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Birth of Patrick Guiney, American Civil War Soldier

Patrick Robert Guiney, American Civil War soldier, is born in Parkstown, County Tipperary, on January 15, 1835.

Guiney is the second and eldest surviving son of James Roger Guiney, who is descended from Jacobites, and Judith Macrae. His father, impoverished after a failed runaway marriage, brings with him on his second voyage to New Brunswick his favourite child Patrick, not yet six years old. After some years, his mother and younger brother, William, rejoin her husband, recently crippled by a fall from his horse. They settle in Portland, Maine. The young Guiney works as a wheel boy in a rope factory, and at the age of fourteen apprenticed to a machinist in Lawrence, Massachusetts, but stays only a year and a half before returning to Portland.

Guiney hopes to better himself through education and attends the public grammar school. He matriculates at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. His depleting finances cause him to leave after about a year, despite the fact that the college president offers to make some arrangement for him to stay, which his honor would not allow him to accept. His book-loving father having meanwhile died, he goes to study for the Bar under Judge Walton, and is admitted in Lewiston, Maine, in 1856, taking up the practice of criminal law.

In politics he is a Republican. For the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, he wins its first suit. In 1859 he marries in the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, Janet Margaret Doyle, related to James Warren Doyle, Bishop of Kildare and Leighlin. They have one son, who dies in infancy, and one daughter, the poet and essayist Louise Imogen Guiney. Home life in Roxbury and professional success are cut short by the outbreak of the American Civil War.

Familiar with the manual of arms, Guiney enlists for example’s sake as a private, refusing a commission from Governor John A. Andrew until he has worked hard to help recruit the 9th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. By June 1861, he is a captain. In July 1862, the first colonel having died from a wound received in action, Lieutenant Colonel Guiney succeeds him to the command. He wins high official praise, notably for courage and presence of mind at the Battle of Gaines’ Mill in Hanover County, Virginia. Here, after three successive color-bearers had been shot down, he himself reportedly seizes the flag, throws aside coat and sword-belt, rises white-shirted and conspicuous in the stirrups, inspires a final rally, and turns the fortune of the day.

Guiney fights in over thirty engagements, including the Battle of Antietam, the Battle of Fredericksburg, and the Battle of Chancellorsville.

The 9th Massachusetts is present at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in second brigade first division V Corps on July 1, 1863. Col Jacob B. Sweitzer the brigade commander, detaches Guiney’s regiment for picket duty. Consequently, the regiment misses the second day’s fighting at the Battle of Gettysburg.

In 1864, through the Battle of the Wilderness, Guiney frequently has been in command of his brigade, the second brigade, first division, V Corps. After many escapes from dangerous combats without serious injury, he is shot in the face by a sharpshooter at the Battle of the Wilderness on May 5, 1864. The Minié ball destroys his left eye, and inflicts, it is believed, a fatal wound. During an interval of consciousness, however, he insists on an operation which saves his life. He is honorably discharged and mustered out of the U.S. Volunteers on June 21, 1864, just before the mustering out of his old regiment.

On February 21, 1866, President Andrew Johnson nominates Guiney for the award of the honorary grade of brevet brigadier general, to rank from March 13, 1865, for gallant and meritorious services during the war. The U.S. Senate confirms the award on April 10, 1866.

Kept alive for years by nursing, Guiney runs unsuccessfully for the United States Congress on a sort of “Christian Socialist” platform, is elected assistant district attorney (1866–70), and acts as consulting lawyer (no longer being able to plead) on many locally celebrated cases.

Guiney’s last exertions are devoted to the defeat of the corruption and misuse of the Probate Court of Suffolk County, Massachusetts, of which he had become registrar (1869–77). He dies suddenly on March 21, 1877, in Boston and is found kneeling against an elm in the little park near his home. General Guiney is Commandant of the Loyal Legion, Major-General Commandant of the Veteran Military League, member of the Charitable Irish Society of Boston, and one of the founders and first members of the Catholic Union of Boston. He also publishes some literary criticism, a few graphic prose sketches and some verse.


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Mary Robinson Inaugurated 7th President of Ireland

Mary Robinson, Irish lawyer, independent politician, and diplomat born Mary Teresa Winifred Bourke, is inaugurated as the seventh President of Ireland on December 3, 1990, becoming the first woman to hold the office. She later serves as United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) from September 1997 – September 2002.

Robinson is born on May 21, 1944, in Ballina, County Mayo. She is educated at Trinity College and the King’s Inns in Dublin and at Harvard Law School in the United States. She serves at Trinity College (University of Dublin) as Reid Professor of penal legislation, constitutional and criminal law, and the law of evidence (1969–1975) and lecturer in European Community law (1975–1990). In 1988 she and her husband establish the Irish Centre for European Law at Trinity College.

A distinguished constitutional lawyer and a renowned supporter of human rights, Robinson is elected to the Royal Irish Academy and is a member of the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva (1987–1990). She sits in Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Oireachtas, for the University of Dublin constituency (1969–1989) and serves as whip for the Labour Party until resigning from the party over the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, which she feels ignores unionist objections. She is also a member of the Dublin City Council (1979–1983) and runs unsuccessfully in 1977 and 1981 for Dublin parliamentary constituencies.

Nominated by the Labour Party and supported by the Green Party and the Workers’ Party, Robinson becomes Ireland’s first woman president in 1990 by mobilizing a liberal constituency and merging it with a more conservative constituency opposed to the Fianna Fáil party. As president, she adopts a much more prominent role than her predecessors and she does much to communicate a more modern image of Ireland. Strongly committed to human rights, she is the first head of state to visit Somalia after it suffers from civil war and famine in 1992 and the first to visit Rwanda after the genocide in that country in 1994.

Shortly before her term as president expires, Robinson accepts the post of United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). As high commissioner, she changes the priorities of her office to emphasize the promotion of human rights at the national and regional levels. She was the first UNHCHR to visit China, and she also helps to improve the monitoring of human rights in Kosovo. In 2001 she serves as secretary-general of the World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. In 1998 she is elected chancellor of Trinity College, a post she holds until 2019.

After stepping down as UNHCHR, Robinson founds the nongovernmental organization Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative (2002–2010). Its central concerns include equitable international trade, access to health care, migration, women’s leadership and corporate responsibility. She is also a founding member of the Council of Women World Leaders, serves as honorary president of Oxfam International, a private organization that provides relief and development aid to impoverished or disaster-stricken communities worldwide, and is a member of the Club of Madrid, which promotes democracy. She also holds various posts at the United Nations, and in 2010, she establishes the Mary Robinson Foundation—Climate Justice, which operates until 2019.

Robinson is the recipient of numerous honours. In 2004 Amnesty International awards her its Ambassador of Conscience Award for her human rights work. In 2009 she receives the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Her memoir, Everybody Matters: My Life Giving Voice (cowritten with Tessa Robinson), is published in 2012.

(Pictured: Mary Robinson during her inauguration as president in 1990, photograph by Matt Kavanagh)


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Inauguration of Mary McAleese as 8th President of Ireland

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Mary Patricia McAleese (née Leneghan) is inaugurated as the eighth President of Ireland on November 11, 1997. She succeeds Mary Robinson, making her the second female president of Ireland and the first woman in the world to succeed another woman as president. She is the first president to come from Northern Ireland.

Leneghan is born into a Roman Catholic family on June 27, 1951, in Ardoyne, north Belfast. The eldest of nine children, she grows up in Northern Ireland through the violent times that have come to be known as “The Troubles.” She is educated at St. Dominic’s High School, Queen’s University Belfast, from which she graduates in 1973, and Trinity College Dublin. She is called to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 1974 and remains a member of the Bar Council of Ireland. In 1975, she is appointed Reid Professor of Criminal Law, Criminology and Penology at Trinity College Dublin.

Leneghan marries Martin McAleese, an accountant and dentist in 1976. They have three children, Emma, born 1982, and twins Justin and SaraMai, born in 1985.

In 1987, McAleese returns to her Alma Mater, Queen’s University Belfast, to become Director of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies. In 1994, she becomes the first female Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the university.

McAleese defeats former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds in an internal party election in 1997, held to determine the Fianna Fáil nomination for the Irish presidency. Her opponents in the 1997 presidential election are Mary Banotti of Fine Gael, Adi Roche of the Labour Party and two Independents, Dana Rosemary Scallon and Derek Nally.

McAleese wins the presidency with 45.2% of first preference votes. In the second and final count against Banotti, McAleese wins 55.6% of preferences. Within weeks of her November 1997 inauguration, she makes her first official overseas trip to Lebanon.

McAleese describes the theme of her presidency as “building bridges.” The first individual born in Northern Ireland to become President of Ireland, McAleese is a regular visitor to Northern Ireland throughout her presidency, where she is on the whole warmly welcomed by both communities, confounding critics who had believed she would be a divisive figure. While on an official visit to the United States in 1998, Archbishop of Boston Cardinal Bernard Francis Law tells her he is “sorry for Catholic Ireland to have you as President.” She tells the cardinal that she is the “President of Ireland and not just of Catholic Ireland.”

McAleese’s initial seven-year term of office ends in November 2004, but she stands for a second term in the 2004 presidential election. She is re-elected on October 1, 2004, being the only validly nominated candidate.

McAleese is an experienced broadcaster, having worked as a current affairs journalist and presenter in radio and television with Radio Telefís Éireann. She has a longstanding interest in many issues concerned with justice, equality, social inclusion, anti-sectarianism and reconciliation.