Hogan is one of four sons and three daughters of Patrick Hogan, farmer, and Margaret Hogan (née Galvin). His family are staunch nationalists who have been heavily involved in the land struggle. He is the brother of Major General Daniel (Dan) Hogan, who is Chief of Staff of the Defence Forces in the 1920s. On November 19, 1920, Hogan is elected company commander of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the Grangemockler area, where he is working on the family farm.
A dedicated footballer, Hogan is the established full back on the Tipperary county football team. During the Irish War of Independence very few championships are completed, and challenge matches are the chief attraction. Following the success of a Kildare–Dublin challenge match, a challenge is organised between Tipperary and Dublin at Croke Park, Dublin, on November 21, 1920.
The day before the match, Hogan travels on the train with the other members of the team. A number of the players, including Hogan, become involved in a fight with soldiers from the Royal Lincolnshire Regiment before throwing them from the train. On arrival at (Kingsbridge) Heuston Station, they quickly go their separate ways anticipating arrest. Michael and Thomas “Tommy” Ryan, the two IRA members on the team, decide to stay at Philip Shanahan‘s pub in Monto that night, rather than Barry’s Hotel as planned. There they learn that “there is a ‘big job coming off” the following day but are unaware of the details.
On the morning of the match, fourteen members of the British intelligence service are assassinated by the IRA. This leads to concerns about the match and the safety of spectators, and the Dublin brigade of the IRA urges that the game be cancelled. Shanahan informs the team of the shooting of the British agents. Ryan claims that Dan Breen advised them it would be better not to attend the match, but instead to return to Tipperary. Leading Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) officials Jim Nowlan, Dan MacCarthy and Luke O’Toole decide the match should proceed, arguing that a postponement would associate the IRA’s activities with the GAA.
Dublin and Tipperary are two of the best teams in the country at the time (and later contest the 1920 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship final when it is eventually played in 1922), so despite the events of the morning, a large crowd of some 10,000 people are in attendance.
At 3:00 p.m., not long after the match has started, a British military plane flies over and drops a flare, signaling British forces to converge on the ground. Black and Tans enter Croke Park and open fire on the crowd.
Hogan drops to the ground and is crawling to safety when a bullet hits him in the mouth. Tom Ryan, a young spectator from Wexford, enters the pitch to pray beside the dying Hogan and is also fatally shot. Another player, Jim Egan, is wounded, but survives. In all, fourteen people are killed and dozens are wounded and injured. The events of that day come to be known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Hogan’s body is returned to Grangemockler for burial on November 24, 1920. A huge crowd attends the funeral. He is buried in his football colours in a coffin draped with the tricolour. The GAA commemorates him by naming the main stand at Croke Park after him and erecting a monument to his memory at Grangemockler. His football jersey is in the South Tipperary County Museum in Clonmel.
Blair urges Protestant waverers to keep the Good Friday Agreement alive and insists that IRA disarmament, which the pro-British unionists are demanding, is “part of the agreement.”
Britain says two monitors, former President of FinlandMartti Ahtisaari and South AfricanCyril Ramaphosa, have reported to the province’s disarmament commission. “We and the Irish government understand from the decommissioning commission that a second inspection of IRA dumps has now taken place, and they have received a report to that effect from President Ahtisaari and Mr. Ramaphosa,” a Northern Ireland Office statement says.
The IRA discloses the inspection, aimed to show that arms from its long anti-British war are no longer being used, as tension grows ahead of a crucial October 28 conference of the Protestant Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). “We specifically announced that we would repeat the inspection of a number of arms dumps by third parties to confirm that our weapons are secure,” the IRA says. “We now wish to confirm that this re-inspection has taken place and thank those involved for their co-operation.”
Ramaphosa and Ahtisaari first examine arms stockpiles in June 2000.
The IRA is observing a ceasefire following a 30-year war against British rule in Northern Ireland.
U.S. PresidentBill Clinton joins Britain and Ireland in applauding the IRA’s decision that it will permit a fresh look at some of its hidden arsenal.
However, as Blair arrives three bomb alerts underline the fragility of a peace that has been shaken by sporadic attacks by armed dissidents who oppose the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. A detective escapes injury when a bomb under his car fails to explode in a carpark at Antrim, north Belfast. A police spokesman blames Protestant “loyalistparamilitaries.” Army bomb experts also deal with two “suspicious objects” found in other parts of the province, police say.
Blair’s visit is seen as a bid to garner support for First MinisterDavid Trimble, who is under pressure from within his Ulster Unionist Party over his decision to share power with Sinn Féin, even though the IRA has not disarmed.
Blair appeals to unionists ahead of their conference not to squander the accord’s hard-won political advances. He warns that disarmament will be out of reach if the coalition falls. “This is the only way forward for the future. If the Executive collapses and the Assembly then collapses, which must automatically happen, you don’t have a process at all, you don’t have decommissioning,” he tells reporters.
Confirmation of the second inspection is seen as a lift for the peace process which might ease pressure on Trimble.
UUP hardliners on Saturday, October 28, plan to urge grassroots members to back their demand for Trimble to pull out of the ruling coalition by November 30 if the IRA has not disarmed by that time. However, Trimble, at a news conference, dismisses the five-week deadline as “a crude device.”
(From: “IRA confirms arms dump inspections,” CNN.com, October 26, 2000 | Pictured: David Trimble, Seamus Mallon and Tony Blair at Stormont. Photograph: Eric Luke/The Irish Times)
The move forces the Government of the United Kingdom to either again suspend the assembly, with rule of Northern Ireland returning to London, or call new elections.
The UUP, the largest Protestant party, are angry over lack of progress on the decommissioning of weapons by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). UUP leader David Trimble (pictured), who has already quit as the assembly’s leader, says his party has spent eighteen months in the government with representatives of Sinn Féin, the republican political party, without the IRA putting its weapons beyond use.
“We have sustained an inclusive executive for eighteen months. For eighteen months we have demonstrated every day our willingness to make progress in terms of this institution and politics in Northern Ireland,” says Trimble, who shared the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize with Catholic moderate leader John Hume. “And for those eighteen months the republican movement have done nothing, nothing at all to reciprocate the sacrifice and risks we have made.”
Trimble later tells CNN the move is a “last resort,” adding: “It’s still up to the IRA. They can still save the situation by doing what they promised to do eighteen months ago. I wish they would.” He adds, “I resigned on the 1st of July. That was a clear indication to the IRA if they hadn’t seen it beforehand of the need to do something. We have been remarkably patient over the last few months — waiting, waiting, waiting. I don’t particularly welcome the resumption of direct rule from London but that will come about quite soon if the IRA don’t move.”
Trimble says the situation is helped, however, because “it removes from office the two Sinn Féin ministers who are there. They will be out of office, and it should be quite clear to them and quite clear to their electorate that they have brought about a crisis by their failure to keep their promises.”
Trimble says the main nationalist newspaper in Northern Ireland has called on the IRA to start the process of disarming and lays the blame clearly on them. “It’s not just unionists who are pointing the finger and saying ‘you’ve let us down’ — it is also nationalists.” Trimble adds that although his move is clearly a step back, he hopes it will soon be a case of “two steps forward.”
There is speculation earlier in the week that the IRA leadership is on the brink of an historic move on weapons. It had been hoped the IRA could agree with disarmament officials to seal one or more of its hidden arms dumps with concrete. The IRA has already allowed foreign diplomats to visit a few arms dumps in secret. These weapons are the first likely candidates for decommissioning as required in Northern Ireland’s 1998 Good Friday Agreement.
It is now up to the Northern Ireland minister, John Reid, to decide whether to order a short suspension of the assembly or to dissolve it, returning to direct rule from London, and call new elections. The assembly cannot survive without the participation of either the Ulster Unionists or the largest Catholic-supported party, Hume’s Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP).
CNN’s European political editor Robin Oakley says the move by the Ulster Unionists means Northern Ireland is facing another crisis after a summer of disappointment and an upsurge of cross-community violence. He says the danger of calling new elections is that there is evidence from the general election earlier in the year of an increase in support for hardline parties.
There is increased support for Sinn Féin, the republican political party, and the Democratic Unionists, who are opposed to the peace agreement forged in Northern Ireland in 1998.
Trimble agrees in November 1999 to form a four-party government that includes Sinn Féin on condition that IRA disarmament follows. Since then, Trimble has battled hard-liners, inside and outside his party, to keep the coalition intact while the IRA makes little movement on the issue.
Britain has stripped power from the executive three times – first for an indefinite period in February 2000 when it appeared likely that Trimble would be ousted as a leader. The Ulster Unionists resume power-sharing after the IRA says it intends to begin putting its weapons “completely and verifiably beyond use.” But the assembly is then suspended twice for 24-hour periods over the summer after Trimble quit as first minister.
(From: “Unionists quit N. Ireland assembly,” CNN.com, October 18, 2001)
Patrick J. Killoran, Irish traditional fiddle player, bandleader and recording artist is born on September 21, 1903, in Emlaghgissan (also spelled “Emlagation”), a townland in the civil parish of Emlaghfad near the town of Ballymote, County Sligo. He is regarded, along with James Morrison and Michael Coleman, as one of the finest exponents of the south Sligo fiddle style in the “golden age” of the ethnic recording industry of the 1920s and 1930s.
Killoran’s father Patrick plays the flute and his mother Mary the concertina, but he is also influenced by local fiddle master Philip O’Beirne, who had earlier tutored Michael Coleman. As a teenager, he is a volunteer with the Ballymote-based 3rd Battalion of the south Sligo Brigade of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence.
In 1925, Killoran emigrates to New York City, arriving on May 19 on the Cunard liner Scythia. Within a few months, he officially declares his intention to become a citizen of the United States, listing his address as 227 East 126th Street in east Harlem and his occupation as “laborer.” He later lodges with fellow Sligo fiddler James Morrison in a Columbus Avenue apartment on Manhattan‘s Upper West Side. A 1927 newspaper ad for “Morrison’s Orchestra” offers “Irish music by P. Killoran and J. Morrison, celebrated violinists,” giving 507 West 133d Street in west Harlem as the contact address. He soon launches his own career as a soloist and bandleader. A publicity photo of his quartet c. 1928 includes button accordionist D. Casey, tenor banjo player Richard Curran and second fiddler Denis Murphy. By the next year, he is performing on a weekly radio program sponsored by the Pride of Erin Ballrooms, located at the corner of Bedford and Atlantic Avenues in Brooklyn. He also tries another side occupation as his 1931 naturalization petition lists his occupation as “Music store owner.”
At the Pride of Erin, and later at the Sligo Ballroom at 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue in Harlem, Killoran’s “Irish Orchestra” provides music for Irish dancing, while Jack Healy, another Ballymote native, leads a group for “American” dancing. Healy, as a singer and tenor saxophone player, also performs and records with Killoran’s group, the membership of which over the course of the 1930s includes fiddler Paddy Sweeney, another Sligo native, fiddle and clarinet player Paul Ryan, Ryan’s brother Jim on the C Melody saxophone, pianists Eileen O’Shea, Edmund Tucker and Jim McGinn, drummer Mickey Murphy, button accordionists Tommy Flanagan and William McElligott and tenor banjo/tenor guitar player Michael “Whitey” Andrews.
Killoran’s band is variously billed as his “Pride of Erin Orchestra,” “Radio Dance Orchestra,” “Sligo Ballroom Orchestra,” “Lakes of Sligo Orchestra” and “Irish Barn Dance Boys.” The group is a popular choice for county association functions, particularly those of Sligo and Roscommon. In 1932, he leads a band that accompanies CardinalWilliam Henry O’Connell of Boston to the Eucharistic Congress in Ireland and briefly bills his group as the “Pride of Erin Eucharistic Congress Orchestra.” He regularly performs at Irish beach resorts on the Rockaway peninsula and in East Durham in the Catskill Mountains.
Uniquely among the major New York Irish musicians of the pre-World War II era, Killoran continues his musical career through the 1950s. He issues new recordings, including duets with flute player Mike Flynn and some fiddle-and-viola sides with Paul Ryan, and leads an active dance band. Age and illness eventually force him to retire, and in 1962 he turns over leadership of the band, a fixture at the City Center Ballroom, to button accordionist Joe Madden, father of Cherish the Ladies flute player Joanie Madden.
In 1956, Killoran is a co-founder of the Dublin Recording Company, later better known simply as Dublin Records, which is organized to record new Irish discs in New York.
Killoran is a founding member of the Emerald Irish Musicians Benevolent Society, a group that stages “Night of Shamrocks” concerts to raise money for the benefit of sick and deceased Irish musicians in New York. He is also a member of the Irish Musicians Association of America, and a New York branch of that organization, which later merges with Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Eireann, is named for him.
In addition to the 1932 trip to the Eucharistic Congress, Killoran returns to Ireland at least twice. In 1949, he plays on a Radio Éireann program hosted by piper and folklorist Séamus Ennis. Some selections from that broadcast are recorded on a private disc and are later released on CD. On a 1960 visit, he visits Sligo and Clare and performs at a concert in County Longford.
Killoran is married twice. His first wife, Anna Gorman, a native of County Roscommon, dies in 1935. His second wife is Betty (Bridget) Hayes, an immigrant from Shanaway West, County Clare, who survives him. He dies in New York City on April 24, 1965.
A “Paddy Killoran Traditional Festival” is celebrated in the third week of June in Ballymote, where a monument in Killoran’s honor is erected in 2012.
Christened as William O’Brien, the seventh child of Arthur O’Brien, clerk, and Mary O’Brien (née Christie), who is from County Meath, Ó Briain takes an interest in the Irish language from an early age and begins learning Irish by himself from a grammar book, as it is not encouraged by his teachers at the Christian Brothers’ O’Connell School nor spoken by his parents. While still at the O’Connell School, he starts using the Irish version of his name. He also attends meetings of the Gaelic League, then attends University College Dublin (UCD) on a scholarship, where he studies French, English and Irish, receiving a BA (1909) and an MA (1910).
UCD decides to start awarding one annual scholarship for overseas travel in 1911, and Ó Briain wins the first one, using it to visit Germany and study under Kuno Meyer and Rudolf Thurneysen. After three years, he returns home, where he rejoins the Gaelic League and begins teaching French at UCD. He also joins the Irish Volunteers then, the following year, Seán T. O’Kelly convinces him to join the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
Around this time, Ó Briain joins Sinn Féin, and he stands unsuccessfully for the party in Mid Armagh at the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, taking 5,689 votes. His campaign leads, indirectly, to his arrest and three months in jail in Belfast. In 1920, following his release, he is appointed a judge in the then-illegal republican court system in Galway, and visits both France and Italy to try to source weapons for the Irish Republican Army (IRA). In November 1920, he is arrested in the UCG dining room by Black and Tans, and is imprisoned for thirteen months, first in Galway and then in the Curragh camp in County Kildare, thereby missing the conclusion of the Irish War of Independence. By the time he is released, the Anglo-Irish Treaty has been signed. He supports the treaty and takes no further part in militant activity.
In the newly independent Ireland, Ó Briain remains a professor at Galway. He also stands in the 1925 Seanad election, although he is not successful. He is the founding secretary of the Taibhdhearc na Gaillimhe theatre, also acting in many of its productions, and spends much time translating works from English and the Romance languages into Irish. He stands to become president of UCG in 1945, but is not elected, and in the 1940s and 1950s is best known for his many appearances on television and radio.
From his retirement in 1959, Ó Briain lives in Dublin. In 1974, the National University of Ireland (NUI) confers an honorary doctorate on him. He dies on August 12, 1974, at St. Gabriel’s Hospital, Cabinteely, County Dublin. His funeral to Glasnevin Cemetery is almost a state occasion, with a huge attendance of public figures, and a military firing party at the graveside, where the oration is given by Micheál Mac Líammóir and a lesson is read by Siobhán McKenna. For days after his death, the newspapers carry tributes to his many-sided career and personality. On the one hundredth anniversary of his birth, Proinsias Mac Aonghusa and Art Ó Beoláin write commemorative articles in Feasta.
On September 1, 1921, Ó Briain marries Helen Lawlor, of Dublin, who dies two years before him. The couple’s only child is Eibhlín Ní Bhriain, who is a journalist for The Irish Times and other periodicals.
Peters is born on July 6, 1939, in Halewood, Lancashire, England, later living at 5 Mere Avenue in Alkrington, where she goes to primary school. She moves to Ballymena (and later Belfast) at the age of eleven when her father’s job is relocated to Northern Ireland. As a teenager, her father encourages her athletic career by building her home practice facilities as birthday gifts. She qualifies as a teacher and works while training.
After Ballymena, the family moves to Portadown where she attends Portadown College. The headmaster, Donald Woodman, and the PE teacher, Kenneth McClelland, introduce her to athletics, McClelland being her first coach. She is head girl of the school in 1956.
At the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, competing for Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Peters wins the gold medal in the women’s pentathlon. She had finished 4th in 1964 and 9th in 1968. To win the gold medal, she narrowly beats the local favourite, West Germany’s Heide Rosendahl, by 10 points, setting a world record score. After her victory, death threats are phoned into the BBC: “Mary Peters is a Protestant and has won a medal for Britain. An attempt will be made on her life, and it will be blamed on the IRA … Her home will be going up in the near future.” But Peters insists she will return home to Belfast. She is greeted by fans and a band at the airport and paraded through the city streets but is not allowed back in her flat for three months. Turning down jobs in the United States and Australia, where her father lives, she insists on remaining in Northern Ireland.
In 1972, Peters wins the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award: “Peters, a 33-year-old secretary from Belfast, won Britain’s only athletics gold at the Munich Olympics. The pentathlon competition was decided on the final event, the 200m, and Peters claimed the title by one-tenth of a second.”
She represents Northern Ireland at every Commonwealth Games between 1958 and 1974. In these games she wins two gold medals for the pentathlon, plus a gold and silver medal for the shot put.
In May 2001, following her athletic career, Peters becomes a Trustee of The Outward Bound Trust and is Vice-President of the Northern Ireland Outward Bound Association. She is also Patron of Springhill Hospice in Rochdale, Greater Manchester.
Peters is appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) for services to athletics in the 1973 New Year Honours. For services to sport, she is promoted in the same Order to Commander (CBE) in the 1990 Birthday Honours and again to Dame Commander (DBE) in the 2000 Birthday Honours. In the 2015 New Year Honours, she is awarded as Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH), also for services to sport and the community in Northern Ireland, and in 2017, she is made a Dame of the Order of Saint John (DStJ). She is appointed a Lady Companion of the Order of the Garter (LG) on February 27, 2019, and therefore granted the title Lady. She represents the Order at the 2023 coronation.
Northern Ireland’s premier athletics track, on the outskirts of Belfast, is named after Peters. A statue of her stands within it.
In April 2009, Peters is named the Lord Lieutenant of the City of Belfast; she retires from the post in 2014, being succeeded by Fionnuala Jay-O’Boyle. She is a Freeman of the Cities of Lisburn and Belfast.
Hammond is born on December 5, 1928, in Miss Kells’s nursing home on the Castlereagh Road in Belfast, the son of Leslie Hammond, a tram driver, and his wife Annie (née Lamont). His parents are not city people; his mother grew up near Ballybogy in the Ballymoney area of County Antrim, and his father, though from a family with roots in south County Londonderry, had lived in Ballymoney as a boy, and had been apprenticed to a blacksmith there. Both have a strong sense of their rural identity and maintain the Ulster Scots dialect of their childhood. They are never quite at home in the Belfast suburb of Cregagh, and in particular do not share the sectarian attitudes that are much more present in 1930s Belfast than they had been in north Antrim, one of the last strongholds of Presbyterian radicalism. Even as a boy, Hammond is interested in the old songs that his mother sang and realises that the traditions in which his parents had been nurtured are disappearing quickly in an increasingly urbanising and modernising world. When he encounters the work of Emyr Estyn Evans in the early 1940s, he is encouraged to document both rural tradition and the street life of the city, and he and a couple of friends, though still just teenagers, ride off on their bicycles to look for folklore in the hinterland of Belfast.
After primary school, Hammond wins a scholarship in 1941 to Methodist College Belfast, where he does well in examinations, and then goes to Stranmillis University College to train as a teacher. In his first job, in Harding Memorial primary school in east Belfast, he proves to be a popular, idealistic teacher, and is remembered by his pupils fifty years later as a fine singer and a teller of ghost stories, who had taken the class on memorable youth-hosteling trips to the Mourne Mountains. Youth hosteling and folklore collecting increases his awareness and understanding of the rich traditions of the whole community in the north of Ireland, and he is never constrained by political or religious barriers. His early career mirrors closely that of James Hawthorne, and their paths are to cross in later life.
Hammond is friendly with many others active in the cultural life of Northern Ireland and makes a name for himself as a song collector and eventually as an expert on all aspects of traditional singing. In 1956, he is awarded a scholarship to travel in the United States to meet the important pioneers of folk-music collecting and performance there. He records his first LP record of Ulster songs, I Am The Wee Falorie Man (1958), in the United States, and becomes friends with Pete Seeger, the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, with old blues singers, and notably with Liam Clancy, one of the three Clancy brothers who as a quartet with Tommy Makem are to popularise Irish folk music in the United States and elsewhere.
On returning to Belfast, Hammond takes a job in 1958 in Orangefield secondary school in the east of the city, where the highly regarded headmaster John Malone encourages new approaches to education. Among his pupils at Orangefield is George Ivan “Van” Morrison, who credits him with inspiring his interest in Irish traditional music. Hammond enjoys teaching but is increasingly drawn to folk-song performance and recording. He appears regularly on radio programmes of the BBC and Radio Éireann, and in 1964 joins the school’s department in BBC Northern Ireland. There, with colleagues like Sam Hanna Bell, James Hawthorne and others, he works on programmes such as Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland, which for the first time introduces pupils (and many adults) to local history and to aspects of tradition. In 1968, with two friends, the poets Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, he puts on poetry and traditional music events in schools all over the province. The Arts Council funds the Room to Rhyme project, which is immensely influential and inspiring, and is still talked about many years later by those who attended as children.
Hammond is creatively involved with hundreds of hours of broadcasting, in television as well as radio, and eventually for adults as well as children. He writes scripts, produces documentary series such as Ulster in Focus and Explorations, and brings an artistic sensibility to filming, as well as working sympathetically with traditional singers and craftspeople. Dusty Bluebells, a sensitively made film of Belfast children’s street games, wins the prestigious Golden Harp award in 1972. After he leaves the BBC to work as a freelance, and founds Flying Fox Films in 1986, he continues making documentaries on many aspects of Ulster life and heritage. His film called Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog (1986), about working in the Belfast shipyards, also wins a Golden Harp award. A companion book of the same name is published. Another book is Belfast, City of Song (1989), with Maurice Leyden. In 1979, he edits a volume of the songs of Thomas Moore. His documentary programmes include films about singers from Boho, County Fermanagh, and about the big houses of the gentry in Ireland. The Magic Fiddle (1991/2) examines the role of the instrument in the folk music of Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, and the American south, while Another Kind of Freedom (1993) is about the experiences of a former Orangefield pupil, the Beirut hostage Brian Keenan. He also produces and directs the films Something to Write Home About (1998), Where Are You Now? (1999), and Bogland (1999), all of which explore Seamus Heaney’s home region and experiences.
The first poem in Heaney’s collection Wintering Out (1972) is entitled “For David Hammond and Michael Longley.” Their lifelong friendship leads to several other creative collaborations. In particular, after a distressing evening in 1972 when Hammond, affected by the despair and terror unleashed by Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of his city, is for once unable to sing, Heaney meditates on the experience in an essay and in an important poem, “The singer’s house” (subsequently included in his 1979 Field Work collection). The poem urges the singer to keep singing, to defend the values of art and friendship in a hostile time. Hammond collaborates with Dónal Lunny and other traditional musicians to bring out an LP also called The Singer’s House (1978), which includes Heaney’s poem on the album sleeve, and features some of the songs that he had made famous, such as “My Aunt Jane” and “Bonny Woodgreen,” from his vast repertoire of songs from Ulster. The album is reissued in 1980.
In 1995, Hammond is one of Heaney’s personal guests at the award of his Nobel prize in Stockholm, characteristically wearing his usual, mustard-yellow, cattle-dealer boots with evening dress. On another formal occasion, when he is awarded an honorary doctorate by Dublin City University in November 2003, he surprises the audience by standing up in his academic robes to sing “My Lagan love,” instead of giving an address. His unique, light mellow voice is an ideal vehicle for the traditional ballads which he knows so well. He records a number of records in the 1960s, including Belfast Street Songs, and publishes the book Songs of Belfast (1978). He also encourages traditional musicians like Arty McGlynn, and collaborates with them on various recording projects. He is well known for live and often impromptu performances at festivals and venues in Ireland and the United States. He also performs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Hammond is also a notable collaborator with poets and dramatists, especially in the important Field Day Theatre Company project, of which he is a director, along with Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Seamus Deane, Thomas Kilroy, and the project’s founders, Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. He supports the Field Day search for a “fifth province,” where history and community and culture can intersect, believing that to speak unthinkingly of “two traditions” is to perpetuate superficial political divisions. As he says in an interview in The Irish Times on July 4, 1998, songs can “take you out of yourself” and become bridges to unite people.
Hammond receives many honours. In 1994, he receives the Estyn Evans award for his contribution to mutual understanding, and his work is featured in several major events in his honour: in the University of North Florida (1999), in the Celtic Film Festival in Belfast (2003), and in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library (2005). A Time to Dream, a film about his life and work, is broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in December 2008.
Hammond dies in hospital in Belfast, after a long illness, on August 25, 2008, survived by his wife Eileen (née Hambleton), whom he marries on July 19, 1954, and by their son and three daughters. His funeral in St Finnian’s church is a major cultural event, where friends sing, play and speak in his honour.
In Seamus Heaney’s last collection of poetry, Human Chain (2010), he includes a poignant farewell to Hammond. The poet imagines (or perhaps dreams) of another visit to the singer’s house, but this time “The door was open, and the house was dark.”
(From: “Hammond, David Andrew (‘Davy’)” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, December 2014)
An intelligence officer with the 4th Battalion of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA in the Ranelagh area, Fovargue is captured by the British Army in Dublin. Under interrogation, he allegedly leaks information that results in the arrest of the other members of his unit a few days later. In return for this information, the Intelligence Corps allegedly allows him to escape during a staged ambush in Dublin’s South Circular Road.
This attempted ruse however does not go unnoticed by Michael Collins‘s many moles inside the Crown’s security forces. On the night of the escape, Detective ConstableDavid Neligan of the Dublin Metropolitan Police‘s G Division is on duty in Dublin Castle when a telephone message on a police form is passed to him. The message, issued by the British Military Headquarters, states that a “Sinn Féin” suspect named Fovargue has escaped from three Intelligence Corps officers in a car while en route to prison. It gives a description of his appearance and asks that the British Army be notified in the event of his recapture by the Dublin Metropolitan Police.
Joe Kinsella is the I/O of the 4th Battalion. He is temporarily transferred to take care of munitions under Seán Russell for a few weeks and Fovargue is put in his place. From Joe Kinsella’s own statement to the Irish Bureau of Military History:
“From the outset I personally did not place a lot of trust in him, because on the morning that he took over from me he appeared to me, to be too inquisitive about the movements of Michael Collins and the G.H.Q. staff generally. He wanted to know where they could be located at any time. He said that he had big things in view, and that it would be to the advantage of the movement generally if he was in a position to get in touch with the principal men with the least possible delay. From his attitude I there and then formed the opinion, rightly or wrongly, that he was inclined to overstep his position. I did not feel too happy about him and I discussed him with Sean Dowling. It transpired that my impressions of this man were correct. I told him of two meeting places of Intelligence staff, one of Company Intelligence held at Rathmines Road and one of Brigade Intelligence held at Saville Place. A short time after giving him this information both these places were raided…I was now confirmed in my suspicions that Fovargue was giving away information. He was later shot in England by the IRA.”
Neither was Neligan fooled by this, as he explains:
“Now if they had said that this man (who was completely unknown to both of us) had escaped from one I.O. it might have sounded reasonable enough. But to tell us that an unarmed man had escaped out of a motorcar in the presence of three presumably armed men was imposing a strain on our credulity. Both of us thought this story too good to be true.”
The two men retype the message and pass it to Collins the following day. Meanwhile, Fovargue has been sent to England where he adopts the alias of Richard Staunton. He has in fact been sent to England by Intelligence Corps Colonel Ormonde Winter to infiltrate the IRA in Britain.
Sean Kavanagh, a Kilkenny IRA man, claims that Fovargue is put in a cell with him in Kilmainham Gaol in 1921 in order to try to extract information from him.
On April 2, 1921, a boy walking on the golf links of the Ashford Manor Golf Club in Ashford, Middlesex discovers the body of Fovargue, who had been shot through the chest. Discovered near the corpse is a small piece of paper on which has been scribbled in blue pencil the words “Let spies and traitors beware – IRA.”
(Pictured: Dublin Brigade IRA officer’s cap badge in white metal, “FF” (Fianna Fáil) at centre, surrounded by a garter bearing the motto “Drong Átha Cliath” (Dublin Brigade), all on an eight-pointed rayed star)
Brooke is born on June 9, 1888, at Colebrooke Park, his family’s neo-Classicalancestral seat on what is then the several-thousand-acre Colebrooke Estate, just outside Brookeborough, a village near Lisnaskea in County Fermanagh. He is the eldest son of Sir Arthur Douglas Brooke, 4th Baronet, whom he succeeds as 5th Baronet when his father dies in 1907. His mother is Gertrude Isabella Batson. He is a nephew of Field MarshalAlan Brooke, 1st Viscount Alanbrooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) during World War II, who is only five years his senior. His sister Sheelah marries Sir Henry Mulholland, Speaker of the Stormont House of Commons and son of Lord Dunleath. He is educated for five years at St. George’s School in Pau, France, and then at Winchester College (1901–05).
Brooke is a very active Ulster Unionist Party member and ally of Edward Carson. He founds his own paramilitary group, Brooke’s Fermanagh Vigilance, from men returning from the war front in 1918. Although the umbrella Ulster Volunteers had been quiescent during the war, it is not defunct. It re-emerges strongly in 1920, subsuming groups like Brooke’s.
In 1920, having reached the rank of captain, Brooke leaves the British Army to farm the Colebrooke Estate, the family estate in west Ulster, at which point he turns toward a career in politics.
Brooke has a very long political career. When he resigns the Premiership of Northern Ireland in March 1963, he is Northern Ireland’s longest-serving prime minister, having held office for two months short of 20 years. He also establishes a United Kingdom record by holding government office continuously for 33 years.
On May 2, 1943, Brooke succeeds John M. Andrews as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. In 1952, while Prime Minister, was raised to the peerage as Viscount Brookeborough, the title taken from the village named after the Brookes. Although a peer, he retained his seat in the House of Commons at Stormont and remained Prime Minister for another decade.
As the Northern Ireland economy begins to de-industrialise in the mid-1950s, leading to high unemployment amongst the Protestant working classes, Brooke faces increasing disenchantment amongst UUP backbenchers for what is regarded as his indifferent and ineffectual approach to mounting economic problems. As this disenchantment grows, British civil servants and some members of the UUP combine to exert discreet and ultimately effective pressure on Brooke to resign to make way for Captain Terence O’Neill, who is Minister of Finance.
Brooke is noted for his casual style toward his ministerial duties. Terence O’Neill later writes of him, “he was good company and a good raconteur, and those who met him imagined that he was relaxing away from his desk. However, they did not realise that there was no desk.”
In his retirement Brooke develops commercial interests as chairman of Carreras (Northern Ireland), a director of Devenish Trade, and president of the Northern Ireland Institute of Directors. He is also made an honorary LL.D. of Queen’s University Belfast.
From 1970 to 1973, years in which the Stormont institution comes under its greatest strain and eventually crumbles, Brooke makes only occasional forays into political life. In 1972, he appears next to William Craig MP on the balcony of Parliament Buildings at Stormont, a diminutive figure beside the leader of the Vanguard Unionist Progressive Party (VUPP) who is rallying right-wing Unionists against the Government of Northern Ireland. He opposes the Westminsterwhite paper on the future of Northern Ireland and causes some embarrassment to his son, Captain John Brooke, the UUP Chief Whip and an ally of Brian Faulkner, by speaking against the Faulkner ministry‘s proposals.
Brooke dies at his home, Colebrooke Park, on the Colebrooke Estate, on August 18, 1973. His remains are cremated at Roselawn Cemetery, East Belfast, three days later, and, in accordance with his wishes, his ashes are scattered on the demesne surrounding his beloved Colebrooke Park.
In effect a special extension of the Defence of the Realm Acts, the aim of the Act is to increase convictions of nationalist rebels while averting the need to declare martial law. Under Section 3(6) of the Act, military authorities are empowered to jail any Irish person without charge or trial. Secret courts-martial are established, and lawyers (appointed by Crown agents) can be present only if the death penalty is involved. Inquests of military or police actions are banned.
By the middle of 1920, Ireland is in the throes of a full-fledged rebellion that is barely recognized by the British Government in Ireland headquartered in Dublin Castle. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), the military arm of the Dáil Éireann revolutionary government, is engaged in a guerilla campaign to destroy elements of British power, particularly burning down courthouses and attacking members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), Britain’s police force in the countryside.
The British response to the increase in violence and the assassination of police officers is twofold. To suppress the IRA “murderers,” Major GeneralHugh Tudor, commander of the RIC and self-styled “Chief of Police,” begins supplementing that body with the employment of World War I veterans known as the “Black and Tans” because of the colour of their surplus World War I uniforms, and an additional temporary force of Auxiliaries. With little discipline and utter indifference to the plight or moral indignation of the Irish population, these groups raid and burn villages, creameries, and farm buildings to intimidate supporters of the IRA.
The second measure is the enactment of the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act (ROIA). The Act is envisioned as a remedy to the problem perceived by Chief Secretary for Ireland Sir Hamar Greenwood that “throughout the greater part of Ireland criminal justice can no longer be administered by the ordinary constitutional process of trial by judge and jury.”
The genesis of the Act may be seen in a Cabinet discussion on May 31, 1920, in which the members focus on the violence in Ireland. Rather than addressing violence as the product of rebellion, Greenwood insists that, “The great task is to crush out murder and arson.” He asserts that the violence is perpetrated by handsomely paid thugs. Commenting on a pending Irish bill, Secretary of State for WarWinston Churchill states, “You should include in the Bill a special tribunal for trying murderers. It is monstrous that we have some 200 murders, and no one hung.” The prime minister agrees that convicted murderers should be hanged but questions whether convictions can be obtained from Catholics. The concern of all is that the civil courts are incapable of strictly administering justice to the revolutionaries because the juries largely consisted of Irish Catholics. The ensuing discussion of possibly imposing court-martial jurisdiction is inconclusive.
After the May 31 meeting, Greenwood investigates the feasibility of imposing martial law in Ireland and raises martial law as the specific subject of a July 23, 1920, conference committee meeting of the Cabinet led by Prime MinisterDavid Lloyd George to which the key members of the Dublin Castle administration are invited. William E. Wylie, the law advisor at Dublin Castle, notes that the RIC is disintegrating through resignations brought on by terrorist attacks, and that with “regard to the Civil Courts, the entire administration of the Imperial Government had ceased.” The civilian participants from Dublin Castle, especially Wylie, maintain that martial law is counter-productive, and will only antagonize the Irish people. As an alternative to martial law, General Tudor argues for the imposition of court-martial jurisdiction. Tudor argues forcefully that court-martial jurisdiction over all crimes will support the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries that he is recruiting. He declaims that “not a single criminal had been brought to justice for murder.” Lloyd George closes the discussion directing the Dublin Castle participants to provide final proposals for enforcement of the laws.
A draft bill to establish military criminal jurisdiction is considered by the Cabinet on July 26. The prime minister’s most telling contribution is his question as to whether a convicted man would be shot or hanged. It appears that he is comforted by the response that the defendant will be tried under the ordinary law which implies death by hanging. The resulting bill is completed by July 30, 1920, and is then quickly pushed through Parliament and receives royal assent on August 9, 1920. The ROIA provides that all crimes punishable under the laws in Ireland can be brought before a court-martial. The court-martial will have the power to impose any punishment authorized by statute or common law including the death penalty. The final step is taken on August 20, 1920, when the final regulations for implementation go into effect.
The combination of growing police and military pressure and recourse to the ROIA lead to increased internments of known or suspected IRA members and a steady increase in convictions to 50-60 per week. This makes it more difficult for IRA soldiers to continue openly working day jobs while carrying on part-time guerrilla activities. As a result, the IRA shifts its approach to guerrilla warfare in the rural counties. Volunteers from IRA units are organized into elite, full-time, mobile flying columns of around 25 men who live off the land and on the run. These flying columns prove to be more suited to ambushes of patrols and convoys and other targets of opportunity, rather than attacks on barracks which had become better defended.
On December 10, 1920, martial law is proclaimed in counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick, and Tipperary. In January 1921 martial law is extended to counties Clare and Waterford.
In a crucial judgement, R (Egan) v Macready, the Irish courts rule that the Act does not give power to impose the death penalty. This would no doubt have proved politically contentious had not hostilities ended the same day.
Despite its name, the courts are of the view that ROIA applies in England as well. Following the creation of the Irish Free State, when the Act is repealed by implication, it is still used to deport ex-members of the Irish Self-Determination League to Ireland.
seamus dubhghaill 