D’Alton is born to Joseph D’Alton and his wife Mary Brennan, at the height of the Land Wars in Ireland. He is baptised four days later, on October 15, 1882, with Michael and Mary Brennan acting as his godparents. His mother has a daughter, Mollie Brennan, from a previous marriage, she remarries again after the Cardinal’s father dies in 1883.
D’Alton occupies important roles at the National Seminary and is successively Professor of Ancient Classics (1912), Greek (1922), Vice-President (1934), and President (1936). He is raised to the rank of Monsignor on June 27, 1938.
D’Alton is named Archbishop of Armagh and thus Primate of All Ireland on June 13, 1946, and is created Cardinal Priest of Sant’ Agata de’ Goti in Rome by Pope Pius XII in the consistory of January 12, 1953. As a cardinal elector in the 1958 papal conclave, he gives a hint of the difficulties involved in that papal conclave and achieving unanimity in the voting.
One highlight of D’Alton’s time in Armagh is the Patrician Year Celebrations in 1961, marked by the Irish Catholic hierarchy as the 1,500th anniversary of the death of Saint Patrick and as such an opportunity to promote the “spiritual empire” created by the Irish Catholic church in the wider anglophone world. He writes a pastoral letter to mark the occasion.
Cardinal D’Alton is seen to be more ecumenical in outlook than other members of the Irish hierarchy. He tries to broker talks between the Irish Free State and the United Kingdom to ease the tensions between both countries, even going so far as to address the situation regarding the Irish ports, but to little avail.
In 1952, D’Alton becomes the first individual from the Republic of Ireland to receive an honorary degree from Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), when he is conferred with a Doctorate in Literature. He already possesses a Doctor of Divinity, so this degree is a recognition of his earlier works such as Horace and His Age: A Study in Historical Background (1917), Roman Literary Theory and Criticism: A Study in Tendencies (1931), and Selections from St. John Chrysostom (1940).
In D’Alton’s hometown of Claremorris, the Dalton Inn Hotel and Dalton Street (formerly Church Street) are named after him. A plaque commemorating him is unveiled at the Dalton Inn Hotel on September 28, 2023. Plans to canonise him have been discussed.
Gray is the third son of John and Elizabeth Gray of Mount Street. He is educated at Trinity College Dublin and obtains the degree of M.D. and Master of Surgery at the University of Glasgow in 1839. Shortly before his marriage in the same year, he settles in Dublin and takes up a post at a hospital in North Cumberland Street. He is admitted as a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in due course.
Gray is publicly minded and contributes to periodicals and the newspaper press. In 1841, he becomes joint proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal, a nationalist paper which is then published daily and weekly. He acts as political editor of the Journal for a time, before becoming sole proprietor in 1850. As owner, he increases the newspaper’s size, reduces its price and extends its circulation.
Gray enters politics at a relatively young age and attaches himself to Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association. As a Protestant Nationalist, he supports the movement for the repeal of the Acts of Union with Britain. In October 1843, he is indicted with O’Connell and others in the Court of the Queen’s Bench in Dublin on a charge of sedition and “conspiracy against the queen.” The following February, he, together with O’Connell, is condemned to nine months imprisonment, but in early September 1844 the sentence is remitted on appeal. The trial has a strong element of farce, as the hot-tempered Attorney-General for Ireland, Sir Thomas Cusack-Smith, challenges Gray’s counsel, Gerald Fitzgibbon, to a duel, for which he is sternly reprimanded by the judges. From then on Gray is careful to distance himself from the advocacy of violence in the national cause, though he is sympathetic to the Young Ireland movement without being involved in its 1848 rebellion. Through the growing influence of the Freeman’s Journal, he becomes a significant figure in Dublin municipal politics. He is also active in national politics during an otherwise quiet period of Irish politics up until 1860. With the resurgence of nationalism after the famine, he helps to organise the Tenant’s League founding conference in 1850, standing unsuccessfully as the League’s candidate for Monaghan in the 1852 United Kingdom general election.
Later Gray originates and organises the “courts of arbitration” which O’Connell endeavours to substitute for the existing legal tribunals of the country. Following O’Connell’s death, in 1862 he inaugurates an appeal for subscriptions to build a monument to O’Connell on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street). Independent from O’Connell, he continues to take a prominent part in Irish politics and in local affairs.
In municipal politics, Gray is elected councillor in 1852 and alderman of Dublin Corporation and takes an interest in the improvement of the city. As chairman of the committee for a new water supply to Dublin, he actively promotes what becomes the “Vartry scheme.” The Vartry Reservoir scheme involves the partial redirection and damming of the River Vartry in County Wicklow, and the building of a series of water piping and filtering systems (and related public works) to carry fresh water to the city. This work is particularly important in the improvement of conditions in the city, and to public health, as it improves sanitation and helps reduce outbreaks of cholera, typhus and other diseases associated with contaminated water. On the opening of the works on June 30, 1863, he is knighted by the Earl of Carlisle, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Partially in recognition of these efforts, he is later be nominated for the position of Lord Mayor of Dublin for the years 1868–69, but he declines to serve.
In national politics, the Liberal government at the time is keen to conciliate an influential representative of the moderate nationalists to support British Liberalism and who will resume O’Connell’s constitutional agitation. In an unusual alliance with the CatholicArchbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, a man devoted to O’Connell’s memory, Gray’s newspaper exploits this shift in government policy. It supports the archbishop’s creation, the National Association of Ireland, established in 1864 with the intention of providing a moderate alternative to the revolutionary nationalism of the Fenians. The Freeman’s Journal adopts the aims of the Association as its own: it advocates the disestablishment of the AnglicanChurch of Ireland, reform of the land laws, educational aspirations of Irish Catholicism and free denominal education.
In the 1865 United Kingdom general election Gray is elected MP for Kilkenny City as a Liberal candidate. In this capacity he campaigns successfully at Westminster and in Ireland for the reforms also advocated in his paper. His newspaper’s inquiry into the anomalous wealth of the established church amidst a predominately Catholic population contributes considerably to William Ewert Gladstone‘s Irish Church Act 1869. He helps to furnish the proof that Irish demands are not to be satisfied by anything other than by radical legislation. He fights for the provision in the new Landlord & Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 for fixity of tenure, which Gladstone eventually concedes. The Act’s other weaknesses, however, result in its failure to resolve the “land question,” the accompanying coercion, the disappointment with Gladstone’s handling of the university question and national education, causing Gray to deflect from the Liberals and become mistrusted in Britain. In the 1874 United Kingdom general election he is re-elected as a Home Rule League MP for Kilkenny, joining its Home Rule majority in the House of Commons, and holds his seat until his death the following year.
Gray dies at Bath, Somerset, England, on April 9, 1875. His remains are returned to Ireland, and he is honoured with a public funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery. Almost immediately afterwards public subscriptions are sought for the erection in O’Connell Street, of a monument to Gray. The monument is completed in 1879 and is dedicated to the “appreciation of his many services to his country, and of the splendid supply of pure water which he secured for Dublin.” His legacy also includes his contributions to the passage of the Irish Church and Land Bills, his advocacy for tenant’s rights and his support of the Home Rule movement.
(Pictured: Statue to Sir John Gray on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, designed by Thomas Farrell and unveiled on June 24, 1879. Photo credit: Graham Hickey)
Boycott is born on March 12, 1832, at Burgh St. Peter, Norfolk, England, eldest surviving son of William Boycatt (1798–1877), rector of Wheatacrebury, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Georgiana Boycatt (née Beevor). The family name is changed to Boycott by his father in 1862. Educated at a boarding school in Blackheath, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he is commissioned ensign in the 39th (Dorsetshire) Regiment of Foot on February 15, 1850, and serves briefly in Ireland. He sells his commission on December 17, 1852, having attained the rank of captain, marries Annie Dunne of Queen’s County (County Laois) in 1852, and leases a farm in south County Tipperary.
In 1855, Boycott leaves for Achill Island, County Mayo, where he sub-leases 2,000 acres and acts as land agent for a friend, Murray McGregor Blacker, a local magistrate. He settles initially near Keem Strand but after some years builds a fine house near Dooagh overlooking Clew Bay. He clashes with local landowners and agents and is regularly involved in litigation. Twice summonsed unsuccessfully for assault (1856, 1859), he is involved (1859–60) in a bitter dispute with a land agent over salvage rights for shipwrecks, one of the few lucrative activities on the island. Achill’s remoteness and the difficulties of wresting a living from its harsh environment adds a roughness to the island’s social relations and probably aggravates Boycott’s tendency to high-handedness.
In 1873, Boycott inherits money and moves to mainland County Mayo, leasing Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe and its surrounding 300 acres. He also becomes agent for John Crichton, 3rd Earl Erne‘s neighbouring estate of 1,500 acres, home to thirty-eight tenant farmers paying rents of £500 a year, of which he receives 10 per cent as agent. He also serves as a magistrate and is unpopular because of his brusque and authoritarian manner, and for denying locals such traditional indulgences as collecting wood from the Lough Mask estate or taking short cuts across his farm. In April 1879, he purchases the 95-acre Kildarra estate between Claremorris and Ballinlough and an adjoining wood for £1,125, taking out a mortgage of £600 which stretches his finances.
Boycott is no brutal tyrant, but he is aloof, stubborn, and pugnacious, and believes that the Irish peasantry is prone to idleness and require firm handling. Such qualities and beliefs are unremarkable enough, but in the peculiar circumstances of the land war in County Mayo, they are enough to catapult this rather ordinary man to worldwide notoriety.
In autumn 1879, concerted land agitation begins in County Mayo, and on August 1, 1879, Boycott receives a notice threatening his life unless he reduces rents. He ignores it and evicts three tenants, which embitter relations on the estate. Lough Mask House is placed under Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) surveillance beginning in November 1879. In August 1880, his farm labourers, encouraged by the Irish National Land League, strike successfully for a wage increase from 7s. –11s. to 9s. –15s. Since the harvest is poor, Lord Erne allows a 10 per cent rent abatement. But in September 1880, when Boycott demands the rent, most tenants seek a 25 per cent abatement. Lord Erne refuses, and on September 22, Boycott attempts to serve processes against eleven defaulters. Servers and police are attacked by an angry crowd of local women and forced to take refuge in Boycott’s house. Almost immediately he is subjected to the ostracism against land grabbers advocated by Charles Stewart Parnell in his September 19 speech at Ennis, County Clare. This weapon proves as devastating against an English land agent as an Irish land-grabber. His servants leave him, labourers refuse to work his land, his walls and fences are destroyed, and local traders refuse to do business with him. He is jeered on the roads, is hissed and hustled by hostile crowds in Ballinrobe, and requires police protection.
The campaign against Boycott is largely orchestrated by Fr. John O’Malley, a local parish priest and president of the Neale branch of the Irish National Land League. It is probably O’Malley who coins the term “boycott” as an alternative to the word “ostracise,” which he believes would mean little to the local peasantry. Propagated by O’Malley’s friend, the American journalist, James Redpath, it is adopted by advocates and opponents alike.
On October 22, 1880, before his story breaks on the world, Boycott gives evidence of his treatment to the Bessborough Commission in Galway. He publicises his plight in an October 18, 1880, letter to The Times, and in a long interview with The Daily News on October 24, which is reprinted in Irish unionist newspapers and arouses considerable sympathy for him. Although he rarely uses his former military rank, he becomes universally known as “Captain Boycott,” since it suits both sides to portray him as someone of social standing. Letters of support appear in unionist papers and the Belfast News Letter sets up a “Boycott Relief Fund” and proposes a relief expedition, portraying Boycott as a peaceable English gentleman unjustly subjected to intimidation.
The prospect of hundreds of armed loyalists descending on County Mayo alarms the government, who announced on November 8 that they will provide protection for a small group of labourers to harvest Boycott’s crops. On November 12, fifty-seven loyalists from counties Cavan and Monaghan, “the Boycott Relief Expedition,” arrive at Lough Mask with an escort of almost a thousand troops. After harvesting Boycott’s crops, they leave on November 26. The entire operation costs £10,000 – about thirty times the value of the crops. Although the expedition passes off largely without incident, it focuses international media attention on the affair and establishes the word “boycott” in English and several other languages as a standard term for communal ostracism.
On November 27, Boycott and his wife go to the Hammam hotel, Dublin, where he receives death threats. On December 1, he travels to London and then to the United States (March–May 1881) to see Murray McGregor Blacker, the friend from his time on Achill Island who has since settled in Virginia. In an interview with the New York Herald, he criticises the liberal government’s weakness toward the Land League and claims that the Irish land question is an intractable problem that can only be solved in the long term by emigration and industrialisation.
Boycott returns to Lough Mask on September 19, 1881, and at an auction in Westport is mobbed and burned in effigy. This, however, is the last outburst of hostility against him, and as the land agitation wanes so does his unpopularity. Although unsuccessful in efforts to win compensation from the government, he receives a public subscription of £2,000. He remains in County Mayo as Lord Erne’s agent until February 1886, when he obtains the post of land agent for Sir Hugh Adair in Flixton, Suffolk, but he keeps the small Kildarra estate, where he continues to holiday. On December 12, 1888, he gives evidence of his treatment to the parliamentary commission on “Parnellism and crime.”
After suffering from ill-health for some years, Boycott dies at Flixton on June 19, 1897, and is buried in the churchyard of Burgh St. Peter. A British-made film, Captain Boycott (1947), stars Cecil Parker in the title role.
A large lorry transporting petrol which is part of a British military convoy travelling from Claremorris towards Ballyhaunis comes off the road on the Claremorris-Ballyhaunis road near Holywell on Saturday, July 31, 1920. The driver of the lorry loses control and crashes off the road into the bog below. The lorry sinks somewhat and is stuck in the bog. A military guard of between 12-20 British soldiers from the 2nd Battalion Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, who are garrisoned in the old workhouse in Claremorris, is placed on the lorry while the rest of the convoy continues on their journey.
The soldiers set up camp in a little old, abandoned house nearby, throwing a large tarpaulin over the roof of the house for shelter. They place two sentries on the road while the rest of the guard retires to the abandoned house where they light a fire in the ruin’s fireplace. Martin Forkhan, a local IRA volunteer, happens upon the scene of the crashed lorry and immediately notifies the Ballyhaunis Battalion Commandant, Patrick Kenny, of the situation. Kenny issues instructions to mobilise all officers in the Ballyhaunis Battalion area.
On that same night, a train leaving Ballyhaunis towards Westport is held up by armed and masked men not far from the military encampment. A unit of 25 IRA men under the command of Capt. Martin Forde take control of the train after firing a number of warning shots. The IRA then removes steel shutters destined for Westport Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Barracks and bury them in the bog nearby. The steel shutters are part of a program of fortification of RIC Barracks country-wide. Some of these men then mobilise with the other IRA officers gathering at Holywell Wood, where arrangements are made for an attempt to overpower and disarm the soldiers guarding the crashed lorry.
The assembled IRA, approximately 40 strong, march to the site of the military encampment where they take up positions. The volunteers are unsure of the size of the British force guarding the lorry, as all they can see is one sentry. An IRA officer approaches the sentry and asks for a light for a cigarette. The sentry sends him into the camp. As he lights his cigarette from the camp fire he looks around and counts 18 rifles present. It is then presumed that there are roughly 18 soldiers at the encampment. Cmdt. Kenny mades a plan and orders an attack, but as the IRA volunteers are crawling through the fields toward their assigned positions to surround the encampment, a line of motorcars appears on the Claremorris road. The headlights from the motorcars would have exposed the positions taken up by the IRA, so due to their poor positions, the delay in organising a plan and the coming dawn, it is decided that the attack is to be postponed until the following night.
The next day, Sunday, August 1, 1920, a section of men under the command of Capt. Patrick McNieve is positioned near the site of the encampment to keep it under observation while the officers mobilise the entire battalion. On this day, there are sports taking place in Aghamore and many of the battalions volunteers gather in that area so are easily located. Back at Holywell, scouts are posted on the surrounding roads to notify of any advancing British reinforcements and a trench has been dug across the road to delay any traffic from getting by. During the day, members of Cumann na mBán assist in transferring ammunition from arms dumps to the ambush site. That night, with all available men in the battalion area mobilised, the IRA assembles once more and organises a plan of attack. Orders are issued, they manoeuvre into their assigned positions and wait. D Coy (Brackloon) proceeds to their positions between Ballyhaunis and Holywell where they are on outpost duty guarding the road about half a mile from the ambush site. The IRA officers decide that while the soldiers in the camp sleep, some volunteers will attempt to sneak into the camp and take their weapons. Cmdt. Patrick Kenny leads a small ambush party of about 20 men and creeps into the camp at approximately 3:00 a.m. They are armed with shotguns and revolvers. A further 188 IRA men, many of them unarmed, from the Battalion are on scouting, road trenching, sentry and outpost duties in the surrounding district.
The ambush party successfully infiltrates the camp without alerting the sentries and Cmdt. Kenny manages to gather up five or six rifles that are stacked together. But as he is leaving the camp, the alarm is raised and the British soldiers begin to awaken. The IRA shouts a demand for the British military guard to surrender but when no surrender comes, the IRA opens fire. Three British soldiers are badly wounded in the opening salvo. One takes a full shotgun blast to his back, another has a portion of his arm blown off and the third is badly wounded in the leg. With three of their men knocked out, the British soldiers organise their defence and return fire on the IRA. The IRA ambush party retreats to positions behind a fence where they maintain constant fire on the camp. A fierce gun battle ensues. In the darkness, as Cmdt. Kenny retreats with the rifles in his arms, he is caught in the crossfire and severely wounded in the left arm and face by a shotgun blast from one of his own men. He falls from his wounds and drops the rifles he had been carrying. Capt. Martin Forde and several other officers run to Kenny’s aid. Forde and his comrades are able to carry Kenny to safety. The battle continues on for about an hour and before dawn, just as the military guard seems about to surrender, two lorries of British reinforcements come from Claremorris to their assistance. The British reinforcements open fire from their lorries on the outposts as they encounter those who return fire with their shotguns. With the IRA running low on ammunition and now out-gunned, Cmdt. Kenny issues an order for the IRA to retreat under fire. There are varied accounts of the length of time the ambush lasts. Some accounts state the attack on the camp lasts 15 minutes, with other accounts indicating that from beginning to end, the ambush lasts for between one and two hours. Dawn is breaking just as the engagement ends.
The IRA operation is deemed unsuccessful as they did not achieved their primary objective of disarming the British soldiers and their commanding officer is badly wounded in the attack. The inability to capture the British soldiers’ weapons will hamper the battalion and the wider East Mayo Brigade’s ability to conduct large ambushes in an area that is already in very short supply of rifles and ammunition. There are varying accounts of casualties from both sides. The IRA inflicts a minimum of three casualties on the British side and the ambush gives many volunteers their first experience of battle. Some of the volunteers who take part in the ambush claim that five and upwards of ten on the British side are wounded. The British claim that they killed one IRA man and wounded several others. They also admit that three of their soldiers are wounded. The following day, British police and military carry out an exhaustive search in the intervening districts. It is reported in the Western People, that in the search that follows, the police and military from Claremorris and Ballyhaunis find blood stains over the ground covered by the IRA and two shotguns, a loaded revolver and two overcoats. In reality the IRA suffers only one casualty, that of their Cmdt. Patrick Kenny. In the military drive that follows, the number of private houses raided totals one hundred and fifty, however nothing incriminating is found.
After Cmdt. Kenny is safely extracted from the engagement; he is carried by Volunteers Jack and William Caulfield along with others to a house nearby and then on to Pat Healy’s house. The British military’s account reports that the soldiers witness a body being carried into a house nearby. From there he is taken to be treated first by Dr. A Smyth, Ballyhaunis, who is the battalion’s Medical Officer. He is moved to Mayo County infirmary and treated by Dr. McBride, however, it is deemed unsafe for him to stay there so after 24 hours he has to leave and is treated by Dr. Hopkins Castlebar in Union hospital for ten days. Members of Cumann na mBan employed in the Union hospital had established an IRA ward in a disused portion of the hospital where numerous wounded volunteers are treated throughout the war. When Kenny has recovered sufficiently, he is taken to Surgeon M Ó Máille in Galway, where he receives treatment for five weeks. He then goes on to recuperate in the home of Pádraic Ó MáilleTD near Maum in Connemara for four months. Ó Máille’s home is used as a safe house by the West Connemara, West Mayo and South Mayo IRA Brigades. Kenny returns to the Ballyhaunis area in April 1921.
(Pictured: Ballyhaunis IRA September 1921: Back L-R:Capt. Pat McNieve (Logboy Coy), Capt Austin Tarpey (Holywell Coy), Bn Cmdt. Patrick Kenny, Vol Joe Taylor (Aghamore Coy), Vol John Forde (Bekan Coy), Capt. Luke Taylor (Aghamore Coy), Vol Sonny Biesty (Holywell Coy), Bn Vice Cmdt. Dom Byrne, Front L-R: Vol Jack Kilduff (Bekan Coy), Bn Adjt. Austin Kenny, Capt. Michael Devaney (Brackloon Coy), Capt. Jim Kilkenny (Crossard Coy), Lt Michael Nolan (Knock Coy). Nearly all of the men photographed played some part in the Holywell Ambush)
Alan Bell, policeman and resident magistrate, is tasked by British Intelligence to track down Michael Collins’s war chest. By March 26, 1920, he has successfully confiscated over £71,000 from Sinn Féin‘s headquarters and by investigating banks throughout the country and is set to seize much more. On that day he is pulled off a tram in South Dublin and shot three times in the head.
Bell is born in Banagher, King’s County (now County Offaly), one of at least two sons of the Rev. James Adamson Bell, Church of Ireland clergyman. His mother’s name is unknown. Educated locally, he joins the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in September 1879 as a cadet, serving in the counties of Cavan, Galway, Roscommon, Westmeath, and Cork up to the rank of district inspector. During the Land War (1879–82) he investigates sources of Irish National Land League funds and in 1882 arrests the American land reformer and journalist Henry George in Athenry. He, along with District Inspector William Henry Joyce, compile evidence against the nationalist and agrarian agitation for the special commission of 1888–89 which investigates charges against the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell and his associates. His actions make him popular with unionists but a marked man among nationalists.
After almost twenty years’ police service, Bell becomes a resident magistrate on November 12, 1898, a civil service post under the Constabulary Act, 1836. His districts included Athenry, Claremorris, Armagh, Belfast, and Portadown. With many years’ experience in criminal intelligence, he is transferred to Dublin Castle early in the Irish War of Independence as a special investigator and intelligence gatherer. In December 1919 he questions suspects for the attempted Irish Republican Army (IRA) assassination of the viceroy, Lord French, and place suspect premises under surveillance. His vulnerability is made evident by the shooting in January 1920 of Dublin Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner William C. Redmond, one of his informants. He remains in Dublin to investigate the “republican loan” raised by Michael Collins and Sinn Féin, believed to be hidden in suspect bank accounts. Refusing protective accommodation in Dublin Castle where other officials have already retreated, he opts to live with his wife at a private suburban residence, 19 Belgrave Square, Monkstown, County Dublin. He summons bank managers to his office in early March 1920 and progresses sufficiently to force Collins into taking action.
Carrying a pocket revolver for protection, Bell travels to work daily by tram until the morning of March 26, 1920. At the busy junction of Simmonscourt Road, Sandymount Avenue, and Merrion Road, Ballsbridge, a group of men immobilise the crowded vehicle and surround their target, declaring, “Come on, Mr. Bell, your time has come.” Bundling him on to the street, they shoot him dead in public view and run from the scene. In spite of vivid eyewitness accounts in the press, no killer is identified. His death comes amid almost daily violence and barely a week after the shooting of the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomás Mac Curtain, allegedly by police assassins. He acts fearlessly, perhaps expecting a violent death as the outcome of his mission.
Molloy is the fifth in a family of five boys and three girls. Two other children die at birth. He is educated at Milltown national school and St. Jarlath’s College, Tuam, County Galway, from 1927 to 1931. His father dies when he is six years old and his uncle, Sonny Tucker, becomes an important influence, encouraging his life-long habit of extensive reading. In 1931 he goes to St. Columba’s Seminary at Dalgan Park, Shrule, County Mayo, but discontinues his studies for the priesthood when he contracts tuberculosis. He undergoes several operations, has to use crutches for three years, and is left with a permanent limp. While under the care of the sanatorium in Newcastle, County Wicklow, in the late 1930s, he is encouraged by a friend to attend a performance of two plays by George Bernard Shaw, Candida and Village Wooing, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. He becomes a regular playgoer and is inspired to begin a career as a dramatist.
Having lived in the family home at Milltown until 1955, he takes up residence at a nearby farmhouse on the marriage of his brother Christy. Despite his handicap, he works the small farm for the rest of his life to supplement the irregular income from his plays. He never marries and is attended by his housekeeper, Agnes Johnston. He is a familiar sight as he travels around his local area on the high bicycle he had fitted with one fixed pedal. The purpose of these journeys is to collect folklore, which provides a rich body of material for his plays and which he gathers into a prose volume, though this remains unpublished and privately held.
Molloy has nine of his thirteen plays produced at the Abbey Theatre, from Old Road in 1943 to Petticoat Loose in 1979. His plays reveal him as a folklorist in the line of John Millington Synge and draw on the same mixture of Christian and pagan beliefs, but with a more sympathetic understanding of his characters’ Catholicism. There is also the same strong vein of grotesque physical humour. His accomplished one-act play The Paddy Pedlar (1953) is based on a folk tale about a man carrying the body of his dead mother around in a sack and takes its bearings from an extraordinary amalgam of beliefs about the afterlife.
Molloy’s history plays re-create a world that shows the oppressions of colonialism on a subject race who respond with a wild anarchy mixed with subdued acceptance. His plays with a contemporary setting most often take emigration as their theme and are prophetic of later work by John B. Keane and Brian Friel. He writes in a heightened folk idiom, which only rarely loses touch with natural speech. Old Road wins an Abbey Prize and is staged in 1943 with Cyril Cusack as the young farm labourer trying to decide whether to emigrate to England or to stay in Ireland. Joseph Holloway gives a touching account of the shy author taking his curtain at this first production, who, though his lips move, is unable to say anything. The Visiting House follows in 1946, and dramatises a night of singing, dancing, and storytelling, peopled by a richly diverse cast of characters.
Molloy’s first masterpiece, The King of Friday’s Men, is launched in 1948. It takes the uncompromising theme of the droit du seigneur exercised by an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish landlord on the most beautiful young women on his estate. His latest prey seeks to evade her fate by enticing the aged faction fighter, Bartley Dowd, to fight the landlord on her behalf. The play recreates that eighteenth-century world with colour, immediacy, and a strong sense of how the colonial system envelops all of the characters save the marginalised Bartley, who in the first production is played by the actor and author Walter Macken.
Molloy’s even greater The Wood of the Whispering follows in 1953 at the Queen’s Theatre, where the Abbey company is now playing. It is his most probing treatment of the effects of emigration, an issue of which Molloy, living in Galway, is only too aware. It is the most Beckettian of Irish plays, with its old tramp, Sanbatch Daly, and a host of older characters who are not so much eccentric as damaged in some profound way. At the play’s close Sanbatch feigns madness to gain entry to the asylum, though he is not in truth far from genuine madness. The various younger couples agree to stay and marry in Ireland rather than go their separate ways back to England. This idea of cultural renewal also underscores the importance Molloy places on the staging of his plays by amateur drama companies.
From the 1960s onwards Molloy’s plays are less readily accepted by the Abbey Theatre and a Dublin audience, but they still find a ready reception in his native place. In later works, such as Daughter from Over the Water (1963), the older characters retain their exuberance, but the younger ones seem beyond his reach. His last play, The Bachelor’s Daughter, is given its first performance by the Tuam Theatre Guild on March 3, 1985. The revival by Galway’s Druid Theatre of The Wood of the Whispering in 1983, which Molloy lives to see, is a revelation, and a reminder to the wider theatrical and academic world of the continuing importance of this playwright, not just as the ‘missing link’ between Synge and Keane but as an original in his own right.
In later years Molloy is a member of Aosdána. He dies of aortic aneurysms at Galway Hospital on May 27, 1994. He remains a committed Catholic all his life and his tombstone reads: “Woe to those who call evil good and who call good evil” (Isaiah, 5: 20).
(From: “Molloy, Michael Joseph” by Anthony Roche, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Married in 1893, Hinkson’s parents initially settle in England, where he studies law and is called to the Inner Temple in 1902. After suffering the loss of their first two sons in infancy, they have two more sons in addition to their daughter, Pamela. During this time her mother earns the main family income, and it is likely that she determines their return to Ireland in 1911. The Hinksons initially settle in Dalkey, County Dublin, before moving to a house called Clarebeg in Shankill. When Henry Hinkson is appointed resident magistrate for south Mayo (Castlebar) in October 1914, the family moves to Claremorris, County Mayo.
Hinkson is educated privately in England and on the Continent, and in Ireland attends a local convent day-school. She is exposed to her mother’s literary milieu which includes prominent writers of the Irish revival, including George William Russell, James Stephens, and Padraic Colum. Her mother’s memoir, The Years of the Shadow (1919), recalls Pamela’s developing talent for writing poetry and her predilection for war themes, as evidenced by The Blind Soldier, one of her first published poems. By the time she turns her hand to short stories, her earnings from writing enable her to buy the latest fashions.
Two key events that consumed Hinkson’s life and later spark her creativity are World War I and the Easter Rising. H. G. Wells describes in the foreword to his war novel Mr. Britling Sees It Through (1916) a conversation he had with her when she was 12, recalling how she had boldly set him straight on the “Irish question.” Her parents send her away to boarding school in County Wicklow in the hope that she will be distracted from her gloomy preoccupations, which are accentuated by the absence of her brothers, serving in the British Army. After the war she is deeply concerned by the redundancy experienced by demobilised and often maimed soldiers and contributes to the welfare work of the Irish servicemen’s Shamrock Club in London. These issues inform two early novels, The Victors (1925) and Harvest (1926), both written in the guise of an ex-serviceman under the pseudonym “Peter Deane.” By masking her identity, she avoids the possibility of her works being discredited because of her gender and lack of first-hand experience of war. Subsequently she writes under her own name for thirty years.
In contrast to her close relationship with her mother, Hinkson deeply dislikes her father. With the exception of her beloved brother Giles A. Hinckson, a correspondent for The Times in Buenos Aires and Santiago, she never meets a man who matches her high ideals. Though briefly engaged to be married, she is ultimately disillusioned by all men, dismissing them as she had her father. After his death early in 1919, she and her mother are left in financial difficulties, and have to resort to friends and boarding houses for accommodation. Without the financial means to embark on a university degree, she remains at her mother’s side. Though she continues to write, she leads a somewhat stifled life. From 1922 onwards they spend several years on the Continent.
Hinkson’s first novel, The End of All Dreams (1923), addresses the decline of the “big house” amid the revolutionary upheavals of recent Irish history, a theme to which she returns in later works, such as The Deeply Rooted (1935) and her last book, The Lonely Bride (1951). During the 1920s she writes much girls’ school fiction, while her novel Wind from the West (1930) is informed by a period spent in France, where she works as a governess. Her transcription of the memoirs of Lady Fingall (Elizabeth Burke-Plunkett), published under the title Seventy Years Young (1937), illustrates the decline of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. Informed by war and the Irish troubles, her novels characteristically are solemn, and reflect her ambivalent relationship with Ireland. Inspired by the Irish landscape, but never an ardent supporter of Irish independence, she maintains an abiding attachment to England.
The death of Hinkson’s mother in 1931 is a devastating blow that triggers her most forceful and first truly successful novel, The Ladies’ Road (1932). Documenting the lives of the Irish and English ascendancies before, during, and after World War I, this novel, without being explicitly autobiographical, contains many motifs that resonate with her own life story. When published in the United States in 1946 it proves a massive success, selling 100,000 copies in the Penguin Books edition, a rare feat for a World War I novel appearing immediately after World War II. Other notable works are The Light on Ireland (1935) and her sketches of Irish life, Irish Gold (1939), written while she lodges with friends near Lough Derg, County Tipperary.
Hinkson’s visit to India in the late 1930s as a guest of the viceroy, which she recounts in Indian Harvest (1941), results in her appointment to the Ministry of Information in London (1939–45). She lectures on India in the United States during World War II, and also lectures to British troops and local audiences in Germany (1946–47), broadcasts on radio, and contributes to The Observer, The Spectator, New Statesman, The Manchester Guardian, and Time and Tide. Her novel Golden Rose (1944), written in London during The Blitz, romanticises the British colonial presence in India. Forthright in the expression of her numerous strongly held opinions, she argues ardently and controversially for women’s rights, animal welfare, and retention of Northern Ireland in the UK. Devout in her Catholicism, she is none the less critical of certain Catholic precepts.
Hinkson returns to Ireland in 1959 where she suffers poor health for twenty years until her death in Dublin on May 26, 1982.
(From: “Hinkson, Pamela” by Jessica March, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)
When in Ireland, Browne lives at Luggala, set deep in the Wicklow Mountains in County Wicklow. The house, which he inherited from his mother, has been variously described as a castle or hunting lodge of large proportions. He once states he would rather have not been born, calling it “frightful to bring anyone into this world.”
Browne is a leading proponent for the revival and preservation of traditional Irish music through his record label Claddagh Records which he founds with others in 1959. His former home, Woodtown Manor near Dublin, is for many years a welcoming place for Irish poets, writers and musicians. The folk-pop group Clannad makes many recordings of their music there.
Browne is instrumental in the formation of the traditional Irish folk group The Chieftains. In 1962, after setting up Claddagh Records, he asks his friend, the famed uileann piperPaddy Moloney, to form a group for a one-off album. Moloney responds with the first line-up for the band, which goes on to achieve international commercial success.
Browne is interviewed at length for the Grace Notes traditional music programme on RTÉ lyric fm on 18 March 2010. He is a friend and patron of British artist Francis Bacon and in January 2017 is featured in the BBC documentary Francis Bacon: A Brush with Violence.
Garech Browne dies at the age of 78 in London on March 10, 2018. In his will and testament, he bequeaths to the city of Galway the granite remains of a medieval “bow gate.” The location of this gate, which had otherwise gone unmentioned by Browne, remains a mystery for over a year following his death. It is discovered on the grounds of the Luggala estate in 2019. According to a Galway historian, the gate may have formed part of the city’s defences in the 17th century, and was later removed from the city by Browne’s father, when it was probably taken to the Browne family home at Castle MacGarrett, just outside Claremorris in County Mayo. The gate is one of a number of items left to the Irish State by Browne.
Rabbitte becomes involved in electoral politics for the first time in late 1982, when he unsuccessfully contests Dublin South-West for the Workers’ Party (WP) at the November general election. He is elected to Dublin County Council in 1985. He enters Dáil Éireann as a Workers’ Party Teachta Dála (TD) for Dublin South-West at the 1989 election. He retains his seat at every election until 2016.
After Tomás Mac Giolla‘s retirement as President of the Workers’ Party in 1988, Rabbitte is seen as one of those who wants to move the party away from its hard left position. In 1992, he plays a prominent role with Proinsias De Rossa in an attempt to jettison some of the party’s harder left positions. This eventually splits the Workers’ Party.
In 1994, a new ‘Rainbow Coalition’ government of Fine Gael, the Labour Party and Democratic Left comes to power. Rabbitte is a member of the junior ministerial team, serving as Minister of State to the Government, as well as Minister for State at the Department of Enterprise and Employment with responsibility for Commerce, Science and Technology.
Following the 1997 general election the Rainbow Coalition loses power. The following year sees a merger between the Labour Party and Democratic Left, with Rabbitte participating in the negotiations. In October 2002 he succeeds Ruairi Quinn as the new leader of the Labour Party. Under his leadership the party makes some gains in the local elections of 2004.
The Labour Party agrees to enter a pre-election pact, commonly known as ‘The Mullingar Accord,’ with Fine Gael in an attempt to offer the electorate an alternative coalition government at the 2007 general election. This move causes some tension in the parliamentary party, as some members prefer not to be aligned with any party in advance of an election.
Following the disappointing result in the election for Labour, Rabbitte announces he is stepping down as leader on August 23, 2007. He is succeeded as party leader by Eamon Gilmore. Rabbitte is re-elected on the first count in the 2011 general election. His running mate Eamonn Maloney is also elected. On March 9, 2011, he is appointed as Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources.
In July 2014, Rabbitte is replaced by Alex White as part of a reshuffle of the cabinet. He does not contest the 2016 general election.
In 2000, McBride undergoes a vocal cord nodule operation on his throat. On July 8, 2005, a plaque is erected by the local community in his home village of Castleblayney. In November 2006, he suffered a sudden heart attack at the age of 70, which puts doubt into whether he will ever tour again with his band.
On February 1, 2008, McBride begins a 12-date tour of Ireland after doctors give him the all clear. On March 24, he performs at Castlebar‘s TF Ballroom’s final farewell night but reportedly takes ill on stage during the performance.
On 25 May, McBride performs for the closure night of the Galtymore dance hall in Cricklewood, London. He is the headline act at London’s Irish Festival on July 27 and headlines the Claremorris Dance Festival weekend on November 23.
In July 2009, K-MAC Records announces more dates in Ireland for Big Tom and the Mainliners which commences in August. From August 14 to September 13, McBride runs a successful tour of Ireland with large attendances to venues. The highlight is the Glencarn Hotel in his hometown Castleblayney where the concert is packed to capacity. The tour ends in Ennis, County Clare, with fans travelling many miles to see McBride and the band. Two days after the end of the tour the band’s trombone player and vocalist Cyril McKevitt dies of a heart attack.
In 2010, McBride announces an extensive series of tour dates. From 2011 until his death in Drogheda, County Louth on April 17, 2018, McBride and his band continue to perform with sporadic appearances.
In June 2016, McBride becomes the inaugural artist to be inducted into the Irish Country Music Hall of Fame.
seamus dubhghaill 