A 1966 review by Howard Klein in The New York Times of Greevy’s recording of Handel arias states: “The voice has the firm, compact resonance of a true contralto. She has endless breath and can move her voice with agility and precision.”
Greevy has a special affinity with Mahler, in particular his orchestral song cycles. In 1966, she performs Kindertotenlieder in London with the then RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. The Times praises the 26-year-old Greevy’s “full, glowing voice, rich and firm at the bottom, radiant at the top, and gloriously expressive phrasing.” Later, in the 1990s, she performs all Mahler’s vocal works with orchestra over a four-year period in the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Greevy chooses to live in her native Dublin throughout her career rather than be based in one of the world’s major music centres. She maintains confidently that “if you’re good enough you can live where you like.” Nevertheless, this decision undoubtedly curtails her opportunities in the recording studio and on the concert stage.
Greevy dies at the age of 68 on September 26, 2008, following a short illness. She is married to Peter Tattan, who predeceases her in 1983. They have one son, Hugh.
O’Connor is one of five children of Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) Supreme Council member and later MPJames O’Connor. He is IRB treasurer in 1870 and party to the discussions on the New Departure, a collaboration between constitutional and physical force nationalists, the open and the secret movements. Her uncle, John O’Connor, is a leading member of the Supreme Council.
In 1890, when O’Connor’s father is a journalist, her mother, Mary O’Connor, and four of her sisters – Annie, Aileen, Kathleen and Norah – die after eating contaminated mussels gathered on the seashore near where they lived in what became known as the Seapoint tragedy. She becomes violently ill, but survives.
O’Connor travels to London after a falling out with her stepmother six years later. She finds work as a civil servant and a paid speaker for the Liberal Party, through which she meets Crompton Llewelyn Davies, adviser to David Lloyd George and solicitor to the General Post Office, brother of Arthur Llewelyn Davies and uncle of the boys who inspire the creation of Peter Pan. They marry on December 8, 1910. The marriage produces two children: Richard and Catherine.
Davies is an orthodox home ruler but is radicalised by the 1916 Easter Rising. Davies and her husband raise funds for Roger Casement‘s legal defence and later lobby for his death sentence to be commuted. She is saluted as one of the “fond ones” in a letter from Casement to Margaret Gavan Duffy on the eve of his August 3, 1916, execution in Pentonville Prison.
Following the Easter Rising, Davies takes her two children to Ireland and purchases Furry Park, a crumbling mansion near Dublin. She collaborates with Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence and her home in Clontarf becomes one of Collins’ many safe houses as he directs the war. She is arrested and imprisoned in 1920. Collins also stays at her Portmarnock house, using it as a safe house.
Davies says in later life that she and Michael Collins had been lovers, but the historian Peter Hart claims her to be a stalker. It has been suggested that Collins is the father of her son Richard. Historian Meda Ryan denies this saying “Letters from him and a phone call confirmed that he was born December 24, 1912, before his mother met Collins.”
Historian Tim Pat Coogan in his book Michael Collins says that Davies claimed on the night that Collins learned that Éamon de Valera was going to reject the Anglo-Irish Treaty “he was so distressed that I gave myself to him.” Coogan refuses to give a source and in the footnotes, he says, “Confidential source.”
Davies makes a lasting contribution to Irish literature with a translation, with George Thomson, of the Muiris Ó Súilleabháin book Fiche Bliain faoi Bhláth as Twenty Years a-Flowering. She is thought to have helped Collins write his book The Path to Freedom.
O’Faolain describes her early life as growing up in a Catholic country which, in her view, fears sexuality and forbids her even information about her body. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expect her to marry and have children, neither of which she does.
O’Faolain becomes internationally well known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There; a novel, My Dream of You; and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. The first three are all featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her posthumous novel Best Love, Rosie is published in 2009.
O’Faolain’s formative years coincide with the emergence of the women’s movement, and her ability to expose misogyny in all its forms is formidable, forensic and unremitting. However, her feminism stems from a fundamental belief in social justice. Unlike most commentators, who maintain a detached, lofty tone, she places herself at the centre of things, a high-risk strategy that works because of her broad range of erudition, worn lightly, her courage and a truthfulness that sometimes borders on the self-destructive.
O’Faolain is engaged at least once but never marries. In Are You Somebody? she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who publishes her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, she lives much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They are registered as domestic partners in 2003.
O’Faolain splits her time between Ireland and New York City. She is diagnosed with metastaticcancer and is interviewed on the Marian Finucane radio show on RTÉ Radio 1 on April 12, 2008, in relation to her terminal illness. She tells Finucane, “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life.”
In a last attempt to grasp as much of life as she can, O’Faolain holidays with family members in Sicily and visits Berlin with a group of friends to hear music and see art. She previously tended to avoid Berlin because, through contact with Jewish friends and lovers, she associated it with the Holocaust. She dies at the Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, on May 9, 2008.
O’Faolain wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985 for her work as the producer of the RTÉ One television programme Plain Tales. In 2006, she wins the Prix Femina étranger, a French literary award, for The Story of Chicago May.
O’Faolain is the subject of a film documentary, Nuala: A Life and Death (2011), directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, and produced and narrated by Marian Finucane. Hugo Hamilton‘s novel Every Single Minute (2014) is based on his experiences when accompanying O’Faolain to Berlin shortly before her death.
Mary Irvine, Irish judge who is the President of the Irish High Court between 2020 and 2022, is born on December 10, 1956, in Clontarf, Dublin. She first practiced as a barrister. She is a judge of the High Court between 2007 and 2014, a judge of the Court of Appeal from 2014 to 2019 and serves as a judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland from May 2019 until becoming President of the High Court on June 18, 2020. In addition to being the first woman to hold that position, she is the first judge to have held four judicial offices. She is an ex officio member of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeal.
Irvine is born to John and Cecily Irvine, her father once being deputy director of RTÉ. She is educated at Mount Anville Secondary School, University College Dublin (UCD) and the King’s Inns. She is an international golf player, winning the Irish Girls Close Championship in 1975.
Irvine’s practice also extends to constitutional law. As a junior counsel, she represents the plaintiff in Cahill v. Sutton in 1980 in the Supreme Court with seniors Niall McCarthy and James O’Driscoll. The case establishes the modern Irish law of standing for applicants to challenge the constitutional validity of statutes. She appears with Peter Kelly to argue on behalf the right of the unborn in a reference made by President of IrelandMary Robinson under Article 26 of the Constitution to the Supreme Court in 1995 regarding the Information (Termination of Pregnancies) Bill 1995.
Irvine is appointed as a Judge of the High Court in June 2007. She is in charge of the High Court Personal Injuries list from 2009 to 2014 and subsequently becomes the second Chair of the Working Group on Medical Negligence and Periodic Payments, established by the President of the High Court.
Irvine is appointed to Court of Appeal on its establishment in October 2014. Some of her judgments on the Court of Appeal reduce awards given by lower courts for personal injuries compensation. She writes “most of the key” Court of Appeal judgments between 2015 and 2017 which have the effect of reducing awards arising from subsequent actions in the High Court.
Irvine is appointed to chair a statutory tribunal to conduct hearings and deal with cases related to the CervicalCheck cancer scandal in 2019. However, following her appointment as President of the High Court in 2020, she is unable to continue with the position.
On April 4, 2019, Irvine is nominated by the Government of Ireland as a Judge of the Supreme Court. She is appointed by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, on May 13, 2019. She writes decisions for the court in appeals involving planning law, the law of tort, intellectual property law, judicial review, and chancery law.
Irvine is appointed by Chief Justice Frank Clarke in 2019 to chair the Personal Injuries Guidelines Committee of the Judicial Council. The purpose of the committee is to review the levels of compensation issues in court cases arising out of personal injuries. Minister of State at the Department of FinanceMichael W. D’Arcy writes a letter to congratulate her on her appointment and outlines his views that personal injuries awards in Ireland should be “recalibrated.” She responds to the letter by saying it is the not the committee’s duty to tailor its findings “in a manner favourable to any particular interest group.”
Following a cabinet meeting on June 12, 2020, it is announced that Irvine will be nominated to succeed Peter Kelly as President of the High Court. A three-person panel consisting of the Chief Justice Frank Clarke (later substituted by George Birmingham), the Attorney GeneralSéamus Woulfe and a management consultant, Jane Williams, reviews applications for the position, before making recommendations to cabinet. The President of the Law Society of Ireland welcomes her appointment, describing her as an “outstandingly able judge.” She is the first woman to hold the role. As she is previously an ordinary judge of three courts, her appointment as President of the High Court makes her the first person to have held four judicial offices. She is appointed on June 18, 2020, and makes her judicial declaration on June 19.
Irvine takes over as president in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland. She issues guidelines for lawyers to negotiate personal injuries cases outside of court due to the backlog formed by delays in hearings. She issues a practice direction in July 2020 that face coverings are to be worn at High Court hearings. She criticises barristers and solicitors in October 2020 for not wearing masks in the Four Courts.
In Irvine’s first week as president, she presides over a three-judge division of the High Court in a case taken by a number of members of Seanad Éireann. The plaintiffs seek a declaration that the Seanad should sit even though the nominated members of Seanad Éireann have not been appointed. The court refuses the relief and finds for the State. In 2021, she also presides over a three-judge division on a Seanad Éireann voting rights case, where the plaintiff argues for the extension of voting rights to graduates of all third-level educational institutions and the wider population. The court finds against the plaintiff.
Irvine continues to sit in the Supreme Court following her appointment.
In April 2022, Irvine announces her intention to retire in July 2022. She retires on July 13, 2022, and is succeeded by David Barniville.
Irvine is formerly married to retired judge Michael Moriarty, with whom she has three children. Her only known son, Mark Moriarty, dies suddenly on August 19,2022.
(Pictured: Justice Mary Irvine with the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, on her appointment on the Supreme Court in 2019)
Frederick May, Irish composer and arranger, dies in Dublin on September 8, 1985. His musical career is seriously hindered by a lifelong hearing problem, and he produces relatively few compositions.
May is born on June 9, 1911, into a Dublin Protestant family who lives in the suburb of Donnybrook. His father, also named Frederick, is employed at the Guinness Brewery. He pursues his musical studies at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, where he is taught composition by John Larchet. In 1930, McCullough Pigott and Co. publishes his Irish Love Song. That same year he is awarded the Esposito Cup at the Feis Ceoil and as a result of this he is nominated as the first recipient of a new scholarship prize worth £100 to be spent on the further study of piano. In July 1930, he takes his preliminary examination for the Bachelor of Music at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) before departing Dublin to utilise his scholarship in London. In September he enrolls at the Royal College of Music (RCM) where his teachers include Charles Kitson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, R. O. Morris and Gordon Jacob. He takes his final TCD examination in December 1931 submitting a string quartet and on December 10 his degree is conferred. During 1932 his study is funded by the RCM’s Foli Scholarship and in October he is awarded the Octavia Travelling Scholarship.
May’s compositions are few in number and he produces most of his small output in the 1930s and early 1940s. His first significant work is the Scherzo for Orchestra, written while he is still a student in London. The first orchestral run through of Scherzo for Orchestra takes place on March 17, 1933, and it receives its first public performance on December 1 when it is heard as part of the Patron’s Concert. Between the months of May and October he composes his Four Romantic Songs, which receive their premiere in London at a Macnaghten-Lemare concert on January 22, 1934. At some point, probably in the second half of 1933, he follows in the footsteps of other Octavia Scholarship winners and travels to Vienna to study with Egon Wellesz.
On January 1, 1936, May takes up the position of Director of Music at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, a position he retains until he is fired in 1948. His duties mainly consist of leading the piano trio which bears the title “The Abbey Orchestra” in music during the intervals of productions. In 1936, he composes what is today his best-known composition, the String Quartet in C Minor, described in the Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians as “one of the most individual statements from an Irish composer in the first half of the 20th century.” He composes the quartet as his hearing is beginning to deteriorate and he later describes it as “an appeal for release.” String Quartet in C Minor is not premiered until 1948 when it is performed by the Martin Quartet in the Wigmore Hall, London. This is followed by Symphonic Ballad (1937), Suite of Irish Airs (1937), Spring Nocturne (1938), Songs from Prison (1941) and Lyric Movement for Strings (1942). He effectively ceases original composition at this point.
Following a long break from composition, May produces what is to be his valedictory work in 1955, the nine-minute orchestral piece Sunlight and Shadows. It is given its first performance on January 22, 1956, by the Radio Éireann Symphony Orchestra at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre. Although this is his last original work, he does not abandon music completely. He produces arrangements of Irish music for Radio Éireann, which while not perhaps rewarding artistically, does help to alleviate his always precarious financial situation. He also composes a number of songs for voice and piano and a short piece entitled Idyll for violin and piano. The latter is chosen as a set work for the junior violin competition at the Feis Ceoil in 2017.
Throughout his life May suffers from significant mental health issues which result in hospitalisation. He also experiences otosclerosis, as a result of which he gradually becomes increasingly deaf. In addition, he suffers from severe tinnitus with constant ringing noises in his head. In later life he becomes homeless for a time due to alcoholism and sleeps at night in Grangegorman Asylum, Dublin. He is rescued by some friends led by Garech Browne whose record company, Claddagh Records, records the String Quartet in 1974.
Throughout his career May is an advocate of better musical education in Ireland and expresses his views on this and other musical matters through the medium of The Bell, a monthly journal dealing with the arts. He is a co-founder, along with Brian Boydell and Aloys Fleischmann, of the Music Association of Ireland (now “Friends of Classical Music”), set up in 1948 to promote art music as an integral part of the cultural life of Ireland. Later he becomes a member of Aosdána. He lives the last years of his life at Orthopaedic Hospital of Ireland, Clontarf, Dublin. He dies on September 8, 1985, at the age of 74 and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.
An intelligence officer with the 4th Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA in the Ranelagh area, Fovargue is captured by the British Army in Dublin. Under interrogation, he allegedly leaks information that results in the arrest of the other members of his unit a few days later. In return for this information, the Intelligence Corps allegedly allows him to escape during a staged ambush in Dublin’s South Circular Road.
This attempted ruse however does not go unnoticed by Michael Collins‘s many moles inside the Crown’s security forces. On the night of the escape, Detective ConstableDavid Neligan of the Dublin Metropolitan Police‘s G Division is on duty in Dublin Castle when a telephone message on a police form is passed to him. The message, issued by the British Military Headquarters, states that a “Sinn Féin” suspect named Fovargue has escaped from three Intelligence Corps officers in a car while en route to prison. It gives a description of his appearance and asks that the British Army be notified in the event of his recapture by the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
Joe Kinsella is the I/O of the 4th Battalion. He is temporarily transferred to take care of munitions under Seán Russell for a few weeks and Fovargue is put in his place. From Joe Kinsella’s own statement to the Irish Bureau of Military History:
“From the outset I personally did not place a lot of trust in him, because on the morning that he took over from me he appeared to me, to be too inquisitive about the movements of Michael Collins and the G.H.Q. staff generally. He wanted to know where they could be located at any time. He said that he had big things in view, and that it would be to the advantage of the movement generally if he was in a position to get in touch with the principal men with the least possible delay. From his attitude I there and then formed the opinion, rightly or wrongly, that he was inclined to overstep his position. I did not feel too happy about him and I discussed him with Sean Dowling. It transpired that my impressions of this man were correct. I told him of two meeting places of Intelligence staff, one of Company Intelligence held at Rathmines Road and one of Brigade Intelligence held at Saville Place. A short time after giving him this information both these places were raided…I was now confirmed in my suspicions that Fovargue was giving away information. He was later shot in England by the IRA.”
Neither was Neligan fooled by this, as he explains:
“Now if they had said that this man (who was completely unknown to both of us) had escaped from one I.O. it might have sounded reasonable enough. But to tell us that an unarmed man had escaped out of a motorcar in the presence of three presumably armed men was imposing a strain on our credulity. Both of us thought this story too good to be true.”
The two men retype the message and pass it to Collins the following day. Meanwhile, Fovargue has been sent to England where he adopts the alias of Richard Staunton. He has in fact been sent to England by Intelligence Corps Colonel Ormonde Winter to infiltrate the IRA in Britain.
Sean Kavanagh, a Kilkenny IRA man, claims that Fovargue is put in a cell with him in Kilmainham Gaol in 1921 in order to try to extract information from him.
On April 2, 1921, a boy walking on the golf links of the Ashford Manor Golf Club in Ashford, Middlesex discovers the body of Fovargue, who had been shot through the chest. Discovered near the corpse is a small piece of paper on which has been scribbled in blue pencil the words “Let spies and traitors beware – IRA.”
(Pictured: Dublin Brigade IRA officer’s cap badge in white metal, “FF” (Fianna Fáil) at centre, surrounded by a garter bearing the motto “Drong Átha Cliath” (Dublin Brigade), all on an eight-pointed rayed star)
Doheny receives a rudimentary education from an itinerant scholar while labouring on his father’s holding, and in 1826 attends Maher’s classical academy near Emly for nine months. Educating himself in the late 1820s and early 1830s while teaching the children of local farmers, he determines on a career in law to help secure political redress for the disenfranchised poor. He is admitted to Gray’s Inn in November 1834, enters the King’s Inns, Dublin, in 1835 and is called to the Irish bar in 1838. Settling later that year in Cashel, County Tipperary, he first practises in the local courts and then on the southern circuit. Appointed legal assessor to the borough of Cashel under the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840, he successfully prosecutes former borough officers for misappropriation of funds and fraudulent transfer of property, winning wider attention. He had supported the campaign for repeal in the early 1830s, and in 1841 joins Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association, becoming active in forming temperance bands and setting up town meetings. By May 1841 he is on the association’s general committee. O’Connell finds him less tractable than most and is ruffled by his queries into the association’s financial management.
During 1842 Doheny begins to associate with the more militant members of the repeal movement such as Thomas Davis. There is a marked gap in age and class between Doheny and most of this group and some look down on his lack of refinement. Others, however, admire his zeal and sincerity, and an anonymous colleague describes him as “rough, generous, bold, a son of the soil, slovenly in dress, red-haired and red-featured, but a true personification of the hopes, passions, and traditions of the people.” Assisting in the launch of The Nation in October 1842, he is chagrined to find most of his articles rejected as unfit for publication, although fifteen are published between January 1843 and September 1844. He also publishes a competent History of the American Revolution (1846) for The Nation‘s “Library of Ireland” series. More impressive as a speaker than a writer, he contributes regularly to repeal meetings at Conciliation Hall, Burgh Quay, Dublin. He enthuses at the apparent martial potential of the immense, ordered crowds attending the “monster” repeal meetings of 1843, and is one of the main organisers of the Cashel meeting of May 31, 1843, at which he is loudly cheered. However, his later claim to have deliberately set up these meetings, with Davis and John Blake Dillon, on quasi-military lines in order to prepare the peasantry for a future war with Britain, is far-fetched. His opposition to O’Connell’s decision to submit to proclamation of the proposed meeting of October 8, 1843, at Clontarf again greatly irritates O’Connell.
An active member of the Repeal Association parliamentary committee from February 1844, in February and March 1845 Doheny chairs a sub-committee of five senior barristers investigating the legality of withdrawal from the House of Commons by the body of repeal MPs, coming “reluctantly” to the verdict that such an action is open to criminal prosecution. O’Connell’s gruff dismissal of his report testifies to their awkward relationship. He further vexes O’Connell by his advocacy of non-denominational university education during debates over the Maynooth College Act 1845. Irrevocable divisions between the Young Irelanders and O’Connell open up between April and July 1846 when Doheny leads calls for endorsement of the conduct of William Smith O’Brien – imprisoned for a month for refusal to serve on a parliamentary committee – and voices Young Ireland’s martial convictions in a speech at Liverpool. After the secession of the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association in July 1846, he opposes attempts at reconciliation and is one of the founders of the Irish Confederation on January 13, 1847.
During the summer of 1847, Doheny begins setting up “Confederate Clubs” in east Tipperary and aids James Fintan Lalor in organising a failed tenant league meeting at Holycross, County Tipperary, on September 19. He is one of the few Young Irelanders attracted to Lalor’s revolutionary agrarian philosophy, but supports Smith O’Brien against John Mitchel in January 1848, deploring irresponsible demands for insurrection. However, after Mitchel’s conviction for treason felony in May, he supports armed action. Arrested for seditious speechmaking at Cashel on July 12, he is bailed on July 20. During the confused period of “rebellion” in late July, he attempts to organise the peasantry in Tipperary but is frustrated by O’Brien’s vacillation.
After the collapse of the armed adventure at Ballingarry on July 31, Doheny takes refuge near Slievenamon and, with James Stephens, eludes pursuit for nearly two months, until he finally escapes, disguised as a clergyman, on a cattle-ship from Cork to Bristol. Some days later he reaches Paris, where he stays for two months with Stephens and John O’Mahony before leaving for New York City. Practising law in New York, he dedicates himself to the development of an Irish Americanrepublican movement. Tensions between conservative and radical Young Ireland exiles, perhaps aggravated by social snobbery, surface by late 1849, when he is arrested for attempting to push Thomas D’Arcy McGee into an open cellar on a New York street, angered by accusations of boasting, drunkenness, and incompetence. Similar criticisms are made by John Blake Dillon and appear to have some foundation.
Doheny finds time to write The Felon’s Track (1849), a polemical account of the repeal agitation and the 1848 insurrection that is highly critical of O’Connell. Despite a rambling narrative, it becomes a popular work and is reprinted several times. He also gives several lectures on historical and literary subjects to Irish American societies and contributes a memoir on Geoffrey Keating to O’Mahony’s translation (1857) of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn.
Involved with the New York Irish militia from his arrival, he is elected lieutenant colonel of the 69th Infantry Regiment in November 1851, and in September 1852 becomes colonel of a new regiment, the Irish Republican Rifles. These formations are often wracked by dissension over strategy and leadership, and in February 1856 he and O’Mahony found the Emmet Monument Association, planning to mobilise an Irish American force to invade Ireland. Efforts to acquire Russian backing fails on the close of the Crimean War in March 1857.
In autumn 1857, Doheny and O’Mahony make overtures to James Stephens to reorganise the republican movement in Ireland, and in March 1858 they accept Stephens’s demands for undisputed authority there, though by the winter of 1858–59 Doheny shows increasing distrust of Stephens’s ambitions. Adopting the organisational structure set out by Stephens in establishing the IRB in 1858, he and O’Mahony found the American equivalent, the Fenian Brotherhood, in early 1859, although he plays a subordinate part. In July 1859, he founds and edits a short-lived newspaper in New York, The Phoenix, to promote Fenian ideals. Active in opposing the national petition for self-government of 1860–61, he argues that Britain will only yield to force. He assists in making preparations for the funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in Ireland and acts as one of the pallbearers in New York. Travelling to Ireland in October 1861, he appears to argue for using the excitement engendered by the funeral to spark an insurrection in Dublin but is thwarted by Stephens.
Doheny dies suddenly on April 1, 1862, in New York and is buried in Calvary Cemetery in the city’s borough of Queens.
(From: “Doheny, Michael” by James Quinn and Desmond McCabe, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Daly is born in Dublin in 1888. He fights in the 1916 Easter Rising under the command of his namesake Edward Daly, leading the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. He is later wounded in the particularly vicious fighting near the Linenhall. He is subsequently interned in Frongoch internment camp for his part in the rebellion until 1918, when he is released as part of a general amnesty for Irish prisoners.
During the Irish War of Independence, Daly serves as leader of the “Squad,”Michael Collins‘ assassination unit.
Daly and the men under his command are responsible for the killing of many British intelligence officers, in particular District Inspector Redmond, who had been putting increasing pressure on the Squad. Daly himself personally kills several people, including Frank Brooke, director of Great Southern and Eastern Railway, who serves on an advisory council to the British military, in June 1920. He does not directly lead any of the attacks on Bloody Sunday but is on standby in one of the Squad’s safe houses. In the aftermath, November 23, 1920, he is arrested and interned in Abercorn Barracks in Ballykinler, County Down.
Daly is released on parole from Ballykinler in March 1921, the British apparently being unaware of his senior position within the Dublin Brigade of the IRA. After his release, he, along with Emmet Dalton, is also involved in the attempt to free Seán Mac Eoin from Mountjoy Prison on May 14, 1921. He and his men hijack a British Army Peerless armoured car in Clontarf at the corporation abattoir, while it is escorting a consignment of meat to a barracks and shoot dead two soldiers in the process. The plan involves Dalton and Joe Leonard impersonating two British army officers and using forged documents to “transfer” MacEoin to Dublin Castle. They gain entry to Mountjoy but are discovered before they can free MacEoin and have to shoot their way out. They later abandon the armoured car after removing the Hotchkiss machine guns and setting fire to what they can. Toward the end of the war, in May 1921, the two principal fighting units of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, the “Squad” and the “Active Service Unit” are amalgamated after losses suffered in the burning of the Custom House. Daly is named Officer Commanding (OC) of this new unit, which is named the Dublin Guard.
After the Anglo-Irish Treaty splits the IRA, Daly and most of his men side with the pro-treaty party, who go on to found the Irish Free State. He is appointed to the rank of brigadier in the newly created Irish National Army, which is inaugurated in January 1922. When the Irish Civil War breaks out in June 1922, he commands the Free State’s troops who secure Dublin, after a week of fighting.
In August 1922, during the Irish Free State offensive that re-takes most of the major towns in Ireland, Daly commands a landing of 450 troops of the Dublin Guard at Fenit, County Kerry, which goes on to capture Tralee from the anti-treaty forces. Acting with severe brutality in Kerry, he comments that, “nobody had asked me to take kid-gloves to Kerry, so I didn’t.” As the Civil War develops into a vicious guerrilla conflict, he and his men are implicated in a series of atrocities against anti-treaty prisoners, culminating in a series of killings with land mines in March 1923. Daly, and others under his command, claim that those killed were accidentally blown up by their own mines. Statements by the Garda Síochána, two Free State lieutenants on duty, W. McCarthy and Niall Harrington, and one survivor, Stephen Fuller, maintain the claims are fabricated.
Daly resigns from the Free State army in 1924 after an incident in Kenmare, County Kerry, concerning the daughters of a doctor. A court martial is held but collapses as no one is prepared to give evidence. He volunteers his services for the Irish Army again in 1940 and is appointed as a Captain to the non-combatant Construction Corps.
Daly is a carpenter by trade. He marries Daisy Gillies in 1910. His brother James (Seamus) marries Daisy’s sister Nora, a Cumann na mBan activist, in a joint wedding ceremony. After Daisy’s death in 1919, Daly marries Bridget Murtagh, also a Cumann na mBan activist, in 1921. Murtagh and Nora O’Daly carry out intelligence gathering for the planned attack on the Magazine Fort in 1916. She is a sister of Elizabeth Murtagh, the first wife of Commandant Michael Love who serves with Daly in the Collins Squad of the IRA, in the Irish Free State Army of the 1920s and during the Emergency period. Murtagh dies in childbirth in 1930. Daly subsequently marries Norah Gillies, his first wife’s niece.
On his death on January 16, 1957, Daly is buried with full military honours in Mount Jerome Cemetery. He is survived by his brothers, Comdt Seamus O’Daly and Capt Frank O’Daly, his sons Patrick and Colbert, and his daughters Brede and Philomena.
Deane is born on December 2, 1879, in New Ross, County Wexford, and grows up in Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin. His family lives close to the families of both Bram Stoker and his wife, Florence Balcombe, and his mother had been acquainted with Bram Stoker in her youth.
Deane enters the theater as a young man, first appearing in 1899 with the Henry Irving Company, of which Stoker is stage manager for many years. Even before he forms his own troupe in the early 1920s, he has been thinking about bringing Dracula to the stage. Stoker had attempted this in 1897 but the verdict from Irving consigned it to the waste-paper basket. Unable to find a scriptwriter to take on the project, Deane writes the play himself in a four-week period of inactivity while he is suffering with a severe cold. He then contacts Florence Stoker, Bram’s widow, and negotiates a deal for the dramatic rights.
To stage the production, Deane is required to submit the completed script to the Lord Chamberlain for a license under the Theatres Act 1843. The play is censored to limit violence – for example, the count’s death cannot be shown to the audience – but is approved on May 15, 1924.
Deane re-imagines Count Dracula as a more urbane and theatrically acceptable character who could plausibly enter London society. It is Deane’s idea that the count should wear a tuxedo and stand-up collar, and a flowing cape which conceals Dracula while he slips through a trap-door in the stage floor, giving the impression that he has disappeared. He also arranges to have a uniformed nurse available at performances, ready to administer smelling salts should anyone faint.
Deane’s play premieres on August 5, 1924, at the Grand Theatre in Derby, England. Despite critics’ misgivings, the audiences love it. Although he originally intended to play the title role himself, Raymond Huntley plays the role of the Count and Deane fills the role of Van Helsing. It is a huge success and the production tours England for three years before settling in London, where it opens at the Little Theatre in the Adelphi on February 14, 1927. It later transfers to the Duke of York’s Theatre and then the Prince of Wales Theatre to accommodate larger audiences.
When the play crosses the Atlantic in 1927, the role of Dracula is taken by the then-unknown Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi. For its United States debut, Dracula is rewritten by the American playwright John L. Balderston. The show runs for a year on Broadway and for two more years on tour, breaking all previous records for any show put on tour in the United States. It is the Deane/Balderston interpretation upon which the classic Tod Browning film Dracula (1931) is based.
Lawless is the only surviving son of Nicholas Lawless, wool merchant, brewer, and banker, who becomes 1st Baron Cloncurry in 1789, and Margaret Lawless (née Browne), only daughter and heiress of Valentine Browne of Mount Browne, County Limerick. He is educated privately at Portarlington, Queen’s County (now County Laois), and at Blackrock, County Dublin. He enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1789, graduating BA in 1792. After completing a tour of Europe (1792–95) he returns to Ireland, where he joins the Society of United Irishmen and the loyalistyeomanry. Pressurized by his father, he decides to study law, and is at Middle Temple from 1795 to 1798. He later claims that at a dinner party in the spring of 1797 he hears the prime minister, William Pitt, discuss his plans for a legislative union with Ireland, prompting him to write an anti-union pamphlet in response. Like many of the claims in his published recollections, the story is unreliable.
During 1797 Lawless helps Arthur O’Connor form his United Irishman newspaper The Press, and Leonard McNally informs Dublin Castle that Lawless is its principal shareholder. In October 1797 Lawless attends a meeting of the executive directory of the United Irishmen, of which he is elected a member. Throughout this period and after his return to London he is carefully watched by the British secret service. His friendship with O’Connor, and the fact that he provides funds for Fr. James Coigly, arouse deep suspicion. After the outbreak of open rebellion in Ireland he is arrested at his lodgings in Pall Mall on May 31, 1798, on suspicion of high treason, and imprisoned for six weeks in the Tower of London. Arabella Jefferyes, sister of the Earl of Clare, apparently tries to extort money from Lawless in return for pleading his case to the Duke of Portland. He refuses the offer. On his release he tours England on horseback but is rearrested on April 14, 1799, and held until March 1801. His father votes for the Act of Union, hoping to secure his son’s release, and dies on August 28, 1799. Lawless succeeds him as 2nd Baron Cloncurry. His grandfather and his fiancée, Mary Ryal, also die while he is imprisoned.
Embittered by his experience, Lawless tours the Continent from 1801 to 1805 before returning to his family estate at Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare. Throwing himself into improving his estates and into local concerns, he founds the County Kildare Farming Society in 1814. He is also involved in canal developments and agricultural improvements in the country. Opposed to the rural constabulary bill of 1822, he supports Catholic emancipation and the attempts of Daniel O’Connell to repeal the Act of Union. He breaks with O’Connell in the 1830s when his friend, Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, is viceroy, because he believes repeal can now be achieved through official means. The rift is never healed.
In 1831, Lawless is admitted to the Privy Council of Ireland (PC) and an English peer but rarely attends the House of Lords. Involved in anti-tithe campaigns, he retires from politics in 1840. Travelling on the Continent in 1841 and 1842, he returns to defend O’Connell’s planned Clontarf meeting in the privy council but refuses to attend any further meetings after his advice on dealing with the Great Famine is ignored in 1846. In 1849 he publishes his personal reminiscences, which appear to have been ghost-written.
Lawless’s health begins to fail in 1851. He dies at the older family home, Maretimo House, Blackrock, on October 28, 1853, and is buried in the family vault at Lyons Hill.
Lawless first marries Elizabeth Georgiana, youngest daughter of Lieutenant-GeneralCharles Morgan, at Rome on April 16, 1803. They have one son and one daughter. The marriage ends in divorce in 1811 after her adultery with Sir John Piers. In 1811, he then marries Emily, daughter of Archibald Douglas of England, and widow of Joseph Leeson. They have two sons and a daughter. The elder son, Edward, succeeds as 3rd Baron Cloncurry. He commits suicide in 1869 by throwing himself out of a third-floor window at Lyons Hill. The younger, Cecil-John, is an MP, but catches a chill at his father’s funeral and dies on November 5, 1853.
(From: “Lawless, Valentine Browne” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Lyons House, Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare)
seamus dubhghaill 