The RMS Royal Adelaide, captained by John Batty, leaves Cork fully laden with cargo and about 250 passengers on Wednesday, March 27,1850, touching off at Plymouth, Devon, England, on Thursday evening. By the time the ship leaves Plymouth for London at 3:00 a.m. on Friday, March 29, there are almost three hundred deck passengers.
The ship is totally lost at about 11:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 30 on Tongue Sands north of Margate, Kent, England, with the loss of all on board. News only reaches London late on Sunday as the river pilot waiting for the ship happens to meet a Deal, Kent, pilot, Charles Gillham, who reports seeing a ship of a similar description in distress the previous evening (The Illustrated London News, April 6 and 13, 1850).
The dead include more than one hundred fifty deck passengers from Ireland, during a time when the Great Famine is at its height.
(Pictured: “The Wreck of the Royal Adelaide,” illustration for The Illustrated London News, April 13, 1850)
Church is born on February 23, 1784, the second son of Matthew Church, a Quaker merchant in the North Mall area of Cork, County Cork, and Anne Dearman, originally from Braithwaith, Yorkshire, England. At the age of sixteen, he runs away from home and enlists in the British Army. For this violation of its principles, he is disowned by the Religious Society of Friends, but his father buys him a commission, dated July 3, 1800, in the 13th Somerset Light Infantry. He serves in the demonstration against Ferrol, Spain, and in the expedition to Egypt under Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1801, where he takes part in the Battle of Abukir and the taking of Alexandria. After the expulsion of the French from Egypt he returns home but goes back to the Mediterranean in 1805 among the troops sent to defend the island of Sicily. He accompanies the expedition which lands in Calabria and fights a successful battle against the French at the Battle of Maida on July 4, 1806. He is present on this occasion as captain of a recently raised company of Royal Corsican Rangers. His zeal attracts the notice of his superiors, and he has begun to show his capacity for managing and drilling foreign levies. His Corsicans form part of the garrison of Capri from October 1806 until the island is taken by an expedition directed against it by Joachim Murat, in September 1808, at the very beginning of his reign as king of Naples. Church, who has distinguished himself in the defence, returns to Malta after the capitulation.
In the summer of 1809 Church sails with the expedition sent to occupy the French-occupied Ionian Islands. Here he increases the reputation he has already gained by forming a Greek regiment in British pay. On September 9, 1809, he takes the position of Major in the 1st Regiment Greek Light Infantry. On November 19, 1812, he becomes Lieutenant-Colonel of the unit, by then renamed The Duke of York’s Greek Light Infantry Regiment. Having gained the experience of managing foreign troops, he commands the regiments made up of Greeks he recruits himself in 1813, when he forms a second regiment composed of 454 Greeks (2nd Regiment Greek Light Infantry) to occupy Paxoi islands. These regiments include many of the men who are afterward among the leaders of the Greeks in the Greek War of Independence including Theodoros Kolokotronis, with whom he keeps a friendship and correspondence. He commands this regiment at the taking of the island of Santa Maura (Lefkada), on which occasion his left arm is shattered by a bullet.
During his slow recovery Church travels in northern Greece, in Macedonia, and to Constantinople. In the years of the fall of Napoleon (1813 and 1814) he is present as British military representative with the Austrian troops until the campaign which terminates in the expulsion of Murat from Naples. He draws up a report on the Ionian Islands for the Congress of Vienna, in which he argues in support, not only of the retention of the islands under the British flag, but of the permanent occupation by Britain of Parga and other formerly Venetian coastal towns on the mainland, then in the possession of Ali Pasha of Ioannina. The peace and the disbanding of his Greek regiment leaves him without employment, though his reputation is high at the war office, and his services are recognized by the grant of a Companion of the Order of the Bath.
In 1817, Church enters the service of King Ferdinand I of Naples as lieutenant-general, with a commission to suppress the brigandage then rampant in Apulia. Ample powers are given him, and he attains a full measure of success. In 1820 he is appointed governor of Palermo and commander-in-chief of the troops in Sicily. The revolution which breaks out in that year leads to the termination of his services in Naples. He escapes from violence in Sicily with some difficulty. At Naples he is imprisoned and put on trial by the government but is acquitted and released in January 1821. King George IV confers on him a Knight Commander of the Royal Guelphic Order in 1822. He is further promoted to Knight Grand Cross by William IV in 1837.
The rising of the Greeks against the Turks has his full sympathy from the beginning. But for some years he has to act only as the friend of the insurgents in England. In 1827 he takes the honourable but unfortunate step of accepting the commandership-in-chief of the Greek army. At the point of anarchy and indiscipline to which they have now fallen, the Greeks can no longer form an efficient army and can look for salvation only to foreign intervention. Church, who lands in March, is sworn archistrategos on April 15, 1827, but cannot secure loyal co-operation or obedience. The rout of his army in an attempt to relieve the Acropolis of Athens, then besieged by the Ottomans, proves that it is incapable of conducting regular operations. With the acropolis capitulated, he turns to partisan warfare in western Greece.
After the Battle of Navarino, and during the Kapodistrias period, Church is placed commander-in-chief of the Greek regular forces in Central Greece, together with Demetrios Ypsilantis. However, he surrenders his commission as a protest against the unfriendly government of Capodistrias on August 25, 1829. He lives the remainder of his life in Greece.
Church’s activity has beneficial results and leads to a rectification in 1832, in a sense favourable to Greece, of the frontier drawn by the Great Powers in the London Protocol (1830). Under King Otto, he occupies senior military positions. On October 3, 1833, he is promoted to lieutenant general in the Hellenic Army, and in January 1835 becomes commander of the forces in Continental Greece. On June 10, 1835, he is appointed head of the Secretariat of State for Military Affairs (Army Minister), becoming Inspector-General of the Army on October 28, 1836. He serves as a senator from 1844 to 1845. He is promoted to full general in February 1854, the grade being established for the first time for this purpose in the Hellenic Army.
Church dies following an illness on March 20, 1873. The funeral service takes place in the Anglican Church in Filellinon Street in the presence of King George I and a large number of official guests. Panagiotis Chalkiopoulos, the Minister of Justice, gives the funeral speech in Greek, while John Gennadius gives a speech in English. He is buried at the First Cemetery of Athens at public expense on March 27. The funeral monument has an inscription in English on the front and Greek on the back.
(Pictured: Portrait of Sir Richard Church, oil on cardboard by an unidentified artist, 1873)
As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Harrington represents Westmeath from February 1883 to November 1885. In 1885 he is elected for the new constituency of Dublin Harbour, which he represents until his death. He serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin three times from 1901 to 1904.
Harrington owns two newspapers, United Ireland and the Kerry Sentinel, and is a member of the so-called Bantry band of prominent nationalist politicians from the Bantry vicinity. They are also more pejoratively known as the Pope’s brass band. Tim Healy is another prominent member of this unofficial group.
In 1884, Harrington publishes a pamphlet, “Maamtrasna Massacres – Impeachment of the Trials,” in which he dismantles the Crown Prosecution’s case against the eight men accused of the murders of the Joyce family on August 17, 1882. He provides evidence that Crown Prosecutor George Bolton had deliberately suppressed evidence that would have acquitted Maolra Seoighe (English: Myles Joyce), who was hanged, and four men who were sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude.
Thereafter Harrington becomes excluded from Redmond’s closed circle of confidants, retains sympathy with O’Brien, and represents the interests of the tenant farmers at the 1902 Land Conference negotiations which lead to the enactment of the unprecedented WyndhamLand Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903.
On September 7, 1901, as the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Harrington kicks off at the official ceremony to open Bohemian F.C.‘s new home, Dalymount Park.
Harrington retains the party nomination for the Dublin Harbour constituency in the January 1910 United Kingdom general election, largely because of local divisions about who should succeed him and because an O’Brienite offer to pay his election expenses deters rivals from going to the polls. He decides that the finely balanced result of the general election means that every nationalist vote would be required at Westminster. He therefore travels to London, but shortly after attending the parliamentary party meeting on February 23 he suffers a stroke. After some days’ recuperation he is brought home to Dublin, but his condition deteriorates and he dies on March 12, 1910, at his home, 70 Harcourt Street. He is buried near the Parnell circle at Glasnevin Cemetery.
Harrington is celebrated by a statue erected in 2001 at the east end of Castletownbere near the Millbrook bar.
Murray is born in Macroom, County Cork on January 17, 1873, the seventh of the eleven children of Cornelius Murray and Honora Murray (née Kelleher). He is educated at St. Patrick’s Teacher Training College in Drumcondra, Dublin. He works as a schoolteacher and in 1900 is appointed headmaster of the national school in Rathduff, County Cork. His first play, The Wheel of Fortune, is produced in 1909 by the Little Theatre in Cork, a theatre he co-founded with Daniel Corkery, Con O’Leary and Terence MacSwiney. The play is revised and renamed Sovereign Love in 1913. In 1915, he moves to Dublin as headmaster of the Model Schools at Inchicore, where he remains until his retirement from teaching in 1932.
Murray’s play Birthright is performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1910 and establishes him as a writer of force. In all, he writes fifteen plays, all of which are produced by the Abbey. His two most highly regarded works are Maurice Harte (1912) and Autumn Fire (1924). Both of these and Birthright are performed in New York City on Broadway, with Autumn Fire having a run of 71 performances. He also writes an autobiographical novel Spring Horizon (1937).
It has been stated both by A. DeGiacomo and by R. Allen Cave that, in the Art competitions at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, Murray is awarded a bronze medal for his play Birthright. However, according to the official record for the games, although Murray is a participant in the literature category with this play and also with Maurice Harte, he does not win a medal.
In his later years, Murray holds a number of significant positions: director of the Authors’ Guild of Ireland, vice-president of the Irish Academy of Letters and president of the Irish Playwrights’ Association. He is awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) by the National University of Ireland in 1949. He dies on March 7, 1959, at his home on Sandymount Strand, Ballsbridge, Dublin, of viral pneumonia, his wife having predeceased him by fifteen years. His extensive papers, containing scripts of almost all of his fifteen plays, correspondence, clippings, reviews, and other material, are held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI).
While at West Ham, Cantwell features in the London XI side that competes in the 1955–58 Inter-Cities Fairs Cup final on May 1, 1958. He captains the Hammers to winning the Division Two championship in the 1957–58 season thereby leading the club into the topflight for the first time since 1932.
In November 1960, Cantwell joins Manchester United for £29,500 which at the time is a record for a full-back. He helps the club win the 1965 and 1967 league titles and captains United when winning the 1963 FA Cup Final – just as his fellow countryman Johnny Carey had done in United’s previous FA Cup win fifteen years earlier.
During his International career (1953-67), Cantwell wins 36 full International caps for the Republic of Ireland, typically playing at left full-back and on several occasions at centre-forward. He makes his debut against Luxembourg in October 1953, with his final appearance coming away to Turkey in February 1967. He scores fourteen goals including five from penalties and also captains the Republic on several occasions including a match against England at Wembley Stadium.
In his first managerial role at Coventry City, Cantwell has the onerous task of following Jimmy Hill who had taken the club into the First Division for the first time in their history. He narrowly keeps the Sky Blues in the top in his first two seasons before taking them to a sixth-place finish in 1969–70, earning them qualification for the Inter-Cities Fairs Cup (a year before it is replaced by the UEFA Cup).
Cantwell returns to Peterborough on November 19, 1986, for a second stint as manager, remaining in this role until he becomes general manager on July 12, 1988. He is general manager at London Road for a year until he quits football to become licensee of the New Inn at Peterborough, where he remains for ten years until he retires in 1999. He also is landlord of the Bull and Swan in Stamford, Lincolnshire.
Cantwell also plays cricket for Cork Bohemians Cricket Club and Ireland as a left-handed batsman and a right-arm medium bowler. He plays five times for Ireland, making his debut in what is his sole first-class match versus Scotland at Edinburgh in 1956, scoring 31 and 17. His last match for Ireland is against Lancashire in July 1959.
Cantwell dies from cancer at Addenbrooke’s Hospital, Cambridge, not far from his home in Peterborough, on September 8, 2005. He is survived by his wife Maggie, a native of Belfast, and two daughters, Liz and Kate. A 22-year-old son, John Robert, is killed in a car crash thirteen years earlier.
Cantwell’s former teams each hold a moment of silence for him before their next matches.
The Capture of Bandon begins on February 23, 1689, when the town of Bandon, County Cork, is forcibly seized from its rebellious Protestant inhabitants by force of Irish Army troops under Justin McCarthy. The skirmishing at the town takes place during the early stages of the Williamite War in Ireland. The Jacobite success at Bandon helps suppress any chance of a general Munster uprising against the rule of James II similar to that which occurs in Ulster the same year. The slogan “No Surrender!” is believed to have been first used at Bandon and subsequently taken up, more famously, by the defenders at the Siege of Derry later in the year.
In 1685, the Catholic James II comes to the throne. This leads to a sharp reversal of government policy in Ireland, which had previously favoured the Protestant inhabitants. This is quickly changed by James’ representative Richard Talbot, 1st Earl of Tyrconnell. Under Talbot’s administration, the army and civil government are mostly purged of Protestants, who are replaced by Catholics. In Bandon, the previous town burgesses are replaced by Catholic nominees.
Talbot’s actions lead to a growing hostility amongst the Protestant inhabitants across the island toward the King and his Irish government. Bandon is a historic centre of Protestants, dating back to the Plantation of Munster in the Elizabethan era and is a natural focus of dissent against James’s rule. In 1688, a similar opposition in England leads to the Glorious Revolution, in which William III successfully invades with a Dutch Army. Many Protestants now believe William to be their rightful King while Catholics, and some Protestants, remain loyal to James. During the growing turmoil, many rural County Cork Protestants come to shelter in Bandon.
Fearing a potential outbreak of rebellion in Bandon will occur, the government sends a detachment of the Irish Army under Captain Daniel O’Neill to take the town. They reportedly enter on a Sunday morning while the inhabitants are attending church services. The following day, February 24, sometimes referred to as “Black Monday,” the townspeople rise and attack the soldiers. Various sources say between three and eight of the redcoats are killed and the remainder are driven out of the town. Using their captured weapons, the Protestants then make an effort to prepare Bandon to withstand an assault.
Having received word about the growing rebellion in the county, Talbot in Dublin has already dispatched six companies of infantry under Justin McCarthy, an experienced Irish Catholic soldier. Instead of immediately assaulting Bandon, McCarthy first seizes nearby Cork, another major centre of Protestants in the south of the country and clamps down on other potential dissidents. He then proceeds to Bandon with his troops, plus some cavalry and artillery. Although they had previously hung out a banner proclaiming “No Surrender,” the defenders negotiate a surrender in exchange for generous conditions. Despite the usual punishment for rebellion being death, the town corporation is fined £1,000 and the walls are ordered to be demolished.
The comparatively light terms imposed on the town are part of a wider attempt by King James to convince Protestants of his goodwill toward them. It angers more hardline Catholics, including McCarthy’s nephew, Donough MacCarthy, 4th Earl of Clancarty, who wants a harsher punishment for the rebels.
The fighting at Bandon is part of a succession of defeats of locally raised Protestant troops both across Munster (at Castlemartyr) and Ireland as a whole, with the Ulster-raised Army of the North suffering heavy defeats at the Break of Dromore and the Battle of Cladyford. The advance of the mainly Catholic Jacobite Army is halted by the successful Protestant defence of Enniskillen and Derry. The arrival of large-scale reinforcements under Frederick Schomberg and King William reverse the tide, and Dublin is captured following the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The same year, Bandon is re-taken by Protestant forces following John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough‘s successful Siege of Cork. The walls are not rebuilt, as they are becoming increasingly militarily obsolete.
Walsh is born in the townland of Rathroon, near Bandon, County Cork, on February 20, 1880. His family comes from a farming background, “working a substantial holding of medium but well-cultivated land.” Until the age of fifteen, he attends a local school in Bandon, but by his own account “as far as learning went, I may as well have been at home.” Together with his school friend P. S. O’Hegarty, he passes the Civil Service exams for the Postal service. He later works locally as a clerk in the Post Office. Like O’Hegarty, he spends three years in London at King’s College, studying for the Secretary’s Office “a syllabus (which) differed little from the Indian Civil Service.” While O’Hegarty succeeds in his studies, Walsh does not, and returns to Cork where a friend, Sir Edward Fitzgerald, arranges work for him on the Entertainments Committee of the Cork International Exhibition.
Walsh is active in the GAA, promoting Gaelic games in many areas, but particularly in Cork city and county. His interest in organised sports has a strong political dimension.
“I happened to be one of those who realised the potentialities of the GAA as a training ground for Physical Force. Contamination with the alien and all his works was taboo. I gathered around me a force of youthful enthusiasts from the University, Civil Service and Business. With this intensely organised instrument, war was declared on foreign games which were made to feel the shock so heavily that one by one, Soccer and Rugby Clubs began to disappear.”
Walsh participates in the Easter Rising in 1916 in the General Post Office (GPO). He claims he is responsible for mobilising 20 members of the Hibernian Rifles and takes them to the GPO. However, Rifles commandant John J. Scollan contradicts this account. He is promoted from Rifleman to Vice-Commandant of the Hibernian Rifles in 1915.
Walsh is arrested following the general surrender and sentenced to death after a court-martial at Richmond Barracks. This is almost immediately commuted to life imprisonment, but he is released the following year under a general amnesty.
In later 1917 Walsh is arrested and imprisoned after making a speech declaring “the only way to address John Bull is through the barrel of a rifle.”
Walsh is elected as a Sinn FéinMember of Parliament (MP) in the 1918 United Kingdom general election for the Cork City constituency. As a member of the First Dáil he is arrested for partaking in an illegal government. He is released in 1921 and supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and goes on to become a founding member of the new political party, Cumann na nGaedheal. He serves as Postmaster General from 1922 until 1924 and joins the cabinet of W. T. Cosgrave between 1924 and 1927, after the office is reconstituted as the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. He is elected at every election for the Cork Borough constituency until 1927 when he retires from government.
In August 1922 Walsh is part of a government committee which is intended to consider what the Irish Free State’s policy towards north-east Ulster will be.
During World War II, known at the time in Ireland as “the Emergency,” Walsh’s connections with fascism, including his association with Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, bring him to the attention of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, the Intelligence branch of the Irish Army. Their request to the Minister for Justice, Gerald Boland, to place a tap on Walsh’s phone is, however, refused. He is closely associated with Irish-based pro-Nazi initiatives through his association with Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, frequently expressing his views with anti-semitic rhetoric.
After leaving politics Walsh founds a bus company which operates with great success between the city centre and south Dublin. When private bus services are bought out by the Dublin Tramway Co., he invests his profits in other Irish companies including Clondalkin Paper Mills, Solus Teoranta and Benbulben Barytes. He is also a director of Killeen and Newbrook Paper Mills, timber exporters Dinan Dowds, the Moore Clothing Co., and Fancy Goods. In 1937 he is elected president of the Federation of Irish Manufacturers, having previously held the vice-presidency. His businesses benefit greatly from the protectionist measures introduced by Fianna Fáil after 1932. Nonetheless, he complains that not enough has been done to make capital available to native entrepreneurs, and that “alien” interests are allowed too much scope to penetrate the Irish market.
In 1944 Walsh publishes a short memoir, Recollections of a Rebel. In his later years he suffers from deteriorating health, leading to his resignation from the presidency of the Federation of Irish Manufacturers in 1946. He dies in Dublin on February 3, 1948. He is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery, Cork, County Cork.
On April 24, 2016, a plaque commemorating Walsh is unveiled in Kilbrittain, County Cork.
She studies in the school of Old Irish established by Professor Osborn Bergin and is strongly influenced by the Irish Australian professor O’Daly. She later teaches Latin through Irish at Ballingeary and becomes proficient in French, German, Italian and Spanish.
She spends the last £100 of her scholarship on a dowry for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the Irish civil service, with whom she lives originally in Glasnevin and then in Dalkey.
She is a founder member of the radical Craobh an Chéitinnigh, the Keating branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, composed mainly of Dublin-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.
In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women’s hurling teams, the rules of camogie (then called camoguidheacht), first appears in Banba, a journal produced by Craobh an Chéitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Conradh na Gaeilge Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men’s hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Ní Chinnéide and Cáit Ní Dhonnchadha, like Ní Chinnéide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist, are credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ní Dhonnchadha’s scholarly brother Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who drew up its rules. She is on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan, County Meath, in July 1904, becomes an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905, is elected president of the infant Camogie Association.
She first visits the Blasket Islands in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who dies tragically young. In the summer of 1934, she puts the idea into Peig Sayers‘s head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ní Chinnéide “she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically.” Peig answers that she has “nothing to write.” She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it has been forgotten.
Ní Chinnéide suggests Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File (“The Poet”), but Peig “only shook her head doubtfully.” At Christmas, a packet arrives from the Blaskets with a manuscript, she transcribes it word for word and the following summer brings it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig. She then edits the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig becomes well known as a prescribed text on the Leaving Certificate curriculum in Irish.
Ní Chinnéide has an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage, Casadh an tSugáin by Douglas Hyde in 1901. She is later author of children’s plays staged by An Comhar Drámuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the Peacock Theatre, of which Gleann na Sidheóg and An Dúthchas (1908) are published. She is a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1923). She is president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.
She soon becomes interested in writing children’s plays, including Gleann na Sidheóg (Fairy Glen, 1905) and Sidheoga na mBláth (Flower Fairies, 1909. Although there is little information available on the staging of her first play, by the time her second children’s play, Sidheóga na mBláth, is published in An Claidheamh Soluis in December 1907, “Éire Óg” (“Young Ireland”) branches of Conradh na Gaeilge have been established in conjunction with adults’ branches. Patrick Pearse in particular voices the expectation that this play will be staged by many “Éire Óg” branches “before the New Year is very old,” thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play’s publication, it is staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ní Chinnéide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.
Healy is one of twins, the third son born to Maurice, a Poor Law Union clerk, and Eliza (née Sullivan) Healy. His mother dies during the birth. It is said that the nurse places him in his brother Tim‘s arms and said, “This little boy has no mother now and you will have to be a mother to him.” As he grows up, he becomes very close to his elder brother. The orphaned children are effectively raised by their maternal grandmother, Jane Sullivan. The family moves to Lismore, County Waterford, where he is educated at the local Christian Brothers school. Both brothers marry Sullivans who are first cousins to their husbands and to each other.
Admitted as a solicitor in 1882, Healy practises as such and is returned to parliament four times, first as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party for Cork City from 1885 to 1900, in which year standing as a Healyite nationalist he is defeated by William O’Brien in a bitter campaign. He is returned again for Cork City in May 1909 to January 1910.
Healy’s force in parliament is land law. He is a close confidant of his brother Tim and although more retiring and stolid than his better-known elder brother, he is considered the more intelligent and often acts as a counterbalance to his brother’s emotionality. On the outbreak of World War I in 1914 a son of each enlists in one of the Irish Divisions.
Maurice (junior) moves to England after the founding of the Irish Free State where he is both a successful lawyer and a broadcaster for the BBC during the early years of World War II. He writes the well-known legal memoir The Old Munster Circuit and the popular Stay Me with Flagons: A Book about Wine and Other Things.
O’Hegarty is born on December 29, 1879, at Carrignavar, County Cork, to John and Katherine (née Hallahan) Hegarty. His parents’ families emigrate to the United States after the Great Famine, and his parents are married in Boston, Massachusetts. His father is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
He is educated at North Monastery CBS, where he forms an enduring friendship with Terence MacSwiney. In 1888, his father dies of tuberculosis at the age of 42. Left destitute, his mother pawns her wedding ring to pay for an advertisement looking for work, and eventually becomes a cook.
He serves at the main Postal Sorting Office in Mount Pleasant, London, from 1902 to 1913. Along with J. J. Walsh, he spends three years at King’s College London, studying for the Secretary’s Office. While he succeeds in his studies, Walsh does not and returns to Ireland. O’Hegarty becomes the IRB representative for South East England and joins the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin and becomes a strong advocate of the Irish language. In 1905, he is elected secretary of the local Dungannon Club, which draws in as members Robert Lynd, Herbert Hughes and George Cavan. In 1907, as Sinn Féin’s London Secretary, he approves and signs the membership card of Michael Collins, later becoming friend and mentor to Collins.
He has to return to Ireland for a break due to overwork in 1909 and gives up some of his work for the Gaelic League. However, he takes over as editor of the IRB publication, Irish Freedom. It is in this publication that he famously writes, concerning the visit of King George V to Ireland in 1911: “Damn your concessions, England: we want our country!” In 1912, at the height of the Playboy riots, he writes four articles entitled “Art and the Nation” in Irish Freedom, which take a very liberal and inclusionist approach to Anglo-Irish literature and art in general but invokes the wrath of many of the paper’s readers.
In 1913, he is re-posted to Queenstown (present-day Cobh) as postmaster. He continues editing nationalist newspapers such as Irish Freedom (founded in 1910 and suppressed in December 1914 on account of its seditious content) and An tÉireannach and joins the Irish Volunteers. At the outbreak of war he is moved to Shrewsbury, probably on account of his political activities. In 1915, he marries Wilhelmina “Mina” Smyth, a schoolteacher and suffragist, and is then moved to Welshpool, Montgomeryshire. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, he is opposed to physical force. In 1918, he refuses to take the British Oath of Allegiance and resigns his position in the Post Office.
O’Hegarty feels that the Abbey Theatre is “doing good for Ireland” and supports W. B. Yeats against attacks from Arthur Griffith and like-minded Nationalists. He opposes the extremist views of D. P. Moran, who seeks a Roman Catholic Irish-speaking Ireland.
He is Secretary of the Irish Department of Post and Telegraphs from 1922 to 1945. He is elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1954.
His son, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, is a founder of the Irish-language publishing house Sáirséal agus Dill. His daughter Gráinne, a harpist, marries Senator Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats.
seamus dubhghaill 