seamus dubhghaill

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Tag Archives: County Londonderry


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Death of Charles Lever, Novelist & Raconteur

Charles James Lever, Irish novelist and raconteur, dies of heart failure on June 1, 1872, at Trieste, Italy. According to Anthony Trollope, his novels are just like his conversation.

Lever is born in Amiens Street, Dublin, on August 31, 1806. He is the second son of James Lever, an architect and builder, and is educated in private schools. His escapades at Trinity College, Dublin (1823–1828), where he earns a degree in medicine in 1831, are drawn on for the plots of some of his novels. The character Frank Webber in the novel Charles O’Malley is based on a college friend, Robert Boyle, who later becomes a clergyman. He and Boyle earn pocket-money singing ballads of their own composing in the streets of Dublin and play many other pranks which he embellishes in the novels Charles O’Malley, Con Cregan and Lord Kilgobbin.

Before seriously embarking upon his medical studies, Lever visits Canada as an unqualified surgeon on an emigrant ship. Arriving in Canada, he journeys into the backwoods, where he is affiliated to a tribe of Native Americans but has to flee because his life is in danger, as later his character Bagenal Daly does in his novel The Knight of Gwynne.

Back in Europe, Lever pretends he is a student from the University of Göttingen and travels to the University of Jena and then to Vienna. He loves German student life and several of his songs, such as “The Pope He Loved a Merry Life,” are based on student-song models. His medical degree earns him an appointment to the Board of Health in County Clare and then as a dispensary doctor in Portstewart, County Londonderry, but his conduct as a country doctor earns him the censure of the authorities.

In 1833 Lever marries his first love, Catherine Baker, and in February 1837, after varied experiences, he begins publishing The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer in the recently established Dublin University Magazine. Before Harry Lorrequer appears in volume form (1839), he has settled on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection as a fashionable physician in Brussels.

In 1842 Lever returns to Dublin to edit the Dublin University Magazine, and gathers round him a typical coterie of Irish wits. In June 1842 he welcomes William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of The Snob Papers, to Templeogue, four miles southwest of Dublin, on his Irish tour. The O’Donoghue and Arthur O’Leary (1845) make his native land an impossible place for Lever to continue in. Thackeray suggests London, but Lever requires a new field of literary observation and anecdote. His creative inspiration exhausted, he decides to renew it on the continent. In 1845 he resigns his editorship and goes back to Brussels, whence he starts upon an unlimited tour of central Europe in a family coach. Now and again, he halts for a few months, and entertains to the limit of his resources in some ducal castle or other which he hires for an off season.

Depressed in spirit as Lever is, his wit is unextinguished. He is still the delight of the salons with his stories, and in 1867, after a few years’ experience of a similar kind at La Spezia, he is cheered by a letter from Lord Derby offering him the more lucrative consulship of Trieste. The $600 annual salary does not atone to Lever for the lassitude of prolonged exile. Trieste, at first “all that I could desire,” became with characteristic abruptness “detestable and damnable.”

Lever’s depression, partly due to incipient heart disease, partly to the growing conviction that he is the victim of literary and critical conspiracy, is confirmed by the death of his wife on April 23, 1870, to whom he is tenderly attached. He visits Ireland in the following year and seems alternately in high and low spirits. Death had already given him one or two runaway knocks, and, after his return to Trieste, he fails gradually, dying suddenly, however, and almost painlessly, from heart failure on June 1, 1872 at his home, Villa Gasteiger. His daughters, one of whom, Sydney, is believed to have been the real author of A Rent in a Cloud (1869), are well provided for.


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Birth of Ian Milne, Northern Ireland Politician

Ian Milne, Irish republican politician from Northern Ireland, is born in Bellaghy, County Londonderry, April 8, 1954.

Milne joins the Official Irish Republican Army-linked Fianna Éireann youth group soon after its formation, but the following year moves to join the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He is gaoled in 1971, after explosives go off in a car in which he is traveling. He is imprisoned in the Crumlin Road Gaol, but escapes in January 1973. The following year, he is arrested in the Republic of Ireland after stealing a Garda car and is sentenced to five years in Portlaoise Prison. However, he again escapes, and remains an active paramilitary based in Northern Ireland.

During the mid-1970s, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) describes Milne as one of its three “most wanted.” In 1977, he is arrested and sentenced to life for killing a British soldier. Serving time at Long Kesh Detention Centre, he participates in the blanket protest. He is released in 1992.

At the 2005 Northern Ireland local elections, Milne is elected to Magherafelt District Council for Sinn Féin, and he holds his seat in the 2011 elections. While on the council, he spends a period as chairman. In 2013, he is co-opted to the Northern Ireland Assembly in Mid Ulster, replacing Francie Molloy. He is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly for Mid Ulster at the 2016 Northern Ireland Assembly election.

In September 2017 Milne is served civil writs for his alleged involvement in the murder of Jimmy Speer on November 9, 1976.

In December 2018, Milne resigns as Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) to seek reelection to local government. He is elected to Mid Ulster District Council in 2019 and continues to hold this position as of 2023.


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Birth of George Henry Perrott Buchanan, Poet, Novelist & Journalist

George Henry Perrott Buchanan, poet, novelist, and journalist is born on January 9, 1904, in Kilwaughter, County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland.

Buchanan is the second child and younger of two sons and one daughter of the Rev. Charles Henry Leslie Buchanan (1863–1939) and Florence Buchanan (née Moore). He is educated at Larne Grammar School in Larne, County Antrim, Campbell College, Belfast, and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He works for the Northern Whig (1921) and is a founder member of the Northern Drama League, Belfast (1923). After moving to London, he joins The Daily Graphic, becomes a reviewer (1928–40) for The Times Literary Supplement, sub-editor (1930–35) of The Times, and columnist and drama critic (1935–38) for the News Chronicle.

During World War II, Buchanan serves as an operations officer in RAF Coastal Command (1940–45). His service includes a period in Sierra Leone, operational liaison with Free France in French Equatorial Africa, and night attacks on U-boats in the Bay of Biscay. After the war, he lives in Limavady, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, for nearly ten years, which he later describes as a period of regeneration. During this time, he broadcasts for BBC Radio and becomes chairman of the NI town and country development committee (1949–53) and a member (from 1954) of the executive council of the European Society of Culture (Venice), and later president of its London centre.

A versatile writer with wide-ranging concerns, Buchanan publishes his first journal, Passage Through the Present, in 1932. It is followed by six novels, including A London Story (1935) and Naked Reason (1971). His plays include A Trip to the Castle (1960) and War Song (1965). The Politics of Culture (1977) is one of several collections of essays, and Green Seacoast (1959) and Morning Papers (1965) are autobiographical. His writing has been noted for its integrity and for the diversity of its ideas. Recurrent themes are the importance of common experience, living sensitively in the present, and the impoverishment of urban life. He believes in the power of ideas and the creative nature of journalism in the modern world. Despite his prosaic style, he writes poetry from his teenage years. It “was always the base from which everything else was motivated. . . [it] affected, and perhaps energised, everything I did. Its pressure led me to special attitudes in journalism, in the theatre, in the novel.” He publishes his first collection, Bodily Responses, in 1958. Other collections include Annotations (1970) and Inside Traffic (1976). In order to bring the variety of his work to a wider audience, Frank Ormsby devotes a supplement in the Honest Ulsterman (1978) to Buchanan, whom he believes is almost forgotten in Ireland and has been unjustly neglected.

Buchanan lives at 18A Courtnell Street, London W2. He marries four times, first to Winifred Mary Corn (1938-45), secondly to Noel Pulleyne Ritter (1949-51), thirdly to the Hon. Janet Hampden Margesson (1952-68), with whom he had two daughters, and fourthly to Sandra Gail McCloy (1974-89). He dies on June 28, 1989, in Richmond, London, and is cremated at Mortlake Crematorium, Richmond.

(From: “Buchanan, George Henry Perrott” by Helen Andrews, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: George Henry Perrott Buchanan by Howard Coster, 10 x 8 inch film negative, 1935, transferred from Central Office of Information, 1974)


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Birth of Neil Hannon, Northern Irish Singer & Songwriter

Edward Neil Anthony Hannon, Northern Irish singer and songwriter, is born in Derry, County Londonderry, on November 7, 1970. He is the creator and front man of the chamber pop group The Divine Comedy, and is the band’s sole constant member. He is the writer of the theme tunes for the television sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd.

Hannon is the son of Brian Hannon, a Church of Ireland minister in the Diocese of Derry and Raphoe and later Bishop of Clogher. He spends some of his youth in Fivemiletown, County Tyrone, before moving with his family to Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, in 1982. While there he attends Portora Royal School.

Hannon enjoys synthesizer-based music as a youngster. He identifies The Human League and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD) as “the first music that really excited [him].” In the late 1980s he develops a fondness of the electric guitar, becoming an “indie kid.”

Hannon is founder and mainstay of The Divine Comedy, a band which achieves their biggest commercial success in the last half of the 1990s with the albums Casanova (1996), A Short Album About Love (1997), and Fin de Siècle (1998). He continues to release albums under The Divine Comedy name, the most recent being Office Politics (2019). In 2000 he and Joby Talbot contribute four tracks for Ute Lemper‘s collaboration album, Punishing Kiss.

In 2004 Hannon plays alongside the Ulster Orchestra for the opening event of the Belfast Festival at Queen’s University Belfast. In 2005, he contributes vocals to his long-time collaborator Joby Talbot’s soundtrack for the movie version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

In 2006 it is announced that Hannon is to lend his vocal ability to the Doctor Who soundtrack CD release, recording two songs – “Love Don’t Roam” for the 2006 Christmas special, “The Runaway Bride“, and a new version of “Song For Ten”, originally used in 2005’s “The Christmas Invasion.” On January 12, 2007, The Guardian website’s “Media Monkey” diary column reports that Doctor Who fans from the discussion forum on the fan website Outpost Gallifrey are attempting to organise mass downloads of the Hannon-sung “Love Don’t Roam,” which is available as a single release on the UK iTunes Store. This is in order to attempt to exploit the new UK Singles Chart download rules, and get the song featured in the Top 40 releases.

The same year Hannon adds his writing and vocal talents to the Air album Pocket Symphony, released in the United States on March 6, 2007. He is featured on the track “Somewhere Between Waking and Sleeping,” for which he writes the lyrics. This song had been originally written for and sung by Charlotte Gainsbourg on her album, 5:55. Though it is not included in its 2006 European release, it is added as a bonus track for its American release on April 24, 2007.

Hannon wins the 2007 Choice Music Prize for his 2006 album, Victory for the Comic Muse. He wins the 2015 Legend Award from the Oh Yeah organisation in Belfast.

Hannon is credited with composing the theme music for the sitcoms Father Ted and The IT Crowd, the former theme composed for the show and later reworked into “Songs of Love,” a track on The Divine Comedy’s breakthrough album Casanova. Both shows are created or co-created by Graham Linehan. A new Divine Comedy album, Bang Goes the Knighthood, is released in May 2010.

Hannon has collaborated with Thomas Walsh, from the Irish band Pugwash, to create a cricket-themed pop album under the name The Duckworth Lewis Method. The first single, “The Age of Revolution,” is released in June 2009, and a full-length album is released the following week. The group’s second album, Sticky Wickets, comes out in 2013.

Hannon contributes to a musical version of Swallows and Amazons, writing the music while Helen Edmundson writes the book and lyrics, which premiers in December 2010 at the Bristol Old Vic.

In April 2012 Hannon’s first opera commission, Sevastopol, is performed by the Royal Opera House. It is part of a program called OperaShots, which invites musicians not typically working within the opera medium to create an opera. Sevastopol is based upon Leo Tolstoy‘s Sevastopol Sketches. Hannon’s second opera for which he writes music, In May, premiers in May 2013 in Lancaster and is shown in 2014 with overwhelming success.

The world premiere of “To Our Fathers in Distress,” a piece for organ, is performed on March 22, 2014, in London, at the Royal Festival Hall. It is inspired by Hannon’s father, Rt. Revz. Brian Hannon, who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease.

Hannon’s partner is Irish musician Cathy Davey. The couple live in the Dublin area. He is previously married to Orla Little, with whom he has a daughter, Willow Hannon. With Davey, Hannon is a patron of the Irish animal charity My Lovely Horse Rescue, named after the Father Ted Eurovision song for which he wrote the music.

Politically, Hannon describes himself as being “a thoroughly leftie, Guardian-reading chap, but of the champagne socialist variety.”


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Death of 1981 Hunger Striker Thomas McElwee

Thomas McElwee, Irish republican volunteer in the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), dies on August 8, 1981 at the age of 23 after 62 days on hunger strike at Long Kesh Prison.

McElwee, the sixth of twelve children, is born on November 30, 1957, into the small, whitewashed home built by his father, along the Tamlaghtduff Road in Bellaghy, County Derry, Northern Ireland. He attended St. Mary’s primary in Bellaghy, and then Clady intermediate. After leaving school he goes to Magherafelt technical college for a while, but later changes his mind and goes to Ballymena training centre to begin an apprenticeship as a motor mechanic. Harassment from loyalist workers there forces him to leave and he then goes to work with a local mechanic.

McElwee and his cousin Francis Hughes form an independent Republican unit, which for several years carries out ambushes on British Army patrols as well as bomb attacks in neighbouring towns such as Magherafelt, Castledawson, and Maghera.

In October 1976, McElwee takes part in a planned bombing blitz on the town of Ballymena. Along with several colleagues, he is transporting one of the bombs, which explodes prematurely and blinds him in his right eye. He is transferred from the Ballymena hospital to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast for emergency surgery to save his remaining eye. It is three weeks before he is able to see at all.

After six weeks McElwee is transferred again, this time to the military wing of the Musgrave Park Hospital. One week before Christmas, he is charged and sent to Crumlin Road Gaol.

At McElwee’s subsequent trial in September 1977, having spent over eight months on remand in Crumlin Road, he is charged and sentenced to 20 years imprisonment for possession of explosives and the murder of Yvonne Dunlop, who is killed when one of the firebombs destroys the shop where she is employed. His murder charge is reduced to manslaughter on appeal, although the original jail term stands. He returns to the blanket protest he had joined immediately after his trial, in the H-Blocks of Long Kesh.

Imprisonment is particularly harsh for McElwee and his brother Benedict who are frequently singled out for brutality by prison warders, outraged at the stubborn refusal of the two to accept any form of criminal status. On one occasion he is put on the boards for fourteen days for refusing to call a prison warder ‘sir.’ In a letter smuggled out to his sister Mary, Benedict writes of the imprint of a warder’s boot on his back and arms after a typical assault. However, throughout the brutality and degradation they have to endure serves only to deepen yet further, and harder, their resistance to criminalisation.

McElwee joins the 1981 Irish hunger strike on June 7, 1981 and died on August 8, 1981, after 62 days on the strike. Indicative of the callousness of the British government towards prisoners and their families alike, he is denied the comfort of his brother’s presence at that tragic moment. He dies after 62 days of slow agonising hunger strike with no company other than prison warders – colleagues of those who had brutalised, degraded and tortured him for three-and-a-half years.

In 2009, Republican Sinn Féin (RSF) name their Waterford cumann after McElwee, replacing that of George Lennon, O/C of the Waterford Flying Column who led the IRA anti-Treaty Republicans into Waterford City in March 1922. The Waterford RSF had adopted the Lennon name without the permission of his son who noted that his father had, in later years, become a committed pacifist and opponent of the Vietnam War.

McElwee is the main subject of the song Farewell to Bellaghy, which also mentions his cousin Francis Hughes, other members of the independent Republican unit and deceased volunteers of the South Derry Brigade of the Provisional IRA. He is also the subject of The Crucifucks‘ song The Story of Thomas McElwee.


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Birth of John Philpot Curran, Orator, Politician, Lawyer & Judge

John Philpot Curran, Irish orator, politician, wit, lawyer and judge, who holds the office of Master of the Rolls in Ireland, is born in Newmarket, County Cork, on July 24, 1750.

Curran is the eldest of five children of James Curran, seneschal of the Newmarket manor court, and Sarah, née Philpot. The Curran family are said to have originally been named Curwen, their ancestor having come from Cumberland as a soldier under Oliver Cromwell during the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, originally settling in County Londonderry.

Curran is educated at Midleton College, County Cork, before studing law at Trinity College Dublin. He continues his legal studies at King’s Inns and the Middle Temple. He is called to the Irish Bar in 1775. Upon his first trial, his nerves get the better of him and he cannot proceed. His short stature, boyish features, shrill voice and a stutter are said to have impacted his career, and earn him the nickname “Stuttering Jack Curran.”

However, Curran can speak passionately in court on subjects close to his heart. He eventually overcomes his nerves and gets rid of his speech impediment by constantly reciting Shakespeare and Bolingbroke in front of a mirror, becoming a noted orator and wit. His championing of popular Irish causes such as Catholic emancipation make him one of the most popular lawyers in Ireland. He is also fluent in the Irish language which is still the language of the majority at the time. He writes a large amount of humorous and romantic poetry.

The case which cements Curran’s popularity is that of Father Neale and St. Leger St. Leger, 1st Viscount Doneraile at the County Cork Assizes in 1780. Having a passion for lost causes, he represents the priest and wins over the jury by setting aside the issue of religion.

A liberal Protestant whose politics are similar to Henry Grattan, Curran employs all his eloquence to oppose the illiberal policy of the Government, and also the Union with Britain. He stands as Member of Parliament (MP) for Kilbeggan in 1783. He subsequently represents Rathcormack (1790-98) and Banagher from 1800 until the Act of Union in 1801, which bitterly disappoints him, forcing him to contemplate emigrating to the United States.

In 1798, Ireland rebels against the British House of Commons and lack of reforms on Catholic emancipation. The British defeat the Irish rebels in numerous battles and soon establish their control over the country by 1799. Many of the Irish ring leaders are charged with treason and are facing death sentences. Curran plays an important role in court defending the leaders of the United Irishmen.

Curran’s youngest daughter Sarah‘s romance with United Irishmen leader Robert Emmet scandalises Curran, who had tried to split them up. He is arrested and agrees to pass their correspondence on to Standish O’Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore, the Attorney-General for Ireland. In the circumstances he cannot defend Emmet. He is suspected of involvement in Emmet’s Rebellion, but is completely exonerated. However, his friend Arthur Wolfe, 1st Viscount Kilwarden, is killed by the rebels, and he loses any faith in the beliefs of the United Irishmen. Emmet is found guilty of rebelling against the Crown and the union between Great Britain and Ireland and is hanged in 1803. Curran disowns Sarah, who dies of tuberculosis five years later.

Curran is appointed Master of the Rolls in Ireland in 1806, following William Pitt the Younger‘s replacement by a more liberal cabinet.

Curran retires in 1814 and spends his last three years in London. He dies in his home in Brompton on October 14, 1817. In 1837, his remains are transferred from Paddington Cemetery, London to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin, where they are laid in an 8-foot-high classical-style sarcophagus. In 1845 a white marble memorial to him, with a carved bust by Christopher Moore, is placed near the west door of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.


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Birth of Sir Maziere Brady, 1st Baronet & Lord Chancellor of Ireland

Sir Maziere Brady, 1st Baronet, PC (Ire), Irish judge, notable for his exceptionally long, though not particularly distinguished tenure as Lord Chancellor of Ireland, is born on July 20, 1796.

Brady is born on Parliament Street, Dublin, the second son of Francis Tempest Brady of Booterstown, a manufacturer of gold and silver thread, and his wife Charlotte Hodgson, daughter of William Hodgson of Castledawson, County Londonderry. He is baptised at St. Werburgh’s Church, Dublin. He is the brother of Sir Nicholas Brady, Lord Mayor of Dublin, and uncle of the eminent ecclesiastical historian William Maziere Brady.

The Bradys are an old and distinguished Munster family who are particularly associated with the town of Bandon, County Cork. Probably the most celebrated of his ancestors is the poet and psalmist Nicholas Brady (1659–1726), who collaborated with Nahum Tate, the Poet Laureate, on New Version of the Psalms of David.

Other notable forebears include Hugh Brady, the first Protestant Bishop of Meath (d. 1584), his father-in-law Robert Weston who, like Maziere serves as Lord Chancellor of Ireland, and the judge and author Luke Gernon (d. 1672), who is now best remembered for his work A Discourse of Ireland (1620), which gives a detailed and (from the English colonial point of view) not unsympathetic picture of the state of Ireland in 1620.

Brady is educated at Trinity College Dublin, and takes his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1816. He enters the Middle Temple in 1816, is called to the Bar in 1819 and becomes King’s Counsel in 1835.

In politics Brady is a Liberal and supports Catholic emancipation. He sits on a commission of inquiry into Irish municipal corporations in 1833. He is appointed Solicitor-General for Ireland in 1837 and Attorney-General for Ireland the following year. In 1840 he is appointed Lord Chief Baron of the Irish Exchequer. In 1846 he is appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland and serves in that office, with short intervals, for the next 20 years. He retires in 1866 and is made a baronet, of Hazelbrook in the County of Dublin, in 1869. His appointment ends the practice which grew after the Acts of Union 1800 of appointing only English lawyers as Lord Chancellor of Ireland. He sits on the Government Commission on Trinity College Dublin in 1851, and is nominated as Vice-Chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast in 1850. All through his life he shows a keen interest in education.

According to Elrington Ball, Brady’s Lord Chancellorship is notable for its length but for nothing else. Ball calls him “a good Chief Baron spoiled to make a bad Chancellor.” By general agreement he had been an excellent Chief Baron of the Exchequer, having a reputation for being fair-minded, courteous and approachable, but in Ball’s view the more onerous (and partly political) office of Lord Chancellor is beyond his capacity. Unlike some judges whose training had been in the common law, he never quite masters the separate code of equity. Delaney takes a somewhat more favourable view of Brady as Lord Chancellor, arguing that while his judgements do not show any great depth of learning they do show an ability to identify the central issue of any case and to apply the correct legal principle to it.

An anonymous pamphlet from 1850, which is highly critical of the Irish judiciary in general, describes Brady as being unable to keep order in his Court, and easily intimidated by counsel, especially by that formidable trio of future judges, Jonathan Christian, Francis Alexander FitzGerald, and Abraham Brewster. The author paints an unflattering picture of Brady as sitting “baffled and bewildered” in a Court where he is “a judge but not an authority.” On the other hand, Jonathan Christian, who had often clashed with Brady in Court, later praises him as “no ordinary man” despite his shortcomings as a judge. He describes him as “independent-minded, patriotic, natural and unaffected.”

Brady is a founder member of the Stephen’s Green Club and a member of the Royal Dublin Society and the Royal Irish Academy. In addition to the arts he shows a keen interest in science, especially after his retirement. Like most judges of the time he has both a town house in central Dublin and a place some distance from the city centre. His country house is Hazelbrook, Terenure, Dublin. He changes his town house several times, settling finally in Pembroke Street.

Brady marries firstly Elizabeth Anne Buchanan, daughter of Bever Buchanan, apothecary of Dublin, and his wife Eleanor Hodgson, in 1823 and they have five children. Elizabeth dies in 1858. In 1860, Brady marries Mary Hatchell, daughter of John Hatchell, Attorney-General for Ireland and Elizabeth Waddy, who survives him. He dies at his house in Pembroke Street on April 13, 1871. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.


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Birth of Martin O’Neill, Association Football Player & Manager

Martin Hugh Michael O’Neill, OBE, Northern Irish association football manager and former player who played as a midfielder, is born in Kilrea, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on March 1, 1952, the sixth child of nine siblings.

O’Neill’s father is a founding member of local GAA club Pádraig Pearse’s GAC Kilrea. He plays for both Kilrea and Derry at underage level. He also plays Gaelic football while boarding at St. Columb’s College, Derry, and later at St. Malachy’s College, Belfast.

Starting his career in Northern Ireland, O’Neill moves to England where he spends most of his playing career with Nottingham Forest, with whom he wins the European Cup twice, in 1979 and 1980. He is capped 64 times for the Northern Ireland national football team, also captaining the side at the 1982 FIFA World Cup.

During his managerial career O’Neill manage Grantham Town, Wycombe Wanderers, Norwich City, Leicester City, Celtic, Aston Villa and Sunderland. He guides Leicester City to the Football League Cup final three times, winning twice. As Celtic manager between 2000 and 2005, he leads that club to seven trophies including three Scottish Premier League titles and the 2003 UEFA Cup Final. After joining Aston Villa he achieves three consecutive sixth-place finishes in the English Premier League and guides them to the 2010 Football League Cup Final.

O’Neill becomes Republic of Ireland manager in 2013 and leads them to qualification for the 2016 UEFA European Football Championship for the third time in the nation’s history, beating the reigning world champions, Germany, in the process. He leaves the role with assistant Roy Keane by “mutual agreement” in November 2018. He is appointed as Nottingham Forest manager on January 15, 2019. He guides the club to a ninth-place finish in the Championship. However, he is sacked as manager on June 28, 2019, after reportedly falling out with some of the senior first team players.

Despite never completing his degree, O’Neill remains a follower of criminology. His fascination begins with the James Hanratty case of 1961. He has worked in television as an analyst for BBC and ITV at the FIFA World Cup, the UEFA European Championship and on UEFA Champions League matches.

In 2002, Norwich supporters voted O’Neill into the club’s Hall of Fame. He is awarded an OBE for services to sport in 2004. He is awarded the Nottingham Lifetime Achievement Award on November 3, 2013 for his services to football and achievements with Nottingham Forest.


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Birth of Garbhan Downey, Novelist & Editor

Garbhan Downey, novelist and editor, is born in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on February 24, 1966. He is the former Director of Communications and Marketing for Culture Company 2013, which delivers Derry’s City of Culture year.

Downey is a product of St. Columb’s College, the Catholic grammar school whose past pupils include John Hume, Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel.

Downey cuts his teeth in journalism editing University College Galway’s student magazine in the late 1980s. After graduating with an MSc in computing from the University of Ulster, he works as an entertainment columnist with the Derry Journal and then as a staff reporter with the Londonderry Sentinel, before moving to The Irish News to become the paper’s Derry correspondent.

Downey’s offbeat reports of the 1994 FIFA World Cup for The Irish News are subsequently compiled for his first book, Just One Big Party. He spends six years as a BBC news producer in Derry and Belfast, before joining the Derry News as editor in 2001. During his period as editor (2001–2004), the Derry News wins two Newspaper Society awards for Fastest Circulation Growth in the United Kingdom.

Since 2004, Downey has published six comic novels set in the criminal underbelly of post-ceasefire Ireland. His books have been described as “a superb blend of comedy, political dirty tricks, grisly murder and bizarre twists.”

A former deputy-president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Downey is one of the organisers of a student occupation of government offices in Dublin on Budget Day 1988 in protest against education cutbacks.

In June 2002, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) get a court order to force Downey to hand over pictures the Derry News had captured of the Real Irish Republican Army attacking a communications post.

In 2006, Downey helps establish the new Northern Ireland literary review Verbal and edits the publication for its first six issues.

A lifelong political anorak, in 2007, Downey works as an election pundit for TV3 (Ireland), alongside the Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll. In 2010, he wins a contest to predict the winners of Northern Ireland’s 18 Westminster constituencies, missing out on just one, Naomi Long, who surprisingly beat First Minister Peter Robinson in Belfast East. He donates his prize, a framed Ian Knox cartoon, to Long by way of apology.

Downey’s 2010 comedy-thriller The American Envoy is the first novel issued by an Irish publishing house as a Kindle e-book, simultaneously with its paperback release.

In June 2011, Downey is appointed Director of Media for Culture Company 2013, the body tasked with delivering Derry’s UK City of Culture year.

Downey is married to Una McNally, and they have two children.


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Birth of Seamus Deane, Poet, Novelist, Critic & Historian

Seamus Francis Deane, Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian, is born in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland on February 9, 1940. He is noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which wins several literary awards and is nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.

Deane is the fourth child of Frank Deane and Winifred (Doherty), and is brought up as part of a Catholic nationalist family. He attends St. Columb’s College in his hometown, where he befriends fellow student Seamus Heaney. He then attends Queen’s University Belfast (BA and MA) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (PhD). Although he too becomes noted for his poetry, he chooses to go into academia instead. He workws as a teacher in Derry, with Martin McGuinness being one of his students. McGuinness later recalls how Deane was “gentle, kind and never raised his voice at all, an ideal teacher who was very highly thought of.”

After graduating from Cambridge, Deane teaches at the Reed College in Portland, Oregon during the 1960s and the University of California, Berkeley during the 1970s. Over the next two decades, he teaches American college juniors part-time at the School of Irish Studies in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin. He is a professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin (UCD) until 1992. He subsequently relocates to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Chair of Irish Studies, from which he retires as professor emeritus.

Deane is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a founding director of the Field Day Theatre Company, together with Heaney, Tom Paulin, and David Hammond.

Deane is the co-editor of Field Day Review, an annual journal of Irish studies. He also serves as general editor of the Penguin Classic James Joyce series and of Critical Conditions, a series in Irish Studies which is jointly published by the University of Notre Dame Press and Cork University Press. He co-founds the book series Field Day Files, which contains key works by David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Marjorie Howes, and Kerby A. Miller.

The first collection of Deane’s poetry, Gradual Wars, is published in 1972 and receives the AE Memorial Award for Literature. His first novel, Reading in the Dark, is published in 1996 and is partly autobiographical. It wins the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Award for Literature, is a New York Times Notable Book, wins The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, besides being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. The novel is translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the general editor of the monumental Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which is 4,000 pages long and whose first volumes are released in 1990. It is later criticised for excluding the voices and experiences of Irish women. He responds to this by stating, “To my astonishment and dismay, I have found that I myself have been subject to the same kind of critique to which I have subjected colonialism … I find that I exemplify some of the faults and erasures which I analyse and characterize in the earlier period.”

Deane’s first marriage is to Marion Treacy. Together, they have four children. He is in a civil partnership with Emer Nolan until his death. They have one child together.

Following a short illness, Deane dies at the age of 81 on May 12, 2021 at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin.