seamus dubhghaill

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Tag Archives: Glasnevin Cemetery


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Birth of Margaret Pearse, Politician & Mother of Patrick Pearse

Margaret Pearse (née Brady), Irish politician and mother of Patrick and Willie Pearse, who are both executed after the 1916 Easter Rising, is born in Dublin on February 12, 1857.

Margaret Brady is born to Patrick Brady, a coal merchant whose family are from County Meath, and Brigid Brady (née Savage) of Oldtown, Dublin. She is baptised in St. Lawrence O’Toole’s parish. At the time, her parents are living at 1 Clarence Street. She has three known siblings and is educated by the Sisters of St. Vincent de Paul. She is employed as a stationery shop assistant where she meets her future husband, James Pearse.

In 1877, she marries James Pearse at St. Agatha’s Church, off the North Strand. James is born in Bloomsbury, Middlesex, on December 8, 1839, and later lives in Birmingham. He comes to Ireland to work as a sculptor in the late 1850s with his first wife, Emily Susanna Fox, who dies in 1876. They have four children together. The first three children are Margaret Mary (born on August 4, 1878), Patrick (born on November 10, 1879) and William (born on November 15, 1881). All three children are born while the family lives in 27 Great Brunswick Street. Their youngest child, Mary Brigid, is born on September 29, 1888, by which time the family has moved to Newbridge Avenue, Sandymount. Pearse’s aunt, Margaret Brady, an Irish speaker, is a frequent visitor to the family home and encourages the children’s interest in the Irish language and culture. Her husband dies in 1900. Pearse does not permit her children to play with other children, however, she supports her children in all their aspirations. She has a very strong relationship and consequent effect on her eldest son, Patrick, who founds St. Enda’s School in 1908 and is the headmaster up until the time of his execution. She takes over the responsibility of Housekeeper at the school.

Pearse supports her sons’ political beliefs. After their execution, she wishes to maintain their legacy and becomes involved in political life. She joins Sinn Féin after the Rising and gives support and endorsement to candidates during the 1918 Westminster election. During the 1920 Poor Law Elections for the Rathmines area of Dublin, she stands as a Sinn Féin candidate and is elected on the first count. She is elected to Dáil Éireann as a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin County constituency at the 1921 Irish elections.

Pearse strongly opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty, as do all the female TDs. She states during the Treaty debate that:

“I rise to support the motion of our President for the rejection of the Treaty. My reasons for doing so are various, but my first reason for doing so I would like to explain here today is my son’s account. It has been said here on several occasions that Patrick Pearse would have accepted this Treaty. I deny it. As his mother I deny it, and on his account, I will not accept it.”

Later she continues in a similar vein:

“Always we had to be on the alert. But even the Black and Tans alone would not frighten me as much as if I accepted this Treaty; because I feel in my heart – and I would not say it only I feel it – that the ghosts of my sons would haunt me.”

Following the ratification of the Treaty Pearse leaves the Dáil with the other anti-Treaty deputies. She is defeated at the 1922 Irish general election. She supports those who oppose the Treaty during the Irish Civil War and continues to be a member of Sinn Féin until 1926. In 1926 she leaves the party conference with Éamon de Valera and becomes a founder member of Fianna Fáil. She never stands for election again.

At the launch of The Irish Press newspaper, Pearse is asked to press the button to start the printers rolling. At many public occasions she states that were her sons alive they too would have joined Fianna Fáil. Accordingly, Patrick Pearse is recognised as the spiritual figurehead of the party to this day.

After Patrick’s death, the responsibility for running the school falls to Pearse and her two daughters. As Patrick Pearse had died without a will, the school is left in a precarious financial position. In May 1924, when she is aged 70, she undertakes a trip to the United States to raise funds for the school, alongside showing support for Éamon de Valera and the Irish Republic. At an event in Brooklyn on May 19, 1924, when referencing the execution of her two sons, she declares herself the “proudest mother in Ireland.” She also states that Michael Collins had attempted to “bribe” her with an offer to subsidise the school, which she refused. During a meeting in Seattle on August 11, 1924, she again discusses her sons and how she believes “the best way to honour their memory was to carry on their work for Ireland.” She raises over $10,000 in donations for the school during the trip. Notwithstanding her fundraising activities, St. Enda’s continues to decline and eventually closes in 1935. Great Brunswick Street, where she and the Pearse family originally lived, is renamed Pearse Street in 1920 by a resolution passed at the Dublin City Council meeting.

Pearse dies on April 22, 1932. She is honoured with a large state funeral and a motion is passed at the meeting of Dublin City Council expressing sympathy with the Pearse family. On April 26, 1932, sizeable crowds pay their respects as her funeral procession makes its way through the streets of Dublin. At the General Post Office (GPO), where Patrick and William fought during the Easter Rising, the funeral cortege pauses for a minute of silence before proceeding to Glasnevin Cemetery. Éamon de Valera gives an oration as she is laid to rest, which praises her inspiring courage, charity and cheerfulness during the years after her son’s death.

After Pearse’s death, her daughter, Mary Margaret, continues to reside at St. Enda’s. She also joins Fianna Fáil, and serves as a TD from 1933 to 1937 and later serves in Seanad Éireann as a Senator from 1938 until her death in 1968. Upon her death, as per her mother’s request, she passes St. Enda’s on to the people of Ireland.


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Birth of Roddy Connolly, Socialist, Trade Unionist & Politician

Roderick James Connolly, socialist, trade unionist, and politician, is born on February 11, 1901, at 54 Pimlico, Dublin. He is also known as “Roddy Connolly” and “Rory Connolly.”

Connolly is the only son and sixth among seven children of Irish socialist James Connolly and Lillie Connolly. A lieutenant in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) boys’ corps, he is involved in the 1916 Easter Rising. At the age of 15, he serves in the General Post Office (GPO) under his father. He joins the Socialist Party of Ireland in 1917.

Connolly travels to Russia on several occasions in 1920 and 1921 and forms a close association with Vladimir Lenin and is hugely influenced by the Soviet leader. He is a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) as a delegate of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in June 1920. It is here he meets Lenin at just 19 years of age following an introduction from journalist John Reed. According to Connolly, Lenin speaks English with a Rathmines accent which he acquired from his Irish tutor.

Connolly helps form and becomes President of the first Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in October 1921. He is editor of the CPI newspaper, The Workers’ Republic. He opposes the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty between the representatives of the Irish Republic and the British state, and fights in the Irish Civil War on the anti-treaty side. The CPI is the first Irish political party to oppose the Treaty and urges the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to adopt socialist policies to defeat the new Irish Free State government. The CPI is dissolved in 1924 by the Comintern but in 1926, Connolly helps set up a second Marxist party, the Irish Workers’ Party. He is the party leader and editor of its journal, The Hammer and Plough. This party too is dissolved in 1927.

Connolly joins the Irish Labour Party in 1928 and in 1934 participates in the last socialist initiative of Inter-War Ireland, the Irish Republican Congress. He is imprisoned twice in 1935. At the 1943 Irish general election, he is elected to Dáil Éireann as a Labour Party Teachta Dála (TD) for Louth. He loses his seat at the 1944 Irish general election, but is re-elected at the 1948 Irish general election, before losing once more at the 1951 Irish general election. He is also financial secretary of the party from 1941 to 1949.

Connolly enters a semi-retirement between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, but in the late 1960s, he begins a comeback. He is elected as party chairman in 1971 and holds this position until 1978. During his time as chairman, he oversees the expulsion of the Socialist Labour Alliance in 1971, some of whose members go on to form the Socialist Workers Network (SWN), which in turn eventually establishes People Before Profit (PBP).

Connolly also sits in Seanad Éireann from 1975 to 1977 on the Cultural and Educational Panel. He is a supporter of the Labour Party–Fine Gael coalition government that is in power from 1973 to 1977 and defends the coalition from left-wing critics by reminding them his father, James Connolly, had allied with the likes of Patrick Pearse in 1916.

Connolly dies of pneumonia and stomach cancer in St. Michael’s Hospital, Dún Laoghaire, on December 16, 1980. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

In 1921, Connolly marries Jessica Maidment, a socialist activist in England and chartered accountant, who from 1928 works for Russian Oil Products in Dublin. She dies in 1930 from blood poisoning arising from an operation. He is survived by his second wife, Peggy, whom he marries in 1937, sons, and daughters. His recreations include chess and bridge; highly adept at both, he learns the former from Seán Mac Diarmada as prisoners after the Easter rising and is international bridge correspondent for the Irish Independent.

(Pictured: Roddy Connolly during an interview conducted for the RTÉ Television project “Portraits 1916” on January 9, 1966)


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Death of Carl Hardebeck, Traditional Music Composer & Arranger

Carl Gilbert Hardebeck, or Carl G. Hardebec, British-born Irish composer and arranger of traditional music, dies in Dublin on February 10, 1945.

Hardebeck is born on December 10, 1869, in Clerkenwell, London, to a German father and Welsh mother. He loses his sight when he is a baby. He attends the Royal Normal School for the Blind in London (1880–92) where, under his teacher Frederick Corder, a professor from the Royal Academy of Music, he shows a marked aptitude for music.

In 1893, at the age of twenty-four, Hardebeck moves to Belfast, where he opens a music store, but the venture fails, and he becomes the organist of a small parish in the city, the Holy Family Church, Wellington Place. He enters an anthem, O God of My Salvation, for contralto and chorus, for the 1897 Dublin Feis Ceoil and wins. On this occasion he hears folk song arrangements of Charles Villiers Stanford and others for the first time. At the 1901 Feis Ceoil, he again wins a prize, this time for a large cantata, The Red Hand of Ulster. In 1914, his wife, Mary Reavy, dies.

In 1919, Hardebeck becomes the director of the music school in Cork and becomes the first professor of Irish music at University College Cork (UCC) in 1922. Ill-suited for administrative tasks, he relinquishes the post after one year and returns to Belfast, which after the Irish Civil War has become the capital of Northern Ireland. In 1932, he finally settles in Dublin, where he works for An Gúm, the Irish government publisher, as arranger of Irish traditional songs for piano and choirs, many of which become teaching material at schools in the nascent Republic of Ireland. He also teaches Irish and traditional music in the Dublin Municipal School of Music for two years. On many occasions he acts as adjudicator in singing and musical competitions across Ireland.

Despite Hardebeck’s mixed German/Welsh/English background, the events of the 1913 Dublin lock-out, the outbreak of World War I, and the 1916 Easter Rising radicalise him, turning him into an Irish nationalist. He is quoted as saying, “I believe in God, Beethoven and Patrick Pearse.” He studies the Irish language and collects folk songs from around the country, making some unique arrangements that bridge the gap between traditional and art song.

At home in Dublin, Hardebeck plays his excellent arrangements of Irish melodies on a Schiedmayer harmonium. The instrument has a “percussion” stop, which he uses to great effect. He also owns a Knauss piano but plays the harmonium by choice. He is quite an authority on plainchant. The noted Irish harpsichord maker Cathal Gannon is a close friend of his for many years. Hardebeck teaches him how to appreciate the structure of the classical symphony and concerto and passes on his enthusiasm and love of Irish melodies.

Following Hardebeck’s death at his home, 14 St. Vincent Street, Berkeley Road, Dublin, on February 10, 1945, a Radio Éireann-sponsored symphony concert, held in the Capitol Theatre in Dublin, begins with a sympathetic performance of his orchestral variations upon Seoithín Seó. A state funeral is held in Saint Joseph’s Church, Berkeley Road, Dublin. The church is packed; various government ministers, the Lord Mayor and representatives of President Douglas Hyde and of Éamon de Valera are there. Hardebeck’s own Kyrie and Agnus Dei are performed at the Requiem Mass. He is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery, where a Benedictus is chanted by the clergy present. A vote of sympathy is issued by the Irish National League of the Blind to Hardebeck’s widow and relatives, in which the hope is expressed “that the nation as a whole would not be unmindful of the important contribution which the late Dr. Hardebeck had made to Irish culture, music and art.”

Unfortunately, very little attention has been given to Hardebeck, who is one of the instigators in the revival of Irish music. Indeed, he is largely forgotten after his death. This is possibly due to his mixed origins and place of birth. His arrangement for orchestra of The Lark in the Clear Air is a fine piece of music, but he is content to sell it to the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes for just six guineas.

In June 2013, a plaque to Hardebeck’s memory is installed at Holy Family Church, Belfast.

(Pictured: “Carl Hardebeck (1869-1945),” oil on canvas, National Museums NI)


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Death of Sir Dominic Corrigan, 1st Baronet, Irish Physician

Sir Dominic John Corrigan, 1st Baronet, an Irish physician known for his original observations in heart disease, dies in Dublin on February 1, 1880, following a stroke. The abnormal “collapsing” pulse of aortic valve insufficiency is named Corrigan’s pulse after him.

Corrigan is born in Thomas Street, Dublin, on December 2, 1802, the son of a dealer in agricultural tools. He is educated in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, which then has a department for secular students apart from the ecclesiastical seminary. He is attracted to the study of medicine by the physician in attendance and spends several years as an apprentice to the local doctor, Edward Talbot O’Kelly. He studies medicine in Dublin later transferring to Edinburgh Medical School where he receives his degree as MD in August 1825.

Corrigan returns to Dublin in 1825 and sets up a private practice at 11 Ormond Street. As his practice grows, he moves to 12 Bachelors Walk in 1832, and in 1837 to 4 Merrion Square West. Apart from his private practice, he holds many public appointments; he is a physician to St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the Sick Poor Institute, the Charitable Infirmary Jervis Street (1830–43) and the House of Industry Hospitals (1840–66). His work with many of Dublin’s poorest inhabitants leads to him specialising in diseases of the heart and lungs, and he lectures and publishes extensively on the subject. He is known as a very hard-working physician, especially during the Great Famine. At the 1870 Dublin City by-election he is elected a Liberal Member of Parliament for Dublin City. In parliament he actively campaigns for reforms to education in Ireland and the early release of Fenian prisoners. He does not stand for re-election in 1874. His support for temperance and Sunday closing of pubs apparently antagonises his constituents and alcohol companies.

In 1847, Corrigan is appointed physician-in-ordinary to the Queen in Ireland. Two years later he is given an honorary MD from Trinity College Dublin (TCD). In 1846 his application to become a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) is blocked. In 1855 he gets around this opposition by sitting the college’s entrance exam with the newly qualified doctors. He becomes a fellow in 1856, and in 1859 is elected president, the first Catholic to hold the position. He is re-elected president an unprecedented four times. There is a statue of him in the Graves’ Hall of the college by John Henry Foley.

Corrigan is President of the Royal Zoological Society of Dublin, the Dublin Pathological Society, and the Dublin Pharmaceutical Society. From the 1840s he is a member of the senate of the Queen’s University and in 1871 becomes its vice-chancellor. In 1866 he is created a baronet, of Cappagh and Inniscorrig in the County of Dublin and of Merrion Square in the City of Dublin, partly as a reward for his services as Commissioner of Education for many years. He is a member of the board of Glasnevin Cemetery and a member of the Daniel O’Connell Memorial Committee. Armand Trousseau, the French clinician, proposes that aortic heart disease should be called Corrigan’s disease.

Corrigan marries Joanna Woodlock, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, and sister of the Bishop Dr. Bartholomew Woodlock, in 1827. They have six children, three girls and three boys. His eldest son, Captain John Joseph Corrigan, Dragoon Guards, dies on January 6, 1866, and is interred at the Melbourne General Cemetery, Melbourne, Australia.

Corrigan dies at Merrion Square, Dublin, on February 1, 1880, having suffered a stroke the previous December. He is buried in the crypt of St. Andrew’s Church, Westland Row, Dublin. His grandson succeeds him to the baronetcy.

The Corrigan Ward, a cardiology ward in Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, is named in his honour. Part of his family crest is also part of the Beaumont Hospital crest.


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Birth of Kevin Barry, IRA Volunteer & Medical Student

Kevin Gerard Barry, Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer and medical student, is born on January 20, 1902, at 8 Fleet Street, Dublin. He becomes the first Irish republican to be executed by the British Government since the leaders of the Easter Rising.

Barry is the fourth of seven children born to Thomas Barry, dairyman, and Mary Barry (née Dowling), both originally from northeast County Carlow. His father dies of heart disease on February 8, 1908, at the age of 56. His mother then moves the family to the family’s farm at Tombeagh, Hacketstown, County Carlow, while retaining the family’s townhouse on Fleet Street. As a child he goes to the National School in Rathvilly. In 1915, he is sent to live in Dublin and attends the O’Connell Schools for three months, before enrolling in the Preparatory Grade at St. Mary’s College, Rathmines, in September 1915. He remains at that school until May 31, 1916, when it is closed by its clerical sponsors. With the closure of St. Mary’s College, he transfers to Belvedere College, a Jesuit school in Dublin. He joins the Irish Volunteers, the forerunner of the IRA, while still at Belvedere College, and enters University College Dublin (UCD) in 1919 to study medicine.

As a member of 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, he takes part in a successful raid for arms on the military post in King’s Inns, Dublin, on June 1, 1920. Within only six minutes the raiders secure rifles, light machine guns, and large quantities of ammunition, and depart the site with no casualties. He also takes part in an abortive attempt to burn Aughavanagh House, Aughrim, County Wicklow in July 1920, and an attack on a British ration party in Church Street, Dublin, on September 20, with the aim of seizing arms. The final operation fails. Gunfire breaks out, three soldiers of around Barry’s own age are killed or fatally wounded, and he becomes the first Volunteer to be captured in an armed attack since 1916.

During interrogation, Barry is threatened with a bayonet and is mistreated. A general court-martial on October 20, which he refuses to recognise, condemns him to death for murdering the three soldiers, although one of the bullets taken from Private Marshall Whitehead’s body is a .45 calibre, while all witnesses state that Barry was armed with a .38 Mauser Parabellum. Despite widespread appeals on grounds of both clemency and expediency, the cabinet in London and officials in Dublin decide separately against a reprieve, probably because of its likely effect on the morale of soldiers and police.

On October 28, the Irish Bulletin, the official propaganda newspaper produced by Dáil Éireann‘s Department of Publicity, publishes Barry’s statement alleging torture. The headline reads English Military Government Torture a Prisoner of War and are about to Hang him. The Irish Bulletin declares Barry to be a prisoner of war, suggesting a conflict of principles is at the heart of the conflict. The British do not recognise a war and treat all killings by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as murder. The public learns on this day that the date of execution has been fixed for November 1.

He was hanged in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, on November 1, after hearing two Masses in his cell. The timing of the execution, only seven days after the death by hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney, the republican Lord Mayor of Cork, brings public opinion to a fever-pitch. He is buried in unconsecrated ground on the jail property. His comrade and fellow student Frank Flood is buried alongside him four months later. A plain cross marks their graves and those of Patrick Moran, Thomas Whelan, Thomas Traynor, Patrick Doyle, Thomas Bryan, Bernard Ryan, Edmond Foley and Patrick Maher who are hanged in the same prison before the Anglo-Irish Treaty of July 1921 which ends hostilities between Irish republicans and the British. The graves go unidentified until 1934. They become known as the Forgotten Ten by republicans campaigning for the bodies to be reburied with honour and proper rites. On October 14, 2001, the remains of the ten men are given a state funeral and moved from Mountjoy Prison to be re-interred at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Barry is the first person to be tried and executed for a capital offence under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act 1920, passed twelve weeks earlier. Together with his youth, this makes him a republican martyr celebrated in many ballads and verses. The best-known, set to a tune popular with British servicemen, is recorded by the American singer Paul Robeson, among others. A memorial stained-glass window by Richard King of the Harry Clarke Studio is later installed in the former UCD council chamber (afterward called the Kevin Barry Room), Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin.


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Birth of Éamonn Mac Thomáis, Irish Republican Author & Historian

Éamonn Mac Thomáis, author, broadcaster, historian, Irish Republican, advocate of the Irish language and lecturer, is born Edward Patrick Thomas in the Dublin suburb of Rathmines on January 13, 1927. He presents his own series on Dublin on RTÉ during the 1970s and is well known for guided tours and lectures of his beloved Dublin.

Mac Thomáis comes from a staunch Republican family. His father, a fire-brigade officer, dies when he is five years old and his family moves to Goldenbridge, Inchicore, Dublin. He leaves school at thirteen to work as delivery boy for White Heather Laundry, learning Dublin neighbourhoods with great thoroughness. He says he found work to help his mother pay the rent. He later works as a clerk and is appointed credit controller for an engineering firm.

Mac Thomáis joins the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army as a young man and is active in the preparations for and prosecution of the 1956-62 border campaign. He is interned in Curragh Camp during the campaign and in December 1961 is sentenced to four months imprisonment under the Offences Against the State Act.

At the November 1959 Ardfheis Mac Thomáis is elected to the Ardchomhairle of Sinn Féin and edits and contributes to the Sinn Féin newspaper United Irishman. He is a close friend of Tomás Mac Giolla and is deeply affected by the 1970 split in Sinn Féin. He takes the Provisional side, opposing Mac Giolla.

Mac Thomáis takes over as editor of An Phoblacht in 1972. In July 1973, he is arrested and charged with IRA membership at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin. He refuses to recognise the court, but he gives a lengthy address from the dock. The following month he is sentenced to 15-months imprisonment. Within two months of completing his sentence he is again before the court on the same charge and again receives a 15-month sentence. Editors of six left-wing and Irish-language journals call for his release, as do a number of writers, and hundreds attend protest meetings – to no avail. He serves his full sentence.

Tim Pat Coogan, editor of The Irish Press, claims the charges against Mac Thomáis are politically motivated to a large degree as his activities are confined strictly to the newspaper An Phoblacht. Under Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act, due to his membership in Sinn Féin in the 1970s he is removed from his position in making some of the RTÉ historical programmes. As a historian he makes numerous contributions to various historical publications such as the Dublin Historical Review.

From 1974 Mac Thomáis writes a number of books on old Dublin. They sell well and remain in print for over 20 years. He also starts a number of walking tours of Dublin, which prove very popular.

Mac Thomáis dies in Dublin on August 16, 2002. He is buried in the republican plot in Dublin’s Glasnevin Cemetery, next to Frank Ryan.

Mac Thomáis’s son Shane, also a historian, runs similar walking tours and is resident historian at Glasnevin Cemetery before his death in 2014.


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Death of Frank Fay, Actor & Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre

Frank J. (Francis John) Fay, actor, theatrical producer and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, dies on January 2, 1931.

Fay is born on August 30, 1870, at 10 Lower Dorset Street, Dublin, the eldest son of four children of William Patrick Fay, a government clerk, and his wife, Martha Fay (née Dowling). He is educated at Belvedere College, Dublin, where he learns shorthand and typing, before leaving to become a secretary for an accountancy firm in Dublin. From an early age he has a passion for the theatre and immerses himself in books on the subject, becoming a drama expert. His brother, William George Fay, shares his enthusiasm and they take part in many amateur productions, setting up the Ormonde Dramatic Company in 1891.

Fay is an ardent nationalist, and Arthur Griffith appoints him drama critic for his newspaper, the United Irishman (1899–1902), where he develops his ideas on how the theatre should be run. Initially in favour of plays in the Irish language, he soon abandons this as unworkable. In May 1901 he attacks W. B. Yeats for his faulty notions about theatre and even his work as a dramatist, ending with the fiercely nationalistic assertion that “there is a herd of Saxon and other swine fattening on us. They must be swept into the sea with the pestilent breed of West Britons with which we are troubled, or they will sweep us there.” Yeats’s and Lady Gregory‘s next play is Cathleen ni Houlihan.

In 1902, Fay writes a famous article advocating a national theatre company that will “be the nursery of an Irish dramatic literature which, while making a world-wide appeal, would see life through Irish eyes.” He is a member of his brother’s National Dramatic Society, which merges with the Irish Literary Theatre in 1902 to form the Irish National Theatre Society, the originating body of the Abbey Theatre. The following year Yeats declares that the national theatre owes its existence to the two Fay brothers. Fay soon abandons Griffith and begins to champion the cause of Yeats.

An excellent tragic actor, Fay can make audiences forget his less than five feet six-inch stature through the power of his voice. When the Abbey Theatre opens on December 27, 1904, he stars in Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand as Cú Chulainn, a role he makes his own. He spends much time training the other actors. As an elocution teacher he has no equal. One play has Yeats leaving with his “head on fire” because of the quality of the voices on stage. Yeats dedicates his play The King’s Threshold (1904) with the words: “In memory of Frank Fay and his beautiful speaking in the character of Seanchan.”

Fay has a close but turbulent relationship with his brother William, whom he defers to in all theatrical matters except acting. Their heated arguments sometimes lead to blows. His temper is always volatile, and he is prone to histrionics and fits of depression. After 1905, the Abbey Theatre becomes a limited company owing to the patronage of Annie Horniman, and the Fays lose most of their control, which results in much tension and bitterness. In 1907, Fay plays Shawn Keogh in the first production of The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge.

Disagreements with Yeats over the approach to choosing and staging of plays comes to a head late in late 1907 and the Fays resign on January 13, 1908. On March 13 they are suspended from the Irish National Theatre Society. They tour the United States with Charles Frohman before separating. Fay then tours England in minor Shakespearean roles and melodrama. Between 1912 and 1914, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett attempt to persuade him to become actor-manager of an Irish theatre. In 1918 he returns to the Abbey Theatre in two short-lived revivals of Yeats’s The Hour Glass and The King’s Threshold. He retires to Dublin permanently in 1921, teaching elocution and directing plays in local colleges.

Fay marries, in 1912, Freda, known as “Bird.” They live at Upper Mount Street, Dublin, and have one son, Gerard, who becomes a popular writer and memoirist. Fay dies on January 2, 1931, having never really recovered from the death of his wife, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery. He is credited with creating the Abbey Theatre style of acting, which becomes internationally known, and influences many other schools of acting. He wanted actors to behave as naturally as possible and to speak the lines as people would in real life, rather than with an exaggerated stage delivery. His training is a major influence on subsequent generations, as actors learned to “speak words with quiet force, like feathers borne on puffs of wind.”

(From: “Fay, Frank J. (Francis John)” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009) | Pictured: Portrait of Frank Fay by John Butler Yeats, commissioned by Annie Horniman for the opening of the Abbey Theatre, December 27, 1904)


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Birth of Edmund Dwyer Gray, Journalist & Politician

Edmund William Dwyer Gray, Irish newspaper proprietor, politician and MP in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, is born on December 29, 1845, in Dublin. He is also Lord Mayor of Dublin and later Sheriff of Dublin City and becomes a strong supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell.

Gray is the second son of Sir John Gray and his wife, Anna Dwyer. He has three brothers and two sisters. After receiving his education, he joins his father in managing the Freeman’s Journal, the oldest nationalist newspaper in Ireland. When his father dies in 1875, he takes over proprietorship of the Journal, and his family’s other newspaper properties such as the Belfast Morning News and the Dublin Evening Telegraph.

In 1868, Gray saves five people from drowning in a wrecked schooner at Killiney Bay, an action for which he receives the Tayleur Fund Gold Medal for bravery from the Royal Humane Society. By coincidence, the rescue is witnessed by his future wife, Caroline Agnes Gray, whom he meets shortly afterwards. Agnes is the daughter of Caroline Chisholm, an English humanitarian renowned for her work in female immigrant welfare in Australia, and although Gray is descended from a Protestant family, he converts to Catholicism to marry her. The wedding in London on July 17, 1869, is conducted by the Bishop of Northampton, Francis Amherst. The couple has one son, Edmund Dwyer-Gray, who eventually takes over from his father as proprietor of his newspapers and goes on to become Premier of Tasmania.

From 1875 to 1883, Gray serves as a member of the Dublin Corporation, and in 1880 serves a term as Lord Mayor of Dublin. Unusual for an Irish nationalist politician, he is very much focused on urban rather than rural affairs, and like his father is heavily involved in public health and water provision for Dublin. He also promotes reform in the municipal health system.

Gray unsuccessfully runs for his father’s seat of Kilkenny City at Westminster in the 1875 by-election that follows Sir John Gray’s death. He wins a later by-election in 1877, becoming a Member of Parliament representing Tipperary for the Home Rule League. At the 1880 United Kingdom general election, he is elected for County Carlow. At the 1885 United Kingdom general election, as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), he wins representation of both County Carlow and the new constituency of Dublin St. Stephen’s Green and chooses to represent the latter.

Gray is imprisoned for six weeks in 1882 for remarks made in the Freeman’s Journal with regard to the composition of the jury in the case of a murder trial. He is actually Sheriff of Dublin City at the time of his imprisonment and, because of the conflict of office, is taken into custody by the city coroner. The defendant in the case in question is later hanged.

A heavy drinker and asthma sufferer, Gray dies at his home, Pembroke House, Upper Mount Street, Dublin, on March 27, 1888, at the age of 42 following a short illness. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.


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Death of Joseph MacDonagh, Politician & Businessman

Joseph MacDonagh, politician and businessman, dies in Dublin while on hunger strike, from the effects of a burst appendix, on December 25, 1922.

MacDonagh is born on May 18, 1883, in Cloughjordan, County Tipperary, the youngest of six surviving children (four sons and two daughters) of Joseph MacDonagh, native of Roosky, County Roscommon, and Mary MacDonagh (née Parker), a Dublin native, both of whom are national school teachers. He is educated in his father’s school in Cloughjordan, and at Rockwell College, Cashel, County Tipperary. Prior to the execution of his eldest brother, Thomas MacDonagh, one of the signatories of the Easter 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, he seems to have had no involvement in politics but works as a customs-and-excise officer with Inland Revenue in Thurles, County Tipperary. Interned after the rising entirely due to his kinship with one of the insurgent leaders, he is compelled to retire from the civil service.

Moving to Dublin by September 1916, MacDonagh is headmaster for a time of Patrick Pearse‘s St. Enda’s School, the bilingual school where his brother Thomas had formerly served on the staff under Pearse, which had reopened after the rising in Cullenswood House, Oakley Road, Rathmines. By 1918 he is in private practice as an income tax recovery expert. He later quips that by recovering thousands of pounds annually for clients, he has done greater harm to the British government than any other Irishman. He is also partner by 1919 in an insurance brokerage with fellow Sinn Féin TD William Cosgrave. Following Cosgrave’s departure, the firm trades from 1920 as MacDonagh & Boland, with offices first on Dame Street, and latterly on College Green.

MacDonagh’s prominence in the post-1916 reorganisation of Sinn Féin commences at the April 19, 1917, convention of advanced nationalists summoned by George Noble Plunkett after his parliamentary by-election victory. MacDonagh makes a resounding speech ratifying Plunkett’s determination not only to abstain from attendance at Westminster, but also to affirm the principles of the republican Easter Week proclamation rather than the dual-monarchy programme of Sinn Féin under Arthur Griffith. After campaigning vigorously on behalf of the successful by-election candidacy of Éamon de Valera in East Clare, he is arrested on August 30 and sentenced to six-months’ imprisonment for making a seditious speech. He joins in the hunger strike of republican prisoners seeking prisoner-of-war status in Mountjoy Gaol, on which Thomas Ashe dies on September 25 after enduring forcible feeding. Released with the other surviving strikers, he is a principal witness at the emotional inquest into the circumstances of Ashe’s death.

Elected to the Sinn Féin executive at the October 1917 ardfheis, at which the party adopts a republican constitution, MacDonagh is alternately rearrested and released on several occasions under the “cat-and-mouse act,” enduring further hunger strikes in both Belfast and Dundalk jails, before serving out in its entirety the original six-month sentence (1917–18). After deportation to England and while incarcerated in Reading Gaol, he is returned unopposed in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland as Sinn Féin candidate in North Tipperary and is released in time to attend the second session of the first Dáil Éireann on April 10, 1919. With the Dáil driven underground in September 1919 after its proscription, he protests against the infrequency of sessions, querying whether “private members [were] to abstain from Dublin as well as Westminster.”

Elected in January 1920 to both Dublin Corporation and Rathmines town council, MacDonagh concentrates his political energies on local government until appointment in January 1921 as acting Dáil Minister for Labour, and director of the Belfast boycott. Exercising effective authority over the labour department because of the imprisonment of the minister, Constance Markievicz, he seeks to define a comprehensive industrial and economic strategy and establishes a labour commission to formulate proposals. The resultant radical plan for supplanting capitalist ownership by developing cooperative and distributive industrial structures is ignored by his cabinet colleagues. His organisation and enforcement of the Belfast boycott – a response to the anti-Catholic rioting of July 1920, and expulsion of workers from jobs and families from homes – is relentless and efficient. He appoints a team of boycott organisers and local boycott committees empowered to impose fines and to seize goods, and blacklists firms that are facilitating circumvention of the boycott by trans-shipment of Belfast goods through non-boycotted northern towns or through British ports.

Throughout the Irish War of Independence MacDonagh is constantly on the run, usually under disguise as a priest, and is imprisoned for a time in Mountjoy Gaol in 1920. One of four Sinn Féin candidates returned unopposed to the Second Dáil for Tipperary Mid, North, and South, after a cabinet reorganisation in August 1921 following the truce, he remains as boycott director but is removed from the Labour Department. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo–Irish Treaty, in the Dáil debates he responds to Griffith’s assertion that the agreement is indeed a treaty concluded between two sovereign nations by asking why the pro-Treatyites are conducting the sovereign Irish nation into the British empire, and whether they are doing so “with their heads up or their hands up.”

Manager of the anti-Treaty bulletin Poblacht na hÉireann, in the 1922 Irish general election MacDonagh is returned on the first count to the third seat in his constituency. Arrested soon after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, he escapes from Portobello military barracks. Rearrested on September 30 and imprisoned in Mountjoy Gaol, he falls seriously ill with acute appendicitis but refuses to sign the required form to secure release for medical treatment because it implicitly recognises the legitimacy of the Free State government. Transferred at length to the Mater Misericordiae private nursing home, he undergoes an operation, but two days later, having developed peritonitis, he dies on December 25, 1922. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.

A small, supple man with alert blue eyes, MacDonagh wielded a swift and stinging tongue in debate. It is said that he indulged his caustic wit more for the delight in the bon mot than for the bitterness of the invective. Genial in company, with a store of amusing anecdote, he was celebrated for hearty humour even in the face of hardship and danger. On a prison sickbed days before his death, he referred to another inmate, bald-headed like himself, “who wears his hair like mine.” In 1913, he married Margaret O’Toole of Dublin. They had one daughter and two sons. They resided in Rathmines, first at 86 Moyne Road, before moving during 1922 to 9 Palmerston Road.

(From: “MacDonagh, Joseph” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Birth of Joe Clarke, Irish Republican Politician

Joseph Christopher Clarke (Irish: Seosamh Ó Clérigh), Irish republican politician, is born on December 22, 1882, in Rush, Dublin.

Clarke is the son of William Clarke, merchant seaman, and Margaret Clarke (née Austin). Educated locally, he leaves school at the age of eleven and begins work as a kitchen porter, later becoming a boot-shop assistant, a harness maker and a van driver. Influenced by a series of lectures at the Oliver Bond Club, Parnell Square, and by the writings of Arthur Griffith, he commits himself to the republican cause, joining the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in 1913 and subsequently the Irish Volunteers.

Clarke works for the Sinn Féin Bank and is active in the 1916 Easter Rising. On Easter Monday morning, on April 24, 1916, he is one of thirteen volunteers who hold the Mount Street Bridge for nine hours against the overwhelming forces of the Sherwood Foresters regiment of the British Army. When captured, he is shot in the head, but survives, and is instead imprisoned in Liverpool Prison, Wakefield Prison and then Frongoch internment camp.

On his return to Ireland, Clarke acts as the courier for the First Dáil and serves as an usher at the first meeting of the First Dáil. He is interned from January 1921. Released in 1923, he acts as caretaker of the Sinn Féin headquarters on Harcourt Street and founds the Irish Book Bureau. Although the Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin rejects participation in the Dáil, they continue to contest local elections, and Clarke sits on Dublin City Council.

Although jailed many times between 1922 and 1940, Clarke remains an active republican campaigner, supporting the Irish Republican Army (IRA) initiatives of the 1940s and 1950s, taking a prominent role at republican meetings, and publicising the conditions of republican prisoners.

Clarke is a founder member of Comhairle na Poblachta in 1929. In 1937, he works with Brian O’Higgins to establish the Wolfe Tone Weekly as a light-hearted party newspaper. In August 1939, he is interned at Arbour Hill Prison, then later at Cork County Jail.

Although Clarke had served under Éamon de Valera during the Easter Rising, the two become implacable opponents. He is ejected from an official commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the First Dáil for interrupting de Valera’s speech in order to raise the complaints of the Dublin Housing Action Committee (DHAC). He vows to outlive de Valera and succeeds in this endeavour by outliving him a year.

Clarke is elected as a Vice-President of Sinn Féin in 1966. In the split of 1970, he supports the provisional wing, remaining Vice-President. In 1973 he is deported from Britain upon his arrival at Heathrow Airport.

Despite crippling arthritis, Clarke continues his work, refusing an IRA pension as he considers himself still on active service. He dies on April 22, 1976, at St. James’s Hospital, Dublin, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery close to the republican plot.

Clarke marries Anne, daughter of Thomas Hughes, sawyer, on July 25, 1909. They have two sons and one daughter. After her death, he marries Elizabeth Delaney on May 30, 1949.

The Dublin South West Inner City cumann of Sinn Féin is named for Clarke.

(Pictured: Joe Clarke selling Easter Lilies on Dublin’s O’Connell Street in 1966)