seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Journalism


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Death of Bill O’Herlihy, Broadcaster & Public Relations Executive

Bill O’Herlihy, Irish television broadcaster and public relations executive, dies in Dublin on May 25, 2015. He is best known for his broadcasts for Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), primarily in the sporting arena.

Born and raised in Glasheen in Cork, County Cork, O’Herlihy is the son of a local government official and the grandson of William O’Herlihy, a news editor for The Cork Examiner. He is educated at Glasheen boys’ national school and later at St. Finbarr’s College, Farranferris.

After finishing his schooling at fifteen, O’Herlihy follows his grandfather into journalism and secures a job in the reading room of The Cork Examiner. He is only seventeen years-old when he subsequently becomes sub-editor of the Evening Echo, a position he holds for five years. He also graduates to the positions of news, features and sports reporter.

In the early 1960s O’Herlihy begins his broadcasting career when he starts to do local association football reports from Cork for Radio Éireann. In 1965, he makes his first television broadcast in a programme commemorating the sinking of the RMS Lusitania off the Cork coast. After three years O’Herlihy is asked to join RTÉ’s current affairs programme 7 Days to add the required field-reporting skills to the studio-based interviews. The programme has a reputation for its hard-hitting investigative reporting and he reports on many varying stories from illegal fishing in Cork to the outbreak of the crisis in Northern Ireland. In November 1970, the 7 Days programme comes into controversy when O’Herlihy reports a story on illegal money lending. The report is unconventional as it is one of the first television pieces to use hidden cameras, it claims the government is not responding to illegal moneylending. A tribunal of inquiry follows, and O’Herlihy is forced to move away from current affairs.

Following this controversy, while O’Herlihy is not sacked as he has fifteen months left on his contract with RTÉ, he is moved to the RTÉ Sports department. There he works under Michael O’Hehir, who dislikes him and his broadcasting style. In spite of this O’Herlihy fronts RTÉ’s television coverage of the Olympic Games that year. He also becomes involved in the production of various sports programmes.

O’Herlihy is not long in the RTÉ Sports department when he becomes a regular presenter for such programmes as Sunday Sport and Sports Stadium. In 1978 he becomes RTÉ Soccer host alongside Eamon Dunphy and, in 1984, Johnny Giles joins the panel and Liam Brady follows in 1998. Since 1974 O’Herlihy becomes RTÉ’s chief sports presenter for such events as all Olympic Games until 2012, FIFA World Cups until 2014, UEFA European Football Championships until 2012 and European and World Track and Field Championships. He hosts RTÉ highlights of the Ryder Cup in 2006 when it is at the K Club in County Kildare and continues to present coverage of Ireland’s soccer internationals for RTÉ, along with Dunphy, Giles and Brady.

O’Herlihy hosts RTÉ’s coverage of rugby union in the 1980s and early 1990s. However, when RTÉ attains the rights to cover the English Premier League in 1992, Tom McGurk takes over as host of RTÉ’s coverage of rugby union. O’Herlihy covers the Premier League, Irish Internationals and The Champions League before dropping the Premier League in 2008. He continues to cover the Olympic Games and International Athletic Championships such as the European and World Athletics. He presents the first Rugby World Cup on RTÉ television in 1987 and, with Jim Carney, co-presents the first edition of The Sunday Game in 1979.

In 2012, while covering Chloe Magee‘s progress at the 2012 Summer Olympics O’Herlihy remarks that badminton was once considered “a mainly Protestant sport.” RTÉ subsequently receives a number of complaints, and while Magee criticises the remarks, the argument is made that the incident inadvertently reflected a complex historical reality.

O’Herlihy presents RTÉ Sport‘s coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, his ninth FIFA World Cup. He fronts 18 European Championships and FIFA World Cups for RTÉ, the last of which comes in 2014. This proves to be the final tournament with O’Herlihy at the helm. He retires at its conclusion and dies the following year.

O’Herlihy attends the 12th Irish Film & Television Awards on Sunday, May 24, 2015. He dies peacefully in his sleep at his home the following day at the age of 76 nearly a year after his retirement. He is survived by wife Hillary and daughters Jill and Sally. Giles, Brady and Dunphy appear on The Late Late Show in tribute later that week. At the time of his death O’Herlihy is working on a sports version of Reeling in the Years, which RTÉ immediately cancels.


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Birth of George Henry Perrott Buchanan, Poet, Novelist & Journalist

George Henry Perrott Buchanan, poet, novelist, and journalist is born on January 9, 1904, in Kilwaughter, County Antrim, in what is now Northern Ireland.

Buchanan is the second child and younger of two sons and one daughter of the Rev. Charles Henry Leslie Buchanan (1863–1939) and Florence Buchanan (née Moore). He is educated at Larne Grammar School in Larne, County Antrim, Campbell College, Belfast, and Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). He works for the Northern Whig (1921) and is a founder member of the Northern Drama League, Belfast (1923). After moving to London, he joins The Daily Graphic, becomes a reviewer (1928–40) for The Times Literary Supplement, sub-editor (1930–35) of The Times, and columnist and drama critic (1935–38) for the News Chronicle.

During World War II, Buchanan serves as an operations officer in RAF Coastal Command (1940–45). His service includes a period in Sierra Leone, operational liaison with Free France in French Equatorial Africa, and night attacks on U-boats in the Bay of Biscay. After the war, he lives in Limavady, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, for nearly ten years, which he later describes as a period of regeneration. During this time, he broadcasts for BBC Radio and becomes chairman of the NI town and country development committee (1949–53) and a member (from 1954) of the executive council of the European Society of Culture (Venice), and later president of its London centre.

A versatile writer with wide-ranging concerns, Buchanan publishes his first journal, Passage Through the Present, in 1932. It is followed by six novels, including A London Story (1935) and Naked Reason (1971). His plays include A Trip to the Castle (1960) and War Song (1965). The Politics of Culture (1977) is one of several collections of essays, and Green Seacoast (1959) and Morning Papers (1965) are autobiographical. His writing has been noted for its integrity and for the diversity of its ideas. Recurrent themes are the importance of common experience, living sensitively in the present, and the impoverishment of urban life. He believes in the power of ideas and the creative nature of journalism in the modern world. Despite his prosaic style, he writes poetry from his teenage years. It “was always the base from which everything else was motivated. . . [it] affected, and perhaps energised, everything I did. Its pressure led me to special attitudes in journalism, in the theatre, in the novel.” He publishes his first collection, Bodily Responses, in 1958. Other collections include Annotations (1970) and Inside Traffic (1976). In order to bring the variety of his work to a wider audience, Frank Ormsby devotes a supplement in the Honest Ulsterman (1978) to Buchanan, whom he believes is almost forgotten in Ireland and has been unjustly neglected.

Buchanan lives at 18A Courtnell Street, London W2. He marries four times, first to Winifred Mary Corn (1938-45), secondly to Noel Pulleyne Ritter (1949-51), thirdly to the Hon. Janet Hampden Margesson (1952-68), with whom he had two daughters, and fourthly to Sandra Gail McCloy (1974-89). He dies on June 28, 1989, in Richmond, London, and is cremated at Mortlake Crematorium, Richmond.

(From: “Buchanan, George Henry Perrott” by Helen Andrews, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: George Henry Perrott Buchanan by Howard Coster, 10 x 8 inch film negative, 1935, transferred from Central Office of Information, 1974)


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Death of Piaras Béaslaí, Author, Playwright & Politician

Piaras Béaslaí, author, playwright, biographer and translator, who is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), fights in the Easter Rising and serves as a member of Dáil Éireann, dies on June 22, 1965.

Béaslaí is born Percy Frederick Beazley in Liverpool, England on February 15, 1881 to Irish Catholic parents, Patrick Langford Beazley, originally from Killarney, County Kerry, and Nannie Hickey, from Newcastle West, County Limerick. During his summer holidays in his younger years, he spends time in Ireland (near Kenmare, County Kerry) with his paternal uncle, Father James Beazley, where he begins to learn the Irish language. He is educated at St. Francis Xavier’s College in Liverpool, where he develops his keen interest in Irish. By the time he is aged 17 his Irish proficiency is exceptional.

After finishing his education at St. Francis Xavier’s, Béaslaí is encouraged to begin Irish poetry by Tadhg Ó Donnchadha. He follows his father’s footsteps into journalism, initially working for the local Wallasey News. In 1906 he moves to Dublin, and within a year becomes a freelance writer for the Irish Peasant, Irish Independent, Freeman’s Journal and Express. He is offered a permanent position with Independent Newspapers, as assistant leader writer and special reporter for the Dublin Evening Telegraph. He writes regularly for the Freeman’s Journal, including a daily half-column in Irish.

After his early introduction to Irish poetry Béaslaí becomes involved in staging Irish-language amateur drama at the Oireachtas annual music festival. He begins to write both original works and adaptations from foreign languages. One of these works, Eachtra Pheadair Schlemiel (1909), is translated from German into Irish.

Later Béaslaí continues to write poetry, such as the collection “Bealtaine 1916” agus Dánta Eile (1920), and short stories such as “Earc agus Aine agus Scéalta Eile.” Between 1913 and 1939 he writes many plays, including Cliuche Cartaí (1920), An Sgaothaire agus Cúig Drámaí Eile (1929), An Danar (1929) and An Bhean Chródha (1931). He writes two books about his comrade Michael Collins: Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland (2 volumes, 1926) and Michael Collins: Soldier and Statesman (1937).

Béaslaí’s works revolve around the Irish language movement and the Irish Republican Army (IRA), focusing on the independence struggle of Ireland. He writes about these topics in newspapers such as the Standard and The Kerryman. His most notable work in newspapers during his later life includes his contribution to the Irish Independent, which publishes a section called ‘A Veteran Remembers’ five days a week from May 16 to June 1957, as well as a weekly section called ‘Moods and Memories’ on Wednesdays from May 24, 1961 to June 16, 1965.

One of the awards Béaslaí gains during his career is on August 14, 1928, a gold medal at the Tailteann Literary Awards. While in Dublin, he joins the Keating Branch of the Gaelic League, and after he moves to Ireland he begins using the Irish form of his name, Piaras Béaslaí, rather than Percy Beazley.

Béaslaí is a founding member of the Irish Volunteers in 1913. In January 1916 he serves as a courier for political activist and revolutionary leader Seán Mac Diarmada. By the time of the Easter Rising that year, he is deputy commanding officer of the 1st Dublin Battalion. In an audio recording to which he contributes in 1958, he details his experience in the Rising, describing the rebels assembling before noon in Blackhall Street at battalion headquarters. After midday they march out to the Four Courts, erecting barricades as they do so. The Four Courts is his main station.

In the audio, Béaslaí recalls a green flag with a gold harp in the centre. This is the non-Sinn Féin flag at the time. He is in direct charge of the Four Courts area, and at one point during the fight he orders a complete blackout. He recalls, “things were going badly for the English soldiers” and describes the whole event as “a weird experience.” He remembers the streets being lit up with fires in the darkness as if it were bright as day. He speaks of the intensity of the firing line and then how it suddenly ceases on the Friday. He remembers falling asleep and when he awakens being presented with Patrick Pearse‘s order to surrender. The rebels are brought to Richmond Barracks. He then spends fifteen months in English prisons.

Béaslaí serves three years of penal servitude divided between a stringent HM Prison Portland and a more lenient HM Prison Lewes. He is then imprisoned two times within four months during 1919, both terms ending in celebrated escapes. After his final prison release, Michael Collins approaches him about editing An tOglach, the Irish Volunteer newspaper. This sees communication between GHQ and local volunteers drastically improve.

Later, Béaslaí becomes director of publicity for the Irish Republican Army, and at the 1918 Irish general election he is elected to the First Dáil as Sinn Féin MP for East Kerry. Sinn Féin MPs elected in the Westminster elections of 1918 refuse to recognise the Parliament of the United Kingdom, and instead assemble the following January at the Mansion House in Dublin as a revolutionary parliament, Dáil Éireann. Béaslaí is noted for his translation of the democratic programme of the First Dáil, which he reads aloud at the inaugural sitting.

Béaslaí is a member of the Sinn Féin party for five years. Between 1919 and 1921 he represents the East Kerry constituency in the First Dáil. Then, at the 1921 Irish elections, he is returned unopposed to the Second Dáil as a Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for Kerry–Limerick West. Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, he is re-elected there unopposed at the 1922 Irish general election as a pro-Treaty Sinn Féin candidate, and is thus a member of the Third Dáil, which is Pro-Treaty at this stage. In 1922 he goes to the United States to explain the Treaty to Sinn Féin’s Irish American supporters. He does not contest the 1923 Irish general election.

Béaslaí and Con Collins share the distinction of having been elected in three Irish general elections unopposed by any other candidates.

During Béaslaí’s time in London, he gives a lot of his time to the Gaelic League. In the Keating branch of the league, in Ireland, he develops an interest in the IRB. Cathal Brugha, a branch member, asks him to join the IRB. The Keating branch is where Béaslaí meets Michael Collins, eventually introducing Collins to his cousin and fellow branch member, Elizabeth Mernin. He is also instrumental in establishing An Fáinne, an Irish-speaking league whose members vow to speak solely Irish among themselves and wear a membership badge of a circle. This coincides with his involvement in the IRB. His love of the Irish language gives him an opportunity to delve into his other hobbies. He writes for Banba, an Irish journal published by the Gaelic League. He is able to express his love for theatre, in the Gaelic League, forming a group of men called “Na hAisteoirí.”

Béaslaí dies, unmarried, at the age of 84 on June 22, 1965, in a nursing home in Dublin. He is buried in a plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, after a Requiem Mass in St. Columba’s Church, Iona Road, Glasnevin.


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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 Garbhan Downey, Novelist & Editor

Garbhan Downey, novelist and editor, is born in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on February 24, 1966. He is the former Director of Communications and Marketing for Culture Company 2013, which delivers Derry’s City of Culture year.

Downey is a product of St. Columb’s College, the Catholic grammar school whose past pupils include John Hume, Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel.

Downey cuts his teeth in journalism editing University College Galway’s student magazine in the late 1980s. After graduating with an MSc in computing from the University of Ulster, he works as an entertainment columnist with the Derry Journal and then as a staff reporter with the Londonderry Sentinel, before moving to The Irish News to become the paper’s Derry correspondent.

Downey’s offbeat reports of the 1994 FIFA World Cup for The Irish News are subsequently compiled for his first book, Just One Big Party. He spends six years as a BBC news producer in Derry and Belfast, before joining the Derry News as editor in 2001. During his period as editor (2001–2004), the Derry News wins two Newspaper Society awards for Fastest Circulation Growth in the United Kingdom.

Since 2004, Downey has published six comic novels set in the criminal underbelly of post-ceasefire Ireland. His books have been described as “a superb blend of comedy, political dirty tricks, grisly murder and bizarre twists.”

A former deputy-president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Downey is one of the organisers of a student occupation of government offices in Dublin on Budget Day 1988 in protest against education cutbacks.

In June 2002, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) get a court order to force Downey to hand over pictures the Derry News had captured of the Real Irish Republican Army attacking a communications post.

In 2006, Downey helps establish the new Northern Ireland literary review Verbal and edits the publication for its first six issues.

A lifelong political anorak, in 2007, Downey works as an election pundit for TV3 (Ireland), alongside the Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll. In 2010, he wins a contest to predict the winners of Northern Ireland’s 18 Westminster constituencies, missing out on just one, Naomi Long, who surprisingly beat First Minister Peter Robinson in Belfast East. He donates his prize, a framed Ian Knox cartoon, to Long by way of apology.

Downey’s 2010 comedy-thriller The American Envoy is the first novel issued by an Irish publishing house as a Kindle e-book, simultaneously with its paperback release.

In June 2011, Downey is appointed Director of Media for Culture Company 2013, the body tasked with delivering Derry’s UK City of Culture year.

Downey is married to Una McNally, and they have two children.


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Murder of Journalist Eugene Moloney

Eugene Moloney, an Irish journalist renowned for his coverage of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, is found dead on Camden Street in Dublin after being attacked and struck on the head while walking in the early morning of June 24, 2012. He had worked for The Irish News in Belfast and later the Evening Herald and Irish Independent in Dublin among other newspapers.

Moloney, aged 55, who lives alone at Portobello Place on the south side of Dublin, is on his way home when he is attacked. He is punched in the side of the head and falls to the ground as the two men in their 20s attack him. The incident is caught on CCTV and police make quick arrests just hours after the murder. Officers believe Moloney may have been robbed as he lay unconscious on the ground, as his wallet and identification are missing.

A murder investigation is launched after a post mortem examination confirms that Moloney had died from serious head injuries as a result of the assault.

Formerly with The Irish News in Belfast and the Irish Independent in Dublin, Moloney had been freelancing on his return from a spell teaching in Vietnam. His final article, on the Ulster Bank IT crisis, appears in the Irish edition of the Daily Mail just hours before his death.

Group Managing Editor of Independent Papers Ireland Ltd. Michael Denieffe pays tribute to Moloney in telling the Irish Independent, “On behalf of Independent Newspapers, I want to express our shock at the untimely death of our former colleague, Eugene Moloney. He was a resourceful and fearless journalist. It is a tragic irony that Eugene has died in an incident similar to many he would have recorded in his years working for the Evening Herald and the Irish Independent. Our sympathies go to his family and friends.”

The Irish News editor Noel Doran tells the paper he is deeply shocked by the death of his good friend Eugene Moloney. “Eugene and I studied journalism together at the former College of Business Studies in Belfast in the late 1970s, and went on to share flats over a number of years. Eugene was a talented and respected reporter with The Irish News during the height of the Troubles and was also the paper’s music columnist for a lengthy period.”

(From: “Journalist Eugene Moloney murdered as attempted robbery goes wrong in Dublin” by Patrick Counihan, IrishCentral, http://www.irishcentral.com, June 25, 2012)


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Birth of John F. Kennedy, 35th President of the United States

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Irish American politician who serves as the 35th president of the United States, is born in Brookline, Massachusetts on May 29, 1917. He serves from 1961 until his assassination in 1963 during the height of the Cold War, with the majority of his work as president concerning relations with the Soviet Union and Cuba.

Kennedy is born into the wealthy, political Kennedy family, the son of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., a businessman and politician, and Rose Kennedy (née Fitzgerald), a philanthropist and socialite. All four of his grandparents are children of Irish immigrants. He graduates from Harvard University in 1940, before joining the United States Naval Reserve the following year. During World War II, he commands a series of PT boats in the Pacific theater and earns the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for his service.

Following a brief stint in journalism, Kennedy, a Democrat, represents a working-class Boston district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1947 to 1953. He is subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate and serves as the junior senator for Massachusetts from 1953 to 1960. While in the Senate, Kennedy publishes his book, Profiles in Courage, which wins a Pulitzer Prize.

Kennedy meets his future wife, Jacqueline Lee “Jackie” Bouvier (1929–1994), while he is a congressman. Charles L. Bartlett, a journalist, introduces the pair at a dinner party. They are married a year after he is elected senator, on September 12, 1953. Following a miscarriage in 1955 and a stillbirth in 1956, they produce three children, Caroline, John, Jr., and Patrick, who dies of complications two days after birth.

In the 1960 presidential election, Kennedy narrowly defeats Republican opponent Richard Nixon, who is the incumbent vice president. His humor, charm, and youth in addition to his father’s money and contacts are great assets in the campaign. His campaign gains momentum after the first televised presidential debates in American history. He is the first Catholic elected president of the United States.

Kennedy’s administration includes high tensions with communist states in the Cold War. As a result, he increases the number of American military advisors in South Vietnam. The Strategic Hamlet Program begins in Vietnam during his presidency. In April 1961, he authorizes an attempt to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro in the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion. He authorizes the Cuban Project, also known as Operation Mongoose, in November 1961. He rejects Operation Northwoods, plans for false flag attacks to gain approval for a war against Cuba, in March 1962. However, his administration continues to plan for an invasion of Cuba in the summer of 1962.

In October 1962, U.S. spy planes discover Soviet missile bases have been deployed in Cuba. The resulting period of tensions, termed the Cuban Missile Crisis, nearly results in the breakout of a global thermonuclear conflict. He also signs the first nuclear weapons treaty in October 1963.

Kennedy presides over the establishment of the Peace Corps, Alliance for Progress with Latin America, and the continuation of the Apollo space program with the goal of landing a man on the Moon. He also supports the civil rights movement, but is only somewhat successful in passing his New Frontier domestic policies.

On November 22, 1963, Kennedy is assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumes the presidency upon Kennedy’s death. Marxist and former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald is arrested for the state crime, but is shot and killed by Jack Ruby two days later. The FBI and the Warren Commission both conclude Oswald had acted alone in the assassination, but various groups contest the Warren Report and believe that Kennedy was the victim of a conspiracy.

After Kennedy’s death, Congress enacts many of his proposals, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Revenue Act of 1964. Despite his truncated presidency, he ranks highly in polls of U.S. presidents with historians and the general public. His personal life has also been the focus of considerable sustained interest following public revelations in the 1970s of his chronic health ailments and extramarital affairs. He is the last U.S. President to have been assassinated as well as the last U.S. president to die in office.

(Pictured: John F. Kennedy, photograph in the Oval Office, July 11, 1963)


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Birth of Sir James Comyn, Irish-born English High Court Judge

Sir James Peter Comyn, Irish-born barrister and English High Court judge, is born at Beaufield House, Stillorgan, County Dublin on March 8, 1921. Considered by many to be “the finest all-round advocate at the English bar”, he is appointed to the High Court of Justice in 1978, serving on the bench until his retirement in 1985.

Comyn is the son of Nationalist barrister James Comyn KC and of Mary Comyn. Through his father he is the nephew of the barrister Michael Comyn KC. Both his father and uncle had been political and legal advisers to Éamon de Valera, who at one point uses Beaufield House as a safe house. However, the Comyn brothers have a falling out with de Valera shortly before he comes to power in 1932, and Michael Comyn is passed over as Attorney General of the Irish Free State. As a result, James Comyn, who is then attending Belvedere College in Dublin, is sent by his father to attend The Oratory School in England. He spends six months as a trainee at The Irish Times under the editor R. M. “Bertie” Smyllie, but abandons journalism after a joke he added to an obituary is printed in the paper, leading to his demotion to the racing department.

Comyn then matriculates at New College, Oxford, where he reads law, graduating with Second Class Honours. In 1940, he defeats Roy Jenkins for the presidency of the Oxford Union, winning by four votes. After suffering the first of several breakdowns through his life, he briefly works for the BBC‘s Empire Service during World War II.

Comyn is called to the English bar by the Inner Temple in 1942, the Irish bar in 1947, and the Hong Kong bar in 1969. In 1944, he begins his pupillage with Edward Holroyd Pearce KC, later a law lord, and joins his chambers at Fountain Court. He practises in London and on the Western circuit, supplementing his earnings by teaching banking, a subject of which he knows nothing. On one occasion, he rises in Lambeth County court to cross-examine a female defendant in an eviction case. Just as he begins by saying “Madam,” the defendant opens her bag, takes out a dead cat, and throws it at him. The judge’s reaction is to tell the defendant, “Madam, if you do that again, I’ll commit you.” Comyn wins the case.

Comyn takes silk in 1961, and acquires a large practice as a senior, appearing in many high-profile cases. In 1964, he wins damages for libel for the former safe-breaker Alfred George Hinds against a Scotland Yard inspector by convincing the jury that Hinds is in fact innocent. In 1970, he successfully defends the Labour MP Will Owen, who is accused of providing information to the Czechoslovak intelligence services. In 1975, he defeats the government’s attempt to obtain an injunction against the publication of the diaries of former minister Richard Crossman.

Comyn is Recorder of Andover between 1964 and 1971 (honorary life recorder from 1972), commissioner of assize for the Western Circuit in 1971, and a Recorder of the Crown Court between 1972 and 1977. He is elected a bencher of the Inner Temple in 1968, and serves as chairman of the Bar council from 1973 to 1974.

Having refused a previous invitation by Quintin Hogg, Baron Hailsham of St. Marylebone to join the bench, Comyn is again nominated by Elwyn Jones, Baron Elwyn-Jones, in 1977, and is appointed a High Court judge in 1978, receiving the customary knighthood upon his appointment. Initially assigned to the Family Division, he does not take to the work and is reassigned to the Queen’s Bench Division in 1979. He has a reputation for leniency in sentencing, first acquired as Recorder of Andover. In 1980–81, he presides over an unsuccessful libel action by a member of the Unification Church, colloquially known as the Moonies, against the Daily Mail, the longest libel trial in England up to that time. His Irish background makes him the target of Irish Republican Army (IRA) action, and in 1981 the Provisional IRA burns his house in Tara.

Recurring bouts of depression lead to Comyn’s early retirement, on grounds of ill health, in 1985. In retirement, he divides his time between England and Ireland, whose citizenship he has retained. He writes a number of books, including memoirs, light verse, and books on famous trials. He also breeds Friesian cattle. He dies in Navan, County Meath on January 5, 1997 at age 75.


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Death of Isabella Tod, Women’s Rights Activist

Isabella Maria Susan Tod, Irish women’s rights activist, dies at her home at 71 Botanic Avenue in Belfast on December 8, 1896. She is a formidable lady who uses her political skills to great advantage in order to further many causes.

Tod is born on May 18, 1836 in Edinburgh into a well known Irish Presbyterian family, her uncle being the Rev. Hope Masterton Waddell, one of the earliest Irish Presbyterian missionaries who served with the Scottish Missionary Society in Jamaica and whose great grandfather is the Rev. Charles Masterton, one of the most distinguished minsters of the General Synod of Ulster who ministers at Connor and Rosemary Street, Belfast. She is very proud of her Presbyterian heritage and of her Scottish ancestry.

The daughter of James Banks Tod, an Edinburgh merchant, Tod spends her early years in Edinburgh. She is educated at home by her mother, Maria Isabella Waddell, who comes from County Monaghan. The family moves to Belfast in the 1850s following the death of her father. She and her mother join Elmwood Presbyterian Church. Her Presbyterian background no doubt contributes to her radical views on social issues and women’s rights. She earns her living from writing and journalism, contributing, for example, to the Dublin University Magazine, an independent literary, cultural and political magazine, and to the Banner of Ulster, a Presbyterian newspaper.

Tod becomes one of the leading pioneers in the fight to improve the position of women. She is the only woman called to give evidence to a Select Committee of Enquiry on the reform of the married women’s property law in 1868 and serves on the executive of the Married Women’s Property Committee in London from 1873 to 1874. She successfully campaigns for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 which enacted that a woman suspected of being a prostitute could be arrested and forced to undergo medical examination for venereal disease. She sees this legislation as an infringement of a woman’s civil liberties.

Tod is also a strong supporter of the temperance movement and, along with her friend Margaret Byers, forms the Belfast Women’s Temperance Association in 1874. Perhaps she is best known for her tireless campaign to extend the educational provision for middle-class women. For example, in 1878 she organises a delegation to London to put pressure on the Government to include girls in the Intermediate Education Act of 1878. The Ladies’ Collegiate School in Belfast, Alexandra College in Dublin and the Belfast Ladies Institute owe their existence largely to her. She writes a paper entitled “An Advanced Education for Girls in the Upper and Middle Classes” which is presented in 1867 at a meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and is among the pamphlets held in the Presbyterian Historical Society of Ireland library.

Tod is also an active campaigner for women’s right to vote, embarking on her first campaign in 1872 and addressing meetings in Belfast, Carrickfergus, Coleraine and Londonderry. Following a meeting in Dublin a suffrage committee is established that later becomes the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Society and in 1873 she forms the North of Ireland Women’s Suffrage Society. She extends her meetings to London, Glasgow and Edinburgh and is a frequent visitor to London to lobby politicians during the parliamentary session.

Tod is very much a staunch opponent of Home Rule, establishing a branch of the London-based Women’s Liberal Federation in Belfast and the Liberal Women’s Unionist Association. She sees unionism as the way to progress. “I knew that all the social work in which I had taken so prominent a part for 20 years was in danger and most of it could not exist a day under a petty legislature of the character which would be inevitable,” she says. “What we dread is the complete dislocation of all society, especially in regard to commercial affairs and organised freedom of action.”

Tod suffers from ill-health in her later days and dies in Belfast of pulmonary illness on December 8, 1896. She is buried in Balmoral Cemetery in South Belfast.


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Death of Risteárd Ó Glaisne, Irish Language Writer & Teacher

Risteárd Ó Glaisne, teacher and writer with a lifelong commitment to the Irish language, dies in Dublin on November 6, 2003. He is the author of biographies of two former Presidents, Douglas Hyde (pictured) and Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh.

Risteárd Earnán Ó Glaisne is born on September 2, 1927 near Bandon, County Cork, the third of four children of George William Giles and his wife, Sara Jane (née Vickery). Educated at Bandon Grammar School and Trinity College Dublin, he graduates with a BA in 1949 and obtains a master’s degree in 1959. At TCD he is greatly influenced by Daithí Ó hUaithne.

Ó Glaisne first becomes interested in the Irish language at school in Bandon. His headmaster gives him a copy of Liam Ó Rinn‘s Peann agus Pár, along with a book of poems by Ivan Turgenev translated into Irish by Ó Rinn. “I suddenly found myself breaking into a world vastly larger than my own world in Irish,” he recalls. “The quality of mind I encountered made me realise I could never again connect Irish only with poteen and potatoes.”

Ó Glaisne further explores the language by making contact with the few native Irish speakers left in the Bandon area. He gradually comes to the conclusion that he is a member of a nation that has an extremely old and in many ways distinguished culture, of which Irish has been historically an integral part. Deciding that Irish best reflects the society in which he grew up and reflects him as an individual, he adopts it as his first language.

On graduating from TCD Ó Glaisne teaches Irish at Avoca School, Blackrock. He later teaches in St. Andrew’s College, Dublin, and at St. Patrick’s Cathedral Grammar School, where he ends his teaching career in 1989. He took a career break in the mid-1960s to study the French educational system and to travel on the Continent.

To perfect his Irish Ó Glaisne holidays on the Great Blasket Island, where he immerses himself in the rich oral culture. He makes many friends among the islanders, and the friendships continue after they are resettled on the mainland in Dún Chaoin. He regularly visits Corca Dhuibhne to meet friends like Muiris Mhaidhc Léan Ó Guithín, one of the last surviving islanders, and to enjoy the annual Ceiliúradh an Bhlascaoid.

Ó Glaisne holds that Protestants have enjoyed a long association with Irish, pointing to 18th-century followers of John Wesley such as Charles Graham, Gideon Ousley and Tomás Breathnach, who evangelised in Irish. He firmly believes that Protestants can be “every whit as Irish” as Roman Catholics. He urges his co-religionists to identify fully with Ireland.

Ó Glaisne is the founder and editor of Focus (1958-66), a monthly magazine that aims to help Protestants “come to an understanding of their cultural heritage.” He is a regular contributor to programmes on RTÉ and RTÉ Raidió na Gaeltachta, and writes for Comhar, Inniú, An tUltach and The Irish Times.

Ó Glaisne is the author of over 20 books and pamphlets in Irish. These include biographies of Conor Cruise O’Brien, Ian Paisley, Tomás Ó Fiaich and Dúbhglas de hÍde. Other works include a history of Methodism in Ireland, a book of essays on early revivalist writers and a manual for beginners in journalism. He also writes Saoirse na mBan (1973), Gaeilge i gColáiste na Trionóide 1592-1992 (1992) and Coláiste Moibhí (2002), a history of the preparatory college for Protestant teachers.

Generous with his time and knowledge, Ó Glaisne makes a point of encouraging young writers.

(From: “Worked to make Protestants aware of Irish culture heritage,” The Irish Times, Saturday, November 15, 2003)