Valerie Place, Irish nurse and overseas aid worker, is killed on February 22, 1993, while serving in Somalia. She is the second western aid worker to be killed there during the conflict and famine in the early 1990s.
Place is born at 20 St. Brendan’s Crescent, Walkinstown, Dublin, on March 24, 1969. She is the third child of Patrick Place, coachbuilder, and his wife Margaret (née Byrne). She has three brothers and two sisters. She attends St. Paul’s secondary school, Greenhills, Dublin, and is trained as a nurse at St. James’s Hospital, Dublin, from 1987 to 1990. She works for a period with Caring and Sharing Association (CASA).
Place goes to Somalia in September 1992 as a volunteer worker on a two-year contract with Concern Worldwide, Ireland’s largest aid and humanitarian agency. Concern has been part of the international emergency response in Somalia since May 1992. She is one of seventy Irish aid workers based in seventeen locations across Somalia. She is the supervisor of a feeding station for 2,500 children and an adjoining school in Mogadishu. The aid workers work with local guards, and later the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) of 30,000 troops to secure the areas for the distribution of humanitarian relief. The task force struggles to protect the aid convoys from attacks from armed groups.
Place is traveling in a party, which includes Rev. Aengus Finucane, on February 22, 1993, to attend the opening of a school in Wanlewein for 1,200 when the party is ambushed. She is fatally wounded when her car, the last in the convoy, is ambushed at Afgooye. She is airlifted to a military hospital in Mogadishu by a United States Air Forcehelicopter but dies within minutes of her arrival there. Her funeral at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Greenhills, Dublin, is attended by 2,000 people, including Irish PresidentMary Robinson, who had met Place during her visit to Somalia in October 1992.
At the time of her death, Place is the second western aid worker killed in Somalia, after the death of Sean Devereux in January 1993. Her death causes demands that the task force do more to protect aid workers and to disarm the Somali factions, as well as prompting fresh criticism of the United Nations mandate in its failure to support military intervention with political initiatives. As the situation worsens, American troops withdraw in March 1994, and the United Nations disengages in March 1995.
The Irish Department of Foreign Affairs founds the Valerie Place commemorative scholarship in March 1993, which brings Somali teachers and nurses to train in Ireland. In June 1997, St. James’s Hospital school of nursing unveils a portrait and a classroom dedicated to her memory. There is also a mural to Place in Mogadishu (pictured above).
The idea for a new party is discussed at a meeting in Dublin on February 21, 1940, attended by 104 former officers of the pro- and anti-Treaty wings of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The inaugural meeting of the new party takes place on March 2, 1940. Simon Donnelly, who had fought in Boland’s Mill under Éamon de Valera in the 1916 Easter Rising, the former leader of the Dublin section of the IRA, and former chief of the Irish Republican Police (IRP), is elected as president of a central committee of fifteen members. Other leaders are Seán Fitzpatrick, another Irish War of Independence veteran; Con Lehane, who had recently left the IRA; Séamus Gibbons; Tom O’Rourke; Seán Dowling, one of Rory O’Connor‘s principal lieutenants in the Irish Civil War; Colonel Roger McCorley, one of the principal IRA leaders in Belfast during the Irish War of Independence who had taken the Irish Free State side in the Irish Civil War; Frank Thornton, one of Michael Collins‘ top intelligence officers; Roger McHugh, a lecturer in English at University College Dublin (UCD) and later professor; Captain Martin Bell and Peter O’Connor.
Also in attendance at the first meeting is Seamus O’Donovan, Director of Chemicals on IRA Headquarters Staff in 1921 and architect of the IRA Sabotage Campaign in England by the IRA in 1939–40. Indeed, O’Donovan proposes several of the basic resolutions. Additionally, the meeting is attended by Eoin O’Duffy and several former leaders of the Irish Christian Front.
Many members of the Irish far-right join Córas na Poblachta including Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, who becomes the leader of the party’s youth wing Aicéin and goes on to found Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, Alexander McCabe, Maurice O’Connor and Reginald Eager from the Irish Friends of Germany, George Griffin, Patrick Moylett, his brother John and Joseph Andrews of the People’s National Party, Dermot Brennan of Saoirse Gaedheal, and Hugh O’Neill and Alexander Carey of Córas Gaedhealach. As a result, the party assumes a pro-German and antisemitic attitude which is frequently expressed in party functions, and Gardaí suspects Córas na Poblachta members of daubing the walls of Trinity College Dublin in antisemitic slogans following the visit of British politician Leslie Hore-Belisha to Ireland in 1941.
Socialist republicans Nora Connolly O’Brien and Helena Molony take an interest in the group. Reflecting divisions within the IRA, a minority of the party’s leaders sympathise with communism rather than fascism.
The main aim of Córas na Poblachta is the formal declaration of a Republic. It also demands that the Irish language be given greater prominence in street names, shop signs, and government documents and bank notes. It proposes to introduce national service in order that male citizens understand their responsibilities. The party’s economic policy is the statutory right to employment and a living wage. It proposes breaking the link with the British pound, the nationalisation of banks and the making of bank officials into civil servants. In the area of education, the party espouses free education for all children over primary age as a right, and university education when feasible. It also calls for the introduction of children’s allowances. In addition, Córas na Poblachta advocates for “the destruction of the Masonic Order in Ireland” and during its founding meeting reporters are told that the party will be ready to take over the government of Ireland “on either a corporate or fascist basis.”
The party has close ties with the Irish nationalist and pro-fascist party Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, whose leader, Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin, had led Córas na Poblachta’s youth wing Aicéin until its independence is terminated in 1942. There is talk of a merger, however, while the majority of the party’s executive committee, noted by G2 to be made up of “four ex-Army men, old IRA, ex-Blueshirts and a number of IRA who had been active up until comparatively recently”, desires a combination of Ireland’s extreme nationalist movements, the three most prominent leaders, Simon Donnelly, Sean Dowling and Roger McCorley, oppose one due to the fear that the party will be submerged in a joint organisation. Ó Cuinneagáin is dismissive of Córas na Poblachta’s prospects and discussions between him and the party’s leaders reinforce their fears that Ó Cuinneagáin seeks an outright takeover by Ailtirí na hAiséirghe. Proposals for a merging of the two parties are dropped though they continue to maintain cordial relations and co-operate in the 1943 Irish general election.
The party is not successful and fails to take a seat in a by-election held shortly after the party’s foundation. The party slowly falls apart, and Tim Pat Coogan notes that: “Dissolution occurred because people tended to discuss the party rather than join it.” Importantly, the party is not supported by the hardcore of republican legitimatists, such as Brian O’Higgins, who views the IRA Army Council as the legitimate government of an existing Irish Republic. Indeed, in March 1940, O’Higgins publishes a pamphlet entitled Declare the Republic lambasting the new party as making what he regards as false promises that will be compromised on following the party’s election to the Oireachtas.
Córas na Poblachta fields candidates in the 1943 Irish General Election but none are elected, receiving a total of 3,892 votes between them.
Although a failure, Tim Pat Coogan argues Córas na Poblachta was the “nucleus” of the Clann na Poblachta party which emerges to help take power from Fianna Fáil in 1948.
(Pictured: IRA veteran Simon Donnelly who serves as President of Córas na Poblachta)
Nolan is born to parents Joseph and Bernadette Nolan in Mullingar, County Westmeath on September 6, 1965. Due to asphyxiation at birth, he is born with permanent impairment of his nerve-signaling system, a condition now labelled dystonia. Because of these complications, he is born with cerebral palsy and can only move his head and eyes. Due to the severity of the cerebral palsy, he uses a wheelchair. In an interview, his father, Joseph, explains how, at the age of 10, he is placed on medication that “relaxed him so he could use a pointer attached to his head to type.” To write, he uses a special computer and keyboard. In order to help him type, his mother holds his head in her cupped hands while he painstakingly picks out each word, letter by letter, with a pointer attached to his forehead.
Nolan communicates with others by moving his eyes, using a signal system. When he is young, his father tells him stories and reads passages from James Joyce, Samuel Beckett and D. H. Lawrence to keep his mind stimulated. His mother strings up letters of the alphabet in the kitchen, where she keeps up a stream of conversation. His sister, Yvonne, sings songs and acts out skits. His mother states that “he wrote extensively since the age of 11 and went on to write many poems, short stories and two plays, many of which were published.” Many of the writings are compiled for his first publication, the chapbookDam-Burst of Dreams.
Nolan spends more than a decade writing The Banyan Tree. According to The New York Times, the book is a multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in Nolan’s native county of Westmeath. The story is seen through the eyes of the aging mother. It is inspired, he tells Publishers Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” A review of the book is done in The New York Times by Meghan O’Rourke. She reviews the book and relates it to James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; in the story the protagonist leaves his mother in Ireland while he moves on to travel the world. Nolan, however, gives the reader a version of the mother’s story. “And so, in the end, one suspects that he wants Minnie’s good-natured, commonplace ways to stand as their own achievement, reminding us that life continues in the places left behind.”
At the age of 43, while working on a new novel, Nolan dies in Beaumont Hospital in Dublin at 2:30 a.m. on February 20, 2009. His death is the result of a piece of salmon becoming trapped in his airway. Nothing from the novel he was working on has been released since his death.
Upon hearing the news of Nolan’s death, President of IrelandMary McAleese says, “Christopher Nolan was a gifted writer who attained deserved success and acclaim throughout the world for his work, his achievements all the more remarkable given his daily battle with cerebral palsy.”
In 1990, Cusack, in the role of Masha, joins two of her sisters, Niamh (as Irina) and Sorcha (as Olga), and her father, Cyril Cusack (as Chebutykin) for a well-received production of Anton Chekhov‘s tragicomedy Three Sisters in a new version by Frank McGuinness, directed by Adrian Noble at the Gate Theatre, Dublin, before transferring to the Royal Court Theatre in London. The production also features Niamh’s husband, Finbar Lynch, as Solenyi and Lesley Manville as Natasha. The production wins the three real-life sisters the Irish Life Award in 1992.
One of Cusack’s best known stage roles is Our Lady of Sligo by Sebastian Barry in 1998, in which she plays the principal role of Mai O’Hara in performances in Ireland, on Broadway and at the National Theatre. For this she wins the 1998 Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress, the 1998 Critics’ Circle Theatre Award for Best Actress and her fourth Olivier Award nomination for Best Actress. In 2006-07 she stars with Rufus Sewell in Tom Stoppard‘s Rock ‘n’ Roll at the Royal Court Theatre in London which transfers to the West End and Broadway, winning Cusack her fifth Olivier Award nomination and her second Tony Award nomination.
In 2015, Cusack returns to Ireland’s Abbey Theatre, where she begins her theatre career. She appears in the world première of Mark O’Rowe‘s play Our Few and Evil Days, acting opposite long-time collaborator Ciarán Hinds. She wins the Irish Times Irish Theatre Award for Best Actress.
Cusack stars with Peter Sellers in the film Hoffman (1970). She guest stars in an episode of The Persuaders! (1971), a TV series starring Tony Curtis and Roger Moore, as Jenny Lindley, a wealthy heiress who suspects that a man claiming to be her dead brother is in fact an impostor. In 1975, she makes three appearances in the TV series Quiller as the character Roz.
Further starring roles include lead roles in Oliver’s Travels (1995), Have Your Cake and Eat It (1997) for which Cusack wins the Royal Television Society‘s RTS Award for Best Actress and Frank McGuinness’s The Hen House (1989) for BBC Television. She stars in the title role of George du Maurier‘s Trilby (1976), in an adaptation for the BBC’s Play of the Month, with Alan Badel as Svengali. She also stars in the BBC mini-series North & South (2004, from the novel by Elizabeth Gaskell) as Mrs. Thornton. She stars in the BBC sitcom Home Again (2006) and appears in the TV series Camelot (2011), which runs for one season. She has featured roles in the mini-series The Deep (2014) and the series Marcella (2016), an eight-episode murder mystery.
Along with other actresses, including Paola Dionisotti, Fiona Shaw, Juliet Stevenson and Harriet Walter, Cusack contributes to a book by Carol Rutter called Clamorous Voices: Shakespeare’s Women Today (1994). The book analyses modern acting interpretations of female Shakespearean roles.
Cusack marries British actor Jeremy Irons in 1978, and they have two sons, Samuel James and Maximilian Paul. Prior to marrying Irons, she gives birth to a son in 1967 and places the boy for adoption. In 2007, a journalist for the Irish Sunday Independent, Daniel McConnell, reveals that Cusack is the mother of left-wing general election candidate and now member of Irish parliament Richard Boyd Barrett. The two have since been reunited.
Cusack is a patron of the Burma Campaign UK, the London-based group campaigning for human rights and democracy in Burma. In 1998, she is named, along with her husband, in a list of the biggest private financial donors to the British Labour Party. In August 2010, she signs the “Irish artists’ pledge to boycott Israel” initiated by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign.
(Pictured: Sinéad Cusack reciting poetry for the British Library in October 2021)
Sir Rory O’Moore (Irish: Ruaidhrí Ó Mórdha), Irish politician and landowner also known Sir Roger O’Moore or O’More or Sir Roger Moore, dies in obscurity on February 16, 1655. He is most notable for being one of the four principal organizers of the Irish Rebellion of 1641.
O’Moore’s uncle, Rory O’More, Lord of Laois, had fought against the English during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. In 1556, Queen Mary I confiscates the O’Mores’ lands and creates “Queens County” (modern-day County Laois). Over 180 family members, who are peaceful and have taken no part in any rebellion, are murdered with virtually all of the leaders of Laois and Offaly by the English at a feast at Mullaghmast, County Kildare, in 1577. Rory Óg and his wife Maighréad O’Byrne, sister of Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne, are hunted down and killed soon afterwards. This leads to the political downfall of the O’Moore family as their estates are given to English settlers.
Given the causes of the rebellion and the Crown’s weakness during the Bishops’ Wars into 1641, O’Moore plans a bloodless coup to overthrow the English government in Ireland. With Connor Maguire, 2nd Baron of Enniskillen, he plans to seize Dublin Castle, which is held by a small garrison, on October 23, 1641. Allies in Ulster led by Sir Phelim O’Neill are to seize forts and towns there. The leaders are to assume the governing of their own country and with this provision offer allegiance to King Charles. They are betrayed, and the plan is discovered on October 22 and the rising fails in its first objective. O’Neill has some success, and O’Moore quickly succeeds in creating an alliance between the Ulster Gaelic clans and the Old English gentry in Leinster.
In November 1641, the Irish forces besiege Drogheda, and a royalist force comes north from Dublin to oppose them. O’Moore is one of the leaders of the rebel army that intercepts and defeats the relief force at the Battle of Julianstown on November 29.
The Irish historian Charles Gavan Duffy writes: “Then a private gentleman, with no resources beyond his intellect and his courage, this Rory, when Ireland was weakened by defeat and confiscation, and guarded with a jealous care constantly increasing in strictness and severity, conceived the vast design of rescuing the country from England, and even accomplished it; for, in three years, England did not retain a city in Ireland but Dublin and Drogheda, and for eight years the land was possessed and the supreme authority exercised by the Confederation created by O’Moore. History contains no stricter instance of the influence of an individual mind.”
Bishop Michael Comerford writes that after O’Moore’s defeat at the Battle of Kilrush in April 1642 he retires and dies in Kilkenny city in the winter of 1642–43, having co-founded the Irish Catholic Confederation there a few months earlier. However, this ignores his contacts with Inchiquin and Ormonde in 1647–48.
In 1652, O’Moore goes to Inishbofin off the coast of Galway, one of the last Catholic strongholds, but as the parliamentary forces approach, he makes arrangements to flee. Walter Lynch, Bishop of Clonfert, sails in the last ship to leave the island without waiting for O’Moore, who is forced to make his own way. He finally escapes into Ulster but dies in obscurity on February 16, 1655. He is buried at Steryne churchyard, in the parish of Magilligan, County Londonderry.
St. Colman’s Church on the island once bears a tablet with the inscription: “In memory of many valiant Irishmen who were exiled to this Holy Island and in particular Rory O’More a brave chieftain of Leix, who after fighting for Faith and Fatherland, disguised as a fisherman escaped from his island to a place of safety. He died shortly afterwards, a martyr to his Religion and his County, about 1653. He was esteemed and loved by his countrymen, who celebrated his many deeds of valour and kindness in their songs and reverenced his memory, so that it was a common expression among them; ‘God and Our Lady be our help and Rory O’More’.”
The Balyna estate is inherited from Calvagh O’More by Rory’s brother Lewis. Balyna is passed down to Lewis’s last surviving O’More descendant, Letitia, who is also descended from Rory O’More because her grandfather married a second cousin. Letitia marries a Richard Farrell in 1751. This Farrell family henceforth takes the surname More O’Ferrall.
The last time England had played Ireland at Lansdowne Road was a UEFA Euro 1992 qualifying Group 7 match on November 14, 1990. After that match, there were clashes between some Irish and English fans and the Gardaí on O’Connell Street in Dublin. Before the 1995 friendly match, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) holds talks with The Football Association (The FA) to review security arrangements to avoid a similar episode. The FA is offered 4,000 out of approximately 40,000 tickets, for English fans.
In pubs near Lansdowne Road stadium some English fans chant “No surrender to the IRA,” “Fuck the Pope” and “Clegg is innocent.” Irish fans are goaded, spat on and attacked. Pub staff find British National Party (BNP) literature left behind and, in some cases, pro-Loyalist graffiti in toilets.
The match begins at 6:15 p.m., and after 22 minutes, David Kelly scores a goal for Ireland. When a David Platt goal is disallowed for England in the 26th minute due to Platt being offside, some of the English fans begin throwing debris down into the lower stands, including parts of benches which they had ripped out earlier in the match. When this happens, the referee immediately stops the game, and brings the players off the pitch. When Jack Charlton, the Irish manager and former England player, walks off the pitch, the mobs “Judas, Judas.” The fans in the lower stands then spill out onto the pitch to escape the missiles from the English fans. Some Irish fans had mistakenly been put into the area where the English fans are when the FA returned a number of tickets to the FAI.
After the teams leave the pitch, the frequency of missiles intensifies, and after 12 minutes, the game is called off, and the fans are evacuated, with the exception of 4,500 English fans, who are kept in the stadium until the Garda Public Order Unit attempts to escort them out, at which time more violence breaks out. The Gardaí are slow to reach the area where the rioters are, and there is some confusion as to the exact location of the English fans between the Gardaí and the stewards. Twenty people are injured during the rioting, and forty are arrested.
The rioting is condemned on both sides of the Irish Sea. England manager Terry Venables says, “It was terrible. I have no words strong enough to describe how we feel about this. There could be repercussions.” Jack Charlton says, “I have seen a lot in football but nothing like this. It is a disaster for Irish football, but I didn’t want the game abandoned because what do you do with 2,000 English fans running around the town? The English fans were being bombarded by some of their own. And they brought out the worst in some of ours.” The rioting brings into question England’s hosting of UEFA Euro 1996, with Ireland’s Minister of State for Youth and Sport, Bernard Allen asking, “How can people from Ireland and from other countries go to England and expect to be safe watching matches in the presence of people like those who were here tonight?” The Garda handling of the match is criticised in the press when it is revealed that the Gardaí had been informed of the plans of some of the English fans to cause trouble by the British National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS). The decision to seat the English fans in an upper tier is also questioned in the press.
After questions are raised about the conduct of the Gardaí, former Chief Justice of Ireland, Thomas Finlay, is appointed to investigate the events. He finds that the rioting was entirely caused by the English fans without any provocation. The investigation finds that the head of the NCIS had offered help to the Gardaí in dealing with the hooligans, an offer which the Gardaí refused. Gardaí failed to act on a warning that 20 supporters of the England team who wore insignia of Combat 18 were travelling to the match. The segregation of the fans was also found to be insufficient, and this was found to be a contributory factor to the incident.
The next meeting between the two sides does not take place until Wednesday, May 29, 2013, a friendly at Wembley Stadium, and the next meeting in the Republic of Ireland is on Sunday, June 7, 2015, at Dublin’s Aviva Stadium. Both games pass without major disturbances.
Lemass is the son of Seán Lemass, a Fianna Fáil TD and fourth Taoiseach of Ireland, and Kathleen Lemass (née Hughes). He is named after his uncle, a victim of the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s. He is educated at Catholic University School, Leeson Street in Dublin and later at Newbridge College in Newbridge, County Kildare. Against his father’s wishes, rather than attend university, he undertakes business training and later becomes an executive member and branch secretary of the Irish Commercial Travellers’ Association.
Lemass follows his father into politics in 1955, when he is elected to Dublin City Council. He is elected to Dáil Éireann in a by-election in Dublin South-West the following year. The by-election is a loss for Fine Gael, who is in government at the time, and whose TD had held the seat for a number of years.
Lemass is active in a number of political councils and other groupings. From 1966 to 1968, he is a member of the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe. He is also a member of the Irish-British Parliamentary Group and the Irish-French Parliamentary Group.
In 1969, Lemass is appointed as Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Finance, with responsibility for the Office of Public Works. In his first year at the Department, he serves under his brother-in-law, Charles Haughey, and later under George Colley.
When Fianna Fáil loses office in 1973, Lemass is named spokesperson for physical planning and the environment. He holds that position until January 1975, when he is dropped from the front bench.
Lemass’s political career, a career in which he is invariably judged in comparison to his father, is cut short when he dies suddenly in Dublin on April 13, 1976. He is buried at Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin. His widow enters the Dáil following his death.
Barnes is educated at the Louis Convent, Carrickmacross, County Monaghan. After the birth of her first child, she later says she suffers from postpartum depression, a condition largely unrecognised in Ireland at the time. She is told by her doctor to “pull yourself together,” and subsequently she sets up a support group for women suffering from the condition and begins to take an interest in equality and women’s rights. She is a co-founder of the Council for the Status of Women (now the National Women’s Council of Ireland) in 1973, a move which prompts her to fully commit herself to politics.
Barnes also unsuccessfully contests the European Parliament election for the Leinster constituency in 1979 and 1994.
Barnes dies at the age of 82 on May 2, 2018, at Glenageary, Dublin.
Following Barnes’s death, TaoiseachLeo Varadkar says in a statement, “Monica Barnes was an inspiration for so many people in the Fine Gael party and beyond. She was particularly inspirational for women and younger members of our party. Monica gave great service to Fine Gael and to the people of Dún Laoghaire, having been encouraged to enter the political arena by [former Taoiseach] Garret FitzGerald, as a result of her work in the women’s movement.”
PresidentMichael D. Higgins says, “I am very saddened to learn of the death of former TD and Senator, Monica Barnes, who provided exceptional public service to the people of Dún Laoghaire and Ireland over many years. Monica was a proud feminist and championed women’s rights throughout her parliamentary career and beyond. She was a pioneer in the struggle for a space for women’s rights to be discussed.”
Barnes is credited as a feminist and an advocate of women’s rights. She is seen as having made a critical intervention that led to the passing of the Health (Family Planning) (Amendment) Bill 1985, which gives Irish adults the right to purchase non-medical contraceptives without having to get a doctor’s prescription, which passed the Dáil by a narrow margin.
McGlinchey is one of eleven siblings born into a staunchly republican home in Ballyscullion Road, Bellaghy, in rural south County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. His father owns a garage and some of his father’s police customers later die at McGlinchey’s hands. His mother Monica is a devout Catholic. He is educated at the local school. When he was sixteen, he begins an apprenticeship in his father’s garage. About this time, he is joining the numerous civil rights marches that are taking place in the county. His precise reasons for doing so are unclear, but speculation is that he is reacting to events around him and the idea of participating in marches offers glamour and a close identification with his own community.
In 1971, McGlinchey is interned without charge for ten months in Long Kesh Detention Centre. Not long after his release the following year, he is imprisoned again on arms charges. On July 5, 1975, during his imprisonment, he marries Mary O’Neil, daughter of Patrick O’Neil from Toomebridge. Together they have three children.
Following his release, McGlinchey joins Ian Milne and future Provisional IRA hunger strikersFrancis Hughes and Thomas McElwee and wages a campaign of shooting and bombing throughout the county and beyond. Together, they later join the Provisional IRA. The gang spends the late 1970s on the run, carrying out operations and evading both the British Army and the Garda Síochána. Following a mailvan robbery, the latter force arrests McGlinchey in County Monaghan in 1977 for carjacking a Garda patrol vehicle and threatening the officer with a pistol, although he claims that the gun is actually a wheel brace. He fails to make bail at Dublin‘s Special Criminal Court after a Garda Superintendent argues that McGlinchey would fail to attend court if bailed. He is convicted and sent to the maximum-security Portlaoise Prison. In 1982, while serving his prison sentence, he clashes with the prison’s IRA leadership and is either expelled by them for indiscipline or leaves the organisation due to strategic differences.
Following his departure from the IRA and his release from prison, McGlinchey joins the INLA. Due to his experience, he rises through the ranks, becoming chief of staff by 1982. Under his leadership, the INLA, which had previously had a reputation for disorganisation, becomes extremely active in cross-borderassassinations and bombings. These include many individual assassinations and woundings, but also massacres such as the Droppin Well bombing of 1982 in which both civilians and soldiers die. There are some failed operations, and McGlinchey, who believes this is the result of an informer within the ranks, devotes much time and energy to finding the cause. Those suspected of betraying the organisation are treated brutally, often by McGlinchey personally. As a result of this resurgence of activity and his high profile, the press nicknames him “Mad Dog.” Under his tenure the Darkley massacre is carried out, ostensibly by another group but using a weapon supplied by McGlinchey. In late 1983, while still on the run, he gives an interview with the Sunday Tribune newspaper in which he condemns the Darkley killings but also lays out his political philosophy and plans for the future.
By 1984, McGlinchey has fallen out with members of a powerful Republican family from South Armagh over what he considers missing funds. Men loyal to this family are subsequently killed by McGlinchey’s unit, which includes his wife. In March of the same year, he is captured in Newmarket-on-Fergus, County Clare, following a gunfight with the Gardaí. At this time, he is wanted in Northern Ireland for the shooting of an elderly woman, but republicans have traditionally been able to avoid extradition by claiming their offences were political. The bloody war in the north is leading the Republic of Ireland to re-evaluate its position, however, and he becomes the first republican to be extradited to Northern Ireland. Although convicted and sentenced there to life imprisonment, this is overturned in 1985. As a result, he is returned to the Republic, where he is sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment on firearms charges. While he is incarcerated, his wife is shot dead at her Dundalk home.
McGlinchey is released in March 1993 and claiming to have no further involvement with the INLA, moves to Drogheda. He survives an assassination attempt soon after his release from prison, but in February 1994, his enemies catch up with him. At around 9:30 on the evening of Thursday, February 10, 1994, he visits and dines with friends of his in Duleek Road, near his home. He leaves about forty minutes later, intending to take a video back to a shop in Brookville, on the north side of town. At around 11:00 p.m. he and his 16-year-old son Dominic are returning home, when he pulls up to make a phone call from a public kiosk on Hardman’s Gardens, near Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital. Almost immediately and despite the presence of four witnesses, a red Mazda pulls up alongside him. While his son watches from the car, three men get out and beat McGlinchey. Once he is on the ground the men, who are armed with three pump action shotguns and a pistol, fire into him fourteen times. The attack finishes with a coup de grâce to the head, although he is already dead. His last words are reputed to be “Jesus, Mary help me.” His son yells for an ambulance.
The following day, an autopsy is carried out in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, which indicates McGlinchey had been hit in the neck, skull, the left upper chest, the left arm, and both legs. His inquest is held in Drogheda two weeks later, suspended and then reopened in November 1996. Gardaí forensic officers tell the coroner that they had compared the shell casings they had found with the database, but no matches have been made to other known weapons. The officer notes that no such information has been received from the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The shotguns used are impossible to trace ballistically, but it is ascertained that the Mazda was registered in the north. His and his wife’s killers have never been found.
McGlinchey’s funeral is held on February 13, 1994, in Bellaghy, with no republican accoutrements. There is no INLA colour guard, and only an Irish tricolor draped over the coffin. Over 1,500 people attend and are watched closely by 200 RUC. Police armoured vans are held on the perimeter. He is buried alongside his wife and their young daughter Máire. His coffin is carried from the McGlinchey family home to St. Mary’s Church by pallbearers who are swapped out from the crowd every 40-yards or so. Martin McGuinness is among them, as is Bernadette McAliskey and her daughter Róisín. His sons carry the coffin for the final yards.
McGlinchey’s posthumous reputation ranges from being a “psycho” to his enemies to being an inspiration to those who followed him. Commentators have speculated on what he would have contributed to Irish politics had he lived. Some have suggested that he would have contributed to the Northern Ireland peace process, while others have argued that dissident republicans, opposed to that process, would have found him a willing rallying point. He remains an influence on Irish fiction and music, with both Edna O’Brien and Martin McDonagh producing acclaimed pieces based on his life and career. He is also featured in popular songs.
On February 21, 1910, Carson accepts the parliamentary leadership of the anti-Home Rule Irish Unionists and, forfeiting his chance to lead the British Conservative Party, devotes himself entirely to the Ulster cause. His dislike of southern Irish separatism is reinforced by his belief that the heavy industry of Belfast is necessary to the economic survival of Ireland. The Liberal government (1908–16) under H. H. Asquith, which in 1912 decides to prepare a Home Rule bill, cannot overcome the effect of his extra-parliamentary opposition. The Solemn League and Covenant of resistance to Home Rule, signed by Carson and other leaders in Belfast on September 28, 1912, and afterward by thousands of Ulstermen, is followed by his establishment of a provisional government in Belfast in September 1913. Early in that year he recruits a private Ulster army, the Ulster Volunteer Force, that openly drills for fighting in the event that the Home Rule Bill is enacted. In preparation for a full-scale civil war, he successfully organizes the landing of a large supply of weapons from Germany at Larne, County Antrim, on April 24, 1914. The British government, however, begins to make concessions to Ulster unionists, and on the outbreak of World War I he agrees to a compromise whereby the Home Rule Bill is enacted but its operation suspended until the end of the war on the understanding that Ulster’s exclusion will then be reconsidered.
Appointed Attorney General for England in Asquith’s wartime coalition ministry on May 25, 1915, Carson resigns on October 19 because of his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. In David Lloyd George’s coalition ministry (1916–22) he is First Lord of the Admiralty from December 10, 1916, to July 17, 1917, and then a member of the war cabinet as minister without portfolio until January 21, 1918.
Carson retires in October 1929. In July 1932, during his last visit to Northern Ireland, he witnesses the unveiling of a large statue of himself in front of Parliament Buildings at Stormont. The statue is sculpted by Leonard Stanford Merrifield, cast in bronze and placed upon a plinth. The inscription on the base reads “By the loyalists of Ulster as an expression of their love and admiration for its subject.” It is unveiled by James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, in the presence of more than 40,000 people.
Carson lives at Cleve Court, a Queen Anne house near Minster-in-Thanet in the Isle of Thanet, Kent, bought in 1921. It is here that he dies peacefully on October 22, 1935. A warship brings his body to Belfast for the funeral. Thousands of shipworkers stop work and bow their heads as HMS Broke steams slowly up Belfast Lough, with his flag-draped coffin sitting on the quarterdeck. Britain gives him a state funeral on Saturday, October 26, 1935, which takes place in Belfast’s St. Anne’s Cathedral. He remains the only person to have been buried there. From a silver bowl, soil from each of the six counties of Northern Ireland is scattered onto his coffin, which had earlier been covered by the Union Jack. At his funeral service the choir sings his own favourite hymn, “I Vow to Thee, My Country.”
seamus dubhghaill 