Webb is born in 1805 in the Cornmarket, Dublin, the eldest of seven sons of James Webb and Deborah Webb (née Sparrow), who own a linen business. He is educated in Quaker schools at Mountmellick, County Laois, and at Ballitore, County Kildare, where he becomes friendly with Mary Leadbeater, sister of the influential schoolmaster Abraham Shackleton. Schoolfellows include James Haughton and Jonathan Pim.
In 1837, Webb is one of three founding members, with James Haughton and Richard Allen, of the Hibernian Antislavery Association. This is not the first antislavery association, but it is acknowledged to be the most active and considered the most ardent abolitionists in Europe. Allen serves as the secretary of this association.
Webb marries Hannah Waring, and they have four children: Alfred, Richard, Deborah and Anne. He and his two sons, Alfred and Richard, are regular correspondents with the American abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
Webb is one of the few Irish delegates at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London which attracts hundreds from the United States. The Irish delegation includes Webb, Richard Allen and Daniel O’Connell. In 1846, he attends another world convention in London. This time the subject is temperance, and his fellow delegate Richard Allen is one of the speakers. He meets the American delegates Wendell Phillips and his wife Ann, with Ann reporting how they are particularly impressed by Webb.
Webb was notable in Douglass’s regard for the arguments that he and Webb have. Douglass feels that white abolitionists would prefer to be hypocritical than be racist and would try not to disagree with him face to face. Webb shows no such false regard, and they argue as equals in a way that Douglass hopes would be a precursor of the relationships that might exist across the races when slavery ends in the United States. Webb, however, quickly comes to distrust and dislike Douglass and his associates.
In 1852 Webb prints and publishs the elaborate Transactions of the Central Relief Committee, compiled by Jonathan Pim. This deals with the relief operations in Ireland in which Quakers had been involved throughout the Great Famine of the 1840s, and also includes statistics and recommendations for reforms. He helps Quaker efforts to provide food for the poor in Ireland, and in April and May 1847 he travels on fact-finding missions in Connacht for the Yearly Meeting. His contributions to Quaker historiography include his edition of Mary Leadbetter’s The Leadbetter Papers, which he prints, and which is published in London (1862). Also, in 1862 he publishes Betsy Shackleton’s Ballitore Seventy Years Ago. He frequently publishes comments on Irish conditions and politics in The Manchester Guardian and elsewhere.
Webb’s commitment to the causes in which he believes so strongly end only with his death on July 14, 1872. He is buried in Temple Hill graveyard, Blackrock, County Dublin.
She meets the Robertson commission in 1901 on behalf of St. Mary’s Dominican convent, Eccles Street, Dublin, where, as well as presenting the results of a questionnaire survey of women graduates, compiles in conjunction with Agnes O’Farrelly and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, she argues for the right of women to receive education on the same terms as men and in the same colleges, and to be employed by the universities on identical conditions (which is not realised until the Irish Universities Act of 1908). Along with Sheehy-Skeffington, she is a key figure in the formation of the Irish Association of Women Graduates in 1902, which concerns itself with various questions regarding women graduates’ employment in government departments, hospitals, and schools, as well as attempting to influence public policy in relation to sex discrimination.
After the passage of the Irish Universities Act in 1908, Hayden is appointed a member of both the senate of the National University of Ireland (NUI) and the governing body of the new University College Dublin (UCD), the first woman to hold such positions. In November 1909 she is appointed a lecturer in history, and in July 1911 first professor of modern Irish history at UCD, a position she holds until her retirement in 1938.
Hayden’s last major public campaign, at the age of 75, is in the lead-up to the referendum on the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, in opposition to articles 40, 41, and 45 concerning the status of women. Reversing her lifelong non-party-political stance, she helps to form the Women’s Social and Progressive League as a political party committed to opposing the constitution and any regressive consequences it would entail.
Hayden receives an honorary doctorate from the NUI in 1935, three years before her retirement. A dedicated cyclist and swimmer, she is fluent in Irish, Greek, and Hindustani, and after retirement devotes her efforts to improving the welfare of Dublin children through her newly formed social club. She dies on July 12, 1942, at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin. Her unpublished diaries are deposited in the NLI.
A biography of Hayden, Mary Hayden: Irish Historian and Feminist, by Joyce Padbury is published by Arlen House in 2020.
Stapleton is a distinguished centre-forward, once touted as being among the best in the world in his position, and an exceptionally strong header of the ball. He starts his career with Arsenal, joining them in 1972 as an apprentice, after being turned down by Manchester United. He makes his first-team debut in March 1975, at home to Stoke City, and goes on to form a potent striking partnership with Malcolm Macdonald. The two score 46 goals between them in 1976–77. He is Arsenal’s top scorer for the three following seasons and helps the Gunners reach a trio of FA Cup finals. He scores one of the goals in Arsenal’s 1979 FA Cup Final 3–2 win over Manchester United, and scores 108 goals in 300 appearances in total for the Gunners.
Stapleton moves on to Manchester United in the summer of 1981 for £900,000 as new manager Ron Atkinson begins building a team capable of challenging for silverware after a disappointing 1980–81 season under Dave Sexton. He helps United win the 1983 and 1985 FA Cups. It is in the first of those finals, when he scores against Brighton & Hove Albion, in which he makes history by becoming the first man to score for two different clubs in FA Cup Finals. United finishes in the top four of the league in each of Stapleton’s first five seasons at Old Trafford, and comes close to winning a league title medal in the 1985–86 season after United wins their first ten league games of the season before their form slumps and they finished fourth. Atkinson is sacked and replaced by Alex Ferguson in November 1986, and Stapleton remains a regular member of the first team under the new manager, but he leaves at the end of the season to sign for Ajax. There, he makes just six appearances and scores one goal before quickly being moved to Belgian side Anderlecht at the end of 1987, followed by a three-month loan back to England with Derby County. He then plays for French club Le Havre for a season, before returning to England with Blackburn Rovers in 1989, followed by moves to Aldershot, Huddersfield Town (as player-coach) and Bradford City.
After three seasons as player-manager at Bradford, Stapleton is sacked following their narrow failure to qualify for the Division Two playoffs at the end of the 1993-94 season. He then has a brief spell at Brighton & Hove Albion in the 1994–95 season, playing two games before finally announcing his retirement as a player.
Stapleton also wins 71 caps for the Republic of Ireland national team, scoring a then record 20 goals. He makes his international debut under then player-manager Johnny Giles in a friendly against Turkey in Ankara in 1976 at 20 years of age. He scores after only three minutes of his debut when he heads home a Giles free-kick at the near post. That friendly international finishes 3–3 and marks the start of a magnificent international career for the quiet and reserved Stapleton.
Stapleton is committed to international football insisting that an “international release clause” be inserted to all of his contracts so that he can be released to play in international games for Ireland.
Stapleton plays a significant role in Ireland’s attempt to qualify for the 1982 FIFA World Cup in Spain in 1982. Goals against Cyprus, the Netherlands and France by him in the qualifying matches are not enough as Ireland is denied a place at the World Cup by a superior French goal difference. He is made captain of the national team for the qualifying campaign for the 1986 FIFA World Cup though Ireland fails to emulate their fine performance in the 1982 qualifiers.
Jack Charlton takes over as the Irish manager in 1986 and he keeps Stapleton as captain despite a sometimes uneasy relationship between the two men. Stapleton scores a magnificent diving header in the opening UEFA Euro 1988 qualifier against Belgium in the 2–2 draw at the Heysel Stadium, Brussels, that September. He also scores in the 2–1 defeat by Bulgaria in Sofia on April 1, 1987, with another goal against Luxembourg in the 2–1 victory at Lansdowne Road the following September.
Stapleton captains the Irish team to the 1988 Euro finals and plays in all of their matches during the competition including Ireland’s famous victory against England.
After the 1988 European Championships Stapleton remains on the fringe of the national team during qualification for 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy making just two appearances late in the campaign. By then, his 20 goals for the Republic had made him the national side’s all-time leading goalscorer, a record which is broken ten years later by Niall Quinn, who is in the early stages of his own international career when Stapleton bows out of the international scene. He does, however, score an 87th-minute goal against Malta in a 3–0 friendly in Valletta just prior to those finals in Italy.
Stapleton moves to the United States to manage Major League Soccer side New England Revolution in 1996. In the 2003–04 season he briefly returns to English football as a specialist coach of Bolton Wanderers. The Bolton manager, Sam Allardyce, wants Stapleton to enhance the skills of the strikers at the club and sees the Irishman as an ideal candidate, given his successful playing career.
Stapleton is appointed assistant manager to former teammate Ray Wilkins with Jordan on September 3, 2014.
Salkeld works in tempera and oil, as well as etching and wood engraving. In 1921 he travels to Germany to study under Ewald Dulberg at the Kassell Kunstschule. He attends the Union of Progressive International Artists in Düsseldorf in May 1922, and is exhibited at the Internationale Kunstausstellung. Upon his return to Dublin in 1924, he holds his first solo exhibition in the Society of Dublin Painters gallery. He becomes a member of the Dublin Painters in 1927. With Francis Stuart, he co-edits the first two issues of To-morrow in 1924. His studio is in a converted labourer’s cottage at Glencree, County Wicklow. He also exhibits with the New Irish Salon and the Radical Painters’ Group.
Salkeld wins the 1926 Royal Dublin Society‘s Taylor scholarship, and has his first exhibited work with the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1929. He lives in Berlin for a year in 1932. He exhibits in Daniel Egan’s Gallery in Dublin in 1935. He has a wide circle of literary friends, including Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien. In O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds, the character of Michael Byrne is designed for Salkeld, reflecting his debilitating alcoholism. He also teaches at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, teaching artists such as Reginald Gray.
From 1937 to 1946 Salkeld runs a private press called Gayfield Press. This is co-founded with his mother, and operates from a garden shed at their home, 43 Morehampton Road. The press is a small Adana wooden hand press. He illustrates her 1938 The Engine Left Running, as well as Ewart Milne‘s Forty North Fifty West (1938) and Liam O’Flaherty‘s Red Barbara and Other Stories (1928). In 1951, he loans the press to Liam and Josephine Miller to found the Dolmen Press.
Salkeld’s most famous public work is his 1942 three-part mural in Davy Byrne’s pub. He is a co-founder of the Irish National Ballet School in the 1940s in his capacity as a pianist. In 1946 he is appointed an associate member of the RHA. In 1953 his play Berlin Dusk is staged at 37 Theatre Club, Dublin. During the 1950s he is a broadcaster with Radio Éireann as well as a director of cultural events for An Tóstal. He dies on May 11, 1969, in St. Laurence’s Hospital, Dublin.
Following an early career as an economist, working with the Irish Sugar Company until 1967, Halligan becomes involved in politics. In that year, he becomes General Secretary of the Labour Party.
The party leader, Brendan Corish, relies on Halligan’s intellectual and political skills in his new role. Under Halligan, the party undergoes an energetic reorganisation. New structures and policies are put in place, coinciding with the party’s leftward policy shift and an acute anti-coalition stance. He strongly supports both approaches, but is instrumental in securing the party’s eventual, somewhat unwilling, reversal of its anti-coalition stance after its disappointing result in the 1969 Irish general election. The 1973 Irish general election results in a Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition government coming to power.
Halligan continues to serve as General Secretary of the party until 1980, and is appointed a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) from 1983 until 1984, replacing Frank Cluskey, where he specialises in economic affairs and energy policy.
In 1980, Halligan sets up CIPA, his own public affairs consultancy based in Dublin, and becomes a lecturer in Economics at the University of Limerick. He is also chairman of European Movement Ireland during the late 1980s. In 1985, he is appointed as Chairman of Bord na Móna, the Irish Peat Development Authority, a position he holds for ten years. In 1989 he founds the Institute of European Affairs (IEA), which later becomes the IIEA. He is Director of CIPA until 2014.
Resulting from his keen interest and experience in energy policy and renewable energy, Halligan serves as Chair of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland from 2007 until 2014. He is President of the IIEA, and he is also a Board Member of Mainstream Renewable Energy.
In later years Halligan also works on the foundation and development of the Ireland China Institute (ICI), which, with its maxim bridging the gap between knowledge and understanding, seeks to strengthen Irish-Chinese diplomatic relations, developing cultural links and fostering a deeper understanding of the respective cultural norms and values between the two nations. He is also President of ICI.
Halligan dies on August 9, 2020, after a long illness. On his death, TaoiseachMicheál Martin describes him as “a man who gave his life to politics and the public service with a deep commitment to the institutions of the state.” European Commissioner for TradePhil Hogan states that “Brendan was a committed European to his fingertips. He was a pragmatic European intellectual, in the tradition of Spinelli, Monnet and Schuman.”
Duffy is born in 1809 probably in County Cavan, at either Shercock or Kingscourt, and is educated locally at a hedge school. He has at least two brothers and two sisters. He first makes a living as a pedlar in County Cavan and County Meath, dealing with Bryan Geraghty, a bookseller in Anglesea Street, Dublin, with whom he exchanges Irish manuscripts for Catholicprayer books. He also buys up Bibles distributed in Ireland by Protestant missionaries for resale in Great Britain. When aged about thirty he sets up in business in Anglesea Street as a publisher, printer and bookseller, specialising in low-priced Catholic books, such as A pocket missal for the use of the laity (1838) and a new edition of the Catechism (1848) by Andrew Donlevy, made possible by the invention of the stereotype. He moves his business to Wellington Quay in 1846. He also prints and distributes public statements by Catholic prelates, and is able to call himself “bookseller to the cardinal archbishop of Dublin.”
At the request of the editor of The Nation, Charles Gavan Duffy (to whom he is not related), he republishes an anthology of nationalistic ballads, The spirit of the nation (1843; 59th ed., 1934), a successful venture that links him to the Young Ireland movement and expands into the publication of numerous popular historical writings, beginning with Gavan Duffy’s Library of Ireland series. He publishes several periodicals for Catholic readers, which combine pietism and patriotism with hagiography: Duffy’s Irish Catholic Magazine (1847–8), Duffy’s Fireside Magazine (1850–54), and Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine (1860–64).
Judged by the distinction of his authors (who include William Carleton, Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, James Clarence Mangan and Richard Robert Madden, the number and popularity of his productions, and their formative influence on Catholic popular opinion, he can be considered the most important Irish publisher in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. He is particularly significant in providing the Young Ireland movement with a cheap and reliable publisher for the dissemination of their writings. Charles Gavan Duffy describes him as “a man of shrewd sense and sly humour but without cultivation or judgment in literature.” He never takes a holiday and, though a kindly employer, never allows his staff to take holidays. The Irish American newspaper Irish American Weekly credits him with providing employment for 500 people and with having bought enough land to give him an income of £5,000 a year. It also notes that his ruthlessness had made him unpopular within his trade.
In 1840 Duffy marries Frances Lynch in Kingscourt, County Cavan. They have five sons and five daughters. The family susceptibility to pulmonary illnesses takes a dreadful toll: none of the sons live beyond the age of twenty-three, three dying from tuberculosis, while one of his daughters dies of pneumonia at the age of fourteen and another two daughters succumb as relatively young adults to tuberculosis.
Duffy dies at the age of 62 on July 4, 1871, at his home at Clontarf, Dublin. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery. His will, which disposes of an estate worth almost £25,000, is contested unsuccessfully in court by the younger of his two surviving sons. His son-in-law, Edmund Burke, becomes managing director of James Duffy and Company Limited, but after his death in 1901 the company passes out of the control of its founder’s family.
(From: “Duffy, James” by C. J. Woods, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Kathleen Cox, Irish artist, sculptor, and mystic, is born Christina Mary Kathleen Cox in Wo-Sung, China, on July 2, 1904. Cox is considered a pioneer of contemporary Irish pottery.
Cox is the eldest daughter of Dr. R. H. Cox, originally from Dundalk, County Louth, and the port health officer in Shanghai. He is also an amateur geologist and models in clay. In his retirement, he invents a periscope later used during World War I by the Royal Navy. The years living in China leave an impression on the young Cox, visually and culturally. The family returns to Ireland in 1911, first moving to Listowel, County Kerry, and later to Howth, County Dublin. She attends Alexandra College, and later the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1921. While there she studies sculpture under Oliver Sheppard and is considered one of his most talented students, winning the Royal Dublin Society Taylor prize for modelling in 1925, 1926, and 1927. The money from these prizes allows Cox to travel to Paris in 1929.
Cox exhibits in 1924 at the Tailteann exhibitions, and in 1925 submits textile designs to the Arts and Crafts Society of Ireland. She establishes a pottery studio at 7 Schoolhouse Lane, Dublin, with college friend Stella Rayner in 1929. The studio has the first electric kiln in Ireland. The first exhibited piece by Cox shown by the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) is in 1930, with a pair of Madonna bookends, and portrait masks of the daughter of Dermod O’Brien, Brigid O’Brien, and writer Norris Davidson. Davidson is a friend and neighbour, who commissions her to design the poster for his 1929 film, Suicide. She exhibits with the RHA from 1931 to 1933, and the Tailteann 1932, while also holding exhibitions in her studio. During this period Hilda Roberts paints her portrait, Strange Spirit. Kathleen Cox in her studio. The theme of womanhood is prominent in her work, including in the sign of her studio.
In 1932, Cox begins producing a line of more commercial figurines, drawing influence from the Royal Doulton Burslem factory, where she works for a time. One such figurine is The Lavender Man (pictured), modelled on Michael Clifford, a Dublin street trader. In the mid 1930s, she develops a frustration with her work and with her lack of impact on the wider world. In attending the Chinese exhibition in London in 1935, it is confirmed to her that pottery should be practical rather than ornamental. It spurs her to destroy all her moulds and sell her kiln upon her return to Dublin.
Cox marries Alan Palmer in 1937, the couple has two daughters and relocate to England. Palmer is a conscientious objector during World War II, with the couple running a farm at Meopham, Kent, returning to London after the war.
Cox dies in early September 1972 in London. Some of her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Ireland and with four works featured in the exhibition Not Just Pots: Contemporary Irish Ceramics of the 21st Century.
It is during the 1920s that Cox begins to question mainstream religion and becomes a vegetarian. Finding that her personal philosophy is similar to that of theosophy, she joins the movement and speaks at meetings. She is heavily influenced by the founder of the Order of the Great Companions, the Rev. William Hayes, who is living in Dublin in the 1930s. She writes and illustrates a children’s book on world religions, A story of stories, which she publishes under the pseudonym C.M. Kay in 1970.
Raised in Dublin, Manning goes to school in Morehampton House and Alexandra College, Dublin. She gets her theatre training in Sara Allgood‘s teaching class in the Abbey Theatre.
Prior to her career as a writer and filmmaker, Manning works as a film critic throughout the 1920s and 30s. She works as a film critic for TheIrish Statesman for a year during that time until it goes out of business. She is known to disapprove of Hollywood‘s “unimaginable stories and its stereotypical portrayal of Ireland and the Irish.” She also works as a writer for the Gate Theatre. She adapts the short story “Guests of the Nation” for a film directed by Denis Johnston. She also helps found the Dublin Film Society in 1930 and co-founds the Gate Theatre arts magazine Motley in 1932.
From 1914 to 1926, Ireland experiences a surge of new film styles being produced, consisting of historical melodramas and romantic comedies. Following this, 1930 to 1935 births a second wave of industry produced silent films that are intended to be less cliche compared to the first wave. The films produced under the second wave are much more experimental and deal less with the commercial appeals of the first wave. There’s minimal information on how Manning specifically contributed to the second wave, however, it is stated that she plays an important role producing five out of the six films to come out of that wave.
Manning is a founder of the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and works as drama director at Radcliffe College during World War II. She marries Faneuil Adams of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1980.
Manning dies at the age of 93 on June 27, 1999, at Mt. Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Edward Bruce is proclaimed the last High King of Ireland on June 29, 1315. He is crowned in 1316. He reigns between 1315 and 1318. The English colonists in Ireland vehemently oppose him.
Bruce, the brother of the King of Scots, Robert the Bruce, leads a three-year military campaign, known as the Bruce campaign, against the Anglo-Norman lordship of Ireland. This invasion, which lasts from 1315 to 1318, ultimately gives rise to the two nations we recognize now as Ireland and Scotland.
In May 1315, a Scots army of up to six thousand soldiers lands on the Antrim coast. That June, near Carrickfergus, many Gaelic lords led by Donnell O’Neill of Ulster join Bruce. “All the Gaels of Ireland agreed to grant him lordship and they called him King of Ireland,” declares the Irish annals.
The invasion coincides with the Great European Famine (1315-1317), which brings hardship and disillusionment among Bruce’s followers. The annals ruefully comment, “falsehood and famine and homicide filled the country, and undoubtedly men ate each other in Ireland.”
In February 1317, Dublin, the capital of the English royal administration in Ireland, comes close to being captured by the Bruce brothers. The brothers encamp at Castleknock within sight of the city walls. The panicking Dubliners burn the suburbs of the city. In order to re-fortify the city walls, they dismantle the Dominicanpriory north of the River Liffey and tear down the bridge across the river. The Bruce brothers do not lay siege to the city and instead move south to Munster.
In 1318, the invasion is brought to an end when, after marching south from Ulster for one last push, Bruce risks an open battle with an English army north of Dundalk at Faughart and is killed. His corpse is dismembered, and portions of it hung over the gates of various Irish towns. His decapitated head is brought to King Edward II of England by the victor, John de Bermingham, a minor Anglo-Irish baron who is elevated to the status of “Earl of Louth” for bringing the Bruce campaign in Ireland to an end.
A conference at Trinity College Dublin, in 2015, entitled The Irish-Scottish World in the Middle Ages, explores this key moment in the history of Ireland and Scotland. “The Bruce Invasion was a watershed moment in that story,” says Seán Duffy, Professor of Medieval Irish History and one of the organizers of the conference.
“Although Edward Bruce was defeated and killed in 1318, the effect of the invasion was far-reaching. The tide of Anglo-Norman expansion in Ireland turned back and the late Middle Ages saw the flowering of a Gaelic literary and cultural revival. Scotland, meanwhile, was galvanized by its victory over the English at Bannockburn which secured its path to independent nationhood.”
“Few peoples have as much in common as the Irish and the Scots. The very name Scotland is an ever-present reminder of that connection, because, in the Latin of the early Middle Ages, a Scotus was an Irishman, and the homeland of the Scoti was Ireland. That the name came to be applied to the northern part of Britain is testament to the strength of Irish influence on what we now know today as Scotland.”
(From: “On This Day: Edward Bruce, the last High King of Ireland, dies in 1318” by IrishCentral Staff, http://www.irishcentral.com, October 2022 | Pictured: Grave of Edward de Bruce, High King of Ireland, in Faughart Cemetery, County Louth)
The Society of United Irishmen is formed in October 1791 by leading citizens in Belfast who seek a representative government in Ireland based on principles they believe have been modelled by the American and French Revolutions. At their first meeting they embrace the argument of Theobald Wolfe Tone for a “brotherhood of affection” between Irishmen of all religious persuasions. Tone argues that in Ireland the landed AnglicanAscendancy and the English appointed Irish executive employ division between Protestants and Catholics to balance “the one party by the other, plunder and laugh at the defeat of both.”
Despairing of reform, and in the hope of French assistance, in May 1798, the United Irishmen take up arms against the Dublin government and the British Crown. Beginning in Kildare, the insurrection spreads to other counties in Leinster before finally reaching the Presbyterian districts surrounding Belfast. On June 5, the Antrim societies of United Irishmen meet in Templepatrick where they elect textile manufacturer Henry Joy McCracken as their General. The next day McCracken issues a proclamation calling for the United army of Ulster to rise. The initial plan meets with success, as the towns of Larne, Ballymena, Maghera and Randalstown are taken and the bridge at Toome is damaged to prevent the government rushing reinforcements into Antrim from west of the River Bann.
According to the memoirs of James Burns from Templepatrick, Dickey commands the insurgents at Randalstown and kills Samuel Parker, a “traitor, with his own hands, while standing at his own door, where he went for the purpose.”
McCracken leads a body of about 6,000 rebels in an attack on Antrim town. As promised, Catholic Defenders turn out, but in the march upon the town tensions with the Presbyterian United Irish causes some desertions and a delay in McCracken’s planned assault. McCracken’s men are defeated, and his army melts away. On June 15, Dickey, together with McCracken, James Hope, James Orr and about fifty other rebel survivors from Antrim, arrive at Slemish, near Ballymena. There they set up camp for three weeks before leaving under threat of attack from Colonel Green of the Tay Fencibles.
Dickey is captured by the Sutherland fencibles on Divis, a hill northwest of Belfast. He is court-martialed and hanged at Corn Market, Belfast on June 26, 1798. Famously, before his hanging he refuses to wear a black hood saying to the hangman, “Sir, don’t cover my face!” According to local legend he shouts, “Don’t think gentlemen, I am ashamed to show my face among you, I am dying for my country!” However, a loyalist source hostile to the United Irish cause, Henry Joy of the Belfast News Letter, has Dickey on the scaffold recanting his commitment to the “brotherhood of affection” between Catholic and Protestant. He supposedly warned the assembled that had “the Presbyterians of the north succeeded in their [republican] designs, they would ultimately have had to contend with the Roman Catholics.” It is testament to the sentiment that in the north is to largely expunge the memory of his, and McCracken’s, sacrifice.
Dickey is 22 years old at the time of his execution. His head is placed on a spike outside the Market House on Belfast’s High Street.
Dickey’s brother, John Dickey of Crumlin, is also implicated in the rebellion. He is informed on by neighbours who had noticed that he was making pikes and attending secret meetings of the United Irishmen late at night. Arrested and court-martialed, he refuses the terms granted by the government to the “State Prisoners” in Dublin. He is transported to the West Indies for penal servitude but manages to escape and makes his way to the United States.
seamus dubhghaill 