Patrick J. Killoran, Irish traditional fiddle player, bandleader and recording artist is born on September 21, 1903, in Emlaghgissan (also spelled “Emlagation”), a townland in the civil parish of Emlaghfad near the town of Ballymote, County Sligo. He is regarded, along with James Morrison and Michael Coleman, as one of the finest exponents of the south Sligo fiddle style in the “golden age” of the ethnic recording industry of the 1920s and 1930s.
Killoran’s father Patrick plays the flute and his mother Mary the concertina, but he is also influenced by local fiddle master Philip O’Beirne, who had earlier tutored Michael Coleman. As a teenager, he is a volunteer with the Ballymote-based 3rd Battalion of the south Sligo Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence.
In 1925, Killoran emigrates to New York City, arriving on May 19 on the Cunard liner Scythia. Within a few months, he officially declares his intention to become a citizen of the United States, listing his address as 227 East 126th Street in east Harlem and his occupation as “laborer.” He later lodges with fellow Sligo fiddler James Morrison in a Columbus Avenue apartment on Manhattan‘s Upper West Side. A 1927 newspaper ad for “Morrison’s Orchestra” offers “Irish music by P. Killoran and J. Morrison, celebrated violinists,” giving 507 West 133d Street in west Harlem as the contact address. He soon launches his own career as a soloist and bandleader. A publicity photo of his quartet c. 1928 includes button accordionist D. Casey, tenor banjo player Richard Curran and second fiddler Denis Murphy. By the next year, he is performing on a weekly radio program sponsored by the Pride of Erin Ballrooms, located at the corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn. He also tries another side occupation as his 1931 naturalization petition lists his occupation as “Music store owner.”
At the Pride of Erin, and later at the Sligo Ballroom at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, Killoran’s “Irish Orchestra” provides music for Irish dancing, while Jack Healy, another Ballymote native, leads a group for “American” dancing. Healy, as a singer and tenor saxophone player, also performs and records with Killoran’s group, the membership of which over the course of the 1930s includes fiddler Paddy Sweeney, another Sligo native, fiddle and clarinet player Paul Ryan, Ryan’s brother Jim on the C Melody saxophone, pianists Eileen O’Shea, Edmund Tucker and Jim McGinn, drummer Mickey Murphy, button accordionists Tommy Flanagan and William McElligott and tenor banjo/tenor guitar player Michael “Whitey” Andrews.
Killoran’s band is variously billed as his “Pride of Erin Orchestra,” “Radio Dance Orchestra,” “Sligo Ballroom Orchestra,” “Lakes of Sligo Orchestra” and “Irish Barn Dance Boys.” The group is a popular choice for county association functions, particularly those of Sligo and Roscommon. In 1932, he leads a band that accompanies CardinalWilliam Henry O’Connell of Boston to the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland and briefly bills his group as the “Pride of Erin Eucharistic Congress Orchestra.” He regularly performs at Irish beach resorts on the Rockaway peninsula and in East Durham in the Catskill Mountains.
Uniquely among the major New York Irish musicians of the pre-World War II era, Killoran continues his musical career through the 1950s. He issues new recordings, including duets with flute player Mike Flynn and some fiddle-and-viola sides with Paul Ryan, and leads an active dance band. Age and illness eventually force him to retire, and in 1962 he turns over leadership of the band, a fixture at the City Center Ballroom, to button accordionist Joe Madden, father of Cherish the Ladies flute player Joanie Madden.
In 1956, Killoran is a co-founder of the Dublin Recording Company, later better known simply as Dublin Records, which is organized to record new Irish discs in New York.
Killoran is a founding member of the Emerald Irish Musicians Benevolent Society, a group that stages “Night of Shamrocks” concerts to raise money for the benefit of sick and deceased Irish musicians in New York. He is also a member of the Irish Musicians Association of America, and a New York branch of that organization, which later merges with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, is named for him.
In addition to the 1932 trip to the Eucharistic Congress, Killoran returns to Ireland at least twice. In 1949, he plays on a Radio Éireann program hosted by piper and folklorist Séamus Ennis. Some selections from that broadcast are recorded on a private disc and are later released on CD. On a 1960 visit, he visits Sligo and Clare and performs at a concert in County Longford.
Killoran is married twice. His first wife, Anna Gorman, a native of County Roscommon, dies in 1935. His second wife is Betty (Bridget) Hayes, an immigrant from Shanaway West, County Clare, who survives him. He dies in New York City on April 24, 1965.
A “Paddy Killoran Traditional Festival” is celebrated in the third week of June in Ballymote, where a monument in Killoran’s honor is erected in 2012.
Cox is the younger of two sons of Dr. Michael Cox, physician originally of Roscommon and Sligo, and Elizabeth Cox (née Nolan). Like his father, he supports the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) and maintains an interest in a wide range of subjects outside his chosen career throughout his life. He attends Belvedere College (1900-09), where he often obtains first place in his class and wins the Union prize for essay writing three years in a row (1905–07). He is the first auditor of the Belvedere Debating Society and is succeeded in the post by George O’Brien, who remains his lifelong friend. In 1909, he wins both a Royal University of Ireland (RUI) scholarship and an entrance exhibition to University College Dublin (UCD), a college of the new National University of Ireland (NUI).
Working for an arts degree at UCD, then housed at 86 St. Stephen’s Green, Cox overcomes an innate shyness to cultivate a reputation as a skillful and humorous orator in the Literary and Historical Society (L&H), where he befriends both Kevin O’Higgins and John A. Costello. He has immense respect for both men, and they remain firm friends. The respect is reciprocal, and during their subsequent careers O’Higgins and Costello often have occasion to seek Cox’s wise counsel. In 1912, Cox defeats Costello for the auditorship of the L&H by 112 votes to 63, and in the same year attains a first-class honours BA. His role as auditor means that he is involved with UCD for a further year. He attends lectures at the Incorporated Law Society while at the same time he pursues both the LL. B course, a one-year postgraduate law degree, and an MA at UCD. By the end of 1913 he has achieved first place in the LL. B and first-class honours in his MA. In addition, he has become auditor of the Solicitors’ Apprentices’ Debating Society.
After university Cox is apprenticed to a solicitor, Francis Joseph Scallan, who runs a firm in partnership with his brother, John Louis Scallan. On qualifying in 1915, he remains with the firm as an assistant solicitor until 1920, when he forms a partnership with another solicitor, John McAreavey. The firm is called Arthur Cox & Co. and has its offices at 5 St. Stephen’s Green. Initially the new firm’s clients are predominantly made up of those for whom he worked at his previous firm, and friends from his university days. Through George O’Brien he meets Sir Horace Plunkett, president of the Irish Agricultural Organisation Society (IAOS), a connection of enormous benefit, which sees the firm both become solicitor to the IAOS and gain a large number of clients through its membership.
Despite his relative youth, Cox is held in high esteem by those attempting to construct the apparatus of the newly independent Irish Free State in 1922. This is clear when he provides Hugh Kennedy, law officer to the provisional government and future Chief Justice of Ireland, with a lengthy opinion on the status of the Anglo–Irish Treaty, in the context of drafting a constitution for the new state. He is conscious of the need to counter claims that the treaty does not go far enough in acknowledging Irish nationhood; and he advises that the first article of the new constitution should explicitly state that the sovereignty of the new state derives from the Irish people. This is ultimately done in the preamble of the Constitution of the Irish Free State (1922).
In 1923, Cox is appointed solicitor to Siemens-Schuckert, the German engineering firm, and helps to negotiate the terms of an agreement with the Irish government for the construction of a hydro-electric station at Ardnacrusha, County Clare. In 1926, the Electricity (Supply) Act is passed, on which he advises. Although he experiences much success in these years, he is very much affected by the death of his friend Kevin O’Higgins, who is shot and dies from his injuries on July 10, 1927. He visits O’Higgins on his deathbed. Arthur Cox & Co. expands rapidly in its early years, and in 1926 Cox and McAreavey purchase new premises at 42–3 St. Stephen’s Green. Four years later he buys his partner out of the firm.
Given his friendships with various members of the original Free State administration, and the amount of work he receives from it, government work for Cox dries up when Fianna Fáil comes to power in 1932. However, the protectionist corporate policies and implementing legislation of the new administration bring new opportunities. The legislation places severe restrictions on foreign companies owning and operating enterprises in Ireland. He develops a reputation for assisting corporate clients to circumnavigate the restrictive laws. Along with his friend James Beddy, chief executive of the Industrial Credit Corporation, he realises that foreign investment is essential to the growth of the Irish economy. He introduces many clients to Beddy, and between them they find ways to assist the firms in investing in various enterprises without breaching the law. During this period, he cements his reputation as the foremost corporate lawyer in Ireland. This is evident when James Marmion Gilmor Carroll appoints him, as one of only two non-family members, to the board of the tobacco manufacturers P. J. Carroll & Co. He plays a key role in transforming the archaic practices of the firm by persuading Carroll to recruit Kevin McCourt as executive director. He and McCourt later convince Carroll to employ his nephew, Don Carroll, who plays a key role in the modernisation and diversification of the firm. In 1960 He and Carroll negotiate the sale of 40 per cent of the company to Rothmans International.
Despite his reputation as a corporate lawyer, Cox also represents non-corporate clients, some of whom include well-known personalities. In 1946, he agrees to assist Hungarian film-maker Gabriel Pascal in attempting to persuade the Irish government to establish an Irish film studio, with a view to filming the plays of George Bernard Shaw. He puts much time and energy into trying to convince the government to provide finance for the venture, but to no avail.
In 1942, Cox is elected to the council of the Incorporated Law Society and becomes president of the society for the 1951-52 term, presiding over the celebrations to commemorate the centenary of the society’s charter of incorporation. In 1951, he also becomes chairman of the company law reform committee, which produces its report, known as “the Cox report,” in 1958. Renowned for his eccentricities, he is almost as well known for his shabby mode of dress as he is for his incisive mind and immense capacity for work. His reputation is also based on a strict adherence to discretion and confidentiality. This is clear in 1948 when his old friend John A. Costello, having been offered the office of Taoiseach in the first inter-party government, turns to him for advice on whether he should accept the post. In 1954, Costello nominates him to the 8th Seanad.
In October 1953, the London firm of Nicholl Manisty & Co. retains him to represent British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill in a libel action brought by BrigadierEric Dorman O’Gowan, arising from comments in Churchill’s The Second World War: The Hinge of Fate. Churchill also relies on the advice of his friend Sir Hartley Shawcross, leader of the English bar, who makes several visits to Dublin to meet Cox and counsel (including John A. Costello). Cox and Shawcross believe it necessary to reach some form of settlement to avoid Churchill having to appear in court. The action is therefore withdrawn in return for an undertaking that certain corrections will be made.
On August 5, 1940, Cox marries Brigid O’Higgins (née Cole), widow of his friend Kevin O’Higgins. Prior to this he lives with his mother at 26 Merrion Square. He had purchased Carraig Breac in Howth in 1936 and moves there on his marriage. His commitment to his work means that he often works seven days a week and he therefore keeps a flat on Mespil Road, Dublin, from 1940. In 1959, he sells Carraig Breac and moves to 8 Shrewsbury Road, Dublin.
On February 14, 1961, Brigid Cox dies. Soon after, Cox decides to retire from his profession and study for the priesthood. He is intent on becoming a Jesuit and discusses his intentions with the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, who agrees to ordain him after two years of private tuition at the Jesuit theologate at Milltown Park, Dublin. On being accepted by the Jesuits, he makes arrangements to settle his worldly affairs by selling his home on Shrewsbury Road and leaving his practice to the existing partners. He enters Milltown Park on October 15, 1961, and is ordained on December 15, 1963. His impact on Irish life over the previous forty years is evident by the presence at his ordination of John A. Costello, W. T. Cosgrave, Seán T. O’Kelly, and James Dillon, among others.
Following ordination Cox is appointed to serve at the Jesuit mission in Monze, Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). He arrives at Monze in August 1964 and is appointed extraordinary chaplain to the local convent and hospital. On June 8, 1965, he suffers head injuries in a car accident while traveling to Namwada in Zambia. Taken to Choma hospital, he initially appears to be relatively unscathed but collapses and dies on June 11, 1965. He is found to have suffered from a cerebral haemorrhage and a fractured skull. He is buried in the grounds of the Jesuit retreat house in Chikuni, Zambia.
Many of the Cox family papers are housed at the UCD archives.
(From: “Cox, Arthur Conor Joseph” by Shaun Boylan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
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)
Following the ambush, the British carry out a sweep in which they capture three of the IRA volunteers involved and kill another who had not taken part.
County Roscommon is not one of the more violent areas of Ireland during the conflict. The local IRA argues to their GHQ that it is very difficult to conduct guerrilla warfare in the flat open countryside there. Prior to the action at Scramogue, the biggest previous incident had been in October 1920, when four RIC officers were killed in an ambush near Ballinderry.
Sean Connolly is sent by IRA GHQ from Longford to re-organise the Roscommon IRA and chooses the ambush site at Scramoge. However, he is killed twelve days before the action, at the Selton Hill ambush in neighbouring County Leitrim.
Both the North and South Roscommon brigades of the IRA take part and are commanded by Patrick Madden. There are 39 volunteers in the flying column, but only 14 take part in the actual attack. The remainder are tasked with blocking roads to keep the IRA’s line of retreat open. The IRA party is armed with thirteen rifles (eleven Lee–Enfields, one Winchester and one sporting rifle), twenty shotguns (though some are in bad condition) and two or three Webley revolvers. This is the largest collection of arms that the IRA assembles in Roscommon during the war and some of them have been borrowed from IRA units in Longford.
Among the volunteers who take part are Martin Fallon, ‘Cushy’ Hughes, Frank Simons, Luke Duffy, Peter Casey, Peter Collins, Patrick Gallagher and Tom Compton. Several of the IRA men, including Hughes, had served in the Irish Guards (IG) in World War I, but had been persuaded by Pat Madden to join the IRA upon their return.
The ambush site is carefully prepared. It is located at a sharp bend on the Strokestown–Longford road. A farmhouse and barn at the bend have been taken over and loopholed, and a trench is dug behind a hedge alongside the road. Only a mile from the IRA’s position, the British 9th Queen’s Royal Lancers regiment is garrisoned in Strokestown House.
The IRA waits in their position all day for British forces to come from Strokestown. Just as a troop lorry finally appears, two civilians came up the road in a pony and trap and have to be frantically waved out of the way.
The lorry carries a nine-man British Army and Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) patrol traveling on the Strokestown–Longford road. The British inquiry into the incident is to question why the lorry is unescorted, as their practice is not to travel in lone vehicles.
The IRA opens fire from very close range, killing the driver and halting the lorry in its tracks. Several of the soldiers and policemen are hit and they scrambled for cover behind a wall along the road. The lorry has a Hotchkiss machine gun bolted onto it, but its gunner gets off only one burst before being badly wounded and the gun is put out of action. The commander of the patrol, Captain Roger Grenville Peek, is hit in the lorry but tries to run to safety, only to be hit again and killed 400 yards down the road. The other officer with the party, Lieutenant Tennant, is also killed by a shotgun blast. After the death of the two officers, the surviving British, several of whom are wounded, surrender.
Just as the firing is dying down, another lorry, an RIC/Black and Tan patrol, approaches the ambush site but turns back after coming under fire.
Four of the British force are killed – this includes two British Army officers (Roger Grenville Peek and John Harold Anthony Tennant), a Royal Army Service Corps (RASC) driver, and one RIC man (Constable Edward Leslie).
Two men in civilian clothes are also found in the lorry. They turn out to be Black and Tans, Constable Buchanan and Constable Evans, who had been placed under arrest by the soldiers. They are made prisoners by the IRA. The ambush party takes the British arms, including the Hotchkiss gun, burn the lorry and make their escape over the hill of Slieve Bawn.
The IRA leaders, Pat Madden, Luke Duffy and Frank Simons, decide to murder the two Black and Tans, despite their offering to show the IRA how to use the captured machine gun. The IRA officers’ reason that if the prisoners identify the IRA men who had taken part in the ambush, the volunteers will be at risk of being executed if captured. The two are taken to remote locations and shot over the next two days.
The British garrison in Roscommon town mounts a sweep directly after the ambush with eight lorries and one Whippet tank. Three volunteers who had taken part are arrested afterward. Pat Mullooly and Brian Nagle of the North Roscommon Brigade are arrested as they try to get away from the scene of the ambush, as is “Cushy” Hughes, who is picked up when he is drawing his soldier’s pension in Roscommon. Mullooly and Nagle are badly beaten by their captors on the road to Roscommon. The next day, another volunteer, Michael Mullooly, brother of Pat Mullooly, is shot dead in his home by the RIC.
Thomas Reynolds, United Irishman, informant, consul and heir to a fortune, is born at his father’s house, 9 West Park Street, Dublin, on March 12, 1771.
Reynolds’s family history is well documented. His great-great-grandfather was Connor Reynolds of Rhynn Castle, County Leitrim, who married the daughter of Sir Robert Nugent, by whom he leaves three sons, Conor, George Nugent and Thomas. The second of these renounces his family’s Catholicism and becomes a Protestant in order to obtain possession of the greater part of the family estates and was grandfather of the George Nugent Reynolds who was killed in a duel in 1786. The third son, Thomas, a successful wool-stapler in Dublin, married Margaret Lacy, the sister of the famous Austrian general, Franz Moritz von Lacy, and by her had three sons and one daughter. Thomas’s eldest son, James, inherited his business and was one of the seven Catholics who in 1757 met at the Globe coffee-house, Essex Street, to form a committee to request the removal of legal disabilities imposed on Catholics. Thomas’s second son, also Thomas, a manufacturer of woolen poplins, had three daughters, whose marriages connected him with several distinguished Catholic families, and an only son, Andrew, father of the main subject of this article. Andrew Reynolds, admitted into partnership with his father, later developed a new poplin “by having the warp of silk and the weft, or shoot, of worsted.” These poplins came to be “prized in foreign countries as Irish tabinets.” He had an annual turnover of £100,000 to £150,000 and eventually made profits of £15,000 to £20,000 a year. On April 20, 1767, Andrew Reynolds married as his second wife, a second-cousin, Rose Fitzgerald, eldest daughter of Thomas Fitzgerald of Kilmead, County Kildare, a distant kinsman and substantial creditor of the Duke of Leinster, and his wife Rose, daughter of Francis Lacy of Inns Quay, Dublin. By Rose he had two sons and twelve daughters.
Until the age of eight, Reynolds, the future United Irishman and the only son to survive to adulthood, lives at the seat of his maternal grandfather in the care of a Catholic priest, William Plunkett. He is then moved to the school of a Protestant clergyman named Crawford at Chiswick near London and by the age of twelve he spends all vacations in the house of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who appears to take pleasure in teaching him the first principles of drawing. From Chiswick, he moves to Liège in 1783 to be educated by Catholics priests, former Jesuits, returning to Ireland shortly before his father’s death, at the age of 44, on May 8, 1788.
After 1784, the introduction of cottons to Ireland spoiled Andrew Reynolds’s trade. Loans to his nephews, the O’Reilly brothers (Thomas, Patrick and Andrew), iron-smelters at Arigna, County Roscommon, worsen his losses, which reach £200,000 at the time of his death. Lodging with his mother in Dublin, 17-year-old Reynolds mixes with “dissipated idlers” such as Simon Butler and Valentine Lawless. He revisits the Continent and is in Paris in July 1789 when the Bastille is stormed. At the behest of his mother, he becomes a member of the Catholic Committee in succession to his father on February 9, 1791, and attends the Catholic Convention as a delegate of the Dublin parish of St. Nicholas Without in December 1792. He chooses not to enter his late father’s business, preferring, despite his small income, the carefree life of a gentleman, doing the rounds of his well-to-do country relations. On March 25, 1794, he marries Harriet Witherington, fourth daughter of William Witherington, a Dublin woolen merchant, and a younger sister of Matilda Tone. His mother thereupon assigns to him half of the capital in the family business – now carried on by a relation, Thomas Warren, formerly clerk to Andrew Reynolds – and one third of the profits. He has other property as well and expectations of more, including a life-interest in an estate in Jamaica and the promise from the Duke of Leinster of the reversion of Kilkea Castle in County Kildare. A poor manager, Warren is forced out and later testifies against him in a judicial process. He still has £18,500 in assets and in 1797 obtains possession of Kilkea Castle and winds up his business affairs.
On the eve of the rebellion of 1798, Reynolds is a gentleman “of ample fortune and of the first connexions in the country.” In January or February 1797, he is drawn into the United Irish organisation by Peter Sullivan, a confidential clerk in the Reynolds family business, who refers him to Richard Dillon, a Catholic linen-draper, and to Oliver Bond, in whose house in Bridge Street he is sworn in, believing, according to his son, that the sole objects of the organisation are Catholic emancipation and the reform of parliament. Soon he is attending meetings of a baronial committee, but only after meeting Lord Edward FitzGerald in November 1797 achieves a position of importance, that of County Kildare treasurer and membership of the Leinster provincial committee. After being informed of a plan for an insurrection and for the assassination of approximately eighty individuals, some of them his own relations, and knowing the provincial committee is to meet on March 12 at the house of Oliver Bond to decide finally on a general rising, he communicates the United Irishmen’s plan to Dublin Castle through William Cope, a merchant. Those present at Bond’s house are arrested and so the plan is spoiled. He resigns as county treasurer on March 18, to be replaced by John Esmonde. Known to the United Irish leadership as an informant and in danger of his life – at least two unsuccessful attempts on his life are made – but known to Dublin Castle only as an influential United Irishman, he suffers the ransacking of his house at Kilkea on April 20 by dragoons and militia, who believe FitzGerald is concealed there. Finally, he is arrested and is to face a court-martial at Athy but, his true identity being disclosed to Dublin Castle by Cope, he is delivered to a grateful Irish privy council on May 5.
During the rebellion, Kilkea Castle, which had been renovated by Reynolds in 1797 at an expense of over £2,500 and contains priceless paintings, is garrisoned by troops and attacked by insurgents, rendering it uninhabitable for many years. It is refitted in the late 1830s. He is the principal prosecution witness in the trials of John McCann, William Michael Byrne and Bond. There being few other grounds of defence, the defence counsel, John Philpot Curran, seeks to impeach his character and motives, which, with adverse remarks by Thomas Moore in his Life and Death of Lord Edward Fitzgerald (1831) and a hostile obituary in The Morning Chronicle, gives rise after his death to a two-volume apologia by his son, Thomas, based on family papers and a remarkably detailed source for the history of the Reynolds family. For his action in coming forward at a critical period to save Ireland from the wicked plans of the conspirators, he is honoured by Dublin Corporation with the Freedom of the City on October 19, 1798.
His life threatened, Reynolds resides for some months in Leinster Street, Dublin, then moves with his family to Britain, spending some time in Monmouthshire before settling in London in 1803. In 1810, he is appointed British postmaster-general in Lisbon, an onerous but lucrative appointment owing to the Peninsular War. In September 1814 he returns to England. In July 1817, favoured by Lord Castlereagh, he goes to Copenhagen as consul to Iceland. He has to visit that remote island part of the kingdom of Denmark only once (June–August 1818) and in January 1820 finally leaves Copenhagen leaving his younger son, Thomas, in charge of consular affairs. With his wife and daughters, he settles in Paris. There in 1825, his elder son, Andrew Fitzgerald, fights a duel with Thomas Warren, a French army officer and son of Thomas Warren who had been Reynolds’s clerk, and is later a United Irishman. In 1831, he undergoes a religious experience and embraces evangelical Protestantism.
Earley first joins the Roscommon minor football team in 1963, at the age of fifteen. In that year, his side reaches the Connacht minor final, losing to Mayo. Two years later, in 1965, he lines out in a second Connacht minor decider. Five-in-a-row hopefuls Mayo are beaten by Roscommon, giving him a Connacht Minor Football Championship title. Roscommon are later defeated in the All-Ireland semi-final. He also plays under-21 hurling with Roscommon. In 1969, he plays in the All-Ireland under-21 final where Roscommon faces Kildare, however Kildare wins on the day.
Earley is only seventeen years-old when he makes his senior debut for Roscommon in 1965. Over the next fifteen years, Roscommon wins four Connacht Senior Football Championship titles. In 1985, he sustains a fractured jaw in the Connacht semi-final against Galway, with many expecting it to end his career. He confounds everybody and lines out in the Connacht final against Mayo two weeks later. In spite of kicking six points, Mayo still triumphs by 2–11 to 0–8. At the age of thirty-seven, he decides to retire from inter-county football.
After completing his Leaving Certificate in 1965, Earley joins the Defence Forces as a cadet and is commissioned in 1967. His first posting is as a platoon commander in the Recruit Training Depot at the Curragh Camp and, in 1969, he is appointed an Instructor at the Army School of Physical Culture (ASPC). Two years later, in 1971, he obtains a specialist diploma in physical education at St. Mary’s College, Twickenham.
Earley’s service record includes overseas service with the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO) in 1975, Adjutant to the 52nd Infantry Battalion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). From 1987 to 1991, he serves as deputy military adviser to UN secretary general Javier Pérez de Cuéllar and Battalion Commander of the 81st Infantry Battalion UNIFIL in 1997. While serving with the UN up to 1991 he is a member of negotiating teams dealing with the Iraqis and Kuwaitis and is a key adviser during the setting up of the UN’s mission in Kuwait – Unikom. He is involved in negotiating an end to the Angolan Civil War. He is a graduate of the Royal College of Defence Studies, London (2001), and holds a Master of Arts (Hons) in peace and development studies from the University of Limerick (1999). He undertakes the Ranger Course in the Defence Forces, which leads to the establishment of special operations training and the establishment of the Army Ranger Wing (ARW). He is the last serving member of that course.
Earley is appointed school commandant of the ASPC. In 1991, he is appointed an instructor at the Command and Staff School of the Military College and in 1994-95 he helps establish the United Nations Training School Ireland (UNTSI) in the Military College.
Earley is promoted to lieutenant colonel in 1995. He commands the 27 Infantry Battalion on the Irish border. He is promoted to colonel in 2001. In December 2003, he is made brigadier general and is appointed major general in March 2004 when he receives his final appointment. He replaces Lieutenant General James Sreenan. He becomes chief of staff in April 2007, leading the Army, Air Corps and Naval Service.
On April 18, 2010, Earley indicates he plans to retire from the Defence Forces due to ill health. He is awarded a Distinguished Service Medal with Honour from TaoiseachBrian Cowen. His resignation is accepted on June 9, 2010, and one of his previous deputies, Major General Sean McCann, is appointed Chief of Staff.
Earley dies of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD) on June 23, 2010, at the age of 62. His Newbridge funeral on June 24, 2010, is attended by Taoiseach Brian Cowen, Irish government ministers and leading GAA figures, while former Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave issues a statement calling him “one of the great figures of this country.”
Reynolds is educated at Summerhill College in Sligo, County Sligo and works for a state transport company before succeeding at a variety of entrepreneurial ventures, including promoting dances and owning ballrooms, a pet-food factory, and newspapers. In 1974 he is elected to the Longford County Council as a member of Fianna Fáil. He enters Dáil Éireann, lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, in 1977 as a member representing the Longford-Westmeath parliamentary constituency and becomes Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in Haughey’s Fianna Fáil government (1979–81). He is subsequently Minister of Industry and Commerce (1987–88) and Minister for Finance (1988–91) in Haughey’s third and fourth governments. He breaks with Haughey in December 1991. On January 30, 1992, Haughey retires as leader of Fianna Fáil at a parliamentary party meeting. Reynolds easily defeats his rivals Mary O’Rourke and Michael Woods in the party leadership election and succeeds Haughey as Taoiseach on February 11, 1992.
The Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democratscoalition that Reynolds inherits breaks up in November 1992 but, after the general election later that month, he surprises many observers by forming a new coalition government with the Labour Party in January 1993. He plays a significant part in bringing about a ceasefire between the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and unionist paramilitary groups in Northern Ireland in 1994, but he is less effective in maintaining his governing coalition. When this government founders in November 1994, he resigns as Taoiseach and as leader of Fianna Fáil, though he remains acting prime minister until a new government is formed the following month. He unsuccessfully seeks his party’s nomination as a candidate for the presidency of Ireland in 1997. He retires from public life in 2002.
Daly is born in Dublin in 1888. He fights in the 1916 Easter Rising under the command of his namesake Edward Daly, leading the unsuccessful attempt to destroy the Magazine Fort in the Phoenix Park. He is later wounded in the particularly vicious fighting near the Linenhall. He is subsequently interned in Frongoch internment camp for his part in the rebellion until 1918, when he is released as part of a general amnesty for Irish prisoners.
During the Irish War of Independence, Daly serves as leader of the “Squad,”Michael Collins‘ assassination unit.
Daly and the men under his command are responsible for the killing of many British intelligence officers, in particular District Inspector Redmond, who had been putting increasing pressure on the Squad. Daly himself personally kills several people, including Frank Brooke, director of Great Southern and Eastern Railway, who serves on an advisory council to the British military, in June 1920. He does not directly lead any of the attacks on Bloody Sunday but is on standby in one of the Squad’s safe houses. In the aftermath, November 23, 1920, he is arrested and interned in Abercorn Barracks in Ballykinler, County Down.
Daly is released on parole from Ballykinler in March 1921, the British apparently being unaware of his senior position within the Dublin Brigade of the IRA. After his release, he, along with Emmet Dalton, is also involved in the attempt to free Seán Mac Eoin from Mountjoy Prison on May 14, 1921. He and his men hijack a British Army Peerless armoured car in Clontarf at the corporation abattoir, while it is escorting a consignment of meat to a barracks and shoot dead two soldiers in the process. The plan involves Dalton and Joe Leonard impersonating two British army officers and using forged documents to “transfer” MacEoin to Dublin Castle. They gain entry to Mountjoy but are discovered before they can free MacEoin and have to shoot their way out. They later abandon the armoured car after removing the Hotchkiss machine guns and setting fire to what they can. Toward the end of the war, in May 1921, the two principal fighting units of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, the “Squad” and the “Active Service Unit” are amalgamated after losses suffered in the burning of the Custom House. Daly is named Officer Commanding (OC) of this new unit, which is named the Dublin Guard.
After the Anglo-Irish Treaty splits the IRA, Daly and most of his men side with the pro-treaty party, who go on to found the Irish Free State. He is appointed to the rank of brigadier in the newly created Irish National Army, which is inaugurated in January 1922. When the Irish Civil War breaks out in June 1922, he commands the Free State’s troops who secure Dublin, after a week of fighting.
In August 1922, during the Irish Free State offensive that re-takes most of the major towns in Ireland, Daly commands a landing of 450 troops of the Dublin Guard at Fenit, County Kerry, which goes on to capture Tralee from the anti-treaty forces. Acting with severe brutality in Kerry, he comments that, “nobody had asked me to take kid-gloves to Kerry, so I didn’t.” As the Civil War develops into a vicious guerrilla conflict, he and his men are implicated in a series of atrocities against anti-treaty prisoners, culminating in a series of killings with land mines in March 1923. Daly, and others under his command, claim that those killed were accidentally blown up by their own mines. Statements by the Garda Síochána, two Free State lieutenants on duty, W. McCarthy and Niall Harrington, and one survivor, Stephen Fuller, maintain the claims are fabricated.
Daly resigns from the Free State army in 1924 after an incident in Kenmare, County Kerry, concerning the daughters of a doctor. A court martial is held but collapses as no one is prepared to give evidence. He volunteers his services for the Irish Army again in 1940 and is appointed as a Captain to the non-combatant Construction Corps.
Daly is a carpenter by trade. He marries Daisy Gillies in 1910. His brother James (Seamus) marries Daisy’s sister Nora, a Cumann na mBan activist, in a joint wedding ceremony. After Daisy’s death in 1919, Daly marries Bridget Murtagh, also a Cumann na mBan activist, in 1921. Murtagh and Nora O’Daly carry out intelligence gathering for the planned attack on the Magazine Fort in 1916. She is a sister of Elizabeth Murtagh, the first wife of Commandant Michael Love who serves with Daly in the Collins Squad of the IRA, in the Irish Free State Army of the 1920s and during the Emergency period. Murtagh dies in childbirth in 1930. Daly subsequently marries Norah Gillies, his first wife’s niece.
On his death on January 16, 1957, Daly is buried with full military honours in Mount Jerome Cemetery. He is survived by his brothers, Comdt Seamus O’Daly and Capt Frank O’Daly, his sons Patrick and Colbert, and his daughters Brede and Philomena.
Joyce is born on April 24, 1906, in Brooklyn, New York, the eldest of three sons of Michael Joyce, an Irish Catholic from a family of tenant farmers in Ballinrobe, County Mayo, and his wife, Gertrude (née Brooke), who although born in Shaw and Crompton, Lancashire, is from a well-off AnglicanAnglo-Irish family of physicians associated with County Roscommon. The Joyces return to Ireland in 1909. William, a precocious child, attends Coláiste Iognáid SJ, a Jesuit school in County Galway, from 1915 to 1921. At the age of fourteen, he abandons Catholicism for Anglicanism, apparently after being told that all non-Catholics, including his mother, would be damned. In adult life he is nominally anglican, though his adherence to Christianity is tenuous.
The Joyces are unionists and teach their children fervent imperialism. During the Irish War of Independence, Joyce openly associates with the Black and Tans and acts as a scout for them. An acquaintance claims that his views are so extreme even loyalists dislike him. On December 9, 1921, he flees to England to join the Worcestershire Regiment and is followed to England in 1923 by the rest of the family. When he enlists, he claims to be eighteen, but after he contracts rheumatic fever, his age is discovered, and he is discharged in March 1922. For a time, he studies mathematics and chemistry at Battersea Polytechnic Institute as a pre-medical student (1922–23), but he leaves of his own accord, with a reputation for laziness and violent political views. His studies in English and history at Birkbeck College are more successful. He is a brilliant linguist and mathematician and graduates BA with first-class honours in 1927. He publishes an academic article on philology and considers progressing to an MA. He later falsely claims that his research had been plagiarised by a Jewish academic. In 1932, he enrolls at King’s College, London, for a Ph.D. in educational psychology.
Joyce is disturbed by the difference between depressed post-war Britain and the imperial ideal that he had imbibed in Galway and is mocked for his outspoken patriotism and obvious Irishness. He identifies strongly with Thomas Carlyle, an earlier angry anti-liberal from the provinces. His life is marked by repeated episodes of hero worship, followed by disillusion and bitter denunciation. In 1923, he joins the British Fascists, an organisation that has a significant Irish loyalist membership, and in 1924 he allies himself with a militant splinter group, the National Fascists. Most British fascists see themselves as Tory auxiliaries, and they often provide a security presence at conservative meetings. On October 22, 1924, while stewarding a meeting addressed by a Jewish conservative candidate, he has his face slashed and is left with a prominent scar across his right cheek. He joins the Conservative Party in 1928 and is active in the Chelsea constituency until 1930, when he is forced out because of his eccentricities and sexual misbehaviour. On April 30, 1927, he marries Hazel Kathleen Barr. They have two daughters but separate in 1935, largely because of his infidelities, heavy drinking, and temper. The marriage is dissolved in 1937.
In November 1933, Joyce abandons his Ph.D. studies to work for Sir Oswald Mosley‘s British Union of Fascists (BUF). By early 1934 he has become its paid publicity director, traveling throughout Britain to organise meetings. He is a powerful, rabble-rousing speaker, driven by an instinctive awareness that vitriolic verbal abuse gives speaker and audience a sense of power and solidarity. MI5 sees him as a compelling, though deranged, personality. On February 8, 1937, he marries Margaret Cairns White, a BUF activist from Lancashire, with whom he had cohabited since 1936.
Joyce leads a BUF faction that favours a recruitment strategy based on uncompromising ideological assertion. This is challenged by populists who prioritise marches and displays and hold that indoctrination should follow membership. In February 1937, he is BUF candidate for the London County Council in Shoreditch. The party wins 14 per cent of the vote. In March 1937, he, along with many full-time BUF staff, are sacked when the BUF cuts expenses. But his dismissal also reflects Mosley’s awareness that his obsessive rhetoric repels “respectable” recruits and that he is no longer a biddable, slavish admirer of “the Leader.” He later falsely claims near-exclusive credit for the BUF’s escalating antisemitism, a view that Mosley eventually finds it convenient to adopt in order to evade his own responsibility.
In April 1937, Joyce founds the National Socialist League, helped by a wealthy patron. He supports himself as a private tutor, refusing to take Jewish pupils. He is active in various antisemitic and pro-Nazi groups such as the Right Club and engages in “peace” campaigns based on the view that British interests lay with Germany against Russia. Political marginalisation intensifies his admiration for Nazi Germany and hero worship of Adolf Hitler. By the time of the Munich crisis in 1938, he has decided that if war comes, he will go to Germany, though he also considers moving to Ireland. He renews his British passport for one-year terms in August 1938 and August 1939.
On August 26, 1939, Joyce and his wife leave London for Berlin. He is allegedly tipped off about his impending arrest and internment by an MI5 officer, to whom he had supplied information on communists. His siblings, whom he recruited into his fascist organisations, are variously penalised for his activities. At a loose end in Berlin, he is persuaded by a British associate to become a radio announcer with the English-language service of the Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft (RRG). He makes his first broadcast on September 6, 1939, and receives a contract in October. He finds in radio an outlet for his forceful style and delight in saying the unsayable, and in the early years of the war takes an exultant pride in recounting Nazi victories. His performances are admired by Joseph Goebbels, whom Joyce, to his regret, never meets. On September 26, 1940, he acquires German citizenship.
The novel experience of hearing the enemy in one’s own living room attracts wide audiences in Britain. Joyce’s practice of naming newly captured prisoners of war in his broadcasts is also a compelling motive for listening. In fact, he tries to recruit British prisoners of war as collaborators. The name “Lord Haw-Haw,” invented by the Daily Express radio critic in September 1939, initially applies to several English-language broadcasters but in time becomes associated with Joyce. He is initially a figure of fun, imitated by comedians, but there are sinister undercurrents of terrifying omnipotence, intensified by his sneering, gloating delivery and his delighted deployment of the “big lie” technique. It is widely believed that British-based fifth columnists supply him with information, that he predicts air raids, and shows minute local knowledge. In time, fear and his growing notoriety feed popular hatred of him in Britain, though his anti-British taunts allegedly win appreciative Irish audiences. He exults that he is daily committing treason and rendering himself liable to the death penalty.
In 1940, Joyce publishes a commissioned self-justifying propaganda work, Twilight over England. His representation of himself echoes that of Hitler in Mein Kampf – the provincial patriot, whose martial sacrifices are betrayed by corrupt elites, learning through poverty the hollowness of bourgeois patriotism and the need to synthesise socialism with nationalism. He shares with his hero a paranoid belief in his own ability to create an alternative reality through language and obstinacy. He dreams of becoming the English Führer.
In Berlin, the Joyces’ marriage comes under increasing strain, marked by drunken rows, domestic violence, and infidelity on both sides, though they retain a fierce mutual fascination. They divorce on August 12, 1941, but remarry on February 11, 1942, while continuing their previous behaviour. As the Axis powers begin to fail, his broadcasts become more defensive, focusing on the Soviet threat. On October 14, 1944, he is awarded the German War Merit Cross, first class. On October 22, he is sworn into the Volkssturm (territorial army) and begins drilling. The Joyces are evacuated from Berlin in March 1945, initially to Apen near the Dutch border and then to Hamburg, where he makes a last, drunken, defiant broadcast on April 30, 1945, the day of Hitler’s death. After an unsuccessful attempt to escape to Sweden, the Joyces hide at Flensburg near the Danish border. On May 28, 1945, he is shot and captured while gathering firewood.
Joyce is brought back to Britain on June 16 after Parliament passed legislation simplifying treason trial procedures. At his September 17-20 trial, he proves his American citizenship, but the court holds that his illegally acquired British passport incurred duties of allegiance. His appeals are rejected by the Court of Appeal and the House of Lords. His fate is influenced by British public opinion, and possibly by a desire to avoid antagonising the Soviet Union. In his death cell he blames the defeat of national socialism on German limitations. He also fantasises that he could have saved Hitler from his incompetent subordinates.
Joyce is hanged at Wandsworth Prison on January 3, 1946. Unlike most of his fellow Nazis, he proclaims to the end his allegiance to national socialism and hatred of Jews. He corresponds cheerfully with Margaret, joking evasively about the death camps and expressing a belief that his spirit will survive, watch over her, and continue his work. To neo-Nazis he becomes a martyr. Even among those to whom his activities had been repellent, a significant body of opinion holds he should not have been condemned on a questionable and innovative technicality. The historian A. J. P. Taylor maintains that Joyce was executed for making a false declaration to obtain a passport, a misdemeanour that normally incurs a £2 fine.
In 1976, Joyce is reinterred in Galway as it is feared that a grave in England might become a fascist shrine. Thomas Kilroy‘s play Double Cross (1986) juxtaposes Joyce and Brendan Bracken as Irishmen who reinvented themselves through fantasies of Britishness. The BBC Sound Archive has recordings of some of Joyce’s broadcasts and transcripts of others, collected during the war as evidence for a future treason trial.
(From: “Joyce, William Brooke (‘Lord Haw-Haw’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Katherine Conolly is born Katherine Conyngham around 1662. Her parents are Sir Albert Conyngham and Margaret (née Leslie). She is the eldest of their ten children, with one of her brother’s being Henry Conyngham. Her maternal grandfather is Henry Leslie. She marries William Conolly in 1694, Speaker of the Irish House of Commons (1715-29) and purported to be the wealthiest man in Ireland. The marriage is likely to have been a love match. The couple uses her dowry of £2,300 to purchase their first estates in County Meath. Through her connections, her husband is able to ally himself with the influential Protestant families such as the Gores, Montgomerys and Leslies. She becomes known as a political hostess, gaining a mention in a ballad detailing the 1723 Westmeath by-election.
Upon the death of her husband in 1729, Connolly inherits estates in Wales, as well as in counties Meath, Roscommon, Westmeath and Kildare. She continues to be influential in Irish public affairs, being asked for her opinions and counsel. Living on Capel Street, Dublin, and at Castletown House, County Kildare, she entertains a large circle of friends. She carries on her husband’s plan to build the residential Collegiate School, Celbridge, built from 1733 to 1737, then supports the school with £50 each year. She commissions a monument in her husband’s memory by Thomas Carter, in Kildrought Church, Celbridge. She also commissions Conolly’s Folly in 1740 and The Wonderful Barn in 1743 to generate employment in the area.
Connolly dies in Castletown House on September 23, 1752. A portrait of her by Charles Jervas still hangs there. Upon hearing of her death, Mary Delany notes that her death “is a general loss. Her table was open to all her friends of all ranks and her purse to the poor … she was clever at business, and wrote all her own letters … she was a plain and vulgar woman in her manner but had very valuable qualities.”
(Pictured: Reclining statue of Katherine Conolly by Thomas Carter, at Castletown House, Celbridge, County Kildare)
seamus dubhghaill 