Gifford is the youngest of twelve children of Frederick and Isabella Gifford. Isabella Gifford (née Burton), is a niece of the artist Frederic William Burton, and is raised with her siblings in his household after the death of her father, Robert Nathaniel Burton, a rector, during the Great Famine.
Gifford’s parents—her father is Catholic and her mother Anglican—are married in St. George’s Church, a Church of Ireland church on the north side of Dublin, on April 27, 1872. She grows up in Rathmines and is raised as a Protestant, as are her siblings.
Gifford is educated in Alexandra College in Earlsfort Terrace. After leaving school she studies music at the Leinster House School of Music. It is her music teacher, in her teens, who first gives her her first Irish national newspaper, The Leader. She begins reading this secretly and then starts reading Arthur Griffith’s newspaper, Sinn Féin.
Gifford is a member of Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a women’s political organisation active from the 1900s. It is founded by Maud Gonne and a group of working-class and middle-class women to promote Irish culture and help to alleviate the shocking poverty of Dublin and other cities at a time when Dublin’s slums are unfavourably compared with Calcutta‘s. Gifford, who is already writing under the name “John Brennan” for Sinn Féin, is asked to write for its newspaper Bean na h-Éireann. Her articles vary from those highlighting poor treatment of women in the workplace to fashion and gardening columns, some written under the pseudonym Sorcha Ní hAnlúan.
She also works, along with her sisters, in Maud Gonne’s and Constance Markievicz‘s dinner system in St. Audoen’s Church, providing good solid dinners for children in three Dublin schools – poor Dublin schoolchildren often arrive at school without breakfast, go without a meal for the day, and if their father has been given his dinner when they arrive home, might not eat or might only have a crust of bread that night.
In 1911, Gifford is elected (as John Brennan) to the executive of the political group Sinn Féin.
Gifford is a member of Cumann na mBan (The Irish Women’s Council) from its foundation in Dublin on April 2, 1914. Its members learn first aid, drilling and signalling and rifle shooting, and serve as an unofficial messenger and backup service for the Irish Volunteers. During the fight for Irish Independence the women carry messages, store and deliver guns and run safe houses where men on the run can eat, sleep and pick up supplies.
In 1914, Gifford moves to the United States to work as a journalist. Through her connection with Padraic Colum and Mary Colum, whom she had met through her brother-in-law Thomas MacDonagh, she meets influential Irish Americans such as Thomas Addis Emmet and Irish exiles like John Devoy, and marries a Hungarian lawyer, Arpad Czira, a former prisoner of war who is said to have escaped and fled to America. Their son, Finian, is born in 1922.
Czira writes both for traditional American newspapers and for Devoy’s newspaper, TheGaelic American. She and her sister Nellie found the American branch of Cumann na mBan, and she acts as its secretary. Both sisters tour and speak about the Easter Rising and those involved. She is an active campaigner for Irish independence and against the United States joining the war against Germany, seen as a war for profit and expansion of the British Empire, and so to the disadvantage of the work for Irish independence. She helps Nora Connolly O’Brien to contact German diplomats in the United States.
In 1922, Czira returns to Ireland with her son. As a member of the Women’s Prisoners’ Defence League, she is an activist against the ill-treatment of Republican prisoners during the Irish Civil War. She continues to work as a journalist, though she is stymied in her work, as are the women of her family and many of those who had taken the anti-Free State side. In the 1950s her memoirs are published in The Irish Times, and she moves into work as a broadcaster and produces a series of historical programmes.
He is appointed Dean of Cork in 1952. Consecrated a bishop, he serves as Bishop of Cork, Cloyne and Ross, between 1952 and 1956. At forty-two, he is the youngest Church of Ireland clergyman appointed to a bishopric since John Gregg in 1915. He serves as Archbishop of Dublin from 1956 to 1969. During this time, he maintains a courteous relationship with John Charles McQuaid, his Roman Catholic counterpart as Archbishop of Dublin. From 1969 to 1980, he serves as Archbishop of Armagh.
Alongside CardinalWilliam Conway, Simms chairs the first official ecumenical meeting between the leaders of Ireland’s Protestant Churches and the Catholic Church in Ballymascanlon Hotel, Dundalk, County Louth, on September 26, 1973, an important meeting amidst the increasing violence in Northern Ireland. The meeting is protested by Ian Paisley.
Simms is a scholar, and publishes research on topics including the history of the Church of Ireland, and theological reflections on key texts including the Book of Kells, Saint Patrick’s Breastplate, and the Sarum Primer. He is also a fluent speaker of the Irish language.
Simms is also an accomplished journalist, and the author of many newspaper obituaries. His weekly Thinking Aloud column in The Irish Times is a popular reflection, and runs continuously for thirty-eight years. He also works on the research, preparation, and even performs the presentation, of a number of television programmes.
In 1978, Simms is made an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin.
Simms is the uncle of mathematician David J. Simms. In 1941, he marries Mercy Felicia Gwynn. They have five children. He dies in Dublin on November 15, 1991. He is interred with his wife in the cemetery attached to St. Maelruain’s Church, Tallaght, County Dublin.
Fulton is born in Portadown, County Armagh in 1961, one of the children of Jim Fulton, a former British soldier who works as a window cleaner. His mother, Sylvia (née Prentice), comes from a family of wealthy car dealers. He grows up in the working classProtestant Killycomain area.
Fulton leaves school early and promptly joins the Mid-Ulster UVF, being sworn in at the age of 15. His early activity includes being part of the UVF gang that opens fire on a Craigavon mobile sweetshop on March 28, 1991, killing two teenaged girls and one man, all Catholics. The attack is allegedly planned by Robin Jackson.
In the early 1990s, Billy Wright, also from Portadown, takes over command of the UVF Mid-Ulster Brigade from Jackson. The Mid-Ulster Brigade, founded in 1972 by its first commander, Billy Hanna, operates mainly in the Lurgan and Portadown areas. Fulton soon becomes Wright’s closest associate and right-hand man and has an “extreme fixation and obsession over Wright.” He even has an image of Wright tattooed over his heart.
Fulton is alleged to have perpetrated twelve sectarian killings in the 1990s, and reportedly is implicated in many other attacks. His victims are often questioned about their religion prior to their killings, and sometimes they are killed in front of their families. He is very violent and has a quick temper. Wright is the only person who is able to control him. A Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) detective who knows both of them says that whenever they are stopped by the police in the 1990s, Wright is “coolness personified,” while Fulton rage’s, shouts and makes threats.
The Mid-Ulster Brigade calls themselves the “Brat Pack,” which journalist Martin O’Hagan of the Sunday World altered to “Rat Pack.” After the nickname of “King Rat” is given to Wright by local Ulster Defence Association commander Robert John Kerr as a form of pub bantering, O’Hagan takes to describing Wright by that term. This soubriquet is thereafter used by the media, much to Wright’s fury. This leads him to issue threats against O’Hagan and all journalists who work for the newspaper. The unit initially welcomes the Combined Loyalist Military Command ceasefire in October 1994; however, things change drastically over the next few years.
Following the order given in August 1996 by the UVF’s Brigade Staff (Belfast leadership) for Wright and the Portadown unit of the Mid-Ulster Brigade to stand down, Fulton remains loyal to Wright and defies the order. This comes after the Mid-Ulster UVF’s killing of a Catholic taxi driver, Michael McGoldrick, while the UVF are on ceasefire. After Wright defies a UVF order to leave Northern Ireland, he forms the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force, taking the members of the officially-disbanded Portadown unit with him, including Fulton.
Fulton, as Wright’s deputy, assumes effective control of the LVF when Wright is sent to the Maze Prison in March 1997. When Wright is shot dead by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) in December 1997, in a prison van while being taken to the Maze’s visitor block, Fulton assumes control of the LVF. He is deeply affected by Wright’s death, and reportedly spends many nights alone by his grave. In May 1998, the LVF calls a ceasefire. It is accepted by the Northern Ireland Office six months later.
Fulton is arrested in 1998 after shooting at an off-duty soldier in Portadown. He is heavily intoxicated at the time and sentenced to four years imprisonment. While he is out on compassionate leave in early 1999, he allegedly organises the killing of Catholic lawyer Rosemary Nelson. During the Drumcree standoff, Nelson had represented the Catholic Portadown residents who opposed the Orange Order‘s march through the predominantly nationalist Garvaghy area. She is blown up by a car bomb on March 15, 1999, outside her home in Lurgan. The bomb is allegedly made by a man from the Belfast UDA but planted by Fulton’s associates acting on his orders.
Colin Port, the Deputy Chief Constable of Norfolk Constabulary who heads the investigation into Nelson’s death, says “without question” Fulton is the person who had masterminded her killing. Although he is back in prison at the time, he is excited when he hears the news of her death on the radio. He is linked to the killing by police informers but not forensics. It is also revealed that prior to his own death, Wright had threatened to kill Nelson in the belief she had defended Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers. Fulton is released from prison in April 2001.
On June 10, 2002, Fulton, who has been held on remand in HM Prison Maghaberry since December 2001, is found dead in his prison cell with a leather belt around his neck. He is found on his bed rather than hanging from the ceiling, leading to speculation that his death had been accidentally caused by autoerotic asphyxiation. Friends claim he had expressed suicidal thoughts due to both his failure to recover from his close friend Wright’s death, as well as his fears that he was suffering from stomach cancer. Some reports suggest his unstable mental state had seen him stand down as leader several weeks before his death, with the LVF’s power base transferred to Belfast. He was also afraid that rival loyalist inmates wished to kill him inside the prison.
At the time of his death, Fulton is awaiting trial, having been charged with conspiracy to murder Rodney Jennett, a member of a rival loyalist paramilitary organisation, in connection with an ongoing feud. He leaves behind his wife, Louise and two children, Lee and Alana. His funeral is attended by 500 mourners, including a number of senior loyalist paramilitaries, including Johnny Adair and John White, who act as pallbearers alongside Fulton’s brother Jim and son, Lee. After a service at St. Columba’s Parish Church, he is interred in Kernan Cemetery in Portadown.
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 (TCD) and obtains a law degree in 1834.
In the spring of 1836, Mitchel 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 Irishman, 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, on June 8, 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 PresidentJefferson 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 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.
Chicago May, the nickname of Mary Anne Duignan, an Irish-born criminal who becomes notorious in the United States, United Kingdom and France, dies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 30, 1929. She refers to herself as the “queen of crooks” and sometimes uses the name May Churchill.
Duignan is born in Edenmore, Ballinamuck, County Longford, on December 26, 1871. In 1890, at the age of 19, she steals the proceeds earned by her parents from a recent cattle fair and runs away to Liverpool, England where she buys new clothes and books a ticket to America. Upon arrival in New York City she supports herself by prostitution and picking pockets.
She moves to Chicago to take advantage of the large influx of visitors at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She teams up with another prostitute. One robs customers while the other is having sex with them. She returns to New York City, where she works as a dancer, but is soon arrested for stealing a wallet, earning her first jail sentence. She briefly marries friend Jim Sharpe but the couple soon separates. After this, she calls herself May Churchill Sharpe. She soon establishes herself with the local criminal underworld, becoming involved in various crimes, mostly of a petty nature, including fraud, assault, brawling, drunk and disorderly behaviour, beggary and pickpocketing.
Duignan has various criminal lovers, but she graduates from petty criminality to major crime when she meets Eddie Guerin, who organises a robbery of the American Express office in Paris. She is imprisoned for her role in the crime. She operates her schemes on four continents and in nine countries. She reaches the height of her career in England when she is taken up by aristocrat Sir Sidney Hamilton Gore, who supposedly proposes marriage to her, shortly before he shoots himself.
After Guerin escapes from a French prison island, he makes his way to London where he meets Duignan again, but the relationship turns sour. She takes up with a burglar named Charley Smith. In 1907, during an altercation with Guerin, Smith shoots him, wounding him in the foot. Smith and Duignan are both accused of attempted murder. She is convicted and sentenced to 15 years. She is released in 1917, and returns to the United States.
By the 1920s, Duignan is living in Detroit and has become destitute. No longer young, she is reduced to propositioning men on the streets and is repeatedly arrested for soliciting and common prostitution. She hopes to make money from her former notoriety by writing magazine articles and an autobiography with the help of a journalist, which is published in 1928 as Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks. Her former lover Guerin publishes his own life story at the same time, under the title I Was a Bandit. She dies at the age of 58 in Philadelphia on May 30, 1929.
The eldest of the three sons and one daughter of Daniel Sheehan, tenant farmer, and his wife, Ellen (née Fitzgerald). He is educated at the local primary school. In his book Ireland since Parnell (1921) he states that witnessing the ragged poverty of labourers’ and smallholders’ children who attended the school made him determined to do something for the poor. The family’s Fenian tradition and his parents’ eviction from their holding in 1880 form his early years. At the age of sixteen he becomes a schoolteacher.
In 1890, Sheehan takes up journalism, serving as correspondent of the Kerry Sentinel and special correspondent of the Cork Daily Herald in Killarney. He also becomes correspondence secretary to the Kanturk trade and labour council, which campaigns on behalf of agricultural labourers. He manages to get reports of meetings into the Cork papers, and this helps the rapid spread of the association, which in 1890 becomes the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, under the leadership of Michael Davitt. It is, however, fatally disrupted by the Parnell split. While Sheehan continues to admire Davitt, and despite the pre-split Irish party leadership having opposed the federation as a threat to Charles Stewart Parnell‘s leadership, he becomes a Parnellite, and always remembers his only meeting with Parnell at Tralee, when the chief is presented with a loyal address (drafted by Sheehan) from his Killarney supporters. After Parnell’s death and the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill, he temporarily drops out of Irish politics.
Following his marriage on February 6, 1894, to Mary Pauline O’Connor of Tralee, Sheehan joins the staff of the Glasgow Observer in pursuit of journalistic experience, then becomes editor of the Catholic News in Preston, Lancashire. In 1898, he returns to Ireland and works on various papers, including the Cork Constitution, before serving as editor of the Skibbereen-based Cork County Southern Star (1899–1901), where his Parnellism brings him into conflict with the Bishop of Ross, Denis Kelly. He expresses sympathy for the newly founded United Irish League (UIL), established by William O’Brien in Connacht with the dual aim of representing western smallholders and using a new land agitation as a vehicle for Irish Party reunion. He does not, however, join the UIL himself.
In August 1894, the Clonmel solicitor J. J. O’Shee, anti-Parnellite MP for West Waterford from 1895, forms the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) to agitate on behalf of agricultural labourers and small tenant farmers. Its appearance reflects the breakdown of the centralised party discipline which had existed before the Parnell split, and recognition that the land war’s prime beneficiaries had been large and middle-sized tenant farmers rather than the nation as a whole. On returning from Britain in 1898, Sheehan throws himself into organising the ILLA and becomes its president. In 1900 there are 100 branches, mostly in Cork, Tipperary, and Limerick. The Irish Party leadership look on this organisation with some suspicion.
At the 1900 United Kingdom general election in Ireland Sheehan seeks the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) nomination for South Cork but was defeated by Edward Barry. After the death of Dr Charles Tanner, however, he succeeds in obtaining the IPP nomination for the constituency of Mid Cork, despite the party leadership’s attempts to deny recognition to ILLA branches in order to hand the nomination to its favoured candidate. Sheehan is elected unopposed on May 17, 1901. At the age of 28, he is the youngest Irish member of parliament. Although he has been admitted to the party, his position as a labour representative and his perceived independent base make him something of an outsider.
From October 1904 Sheehan allies himself with O’Brien, writing regularly for the latter’s weekly a TheIrish People. Redmondites accuse him of opportunism, but he always maintains that his personal inclination as an old Parnellite has been towards John Redmond and that his support for O’Brien derives from the older man’s willingness from 1904 to identify himself with the labourers’ campaign. Although their alliance originally likely contains elements of expediency, Sheehan and O’Brien develop a deep personal friendship.
Sheehan’s support for O’Brien leads to a split in the ILLA in 1906, with Tipperary and Waterford branches following O’Shee and Redmond, and Sheehan retaining the support of his Cork base and of some branches in Limerick and Kerry. He serves on the Cork advisory committee which represents tenant interests in land purchase negotiations under the Wyndham Land Act. It’s policy of “conference plus business” combines an offer to negotiate with willing landlords and a threat of agitation against those unwilling to give satisfactory terms. His faction of the ILLA becomes the basis for the grassroots organisation of O’Brien’s followers, and sporadic attempts, financed by O’Brien, are made to spread it outside its Munster base. Both factions of the ILLA claim credit for the passage of the 1906 and 1911 Labourers’ (Ireland) Acts which provide for the allocation of cottages and smallholdings to labourers. In Cork and some other parts of Munster these buildings become popularly known as “Sheehan’s cottages,” a term which long outlives Sheehan’s political career. He also helps to bring about the creation of a “model village” at Tower, near Blarney, the result of cooperation between the local ILLA branch and the rural district council.
At the 1906 general election the Redmond leadership attempts to avoid an open split by allowing O’Brien’s supporters to return unopposed. However, the continuing conflict between the two factions rapidly leads to a formal break. Shortly after the election Sheehan is excluded from the IPP, and thereby deprived of the parliamentary stipend paid to MPs with insufficient resources to maintain themselves. With the support of O’Brien and the small group of O’Brienite MPs, he maintains that the party has no right to exclude an elected MP willing to take the party pledge. After resigning his seat to which he was re-elected without opposition on December 31, 1906, he demands readmission to the party and mounts an unsuccessful lawsuit demanding payment of the stipend. He is subsequently supported from the proceeds of collections outside church gates on Sundays.
Sheehan and the other O’Brienite MPs are readmitted to the party in 1908 as part of an attempt at general reconciliation after the disruptions following the rejection of the Irish Council Bill. Dissensions rapidly reappear over Augustine Birrell‘s 1909 land act, which the O’Brienites see as wriggling out of the financial responsibilities accepted by the British government in the Wyndham land act and as sabotaging land purchase, since landlords will not accept the terms offered. Sheehan’s section of the ILLA is denied official recognition and thereby prevented from sending delegates to a party convention called to consider the bill. At the convention, groups of “heavies”recruited from Joseph Devlin‘s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) exclude delegates with Cork accents, while O’Brienite speakers are howled down. This leads to the formation in March 1909 of the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL), a body based on the existing O’Brienite organisation and advocating O’Brien’s policy of gradually implementing home rule through step-by-step cooperation with moderate unionist supporters of devolution. Although O’Brien’s temporary retirement for health reasons in April 1909 leads to the suspension of the AFIL, it is revived in response to an attempted purge of the O’Brienite MPs by the leadership and by O’Brien’s reappearance in response to the January 1910 general election. Sheehan writes regularly for its paper, the Cork Free Press.
In the general election the O’Brienites hold their seats while two Cork Redmondites are displaced. Sheehan is re-elected for Mid Cork, defeating the Redmondite W. G. Fallon in a campaign marked by widespread rioting and impassioned clerical denunciations of Sheehan. Fallon subsequently attempts to get up a “red scare” against the ILLA. The Cork ILLA later splits over Sheehan’s slightly erratic leadership. While the split is initially personality-driven, the breakaway faction, led by Patrick Bradley and centred in east Cork, moves back toward alignment with Redmond. At the December 1910 election the AFIL consolidates its position in Cork, but is defeated everywhere else. Sheehan retains his Mid Cork seat against a local candidate but is defeated in a simultaneous contest in East Limerick. He is also defeated when he stands for Cork County Council in June 1911, though the AFIL wins control of that body.
Sheehan studies law at University College Cork (UCC) (1908–09), where he is an exhibitioner and prizeman, and at King’s Inns, where he graduated with honours. He is called to the bar in 1911 and practised on the Munster circuit. In 1913–14 he is active in the AFIL’s attempts to avert partition by trying to recruit sections of British political opinion in favour of a conference between the parties. He becomes vice-chairman of the Imperial Federation League. This receives considerable attention among the British political classes but contributes to the decline of the AFIL’s electoral base. The policy of conciliation has been driven to a considerable extent by the belief that it is the only way of achieving home rule. The abolition of the House of Lords’ veto and the introduction of the third home rule bill by the Asquith government undercuts this argument and increases Redmond’s prestige, while AFIL denunciations of Redmondism are seen as driven by personal resentment and playing into the hands of unionists. The decision of the AFIL MPs to abstain from supporting the bill on its final passage through the House of Commons in 1914 as a protest against the prospect of a partition-based compromise is represented by Redmondites as a vote against home rule itself and contributed to AFIL loss of Cork County Council in June 1914.
On the outbreak of World War I, Sheehan supports O’Brien in calling for Irish enlistment for foreign service. In November 1914, at the age of forty-two, he enlists himself and is gazetted as a lieutenant in the Royal Munster Fusiliers. It is claimed that he is almost single-handedly responsible for raising the 9th (service) battalion of this regiment. Three of his sons also enlist. Two of his sons are killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps, and a daughter is disabled by injuries received in an air raid while serving as a nurse. In the spring and summer of 1915 he organises and leads recruiting campaigns in Cork, Limerick, and Clare. This is part of a nationwide drive for recruits, aimed in particular at the farming community, which reflects the realisation that the war is going to last much longer than expected.
In 1915, Sheehan is promoted to the rank of captain and serves with his battalion on the Loos-en-Gohellesalient and at the Battle of the Somme, contributing a series of articles from the trenches to the London Daily Express. Various ailments, including deafness caused by shellfire, and hospitalisation necessitate his transfer to the 3rd Royal Munster Fusiliers (Reserve) Battalion, and he resigns his commission on January 13, 1918, due to ill health. In April 1918 he speaks at Westminster against the bill extending conscription to Ireland, threatening to resist it by force. One of his last parliamentary speeches (in October 1918) is in support of a bill providing land grants for Irish ex-servicemen. With the growth of Sinn Féin and the virtual demise of the AFIL, his position in Cork grows increasingly untenable. The Sheehan family faces intimidation and are obliged to leave their home on the Victoria Road for London, where he has secured the Labour Party nomination for the Limehouse–Stepney division of the East End, later represented by Clement Attlee.
Sheehan is unsuccessful in the 1918 United Kingdom general election, and is obliged to leave politics after a financially disastrous involvement in an Achill Island mining company leads to his bankruptcy. Unable to practise at the bar because of the hearing loss caused by his war service, he returns to journalism and becomes editor and publisher of TheStadium, a daily newspaper for sportsmen. In 1921, shortly before the Anglo-Irish truce, he publishes Ireland since Parnell, a history of recent events heavily dependent on the writings of O’Brien but incorporating some personal reminiscences. It concludes by blaming the outbreak of the IRA guerrilla campaign on provocation by Crown forces, denouncing reprisals, and pleading for British recognition of Dáil Éireann and dominion home rule for an undivided Ireland.
Sheehan moves to Dublin in 1926 after hearing that the threats against him have been lifted. His wife, who has never fully recovered from the stresses and bereavements she has experienced since 1914, dies soon afterward. Sheehan himself becomes managing editor of Irish Press and Publicity Services and, in 1928, publisher and editor of the South Dublin Chronicle. The paper gives critical support to the Irish Labour Party, publishes campaigning articles on slum conditions, and advocates housing reform. In September 1930, he is an unsuccessful Labour candidate for Dublin County Council. In the 1930s, as his health deteriorates further, he works as coordinator for the ex-servicemen’s group the Old Comrades’ Association, editing both northern and southern editions of its annual journal. In 1942, he offers himself to Richard Mulcahy as a Fine Gael candidate for Cork South-East, but is turned down. He dies on November 28, 1948, while visiting his daughter at Queen Anne Street, London. Both he and his wife are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
(From: “Sheehan, Daniel Desmond (‘D. D.’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Drew’s parents are the Rev. Thomas Drew and Isabella (née Dalton) Drew. She is the third of the couple’s eight daughters and four sons, although most of her siblings die young. She spends her childhood in Belfast, where her father is the rector of Christ Church in Durham Street from 1833 to 1859. In 1866, she moves to 60 Upper Sackville Street, Dublin, to live with her brother, the architect Thomas Drew.
From here she appears to begin her journalist career, writing articles for the Irish Builder, going on to eventually become its assistant editor. She goes on to write for Belfast’s News Letter, and following advice from its proprietor James Alexander Henderson, she moves to London in 1871 becoming the paper’s London correspondent. She writes two columns, Metropolitan gossip and Ladies’ letter, which are among some of the earliest regular columns written specifically for women, providing society news for her readers in Belfast. Articles by her also appear in The Literary World, The British Architect and London Society.
Drew is one of the founding members of the Ladies’ Press Association, and campaigns for greater rights for women journalists. She becomes a prominent figure in the Institute of Journalists, representing the Institute at several international congresses. She is serving as the vice-president of the Institute at the time of her death. She also works on its Orphan Fund for many years, an initiative she originally suggests in 1891.
In 1894, Drew is one of the signatories of the Frances Power Cobbe memorial campaigning for greater recognition and rights for women journalists, alongside Millicent Fawcett and Jessie Boucherett. She writes a number of novels, including Harry Chalgraves’s Legacy (1876) and The Lutanistes of St. Jacobi’s (1881). In March 1885, she gives a lecture titled Dress, Economic and Technical at the Loan Exhibition of Women’s Industries in Bristol, which later appears as a pamphlet.
Drew dies at her home in Holland Street, Kensington, on August 26, 1910, and is buried at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Cemetery, Hanwell. Lady Drew, her sister-in-law, erects a Celtic cross memorial there in her honour. She bequeaths a jewel-studded gold bracelet to the Institute of Journalists, which had been presented to her by the Institute to mark her retirement in 1908. It is worn by women presidents or the wives of male presidents, and is known as the “Drew Bracelet.”
O’Reilly is one of six children of James P. O’Reilly, shopkeeper and musician, and Catherine O’Reilly (née Donegan). The family moves to Dublin when he is nine years old. He is educated at the Christian Brothers school in James’s Street, where he excels at Gaelic football and develops an interest in drama and music. Toward the end of his schooldays, he begins to participate in athletics, particularly the high jump, and is coached by Jack Sweeney, a leading athletics coach.
Always a man of many talents and interests, after leaving school O’Reilly combines working in the insurance business with an athletics career with Donore Harriers and evening drama classes. He wins several Irish titles, including the high jump, javelin, and decathlon, and sets a national record in the high jump. In 1954 he wins the British AAA Championships high jump title, beating the Commonwealth champion into second place, and setting a championship record of 6 ft. 5 in. (1.96 m). As a result, he secures a United States athletics scholarship to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he takes a degree in liberal arts, majoring in speech and drama. While at Michigan he improves his Irish record to 6 ft. 7 in. (2.007 m). His athletic career, however, is dogged with bad luck. He is selected to compete in the high jump at the European Athletics Championships in Bern, Switzerland, in 1954 but fractures an ankle in practice and fails to advance beyond the qualifying round. Although he competes at international level for ten years (1952–62), he is unlucky to never take part in the Olympic Games. A victim of sporting politics in 1952, as an NCAA athlete he is not entitled to compete. He is selected for the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne but is unable to attend when, at the last minute, his club cannot provide the finance for him to attend. Earlier that year he wins the Big Ten Conference high jump title.
On leaving Michigan O’Reilly moves to New York City, where he embarks on an acting career with the Irish Players, but he returns to Dublin in 1959, where, after brief spells working as a teacher and for an advertising agency, he applies to Ireland’s new television station for a position. He is looking for an acting job but ends up being offered a position as a presenter, joining Teilifís Éireann in 1961 as an announcer/interviewer. His relaxed and unobtrusive style appeals to viewers and his light entertainment show, The Life of O’Reilly, is the most popular programme on Irish television in the day, eclipsing even a fledgling The Late Late Show. It is as a sports presenter and commentator, however, that O’Reilly is primarily remembered, as he becomes the face of sport on RTÉ Television for many years. He attends five Olympic Games as a broadcaster, from Mexico in 1968 to Los Angeles in 1984, commentating on athletics and gymnastics. The first presenter of RTÉ’s flagship Saturday afternoon sports programme Sports Stadium in 1984, he continues to present it over its fourteen-year life, co-presenting the final programme in December 1997. He also is the regular presenter of RTÉ’s Wimbledon Championships tennis coverage for many years, the sports results on news broadcasts on TV and radio, and Sunday Sport on RTÉ Radio, as well as commentating on individual sports such as ice-skating.
Although sports presenting is a natural progression for an athlete with his talents, O’Reilly’s real love is the arts. He continues to act, playing the part of Detective Inspector Michael Roarke in the classic children’s film Flight of the Doves (1971) with Ron Moody and Willie Rushton. He is also an accomplished singer and songwriter, and writes and performs his own one-man show, Across the Spectrum, comprising his own poems and songs in 1992. As well as a book of poems, The Great Explosion (1977), he releases a number of albums and tops the charts with his own song, “The Ballad of Michael Collins,” in 1981. He has a great admiration for Michael Collins, and this leads to his becoming the first non-political figure to give the oration at the annual Collins commemoration at Béal na Bláth, County Cork, in 1981. He also writes the song “Let the Nations Play” (1985), inspired by the boycotts of the Olympic games of 1980 and 1984, and the song is adopted as an anthem of the international Olympic movement.
Tall and slim in build, O’Relly is affable, modest, and self-deprecating in character. His relaxed style is no mere public affectation. He often exasperates colleagues by turning up just in time for broadcasts, and his ability to ad-lib is important in a live television environment. He once describes himself as “a champion high-jumper who could enunciate properly and keep my hair neatly combed” (The Irish Times, April 7, 2001). Despite the disappointments in his sporting career, he maintains that his other interests more than compensated. In relation to the Olympics he is quoted as saying, “If you asked me whether I’d have preferred to win a medal or have written the song, I’d honestly say I would have preferred to have written the song” (Longford Leader, April 6, 2001).
O’Reilly lives in Ranelagh, Dublin, and is married twice. He meets his first wife Linda Herbst (née Kuhl) in New York in the late 1950s. His second marriage is to Johanna Lowry. He has four children. After a lengthy illness, he dies on April 1, 2001, in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Fairview, Dublin. He is buried at Mount Venus cemetery, Rathfarnham.
(From: “O’Reilly, Brendan” by Jim Shanahan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Kickham’s father, John Kickham, is the proprietor of the principal drapery in the locality and is held in high esteem for his patriotic spirit. His mother, Anne O’Mahony, is related to the Fenian leader John O’Mahony. He grows up largely deaf and almost blind, the result of an explosion with a powder flask when he is thirteen. He is educated locally, where it is intended that he study for the medical profession. During his boyhood the campaign for a repeal of the Acts of Union 1800 between Great Britain and Ireland is at its height, and he soon becomes versed in its arguments and is inspired by its principles. He often hears the issues discussed in his father’s shop and at home amongst all his friends and acquaintances.
From a young age Kickham is imbued with these patriotic ideals. He becomes acquainted with the teaching of the Young Irelanders through their newspaper The Nation from its foundation in October 1842. His father read the paper aloud every week for the family. Like all the young people of the time, and a great many of the old ones, his sympathies are with the Young Irelanders on their secession from the Repeal Association.
When he is 22 years old, Kickham contributes The Harvest Moon sung to the air of “The Young May Moon,” to The Nation on August 17, 1850. Other verses are to follow, but the finest of his poems according to A. M. O’Sullivan, appear in other journals. Rory of the Hill, The Irish Peasant Girl, and Home Longings, better known as Slievenamon, are published in the Celt. The First Felon appears in the Irishman. Patrick Sheehan, the story of an old soldier, is published in the Kilkenny Journal, and becomes very popular as an anti-recruiting song.
Kickham begins to write for a number of papers, including The Nation, but also the Celt, the Irishman, the Shamrock, and becomes one of the leading writers of The Irish People, the Fenian newspaper, in which many of his poems appear. His writings are signed using his initials, his full name, or the pseudonyms, “Slievenamon” and “Momonia.”
Kickham is the leading member of the Confederation Club in Mullinahone, which he is instrumental in founding. When the revolutionary spirit begins to grip the people in 1848, he turns out with a freshly made pike to join William Smith O’Brien and John Blake Dillon when they arrive in Mullinahone in July 1848. On hearing of the progress of O’Brien through the country, he sets to work manufacturing pikes and is in the forge when news reaches him that the leaders are looking for him. It is here that he meets James Stephens for the first time. At O’Brien’s request, he rings the chapel bell to summon the people and before midnight a Brigade has answered the summons. He later writes a detailed account about this period which brings his connection with the attempted Rising of 1848 to a close.
After the failed 1848 uprising at Ballingarry, Kickham has to hide for some time, as a result of the part he had played in rousing the people of his native village to action. When the excitement has subsided, he returns to his father’s house and resumes his interests in the sports of fishing and fowling and spends much of his time in literary pursuits. Some of the authors in which he is well versed are Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens and he greatly admires George Eliot, and after William Shakespeare, is Robert Burns.
In the autumn of 1857, a messenger arrives from New York with a message for James Stephens from members of the Emmet Monument Association, calling on him to get up an organization in Ireland. On December 23, Stephens dispatches Joseph Denieffe to the United States with his reply and outlines his conditions and his requirements from the organisation in America. Denieffe returnd on March 17, 1858, with the acceptance of Stephens’ terms and £80. That evening the Irish Republican Brotherhood commences. Those present in Langan’s, lathe-maker and timber merchant, 16 Lombard Street, for that first meeting are Stephens, Kickham, Thomas Clarke Luby, Peter Langan, Denieffe and Garrett O’Shaughnessy. Later it includes members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society, which is formed in 1856 by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in Skibbereen, County Cork.
In mid-1863, Stephens informs his colleagues that he wishes to start a newspaper, with financial aid from O’Mahony and the Fenian Brotherhood in America. The offices are established at 12 Parliament Street, almost at the gates of Dublin Castle. The first issue of The Irish People appears on November 28, 1863. The staff of the paper along with Kickham are Luby and Denis Dowling Mulcahy as the editorial staff, O’Donovan Rossa and James O’Connor in charge of the business office, with John Haltigan being the printer. John O’Leary is brought from London to take charge in the role of Editor. Shortly after the establishment of the paper, Stephens departs on an America tour, and to attend to organizational matters. Before leaving, he entrusts to Luby a document containing secret resolutions on the Committee of Organization or Executive of the IRB. Though Luby intimates its existence to O’Leary, he does not inform Kickham as there seems no necessity. This document later forms the basis of the prosecution against the staff of The Irish People.
Kickham’s first contribution to The Irish People, entitled Leaves from a Journal, appears in the third issue and is based on a journal he kept on his way to America in 1863. This article leaves no doubt as to his literary capacity according to O’Leary. It falls to Kickham, as a good Catholic, to tackle the priests, though not exclusively with articles such as “Two Sets of Principles,” a rebuff to the doctrines laid down by Lord Carlisle, and “A Retrospect,” dealing with the tenant-right movement chiefly but also the events of the recent past and their bearing on the present. Kickham articulates the attitude held by the IRB in relation to priests, or more particularly in politics.
On July 15, 1865, American-made plans for a rising in Ireland are discovered when the emissary loses them at Kingstown railway station. They find their way to Dublin Castle and to Superintendent Daniel Ryan, head of G Division. Ryan has an informer within the offices of The Irish People named Pierce Nagle. He supplies Ryan with an “action this year” message on its way to the IRB unit in Tipperary. With this information, Ryan raids the offices of The Irish People on September 15, followed by the arrests of O’Leary, Luby, and O’Donovan Rossa. Kickham is caught after a month on the run. Stephens is also caught but with the support of Fenian prison warders John J. Breslin and Daniel Byrne is less than a fortnight in Richmond Bridewell when he vanishes and escapes to France. The last issue of The Irish People is dated September 16, 1865.
On November 11, 1865, Kickham is convicted of treason. Judge William Keogh, with many expressions of sympathy for the prisoner, and many compliments in reference to his intellectual attainments, sentences him to fourteen years’ penal servitude. The prisoners’ refusal to disown their opposition to British rule in any way, even when facing charges of life-imprisonment, earn them the nickname of “the bold Fenian men.” Kickham spends time from 1866 until his release in the Woking Convict Invalid Prison.
Kickham is given a free pardon from Queen Victoria on February 24, 1869, because of ill-health, and upon his release he is made Chairman of the Supreme Council of the IRB and the unchallenged leader of the reorganized movement. He is an effective orator and chairman of meetings despite his physical handicaps. He wears an ear trumpet and can only read when he holds books or papers within a few inches of his eyes. For many years he carries on conversations by means of the deaf and dumb alphabet.
Kickham is the author of three well-known stories, dealing sympathetically with Irish life and manners and the simple faith, the joys and sorrows, the quaint customs and the insuppressible humour of the peasantry. Knocknagow is deemed one of the finest tales of peasant life ever written. Sally Cavanagh is a touching story illustrating the evils of landlordism and emigration. For the Old Land deals with the fortunes of a small farmer’s family.
Kickham dies on August 22, 1882, at the house of James O’Connor, a former member of the IRB and afterward MP for West Wicklow, 2 Montpelier Place, Blackrock, Dublin, where he had been living for many years, and had been cared for by the poet Rose Kavanagh. He is buried in Mullinahone, County Tipperary.
Coogan’s particular focus is on Ireland’s nationalist/independence movement in the 20th century, a period of unprecedented political upheaval. He blames the Troubles in Northern Ireland on “Paisleyism.”
In 2000, Irish writer and editor Ruth Dudley Edwards is awarded £25,000 damages and a public apology by the High Court in London against Coogan for factual errors in references to her in his book Wherever Green is Worn: The Story of the Irish Diaspora (2000). In the book, he writes that Dudley Edwards had “groveled to and hypocritically ingratiated herself with the English establishment to further her writing career.” He also alleges that Dudley Edwards “had abused the position of chairwoman of the British Association for Irish Studies (BAIS) by trying to impose her political views on it” and that her commission to write True Brits had been awarded because of political favouritism.
When TaoiseachEnda Kenny causes confusion following a speech at Béal na Bláth by incorrectly claiming Michael Collins had brought Lenin to Ireland, Coogan comments, “Those were the days when bishops were bishops and Lenin was a communist. How would that have gone down with the churchyard collections?”
Coogan has been criticised by the Irish historians Liam Kennedy and Diarmaid Ferriter, as well as Cormac Ó Gráda, for a supposed lack of thoroughness in his research and bias:
“Well, I waited in this book to hear some great revelation, and it just isn’t there. It’s anticlimactic. I could not see the great plot, and indeed there is no serious historian who … I can’t think of a single historian who has researched the Famine in depth – and Tim Pat has not researched it in depth” (The Famine Plot).
“Coogan is not remotely interested in looking at what others have written on 20th-century Irish history…. he does not appear interested in context and shows scant regard for evidence. He does not attempt to offer any sustained analysis in relation to the challenges of state building, the meaning of sovereignty, economic and cultural transformations, or comparative perspectives on the evolution of Irish society. There is no indication whatsoever that Coogan has engaged with the abundant archival material relating to the subject matter he pronounces on. There is no rhyme or reason when it comes to the citation of the many quotations he uses; the vast majority are not referenced. For the 300-page text, 21 endnotes are cited and six of them relate to Coogan’s previous books, a reminder that much of this tome consists of recycled material…. Tim Pat Coogan… he is a decent, compassionate man who has made a significant contribution to Irish life. But he has not read up on Irish history; indeed, such is the paucity of his research efforts that this book amounts to a travesty of 20th-century Irish history” (1916: The Mornings After).
seamus dubhghaill 