seamus dubhghaill

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Death of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Irish Poet

Máirtín Ó Direáin, Irish poet, dies in Dublin on March 19, 1988.

Ó Direáin is born on November 26, 1910, in Inis Mór, Aran Islands, County Galway, the eldest of the three sons and one daughter of Seán Ó Direáin, a small farmer, and Mairéad Ní Dhireáin (widow of Labhrás Mac Confhaola), both of Inis Mór. His father dies in 1917, aged forty-three, leaving his mother to rear a family of four on less than 20 acres of land. Educated at the local national school, he leaves Aran to join the post office in Galway in January 1928.

Ó Direáin is involved with the Irish language movement during the late 1920s and 1930s, during which time he is secretary of the Galway branch of the Gaelic League and writes for and acts on the stage of the Taibhdhearc Theatre. In July 1937 he moves to Dublin to work as a clerical officer in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and later in the Department of Education. Inspired by a lecture given by the poet and Gaelic scholar Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, he begins writing poetry in Irish in the winter of 1938. Unlike Ó Donnchadha, however, who advocates and practises a poetry based on traditional Gaelic metres, he favours a rhythmically measured form of free verse. He publishes his first collection, Coinnle geala, in 1942, quickly followed by Dánta aniar (1943), both at his own expense. In 1949, a volume of selected poems, Rogha dánta, is one of the first books published by the newly founded Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill.

These books herald not just a new voice, but a new generation of modern poets in Irish, distinct in outlook and ambition from most of the revivalist poets who precede them. The leading figures of this generation, Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, all publish poems in various Irish language journals during the 1940s, though the latter two poets do not produce their first collections until the 1950s. Ó Direáin’s poetry is less thematically and linguistically adventurous than that of Ó Ríordáin (whom he nevertheless defends in print against the dogmatic criticism of Ó Ríordáin’s traditionalist detractors), and less consciously indebted to tradition than that of Mhac an tSaoi.

Ó Direáin’s early lyrics celebrate the traditional virtues of island life and mourn its passing because of increasing modernisation and population shifts toward the major cities. One of the best known of these poems, “Stoite“ (“Uprooted”), sets up a gloomy contrast between a traditional life in tune with nature’s rhythms, destined to endure in communal memory, and the fruitless urban existence of the contemporary office worker. This theme of uprootedness haunts his work throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period he publishes his two most significant collections, Ó Mórna agus dánta eile (1957) and Ár ré dhearóil (1962), both of which take their titles from ambitious, and uncharacteristically long, poems. Ó Mórna, a poem of which there are two published versions, charts the colourful life of a proud, amoral tyrant, a figure based loosely on traditional accounts of a hard-living nineteenth-century landlord’s agent from Aran. Ó Mórna represents, in the poet’s view, the timeless Übermensch whose will to power is boundless and awesome. Ár ré dhearóil (“Our wretched era”) is an excoriation of the loveless hedonism of a middle-class Dublin populated by lonely bachelors, bitter spinsters, and immoral, though free-spirited and well-educated, women. The poem, which ends with an ominous if oblique warning against the threat of nuclear annihilation, bears some comparison with T. S. Eliot‘s “The waste land.” Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats are key influences alongside the canonical figures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry. His strong social conscience is registered early on in poems such as “An Stailc“ (“The strike“). His life-long adherence to traditional nationalist values and his scornful attitude to what he perceives as the mercenary embrace of American-style capitalism in the changing economic climate of Ireland in the 1960s is most trenchantly voiced in poems such as “Éire ina bhfuil romhainn” (“Ireland in times ahead”) and “Mar chaitheamar an choinneal” (“As we spent the candle”).

Ó Direáin is an active member of the Irish language literary groups Cumann na Scríbhneoirí and Cumann na hÉigse, and publishes essays on a variety of topics throughout the 1940s and 1950s in magazines such as Ar Aghaidh, An Glór, Comhar and Feasta. A selection of mostly autobiographical essays, Feamainn Bhealtaine (1961), casts valuable light on the Aran of his youth and early adulthood. He is registrar for the National College of Art (1948–55), where he gets to know such prominent artists as Seán Keating, Maurice MacGonigal and Nano Reid, whose artwork adorns Rogha Dánta. From 1955 until his retirement from the civil service in 1975, he is a staff officer in the Department of Education. Cloch choirnéil appears in 1966, followed by Crainn is cairde (1970) and Ceacht an éin (1979).

The most comprehensive selection of Ó Direáin‘s poetry, Máirtín Ó Direáin: dánta 1939–1979 (1980), edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain, covers all but two final volumes, Béasa an túir (1984) and Craobhóg dán (1986), neither of which add much of major significance to his oeuvre. A bilingual selection, Selected poems: Tacar dánta (1984), includes translations by Tomás Mac Síomóin and Douglas Sealy. In 1969, Ó Direáin delivers a series of lectures on his own work at University College Dublin (UCD), later edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain as Ón ulán ramhar siar (2002), which provides useful background information on many individual poems. He receives the Irish American Cultural Institute (IACI) award in 1967 and is made a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1970. In 1977, he receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the National University of Ireland and the Ossian-Preis of the Freiherr von Stein Foundation in Hamburg. He is a full-time visiting lecturer in the department of Irish at University College Galway for the academic year 1978–79. He was also a member of Aosdána.

Ó Direáin marries Áine Colivet, a Dubliner of French extraction, in 1945. Their only child, Niamh, is born in 1947. He dies in Dublin on March 19, 1988.

A selection of Ó Direáin’s essays, An chuid eile díom féin, edited by Síobhra Aiken, and a bilingual volume of poems Máirtin Ó Direáin: Selected poems/ Rogha dánta, translated by Frank Sewell, are both published in 2018.

(From: “Ó Direáin, Máirtín” by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Dictionary of Irish Biography, www dib.ie, October 2009, last revised March 2021)


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Birth of Actress Nora-Jane Noone

Irish actress Nora-Jane Noone is born in Galway, County Galway, on March 8, 1984. In 2020, The Irish Times ranks her 47th on its list of the greatest Irish film actors of all time. She makes her screen debut in her breakthrough role film The Magdalene Sisters (2002), and has since been nominated three times at the IFTA Film & Drama Awards for her work in three films: The Descent (2005),  Savage (2009) and Wildfire (2020).

Noone’s other credits include Doomsday (2008), Ella Enchanted (2004), The Ipcress File (2022), and Hidden Assets (2023).

Noone grows up in Upper Newcastle, Galway. She trains for two years at the Performing Arts School in Galway, and is a proficient musician (piano to Grade 7 level) and dancer. Her previous acting roles before starting her acting career, are in school and amateur productions and pantomime.

Noone graduates in 2004 from NUI Galway with a degree in Science, and then moves to London.

Noone makes her professional film debut playing Bernadette in the Peter Mullan written and directed film The Magdalene Sisters (2002). The film wins the Best Film prize in the 2002 Venice Film Festival, and is nominated as Best British Picture at the British Academy Film Awards. For her performance as Bernadette, she is nominated for British Newcomer of the Year at the 2004 London Film Critics’ Circle Awards, alongside Mullan, who wins best director and best film of the year.

In 2005, Noone is nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Feature Film for her role as Holly in The Descent (2005) at the 3rd Irish Film & Television Awards. She is nominated in 2010 for Best Actress in a Supporting Role Film at the 7th Irish Film & Television Awards for her role in the film Savage (2009).

In 2008, Noone co-stars in Doomsday, directed by Neil Marshall, Speed Dating and Ella Enchanted. Other work includes the short films News for the Church written and directed by Andrew McCarthy and The Listener, directed by Michael Chang. She also records Walking at Ringsend for BBC Radio 4. In 2008, she appears in Insatiable.

Noone also appears in The Descent Part 2, The Day of the Triffids and The Runaway and she co-stars in episodes 1–6 in season one of Jack Taylor. In 2013 she also begins writing a film short.

In 2020, Noone receives a nomination Best Actress in a Leading Role Film at the 17th Irish Film & Television Awards for her performance as Lauren in Wildfire. In 2022, she is involved in the relaunch of The Ipcress File, as Dr. Karen Newton.

In 2023, Noone returns to Ireland as Detective Sergeant Claire Wallace in the RTÉ crime series Hidden Assets.

In 2023, Noone moves back to live in Galway while filming Hidden Assets. She and her husband, fellow actor Chris Marquette, have a daughter in 2020. This is one reason that she decides to return to Ireland.


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Death of Michael J. Browne, Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh

Michael J. Browne, an Irish prelate of the Roman Catholic Church, dies in Galway, County Galway, on February 24, 1980. He serves as Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh for almost forty years from 1937 to 1976.

Browne is born in Westport, County Mayo, on December 20, 1895. He is an important and outspoken member of the Irish hierarchy. His time as Bishop has been described by the historian James S. Donnelly Jr. as “far-reaching and … controversial,” while the historian of Irish Catholicism John Henry Whyte claims that Browne’s “readiness to put forward his views bluntly is welcome at least to the historian.”

Browne is ordained to the priesthood on June 20, 1920, for the Archdiocese of Tuam. He later serves as professor of moral theology at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth.

On August 6, 1937, at the relatively young age of 41, Browne is appointed Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh by Pope Pius XI, receiving his episcopal consecration from Archbishop Thomas Gilmartin on the following August 10. He supports Taoiseach Éamon de Valera‘s defence of arrests and police searches for cached Irish Republican Army (IRA) arms, declaring, “Any Irishman who assists any foreign power to attack the legitimate authority of his own land is guilty of the most terrible crime against God’s law, and there can be no excuse for that crime – not even the pretext of solving partition or of securing unity.”

In 1939, Browne is selected by Éamon de Valera to chair the Commission on Vocational Organisation.

Browne is attentive to the state of public morality in the diocese, and James S. Donnelly Jr. has noted his role in directing episcopal and clerical censorship of newsagents and county librarians. He is also concerned about public intoxication and other misconduct at the Galway Races, controversies over dancing and the commercial dance halls, as well as immodesty in dress and the closely related issue of so-called “mixed bathing” in Galway and Salthill.

Like other members of the Irish Catholic hierarchy, Browne regularly condemns communism in his pastoral letters. When Cardinal József Mindszenty is detained by Hungary‘s post-war communist government, Browne in 1949 forwards protest resolutions from Galway Corporation, Galway County Council and the University College Galway student body to Pope Pius XII. He also frequently condemns the Connolly Association, an Irish republican socialist group in Britain close to the Communist Party of Great Britain.

In 1957, in response to a growing tension between Catholics and Protestants at Fethard-on-Sea, including the Fethard-on-Sea boycott, Browne says, “non-Catholics do not protest against the crime of conspiring to steal the children of a Catholic father, but they try to make political capital when a Catholic people make a peaceful and moderate protest.”

The most enduring monument or physical legacy of Browne’s time as Bishop is the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St Nicholas, commonly known as Galway Cathedral, which is dedicated in 1965 by Cardinal Richard James Cushing of Boston, Massachusetts. The site of the old jail had come into the possession of the diocese in 1941 and Browne leads the campaign to construct a new Cathedral. This includes a 1957 audience with Pope Pius XII where the plans are approved.

Browne attends the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 and retires in 1976. He dies four years later in Galway, at the age of 84, on February 24, 1980.

Browne is parodied in Breandán Ó hÉithir`s novel Lig Sinn i gCathu, which fictionalises late 1940s Galway as “Baile an Chaisil” and Browne as “An tEaspag Ó Maoláin.”

The Irish cabinet minister Noël Browne (no known relation) in his 1986 memoir Against the Tide describes the physical attributes of his episcopal namesake:

“The bishop had a round soft baby face with shimmering clear cornflower-blue eyes, but his mouth was small and mean. Around his great neck was an elegant glinting gold episcopal chain with a simple pectoral gold cross. He wore a ruby ring on his plump finger and wore a slightly ridiculous tiny scullcap on his noble head. The well-filled semi-circular scarlet silk cummerbund and sash neatly divided the lordly prince into two.”


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Death of Thomas Eyre, Surveyor General of Ireland

Thomas Eyre, an Irish military engineer, dies in Dublin on February 22, 1772, while attending a session of the Irish House of Commons from an apoplectic fit.

Eyre is born around 1720, the second son of Colonel Samuel Eyre of Eyreville, County Galway, a descendant of Colonel John Eyre, who accompanies General Ludlow to Ireland in 1651 and acquires large estates in County Galway, including the Manor of Eyrecourt.

Eyre is that rare man whose military and engineering training occurs entirely in the Americas before he assumes the significant office of Surveyor General of Ireland in 1752. In 1738, he joins the regiment of James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Province of Georgia, and sails to the colony. As a cadet in Oglethorpe’s Regiment, he is sent to the colony’s interior as an agent to the Cherokee Indians. He rises from the rank of cadet to be sub-engineer for Georgia and the Province of South Carolina and in 1740 he is commissioned an ensign. He learns engineering from Major William Cook, the Regiment’s Engineer, and he marries Cook’s daughter Anne, who has accompanied her father to Georgia. The date of the wedding is not documented, but occurs by 1743, by which date both Eyre and Cook have returned to London. In the last two years of his tour of duty, Eyre serves also as the Sub-engineer for South Carolina and Georgia.

In 1744, Eyre is commissioned a lieutenant and joins Trelawney’s Regiment of Foot, headed by Edward Trelawney, Governor of Jamaica. He serves in Jamaica and at Roatán (Rattan) and is in charge of Roatán’s defences until 1748, when the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the War of the Austrian Succession and returns the island to Spain. He is promoted to captain in 1748. For the four years after his departure from Roatán and before his resignation from Trelawney’s Regiment, little is known about his activities until he retires from active duty in 1752.

On August 31, 1752, Eyre is appointed Surveyor General of Ireland, having purchased the office from Arthur Jones-Nevill. Joseph Jarratt works as his deputy in this role. He undertakes works at the Royal Barracks in Dublin, but the condition of the barracks is criticised by the Commissioners of the Ordnance for Ireland. As Surveyor General, he is also involved in harbour works at Dún Laoghaire, and is responsible for the rebuilding of the State Apartments at Dublin Castle. In 1763, the office of Surveyor General is abolished, and he is transferred to the new post of Chief Engineer of the Ordnance.

Eyre resigns his commission in 1766 and becomes member of the Irish House of Commons for Thomastown (1761-68) and Fore (1768-1772). He dies on February 22, 1772, from an apoplectic fit brought on by the sudden death of a much loved daughter, at Parliament House, Dublin, while attending a session of the House.


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Death of Micho Russell, Musician & Author

Micho Russell, an Irish musician and author best known for his expert tin whistle performance, dies in an automobile accident on February 19, 1994. He also plays the simple system flute and is a collector of Irish traditional music and folklore.

Russell is born in Doonagore, Doolin, County Clare, on March 25, 1915. He comes from a musically renowned family. His mother plays the concertina, and his father is a sean-nós singer. He has two brothers, Packie and Gussie, who are also musicians. He also has two sisters. He never marries.

Russell teaches himself to play the tin whistle by ear, beginning at the age of eleven. The 1960s revival of Irish traditional music brings him attention and performance opportunities. In 1973, he wins the All-Ireland tin whistle competition, which further increases demand for his performances. Like Séamus Ennis, he is also known for his spoken introductions to tunes in his live performances, which incorporate folklore and legend. His knowledge of tradition extends past music to language, stories, dance, herbal lore, and old country cures.

“Micho Russell’s Reel,” Russell’s only known composition, is a variant of an older tune he calls “Carthy’s Reel.” He tells Charlie Piggott, “…So Carthy was beyond anyway, and he heard the old tune from a piper playing it, and he had the first part but only three-quarters of the second part. So when Séamus Ennis came around collecting music, I put in the last bit. That’s roughly the story of the tune.” The reel has been recorded by other artists such as Mary Bergin. His best-known songs are John Phillip Holland and The Well of Spring Water.

Russell dies in a car accident on February 19, 1994, in Kilcolgan, County Galway, on his way home from a gig just prior to going back into the studio to record another CD.


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Death of Maolra Seoighe, Wrongly Convicted & Hanged

Maolra Seoighe (English: Myles Joyce), is an Irish man who is wrongfully convicted and hanged on December 15, 1882. He is found guilty of the Maumtrasna Murders and is sentenced to death. Though he can only speak Irish, the case is heard in English without any translation service. He is posthumously pardoned in 2018.

Seoighe is the most prominent figure in a controversial trial in 1882 that takes place while Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. Three Irish language speakers are condemned to death for the murder of a local family (John Joyce, his wife Brighid, his mother Mairéad, his daughter Peigí and son Mícheál) in Maumtrasna, on the border between County Mayo and County Galway. It is presumed by the authorities to be a local feud connected to sheep rustling and the Land War. Eight men are convicted on what turns out to be perjured evidence and three of them condemned to death: Maolra Seoighe (a father of five children), Pat Casey and Pat Joyce.

Covering the incident, The Spectator writes the following:

“The Tragedy at Maumtrasna, investigated this week in Dublin, almost unique as it is in the annals of the United Kingdom, brings out in strong relief two facts which Englishmen are too apt to forget. One is the existence in particular districts of Ireland of a class of peasants who are scarcely civilised beings, and approach far nearer to savages than any other white men; and the other is their extraordinary and exceptional gloominess of temper. In remote places of Ireland, especially in Connaught, on a few of the islands, and in one or two mountain districts, dwell cultivators who are in knowledge, in habits, and in the discipline of life no higher than Maories or other Polynesians.”

The court proceedings are carried out in a language the accused do not understand (English), with a solicitor from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), who does not speak Irish. The three are executed in Galway by William Marwood for the crime in 1882. The role of John Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, who is then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, is the most controversial aspect of the trial, leading most modern scholars to characterise it as a miscarriage of justice. Research carried out in The National Archives by Seán Ó Cuirreáin, has found that Spencer “compensated” three alleged eyewitnesses to the sum of £1,250, equivalent to €157,000 (by 2016 rates).

As of 2016, nobody has issued an apology or pardon for the executions, though the case has been periodically taken up by various political figures. The then MP for Westmeath, Timothy Harrington, takes up the case, claiming that the Crown Prosecutor for the case George Bolton, had deliberately withheld evidence from the trial. In 2011, two sitting members of the House of Lords, the Liberal Democrat life peers David Alton and Eric Lubbock, request a review of the case. Crispin Blunt, Tory Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Prisons and Youth Justice, states that Seoighe was “probably an innocent man,” but he does not seek an official pardon.

Seoighe’s final words are: “Feicfidh mé Iosa Críost ar ball beag – crochadh eisean san éagóir chomh maith. … Ara, tá mé ag imeacht … Go bhfóire Dia ar mo bhean agus a cúigear dílleachtaí.” (I will be seeing Jesus Christ soon – he too was also unjustly hanged … I am leaving … the blessings of God on my wife and her five orphans.)

On April 4, 2018, Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, issues a pardon on the advice of the government of Ireland saying “Maolra Seoighe was wrongly convicted of murder and was hanged for a crime that he did not commit”. It is the first presidential pardon relating to an event predating the foundation of the state in 1922 and the second time a pardon has been issued after an execution. Seoighe’s case is not an isolated one, and there are strong similarities with the case of Patrick Walsh who was hanged in the Galway jail on September 22, 1882, just three months before Seoighe for the murders of Martin and John Lydon. The same key players and political factors are active in both cases and his conviction is just as questionable as that of Seoighe.

In September 2009, the story is featured on RTÉ‘s CSI programme under an episode entitled CSI Maamtrasna Massacre. A dramatised Irish language film regarding the affair, entitled Murdair Mhám Trasna, produced by Ciarán Ó Cofaigh is released in 2017.


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Birth of George Noble Plunkett, Scholar & Revolutionary

George Noble Plunkett, scholar and revolutionary, is born on December 3, 1851, at 1 Aungier Street, Dublin, the youngest and only survivor from infancy of the three children of Patrick Joseph Plunkett (1817–1918), builder and politician, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Noble). The Plunketts are Catholic, claiming collateral descent from Archbishop of Armagh Oliver Plunkett, and nationalist: the two drummers from the republican army at Vinegar Hill in 1798 visit George’s cradle.

Plunkett is educated expensively: at a primary school in Nice, making him fluent in French and Italian, then at Clongowes Wood College, and, from 1872, at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where his generous allowance allows him to study renaissance and medieval art. He enrolls at King’s Inns in 1870 and the Middle Temple in 1874, but is not called to the bar until 1886. While there he befriends Oscar Wilde and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. In 1877, he endows a university gold medal for Irish speakers and publishes a book of poems, God’s Chosen Festival, and the following year he issues a pamphlet, The Early Life of Henry Grattan. He also writes articles for magazines, editing a short-lived one, Hibernia, for eighteen months from 1882. In 1883, he donates funds and property to the nursing order of the Little Company of Mary (Blue Sisters), and on April 4, 1884, Pope Leo XIII makes him a count.

On June 26, 1884, Plunkett marries Mary Josephine Cranny (1858–1944). The couple has seven children: Philomena (Mimi) (b. 1886), Joseph (b. 1887), Mary Josephine (Moya) (b. 1889), Geraldine (b. 1891), George Oliver (b. 1894), Fiona (b. 1896), and Eoin (Jack) (b. 1897).

Plunkett surprises many in 1890 by declaring for Charles Stewart Parnell against the Catholic hierarchy. In the 1892 United Kingdom general election in Ireland he is a Parnellite candidate for Mid Tyrone but withdraws from a potential three-cornered fight lest he let in the unionist. He is sole nationalist candidate for Dublin St. Stephen’s Green in the 1895 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, and at an 1898 by-election there he cuts the unionist majority to 138 votes. The reunited Irish Party wins the seat in 1900.

In 1894, Plunkett part-edits Charles O’Kelly‘s memoir The Jacobite War in Ireland. By 1900, when he publishes the standard biography Sandro Botticelli, he is supplementing his income by renewed artistic studies, which until 1923 finances his lease of Kilternan Abbey, County Dublin. His Pinelli (1908) is followed by Architecture of Dublin, and, in 1911, by his revised edition of Margaret McNair Stokes‘s Early Christian Art in Ireland. In 1907, he becomes director of the National Museum of Ireland, where he increases annual visits from 100 to 3,000.

Joseph Plunkett swears his father into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in April 1916, sending him secretly to seek German aid and a papal blessing for the projected Easter rising. After its defeat, Plunkett is sacked by the National Museum of Ireland and deported with the countess to Oxford, and the following January he is expelled by the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). This earns him nomination as the surviving rebels’ candidate in the North Roscommon by-election. He returns to Ireland illegally on January 31, 1917, and wins the seat easily three days later. Pledging abstention from attendance at Westminster in accordance with Sinn Féin policy, he initiates a Republican Liberty League, which coalesces with similar groups such as Sinn Féin. In October this front becomes the new Sinn Féin, committed to Plunkett’s republic rather than to the “king, lords and commons“ of Arthur Griffith. Plunkett and Griffith become the new party’s vice-presidents, under Éamon de Valera.

On May 18, 1918, Plunkett is interned again. Released after Sinn Féin’s general election landslide (in which he is returned unopposed), he presides, Sinn Féin’s oldest MP, at the planning meeting for Dáil Éireann on January 17, 1919, and at its opening session on January 21. On the 22nd he is made foreign affairs minister by Cathal Brugha, an appointment reaffirmed by de Valera on April 10. He criticises his president for advocating a continuing Irish external relationship with Britain, and fails to organise an Irish foreign service. In February 1921, de Valera makes Robert Brennan his departmental secretary and a ministry takes shape, while Plunkett publishes a book of poems, Ariel. After uncontested “southern Irish“ elections to the Second Dáil, de Valera moves his implacable foreign minister from the cabinet to a tailor-made portfolio of fine arts. Plunkett’s Dante sexcentenary commemoration is overshadowed by news of the Anglo–Irish Treaty. Opposing this, Plunkett cites his oath to the republic and its martyrs including his son. He leaves his ministry on January 9, 1922.

Plunkett chairs the anti-treaty Cumann na Poblachta, which loses the June general election, though he is returned again unopposed. In the Irish Civil War the treatyites intern him and the republicans appoint him to their council of state. In the August 1923 Irish general election, his first electoral contest since 1917, the interned count tops the poll in County Roscommon. He is released in December.

When de Valera forms Fianna Fáil in 1926, Plunkett stays with Sinn Féin, and loses his deposit in the June 1927 Irish general election. A year later he publishes his last poetry collection, Eros. He runs for a new Cumann Poblachta na hÉireann in a County Galway by-election in 1936, but loses his deposit again. On December 8, 1938, with the other six surviving abstentionist Second Dáil TDs, he transfers republican sovereignty to the IRA Army Council.

Plunkett is a big man with a black beard which whitens steadily after his fiftieth birthday. He is always formally pleasant and courteous. His oratory is described by M. J. MacManus as “level, cultured tones . . . [more] used to addressing the members of a learned society than to the rough and tumble of the hustings” (The Irish Press, March 15, 1948). Theoretically and practically, he is more scholar than politician. His portrait is on display at the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI).

Plunkett dies from cancer on March 12, 1948, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, survived by his children Geraldine (wife of Thomas Dillon), Fiona, and Jack. His grandson Joseph (1928–66), son of George Oliver Plunkett, inherits the title.

(From: “Plunkett, Count George Noble” by D. R. O’Connor Lysaght, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Irish Sculptor Albert Power

Albert George Power, Irish sculptor in the academic realist style, is born at 8 Barrack Street (now Benburb Street) in Dublin on November 16, 1881. He is particularly known for his iconic statue of the Irish writer Pádraic Ó Conaire.

Power is born to Henry Power, a watchmaker, and Mary (née Atkins), an embroideress. He has one older brother, and one younger sister. He attends a Christian Brothers national school in North Brunswick Street. As a child he plays in local clay brickyards and sculpts busts of his friends. After finishing his primary school education, he trains with a firm of sculptors run by Edward Smyth. In 1884, he enrolls as an evening pupil at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (DMSA), later attending as a full-time student from 1906 to 1911. During his time at the DMSA he is taught and strongly influenced by John Hughes, Oliver Sheppard and William Orpen. He wins a number of prizes during his time at the DMSA, including medals, three scholarships, book prizes, and the national gold medal for the best modeling of a nude figure, in Ireland, Scotland, and the Channel Islands in 1911.

Power marries Agnes Kelly in 1903. The couple has ten children, four daughters and six sons, including May and James who also become sculptors.

Power establishes his own stone-carving business in 1912 from his new home at 18 Geraldine Street, Phibsborough, Dublin. As the firm grows, it moves to premises nearby at 15 Berkeley Street from 1930. He executes a wide range of works, including monuments and architectural features in bronze, marble, and stone. Among his notable works are the figure of “Science” designed by Sheppard from the façade of the new Royal College of Science for Ireland (later Government Buildings) on Merrion Street, Dublin, carved motifs and sphinxes for the Gresham Hotel, O’Connell Street, and four statues on the dome of Christ the King church, Carndonagh, County Donegal.

Power is considered the leading Irish sculptor of the 1920s and 1930s. He is a nationalist and promotes the use of Irish materials such as limestone from Durrow and Connemara marble. He is noted for his academic realist style. He exhibits regularly with the Royal Hibernian Academy from 1906, becoming an associate member in 1911, and a full member in 1919. Among those he models sculptures for are James Stephens (1913), W. B. Yeats (1918), and Lord Dunsany (1920). Among his patrons are Oliver St. John Gogarty, and through Gogarty he is commissioned to model a number of prominent Irish nationalists. Gogarty asks him to carve a portrait of Terence MacSwiney in 1920, while MacSwiney is on hunger strike in HM Prison Brixton, London. Smuggled into the prison to do a thumbnail sketch, Power then carves a portrait in the form of a life mask.

On Gogarty’s recommendation, Power is commissioned by the Irish Free State government to create portraits of a number of leading politicians including Arthur Griffith (1922), Michael Collins (1936), and Austin Stack (1939). He is also privately commissioned to execute a portrait of Éamon de Valera in 1944. Among his monumental works are sculptures of Tom Kettle (1919) at St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin, Christ the King in Gort, County Galway, (1933), Pádraic Ó Conaire (1935) at Eyre Square, Galway, and W. B. Yeats (1939) at Sandymount Green, Dublin. He is one of the artists invited to submit designs for the new coinage of the Irish Free State in 1928.

Power dies in Dublin on July 10, 1945, following complications from a double hernia. His is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.


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Birth of Helena Concannon, Historian, Writer & Politician

Helena Concannon (née Walsh), Irish historian, writer, language scholar and Fianna Fáil politician, is born in Maghera, County Londonderry, on October 28, 1878.

Concannon is educated by the Loreto nuns in Coleraine, County Londonderry. In 1897, she studies modern languages at the Royal University of Ireland on a three-year scholarship. She studies abroad during these years as in 1899, she travels to Germany and studies German in Berlin University accompanied by her friend, Mary Macken. She then travels to France to study French at Sorbonne University. In 1900, she graduates Bachelor of Arts with first class honours and goes on to study Master of Arts in 1902 at the Royal University of Ireland. She is fortunate to being one of the first generation of educated women.

In 1906, Concannon marries Tomás Bán Ó Conceanainn, who she met in 1900 when he arrived home from the United States. They settle down in County Galway where they share the same love for the Irish language and write many Irish texts. They have no children. In Galway, she is a professor at University College Galway where she teaches history, which mainly involves the history of Irish women. In 1909, she is offered a lectureship at University College Dublin, in Italian, but the offer is then withdrawn before she can accept it, so she decides to pursue a writing career.

Concannon produces over twenty books, including works on religion, the history of Ireland and Irish women’s history. Her works are highly impacted by her political and nationalist views. Her analyses of Irish history is based on Catholicism and patriotism. She is also an advocate of Irish language restoration. Her first writings are love poems to her husband. These poems are ”simple, sensuous and passionate.”

Concannon also produces a number of imaginative historical text for children. She uses her married name for her publications and her first book, entitled A Garden of girls, or the famous schoolgirls of former days, is published in 1914. It is about “school life and education of real little girls” Her next well known piece is the Life of St. Columban in 1915, which is a study about the Irish ancient monastic life and a biography of a sixth-century saint.

Two of Concannon’s books, Daughters of Banba (1922) and St. Patrick (1932), receive the Tailteann Medal for Literature, and The Poor Clares in Ireland (1929) wins the National University Prize, a D.Litt. higher doctorate degree for historical research.

Concannon’s most common publication, Women of ‘Ninety Eight, is dedicated to all the dead women and all the living ones who have given their loved ones. This book emerges on the ideologies of Catholicism and patriotism “praising the devotion of Irish nationalist women while emphasising the centrality of women’s spiritual and domestic role in the home to the well-being of the nation.” As this work is written during the time of the Irish War of Independence, she stresses the importance of women help during the rebellion as “they acted as messengers and intelligence officers,” and in some cases, they fought as any men.

Concannon was elected to the 8th Dáil for Fianna Fáil at the 1933 Irish general election for the National University of Ireland constituency, serving from February 8, 1933 until June 14, 1937.

Concerning the Land Purchase (Guarantee Fund) Bill 1935, which according to George Cecil Bennett will negatively impact the rural middle class of which he is a representative, Bennett accuses Concannon and her fellow Dublin men of not caring about the people of the country. Concannon goes on to vote that the Dáil should disagree with the Seanad Éireann-proposed bill with 71 others.

Though Concannon is a TD as a university representative, she votes with her party to remove university representation from the Dáil, leading one TD to say, “I am very much surprised to see such a distinguished scholar and such a great contributor to Irish literature as Deputy Mrs. Concannon voting for the disfranchisement of the University that she has so well and so ably represented.”

Concannon speaks on behalf of Irish women in the Dáil in 1936. She speaks on how Irish women play a fundamental role in Ireland’s agricultural economy and therefore more money should be put toward educating these women.

Concannon is one of the minority voices against the role appointed to women in Éamon de Valera‘s constitution. She does not contest the Dáil election of 1937.

After the adoption of the Constitution of Ireland in 1937, the National University of Ireland constituency is reconstituted in the new Seanad Éireann. The first election takes place in 1938, and Concannon is elected. She is a popular figure and is re-elected each election in the Seanad until she dies in office on February 27, 1952.


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Death of Séamus Ennis, Musician, Singer & Music Collector

Séamus Ennis (Irish: Séamas Mac Aonghusa), Irish musician, singer and Irish music collector, dies in Naul, County Dublin, on October 5, 1982. He is most noted for his uilleann pipe playing and is partly responsible for the revival of the instrument during the twentieth century, having co-founded Na Píobairí Uilleann, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to the promotion of the uilleann pipes and its music. He is recognised for preserving almost 2,000 Irish songs and dance-tunes as part of the work he does with the Irish Folklore Commission. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest uilleann pipers of all time.

Ennis’s father, James, works for the Irish civil service at Naul, County Dublin. In 1908, James Ennis is in a pawn shop in London and purchases a bag containing the pieces of a set of old uilleann pipes. They were made in the mid nineteenth century by Coyne Pipemakers of Thomas Street in Dublin. In 1912, he comes in first in the Oireachtas competition for warpipes and second in the uilleann pipes. He is also a prize-winning dancer. In 1916, he marries Mary Josephine McCabe, an accomplished fiddle player from County Monaghan. They have six children, Angela, Séamus, Barbara, and twins, Cormac and Ursula (Pixie) and Desmond. Séamus is born on May 5, 1919, in Jamestown in Finglas, Dublin. James Ennis is a member of the Fingal trio, which includes Frank O’Higgins on fiddle and John Cawley on flute, and performs regularly with them on the radio. At the age of thirteen, Séamus starts receiving lessons on the pipes from his father. He attends a Gaelscoil, Cholmcille, and a Gaelcholáiste, Coláiste Mhuire, which gives him a knowledge of the Irish language that serves him well in later life. He sits in an exam to become Employment Exchange clerk but is too far down the list to be offered a job. He is twenty and unemployed.

Colm Ó Lochlainn is editor of Irish Street Ballads and a friend of the Ennis family. In 1938, Ennis confides in Colm that he intends to move to England to join the British Army. Colm immediately offers him a job at The Three Candles Press. There Ennis learns all aspects of the printing trade. This includes writing down slow airs for printed scores – a skill which later proves important. Colm is director of an Irish language choir, An Claisceadal, which Ennis joins. In 1942, during The Emergency, shortages and rationing mean that things become difficult in the printing trade. Professor Seamus Ó Duilearge of the Irish Folklore Commission hires the 23-year-old to collect songs. He is given “pen, paper and pushbike” and a salary of three pounds per week. Off he goes to Connemara.

From 1942 to 1947, working for the Irish Folklore Commission, Ennis collects songs in west Munster; counties Galway, Cavan, Mayo, Donegal, Kerry; the Aran Islands and the Scottish Hebrides. His knowledge of Scottish Gaelic enables him to transcribe much of the John Lorne Campbell collection of songs. Elizabeth Cronin of Ballyvourney, County Cork, is so keen to chat to Ennis on his visits that she writes down her own songs and hands them over as he arrives, and then gets down to conversation. He has a natural empathy with the musicians and singers he meets. In August 1947, he starts work as an outside broadcast officer with Raidió Éireann. He is a presenter and records Willie Clancy, Seán Reid and Micho Russell for the first time. There is an air of authority in his voice. In 1951, Alan Lomax and Jean Ritchie arrived from the United States to record Irish songs and tunes. The tables are turned as Ennis becomes the subject of someone else’s collection. There is a photograph from 1952/53 showing Ritchie huddled over the tape recorder while Ennis plays uilleann pipes.

Late in 1951, Ennis joins the BBC. He moves to London to work with producer Brian George. In 1952, he marries Margaret Glynn. They have two children, the organist Catherine Ennis and Christopher. His job is to record the traditional music of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and to present it on the BBC Home Service. The programme is called As I Roved Out and runs until 1958. Meeting up with Alan Lomax again, he is largely responsible for the album Folk and Primitive Music (volume on Ireland) on the Columbia Records label.

In 1958, after his contract with the BBC is not renewed, Ennis starts doing freelance work, first in England then back in Ireland, with the new TV station Teilifis Éireann. Soon he is relying totally on his musical ability to make a living. About this time, his marriage breaks down and he returns to Ireland. He suffers from tuberculosis and is ill for some time. In 1964, he performs at the Newport Folk Festival. His father gives him the pipes he had bought in 1908. Although most pipers can be classed as playing in a tight style or an open style, Ennis is in between. He is a master of the slow air, knowing how to decorate long notes with taste and discreet variation.

Two events will live in legend among pipers. The first is in Bettystown, County Meath, in 1968, when the society of Irish pipers, Na Píobairí Uilleann, is formed. Breandán Breathnach is playing a tape of his own piping. Ennis asks, “What year?” Breandán replies, “1948.” Ennis says, “So I thought.” For a couple of hours the younger players perform while Ennis sits in silence. Eventually he is asked to play. Slowly he takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. He spends 20 minutes tuning up his 130-year-old pipes. He then asks the gathering whether all the tape recorders are ready and proceeds to play for over an hour. To everyone’s astonishment he then offers his precious pipes to Willie Clancy to play a set. Clancy demurs but eventually gives in. Next, Liam O’Flynn is asked to play them, and so on, round the room. The second unforgettable session is in Dowlings’ Pub in Prosperous, County Kildare. Christy Moore is there, as well as most of the future members of Planxty.

Ennis never runs any school of piping but his enthusiasm infuses everyone he meets. In the early 1970s, he shares a house with Liam O’Flynn for almost three years. Finally, he purchases a piece of land in Naul and lives in a mobile home there. One of his last performances is at the Willie Clancy Summer School in 1982. He dies on October 5, 1982. His pipes are bequeathed to Liam O’Flynn. Radio producer Peter Browne produces a compilation of his performances, called The Return from Fingal, spanning 40 years.

Séamus Ennis Road in his native Finglas is named in his honour. The Séamus Ennis Arts Centre in Naul is opened in his honour, to commemorate his work and to promote the traditional arts. He is also the subject of Christy Moore’s song “The Easter Snow.” This is the title of a slow air Ennis used to play, and one after which he named his final home in Naul.