Watt is born on November 4, 1853, to Samuel Watt of Thornhill House, then on the northern outskirts of Derry, and his wife Jane Newman, daughter of Captain Robert Newman, R.N.. He is educated at Foyle College in Derry and then at home by tutors. The Watt family are Ulster Scots gentry who had arrived at Claragh, on the outskirts of Ramelton in the north of County Donegal, during the Plantation of Ulster.
Watt is the owner of Watt’s Distillery, located on Abbey Street in the Bogside in Derry, one of the largest distilleries in Ireland, and the creator of many whiskies, including the famous Tyrconnell, which he names after his racehorse that wins the National Produce Stakes against the odds of 100 to 1. The horse itself is named after Tyrconnell (Irish: Tír Chonaill), the ancient túath or Gaelic kingdom that once covered most of what is now County Donegal in the west of Ulster.
During industrial unrest in 1921, brought about by World War I, prohibition in the United States, and the Irish War of Independence, Watt’s workers at the distillery in Derry are made redundant after challenging his authority. He is said to have stood on a barrel outside the gates to his distillery in the Bogside, while the workers are on strike, and shouted, “Well men, I shall put it to you like this …what is it to be? Will you open the gates?” To which the workers retorted, “The gates stay shut!” This prompts Watt to reply, “Shut they are, and shut they shall remain!” He subsequently closes down Watt’s Distillery, at great economic expense to Derry and neighbouring areas of County Donegal.
On October 7, 1875, Watt marries Violet Flora de Burgh, daughter of George de Burgh and Constance Matthews, with whom he had four sons and two daughters.
Watt serves as High Sheriff of County Londonderry from 1886 to 1887. He is a member of Boodle’s. He dies at Easton Hall in Lincolnshire, where he lives in England after he left Ireland. Easton Hall is later demolished in 1951.
The blast occurs at 15:17 IST, severely damaging the forecourt and partially collapsing the building behind the petrol station. The complex includes apartments, a convenience store, post office, and hair salon. Up to thirty people — including schoolchildren — are present at the time. Emergency services from both sides of the border assist in the search and rescue.
The deceased are Leona Harper (14), Robert Garwe (50) and his 5-year-old daughter Shauna Flanagan-Garwe, Catherine O’Donnell (39) and her 13-year-old son James Monaghan, Jessica Gallagher (24), Martin McGill (49), James O’Flaherty (48), Martina Martin (49) and Hugh “Hughie” Kelly (59).
A primary investigation file is sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) in September 2025, with a supplementary file from gardaí and the HSA’s final report submitted in August 2026. The DPP will now decide whether to proceed with criminal charges.
Families have campaigned for a public inquiry if the criminal investigation does not provide satisfactory answers. TaoiseachMicheál Martin has said such an inquiry can be facilitated if needed, but the government has maintained it should not begin while the criminal case is active. Families have met with senior officials and continue to seek transparency.
As of August 2026, the HSA’s final report has been sent to the DPP, marking a key step in closing the criminal investigation chapter. The outcome will determine whether further legal or public inquiry action follows.
On August 17, 1846, Lord John Russell’s Whig administration formally adopts a policy of non-interference with internal and export markets for food in Ireland during the Great Famine. This decision reflects the prevailing laissez-faire economic philosophy of the time, which holds that markets should operate freely without government intervention.
The Great Famine devastates the 1845 potato harvest, and by 1846 the blight returns with greater severity, destroying the autumn crop. Many Irish peasants have no money to buy imported grain, meat, or dairy, which are being exported to Britain under the Corn Laws. While the repeal of these laws in 1846 lowers grain prices, it does little to help Ireland because of the lack of purchasing power.
Russell’s government, influenced by figures like Charles Trevelyan, believes that internal markets (local food supply) should be left to private merchants, who are often reluctant to import food for Ireland; export markets for Irish grain should not be restricted, as the Whigs see no need to interfere with trade; government relief should focus on employment schemes (e.g., road and canal building) to give people income to buy food, rather than direct food distribution.
Relief depots are opened only in areas of greatest need, such as West Cork, Kerry, and Donegal, where local merchants are few. Imported maize is distributed in these limited areas, but most of Ireland remains without direct food aid. Work schemes are introduced, but wages are low (8–10 pence per day) and often delayed, making them insufficient for survival.
This policy means that Ireland’s food crisis worsens as exports continue and local shortages deepen, causing many people to starve despite the availability of food in Ireland. The government’s role is minimal, focusing on indirect measures rather than direct relief.
In short, the August 17, 1846 decision marks a shift from Robert Peel’s limited relief efforts to a hands-off approach, prioritizing free markets over direct intervention, which critics argue prolonged the famine’s suffering.
(Pictured: Photograph of John Russell, by Edwin Mayal, 1861. Source: The National Portrait Gallery)
Tom Dunphy, the charismatic lead vocalist of the Royal Showband and later the bassist of the Big 8, dies on July 29, 1975, in a tragic road accident.
Dunphy is traveling in a Ford Granada on the Longford side of Carrick-on-Shannon, County Leitrim, when his car skids on a wet surface while rounding a bend. It collides with an oncoming cement lorry. The crash occurs about five miles from Drumsna, near Annaduff, where he is en route to meet fellow band members for the Mary from Dungloe Festival in County Donegal. Band member Noel Ryan, who is a passenger in the car, escapes with little more than a concussion.
The Royal Showband, formed in 1957, is one of Ireland’s most popular showbands in the 1960s, known for large-scale dance events with audiences often exceeding 2,000. Dunphy sings lead on their hit “Come Down the Mountain, Katie Daly.” In 1971, he and Brendan Bowyer leave the Royal Showband to form the Big 8, a successful showband supergroup.
The accident cuts short a promising career and leaves a void in the Irish music scene. In 1978, a memorial site is erected near the crash location in Annaduff, maintained by local volunteers. Annual tributes have been held, including a Mass at St. Mary’s Church and musical events in Drumshanbo, often attended by family, fellow musicians, and fans from across Ireland and abroad.
Dunphy is remembered for his “sincere wit, charm and personality” that endears him to dancing enthusiasts nationwide. He performs alongside international stars such as Elvis Presley, Tom Jones, the Beatles, and Cliff Richard. His death marks the symbolic end of the showband era in Ireland.
Today, Dunphy’s life and career are commemorated in counties Waterford and Leitrim, with ongoing efforts to preserve his memory through plaques, events, and archival work.
Gwynn excels academically as well as on the sporting field. The most outgoing of the Gwynn brothers at Trinity College, he cuts a handsome and dashing figure. He graduates from Trinity College in 1896, taking a double first in his finals.
Gwynn makes his debut for Ireland in a match against W. H. Laverton’s XI, scoring one run in the only Irish innings. The following year, he plays twice for Ireland, against I Zingari and South Africa. He scores 62 in the second innings against South Africa, his top score for Ireland.
May 1895 sees Gwynn make his first-class debut, playing for Dublin University against the Marylebone Cricket Club on May 20. This is followed three days later by a match for Ireland against the same opponents. He plays three further first-class matches that year, two against Cambridge University and one against Leicestershire. He scores 130 in the final match against Cambridge University, his highest first-class score.
In all matches for Ireland, Gwynn scores 220 runs at an average of 36.67. He takes six catches and one stumping.
After completing the induction course for the Indian Civil Service in the autumn of 1897, Gwynn travels to Burma for his first tour of duty. Tragically his promising career comes to an abrupt end a few months later. He dies in Rangoon of septicemia resulting from a tooth infection on February 14, 1898.
MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.
MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).
The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”
Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.
The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.
When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.
Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”
In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.
MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.
On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.
On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.
MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.
MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.
MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.
Christy O’Connor Snr, an Irish professional golfer born Patrick Christopher O’Connor, dies in Dublin on May 14, 2016. He is one of the leading golfers on the British and Irish circuit from the mid-1950s.
O’Connor wins over twenty tournaments on the British PGA and finishes in the top 10 in The Open Championship many times. Later he has considerable success in senior events, twice winning the World Senior Championship. In team events he plays in ten successive Ryder Cup matches and plays in fifteen Canada Cup/World Cup matches for Ireland, winning the Canada Cup in 1958 in partnership with Harry Bradshaw.
O’Connor is born in Knocknacarra, a village in Galway, on December 21, 1924. He catches his first glimpse of golf at the nearby Galway Golf Club, and from the age of 10 spends most of his spare time there. His foray into professional golf begins with caddying, first at Galway and then over at Tuam Golf Club.
In 1951, O’Connor turns professional with Tuam members funding his first tournament at The Open Championship at Royal Portrush Golf Club in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, that same year. His 19th-place finish garners a membership invitation from Bundoran Golf Club in Bundoran, County Donegal, which he accepts.
O’Connor’s first professional win is at the Swallow-Penfold Tournament held in 1955, the first £1,000 prize to be offered in British golf. He goes on to win the 1956 and 1959 British Masters. In 1958, he helps Ireland to win the Canada Cup in Mexico City playing with Harry Bradshaw. A year later, he moves to Dublin and joins The Royal Dublin Golf Club. Throughout the 1960s he wins at least one professional event during each year on the British Tour, a level of consistent success matched by very few other players. He rarely plays professional tournaments outside Britain or Ireland, at one stage saying he forwent playing at the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, because he could not afford to participate.
The only major championship O’Connor plays is The Open Championship. He plays the event twenty-six times between 1951 and 1979. His best performance comes at the 1965 Open Championship where he ties for second place with Brian Huggett, two behind five-time winner Peter Thomson. He easily outplays international stars like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, and Gary Player. He receives an astonishing twenty invitations to play in the Masters Tournament but rejected all of them, citing prohibitive financial costs.
O’Connor plays in every Ryder Cup from 1955 to 1973, setting a record of ten appearances in the event which stands until it is surpassed by Nick Faldo in 1997. He is the Irish professional champion on ten occasions, including in 1978 (at the age of 53), and is twice (1961 and 1962) recipient of the Harry Vardon Trophy for leading the British Tour’s “Order of Merit.”
In the 1966 Carroll’s International at The Royal Dublin Golf Club, O’Connor finishes 2-3-3 (eagle-birdie-eagle) to win the tournament by two strokes. At the par-4 16th, he drives the green and holes a 20-foot putt. He then holes a 12-foot putt at the 17th and, at the par-5 18th, hits a 3-iron to eight feet and holes the putt. A plaque by the 16th tee commemorates the achievement. In 1970, he wins the John Player Classic, at the time its £25,000 first prize is the richest offered in golf (in 1970, even The Open Championship winner receives just a little over £5,000), making him the season’s leading money-winner, although not “Order of Merit” leader, which is decided by a points system not directly related to prize money.
Later in his career, O’Connor becomes the leading “senior” (over-50s) professional player of his day, just before the lucrative U.S.-based Senior PGA Tour, now known as the PGA Tour Champions, takes off. He wins the PGA Seniors Championship six times and the World Senior Championship in 1976 and 1977. He is elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2009 in the Veterans category.
O’Connor meets his wife, Mary Collins, in Donegal while he is a member of Bundoran Golf Club. They marry in 1954 and have six children together. During his early career he is known simply as Christy O’Connor, but his nephew of the same name also becomes a prominent golfer, and from that point forward they are referred to as Christy O’Connor Senior and Christy O’Connor Junior, respectively. He is known as “Himself” among his golfing peers. He dies at the age of 91 in Dublin’s Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, on May 14, 2016.
Hamilton enters Trinity College Dublin on November 17, 1742, at the age of 13 with Thomas McDonnell as his tutor. He graduates Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1747 and Trinity Master of Arts (MA Dubl) in 1750. He takes the competitive examination for a vacant fellowship of the college in 1750, but the position is secured instead by his friend Richard Murray, who is a few years older. Two fellowships become vacant the following year and Hamilton is elected to one of them at the age of 22. He is appointed Erasmus Smith’s Professor of Natural and Experimental Philosophy at Trinity College Dublin in 1759 and that same year graduates Bachelor of Divinity (BD). He is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on February 19, 1761, and graduates Doctor of Divinity (DD) in 1762.
Trinity College presents him to the rectory of Kilmacrennan in the diocese of Raphoe, County Donegal, in 1764. This is a small benefice in the gift of the college, for which he resigns his fellowship. He retains the Erasmus Smith’s chair, however, being succeeded in that by Thomas Wilson in 1769. He resigns from Kilmacrenan in 1767 and becomes vicar of St. Ann’s Church in Dublin.
Hamilton then becomes Dean of Armagh, the chief resident cleric of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Armagh, County Armagh, from April 1768 to 1796. Finding the existing dean’s house inconvenient and poorly situated, he has a new one built in a better location just off Portadown Road, now known as Dean’s Hill. The house, of three stories and a semi-basement, is built in 1772–74. The house is later sold by the church and the present owners provide bed and breakfast accommodation in it. While dean he also acts as treasurer for the infirmary or county hospital, he establishes Sunday schools in the districts of the parish, and he founds a charitable loan for poor tradesmen. He is also instrumental in planning a piped water supply for the town, which is later put into effect. He is one of the 38 original members of the Royal Irish Academy when it is founded in 1785. Gilbert Stuart paints his portrait in about 1790 (pictured above).
Hamilton is promoted to Bishop of Clonfert and Kilmacduagh on January 20, 1796, without seeking it. On January 24, 1799, he is translated to Ossory, where he is bishop until 1805. He dies of a fever at Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, on December 1, 1805. He is buried in the graveyard of St. Canice’s Cathedral at Kilkenny, and there is a memorial to him inside the cathedral.
Hamilton writes a mathematical treatise on conic sections called De Sectionibus Conicis: Tractatus Geometricus, published in 1758. In this book he “was the first to deduce the properties of the conic section from the properties of the cone, by demonstrations which were general, unencumbered by lemmas, and proceeding in a more natural and perspicuous order,” according to writer James Wills in 1847. The work is acclaimed for its lucidity and Leonhard Euler describes it as a perfect book. It is “soon adopted in all the British universities” and is translated from Latin into English as A Geometrical Treatise of the Conic Sections in 1773.
Hamilton also writes Philosophical Essays on Vapours (1767), Four Introductory Lectures on Natural Philosophy (1774), and An Essay on the Existence and Attributes of the Supreme Being (1784). His principal works are collected and republished, with a memoir, as The Works of the Right Rev. Hugh Hamilton by his eldest son, Alexander Hamilton, in two volumes in 1809.
Hamilton marries Isabella, daughter of Hans Widman Wood of Rosmead, County Westmeath, in 1772. Isabella’s mother Frances is the twin sister of Edward King, 1st Earl of Kingston. They have five sons and two daughters. They are Alexander, who was a barrister; Frances; Hans, who is rector of Knocktopher, County Kilkenny, and associated with the Carrickshock incident of 1831; Isabella; Henry; George, who is a biblical scholar; and Hugh, who marries Elizabeth Staples, a daughter of John Staples, a Member of Parliament. The younger Hugh is the great-grandfather of Clive Staples Lewis, better known as C. S. Lewis. Bishop Hugh Hamilton is a great-great-great-grandfather of the mathematicians John Lighton Synge and his brother Edward Hutchinson Synge. Dodgson Hamilton Madden, the High Court judge and noted scholar, is Hamilton’s great-grandson.
(Pictured: “Hugh Hamilton,” oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart)
In 1908, at the age of 15, McGuinness leaves home, stowing away in a ship and traveling extensively throughout the world for several years. At the age of 17 he is involved in the first of several shipwrecks, drifting for two weeks on a lifeboat before being rescued near Tahiti. He works as a pearl fisher in the South Seas for a year before resuming his nautical career.
Disillusioned with the war, McGuinness resumes his travels. In 1920, he returns to Derry and joins the Irish Republican Army (IRA), leading a flying column in northwest Ireland. McGuinness, who reputedly introduces the first monkey to Derry, is viewed locally as an eccentric adventurer but is much celebrated for his instrumental role in the daring escape of Frank Carty, the IRA Sligo Brigade commander, from Derry jail.
Wanted for the murder of Inspector Robert Johnson in Glasgow, a charge he denies, McGuinness is captured by the British army in June 1921 after a failed bank raid in Glenties, County Donegal, but escapes from Derry’s Ebrington Barracks before his identity is established. Shortly after the truce in July 1921 he is sent by Liam Mellows to Germany, from where he smuggles arms to Ireland. After the treaty split, he continues to smuggle arms for the republican side but leaves the IRA, having become disillusioned with its incompetence. He claims to have been arrested in Berlin in 1922 for conspiring with Bulgarian revolutionaries, and released on condition that he leaves the state.
McGuinness emigrates to New York in 1923 where, following an alleged spell of employment by Chiang Kai-shek‘s forces in China, he establishes himself as a building contractor. In 1928, he joins Admiral Richard E. Byrd‘s expedition to the Antarctic, serving as a navigation officer. At a reception on his return in 1929, he presents the mayor of New York City, Jimmy Walker, with an Irish tricolour which, he claims, Byrd had flown over the South Pole. He is not, as he claims, awarded a congressional medal by the secretary of the navy.
In 1930, McGuinness embarks on a new career, smuggling rum between Canada and the United States (his memoirs of which are subsequently published in the American press under the pseudonym “Night-Hawk”). After losing his fortune when his boat and cargo are impounded in the summer of 1931, he travels to the Soviet Union to observe communism at first hand. He remains in the Soviet Union around two years, where he claims to work as a harbourmaster in Murmansk, and forms an unfavourable opinion of the Soviet Union.
McGuinness’s autobiography, Nomad, is published in 1934. His publisher, Methuen Publishing, is sued for considerable damages by the notorious Alderman John William Nixon, MP, as a result of McGuinness’s veiled reference to him as the former Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detective inspector who led a murder gang in Belfast in 1922, believed responsible for the murder of the McMahon family.
In late 1936, McGuinness joins the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War but soon deserts after disagreements with the authorities. He returns to Ireland, where he pens a sensational exposé of the International Brigades, I fought with the Reds, which is published by the Irish Independent. He also writes colourful accounts of life under communism, such as Behind the Iron Curtain, under the pseudonym “Peter Dawson.”
In 1942, while serving as chief petty officer in the marine service at Haulbowline, McGuinness offers to assist the German legation by smuggling spies out of Ireland. Despite his British naval service, he is virulently anti-British. According to local legend he has the sole of both feet tattooed with the Union Jack so wherever he goes he is safe in the knowledge that he is “trampling on the butcher’s apron.” He is arrested and sentenced to seven years imprisonment but is released shortly after the end of the Emergency.
McGuinness is believed to have died on December 4, 1947, when he supposedly drowns alongside four other crew members of the schoonerIsaalt that he is piloting on Ballymoney Strand near Gorey, County Wexford. Two members of the crew survive, managing to swim ashore, the ship is a mere 100 metres from land. However, members of McGuinness’ family express doubt over the years. A nephew claims to have encountered McGuinness on the London Underground in 1955. Upon their gazes meeting, McGuinness is reported to smile and say four simple words: “You never saw me.”
(From: “McGuinness, Charles John” by Fearghal McGarry, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
McGuckian is the youngest of six children to Brian McGuckian and his wife Pauline (née McKenna). He is named after his uncle, also Alexander Aloysius McGuckian, who dies five month before he is born. Yet another uncle, Daniel McGuckian, is a priest of the Diocese of Down and Connor and serves as parish priest of Cushendun and then Randalstown until his death in 1980. His father is a successful pig farmer who, alongside his brothers, develops the world’s biggest pig farm.
Two of McGuckian’s brothers are also Jesuit priests, while another brother is a businessman. Both of his sisters predecease him.
McGuckian is ordained to the priesthood on June 22, 1984, and makes his final profession on February 15, 1997.
Following ordination, McGuckian spends four years as a teacher in Clongowes Wood College and vocations director for the Jesuits, before undertaking a six month period of spiritual renewal in southern India and serving in a shanty town in Quezon City, Philippines.
McGuckian returns to Ireland in 1992, where he is appointed director of the Jesuit Communication Centre, during which he develops Sacred Space, a website which allows people to pray at their computer, in 1999, and Catholic news service CatholicIreland.net in 2004.
McGuckian also serves as editor of both An Timire and Foilseacháin Ábhair Spioradálta, later translating the autobiography of Ignatius of Loyola into Irish under the title Scéal an Oilithrigh. He also co-authors the drama 1912 – A Hundred Years On with Presbyterian historian Philip Orr in 2011, which looks at the experiences of the Ulster Covenant and the wider Home Rule movement from both nationalist and unionist perspectives.
McGuckian also serves as chaplain to many of the Gaelscoileanna in the Diocese of Down and Connor, and subsequently as chaplain to Ulster University campuses in Belfast and Jordanstown. Following the publication of the Living Church Report, which outlines the findings of a synodal process within the diocese, he is appointed by Noël Treanor in 2012 to set up and lead the Living Church Office, whose aim is to realise the hopes and aspirations expressed in the report and subsequently in the upcoming diocesan pastoral plan.
McGuckian is also appointed diocesan director of formation for the permanent diaconate in 2014, and also works during his directorship of the Living Church Office to establish pastoral communities across the diocese, through fostering a culture of co-responsibility for the mission of the Church between clergy and lay people.
McGuckian is appointed Bishop-elect of Raphoe by Pope Francis on June 9, 2017. His appointment makes him the first member of the Jesuits to be appointed a bishop in Ireland.
In an interview with The Irish Catholic in September 2019, McGuckian says that having a home is as fundamental as the right to life and education, and that the Government must be “pushed” to enshrine a right to housing in the Constitution of Ireland. He also joins a number of church leaders in the West of Ireland on September 16, 2021, in calling on the Irish government to offer reparations to homeowners whose properties are affected by defective concrete blocks.
In an interview with The Irish Catholic in February 2021, McGuckian takes issue with the view held by political leaders that public worship is deemed to be “non-essential” during the COVID-19 pandemic in the Republic of Ireland. Quoting Pope Francis, who states that “the right to worship must be respected, protected and defended by civil authorities like the right to bodily and physical health,” he expresses a need to let political leaders know that public worship is not only central, but also “utterly essential.”
Following a fatal explosion in Creeslough, County Donegal, on October 7, 2022, McGuckian refers to the explosion as “the darkest day in Donegal,” adding that the local community is “living through a nightmare of shock and horror.” He also concelebrates at the Funeral Masses of each of the victims, describing the fact that the parish church would be holding two funerals in the space of three hours as “surreal.”
McGuckian is appointed Bishop of Down and Connor by Pope Francis on February 2, 2024. In his first address following his appointment, he expresses his hope that the restoring of the Northern Ireland Executive will help the most vulnerable in society.
