Clare Boylan, Irish author, journalist and critic for newspapers, magazines and many international broadcast media, is born in Dublin on April 21, 1948.
After leaving St. Louis convent, Boylan takes a job as a sales assistant in a bookshop before beginning her career as a journalist at The Irish Press, now defunct. In 1974 she wins the Journalist of the Year award when working in the city for the Evening Press. Later in her career she edits the glossy magazine Image, before largely giving up journalism to focus on a career as an author.
Boylan’s novels are Holy Pictures (1983), Last Resorts (1984), Black Baby (1988), Home Rule (1992), Beloved Stranger (1999), Room for a Single Lady (1997), which wins the Spirit of Light Award and is optioned for a film, and Emma Brown (2003). The latter work is a continuation of a 20-page fragment written by Charlotte Brontë before her death.
Boylan’s short stories are collected in A Nail on the Head (1983), Concerning Virgins (1990) and That Bad Woman (1995). The film Making Waves, based on her short story “Some Ladies on a Tour”, is nominated for an Oscar in 1988.
Boylan’s non-fiction includes The Agony and the Ego (1994) and The Literary Companion to Cats (1994). She writes introductions to the novels of Kate O’Brien and Molly Keane and adapts Keane’s novel Good Behaviour as the classic serial for BBC Radio 4 (2004). Her work has been translated as far afield as Russia and Hong Kong.
In later life, Boylan lives in County Wicklow with her husband Alan Wilkes. When she is diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she faces her illness with characteristic strength. She takes up kickboxing and spends time in France, shopping, cooking and entertaining friends. She succumbs to cancer at the age of 58 on May 16, 2006.
Power is born Jane O’Toole in Baltinglass, County Wicklow on May 1, 1858. In the 1880s she joins the Ladies’ Land League and finds herself immersed in their activities during the Land War. She compiles lists of those evicted from their homes and also organises the Land League in Wicklow and Carlow. In 1883 she marries John Wyse Power, a journalist who shares her political beliefs and is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). They have four children together, a fact that does not interfere with her political work.
Power helps set up the Irish Women’s Franchise League and is also a founding member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann and Sinn Féin becoming Vice-President of both organisations. She is later on the Provisional Committee that sets up Cumann na mBan. She rises in the ranks to become one of the most important women of the revolution. In October 1914, she is elected the first President of Cumann na mBan. She is a successful businesswoman owning four branches of her Irish Farm Produce Company. The 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic is written in her home at 21 Henry Street, and she always maintains that the Military Council signed the proclamation in no particular order; they just signed as it was passed to each of the signatories, though, with James Connolly being eager to be the first to sign. Even the identity of the head of the Provisional Government was not altogether clear.
During the 1916 Easter Rising she supplies food to the Irish Volunteers. After the Rising she and her daughter, Nancy, help re-organise Cumann na mBan and distribute funds to families suffering hardships, as well as the Prisoners Dependants Fund. These funds had been sent by Clan na Gael in the United States. She is subsequently elected as one of five women members onto Dublin Corporation in 1920 for the Inns Quay – Rotunda District.
Power supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and by the end of 1921, she is convinced that in doing so, will mean the need to leave Cumann na mBan to form a separate organisation. She helps set up Cumann na Saoirse (The League for Freedom), the pro-Treaty women’s organisation and becomes its Vice-President. She is a Free State Senator from 1922 until 1936 and is also a member of Cumann na nGaedheal.
Jennie Wyse Power dies on January 5, 1941, aged 82, at her home in Dublin. She is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery with her husband and daughter, Máire (who predeceased her). Her funeral is attended by many from both sides of the Dáil and the former revolutionary movement.
Childers is educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and the University of Cambridge, hence his striking British upper-class accent. On November 24, 1922, when he is sixteen, his father, Robert Erskine Childers, is executed by the new Irish Free State on politically inspired charges of gun-possession. The pistol he had been found with had been given to him by Michael Collins. Before his execution, in a spirit of reconciliation, the elder Childers obtains a promise from his son to seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his death warrant.
Following his father’s funeral, he returns to Gresham’s, then two years later he goes on to Trinity College, Cambridge. He returns to Ireland in 1932 and becomes advertising manager of The Irish Press, the newly founded newspaper owned by the family of Éamon de Valera.
Childers is nominated as the presidential candidate of Fianna Fáil at the behest of de Valera, who pressures Jack Lynch in the selection of the presidential candidate. He is a controversial nominee, owing not only to his British birth and upbringing but to his Protestantism. However, on the campaign trail his personal popularity proved enormous, and in a political upset at the 1973 Irish presidential election, he is elected the fourth President of Ireland on May 30, 1973, defeating Tom O’Higgins by 635,867 (52%) votes to 578,771 (48%). He becomes the second Protestant to hold the office, the first being Douglas Hyde (1938–1945).
Prevented from transforming the presidency as he desires, Childers instead throws his energy into a busy schedule of official visits and speeches, which is physically taxing.
John Howard Kyan, inventor of the ‘kyanising’ process for preserving wood, is born on November 27, 1774, in Dublin. His father, also John Howard Kyan, is the owner of valuable copper mines in County Wicklow. He is educated to take part in the management of the mines, but soon after he enters the company its fortunes decline, and in 1804 his father dies almost penniless.
For a time, Kyan is employed at some vinegar works at Newcastle upon Tyne, but subsequently removes to London. The decay of the timber supports in his father’s copper mines had already directed his attention to the question of preserving wood, and as early as 1812 he begins experiments with a view to discovering a method of preventing the decay. Eventually he finds that bichloride of mercury or corrosive sublimate, as it is commonly called, gives the best results and, without revealing the nature of the process, he submits a block of oak impregnated with the substance to the Admiralty in 1828. It is placed in the ‘fungus pit’ at Woolwich, where it remains for three years exposed to all the conditions favourable to decay. When taken out in 1831, it is found to be perfectly sound, and after further trials it still remains unaffected.
Kyan patents his discovery in 1832 (Nos. 8263 and 6309), extending the application of the invention to the preservation of paper, canvas, cloth, cordage, etc. A further patent is granted in 1836 (No. 7001).
The process attracts great attention. Michael Faraday chooses it as the subject of his inaugural lecture at the Royal Institution on February 22, 1833, on his appointment as Fullerian professor of chemistry. Dr. George Birkbeck gives a lecture upon it at the Royal Society of Arts on December 9, 1834, and in 1835 the Admiralty publishes the report of a committee appointed by the board to inquire into the value of the new method.
In 1836, Kyan sells his rights to the Anti-Dry Rot Company, an Act of Parliament being passed which authorises the raising of a capital of £250,000. Tanks are constructed at Grosvenor Basin, Pimlico, at the Grand Surrey Canal Dock, Rotherhide, and at the City Road Basin.
Among the early applications of the process is the kyanising of the palings around the Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, which is carried out in 1835 as an advertisement with small brass plates being attached to the palings at intervals stating that the wood has been submitted to the new process. The plates soon disappear, but the original palings still remain in good condition.
It becomes evident that iron fastenings cannot be used in wood treated with corrosive sublimate, on account of the corrosive action, and it is said that the wood becomes brittle. The salt is somewhat expensive and Sir William Burnett‘s method of preserving timber by zinc chloride, and afterwards the application of creosote for that purpose, proves severe competitors. Doubts begin to be expressed as to the real efficiency of kyanising, and the process gradually ceases to be employed.
John Kyan dies on January 5, 1850, in New York City, where he is engaged on a plan for filtering the water supplied to that city by the Croton Aqueduct.
Parnell dies of pneumonia at half-past eleven on the night of October 6 at his residence at 10 Walsingham Terrace, Aldrington, near Brighton, England. He dies in the arms of his wife Katherine whom he had married just five months earlier.
Prior to the funeral, Parnell’s body lay in state for several hours and his death is the primary topic of conversation around Dublin. The belief that his demise would close the chasm in the Irish ranks is no longer tenable. His death makes it too wide even to be bridged. His old opponents may have felt inclined to forget and forgive, but this spirit is crushed almost before it is born, and his old adherents are simply ferocious in their enmity.
The city is astir at an unusually early hour, and there is a crowd of thousands in and around the Westland Row Station before seven o’clock. In front, as a guard of honor, stands a body of the Gaelic Athletic Association, armed with camans, around which are bound crape and green ribbon. It is nearly eight o’clock when Parnell’s body is placed in a hearse drawn by four black horses. The Gaels march in front. Thousands join the cortège, which includes several bands and fife corps.
Though an Anglican, Parnell’s funeral at the Irish National nondenominational Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin is attended by more than 200,000 people. His notability is such that his gravestone of unhewn Wicklow granite, erected in 1940, reads only “Parnell.”
Parnell is buried amid warring elements and in the presence of an immense assemblage. As a scene of great but suppressed excitement, and of still greater impressiveness, the funeral and its surroundings will never be forgotten by those who witness it, and it will long furnish a landmark in history for Ireland.
The Irish government declares a National Day of Mourning on September 14, 2001. Schools, businesses, and shops are shut down in an unprecedented gesture of sympathy following the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City three days earlier.
Thousands of people queue for hours in front of the United States Embassy in Ballsbridge, Dublin, waiting patiently to sign one of the many books of condolences to be presented to the U.S. government in the aftermath of the attack. At John F. Kennedy’s ancestral home in Dunganstown, County Wexford, the U.S. flag flies at half-mast and the house is closed to visitors.
As it was on the day that Kennedy was assassinated, everyone remembers where they were on September 11. But on September 14 in Ireland, the churches are full and the offices, shops and pubs dark and silent as the country mourns with its American relatives, colleagues and friends.
Bouquets of flowers, teddy bears, candles and messages are left at the Embassy, as thousands stand with heads bowed. The building’s facade is turned into a shrine to those who died in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. There are both tears and applause when 250 firefighters from all over Ireland parade past the Embassy as a mark of respect to the hundreds of firefighters lost in New York. People weep openly as they hear of the casualties and more details emerge of that terrible morning.
The nation prays as industrial and commercial life comes to a halt and offices, government departments and all places of entertainment close for mourning. In every parish and diocese religious services are held, with the biggest, an ecumenical service in Dublin, attended by TaoiseachBertie Ahern, PresidentMary McAleese and many other cabinet members. At least 2,000 people attempt to squeeze into St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, which holds only 1,500. Outside, a group of U.S. students break into the American national anthem and the crowd falls silent.
The bells of Christ Church Cathedral ring muffled for 90 minutes to mark the occasion, and at 11:00 AM towns and villages fall silent as the people join in a European-wide three minutes of silence. At noon, all trains stop for five minutes, and special services are held in practically every town in the country. In Bray, County Wicklow, so many people show up that the church runs out of communion. A number of people approaching the altar are given a blessing instead.
In Dublin’s universities in the months following the attacks, Irish students who were present in New York at the time are offered free counseling to help them deal with the “nightmares and flashbacks.”
(From: “Ireland’s National Day of Mourning” by Irish America staff, http://www.irishamerica.com, December/January 2002 | Pictured: Taoisearch Bernie Ahern and Tanaiste Mary Harney with members of the Irish Cabinet sign the book of condolences in the U.S. Embassy in Dublin three days after the terrorist attacks)
The first episode of Glenroe, a television drama series broadcast on RTÉ One, airs on September 11, 1983. The series runs for eighteen years, ending in May 2001.
A spin-off from Bracken, a short-lived RTÉ drama itself spun off from The Riordans, Glenroe is broadcast, generally from September to May, each Sunday evening at 8:30 PM. It is created, and written for much of its run, by Wesley Burrowes, and later by various other directors and producers including Paul Cusack, Alan Robinson and Tommy McCardle. Glenroe is the first show to be subtitled by RTÉ, with a broadcast in 1991 starting the station’s subtitling policy.
Glenroe centers on the lives of the people living in the fictional rural village of the same name in County Wicklow. The real-life village of Kilcoole is used to film the series. The series is also filmed in studio at RTÉ and in various other locations when directors see fit.
The main protagonists are the Byrne and McDermott/Moran families, related by the marriage of Miley Byrne to Biddy McDermott, colloquially known as Biddy and Miley. Other important characters include Teasy McDaid, the proprietor of the local pub, Tim Devereux, the Roman Catholicpriest, George Black, the Church of IrelandRector of the village, Fidelma Kelly, a cousin of Biddy, Blackie Connors, George Manning and Stephen Brennan.
Glenroe is noted for its original title sequence, which features the words “Gleann Rua” in Gaelic script morphing into “Glenroe” over a series of rural images. The original title sequence is used from the 1983-1984 season to the end of the 1992-1993 season. It is replaced with a more up-to-date title sequence at the start of the 1993-1994 season.
Glenroe‘s original theme tune is a traditional Irish song called “Cuaichín Ghleann Néifinn” and is arranged by Jim Lockhart of the Celtic rock band Horslips. A newly recorded version, arranged by Máire Ní Bhraonáin of the band Clannad, is introduced at the start of the 1993-1994 season.
In 2000 it seems the series is going into inevitable decline. On January 19, 2001, despite claims four years previously that it could run for another ten years, RTÉ announces that Glenroe is to end after eighteen seasons. The final episode of the series is broadcast on May 6, 2001.
Dwyer is born in Camara, a townland in the Glen of Imaal, County Wicklow in 1772 and he participates in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. However, unlike most of the leaders and soldiers in that Rising, he does not either leave the country or return to his normal life, nor is he captured. He retreats into the Wicklow Mountains with a band of men and drives the British to distraction in their attempts to apprehend him. A reward is placed on Dwyer’s head and another for each of his men, but he leads the British authorities on a merry chase for five years, with many daring narrow escapes, each adding to his legend. Some call him the “Outlaw of Glenmalure.”
In 1803, he plans to assist Robert Emmet in his rising but he never receives the signal to join the rising. At this point he recognizes the futility of his situation, and he also wishes to relieve the suffering of a number of his family members, including his sister, whom has been jailed for no offense other than their family relationship to him. Some claim that when he contacts the British to ask terms of surrender, he is promised he and his men will be sent to the United States. If so, and not for the first time, their word to an Irishman proves worthless. After two years of brutal treatment in Kilmainham Gaol, under the infamous Edward Trevor, Dwyer is transported to Botany Bay.
Dwyer and his family, along with a number of his men, set sail for Australia on board the Tellicherry on August 25, 1805, arriving in Sydney on February 14, 1806. However, the story of Michael Dwyer does not end there. In Sydney, Dwyer runs afoul of the Governor, a certain Capt. William Bligh, of HMS Bounty fame. Bligh accuses Dwyer of being the leader of a rebellious plot involving other United Irishmen in the area, which, if true, would certainly not be out of character. Bligh ships Dwyer off to Norfolk Island, one of the worst hellholes of the British penal system in Australia.
After six months he is transferred to Tasmania, where he remains for another two years. In 1808, Bligh leaves the Governorship and Dwyer finally makes it back to his family in Sydney and is granted 100 acres of land nearby. Like many transported Irish rebels, he eventually becomes part of the local establishment and, in a bit of irony, the “Outlaw of Glenmalure” is appointed constable. However, he is dismissed in October for drunken conduct and mislaying important documents.
In December 1822 Dwyer is sued for aggrandising his by now 620 acre farm. Bankrupted, he is forced to sell off most of his assets, which include a tavern called “The Harrow Inn”, although this does not save him from several weeks incarceration in the Sydney debtors’ prison in May 1825. Here he evidently contracts dysentery, to which he succumbs on August 23, 1825.
Dwyer’s wife lives to be 93, not dying until 1861. With her passes the last connection to the “Boys of ’98” in Australia. Dwyer remains a legend among the people of the Wicklow Mountains to this day.
Goulet’s involvement in Breton nationalism leads to accusations that he had orchestrated the destruction of the Monument to the Breton-Angevin Federation at Pontivy on December 18, 1938, by Gwenn ha du, the nationalist terrorist group. He is detained, but then released.
In 1939, he is sent to Strasbourg to study the art of sabotage. He participates in the beginning of World War II fighting for France, and is captured by the Germans on June 11, 1940, while blowing up a bridge on the Aisne with friends from a French corps.
Later in the war, Goulet joins the assault section of Bagadou Stourm, Breton nationalist stormtroopers allied to the Germans. He also collaborates with the pro-Nazi nationalist newspaper L’Heure Bretonne. In 1941 in Paris, he becomes head of Bagadou Stourm and the “Youth Organizations” of the Breton National Party. The promotion of Bagadou Stourm officers is named “Patrick Pearse” to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland.
After the liberation of France, Goulet travels with his wife and children to Ireland, and is sentenced to death as a Collaborationist by a French court in his absence. He acquires Irish citizenship in 1952 and becomes an art professor.
Goulet is commissioned to create public works commemorating the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and other republicans, including the Custom House Memorial (Dublin), the East Mayo Brigade IRA Memorial, the Republican Memorial (Crossmaglen), and the Ballyseedy Memorial (Kerry). He exhibits regularly at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA), eventually becoming the RHA Professor of Sculpture. He is also made a member of Aosdána in 1982.
Towards the end of the 1960s, Goulet claims to have taken the reins of the Breton Liberation Front (Front de Libération de la Bretagne, or FLB) and to have been behind all their attacks.
In 1969 Goulet becomes secretary general and chair of the Comité National de la Bretagne Libre and publishes the communiques of the FLB. In 1968, the head of police in Bray congratulate him on organising the previous day’s attack on the CRS barracks in Saint-Brieuc.
Goulet died at Bray, County Wicklow, on August 22, 1999, two days after his 85th birthday.
(Pictured: Custom House Memorial in Dublin by Yann Renard-Goulet, 1957)
To make up for a deficiency in their living Hannay writes a short story and sends it to a London publisher. It is accepted for publication, and he receives a check of ￡10. On his wife’s advice, he gives up writing fiction and commits himself to the study of Christian theology with her. This bears fruit with the publications of The Spirit and Origin of Christian Monasticism (1903) and The Wisdom of the Desert (1904).
Hannay then serves as rector of Holy Trinity Church in Westport, County Mayo. It is here that he makes his debut as a novelist. His early writings raise the ire of nationalist Catholics, and he withdraws from the Gaelic League in the wake of ongoing protests about the tour of his successful play General John Regan.
Hannay becomes rector of Kildare parish from 1918 to 1920, and after serving as chaplain to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he joins the British ambassadorial team in Budapest in 1922. He returns to officiate at Mells, Somerset from 1924 to 1934, after which he is appointed vicar of Holy Trinity Church in the London suburb of Kensington where he serves from 1934 until his death in London on February 2, 1950.
Hannay enjoys sailing and is taught the rudiments by his father and grandfather in Belfast. When he is based in Westport, the financial success of his writing enables him to purchase a boat, a Dublin Bay Water Wag. In recognition of Hannay, the Water Wag Club of Dun Laoghaire returns to Westport and Clew Bay in 2016. In the frontispiece of his book The Inviolable Sanctuary Hannay includes a picture of the Water Wag.
The funeral and burial of 
seamus dubhghaill 