Grey had landed in Ireland with reinforcements from England to put down the rebellion. His strategy is to meet O’Byrne’s threat to the English heartland of Dublin and the Pale by attacking through the highlands to the south of the city. Against the advice of veteran commanders, he chooses to lead his army (around 3,000 strong) through lowland Kildare and into the Wicklow Mountains, with the aim of taking the fastness at Balinacor in the Glenmalure Valley.
While climbing the steep slopes of the valley, the inexperienced English soldiers are ambushed by the Irish who were hiding in the woods. The English are sniped at for a long period of time before their discipline collapses and they turn and flee down the valley. It is at this point that most of their casualties occur, as the Irish leave their cover and fall upon the English with swords, spears, and axes. Hundreds of English soldiers are cut down by the pursuing Irish as they try to escape the field. The remaining English have to fight a rearguard action for several miles until they reach the town of Rathdrum.
Irish sources state that around 800 English soldiers are killed, though the English put their losses at 360 dead. Among those killed is Peter Carew, cousin of his namesake colonist who had made claims to, and won, large tracts of land in southern Ireland. The remainder of the English force retreat to lowland Wicklow and from there to Dublin. However, the following year, when offered terms, most of the Irish soldiers, including O’Byrne, come in and surrender. The exception is Baltinglass, who flees to France.
O’Shannon first becomes a journalist with The Irish Times on leaving the RAF in 1947. Later he joins the Irish state broadcasting service Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ).
In July 1972 O’Shannon records a notable television interview with 31-year-old Muhammad Ali, when Ali is in Dublin to compete at Croke Park in a bout with Alvin Lewis.
O’Shannon receives a Jacob’s Award for his 1976 TV documentary, Even the Olives are Bleeding, which details the activities of the “Connolly Column” in the Spanish Civil War. Two years later he is honoured with a second Jacob’s Award for his television biography Emmet Dalton Remembers (1978).
In 1978, O’Shannon leaves RTÉ to join Canadian company Alcan, which is setting up an aluminum plant at Aughinish, County Limerick, in 1978. He is head-hunted to become its Director of Public Affairs, an important post at a time when there are environmental concerns about the effects of aluminium production. He admits that he was attracted by the salary, “five times what RTÉ were paying me,” but he also later says that one of the reasons for the move is that he had become unhappy with working at RTÉ, stating in an interview that “The real reason I got out of RTÉ was that they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do journalistically.” He had submitted proposals to the station’s editors for a television documentary series on the Irish Civil War, and also one on the wartime Emergency period, but they had been rejected. While he enjoys the social life with lavish expenses which his public relations duties involve, his friends believe that he missed the varied life and travel of journalism. He retires early from Aughinish in 1992 and returns to making television documentaries with RTÉ.
O’Shannon announces his retirement at the age of 80 on January 12, 2007.
O’Shannon is awarded lifetime membership in the Irish Film & Television Academy in 2010, to which he says is “particularly gratifying that it occurs before I pop my clogs.”
After weakening health for two years, and spending his last days in hospice at Blackrock, O’Shannon dies at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin on October 22, 2011. His body is reposed at Fanagans Funeral Home in Dublin on October 25, 2011, followed by a funeral the following day at Glasnevin Cemetery Chapel, where it is afterwards cremated.
O’Shannon’s wife, Patsy, whom he met while they were working for The Irish Times office in London, dies in 2006. They are married for more than 50 years. In a 2008 television documentary O’Shannon admits that throughout his marriage he had been a serial womaniser, who had repeatedly engaged in extra-marital affairs unbeknownst to his wife.
Director-General of RTÉNoel Curran says O’Shannon had brought into being “some of the great moments in the RTÉ documentary and factual schedule over the past five decades.” In tribute, RTÉ One shows the documentary Cathal O’Shannon: Telling Tales on November 10, 2011. It had originally aired in 2008 to mark his 80th birthday.
Lawless’s grandfather is Valentine Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry, a member of the Society of United Irishmen and son of a convert from Catholicism to the Church of Ireland. Her father is Edward Lawless, 3rd Baron Cloncurry, thus giving her the title of “The Honourable.” In contrast, her brother Edward Lawless is a landowner with strong Unionist opinions, a policy of not employing Roman Catholics in any position in his household, and chairman of the Property Defence Association set up in 1880 to oppose the Irish National Land League and “uphold the rights of property against organised combination to defraud.” The prominent Anglo-Irish unionist and later nationalist, Home Rule politician Horace Plunkett is a cousin. Lord Castletown, Bernard FitzPatrick, 2nd Baron Castletown is also a cousin. It is widely believed that she is a lesbian and that Lady Sarah Spencer, dedicatee of A Garden Diary (1901) is her lover.
Lawless spends part of her childhood with the Kirwans of Castle Hackett, County Galway, her mother’s family, and draws on West of Ireland themes for many of her works. She occasionally writes under the pen name “Edith Lytton.”
Lawless writes nineteen works of fiction, biography, history, nature studies and poetry, many of which are widely read at the time. She is most famous today for her Wild Geese poems (1902).
Some critics identify a theme of noble landlord and noble peasant in her fourth book, Hurrish, a Land War story set in The Burren of County Clare which is read by William Ewart Gladstone and said to have influenced his policy. It deals with the theme of Irish hostility to English law. In the course of the book a landlord is assassinated, and Hurrish’s mother, Bridget, refuses to identify the murderer, a dull-witted brutal neighbour. The book is criticised by Irish-Ireland journals for its “grossly exaggerated violence,” it’s embarrassing dialect, staid characters.
Her reputation is damaged by William Butler Yeats who accuses her in a critique of having “an imperfect sympathy with the Celtic nature” and for adopting “theory invented by political journalists and forensic historians.” Despite this, Yeats includes her novels With Essex in Ireland (1890) and Maelcho (1894) in his list of the best Irish novels.
A keen fan of all competitive sport, Coveney plays rugby for Garryowen, Cork Constitution and Crosshaven Rugby Club. In 1997-98, he leads the “Sail Chernobyl Project” which involves sailing a boat 30,000 miles around the world and raising €650,000 for charity. He is a qualified sailing instructor and lifeguard. He spends several years working as an agriculture adviser and farm manager.
Coveney is first elected to Dáil Éireann in a 1998 by-election as a Fine Gael candidate for Cork South-Central. He holds Shadow Ministries in the areas of Drugs and Youth Affairs, Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, and Transport. He chairs the Fine Gael Policy Development Committee prior to the 2011 Irish general election.
Coveney is a member of Cork County Council and the Southern Health Board from 1999 to 2003.
Coveney is elected to the European Parliament in 2004 and is a member of the EPP-ED group. He is a member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee. He is the author of the European Parliament’s Annual Report on Human Rights in the World for the year 2004 and again for 2006.
Coveney is named Tánaiste by Leo Varadkar, replacing Frances Fitzgerald, on November 30, 2017, a position he holds until June 27, 2020. He also serves as Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government as well as Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine. For the six-month period ending June 2013, he chairs the EU Council of Agriculture & Fisheries Ministers where he is at the forefront regarding EU efforts in respect of Common Agricultural (CAP) as well as Common Fisheries (CFP) Policy reforms. Under his chairmanship both dossiers are progressed significantly, with a reform package for CFP agreed in May 2013 and a reform package for CAP agreed at the end of the Irish Presidency in July. The Defence portfolio is added to his brief on July 11, 2014.
In July 2008, Simon marries his long-time girlfriend Ruth Furney, an IDA Ireland employee. They have three daughters and currently live in Carrigaline, County Cork.
The Society of United Irishmen having failed to advance its aims of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform by political means, instigate a rebellion against British rule. The rebellion begins on the morning of May 24, 1798, but the only significant uprisings outside of the province of Ulster occur in counties Wicklow and Wexford, both south of County Dublin. The rebels are met with a swift response from British forces and the bulk of the rebellion is suppressed within a year.
By the morning of the May 25, news of the long-expected outbreak of the 1798 rebellion in neighbouring County Kildare and of military losses in the battles of Ballymore-Eustace, Naas, and Prosperous have reached the garrison in Carnew, who decide to take preventative measures by assembling the rebel suspects in detention. The suspects are marched from Carnew Castle to the local Gaelic handball alley and executed by firing squad as a warning to the local populace.
News of the summary executions, together with news of the similar massacre at Dunlavin, spread throughout County Wicklow and across the border into County Wexford, giving substance to the rumours of widespread killing already prevalent. On June 7, the town is burned and sacked in a revenge raid by Wexford rebels, led by Anthony Perry.
Boylan is born in Dublin on April 21, 1948, the youngest of three daughters of Patrick Boylan, a clerk, and his wife Evelyn (née Selby). Her mother feels trapped by the limitations that domesticity imposes on women in 1950s Ireland, and had wanted to have a writing career. She encourages her daughter to send off stories and poems to newspapers. The first piece is published when she is 14, and she wins a prize in the national Texaco Children’s Art Competition when she is about 10 years old.
The family lives in the Dublin suburb of Terenure. Boylan goes to school in the Presentation convent, then St. Louis convent in Rathmines, and does her leaving certificate in Rathmines College.
After leaving St. Louis convent, Boylan takes a job as a sales assistant in a bookshop before beginning her career as a journalist at The Irish Press, now defunct. She marries Alan Wilkes, a journalist who is a colleague at The Irish Press, in St. Patrick’s Church in Straffan, County Kildare, on September 18, 1970. In 1974 she wins the Journalist of the Year award when working in the city for the Evening Press. Later in her career she edits the glossy magazine Image, before largely giving up journalism to focus on a career as an author.
Boylan’s novels are Holy Pictures (1983), Last Resorts (1984), Black Baby (1988), Home Rule (1992), Beloved Stranger (1999), Room for a Single Lady (1997), which wins the Spirit of Light Award and is optioned for a film, and Emma Brown (2003). The latter work is a continuation of a 20-page fragment written by Charlotte Brontë before her death.
Boylan’s short stories are collected in A Nail on the Head (1983), Concerning Virgins (1990) and That Bad Woman (1995). The film Making Waves, based on her short story “Some Ladies on a Tour”, is nominated for an Oscar in 1988.
Boylan’s non-fiction includes The Agony and the Ego (1994) and The Literary Companion to Cats (1994). She writes introductions to the novels of Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane and adapts Keane’s novel Good Behaviour as the classic serial for BBC Radio 4 (2004). Her work has been translated as far afield as Russia and Hong Kong.
In later life, Boylan lives in County Wicklow with her husband. When she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she faces her illness with characteristic strength. She takes up kickboxing and spends time in France, shopping, cooking and entertaining friends. She succumbs to cancer at the age of 58 on May 16, 2006.
Rolleston is the youngest child among three sons and a daughter of Charles Rolleston-Spunner, barrister and county court judge for Tipperary, and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of John Richards, judge and baron of the Court of Exchequer, Ireland. He attends St. Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, where he is head boy, and Trinity College Dublin (TCD), graduating with an MA in 1878. His literary ambitions first emerge at university, where he wins the vice-chancellor’s prize for English verse in 1876.
In 1879 Rolleston marries Edith Caroline, daughter of Rev. William de Burgh of Naas, County Kildare. She suffers from rheumatism, and this encourages the couple to live in Germany from 1879 to 1883. During this period, he develops a fascination for German philosophy and literature and begins a correspondence with the American poet Walt Whitman, whose work he knows through Edward Dowden. In 1881 he offers to translate into German, with S. K. Knortz, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This is published as Grashalme in 1889. In that year he also publishes a biography of the German philosopher Gotthold Lessing, and in 1892 delivers the Taylorian Lectures at the University of Oxford on this subject.
In the meantime, Rolleston has returned to Ireland and co-founds the Dublin University Review (DUR) with Charles Hubert Oldham in February 1885. In March 1885, under their stewardship the DUR is the first to publish W. B. Yeats. The poetry of Katharine Tynan and the first English translations of Ivan Turgenev also appear in the magazine. He has a fondness for clubs and at this time is associated with the Contemporary Club, where he becomes friendly with fellow member Douglas Hyde, and the Young Ireland Society, where he is vice-president and a disciple of John O’Leary. He writes the dedication to O’Leary in Poems and ballads of Young Ireland (1888) and is encouraged by the older man in his editing of The prose writing of Thomas Davis (1890). Under O’Leary’s influence he flirts with Fenianism, perhaps even joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) for a time and is strongly critical of the prominent involvement of Catholic clergy in the home rule movement.
After the demise of the DUR in December 1886 Rolleston moves to London but remains involved in Irish literary activity. Although unenthusiastic in his assessment of The Wanderings of Oisín (1889), he is friendly with Yeats, and they instigate the Rhymers’ Club (1890). He is a much better critic and organiser than poet but contributes to The Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1892) and The Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club (1894). His work appears in a number of contemporary journals and anthologies, and he has one collection published, Sea Spray (1909).
Rolleston is first secretary of the Irish Literary Society (1892) and attends the foundation of its sister organisation in Dublin, the National Literary Society. These societies are soon riven by a dispute for control between Yeats and Charles Gavan Duffy, centred on the political and literary agenda of the movement. Rolleston at least acquiesces in, if not actively contributes to, Yeats’s defeat. They remain on reasonable terms, but Yeats is resentful. Rolleston edits the famous anthology, Treasury of Irish Poetry (1900), with the Rev. Stopford Augustus Brooke, whose daughter, Maud, he had married in October 1897. They have four children. His first marriage also produces four children, and he is godfather to Robert Graves, whose father, Alfred Perceval Graves, is a friend.
In 1894 Rolleston returns to Dublin, becoming managing director and secretary of the Irish Industries Association (1894–7) and honorary secretary of the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland (1898–1908). A central figure in the latter as an organiser, propagandist, and critic rather than a practitioner, lecturing regularly and editing the journal of the society, he seeks to integrate the arts and crafts revival with other contemporary developments, cooperating with the Congested Districts Board for Ireland to organise classes. He is a supporter of the co-operative movement of Horace Plunkett, and a member of the Recess Committee. On the foundation of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI), he is employed by Plunkett and T. P. Gill as organiser of lectures (1900–05). In this capacity he manages the Irish historic collection at the St. Louis exhibition of 1904 and publicly supports Plunkett in his dispute with the DATI in 1908. Convinced that the development of Irish industry is central to national progress, he believes that the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) failed to offer a clear practical programme for Irish nationalism. By 1900, however, his own nationalism is tempered by a belief in the importance of the imperial connection, and he opposes the pro-Boer stance taken by many Irish nationalists. In later years he publishes pamphlets urging economic development as a means of quelling Irish demands for home rule.
Rolleston is a sporadic member of the Gaelic League, writing the lyrics for the ‘Deirdre cantata,’ which wins first prize at the first Feis Ceoil in Dublin in 1897. At one point he suggests the foundation of a separate Gaelic League for Protestants and provokes controversy in 1896 by suggesting that scientific ideas cannot be represented in the Irish language. Later, he concedes that he is wrong. In 1909 he settles in London when offered the job of editor of the German language and literature section of The Times Literary Supplement, a position he holds until his death. He reinvolves himself in the Irish Literary Society and publishes a number of volumes based on Irish myth, including the influential Myths and Legends of the Celtic Race (1911), and Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen. He is a founder of the India Society of London (1910). During the World War I he is librarian for the ministry of information and utilises his knowledge of Irish in the Obscure Languages section of the censor’s department.
Like many involved in cultural activities at this time Rolleston is satirised by George Moore in Hail and Farewell, but he remains very friendly with Moore, who dedicates the 1920 edition of Esther Waters to him. Rolleston dies suddenly on December 5, 1920, at his home in Hampstead, London. His widow donates many of his books to Cork Public Library.
(From: “Rolleston, Thomas William Hazen (T. W.)” contributed by William Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)
Keane is born Mary Nesta Skrine on July 20, 1904 in Ryston Cottage, Newbridge, County Kildare. Her mother is a poet who writes under the pseudonym Moira O’Neill. Her father is a fanatic for horses and hunting. She grows up at Ballyrankin House on the banks of the River Slaney, a few miles southeast of Bunclody, County Wexford and refuses to go to boarding school in England as her siblings had done. She is educated by her mother, governesses, and at a boarding school in Bray, County Wicklow. Relationships between her and her parents are cold and she states that she had no fun in her life as a child. Her own passion for hunting and horses is born out of her need for fun and enjoyment. Reading does not feature much in her family, and, although her mother writes poetry, it is of a sentimental nature, “suitable to a woman of her class.”
Keane claims she had never set out to be a writer, but at seventeen she is bed bound due to suspected tuberculosis, and turns to writing out of sheer boredom. It is then she writes her first book, The Knight of Cheerful Countenance, which is published by Mills & Boon. She writes under the pseudonym “M. J. Farrell,” a name over a pub that she had seen on her return from hunting. She explains writing anonymously because “for a woman to read a book, let alone write one was viewed with alarm: I would have been banned from every respectable house in County Carlow.”
In her teenage years Keane spends much of her time in the Perry household in Woodruff, County Tipperary. Here she befriends the two children of the house, Sylvia and John Perry. She later collaborates with John in writing a number of plays. Among them is Spring Meeting, directed by John Gielgud in 1938, and one of the hits of the West End that year. She and Gielgud become life long friends.
It is through the Perry family that Keane meets Bobby Keane, whom she marries in 1938. He belongs to a Waterford squirearchical family, the Keane baronets. The couple goes on to have two daughters, Sally and Virginia.
Keane loves Jane Austen, and like Austen’s, her ability lay in her talent for creating characters. This, with her wit and astute sense of what lay beneath the surface of people’s actions, enables her to depict the world of the big houses of Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. She “captured her class in all its vicious snobbery and genteel racism.” She uses her married name for her later novels, several of which (including Good Behaviour and Time After Time) have been adapted for television. Between 1928 and 1956, she writes eleven novels, and some of her earlier plays, under the pseudonym “M. J. Farrell.” She is a member of Aosdána.
Keane’s husband dies suddenly in 1946, and, following the failure of a play, she publishes nothing for twenty years. In 1981 Good Behaviour comes out under her own name. The manuscript, which had languished in a drawer for many years, is loaned to a visitor, the actress Peggy Ashcroft, who encourages Keane to publish it. The novel is warmly received and is short-listed for the Booker Prize.
Following the death of her husband, Keane moves to Ardmore, County Waterford, a place she knows well, and lives there with her two daughters. She dies on April 22, 1996 in her Cliffside home in Ardmore at the age of 91. She is buried beside the Church of Ireland church, near the centre of the village.
Hopkirk is raised as a Catholic, and educated at Clongowes Wood College in County Kildare from 1945 to 1949 before attending Trinity College, Dublin until 1953. His academic career, however, is held back by his dyslexia. He first learns the basics of car control at the age of nine, when a local clergyman leaves him his invalid carriage in his will. He later graduates to a motorcycle with a sidecar, which is added at the insistence of his father who feels it would be safer, and upon attending Trinity to study engineering, acquires an Austin 7 “Chummy” Tourer which he uses to make his rally debut. Now bitten by the car bug, he drops out of university to start working for Dublin‘s Volkswagen assembler’s retail operation in Ballsbridge, where he purchases a string of used Volkswagen Beetles to enter in competitions.
Hopkirk’s first win comes in 1953 at the Cairncastle hillclimb at the wheel of a VW Beetle. He is offered a free Beetle for the 1953 Circuit of Ireland by Isaac Agnew of Belfast. It is the first of many Circuit entries. The following year he leads the Circuit on the first day of the competition.
Hopkirk starts his winning career in professional racing and rally driving in 1955, taking a class win at that year’s Circuit of Ireland Rally, and clinching his first Hewison Trophy, awarded to the most successful Irish rally driver of the year. He goes on to win the Trophy for three consecutive years. By this time he has graduated to a Triumph TR2. His success in the Triumph is noticed by the Standard Motor Company, who offers him his first factory drive in a Standard Ten at the 1956 RAC Rally in March of that year, where he takes the early lead before suffering problems later on. Two months later he takes a Standard Eight to third place in the Tulip Rally in the Netherlands, his first trip outside of Britain and Ireland. However he loses his drive with Standard in 1958, after overdriving his car at the Alpine Rally in an effort to make up time lost due to a puncture on the Stelvio Pass, damaging the engine and forcing him to retire from the competition.
In 1959 Hopkirk joins the Rootes Group as a works driver, initially picking up a drive in a Hillman Husky at the Safari Rally after reigning F1 World Champion Mike Hawthorn, who is originally meant to drive the car, is killed in a road accident. Later that year he places third overall and takes a class win at the Alpine Rally in a Sunbeam Rapier, and he leads the 1960 Safari Rally until his Rapier suffers a differential failure. He takes two Circuit of Ireland Rally wins in 1961 and 1962 and another third at the Alpine Rally in 1961. While at Rootes he also takes part in circuit racing, winning his class in a Rapier in the touring car race supporting the 1960 British Grand Prix.
Hopkirk finishes third at the 1962 Monte Carlo Rally in a Sunbeam Rapier. However, he becomes frustrated by the Rapier’s lack of reliability, culminating in all three works cars blowing their engines within the space of a kilometre at that year’s Acropolis Rally. After being impressed by a test drive of Pat Moss‘ Austin-Healey 3000, he sets his mind on a move, joining the British Motor Corporation and making his debut in a 3000 at the Liège-Sofia-Liège rally in August. In his second competition with the 3000, the RAC Rally, he finishes in second despite having to complete two miles of a special stage with a shredded tyre after a puncture. He first competes in a Mini at the 1963 Monte Carlo Rally, where he finishes sixth. That season he also finishes second on the Tulip Rally, sixth on Liège-Sofia-Liège, and fourth on the RAC Rally. In addition he takes the Mini to third place in the Tour de France Automobile‘s Touring Category behind two 3.8-litre Jaguars, winning his class and the overall on handicap.
Hopkirk also travels to Australia during his career to drive for the BMC Works Team in the annual Bathurst 500 race for standard production cars at the Mount Panorama Circuit. He drives at Bathurst in a Morris Cooper S from 1965 to 1967, obtaining a best result of 6th outright and 3rd in class in the 1965 Armstrong 500 when paired with Mäkinen. In 1965, he wins a Coupe d’Argent at the Alpine Rally. He wins the 1965 and 1967 Circuit of Ireland Rally, the 1966 and 1967 Alpine Rally, and the 1967 Rally Acropolis.
Hopkirk is elected as a life member of the British Racing Drivers’ Club in 1967, and is also president of the Historic Rally Car Register, and a patron of disability charity WheelPower.
In 1968 Hopkirk finishes second at the second edition of the Rally de Portugal. The following year, he finishes second in the Circuit of Ireland Rally and the RAC Rally, then fourth at the 1970 London to Mexico World Cup Rally with teammates Tom Nash and Neville Johnston in a Triumph 2.5 PI. He elects to step away from full-time competition at the end of that year, coinciding with British Leyland head Lord Stokes‘ decision to close down BL’s competition department.
In 1977, with co-driver Taylor Mike, Hopkirk takes part once again in a revived edition of the London-Sydney Marathon, the Singapore Airlines London to Sydney Rally, this time driving a Citroën CX 2400, taking third place overall in front of another CX driven by Claude Laurent and Jean-Claude Ogier.
In 1982, Hopkirk wins the RAC Golden 50, a historical anniversary race celebrating the 50th RAC Rally, with co-driver Brian Culcheth in the Mini Cooper with which Timo Mäkinen had won the 1965 Monte Carlo Rally. In 1990, he wins the Pirelli Classic Marathon with co-driver Alec Poole. In 1994, he enters the Monte Carlo Rally again, driving a current Mini Cooper, very similar to the original car, but now produced by Rover Group. He and his co-pilot Ron Crellin finish the race in 60th place against much more modern and powerful machines.
In 2010, Hopkirk is among the first four inductees into the Rally Hall of Fame, along with Timo Mäkinen, Rauno Aaltonen and Erik Carlsson.
Myers grows up in England. His father, an Irish GP, dies when he is 15 and away at Ratcliffe College, a Catholicboarding school. His father’s early death creates financial difficulties, though he manages to stay at the school with the help of both the school and the Local Education Authority (LEA). He moves to Ireland to go to university, and graduates from University College Dublin (UCD) in 1969.
Myers subsequently works as a journalist for Irish broadcaster RTÉ, and reports from Northern Ireland during the height of the Troubles. He later works for three of Ireland’s major newspapers, The Irish Times, the Irish Independent, and the Irish edition of The Sunday Times. In 2000, a collection of his An Irishman’s Diary columns is published, with a second volume following in 2007. He is also a presenter of the Challenging Times television quiz show on RTÉ during the 1990s.
In 2001, Myers publishes Banks of Green Willow, a novel, which is met with negative reviews. In 2006, he publishes Watching the Door, about his time as a journalist in Northern Ireland during the 1970s. The book receives positive reviews in The Times, The Guardian, and the New Statesman, while The Independent publishes a more mixed review that wonders whether there is “an element of hyperbole” in Myers’ account.
Myers is a regular contributor to radio programmes on News Talk 106, particularly Lunchtime with Eamon Keane and The Right Hook. He regularly appears on The Last Word on Today FM. He is also a member of the Film Classification Appeals Board, formerly known as the Censorship Board.
In 2005, Myers attracts considerable criticism for his column, An Irishman’s Diary, in which he refers to children of unmarried mothers as “bastards.” Former Minister of StateNuala Fennell describes the column as “particularly sad.” She says the word “bastard” is an example of pejorative language that is totally unacceptable. Myers issues an unconditional apology two days later. The Irish Times editor, Geraldine Kennedy, also apologises for having agreed to publish the article.
In July 2008, Myers writes an article arguing that providing aid to Africa only results in increasing its population, and its problems. This produces strong reactions, with the Immigrant Council of Ireland making an official complaint to the Garda Síochána alleging incitement to hatred. Hans Zomer of Dóchas, an association of NGOs, and another complainant, take a complaint to the Press Council on the grounds that it breaches four principles of the Council’s Code of Practice: accuracy, fairness and honesty, respect for rights, and incitement to hatred.
At the end of July 2017, Myers contributes an article entitled “Sorry, ladies – equal pay has to be earned” to the Irish edition of The Sunday Times about the BBC gender-pay-gap controversy. He further alleges that Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz are higher paid than other female presenters because they are Jewish. The editor of the Irish edition, Frank Fitzgibbon, issues a statement saying in part “This newspaper abhors anti-Semitism and did not intend to cause offence to Jewish people.” Martin Ivens, editor of The Sunday Times, says the article should not have been published. Ivens and Fitzgibbon apologise for publishing it. After complaints from readers and the Campaign Against Antisemitism, the article is removed from the website. The newspaper announces that Myers will not write for The Sunday Times again. Myers is defended by the chair of the Jewish Representative Council of Ireland, Maurice Cohen, who states, “Branding Kevin Myers as either an antisemite or a Holocaust denier is an absolute distortion of the facts.”
Myers is married to Rachel Nolan and lives in County Kildare. He is the brother-in-law of TV presenter, producer and UK Big Brother housemate Anna Nolan.
seamus dubhghaill 