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Birth of Helena Concannon, Historian, Writer & Politician

Helena Concannon (née Walsh), Irish historian, writer, language scholar and Fianna Fáil politician, is born in Maghera, County Londonderry, on October 28, 1878.

Concannon is educated by the Loreto nuns in Coleraine, County Londonderry. In 1897, she studies modern languages at the Royal University of Ireland on a three-year scholarship. She studies abroad during these years as in 1899, she travels to Germany and studies German in Berlin University accompanied by her friend, Mary Macken. She then travels to France to study French at Sorbonne University. In 1900, she graduates Bachelor of Arts with first class honours and goes on to study Master of Arts in 1902 at the Royal University of Ireland. She is fortunate to being one of the first generation of educated women.

In 1906, Concannon marries Tomás Bán Ó Conceanainn, who she met in 1900 when he arrived home from the United States. They settle down in County Galway where they share the same love for the Irish language and write many Irish texts. They have no children. In Galway, she is a professor at University College Galway where she teaches history, which mainly involves the history of Irish women. In 1909, she is offered a lectureship at University College Dublin, in Italian, but the offer is then withdrawn before she can accept it, so she decides to pursue a writing career.

Concannon produces over twenty books, including works on religion, the history of Ireland and Irish women’s history. Her works are highly impacted by her political and nationalist views. Her analyses of Irish history is based on Catholicism and patriotism. She is also an advocate of Irish language restoration. Her first writings are love poems to her husband. These poems are ”simple, sensuous and passionate.”

Concannon also produces a number of imaginative historical text for children. She uses her married name for her publications and her first book, entitled A Garden of girls, or the famous schoolgirls of former days, is published in 1914. It is about “school life and education of real little girls” Her next well known piece is the Life of St. Columban in 1915, which is a study about the Irish ancient monastic life and a biography of a sixth-century saint.

Two of Concannon’s books, Daughters of Banba (1922) and St. Patrick (1932), receive the Tailteann Medal for Literature, and The Poor Clares in Ireland (1929) wins the National University Prize, a D.Litt. higher doctorate degree for historical research.

Concannon’s most common publication, Women of ‘Ninety Eight, is dedicated to all the dead women and all the living ones who have given their loved ones. This book emerges on the ideologies of Catholicism and patriotism “praising the devotion of Irish nationalist women while emphasising the centrality of women’s spiritual and domestic role in the home to the well-being of the nation.” As this work is written during the time of the Irish War of Independence, she stresses the importance of women help during the rebellion as “they acted as messengers and intelligence officers,” and in some cases, they fought as any men.

Concannon was elected to the 8th Dáil for Fianna Fáil at the 1933 Irish general election for the National University of Ireland constituency, serving from February 8, 1933 until June 14, 1937.

Concerning the Land Purchase (Guarantee Fund) Bill 1935, which according to George Cecil Bennett will negatively impact the rural middle class of which he is a representative, Bennett accuses Concannon and her fellow Dublin men of not caring about the people of the country. Concannon goes on to vote that the Dáil should disagree with the Seanad Éireann-proposed bill with 71 others.

Though Concannon is a TD as a university representative, she votes with her party to remove university representation from the Dáil, leading one TD to say, “I am very much surprised to see such a distinguished scholar and such a great contributor to Irish literature as Deputy Mrs. Concannon voting for the disfranchisement of the University that she has so well and so ably represented.”

Concannon speaks on behalf of Irish women in the Dáil in 1936. She speaks on how Irish women play a fundamental role in Ireland’s agricultural economy and therefore more money should be put toward educating these women.

Concannon is one of the minority voices against the role appointed to women in Éamon de Valera‘s constitution. She does not contest the Dáil election of 1937.

After the adoption of the Constitution of Ireland in 1937, the National University of Ireland constituency is reconstituted in the new Seanad Éireann. The first election takes place in 1938, and Concannon is elected. She is a popular figure and is re-elected each election in the Seanad until she dies in office on February 27, 1952.


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Death of Albert Morrow, Illustrator, Poster Designer & Cartoonist

Albert George Morrow, Irish illustrator, poster designer and cartoonist, dies at his home in West Sussex, England, on October 26, 1927.

Morrow is born on April 26, 1863, in Comber, County Down, the second son of George Morrow, a painter and decorator from Clifton Street in west Belfast. Of his seven brothers, four, George, Jack, Edwin, and Norman, are also illustrators and all but one are artists. He is a keen ornithologist in his youth. In later life he is a keen walker and paints landscapes for leisure.

Morrow is educated at the Belfast Model School and latterly at the Belfast Government School of Art between 1878 and 1881.

While studying under T. M. Lindsay at the Government School of Art in 1880, Morrow is awarded a £10 prize for drawing from the eminent publishers Cassell, Petter and Galpin. In 1881, while still learning his trade, he paints a mural of Belfast for the Working Men’s Institute in Rosemary Street, where his father is chairman. Later in that same year he exhibits a watercolour sketch of a standing figure entitled Meditative at the gallery of Rodman & Company, Belfast.

Morrow then wins a three-year scholarship worth £52 per year which he takes to the National Art Training School at South Kensington in 1882, where he begins a lifelong friendship with the British sculptor Albert Toft. In 1883, while still attending South Kensington, he joins the staff of The English Illustrated Magazine in preparation for the launch of the first edition. Two of his works are published in the Sunday at Home magazine in September of the same year.

J. Comyns Carr, first editor of The English Illustrated Magazine, commissions Morrow to complete a series on English industry when he has yet to complete his studies at South Kensington.

In 1890, Morrow begins illustrating for Bits and Good Words. He exhibits nine works at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1890 and 1904, all of which are watercolours, and another in 1917, and an offering in chalk at the 159th Exhibition, in the year of his death.

Morrow becomes a member of the Belfast Art Society in 1895, exhibiting with them in the same year. In 1896, a Morrow print is published in Volume 2 of the limited-edition print-collection Les Maîtres de l’Affiche selected by “Father of the Poster” Jules Chéret. In the same year he shows a watercolour of a Gurkha at the Earls Court in the Empire of India and Ceylon exhibition. In 1900, he exhibits with two Ulster artists, Hugh Thomson and Arthur David McCormick, at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast, who along with Morrow had contributed to the early success of The English Illustrated Magazine.

Morrow is one of the founders of the Ulster Arts Club in November 1902 along with five of his brothers, an organisation that has a nonsectarian interest in Celtic ideas, language and aesthetics. In November 1903, he exhibits at the first annual exhibition of the Club when he shows alongside John Lavery, Hans Iten, James Stoupe and F. W. Hull. He exhibits The Itinerant Musician, a watercolour that he had previously shown at the Royal Academy in 1902. Honorary membership is conferred upon him the following year. Three years later he is honoured with a solo exhibition of sketches and posters in conjunction with the Ulster Arts Club, at the Belfast Municipal Gallery.

In 1908, Morrow joins his brothers in an exhibition at 15 D’Olier Street, Dublin, an address which is later registered to the family business in 1913. Among his contributions to the family exhibition is his painting of Brandon Thomas, The Clarionette Player, which had previously been exhibited at the Royal Academy, and a poster entitled Irving in Dante.

In 1917, Morrow joins his brother George and 150 artists and writers, in petitioning the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George to find a way of enacting the unsigned codicil to Hugh Lane’s will and establish a gallery to house Lane’s art collection in Dublin. Among the 32 notable artists who sign this petition are Jack B. Yeats, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, and Augustus John.

Morrow illustrates books for children and adults, but he is best known for the hundreds of posters he designs for the theatre, with the bulk of his commissions coming from just one lithographical printer, David Allen and Sons. As a cartoonist he draws for children’s annuals, and contributes three cartoons to Punch in 1923, 1925 and posthumously in 1931.

Morrow dies at his home in West Hoathly, West Sussex, on October 26, 1927, at the age of 64. He is survived by his wife and two children. His headstone in the local churchyard at All Saints Church, Highbrook is designed by his friend, the sculptor and architect, Albert Toft.

Morrow’s works can be found in many public and private collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum, Musée des Arts Décoratifs and the British Museum.

(Pictured: Colour lithograph poster by Albert Morrow advertising a cinematic showing at the Curzon Hall, Birmingham, c. 1902)


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Birth of Arthur Clery, Politician & University Professor

Arthur Edward Clery, Irish republican politician and university professor, is born at 46 Lower Leeson Street in Dublin on October 25, 1879.

Clery is the son of Arthur Clery (who also uses the names Arthur Patrick O’Clery and Arthur Ua Cléirigh), a barrister, and Catherine Moylan. His father, who practises in India, publishes books on early Irish history.

Clery is brought up to a considerable extent by a relative, Charles Dawson. A cousin, William Dawson, who uses the pen-name “Avis,” becomes his closest friend and associate. He is educated at the Catholic University School on Leeson Street (where he acquires the confirmation name “Chanel” in honour of the Marist martyr Peter Chanel, which he often uses as a pseudonym), at Clongowes Wood College, and University College Dublin in St. Stephen’s Green. He is a university contemporary of James Joyce.

Clery’s principal themes include the difficulties of Roman Catholic graduates seeking professional employment, dramatic criticism (he hails Lady Gregory‘s play Kincora as the Abbey Theatre‘s first masterpiece but is repulsed by the works of John Millington Synge), Catholic-Protestant rivalry, tension within the Dublin professional class, and the vagaries of the Gaelic revival movement.

Clery advocates partition on the basis of a two nations theory, first advanced in 1904–1905, possibly in response to William O’Brien‘s advocacy of securing Home Rule through compromise with moderate Unionists. Several of his articles on the subject are reprinted in his 1907 essay collection, The Idea of a Nation.

Clery derives this unusual view for a nationalist from several motives, including a belief that arguments for Irish nationalists’ right to self-determination can be used to justify Ulster Unionists’ right to secede from Ireland, fear that it might be impossible to obtain Home Rule unless Ulster is excluded, and distaste for both Ulster Protestants and Ulster Catholics, whom he sees as deplorably anglicised. He remains a partitionist for the rest of his life. He is not particularly successful as a barrister, but on the establishment of University College Dublin (UCD) in 1909, he is appointed to the part-time post of Professor of the Law of Property.

After 1914, Clery moves from unenthusiastic support for John Redmond‘s Irish Parliamentary Party to separatism. Before the 1916 Easter Rising he is an inactive member of the Irish Volunteers, and is defence counsel at the court-martial of Eoin MacNeill. During the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland he campaigns for Sinn Féin. As one of the few barristers prepared to assist the Sinn Féin Court system, he is appointed to the Dáil Supreme Court in 1920.

Clery opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty because he believes it will lead to re-Anglicisation and the eventual return of the Union. He is elected to Dáil Éireann as an abstentionist independent Teachta Dála (TD) for the National University of Ireland constituency at the June 1927 Irish general election.

Clery does not take his seat and does not contest the September 1927 Irish general election since new legislation obliges candidates to pledge in advance that they will take their seat. He is one of the lawyers who advises Éamon de Valera that the Irish Free State is not legally obliged to pay the Land Annuities which had been agreed in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922.

Clery was a close friend of Tom Kettle, with whom he founds a dining club, the “Cui Bono.” Hugh Kennedy is also a lifelong friend. As Auditor of the L & H, he tries to prevent James Joyce from reading a paper praising Henrik Ibsen, asserting that “the effect of Henrik Ibsen is evil,” but Joyce succeeds in reading it after he argues his case with the college president. The principal influence on Clery is the Irish Ireland editor D. P. Moran, to whose weekly paper, The Leader, Clery becomes a frequent contributor. In addition to The Idea of a Nation, he publishes Dublin Essays (1920) and (as Arthur Synan) The coming of the king.

Clery dies, unmarried, on November 20, 1932, in Dublin from heart failure caused by pneumonia. He is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin.


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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.


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Birth of Sarah Atkinson, Writer & Philanthropist

Sarah (née Gaynor) Atkinson, Irish writer, biographer, essayist and philanthropist, is born in Athlone, County Westmeath, on October 23, 1823.

She is the eldest daughter of John and Anne Gaynor, of Athlone. At the age of fifteen she moves with her family to Dublin where her education is completed. Two of her sisters, Anna and Marcella, become nuns with Religious Sisters of Charity. At twenty-five, she marries the much older George Atkinson, a medical doctor and, with Sir John Gray, joint proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal. They are both interested in art and she accompanies her husband on many trips abroad, taking in the cultural centres of Europe. At home they make the acquaintance of prominent politicians, journalists and musicians. Regular guests at their house are Dr. John Shaw, editor of the Evening Mail, Rosa Mulholland and Katharine Tynan.

The loss of her only child in his fourth year deeply affected Atkinson and she throws herself into charitable and other good works. She moves with her husband to Drumcondra in Dublin, where she makes the acquaintance of Ellen Woodlock. Woodlock, a sister of Francis Sylvester Mahony, is born in Cork, County Cork, in 1811 and is married in 1830 and widowed quite young, just before the birth of her only son. Woodlock is the sister-in-law of Rev. Dr. Bartholomew Woodlock, who is President of All Hallows College. She intends to join a religious community in France but after spending a few years in that country (with her son in a nearby school) returns to Cork and then moves to Dublin. At this time the post-famine city is inundated with poverty-stricken families and abandoned children. Fever and disease are rife, and the Poor Law of the day is insufficient to meet the needs of the starving population. Many evictions are taking place in deplorable circumstances, which force the poor, however reluctantly, to seek refuge in the workhouses. The most vulnerable sections of the community are single women (including widows) and children. Woodlock is totally against placing children in workhouses and founds St. Joseph’s Industrial Institute in 1855 to rescue girls from that situation. With her, Atkinson interests herself in the female paupers of the South Dublin Union. With much difficulty in the 1860s, she gains permission for ladies like herself to enter and inspect the condition of young girls in the North and South Dublin Unions, after which she opens a better home to which many were transferred. She campaigns for years to improve the state of the workhouses and provide better conditions for the poverty-stricken. One of her sisters runs the Our Lady’s Hospice in Dublin, to which she donates funds. She helps Woodlock establish the Children’s Health Ireland at 9 Buckingham Street in 1872, which later moves to Temple Street, which she visits every day. Every week she visits hospitals and prisons, in the 1880s accompanying Katharine Tynan to visit the last of the Land Leaguers incarcerated in Kilmainham Gaol.

From the 1850s Atkinson contributes a large number of historical and biographical articles and essays to several publications, including Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine, The Month, The Nation and the Freeman’s Journal. She later writes for the Irish Monthly after it is established, and for the Irish Quarterly Review. Her Life of Mary Aikenhead is published in 1875 and is very well received. She follows this with biographies of the Irish sculptors John Henry Foley and John Hogan and also a life of Catherine of Siena. A collection of her essays, with a preface and biography by Rosa Mulholland, is published posthumously in 1895.

Atkinson dies in County Dublin on July 8, 1893, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, where the cemetery committee places a Celtic cross as a monument to her and her husband after his death on December 8, 1893.


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Death of Cathal O’Shannon, Journalist & Television Presenter

Cathal O’Shannon, Irish journalist and television presenter, dies in Dublin on October 22, 2011. He is a former journalist with The Irish Times and television reporter/presenter and documentary film maker with RTÉ. He is probably best known for presenting documentaries on Irish history, produced mainly for Irish television viewers and broadcast by RTÉ.

O’Shannon is awarded lifetime membership of the Irish Film & Television Academy in 2010, to which he says it is “particularly gratifying that it occurs before I pop my clogs”.

The Irish radio and television broadcaster Terry Wogan describes O’Shannon as possibly the greatest Irish television journalist of the 20th century.

O’Shannon is born in Marino, Dublin, on August 23, 1928, the son of Cathal O’Shannon (Sr.), a socialist and Irish Republican. He receives his formal education at Coláiste Mhuire in Parnell Square, Dublin. In 1945, despite his father’s politics, as a 16-year-old, he volunteers for war time service with the Royal Air Force in Belfast during World War II, utilizing a forged birth certificate to disguise being underage for enlistment with the British Armed Forces. After air crew training he is posted to the Far East, as a tail gunner in an Avro Lancaster bomber to take part in the Burma campaign, but the war ends with the downfall of the Japanese Empire before he is required to fly combat sorties.

O’Shannon first becomes a journalist with The Irish Times on leaving the Royal Air Force in 1947. Later he joins the Irish state broadcasting service Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ).

In July 1972, O’Shannon records a notable television interview with 31-year-old Muhammad Ali, when Ali is in Dublin to compete at Croke Park in a bout with Alvin Lewis.

O’Shannon receives a Jacob’s Award for his 1976 TV documentary, Even the Olives are Bleeding, which details with the activities of the “Connolly Column” in the Spanish Civil War. Two years later he is honoured with a second Jacob’s Award for his television biography Emmet Dalton Remembers (1978).

In 1978, O’Shannon leaves RTÉ to join Canadian company Alcan which is setting up an aluminum plant at Aughinish, County Limerick, in 1978. He is head-hunted to become its Director of Public Affairs, an important post at a time when there are environmental concerns about the effects of aluminum production. He admits that he is attracted by the salary, “five times what RTÉ were paying me,” but he also later says that one reason for the move is that he had become unhappy with working at RTÉ, stating in an interview that: “The real reason I got out of RTÉ was that they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do journalistically.” He had submitted proposals to the station’s editors for television documentary series on the Irish Civil War, and also one on the wartime Emergency period, but they had been rejected. While he enjoys the social life with lavish expenses which his public relations duties involve, his friends believe that he misses the varied life and travel of journalism. He retires early from Aughinish in 1992, and returns to making television documentaries with RTÉ.

In January 2007, O’Shannon’s last documentary, Hidden History: Ireland’s Nazis, is broadcast by RTÉ as a two-part series. It explores how a number of former Nazis and Nazi collaborators from German-occupied Europe went to live in Republic of Ireland after World War II, the best known of whom is Otto Skorzeny, who lives for a period in County Kildare. Others include such Breton nationalists as Alan Heusaff, Yann Fouéré and Yann Goulet, as well as two Belgians, Albert Folens and Albert Luykx.

O’Shannon’s wife, Patsy, whom he met while they were working at The Irish Times office in London, dies in 2006. They had been married for more than 50 years.

On January 12, 2007, O’Shannon announces his retirement at the age of 80. In a 2008 television documentary, he admits that throughout his marriage he had been a serial womaniser and had repeatedly engaged in extra-marital affairs unbeknownst to his wife.

After weakening health for two years, and spending his last days in a hospice at Blackrock, O’Shannon dies at the Beacon Hospital in Dublin on October 22, 2011, in his 84th year. His body is reposed at Fanagans Funeral Home in Dublin on October 25, followed by a funeral the following day at Glasnevin Cemetery Chapel, where his remains are cremated afterward.

Director General of RTÉ Noel Curran says O’Shannon had brought into being “some of the great moments in the RTÉ documentary and factual schedule over the past five decades.” In tribute, RTÉ One shows the documentary Cathal O’Shannon: Telling Tales on November 10, 2011. It had originally aired in 2008 to mark his 80th birthday


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Death of William FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster

William Robert FitzGerald, 2nd Duke of Leinster, KP, PC (Ire), an Irish liberal politician and landowner, dies at Carton House in Maynooth, County Kildare, on October 20, 1804.

FitzGerald is born on March 13, 1749, in Arlington Place, Piccadilly, London, the second son of nine sons and ten daughters of James Fitzgerald, 20th Earl of Kildare and later 1st Duke of Leinster, and his wife, Lady Emily Lennox. He is educated at Eton College (1758–63). He is the elder brother of the 1790s revolutionary Lord Edward FitzGerald, and is a first cousin of the English liberal politician Charles James Fox.

FitzGerald makes his Grand Tour between 1768 and 1769. During the same time, he is also a Member of Parliament (MP) for Kildare Borough. He then sits in the Irish House of Commons for Dublin City until 1773, when he inherits his father’s title and estates. He is appointed High Sheriff of Kildare for 1772. Politically he is a liberal supporter of Henry Grattan‘s Irish Patriot Party and he co-founds the Irish Whig Club in 1789. He controls about six Kildare members of the Irish House of Commons. In 1779, he is elected colonel of the Dublin Regiment of the Irish Volunteers.

In November 1775, FitzGerald marries Emilia Olivia Usher, daughter of the 1st Baron Saint George and Elizabeth Dominick and sole grand daughter of Sir Christopher Dominick. They have three sons and six daughters.

In 1770, FitzGerald is chosen Grandmaster of the masonic Grand Lodge of Ireland, a post he holds for two years. He is re-elected for another year in 1777. In 1783, he is among the first knights in the newly created Order of St. Patrick.

In 1788–89, FitzGerald is Master of the Rolls in Ireland. In theory a senior judicial office, it is then largely a sinecure, but so blatant a choice of a man who is wholly unqualified for it gives rise to unfavourable comment, and a few years later it becomes the rule that the Master must be a lawyer of repute.

FitzGerald is a supporter of Catholic emancipation and helps to found the Royal College of St. Patrick at Maynooth on land he donates, in 1795. Withdrawing from Parliament with Grattan in 1797, he moves to England to be with his sick wife and remains there during the Irish Rebellion of 1798.

FitzGerald’s homes are at Carton and Kilkea Castle in County Kildare, and at Leinster House in Dublin (now the home of the Oireachtas). He is a founder member of the Order of St. Patrick in 1783 and of the Royal Irish Academy in 1785, and is a large investor in the Royal Canal company launched in 1790. His family’s estates of 60,000 acres (25,000 Ha) in Kildare are in three main parts, around Maynooth, Rathangan and Athy. He rebuilds the main bridge in Athy over the River Barrow.

FitzGerald dies of strangury, a urinary tract disorder, at Carton House on October 20, 1804. He is buried in Kildare Abbey. His funeral is so well attended that the mourners reach across The Curragh. He is succeeded by his second, but eldest surviving, son, Augustus Frederick Fitzgerald, as 3rd Duke of Leinster.


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Birth of Dairine Vanston, Landscape Artist

Dairine (Doreen) Vanston, Irish landscape artist who works in a Cubist style, is born in Dublin on October 19, 1903.

Vanston is the daughter of solicitor John S. B. Vanston, and sculptor Lilla Vanston (née Coffey). She attends Alexandra College, going on to study at Goldsmiths College, London under Roger Bissière. She then goes to Paris to the Académie Ranson, being sent there following the advice of Paul Henry. While in Paris she meets Guillermo Padilla, a Costa Rican law student at the University of Paris. They marry in 1926 and she takes the name Vanston de Padilla. The couple lives for a time in Italy, before moving to San José, Costa Rica. The marriage breaks down in the early 1930s, at which point she returns to Paris with her son and studies with André Lhote. She is living in France at the outbreak of World War II with Jankel Adler, but is able to escape to London in 1940, and later to Dublin.

Vanston’s time in Paris leaves a lasting impression on her work, including use of primary colours and a strong Cubist influence. She belongs to what critic Brian Fallon calls the “Franco-Irish generation of painters who looked to Paris,” along with Mainie Jellett, Evie Hone, and Norah McGuinness. Her time spent living in Costa Rica in the late 1920s and early 1930s imbues her work with tropical and highly toned colours. In Dublin in 1935, she exhibits 17 paintings, largely Costa Rican landscapes, at Daniel Egan’s gallery on St. Stephen’s Green. This is the closest thing to a solo show she would mount, with this show also featuring Grace Henry, Cecil Ffrench Salkeld, and Edward Gribbon.

Meeting the English artist Basil Rakoczi, who is also living in Dublin during World War II, leads Vanston to become associated with The White Stag group. In November 1941, she exhibits for the first time at a group show with 24 other artists, including Patrick Scott. One work that is shown at this exhibition is the painting Keel dance hall, which demonstrates that she spends time in the west of Ireland. The most important event staged by the group is the Exhibition of subjective art, which takes place at 6 Lower Baggot St. in January 1944. The Dublin Magazine notes her work at this show as the most effective of the experimental vanguard. This work, Dying animal, is a Cubist work with semi-representation forms rendered in bold colours. In 1945, her work is featured in a White Stag exhibition in London of young Irish painters at the Arcade gallery, Old Bond Street.

In 1947, Vanston spends almost a year in Costa Rica where she paints primarily in watercolours. Apart from this period, she lives and works in Dublin, living at 3 Mount Street Crescent near St. Stephen’s Church. At the inaugural Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1943, she exhibits five works. At the first Exhibition of Independent Artists in 1960, of which she is a founder, she exhibits three landscapes and a work entitled War. She largely exhibits with the Independent Artists, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, and the Oireachtas na Gaeilge, and does not exhibit with the Royal Hibernian Academy. Later in life, she exhibits with the Figurative Image exhibitions in Dublin, and is amongst the first painters chosen for Aosdána. A number of her works are featured in the 1987 exhibition, Irish women artists, from the eighteenth century to the present arranged by the National Gallery of Ireland and The Douglas Hyde Gallery.

Vanston dies on July 12, 1988, in a nursing home in Enniskerry, County Wicklow. Her work is greatly admired, but has received little by way of critical attention, which may have been to do with her slow rate of output. A number of her works have proved difficult to trace. She was a private person, even refusing to cooperate with the Taylor Galleries in the 1980s when they wanted to mount a retrospective of her work. The National Self-Portrait Collection in Limerick holds a work by Vanston.

(Pictured: Dairine Vanston with Guillermo Padilla in Paris)


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Birth of Éamon de Valera, Third President of Ireland

Éamon de Valera, Irish politician and patriot, is born George de Valero on October 14, 1882, in Lennox Hill, a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in New York City. He serves as Taoiseach (1932–48, 1951–54, 1957–59) and President of Ireland (1959–73). An active revolutionary from 1913, he becomes president of Sinn Féin in 1917 and founds the Fianna Fáil party in 1926. In 1937, he makes his country a sovereign state, renamed Ireland, or Éire. His academic attainments also inspire wide respect. He becomes chancellor of the National University of Ireland in 1921.

De Valera is the son of Catherine Coll, who is originally from Bruree, County Limerick, and Juan Vivion de Valera, described on the birth certificate as a Spanish artist born in 1853. His father dies when he is two years old. He Is then sent to his mother’s family in County Limerick, and studies at the local national school and at Blackrock College, Dublin. He graduates from the Royal University of Ireland and becomes a teacher of mathematics and an ardent supporter of the Irish language revival. In 1913, he joins the Irish Volunteers, which had been organized to resist opposition to Home Rule for Ireland.

In the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin, de Valera commands an occupied building and is the last commander to surrender. Because of his American birth, he escapes execution by the British but is sentenced to penal servitude. Released in 1917 but arrested again and deported in May 1918 to England, where he is imprisoned, he is acclaimed by the Irish as the chief survivor of the uprising and in October 1917 is elected president of the Irish republican and democratic socialist Sinn Féin political party, which wins three-fourths of all the Irish constituencies in December 1918.

After a dramatic escape from HM Prison Lincoln in February 1919, de Valera goes in disguise to the United States, where he collects funds. He returns to Ireland before the Irish War of Independence ends with the truce that takes effect on July 11, 1921, and appoints plenipotentiaries to negotiate in London. He repudiates the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 6, 1921, that they signed to form the Irish Free State, however, primarily because it imposes an oath of allegiance to the British crown.

After Dáil Éireann ratifies the treaty by a small majority in 1922, de Valera supports the republican resistance in the ensuing Irish Civil War. W. T. Cosgrave’s Irish Free State ministry imprisons him, but he is released in 1924 and then organizes a republican opposition party that does not sit in Dáil Éireann. In 1927, however, he persuades his followers to sign the oath of allegiance as “an empty political formula,” and his new Fianna Fáil (“Soldiers of Destiny”) party then enters the Dáil, demanding abolition of the oath of allegiance, of the governor-general, of the Seanad Éireann (senate) as then constituted, and of land-purchase annuities payable to Great Britain. The Cosgrave ministry is defeated by Fianna Fáil in 1932, and de Valera, as head of the new ministry, embarks quickly on severing connections with Great Britain. He withholds payment of the land annuities, and an “economic war” results. Increasing retaliation by both sides enables de Valera to develop his program of austere national self-sufficiency in an Irish-speaking Ireland while building up industries behind protective tariffs. In the new Constitution of Ireland, ratified by referendum in 1937, the Irish Free State becomes Ireland, a sovereign, independent democracy tenuously linked with the British Commonwealth (under the Executive Authority (External Relations) Act 1936) only for purposes of diplomatic representation.

De Valera’s prestige is enhanced by his success as president of the council of the League of Nations in 1932 and of its assembly in 1938. He also enters negotiations with British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in which he guarantees that he will never allow Ireland to be used as a base for attacking Britain in the event of war. This culminates in the Anglo-Irish defense agreement of April 1938, whereby Britain relinquishes the naval bases of Cobh, Berehaven, and Lough Swilly (retained in a defense annex to the 1921 treaty), and in complementary finance and trade treaties that end the economic war. This makes possible de Valera’s proclamation in September 1939, upon the outbreak of World War II, that Ireland will remain neutral and will resist attack from any quarter. In secret, however, de Valera also authorizes significant military and intelligence assistance to both the British and the Americans throughout the war. He realizes that a German victory will imperil Ireland’s independence, of which neutrality is the ultimate expression. By avoiding the burdens and destruction of the war, de Valera achieves a relative prosperity for Ireland in comparison with the war-torn countries of Europe, and he retains office in subsequent elections.

In 1948, a reaction against the long monopoly of power and patronage held by de Valera’s party enables the opposition, with the help of smaller parties, to form an interparty government under John A. Costello. Ironically, this precarious coalition collapses within three years after Ireland becomes a republic by means of the repeal of the Executive Authority (External Relations) Act 1936 and the severance of all ties with the British Commonwealth, an act de Valera had avoided. De Valera resumes office until 1954, when he appeals unsuccessfully for a fresh mandate, and Costello forms his second interparty ministry. No clearly defined difference now exists between the opposing parties in face of rising prices, continued emigration, and a backward agriculture. De Valera claims, however, that a strong single-party government is indispensable and that all coalitions must be weak and insecure. On this plea he obtains, in March 1957, the overall majority that he demands.

In 1959, de Valera agrees to stand as a candidate for the presidency. He resigns his position as Taoiseach and leader of the Fianna Fáil party. In June he is elected president, and is reelected in 1966. He retires to a nursing home near Dublin in 1973 and dies there on August 29, 1975.

De Valera’s career spans the dramatic period of Ireland’s modern cultural and national revolution. As an anticolonial leader, a skillful constitutionalist, and a symbol of national liberation, he dominates Ireland in the half century following the country’s independence.

(From: “Éamon de Valera, president of Ireland,” Encyclopedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com, last updated August 14, 2025)


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Birth of Pádraig de Brún, Catholic Priest & Linguist

Pádraig de Brún, also called Patrick Joseph Monsignor Browne, a Roman Catholic priest, linguist, Classicist, and Celticist, is born in Grangemockler, County Tipperary, on October 13, 1889. With regard to his contribution to modern literature in Irish, he, who Louis de Paor terms in 2014 “one of the most distinguished literary figures of his time,” is also a writer of Irish poetry in the Irish language and the literary translator of many of the greatest works of the Western canon into Modern Irish. He serves as President of University College, Galway (UCG), and is known in friendly and informal circles as Paddy Browne.

De Brún is the son of a primary school teacher, Maurice Browne. He is educated locally, at Rockwell College, Cashel, and at Holy Cross College, Drumcondra, Dublin (at both he is tutored in mathematics by Éamon de Valera). In 1909, he is awarded a BA from the Royal University of Ireland. He is awarded an MA degree by the National University of Ireland, and wins a traveling scholarship in mathematics and mathematical physics, enabling him to pursue further studies in Paris. He is ordained as a Catholic priest at the Irish College in Paris in 1913, the same year he earns his D.Sc. in mathematics from the University of Paris under Émile Picard.

After a period at the University of Göttingen, de Brún is appointed professor of mathematics at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Maynooth, in 1914. In April 1945, he is elected by the Senate of the National University of Ireland to succeed John Hynes as President of University College, Galway, an office he holds until his retirement in 1959. His friend Thomas MacGreevy refers to de Brún as, “Rector Magnificus,” and praises his, “Olympian capacity to appreciate the most exalted works of art and literature, ancient and modern.”

The School of Mathematics, Mathematical Physics and Statistics is based in Áras de Brún, a building named in de Brún‘s honour. He subsequently becomes Chairman of the Arts Council of Ireland, a position he holds until his death in 1960. He also serves as chairman of the Council of the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS).

De Brún is close friend of 1916 Easter Rising leader Seán Mac Diarmada and is deeply affected by the latter’s execution.

De Brún was a prolific writer of Irish poetry in the Irish language, including the well-known poem “Tháinig Long ó Valparaiso.” He further translates into Modern Irish many great works of the Western canon, including Homer‘s Iliad and Odyssey, Sophocles‘ Antigone and Oedipus Rex, and Plutarch‘s Parallel Lives, as well as French stage plays by Jean Racine and Dante Alighieri‘s Divine Comedy. With regards to his importance to modern literature in Irish, he is recently termed “one of the most distinguished literary figures of his time.”

The French Government awards de Brún the title of Chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur in 1949, and in 1956, the order Al Merito della Repubblica Italiana is conferred on him by the President of Italy. He is created a Domestic Prelate (a Monsignor) by Pope Pius XII in 1950.

De Brún purchases land at Dunquin in the Dingle Peninsula Gaeltacht. In the 1920s, he also builds a house there known as Tigh na Cille, where his sister and her children often visit and stay at length. Through his literary mentorship of his niece, the future poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi, he has been credited with having an enormous influence upon the future development of modern literature in Irish.

After suffering a heart attack at his house at Seapoint, Dún Laoghaire, into which he had recently moved, de Brún dies on June 5, 1960, in St. Vincent’s nursing home, Leeson Street, Dublin.