Lady Harriet Kavanagh, Irish artist, traveler, and antiquarian, described as a “woman of high culture and of unusual artistic power,” is born Lady Harriet Margaret Le Poer Trench on October 13, 1799. She is believed to be the first Irish female traveler to Egypt.
Kavanagh is the second daughter of Richard Le Poer Trench and Henrietta Margaret Le Poer Trench (née Staples), with three brothers and three sisters. She marries Thomas Kavanagh of Borris House, County Carlow, on February 28, 1825, as his second wife. The couple has four children, three sons Charles, Thomas, Arthur, and one daughter, Harriet or “Hoddy.”
Kavanagh’s third son, Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, is born without fully formed limbs. Some attribute the disability to a peasant’s curse, while others speculate it is due to Lady Kavanagh taking laudanum during her pregnancy. She refuses to treat her son differently to his siblings, and with the help of local doctor Francis Boxwell, raises him as a normal child. During his initial education, she teaches Arthur herself, teaching him to paint and then write by holding brushes and pens in his mouth. With the help of the surgeon Sir Philip Crampton, she has a mechanical wheelchair constructed for Arthur, and also encourages him to ride horses and engage in other outdoor activities. Her husband dies after twelve years of marriage, in 1837.
In 1846, Kavanagh takes her children to learn French in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, later traveling to Rome. As an antiquarian, she also wants to visit Egypt and the Holy Land, setting off on the long journey from Marseille in October 1846. Accompanying her are her daughter, Harriet, her two sons, Thomas and Arthur, their tutor, the Rev. David Wood, and a maid, Miss Hudson. In Cairo, she hires two feluccas with Arab crews, and visits archaeological sites along the Nile, such as Thebes, Karnak, and the Nubia region. From there, she visits sites of biblical interest, including Tyre, Sidon, and Roda Island. She negotiates with Bedouin chiefs in Aqaba, hiring camels and Bedouin guides to travel to Hebron. She visits harems and a slave market and records the journey’s incidents in her diary, including her son Arthur’s accidental near drowning when he falls off their boat while fishing.
While visiting Jerusalem in Easter 1847, Kavanagh bears witness to a confrontation over the control of holy places between Roman and Orthodox Catholics priests. She goes on to visit Petra, the Sinai Peninsula, Beirut, Smyrna, and Constantinople. The group spends a second winter in Egypt before traveling to the Black Sea before returning to Marseilles in April 1848. Much of these journeys are conducted on horse or camel-back, with one desert crossing taking 36 days. She later comments on her travels as a woman, stating “quite enough danger to make it a very exciting business.”
In 1850 and 1852, Kavanagh travels to Corfu, returning to Borris with samples of Greek lace. She teaches a number of her tenants to copy these designs, which lead to the establishment of a local lace-making industry. She is elected to the Kilkenny Archaeological Society in 1851.
Kavanagh moves to Ballyragget Lodge, County Kilkenny, in 1860, dying there on July 14, 1885. She is buried in St. Mullin’s Abbey, Borris in County Carlow. She documented her travels in journals, with drawings and paintings of the sites she visited. These are held by the Kavanagh family, along with an oil portrait and a self-portrait. Her collection of roughly 300 Egyptian antiquities were donated to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland after her death. These collections were later moved to the National Museum of Ireland and form a core element of the Museum’s Egyptian collection. Copies of two of her watercolours, a self-portrait, and a landscape are on display in the Museum.
In September 1919, the Commander-in-Chief, Ireland, Sir Frederick Shaw, suggests that the police force in Ireland be expanded via the recruitment of a special force of volunteer British ex-servicemen. During a Cabinet meeting on May 11, 1920, the Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill, suggests the formation of a “Special Emergency Gendarmerie, which would become a branch of the Royal Irish Constabulary.” Churchill’s proposal is referred to a committee chaired by General Sir Nevil Macready, Commander-in-Chief of the British forces in Ireland. Macready’s committee rejects Churchill’s proposal, but it is revived two months later, in July, by the Police Adviser to the Dublin Castle administration in Ireland, Major-General Henry Hugh Tudor. In a memo dated July 6, 1920, Tudor justifies the scheme on the grounds that it will take too long to reinforce the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) with ordinary recruits. Tudor’s new “Auxiliary Force” is to be strictly temporary with its members enlisting for a year. Their pay is to be £7 per week (twice what a constable is paid), plus a sergeant’s allowances, and are to be known as “Temporary Cadets.” At that time, one of high unemployment, a London advertisement for ex-officers to manage coffee stalls at two pounds ten shillings a week receives five thousand applicants.
The Auxiliary Division is recruited in Great Britain from among ex-officers who had served in World War I, especially those who had served in the British Army (including the Royal Flying Corps). Most recruits are from Britain, although some are from Ireland, and others come from other parts of the British Empire. Many have been highly decorated in the war and three, James Leach, James Johnson, and George Onions, have been awarded the Victoria Cross (VC). Enlisted men who had been commissioned as officers during the war often find it difficult to adjust to their loss of status and pay in civilian life, and some historians have concluded that the Auxiliary Division recruited large numbers of these “temporary gentlemen.”
Piaras Béaslaí, a former senior member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) who supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty, while paying tribute to the bravery of the Auxiliaries, notes that the force is not composed exclusively of ex-officers but contains “criminal elements,” some of whom robbed people on the streets of Dublin and in their homes.
Recruiting began in July 1920, and by November 1921, the division is 1,900 strong. The Auxiliaries are nominally part of the RIC, but actually operate more or less independently in rural areas. Divided into companies, each about one hundred strong, heavily armed and highly mobile, they operate in ten counties, mostly in the south and west, where IRA activity is greatest. They wear either RIC uniforms or their old army uniforms with appropriate police badges, along with distinctive tam o’ shanter caps. They are commanded by Brigadier-General Frank Percy Crozier.
The elite ex-officer division proves to be much more effective than the Black and Tans especially in the key area of gathering intelligence. Auxiliary companies are intended as mobile striking and raiding forces, and they score some notable successes against the IRA. On November 20, the night before Bloody Sunday, they capture Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, the commandant and vice-commandant of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, and murder them in Dublin Castle. That same night, they catch Liam Pilkington, commandant of the Sligo IRA, in a separate raid. A month later, in December, they catch Ernie O’Malley completely by surprise in County Kilkenny. He is reading in his room when a Temporary Cadet opens the door and walks in. “He was as unexpected as death,” says O’Malley. In his memoirs, the commandant of the Clare IRA, Michael Brennan, describes how the Auxiliaries nearly capture him three nights in a row.
IRA commanders become concerned about the morale of their units as to many Volunteers the Auxiliaries seem to be “super fighters and all but invincible.” Those victories which are won over the Auxiliaries are among the most celebrated in the Irish War of Independence. On November 28, 1920, for example, a platoon of Auxiliaries is ambushed and wiped out in the Kilmichael Ambush by Tom Barry and the 3rd Cork Brigade. A little more than two months later, on February 2, 1921, another platoon of Auxiliaries is ambushed by Seán Mac Eoin and the North Longford Flying Column in the Clonfin Ambush. On March 19, 1921, the 3rd Cork Brigade of the IRA defeats a large-scale attempt by the British Army and Auxiliary Division to encircle and trap them at Crossbarry. On April 15, 1921, Captain Roy Mackinnon, commanding officer of H Company of the Auxiliary Division, is assassinated by the Kerry IRA.
Successes require reliable intelligence and raids often bring no result — or sometimes worse. In one case, they arrest a Castle official, Law Adviser W. E. Wylie, by mistake. In another, more notorious case, on April 19, 1921, they raid the Shannon Hotel in Castleconnell, County Limerick, on a tip that there are suspicious characters drinking therein. The “suspicious characters” turn out to be three off-duty members of the RIC. Both sides mistake the other for insurgents and open fire. Three people, an RIC man, an Auxiliary Cadet and a civilian, are killed in the shootout that follows.
The Auxiliary Division is disbanded along with the RIC in 1922. Although the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty requires the Irish Free State to assume responsibility for the pensions of RIC members, the Auxiliaries are explicitly excluded from this provision. Following their disbandment, many of its former personnel join the Palestine Police Force in the British-controlled territory.
The anti-insurgency activities of the Auxiliaries Division have become interchangeable with those conducted by the Black and Tans, leading to many atrocities committed by them being attributed to the Black and Tans. Nevertheless, both British units remain equally reviled in Ireland.
Abraham Colles, Professor of Anatomy, Surgery and Physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) and the President of RCSI in 1802 and 1830, is born in Millmount, County Kilkenny, on July 23, 1773. A prestigious Colles Medal & Travelling Fellowship in Surgery is awarded competitively annually to an Irish surgical trainee embarking on higher specialist training abroad before returning to establish practice in Ireland.
Descended from a Worcestershire family, some of whom had sat in Parliament, Colles is born to William Colles and Mary Anne Bates of Woodbroak, County Wexford. The family lives near Millmount, a townland near Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, where his father owns and manages his inheritance which is the extensive Black Quarry that produces the famous Kilkenny black marble. His father dies when he is 6 years old, but his mother takes over the management of the quarry and manages to give her children a good education. While at Kilkenny College, a flood destroys a local physician’s house. He finds an anatomy book belonging to the doctor in a field and returns it to him. Sensing the young man’s interest in medicine, the physician lets him keep the book.
Following his return to Dublin, in 1799, Colles is elected to the staff at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital where he serves for the next 42 years. In October 1803, he is appointed Surgeon to Cork-street Fever Hospital, and subsequently becomes Consulting Surgeon to the Rotunda Hospital, City of Dublin Hospital, and Victoria Lying-in Hospital. He is a well-regarded surgeon and is elected as president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) in 1802 at the age of 28 years, subsequently also serving as president in 1830. In 1804, he is appointed Professor of Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery at RCSI.
In 1811, Colles writes an important treatise on surgical anatomy and some terms he introduces have survived in surgical nomenclature until today. He is remembered as a skillful surgeon and for his 1814 paper On the Fracture of the Carpal Extremity of the Radius. This injury continues to be known as Colles’ fracture. This paper, describing distal radial fractures, is far ahead of its time, being published decades before X-rays come into use. He also describes the membranous layer of subcutaneous tissue of the perineum, which comes to be known as Colles’ fascia. He also extensively studies the inguinal ligament, which is sometimes called Colles’ ligament. He is regarded as the first surgeon to successfully ligate the subclavian artery.
In 1837, Colles writes “Practical observations on the venereal disease, and on the use of mercury” in which he introduces the hypothesis of maternal immunity of a syphilitic infant when the mother has not shown signs of the disease. His principal textbook is the two-volume Lectures on the theory and practice of surgery. His writings are important, though not voluminous. Some of his papers are collected and edited by his son, William Colles, and published in the Dublin Journal of Medical Science. Selections from the works of Abraham Colles, chiefly relative to the venereal disease and the use of mercury, comprise Volume XOII. of the Library of the New Sydenham Society, published in 1881. They are edited and annotated by one of the most distinguished Fellows of the RCSI, Robert McDonnell. His Lectures on Surgery are edited by Simon M’Coy and published in 1850. In tribute to his distinguished career, he is awarded a baronetcy in 1839, which he refuses.
Upon Colles’s retirement as Professor of Surgery, the Members of RCSI pass a resolution which includes “We have also to assure you that it is the unanimous feeling of the College, that the exemplary and efficient manner in which you have filled this chair for thirty-two years, has been a principal cause of the success and consequent high character of the School of Surgery in this country.”
In 1807, Colles marries Sophia Cope. His son William follows in his footsteps, being elected to the Chair of Anatomy in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1863. Another of his sons, Henry, marries Elizabeth Mayne, a niece of Robert James Graves. His grandson is the eminent music critic and lexicographerH. C. Colles. His granddaughter Frances marries the judge Lord Ashbourne, and her sister Anna marries his colleague Sir Edmund Thomas Bewley.
Ernest Bernard (Ernie) O’Malley, Irish republican revolutionary and writer, is born on May 26, 1897, in Ellison Street, Castlebar, County Mayo, the second child among nine sons and two daughters of Luke Malley, solicitor’s clerk, of County Mayo, and Marion Malley (née Kearney) of County Roscommon. Christened Ernest Bernard Malley, his adoption of variations on this name reflects his enthusiasm for a distinctively Irish identity – an enthusiasm that lay at the heart of his republican career and outlook.
In 1906, O’Malley’s family moves to Dublin, where he attends the Christian Brothers‘ School, North Richmond Street. In 1915, he begins to study medicine at University College Dublin (UCD). Having initially intended to follow his older brother into the British Army, he rather joins the Irish Volunteers in the wake of the 1916 Easter Rising, as a member of F Company, 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade. He becomes a leading figure in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence which the Easter Rising helps to occasion. In 1918, having twice failed his second-year university examination, he leaves home to commit himself to the republican cause. He is initially a Volunteer organiser with the rank of second lieutenant, under the instruction of Richard Mulcahy, operating in Counties Tyrone, Offaly, Roscommon, and Donegal. His work in 1918 involves the reorganisation, or new establishment, of Volunteer groups in the localities.
In August 1918, O’Malley is sent to London by Michael Collins to buy arms. During 1919 he works as an IRA staff captain attached to General Headquarters (GHQ) in Dublin, and also trains and organises Volunteers in Counties Clare, Tipperary, and Dublin. He has a notable military record with the IRA during the Irish War of Independence and is a leading figure in attacks on Hollyford barracks in County Tipperary (May 1920), Drangan barracks in County Kilkenny (June 1920), and Rearcross barracks in County Tipperary (July 1920). His IRA days thus involve him with comrades such as Dan Breen, Séumas Robinson, and Seán Treacy. In December 1920, he is captured in County Kilkenny by Crown forces. He escapes from Dublin’s Kilmainham Gaol in February 1921, to take command of the IRA’s 2nd Southern Division, holding the rank of commandant-general.
O’Malley’s republican commitment has political roots in his conviction that Ireland should properly be fully independent of Britain, and that violence is a necessary means to achieve this end. But the causes underlying his revolutionism are layered. Family expectations of respectable, professional employment combined with a religious background and an enthusiasm for soldiering provide some of the foundations for his IRA career. As an IRA officer he enjoys professional, military expression for a visceral CatholicIrish nationalism. He also finds excitement, liberation from the frequent dullness of his life at home, defiant rebellion against his non-republican parents, an alternative to his stalled undergraduate career, and, in political and cultural Irish separatism, a decisive resolution of the profound tension between his anglocentrism and his anglophobia.
O’Malley rejects the 1921 Anglo–Irish Treaty as an unacceptable compromise. He spends the 1921 truce period training IRA officers in his divisional area, in preparation for a possible renewal of fighting. He is, in the event, to be a leading anti-treatyite in the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. In the Four Courts in 1922, at the start of the latter conflict, he is captured on the republicans’ capitulation on June 30 but then manages to escape from captivity. Subsequently he is appointed assistant Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty IRA and also becomes part of a five-man anti-Treaty army council, along with Liam Lynch, Liam Deasy, Frank Aiken and Thomas Derrig.
O’Malley is dramatically captured and badly wounded by Free State forces in Dublin in November 1922. Imprisoned until July 1924, he is during the period of his incarceration elected as a TD for Dublin North in the 1923 Irish general election and is also a forty-one-day participant in the republican hunger strike later that year. Following release from prison, he returns home to live with his parents in Dublin. He decides not to focus his post-revolutionary energy on a political career. During 1926–28 and 1935–37 he unsuccessfully tries to complete his medical degree at UCD, but increasingly his post-1924 efforts are directed toward life as a Bohemian traveler and writer. He spends much of 1924–26 on a recuperative journey through France, Spain, and Italy; and 1928–35 traveling widely in North America. During 1929–32 he spends time in New Mexico and Mexico City. In Taos, New Mexico, he mixes with, and is influenced by, writers and artists as he works on what are to become classic autobiographies of the Irish revolution: On Another Man’s Wound (1936) and The Singing Flame (1978).
O’Malley meets Helen Hooker, daughter of Elon and Blanche Hooker, in Connecticut in 1933. They marry in London in 1935, each rejecting something of their prior lives in the process: he, his Irish republicanism, through marriage to somebody entirely unconnected with that world; she, her wealthy and respectable upbringing, through liaison with a Catholic, Irish, unemployed, bohemian ex-revolutionary. They settle first in Dublin then, from 1938 onward, primarily in County Mayo. Burrishoole Lodge, near Newport, is his main base until 1954, when he moves to Dublin. Three children are born to the O’Malleys: Cahal (1936), Etáin (1940), and Cormac (1942). Sharing enthusiasm for the arts, he and Helen enjoy several years of intimacy. However, by the mid-1940s their relationship has frayed. In 1950, Helen kidnaps (the word is used by both parents and by all three children) the couple’s elder two children and takes them to the United States. From there she divorces O’Malley in 1952. Cormac remains with his father.
O’Malley’s post-American years are devoted to a number of projects. He writes extensively, including work for The Bell and Horizon. He is involved with the film director John Ford in the making of his Irish films, including The Quiet Man (1952). He gives radio broadcasts on Mexican painting for BBC Third Programme (1947), and on his IRA adventures for Radio Éireann (1953). In the latter year he suffers a heart attack, and his remaining years are scarred by ill health. He dies of heart failure on March 25, 1957, in Howth, County Dublin, at the house of his sister Kathleen. Two days later he is given a state funeral with full military honours. He is buried in the Malley family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.
O’Malley exemplifies some important themes in modern Irish political and intellectual history. His powerful memoirs form part of a tradition of writing absorbedly about Ireland, while under idiosyncratic emigrant influences which lend the writing much of its distinctiveness. His aggressive republicanism exemplifies a persistent but ultimately unrealisable tradition of uncompromising IRA politics. His unflinching single-mindedness is the condition for much courageous and striking activity, but also lay behind his infliction and his suffering of much pain. Literary, intellectual, and defiantly dissident, he is the classic bohemian revolutionary. His historical significance lies in his having been both a leading Irish revolutionary and the author of compelling autobiographical accounts of those years. His memoirs are distinguished from their rivals on the shelf by subtlety, self-consciousness, and literary ambition. In particular, his preparedness to identify motives for Irish revolutionary action, beyond the terms of ostensible republican purpose, renders his writing of great value to historians. Similarly, the large body of archival material left in his name (especially, perhaps, the papers held in UCD archives, and those in the private possession of his children) leaves scholars in his debt. The most striking and evocative visual images of O’Malley are, arguably, the set of photographic portraits taken in 1929 by Edward Weston and held at the University of Arizona‘s Center for Creative Photography (CCP). These capture with precision his reflective concentration, his piercing earnestness, and his troubled intensity.
(From: “O’Malley, Ernest Bernard (‘Ernie’)” by Richard English, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Photograph of Ernie O’Malley taken by Helen Hooker, New York City, 1934)
Ó Súilleabháin is deeply involved in Daniel O’Connell‘s Catholic emancipation movement and in relief work among the poor of County Kilkenny. He is also an avid bird watcher and a collector of manuscripts in the Irish language. His diary, published later as Cín Lae Amhlaoibh, is kept between 1827 and 1835. It remains one of the most important sources for 19th-century Irish life and one of the few surviving works from the perspective of the Roman Catholic lower and middle classes. (A translation has been published in English and an abridged and annotated edition in Irish, both edited by Tomás de Bhaldraithe.) He also composes verse and stories.
Ó Súilleabháin is born in Killarney, County Kerry. He comes to live at Callan, County Kilkenny, when he is nine years old, joining his father, Donncha Ó Súilleabháin. Father and son establish themselves as teachers in the surrounding towns. They begin by teaching under the hedges, but eventually a cabin is built as a school. He takes over the post of teacher there when his father dies in 1808. He remains a resident of Callan until his death. At the time, County Kilkenny is one of the most strongly Irish-speaking areas in Leinster.
As a teacher, Ó Súilleabháin is well versed in mathematics and Latin, and likely teaches English to a high standard. His diary shows him to have a deep interest in the natural world, and there are daily references to the weather.
Though Ó Súilleabháin is clearly a master of English, his diary is mostly in Irish, with occasional business-related entries in English, likely so that such transactions can be verified by others. He mostly eschews the archaisms favoured by other writers in Irish, writing in a fluent, flexible, colloquial style which could encompass both concision and literary elaboration. His diary shows him to be deeply involved in the life of the poor but to also be well acquainted with local notables. He is fond of occasional revelry and a good meal.
Ó Súilleabháin has an impressive collection of Irish language manuscripts, both prose and verse, which are supplemented by books. As a businessman, he deals in linen, corn and meal, and often has to make long trips to Dublin, Clonmel and Waterford.
Ó Súilleabháin marries a woman named Máire Ní Dhulachanta, not often mentioned in his diary. They have six or seven children, four of whom survive into adulthood. Her death, however, causes him great grief, and he never remarries.
Ó Súilleabháin dies on November 20, 1838, in Callan and is buried in the family plot in St. Brigid’s graveyard.
Amhlaoibh’s original manuscript is currently in the possession of the Royal Irish Academy. An edition of the complete manuscript is published as Cinnlae Amhlaoibh Uí Shúileabháin by M. McGrath in 1936-37 and an abridged and annotated edition, Cín Lae Amhlaoibh, by Tomás de Bhaldraithe in 1970–1973. A translation, The Diary of an Irish Countryman, is published by de Bhaldraithe (Mercier Press) in 1979.
(Pictured: The Seal of Milesius, the official seal of the Ó Súilleabháin Clann of Munster)
Henry II returns to England on April 17, 1172, having granted a charter to Dublin, the first granted to an Irish town.
Toward the end of 1171, Henry II, the first king of England to set foot on Irish soil, lands at Crook, County Waterford. His visit to Ireland serves two purposes. Firstly, it allows him to bring his adventurous English barons to heel and put the royal seal on their conquests in Ireland. Secondly, it means he can avoid meeting the cardinal legates who have been dispatched from Rome to investigate his complicity in the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170.
When the King of Leinster, Diarmait Mac Murchada, finds himself exiled in the late 1160s, he quickly finds help across the Irish Sea. He finds Henry II on the banks of the Loire in 1166 and is then pointed in the direction of south Wales by a Bristol merchant to find Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, more commonly known as Strongbow, who is then out of royal favour due to his prior support of Henry II’s competition for the kingship, Stephen of Blois.
Bolstered by English forces, Diarmait returns to Ireland and retakes his kingdom with Strongbow’s help, the latter earning the hand in marriage of Diarmait’s daughter, Aoife, in return. None of this has greatly concerned Henry II, until Diarmait dies, and Strongbow seizes the Kingdom of Leinster for himself in 1171. Leinster encompasses not only the counties of Carlow, Kilkenny, Wexford, Kildare, and parts of Wicklow, Laois, and Offaly, but the kings of Leinster are often the overlords of the flourishing Hiberno-Norse ports of Wexford and Dublin, both of which have considerable trading links with England and wider Europe.
Concerned with the growing power of Strongbow in Ireland, Henry II decides to head across the Irish Sea. He originally intends to arrive in Ireland in September 1171, but unfavourable winds on the coast of southwest Wales delay his journey for 17 days. He finally embarks from Pembroke on October 16 and arrives on the County Waterford coast the following day.
Naturally, Henry does not come alone and is at the head of an estimated 4,000 strong army comprised of 500 knights and their esquires and a large body of archers, all of which are carried, along with horses, in 400 ships. The undertaking is vast, and a large quantity of supplies are gathered to provision this considerable force. These ingredients include salted meats and fish, 1,000 lbs. of wax to ensure that Henry can seal charters and mandates, and, of course, the oil on which the medieval war machine runs, wine.
With the arrival of Henry II in Ireland, Strongbow surrenders the kingdom of Leinster and the Hiberno-Norse towns of Dublin, Wexford, and Waterford. Henry II regrants Leinster to Strongbow as a lordship, and later grants him Wexford. However, Waterford and Dublin become, and remain, royal ports.
Henry II then tours Ireland, showing the clergymen and native kings who their new lord is. He first visits Lismore and Cashel, then back to Waterford for a brief rest, before journeying by way of Kilkenny to Dublin, where he arrives around November 11. At all of his stop he collects the submissions of the Irish kings, with the probable exception of Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair (Rory O’Connor), who is the claimant to the high kingship of Ireland at the time.
Outside the city walls of Dublin, Henry II constructs a palace at the present-day southern side of Dame Street, where he celebrates the winter festivities until February 2. At this time, he also grants Dublin its first charter, on a piece of parchment measuring only 121 x 165 mm, which, extraordinarily, survives to this day. Henry’s charter to Dublin grants the right to live in the city to the men of Bristol, with whom the men of Dublin have enjoyed pre-existing economic relations.
About March 1, 1172, Henry II makes his way to Wexford, before finally departing for England on Easter Sunday, April 17, after celebrating Mass. It is probable that he had intended to stay in Ireland longer than he did, but events in England and Normandy divert his attention. In Normandy, Henry II’s son, Henry, has gone into rebellion against his father, while in England, the cardinal legates are threatening to interdict Henry’s lands unless he comes to meet with them regarding Becket’s murder.
The circumstances which lead to Henry II’s departure are more telling for Ireland’s future than any member of contemporary society could have realised. Now, Ireland has to compete with the other segments of a vast transnational realm, with lands stretching across England, Wales and France. Although Henry II is the first king of England to arrive in Ireland, his visit does not mean that royal visits would become a routine occurrence. Throughout the Middle Ages, the kings of England only directly visit Ireland in 1185, 1210, 1394–5, and 1399. As such, Henry’s visit and departure marks the beginning of absentee lordship over Ireland.
(From: “The royal visit: what did Henry II do in Ireland 850 years ago?” by John Marshall, PhD student in the Department of History at Trinity College Dublin, RTÉ, http://www.rte.ie | Pictured: Henry at Waterford, Ireland, October 18, 1172. Illustration by James E. Doyle (1864). Image: Historical Picture Archive/ Corbis via Getty Images)
Captain Otway Cuffe, benefactor, Gaelic revivalist, twice mayor of Kilkenny and a founder of businesses and organisations to profit the local people, is born in London on January 11, 1853.
Cuffe is born the Honourable Otway Frederick Seymour Cuffe to John Cuffe, 3rd Earl of Desart, and Lady Elizabeth Lucy Campbell. He has an older sister and two older brothers. After the death of his eldest brother William Ulick, 4th Earl of Desart, his seecond eldest brother, Hamilton, becomes the 5th Earl of Desart. As the 5th Earl has no male heirs himself, Cuffe is nominally his heir. However, as he also dies without heirs, the line becomes extinct upon the death of the 5th Earl.
Dedicated to ensuring a strong Irish identity in the area, Cuffe works with his sister-in-law, Ellen Cuffe, Countess of Desart. He joins Conradh na Gaeilge soon after his arrival in Kilkenny. He is elected president of its Kilkenny branch in 1904 and remains so until his death. He is replaced by Lady Desart. Together they open the theatre in Kilkenny in 1902 and he is the first President of the Kilkenny Drama Club. He also performs on stage.
Cuffe is first elected Mayor of Kilkenny in 1907 and again in 1908. With Lady Desart, he builds the Kilkenny Woollen Mills, Desart Hall, the Talbot’s Inch model village and the Kilkenny Woodworkers factory. He lays the foundation stone for Kilkenny’s Carnegie library. He is also President of the Irish Industrial Association.
Cuffe is a friend of William Morris whom he had met on a trip to Iceland. He believes in the Arts and Crafts movement and tries to implement it in the projects which he drives. He is also a friend and supporter of Standish James O’Grady and helps him found the weekly radical conservative paper The All-Ireland Review and runs it between 1900 and 1906.
In 1911, Cuffe becomes ill and is forced to move to warmer climates until he recovers. He decides to go to the south of Europe but then a visit to Australia seems appropriate. However, on the journey there he contracts pneumonia and dies at Fremantle in Western Australia on January 3, 1912. He is buried at Perth, carried to his grave by Kilkenny hurlers. The Kilkenny Moderator calls his death “a thunderbolt to the people of Kilkenny.” He is remembered as a visionary who made a permanent impact on the physical landscape of Kilkenny.
MacManus begins writing while still teaching, first publishing a trilogy set in Penal times and concerning the life of the Gaelic poet Donncha Rua Mac Conmara comprising the novels Stand and Give Challenge (1934), Candle for the Proud (1936) and Men Withering (1939). A second trilogy follows which turns its attention to contemporary Ireland: This House Was Mine (1937), Flow On, Lovely River (1941), and Watergate (1942). The location is the fictional “Dombridge,” based on Kilkenny, and deals with established themes of Irish rural life including obsessions with land, sexual frustration, and the trials of emigration and return. Other major works include the novel The Greatest of These (1943), concerning religious conflict in nineteenth-century Kilkenny, and the biographies Boccaccio (1947) and Saint Columban (1963). In his last two novels, he descends into the depths of theological debate: The Fire in the Dust (1950) is followed by American Son (1959), a remarkable dialogue between conflicting modes of belief which reveals the strong influence of Roman Catholicism on the author.
Francis MacManus dies of a heart attack at the age of 56 in Dublin on November 27, 1965.
The RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story Award is established in his memory in 1985. The competition is run by RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, and is open to entries written in Irish or English from authors born or resident in Ireland. The total prize fund is €6000, out of which the winning author receives €3,000. Sums of €2,000 and €1,000 are awarded to the second and third prize winners.
Rice is born on June 1, 1766, at Westcourt, Callan, County Kilkenny, the fourth of seven sons of Robert Rice, a farmer, and his wife, Margaret Tierney. His education begins at a local hedge school. He subsequently transfers to a school in Kilkenny before being apprenticed in 1779 to his uncle, a prosperous merchant at Waterford. He amasses a fortune in the lucrative provisioning trade of the city, and in 1785 he marries Mary Elliott, the daughter of a local tanner. Their only child, Mary, has intellectual disabilities and Rice suffers additional heartbreak with the death of his wife in 1789 following an accident, possibly by a fever that set in afterwards.
The death of his wife clearly affects Rice’s life. While he continues in trade and is an active member of the Catholic committee in the city, his priorities are radically changed. From this point he becomes increasingly involved in pious and charitable pursuits. He assists in the foundation of the Trinitarian Orphan Society in 1793 and the Society for the Relief of Distressed Roomkeepers in 1794. He joins religious confraternities and devotes considerable attention to the plight of prisoners. His endeavours become more focused in 1797 when, in response to a controversial pastoral of BishopThomas Hussey of Waterford and Lismore, he embraces the cause of Catholic education. In 1802, he establishes a religious community of laymen who set out to do for the neglected poor boys of Waterford what Nano Nagle had done for poor girls in Cork. His community is the genesis of both the Presentation Brothers and the Irish Congregation of Christian Brothers. Rice’s “monks” follow a variation of the Presentation rule, and his school curriculum is a pragmatic combination of best practice of the time overlaid by an uncompromisingly Catholic emphasis. By the time of his death in 1844, the Christian Brothers run forty-three schools, including six in England.
Rice is pivotal in the revival of Irish Catholicism following the severe dislocation of the penal era. Among the urban poor the Brothers make a landmark contribution in widening the social base of the institutional church. Through their teaching and catechetical instruction, they introduce the poor to the new forms of devotion which become the hallmark of nineteenth-century Catholicism. This effort brings a previously marginalised class within the ranks of the institutional church, which in time becomes the backbone of the emerging Catholic Ireland. The Brothers also play a determined role in the Catholic response to the proselytising efforts of the protestant Second Reformation in the country. Rice’s Brothers assist in the moulding of a distinctively Catholic urban working class, by promoting literacy alongside piety and instilling in their pupils the middle-class virtues of personal discipline, hard work, and sobriety.
Rice collaborates closely with other Catholic leaders of his age. His congregation is central to the success of Theobald Mathew‘s temperance movement. In 1828, at the height of the emancipation campaign, he invites Daniel O’Connell to lay the foundation stone of the Brothers’ model school at North Richmond Street, Dublin. This “monster meeting” attracts an attendance of 100,000, before which O’Connell hails Rice as the “patriarch of the monks of the west.” During the Repeal campaign, too, the Brothers frequently host the Liberator. Reflecting on their efforts, O’Connell declares that “education to be suited to this country must be Catholic and Irish in its tone, having as its motto Faith and Fatherland.”
Rice’s uncompromising adherence to these principles is not without difficulty. It leads to a predictably acrimonious relationship with the secular national board and his eventual withdrawal of the Brothers’ schools from the system in 1836. Rejection of the national board imposes serious financial burdens on the Christian Brothers which are relieved only by the bounties provided by the Intermediate Education Act (1878). Withdrawal also serves to alienate many friends and benefactors, including Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, who is a commissioner of national education. But the bishops gradually adopt Rice’s stance. After 1838 they become increasingly hostile to the national board, and the Brothers’ schools, with their acclaimed textbooks, are recognised as a bulwark against non-denominational education. For similar reasons, the Brothers become closely associated with Irish nationalism. In 1892, the MPWilliam O’Brien observes that “the Christian Brothers system was regarded in Ireland as the really national system.”
The 1830s bring a rapid deterioration in Rice’s health. Financial difficulties frustrate his plans, and the plight of the three Dublin foundations is particularly acute. Rice resigns as superior general of his congregation in 1838, but fraught relations with his successor, Br. Michael Paul Riordan, blights his later years.
From this time on, Rice spends an increasing proportion of his time at Mount Sion and the adjoining school, showing a continued interest in the pupils and their teachers. He also takes a short walk each day on the slope of Mount Sion, but his increasingly painful arthritis leads the community superior, Joseph Murphy, to purchase a wheelchair for his benefit. At Christmas time in 1841, his health takes a turn for the worse and even though expectations of his imminent death do not turn out to be justified, he is increasingly confined to his room.
After living in a near-comatose state for more than two years and in the constant care of a nurse since May 1842, Rice dies on August 29, 1844, at Mount Sion, Waterford, where his remains lie in a casket to this day. Large crowds fill the streets around his house in Dublin to honour him. He is beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1996.
(From: “Rice, Edmund Ignatius” by Dáire Keogh, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Dowling begins his hurling career at club level with the O’Loughlin Gaels. He breaks onto the club’s top adult team as a 16-year-old in 1994 and enjoys his first success the following year when the club wins the 1995 Kilkenny Premier Junior Hurling Championship. He wins a Kilkenny Intermediate Hurling Championship title in 1996 and promotion to the top flight of Kilkenny hurling. He goes on to make numerous championship appearances at senior level and is at left wing-back on the O’Loughlin Gaels’ Leinster Senior Club Hurling Championship-winning team in 2003. His club career ends as a result of a hip injury in 2010, by which time he has also won two Kilkenny Senior Championship titles.
At inter-county level, Dowling is part of the Kilkenny minor team that wins back-to-back Leinster Minor Hurling Championships in 1995 and 1996 before winning the All-Ireland Under-20 Hurling Championship in 1999. He joins the Kilkenny senior team in 2001. From his debut, he lines out as a half-back or a midfielder and makes a combined total of 25 National League and Championship appearances in a career that ends with his last game in 2005. During that time, he is part of two All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship-winning teams – in 2002 and 2003. He also secures three successive Leinster Senior Hurling Championship medals and three National Hurling League medals. He is dropped from the panel in June 2005.
seamus dubhghaill 