seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

Tag Archives: Irish Land Commission


by Leave a comment

Birth of Frank Duff, Lay Catholic & Author

Francis Michael Duff, Irish author, lay Catholic and founder of the Legion of Mary, known for bringing attention to the role of the Catholic laity during the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, is born at 97 Phibsboro Road, Dublin, on June 7, 1889.

Duff is the eldest of seven children of John Duff, a civil servant with the local government board, and his wife, Susan Letitia (née Freehill), a civil servant with the post office. The wealthy family lives in the city at St. Patrick’s Road, Drumcondra. He attends Blackrock College.

In 1908, Duff enters the Civil Service and is assigned to the Irish Land Commission. In 1913, he joins the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and is exposed to the real poverty of Dublin. Many who live in tenement squalor are forced to attend soup kitchens for sustenance, and abject poverty, alcoholism, street gangs, and organized prostitution are rife in parts of Dublin. He joins and soon rises through the ranks to become President of the Saint Patrick’s Conference at Saint Nicholas of Myra Parish. Having concern for people he sees as materially and spiritually deprived, he has the idea to picket Protestant soup kitchens as he considers they are giving aid in the form of food and free accommodation at hostels, in return for not attending Catholic services. He sets up rival Catholic soup kitchens and, with his friend, Sergeant Major Joe Gabbett, who has already been working at discouraging Catholics from patronizing Protestant soup kitchens. They succeed in closing down two of them over the years.

In 1916, Duff publishes his first pamphlet, Can we be Saints?, where he expresses the conviction that all are called to be saints without exception, and that through Christian faith, all have the means necessary.

In 1918, a friend gifts Duff a copy of the book True Devotion to Mary by the seventeenth-century French cleric Louis de Montfort, which influences his views on Mary. He is additionally influenced by the writings of John Henry Newman.

Duff briefly acts as private secretary to Michael Collins, then-Chairman of the Provisional Government and commander-in-chief of the National Army. In 1924, he is transferred to the Department of Finance.

On September 7, 1921, along with Fr. Michael Toher and fifteen predominantly young women, he is present at the first meeting of the association which he would forge as the Legion of Mary. He models the Legion on the Roman legions, naming the local unit the “praesidium,” and he immerses himself in the apostolic work which dominates the rest of his life.

In 1922, Duff establishes the Sancta Maria hostel in Dublin as a refuge for prostitutes, and is the driving force behind the closure of “Monto,” Dublin’s notorious red-light district. In 1927, he establishes the Morning Star hostel for homeless men in Dublin, and in 1930 the Regina Coeli hostel for homeless women, which provides special units for unmarried mothers and their children at a time when neither church nor state favour helping unmarried women to keep their children.

While Duff enjoys the support of W. T. Cosgrave, Ireland’s head of government, and in May 1931 is granted an audience with Pope Pius XI, his efforts are opposed internally in the Dublin diocese. In the 1930s and 1940s, he creates the Mercier Society, a study group designed to bring together Catholics and Protestants, as well as the Pillar of Fire, a group designed to promote dialogue between Irish Catholics with Ireland’s Jewish community.

Duff retires from the Civil Service in 1934 to devote all of his time to the Legion of Mary. For the rest of his life, with the help of many others, he guides the Legion’s worldwide extension.

In 1965, Pope Paul VI invites Duff to attend the Second Vatican Council as a lay observer. When he is introduced to the assembly by Archbishop John Heenan of Liverpool, he receives a standing ovation.

Duff makes the promotion of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus part of the Legion’s apostolate.

Duff dies in Dublin at the age of 91 on November 7, 1980. He Is interred in Glasnevin Cemetery. In July 1996, the cause of Duff’s beatification is introduced by Cardinal Desmond Connell.

Today, the Legion of Mary has an estimated four million active members and 10 million auxiliary members in close to 200 countries in almost every diocese in the Catholic Church.


by Leave a comment

Irish National Land League Outlawed by the British Government

The Irish National Land League, also known as the Land League, is outlawed by the British government on October 20, 1881. From the start, the League is a thorn in the side of the government of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone.

The Irish National Land League is an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which organises tenant farmers in their resistance to exactions of landowners. Its primary aim is to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they work on. The period of the Land League’s agitation is known as the Land War.

The Irish National Land League is founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, County Mayo, on October 21, 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell, the prominent Home Rule Member of Parliament, is elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan are appointed as honorary secretaries. This unites practically in a single organisation all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements on the nationalist side of the increasingly frozen sectarian-political divide in Ireland. 

The government had introduced the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, the first Land Act, which proves largely ineffective. It is followed by further marginally more effective Irish Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These establish the Irish Land Commission that starts to reduce some rents. The passage of the second Land Act in 1881 fails to mollify many of the leaders of the Land League, mainly due to the fact that close to 300,000 tenants behind in their rents are excluded from its benefits. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehy, known as “the Land League priest,” go into a bitter verbal offensive.

William Ewart Gladstone has them arrested and imprisoned in Kilmainham Gaol in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act for “sabotaging the Land Act,” from where the No Rent Manifesto is issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until “constitutional liberties” are restored, and the prisoners freed. It has a modest success In Ireland and mobilizes financial and political support from the Irish diaspora. Many other leaders of the League, including Michael Davitt, whose name is added to the bottom of the document by others, and other moderate elements in Ireland oppose this move.

Perhaps sensing weakness in the League organization, the government outlaws the League on October 20, 1881, but the work of the League is then continued by the Ladies’ Land League, which had been founded earlier by Parnell’s sister Anna. In 1882, Parnell is released from jail after reaching a written compact with the government, which extends the benefits of the Land Act to those excluded earlier, while Parnell pledges to help end land-agitation violence in Ireland and cooperate with Gladstone’s Liberal party.

In October 1882, Parnell forms the Irish National League, replacing the Land League. The Land League passes into history, but it has helped show Irish peasants that if they all stand together there is strength in numbers.

(Pictured: Irish land League poster dating from the 1880s)


by Leave a comment

Death of Iris Cummins, First Female Engineering Graduate at UCC

Iris Ashley Cummins, the first female engineer to graduate from University College Cork (UCC), dies in Dublin on April 30, 1968. She is also an international field hockey player.

Cummins is born on June 6, 1894, in Woodville, Glanmire, County Cork, to William Edward Ashley Cummins (1858–1923), professor of medicine at UCC, and Jane Constable Cummins (née Hall). Of her four sisters and six brothers, Geraldine is a renowned psychic and author, Jane serves as a squadron officer in the Women’s Royal Air Force (WRAF) during World War II and becomes a medical doctor, Mary is a gynaecologist and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI), and her brother Marshall is involved in setting up the first blood transfusion service in Cork.

Cummins begins to study at UCC in 1912. At that time, there are 78 women students out of the 420 students enrolled. She graduates with an engineering degree in 1915. During her time in engineering, she is editor of the Journal of the Engineering Society.

While she is in college, Cummins is on the Ireland field hockey team. She earns her first “cap” for hockey in 1914 and leads the college hockey team to victory in the Munster cup. The Irish hockey team tours the United States in 1925 with Cummins as the captain. With the team she goes to the White House at the invitation of Calvin Coolidge.

Cummins works for the Royal Arsenal with the munitions factory at Woolwich, London, and then the Vickers Limited factory at nearby Erith. She works in a shipyard in Scotland during World War I between 1915 and 1916 before returning to Cork. Initially, she finds it difficult to find work there.

In 1924, Cummins founds a private practice in the city and works there until 1927 at which time she is appointed to the Irish Land Commission in Dublin. She moves to Dublin and although she visits, she never returns to live in Cork. She retires from the Land Commission in 1954.

In 1927, Cummins becomes the first woman member of the Institution of Civil Engineers of Ireland.

Cummins is a Council member of the Women’s Engineering Society, having joined at the organisation’s inception. In December 1919, she writes an encouraging article in the very first edition of the society’s journal, The Woman Engineer. Based on her own Irish university experience, it lays out the practicalities of studies as well as social interactions likely to be encountered by a woman thinking of training as a civil engineer. The following year, she has another article published, this time in the Practical Engineer magazine, entitled The Suitability of Women for the Engineering Industries.

Twenty years later, in 1940, Cummins writes a lively piece entitled Women Engineers Overseas – in Eire for The Woman Engineer journal on her experiences as one of the earliest women engineers in Ireland. In this article, she recounts a tale of encountering the “oldest Inhabitant” of a very rural area, a proud owner of two fine horses, who on discovering “you must be an engineer, so would ye mind mending the electric light in the mare’s stable?”

Cummins dies at the age of 73 in Dublin on April 30, 1968.

(Pictured: Detail from photo of the 1913-14 2nd Year Engineering Class at University College Cork (UCC University Archives, OCLA, UCC))


by Leave a comment

Death of Frank Duff, Founder of the Legion of Mary in Dublin

Francis Michael Duff, Irish lay Catholic and author known for bringing attention to the role of the Catholic Laity during the Second Vatican Council of the Roman Catholic Church, dies in Dublin on November 7, 1980. He is also the founder of the Legion of Mary in Dublin.

Duff is born in Dublin on June 7, 1889, at 97 Phibsboro Road, the eldest of seven children of John Duff and his wife, Susan Letitia (née Freehill). The wealthy family lives in the city at St. Patrick’s Road, Drumcondra. He attends Blackrock College.

In 1908, Duff enters the Civil Service and is assigned to the Irish Land Commission. In 1913, he joins the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul and is exposed to the real poverty of Dublin. Many who live in tenement squalor are forced to attend soup kitchens for sustenance, and abject poverty, alcoholism, and prostitution are rife in parts of Dublin. He joins and soon rises through the ranks to President of the St. Patrick’s Conference at St. Nicholas of Myra Parish. Having concern for people he sees as materially and spiritually deprived, he gets the idea to picket Protestant soup kitchens as he considers they are giving aid in the form of food and free accommodation at hostels in return for not attending Catholic services. He sets up rival Catholic soup kitchens and, with his friend, Sergeant Major Joe Gabbett, discourages Catholics from patronizing Protestant soup kitchens. They succeeded in closing down two of them over the years.

Duff publishes his first pamphlet, Can we be Saints?, in 1916. In it, he expresses the conviction that all, without exception, are called to be saints, and that through Christian faith, all have the means necessary.

In 1918, a friend gifts Duff a copy of True Devotion to Mary by the seventeenth-century French cleric Louis de Montfort, which influences his views on Mary. He is additionally influenced by the writings of John Henry Newman.

Duff briefly acts as private secretary to Michael Collins, the chairman of the Provisional Government and the commander-in-chief of the National Army. In 1924, he is transferred to the Department of Finance.

On September 7, 1921, Duff is a part of a meeting alongside Fr. Michael Toher and fifteen women which becomes the nucleus of what would become the Legion of Mary. The Legion of Mary is created to organise lay Catholics to perform voluntary work. He models the organisation on Roman legions. Some of the first causes the Legion pursues is to become involved with homelessness and prostitution in Dublin. In 1922, he defies the wishes of the Archbishop of Dublin and the widespread Crypto-Calvinism, or Jansenism, within the Catholic Church in Ireland, which had created an intense hostility towards both prostitutes and other allegedly “fallen women.” Similarly, to St. Vitalis of Gaza before him, he begins an outreach to the prostitutes living in often brutal and inhuman conditions in the “kip houses” of “the Monto,” as Dublin’s red-light district, one of the largest in Europe at the time, is then called. Although middle-class Dubliners dismissively view these women as “whores,” the impoverished but devoutly Catholic residents of the Monto tenements refer to local prostitutes as “unfortunate girls,” and understand that they often turn to prostitution as a last resort. As part of his work, Duff establishes the Sancta Maria hostel, a safe house for former prostitutes who had run away from their “kip keepers.” Following the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War, he also persuades the first Catholic Commissioner of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, former Irish Army General W. R. E. Murphy, to launch a crackdown and, even though prostitution in the Republic of Ireland, rooted in human trafficking, still exists, the closure of the Monto’s last “Kip-Houses” is announced on March 12, 1925.

In 1927, Duff establishes the Morning Star hostel for homeless men, followed shortly by the Regina Coeli hostel for homeless women in 1930. Unlike the Magdalen Asylums, the Regina Coeli hostel reflects his view that unwed mothers should be taught how to be able to provide for and raise their children. This defies the norm of the era which holds that the children of unwed mothers should be saved from the stigma of their illegitimacy by being put up for adoption as quickly as possible.

While Duff enjoys the support of W. T. Cosgrave, Ireland’s head of government, and in May 1931 is granted an audience with Pope Pius XI, his efforts are opposed internally in the Dublin diocese. The Archbishop of Dublin Edward Joseph Byrne and his successor John Charles McQuaid seek to censor him because of his involvement with prostitutes. McQuaid also does not approve of his ecumenical efforts. In the 1930s and 1940s Duff creates the Mercier Society, a study group designed to bring together Catholics and Protestants, as well as the Pillar of Fire, a group designed to promote dialogue with Ireland’s Jewish community. In communication with Irish social dissidents Seán Ó Faoláin and Peadar O’Donnell, he suggests he is far more censored than even they are.

Duff does have some supporters amongst the Catholic hierarchy though. With the backing of Cardinal Joseph MacRory and Francis Bourne of Westminster, the Legion is able to expand rapidly and internationally. In 1928 the Legion establishes its first presidium in Scotland. In 1932 he is able to use the occasion of the Eucharistic Congress of Dublin to introduce the concept of the Legion of Mary to several visiting bishops, leading to further international growth.

Duff retires from the Civil Service in 1934 to devote all of his time to the Legion of Mary.

In July 1940, an overseas club for Afro-Asian students in Dublin is created. At that time Ireland is a popular destination for students from Asia and Africa because of its recent anti-imperial, anti-colonial history. Duff personally funds the purchase of a building for the club using funds from an inheritance. The club lasts until 1976 and facilitate many notable students, including Jaja Wachuku.

For the rest of his life, and with the help of many others, Duff guides the Legion’s worldwide extension. Today, the Legion of Mary has an estimated four million active members and 10 million auxiliary members in close to 200 countries in almost every diocese in the Catholic Church.

In 1965, Pope Paul VI invites Duff to attend the Second Vatican Council as a lay observer. When he is introduced to the assembly by the Archbishop of Liverpool, John Heenan, he receives a standing ovation.

Duff makes the promotion of devotion to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus part of the Legion’s apostolate.

Duff dies in Dublin at the age of 91 on November 7, 1980, and is interred at Glasnevin Cemetery. In July 1996, the cause of his beatification is introduced by Cardinal Desmond Connell.


by Leave a comment

Birth of George Fitzmaurice, Playwright & Writer

George Fitzmaurice, Irish dramatist and short story writer, some of whose plays were broadcast on Radio Éireann, is born at Bedford House, Listowel, County Kerry on the January 28, 1877.

Fitzmaurice attends Duagh National School and later St. Michael’s College, Listowel. He is brought up in the Protestant faith as his father is a Protestant clergyman and is the vicar of St. John’s Church, Listowel. His father dies when he is fourteen years old and the family fortune declines. He takes a job in Dublin as a clerk in the Congested Districts Board for Ireland. In 1916 he enlists in the British Army and returns to Dublin after the war and is diagnosed with neurasthenia, rendering him fearful of crowds. On his return to Dublin, he takes up a position working for the Irish Land Commission.

Fitzmaurice and his eleven siblings are the children of a mixed marriage. He and his brothers are brought up as Protestants and his sisters are brought up as Roman Catholics. His family home at Bedford, together with its extensive lands has to be given up as collateral in respect of a £60 debt owed to the local butcher. Neither Fitzmaurice nor any of his eleven siblings are to marry or have any offspring. He is the last Fitzmaurice of Duagh. There are no photographs of him other than a sketch of him in later life.

Fitzmaurice’s first success was in 1907, with an Abbey Theatre production of his comedy The Country Dressmaker which features one of his most famous characters, Luke Quilter, “The man from the mountain.” This character proves to be a favourite with the audience, to the surprise of William Butler Yeats. The play’s commercial success brings necessary income to the Abbey Theatre in 1907. The play is ultimately broadcast by the Radio Éireann Players.

Fitzmaurice’s second play is a dramatic fantasy called The Pie Dish. It is heavily rejected and slated by critics and considered blasphemous. This leads to the rejection of another of his plays called The Dandy Dolls which is now understood as another of his best plays. It is produced in the Abbey Theatre in 1969, six years after his death.

During Fitzmaurice’s lifetime, some of his dramatic works are produced by poet Austin Clarke in Lyric Theatre, Dublin. In 1923 his play Twixt by Giltinans and the Carmodys is also performed on Abbey and eight more of his plays are printed in the literary journey The Dublin Magazine from 1924 to 1925.

The effects of having fought in World War I lead to Fitzmaurice becoming increasingly reclusive over time. With a fear of travelling and people or crowds, he spends his later years following “monotonous routines in Dublin.” On May 12, 1963, he dies in poverty at his home at 3 Harcourt Street and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery. In his room there are no pictures of himself, few personal mementos, but he does have a copy of almost every play he had published, as well as some unpublished drafts. Besides his personal clothing, there is little else. He dies without leaving a will.

In 1965, RTÉ reports that “the works of George Fitzmaurice are now undergoing something of a revival.” A fellow Kerry playwright, John B. Keane, states at the time that Fitzmaurice is increasingly being recognised as the great dramatist he truly was. He also describes his work as having “practical clarity of speech coupled with a great conciseness, and a tightness in his writing and in his construction.” Michael Connor, the man who owns the Fitzmaurice property in Daugh, recounts that he often saw Fitzmaurice in the town after his retirement from the civil service but by that time the dramatist had completely lost interest in seeing his own plays on the stage.

In his native Daugh, The George Fitzmaurice Library is founded, and on October 14, 1995, a headstone that is sculpted by a local and commissioned by the Duagh Historical Society, is placed over Fitzmaurice’s grave.


by Leave a comment

Founding of the Irish National Land League

land-league-poster

The Irish National Land League, one of the most important political organizations in Irish history which seeks to help poor tenant farmers, is founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, County Mayo, on October 21, 1879. Its primary aim is to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they work on. The national organization is modeled on the Land League of Mayo, which Michael Davitt had helped found earlier in the year.

At the founding meeting Charles Stewart Parnell is elected president of the league. Davitt, Andrew Kettle, and Thomas Brennan are appointed as honorary secretaries. This unites practically all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements under a single organisation.

Parnell, Davitt, John Dillon, and others including Cal Lynn then go to the United States to raise funds for the League with spectacular results. Branches are also set up in Scotland, where the Crofters Party imitates the League and secures a reforming Act in 1886.

The government introduces the Landlord and Tenant (Ireland) Act 1870, which proves largely ineffective. It is followed by the marginally more effective Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These establish a Land Commission that starts to reduce some rents. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants including Father Eugene Sheehy, known as “the Land League priest,” go into a bitter verbal offensive and are imprisoned in October 1881 under the Protection of Person and Property Act 1881 in Kilmainham Gaol for “sabotaging the Land Act.” It is from here that the No-Rent Manifesto is issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until “constitutional liberties” are restored and the prisoners freed. It has a modest success In Ireland and mobilizes financial and political support from the Irish Diaspora.

Although the League discourages violence, agrarian crimes increase widely. Typically, a rent strike is followed by eviction by the police and the bailiffs. Tenants who continue to pay the rent can be subject to a boycott by local League members. Where cases go to court, witnesses would change their stories, resulting in an unworkable legal system. This in turn leads on to stronger criminal laws being passed that are described by the League as “Coercion Acts.”

The bitterness that develops helps Parnell later in his Home Rule campaign. Davitt’s views as seen in his famous slogan: “The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland” is aimed at strengthening the hold on the land by the peasant Irish at the expense of the alien landowners. Parnell aims to harness the emotive element, but he and his party are strictly constitutional. He envisions tenant farmers as potential freeholders of the land they have rented.