Louisa (Louie) Bennett, suffragette, trade unionist, and peace activist, is born on January 7, 1870, in Garville Avenue, Rathgar, Dublin, the eldest daughter of James Cavendish Bennett, a prosperous auctioneer, and his wife Susan (née Bolger). She is brought up at Temple Hill, Blackrock, and educated at Alexandra College, and at an academy for young ladies in London, where she and her sisters form an Irish League. She goes on to study singing in Bonn, Germany. Already as a teenager she shows an interest in writing, her first literary effort being Memoirs of the Temple Road in the 80s. Afterward she publishes two unsuccessful romantic novels, The Proving of Priscilla (1902) and A Prisoner of His Word (1908), the latter set in County Down in the aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798.
Bennett turns her attention to women’s issues and by 1910 has become involved in the suffrage movement, initially through her reading of the suffrage monthly TheIrish Citizen. In 1911, she co-founds, with her life-long friend and colleague Helen Chenevix, the Irish Women’s Suffrage Federation, an umbrella organisation, which by 1913 has connected fifteen Irish suffrage societies and has established links with Europe and the United States. She and Chenevix are the organisation’s first honorary secretaries. She is also associated with the Irish Women’s Franchise League, for which she runs public speaking classes. However, as the divide between militants and opponents of the use of violence become more pronounced, Bennett, as a confirmed pacifist, who endorses what she calls “constructive, rather than destructive action,” distances herself from the league, and through her involvement in the production of TheIrish Citizen seeks to sideline the militants.
Bennett’s concerns are not limited to the question of women’s franchise. As founder of the Irish Women’s Reform League, she not only addressea the suffrage question, but examines many social issues concerning women. The league focuses on working conditions, monitors court cases involving women, and demands school meals and better education. She is among those who assist in the relief effort at Liberty Hall during the 1913 strike and lockout in Dublin, and she appeals for funds for strikers’ families through TheIrish Citizen. In the period that follows she maintains her links with the labour movement. She often opposes the direct, uncompromising approach of both James Connolly and Helena Molony, and argues that labour and women’s issues can only be hampered by any affiliation with nationalist politics. The aftermath of the Easter Rising, and in particular, the murder of Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, causes her to revise some of her views on nationalism. In late 1916 she accepts an invitation to reorganise the Irish Women Workers’ Union (IWWU), on the understanding that she would have complete independence from Liberty Hall. Assisted by Chenevix and Father John Flanagan, she re-creates the union along professional lines, and by 1918 its membership has risen dramatically from a few hundred to 5,300. She consistently defends its separatist stance, arguing that women’s concerns in a male-dominated union will always be of secondary importance.
Throughout World War I Bennett campaigns for peace, and she is selected as the Irish representative to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She leads the IWWU in its opposition to the attempted introduction of conscription in 1918, and in 1920 she travels to the United States to highlight Black and Tan atrocities (she later meets David Lloyd George and demands the removal of the Black and Tans from Ireland). As a member of the Women’s Peace Committee, she acts as a mediator during the Irish Civil War.
In 1925, Bennett is appointed to an Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) committee to promote a scheme of working class education with the assistance of the labour movement. Her interest in adult education later leads to her involvement with The People’s College. A member of the national executive of the ITUC (1927–32, 1944–50), she becomes the first female president of the congress in 1932. She serves a second presidential term in 1947. Her knowledge of labour issues is officially acknowledged by the Irish government in 1932, when she is sent as a representative to Geneva to put forward the case of Irish women workers. In 1938 she delivers a paper entitled Industrialism in an Agrarian Country to the International Relations Institute in the Netherlands.
Despite the depth of Bennett’s involvement with the union movement, she has ambitions outside trade unionism, and in 1938 she lets her name be put forward by the IWWU as a congress candidate for election to the senate, but this comes to nothing. In that year she is appointed to the government commission on vocational organisation (1938–43). In 1943, she is elected as a Labour Party member of the Dún Laoghaire borough council. As a councillor she consistently lobbies for improved housing and is instrumental in the establishment of Dún Laoghaire’s housing council in 1949. She had refused a labour nomination in the 1918 general election, but she stands for Dublin County Council and Dáil Éireann in 1944, in both cases unsuccessfully. She is the only Labour Party member to criticise the party’s support for the Fianna Fáil minority government of 1932, arguing that it is “never right or wise to co-operate with another party with fundamentally different principles.” As an elected member of the Labour Party executive, she represents Ireland at the International Labour Organization in Europe. She is also a representative at the League of Nations.
Throughout her public career Bennett consistently condemns colonialism, fascism, and armaments expenditure. She is possibly best remembered for her leadership in the laundry workers’ strike of 1945, during which IWWU members successfully fight for a fortnight‘s paid holiday. Her management of the IWWU, which lasts until 1955, is marked by determination and diplomacy, though she often uses threatened resignations as a means of controlling her colleagues. She died, unmarried, on November 25, 1956, in Killiney, County Dublin.
(From: “Bennett, Louisa (‘Louie’)” by Frances Clarke, Dictionary of Irish Biography, October 2009)
Doran tours with Benson and other managements, and plays in the West End before setting up his own company in 1920. He leads it for eleven years, before leaving Britain to work in India. On his return he works on stage and makes occasional television appearances.
Doran is the son of Charles Jenkins Doran. He is educated in Cork and privately. In 1899, he makes his stage debut as a member of Frank Benson’s touring company, in Julius Caesar at the Theatre Royal, Belfast. He remains with Benson for two and a half years, during which he makes his London debut, as Captain MacMorris in Henry V at the Lyceum Theatre.
In October 1910, returning to England, Doran plays La Tribe in Count Hannibal at the New Theatre, after which he is Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Garrick Theatre to the Falstaff of Asche. For the next ten years he plays in new, ephemeral works, interspersed with classics. Among his roles in the latter are Constantine Levin in Anna Karenina (1913), Douglas in Henry IV, Part 1and the Constable of France in Henry V (1914) in London, and a variety of Shakespeare parts at the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (1919).
In February 1920, Doran begins touring with his own Shakespearean company, playing Hamlet, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Brutus in Julius Caesar, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Prospero in The Tempest, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Falstaff, Henry V, and Jaques in As You Like It. He has a keen eye for rising talent, and among his recruits are Noel Streatfeild, Cecil Parker, Ralph Richardson, Edith Sharpe, Norman Shelley, Abraham Sofaer, Francis L. Sullivan and Donald Wolfit.
In 1931, Doran goes to India as director of Shakespeare’s plays at the State Theatre in Jhalawar and then on to Bombay where he performs primarily in Shakespeare on the radio. He returns to England in 1937. His last London appearance is in Song of Norway (1949). His last Shakespearean role in the theatre is Time in The Winter’s Tale (1951). He continues to act on stage in other parts until 1954. He appears on BBC Television as a senator in Othello in 1950 and Adabashev, the tragedian in Curtain Down in 1952.
Doran dies in Folkestone on the south coast of England on April 5, 1964, at the age of 87. An article on him published by Emory University in 2003 sums up his career thus:
On stage in one role or another, Doran’s fifty-seven years in the theatre made him a major force in the profession, particularly in his productions of Shakespeare. Such was his energy and enthusiasm that he kept alive for a few more years the actor-manager system when the major talents, men like Tree, Benson, and Irving, had dissolved their companies. Doran was indeed the last of his theatrical breed.
O’Hegarty is born to John and Katherine (née Hallahan) Hegarty. His parents’ families emigrate to the United States after the Great Famine, and his parents are married in Boston, Massachusetts. His father is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
O’Hegarty is educated at North Monastery CBS, where he forms an enduring friendship with Terence MacSwiney. In 1888, his father dies of tuberculosis at the age of 42. Left destitute, his mother pawns her wedding ring to pay for an advertisement looking for work, and eventually becomes a cook.
O’Hegarty serves at the main Postal Sorting Office in Mount Pleasant, London, from 1902 to 1913. Along with J. J. Walsh, he spends three years at King’s College London, studying for the Secretary’s Office. While he succeeds in his studies, Walsh does not and returns to Ireland. O’Hegarty becomes the IRB representative for South East England and joins the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin and becomes a strong advocate of the Irish language. In 1905, he is elected secretary of the local Dungannon Club, which draws in as members Robert Lynd, Herbert Hughes and George Cavan. In 1907, as Sinn Féin’s London Secretary, he approves and signs the membership card of Michael Collins, later becoming friend and mentor to Collins.
O’Hegarty has to return to Ireland for a break due to overwork in 1909 and gives up some of his work for the Gaelic League. However, he takes over as editor of the IRB publication, Irish Freedom. It is in this publication that he famously writes, concerning the visit of King George V to Ireland in 1911: “Damn your concessions, England: we want our country!” In 1912, at the height of the Playboy riots, he writes four articles entitled “Art and the Nation” in Irish Freedom, which take a very liberal and inclusionist approach to Anglo-Irish literature and art in general but invokes the wrath of many of the paper’s readers.
In 1913, he is re-posted to Queenstown (present-day Cobh) as postmaster. He continues editing nationalist newspapers such as Irish Freedom (founded in 1910 and suppressed in December 1914 on account of its seditious content) and An tÉireannach and joins the Irish Volunteers. At the outbreak of war he is moved to Shrewsbury, probably on account of his political activities. In 1915, he marries Wilhelmina “Mina” Smyth, a schoolteacher and suffragist, and is then moved to Welshpool, Montgomeryshire. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, he is opposed to physical force. In 1918, he refuses to take the British Oath of Allegiance and resigns his position in the Post Office.
O’Hegarty feels that the Abbey Theatre is “doing good for Ireland” and supports W. B. Yeats against attacks from Arthur Griffith and like-minded Nationalists. He opposes the extremist views of D. P. Moran, who seeks a Roman Catholic Irish-speaking Ireland.
O’Hegarty is Secretary of the Irish Department of Post and Telegraphs from 1922 to 1945. He is elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1954.
O’Hegarty’s son, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, is a founder of the Irish-language publishing house Sáirséal agus Dill. His daughter Gráinne, a harpist, marries Senator Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats.
Henderson is born to James Douglas Alexander Henderson, who manages the family business of Henderson & Eadie, and Doris Josephine (née Watson). He attends Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, where the art master, Angus Bryson, spots him as an exceptional student.
From 1972 to 1973 Henderson studies an Arts Foundation course at Ulster University. From 1973 to 1976 he studies Fine Art at Kingston University, London, achieving a Bachelor of Artsfirst class honours degree under the tutelage of Terry Jones, returning in 1977 as Artist-in-Residence. In the same year he becomes the first recipient of the Stanley Picker Fellowship Award in Painting. Between 1978 and 1979 he completes a MA postgraduate in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art under the tutelage of the artist John Hoyland.
In 1980, Henderson starts his professional artistic journey, developing abstract techniques, creating large canvases with complex layers of overlaid and inter-worked paint. He lives and paints in London for twenty years before relocating back to Ireland. In the mid-1980s he works in a studio adjacent to the house he shares with his partner, Jenni Stone, with whom he has a daughter named Emerald.
During the mid-1980s Henderson’s work becomes recognised by private and public collectors, including Bono, leader of the Irish rock band U2. During this period he sells his first work to the National Art Collection (1986). Cuilcagh Under A Renaissance Sky is purchased for Fermanagh County Museum with a grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland during his first solo exhibition “Around a Border” in Ireland. This is followed by three more acquisitions via the Arts Council during the 1980s, who continue to support his work into the new millennium acquiring If Hobbema had Seen Ireland (1989) in 2004 via Art Fund with support from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. His work is exhibited by Arts Council England.
In 1990 Henderson moves to the Cooperage Studio, Brick Lane, London, sharing the top floor with sculptor David Fusco and artist Bryan Benge, a friend from Kingston University. Benge says “Every summer the studios in the East End became part of the open studios programme. . . . . He was an intelligent and incredibly accomplished Painter.” It is here, separated from his partner and virtually penniless, he devotes himself entirely to his work, living in a tent, donated by Benge’s parents, inside the studio.
Henderson begins Palinurus in Soho in 1991, a series of twelve paintings depicting night time rooftop scenes across London, painted from an attic in Kingly Street. Exhibited at the Anna Bornholt Gallery in 1992, ten of the series are acquired by a single private collector.
Around 2000, Henderson becomes more influenced by Greek and Irish symbolism, in particular White Island, the Book of Kells and Sheela na gig, reflected in much of the art produced from this time onward. In 2001, he creates a set of enamel manuscripts for The Clinton Centre in Enniskillen, inaugurated by U.S. PresidentBill Clinton in 2002, in commemoration of the Remembrance Day bombing of 1987. He is interested in enameling because of the possibilities that it offers to him as a colourist and in the behaviour of gestural mark-making. The process is made possible when he is introduced to Andrew Morley, the authority on enamel sign making.
Henderson’s artistic influences include Hans Hofmann, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and John Hoyland. Frequently associated with Samuel Beckett and Jack Butler Yeats, he is influenced by his homeland; his early environment, growing up around weaving, yarns and dyeing, the regions political turmoil, symbolism, and in later life his chronic illness, expressed in his more sombre paintings.
John Hutchinson, critic and director of the Douglas Hyde Gallery writes in the Sunday Independent that Henderson’s paintings “demonstrate the fruitfulness of the no man’s land between abstraction and representation,” and “His images deliberately evoke the picturesque and romantic landscape conventions that originated in the late 18th century…..as well as the expressionist subjectivity of painters such as Jack B. Yeats.” Due to Henderson’s disinterest in the commercialisation of his work, he is sometimes referred to as Ireland’s Invisible Genius.
Henderson describes the evolution of his work, after returning to Ireland in 1993, saying, “Since returning to Ireland my work has become less concerned with resting landscape painting in a cultural context more appropriate to our times, but has come full circle towards an internalised organic abstraction which characterised my more intuitive approach until the early eighties.”
Henderson is married once, in 1995 to the actress Patricia Martinelli with whom he subsequently has a daughter in 1997, Bella-Lucia. He remains married, living in the remote village of Boho, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, until his death, brought on by a brain tumour, on April 28, 2009. He remains a prolific artist throughout his life.
Macardle is born in Dundalk, County Louth, on March 7, 1889, into a wealthy brewing family famous for producing Macardle’s Ale. Her father, Sir Thomas Callan Macardle, is a Catholic who supports John Redmond and the Irish Home Rule movement, while her mother, Lucy “Minnie” Macardle, comes from an English Anglican background and is politically a unionist. Lucy converts to Catholicism upon her marriage to Thomas. Macardle and her siblings are raised as Catholics, but Lucy, who is politically isolated in Ireland, “inculcated in her children an idealised view of England and an enthusiasm for the British empire“. She receives her secondary education in Alexandra College, Dublin—a school under the management of the Church of Ireland—and later attends University College Dublin (UCD). Upon graduating, she returns to teach English at Alexandra where she had first encountered Irish nationalism as a student. This is further developed by her first experiences of Dublin’s slums, which “convinced her that an autonomous Ireland might be better able to look after its own affairs” than the Dublin Castle administration could.
Between 1914 and 1916, Macardle lives and works in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. There, her encounters with upper-class English people who express anti-Irish sentiment and support keeping Ireland in the British Empire by force further weakens her Anglophilia. Upon the outbreak of World War I, she supports the Allies, as does the rest of her family. Her father leads the County Louth recruiting committee while two of her brothers volunteer for the British Army. Her brother, Lieutenant Kenneth Callan Macardle, is killed at the Battle of the Somme, while another brother, Major John Ross Macardle, survives the war and earns the Military Cross. While Macardle is a student, the Easter Rising occurs, an experience credited for a further divergence of her views regarding republicanism and her family.
On January 19, 1919, Macardle is in the public gallery for the inaugural meeting of the First Dáil and witnesses it declare unilateral independence from the United Kingdom, which is ultimately the catalyst for the Irish War of Independence.
By 1919 Macardle has befriended Maud Gonne MacBride, the widow of the 1916 Easter Rising participant John MacBride, and together the two work at the Irish White Cross, attending to those injured in the war. It is during this period she also becomes a propagandist for the nationalist side.
Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, Macardle takes the anti-treaty side in the ensuing Irish Civil War. Alongside Gonne MacBride and Despard, she helps found the Women Prisoners’ Defence League, which campaigns and advocates for republicans imprisoned by the newly established Irish Free State government. It is also during this same time that she begins working alongside Erskine Childers in writing for anti-treaty publications An Phoblacht and Irish Freedom.
In October 1922, Despard, Gonne MacBride and Macardle are speaking at a protest on O’Connell Street, Dublin against the arrest of Mary MacSwiney, a sitting Teachta Dála, by the Free State when Free State authorities move to break it up. Rioting follows and Free State forces open fire, resulting in 14 people being seriously wounded while hundreds of others are harmed in the subsequent stampede to flee. Following the event, Macardle announces she is going to pursue support of the Anti-treaty side full-time in a letter to Alexandra College, which ultimately leads to her dismissal on November 15, 1922. In the following days Macardle is captured and imprisoned by the Free State government and subsequently serves time in both Mountjoy Prison and Kilmainham Gaol, with Rosamond Jacob as her cellmate. During one point at her time in Kilmainham, Macardle is beaten unconscious by male wardens. She becomes close friends with Jacob and shares a flat with her in Rathmines later in the 1920s.
The Irish Civil War concludes in the spring of 1923, and Macardle is released from prison on May 9.
Following the Irish Civil War, Macardle remains active in Sinn Féin and is drawn into the camp of its leader Éamon de Valera and his wife Sinéad. She travels alongside the de Valeras as they tour the country and she is a frequent visitor to their home. As the trust between Macardle and de Valera develops, de Valera asks her to travel to County Kerry to investigate and document what later becomes known as the Ballyseedy massacre of March 1923, in which a number of unarmed republican prisoners are reportedly killed in reprisals. She obliges, and by May 1924 she has compiled a report that is released under the title of The Tragedies of Kerry.” Immediately upon the release of the report, the Minister for DefenceRichard Mulcahy sets up an inquiry in June 1924 to carry out a separate investigation by the government. However, the government’s inquiry comes to the conclusion there had been no wrongdoing committed. Her book The Tragedies of Kerry remains in print and is the first journalistic historical account of the Irish Civil War from those on the republican side detailing Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and various other incidents that occur in Kerry during this time.
In 1926, Éamon de Valera resigns as President of Sinn Féin and walks out of the party following a vote against his motion that members of the party should end their policy of abstentionism against Dáil Éireann. De Valera and his supporters, including Macardle, form the new political party Fianna Fáil in May 1926, with Macardle immediately elected to the party’s National Executive|Ard Chomhairle, one of six female members out of twelve on the original party National Executive, the others being Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kathleen Clarke, Countess Constance Markievicz and Linda Kearns. Macardle is made the party’s director of publicity. However, she resigns from Fianna Fáil in 1927 when the new party endorses taking their seats in Dáil Eireann. Nevertheless, her views remain relatively pro-Fianna Fáil and pro-de Valera.
Macardle recounts her civil war experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). She continues as a playwright for the next two decades. In her dramatic writing, she uses the pseudonymMargaret Callan. In many of her plays a domineering female character is always present. This is thought to be symbolic of her own relationship with her own mother. Her parents’ marriage had broken up as her mother returned to England and her father raised the children with servants in Cambrickville and they were sent away for school. This female character holds back the growth and development of the younger female character in Dorothy’s plays and writings.
By 1931, Macardle takes up work as a writer for The Irish Press, which is owned by de Valera and leans heavily toward supporting Fianna Fáil and Irish republicanism in general. In addition to being a theatre and literary critic for the paper, she also occasionally writes pieces of investigative journalism such as reports on Dublin’s slums. In the mid-1930s she also becomes a broadcaster for the newly created national radio station Radio Éireann.
In 1937, Macardle writes and publishes the work by which she is best known, The Irish Republic, an in-depth account of the history of Ireland between 1919 until 1923. Because of the book, political opponents and some modern historians consider her to have been a hagiographer toward de Valera’s political views. In 1939 she admits, “I am a propagandist, unrepentant and unashamed.” Overall, however, the book is well-received, with reviews ranging from “glowing” to measured praise. She is widely praised for her research, thorough documentation, range of sources and narration of dramatic events, alongside reservations about the book’s political slant. The book is reprinted several times, most recently in 2005. Éamon de Valera considers The Irish Republic the only authoritative account of the period from 1916 to 1926, and the book is widely used by de Valera and Fianna Fáil over the years and by history and political students. She spends seven years writing the book in a cottage in Delgany, County Wicklow, and it is a day-by-day account of the history of the events in Ireland from 1919 to 1923 recorded in painstaking detail together with voluminous source material.
In 1937, de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government is able to create a new Constitution of Ireland following a successful referendum. However, there is widespread criticism of the new Constitution from women, particularly republican women, as the language of the new Constitution emphasises that a woman’s place should be in the home. Macardle is among them, deploring what she sees as the reduced status of women in this new Constitution. Furthermore, she notes that the new Constitution drops the commitment of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic to guarantee equal rights and opportunities “without distinction of sex” and writes to de Valera questioning how anyone “with advanced views on the rights of women” can support it. DeValera also finds her criticising compulsory Irish language teaching in schools.
While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the late 1930s, Macardle acquires a considerable affinity with the plight of Czechoslovakia being pressed to make territorial concessions to Nazi Germany. Believing that “Hitler‘s war should be everybody’s war,” she disagrees with de Valera’s policy of neutrality. She goes to work for the BBC in London, develops her fiction and, in the war’s aftermath, campaigns for refugee children – a crisis described in her book Children of Europe (1949). In 1951, she becomes the first president of the Irish Society of Civil Liberties.
Macardle dies of cancer on December 23, 1958, in a hospital in Drogheda, at the age of 69. Though she is somewhat disillusioned with the new Irish State, she leaves the royalties from The Irish Republic to her close friend Éamon de Valera, who had written the foreword to the book. De Valera visits her when she is dying. She is accorded a state funeral, with de Valera giving the oration. She is buried in Sutton, Dublin.
Agar is known to have held particularly marked Calvinistic positions. He serves as Dean of Kilmore from 1765 to 1768, and then as Bishop of Cloyne until 1779.
In 1794, Agar is raised to the Peerage of Ireland as Baron Somerton. In 1801, he is translated to become Archbishop of Dublin and is created Viscount Somerton. In 1806, he is further honoured when he is made Earl of Normanton. These titles are all in the Peerage of Ireland. He remains as Archbishop of Dublin until his death in 1809, and from the beginning of 1801 onward, sits in the House of Lords as one of the twenty-eight original Irish representative peer, following the Acts of Union 1800 which unites Ireland and Great Britain.
Agar dies on July 14, 1809, aged 72, and is succeeded in his secular titles by his son Welbore Ellis Agar. He is buried in the north transept of Westminster Abbey. His widow Jane, Countess of Normanton, is buried alongside him following her death in 1826. His tomb dates from 1815 and is created by John Bacon.
Luttrell was a captain in the Royal Navy but retires in 1789. He is returned to Parliament for Stockbridge in 1774, a seat he holds until 1775, and again between 1780 and 1785. Between 1785 and 1826 he is a commissioner of HM Customs and Excise. He succeeds his elder brother to the earldom in 1821. This is an Irish peerage and does not entitle him to an automatic seat in the House of Lords.
In 1766, Lord Carhampton marries the Honorable Elizabeth Olmius (1742-97), daughter of John Olmius, 1st Baron Waltham. In 1787, out of respect after the death of his father-in-law, he assumes by Royal Licence the additional surname of “Olmius.” In 1798, he sells the Olmius family seat of Newhall to the founding nuns of New Hall School. There are three children from his first marriage (however only his daughter survives to adulthood):
Lady Frances Maria Luttrell (b. 1768), married Sir Simeon Stuart, 4th Baronet
James Luttrell (d. 1772)
John Luttrell (d. 1769)
Lord Carhampton marries secondly Maria Morgan, daughter of John Morgan, in 1798. They have one child:
Lady Maria Anne Luttrell (1799–1857), married Lieutenant-Colonel Hardress Robert Saunderson
Marrinan becomes ill with infantile paralysis at the age of five, and as a result is tutored privately. He has no formal training in art but is largely influenced by his reading matter, particularly the American comic strips of Bud Fisher. The variety of facial expressions that Fisher can achieve, with only a pencil, intrigues and inspires him. Likewise, the images evoked by Celtic mythology and religious art also contributes to his visual language, and many hours are spent in the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery studying the paintings in their collection.
Marrinan exhibits with the Ulster Academy of Arts from an address at 524 Donegall Road, Belfast, entering “The Wee Gate, Earl Street, Belfast” (1931) and “The Painter’s Father” and the “Apache” (1934), which is judged “picture of the year.” He last exhibits with a landscape, “Connemara,” along with four other works in 1949.
Marrinan paints and sketches portraits of many notable Irish figures, among which is the charcoal drawing of northern Fenian Robert Johnston (1934; National Gallery of Ireland) and a sketch of the Donegal storyteller Niall Duffy (University College Dublin). His literary portraits include one of Brian Friel. He holds a one-man show in 1951 at 55a Donegall Place, Belfast, where he exhibits a bust of John McLaverty. He takes an interest in sculpture although painting and drawing remain his preferred form of expression. Important commissions are for a memorial portrait (completed 1952) of Éamonn Ceannt for Ceannt Barracks officers’ mess, Curragh Camp, County Kildare, and for a portrait of Vice-brigadier Peadar Clancy for Clancy Barracks, Dublin. He paints two memorial portraits of PresidentJohn F. Kennedy, one of which is in the Irish Club, London.
Marrinan is an honorary member of the Royal Ulster Academy and exhibits with them every year from 1950 onward, showing a portrait of Mrs. Padraig Marrinan in 1967 (no other details of his marriage are known). He is preparing for an exhibition to be held at the Irish Club, London, in 1974, but dies on October 25, 1973, at Tyrone County Hospital in Omagh. He is then living at James Street, Omagh.
(From: “Marrinan, Padraig H.” by Ruth Devine, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: “The River Lee, Cork City, Ireland” by Padraig Marrinan, oil on canvas)
Shackleton is the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–92) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton (1726–66), and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents are Quakers. She keeps a personal diary for most of her life, beginning at the age of eleven and writing in it almost daily. There 55 extant volumes of her diaries in the National Library of Ireland.
Shackleton is educated, and her literary studies are aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784, she travels to London with her father and pays several visits to Burke’s town house, where she meets Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also goes to Beaconsfield, and on her return writes a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which is acknowledged by Burke on December 13, 1784, in a long letter. On her way home she visits, at Selby, North Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she describes in her journal.
On January 6, 1791, Shackleton marries William Leadbeater, a former pupil of her father and a descendent of the Huguenot Le Batre and Gilliard families. He becomes a prosperous farmer and landowner in Ballitore. She spends many years working in the village post office and also works as a bonnet-maker and a herbal healer for the village. The couple lives in Ballitore and have six children. Their daughter Jane dies at a young age from injuries sustained after an accident with a wax taper. Another daughter, Lydia, is a friend and possible patron of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin.
On her father’s death in 1792, Leadbeater receives a letter of consolation from Burke. Besides receiving letters from Burke, she corresponds with, among others, Maria Edgeworth, George Crabbe, and Melesina Trench. On May 28, 1797, Burke writes one of his last letters to her.
Leadbeater describes in detail the effects of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on the lives of her family and neighbours in Ballitore. She is in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 attending a Quaker meeting when the news arrives that the French fleet has been seen off Bantry. She describes the troops marching out of the town and the ensuing confusion in Carlow and Ballitore.
Leadbeater’s first literary work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, is published anonymously in 1794 in Dublin. It contains an account of the history of Quakerism and several poems on secular and religious subjects.
In 1808, Leadbeater publishes Poems with a metrical version of her husband’s prose translation of Maffeo Vegio‘s Thirteenth Book of the Æneid. She next publishes in 1811 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, of which four editions, with some alterations and additions, appear by 1813. In 1813, she tries to instruct the rich on a similar plan in The Landlord’s Friend. Intended as a sequel to Cottage Dialogues, in which persons of quality are made to discourse on such topics as beggars, spinning-wheels, and Sunday in the village, Tales for Cottagers, which she brings out in 1814 in conjunction with Elizabeth Shackleton, is a return to the original design. The tales illustrate perseverance, temper, economy, and are followed by a moral play, Honesty is the Best Policy.
In 1822, Leadbeater concludes this series with Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry. The lives are those of real persons, and contain some interesting passages, especially in the life of James Dunn, a pilgrim to Lough Derg. Many traits of Irish country life appear in these books, and they preserve several of the idioms of the English-speaking inhabitants of the Pale. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton … compiled by their Daughter is also issued in 1822. Her Biographical Notices of Members of the Society of Friends who were resident in Ireland appears in 1823, and is a summary of their spiritual lives, with a scanty narrative of events. Her last work is The Pedlars, a Tale, published in 1824.
Leadbeater’s best known work, the Annals of Ballitore, is not printed until 1862, when it is brought out with the general title of The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols.) by Richard Davis Webb, a printer who wants to preserve a description on rural Irish life. It tells of the inhabitants and events of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, and few books give a better idea of the character and feelings of Irish cottagers, of the premonitory signs of the rebellion of 1798, and the Rebellion itself. The second volume includes unpublished letters of Burke and the correspondence with Mrs. Richard Trench and with Crabbe.
Leadbeater dies at Ballitore on June 27, 1826, and is buried in the Quaker burial-ground there.
Norman Derek Mahon, Irish poet, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 23, 1941, but lives in a number of cities around the world. At his death it is noted that his “influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense.” President of IrelandMichael D. Higgins says of Mahon, “he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness.”
At Inst Mahon encounters fellow students who share his interest in literature and poetry. The school produces a magazine in which he produces some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton, his early poems are highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents cannot see the point of poetry, but he sets out to prove them wrong after he wins his school’s Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem ”The power that gives the water breath.”
At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon describes himself as an “aesthete” with a penchant “for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.”
In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ends its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.
Mahon dies in Cork, County Cork, on October 1, 2020, after a short illness, aged 78. He is survived by his partner, Sarah Iremonger, and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie. His papers are held at Emory University.
Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica)
seamus dubhghaill 