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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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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 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 Sean O’Callaghan, Member of the Provisional IRA

Sean O’Callaghan, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), who from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s works against the organisation from within as a mole for the Irish Government with the Garda Síochána‘s Special Detective Unit, is born in Tralee, County Kerry, on October 10, 1954.

O’Callaghan is born into a family with a Fenian paramilitary history. His paternal grandfather had taken the Anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War, and his father had been interned by the Irish Government at the Curragh Camp in County Kildare for IRA activity during World War II.

By the late 1960s, O’Callaghan ceases to practise his Catholic faith, adopts atheism and has become interested in the theories of Marxist revolutionary politics, which finds an outlet of practical expression in the sectarian social unrest in Northern Ireland at the time, centered on the activities of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. In 1969, communal violence breaks out in Northern Ireland and believing that British imperialism is responsible, he joins the newly founded Provisional IRA at the age of 17.

Soon afterward, O’Callaghan is arrested by local Gardaí after he accidentally detonates a small amount of explosives, which cause damage to the homes of his parents and their neighbours. After demanding, and receiving, treatment as a political prisoner, he quietly serves his sentence.

After becoming a full-time paramilitary with the IRA, in the early to mid-1970s O’Callaghan takes part in over seventy operations associated with Irish Republican political violence including bomb materials manufacture, attacks on IRA targets in Northern Ireland, and robberies to provide funding for the organisation.

In 1976, O’Callaghan ends his involvement with the IRA after becoming disillusioned with its activities. He later recalls that his disenchantment with the IRA began when one of his compatriots openly hoped that a female police officer who had been blown up by an IRA bomb had been pregnant so they could get “two for the price of one.” He is also concerned with what he perceives as an undercurrent of ethnic hatred in its rank and file toward the Ulster Scots population. He leaves Ireland and moves to London. In May 1978, he marries a Scottish woman of Protestant unionist descent. During the late 1970s, he runs a successful mobile cleaning business. However, he is unable to fully settle into his new life, later recalling, “In truth there seemed to be no escaping from Ireland. At the strangest of times I would find myself reliving the events of my years in the IRA. As the years went on, I came to believe that the Provisional IRA was the greatest enemy of democracy and decency in Ireland.”

In 1979, O’Callaghan is approached by the IRA seeking to recruit him again for its paramilitary campaign. In response, he decides to turncoat against the organisation and becomes an agent within its ranks for the Irish Government. He decides to become a double agent even though he knows that even those who hate the IRA as much as he now does have a low opinion of informers. However, he feels it is the only way to stop the IRA from luring teenagers into their ranks and training them to kill.

Soon after being approached by the IRA to re-join, O’Callaghan returns to Tralee from London, where he arranges a clandestine meeting with an officer of the Garda Special Detective Unit in a local cemetery, at which he expresses his willingness to work with it to subvert the IRA from within. At this point, he is still opposed to working with the British Government. A few weeks later, he makes contact with Kerry IRA leader Martin Ferris and attends his first IRA meeting since 1975. Immediately afterward, he telephones his Garda contact and says, “We’re in”.

During the 1981 hunger strike in the Maze Prison, O’Callaghan attempts to start his own hunger strike in support of the Maze prisoners but is told to desist by the IRA for fear it will detract focus from the prisoners. He successfully sabotages the efforts of republicans in Kerry from staging hunger strikes of their own.

In 1984, O’Callaghan notifies the Garda of an attempt to smuggle seven tons of AK-47 assault rifles from the United States to Ireland aboard a fishing trawler named Valhalla. The guns are intended for the arsenal of the Provisional IRA’s units. As a result of his warning, a combined force of the Irish Navy and Gardaí intercept the boat that received the weaponry, and the guns are seized. The seizure marks the complete end of any major attempt by the IRA to smuggle guns out of the United States.

In 1983, O’Callaghan claims to be tasked by the IRA with placing 25 lbs. of Frangex in the Dominion Theatre in London, in an attempt to kill Prince Charles and Princess Diana who are due to attend a charity pop music concert there. A warning is phoned into the Garda, and the Royal couple are hurriedly ushered from the theatre by their police bodyguard during the concert. The theatre had been searched before the concert and a second search following the warning reveals no device.

In 1985, O’Callaghan is elected as a Sinn Féin councillor for Tralee Urban District Council, and unsuccessfully contests a seat on Kerry County Council.

After becoming disillusioned with his work with the Irish Government following the murder of another of its agents within the IRA, which it had failed to prevent despite O’Callaghan’s warnings of the threat to him, and sensing a growing threat to himself from the organisation which had become suspicious of his own behaviour, he withdraws from the IRA and leaves Ireland to live in England, taking his wife and children with him. His marriage ends in a divorce in 1987, and on November 29, 1988, he walks into a police station in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, where he presents himself to the officer on duty at the desk, confesses to the murder of Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) Greenfinch (female member) Eva Martin and the murder of D.I. Peter Flanagan during the mid-1970s, and voluntarily surrenders to British prosecution.

Although the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) offers him witness protection as part of the informer policy, O’Callaghan refuses it and is prosecuted under charges of two murders and 40 other crimes, to all of which he pleads guilty, committed in British jurisdiction with the IRA. Having been found guilty, he is sentenced to a total of 539 years in prison. He serves his sentence in prisons in Northern Ireland and England. While in jail, he publishes his story in The Sunday Times. He is released after being granted the royal prerogative of mercy by Queen Elizabeth II in 1996.

In 1998, O’Callaghan publishes an autobiographical account of his experiences in Irish Republican paramilitarism, entitled The Informer: The True Life Story of One Man’s War on Terrorism (1998).

In 2002, O’Callaghan is admitted to Nightingale Hospital, Marylebone, an addiction and rehab center where he undergoes a rehabilitation program for alcohol dependency. His identity and past activities are not revealed to the other patients. He lives relatively openly in London for the rest of his life, refusing to adopt a new identity. He is befriended in the city by the Irish writer Ruth Dudley Edwards, and works as a security consultant, and also occasional advisor to the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) on how to handle Irish republicanism in general, and Sinn Féin in particular.

In 2006, O’Callaghan appears in a London court with regard to an aggravated robbery that occurs in which he is the victim.

In 2015, O’Callaghan publishes James Connolly: My Search for the Man, the Myth & his Legacy (2015), a book containing a critique of the early 20th century Irish revolutionary James Connolly, and what he considers to be his destructive legacy in Ireland’s contemporary politics.

O’Callaghan dies by drowning after suffering a heart attack at the age of 63 while in a swimming pool in Kingston, Jamaica, on August 23, 2017, while visiting his daughter. A memorial service is held in his memory on March 21, 2018, at St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields, a Church of England parish church at the northeast corner of Trafalgar Square in the City of Westminster, London. The service is attended by representatives from Ulster Unionist parties and the Irish Government.


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Birth of Composer Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer

Geoffrey Molyneux Palmer (Irish: Seathrún de Pámar), Irish composer, is born to Protestant Irish parents in Staines, Middlesex, England, on October 8, 1882. His compositions consist mainly of operas and vocal music, among them the first musical settings of poems by James Joyce.

Palmer grows up in South Woodford, an area of East London, where his father, Abram Smythe Palmer, is vicar at Holy Trinity Church. He studies at the University of Oxford where, in 1901, he is the youngest Bachelor of Music (BMus) in college history. Between 1904 and 1907 he studies composition with Charles Villiers Stanford at the Royal College of Music, London. He moves to Ireland in 1910 where he is initially active as a church organist in Dublin suburbs. From his early twenties he suffers from multiple sclerosis, which makes a professional independence increasingly difficult.

Palmer’s music includes at least three operas, a number of choral pieces and many songs. His strong interest in opera comes during a politically difficult period in Irish history. Ireland is struggling for independence, and cultural politicians often regard opera (and classical music in general) as alien to Irish culture. Initially, however, he is successful, his earliest stage work being Finn Varra Maa (a transliteration from the Gaelic meaning “good Finbar”), subtitled The Irish Santa Claus. It survives as a libretto only, published in a drama series by Talbot Press, Dublin, in 1917. Contrary to what the (sub-)title may suggest, the work is a political satire that is much criticised for its nationalism. Sruth na Maoile (“The Sea of Moyle”) is first performed in July 1923 and restaged by the O’Mara Opera Company in the cultural by-programme of the Tailteann Games in August 1924. Its story is based on the legend of the Children of Lir, while the music relies on numerous references to Irish traditional music, including the song Silent O Moylefrom Thomas Moore‘s Irish Melodies. A third work, Grania Goes (1924), conceived as a light, comic opera, cannot be performed in the years following Irish independence. The manuscript scores of the Sruth na Maoile and Grania Goes are in the National Library of Ireland.

Between 1925 and 1930, Palmer embarks on a cycle of three full-scale operas on the Cuchullain cycle to words by William Mervyn Crofton. In one of them, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1925), Crofton acknowledges Palmer’s “beautiful music.” Despite this, Palmer’s illness prevents the completion of the score, which is later handed over to the composer Staf Gebruers (1902–70), but they are never performed. The manuscript scores of the operas Cuchullain and Deirdre of the Sorrows composed by Gebruers are held by his son Adrian. Unfortunately, despite extensive searching, the score of The Wooing of Emer has not been located, though it is referenced in Gebruers’ own inventories and mentioned as being of three hours duration. In addition, there is a copy of The King’s Song, also composed by Gebruers with lyrics by Crofton and described as from Act 1 of The Black Hag, but whether or not this has any connection with Palmer is unknown.

Palmer is mainly known as the composer of light songs and ballads, often in a folkloristic style, that find publishers in England and are frequently performed. “They show a skilled hand with a talent for vocal harmony but little originality.” His choral music is mainly on a similar miniature scale, an exception being the early cantata The Abbot of Innisfallen (1909). There are some isolated examples of orchestral music performed by the orchestra of Radio Éireann, but the surviving references may not give a full picture of his output.

In the last decades of his life, Palmer was confined to a wheelchair and depends upon the care of his two sisters, who were running Hillcourt, a private girls’ boarding school in Glenageary, near their home in Sandycove (south Dublin). Palmer dies in Dublin on November 29, 1957.


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Death of Séamus Ennis, Musician, Singer & Music Collector

Séamus Ennis (Irish: Séamas Mac Aonghusa), Irish musician, singer and Irish music collector, dies in Naul, County Dublin, on October 5, 1982. He is most noted for his uilleann pipe playing and is partly responsible for the revival of the instrument during the twentieth century, having co-founded Na Píobairí Uilleann, a nonprofit organisation dedicated to the promotion of the uilleann pipes and its music. He is recognised for preserving almost 2,000 Irish songs and dance-tunes as part of the work he does with the Irish Folklore Commission. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest uilleann pipers of all time.

Ennis’s father, James, works for the Irish civil service at Naul, County Dublin. In 1908, James Ennis is in a pawn shop in London and purchases a bag containing the pieces of a set of old uilleann pipes. They were made in the mid nineteenth century by Coyne Pipemakers of Thomas Street in Dublin. In 1912, he comes in first in the Oireachtas competition for warpipes and second in the uilleann pipes. He is also a prize-winning dancer. In 1916, he marries Mary Josephine McCabe, an accomplished fiddle player from County Monaghan. They have six children, Angela, Séamus, Barbara, and twins, Cormac and Ursula (Pixie) and Desmond. Séamus is born on May 5, 1919, in Jamestown in Finglas, Dublin. James Ennis is a member of the Fingal trio, which includes Frank O’Higgins on fiddle and John Cawley on flute, and performs regularly with them on the radio. At the age of thirteen, Séamus starts receiving lessons on the pipes from his father. He attends a Gaelscoil, Cholmcille, and a Gaelcholáiste, Coláiste Mhuire, which gives him a knowledge of the Irish language that serves him well in later life. He sits in an exam to become Employment Exchange clerk but is too far down the list to be offered a job. He is twenty and unemployed.

Colm Ó Lochlainn is editor of Irish Street Ballads and a friend of the Ennis family. In 1938, Ennis confides in Colm that he intends to move to England to join the British Army. Colm immediately offers him a job at The Three Candles Press. There Ennis learns all aspects of the printing trade. This includes writing down slow airs for printed scores – a skill which later proves important. Colm is director of an Irish language choir, An Claisceadal, which Ennis joins. In 1942, during The Emergency, shortages and rationing mean that things become difficult in the printing trade. Professor Seamus Ó Duilearge of the Irish Folklore Commission hires the 23-year-old to collect songs. He is given “pen, paper and pushbike” and a salary of three pounds per week. Off he goes to Connemara.

From 1942 to 1947, working for the Irish Folklore Commission, Ennis collects songs in west Munster; counties Galway, Cavan, Mayo, Donegal, Kerry; the Aran Islands and the Scottish Hebrides. His knowledge of Scottish Gaelic enables him to transcribe much of the John Lorne Campbell collection of songs. Elizabeth Cronin of Ballyvourney, County Cork, is so keen to chat to Ennis on his visits that she writes down her own songs and hands them over as he arrives, and then gets down to conversation. He has a natural empathy with the musicians and singers he meets. In August 1947, he starts work as an outside broadcast officer with Raidió Éireann. He is a presenter and records Willie Clancy, Seán Reid and Micho Russell for the first time. There is an air of authority in his voice. In 1951, Alan Lomax and Jean Ritchie arrived from the United States to record Irish songs and tunes. The tables are turned as Ennis becomes the subject of someone else’s collection. There is a photograph from 1952/53 showing Ritchie huddled over the tape recorder while Ennis plays uilleann pipes.

Late in 1951, Ennis joins the BBC. He moves to London to work with producer Brian George. In 1952, he marries Margaret Glynn. They have two children, the organist Catherine Ennis and Christopher. His job is to record the traditional music of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland and to present it on the BBC Home Service. The programme is called As I Roved Out and runs until 1958. Meeting up with Alan Lomax again, he is largely responsible for the album Folk and Primitive Music (volume on Ireland) on the Columbia Records label.

In 1958, after his contract with the BBC is not renewed, Ennis starts doing freelance work, first in England then back in Ireland, with the new TV station Teilifis Éireann. Soon he is relying totally on his musical ability to make a living. About this time, his marriage breaks down and he returns to Ireland. He suffers from tuberculosis and is ill for some time. In 1964, he performs at the Newport Folk Festival. His father gives him the pipes he had bought in 1908. Although most pipers can be classed as playing in a tight style or an open style, Ennis is in between. He is a master of the slow air, knowing how to decorate long notes with taste and discreet variation.

Two events will live in legend among pipers. The first is in Bettystown, County Meath, in 1968, when the society of Irish pipers, Na Píobairí Uilleann, is formed. Breandán Breathnach is playing a tape of his own piping. Ennis asks, “What year?” Breandán replies, “1948.” Ennis says, “So I thought.” For a couple of hours the younger players perform while Ennis sits in silence. Eventually he is asked to play. Slowly he takes off his coat and rolls up his sleeves. He spends 20 minutes tuning up his 130-year-old pipes. He then asks the gathering whether all the tape recorders are ready and proceeds to play for over an hour. To everyone’s astonishment he then offers his precious pipes to Willie Clancy to play a set. Clancy demurs but eventually gives in. Next, Liam O’Flynn is asked to play them, and so on, round the room. The second unforgettable session is in Dowlings’ Pub in Prosperous, County Kildare. Christy Moore is there, as well as most of the future members of Planxty.

Ennis never runs any school of piping but his enthusiasm infuses everyone he meets. In the early 1970s, he shares a house with Liam O’Flynn for almost three years. Finally, he purchases a piece of land in Naul and lives in a mobile home there. One of his last performances is at the Willie Clancy Summer School in 1982. He dies on October 5, 1982. His pipes are bequeathed to Liam O’Flynn. Radio producer Peter Browne produces a compilation of his performances, called The Return from Fingal, spanning 40 years.

Séamus Ennis Road in his native Finglas is named in his honour. The Séamus Ennis Arts Centre in Naul is opened in his honour, to commemorate his work and to promote the traditional arts. He is also the subject of Christy Moore’s song “The Easter Snow.” This is the title of a slow air Ennis used to play, and one after which he named his final home in Naul.


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Birth of Annie Horniman, Theatre Patron & Manager

Annie Elizabeth Fredericka Horniman CH, English theatre patron and manager, is born at Surrey Mount, Forest Hill, London, on October 3, 1860. She establishes the Abbey Theatre in Dublin and founds the first regional repertory theatre company in Britain at the Gaiety Theatre in Manchester. She encourages the work of new writers and playwrights, including W. B. Yeats, George Bernard Shaw and members of what become known as the Manchester School of dramatists.

Horniman, the elder child of Frederick John Horniman and his first wife Rebekah (née Emslie). Her father is a tea merchant and the founder of the Horniman Museum. Her grandfather is John Horniman who founds the family tea business of Horniman and Company. She and her younger brother, Emslie, are educated privately at their home. Her father is opposed to the theatre, which he considers sinful, but their German governess takes her and Emslie secretly to a performance of The Merchant of Venice at The Crystal Palace when she is fourteen years old.

Horniman’s father allows her to enter the Slade School of Fine Art in 1882. Here she discovers that her talent in art is limited but she develops other interests, particularly in the theatre and opera. She takes great pleasure in Richard Wagner‘s Der Ring des Nibelungen and in Henrik Ibsen‘s plays. She cycles in London and twice over the Alps, smokes in public and explores alternative religions. The “lonely rich girl” has become “an independent-minded woman.” In 1890 she joins the occult society, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, where she remains a member until disagreements with its leaders lead to her resignation in 1903. During this time she meets and becomes a friend of W. B. Yeats, acting as his amanuensis for some years. Their friendship endures. Frank O’Connor recalls that on the day Yeats hears of her death, he spends the entire evening speaking of his memories of her.

Horniman’s first venture into the theatre is in 1894 and is made possible by a legacy from her grandfather. She anonymously supports her friend Florence Farr in a season of new plays at the Royal Avenue Theatre, London. This includes a new play by Yeats, The Land of Heart’s Desire, and the première of George Bernard Shaw’s play Arms and the Man. In 1903, Yeats persuades her to go to Dublin to back productions by the Irish National Theatre Society. Here she discovers her skill as a theatre administrator. She purchases a property and develops it into the Abbey Theatre, which opens in December 1904. Although she moves back to live in England, she continues to support the theatre financially until 1910. Meanwhile, in Manchester she purchases and renovates the Gaiety Theatre in 1908 and develops it into the first regional repertory theatre in Britain.

At the Gaiety, Horniman appoints Ben Iden Payne as the director and employs actors on 40-week contracts, alternating their work between large and small parts. The plays produced include classics such as Euripides and Shakespeare, and she introduces works by contemporary playwrights such as Ibsen and Shaw. She also encourages local writers who form what becomes known as the Manchester School of dramatists, the leading members of which are Harold Brighouse, Stanley Houghton and Allan Monkhouse. The Gaiety company undertakes tours of the United States and Canada in 1912 and 1913. Horniman becomes a well-known public figure in Manchester, lecturing on subjects which include women’s suffrage and her views about the theatre. In 1910 she is awarded the honorary degree of MA by the University of Manchester. During World War I the Gaiety continues to stage plays but financial difficulties lead to the disbandment of the permanent company in 1917, following which productions in the theatre are by visiting companies. In 1921 she sells the theatre to a cinema company.

As a result of her tea connection, Horniman is known as “Hornibags.” She holds court at the Midland Hotel, wearing exotic clothing and openly smoking cigarettes, which is considered scandalous at the time. She introduces Manchester to what is called at the time “the play of ideas.” The theatre critic James Agate notes that her high-minded theatrical ventures have “an air of gloomy strenuousness” about them.

Horniman moves to London where she keeps a flat in Portman Square. In 1933 she is made a Companion of Honour. She and Algernon Blackwood might be the only past or present members of an occult society to receive a United Kingdom honour.

Horniman dies, unmarried, on August 6, 1937, while visiting friends in Shere, Surrey. Her estate amounts to a little over £50,000. The Annie Horniman Papers are held in the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester. Her portrait, painted by John Butler Yeats in 1904, hangs in the public area of the Abbey Theatre.


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Birth of Jasmine Guinness, Designer & Fashion Model

Jasmine Leonora Guinness, Irish designer and a fashion model active since 1994, is born on September 28, 1976. She is a member of Anglo-Irish brewing Guinness family.

Guinness is the daughter of Patrick Guinness and Liz Casey. She is educated at St. Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, in Dublin. She also spends a year at Winchester School of Art, the art school of the University of Southampton, situated 10 miles (14 km) north of Southampton in the city of Winchester near the south coast of England.

Guinness and Gawain O’Dare Rainey are engaged on January 31, 2005, and married on July 1, 2006, in Leixlip, County Kildare. The wedding is extensively covered in the July 18, 2006 issue of Hello! magazine and is attended by 500 guests, including the designer of her draped silk dress, Jasper Conran, Mario Testino, Paddy Moloney, Anjelica Huston, Jacquetta Wheeler, Jade Parfitt, Erin O’Connor, Garech Browne and Philip Treacy.

Her husband is the son of Michael Rainey and the Hon. Jane Ormsby-Gore, a daughter of David Ormsby-Gore, 5th Baron Harlech. They have two sons and a daughter together.

Guinness opens the toy shop Honeyjam on London‘s Portobello Road in 2006.

A portrait of Guinness is held at the National Portrait Gallery in London. She has modeled for various perfume and make-up campaigns, including Armani and Shu Uemura. She is the face of the Goffs Million horse races at the Curragh Racecourse in September 2007, an event that pays the highest winnings of any race meeting in Europe.

In 2009, Guinness is the face of the Arthur’s Day event celebrating her ancestor Arthur Guinness. In March and December 2011 she is again the subject of articles in Hello! magazine.

The year 2014 marks a revival of Guinness’s modeling career as she leads Jaeger‘s AW14 campaign alongside her mother Liz and fellow models Kirsty Hume and Jodie Kidd. Her range largely includes knitwear, including cardigans, skirts and sweater dresses.

Guinness is the great-granddaughter of Diana Mitford (later Lady Mosley), who is one of the Mitford sisters, and her first husband Bryan Guinness, later the 2nd Lord Moyne. Her paternal grandfather, Desmond Guinness, is a conservationist specialising in Georgian and classical architecture, while her paternal grandmother, Mariga Guinness, is born Marie-Gabrielle, Princess of Urach. Desmond and Mariga Guinness are co-founders of the Irish Georgian Society. Guinness’s maternal family is researched in the RTÉ programme Where Was Your Family During the Famine?


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Death of James Ryan, Doctor, Revolutionary & Fianna Fáil Politician

James Ryan, medical doctor, revolutionary and politician who serves in every Fianna Fáil government from 1932 to 1965, dies on his farm at Kindlestown, County Wicklow, on September 25, 1970.

Ryan is born on the family farm at Tomcoole, near Taghmon, County Wexford, on December 6, 1892. The second-youngest of twelve children, he is educated at St. Peter’s College, Wexford, and Ring College, Waterford. In 1911, he wins a county council scholarship to University College Dublin (UCD) where he studies medicine.

In March 1917, Ryan passes his final medical examinations. That June he sets up medical practice in Wexford. In 1921, he moves to Dublin where he opens a doctor’s practice at Harcourt Street, specialising in skin diseases at the Skin and Cancer Hospital on Holles Street. He leaves medicine in 1925, after he purchases Kindlestown, a large farm near Delgany, County Wicklow. He lives there and it remains a working farm until his death.

In July 1919, Ryan marries Máirín Cregan, originally from County Kerry and a close friend of Sinéad de Valera throughout her life. Cregan, like her husband, also fought in the Easter Rising and is subsequently an author of children’s stories in Irish. They have three children together.

One of Ryan’s sisters, Mary Kate, marries Seán T. O’Kelly, one of Ryan’s future cabinet colleagues and a future President of Ireland. Following her death O’Kelly marries her sister, Phyllis Ryan. Another of Ryan’s sisters, Josephine (‘Min’) Ryan, marries Richard Mulcahy, a future leader of Fine Gael. Another sister, Agnes, marries Denis McCullough, a Cumann na nGaedheal TD from 1924 to 1927. He is also the great-grandfather of Ireland and Leinster Rugby player James Ryan.

While studying at university in 1913, Ryan joins the Gaelic League at Clonmel. The company commander recruits the young Catholic nationalist, who becomes a founder-member of the Irish Volunteers and is sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) the following year. In 1916, he goes first to Cork to deliver a message from Seán Mac Diarmada to Tomás Mac Curtain that the Easter Rising is due to happen on Easter Sunday, then to Cork again in a 12-hour journey in a car to deliver Eoin MacNeill‘s cancellation order, which attempts to stop the rising. When he arrives back on Tuesday, he serves as the medical officer in the General Post Office (GPO) and treats many wounds, including James Connolly‘s shattered ankle, a wound which gradually turns gangrenous. He is, along with Connolly, one of the last people to leave the GPO when the evacuation takes place. Following the surrender of the garrison, he is deported to HM Prison Stafford in England and subsequently Frongoch internment camp. He is released in August 1916.

Ryan rejoins the Volunteers immediately after his release from prison, and in June 1917, he is elected Commandant of the Wexford Battalion. His political career begins the following year when he is elected as a Sinn Féin candidate for the constituency of South Wexford in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland. Like his fellow Sinn Féin MPs, he refuses to attend the Westminster Parliament. Instead he attends the proceedings of the First Dáil on January 21, 1919. As the Irish War of Independence goes on, he becomes Brigade Commandant of South Wexford and is also elected to Wexford County Council, serving as chairman on one occasion. In September 1919, he is arrested by the British and interned on Spike Island and later Bere Island. In February 1921, he is imprisoned at Kilworth Internment Camp, County Cork. He is later moved on Ballykinlar Barracks in County Down and released in August 1921.

In the 1922 Irish general election, Ryan and one of the other two anti-Treaty Wexford TDs lose their seats to pro-Treaty candidates. During the Irish Civil War, he is arrested and held in Mountjoy Prison before being transferred to Curragh Camp, where he embarks on a 36-day hunger strike. While interned he wins back his Dáil seat as an abstentionist at the 1923 Irish general election. He is released from prison in December 1923.

In 1926, Ryan is among the Sinn Féin TDs who follow leader Éamon de Valera out of the party to found Fianna Fáil. They enter the Dáil in 1927 and spend five years on the opposition benches.

Following the 1932 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil comes to office and Ryan is appointed Minister for Agriculture, a position he continuously holds for fifteen years. He faces severe criticism over the Anglo-Irish trade war with Britain as serious harm is done to the cattle trade, Ireland’s main export earner. The trade war ends in 1938 with the signing of the Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement between both governments, after a series of talks in London between the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, de Valera, Ryan and Seán Lemass.

In 1947, after spending fifteen years as Minister for Agriculture, Ryan is appointed to the newly created positions of Minister for Health and Minister for Social Welfare. Following Fianna Fáil’s return to power at the 1951 Irish general election, he returns as Minister for Health and Social Welfare. Following the 1954 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil loses power and he moves to the backbenches once again.

Following the 1957 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil are back in office and de Valera’s cabinet has a new look to it. In a clear message that there will be a change to economic policy, Ryan, a close ally of Seán Lemass, is appointed Minister for Finance, replacing the conservative Seán MacEntee. The first sign of a new economic approach comes in 1958, when Ryan brings the First Programme for Economic Development to the cabinet table. This plan, the brainchild of T. K. Whitaker, recognises that Ireland will have to move away from self-sufficiency toward free trade. It also proposes that foreign firms should be given grants and tax breaks to set up in Ireland.

When Lemass succeeds de Valera as Taoiseach in 1959, Ryan is re-appointed as Minister for Finance. Lemass wants to reward him for his loyalty by also naming him Tánaiste. However, the new leader feels obliged to appoint MacEntee, one of the party elders to the position. Ryan continues to implement the First Programme throughout the early 1960s, achieving a record growth rate of 4 percent by 1963. That year an even more ambitious Second Programme is introduced. However, it overreaches and has to be abandoned. In spite of this, the annual growth rate averages five percent, the highest achieved since independence.

Ryan does not stand in the 1965 Irish general election, after which he is nominated by the Taoiseach to Seanad Éireann, where he joins his son, Eoin Ryan Snr. At the 1969 dissolution he retires to his farm at Kindlestown, County Wicklow, where he dies at age 77 on September 25, 1970. He is buried at Redford Cemetery, Greystones, County Wicklow. His grandson, Eoin Ryan Jnr, serves in the Oireachtas from 1989 to 2007 and later in the European Parliament from 2004 to 2009.


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Death of Oliver St. John Gogarty, Poet, Author, Athlete & Politician

Oliver Joseph St. John Gogarty, Irish poet, author, otolaryngologist, athlete, politician, and well-known conversationalist, dies in New York City on September 22, 1957. He serves as the inspiration for Buck Mulligan in James Joyce‘s novel Ulysses.

Gogarty is born on August 17, 1878, in Rutland Square, Dublin. In 1887, his father dies of a burst appendix, and he is sent to Mungret College, a boarding school near Limerick. He is unhappy in his new school, and the following year he transfers to Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, England, which he likes little better, later referring to it as “a religious jail.” He returns to Ireland in 1896 and boards at Clongowes Wood College while studying for examinations with the Royal University of Ireland. In 1898, he switches to the medical school at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), having failed eight of his ten examinations at the Royal.

A serious interest in poetry and literature begins to manifest itself during his years at TCD. In 1900, he makes the acquaintance of W. B. Yeats and George Moore and begins to frequent Dublin literary circles. In 1904 and 1905 he publishes several short poems in the London publication The Venture and in John Eglinton‘s journal Dana. His name also appears in print as the renegade priest Fr. Oliver Gogarty in George Moore’s 1905 novel The Lake.

In 1905, Gogarty becomes one of the founding members of Arthur Griffith‘s Sinn Féin, a non-violent political movement with a plan for Irish autonomy modeled after the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy.

In July 1907, his first son, Oliver Duane Odysseus Gogarty, is born, and in autumn of that year he leaves for Vienna to finish the practical phase of his medical training. Returning to Dublin in 1908, he secures a post at Richmond Hospital, and shortly afterward purchases a house in Ely Place opposite George Moore. Three years later, he joins the staff of the Meath Hospital and remains there for the remainder of his medical career.

As a Sinn Féiner during the Irish War of Independence, Gogarty participates in a variety of anti-Black and Tan schemes, allowing his home to be used as a safe house and transporting disguised Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers in his car. Following the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he sides with the pro-Treaty government and is made a Free State Senator. He remains a senator until the abolition of the Seanad in 1936, during which time he identifies with none of the existing political parties and votes according to his own whims.

Gogarty maintains close friendships with many of the Dublin literati and continues to write poetry in the midst of his political and professional duties. He also tries his hand at playwriting, producing a slum drama in 1917 under the pseudonym “Alpha and Omega,” and two comedies in 1919 under the pseudonym “Gideon Ouseley,” all three of which are performed at the Abbey Theatre. He devotes less energy to his medical practice and more to his writing during the twenties and thirties.

With the onset of World War II, Gogarty attempts to enlist in the Royal Air Force (RAF) and the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) as a doctor. He is denied on grounds of age. He then departs in September 1939 for an extended lecture tour in the United States, leaving his wife to manage Renvyle House, which has since been rebuilt as a hotel. When his return to Ireland is delayed by the war, he applies for American citizenship and eventually decides to reside permanently in the United States. Though he regularly sends letters, funds, and care-packages to his family and returns home for occasional holiday visits, he never again lives in Ireland for any extended length of time.

Gogarty suffers from heart complaints during the last few years of his life, and in September 1957 he collapses in the street on his way to dinner. He dies on September 22, 1957. His body is flown home to Ireland and buried in Cartron Church, Moyard, near Renvyle, County Galway.

(Pictured: 1911 portrait of Oliver St. John Gogarty painted by Sir William Orpen, currently housed at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland)