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Birth of Eoin MacNeill, Gaelic Revivalist, Nationalist & Politician

Eoin MacNeill, Irish scholar, Irish language enthusiast, Gaelic revivalist, nationalist and politician, is born John McNeill in Glenarm, County Antrim, on May 15, 1867.

MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.

MacNeill is educated at St. Malachy’s College and Queen’s College, Belfast. He is interested in Irish history and immerses himself in its study. He achieves a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics, jurisprudence and constitutional history in 1888, and then works in the British Civil Service.

MacNeill co-founds the Gaelic League in 1893, along with Douglas Hyde. He is unpaid secretary from 1893 to 1897 and then becomes the initial editor of the League’s official newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis (1899–1901). He is also editor of the Gaelic Journal from 1894 to 1899. In 1908, he is appointed professor of early Irish history at University College Dublin (UCD).

MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).

The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.

Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”

Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.

The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.

When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.

Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”

MacNeill is released from prison in 1917 and is elected Member of Parliament (MP) for the National University and Londonderry City constituencies for Sinn Féin in the 1918 United Kingdom general election. In line with abstentionist Sinn Féin policy, he refuses to take his seat in the British House of Commons in London and sits instead in the newly convened Dáil Éireann in Dublin, where he is made Secretary for Industries in the second ministry of the First Dáil. He is a member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland for Londonderry between 1921 and 1925, although he never takes his seat. In 1921, he supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In 1922, he is in a minority of pro-Treaty delegates at the Irish Race Convention in Paris. Following the establishment of the Irish Free State, he becomes Minister for Education in its second (provisional) government, the third Dáil. He strongly supports the execution of Richard Barrett, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey and Rory O’Connor during the Irish Civil War.

In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.

MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.

In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.

On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.

On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.

MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.

MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.

MacNeill is President of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) from 1937 to 1940 and President of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) from 1940 to 1943.

MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.

MacNeill’s grandson Michael McDowell serves as Tánaiste, Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform, TD and a Senator. Another grandson, Myles Tierney, serves as a member of Dublin County Council, where he is Fine Gael whip on the council.


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Death of Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne, Lord of Ranelagh

Fiach mac Aodha Ó Broin (anglicised as Feagh or Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne), the son of the chief of the O’Byrnes of the Gabhail Raghnaill, is executed in Farranerin, County Wicklow, on May 8, 1597.

His sept, a minor one, claims descent from the 11th century King of Leinster, Bran Mac Máel Mórda, and is centered at Ballinacor North in Glenmalure, a steep valley in the fastness of the Wicklow Mountains. Their chiefs style themselves as Lords of Ranalagh. The territory of the Gabhail Rabhnaill stretches from Glendalough south to the Forest of Shillelagh in Wexford and west to the borders of present-day County Carlow, an area of some 150,000 acres.

By the time of his death in 1579, O’Byrne’s father, Hugh MacShane O’Byrne, has brought his sept to prominence much to the discomfort of the senior branch of the clan, the Crioch Branagh. The Gabhaill Rabhaill has allied themselves to several leading clans in Leinster and are related by blood and marriage to the Kavanaghs, O’ Tooles, O’Connors and the O’Moores.

O’Byrne makes a name for himself as an enemy of the English. Resenting the greed and cruelty of the Elizabethan adventurers and settlers, he raids their villages and kills them or drives them out. He is appalled at the ruthless cruelty of the seneschals (Stewarts) Thomas Masterson and Sir Henry Harrington and in 1580 goes into open rebellion when Masterson summarily execute many Kavanagh clansmen.

Other clans join with O’Byrne and when James Eustace, 3rd Viscount Baltinglass, angered by the treatment of the Catholic Old English also rebells, O’Byrne joins with him. The English are appalled at this, already Munster is in turmoil as the Earl of Desmond is in rebellion and in the north the O’ Neills are moving also against the English.

An army of 3,000 men is sent into the Wicklow Mountains but O’Byrne and Eustace are waiting for them in Glenmalure. Over 800 English lose their lives at the Battle of Glenmalure and the rest flee back to Dublin. The following year the English offer terms, Eustace refuses and flees to Spain but O’Byrne and the other clan chiefs accept the terms and are pardoned.

In the following years, O’Byrne keeps a low profile. He makes no overt moves against the English, instead of holding them at bay and even giving them hostages.

In 1592, Hugh Roe O’Donnell, with brothers Art and Henry MacShane O’Neill, escapes from Dublin Castle. The breakout has been planned with the help of Hugh O’Neill, Earl of Tyrone, and the escapees fled to the safety of Glenmalure. It is a severe winter and Art dies from exposure and is buried in O’Byrne land but O’Byrne is able to transport Hugh Roe and Henry away to safety.

In January 1594, the English decide to move against O’Byrne, claiming that he is involved in treason. The Lord Deputy of Ireland Sir William Russell manages to take Ballinacor but O’Byrne and his wife Rose escape.

The English spend a long time collecting heads and plundering, they spare few. In April, Russell again goes hunting for O’Byrne who once again escapes. His wife, however, is captured and sentenced to be burned to death. The sentence is not carried out.

O’Byrne is once again forced to seek terms which he is granted for renewable 3 monthly terms. He stays quiet until September 1596 when his son successfully attacks a munitions transport and is able to overrun the English garrison that had been placed in Ballinacor.

Lord Deputy Russell spends the next year unsuccessfully scouring the country for O’Byrne. However O’ Byrne’s luck eventually runs out. A traitor in his camp gives information to Russell that O’Byrne will be in Ballinacorr on May 8, 1597. The Lord Deputy is able to surprise him and capture him in a cave. There he is hacked to death and decapitated with his own sword.

The head of O’Bryne is put on a spike at Dublin Castle then later sent to London to Queen Elizabeth. Angry that it would be even sent to England, she disdains to accept the head of such a base “Robin Hood.”

(From: “Feagh MacHugh O’Byrne 1543-1597” by Pádraig Mac Donnchadha, YourIrish.com, http://www.yourirish.com | Pictured: The armorial achievements (coat of arms, crest and motto) recorded by the Chief Herald of Ireland and the Ulster King of Arms as being awarded to Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne)


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Birth of Archibald Hamilton Rowan, Founding Member of the Dublin United Irishmen

Archibald Hamilton Rowan, a founding member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, is born in the home of his grandfather, William Rowan, in London on May 1, 1751.

Hamilton Rowan lives there with his mother and sister for much of his early life. He is admitted to Queens’ College, Cambridge in 1768, but is expelled from the college and rusticated for an attempt to throw a tutor into the River Cam. He is sent for a period in 1769 to Warrington Academy.

Hamilton Rowan travels throughout the 1770s and 1780s, visiting parts of Europe, the Americas, and North Africa. In 1781, he marries Sarah Dawson in Paris, France. The couple has ten children. He is the godfather of the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton.

Hamilton Rowan returns to Ireland in his thirties, in 1784, to live at Rathcoffey near Clane in County Kildare. He becomes a celebrity and, despite his wealth and privilege, a strong advocate for Irish liberty. That same year he joins the Killyleagh Volunteers, a militia group later associated with radical reform. He first gains public attention by championing the cause of fourteen-year-old Mary Neal in 1788. Neal had been lured into a Dublin brothel and then assaulted by Henry Luttrell, 2nd Earl of Carhampton. Hamilton Rowan publicly denounces Luttrell and publishes a pamphlet A Brief Investigation of the Sufferings of John, Anne, and Mary Neal in the same year. An imposing figure at more than six feet tall, his notoriety grows when he enters a Dublin dining club threatening several of Mary Neal’s detractors, with his massive Newfoundland at his side and a shillelagh in hand. The incident wins him public applause and celebrity as a champion of the poor.

In 1790 Hamilton Rowan joins the Northern Whig Club, and by October has become a founding member of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, working alongside famous radicals such as William Drennan and Theobald Wolfe Tone. He is arrested in 1792 for seditious libel when caught handing out “An Address to the Volunteers of Ireland,” a piece of United Irish propaganda. Unknown to him, from 1791 Dublin Castle has a spy in the Dublin Society, Thomas Collins, whose activity is never discovered. From February 1793, Britain and Ireland join the War of the First Coalition against France, and the United Irish movement is outlawed in 1794.

Hamilton Rowan’s reputation for radicalism and bluster grow during this time when he leaves Ireland to confront the Lord Advocate of Scotland about negative comments made in respect to his character and that of members of the Society of United Irishmen. As a prominent member of the Irish gentry, he is an important figure in the United Irishmen and becomes the contact for the Scottish radical societies as a result of his visit. Upon his return to Dublin, he is charged and is found guilty of seditious libel, even though he is excellently defended by the famous John Philpot Curran. He is sentenced to two years imprisonment, receives a fine of £500, and is forced to pay two assurities for good behaviour of £1,000 each. In January 1794, he retires to his apartments in Dublin’s Newgate Prison.

In the years following, Hamilton Rowan spends time in exile in France, the United States and Germany. He is allowed to return to Ireland in 1806. He returns to the ancestral home of Killyleagh Castle, County Down, receiving a hero’s welcome. While he agrees to be a model citizen under the conditions of his return to Ireland, he remains active in politics and retains his youthful radicalism. Following his last public appearance at a meeting in the Rotunda in Dublin on January 20, 1829, he is lifted up by a mob and paraded through the streets.

Hamilton Rowan dies at the age of 84 in his home on November 1, 1834. He is buried in the vaults of St. Mary’s Church, Dublin.


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Birth of Michael O’Hanrahan, Irish Rebel

Michael O’Hanrahan (Irish: Mícheál Ó hAnnracháin), an Irish rebel who is executed for his active role in the 1916 Easter Rising, is born as Michael Hanrahan on March 17, 1877, in New Ross, County Wexford.

O’Hanrahan is the son of Richard Hanrahan, a cork cutter, and Mary Williams. His father appears to have been involved in the 1867 Fenian rising. The family moves to Carlow, County Carlow, where he is educated at Carlow Christian Brothers School and Carlow College Academy. On leaving school he works various jobs including a period alongside his father in the cork-cutting business. In 1898, he joins the Gaelic League and in 1899 founds the League’s first Carlow branch and becomes its secretary. Also in 1899 he helps found a working men’s club in Carlow. By 1903 he is in Dublin, where he is working as a proofreader for the Gaelic League printer An Cló Cumann. He publishes journalism under the by-lines “Art” and “Irish Reader” in several nationalist newspapers, including Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteer. He is the author of two novels, A Swordsman of the Brigade (1914) and When the Norman Came (published posthumously in 1918).

In 1903, O’Hanrahan becomes involved in Maud Gonne’s and Arthur Griffith‘s campaign against the visit of King Edward VII to Ireland. The encounter with Griffith leads O’Hanrahan to join the newly formed Sinn Féin. He also becomes a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). In November 1913, he joins the Irish Volunteers. He is later employed as an administrator on the Volunteers headquarters staff. He is made quartermaster general of the 2nd Battalion. He and the commandant of the 2nd Battalion, Thomas MacDonagh, become close friends.

During the Easter Rising O’Hanrahan is second in command of Dublin’s 2nd Battalion under MacDonagh. He fights at Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, though the battalion sees little action other than intense sniping throughout Easter week, as the British Army largely stays clear of the impregnable factory dominating the road from Portobello Barracks on one side and Dublin Castle on the other. When the situation becomes desperate O’Hanrahan tells MacDonagh they “were inviting destruction of the factory by incendiary shells, and also of the surrounding thickly populated area.” MacDonagh orders a break-out amidst the chaos and confusion. O’Hanrahan leads “with some difficulty” the garrison out of the factory through New Bride Street gate.

O’Hanrahan is executed by firing squad on May 4, 1916 at Kilmainham Gaol. His brother, Henry O’Hanrahan, is sentenced to penal servitude for life for his role in the Easter Rising. After his execution, his mother and three sisters open a shop near Mountjoy Prison where they develop a secret line of communications between prisoners and their visitors.

In 1966, Wexford railway station is renamed Wexford O’Hanrahan Station in commemoration of O’Hanrahan, as is the road bridge over the River Barrow at New Ross. Two Gaelic games sports clubs are named after him: Geraldine O’Hanrahans GAA (New Ross) and O’Hanrahans GFC (Carlow).


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Death of James Boland, Member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood

James Boland, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) who is linked to the Irish National Invincibles, dies in Dublin on March 11, 1895. He is the father of republican revolutionaries and politicians Harry, Gerald, Ned and Kathleen Boland.

Boland is born in Manchester, Lancashire, England, on October 6, 1856. His parents, Patrick Boland and Eliza Boland (née Kelly), are both Great Famine emigrants from Connacht in Ireland. His father is reputed to be a member of the IRB and his mother is a first cousin of Colonel Thomas J. Kelly.

Patrick and his brothers may have been involved in the IRB campaign to rescue Kelly and Timothy Deasy from a Manchester police van. Ten-year-old Boland is believed to have been a scout for the party that attacks the van and kills a police officer. As he grows older, he becomes more involved in the movement himself.

Boland moves to Dublin in around 1881 and becomes a foreman with a company paving the streets of Smithfield, Dublin. He is transferred from the Manchester Fenians to the Dublin section. He marries Kate Woods in 1882.

Boland is awarded the Royal Humane Society‘s medal in the same year for “jumping off the Metal Bridge” to save a life.

Boland’s involvement in the Invincibles and the Phoenix Park Murders remains unclear. He works with Joe Brady and is named by informers as a member of the IRB’s Dublin Directory in 1882, while another informer names him as a member of the Invincibles and claims that he gave orders to Brady. He is questioned at Dublin Castle, but when a warrant is issued for his arrest on January 25, 1883, he and Kate had fled to New York.

Boland finds work as an engineer with De Castro & Donner, a sugar-refining company in Brooklyn. He also becomes involved in Clan na Gael and gets to know John Devoy very well. He possibly secretly returns to Ireland in 1883 as he reputedly takes part in IRB meetings that are believed to lead to the formation of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA). According to his grandson, Kevin Boland, he is in attendance as a member of the already established General Council at the historic meeting in Hayes’ Hotel in Thurles, County Tipperary.

Boland’s first child, Nellie, is born in the United States, while his second child, Gerald is conceived there, but is born in Manchester in May 1885.

The Boland family returns to Dublin in 1885 where Boland resumes work with the Dublin Corporation, this time directly employed and, by 1891, has been promoted from foreman to overseer. He is a leading figure in the Paviors’ Society. He is also under continuous surveillance by the police as his IRB role continues. He is named number 59 of 63 “dangerous Fenians” in the Dublin Metropolitan Police District in September 1886.

The Bolands’ third child, Harry, is born in 1887. Boland’s involvement in the nationalist movement increases and, after the split over Charles Stewart Parnell‘s leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), he becomes one of the main Parnellite organisers in Dublin. At Parnell’s funeral procession in 1891, he and seven colleagues head a contingent of 2,000, each wielding a camán (hurley) draped in black. He also organises the funeral of his friend Pat Nally, a former member of the IRB’s Supreme Council with whom Boland had originally conspired in Manchester.

In 1892, Boland is brought before the courts charged with keeping drink for the purposes of sale without a license. In court, he is able to show that, in fact, the premises is the new premises of the Nally Branch of the GAA and that the bar is attached to the club. The case is dismissed.

Boland is elected President of the Dublin County Committee of the GAA in 1892 and to the Dublin seat of GAA Central Council for the next two years. The Bolands have two more children, Kathleen in 1889 and Ned in 1893.

In 1894, Boland is elected to the Supreme Council of the IRB.

Boland falls ill in October 1894 with a serious brain disorder. He has received head injuries at two previous incidents. According to accounts, he is hit in the head protecting Parnell from assailants before his last trip to Wicklow and suffers a concussion. The injury also causes an undetected skull fracture. He is also involved in a bombing of the offices of the Parnell’s newspaper United Ireland in 1891 following an attempted takeover by Healyites, during which he is struck in the head.

Boland fails to recover and dies in Dublin on March 11, 1895. Around 1,500 mourners on foot follow his open hearse at his funeral. The group includes three members of parliament, eight city councillors and prominent Nationalists, including Arthur Griffith, James Bermingham and Fred Allan. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, Glasnevin, County Dublin. Following his death, two funds are raised to save his wife and young family from destitution. Enough money is raised to acquire a tobacconists business for Kate Boland.


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Death of Thomas Eyre, Surveyor General of Ireland

Thomas Eyre, an Irish military engineer, dies in Dublin on February 22, 1772, while attending a session of the Irish House of Commons from an apoplectic fit.

Eyre is born around 1720, the second son of Colonel Samuel Eyre of Eyreville, County Galway, a descendant of Colonel John Eyre, who accompanies General Ludlow to Ireland in 1651 and acquires large estates in County Galway, including the Manor of Eyrecourt.

Eyre is that rare man whose military and engineering training occurs entirely in the Americas before he assumes the significant office of Surveyor General of Ireland in 1752. In 1738, he joins the regiment of James Oglethorpe, the founder of the Province of Georgia, and sails to the colony. As a cadet in Oglethorpe’s Regiment, he is sent to the colony’s interior as an agent to the Cherokee Indians. He rises from the rank of cadet to be sub-engineer for Georgia and the Province of South Carolina and in 1740 he is commissioned an ensign. He learns engineering from Major William Cook, the Regiment’s Engineer, and he marries Cook’s daughter Anne, who has accompanied her father to Georgia. The date of the wedding is not documented, but occurs by 1743, by which date both Eyre and Cook have returned to London. In the last two years of his tour of duty, Eyre serves also as the Sub-engineer for South Carolina and Georgia.

In 1744, Eyre is commissioned a lieutenant and joins Trelawney’s Regiment of Foot, headed by Edward Trelawney, Governor of Jamaica. He serves in Jamaica and at Roatán (Rattan) and is in charge of Roatán’s defences until 1748, when the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ends the War of the Austrian Succession and returns the island to Spain. He is promoted to captain in 1748. For the four years after his departure from Roatán and before his resignation from Trelawney’s Regiment, little is known about his activities until he retires from active duty in 1752.

On August 31, 1752, Eyre is appointed Surveyor General of Ireland, having purchased the office from Arthur Jones-Nevill. Joseph Jarratt works as his deputy in this role. He undertakes works at the Royal Barracks in Dublin, but the condition of the barracks is criticised by the Commissioners of the Ordnance for Ireland. As Surveyor General, he is also involved in harbour works at Dún Laoghaire, and is responsible for the rebuilding of the State Apartments at Dublin Castle. In 1763, the office of Surveyor General is abolished, and he is transferred to the new post of Chief Engineer of the Ordnance.

Eyre resigns his commission in 1766 and becomes member of the Irish House of Commons for Thomastown (1761-68) and Fore (1768-1772). He dies on February 22, 1772, from an apoplectic fit brought on by the sudden death of a much loved daughter, at Parliament House, Dublin, while attending a session of the House.


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Death of Elizabeth Mernin, Irish Intelligence Agent

Elizabeth “Lily” Mernin, an Irish intelligence agent known as the “Little Gentleman” or “Lt. G.,” dies in Dublin on February 18, 1957.

Mernin is born in Clanbrassil Street, Dublin, on November 16, 1886. Her parents are John Mernin and Marianne “Mary” (née McGuire). She has one sister, May. Her father is a baker and confectioner of Dorset Street, Dublin. After his death when Mernin is young, the children are raised by his family in Dungarvan, County Waterford.

In the 1910s, Mernin works as a typist in a number of Dublin companies, and by 1914 she is a shorthand typist in Dublin Castle at the garrison adjutant’s office. She is a member of the Keating branch of the Gaelic League, and through this her cousin, Piaras Béaslaí, introduces her to Michael Collins in 1918. From 1919 she begins working for Collins as an intelligence agent. She uses her position in Dublin Castle to obtain important documents and, in 1920, intelligence on British intelligence officers and the auxiliary police.

Under the alias of “Little Gentleman” or “Lt. G.,” Mernin is one of Collins‘a most important agents, so much so that many believe the Little Gentleman is a British intelligence officer. One of the most important contributions she makes is identifying the homes of British intelligence officers who are later killed on Bloody Sunday, November 21, 1920, by Collins‘s Irish Republican Army (IRA) unit The Squad. She aids Frank Saurin and Tom Cullen in identifying senior British agents in Dublin, typing secret reports for Collins in a room in 19 Clonliffe Road.

In February 1922, Mernin is discharged from the British service, taking up a position as a typist in the Irish Army from July 1922 until February 1952, when she retires. She works primarily at Clancy Barracks. She is awarded a military pension for her service from 1918-1922, and her statement is held in the Bureau of Military History in the Military Archives.

Mernin never marries, although she gives birth to a son in London in June 1922, with some evidence suggesting Béaslaí is the father. She lives at 167 Mangerton Road, Drimnagh. She dies at the age of 70 on February 18, 1957, in Dublin.


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Death of Gerard Slevin, Heraldist & Dramatist

(John) Gerard Slevin, dramatist and Chief Herald of Ireland from 1954 to 1981, dies on January 18, 1997.

Slevin is born on November 1, 1919, in Cork, County Cork, the son of John Slevin, motor mechanic, of Wellington Road, Cork, and Bridget Slevin (née Kennelly). His father, who hails from County Laois tenant farmers, works with the Irish Omnibus Corporation. He is educated at North Monastery CBS and University College Cork (UCC), taking an MA summa cum laude in philosophy and English in 1941.

After lecturing at St. Patrick’s College, Dublin, from 1941 to 1944, Slevin enters the civil service. Despite no prior interest in heraldry, he is selected via competition to assist the newly installed Chief Herald, Dr. Edward MacLysaght, in the genealogical office, Bedford Tower, Dublin Castle. After serving as Deputy Chief Herald (1944–54), he succeeds MacLysaght as Chief Herald of Ireland, becoming the longest-serving occupant of the office (1954–81).

One of three national heralds named to a vexillogical committee to devise a common emblem for the Council of Europe, Slevin persuades his colleagues to eschew religious iconography, such as the Christian cross, as inappropriate. His own design of a circle of twelve golden stars on an azure field is selected by the committee in 1954, and formally accepted by the council in December 1955. With blue chosen as a colour common to the flags of many European countries, the twelve stars represent not individual states but such associations as the zodiac and a clock face, suggesting ideals of universality, harmony, and evolution through time. Adopted in 1985 for the flag of the European Community (latterly the European Union), his design attracts wide acclaim in heraldic circles, leading to his being awarded membership of the Académie Internationale d’Héraldique.

During Slevin’s tenure as Chief Herald, several hundred patents of arms are issued to Irish public bodies, including civic and municipal authorities, and to individuals of Irish descent worldwide. On behalf of the Irish government, he confirms the Irish connections of such notables as United States presidents Kennedy, Nixon, and Reagan, French president Charles de Gaulle, and Princess Grace of Monaco. His coat of arms for President Kennedy, combining the ancient arms of the Kennedy and Fitzgerald families, wins renown as a masterpiece of heraldic design. While possessing a keen sense of graphic impact, he is not a great draughtsman, and he employs the noted heraldic painter Myra Maguire to execute the designs that he creates. He oversees expansion of genealogical office services, instituting an advisory service and team of research assistants for the growing numbers – especially within emigrant communities abroad – seeking to trace Irish ancestry. He establishes a committee to catalogue churchyard memorial inscriptions as an archival resource, meant to redress the loss of state records in the 1922 Four Courts fire.

Slevin wins first prize in successive years in the 1950s for entries in the Oireachteas drama competition, both plays being subsequently produced at the Abbey Theatre. He writes a detective novel in Irish, and contributes numerous articles to learned journals, chiefly on medieval heraldry and Anglo-Irish families. Erudite and possessed of great presence, courtesy, and wit, he is an engaging speaker.

Resident in south County Dublin, Slevin is active in amateur dramatics, local history societies, and the ecumenical movement. His recreation is long country walks. He marries Millicent Nolan in 1950 and they have three sons. He dies on January 18, 1997.

(From: “Slevin, (John) Gerard” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 (last revised February 2025))


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Death of Vincent “Vinnie” Byrne, Member of “The Squad”

Vincent (‘Vinnie’) Byrne, a member of the Irish Republican Army and a senior figure in the assassination group known as The Squad, dies at the age of 92 on December 13, 1992, in Artane, Dublin.

Byrne is born on November 23, 1900, in the National Maternity Hospital, Holles Street, Dublin, the elder among one son and one daughter of Vincent Byrne, carpenter, of 33 Denzille Street (now Fenian Street), and his wife Margaret (née White). By 1911 the family is living with maternal relatives at 1 Anne’s Lane. Educated at St. Andrew’s national school, Westland Row, he is apprenticed as a cabinet maker under Thomas Weafer, a company captain in the Irish Volunteers, who is subsequently killed in the 1916 Easter Rising. At the age of fourteen, he joins the Irish Volunteers in January 1915, and is posted to the 2nd Battalion of the Dublin Brigade. His training includes lectures on street fighting by James Connolly. During the 1916 rising he serves with the 2nd Battalion in Jacob’s biscuit factory under Thomas MacDonagh. At the surrender he is slipped out a factory window to safety by a priest who is acting as an intermediary. Arrested in his home a week later, he is held in Richmond Barracks with other youngsters, all of whom are released after an additional week. Active in the post-rising reorganisation of the Dublin Brigade, he claims to have voted twenty times for Sinn Féin candidates in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland.

In November 1919, Byrne is recruited to an elite counter-intelligence squad of the Dublin Brigade, whose primary mission is the assassination of plainclothes detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police’s (DMP) political (‘G’) division. He participates in the attempted ambush of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, John French, at Ashtown, Dublin, on December 19, 1919, a combined operation of the Dublin and the 3rd Tipperary brigades. In March 1920, he leaves his civilian employment with the Irish Woodworkers, Crow Street, when the squad is constituted as a full-time, paid, GHQ guard, under direct orders from Michael Collins. Dubbed “The Twelve Apostles,” the squad also includes James Slattery, a workmate of Byrne since their apprenticeships. For the duration of the Irish War of Independence, Byrne takes part in the stakeouts and killings of police detectives and military intelligence agents. His witness statement to the Bureau of Military History recounts his participation in some fifteen such operations. On Bloody Sunday he commands an IRA detail that kills two of the “Cairo Gang“ agents in their boarding house at 38 Upper Mount Street on November 21, 1920. He takes part in The Custom House raid on May 25, 1921.

Owing largely to his devoted allegiance to Collins, Byrne supports the Anglo–Irish Treaty of December 1921, regarding it as a stepping stone to complete independence. Enlisting in the National Army, he serves in the Dublin Guard. Promoted five times from January 1922 to February 1923, he rises in rank from company sergeant to commandant. He is OC of the guard at the handover of Dublin Castle from British to Irish authority on January 16, 1922. During ensuing months he commands guard details at government buildings and the Bank of Ireland, College Green, Dublin. In March 1922, he foils an attempt by Anti-Treaty forces to seize the bank with the aid of mutinous soldiers within the building’s guard. Having displayed courage and presence of mind throughout the incident, he is promoted captain in the field. Resenting the role given to ex-British-army officers in the National Army, and feeling that the political elite of the Free State are betraying the national interest, he is among the group of officers involved in the failed army mutiny of 1924, and accordingly is forced to resign his commission on March 21. He then works as a carpenter on the industrial staff of the Office of Public Works (OPW), and in the post office stores, St. John’s Road, Kilmainham, Dublin, until his retirement.

Byrne is a founding member of both the Association of Dublin Brigades and the 1916–1921 Club. Long lived, and a willing raconteur with a colourful turn of phrase, he becomes probably the best known of Collins’s squad (of which he is the last surviving member), granting many interviews to journalists and historians. He expresses no misgivings about his role as a revolutionary hit man, arguing the necessity of the ruthless methods employed, which deterred potential informers, and eventually won the struggle by crippling British intelligence.

Byrne lives in Dublin at 59 Blessington Street, and later at 227 Errigal Road, Drimnagh. His last address is 25 Lein Road, Artane. His wife Eileen predeceases him. He dies on December 13, 1992, survived by two daughters and one son. He is buried at Balgriffin Cemetery, Balgriffin, County Dublin.

(From: “Byrne, Vincent (‘Vinnie’)” by Lawrence William White and Pauric J. Dempsey, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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The Proclamation of Dungannon

The Proclamation of Dungannon is a document produced by Sir Phelim O’Neill on October 24, 1641, in the Irish town of Dungannon. O’Neill is one of the leaders of the Irish Rebellion of 1641, which was launched the previous day. O’Neill’s Proclamation sets out a justification of the uprising. He claims to have been given a commission signed and sealed on October 1 by the King of England, Scotland and Ireland Charles I that commands him to lead Irish Catholics in defence of the Kingdom of Ireland against Protestants who sympathise with Charles’s opponents in the Parliament of England.

Following the trial and execution of the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, in May 1641, Ireland is in a state of turmoil. There is growing tension between Catholics and Protestants (particularly those of a Puritan tendency) with the former generally sympathetic to King Charles while the latter supports the English Parliament and the Scottish Covenanters in the dispute that shortly leads to the outbreak of the English Civil War. This forms part of the wider War of the Three Kingdoms.

On October 23, a major uprising breaks out in Ulster organised by leading members of the Gaelic aristocracy. The rebels attack Protestant plantation settlements as well as native Irish Protestants and take garrison towns held by the Irish Army. Irish government authorities in Dublin struggle to contain the insurgency with the limited number of troops they have at their disposal. A last-minute warning saves Dublin Castle from a surprise attack, although O’Neill is clearly unaware of the failure of the Dublin plot when he issues his proclamation.

After seizing several key strategic points in Ulster over the previous twenty-four hours, O’Neill makes his proclamation in Dungannon, a town that has symbolic importance as the traditional capital of the O’Neill dynasty.

In support of his actions, O’Neill claims to have a document from King Charles commissioning him. The Commission is supposedly signed under the Great Seal of Scotland. By declaring their loyalty to the Crown and defence of the Catholic religion, O’Neill and his followers adopt a political stance which is taken up by the subsequent Irish Confederation which governs rebel-controlled territory in the name of the King from 1642 until 1649. The Proclamation encourages many Catholics to believe they can lawfully join the rising with the King’s blessing, while Protestants are left demoralised.

O’Neill’s second and more trenchant proclamation is made “from our camp at Newry” on November 4, 1641 alongside Rory Maguire. He also publishes the actual royal commission that gives authority for his earlier proclamation. It is subtly different, in that it empowers him to arrest and seize property from all of Charles’s English Protestant subjects living in Ireland, but exempts his Irish and Scottish subjects.

Until the late nineteenth century historians generally accept that the commission is genuine, or at the very least Charles had secretly encouraged the Irish Catholics to launch a rising. Since then, for a variety of reasons, it has been considered to be a forgery produced by O’Neill and his associates without the knowledge of the King. They may well have acquired a copy of the Great Seal of Scotland when they captured the garrison town of Charlemont on October 23.

The historian David Stevenson notes that it would be unlikely that the commission would have been addressed to O’Neill. Had it been genuine it would almost certainly have been issued to more senior Irish Royalists such as the James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, or the leading Catholic noble of Ulster, Randal MacDonnell, 1st Marquess of Antrim. It is also unlikely to have been issued at Edinburgh as O’Neill claimed. However, King Charles was in Edinburgh on October 1, dealing with Scottish political matters.

Forgery or not, King Charles publicly proclaims all the Irish rebels as traitors on January 1, 1642.

That the Commission is genuine is widely accepted in England and Scotland by the King’s opponents and even some of his own supporters. It seems to tie in with earlier rumours of an army plot which had suggested that Charles might bring over the New Irish Army, made up largely of Ulster Catholics, to impose his will on England and Scotland. Anger at the King’s alleged links with the insurgents grow – particularly as horror stories of atrocities committed, such as the Portadown Massacre, begin to filter across the Irish Sea. Tensions arising from news of the Irish rebellion is a factor in the English push to Civil War in early 1642.

The Scottish authorities dispatch an Army which quickly retakes much of Ulster from the insurgents. Once the English Civil War breaks out in October 1642, Charles’ emissaries begin negotiations with the Irish rebels for their support, which seems to present further evidence to his opponents of his links with the Catholic Ulster leaders. Many of these later dealings are exposed when Charles private letters are captured during the Battle of Naseby (1645) and published as King’s Cabinet Opened.

When O’Neill is captured in 1653 following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, he is put on trial for his life. The authorities offer to spare him if he will repeat his earlier claims that Charles had ordered the Catholics to rise in 1641. O’Neill now refuses to implicate the King, who had been executed four years earlier, and is put to death himself. Nonetheless, the English Republicans continue to use O’Neill’s earlier claims of the King’s involvement to justify their decision to commit regicide.