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Death of Myles Byrne, United Irishman & French Army Officer

Myles Byrne, United Irishman, French army officer, and author, dies at his house in the rue Montaigne (now rue Jean Mermoz, 8th arrondissement, near Champs-Élysées), Paris on January 24, 1862.

Byrne is born on March 20, 1780, at Ballylusk, Monaseed, County Wexford, the eldest son of Patrick Byrne, a middling Catholic farmer, and Mary (née Graham). He joins the United Irishmen in the spring of 1797 and, although only seventeen, becomes one of the organisation’s most active agents in north Wexford.

When rebellion engulfs his home district on May 27, 1798, Byrne assumes command of the local Monaseed corps and rallies them at Fr. John Murphy‘s camp on Carrigrew Hill on June 3. They fight at the rebel victory at Tubberneering on June 4 and the unsuccessful attempt to capture Arklow five days later. After the dispersal of the main rebel camp at Vinegar Hill on June 21, he accompanies Murphy to Kilkenny but begins the retreat to Wexford four days later. Heavily attacked at Scollagh Gap, he is one of a minority of survivors who spurn the proffered amnesty and join the rebel forces in the Wicklow Mountains. He is absent when the main force defeats a cavalry column at Ballyellis on June 30 but protects the wounded who are left in Glenmalure when the rebels launch a foray into the midlands the following week. He takes charge of the Wexfordmen who regain the mountains and fight a series of minor actions in the autumn and winter of 1798 under the militant Wicklow leader Joseph Holt. On November 10, he seizes an opportunity to escape into Dublin, where he works as a timber-yard clerk with his half-brother Edward Kennedy.

Byrne is introduced to Robert Emmet in late 1802 and immediately becomes a prominent figure in his insurrection plot. He is intended to command the many Wexford residents of the city during the planned rising of 1803. On July 23, 1803, he assembles a body of rebels at the city quays, which disperse once news is received that the rising has miscarried. At Emmet’s request, he escapes to Bordeaux in August 1803 and makes his way to Paris to inform Thomas Addis Emmet and William James MacNeven of the failed insurrection. In his Paris diary, the older Emmet recalls passing on “the news brought by the messenger” to Napoleon Bonaparte‘s military advisors.

Byrne enlists in the newly formed Irish Legion in December 1803 as a sub-lieutenant and is promoted to lieutenant in 1804 but only sees garrison duty. The regiment eventually moves to the Low Countries, and is renamed the 3rd Foreign Regiment in 1808, the year he is promoted to captain. He campaigns in Spain until 1812, participating in counterinsurgency against Spanish guerillas. He fights in Napoleon’s last battles and is appointed Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur on June 18, 1813. With Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the former Irish Legion, with its undistinguished and somewhat unfortunate history, is disbanded.

Though a supporter of Napoleon during the Hundred Days, Byrne is not involved in his return, yet he is included in an exclusion order from France which he successfully appeals. In November 1816, he swears the oath of loyalty to the now Royal Order of the Legion of Honour and becomes a naturalised French subject by royal decree on August 20, 1817. He becomes a half-pay captain but is recalled for active service in 1828 and serves as a staff officer in the French expeditionary force in Morea in support of Greek independence (1828–1830). His conduct on this campaign leads to his promotion as chef de bataillon (lieutenant-colonel) of the 56th Infantry Regiment in 1830.

After five years of service in garrisons around France, including counterinsurgency duty in Brittany, Byrne retires from the army in 1835. On December 24, 1835, he marries a Scottish woman, Frances “Fanny” Horner, at the British Embassy Chapel in Paris. They live in modest circumstances in various parts of Paris and remain childless. Though it is unclear when he is awarded the Chevalier de St Louis, having initially applied for it unsuccessfully in 1821, this distinction is mentioned in his tomb inscription, under his Legion of Honour. John Mitchel, who visits him regularly in Paris in the late 1850s, recalls Byrne sporting the rosette of the Médaille de Sainte Hélène, awarded in 1857 to surviving veterans of Napoleon’s campaigns.

An early list of Irish Legion officers describes Byrne as an upright and disciplined man, with little formal instruction but aspiring to improve himself. He becomes fully fluent in French but also learns Spanish and his language skills are a useful asset in various campaigns. Because of his suspected Bonapartist leanings, he is under police surveillance for some time after the Bourbon Restoration. He does, however, cultivate a wide social circle in Paris over the years. Various references throughout his writings testify to an inquisitive and cultured mind. He intended publishing a lengthy criticism of Gustave de Beaumont‘s Irlande, sociale, politique et religieuse (1840), claiming that it misrepresented the 1798 rebellion, but he withdraws it after meeting the author, not wishing to prejudice the reception of such an important French work on “the sufferings of Ireland.”

A lifelong nationalist, Byrne acts as Paris correspondent of The Nation in the 1840s and is a well-known figure in the Irish community there. He works in the 1850s on his notably unapologetic and candid Memoirs, an early and significant contribution to the Irish literature of exile. This autobiography is acclaimed by nationalists when published posthumously by his wife in 1863, with a French translation swiftly following in 1864. His detailed testimony of key battles of the 1798 rebellion in the southeast and Emmet’s conspiracy are written with the immediacy of an eyewitness and make them an invaluable contribution to that period of Irish history.

Byrne dies on January 24, 1862, in Paris, and is buried in Montmartre Cemetery. On November 25, 1865, John Martin writes of him: “In truth he was a beautiful example of those natures that never grow old. A finer, nobler, gentler, kindlier, gayer, sunnier nature never was than his, and to the last he had the brightness and quickness and cheeriness of youth”.

Byrne’s engaging and dispassionate Memoirs have ensured his special status among Irish nationalists. Because of his longevity he is the only United Irishman to have been photographed. His wife had sketched him in profile in middle age, and the photograph taken almost three decades later shows the same, strong features though those of a frail, but dignified man of 79 years.

(From: “Byrne, Miles” by Ruan O’Donnell and Sylvie Kleinman, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009, last revised August 2024 | Pictured: Photograph of Miles Byrne taken in Paris in 1859)


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Birth of Máire Ní Chinnéide, Language Activist & Playwright

Máire Ní Chinnéide (English: Mary or Molly O’Kennedy) Irish language activist, playwright, first president of the Camogie Association and first female president of Oireachtas na Gaeilge, is born in Rathmines, an affluent inner suburb on the Southside of Dublin, on January 17, 1879.

Ní Chinnéide attends Muckross Park College and the Royal University of Ireland (later the National University of Ireland) where she is a classmate of Agnes O’Farrelly, Helena Concannon, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. She learns the Irish language on holiday in Ballyvourney, County Cork, and earns the first scholarship in Irish language from the Royal University of Ireland, worth £100 a year, which is spent on visits to the Irish college in Ballingeary.

She studies in the school of Old Irish established by Professor Osborn Bergin and is strongly influenced by the Irish Australian professor O’Daly. She later teaches Latin through Irish at Ballingeary and becomes proficient in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

She spends the last £100 of her scholarship on a dowry for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the Irish civil service, with whom she lives originally in Glasnevin and then in Dalkey.

She is a founder member of the radical Craobh an Chéitinnigh, the Keating branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, composed mainly of Dublin-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.

In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women’s hurling teams, the rules of camogie (then called camoguidheacht), first appears in Banba, a journal produced by Craobh an Chéitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Conradh na Gaeilge Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men’s hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Ní Chinnéide and Cáit Ní Dhonnchadha, like Ní Chinnéide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist, are credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ní Dhonnchadha’s scholarly brother Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who drew up its rules. She is on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan, County Meath, in July 1904, becomes an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905, is elected president of the infant Camogie Association.

Ní Chinnéide later serves as Vice-President of Craobh an Chéitinnigh, to Cathal Brugha. She is active in Cumann na mBan during the Irish War of Independence and takes the pro-treaty side during the Irish Civil War and attempts to set up a woman’s organisation “in support of the Free State” alongside Jennie Wyse Power.

She first visits the Blasket Islands in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who dies tragically young. In the summer of 1934, she puts the idea into Peig Sayers‘s head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ní Chinnéide “she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically.” Peig answers that she has “nothing to write.” She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it has been forgotten.

Ní Chinnéide suggests Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File (“The Poet”), but Peig “only shook her head doubtfully.” At Christmas, a packet arrives from the Blaskets with a manuscript, she transcribes it word for word and the following summer brings it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig. She then edits the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig becomes well known as a prescribed text on the Leaving Certificate curriculum in Irish.

Ní Chinnéide has an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage, Casadh an tSugáin by Douglas Hyde in 1901. She is later author of children’s plays staged by An Comhar Drámuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the Peacock Theatre, of which Gleann na Sidheóg and An Dúthchas (1908) are published. She is a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1923). She is president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.

She soon becomes interested in writing children’s plays, including Gleann na Sidheóg (Fairy Glen, 1905) and Sidheoga na mBláth (Flower Fairies, 1909. Although there is little information available on the staging of her first play, by the time her second children’s play, Sidheóga na mBláth, is published in An Claidheamh Soluis in December 1907, “Éire Óg” (“Young Ireland”) branches of Conradh na Gaeilge have been established in conjunction with adults’ branches. Patrick Pearse in particular voices the expectation that this play will be staged by many “Éire Óg” branches “before the New Year is very old,” thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play’s publication, it is staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ní Chinnéide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.

Ní Chinnéide dies on April 25, 1967, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

In 2007 the camogie trophy (Máire Ní Chinnéide Cup) for the annual inter-county All-Ireland Junior Camogie Championship is named in her honour.

(Pictured: Máire Ní Chinéide at her graduation, photograph from Banba, 1903)


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Death of Sheila Pim, Crime Novelist & Horticulturalist

Sheila Pim, Irish crime novelist and horticulturalist, dies in Dublin on December 16, 1995.

Pim is born in Dublin on September 21, 1909, to a Quaker father and English mother. She is a twin, but her brother dies. She is sent to the French School in Bray, County Wicklow, before being sent to Lausanne, Switzerland to finishing school. She then goes on to Girton College, Cambridge to study modern languages, intending to graduate with a degree in French and Italian. Her mother’s ill health and ultimate death in 1940, causes her to return to Ireland to look after her and she remains there taking care of her father, who dies in 1958, and an older incapacitated brother, Tom.

But these are good years for Pim with time to write, and during the 1950s and early 1960s she writes no fewer than seven novels, mostly crime fiction in a lighthearted style. During this time, she is a member of Irish PEN. She is also an avid amateur horticulturalist and writes for the magazine My Garden. Her more serious undertaking is a biography of the Irish plant collector Augustine Henry, The Wood and the Trees: A Biography of Augustine Henry (Macdonald, London). Her brother Tom dies in an accident in 1964 leaving Pim with no further responsibilities. This allows her to spend significant time researching through Henry’s papers. The book is published in 1966.

When Pim has completed the biography, she focuses on philanthropy. She dedicates her time to the Friends Historical Society and is particularly interested in helping out in the traveller community. She supports a young group of children and their grandfather. They bring her considerable joy. The Royal Horticultural Society of Ireland awards her the Society’s Medal of Honour and makes her an honorary life member for her services to the study of horticulture.

In Pim’s later years increasing deafness makes socialising difficult for her, but she still keeps up with the world of books, the theatre and painting. She reads The Irish Times from cover to cover every day, and her reading includes the Bible, Marcel Proust (in French) and the stories of Roddy Doyle.

Pim’s deafness finally forces her to move into sheltered housing in Dublin where she dies on December 16, 1995.


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Birth of Harriet Kavanagh, Artist, Traveler & Antiquarian

Lady Harriet Kavanagh, Irish artist, traveler, and antiquarian, described as a “woman of high culture and of unusual artistic power,” is born Lady Harriet Margaret Le Poer Trench on October 13, 1799. She is believed to be the first Irish female traveler to Egypt.

Kavanagh is the second daughter of Richard Le Poer Trench and Henrietta Margaret Le Poer Trench (née Staples), with three brothers and three sisters. She marries Thomas Kavanagh of Borris House, County Carlow, on February 28, 1825, as his second wife. The couple has four children, three sons Charles, Thomas, Arthur, and one daughter, Harriet or “Hoddy.”

Kavanagh’s third son, Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh, is born without fully formed limbs. Some attribute the disability to a peasant’s curse, while others speculate it is due to Lady Kavanagh taking laudanum during her pregnancy. She refuses to treat her son differently to his siblings, and with the help of local doctor Francis Boxwell, raises him as a normal child. During his initial education, she teaches Arthur herself, teaching him to paint and then write by holding brushes and pens in his mouth. With the help of the surgeon Sir Philip Crampton, she has a mechanical wheelchair constructed for Arthur, and also encourages him to ride horses and engage in other outdoor activities. Her husband dies after twelve years of marriage, in 1837.

In 1846, Kavanagh takes her children to learn French in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, later traveling to Rome. As an antiquarian, she also wants to visit Egypt and the Holy Land, setting off on the long journey from Marseille in October 1846. Accompanying her are her daughter, Harriet, her two sons, Thomas and Arthur, their tutor, the Rev. David Wood, and a maid, Miss Hudson. In Cairo, she hires two feluccas with Arab crews, and visits archaeological sites along the Nile, such as Thebes, Karnak, and the Nubia region. From there, she visits sites of biblical interest, including Tyre, Sidon, and Roda Island. She negotiates with Bedouin chiefs in Aqaba, hiring camels and Bedouin guides to travel to Hebron. She visits harems and a slave market and records the journey’s incidents in her diary, including her son Arthur’s accidental near drowning when he falls off their boat while fishing.

While in Cairo, Kavanagh becomes acquainted with a number of fellow Europeans, including Sir Charles Murray, Sophia Lane Poole, and Edward William Lane. Harriet Martineau travels with the party from Cairo to the Holy Land.

While visiting Jerusalem in Easter 1847, Kavanagh bears witness to a confrontation over the control of holy places between Roman and Orthodox Catholics priests. She goes on to visit Petra, the Sinai Peninsula, Beirut, Smyrna, and Constantinople. The group spends a second winter in Egypt before traveling to the Black Sea before returning to Marseilles in April 1848. Much of these journeys are conducted on horse or camel-back, with one desert crossing taking 36 days. She later comments on her travels as a woman, stating “quite enough danger to make it a very exciting business.”

In 1850 and 1852, Kavanagh travels to Corfu, returning to Borris with samples of Greek lace. She teaches a number of her tenants to copy these designs, which lead to the establishment of a local lace-making industry. She is elected to the Kilkenny Archaeological Society in 1851.

Kavanagh moves to Ballyragget Lodge, County Kilkenny, in 1860, dying there on July 14, 1885. She is buried in St. Mullin’s Abbey, Borris in County Carlow. She documented her travels in journals, with drawings and paintings of the sites she visited. These are held by the Kavanagh family, along with an oil portrait and a self-portrait. Her collection of roughly 300 Egyptian antiquities were donated to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland after her death. These collections were later moved to the National Museum of Ireland and form a core element of the Museum’s Egyptian collection. Copies of two of her watercolours, a self-portrait, and a landscape are on display in the Museum.


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Birth of Liam Ó Briain, Irish Language Expert & Political Activist

Liam Ó Briain, Irish language expert and political activist, is born at 10 Church Street, North Wall, Dublin, on September 16, 1888.

Christened as William O’Brien, the seventh child of Arthur O’Brien, clerk, and Mary O’Brien (née Christie), who is from County Meath, Ó Briain takes an interest in the Irish language from an early age and begins learning Irish by himself from a grammar book, as it is not encouraged by his teachers at the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School nor spoken by his parents. While still at the O’Connell School, he starts using the Irish version of his name. He also attends meetings of the Gaelic League, then attends University College Dublin (UCD) on a scholarship, where he studies French, English and Irish, receiving a BA (1909) and an MA (1910).

UCD decides to start awarding one annual scholarship for overseas travel in 1911, and Ó Briain wins the first one, using it to visit Germany and study under Kuno Meyer and Rudolf Thurneysen. After three years, he returns home, where he rejoins the Gaelic League and begins teaching French at UCD. He also joins the Irish Volunteers then, the following year, Seán T. O’Kelly convinces him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).

During the 1916 Easter Rising, Ó Briain sees action with the Irish Citizen Army. He comes into conflict with his commander, Michael Mallin, as he wants to pursue a strategy without the Dublin brigade being “cooped up in the city.” However, Mallin overrules him and insists they should focus on taking Dublin Castle. He spends two months in Wandsworth Prison in London and six months in Frongoch internment camp in Wales before being released to discover that he has been fired from his job. However, he quickly obtains a professorship in Romance languages at University College Galway (UCG).

Around this time, Ó Briain joins Sinn Féin, and he stands unsuccessfully for the party in Mid Armagh at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, taking 5,689 votes. His campaign leads, indirectly, to his arrest and three months in jail in Belfast. In 1920, following his release, he is appointed a judge in the then-illegal republican court system in Galway, and visits both France and Italy to try to source weapons for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In November 1920, he is arrested in the UCG dining room by Black and Tans, and is imprisoned for thirteen months, first in Galway and then in the Curragh camp in County Kildare, thereby missing the conclusion of the Irish War of Independence. By the time he is released, the Anglo-Irish Treaty has been signed. He supports the treaty and takes no further part in militant activity.

In the newly independent Ireland, Ó Briain remains a professor at Galway. He also stands in the 1925 Seanad election, although he is not successful. He is the founding secretary of the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe theatre, also acting in many of its productions, and spends much time translating works from English and the Romance languages into Irish. He stands to become president of UCG in 1945, but is not elected, and in the 1940s and 1950s is best known for his many appearances on television and radio.

From his retirement in 1959, Ó Briain lives in Dublin. In 1974, the National University of Ireland (NUI) confers an honorary doctorate on him. He dies on August 12, 1974, at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, Cabinteely, County Dublin. His funeral to Glasnevin Cemetery is almost a state occasion, with a huge attendance of public figures, and a military firing party at the graveside, where the oration is given by Micheál Mac Líammóir and a lesson is read by Siobhán McKenna. For days after his death, the newspapers carry tributes to his many-sided career and personality. On the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, Proinsias Mac Aonghusa and Art Ó Beoláin write commemorative articles in Feasta.

On September 1, 1921, Ó Briain marries Helen Lawlor, of Dublin, who dies two years before him. The couple’s only child is Eibhlín Ní Bhriain, who is a journalist for The Irish Times and other periodicals.


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Birth of Mary Letitia Martin, Novelist & Philanthropist

Mary Letitia Martin, Irish novelist and philanthropist who is known as the “Princess of Connemara,” is born in Ballynahinch Castle, in the Connemara region of County Galway, on August 28, 1815. She publishes two books in her lifetime, and a third is published posthumously.

Martin is born into the chief landowning family of Connemara, the Martins of Ballynahinch Castle, a branch of the Martyn Tribe of Galway. Her parents are Thomas Barnwall Martin and Julia Kirwin. Her paternal grandfather is Richard Martin, a Member of Parliament (MP) for County Galway also known as “Humanity Dick.”

Educated at home in the upper-class style and by herself, Martin becomes fluent in Irish, English, French and a number of other languages. According to Maria Edgeworth, who meets her during her tour of Connemara in 1833, she is courted in 1834 by Count Adolphe de Werdinsky, whom she had met in London earlier in the year. She refuses to marry and de Werdinsky feigns a suicide attempt at Ballynahinch.

Martin publishes her first novel, St. Etienne, a Tale of the Vendean War, in 1845.

In 1847, Martin marries a cousin, Colonel Arthur Gonne Bell. He takes the name of Martin on marriage, by Royal Licence. In the same year, her father dies of famine fever contracted while visiting his tenants in the Clifden workhouse.

On the death of her father, Martin inherits a heavily encumbered estate of 200,000 acres. In the following two years, her remaining fortune is destroyed in the famine as she attempts to alleviate its effects on her tenants. Penniless, she emigrates with her husband to Belgium. There she contributes to a number of periodicals, notably Encyclopaedie Des Gens Du Monde.

In 1850, Martin’s autobiographical novel, Julia Howard: A Romance, is published. Martin and her husband sail to the United States in 1850, but she dies at the Union Place Hotel in New York City on November 7, 1950, ten days after arrival due to complications of premature childbirth in which the baby does not survive.

Martin’s husband returns to England. He arranges for the posthumous publication of her novel, Deed, not Words (1857). In 1883, he is killed in a railway accident.


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Unveiling of the James Larkin Memorial Statue

The memorial to James Larkin on O’Connell Street, Dublin, is unveiled on June 15, 1979. Larkin, a revolutionary socialist, dominated the Irish Trade Union movement. George Bernard Shaw once described him as “the greatest Irishman since Parnell.”

When Oisín Kelly completes his statue of the union leader James Larkin in 1978, he does not know that it is to be among his final works. He is at the height of his power, the go-to sculptor for public commissions in Ireland.

That Larkin would be commemorated by a monument in Dublin is proposed in 1959 by the Workers’ Union of Ireland (WUI), which Larkin had set up in 1924, after his expulsion from the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union (ITGWU), which he had also established. But it is 1974, the centenary of Larkin’s birth, before the commemoration gets under way. Larkin had claimed to be two years younger than he was, which results in his centenary celebrations taking place in 1976 and the date of his birth inscribed on the monument having to be corrected to read 1874.

The memorial committee, comprising the great and the good of the union, includes Donal Nevin, who is instrumental in choosing the sculptor. Kelly is an inspired choice, as the resulting statue is one of the most dynamic public works in the centre of Dublin. Only John Henry Foley’s representation of Henry Grattan, from 1876, on College Green, exudes a similar energy. In these two works, emphatic gesture and naturalistic treatment of the men’s clothing create a liveliness in the figures. Foley’s 19th-century concern is to create a contrast with his statues of Oliver Goldsmith and Edmund Burke, positioned opposite, in the grounds of Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Kelly’s 20th-century aspiration is to please both his patron and the public.

Kelly, who had not known Larkin, chooses to use a familiar image of the man. Joseph Cashman had photographed Larkin addressing a crowd in Dublin in 1923. He looked so vital and passionate that the photograph has become iconic.

Once his maquette is approved, Kelly begins work on the plaster model in the backyard of his family home, in Firhouse, outside Dublin. His neighbour Eddie Golden, the actor, poses for the statue. When the full-size model is completed, it is transferred to Dublin Art Foundry, where it is cast in bronze by Leo Higgins and John Behan.

Although ready for unveiling in 1978, a delay ensues while attempts are made to quarry a colossal stone for the pedestal. Larkin’s son Denis is keen that it be carved from a single piece of granite, which proves impossible. Also, President Patrick Hillery’s decision to perform the unveiling necessitates careful consideration of his speech. The writing of several drafts ensures that his language is neither controversial nor ambiguous. The word “comrades,” present in early drafts, does not appear in the final text. The statue is unveiled on June 15, 1979.

The sculpture has a commanding presence on O’Connell Street, where it has become one of the most popular monuments in Dublin. It regularly serves as a site of celebration and demonstration and is often a central motif in photographs of union members and politicians of the left gathering for anniversaries, or of crowds of the aggrieved and dissatisfied marching past.

The quotation on the pedestal, in French, Irish and English, dates back to the French Revolution: “The great appear great because we are on our knees. Let us rise.”

(From: “Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1978 – James Larkin statue, by Oisín Kelly” by Paula Murphy, The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, January 30, 2016)


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Birth of Julia O’Faolain, Novelist & Short Story Writer

Julia O’Faolain, Irish novelist and short story writer, is born in London on June 6, 1932. She works as a writer, language teacher, editor and translator and lives in France, Italy, and the United States.

Although born in England when her father, Irish writer Seán Ó Faoláin, is lecturing at the Catholic college, St. Mary’s College, at Strawberry Hill, London, O’Faolain grows up in Ireland. The family returns to Ireland when she is just one year old. They live first in Killough House in County Wicklow, where future Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald is a playmate, artist Paul Henry a neighbour and Cork writer Frank O’Connor a regular visitor. The family then moves to Knockaderry House in Killiney, County Dublin, where her father publishes the literary journal The Bell from an outhouse at the bottom of the garden. Writers, poets and intellectuals such as Patrick Kavanagh, Brendan Behan and Conor Cruise O’Brien are regular visitors and often have to entertain her while waiting to speak with her father.

O’Faolain does not begin school until she is eight years old as her mother, Irish writer and teacher Eileen Gould, has little time for nuns. Following her schooling, she completes an arts degree at University College Dublin (UCD) and then further studies at the Sapienza University of Rome and the Sorbonne in Paris. A formidable student and strikingly beautiful, she makes a strong impression on those who meet her.

In search of love, literature and freedom from 1950s Ireland, the young O’Faolain remains abroad working variously as a translator, language teacher, editor and writer in London. She makes lifelong friends who speak highly of her generosity, loyalty and kindness. As well as maintaining a strong interest in politics throughout her life, she attains a black belt in karate and attends karate classes until her early 70s.

In her 2013 memoir, O’Faolain recounts a number of her adult loves before she meets and marries Lauro Martines in Florence in 1957. The couple lives in Florence for a year while Martines completes a travelling fellowship from Harvard University. They then move to Portland, Oregon, where their son Lucien is born in 1959. While in the United States, she teaches French at Reed College in Portland. The family returns to live in Florence from 1962-66 while her husband carries out research. When he is offered a professorship at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1966, they move back to the United States. However, not keen to live full-time in the United States, they purchase a house in Hampstead in 1970 and later in central London where she spends a good deal of time. From the 1990s onwards, she and Lauro spend more and more time in London, and they visit Ireland more during these years. Lucian, a painter and picture repairer, lives in London.

O’Faolain’s novels include No Country for Young Men, which is nominated for the Booker Prize in 1980, Women in the Wall (1975), The Obedient Wife (1982) and The Judas Cloth (1992) which is set in 19th-century Italy. Her first collection of short stories, We Might See Sights and Other Stories, is published in 1968, followed by Man in the Cellar (1974), Melancholy Baby (1978) and Daughters of Passion (1982). And with her husband, she edits Not in God’s Image: Women in History from the Greeks to the Victorians (1973).

O’Faolain’s writings are suffused with themes of clerical intrigue, women’s role in society, power, faith and sexuality. She says once that she is more detached from her characters than her father was. “He was fond of his characters whereas I was more impatient of mine… The fact that he often forgave their foolishness showed that he was fond of Ireland itself, where he lived for the most of his life. I instead left it and found I was happier elsewhere.”

As a writer, O’Faolain is not particularly well-known in Ireland. Following the publication of her memoir in 2013, she is asked by The Irish Times journalist Arminta Wallace if it bothers her that her name does not often figure in lists of famous Irish writers, perhaps because she did not live here. She replies, “Not only do I not live here but when my last book came out someone wrote an article naming me as a ‘forgotten writer’… which was not a cheerful read. It wasn’t in any way offensive, but it wasn’t very comforting…I suppose I didn’t write enough. You mustn’t let too many years go by between books – and I did that.”

O’Faolain dies at the age of 88 in London on October 27, 2020, following a long illness. Her papers, which include manuscripts of her writing and a significant correspondence between her and her father, are donated to UCD in 2018. At the time, archivists expect them to be available to researchers by 2022.


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Birth of Joe Higgins, Politician & Member of the European Parliament

Joe Higgins, a former Socialist Party politician who serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin West constituency from 1997 to 2007 and from 2011 to 2016, is born in Lispole, County Kerry, on May 20, 1949. He serves as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for the Dublin constituency from 2009 to 2011.

One of nine children of a small farming family, Higgins goes to school in the Dingle Christian Brothers School, and after finishing he enrolls in the priesthood. As part of his training, he is sent to a Catholic seminary school in Minnesota, United States, in the 1960s. He becomes politicised at the time of anti-Vietnam War protests and the civil rights movement. He is a brother of Liam Higgins, who plays football with the Kerry GAA senior team in the 1960s and 1970s. He is bilingual in English and Irish.

Higgins returns to Ireland and attends University College Dublin (UCD), studying English and French. For several years he is a teacher in several Dublin inner city schools. While at university he joins the Labour Party and becomes active in the Militant Tendency, an entryist Trotskyist group that operates within the Labour Party. Throughout his time in the Labour Party, he is a strong opponent of coalition politics, along with TDs Emmet Stagg and Michael D. Higgins. He is elected to the Administrative Council of the Labour Party by the membership in the 1980s. In 1989, he is expelled alongside 13 other members of Militant Tendency by party leader Dick Spring. The group eventually leaves the party and forms Militant Labour, which becomes the Socialist Party in 1996.

Higgins spends over half his salary on the Socialist Party and causes he supports. He is elected to Dublin County Council in 1991 for the Mulhuddart electoral area and is until 2003 a member of Fingal County Council. In 1996, he campaigns against local authority water and refuse charges and contests the Dublin West by-election, losing narrowly to Brian Lenihan Jnr.

Higgins is first elected to Dáil Éireann at the 1997 Irish general election and re-elected at the 2002 general election. He loses his seat at the 2007 general election but regains it at the 2011 general election. From 2002 to 2007, he is a member of the Technical Group in the Dáil which consists of various independent TDs, Sinn Féin and the Green Party grouped together for better speaking time.

Higgins speaks out against the Iraq War while a TD, and addresses the Dublin leg of the March 20, 2003 International Day of Action. He is also prominent in the successful 2005 campaign to bring Nigerian school student Olukunle Eluhanla back to Ireland after he had been deported. He remains an opponent of the deportation policy.

Higgins uses his platform in the Dáil to raise the issue of exploitation of migrant and guest workers in Ireland. He and others claim that many companies are paying migrants below the minimum wage and, in some cases, not paying overtime rates. He expresses opposition in the Dáil to the jailing of the Rossport Five in July 2005. He raises the outsourcing of jobs by Irish Ferries in the Dáil in November 2005, requesting new legislation to regulate what he describes as “these modern slavers.”

Higgins successfully contests the 2009 European Parliament election for the Dublin constituency, beating two incumbents, Mary Lou McDonald of Sinn Féin and Eoin Ryan of Fianna Fáil, for the third and final seat. He is elected on the same day to Fingal County Council for the Castleknock electoral area, topping the poll. As Irish law prohibits politicians having a dual mandate, he vacates the council seat in July 2009 and is replaced by Matt Waine. He was a member of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left (EUL–NGL) group in the European Parliament, the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade, and the delegation for relations with the countries of South Asia. He is also a substitute member of the Committee on Employment and Social Affairs, the Committee on Petitions and the delegation for relations with the Mercosur countries. Paul Murphy replaces him as an MEP when he is re-elected to the Dáil in 2011.

Higgins is elected again as TD for Dublin West at the 2011 Irish general election. He wins the third seat (of four) with 8,084 first preference votes. In his first speech in the 31st Dáil, he opposed the nomination of Fine Gael‘s Enda Kenny as Taoiseach. On May 4, 2011, Kenny is forced to apologise to Higgins in the Dáil after falsely accusing him of being a supporter of Osama bin Laden after Higgins offers criticism of his assassination by the CIA. He had asked the Taoiseach, “Is assassination only justified if the target is a reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-human rights obscurantist like bin Laden?”

In the Dáil, Higgins accuses Tánaiste Eamon Gilmore of doing nothing for the 14 Irish citizens being held “incommunicado” by Israel in November 2011. In December 2011, he describes as a disgraceful campaign of intimidation the fines imposed by the government on people who are unable to pay a new household charge brought in as part of the latest austerity budget and says to Enda Kenny that he will be “the new Captain Boycott of austerity in this country.” He asks that Minister for Finance Michael Noonan provide EBS staff with the 13th month end-of-year payment they are being denied.

In September 2012, Higgins publicly disagrees with former Socialist Party colleague Clare Daly, saying it is “unfortunate” that she has resigned from the party, but that it is impossible for Daly under the banner of the Socialist Party to continue to offer political support to Mick Wallace, who is at that time embroiled in scandal.

Higgins announces in April 2014 that he will not contest the next Dáil election. At the time he states his belief that the “baton of elected representation” should be carried by another generation of Socialist Party politicians — like Ruth Coppinger and Paul Murphy.


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Birth of Josephine McNeill, First Irish Female Diplomat

Josephine McNeill, Irish diplomat, is born on March 31, 1895, in Fermoy, County Cork. She is the first Irish female diplomat appointed to represent Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity.

McNeill is born Josephine Ahearne, the daughter of shopkeeper and hotelier, James Ahearne, and his wife Ellen Ahearne (née O’Brien). She attends the Loretto Convent, Fermoy, and goes on to graduate from University College Dublin (UCD) with a BA, H.Dip.Ed. in French and German. With this she begins a teaching career, at St. Louis’ Convent, Kiltimagh, at the Ursuline Convent, Thurles, and at Scoil Íde. Scoil Íde, the female counterpart to St. Enda’s School, had been established by her friend, Louise Gavan Duffy. She is fluent in the Irish language and takes an active part in the cultural elements of the Irish independence movement, such as literature and music. She is a member of Cumann na mBan, serving as a member of the executive committee in 1921.

McNeill becomes engaged to Pierce McCan, but he dies of influenza in Gloucester Gaol in March 1919. She marries James McNeill in 1923, while he is serving as Irish High Commissioner in London. Despite her reservations, she becomes a noted hostess, both in London and later in Dublin when her husband becomes the Governor-General of the Irish Free State from 1928 to 1932.

After the death of her husband in 1938, McNeill becomes the honorary secretary of the council of the Friends of the National Collections, as well as serving as chair of the executive committee of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association until 1950. As a member of the Department of External Affairs advisory committee on cultural relations, she writes on economic, social and cultural issues. She represents Ireland at the UNESCO general assembly in Paris in 1949.

McNeill is an active member of Clann na Poblachta from its foundation in 1946. She is appointed the minister to the Netherlands in 1950 by Seán MacBride, making her the first Irish female diplomat to represent the Republic of Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity. This appointment is not well received by diplomats in the Department of External Affairs. Her reports from The Hague focus on the issues the Netherlands faces with decolonisation. In 1955, she becomes the minister to Sweden, going on to hold the joint appointment to Austria and Switzerland from 1956 to 1960, after which she retires. While serving in Switzerland she puts aside the resentment she feels towards Éamon de Valera based on how he had treated her husband, to sit with him during a convalescence while de Valera recovers from an eye operation.

McNeill is an amateur pianist and collects paintings and porcelains. In 1933, she publishes the Irish language book, Finnsgéalta ó India.

McNeill dies in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, on November 19, 1969. She is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery. Her papers are held in the UCD Archives.