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Birth of Gordon Lambert, Businessman, Senator & Art Collector

Charles Gordon Lambert, Irish businessman, senator and art collector, is born on April 9, 1919, in the family home at Highfield Road, Rathmines, Dublin, the youngest of four sons of Robert James Hamilton Lambert, a veterinarian and renowned cricketer, and his wife Nora (née Mitchell). His eldest brother, Noel Hamilton “Ham” Lambert, is a versatile sportsman and noted veterinary practitioner.

Lambert is educated at Sandford Park School, Dublin, and at Rossall School, Lancashire. He is steered by his mother toward a career in accountancy for which he prepares by studying commerce at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). Graduating in 1940, he joins the accounting firm Stokes Brothers and Pim, qualifying Associate Chartered Accountant in 1943. In 1944, after auditing biscuit manufacturers W. & R. Jacob and Co. Ltd, one of Ireland’s largest and most prestigious industrial companies, he is offered and accepts a £300 a year job at Jacob’s as assistant accountant.

In 1953, Lambert becomes Jacob’s chief accountant as the management grooms him for an executive career. During 1948–56, Jacob’s suffers from profit and price controls, lack of capital investment and complacency brought about by the absence of competition. The entry of Boland’s Bakery into the Irish biscuit market in 1957 is exploited by Lambert who urges the alarmed board, which has long regarded advertising as vulgar, to market its products more vigorously. This assertiveness yields his advancement to the position of commercial manager in 1958. A year later he becomes the first non-member of the Bewley and Jacob families to be appointed to the board.

Between 1959 and 1970, biscuit consumption in Ireland doubles for which Lambert can claim much credit. Recognising that the advent of self-service stores means that manufacturers can no longer rely on retailers to sell their products, he pioneers advanced promotional techniques in Ireland, particularly the use of marketing surveys and of mass advertising in newspapers, on radio and on the emerging medium of television. To further accord with retailers’ preferences, Jacob’s drives the widespread packaging of biscuits in airtight packets rather than tins, and also introduces a striking red flash logo for its packets. His interest in contemporary art enables him to contribute directly to Jacob’s packaging designs.

Lambert is appointed to the board of the Electricity Supply Board (ESB) in 1964, a position he holds until 1977, and serves as president of the National Agricultural and Industrial Development Association (NAIDA) in 1964–65, spearheading a “Buy Irish” campaign. His involvement with NAIDA dates to the mid-1950s and leads to his friendship with Jack Lynch, Minister for Industry and Commerce. This relationship and his admiration for Seán Lemass incline him toward Fianna Fáil. He also believes the party is the one most likely to deliver economic growth.

In 1977, Lambert is appointed to Seanad Éireann by Taoiseach Jack Lynch. He sits as an independent but assures Lynch he will broadly support the government. Dismayed by Ireland’s economic uncompetitiveness, he uses this platform to bemoan the state’s financial profligacy and failure to control inflation, and the indifference of Irish politicians towards the business community, contending that Irish industrialists suffer and need to learn from the expert lobbying of the indigenous agricultural sector and of large multi-national companies based in Ireland. He also articulates his social liberalism, desire for peaceful reconciliation in Northern Ireland and support for cultural and environmental causes. But his commitment to the Seanad wanes as he grasps its irrelevance. When Lynch resigns in December 1979, Lambert joins the Fianna Fáil party in a futile bid to preserve his political influence.

Following Jacob’s takeover of Boland’s Bakery in 1966, Lambert becomes joint managing director of a new entity, Irish Biscuits Ltd, the manufacturing and trading company for the Boland’s and Jacob’s biscuits operations. W. & R. Jacob and Co. Ltd becomes a holding company. In 1968, he becomes the sole managing director. From 1977 he begins withdrawing from the active administration of the company, relinquishing his managing directorship in 1979 to become chairman.

Initially, Lambert views art as a hobby but he comes to see it as a calling, drawing inspiration from Sir William Basil Goulding, his predecessor as Ireland’s leading collector and advocate of modern art. From the late 1970s he serves as head of the Contemporary Irish Art Society (CIAS) and on the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the advisory committee of the Dublin Municipal Gallery, the board of the National Gallery of Ireland, the editorial board of the Irish Arts Review and the international council of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

The Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) opens in 1991 and receives through the medium of the Gordon Lambert Trust some 212 works, which form the centerpiece of its collection. Thereafter Lambert gifts another 100 works to IMMA. He sits on IMMA’s board from 1991, and the west wing of the museum is named after him in 1999.

Despite being diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 1988, Lambert remains relatively active and plays golf into his 80s. In 1999 he receives an honorary LLD from TCD. From 1997, he relies increasingly on Anthony Lyons, an acquaintance of longstanding, to care for him. His last years are overshadowed by the collapse in autumn 2002 of his close but complex relationship with his family. Thereafter he shuns his relations and changes his will, granting Lyons a substantial portion of his estate while curtailing the amount to be received by his family. He dies in a Dublin hospital on January 27, 2005. Relatives challenge his final will in the High Court in 2009 but it is upheld.

(Pictured: Photograph of director of Jacob’s Biscuits, Gordon Lambert, speaking from a podium at the first Jacob’s Television Awards. The Lord Mayor of Dublin, James O’Keefe, is sitting behind Lambert. The awards ceremony takes place at the Bishop Street factory, Dublin.)


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Birth of Angelo Fusco, Provisional Irish Republican Army Volunteer

Angelo Fusco, former volunteer in the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) who escapes during his 1981 trial for killing a Special Air Service (SAS) officer in 1980, is born in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, on September 2, 1956.

Fusco is born to a family with an Italian background who owns a fish and chip shop. He joins the Belfast Brigade of the IRA and is part of a four-man active service unit (ASU), along with Joe Doherty and Paul Magee, which operates in the late 1970s and early 1980s nicknamed the “M60 gang” due to their use of an M60 heavy machine gun.

On April 9, 1980, the unit lures the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) into an ambush on Stewartstown Road, killing one constable and wounding two others. On May 2 the unit is planning another attack and has taken over a house on Antrim Road, when an eight-man patrol from the SAS arrive in plain clothes, after being alerted by the RUC. A car carrying three SAS members goes to the rear of the house, and another car carrying five SAS members arrives at the front of the house. As the SAS members at the front of the house exit their car the IRA unit opens fire with the M60 machine gun from an upstairs window, hitting Captain Herbert Westmacott in the head and shoulder, killing him instantly. He is the highest-ranking member of the SAS killed in Northern Ireland. The remaining SAS members, armed with Colt Commando automatic rifles, submachine guns and Browning pistols, return fire but are forced to withdraw. Magee is apprehended by the SAS members at the rear of the house while attempting to prepare the IRA unit’s escape in a transit van, while the other three IRA members remain inside the house. More members of the security forces are deployed to the scene, and after a brief siege the remaining members of the IRA unit surrender.

The trial of Fusco and the other members of the M60 gang begins in early May 1981, with them facing charges including three counts of murder. On June 10 Fusco and seven other prisoners, including Joe Doherty and the other members of the IRA unit, take a prison officer hostage at gunpoint in Crumlin Road Jail. After locking the officer in a cell, the eight take other officers and visiting solicitors hostage, also locking them in cells after taking their clothing. Two of the eight are wearing officer’s uniforms while a third wears clothing taken from a solicitor, and the group moves towards the first of three gates separating them from the outside world. They take the officer on duty at the gate hostage at gunpoint, and force him to open the inner gate. An officer at the second gate recognises one of the prisoners and runs into an office and presses an alarm button, and the prisoners run through the second gate towards the outer gate. An officer at the outer gate tries to prevent the escape but is attacked by the prisoners, who escape onto Crumlin Road. As the prisoners are moving towards the car park where two cars are waiting, an unmarked RUC car pulls up across the street outside Crumlin Road Courthouse. The RUC officers open fire, and the prisoners returned fire before escaping in the waiting cars. Two days after the escape, Fusco is convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum recommended term of thirty years.

Fusco escapes across the border into the Republic of Ireland before being arrested in January 1982, and is sentenced to ten years imprisonment for the escape and firearms offences under extra-jurisdictional legislation. A further three years are added to his sentence in 1986 after he attempts to escape from Portlaoise Prison, and he is released in January 1992. Upon his release, he is immediately served with extradition papers from the British government for his return to the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland to serve his sentence for the murder conviction. The extradition is granted by a District Court but Fusco appeals, and in 1995 he wins a legal victory when a judge at the High Court in Dublin rules it would be “unjust, oppressive and invidious” to order his extradition due to the time lag involved. Fusco settles in Tralee with his wife and three children until February 1998, when the Supreme Court of Ireland brings an end to the six-year legal battle by ordering his extradition, but he has already fled on bail and a warrant is issued for his arrest.

Fusco is arrested at a Garda checkpoint in Castleisland, County Kerry, on January 3, 2000. The following day he is being escorted back to Northern Ireland to be handed over to the RUC, when his handover is halted by a successful court appeal by Sinn Féin. The arrest and abortive return of Fusco undermines the Northern Ireland peace process, with Unionist politicians including Ken Maginnis criticising the extradition being halted. Republicans are critical of Fusco’s arrest, with leading Sinn Féin member Martin Ferris stating, “The Irish government should immediately move to rescind the warrant against Angelo Fusco. The action will cause great anger and resentment within the nationalist community,” and graffiti in one republican area reads “Extradite Bloody Sunday war criminals, not Fusco.” On January 6 Fusco is refused bail and remanded to prison in Castlerea, County Roscommon, to await a legal review of his extradition, prompting scuffles outside the court between police and Sinn Féin supporters.

Fusco is freed on bail on March 21 pending the outcome of his legal challenge, and in November 2000 the Irish government informs the High Court that it is no longer seeking to return him to Northern Ireland. This follows a statement from Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Peter Mandelson saying that “it is clearly anomalous to pursue the extradition of people who appear to qualify for early release under the Good Friday Agreement scheme, and who would, on making a successful application to the Sentence Review Commissioners, have little if any of their original prison sentence to serve.” After the court hearing Fusco states, “I’m relieved it’s over,” and that he will continue to live in Tralee with his family and work for Sinn Féin.

In December 2000 Fusco and three other IRA members, including two other members of the M60 gang, are granted a royal prerogative of mercy which allows them to return to Northern Ireland without fear of prosecution.


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Birth of Susan Denham, First Female Chief Justice of Ireland

Susan Jane Denham, SC (née Gageby), Irish judge who is the first woman to hold the position of Chief Justice of Ireland (2011-17), is born in Dublin on August 22, 1945. She serves as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland (1992-2017), and is the longest-serving member of the court on her retirement. She also serves as a Judge of the High Court (1991-92).

Gageby is the daughter of the former editor of The Irish Times, Douglas Gageby, the sister of another barrister, Patrick Gageby, and maternal granddaughter of Seán Lester. She is from a Church of Ireland background. She is educated at Alexandra College, Dublin, and attends Trinity College Dublin, the King’s Inns, and the Law School of Columbia University, New York City (LL.M. 1972). She is involved with the Free Legal Advice Centres while studying in Dublin and is a founder and president of the Archaeology and Folklife Society at Trinity College.

Gageby is called to the bar in July 1971 and becomes a Senior Counsel in October 1987. She is the fourth woman to enter the Inner Bar. She becomes a senior counsel on the same day as future Supreme Court colleague Mary Laffoy. She works on the Midland circuit until 1979, following which she is based in Dublin. She is involved in a number of leading cases while a junior barrister and a Senior Counsel particularly in the area of judicial review. She becomes a High Court judge in 1991.

Gageby marries paediatrician Dr. Brian Denham in 1992. Also in 1992, at the age of 47, Denham is the first woman appointed to the Supreme Court. She is considered for appointment to the role of President of the High Court in 1994, but declines to have her name put forward. She makes two dissents early on in her period on the Court. Throughout her tenure as a judge she is seen by commentators to be a “liberal” judge.

In Kelly v Hennessy in 1996, Denham outlines criteria for a court to consider the evidence of the existence of nervous shock in Ireland. In 2001, she is the sole member of the Supreme Court to dissent in TD v Minister for Education. The court overturns a decision of Peter Kelly in the High Court to direct the government to build secure care units for certain children.

From 1995 to 1998, Denham chairs the Working Group on a Courts Commission, which is responsible for a significant reform of the organisation of the courts since the foundation of the state. It leads to the establishment of the Courts Service. She is on the Interim Board of the Court Service and serves on the Board of the Court Service from its inception, and chairs the board from 2001 to 2004. She chairs the Committee on Court Practice and Procedure which recommends in 2002 the establishment of a commercial court within the High Court.

From 2006, Denham chairs the Working Group on a Court of Appeal. The report of the group is published by the government in August 2009 and recommends the establishment of a general Court of Appeal. This is ultimately established in 2014, after a referendum in 2013.

Denham is part of the Irish delegation which, with the Netherlands and Belgium, establishes the European Network of Councils for the Judiciary (ENCJ) and she continues an involvement in this Network. From January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2016, she is President of the Network of the Presidents of the Supreme Judicial Courts of the European Union which is an association of Supreme Court Presidents and Chief Justices of EU Member States.

Denham writes the judgment in McD v. L (2009), upholding the parental rights of a sperm donor.

On July 4, 2011, Denham is nominated by Taoiseach Enda Kenny to become Chief Justice of Ireland, and is appointed as Chief Justice by President Mary McAleese on July 25, 2011. She is the first woman appointed to the office and as a member of the Church of Ireland, she is the first non-Catholic to hold the position. She is also the first graduate of Trinity College Dublin to have been appointed as Chief Justices have largely been graduates of University College Dublin. She succeeds John L. Murray.

During Denham’s tenure as Chief Justice, the Supreme Court issues suspended declarations of unconstitutionality for the first time. The possibility to delay the effect of a court declaration that a piece of legislation is contrary to the Constitution is first explored by Denham in A v Governor of Arbour Hill Prison. The court first adopts this approach in N.V.H. v Minister for Justice & Equality in May 2017.

As Chief Justice, Denham oversees changes in the operations of the Supreme Court and the courts generally. She oversees the removal of the requirement for judges to wear wigs while hearing cases. In 2015, the Supreme Court sits outside Dublin for the first time since 1931, sitting in Cork. She corresponds with the Office of Public Works over the lack of heating in the Four Courts, threatening to cancel sittings if the issue is not resolved. She advocates for the inclusion of a new courtroom for the Supreme Court in plans to develop a new family court complex on Hammond Lane.

In her capacity as Chief Justice, Denham oversees the administration of the Presidential Declaration of Office at the inauguration of President Michael D. Higgins in Dublin Castle in November 2011.

Denham retires from the position in July 2017, and is succeeded by Judge Frank Clarke. She is the third-longest serving Supreme Court judge ever at the time of her retirement. In her remarks on her retirement, she draws attention to the government’s failure to institute a judicial council, having first attempted to persuade the government to establish one in 1997.

In 2019, Denham is made an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin, where she was a Pro-Chancellor from 1996-2010.

The Courts Service announces on August 24, 2020 that the Supreme Court has appointed Denham to review the attendance of Supreme Court judge Séamus Woulfe at a dinner organised by the Oireachtas Golf Society. She is appointed on a non-statutory basis as the relevant section in the Judicial Council Act 2019 on judicial conduct has not yet been commenced.


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Death of Stephen Hayes, Member & Leader of the IRA

Stephen Hayes, a member and leader of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) from April 1939 to June 1941, dies in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, on December 28, 1974.

Hayes is born in Enniscorthy on December 26, 1902. During the Irish War of Independence (1919-21), he is commandant of the Wexford Brigade of Fianna Éireann. He takes the Anti-Treaty side during the Irish Civil War (1922-23), during which he is interned.

Hayes is active in Gaelic Athletic Association circles in Wexford. In 1925, he helps Wexford win the Leinster Senior Football Championship. He also serves as secretary to the county board for ten years, from the 1920s to 1930s.

Hayes joins the IRA and is on the IRA Army Council in January 1939 when it declares war on the British government. When IRA Chief of Staff Seán Russell departs on IRA business to the United States, and subsequently to Nazi Germany, Hayes becomes IRA Chief of Staff. His time in office is marred by controversy and it is widely believed that he serves as an informer to the Garda Síochána.

Hayes sends a plan for the invasion of Northern Ireland by German troops to Germany in April 1940. This plan later becomes known as Plan Kathleen. He is also known to have met with German agent Hermann Görtz on May 21, 1940 in Dublin shortly after the latter’s parachuting into Ireland on May 5, 1940 as part of Operation Mainau. He is known to have asked Görtz for money and arms to wage a campaign in Northern Ireland, although shortly after this meeting the original Plan Kathleen is discovered. The discovery of the plan leads to the acceleration of joint British and Irish military planning for a German invasion known as Plan W.

Another meeting on August 15, 1940 on Rathgar Road, Dublin organised by Hayes and attended by senior IRA men Paddy McGrath, Tom Harte and Tom Hunt, is also raided by the Garda Síochána.

McGrath and Harte are both arrested and tried by Military Tribunal, established under the Emergency Powers Act 1939. They challenge the legislation in the High Court, seeking a writ of habeas corpus, and ultimately appeal to the Supreme Court of Ireland. They are represented in the courts by Seán MacBride. The appeal is unsuccessful and they are executed by firing squad at Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison on September 6, 1940.

On June 30, 1941, Northern-based IRA men kidnap Hayes, accusing him of being a spy. By his own account, he is tortured and “court-martialed” for “treason” by his comrades, and would have been executed, but he buys himself time composing an enormously long confession. He manages to escape on September 8, 1941, and hands himself in to the Garda for protection.

The Officer Commanding (O/C) of the IRA Northern Command, Seán McCaughey, is convicted on September 18, 1941 of the kidnapping. After a long hunger and thirst strike in Portlaoise Prison, he dies on May 11, 1946.

Hayes is later sentenced to five years’ imprisonment by the Special Criminal Court on account of his IRA activities.

Within IRA circles, Hayes is still considered a traitor and an informer. One of the main allegations against him is that he informed the Garda Síochána about IRA arms dumps in Wexford. However, this is later blamed on a Wexford man named Michael Deveraux, an officer of the Wexford Battalion of the IRA who is subsequently abducted and executed by an IRA squad in County Tipperary on Hayes’ orders. George Plant, a Protestant IRA veteran, is later executed in Portlaoise Prison for Devereux’s murder.

After his release, Hayes resumes his clerical position at Wexford County Council. He dies in Enniscorthy on December 28, 1974.


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Birth of Irish Writer Francis Stuart

Henry Francis Montgomery Stuart, Irish writer, is born in Townsville, Queensland, Australia on April 29, 1902. He is awarded one of the highest artistic accolades in Ireland, being elected a Saoi of Aosdána, before his death in 2000. His years in Nazi Germany lead to a great deal of controversy.

Stuart is born to Irish Protestant parents, Henry Irwin Stuart and Elizabeth Barbara Isabel Montgomery. His father is an alcoholic and kills himself when Stuart is an infant. This prompts his mother to return to Ireland and Stuart’s childhood is divided between his home in Ireland and Rugby School in England, where he boards.

In 1920, at age 17, Stuart becomes a Catholic and marries Iseult Gonne, daughter of Maud Gonne. Her father is the right-wing French politician Lucien Millevoye, with whom Maud Gonne had had an affair between 1887 and 1899. Because of her complex family situation, Iseult is often passed off as Maud Gonne’s niece in conservative circles in Ireland. Iseult has a brief affair with Ezra Pound prior to meeting Stuart. Pound and Stuart both believe in the primacy of the artist over the masses and are subsequently drawn to fascism; Stuart to Nazi Germany and Pound to Fascist Italy.

Gonne and Stuart have a baby daughter who dies in infancy. Perhaps to recover from this tragedy, they travel for a while in Europe but return to Ireland as the Irish Civil War begins. Unsurprisingly given Gonne’s strong opinions, the couple are caught up on the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) side of the fight. Stuart is involved in gun running and is interned following a botched raid.

After independence, Stuart participates in the literary life of Dublin and writes poetry and novels. His novels are successful and his writing is publicly supported by W. B. Yeats.

Stuart’s time with Gonne is not an entirely happy time as both he and his wife apparently struggle with personal demons and their internal anguish poisons their marriage. In letters to close friend W. B. Yeats, Maud Gonne characterizes Stuart as being emotionally, financially, and physically abusive towards Iseult.

During the 1930s Stuart becomes friendly with German Intelligence (Abwehr) agent Helmut Clissmann and his Irish wife Elizabeth. Clissmann is working for the German Academic Exchange Service and the Deutsche Akademie (DA). He is facilitating academic exchanges between Ireland and the Third Reich but also forming connections which might be of benefit to the Abwehr. Clissmann is also a representative of the Nazi Auslandorganisation (AO), the Nazi Party’s foreign organisation, in pre-war Ireland.

Stuart is also friendly with the head of the German Legation in Dublin, Dr. Eduard Hempel, largely as a result of Maud Gonne MacBride’s rapport with him. By 1938 he is seeking a way out of his marriage and the provincialism of Irish life. Iseult intervenes with Clissmann to arrange for Stuart to travel to Germany to give a series of academic lectures in conjunction with the DA. He travels to Germany in April 1939 and visits Munich, Hamburg, Bonn and Cologne. After his lecture tour, he accepts an appointment as lecturer in English and Irish literature at Berlin University to begin in 1940. At this time, under the Nuremberg Laws, the German academic system has barred Jews.

In July 1939, Stuart returns home to Laragh, County Wicklow, and after his plans for traveling to Germany are finalised, he receives a visit from his brother-in-law, Seán MacBride, following the seizure of an IRA radio transmitter on December 29, 1939 which had been used to contact Germany. Stuart, MacBride, Seamus O’Donovan, and IRA Chief of Staff Stephen Hayes then meet at O’Donovan’s house. Stuart is told to take a message to Abwehr HQ in Berlin. Upon arrival in Berlin in January 1940, he delivers the IRA message and has some discussion with the Abwehr on conditions in Ireland and the fate of the IRA-Abwehr radio link. Around August 1940, he is asked by Sonderführer Kurt Haller if he will participate in Operation Dove and he agrees, although he is later dropped in favour of Frank Ryan.

Between March 1942 and January 1944 Stuart works as part of the Redaktion-Irland team, reading radio broadcasts containing Nazi propaganda which are aimed at and heard in Ireland. In his broadcasts he frequently speaks with admiration of Adolf Hitler and expresses the hope that Germany will help unite Ireland. He is dropped from the Redaktion-Irland team in January 1944 because he objects to the anti-Soviet material that is presented to him and deemed essential by his supervisors. His passport is taken from him by the Gestapo after this event.

In 1945 Stuart plans to Ireland with a former student Gertrude Meissner. They are arrested and detained by Allied troops. Following their release, Stuart and Meissner live in Germany and then France and England. They marry in 1954 after Iseult’s death and in 1958 they return to settle in Ireland. In 1971 Stuart publishes his best known work, Black List Section H, an autobiographical fiction documenting his life and distinguished by a queasy sensitivity to moral complexity and moral ambiguity.

In 1996 Stuart is elected a Saoi of Aosdána, a high honour in the Irish art world. Influential Irish language poet Máire Mhac an tSaoi objects strongly, referring to Stuart’s actions during the war and claiming that he holds anti-Semitic opinions. When it is put to a vote, she is the only person to vote for her motion. She resigns from Aosdána in protest, sacrificing a government stipend by doing so. While the Aosdána affair is ongoing, The Irish Times columnist Kevin Myers attacks Stuart as a Nazi sympathiser. Stuart sues for libel and the case is settled out of court. The statement from The Irish Times read out in the High Court accepts “that Mr. Stuart never expressed anti-Semitism in his writings or otherwise.”

For some years before his death Stuart lives in County Clare with his partner Fionuala and in County Wicklow with his son Ian and daughter-in-law Anna in a house outside Laragh village. He dies of natural causes on February 2, 2000 at the age of 97 in County Clare.


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2009 Bank of Ireland Robbery

The 2009 Bank of Ireland robbery is a large robbery of cash from the College Green cash centre of the Bank of Ireland in Dublin on February 27, 2009. It is the largest bank robbery in the Republic of Ireland‘s history. Criminals engage in the tiger kidnapping of a junior bank employee, 24-year-old Shane Travers, and force him to remove €7.6 million (US$9 million) in cash from the bank as his girlfriend and two others are held hostage.

Late on the night of February 26, Travers, whose father is a member of the Garda Síochána based at Clontarf, Dublin, is alone watching television at the home of his girlfriend near Kilteel, County Kildare. The woman and her mother are out shopping together. When they arrive home with the five-year-old nephew of Travers, six heavily built masked men, dressed in black and carrying handguns, jump from the bushes.

The family is held overnight by the armed gang, during which time their mobile phones are confiscated and Travers’ girlfriend is hit across the back of her head with a vase by one of the men. As dawn approaches, the gang orders all but Travers to enter their dark Volkswagen Golf family car. They are then bound together and driven to Ashbourne, County Meath.

The bank employee is given a mobile phone, ordered to collect €20, €50, €100 and €200 bank notes from his workplace, and supplied with a photograph of the rest of the family at gunpoint to convince his colleagues that their lives are under threat. Travers drives to Dublin in his red Toyota Celica, acquires the cash through the assistance of colleagues who viewed the photo, and carries the money out of the building in four laundry bags. He takes it to Clontarf Road railway station, whereupon he surrenders the cash and his sports car to a waiting gang member.

Travers then enters a Garda station, the first point at which Gardaí are notified that the robbery had taken place. One hour after this, the other family members succeed in freeing themselves and walk to a nearby garda station. Travers’ girlfriend requires immediate medical treatment for a head wound she received during a struggle with her captors, and the family are reported to be “traumatised” by their ordeal. Travers’s car is later found burned out in an apartment block near Tolka House Pub in Glasnevin.

Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform Dermot Ahern says “proper procedures” were not followed during the course of the robbery, saying that Gardaí should have been contacted before the money had left the bank. He also questions how such a large sum of money could be taken as a result of one man being targeted.

The bank’s chief executive, Richie Boucher, appointed just two days earlier, immediately writes to all his staff to remind them that protocol should be followed in the event of future robberies, saying “Our priority is always for the safety and well-being of all staff. I am sure this incident will raise concerns. Our best defence is to follow tried and tested procedures. I would ask everybody to remind themselves of these procedures, which are there to protect you, your families and the bank.”

€1.8 million of the stolen cash is recovered and seven people are arrested by Gardaí in a number of incidents on February 28. A house in Phibsborough is sealed off and ten more houses are searched. A total of five cars and one van are seized by Gardaí. One of the men is arrested following a chase along the M50 motorway near the Navan road, with two bales of packed cash being discovered in his car. Four other men are arrested in a car in Monk Place and in Great Western Square, Phibsborough, and two more are seized in a house on Great Western Villas, Phibsborough. Cash is also found in a car in Phibsborough.

The six men and one woman are believed to be members of a well-known gang from Dublin’s north inner city and have connections to a major Dublin gangland figure. On March 2, those arrested appear before the High Court to challenge the lawfulness of their detention, viewing the warrants issued by the District Court the day before as invalid. That day, two of those arrested are released.

An unidentified bank employee is arrested on January 28, 2010 based on suspicion that the robbery had been an inside job.


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De Valera’s 1937 Constitution

Éamon de Valera’s new constitution, with its assertions of Ireland as a sovereign 32-county state, and its definition of Catholic morality and “women’s place” is approved on January 14, 1937.

De Valera’s 1937 constitution (Bunreacht na hÉireann) evokes a passionate rebuke of the articles defining the role and rights of women. The aspirations of 1916 had been eroded to the extent that the rights of half of the State’s citizens were reduced and effectively became second-class citizens. In 1936, while formulating the new constitution, Éamon de Valera establishes a civil service committee to assist him. They are all men. He also takes extensive advice from the president of the Supreme Court and the High Court. Both again are men. Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, also heavily influences the final text. There are only three women TDs at the time and none of them say a word in the Dáil debates on the draft.

Women are told that marriage should be their highest aspiration, child rearing their only creative outlet, and that economic dependence their civic duty. That in its turn produces levels of misogyny, emotional sterility and civic immaturity.

Article 41.2.1 becomes famous as ‘a woman’s place is in the home’ statement: “the State recognises that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.”

Many women protest in public and in private during the drafting of de Valera’s constitution. The Irish Women Workers Union, many of whose members had been involved in the 1916 Easter Rising, express outrage. A letter from the secretary to de Valera, quoting the clauses which refer to the position of women says, “it would hardly be possible to make a more deadly encroachment upon the liberty of the individual.” The constitution is accepted and a combination of revisionism and isolationism in the years that follow leave the majority of Ireland’s citizens ignorant of the legacy woman had been denied.

The fundamental principle of the 1916 proclamation, which guaranteed religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all citizens, echoed by the 1922 Constitution of the Irish Free State, guaranteeing those rights to every person “without distinction of sex,” had been changed.

As commander of the Boland’s Mill outpost in 1916, de Valera had been the only leader to refuse women’s participation in the Rising. As with many of the woman who fought in the Rising, in the same streets where Elizabeth O’Farrell walked through gunfire, now with Article 41 of the Constitution, de Valera closes the door on women’s progress in a more definitive way.


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Birth of Justice Catherine McGuinness

Catherine McGuinness (née Ellis), retired Irish judge, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on November 14, 1934. She serves as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland from 2000 to 2006, a Judge of the High Court from 1996 to 2000, a Judge of the Circuit Court from 1994 to 1996 and a Senator for the University of Dublin from 1979 to 1981 and between 1983 and 1987. She is appointed by President Michael D. Higgins to the Council of State from 1988 to 1990 and 2012 to 2019.

McGuinness is President of the Law Reform Commission from 2007 to 2009. In May 2013, she is appointed Chair of the National University of Ireland Galway Governing Authority.

McGuinness is educated in Alexandra College, Trinity College Dublin and the King’s Inns. In the 1960s she works for the Labour Party. She is called to the Irish Bar in 1977 at age 42. In 1989, she is called to the Inner Bar.

In 1979, McGuinness is elected as an independent candidate to Seanad Éireann at a by-election on December 11, 1979 as a Senator for the University of Dublin constituency, following the resignation of Senator Conor Cruise O’Brien, taking her seat in the 14th Seanad. She is re-elected at the 1981 elections to the 15th Seanad, and in 1983 to the 17th Seanad, where she serves until 1987, losing her seat to David Norris. She is appointed to the Council of State on May 2, 1988 by President Patrick Hillery and serves until 1990.

McGuinness is appointed a judge of the Circuit Court in 1994, the first woman to hold that office in Ireland. In 1996, she is appointed to the High Court and remains there until her appointment to the Supreme Court in January 2000.

In November 2005, McGuinness is appointed Adjunct Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Ireland, Galway. She is also appointed President of the Law Reform Commission in 2005, and holds that position until 2011.

In April 2009, McGuinness is awarded a “Lord Mayor’s Award” by Lord Mayor of Dublin Eibhlin Byrne “for her contribution to the lives of children and families in the city through her pioneering work.” In September 2010, she is named as one of the “People of the Year” for “her pioneering, courageous and long-standing service to Irish society.” In November 2012, she wins the Irish Tatler Hall of Fame Award.

In addition to her judicial career, McGuinness serves on the Employment Equality Agency, Kilkenny Incest Investigation, the Forum for Peace and Reconciliation, the National Council of the Forum on End of Life in Ireland and the Irish Universities Quality Board. In June 2011, she becomes patron of the Irish Refugee Council. In November 2011, she is appointed Chairperson of the “Campaign for Children.”

McGuinness has received honorary doctorates from the University of Ulster, the National University of Ireland, the University of Dublin, the Higher Education and Training Awards Council (HETAC) and the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In February 2013, she accepts the Honorary Presidency of Trinity College, Dublin’s Free Legal Advice Centre.

In January 2014, McGuinness is appointed by Minister for Communications, Energy and Natural Resources, Pat Rabbitte, to chair the expert panel to oversee the preparation of reports on the best underground route options to compare with the Grid Link and Grid West high voltage power lines in Ireland. In March 2015, McGuinness receives an Alumni Award from Trinity College Dublin.

McGuinness is married to broadcaster and writer Proinsias Mac Aonghusa from 1954 until his death in 2003 and has three children. She resides in Blackrock, Dublin.


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Geraldine Kennedy Appointed Editor of The Irish Times

Geraldine Kennedy, Irish journalist and politician, is appointed editor of The Irish Times on October 11, 2002, becoming the first female editor of a national daily newspaper.

Kennedy is born on September 1, 1951 in Tramore, County Waterford. She studies at Dublin Institute of Technology and begins her journalistic career with a regional newspaper, The Munster Express. She moves to The Cork Examiner after less than a year, but spends only a few years there before joining The Irish Times.

On the foundation of the Sunday Tribune in 1980, Kennedy joins it as the paper’s political correspondent. The paper’s publisher, John Mulcahy, had become familiar with her when she had contributed to his journal Hibernia. When the Tribune briefly ceases production, she moves to the Sunday Press.

In 1982, Kennedy’s telephone, along with those of two other journalists, is tapped by former Minister for Justice Seán Doherty. Early in 1987, Kennedy successfully sues the incumbent Charles Haughey-led Fianna Fáil government for illegally tapping her phone. The revelation in 1992 that Haughey had ordered the phone taps leads to his resignation as Taoiseach.

Kennedy stands in the 1987 Irish general election as a candidate for the newly formed Progressive Democrats party in Dún Laoghaire. She comes third in the poll, winning 9.4% of the first-preference vote. She is one of fourteen Progressive Democrats TDs elected to Dáil Éireann in that election — a feat the party never achieves again. She is appointed the party’s spokesperson for foreign affairs. She stands again in the 1989 Irish general election and wins 9% of the first-preference vote but fails to retain her seat.

Following her election defeat, Kennedy returns to The Irish Times, then edited by Conor Brady, whom she had worked with at the Tribune when he was the editor. She avoids party-political journalism for several years, but she returns to covering politics in the early 1990s, and becomes The Irish Times‘ political editor in 1999. She becomes the newspaper’s first female editor upon the departure of Conor Brady in October 2002. One of her rivals for the editor’s chair is the paper’s high-profile columnist, Fintan O’Toole.

Kennedy is paid more than the editor of Britain’s top non-tabloid newspaper The Daily Telegraph, which has a circulation of about nine times that of The Irish Times. Later columnist Fintan O’Toole tells the Sunday Independent, “We as a paper are not shy of preaching about corporate pay and fat cats but with this there is a sense of excess. Some of the sums mentioned are disturbing. This is not an attack on Ms. Kennedy, it is an attack on the executive level of pay. There is double-standard of seeking more job cuts while paying these vast salaries.”

In September 2006, Kennedy approves the publication of an article in The Irish Times giving confidential details of investigations being made into payments purported to have been made in 1993 to Taoiseach Bertie Ahern. She refuses, upon request of the investigating Mahon Tribunal, to provide details of the source of the printed information. She responds that the documents have since been destroyed. Her refusal causes the Tribunal to seek High Court orders compelling her to provide details of the source. On October 23, 2007, the High Court grants the orders compelling her to go before the Tribunal and answer all questions. In its judgment, the High Court, criticising her decision to destroy the documents, says it is an “astounding and flagrant disregard of the rule of law.” In 2009, however, the Supreme Court of Ireland overturns this ruling, holding that the High Court had not struck the correct balance between the journalists’ right to protect their source and the tribunal’s right to confidentiality.

Kennedy announces on March 12, 2011 her intention to retire from The Irish Times by September, after a nine-year term as editor. She actually retires in June, and is succeeded by news editor, Kevin O’Sullivan, who succeeds her as editor on June 23, 2011.

In August 2012, Kennedy is appointed Adjunct Professor of Journalism at the University of Limerick. She has been awarded five honorary doctorates from Irish universities.


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Birth of Hugh Kennedy, Politician, Barrister & Judge

File source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hugh_Kennedy.jpgHugh Edward Kennedy, Fine Gael politician, barrister and judge, is born in Abbotstown, Dublin on July 11, 1879. He serves as Attorney General of Ireland from 1922 to 1924, a Judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland from 1924 to 1936 and Chief Justice of Ireland from 1924 to 1936. He serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) for the Dublin South constituency from 1923 to 1927. As a member of the Irish Free State Constitution Commission, he is also one of the constitutional architects of the Irish Free State.

Kennedy is the son of the prominent surgeon Hugh Boyle Kennedy. His younger sister is the journalist Mary Olivia Kennedy. He studies for the examinations of the Royal University of Ireland while a student at University College Dublin and King’s Inns, Dublin. He is called to the Bar in 1902. He is appointed King’s Counsel in 1920 and becomes a Bencher of King’s Inn in 1922.

During 1920 and 1921, Kennedy is a senior legal adviser to the representatives of Dáil Éireann during the negotiations for the Anglo-Irish Treaty. He is highly regarded as a lawyer by Michael Collins, who later regrets that Kennedy had not been part of the delegation sent to London in 1921 to negotiate the terms of the treaty.

On January 31, 1922, Kennedy becomes the first Attorney General in the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State. Later that year he is appointed by the Provisional Government to the Irish Free State Constitution Commission to draft the Constitution of the Irish Free State, which is established on December 6, 1922. The functions of the Provisional Government are transferred to the Executive Council of the Irish Free State. He is appointed Attorney General of the Irish Free State on December 7, 1922.

In 1923, Kennedy is appointed to the Judiciary Commission by the Government of the Irish Free State, on a reference from the Government to establish a new system for the administration of justice in accordance with the Constitution of the Irish Free State. The Judiciary Commission is chaired by James Campbell, 1st Baron Glenavy, who had also been the last Lord Chancellor of Ireland. It drafts the Courts of Justice Act 1924 for a new court system, including a High Court and a Supreme Court, and provides for the abolition, inter alia, of the Court of Appeal in Ireland and the Irish High Court of Justice. Most of the judges are not reappointed to the new courts. Kennedy personally oversees the selection of the new judges and makes impressive efforts to select them on merit alone. The results are not always happy. His diary reveals the increasingly unhappy atmosphere, in the Supreme Court itself, due to frequent clashes between Kennedy and his colleague Gerald Fitzgibbon, since the two men prove to be so different in temperament and political outlook that they find it almost impossible to work together harmoniously. In a similar vein, Kennedy’s legal opinion and choice of words could raise eyebrows amongst legal colleagues and fury in the Executive Council e.g. regarding the Kenmare incident.

Kennedy is also a delegate of the Irish Free State to the Fourth Assembly of the League of Nations between September 3-29, 1923.

Kennedy is elected to Dáil Éireann on October 27, 1923, as a Cumann na nGaedheal TD at a by-election in the Dublin South constituency. He is the first person to be elected in a by-election to Dáil Éireann. He resigns his seat when he is appointed Chief Justice of Ireland in 1924.

On June 5, 1924, Kennedy is appointed Chief Justice of Ireland, thereby becoming the first Chief Justice of the Irish Free State. He is also the youngest person appointed Chief Justice of Ireland. When he is appointed he is 44 years old. Although the High Court of Justice and the Court of Appeal had been abolished and replaced by the High Court and the Supreme Court respectively, one of his first acts is to issue a practice note that the wearing of wigs and robes will continue in the new courts. This practice is still continued in trials and appeals in the High Court and the Supreme Court (except in certain matters). He holds the position of Chief Justice until his death on December 1, 1936 in Goatstown, Dublin.

In September 2015, a biography by Senator Patrick Kennedy (no relation) is written about Kennedy called Hugh Kennedy: The Great But Neglected Chief Justice.