seamus dubhghaill

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Tag Archives: Irish Nationalism


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Birth of Oscar Traynor, Fianna Fáil Politician & Republican

Oscar Traynor, Fianna Fáil politician and republican, is born in Dublin on March 21, 1886. He serves as Minister for Justice from 1957 to 1961, Minister for Defence from 1939 to 1948 and 1951 to 1954, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs from 1936 to 1939 and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Defence from June 1936 to November 1936. He serves as a Teachta Dála (TD) from 1925 to 1927 and 1932 to 1961. He is also involved with association football, being the President of the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) from 1948 until 1963.

Traynor is born into a strongly nationalist family in Dublin. He is educated by the Christian Brothers. In 1899, he is apprenticed to John Long, a famous woodcarver. As a young man he is a noted footballer and tours Europe as a goalkeeper with Belfast Celtic F.C. whom he plays with from 1910 to 1912. He rejects claims soccer is a foreign sport calling it “a Celtic game, pure and simple, having its roots in the Highlands of Scotland.”

Traynor joins the Irish Volunteers and takes part in the Easter Rising in 1916, being the leader of the Hotel Metropole garrison. Following this he is interned in Wales. During the Irish War of Independence, he is brigadier of the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army and leads the disastrous attack on the Custom House in 1921 and an ambush on the West Kent Regiment at Claude Road, Drumcondra on June 16, 1921, when the Thompson submachine gun is fired for the first time in action.

When the Irish Civil War breaks out in June 1922, Traynor takes the Anti-Treaty IRA side. The Dublin Brigade is split, however, with many of its members following Michael Collins in taking the pro-Treaty side. During the Battle of Dublin, he is in charge of the Barry’s Hotel garrison, before making their escape. He organises guerilla activity in south Dublin and County Wicklow, before being captured by Free State troops in September. He is then imprisoned for the remainder of the war.

On March 11, 1925, Traynor is elected to Dáil Éireann in a by-election as a Sinn Féin TD for the Dublin North constituency, though he does not take his seat due to the abstentionist policy of Sinn Féin. He is re-elected as one of eight members for Dublin North in the June 1927 Irish general election but just one of six Sinn Féin TDs. Once again, he does not take his seat. He does not contest the September 1927 Irish general election but declares his support for Fianna Fáil. He stands again in the 1932 Irish general election and is elected as a Fianna Fáil TD for Dublin North.

In 1936, Traynor is first appointed to the Cabinet as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. In September 1939, he is appointed Minister for Defence and holds the portfolio to February 1948. In 1948, he becomes President of the Football Association of Ireland, a position he holds until his death. He serves as Minister for Defence in several Fianna Fáil governments and as Minister for Justice, where he is undermined by his junior minister, and later Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, before he retires in 1961.

Traynor dies in Dublin at the age of 77 on December 15, 1963. He has a road named in his memory, running from the Malahide Road through Coolock to Santry in Dublin’s northern suburbs.

(Pictured: Minister for Defence Oscar Traynor at his desk, June 1940)


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John Mitchel Re-elected to Parliament; Dies Eight Days Later

After being barred as an undischarged felon from taking his seat as elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Tipperary, John Mitchel, Irish nationalist activist, author, and political journalist, is re-elected on March 12, 1875. He dies eight days later.

Mitchel is born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Derry on November 3, 1815, the son of a Presbyterian minister. At the age of four, he is sent to a classical school, run by an old minister named Moor, nicknamed “Gospel Moor” by the students. He reads books from a very early age. When a little over five years old, he is introduced to Latin grammar by his teacher and makes quick progress. In 1830, not yet 15 years old, he enters Trinity College, Dublin and obtains a law degree in 1834. In the spring of 1836 he meets Jane Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner. Though both families are opposed to the relationship, they become engaged in the autumn and are married on February 3, 1837, by the Rev. David Babington in Drumcree Church, the parish church of Drumcree.

Mitchel works in a law office in Banbridge, County Down, where he eventually comes into conflict with the local Orange Order. He meets Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy during visits to Dublin. He joins the Young Ireland movement and begins to write for The Nation. Deeply affected by the misery and death caused by the Great Famine, he becomes convinced that nothing will ever come of the constitutional efforts to gain Irish freedom. He then forms his own paper, United Irishmen, to advocate passive resistance by Ireland’s starving masses.

In May 1848, the British tire of Mitchel’s open defiance. Ever the legal innovators in Ireland, they invent a crime especially for the Young Irelanders – felony-treason. They arrest him for violating this new law and close down his paper. A rigged jury convicts him, and he is deported first to Bermuda and then to Australia. However, in June 1853, he escapes to the United States.

Mitchel works as a journalist in New York City and then moves to the South. When the American Civil War erupts, he is a strong supporter of the Southern cause, seeing parallels with the position of the Irish. His family fully backs his commitment to the Southern cause. He loses two sons in the war, one at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and another at the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1864, and another son loses an arm. His outspoken support of the Confederacy causes him to be jailed for a time at Fort Monroe, where one of his fellow prisoners is Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

In 1874, the British allow Mitchel to return to Ireland and in 1875 he is elected in a by-election to be a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom representing the Tipperary constituency. However, his election is invalidated on the grounds that he is a convicted felon. He contests the seat again in the resulting by-election and is again elected, this time with an increased vote.

Unfortunately, Mitchel, one of the staunchest enemies to English rule of Ireland in history, dies eight days later in Newry on March 20, 1875, and is buried there. Thirty-eight years later, his grandson, John Purroy Mitchel, is elected Mayor of New York City.


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Birth of Emmet Dalton, Soldier & Film Producer

James Emmet Dalton MC, Irish soldier and film producer, is born in Fall River, Massachusetts, on March 4, 1898. He serves in the British Army in World War I, reaching the rank of captain. However, on his return to Ireland he becomes one of the senior figures in the Dublin Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) which fights against British rule in Ireland.

Dalton is born to Irish American parents James F. and Katharine L. Dalton. The family moves back to Ireland when he is two years old. He grows up in a middle-class Catholic background in Drumcondra in North Dublin and lives at No. 8 Upper St. Columba’s Road. He is educated by the Christian Brothers at O’Connell School in North Richmond Street. He joins the nationalist militia, the Irish Volunteers, in 1913 and the following year, though only fifteen, is involved in the smuggling of arms into Ireland.

Dalton joins the British Army in 1915 for the duration of the Great War. His decision is not that unusual among Irish Volunteers, as over 20,000 of the National Volunteers join the British New Army on the urgings of Nationalist leader John Redmond. His father, however, disagrees with his son’s decision. He initially joins the 7th battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers (RDF) as a temporary 2nd Lieutenant. By 1916 he is attached to the 9th Battalion, RDF, 16th (Irish) Division under Major-General William Hickie, which contains many Irish nationalist recruits.

During the Battle of the Somme in September 1916, Dalton is involved in bloody fighting during the Battle of Ginchy, in which over 4,000 Irishmen are killed or wounded. He is awarded the Military Cross for his conduct in the battle. Afterwards he is transferred to the 6th Battalion, Leinster Regiment, and sent to Thessaloniki then Palestine, where he commands a company and then supervises a sniper school in el-ʻArīsh. In 1918 he is re-deployed again to France, and in July promoted to captain, serving as an instructor.

On demobilisation in April 1919, Dalton returns to Ireland. There, finding that his younger brother Charlie had joined the IRA, he himself follows suit. He later comments on the apparent contradiction of fighting both with and against the British Army by saying that he had fought for Ireland with the British and fought for Ireland against them.

Dalton becomes close to Michael Collins and rises swiftly to become IRA Director of Intelligence and is involved in The Squad, the Dublin-based assassination unit. On May 14, 1921, he leads an operation with Paddy Daly that he and Collins had devised. It is designed to rescue Gen. Seán Mac Eoin from Mountjoy Prison using a hijacked British armoured car and two of Dalton’s old British Army uniforms.

Dalton follows Collins in accepting the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 and is one of the first officers, a Major General, in the new National Army established by the Irish Provisional Government of the Irish Free State. The Treaty is opposed by much of the IRA and Civil War between pro and anti-treaty factions eventually results.

Dalton is in command of troops assaulting the Four Courts in the Battle of Dublin which marks the start of the war in June 1922. At Collins’ instigation he, as Military liaison officer with the British during the truce, takes control of the two 18 pounder guns from the British that are trained on the buildings. He becomes commander of the Free State Army under Richard Mulcahy‘s direction. He is behind the Irish Free State offensive of July–August 1922 that dislodges the Anti-Treaty fighters from the towns of Munster. He proposes seaborne landings to take the Anti-Treaty positions from the rear and he commands one such naval landing that takes Cork in early August. In spite of firm loyalty to the National Army, he is critical of the Free State’s failure to follow up its victory, allowing the Anti-Treaty IRA to regroup resuming the guerrilla warfare started in 1919.

On August 22, 1922, he accompanies Collins in convoy, touring rural west Cork. The convoy is ambushed near Béal na Bláth and Collins is killed in the firefight. He had advised Collins to drive on, but Collins, who is not an experienced combat veteran, insists on stopping to fight.

Dalton is married shortly afterwards, on October 9, 1922, to Alice Shannon in Cork’s Imperial Hotel. By December 1922 he has resigned his command in the Army. He does not agree with the execution of republican prisoners that mark the latter stages of the Civil War. After briefly working as clerk of the Irish Senate, Seanad Éireann, he leaves the job to work in the movie industry.

Over the following forty years, Dalton works in Ireland and the United States in film production. In 1958 he founds Irish Ardmore Studios in Bray, County Wicklow. His company helps produce films such as The Blue Max, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and The Lion in Winter, all of which are filmed in Ireland. His daughter is Irish actress Audrey Dalton.

Dalton dies in his daughter Nuala’s house in Dublin on March 4, 1978, his 80th birthday, never having seen the film that Cathal O’Shannon of RTÉ had made on his life. During the making of the film, they visit the battlefields in France, Kilworth Camp in Cork, Béal Na Bláth, and other places that Dalton had not visited since his earlier years. He wishes to be buried as near as possible to his friend Michael Collins in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin and is buried there in March 1978 after a military funeral. None of the ruling Fianna Fáil government ministers or TDs attend.

(Pictured: Dalton photographed in lieutenant’s uniform, Royal Dublin Fusiliers, taken circa. 1914-1918)


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Birth of Elizabeth Dillon, Diarist and Nationalist

Elizabeth Dillon, an Irish diarist and nationalist, is born Elizabeth Mathew in England on March 2, 1865.

Dillon is the eldest of five children of Sir James Charles Mathew and Elizabeth Blackmore Mathew. Her family is related to the Butler family, but she does not visit Ireland until 1886. Living in Queen’s Gate Gardens, Kensington, London, she is educated at home. From a young age she attends the ladies’ gallery of the House of Commons, while mixing a busy social life with charitable works.

Dillon begins keeping a diary in 1879, which she continues to write until her death. Her ancestor, Mary Mathew, is also a diarist and keeps the diary for the discipline of the daily activity. She soon begins to write for the love of it, and some have surmised she wrote with the intention her diaries would be read by others. She attends lectures in Old English and literature at King’s College, London from late 1882 to 1884, and begins to learn Irish in 1893.

Dillon’s father supports land reform in Ireland, chairs the evicted tenants commission in 1892, and is a huge influence on her politics. She makes her first political reference on February 25, 1883, when she notes the arrest of the Invincibles, and she then regularly comments on land reform. She travels to Ireland for the first time in August 1886, staying in Killiney, County Dublin. In October 1886, she meets John Dillon and begins to follow the Plan of Campaign so that she can discuss it with him during his visits to the Mathew house in London.

During this time, John Dillon is deeply immersed in politics and is imprisoned on a number of occasions. Being a careful follower of Irish politics, she becomes an anti-Parnellite. She confronts John Dillon in autumn 1895 about their relationship, saying that they can no longer meet as they had become the subject of gossip. He proposes within two weeks, and they are married on November 21, 1895, in Brompton Oratory. They are busy and often apart, with Dillon spending time in a warm climate due to his ill health. She tries to accompany him when she can, but the couple’s large family makes that difficult. They have one daughter and five sons, John Dillon (1896-1970), Anne Elizabeth Dillon (born October 29, 1897), Theobald Wolfe Tone (1898-1946), Myles, James, and Brian.

Finances are strained until John’s uncle Charles bequeaths him his house, 2 North Great George’s Street, Dublin in 1898, and a business in Ballaghaderreen, County Mayo is bequeathed him by a cousin, Anne Deane, in 1905. Dillon runs the business successfully, while also carrying out duties as a politician’s wife such as opening the Belfast ladies’ branch of the United Irish League in June 1905. Her busy life results in her neglecting her diary.

Dillon dies on May 14, 1907, in Dublin, having given birth to a stillborn daughter that morning. Pneumonia is given as the cause of death, but it could have been medical incompetence. She is buried in the family vault in Glasnevin Cemetery. Her husband writes of her death in June 1907, A short narrative of the illness and death of my dearest love. Trinity College Dublin holds her diary and correspondence. Her diaries, edited by Brendan Ó Cathaoir, are published in 2019.


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Death of Novelist Shan Fadh Bullock

Novelist Shan Fadh Bullock dies in Sutton, Surrey, on February 27, 1935. His works include fourteen novels set in Ulster and he is admired by James Matthew Barrie and Thomas Hardy.

Bullock is born on May 17, 1865 at Inisherk, County Fermanagh just outside the County Cavan border near Belturbet, in what is now Northern Ireland. His father, Thomas Bullock, is a strict man who has eleven children and drives several to emigration because of his stern demeanour. Thomas Bullock works on the Crom Castle estate which runs along the Cavan/Fermanagh border and has both Catholic and Protestant workers. Protestant workers have the prime jobs and are employed as craftsmen and supervisors while Catholics work in the outer area of the estate at unskilled jobs. Folk memories of the Battle of Newtownbutler in 1689 remain long in the memory in the area where up to 1,500 Jacobite troops are hacked down or drowned in Upper Lough Erne when pursued by the Williamite cavalry. Many of the Williamite army is drawn from the local Protestant population.

Bullock is educated at Crom estate primary school run by the Church of Ireland and Farra School near Bunbrosna, County Westmeath. He fails the entrance exams at the University of Dublin. He tries his hand at farming but finds he is not suited. He moves to London in 1883 and becomes a Civil Service clerk. He takes to journalism to supplement his salary and publishes his first book of stories, The Awkward squads, in 1893. His stories are centered on Irish Catholic and Protestant small farmers and labourers and their struggles and tensions. He marries Emma Mitchell in 1899 and they have a son and daughter.

Bullock is well respected in literary circles but his books are never successful enough for him to become a full time writer. He says that the English are not interested in Irish stories and that there is no reading public in Ireland. He dislikes Orange sectarianism and is ambivalent to Irish nationalism. His novel The Red Leaguers looks at sectarianism conflict and Robert Thorne examines the lives of London clerks which is a popular theme at the time. His last and best novel The Loughsiders is published in 1924 and is the story of a conniving smallholder based on William Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Bullock’s wife dies in 1922. He spends the final years of his life in Sutton, Surrey and dies there on February 27, 1935.

Bullock’s daughter presents his literary papers, including two unpublished novels, two plays, numerous short stories and essays, and some correspondence to the Queen’s University Belfast library in the 1960s. A portrait of Bullock by Dermod O’Brien, RHA, is also at Queen’s University Belfast. His correspondence with Sir Horace Plunkett is in the archives of the Plunkett Foundation, Long Hanborough Business Park, Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Enniskillen public library has a collection of cuttings on Bullock, including some photocopied letters.


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Birth of Seamus Deane, Poet, Novelist, Critic & Historian

Seamus Francis Deane, Irish poet, novelist, critic, and intellectual historian, is born in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland on February 9, 1940. He is noted for his debut novel, Reading in the Dark, which wins several literary awards and is nominated for the Booker Prize in 1996.

Deane is the fourth child of Frank Deane and Winifred (Doherty) and is brought up as part of a Catholic nationalist family. He attends St. Columb’s College in his hometown, where he befriends fellow student Seamus Heaney. He then attends Queen’s University Belfast (BA and MA) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (PhD). Although he too becomes noted for his poetry, he chooses to go into academia instead. He workws as a teacher in Derry, with Martin McGuinness being one of his students. McGuinness later recalls how Deane was “gentle, kind and never raised his voice at all, an ideal teacher who was very highly thought of.”

After graduating from Cambridge, Deane teaches at the Reed College in Portland, Oregon during the 1960s and the University of California, Berkeley during the 1970s. Over the next two decades, he teaches American college juniors part-time at the School of Irish Studies in the Ballsbridge section of Dublin. He is a professor of Modern English and American Literature at University College Dublin (UCD) until 1992. He subsequently relocates to the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Chair of Irish Studies, from which he retires as professor emeritus.

Deane is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a founding director of the Field Day Theatre Company, together with Heaney, Tom Paulin, and David Hammond.

Deane is the co-editor of Field Day Review, an annual journal of Irish studies. He also serves as general editor of the Penguin Classic James Joyce series and of Critical Conditions, a series in Irish Studies which is jointly published by the University of Notre Dame Press and Cork University Press. He co-founds the book series Field Day Files, which contains key works by David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Marjorie Howes, and Kerby A. Miller.

The first collection of Deane’s poetry, Gradual Wars, is published in 1972 and receives the AE Memorial Award for Literature. His first novel, Reading in the Dark, is published in 1996 and is partly autobiographical. It wins the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Award for Literature, is a New York Times Notable Book, wins The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, besides being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. The novel is translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the general editor of the monumental Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which is 4,000 pages long and whose first volumes are released in 1990. It is later criticised for excluding the voices and experiences of Irish women. He responds to this by stating, “To my astonishment and dismay, I have found that I myself have been subject to the same kind of critique to which I have subjected colonialism … I find that I exemplify some of the faults and erasures which I analyse and characterize in the earlier period.”

Deane’s first marriage is to Marion Treacy. Together, they have four children. He is in a civil partnership with Emer Nolan until his death. They have one child together.

Following a short illness, Deane dies at the age of 81 on May 12, 2021 at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin.


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The Downing Street Mortar Attack

The Downing Street mortar attack was carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) on February 7, 1991. The IRA launches three homemade mortar shells at 10 Downing Street, London, the headquarters of the British government in an attempt to assassinate prime minister John Major and his war Cabinet, who were meeting to discuss the Gulf War.

During the Troubles, as part of its armed campaign against British rule in Northern Ireland, the Provisional Irish Republican Army repeatedly uses homemade mortars against targets in Northern Ireland. The IRA carries out many attacks in England, but none involve mortars. In December 1988, items used in mortar construction and technical details regarding the weapon’s trajectory are found during a raid in Battersea, South West London, by members of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch. In the late 1980s, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is top of the IRA’s list for assassination, following the failed attempt on her life in the Brighton hotel bombing.

Security around Downing Street is stepped up following increased IRA activity in England in 1988. Plans to leave a car bomb on a street near Downing Street and detonate it by remote control as Thatcher’s official car is driving by had been ruled out by the IRA Army Council owing to the likelihood of civilian casualties.

The Army Council instead sanctions a mortar attack on Downing Street and, in mid-1990, two IRA members travel to London to plan the attack. One is knowledgeable about the trajectory of mortars and the other, from the IRA’s Belfast Brigade, is familiar with their manufacture. An active service unit (ASU) purchases a Ford Transit van and rents a garage, and an IRA co-ordinator procures the explosives and materials needed to make the mortars. The IRA unit begins making the mortars and cutting a hole in the roof of the van for the mortars to be fired through. Once preparations are complete, the two IRA members return to Ireland, as the IRA leadership considers them valuable personnel and does not wish to risk them being arrested in any follow-up operation by the security services. In November 1990, Thatcher unexpectedly resigns from office, but the Army Council decides the planned attack should still go ahead, targeting her successor, John Major. The IRA plans to attack when Major and his ministers are likely to be meeting at Downing Street and wait until the date of a planned cabinet meeting is publicly known.

On the morning of February 7, 1991, the War Cabinet and senior government and military officials are meeting at Downing Street to discuss the ongoing Gulf War. As well as the Prime Minister, John Major, those present include politicians Douglas Hurd, Tom King, Norman Lamont, Peter Lilley, Patrick Mayhew, David Mellor and John Wakeham, civil servants Robin Butler, Percy Cradock, Gus O’Donnell and Charles Powell, and Chief of the Defence Staff David Craig. As the meeting begins, an IRA member is driving the van to the launch site at the junction of Horse Guards Avenue and Whitehall, about 200 yards from Downing Street.

On arrival, the driver parks the van and leaves the scene on a waiting motorcycle. Several minutes later, at 10:08 AM, as a policeman is walking towards the van to investigate it, three mortar shells are launched from a Mark 10 homemade mortar, followed by the explosion of a pre-set incendiary device. This device is designed to destroy any forensic evidence and set the van on fire. Each shell is four and a half feet long, weighs 140 pounds, and carries a 40-pound payload of the plastic explosive Semtex. Two shells land on Mountbatten Green, a grassed area near the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. One explodes and the other fails to detonate. The third shell explodes in the back garden of 10 Downing Street, 30 yards from the office where the cabinet is meeting. Had the shell struck 10 Downing Street itself, it is likely the entire cabinet would have been killed. On hearing the explosion, the cabinet ducks under the table for cover. Bomb-proof netting on the windows of the cabinet office muffle the force of the explosion, which scorches the back wall of the building, smashes windows and makes a crater several feet deep in the garden.

Once the sound of the explosion and aftershock has died down, the room is evacuated, and the meeting reconvenes less than ten minutes later in the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (COBR). No members of the cabinet are hurt, but four people receive minor injuries, including two police officers injured by flying debris. Immediately after the attack, hundreds of police officers seal off the government district, from the Houses of Parliament to Trafalgar Square. Until 6:00 PM, civilians are kept out of the area as forensic experts combed the streets and government employees are locked in behind security gates.

The IRA claims responsibility for the attack with a statement issued in Dublin, saying, “Let the British government understand that, while nationalist people in the six counties [Northern Ireland] are forced to live under British rule, then the British Cabinet will be forced to meet in bunkers.” John Major tells the House of Commons that “Our determination to beat terrorism cannot be beaten by terrorism. The IRA’s record is one of failure in every respect, and that failure was demonstrated yet again today. It’s about time they learned that democracies cannot be intimidated by terrorism, and we treat them with contempt.” Leader of the Opposition Neil Kinnock also condemns the attack, stating, “The attack in Whitehall today was both vicious and futile.” The head of the Metropolitan Police Anti-Terrorist Branch, Commander George Churchill-Coleman, describes the attack as “daring, well planned, but badly executed.”

A further statement from the IRA appears in An Phoblacht, with a spokesperson stating “Like any colonialists, the members of the British establishment do not want the result of their occupation landing at their front or back doorstep … Are the members of the British cabinet prepared to give their lives to hold on to a colony? They should understand the cost will be great while Britain remains in Ireland.” The attack is celebrated in Irish rebel culture when the band The Irish Brigade releases a song titled “Downing Street,” to the tune of “On the Street Where You Live,” which includes the lyrics “while you hold Ireland, it’s not safe down the street where you live.”


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Birth of John Ford, Award Winning Irish American Film Director

John Ford, film director, is born as John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894 at Cape Elizabeth, Maine. He is the fourth son among five sons and six daughters of Seán Feeney, Roman Catholic farmer and saloon-keeper, and Barbara ‘Abby’ Feeney (née Curran). His father had emigrated to the United States from Spiddal, County Galway, and his mother from Kilronan, Inishmore, one of the Aran Islands.

From an early age Ford has an interest in painting and sailing, and in July 1914 moves to California, where his older brother Francis is an actor with a small film company. Adopting the name ‘Jack Ford,’ he learns his trade as a filmmaker and acts in a number of silent pictures. Reveling in his Irish heritage, he makes his director’s debut with The Tornado (1917) and follows it with more than forty movies over the next six years. On July 3, 1920, he marries Mary McBryde Smith, a former officer in the army medical corps. They meet at a party thrown by the director Rex Ingram and have one son and one daughter.

In 1921 Ford visits Ireland for the first time and later claims to have travelled on the same boat that brought Michael Collins back from the treaty negotiations. He meets his relatives at Spiddal, falls in love with the countryside, and becomes a fervent Irish nationalist. It is later claimed that he brought over funds for his cousin Martin Feeney, a member of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column.

Returning to Hollywood, Ford becomes friends with the retired marshal Wyatt Earp and makes a number of commercially successful films, now as ‘John Ford’. In 1926 he directs The Shamrock Handicap, a horse-racing yarn partly set in Ireland. In 1928 he shoots Mother Machree, a movie about Irish emigration, starring Victor McLaglen, a regular collaborator. McLaglen also stars in Hangman’s House, made the same year, Ford’s first major movie about Ireland.

In 1934 Ford purchases a luxury yacht which he names the Araner after the Aran Islands. He also begins shooting The Informer, a film set in Ireland during the Irish War of Independence, and based on a short novel by Liam O’Flaherty. The picture is a major box office success and wins four Academy Awards, including Best Director. O’Flaherty is so impressed with the film that he dedicates his next book, Famine, to Ford.

In 1934 Ford visits Ireland for the second time, and approaches Seán O’Casey about directing a version of The Plough and the Stars. Released in 1936, the film stars Barry Fitzgerald as Fluther, but it is reedited by the studio, much to Ford’s fury, and is a commercial and critical flop.

Stagecoach, shot in 1938, is one of Ford’s masterpieces. It was a western starring his protégé, John Wayne, and marks the beginning of his golden decade. In 1940 and 1941 he wins Best Director Oscars successively for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green Was My Valley. With American entry into World War II, he serves in the U.S. Navy, and makes important documentaries such as The Battle of Midway (1942).

In 1952 Ford returns to Ireland to film The Quiet Man, starring Wayne, McLaglen, and Maureen O’Hara. Shot at Ashford Castle, County Mayo, the picture becomes one of the most popular Irish films of all time. He is immensely proud of the work and is in tears leaving Ireland. The following year he makes Mogambo, with Clark Gable, Grace Kelly and a young English actor, Donald Sinden, who later recalls that Ford berated him personally for all the problems of Ireland from the time of William of Orange. Ford’s strong sense of Irishness is central to his character and is crucial for any understanding of his work. Back in Ireland in 1956, he shoots The Rising of the Moon, a portmanteau film for which he takes no salary, starring Tyrone Power, Cyril Cusack, and Noel Purcell. A minor film, it makes no impact at the box office.

Two of Ford’s finest movies are made in his later years. The Searchers (1956) is a powerful study of vengeance, while The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is an elegiac revisionist western which concludes with the famous line, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Struck with cancer in his final years, Ford dies on August 31, 1973 at his home in Palm Desert, California, and is buried at Holy Cross Cemetery, Culver City. His will disinherits his son, Michael Patrick Roper, and leaves everything to his wife, daughter, and grandchildren.

When asked to name the finest American directors, Orson Welles replies simply, “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.” An alcoholic, Ford is a difficult and often tyrannical director, but he makes films of extraordinary power and vision. He ranks as one of the greatest film-makers of the twentieth century. As Frank Capra concludes, “John is half-tyrant, half-revolutionary; half-saint, half-Satan; half-possible, half-impossible; half-genius, half-Irish.”

(From: “Ford, John,” contributed by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


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Tribunal of Inquiry Into Bloody Sunday 1972 Announced

On January 31, 1972, the day after Bloody Sunday, British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling announces a tribunal of inquiry “into the circumstances of the march and the incidents leading up to the casualties which resulted.”

The official British Army position, backed by Maudling in the House of Commons, is that the paratroopers reacted to gun and nail bomb attacks from suspected Irish Republican Army (IRA) members. Apart from the soldiers, all eyewitnesses — including marchers, local residents, and British and Irish journalists present — maintain that soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd or were aiming at fleeing people and those tending the wounded, whereas the soldiers themselves were not fired upon. No British soldier is wounded by gunfire or reports any injuries, nor are any bullets or nail bombs recovered to back up their claims.

On February 2, 1972, the day that twelve of those killed are buried, there is a general strike in the Republic of Ireland, the biggest such strike in Europe since World War II relative to population. Memorial services are held in Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as synagogues, throughout the Republic. The same day, irate crowds burn down the British embassy in Merrion Square in Dublin. Anglo-Irish relations hit one of their lowest ebbs with the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Patrick Hillery, going to the United Nations Security Council to demand the involvement of a UN peacekeeping force in the Northern Ireland conflict.

In the days following Bloody Sunday, Bernadette Devlin, the independent Irish nationalist Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster, expresses anger at what she perceives as British government attempts to stifle accounts being reported about the shootings. Having witnessed the events firsthand, she is infuriated that the Speaker of the House of Commons, Selwyn Lloyd, consistently denies her the chance to speak in Parliament about the shootings, although parliamentary convention decrees that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion will be granted an opportunity to speak about it in Parliament. Devlin slaps Reginald Maudling and calls him a “murdering hypocrite” when he makes a statement to Parliament that the British Army had fired only in self-defence. She is temporarily suspended from Parliament as a result.

An inquest into the deaths is held in August 1973. The city’s coroner, Hubert O’Neill, a retired British Army major, issues a statement at the completion of the inquest. He declares:

“This Sunday became known as Bloody Sunday and bloody it was. It was quite unnecessary. It strikes me that the Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder.”

(Pictured: Home Secretary Reginald Maudling (left) and Member of Parliament for Mid Ulster Bernadette Devlin)


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The Teebane Bombing

The Teebane bombing takes place on January 17, 1992, at a rural crossroads between Omagh and Cookstown in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. A roadside bomb destroys a van carrying 14 construction workers who had been repairing a British Army base in Omagh. Eight of the men are killed and the rest are wounded. The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) claims responsibility, saying that the workers were killed because they were “collaborating” with the “forces of occupation.”

Since the beginning of its campaign in 1969, the Provisional IRA has launched frequent attacks on British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) bases in Northern Ireland. In August 1985 it begins targeting civilians who offer services to the security forces, particularly those employed by the security forces to maintain and repair its bases. Between August 1985 and January 1992, the IRA kills 23 people who had been working for (or offering services to) the security forces. The IRA also alleges that some of those targeted had links with Ulster loyalist paramilitaries.

On the evening of January 17, 1992, the 14 construction workers leave work at Lisanelly British Army base in Omagh. They are employees of Karl Construction, based in Antrim. They travel eastward in a Ford Transit van towards Cookstown. When the van reaches the rural Teebane Crossroads, just after 5:00 PM, IRA volunteers detonate a roadside bomb containing an estimated 600 pounds (270 kg) of homemade explosives in two plastic barrels. Later estimates report a 1,500-pound (680 kg) device. The blast is heard from at least ten miles away. It rips through one side of the van, instantly killing the row of passengers seated there. The vehicle’s upper part is torn asunder, and its momentum keeps it tumbling along the road for 30 yards. Some of the bodies of the dead and injured are blown into the adjacent field and ditch. IRA volunteers had detonated the bomb from about 100 yards away using a command wire. A car travelling behind the van is damaged in the explosion, but the driver is not seriously injured. Witnesses report hearing automatic fire immediately prior to the explosion.

Seven of the men are killed outright. They are William Gary Bleeks (25), Cecil James Caldwell (37), Robert Dunseath (25), David Harkness (23), John Richard McConnell (38), Nigel McKee (22) and Robert Irons (61). The van’s driver, Oswald Gilchrist (44), dies of his wounds in hospital four days later. Robert Dunseath is a British soldier serving with the Royal Irish Rangers. The other six workers are badly injured; two of them are members of the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). It is the highest death toll from one incident in Northern Ireland since 1988.

The IRA’s East Tyrone Brigade claims responsibility for the bombing soon afterward. It argues that the men were legitimate targets because they were “collaborators engaged in rebuilding Lisanelly barracks” and vowed that attacks on “collaborators” would continue.

Both unionist and Irish nationalist politicians condemn the attack. Sinn Féin president Gerry Adams, however, describes the bombing as “a horrific reminder of the failure of British policy in Ireland.” He adds that it highlights “the urgent need for an inclusive dialogue which can create a genuine peace process.” British Prime Minister John Major visits Northern Ireland within days and promises more troops, pledging that the IRA will not change government policy.

As all of those killed are Protestant, some interpret the bombing as a sectarian attack against their community. Less than three weeks later, the Ulster loyalist Ulster Defence Association (UDA) launches a ‘retaliation’ for the bombing. On February 5, two masked men armed with an automatic rifle and revolver enter Sean Graham’s betting shop on Ormeau Road in an Irish nationalist area of Belfast. The shop is packed with customers at the time. The men fire indiscriminately at the customers, killing five Irish Catholic civilians, before fleeing to a getaway car. The UDA claims responsibility using the cover name “Ulster Freedom Fighters,” ending its statement with “Remember Teebane.” After the shootings, a cousin of one of those killed at Teebane visits the betting shop and says, “I just don’t know what to say but I know one thing – this is the best thing that’s happened for the Provos [Provisional IRA] in this area in years. This is the best recruitment campaign they could wish for.”

The Historical Enquiries Team (HET) conducts an investigation into the bombing and releases its report to the families of the victims. It finds that the IRA unit had initially planned to carry out the attack on the morning of January 17 as the workers made their way to work but, due to fog, it was put off until the afternoon. Although suspects were rounded up and there were arrests in the wake of the attack, nobody has ever been charged or convicted of the bombing.

Karl Construction erects a granite memorial at the site of the attack and a memorial service is held there each year. In January 2012, on the 20th anniversary of the attack, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) MLA, Trevor Clarke, whose brother-in-law Nigel McKee at age 22 was the youngest person killed in the bombing, demands that republicans provide the names of the IRA bombers.