seamus dubhghaill

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Tag Archives: Cork (County Cork)


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Death of John Havelock Nelson, Composer & Conductor

John Havelock Nelson, composer and conductor, dies in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on August 5, 1996. He makes an immense contribution to the development of the cultural life of the province – and beyond – over the second half of the 20th century.

Nelson is born of middle-class parents in Cork, County Cork, on May 25, 1917, his distinctive forename being taken from a cousin of his mother who lost his life in World War I. Despite his birthplace, both his parents’ ancestral roots lie firmly in Northern Ireland.

Nelson’s father Robert comes from Larne, County Antrim, where he was raised. However, the early years of his mother Grace are quite eventful. She is born in the Belgian Congo on account of her father’s placement there as a missionary in the latter years of the 19th century (his family hail from Tobermore, County Londonderry). She is eventually sent home at an early age, due to the threat of malaria, and is raised in Belfast by an aunt and uncle who have no family of their own. It appears that Nelson inherits his musical genes from both parents. Although his father is trained as a chartered accountant, he is a capable baritone singer who studies in the early 1900s with C. J. Brennan, later to become the organist and choirmaster at St. Anne’s Cathedral, Belfast). Meanwhile, his mother shows talent as a pianist during her upbringing in her adopted city and by her early 20s is offering her services as an accompanist.

By chance, this is how his parents meet. They marry in 1916, shortly before their arrival in Cork where Robert takes up his first accountancy job. Within a month of Nelson’s birth, the family moves to Dublin where his father has secured a better post, eventually settling near Dún Laoghaire, just south of the capital city. From the age of five, now the eldest of four brothers born a year apart, he starts piano lessons and makes such rapid progress that, by the age of ten, he is able to play in a piano trio and to accompany his father in informal concerts. By the age of twelve, he wins a scholarship to the Royal Irish Academy of Music, Dublin, giving him the opportunity to study piano and theory and helping him to establish his core musical skills. Soon he adds conducting and organ lessons to his study programme.

As far as Nelson’s general education is concerned, this is completed at St. Andrew’s College, Dublin, where he excels in English, history and the sciences. By his late teens, he is determined to pursue a professional career as a musician. His father, however, exercises caution in this regard, advising him to take a science degree in the first instance. Consequently, he gains entry to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1935 to read Natural Science, then makes a decision the following year to change to Medical Science. By 1939, he completes his primary degree in Medical Science, leading to doctoral research in bacteriology. At the same time, he begins a 4-year music degree at TCD while remaining musically active outside the university in relation to his piano studies, and also co-founds and conducts the Dublin Orchestral Players, a body that continues to provide an invaluable platform for amateur performers. He completes his university studies in 1943, graduating with a PhD in Medical Science and a primary Music degree. Seven years later he also completes a doctorate in Music from the same university.

His university career now behind him, like many fellow Irishmen, Nelson feels a desire to contribute to the World War II effort and applies for a commission in the medical branch of the Royal Air Force (RAF) in 1944. Eventually, he is called up and located at RAF Halton, Buckinghamshire, where he remains until after the end of the War, only returning to Dublin for his marriage in 1945. By nature, an outgoing, sociable person, he wastes no time in immersing himself in music-making activities when off duty, both inside and outside his RAF base. It is during this immediate post-war period that he becomes convinced that he wants to pursue a career in music. By chance, his attention is drawn to a BBC advertisement regarding a number of regional posts for staff accompanists, including Northern Ireland. His application is successful, and he reports for duty at BBC Northern Ireland in March 1947, where he remains for the next 30 years. In his new post, his main role is to play and accompany on the piano. To this end, he becomes involved in a number of new radio programmes, notably Children’s Hour. Elsewhere, he composes and arranges music for adult dramas and serials, the best known being The McCooeys. Another responsibility is to assist in auditioning local musicians for broadcasting opportunities, a process that uncovers much local talent, including a young James Galway. While his activities revolve around radio work in the 1950s, the next 20 years embrace opportunities arising from the new medium of television, including the popular Songs of Praise which involve him as conductor.

Nelson’s decision to retire from the BBC in 1977 enables him to focus fully on his free-lance career which had been running parallel, up until then, with his broadcasting work. In this capacity he is able to give full rein to his diverse range of musical skills as choral and orchestral conductor, chamber musician, music-festival adjudicator, composer and arranger. One should not overlook his role as animateur in founding the Studio Symphony Orchestra (1947) and the Studio Opera Group (1950). Both became integral parts of the local cultural scene during Nelson’s lifetime. His contribution as a festival adjudicator is an important activity, notably when undertaking tours abroad, including to Canada and the Caribbean. His visits to the latter area lead him to form the Trinidad and Tobago Opera Company shortly after his BBC retirement. In his busy lifestyle, he makes time to satisfy his creative energy as a composer and arranger. In total he publishes over 100 pieces, many inspired by his love of Irish traditional song and are of short duration and scored for a variety of vocal combinations. His enjoyment of his reputation as a piano accompanist of international standing is confirmed by his association with some of the leading Irish and British professional singers of the period, including Bernadette Greevy (soprano), Margaret Marshall (soprano), Peter Pears (tenor) and Ian Wallace (bass-baritone).

During his lifetime, Nelson’s outstanding services to music, both inside and outside the province, are recognised by a number of awards. The first of these is an OBE in 1966, followed in the latter part of his life by four honorary doctorates, three from local universities. A gifted and versatile musician, his personality is described by one colleague as “magnetic”- he has the unique ability to reach out to everybody irrespective of their age, status and position in life in whatever role he performs. In his best-known role as a conductor, a critic says of him that, “Dr. Nelson has a remarkable touch in getting people to do what he wants in the pleasantest way possible.” His vision and determination help to establish a vibrant music culture throughout Northern Ireland, an achievement that will remain his lasting legacy.

Nelson is survived by his three children and eight grandchildren; his wife Hazel having predeceased him in 1983.

(From: “John Havelock Nelson (1917-1996),” Dictionary of Ulster Biography, http://www.newulsterbiography.co.uk)


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Death of John Joe Rice, Sinn Féin Politician & Republican Activist

John Joe Rice, Sinn Féin politician and republican activist who serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Kerry South constituency from 1957 to 1961, dies on July 24, 1970.

Rice is born in Cork, County Cork, on June 19, 1893, but is raised in the townland of Kilmurry near Kenmare, County Kerry. He is the son of George Rice, a draper’s assistant, and Ellen Rice (née Ring). After national school he becomes a clerk with the Great Southern and Western Railway company working at stations in Kenmare, Killorglin, and Killarney.

Rice joins the Irish Volunteers in 1913 but does not take part in the 1916 Easter Rising. For a time, he shares lodgings in Rock Street, Tralee, with Austin Stack, and like Stack he is a Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) member, playing hurling with Kenmare. At the outbreak of the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), he becomes Officer Commanding of the 5th Battalion of the Kerry No. 2 Brigade. He also holds the post of second in command of that brigade, under Humphrey Murphy. On April 26, 1921, he attends the meeting in Kippagh, County Tipperary, that sees the establishment of the First Southern Division. After the truce, Murphy is transferred to command Kerry No. 1 Brigade, and Rice becomes commanding officer of Kerry No. 2.

Rice opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and leads the brigade throughout the Irish Civil War (1922-1923). When Michael Collins comes to Killarney on April 22, 1922, to speak in favour of the agreement, he is met at the train station by a group of fifty men, led by Rice, who attempt to prevent him from speaking. The meeting goes ahead despite several attempts by the group to stop it. During the civil war he leads his men into Limerick, briefly seizing Rathkeale, but for the most part they are on the defensive. In September he commands a force of seventy republicans to take Kenmare. This is a rare and morale-boosting success. When the First Southern Division council meets on February 26-28, 1923, he is one of only two senior officers, among a group of eighteen, who feel that it is worth fighting on.

Shortly after the civil war, Rice marries Nora Aherne, a Cumann na mBan member; they have one son, George. After the war he continues to be active in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Sinn Féin. He attends IRA executive meetings in 1923 and is involved in attempts to reorganise the IRA in 1924. He is a delegate to the Sinn Féin ardfheis in 1926, opposing the proposal of Éamon de Valera that abstention be a matter of policy rather than principle. He is elected as a Sinn Féin TD for the Kerry South constituency at the 1957 Irish general election. He does not take his seat in the Dáil due to the Sinn Féin policy of abstentionism. He is one of four Sinn Féin TDs elected at the 1957 Irish general election, the others being Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, John Joe McGirl and Eighneachán Ó hAnnluain. During his time as a TD, he campaigns against the Special Powers Act, which grants the Irish state extra abilities to deal with and punish suspected members of the IRA. He is defeated at the 1961 Irish general election.

In 1966, Rice and fellow Kerry Republican John Joe Sheehy are expelled from Sinn Féin, as are many others, by the new Marxist-Leninist party leadership that had recently come into power. This move both foreshadows and fuels the split in 1969/1970 of both the IRA and Sinn Féin, which leads to the creation of the Marxist-Leninist Official IRA and the more traditional but still left-wing Provisional IRA, and in parallel Sinn Féin – The Workers’ Party and “Provisional” Sinn Féin. Rice gives his support to the Provisionals.

Rice drives an oil lorry for a time and then becomes manager of the Tralee branch of Messrs Nash, mineral-water manufacturers and bottlers. He remains in this position until his retirement in 1965. He dies on July 24, 1970, at his son’s residence in Oakview, Tralee.

Rice’s sister, Rosalie, is a member of Cumann na mBan during the 1916 Easter Rising and is arrested for sending a telegram alerting the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in the United States to the rising. His cousins Eugene and Timothy Ring are members of the IRB and are also involved with the telegram. His grandfather, Timothy Ring, was a Fenian who fought in the uprising. Two of his cousins are members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) who both help the republican side during the Irish revolutionary period.


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Birth of Florence O’Donoghue, Historian & IRA Member

Florence O’Donoghue, historian and head of intelligence of the Cork No. 1 Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence, is born in Rathmore, County Kerry, on July 22, 1894, the son of farmer Patrick O’Donoghue and Margaret Cronin. He moves to Cork in 1910, where he works as an apprentice in the drapery trade.

The 1916 Easter Rising is a watershed in O’Donoghue’s life. In December 1916, he joins the Cork branch of the Irish Volunteers. In early 1917, he is elected unanimously First Lieutenant of the Cyclist Company and as a result devotes all his spare time to Volunteer work. He begins writing weekly for two years for The Irish World newspaper. By May 1917, he is sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and in October, Tomás Mac Curtain appoints him head of communications of the Cork Brigade. He replaces Pat Higgins as Brigade Adjutant in February 1917. He is a key organiser in the sensational jailbreak of Captain Donnchadh Mac Niallghuis on Armistice Day 1918 and takes personal responsibility for his protection. Michael Collins is the last officer from Volunteers General Headquarters to visit Cork shortly after Christmas 1919, until the truce in 1921.

O’Donoghue builds up an intelligence network and agents which includes his future wife, Josephine Marchment. She is head female clerk at the 6th Division Headquarters at Victoria Barracks, Cork, and passes on secret British Army correspondence to him. He recruits people to open letters, tap phone lines and intercept telegrams. The Irish Republican Army has 2,000 active members in Cork which are also used for intelligence gathering. By March 1920, after killing a Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) Inspector, he is on the run and serving full-time in the IRA. In November of that year, the Cork Brigade kills six British Army officers and executes five Cork civilians on suspicion of spying.

After two and a half years of fighting, a truce is agreed upon on July 11, 1921. When the Dáil approves the Anglo-Irish Treaty, in January 1922, the IRA splits into pro- and anti-Treaty camps. Over the coming months and after being elected to the army’s executive as Adjutant General, O’Donoghue warns of the dangers of an Irish Civil War. In June 1922, he resigns from the army’s national executive and a month later, on July 3, 1922, from the army. Civil war does break out on June 28, 1922, between pro- and anti-Treaty factions, much to his dismay.

During the Irish Civil War, O’Donoghue remains neutral and tries to organise a truce to end the fighting. In December 1922, he forms a group called the “Neutral IRA”, along with Seán O’Hegarty, composed of pro-truce IRA men. He claims he has 20,000 members in this group. He campaigns for a month’s truce between the two sides, so that a political compromise could be reached. However, his efforts come to nothing and in March 1923, he winds up the “Neutral IRA,” judging that its objectives cannot be achieved. The Irish Civil War ends on May 24, 1923.

O’Donoghue serves as major in the Irish Army from 1939-1946. He forms a Supplementary Intelligence Service that is to remain behind enemy lines in the event of an invasion. He also teaches guerrilla warfare tactics to new army recruits.

O’Donoghue marries Josephine Brown (née Marchment) in April 1921, and they have four children. The couple also adopts two children from Josephine’s first marriage, including Reggie Brown, whom O’Donoghue kidnaps from his grandparents in Wales in 1920. He becomes a rate collector and remains outside politics.

In later years O’Donoghue becomes a respected historian. While in the army he edits An Cosantóir, the Irish Army’s magazine. He convinces Éamon de Valera to establish the Bureau of Military History to record personal accounts from the Irish War of Independence. He is a recording officer until 1948. His most famous work is his biography on Liam Lynch, entitled No Other Law.

O’Donoghue dies on December 18, 1967, in Mercy University Hospital, Cork, County Cork. Tom Barry gives the graveside oration. His papers are in the National Library of Ireland (NLI) and his statement to the Bureau of Military History is in the Military Archives.


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Birth of Sean P. Keating, IRA Volunteer & New York Politician

Sean P. Keating, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and later becomes Deputy Mayor of New York City and Regional Director of the United States Postal Service, is born in Kanturk, County Cork, on July 14, 1903.

Raised in Kanturk, Keating is a volunteer in the Irish Republican Army during the Irish War of Independence and fights for the Anti-Treaty Forces against the Irish Free State during the Irish Civil War. He moves to the United States, where he advocates for Irish nationalist causes and for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. He is involved in Democratic Party politics and a close associate of Irish American political activist Paul O’Dwyer and his brother, New York City Mayor William O’Dwyer. He is involved in the campaigns of President John F. Kennedy and Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Keating is the youngest of six surviving children of Michael Keating, baker, and his wife Johanna, a native of County Kerry. He was educated at a local school and was an active member of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), playing football and hurling. After the 1916 Easter Rising, he leaves school at the age of thirteen to join the Irish Volunteers, which later becomes the IRA, serving in the 4th Cork Brigade. He is arrested by British troops in November 1920 and badly beaten. He spends a month in the Cork jail and is then interned for a year in Ballykinlar internment camp until December 1921. While interned he participates in several hunger strikes and makes several escape attempts. Following his release, he opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and serves in the Fianna Cork 4th Brigade on the Republican side under Seán Moylan during the Irish Civil War.

Keating emigrates to New York City in 1927 and becomes involved in Irish cultural organizations and Democratic party politics. He is a founder of American Friends of Irish Neutrality, which opposes Irish involvement in World War II, ostensibly fearing it will result in British re-occupation of Ireland.

Following World War II, Keating is chairman of the executive council of the 1947 Irish Race Convention and president of the American League for an Undivided Ireland, lobbying in support of the Fogarty Amendment, which unsuccessfully attempts to tie the release of Marshall Plan funds to British withdrawal from Northern Ireland.

Between the 1940s and 1960s, Keating serves as president of the County Corkmen Association, president of the United Irish Counties Association, and president of the Irish Institute. In 1956, he serves as Grand Marshal of the New York City St. Patrick’s Day Parade.

Keating serves in various positions under New York City mayors William O’Dwyer, Vincent R. Impellitteri, and Robert F. Wagner, Jr., rising to the position of Deputy Mayor, under Wagner. He is reportedly the first to publicly introduce future President Kennedy as “the next President of the United States” at an Irish Institute event in 1957. He is appointed Regional Director of the United States Postal Service by President Kennedy and serves in that position from 1961 until his retirement in 1966.

Following President Kennedy’s assassination, Keating serves as National Chairman of the President Kennedy Memorial Committee, which secures the lands and raises the funds for the John F. Kennedy Arboretum in New Ross, County Wexford.

In retirement, Keating returns to Kanturk and continues to advocate for the reunification of Ireland. Keating dies at his home in Kanturk on July 2, 1976, and is buried in a local cemetery with military honors. He represents an emigrant political and social milieu which is often treated dismissively by later, more cosmopolitan Irish commentators, but his career reflects not only his own considerable talents but the ways in which this milieu sustains a generation of immigrants, and the contribution of Irish America to Irish development in the post-war decades.


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Birth of Tom Barry, Prominent Irish Republican Army Leader

Thomas Bernadine Barry, prominent guerrilla leader in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, is born on July 1, 1897, in Killorglin, County Kerry.

Barry is the second child and son among eleven children of Thomas Barry, small farmer, Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) member and shopkeeper, and his wife, Margaret Donovan, daughter of a Liscarroll businessman. Educated at Ardagh Boys’ National School and Mungret College, near Limerick, he leaves school at 17, is employed as a clerk for a Protestant merchant in Bandon, County Cork, and joins the British Army in 1915 after falsifying his age. More committed, it appears, to the British Army than he is later to admit, he is mentioned in dispatches and serves in Mesopotamia, Asiatic Russia (where he is wounded), Egypt, Italy, and France.

Barry returns to Bandon in early 1919. He describes in his guerilla days in Ireland a Damascus-like conversion to Irish nationalism on hearing of the Easter Rising while with the Mesopotamian expeditionary force, but he is only accepted into the IRA with considerable caution. Initially tested in intelligence and training work, in mid-1920 he takes charge of the new brigade flying column, which is used both to train officers and to stage offensive actions.

Barry adapts his military experience successfully to the demands of guerrilla warfare, becoming the most famed of column leaders during the Irish War of Independence. In his memoirs, he pours scorn on the obsession of many with military titles and orthodox procedure, complaining of a “paper army.” He stresses the need for spontaneity, initiative, and knowledge of local conditions. “The reality,” he writes, “was a group of fellows, mostly in caps and not-too-expensive clothing, wondering how to tackle their job and where they would sleep that night or get their supper.” (The Reality of the Anglo–Irish War (1974)). He well realises that the war’s character does not permit any close control from the IRA’s GHQ in Dublin, hence increasing the importance of local leaders. His tactics put strong emphasis on speed of movement and on the need to attack the enemy at his weakest point. The column’s ambush successes are small in number but among the best-remembered of the war. He admits, however, that his own and his column’s lack of experience with mines frequently weakened their offensives.

The column’s first successful ambush is at Tooreen on October 22, 1920, followed on November 28 by the dramatic ambushing of a patrol of auxiliaries at Kilmichael while travelling from their Macroom base. A column of thirty-six men, divided into three sections, kill sixteen auxiliaries, with one captured and later shot, suffering two fatalities of their own. Controversy has raged since over whether a false surrender by the British force caused the brutality of some of the deaths. Together with the Bloody Sunday killings of a week earlier in Dublin, Kilmichael has a profound effect on the British military and political establishment, with the declaration in December of martial law for much of Munster and the implementation of wide-ranging internment, together with the authorisation of official reprisals.

After a short period in hospital with a heart condition, in early 1921 Barry leads unsuccessful attacks on Kilbrittain, Innishannon, Drimoleague, and Bandon barracks. The seizure of Burgatia House, outside Rosscarbery, in early February, and the successful resistance made there to British troops, wins much publicity but has little military significance. He is a leading figure in the brutal final stage of the war in the first six months of 1921, which sees widespread shooting of suspected spies and destruction of loyalist property. By March 1921, his flying column, with 104 men, is easily the largest in Ireland, and an explosives expert, Capt. McCarthy, has joined them.

The protracted engagement between Barry’s column and encircling British forces at Crossbarry on March 19, 1921, comes at a time when large-scale sweeps are making life increasingly difficult for the IRA. It consists of a daring and courageous breakout. Crossbarry is the largest action of the war, and Barry is to regard it as even more important than Kilmichael. Soon afterwards, Rosscarbery barracks is successfully attacked by a Barry-led party, representing one of the few successful such initiatives in 1921. Isolated triumphs, however, cannot hide the fact that pressure is increasing on the column, and he becomes increasingly critical of inactive regions. He is later to say that all County Kerry does during the war is to shoot one decent police inspector at Listowel Racecourse and a colleague of his. He is strongly critical also of the lack of assistance from GHQ and of the divisionalisation policy. He visits Dublin in May, travels around with Michael Collins, and is present when two American officers demonstrate the Thompson submachine gun. He is more aware than most of his 1st Southern Division colleagues of the scarcity of arms and ammunition at the war’s end.

During the truce, Barry becomes liaison officer for Munster, riling the British by insisting on his military rank, and criticising the IRA liaison men in Dublin for being overly deferential. He joins the overwhelming majority of the Cork IRA in opposing the Anglo–Irish Treaty but plays a characteristically maverick role throughout the treaty split. His independent attitude is heightened by his dislike of Liam Lynch, the republican IRA’s Chief of Staff, and his continuing respect for Michael Collins. He shows impatience at the long-drawn-out peace initiatives. In March 1922, therefore, he advocates armed confrontation with pro-treaty units over the occupation of barracks in Limerick, and on June 18 he submits a resolution, which only narrowly fails, at the army convention, giving British troops seventy-two hours to leave Dublin.

At the beginning of the Irish Civil War, Barry is arrested entering the Four Courts disguised as a woman. He escapes from an internment camp at Gormanston in early September 1922. For the rest of the war his actions mirror its confused nature. In late October 1922, he leads successful raids on the small towns of Ballineen and Enniskean, and later on Inchigeelagh and Ballyvourney. In December his column takes Carrick-on-Suir, demonstrating the weakness of the Free State army, but his talk of advancing on the Curragh and of large-scale actions does not materialise. There is no evidence that he is acting in accordance with any coordinated plan. By February 1923, he realises that the Republican IRA cause is hopeless and he is involved with Fr. Tom Duggan in efforts to get 1st Southern Division to declare a ceasefire. He journeys to Dublin to put pressure on the intransigent Lynch in this connection, telling Lynch, “I did more fighting in one week than you did in your whole life.”

Barry avoids capture in roundups after the war, remaining on the run until 1924. Unlike many republicans, he does not turn to constitutionalism, remaining strongly militaristic. He is always an unreconstructed republican, though by no means a naive one. In 1924 he becomes attached to Cleeves Milk Co., based in Limerick and Clonmel, and from 1927 to retirement in 1965 is general superintendent with the Cork harbour commissioners. He strongly advocates preserving the independence of the IRA army executive during the republican split of 1925–27. He is instrumental in continuing the drilling of IRA members and is a strong supporter of armed opposition to the Blueshirts.

During the 1930s Barry is arrested at various times for possession of arms and seditious utterances. He promotes an attack against a Freemasons’ meeting in Cork in 1936 and gives the orders for the killing on March 4 of that year of Vice-Admiral Henry Boyle Somerville. He is opposed to the use by Frank Ryan of IRA volunteers to support the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and to the proposals of Seán Russell for a bombing campaign in England. To maintain the link with traditional republicanism, he is elected IRA chief of staff in 1937. His plan, however, for the seizure of Armagh city, as part of a direct northern offensive, quickly collapses due to a leak of information, and he soon resigns his position. He forcefully attacks the bombing of English cities in 1938, regarding attacks on innocent civilians as immoral and counterproductive. He enlists in the National Army on July 12, 1940, only to be demobilised a month later. In 1946, he stands as an independent candidate in a by-election in the Cork Borough constituency, finishing at the bottom of the poll. He is more comfortable the following year touring the United States on an anti-partition platform.

In 1949 his Guerilla Days in Ireland is published. It proves a best-seller and has frequently been reprinted. It is well written in a forceful and direct style, one memoir needing no assistance from a ghost writer. Age does not mellow him: lawyers and bank managers are threatened by him over matters relating to his own column, and in 1974 he publishes a fierce pamphlet, angry at perceived slights in the Irish War of Independence memoir of Liam Deasy. He does strive to achieve a public reconciliation with Collins’s memory by unveiling the memorial to Collins at Sam’s Cross in 1966. On the outbreak of the Northern Ireland crisis in the late 1960s, he takes a militant line, castigating the argument that the Six Counties can be brought into the Republic by peaceful means, and asking when had peaceful means existed there. At the memorial meeting in Carrowkennedy, County Mayo, in 1971, he claims that there is a perfect right at the opportune time to take the Six Counties by force. He remains opposed to IRA bombing of civilian targets.

Barry dies in Cork on July 2, 1980. He is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery, Cork. Early in the truce of 1921 he marries Leslie Price, one of the most active of Cumann na mBan members during and after the rising. They have no children.

While Barry always remains an influential figure in republican circles, he will be remembered best as the pioneer of guerrilla warfare, the hero of Kilmichael and Crossbarry. His military flair, individualism, and ruthlessness are well suited to the 1919–21 conflict. After that, his strained relations with colleagues and his lack of flexibility reduce his importance. While his life after the revolutionary era appears anti-climactic, he retains much of his charisma. In later years, he is ever willing to remind politicians and historians how far Ireland has retreated from republican ideals. He is often prickly and autocratic yet could be generous to old colleagues of either side of the treaty split. He is arguably the most intelligent but also the most intolerant of the revolutionary leaders.

(From: “Barry, Thomas Bernadine (‘Tom’)” by M. A. Hopkinson, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Julia O’Faolain, Novelist & Short Story Writer

Julia O’Faolain, Irish novelist and short story writer, is born in London on June 6, 1932. She works as a writer, language teacher, editor and translator and lives in France, Italy, and the United States.

Although born in England when her father, Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin, is lecturing at the Catholic college, St. Mary’s College, at Strawberry Hill, London, O’Faolain grows up in Ireland. The family returns to Ireland when she is just one year old. They live first in Killough House in County Wicklow, where future Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald is a playmate, artist Paul Henry a neighbour and Cork writer Frank O’Connor a regular visitor. The family then moves to Knockaderry House in Killiney, County Dublin, where her father publishes the literary journal The Bell from an outhouse at the bottom of the garden. Writers, poets and intellectuals such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Conor Cruise O’Brien are regular visitors and often have to entertain her while waiting to speak with her father.

O’Faolain does not begin school until she is eight years old as her mother, Irish writer and teacher Eileen Gould, has little time for nuns. Following her schooling, she completes an arts degree at University College Dublin (UCD) and then further studies at the Sapienza University of Rome and the Sorbonne in Paris. A formidable student and strikingly beautiful, she makes a strong impression on those who meet her.

In search of love, literature and freedom from 1950s Ireland, the young O’Faolain remains abroad working variously as a translator, language teacher, editor and writer in London. She makes lifelong friends who speak highly of her generosity, loyalty and kindness. As well as maintaining a strong interest in politics throughout her life, she attains a black belt in karate and attends karate classes until her early 70s.

In her 2013 memoir, O’Faolain recounts a number of her adult loves before she meets and marries Lauro Martines in Florence in 1957. The couple lives in Florence for a year while Martines completes a travelling fellowship from Harvard University. They then move to Portland, Oregon, where their son Lucien is born in 1959. While in the United States, she teaches French at Reed College in Portland. The family returns to live in Florence from 1962-66 while her husband carries out research. When he is offered a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1966, they move back to the United States. However, not keen to live full-time in the United States, they purchase a house in Hampstead in 1970 and later in central London where she spends a good deal of time. From the 1990s onwards, she and Lauro spend more and more time in London, and they visit Ireland more during these years. Lucian, a painter and picture repairer, lives in London.

O’Faolain’s novels include No Country for Young Men, which is nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980, Women in the Wall (1975), The Obedient Wife (1982) and The Judas Cloth (1992) which is set in 19th-century Italy. Her first collection of short stories, We Might See Sights and Other Stories, is published in 1968, followed by Man in the Cellar (1974), Melancholy Baby (1978) and Daughters of Passion (1982). And with her husband, she edits Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (1973).

O’Faolain’s writings are suffused with themes of clerical intrigue, women’s role in society, power, faith and sexuality. She says once that she is more detached from her characters than her father was. “He was fond of his characters whereas I was more impatient of mine… The fact that he often forgave their foolishness showed that he was fond of Ireland itself, where he lived for the most of his life. I instead left it and found I was happier elsewhere.”

As a writer, O’Faolain is not particularly well-known in Ireland. Following the publication of her memoir in 2013, she is asked by The Irish Times journalist Arminta Wallace if it bothers her that her name does not often figure in lists of famous Irish writers, perhaps because she did not live here. She replies, “Not only do I not live here but when my last book came out someone wrote an article naming me as a ‘forgotten writer’… which was not a cheerful read. It wasn’t in any way offensive, but it wasn’t very comforting…I suppose I didn’t write enough. You mustn’t let too many years go by between books – and I did that.”

O’Faolain dies at the age of 88 in London on October 27, 2020, following a long illness. Her papers, which include manuscripts of her writing and a significant correspondence between her and her father, are donated to UCD in 2018. At the time, archivists expect them to be available to researchers by 2022.


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Birth of Pat Falvey, Mountaineer, Expedition Leader & Polar Explorer

Pat Falvey, Irish high-altitude mountaineer, expedition leader, polar explorer, entrepreneur, author, corporate/personal trainer/coach, and motivational speaker, is born in Cork, County Cork, on June 2, 1957. He is the first person to complete the Seven Summits twice, with the summiting of Mount Everest reached from both the Tibetan (1996) and Nepalese sides (2004). He is expedition leader of the team that sees Clare O’Leary become the first Irish woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest in 2004. Other extreme expeditions that he makes include walking to the South Pole, crossing South Georgia island, and traversing the Greenland ice sheet. He starts his first business at 15 years of age and has since had businesses in property development, finance, construction, insurance, tourism, and film production. He has been a motivational speaker since the 1990s.

Raised on the north side of Cork city, Falvey starts mountain climbing in his late twenties, having worked as a builder and property developer from his late teens onward. Following the economic recession of the mid-1980s in Ireland, he loses most of his wealth and discovers mountaineering in his late 20s.

Falvey begins his climbing career with hill walking and climbing on the MacGillycuddy’s Reeks in County Kerry. He then devotes himself to training to become a high-altitude mountaineer. He trains initially with the Cork Mountaineering Club, at Tiglin in County Wicklow and becomes a member of Kerry Mountain Rescue, climbing very frequently in Ireland, Scotland, France and the Himalayas.

In June 1994, Falvey climbs Denali, also known as Mount McKinley, in Alaska, reaching the first summit in his Seven Summits attempt. This is followed by Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania (January 1995), Mount Everest via the Northeast Ridge (June 1995), Aconcagua in Argentina (December 1995), Mount Elbrus in Russia (March 1996), Vinson Massif in Antarctica (January 1997) and Mount Kosciusko in Australia (February 1997). He is the first Irish man (and the 32nd person in the world) to complete the Seven Summits.

Falvey is the expedition leader of the first Irish team to reach the summit of Cho Oyu in China and Nepal without oxygen, on May 20, 1998. He reaches the summit of Ama Dablam in Nepal on November 3, 1999. In 2003, he is the expedition leader of the first Irish team to reach the summit of Mount Everest via the South-Southeast Ridge, with team members Ger McDonnell and Mick Murphy reaching the summit. On May 18, 2004, he reaches the summit of Everest via the South-Southeast Ridge, and leads the expedition that sees the first Irish woman, Dr. Clare O’Leary, reach the top of Everest.

Falvey and O’Leary complete the Seven Summits on December 16, 2005, when he becomes the first person to complete the Seven Summits twice by climbing Mount Everest from both the Tibetan and Nepalese sides.

In 2006, Falvey leads a group of 32 across the South Georgia Traverse on South Georgia island in honour of Polar explorers Sir Ernest Shackleton and Kerryman Tom Crean, in the Beyond Endurance Antarctic expedition. He leads the first Irish traverse of Greenland in 2006. In January 2008, he leads a four-person Irish expedition to the South Pole. In April 2009, he and O’Leary do a “symbolic” walk to the North Pole, completing the final four-day trek to the Pole.

Falvey joins the Kerry county football team as a “sports performance coach” in 2021. Manager Peter Keane says, “You take us in this country with five million people and we have had some unbelievable adventurers like Shackleton and Crean; you look at someone like Pat who has climbed Everest twice from two different sides, managed to climb the Seven Summits twice, and I am looking to see if he can bring something different in here.”

Falvey’s publications include Reach for the Sky (The Collins Press, 1997), A Journey to Adventure: Stories I never thought I’d tell (The Collins Press, 2007), The Summit: How Triumph Turned to Tragedy on K2’s Deadliest Days (Beyond Endurance Publishing with The O’Brien Press, 2013), You Have the Power: Explore the Mindset You Need to Realise Your Dreams (Beyond Endurance Publishing, 2016) and Accidental Rebel (Beyond Endurance Publishing, 2018).


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Death of Joseph Brenan, Poet, Journalist & Author

Joseph Brenan (also Brennan), poet, journalist and author, and leading member of the Young Irelanders and Irish Confederation, dies on May 27, 1857, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Brenan is born in Cork, County Cork, on November 17, 1828. He begins to write verse at an early age and is one of the genuine poets of the Young Ireland movement. His earlier poems are published under the initials “J. B., Cork,” or “J. B—n,” and some of his American verses under the pseudonym “Gondalez.” He is also an able prose writer.

Brenan is an active member of the Cork Historical Society, and is one of the editors of the Cork Magazine, which appears in November 1847, and continues to be published until the end of 1848, when the journal ceases publication. Some of its contributors, who include Frazer, Martin MacDermott, Fitz James O’Brien, Mulchinock and Mary Savage, later either end up in jail or in exile.

In January 1848, John Mitchel visits Cork and, according to Michael Cavanagh, who publishes a sketch of Brenan’s life in Young Ireland, Dublin, in June and July 1885, Brenan for the first time “beheld the man he most admired on earth, and with whose future destiny, whether for weal or woe, he felt his own was bound up. Never had the archenemy of England a more faithful or earnest follower.”

Brenan contributes to the Mitchel’s United Irishman and sells his rifle to obtain train fare so he can take up his residence in Dublin, the headquarters of the revolutionary movement. He later publishes articles in John Martin‘s The Irish Felon urging the Confederate Clubs members, many of whom have arms, to be in readiness for action. “The sooner you realise the fact,” he writes in a letter addressed to the Members of the Provincial Confederate Clubs, “that the Confederation was got up for the purpose of doing something, the better for us all. Just think what it undertook to do. It undertook to defeat the strongest Government and to liberate the most degraded country that ever existed. It undertook to give – to a province—to strike the chains off millions of slaves and, if necessary, to wash out the iron moulds in blood.”

In another letter to “the Young Men of Ireland” on July 22, 1848, he writes, “On you I principally rely. You realise that you are very ‘rash,’ rather inclined to be ‘violent,’ and have exceedingly little prudence to spare. Brothers, let your watchword be ‘Now or never—now and forever’ rashly.”

Brenan is associated with John Savage and John O’Mahony while Savage is operating on the slopes of the Comeragh Mountains. He is arrested and kept in prison for seven months alternately in Newgate Prison, Carrickfergus and Kilmainham Gaols. During his confinement he writes some fine poems, according to T. F. O’Sullivan, one, entitled Yearnings, evidently addressed to Mary Savage, sister of John.

After his release without trial in March 1849, Brenan becomes editor of the Irishman which had been started in Dublin by Bernard Fulham, and for six months attempts to rekindle the insurrectionary flame in the country. He is implicated in the attack on the Cappoquin police barracks on September 16, 1848, and in October escapes to the United States.

In America Brenan becomes associated with a number of journals, including Horace Greeley‘s New-York Tribune, Devin Reilly’s People, The Enquirer of Newark, New Jersey, and the New Orleans Delta in which he writes a series of papers under the pen-name Ben Fox. On August 27, 1851, he marries Mary Savage, in her parents’ house, on Thirteenth Street, New York.

Brenan writes some articles and poems for John Mitchel’s Irish Citizen in 1854. He is an enthusiastic supporter of the Southern cause and founds the New Orleans Times.

Brenan dies on May 27, 1857, at the early age of twenty-nine and is buried in the old French cemetery of New Orleans. During the last year of his life, he is almost totally blind. He is attended in his last illness by Dr. Dalton Williams. There are seven children of his and Mary’s marriage, only one of whom, Florence, survives their parents. She possesses her father’s literary ability but devotes her life to religion as a member of the Mercy Order.

Brenan’s best-known poem, “Come to Me, Dearest,” is addressed to Mary Savage before their marriage. The love story of Brenan and Mary is told in the sketch by Ellen Mary Patrick Downing, afterwards Sister Mary Alphonsus.


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Death of Albert Rosen, Czech/Irish-Naturalized Conductor

Albert Rosen, Austrian-born and Czech/Irish-naturalised conductor associated with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, the Wexford Festival Opera, the National Theatre in Prague and J. K. Tyl Theatre in Plzeň (Pilsen), dies of lung cancer in Dublin on May 23, 1997. He has a strong affinity with the works of Czech composers such as Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, Bohuslav Martinů, and Leoš Janáček.

Rosen is born in Vienna on February 14, 1924. His mother is Czech, while his father’s family is Austrian-Jewish. After Anschluss of Austria in 1938 they move to Bratislava, and after the Slovak version of Nuremberg Laws comes to force in September 1941, he escapes discrimination and genocide via the Danube and the sea to Israel (then Mandatory Palestine). There he works in the Shaʽar_HaGolan kibbutz, manually and as an amateur chorus master, until 1945, when he returns to Bratislava.

In 1946–47 Rosen studies piano, composition and conducting at the Vienna Academy of Music with Joseph Marx and Hans Swarowsky, and continues to study conducting at the Prague Conservatory under Pavel Dědeček and Alois Klíma (1947–48). He starts his career in J. K. Tyl Theatre in Plzeň (Pilsen) as a correpetiteur, assistant conductor and chorus master (1949–52) and conductor (1953–59), participating on the production of 11 operas, 19 ballets and, as the composer of stage music, 17 dramas. In 1960 he is engaged by National Theatre in Prague, to be appointed in 1964 the chief conductor of Smetana Theatre, the National Theatre’s opera stage. He holds this position until 1971, conducting 11 ballets and 9 opera productions.

In 1965 Rosen comes to Ireland for the first time to conduct the National Symphony Orchestra (under its former name, the Radio Telefís Éireann Symphony Orchestra) at the Wexford Festival Opera. This leads to regular appearances at the festival until 1994, conducting 18 Wexford productions, more than anyone else. In 1969 he becomes the orchestra’s chief conductor, until he becomes principal guest conductor in 1981. In 1994 he is honoured with the title Conductor Laureate of the orchestra.

Rosen’s operatic repertoire includes standard works such as Carmen (Bizet), Tosca and Madama Butterfly (Puccini), Il trovatore and Don Carlos (Verdi), Lohengrin (Wagner), Lucrezia Borgia (Donizetti), Otello and L’italiana in Algeri (Rossini), Káťa Kabanová (Janáček), La Wally (Catalani), The Bartered Bride (Smetana), and Salome (Richard Strauss). He also conducted unusual works such as Smetana’s The Two Widows and The Kiss, and Dvořák’s Rusalka, The Devil and Kate and The Jacobin.

In October 1978, in Dublin and Cork, Rosen conducts the National Symphony Orchestra in only the second and third performances of André Tchaikowsky‘s 2nd Piano Concerto, Op. 4, which are the first performances with the composer as soloist. He is to record the work in 1982, again with Tchaikowsky at the piano, but the composer becomes ill and the recording is cancelled. His other work with the NSO includes standard orchestral repertoire as well as major pieces such as Olivier Messiaen‘s Turangalîla-Symphonie and Gustav Mahler‘s Symphony No. 8 (Symphony of a Thousand). In 1992, the orchestra tours ten cities in Germany, having a major success with Die Fledermaus in Stuttgart.

Rosen makes his American debut at the San Francisco Opera in 1980, in Janáček’s Jenůfa. In Australia, he is chief conductor of the West Australian Symphony Orchestra from 1983 until 1985, and the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra in 1986. He conducts the British premiere of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov‘s opera Christmas Eve with English National Opera in 1988. He becomes music director of the Irish National Opera in 1993.

Rosen often conducts the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland during the 1990s, in challenging works such as the tone poems and An Alpine Symphony of Richard Strauss. Other opera orchestras he conducts included those of the Welsh National Opera, Scottish Opera, Vancouver Opera, San Diego Opera, and the Dublin Grand Opera Society.

Rosen becomes an Irish citizen by naturalisation. His own conducting students include John Finucane.

Rosen dies at the age of 73 in Dublin on May 23, 1997, of lung cancer.


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Birth of Michael Doheny, Writer, Lawyer & Co-founder of the IRB

Michael Doheny, Irish writer, lawyer, member of the Young Ireland movement, and co-founder of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), is born on May 22, 1805, at Brookhill, parish of Fethard, County Tipperary, the second son of Michael Doheny of Brookhill, a small farmer, and Ellen Doheny (née Keley).

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 American republican 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)