa first works as an actor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, performing in Irish language productions. In 1952, he becomes involved in Radio Éireann, first as an actor but later as a reader of short stories before advancing to becoming a newsreader, presenter and interviewer. As he advances his career, he works for RTÉ, UTV and BBC television from the 1960s. In 1962, he begins presenting An Fear agus An Sceal (The Man & his Story) on RTÉ television, an Irish language show which sees him interviewing a different guest of note about their life each episode. That same year he wins a Jacob’s Award for An Fear agus an Sceal, which he continues to host until 1964.

As well as attracting awards, An Fear agus an Sceal also brings controversy. Two interviews, one with Máirtín Ó Cadhain, one with Con Lehane, both criticise the measures practised by the Fianna Fáil government during World War II to suppress and imprison Irish republicans. In response, the Fianna Fáil government intervenes with RTÉ, and those episodes are not aired. This is not to be Mac Aonghusa’s only run-in with the Fianna Fáil government. After he recorded a programme in which he questioned the effectiveness of Ireland’s civil defence measures in the face of nuclear war, then Minister for Defence Kevin Boland has the episode suppressed. He once again runs afoul of the Fianna Fáil government when, after criticising the party in his anonymous weekly political gossip column in the Sunday Independent, then Minister for Agriculture Neil Blaney sees to it that the column is dropped. He is not deterred and returns anonymously as “Gulliver” in The Sunday Press and a gossip column on the back page of The Hibernia Magazine.

The latter half of Mac Aonghusa’s 1960s/70s broadcasting career is primarily associated with the Irish language current events show Féach, which he both presents and edits. He resigns from Féach in 1972 following a bitter dispute with the broadcaster and commentator Eoghan Harris.

Influenced by O’Donnell and Ó Cadhain in his youth, Mac Aonghusa also pursues left-wing republican politics as an adult. In 1958, he becomes, alongside David Thornley, Noël Browne, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington and Desmond Ryan, a member of the “1913 Club,” a group which seeks to ideologically reconcile Irish nationalism and socialism.

In 1959, Mac Aonghusa writes a series of six articles for The Irish Times in which he vehemently opposes the Fianna Fáil government’s proposal to abolish single transferable vote in Ireland in favour of first-past-the-post voting. He contends that first-past-the-post voting gives too much influence to party bosses, while proportional representation gives even small minorities representation, preventing them from feeling excluded by the state such as nationalists in Northern Ireland. In the referendum held on the matter on June 17, 1959, voters reject first past the vote by a margin of 2%. Fianna Fáil attempts to repeal proportional representation again in the late 60s, at which point Mac Aonghusa once again throws himself into the fight, leading a group called “Citizens for PR.” In the referendum of 1968, voters reject the first past the post system by over 20%. He later recalls that his defence of proportional representation his greatest achievement in politics.

In the 1960s, both Mac Aonghusa and his wife, Catherine, join the Sean Connolly branch of the Labour Party in Dublin. The branch had established a reputation as a haven for intellectuals who want a branch to themselves away from the many other Labour branches dominated by trade unionists. The branch comes to advocate for expressly socialist policies combined with on-the-ground grass-roots campaigning. Through the Sean Connolly Branch, both he and his wife begin to develop significant influence over the leader of the Labour party Brendan Corish.

In the 1965 Irish general election, Mac Aonghusa stands on behalf of the Labour party in the Louth constituency but is not elected. In 1966, he publishes a book of speeches by Corish, the speeches themselves mostly having been ghostwritten by his wife Catherine. The introduction of the book proclaims that Corish had developed a “brand of democratic republican socialism … broadened by experience and built firmly on Irish‐Ireland roots” and had rid the party of “do‐nothing backwoodsmen”, thereby becoming the “first plausible and respected Labour leader in Ireland”. It is at this same time that he is elevated to vice-chairman of the party. As vice-chair, he tries to convince Corish to stand in the 1966 Irish presidential election. When he fails to do so, he supports Fine Gael‘s Tom O’Higgins in his bid for the presidency. O’Higgins comes within 0.5% of beating the incumbent, an ageing Éamon de Valera.

It was around this same time that Mac Aonghusa becomes active in the Wolfe Tone Societies, a republican organisation linked almost directly to Sinn Féin. He suggests that republicans with “progressive views” should join the Labour party. In 1966, alongside Máirtín Ó Cadhain and other Gaeilgeoirí, he counter-protests and disrupts the Language Freedom Movement, an organisation seeking the abolition of compulsory Irish in the education system. For this, he and his allies are criticised as acting illiberally, while he maintains that those who oppose the Irish language are “slaves” unworthy of tolerance.

Mac Aonghusa’s open disdain for the conservative and trade union wings of the Labour, as well as his open embrace of republican sensibilities and tendency to make pronouncements on Labour policy without first consulting the party’s structures, bring him many internal enemies. An attempt is made to censure him for backing breakaway trade unions, but he is able to survive this. In 1966, he encourages the formation of the Young Labour League, an unofficial youth wing of the party led by Brian Og O’Higgins, son of former Sinn Féin president Brian O’Higgins. Mirroring his own position, the Youth League are Corish loyalists that openly rebel against the views of Labour’s conservative deputy leader James Tully. When the youth league begins publishing their own weekly newsletter, Labour’s administrative council condemns it after discovering material which is “violently” critical of Tully and other Labour conservatives. An ensuing investigation into the newsletter leads to Mac Aonghusa admitting that he had financed it and written some of the content, but not the anti-Tully material. After he refuses to co-operate with further investigations into the matter, he is expelled on January 12, 1967 for “activities injurious” to the party. In the aftermath, he portrays himself a left-wing martyr purged by a right-wing “Star chamber,” a tactic that garners him sympathy. Nevertheless, his expulsion is confirmed at the October 1967 party conference, despite one last appeal. His wife leaves the party alongside him.

In the aftermath of his expulsion from Labour, Mac Aonghusa expresses an interest in the social democratic wing of Fine Gael, which had been developing under Declan Costello since the mid-1960s. However, he does not join the party and instead runs as an independent candidate in the 1969 Irish general election in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown. When he is not elected, he begins to refocus on the revival of the Irish language and with nationalist politics rather than being elected himself.

Upon the onset of the Troubles, Mac Aonghusa is initially supportive of Official Sinn Féin, however by 1972 he comes to resent them and, through the Ned Stapleton Cumann, their secret influence over RTÉ. During the Arms Crisis in 1970, he supports Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, who stand accused of arranging to supply weapons to the Provisional IRA, in the pages of the New Statesman and other left‐wing journals. In this time period, he warns editors not to reprint his material in the Republic of Ireland as there is a de facto ban on him, and indeed, official attempts are made to block the transmission of his telexed reports.

Despite his earlier famed stark criticism of Fianna Fáil, Mac Aonghusa’s defence of Haughey leads to a friendship between the two men which results in him becoming one of Haughey’s loudest defenders throughout the rest of his career. His columns in The Sunday Press and Irish language paper Anois are accused of descending into self-parody in their stringent defences of Haughey.

During the 1970s, Mac Aonghusa writes a number of books covering significant figures in Irish republicanism. In order, he releases books on James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Wolfe Tone and Éamon de Valera. In his work on De Valera, he emphasises what he perceives as the more radical aspects of the Fianna Fáil founder. During 1974 and 1975, he works as a United Nations Special Representative to the Southern Africa region with Seán MacBride, where they involve themselves in the South African Border War, and during which time Mac Aonghusa becomes involved in setting up a radio station in Namibia, linked to the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) nationalist party.

In the 1980s, Haughey twice appoints Mac Aonghusa to the Arts Council as well as naming him president of Bord na Gaeilge (1989-93). This is an issue as Mac Aonghusa is already president of Conradh na Gaeilge. Being head of the main Irish language lobbying body as well as the state body responsible for the Irish language has an obvious conflict of interest. In 1991, following the announcement by Haughey that the government is to fund the creation of an Irish-language television station (launched in 1996 as Teilifís na Gaeilge), an elated Mac Aonghusa suggests that Haughey would be “remembered among the families of the Gael as long as the Gaelic nation shall survive.”

In 1992 there are calls for Mac Aonghusa to step down from Bord na Gaeilge after he pronounces that “every respectable nationalist” in West Belfast should vote for Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams over the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) candidate Joe Hendron in the 1992 United Kingdom general election as he considers a defeat for Adams “a victory for British imperialism.” Nevertheless, he simultaneously advises voters in South Down to vote for the SDLP’s Eddie McGrady over Sinn Féin. He rails against his detractors at the Conradh na Gaeilge ardfheis that year, declaring that “The mind of the slave, of the slíomadóir, of the hireling and the vagabond is still fairly dominant in Ireland.”

As of 1995, Mac Aonghusa continues to label himself a socialist. In the foreword to the book, he writes about James Connolly that is released that year, he declares that “the abolition of capitalism is essential if the great mass of the people in all parts of the globe are to be emancipated.”

However, with the recent collapse of the Soviet Union in mind, Mac Aonghusa declares that the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe have not been socialist and argues that the social democracies of Scandinavia are what James Connolly had envisioned as the desired socialist society. In the same text, he accuses the Irish education system as well as Ireland’s media of obfuscating Connolly’s views on socialism and nationalism.

Mac Aonghusa battles through ill health in his final years but remains able to continue writing a number of books. His last publication, Súil Tharam (2001), comes just two years before his death in Dublin on September 28, 2003.

In 1955, Mac Aonghusa marries Catherine Ellis, a member of the Church of Ireland from Belfast. For her married name, she chooses to use “McGuinness,” the English language equivalent of Mac Aonghusa. Catherine McGuinness goes on to become a Senator and a Judge of the Circuit Court, High Court and Supreme Court over the course of her legal career. Together they have three children together.


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Death of Stephen Lucius Gywnn, Writer & Politician

Stephen Lucius Gwynn, Irish journalist, biographer, author, poet and Protestant Nationalist politician, dies on June 11, 1950, at Terenure, Dublin. As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) he represents Galway Borough as its Member of Parliament from 1906 to 1918. He serves as a British Army officer in France during World War I and is a prominent proponent of Irish involvement in the Allied war effort. He founds the Irish Centre Party in 1919, but his moderate nationalism is eclipsed by the growing popularity of Sinn Féin.

Gwynn is born in St. Columba’s College in Rathfarnham, County Dublin, where his father John Gwynn (1827–1917), a biblical scholar and Church of Ireland clergyman, is warden. His mother, Lucy Josephine (1840–1907), is the daughter of the Irish nationalist William Smith O’Brien. He is the eldest of ten children (eight brothers and two sisters). Shortly after his birth the family moves to Ramelton in County Donegal to the parish where his father has been appointed parson. He later becomes Regius Professor of Divinity at Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

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

After graduating, Gwynn spends ten years from 1886 tutoring as a schoolmaster, for a time in France, which creates a lifelong interest in French culture, as expressed in his Praise of France (1927). By 1896 he has developed an interest in writing, becoming a writer and journalist in London focused on English themes, until he comes into contact with the emerging Irish literary revival, when he serves as secretary of the Irish Literary Society.

This is the beginning of a long and prolific career as a writer covering a wide range of literary genres, from poetry and biographical subjects to general historical works. The eighteenth century is Gwynn’s particular specialism. He writes numerous books on travel and on the topography of his own homeland, as well as on his other interests: wine, eighteenth-century painting and fishing.

Gwynn returns to Ireland in 1904 when he enters politics. In the 1906 Galway Borough by-election he wins a seat for Galway Borough, which he represents as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party until 1918. During this period, he is active in the Gaelic League and is one of the few Irish MPs to have close links to the Irish literary revival. Along with Joseph Maunsel Hone and George Roberts he founds the Dublin publishing house of Maunsel and Company. He is opposed to the demand for the Irish language to be a compulsory subject for matriculation. He supports the campaign which wins the establishment of a Catholic university when he serves on the Irish University Royal Commission in 1908. During the debate on the third Home Rule Bill, and at the request of his party leader John Redmond, he writes The case for Home Rule (1911) and is in charge of much of the party’s official publicity and its replies to criticism from Sinn Féin.

On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Gwynn strongly supports Redmond’s encouragement of Irish nationalists and the Irish National Volunteers to support the Allied and British war effort by enlisting in Irish regiments of the Irish Divisions, especially as a means to ensure the implementation of the suspended Home Rule Act at the end of an expectedly short war. Now over fifty, he enlists in January 1915 with the 7th Leinster Regiment in the 16th (Irish) Division. In July he is commissioned as a captain in the 6th (Service) Battalion, Connaught Rangers and serves with them on the Western Front at Messines, the Somme and elsewhere.

Gwynn is one of five Irish Nationalist MPs who enlist and serve in the army, the others being John L. Esmonde, Willie Redmond, William Redmond and D. D. Sheehan, as well as former MP Tom Kettle. Together with Kettle and William Redmond, he undertakes a recruitment drive for the Irish divisions, co-operating with Kettle on a collection of ballads called Battle Songs for the Irish Brigade (1915). He is made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in July 1915. In 1916, he is appointed to the Dardanelles Commission.

Recalled to Ireland in late 1917 to participate in the Irish Convention chaired by Sir Horace Plunkett, Gwynn sides with the Redmondite faction of the Irish Party in supporting a compromise with the southern unionists in an attempt to reach consensus on a Home Rule settlement which would avoid partition. On the death of Redmond in March 1918, he takes over as leader of the moderate nationalists in the Convention. He opposes the threat of compulsory military service during the Conscription Crisis of 1918, though as a member of the Irish Recruiting Council he continues to support voluntary recruitment, encountering intense opposition led by Sinn Féin.

Gwynn forms the Irish Centre Party in 1919 and stands unsuccessfully as an Independent Nationalist for Dublin University in the 1918 Irish general election. The party merges with Plunkett’s Irish Dominion League to press for a settlement by consent on the basis of dominion status, but Gwynn subsequently breaks with Plunkett due to his willingness to accept partition as a temporary compromise. The polarities which divide Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War increasingly sideline his brand of moderate cultural nationalism. Although he supports the newly emergent nation, he equally condemns some of the excesses, such as the burning of houses belonging to Free State senators.

Gwynn’s personal life also becomes complicated at this stage and around 1920. He has a romantic association with married artist Grace Henry who is perhaps the best-known female artist in Ireland at the time. During this period, he and Grace travel in France and Italy and at various stages in his life she painted portraits of him including a very distinguished looking one of him in his late 60s or early 70s. Their relationship contributes significantly to the separation of Henry from her artist husband Paul Henry in 1930.

During the 1920s, Gwynn also devotes himself to writing, covering political events as Irish correspondent to The Observer and The Times. Later in his career, he writes some substantial works, and together with his son Denis Gwynn (The Life of John Redmond, 1932) does much to shape the retrospective image and self-justification of John Redmond. In the mid-1930s he authors three books with a connecting theme of fishing with the artist Roy Beddington serving as illustrator: The Happy Fisherman (1936), From River to River (1937), and Two in a Valley (1938).

Gwynn is awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the National University of Ireland in 1940, and a Litt.D. by the University of Dublin in 1945. The Irish Academy of Letters awards him the Gregory Medal in April 1950. In his literary writings he stands for a humanism and tolerance, which qualities, due to political upheavals, were relatively rare in the Ireland of his day.

Gwynn dies on June 11, 1950, at his home in Terenure, Dublin, and is buried at Tallaght Cemetery, south County Dublin.

Gwynn marries his cousin Mary Louisa (d. 1941), daughter of Rev. James Gwynn. She later converts to Catholicism. They have three sons and two daughters who are brought up in her religion, of whom Aubrey (1892–1983) becomes a Jesuit priest and professor of medieval history at University College Dublin (UCD). Their second son, Denis Rolleston (1893–1971), is professor of modern Irish history at University College Cork (UCC).

Gwynn’s brother Edward John (1868–1941) becomes provost of Trinity College and another brother Robert Malcolm becomes its senior dean. His sister Lucy Gwynn is the first woman registrar of Trinity. A third brother, Charles, has a successful career in the British Army and retires as a Major General. Younger brothers Lucius and Jack are noted cricketers.


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Birth of Annie Roycroft, Ireland’s First Female Newspaper Editor

Annie Roycroft, Ireland’s first female newspaper editor, working for the County Down Spectator, is born on May 2, 1926, in Bangor, County Down, Northern Ireland.

Born Annie Roslyn Roycroft, she is the fifth of six children born to Tom Roycroft of County Cork and Annie Stephens of County Kerry. Her father works in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), which is what prompts the move to County Down. She gets her education at Bangor Central Public Elementary School and Technical College before going on to get a job with the local newspaper, the County Down Spectator in 1941.

Roycroft begins her career with the County Down Spectator as a junior office assistant but shows the instincts of a journalist and learns journalistic skills by typing up the reports dictated by the newspaper’s journalists. She begins submitting local news stories and in 1952 she is taken on as a journalist despite misgivings among the teams locally about a woman working in the field.

Roycroft then takes a break working as a clerk for North Down Borough Council before being asked to return as the editor for the County Down Spectator. A member of the National Union of Journalists, so that she knows how to pay her journalists properly, she has a reputation of standing her ground during reporting of the Troubles. She leaves County Down and her role as editor in 1983 when she marries Joe Stephens and eventually moves to Cork.

Roycroft is very involved in the Church of Ireland. She is a Sunday school teacher from the age of sixteen. When she moves to Cork, she turns her time to working with the church.

Roycroft dies in Beaumont, Cork, on January 11, 2019. She is predeceased by her husband. She writes her memoirs, Memoirs of a Scribbler, in 1995. She is remembered in the book Bangor in the Eighties which is dedicated to her.

(Photo: From “Annie Stephens obituary: One of Ireland’s first female newspaper editors,” The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, February 16, 2019)


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The Capture of RIC District Inspector Gilbert Potter

Gilbert Norman Potter, a District Inspector of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) is captured by the 3rd (South) Tipperary Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on April 23, 1921, in reprisal for the British execution of Thomas Traynor, an Irish republican.

Potter is born in Dromahair, County Leitrim, on July 10, 1878, a son of Rev. Joseph Potter, Church of Ireland rector of Drumlease Parish, and his wife Jane. He is stationed at Cahir, County Tipperary, during the Irish War of Independence.

On April 23, 1921, District Inspector Potter is captured by the 3rd (South) Tipperary Brigade, IRA, following the Hyland’s Cross Ambush. This occurs near Curraghcloney, close to the village of Ballylooby. The ambush party is initially made up of a combination of the 1st and 2nd Flying Columns of the 3rd Tipperary Brigade. This is the largest force assembled to date by the Tipperary IRA in anticipation of a major battle. However, the convoy of military lorries that is expected never materialises. Dan Breen and Con Moloney return to battalion headquarters, while Seán Hogan‘s Column withdraws northward in the direction of the Galtee Mountains.

As Dinny Lacey‘s (No.1) Column prepares to leave toward the south, a small party of British soldiers accompanying two horse-drawn carts unexpectedly approaches from Clogheen and are immediately fired upon. Amid some confusion Lacey’s scattered men withdraw southward toward the Knockmealdown Mountains. One British soldier, Frank Edward Conday, is fatally wounded and two others from the relieving party are wounded. Reports that army lorries are burned during the exchange may have been abandoned by the relieving soldiers sent from Clogheen.

By chance, Potter, who is returning by car from police duties at Ballyporeen, drives into a section of the withdrawing No.1 Column. Although in mufti, he is recognised by one of the IRA volunteers and taken prisoner. As part of a new strategy, he is held as a hostage for the safe release of Thomas Traynor, an IRA volunteer (and father of ten young children), then under sentence of death at Mountjoy Gaol. The IRA offers to release Potter in exchange for Traynor’s release, however, Traynor is executed. Traynor has since been honoured by the Irish state as one of “The Forgotten Ten.”

The Column, under sporadic fire from soldiers alerted at the nearby Clogheen barracks, follow the contours of the mountains to the village of Newcastle. Losing their pursuers, they stay for a period of time at the townland of Glasha. Here Potter is detained in an out-building of a farm which is regularly used by the IRA as a safe house. From there the party is guided into the Nire Valley by a contingent of local Waterford Volunteers and on to the Comeragh Mountains.

Accounts from Rathgormack, County Waterford, suggest that Potter is kept for at least one night at a nearby ringfort before being taken down the hill to a field then owned by Powers of Munsboro, where he meets his ultimate fate. At 7:00 p.m., on April 27, following news of Traynor’s execution by hanging, he is shot to death and hastily buried in a shallow grave on the banks of the River Clodiagh. A diary he kept during his period of captivity and some personal effects and farewell letters are returned anonymously to his wife, Lilias. This is the first confirmation she has that he had been killed. The artifacts are later lost when his son’s ship is torpedoed in 1942, during World War II.

On May 18, three weeks after Potter’s death, a notice of officially sanctioned military reprisals appears in local newspapers.

During the Truce, by arrangement through specially appointed Liaison Officers, Potter’s body is disinterred by the IRA and conveyed to Clonmel where it is returned to his widow. Two days later his body is brought to Cahir and buried with full military honours at the Church of Ireland cemetery at Kilcommon, 4 kilometres south of the town. The funeral is presided over by Bishop Miller of Waterford and attended by the Band of the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment, the locally stationed Royal Field Artillery and officers and men of the RIC, takes place in the afternoon of August 30, 1921.


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Death of Ella MacMahon, Romance Novelist

Ella MacMahon, prolific Irish romance novelist, dies in the United Kingdom on April 19, 1956.

MacMahon is born Eleanor Harriet on July 23, 1864, in Dublin, the elder of two children of the Rev. John Henry MacMahon (1829–1900), curate of St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin (1860-71), and later chaplain of Mountjoy Prison (1887–1900), and Frances MacMahon (née Snagge). Her father is also secretary to the board of religious education of the Church of Ireland, editor of The Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette, and author of four books, including a translation of Aristotle‘s Metaphysics (1857) and Church and State in England, Its Origin and Use (1872).

MacMahon, who is educated at home, is also literary. From the 1890s she begins contributing to periodicals such as the New Ireland Review, for which she writes on local history. Her first novel, A New Note, appears in 1894 and over the next thirty-five years she is prolific, publishing over twenty novels as well as making numerous contributions to magazines, and several to BBC radio programmes. She is unmarried and writing is her main source of income, but during World War I she works as a civil servant in various government departments including War, Trade, and the newly created Intelligence department. Afterward she lives in Brockenhurst, Hampshire, England, and converts at some stage to Catholicism.

MacMahon’s novels are romances. Typical of them is An Honorable Estate (1898), which features an English heiress marrying an impoverished Irish clergyman in a fit of pique, only to fall in love with him. They are undemanding but entertaining and occasionally ironic, with clever social commentary. Irish Book Lover, a quarterly review of Irish literature and bibliography, commends The Job (1914) for its insightful and sympathetic characterisation. It is an account of a baronet‘s struggle to improve his Irish estate despite the fecklessness of the inhabitants. Ireland is a frequent setting for her stories. Her view of it verges on the sentimental, and she often features eccentric but ultimately good-hearted country people.

However, MacMahon’s last book, Wind of Dawn (1927), is a more profound, interesting study. Set during the Irish War of Independence and the truce, it looks at the complexities within Irish society and the differences in attitude between the Anglo- and native Irish. Rich in characters, it features a naive English girl in love with Ireland, a papist-hating domestic servant, and an ascendancy grande dame who finds England monotonous but is adamant that her children will be educated there and will not acquire a brogue. Unlike MacMahon’s other books, it is not a romance and ends in tragedy and then acceptance for the coming change of regime. It reads like a lesser novel by Elizabeth Bowen and resembles in theme and argument, though not in quality, The Last September (1929), which it predates. Unfortunately, she is not inspired to go further in this line. She writes no more and retires on a government civil pension.

By the time of her death on April 19, 1956, MacMahon has fallen into complete obscurity, and surprisingly, given the quantity and relative merit of her work, she has no entry to date in any of the numerous anthologies of Irish or women writers.


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Birth of Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh

Arthur MacMurrough Kavanagh, Irish politician, is born on March 25, 1831, at Borris House, a country house near Borris, County Carlow. His middle name is spelled MacMorrough in some contemporaneous sources.

Kavanagh is the son of Thomas Kavanagh MP and artist Lady Harriet Margaret Le Poer Trench, daughter of Richard Trench, 2nd Earl of Clancarty. His father traced his lineage to the medieval Kings of Leinster through Art Óg Mac Murchadha Caomhánach. He has two older brothers, Charles and Thomas, and one sister, Harriet or “Hoddy.” He is born with only the rudiments of arms and legs, though the cause of this birth defect is unknown.

Kavanagh’s mother insists that he be brought up and have opportunities like any other child and places him in the care of the doctor Francis Boxwell, who believes that an armless and legless child can live a productive life. Kavanagh learns to ride horses at the age of three by being strapped to a special saddle and managing the horse with the stumps of his arms. With the help of the surgeon Sir Philip Crampton, Lady Harriet has a mechanical wheelchair constructed for her son, and encourages him to ride horses and engage in other outdoor activities. He also goes fishing, hunting, draws pictures and writes stories, using mechanical devices supplementing his physical capacities. His mother teaches him how to write and paint holding pens and brushes in his mouth.

In 1846, Lady Harriet takes three of her children, Thomas, Harriet and Arthur, traveling to the Middle East for two years. Kavanagh nearly drowns in the Nile when he falls in while fishing and is rescued by a local antiquities salesman who dives in to pull him out.

In 1849, Kavanagh’s mother discovers that he has been having affairs with girls on the family estate, so she sends him into exile to Uppsala, and then to Moscow with his brother and a clergyman, whom he comes to hate. He travels extensively in Egypt, Anatolia, Persia, and India between 1846 and 1853. In India, his letter of credit from his mother is cancelled when she discovers that he has spent two weeks in a harem, so he persuades the East India Company to hire him as a despatch rider. Other sources say that this is due to the death of his eldest brother, Charles, of tuberculosis in December 1851, which leaves him with only 30 shillings.

In 1851, Kavanagh succeeds to the family estates and to the title of The MacMurrough following the death of his older brother Thomas. He serves as High Sheriff of County Kilkenny for 1856 and High Sheriff of Carlow for 1857. A Conservative and a Protestant, he sits in Parliament for County Wexford from 1866 to 1868, and for County Carlow from 1868 to 1880. On being elected, he has to be placed on the Tory benches by his manservant. The Speaker of the House of Commons, Evelyn Denison, gives a special dispensation to allow the manservant to stay in the chamber during sittings. He is opposed to the disestablishment of the (Anglican) Church of Ireland but supports the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870. On losing his seat in 1880, William Ewart Gladstone appoints him to the Bessborough Commission, but he disagrees with its conclusions and publishes his own dissenting report. In 1886, he is made a member of the Privy Council of Ireland.

Kavanagh dies of pneumonia in London at the age of 58 on December 25, 1889. He is buried in Ballicopagan cemetery. He is succeeded in the title of The MacMurrough by his son, Walter MacMurrough Kavanagh, who also serves as MP for County Carlow from 1908 to 1910. The 1901 novel The History of Sir Richard Calmady, written by Lucas Malet (pseudonym of Mary St. Leger Kingsley), is based on his life.

Kavanagh marries his cousin, Mary Frances Forde-Leathley, in 1855. Assisted by his wife, he is a philanthropic landlord, active county magistrate, and chairman of the board of guardians. Together, they have seven children.


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Death of John McKeague, Northern Irish Loyalist

John Dunlop McKeague, a Northern Irish loyalist and one of the founding members of the paramilitary group the Red Hand Commando (RHC) in 1970, is killed by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on January 29, 1982.

McKeague is born in 1930 at Messines Cottage, Bushmills, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, one of six children of Thomas McKeague and his wife, Isabella. The family operates a guesthouse in Portrush before moving to Belfast, where they open a stationer’s shop on Albertbridge Road. It is inherited by McKeague and in the late 1970s it becomes a confectioner’s shop and café.

In the late 1960s, McKeague is active in Ian Paisley‘s Free Presbyterian Church of Ulster and the Willowfield branch of the Ulster Protestant Volunteers (UPV). He is linked to William McGrath and the revived Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) of the mid-1960s, and he publicises the claims of Gusty Spence that the police had framed him for the murder of a Catholic barman. On November 30, 1968, he participates in a banned demonstration by supporters of Ian Paisley against a civil rights march in Armagh city. Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s he publishes a magazine, Loyalist News, full of anti-Catholic rhetoric and gossip, sectarian rhymes, Protestant religious material, and illustrated lessons in the use of firearms. He takes part in the bombing campaign of 1969 which leads to the downfall of Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Terence O’Neill and stands unsuccessfully for Belfast Corporation in 1969 as a Protestant Unionist Party (PUP) candidate. McKeague, who never marries, is a promiscuous homosexual. His paramilitary recruitment of young men has homoerotic overtones, and his violence contains elements of sexual perversion.

In 1969, McKeague and his associates take over the nascent Shankill Defence Association (SDA), which had been formed to oppose a destructive redevelopment scheme. He becomes its chairman and, despite his outsider status and eccentricities, is given to strutting around wearing a helmet and brandishing a stick, often seen as offering communal defence against a perceived Catholic threat. The organisation acquires 1,000 members. In August 1969, he orchestrates mob attacks on Catholic enclaves in Belfast, including Bombay Street. He boasts of these activities, becoming a figure of hate for Catholics. In October 1969, he is arrested and charged with conspiracy to cause an explosion but is cleared in February 1970. The sentence is reduced to three months on appeal. He testifies before Justice Leslie Scarman‘s tribunal, appointed to inquire into the unrest. In the course of his evidence, he exults over the August 1969 riots and the tribunal’s report condemns him by name. He later further enrages Catholics by calling the events of Bloody Sunday in January 1972 “Good Sunday” in a television interview.

McKeague seeks publicity and power, but his eccentricity and unwillingness to participate where he cannot command dooms his political ambitions. In the 1970 United Kingdom general election he wins only 441 votes in Belfast North. He is expelled from the UPV after being prosecuted in February–March 1970 over the loyalist bombing campaign of 1969, even though he is acquitted. He and Ian Paisley exchange bitter invective and he subsequently supports William Craig‘s Vanguard movement. In 1971, he and two associates are prosecuted under the new Incitement to Hatred Act for publishing a Loyalist song book, which includes verses, probably composed by McKeague, reveling in the murder of Catholics. The defendants plead that the book is purely a historical record, and their acquittal vitiates the act. After he quarrels with the newly formed Ulster Defence Association (UDA), which is created by a federation of the SDA with other local vigilante groups, his elderly mother is burned alive when the UDA petrol-bombs the family shop on May 9, 1971.

Early in 1972 McKeague is expelled from the SDA. He founds the Red Hand Commandos (RHC), centered on east Belfast and north Down, which perpetrates numerous sectarian murders. As RHC leader, he allegedly participates in murders involving torture and mutilation. He aligns the RHC with the UVF in 1972 and in February 1973 he is one of the first loyalist internees. He is subsequently imprisoned for three years for armed robbery, although he always asserts his innocence of this charge. During his imprisonment he assumes a leadership role among loyalist prisoners, undertaking two short hunger strikes in protest against the Special Powers Act and prison conditions. Later, in December 1981, he acts as an intermediary during a loyalist prison protest. On his release in 1975, the RHC splits and thereafter he denies any connection with the organisation, threatening to sue newspapers that link him with it. Until his death he is co-chair of the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (ULCCC), a paramilitary umbrella group established in 1974. On October 6, 1975, a Catholic customer is killed and McKeague’s sister severely injured when his shop is bombed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

From the mid-1970s McKeague advocates negotiated independence for Northern Ireland, arguing that this can accommodate republican anti-British feeling and unionist fears of a united Ireland. “The days of the Orange card are gone forever,” he says (Sunday World, January 31, 1982). He is a founder and deputy leader of the minuscule Ulster Independence Association and suggests that the “Londonderry Air” become Ulster‘s national anthem. In talks with nationalists and republicans, he tells the Catholic priest Des Wilson that a united Ireland would be acceptable to Protestants, provided “we enter as a free people, even if we’re only independent for five minutes.” However, his record is an insuperable barrier to these initiatives.

In his last years, McKeague is chairman of the Frank Street–Cluan Place–Stormont Street Housing Association. He lobbies for a security wall to shield this Protestant district of Belfast from the Catholic Short Strand on which it borders. Construction of the wall begins just before his death. He is shot dead by the INLA at his shop on Albertbridge Road on January 29, 1982. Shortly before his death, he is linked to the rape and prostitution of teenage boys at Kincora Boys’ Home in east Belfast. He had apparently been an informer to the security forces, and it is sometimes suggested that his murder is part of an official cover-up. He is buried in Bushmills, with Church of Ireland rites.

McKeague exemplifies the social deviant who can gain prominence during political instability, projecting and legitimising his hatreds and obsessions through extremist politics. In his last years, he accepts that he will die violently. He says that if loyalists kill him, “I want . . . to be left in the Republican area so that they’re blamed” (Sunday World, January 31, 1972).

(From: “McKeague, John Dunlop” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of John Neill, Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin

John Robert Winder Neill, the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin until the end of January 2011, is born on December 17, 1945.

The fourth generation of his family to become a clergyman, Neill is educated at the Avoca School, Blackrock, Dublin, and Sandford Park School, Ranelagh, Dublin. He attends Trinity College Dublin studying Hebrew and oriental languages winning a scholarship in 1965 and graduating in 1966. He is awarded an MA degree at Jesus College, Cambridge, in 1972.

Ordained in 1969 for the curacy of St. Paul’s Glenageary, Dublin, Neill is the fourth generation of his family to enter the ministry. He is Bishop of Tuam, Killala and Achonry from 1986 to 1997 before his consecration as Bishop of Cashel and Ossory in 1997.

At the Lambeth Conference in 1988, Neill proposes all the approved resolutions in respect of Women in the Episcopate and is chairman of the Church of Ireland General Synod Committee on Ordination of Women (1988–91). He serves on many central committees of the Church of Ireland covering issues such as liturgical reform, education, communications, ministry, Christian unity and synodical structures.

Neill serves as President of the Council of Churches for Britain and Ireland (1990-94) and as President of Churches Together in Britain and Ireland (1999-2002) and is co-founder and chairman of the Church of Ireland/Methodist Church Joint Theological Working Party.

On August 29, 2002, the Church of Ireland announces that the Right Reverend John Neill, Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, is to succeed the Most Reverend Dr. Walton Empey as Archbishop of Dublin. The announcement is made at a meeting of the Church of Ireland Episcopal Electoral College in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.

Neill and his wife Betty have three sons, The Reverend Canon Stephen Neill, Rector of Celbridge, Andrew Neill, a member of Garda Síochána, and Peter Neill, a photographer.


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Death of Thomas Clarke Luby, Author, Journalist & Founding Member of the IRB

Thomas Clarke Luby, Irish revolutionary, author, journalist and one of the founding members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, dies in Jersey City, New Jersey, on November 29, 1901.

Luby is born in Dublin on January 16, 1822, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman from Templemore, County Tipperary, his mother being a Catholic. He is educated at Trinity College Dublin where he studies law and puts in the necessary number of terms in London and Dublin where he acquires a reputation as a scholar and takes his degree. He goes on to teach at the college for a time.

Luby supports the Repeal Association and contributes to The Nation newspaper. After the breach with Daniel O’Connell, he joins the Young Irelanders in the Irish Confederation. He is deeply influenced by James Fintan Lalor at this time. Following the suppression of the Young Irelander Rebellion of 1848, he with Lalor and Philip Gray attempt to revive the fighting in 1849 as members of the secret Irish Democratic Association. This, however, ends in failure.

In 1851 Luby travels to France, where he hopes to join the French Foreign Legion to learn infantry tactics but finds the recruiting temporarily suspended. From France he goes to Australia for a year before returning to Ireland. From the end of 1855 he edits the Tribune newspaper founded by John E. Pigot who had been a member of The Nation group. During this time, he remains in touch with the small group of ’49 men including Philip Gray and attempts to start a new revolutionary movement. Luby’s views on social issues grow more conservative after 1848 which he makes clear to James Stephens whom he meets in 1856.

In the autumn of 1857 Owen Considine arrives with a message signed by four Irish exiles in the United States, two of whom are John O’Mahony and Michael Doheny. The message conveys the confidence they have in Stephens and asks him to establish an organisation in Ireland to win national independence. Considine also carries a private letter from O’Mahony to Stephens which is a warning, and which is overlooked by Luby and Stephens at the time. Both believe that there is a strong organisation behind the letter, only later to find it is rather a number of loosely linked groups. On December 23, Stephens dispatches Joseph Denieffe to America with his reply which is disguised as a business letter dated and addressed from Paris. In his reply, Stephen’s outlines his conditions and his requirements from the organisation in America.

On March 17, 1858, Denieffe arrives in Dublin with the acceptance of Stephens’s terms by the New York Committee and the eighty pounds. On that very evening the Irish Republican Brotherhood is established in Peter Langan’s timberyard in Lombard Street.

In mid-1863 Stephens informs his colleagues he wishes to start a newspaper, with financial aid from O’Mahony and the Fenian Brotherhood in America. The offices are established at 12 Parliament Street, almost at the gates of Dublin Castle. The first issue of the Irish People appears on November 28, 1863. The staff of the paper along with Luby are Charles J. Kickham and Denis Dowling Mulcahy as the editorial staff. Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa and James O’Connor have charge of the business office, with John Haltigan being the printer. John O’Leary is brought from London to take charge in the role of Editor.

On July 15, 1865, American-made plans for a rising in Ireland are discovered. Superintendent Daniel Ryan, head of the G Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police at Dublin Castle, has an informer within the offices of the Irish People who supplies him with an “action this year” message on its way to the IRB unit in Tipperary. With this information, Ryan raids the offices of the Irish People on Thursday, September 15, followed by the arrests of Luby, O’Leary and O’Donovan Rossa. Kickham is caught after a month on the run. Stephens is also caught with the support of Fenian prison warders. The last number of the paper is dated September 16, 1865.

After his arrest and the suppression of the Irish People, Luby is sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude. He is released in January 1871, but is compelled to remain away from Ireland until the expiration of his sentence.

Upon his release Luby goes first to the Continent and later settles in New York City. He lectures all over the country for years and writes for a number of Irish newspapers on political topics. At the memorial meeting on the death of John Mitchel, he delivers the principal address in Madison Square Garden.

Thomas Clarke Luby dies at 109½ Oak Street, Jersey City, New Jersey of paralysis, on November 29, 1901, and is buried in a grave shared with his wife in Bayview Cemetery in Jersey City. His epitaph reads: “Thomas Clarke Luby 1822–1901 He devoted his life to love of Ireland and quest of truth.”


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Death of Philip Twysden, Lord Bishop of Raphoe

Philip Twysden, Anglican clergyman who serves in the Church of Ireland as Lord Bishop of Raphoe from 1747 to 1752, dies bankrupt on November 2, 1752, after having been shot while allegedly masquerading as a highwayman. The circumstances of his death later become the subject of scandalous rumour.

Twysden is born in Kent, in the South East England region, on September 7, 1713, the third son of Sir William Twysden, 5th Baronet of Roydon Hall, East Peckham, Kent, by his wife (and distant cousin) Jane Twisden.

Twysden studies at University College, Oxford, from 1732. He is awarded a Master of Arts degree, and the honorary degree of Doctor of Civil Law in 1745.

Twysden marries twice: firstly, to Mary Purcell, who dies in 1743, and secondly to Frances Carter, daughter of The Rt Hon. Thomas Carter, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. After Twysden’s death, she marries her cousin, General James Johnston.

By his second wife, Twysden has two children: Mary, who dies in infancy, and a posthumous daughter named Frances (1753–1821). Frances, later Countess of Jersey, is one of the many mistresses of King George IV when he is Prince of Wales.

Twysden is ordained a priest in the Church of England. He is instituted in 1738 as rector of Eard and in 1745, for a short time, serves as the rector of Eastling in Kent. He accompanies Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, to Dublin as his chaplain, upon the Earl’s appointment as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.

Twysden is nominated to the Bishopric of Raphoe in Ulster on March 3, 1746, and is consecrated by the Archbishop of Dublin, assisted by the bishops of Derry and Clonfert, at St. Michan’s Church, Dublin, on March 29, 1747.

Twysden dies on November 2, 1752, at home in Jermyn Street, St. James’s, London. However, according to ecclesiastical historian and author Henry Cotton, he dies at Roydon Hall, East Peckham, his father’s country house. He is buried in the south chancel of St. Michael’s Church, East Peckham, under a plain stone with no inscription.

A story grows up that, having been made bankrupt, Twysden is shot while attempting to rob a stagecoach. The location of his alleged attempted career as a highwayman is either Hounslow Heath (west of London) or Wrotham Heath in Kent.

(Pictured: The Cathedral of St Eunan, Raphoe, the episcopal seat of the pre-Reformation and Church of Ireland bishops of Raphoe)