The Irish Lights vessel Granuaile begins laying the cable a few hundred metres offshore. Divers pull the cable ashore while the ship continues laying to a point about 4 km offshore. From there another vessel, the Reliance, takes over the task, relay-race like, and begins laying further out towards the United States.
The fiber optic cable is owned and operated by Irish company Aqua Comms and will run directly from Ross Strand in Killala to Long Island, New York. It has the capacity to handle up to one third of the world’s telephone calls and can cover the entire Internet traffic of Europe and the United States. The system will enable 53.8 millisecond transfer speeds across the Atlantic Ocean when it goes live in early 2016.
Silicon Republic describes Mayo as “Europe’s entry point to a vastly superior service when construction is completed by next year.” These connections are expected to create “thousands of jobs” in data centre operations. It will have a 53.8 millisecond latency and be capable of handling a third of the world’s phone calls, with over 1.6 million simultaneous Ultra HD video channels, or over 32 million LTE wireless callers.
CEO Martin Roche says, “It will also be the most secure transatlantic cable system, due to the carefully mapped route and the design built into the construction of this project.”
TaoiseachEnda Kenny says, “This new digital infrastructure is essential to help create jobs and new business opportunities across Ireland.” He also added, “This is the most important landing since [French general] Humbert in 1798.”
Local councillor Jarlath Munnelly says the project could “transform” Killala and the north Mayo region. “This is an exciting project, which I am enthusiastically supportive of. It has the potential to transform North Mayo, not just Killala, by enhancing the telecommunications infrastructure in the area, and putting Ireland and Mayo into the centre of a global network,” said the councillor.
MacGahan’s father is an immigrant from Ireland who had served on the Northumberland, the ship which took Napoleon into exile on Saint Helena. He moves to St. Louis, where he briefly works as a teacher and as a journalist. There he meets his cousin, General Philip Sheridan, an American Civil War hero also of Irish parentage, who convinces him to study law in Europe. He sails to Brussels in December 1868.
MacGahan does not get a law degree, but he discovers that he has a gift for languages, learning French and German. He runs short of money and is about to return to America in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War breaks out. Sheridan happens to be an observer with the German Army, and he uses his influence to persuade the European editor of the New York Herald to hire MacGahan as a war correspondent with the French Army.
MacGahan’s vivid articles from the front lines describing the stunning defeat of the French Army win him a large following, and many of his dispatches to the Herald are reprinted by European newspapers. When the war ends, he interviews French leader Léon Gambetta and Victor Hugo and, in March 1871, he hurries to Paris and is one of the first foreign correspondents to report on the uprising of the Paris Commune. He is arrested by the French military and nearly executed and is only rescued through the intervention of the U.S. Minister to FranceElihu B. Washburne.
In 1871 MacGahan is assigned as the Herald‘s correspondent to Saint Petersburg. He learns Russian, mingles with the Russian military and nobility, covers the Russian tour of General William Tecumseh Sherman and meets his future wife, Varvara Elagina, whom he marries in 1873. In 1874 he spends ten months in Spain, covering the Third Carlist War.
In 1876 MacGahan quarrels with James Gordon Bennett Jr., the publisher of the New York Herald, and leaves the newspaper. He is invited by his friend, Eugene Schuyler, the American Consul-General in Constantinople, to investigate reports of large-scale atrocities committed by the Turkish Army following the failure of an attempted uprising by Bulgarian nationalists in April 1876. He obtains a commission from The Daily News, then the leading liberal newspaper in England, and leaves for Bulgaria on July 23, 1876.
MacGahan reports that the Turkish soldiers have forced some of the villagers into the church, then the church is burned, and survivors tortured to learn where they have hidden their treasures. He says that of a population of seven thousand, only two thousand survive. According to his account, fifty-eight villages in Bulgaria are destroyed, five monasteries demolished, and fifteen thousand people in all massacred. These reports, published first in The Daily News, and then in other papers, cause widespread popular outrage against Turkey in Britain. The government of British Prime MinisterBenjamin Disraeli, a supporter of Turkey, tries to minimize the massacres and says that the Bulgarians are equally to blame, but his arguments are refuted by the newspaper accounts of MacGahan.
In the wake of the massacres and atrocities committed by the Ottoman forces during the suppression of the April Uprising, as well as centuries-long conflicts between Russia and Turkey in Crimea, the Russian Government, stirred by anti-Turkish and Pan-Slavism sentiment, prepare to invade the Ottoman Empire, and declare war on it on April 24, 1877. The Turkish Government of SultanAbdul Hamid II appeals for help to Britain, its traditional ally against Russia, but the British government responds that it cannot intervene “because of the state of public feeling.”
MacGahan is assigned as a war correspondent for The Daily News and, thanks to his friendship with General Skobelev, the Russian commander, rides with the first units of the Russian Army as it crosses the Danube into Bulgaria. He covers all the major battles of the Russo–Turkish War, including the Siege of Plevna and the Battle of Shipka Pass. He reports on the final defeat of the Turkish armies and is present at the signing of the Treaty of San Stefano, which ends the war.
MacGahan is in Constantinople, preparing to travel to Berlin for the conference that determines the final borders of Bulgaria, when he catches typhoid fever. He dies on June 9, 1878, and is buried in the Greek cemetery, in the presence of diplomats, war correspondents, and General Skobelev. Five years later his body is returned to the United States and reburied in New Lexington and a statue is erected in his honor by a society of Bulgarian Americans.
Holt is one of six sons of John Holt, a farmer in County Wicklow. He joins the Irish Volunteers in the 1780s and holds a number of minor public offices but becomes involved in law enforcement as a sub-constable, billet master for the militia and a bounty hunter. He is involved in the Battle of Vinegar Hill which is an engagement during the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on June 21, 1798, when over 15,000 British soldiers launch an attack on Vinegar Hill outside Enniscorthy, County Wexford.
Despite Holt’s apparent loyalism, he becomes a member of the Society of United Irishmen in 1797 and gradually begins to attract suspicion until finally in May 1798, his house is burned down by the militia of Fermanagh. He then takes to the Wicklow mountains, gradually assuming a position of prominence with the United Irish rebels. The defeat of the County Wexford rebels at Vinegar Hill on June 21 sees surviving rebel factions heading towards the Wicklow Mountains to link up with Holt’s forces.
Emerging to meet them, Holt is given much of the credit for the planning of the ambush and defeat of a pursuing force of 200 British cavalry in the Battle of Ballyellis on June 30, 1798. However, the subsequent Midlands campaign to revive the rebellion is a disaster, and he is lucky to escape with his life back to the safety of the Wicklow Mountains.
Holt largely holds out in expectation of the arrival of French aid but news of the defeat of the French in the Battle of Ballinamuck together with his ill-health brought about by the hardships of his fugitive life, age and family considerations prompt him to initiate contact with the Dublin Castle authorities with a view to a negotiated surrender. Dublin Castle is eager to end the rebellion in Wicklow and allows him exile after incarceration in the Bermingham Tower without trial in New South Wales.
Holt goes out on the Minerva and meets Captain William Cox who has been appointed paymaster of the New South Wales Corps. The ship arrives at Sydney on January 11, 1800, and shortly afterwards Holt agrees to manage Captain Cox’s farm. He always claims in Australia that he is a political exile and not a convict. In 1804 when the Castle Hill uprising occurs Holt, who is not involved, has been warned that evening that it is about to happen. During the night he sets up a defense of Captain Cox’s house. He is nonetheless afterwards hounded by Governor Philip Gidley King and many false witnesses are brought against him. Although there is no plausible evidence at all against him, he is exiled by King to Norfolk Island in April 1804, and there put to hard labour.
Holt is officially pardoned on January 1, 1811, and in December 1812, with his wife and younger son, takes passage to Europe on the Isabella. The ship is wrecked by a reef, so the passengers and crew are landed at Eagle Island, one of the Falkland Islands. He shows great resolution and ingenuity in making the best of the conditions on the island. He is rescued on April 4, 1813, but does not reach England until February 22, 1814, as he travels via the United States. He retires to Ireland where he lives for the rest of his life but regrets he had left Australia.
James Henthorn Todd, biblical scholar, educator, and Irish historian, is born in Rathfarnham, a Southside suburb of Dublin, on April 23, 1805. He is noted for his efforts to place religious disagreements on a rational historical footing, for his advocacy of a liberal form of Protestantism, and for his endeavours as an educator, librarian, and scholar in Irish history.
Todd is the son of Charles Hawkes Todd, a professor of surgery, and Eliza Bentley, and is the oldest of fifteen children. Noted physician Robert Bentley Todd is among his younger brothers. His father dies a year after he receives a B.A. from Trinity College, Dublin in 1825, diminishing his prospects for success. However, he is able to remain at the college by tutoring and editing a church periodical.
Todd obtains a premium in 1829, and two years later is elected Fellow, taking deacon’s orders in the same year. From that time until 1850, when he becomes a Senior Fellow, he is among the most popular tutors in Trinity College.
Todd takes priest’s orders in 1832. He begins publishing in earnest, including papers on John Wycliffe, church history, and the religious questions of his day. He is Donnellan Lecturer in 1838 and 1839, publishing works related to the Antichrist in which he opposes the views of the more extreme of his co-religionists who apply this term to the Roman Catholicism and the Pope. In 1840 he graduates Doctor of Divinity.
In 1837 Todd is installed Treasurer at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin and becomes Precentor in 1864. His style of preaching is described as simple and lucid, and his sermons interesting. He co-founds Saint Columba’s College in 1843, a school which promotes the Irish language for those who intend to take orders, as well as promoting the principles of the Church of Ireland.
In 1849 Todd is made Regius Professor of Hebrew at Trinity, and a Senior Fellow the following year. In 1852 he is appointed Librarian, and working alongside John O’Donovan and Eugene O’Curry, he classifies and arranges the collection of manuscripts. When his office receives money, he spends it on the acquisition of manuscripts and rare books, and he deserves much credit for the library’s high ranking as one of the chief libraries of Europe.
Todd’s secular achievements are no less remarkable. In 1840 he co-founds the Irish Archaeological Society and acts as its honorary secretary. He is elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy and strives actively to acquire transcripts and accurate accounts of Irish manuscripts from foreign libraries. He is honorary secretary from 1847 to 1855, and president from 1856 to 1861. In 1860 he is given an ad eundem degree at the University of Oxford.
Todd is a notable person among notable people. His work is widely respected and cited. Among his friends and acquaintances are lawyer and poet Sir Samuel Ferguson, Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and Roman Catholic convert Edwin Wyndham-Quin, fellow historian William Reeves, artist Sir George Petrie, and the Stokes family (physician father William, future lawyer and Celticist son Whitley, and future antiquarian daughter Margaret).
James Henthorn Todd dies at his house in Rathfarnham on June 28, 1869, and is buried in the churchyard of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Melesina Trench (née Chenevix), Irish writer, poet and diarist, is born in Dublin on March 22, 1768. During her lifetime she is known more for her beauty than her writing. It is not until her son, Richard Chenevix Trench, publishes her diaries posthumously in 1861 that her work receives notice.
Melesina Chenevix is born to Philip Chenevix and Mary Elizabeth Gervais. She is orphaned before her fourth birthday and is brought up by her paternal grandfather, Richard Chenevix (1698–1779), the AnglicanBishop of Waterford and Lismore. The family is of Huguenot extraction.
After the death of Richard Chenevix she goes to live with her other grandfather, the Archdeacon Gervais. On October 31, 1786, she marries Colonel Richard St. George, who dies only four years later in Portugal, leaving one son, Charles Manners St. George, who becomes a diplomat.
On March 3, 1803, in Paris she marries her second husband, Richard Trench, who is the sixth son of Frederick Trench and brother of Frederick Trench, 1st Baron Ashtown.
After the breakdown of the Peace of Amiens, Richard Trench is detained in France by Napoleon‘s armies, and in August 1805 Melesina takes it upon herself to petition Napoleon in person and pleads for her husband’s release. Her husband is released in 1807, and the couple settles at Elm Lodge in Bursledon, Hampshire, England.
Their son, Francis Chenevix Trench, is born in 1805. In 1807, when they are on holiday in Dublin, their son Richard Chenevix Trench is born. He goes on to be the Archbishop of Dublin, renowned poet and contemporary of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Her only daughter dies a few years later at the age of four.
Trench corresponds with, amongst others, Mary Leadbeater, with whom she works to improve the lot of the peasantry at her estate at Ballybarney. She dies at the age of 59 in Malvern, Worcestershire on May 27, 1827.
Melesina Trench’s diaries and letters are compiled posthumously by Richard Chenevix Trench as The remains of the late Mrs. Richard Trench in 1861 with an engraving of her taken from a painting by George Romney. Another oil painting, The Evening Star by Sir Thomas Lawrence, has her as a subject, and she is reproduced in portrait miniatures – one in Paris by Jean-Baptiste Isabey and another by Hamilton that is copied by the engraver Francis Engleheart.
The third Irish Race Convention is held in New York City on March 4, 1916, and serves as an immediate call for the Easter Rebellion in Dublin. Previous conventions were held in Chicago (1881) and Dublin (1896). The Irish Race Conventions are a disconnected series of conventions held in Europe and the Americas between 1881 and 1994. The main participants and financial supporters of the conventions are usually Irish Americans.
The 1916 convention, comprising 2,300 delegates at the Hotel Astor, is held six weeks before the Easter Rising, and considers the division between the home Rule parties and the more militant nationalists. The Rising would be supported by Clan na Gael, but other members remain hopeful that the 1914 Home Rule Act, which had been passed but suspended during World War I, might work.
A majority at the convention support the American policy of neutrality during the war and are opposed to any alliance with Britain. Woodrow Wilson wins the United States presidential election in 1916 with help from Irish Americans and his campaign slogan of “He kept us out of War.”
An important result is the formation of the “Friends of Irish Freedom” that work as a coordinating body to support “the independence of Ireland, the industrial development of Ireland, the use and sale of Irish products, and to revive Irish culture.”
(Pictured: Hotel Astor, located in the Times Square area of Manhattan, New York City. The hotel was demolished in 1967 and replaced with the 54-story high-rise office tower One Astor Plaza.)
Three Studies for a Portrait of Lucian Freud, which is painted in 1964 and shows Bacon’s friend and fellow artist with a variety of facial expressions, creates a buzz before the sale. The question is not if it will make its pre-sale estimate of £7 – £9 million, but how much higher might it possibly go.
More than 10 bidders from four different continents compete for the work. After seven minutes of bidding, it reaches £20.5 million and a hopeful telephone bidder asks if £20.6 million can be offered. The auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, insists on £21 million. There is applause as he finally bangs his hammer.
Cheyenne Westphal, the auction house’s chairman of contemporary art in Europe, says, “This striking painting has everything a collector in the current market is looking for. It is an artwork that radiates ‘wall-power’ with its brilliant colour and dramatic brushstrokes.”
The triptych has been in the same private collection for nearly 50 years and is a testament to the close friendship of two of the titans of 20th century British art. This triptych, Sotheby’s says, contains an “intensity and intimacy that is rarely seen elsewhere.”
Bacon, who dies in 1992, and Freud are kindred spirits, close friends who often see each other every day. They gamble together, drink in the same Soho dens and paint each other.
At the same auction, Salvador Dalí‘s Portrait of Paul Eluard sells for £13.5 million, at a stroke tripling the record auction price for a Dali set at Christie’s on the previous Wednesday, and becoming the most expensive surrealist artwork sold at any auction.
The paintings are part of a truly wondrous private collection. The sale of 60 works from it also includes paintings by Amedeo Modigliani, Alberto Giacometti, Marc Chagall and Joan Miró. There are many gems, including a tiny 12.5 by 9.5 cm Lucian Freud self-portrait that he painted in Jamaica while visiting Ian Fleming at his house, Goldeneye. It sells for £3.3 million.
(Credit: Mark Brown, Arts Correspondent, The Guardian, Feb. 10, 2011)
The SS Tuscania, a luxury liner of the Cunard Line subsidiary Anchor Line converted for troop use, is torpedoed and sunk on February 5, 1918 off Rathlin Island, north of Ireland by the German U-boatUB-77. The ship is transporting over 2,000 American troops to the war in Europe. Over 200 people lose their lives.
SS Tuscania makes international headlines for rescuing passengers and crew from the burning Greek steamer SS Athinai on September 20, 1915. In 1916, SS Tuscania is refitted and pressed into service as a troopship. She makes the news again in March 1917 by evading a submarine and a suspected Imperial German Navyarmed merchant cruiser.
On January 24, 1918, SS Tuscania departs Hoboken, New Jersey, with 384 crew members and 2,013 United States Army personnel aboard. On the morning of February 5, 1918, she turns south for the North Channel en route to Liverpool. The German submarine UB-77 sights SS Tuscania′s convoy during the day and stalks it until early evening. Under the cover of darkness at about 6:40 PM, the submarine′s commanding officer, Korvettenkapitän Wilhelm Meyer, orders two torpedoes fired at SS Tuscania. The second of these strikes home, sending her to the bottom of the Irish Sea within about four hours. SS Tuscania sinks nearly three years to the day after her maiden voyage as a passenger liner. Approximately 210 of the troops and crew are lost, while many others are rescued by the Royal Navydestroyers HMS Mosquito and HMS Pigeon.
Edward Martyn, Irish playwright and early republican political and cultural activist, is born in County Galway on January 30, 1859. He serves as the first president of Sinn Féin from 1905 to 1908.
Martyn is the elder son of John Martyn of Tullira Castle, Ardrahan and Annie Mary Josephine (née Smyth) of Masonbrook, Loughrea, both of County Galway. He is educated at Belvedere College, Dublin, and Wimbledon College, London, both Jesuit schools, after which he enters Christ Church, Oxford in 1877, but leaves without taking a degree in 1879. His only sibling, John, dies in 1883.
Martyn begins writing fiction and plays in the 1880s. While his own output is undistinguished, he acquires a well-earned reputation as a noted connoisseur of music, both European classical and Irish traditional. He is a fine musician in his own right, giving memorable performances for guests on an organ he has installed at Tullira. He uses his wealth to benefit Irish culture.
Martyn is reportedly pivotal in introducing William Butler Yeats and Lady Gregory to each other in 1896. The three found the Irish Literary Theatre, for whom Martyn writes his best and most popular plays, The Heather Field and A Tale of a Town. He covers the costs of the company’s first three seasons, which proves crucial to establishing the company and the future of the Abbey Theatre. He later parts ways with Yeats and Gregory, something he later regrets, but remains on warm terms with Lady Gregory until the end of his life.
Martyn is a cousin and friend to George Moore (1852–1933). The two make frequent trips all over Europe, where Moore influences Martyn’s views on modern art, which result in the latter purchasing several works by Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Kitagawa Utamaro, all later donated to the National Gallery of Ireland. Moore does not share Martyn’s fenian ideas nor espousal of violent means to achieve national sovereignty. Their different political opinions eventually drive their friendship apart.
Martyn is descended from Richard Óge Martyn, a leading Irish Confederate, and Oliver Óge Martyn, a Jacobite who fights in the Williamite War in Ireland. Yet by his lifetime, the family are unionists. Martyn’s outlook begins to change in the 1880s after studying Irish history, as well as living through the events of the Irish Land War. He comes out as an Irish republican when he famously refuses to allow “God Save The Queen” to be sung after a dinner party at Tullira. By this stage he is involved with the political work of Maude Gonne and Arthur Griffith and is a vocal opponent of the visit of Queen Victoria to Ireland in 1897. He also protests the visit by Edward VII in 1903, this time as chairman of the People’s Protection Committee. He is the first president of Sinn Féin from 1905 to 1908. In 1908 he resigns from the party and politics in general to concentrate on writing and his other activities.
Martyn dies at Tullira on December 5, 1923, after years of ill health. Friends and family are shocked at a provision in his will that directs that his body be donated for the use of medical science and, after dissection, be buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave. The Palestrina Choir sings at his graveside. He bequeaths his papers to the Carmelites of Clarendon Street in Dublin, who subsequently misplace and lose them. Portraits of Martyn exist by, among others, John Butler Yeats and Sarah Purser. On his death the senior line of the Martyn family dies out. His property is inherited by his cousins, the Smyths of Masonbrook and Lord Hemphill. Tullira is sold by the latter forty years later changing ownership several times since.
The American Committee for Relief in Ireland (ACRI) is founded through the initiative of Dr. William J. Maloney and others on December 16, 1920, with the intention of giving financial assistance to civilians in Ireland who have been injured or suffer severe financial hardship due to the ongoing Irish War of Independence.
The Committee is only one of several U.S. based philanthropic organisations that emerge following World War I with a view to influencing the post-war settlement from their perspective of social justice, economic development and long term stability in Europe. Some of them concentrate their efforts on events in Ireland, and while activists of Irish ethnicity are well represented, membership is far from confined to Americans of Irish heritage. Apart from the ACRI, bodies such as the American Commission on Irish Independence and the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland raise money and attempt to influence U.S. foreign policy in a manner sympathetic to the goal of Irish secession from the United Kingdom.
This period of Irish political radicalism coincides with a Red Scare in the United States. Jim Larkin, an Irish trade unionist, who has been closely associated with James Connolly in Ireland and with the Wobblies in the U.S., is serving a five-year sentence in Sing Sing prison for promoting his socialist agenda. While his political views differ fundamentally from most of the Sinn Féin leadership, Irish republicanism is seen by many of the American establishment as based on a questionable ideology. During the Irish War of Independence, the activities of Irish-American fund-raising organisations are viewed with suspicion and kept under close scrutiny by the intelligence services including J. Edgar Hoover, head of the General Intelligence Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. U.S. policy towards Irish concerns, initially hostile or at best indifferent, become somewhat less so following the 1920 U.S. presidential election and the landslide victory of Warren G. Harding over James M. Cox.
Following the burning of parts of Cork on December 11, 1920 by elements of the British security forces known as the Black and Tans, approaches are made by the city’s Lord Mayor, Donal O’Callaghan, to the American Red Cross for humanitarian assistance. The society, having taken advice from President Woodrow Wilson, the British embassy, the Foreign Office and the British Red Cross, decline at this time to act on his appeal. Numerous organisations and committees across the United States, operating independently in raising humanitarian aid money for Ireland realise that their funds will not be channelled through the U.S. Committee of the Red Cross and so another distribution channel is needed.
Five days after the inferno at Cork, a widely publicised meeting takes place at the Banker’s Club in New York City. It is organised by William Maloney with the intention of establishing a single nationwide organisation. It will have as its goal, explicitly and solely for the purpose of humanitarian relief, the raising and distribution in Ireland of $10 million. The body which soon emerges styles itself “The American Committee for Relief in Ireland.” One of its founding members, Levi Hollingsworth Wood, approaches a Dublin-based businessman and fellow Quaker, James Douglas, requesting his assistance in the local distribution of the funds on a non-partisan basis. In Ireland, Douglas speaks with Laurence O’Neill, the Lord Mayor of Dublin, who in turn contacts senior members of Sinn Féin to inform them of the wishes of the American Committee. These meetings culminate in the establishment of the Irish White Cross, for the purpose of local distribution of the Committee’s funds.
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