Living in the nationalist Beechmount neighbourhood of the Falls, he stands for the Falls as a candidate for the Dock Labour Party in a city council by-election in 1956, but loses to Paddy Devlin of the Irish Labour Party, who later becomes his close ally. In 1958, he is elected to Belfast City Council as a member of the Irish Labour Party.
Many sympathetic British Members of Parliament (MPs) are present at a civil rights march in Derry on October 5, 1968, when Fitt and others are beaten by the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Fitt also supports the 1969 candidacy of Bernadette Devlin in the Mid Ulster by-election who runs as an anti-abstentionist ‘Unity‘ candidate. Devlin’s success greatly increases the authority of Fitt in the eyes of many British commentators, particularly as it produces a second voice on the floor of the British House of Commons who challenge the Unionist viewpoint at a time when Harold Wilson and other British ministers are beginning to take notice.
In August 1970, Fitt becomes the first leader of a coalition of civil rights and nationalist leaders who create the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). By this time Northern Ireland is charging headlong towards near-civil war and the majority of unionists remain hostile.
After the collapse of Stormont in 1972 and the establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1973 Fitt becomes deputy chief executive of the short-lived Power-Sharing Executive created by the Sunningdale Agreement.
Fitt becomes increasingly detached from both his own party and also becomes more outspoken in his condemnation of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He becomes a target for republican sympathisers in 1976 when they attack his home. He becomes disillusioned with the handling of Northern Ireland by the British government. In 1979, he abstains from a crucial vote in the House of Commons which brings down the Labour government, citing the way that the government had failed to help the nationalist population and tried to form a deal with the Ulster Unionist Party.
In 1979, Fitt is replaced by John Hume as leader of the SDLP and he leaves the party altogether after he agrees to constitutional talks with British Secretary of StateHumphrey Atkins without any provision for an ‘Irish dimension’ and then sees his decision overturned by the SDLP party conference. Like Paddy Devlin before him, he claims the SDLP has ceased to be a socialist force.
In 1981, he opposes the hunger strikes in the Maze prison in Belfast. His seat in Westminster is targeted by Sinn Féin as well as by the SDLP. In June 1983, he loses his seat in Belfast West to Gerry Adams, in part due to competition from an SDLP candidate. The following month, on October 14, 1983, he is created a UK life peer as Baron Fitt, of Bell’s Hill in County Down. His Belfast home is firebombed a month later and he moves to London.
Gerry Fitt dies in London on August 26, 2005, at the age of 79, after a long history of heart disease.
Gray is the third son of John and Elizabeth Gray of Mount Street. He is educated at Trinity College Dublin and obtains the degree of M.D. and Master of Surgery at the University of Glasgow in 1839. Shortly before his marriage in the same year, he settles in Dublin and takes up a post at a hospital in North Cumberland Street. He is admitted as a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in due course.
Gray is publicly minded and contributes to periodicals and the newspaper press. In 1841, he becomes joint proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal, a nationalist paper which is then published daily and weekly. He acts as political editor of the Journal for a time, before becoming sole proprietor in 1850. As owner, he increases the newspaper’s size, reduces its price and extends its circulation.
Gray enters politics at a relatively young age and attaches himself to Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association. As a Protestant Nationalist, he supports the movement for the repeal of the Acts of Union with Britain. In October 1843, he is indicted with O’Connell and others in the Court of the Queen’s Bench in Dublin on a charge of sedition and “conspiracy against the queen.” The following February, he, together with O’Connell, is condemned to nine months imprisonment, but in early September 1844 the sentence is remitted on appeal. The trial has a strong element of farce, as the hot-tempered Attorney-General for Ireland, Sir Thomas Cusack-Smith, challenges Gray’s counsel, Gerald Fitzgibbon, to a duel, for which he is sternly reprimanded by the judges. From then on Gray is careful to distance himself from the advocacy of violence in the national cause, though he is sympathetic to the Young Ireland movement without being involved in its 1848 rebellion. Through the growing influence of the Freeman’s Journal, he becomes a significant figure in Dublin municipal politics. He is also active in national politics during an otherwise quiet period of Irish politics up until 1860. With the resurgence of nationalism after the famine, he helps to organise the Tenant’s League founding conference in 1850, standing unsuccessfully as the League’s candidate for Monaghan in the 1852 United Kingdom general election.
Later Gray originates and organises the “courts of arbitration” which O’Connell endeavours to substitute for the existing legal tribunals of the country. Following O’Connell’s death, in 1862 he inaugurates an appeal for subscriptions to build a monument to O’Connell on Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street). Independent from O’Connell, he continues to take a prominent part in Irish politics and in local affairs.
In municipal politics, Gray is elected councillor in 1852 and alderman of Dublin Corporation and takes an interest in the improvement of the city. As chairman of the committee for a new water supply to Dublin, he actively promotes what becomes the “Vartry scheme.” The Vartry Reservoir scheme involves the partial redirection and damming of the River Vartry in County Wicklow, and the building of a series of water piping and filtering systems (and related public works) to carry fresh water to the city. This work is particularly important in the improvement of conditions in the city, and to public health, as it improves sanitation and helps reduce outbreaks of cholera, typhus and other diseases associated with contaminated water. On the opening of the works on June 30, 1863, he is knighted by the Earl of Carlisle, then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Partially in recognition of these efforts, he is later be nominated for the position of Lord Mayor of Dublin for the years 1868–69, but he declines to serve.
In national politics, the Liberal government at the time is keen to conciliate an influential representative of the moderate nationalists to support British Liberalism and who will resume O’Connell’s constitutional agitation. In an unusual alliance with the CatholicArchbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen, a man devoted to O’Connell’s memory, Gray’s newspaper exploits this shift in government policy. It supports the archbishop’s creation, the National Association of Ireland, established in 1864 with the intention of providing a moderate alternative to the revolutionary nationalism of the Fenians. The Freeman’s Journal adopts the aims of the Association as its own: it advocates the disestablishment of the AnglicanChurch of Ireland, reform of the land laws, educational aspirations of Irish Catholicism and free denominal education.
In the 1865 United Kingdom general election Gray is elected MP for Kilkenny City as a Liberal candidate. In this capacity he campaigns successfully at Westminster and in Ireland for the reforms also advocated in his paper. His newspaper’s inquiry into the anomalous wealth of the established church amidst a predominately Catholic population contributes considerably to William Ewert Gladstone‘s Irish Church Act 1869. He helps to furnish the proof that Irish demands are not to be satisfied by anything other than by radical legislation. He fights for the provision in the new Landlord & Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870 for fixity of tenure, which Gladstone eventually concedes. The Act’s other weaknesses, however, result in its failure to resolve the “land question,” the accompanying coercion, the disappointment with Gladstone’s handling of the university question and national education, causing Gray to deflect from the Liberals and become mistrusted in Britain. In the 1874 United Kingdom general election he is re-elected as a Home Rule League MP for Kilkenny, joining its Home Rule majority in the House of Commons, and holds his seat until his death the following year.
Gray dies at Bath, Somerset, England, on April 9, 1875. His remains are returned to Ireland, and he is honoured with a public funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery. Almost immediately afterwards public subscriptions are sought for the erection in O’Connell Street, of a monument to Gray. The monument is completed in 1879 and is dedicated to the “appreciation of his many services to his country, and of the splendid supply of pure water which he secured for Dublin.” His legacy also includes his contributions to the passage of the Irish Church and Land Bills, his advocacy for tenant’s rights and his support of the Home Rule movement.
(Pictured: Statue to Sir John Gray on Dublin’s O’Connell Street, designed by Thomas Farrell and unveiled on June 24, 1879. Photo credit: Graham Hickey)
Doheny receives a rudimentary education from an itinerant scholar while labouring on his father’s holding, and in 1826 attends Maher’s classical academy near Emly for nine months. Educating himself in the late 1820s and early 1830s while teaching the children of local farmers, he determines on a career in law to help secure political redress for the disenfranchised poor. He is admitted to Gray’s Inn in November 1834, enters the King’s Inns, Dublin, in 1835 and is called to the Irish bar in 1838. Settling later that year in Cashel, County Tipperary, he first practises in the local courts and then on the southern circuit. Appointed legal assessor to the borough of Cashel under the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840, he successfully prosecutes former borough officers for misappropriation of funds and fraudulent transfer of property, winning wider attention. He had supported the campaign for repeal in the early 1830s, and in 1841 joins Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association, becoming active in forming temperance bands and setting up town meetings. By May 1841 he is on the association’s general committee. O’Connell finds him less tractable than most and is ruffled by his queries into the association’s financial management.
During 1842 Doheny begins to associate with the more militant members of the repeal movement such as Thomas Davis. There is a marked gap in age and class between Doheny and most of this group and some look down on his lack of refinement. Others, however, admire his zeal and sincerity, and an anonymous colleague describes him as “rough, generous, bold, a son of the soil, slovenly in dress, red-haired and red-featured, but a true personification of the hopes, passions, and traditions of the people.” Assisting in the launch of The Nation in October 1842, he is chagrined to find most of his articles rejected as unfit for publication, although fifteen are published between January 1843 and September 1844. He also publishes a competent History of the American Revolution (1846) for The Nation‘s “Library of Ireland” series. More impressive as a speaker than a writer, he contributes regularly to repeal meetings at Conciliation Hall, Burgh Quay, Dublin. He enthuses at the apparent martial potential of the immense, ordered crowds attending the “monster” repeal meetings of 1843, and is one of the main organisers of the Cashel meeting of May 31, 1843, at which he is loudly cheered. However, his later claim to have deliberately set up these meetings, with Davis and John Blake Dillon, on quasi-military lines in order to prepare the peasantry for a future war with Britain, is far-fetched. His opposition to O’Connell’s decision to submit to proclamation of the proposed meeting of October 8, 1843, at Clontarf again greatly irritates O’Connell.
An active member of the Repeal Association parliamentary committee from February 1844, in February and March 1845 Doheny chairs a sub-committee of five senior barristers investigating the legality of withdrawal from the House of Commons by the body of repeal MPs, coming “reluctantly” to the verdict that such an action is open to criminal prosecution. O’Connell’s gruff dismissal of his report testifies to their awkward relationship. He further vexes O’Connell by his advocacy of non-denominational university education during debates over the Maynooth College Act 1845. Irrevocable divisions between the Young Irelanders and O’Connell open up between April and July 1846 when Doheny leads calls for endorsement of the conduct of William Smith O’Brien – imprisoned for a month for refusal to serve on a parliamentary committee – and voices Young Ireland’s martial convictions in a speech at Liverpool. After the secession of the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association in July 1846, he opposes attempts at reconciliation and is one of the founders of the Irish Confederation on January 13, 1847.
During the summer of 1847, Doheny begins setting up “Confederate Clubs” in east Tipperary and aids James Fintan Lalor in organising a failed tenant league meeting at Holycross, County Tipperary, on September 19. He is one of the few Young Irelanders attracted to Lalor’s revolutionary agrarian philosophy, but supports Smith O’Brien against John Mitchel in January 1848, deploring irresponsible demands for insurrection. However, after Mitchel’s conviction for treason felony in May, he supports armed action. Arrested for seditious speechmaking at Cashel on July 12, he is bailed on July 20. During the confused period of “rebellion” in late July, he attempts to organise the peasantry in Tipperary but is frustrated by O’Brien’s vacillation.
After the collapse of the armed adventure at Ballingarry on July 31, Doheny takes refuge near Slievenamon and, with James Stephens, eludes pursuit for nearly two months, until he finally escapes, disguised as a clergyman, on a cattle-ship from Cork to Bristol. Some days later he reaches Paris, where he stays for two months with Stephens and John O’Mahony before leaving for New York City. Practising law in New York, he dedicates himself to the development of an Irish Americanrepublican movement. Tensions between conservative and radical Young Ireland exiles, perhaps aggravated by social snobbery, surface by late 1849, when he is arrested for attempting to push Thomas D’Arcy McGee into an open cellar on a New York street, angered by accusations of boasting, drunkenness, and incompetence. Similar criticisms are made by John Blake Dillon and appear to have some foundation.
Doheny finds time to write The Felon’s Track (1849), a polemical account of the repeal agitation and the 1848 insurrection that is highly critical of O’Connell. Despite a rambling narrative, it becomes a popular work and is reprinted several times. He also gives several lectures on historical and literary subjects to Irish American societies and contributes a memoir on Geoffrey Keating to O’Mahony’s translation (1857) of Foras Feasa ar Éirinn.
Involved with the New York Irish militia from his arrival, he is elected lieutenant colonel of the 69th Infantry Regiment in November 1851, and in September 1852 becomes colonel of a new regiment, the Irish Republican Rifles. These formations are often wracked by dissension over strategy and leadership, and in February 1856 he and O’Mahony found the Emmet Monument Association, planning to mobilise an Irish American force to invade Ireland. Efforts to acquire Russian backing fails on the close of the Crimean War in March 1857.
In autumn 1857, Doheny and O’Mahony make overtures to James Stephens to reorganise the republican movement in Ireland, and in March 1858 they accept Stephens’s demands for undisputed authority there, though by the winter of 1858–59 Doheny shows increasing distrust of Stephens’s ambitions. Adopting the organisational structure set out by Stephens in establishing the IRB in 1858, he and O’Mahony found the American equivalent, the Fenian Brotherhood, in early 1859, although he plays a subordinate part. In July 1859, he founds and edits a short-lived newspaper in New York, The Phoenix, to promote Fenian ideals. Active in opposing the national petition for self-government of 1860–61, he argues that Britain will only yield to force. He assists in making preparations for the funeral of Terence Bellew MacManus in Ireland and acts as one of the pallbearers in New York. Travelling to Ireland in October 1861, he appears to argue for using the excitement engendered by the funeral to spark an insurrection in Dublin but is thwarted by Stephens.
Doheny dies suddenly on April 1, 1862, in New York and is buried in Calvary Cemetery in the city’s borough of Queens.
(From: “Doheny, Michael” by James Quinn and Desmond McCabe, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
O’Connell had rejected a suggestion from “friends of emancipation,” and from the English Roman Catholic bishop, John Milner, that the fear of Catholic advancement might be allayed if the Crown were accorded the same right exercised by continental monarchs: a veto on the confirmation of Catholic bishops. O’Connell insists that Irish Catholics would rather “remain forever without emancipation” than allow the government “to interfere” with the appointment of their senior clergy. Instead, he relies on their confidence in the independence of the priesthood from Ascendancy landowners and magistrates to build his Catholic Association into a mass political movement. On the basis of a “Catholic rent” of a penny a month (typically paid through the local priest), the Association mobilises not only the Catholic middle class, but also poorer tenant farmers and tradesmen. Their investment enables O’Connell to mount “monster” rallies that stay the hands of authorities and embolden larger enfranchised tenants to vote for pro-emancipation candidates in defiance of their landlords.
O’Connell’s campaign reaches its climax when he himself stands for parliament. In July 1828, he defeats a nominee for a position in the British cabinet, William Vesey-FitzGerald, in a County Clare by-election, 2057 votes to 982. This makes a direct issue of the parliamentary Oath of Supremacy by which, as a Catholic, he will be denied his seat in the Commons.
As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellington’s brother, Richard Wellesley, had attempted to placate Catholic opinion, notably by dismissal of the long-serving Attorney-General for Ireland, William Saurin, whose rigid Ascendancy views and policy made him bitterly unpopular, and by applying a policy of prohibitions and coercion against not only the Catholic Ribbonmen but also the Protestant Orangemen. But now both Wellington and his Home Secretary, Robert Peel, are convinced that unless concessions are made, a confrontation is inevitable. Peel concludes, “though emancipation was a great danger, civil strife was a greater danger.” Fearing insurrection in Ireland, he drafts the Relief Bill and guides it through the House of Commons. To overcome the vehement opposition of both the King and of the House of Lords, Wellington threatens to resign, potentially opening the way for a new Whig majority with designs not only for Catholic emancipation but also for parliamentary reform. The King initially accepts Wellington’s resignation and the King’s brother, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, attempts to put together a government united against Catholic emancipation. Though such a government would have considerable support in the House of Lords, it would have little support in the Commons and Ernest abandons his attempt. The King recalls Wellington. The bill passes the Lords and becomes law.
The key, defining, provision of the Acts is its repeal of “certain oaths and certain declarations, commonly called the declarations against transubstantiation and the invocation of saints and the sacrifice of the mass, as practised in the Church of Rome,” which had been required “as qualifications for sitting and voting in parliament and for the enjoyment of certain offices, franchises, and civil rights.” For the Oath of Supremacy, the act substitutes a pledge to bear “true allegiance” to the King, to recognise the Hanoverian succession, to reject any claim to “temporal or civil jurisdiction” within the United Kingdom by “the Pope of Rome” or “any other foreign prince … or potentate,” and to “abjure any intention to subvert the present [Anglican] church establishment.”
This last abjuration in the new Oath of Allegiance is underscored by a provision forbidding the assumption by the Roman Church of episcopal titles, derived from “any city, town or place,” already used by the United Church of England and Ireland. (With other sectarian impositions of the Act, such as restrictions on admittance to Catholic religious orders and on Catholic-church processions, this is repealed with the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1926.)
The one major security required to pass the Act is the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829. Receiving its royal assent on the same day as the relief bill, the act disenfranchises Ireland’s forty-shilling freeholders, by raising the property threshold for the county vote to the British ten-pound standard. As a result, “emancipation” is accompanied by a more than five-fold decrease in the Irish electorate, from 216,000 voters to just 37,000. That the majority of the tenant farmers who had voted for O’Connell in the Clare by-election are disenfranchised as a result of his apparent victory at Westminster is not made immediately apparent, as O’Connell is permitted in July 1829 to stand unopposed for the Clare seat that his refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy had denied him the year before.
In 1985, J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people still believed in the divine right of kings, and the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility, and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark’s interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828, because Catholic emancipation undermined its central symbolic prop, the Anglican supremacy. He argues that the consequences were enormous: “The shattering of a whole social order. … What was lost at that point … was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite.”
Clark’s interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature, and almost every historian who has examined the issue has highlighted the substantial amount of continuity before and after the period of 1828 through 1832.
Eric J. Evans in 1996 emphasises that the political importance of emancipation was that it split the anti-reformers beyond repair and diminished their ability to block future reform laws, especially the great Reform Act of 1832. Paradoxically, Wellington’s success in forcing through emancipation led many Ultra-Tories to demand reform of Parliament after seeing that the votes of the rotten boroughs had given the government its majority. Thus, it was an ultra-Tory, George Spencer-Churchill, Marquess of Blandford, who in February 1830 introduced the first major reform bill, calling for the transfer of rotten borough seats to the counties and large towns, the disfranchisement of non-resident voters, the preventing of Crown officeholders from sitting in Parliament, the payment of a salary to MPs, and the general franchise for men who owned property. The ultras believed that a widely based electorate could be relied upon to rally around anti-Catholicism.
In Ireland, emancipation is generally regarded as having come too late to influence the Catholic-majority view of the union. After a delay of thirty years, an opportunity to integrate Catholics through their re-emerging propertied and professional classes as a minority within the United Kingdom may have passed. In 1830, O’Connell invites Protestants to join in a campaign to repeal the Act of Union and restore the Kingdom of Ireland under the Constitution of 1782. At the same, the terms under which he is able to secure the final measure of relief may have weakened his repeal campaign.
George Ensor, a leading Protestant member of the Catholic Association in Ulster, protests that while “relief” bought at the price of “casting” forty-shilling freeholders, both Catholic and Protestant, “into the abyss,” might allow a few Catholic barristers to attain a higher grade in their profession, and a few Catholic gentlemen to be returned to Parliament, the “indifference” demonstrated to parliamentary reform will prove “disastrous” for the country.
Seeking, perhaps, to rationalise the sacrifice of his freeholders, O’Connell writes privately in March 1829 that the new ten-pound franchise might actually “give more power to Catholics by concentrating it in more reliable and less democratically dangerous hands.” The Young IrelanderJohn Mitchel believes that the intent is to detach propertied Catholics from the increasingly agitated rural masses.
In a pattern that had been intensifying from the 1820s as landlords clear land to meet the growing livestock demand from England, tenants have been banding together to oppose evictions and to attack tithe and process servers.
In 1838, Hill purchases land in Gweedore (Irish: Gaoth Dobhair), a “district” in northwest County Donegal in the west of Ulster, and, over the next few years, he expands his holdings to 23,000 acres. He himself describes the condition of the local population as “more deplorable than can well be conceived.” According to the schoolmaster, Patrick McKye, they are in the “most needy, hungry and naked condition of any people.” Among other improvements, he builds a port, Bunbeg Harbour, to encourage fishing, improves the roads and other infrastructure, and constructs The Gweedore Hotel to attract wealthy tourists.
However, Hill’s attempts to reform local farming practices, in particular, his suppression of the rundale system of shared landholding, proves unpopular and controversial. While his reforms may have protected Gweedore from the worst effects of the Great Famine of the 1840s, as the local population did not decrease, as it did elsewhere in Ireland, his attitude to the famine is uncompromising and unsympathetic:
“The Irish people have profited much by the Famine, the lesson was severe; but so were they rooted in old prejudices and old ways, that no teacher could have induced them to make the changes which this Visitation of Divine Providence has brought about, both in their habits of life and in their mode of agriculture.”
Hill’s book Facts from Gweedore (1845) provides an account of conditions in Gweedore and seeks to explain and justify Hill’s agricultural reforms. It runs to five editions and plays a large part in the bitter public debates about the effects of Irish landlordism. In June 1858, he gives evidence to a House of Commonsselect committee on Irish poverty. The committee is critical of his actions.
Hill is twice married, to two sisters, daughters of Edward Austen Knight, brother of Jane Austen. On October 21, 1834, he marries Cassandra Jane Knight (1806–42). They have four children:
Norah Mary Elizabeth Hill (December 12, 1835 – April 24, 1920)
Captain Arthur Blundell George Sandys Hill (May 13, 1837 – June 16, 1923)
Augustus Charles Edward Hill (March 9, 1839 – December 9, 1908)
Cassandra Jane Louisa Hill (March 12, 1842 – August 16, 1901)
On May 11, 1847, Hill marries Louisa Knight (1804–89), niece and goddaughter of Jane Austen. She had moved to Ulster after Cassandra’s death to look after the children. The marriage prompts a parliamentary investigation into the legality of a marriage between a widower and his deceased wife’s sister. They have one son:
George Marcus Wandsbeck Hill (April 9, 1849 – March 22, 1911)
Hill dies at his residence, Ballyare House, in Ramelton, County Donegal, on April 6, 1879. He is buried at Conwal Parish Church in Letterkenny, alongside his first wife.
Duffy is born on April 12, 1816, in Dublin Street, Monaghan, County Monaghan. Both of his parents die while he is still a child and his uncle, Fr. James Duffy, who is the Catholic parish priest of Castleblayney, becomes his guardian for a number of years. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College in Belfast and is admitted to the Irish Bar in 1845. He becomes a leading figure in Irish literary circles.
In August 1850, Duffy forms the Tenant Right League to bring about reforms in the Irish land system and protect tenants’ rights, and in 1852 is elected to the House of Commons for New Ross. By 1855, the cause of Irish tenants seems more hopeless than ever. Broken in health and spirit, Duffy publishes a farewell address to his constituency, declaring that he has resolved to retire from parliament, as it is no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he has solicited their votes.
In 1871, Duffy leads the opposition to Premier Sir James McCulloch‘s plan to introduce a land tax, on the grounds that it unfairly penalised small farmers. When McCulloch’s government is defeated on this issue, he becomes Premier and Chief Secretary. The majority of the colony is Protestant, and he is accused of favouring Catholics in government appointments. In June 1872, his government is defeated in the Assembly on a confidence motion allegedly motivated by sectarianism.
When Graham Berry becomes Premier in 1877, he makes Duffy Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, a post he holds without much enthusiasm until 1880, when he quits politics and retires to the south of France. Duffy remains interested in both the politics of his adoptive country and of Ireland. He is knighted in 1873 and is made KCMG in 1877.
Duffy spends his last years in Nice and dies at the age of 86 on February 9, 1903, at his home there, 12 Boulevard Victor Hugo. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery, Glasnevin, Dublin on March 8. 1903. The length of his career, the breadth of his experience, and his voluminous labours as a chronicler make him an important figure in the history of Ireland and the Irish diaspora in the nineteenth century. He also deserves attention as the most prominent and articulate Ulster catholic nationalist of his time. There are Duffy papers in the Royal Irish Academy and National Library of Ireland.
Daniel O’Connell, a prominent political leader in Ireland, is known for his strong advocacy for Irish independence and his efforts to bring about reforms in the British government‘s treatment of Ireland. On February 17, 1846, he takes to the floor of Britain’s House of Commons to warn of the dangers of Ireland’s Great Hunger, also known as the Potato Famine.
In 1846, Ireland is in the midst of one of its greatest disasters – the Great Hunger, a period of mass starvation caused by the failure of the potato crop, the staple food of the Irish population. The conditions in Ireland are dire, with widespread poverty, disease, and death. In response to this crisis, O’Connell takes to the floor of Britain’s House of Commons to deliver a speech warning of the dangers of the situation in Ireland.
O’Connell begins his speech by pointing out the stark reality of the situation in Ireland, where people are dying of starvation on a daily basis. He draws the attention of the House to the fact that the Irish people are suffering because of a lack of food, and that this is due to the failure of the potato crop, which is the only source of sustenance for the majority of the population. He then goes on to argue that the British government is failing in its duty to provide relief to the Irish people and that they are turning a blind eye to the suffering of the Irish people.
O’Donnell then goes on to make a passionate plea for the British government to take action to alleviate the suffering of the Irish people. He argues that the government has a moral obligation to help the Irish people and that their failure to do so will be a stain on their reputation. He also warns that the situation in Ireland is rapidly deteriorating and that unless the British government takes action soon, the situation could become much worse.
O’Connell ends his speech by calling on the British government to take immediate action to provide food and assistance to the Irish people. He argues that the government should do everything in its power to prevent further starvation and death in Ireland and that the British people have a duty to help their fellow citizens in Ireland.
O’Connell’s speech in the House of Commons is an important moment in the history of Ireland and its relationship with Britain. It is a powerful reminder of the suffering of the Irish people and a call to action for the British government to take responsibility for the crisis in Ireland. The speech is significant in that it brings attention to the plight of the Irish people and highlights the moral obligation of the British government to help those in need.
O’Connell’s speech is also significant in that it demonstrates his strong leadership skills and his ability to effectively advocate for the rights of the Irish people. His passion and commitment to helping the Irish people inspires many others to join the cause and fight for justice for the Irish people.
(From: “On This Day: Daniel O’Connell addressed British government warning of Great Hunger” by IrishCentral Staff, http://www.IrishCentral.com, February 17, 2023)
On February 21, 1910, Carson accepts the parliamentary leadership of the anti-Home Rule Irish Unionists and, forfeiting his chance to lead the British Conservative Party, devotes himself entirely to the Ulster cause. His dislike of southern Irish separatism is reinforced by his belief that the heavy industry of Belfast is necessary to the economic survival of Ireland. The Liberal government (1908–16) under H. H. Asquith, which in 1912 decides to prepare a Home Rule bill, cannot overcome the effect of his extra-parliamentary opposition. The Solemn League and Covenant of resistance to Home Rule, signed by Carson and other leaders in Belfast on September 28, 1912, and afterward by thousands of Ulstermen, is followed by his establishment of a provisional government in Belfast in September 1913. Early in that year he recruits a private Ulster army, the Ulster Volunteer Force, that openly drills for fighting in the event that the Home Rule Bill is enacted. In preparation for a full-scale civil war, he successfully organizes the landing of a large supply of weapons from Germany at Larne, County Antrim, on April 24, 1914. The British government, however, begins to make concessions to Ulster unionists, and on the outbreak of World War I he agrees to a compromise whereby the Home Rule Bill is enacted but its operation suspended until the end of the war on the understanding that Ulster’s exclusion will then be reconsidered.
Appointed Attorney General for England in Asquith’s wartime coalition ministry on May 25, 1915, Carson resigns on October 19 because of his dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war. In David Lloyd George’s coalition ministry (1916–22) he is First Lord of the Admiralty from December 10, 1916, to July 17, 1917, and then a member of the war cabinet as minister without portfolio until January 21, 1918.
Carson retires in October 1929. In July 1932, during his last visit to Northern Ireland, he witnesses the unveiling of a large statue of himself in front of Parliament Buildings at Stormont. The statue is sculpted by Leonard Stanford Merrifield, cast in bronze and placed upon a plinth. The inscription on the base reads “By the loyalists of Ulster as an expression of their love and admiration for its subject.” It is unveiled by James Craig, 1st Viscount Craigavon, in the presence of more than 40,000 people.
Carson lives at Cleve Court, a Queen Anne house near Minster-in-Thanet in the Isle of Thanet, Kent, bought in 1921. It is here that he dies peacefully on October 22, 1935. A warship brings his body to Belfast for the funeral. Thousands of shipworkers stop work and bow their heads as HMS Broke steams slowly up Belfast Lough, with his flag-draped coffin sitting on the quarterdeck. Britain gives him a state funeral on Saturday, October 26, 1935, which takes place in Belfast’s St. Anne’s Cathedral. He remains the only person to have been buried there. From a silver bowl, soil from each of the six counties of Northern Ireland is scattered onto his coffin, which had earlier been covered by the Union Jack. At his funeral service the choir sings his own favourite hymn, “I Vow to Thee, My Country.”
On January 21, 2002, Sinn Féin‘s four MPs take the historic step of signing up to use the facilities of the House of Commons, whose authority over Northern Irelandrepublicans have been fighting for almost a century. Party policy is also changed to allow MPs to sit in the Irish Parliament, the Dáil.
Amid concern among some republicans that the move comes close to recognising British rule, Sinn Féin president and Belfast West MP, Gerry Adams, insists that his party will never take its seats at Westminster. “There will never ever be Sinn Féin MPs sitting in the British houses of parliament,” he tells a Westminster press conference.
However, flanked by his three fellow Sinn Féin MPs, Martin McGuinness (Mid Ulster), Pat Doherty (West Tyrone) and Michelle Gildernew (Fermanagh and South Tyrone), Adams says taking up seats in the Dáil is a very different proposition from doing so the Commons. No Sinn Féin member would take the loyalty oath to the Queen, needed to take up a seat in Parliament, but that was a mere side issue to the key question of sovereignty, he says. Even if the oath were amended, the party would still refuse to take its seats because republicans do not recognise parliament’s jurisdiction over Northern Ireland.
“There are lots of things which there can be no certainty of and there are some things of which we can be certain,” Adams says. “There will never, ever be Sinn Féin MPs sitting in the British Houses of Parliament. The transfer of power by London and Dublin to the Assembly in the north … is all proof of where we see the political centre of gravity on the island of Ireland and that is in the island of Ireland.”
Adams insists his party’s presence in the Commons is a “temporary” measure until they can join the parliament of a united Ireland.
A ban on MPs using Commons facilities without taking the loyalty oath was lifted in December 2001 to Conservative fury. Tories end three decades of cross-party cooperation over the move, which also entitles Sinn Féin’s four MPs to allowances of £107,000 a year each.
Shadow Secretary of State for Northern IrelandQuentin Davies claims Adams plans to use the cash for party political campaigning – something forbidden by Westminster rules. He accuses British Prime MinisterTony Blair of “deliberately contributing to a great propaganda coup in which … the British Government are licking their boots.” The Prime Minister’s spokesman says Blair acknowledges “many victims do feel very strongly about what has happened, but the Prime Minister’s view is that this peace process has saved many lives.”
Sitting alongside a giant Irish tricolour inside his new office, Adams likens his presence there to that of MPs who had served in the British Army and intelligence services – suggesting some of them still do. He also dismisses concerns about the misuse of the money, accusing those “complaining loudest” of being from parties “indicted for corruption and sleaze.”
Sinn Féin’s move into their new offices coincides with a “routine” meeting with the Prime Minister in Downing Street to discuss the peace process. The Sinn Féin president uses publicity surrounding the controversial move to issue a new challenge to Blair to tackle the loyalist “killing campaign.” Adams is joined in Downing Street by his three fellow Sinn Féin MPs.
“There have been 300 bombs over the last nine or ten months,” Adams says. “The British Prime Minister has to face up to the reality that the threat to the peace process within Northern Ireland comes from within loyalism.”
Adams blames Betty Boothroyd‘s decision to bar Sinn Féin MPs from using Commons facilities for the current controversy. “We are here, elected, with our mandate renewed and increased,” he adds.
Adams is asked how he would react if he met former Cabinet minister Lord Tebbit and his wife, who was badly injured by the 1984 Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb attack at the Tories conference at the Grand Brighton Hotel in Brighton, at the Commons. “I don’t ignore anyone. As someone who has been wounded and shot and someone whose house has been bombed, I understand precisely how others who have suffered more than me feel about all of this,” Adams replies. “I would like to think that as part of building a peace process that all of us agree there must be dialogue.”
(Pictured: from left, Sinn Fein MPs Michelle Gildernew, Martin McGuinness, Gerry Adams and Pat Doherty)
Hume does not complete his clerical studies but does obtain an M.A. degree in French and history from the college in 1958. He then returns home to his native Derry, where he becomes a teacher at his alma mater, St. Columb’s College. He is a founding member of the Credit Union movement in the city and is chair of the University for Derry Committee in 1965, an unsuccessful fight to have Northern Ireland’s second university established in Derry in the mid-1960s.
Hume becomes the youngest ever President of the Irish League of Credit Unions at age 27. He serves in the role from 1964 to 1968. He once says that “all the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.”
Hume becomes a leading figure in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s along with people such as Hugh Logue. He is a prominent figure in the Derry Citizens’ Action Committee. The DCAC is set up in the wake of the October 5, 1968, march through Derry which had caused much attention to be drawn towards the situation in Northern Ireland. The purpose of the DCAC is to make use of the publicity surrounding recent events to bring to light grievances in Derry that had been suppressed by the Unionist Government for years. The DCAC, unlike the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), is aimed specifically at a local campaign, improving the situation in Derry for everyone, and maintaining a peaceful stance. The committee also has a Stewards Association that is there to prevent any violence at marches or sit-downs.
In October 1971, Hume joins four Westminster MPs in a 48-hour hunger strike to protest at the internment without trial of hundreds of suspected Irish republicans. State papers that have been released under the 30-year rule that an Irish diplomat eight years later in 1979 believes Hume supported the return of internment.
Hume is directly involved in secret talks with the British government and Sinn Féin, in an effort to bring Sinn Féin to the discussion table openly. The talks are speculated to lead directly to the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985.
The vast majority of unionists reject the agreement and stage a massive and peaceful public rally in Belfast City Centre to demonstrate their distaste. Many Republicans and nationalists also reject it, as they see it as not going far enough. Hume, however, continues dialogue with both governments and Sinn Féin. The “Hume–Adams process” eventually delivers the 1994 Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire which ultimately provides the relatively peaceful backdrop against which the Good Friday agreement is brokered.
In 2015, Hume is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, of which he had first displayed symptoms in the late 1990s. He dies in the early hours of August 3, 2020, at a nursing home in Derry, at the age of 83. On his death, former Labour Party leader and prime ministerTony Blair says, “John Hume was a political titan; a visionary who refused to believe the future had to be the same as the past.” The Dalai Lama says on Twitter, “John Hume’s deep conviction in the power of dialogue and negotiations to resolve conflict was unwavering… It was his leadership and his faith in the power of negotiations that enabled the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to be reached. His steady persistence set an example for us all to follow.”
(Pictured: John Hume with U.S. President Bill Clinton in 1995)
seamus dubhghaill 