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Birth of Tim Pat Coogan, Journalist, Writer & Broadcaster

Timothy Patrick “Tim Pat” Coogan, Irish journalist, writer and broadcaster, is born in Monkstown, County Dublin, on April 22, 1935. He serves as editor of The Irish Press newspaper from 1968 to 1987. He is best known for such books as The IRA (1970) and On the Blanket: The H Block Story (1980), and biographies of Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera.

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.”

Coogan is the first of three children born to Beatrice (née Toal) and Eamonn Coogan, a native of Kilkenny who is an Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer during the Irish War of Independence and later serves as the first Deputy Commissioner of the newly established Garda Síochána, then a Fine Gael TD for the Kilkenny constituency. His mother, the daughter of a policeman, is a Dublin socialite who is crowned Dublin’s Civic Queen of Beauty in 1927. She writes for the Evening Herald and takes part in various productions in the Abbey Theatre and Radio Éireann. He spends many summer holidays in the town of Castlecomer, County Kilkenny, his father’s hometown.

A former student of the Irish Christian Brothers in Dún Laoghaire and Belvedere College in Dublin, Coogan spends most of his secondary studies at Blackrock College in Dublin.

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 Taoiseach Enda 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?”

In November 2012, for reasons that are uncertain, the United States embassy in Dublin refuses to grant Coogan a visa to visit the United States. As a result, a planned book tour for his book The Famine Plot, England’s role in Ireland’s Greatest Tragedy (2012) is cancelled. After representations to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by United States Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Congressman Peter T. King (R-NY), he receives his visa.

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).


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Death of Denis Florence MacCarthy, Poet & Translator

Denis Florence MacCarthy, Irish poet, translator, and biographer, dies at 7 Herbert Terrace, Blackrock, Dublin, on April 7, 1882.

MacCarthy is born in Lower O’Connell Street, Dublin, on May 26, 1817, and educated there and at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth. He acquires an intimate knowledge of Spanish from a learned priest, who had spent much time in Spain, which he is later to turn to good advantage. In April 1834, before turning seventeen, he contributes his first verses to the Dublin Satirist. He is one of a coterie of writers whose works appear in The Nation, which is started by Charles Gavan Duffy in 1842. Writing under the pseudonym “Desmond,” most of MacCarthy’s patriotic verse appears in this organ.

In 1846, MacCarthy is called to the Irish bar but never practises. In the same year he edits The Poets and Dramatists of Ireland, which he prefaces with an essay on the early history and religion of his countrymen. About this time, he also edits The Book of Irish Ballads (by various authors), with an introductory essay on ballad poetry in general. His Ballads, Poems, and Lyrics appears in 1850, original and translated. His attention is first directed to Pedro Calderón de la Barca by a passage in one of Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s essays, and from then on, the interpretation of the “Spanish Shakespeare” claims the greater part of his attention.

The first volume of MacCarthy’s translations, containing six plays, appears in 1853, and is followed by further instalments in 1861, 1867, 1870, and 1873. His version of Daybreak in Capacabana is completed only a few months before his death.

Until 1864, MacCarthy resides principally on Killiney Hill, overlooking Dublin Bay. The delicate health of some members of his family then renders a change of climate imperative, and he pays a prolonged visit to continental Europe. On his return, he settles in London in 1871, where he publishes – in addition to his translations – Shelley’s Early Life, which contains an account of that poet’s visit to Dublin in 1812.

During MacCarthy’s final illness he returns to Dublin, settling at 7 Herbert Terrace, Blackrock, and died there on Good Friday, April 7, 1882. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. His memorial committee includes Cardinals John Henry Newman and Edward McCabe, a lifelong friend, Thomas (Lord) O’Hagan, Gavan Duffy, Timothy Daniel Sullivan, and the poets Aubrey Thomas de Vere and Sir Samuel Ferguson. The committee finances the publication of his Poems (1882), edited by his eldest son, John, a minor poet living in London, and commission a bust by Thomas Farrell which is displayed at City Hall, Dublin. His poetical gifts are inherited by his daughter, who becomes a nun and writes as Sister Mary Stanislaus.

MacCarthy’s poems are distinguished by a sense of harmony and sympathy with natural beauty. Such poems as “The Bridal of the Year,” “Summer Longings” (alias “Waiting for the May”), and his long narrative poem, “The Voyage of St. Brendan,” are among his most enduring works. The last-mentioned, which paraphrases the “Ave Maria Stella” as the evening song of the sailors, is also marked by the earnest religious feeling which mark its author throughout life. But it is by his version of Calderon that he is considered to have won a permanent place in English letters. His success is sufficiently testified by George Ticknor, who declares in his History of Spanish Literature that MacCarthy “has succeeded in giving a faithful idea of what is grandest and most effective in [Calderon’s] genius… to a degree which I had previously thought impossible. Nothing, I think, in the English language will give us so true an impression of what is most characteristic of the Spanish drama, and of Spanish poetry generally.”


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Birth of Irish Artist Estella Solomons

Estella Frances Solomons, one of the leading Irish artists of her generation, is born into a prominent Jewish family in Dublin on April 2, 1882. She is noted for her portraits of contemporaries in the republican movement and her studio is a safe house during the Irish War of Independence.

Solomons is born to Maurice Solomons and poet Rosa Jane Jacobs. Her father is an optician whose practice in 19 Nassau Street, Dublin, is mentioned in Ulysses. Her father is also the Vice-Consul of Austria-Hungary. The Solomons family, who came to Dublin from England in 1824, are one of the oldest continuous lines of Jews in Ireland.

Solomons grandmother, Rosa Jacobs Solomons, who is born in Hull in England, is the author of a book called Facts and Fancies (Dublin 1883). Her brother, Bethel Solomons, a renowned physician, a master of the Rotunda Hospital and Irish international rugby player, is mentioned in Finnegans Wake. Her brother Edwin is a stockbroker and prominent member of the Dublin Jewish community. Her younger sister Sophie is a trained opera singer. A portrait of Sophie, by her cousin the printmaker Louise Jacobs, survives in the Estella Solomons archives in the Library of Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

In 1898, at the age of 16, Solomons enters the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art where she wins a significant prize. Her classmates include future Irish artists including Mary Swanzy, Eva Hamilton and William J. Leech. She also attends the Chelsea School of Art from 1903 to 1906. A visit to the tercentenary exhibition of the work of Rembrandt in Amsterdam in 1903 impacts her creative practice and possibly influences her adoption of printmaking as her principal vehicle of expression. She studies under two of Ireland’s leading artists, Walter Osborne, who is another major influence, and William Orpen. With her friends Cissie Beckett (aunt of Samuel Beckett) and Beatrice Elvery, she goes to study in Paris at Académie Colarossi. On her return she exhibits in Leinster Hall, Molesworth Street, with contemporaries such as Beatrice Elvery, Eva Hamilton and Grace Gifford. Her work is also included in joint exhibitions with other artists at Mills Hall and the Arlington Gallery, London. She also exhibits at her Great Brunswick Street studio in December 1926.

Solomons illustrates Padraic Colum‘s The Road Round Ireland (1926) and DL Kelleher’s The Glamour of Dublin in 1928. Originally published after the devastation of the 1916 Easter Rising, the later edition features eight views of familiar locations in the city centre including Merchant’s Arch and King’s Inns. Her etching “A Georgian Doorway” is included in Katherine MacCormack’s Leabhar Ultuin in 1920. This publication features illustrations by several prominent Irish artists and is sold in aid of the new Saint Ultan’s Children’s Hospital in Charlemont Street, Dublin, that had been founded by two prominent members of Cumann na mBan, Dr. Kathleen Lynn and Madeleine ffrench-Mullen.

Solomons paints landscapes and portraits, including of artist Jack Yeats, politician Arthur Griffith, poet Austin Clarke, and writers James Stephens and George Russell (Æ).

Solomons is elected an associate of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in July 1925, but it is not until 1966 that she is elected an honorary member. Her work is included in the Academy’s annual members’ exhibition every year for sixty years.

Solomons is married to poet and publisher Seumas O’Sullivan, whose birth name is James Sullivan Starkey. Her parents oppose the relationship as O’Sullivan is not of the Jewish faith. They marry in 1925, when she is 43 and he 46, after her parents have died. She collaborates with her husband on The Dublin Magazine (1923–58), the renowned literary and art journal, of which O’Sullivan is editor for 35 years. She provides vital financial support to the magazine, particularly in sourcing advertising, which is difficult in the tough economic climate of the new Free State. She is helped in this endeavour by poet and writer, Kathleen Goodfellow, a lifelong friend. When Solomons and O’Sullivan are looking to move from their house in Rathfarnham because of a damp problem, Goodfellow offers them the house beside her own on Morehampton Road for a nominal rent. Two of Solomons’ portraits of Goodfellow are in the Model Arts and Niland Gallery in Sligo.

Solomons joins the Ranelagh branch of Cumann na mBan at the same time as Goodfellow. They are taught first aid, drilling and signaling by Phyllis Ryan. She is active before and during the Irish War of Independence. She conceals ammunition in the family vegetable garden before delivering it to a Sinn Féin agent. Her studio at Great Brunswick Street is used as a safe house by republican volunteers. During this time, she paints the portraits of a number of revolutionaries, some of which she has to later destroy to avoid incriminating them. Her work includes a portrait of Frank Aiken when we was chief of staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA).

Solomons takes up a teaching position at Bolton Street College, Dublin. In 1939, she organises an exhibition in Dublin to help refugee artists from Europe.

Solomons dies on November 2, 1968, and is buried in Woodtown Cemetery, Rathfarnham. Her friend Kathleen Goodfellow gifts the Morehampton Road Wildlife Sanctuary, where Solomons liked to paint, to An Taisce. Two plaques have subsequently been erected there, one in memory of Solomons and one for Goodfellow.

Some of Solomons works are held in the Niland Collection, at The Model gallery in Sligo and in the National Gallery of Ireland. Her archives, which include artwork and photographs (and prints by Louise Jacobs), and the archives of The Dublin Magazine are in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.


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The Wreck of the RMS Royal Adelaide

The RMS Royal Adelaide, a paddle steamship owned and operated by the City of Dublin Steam Packet Company, sinks in a storm on March 30, 1850, with the loss of two hundred lives. Its principal route runs between London and Cork, County Cork.

The RMS Royal Adelaide, captained by John Batty, leaves Cork fully laden with cargo and about 250 passengers on Wednesday, March 27,1850, touching off at Plymouth, Devon, England, on Thursday evening. By the time the ship leaves Plymouth for London at 3:00 a.m. on Friday, March 29, there are almost three hundred deck passengers.

The ship is totally lost at about 11:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 30 on Tongue Sands north of Margate, Kent, England, with the loss of all on board. News only reaches London late on Sunday as the river pilot waiting for the ship happens to meet a Deal, Kent, pilot, Charles Gillham, who reports seeing a ship of a similar description in distress the previous evening (The Illustrated London News, April 6 and 13, 1850).

The dead include more than one hundred fifty deck passengers from Ireland, during a time when the Great Famine is at its height.

(Pictured: “The Wreck of the Royal Adelaide,” illustration for The Illustrated London News, April 13, 1850)


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Birth of Moya Llewelyn Davies, Republican Activist & Gaelic Scholar

Moya Llewelyn Davies, born Mary Elizabeth O’Connor, an Irish Republican activist during the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and a Gaelic scholar, is born in Blackrock, Dublin, on March 25, 1881.

O’Connor is one of five children of Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) Supreme Council member and later MP James O’Connor. He is IRB treasurer in 1870 and party to the discussions on the New Departure, a collaboration between constitutional and physical force nationalists, the open and the secret movements. Her uncle, John O’Connor, is a leading member of the Supreme Council.

In 1890, when O’Connor’s father is a journalist, her mother, Mary O’Connor, and four of her sisters – Annie, Aileen, Kathleen and Norah – die after eating contaminated mussels gathered on the seashore near where they lived in what became known as the Seapoint tragedy. She becomes violently ill, but survives.

O’Connor travels to London after a falling out with her stepmother six years later. She finds work as a civil servant and a paid speaker for the Liberal Party, through which she meets Crompton Llewelyn Davies, adviser to David Lloyd George and solicitor to the General Post Office, brother of Arthur Llewelyn Davies and uncle of the boys who inspire the creation of Peter Pan. They marry on December 8, 1910. The marriage produces two children: Richard and Catherine.

Davies is an orthodox home ruler but is radicalised by the 1916 Easter Rising. Davies and her husband raise funds for Roger Casement‘s legal defence and later lobby for his death sentence to be commuted. She is saluted as one of the “fond ones” in a letter from Casement to Margaret Gavan Duffy on the eve of his August 3, 1916, execution in Pentonville Prison.

Following the Easter Rising, Davies takes her two children to Ireland and purchases Furry Park, a crumbling mansion near Dublin. She collaborates with Michael Collins during the Irish War of Independence and her home in Clontarf becomes one of Collins’ many safe houses as he directs the war. She is arrested and imprisoned in 1920. Collins also stays at her Portmarnock house, using it as a safe house.

Davies says in later life that she and Michael Collins had been lovers, but the historian Peter Hart claims her to be a stalker. It has been suggested that Collins is the father of her son Richard. Historian Meda Ryan denies this saying “Letters from him and a phone call confirmed that he was born December 24, 1912, before his mother met Collins.”

Historian Tim Pat Coogan in his book Michael Collins says that Davies claimed on the night that Collins learned that Éamon de Valera was going to reject the Anglo-Irish Treaty “he was so distressed that I gave myself to him.” Coogan refuses to give a source and in the footnotes, he says, “Confidential source.”

Davies makes a lasting contribution to Irish literature with a translation, with George Thomson, of the Muiris Ó Súilleabháin book Fiche Bliain faoi Bhláth as Twenty Years a-Flowering. She is thought to have helped Collins write his book The Path to Freedom.

Davies dies from cancer in a Dublin nursing home on September 28, 1943.


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Death of Sir Robert Prescott Stewart, Organist, Conductor & Composer

Sir Robert Prescott Stewart, organist, conductor, composer, teacher, and academic, dies in Dublin on March 24, 1894. He is one of the most influential (classical) musicians in 19th-century Ireland.

Stewart is born on December 16, 1825, the second of two sons of Charles Frederick Stewart of 6 Pitt Street (now Balfe Street), Dublin, librarian of King’s Inns. Nothing is known of his mother other than that she studies music with one of the Logier family, presumably the noted military musician and piano teacher Johann Bernhard Logier, a resident of Dublin from 1809.

Stewart is educated at Christ Church Cathedral school in Dublin, where he is a chorister. He begins to accompany choral services in his early teens, and in 1844 is appointed organist of Christ Church Cathedral and the Trinity College Dublin (TCD) chapel. In addition, in 1852 he becomes de facto organist of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and holds all three positions concurrently for the rest of his life.

Stewart’s first conducting appointment is with the Dublin University Choral Society in 1846, to which he later adds similar appointments in Dublin, Bray, and Belfast. He is active as a teacher, both privately and from 1869 at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), and as a critic with the Dublin Daily Express. On occupying the University of Dublin‘s chair of music in 1862, he takes steps to formalise requirements for the music baccalaureate, introducing examinations in a modern language, Latin (or a second modern language), English (literature and composition), arithmetic, and music history. As a result, though not until 1878, similar examinations are introduced at the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge. In his professorial capacity he delivers in the 1870s public lectures on Bach, Handel, Wagner, church music, music education, organology, and, most notably, Irish music, in which he reveals an uncanny knowledge of the wire-strung harp and the uilleann pipes. He also contributes entries on Irish music and musicians to the first edition of George Grove‘s A Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

By all accounts, Stewart is a very adept musician, having perfect pitch, a formidable memory, and astonishing facility in transposition. Apparently an autodidact, he is the first Irish organist to cultivate pedal technique, while in the art of improvisation both Joseph Robinson and Sir John Stainer hold him to be the equal of Mendelssohn.

Intent on broadening his musical horizons, Stewart travels widely. From 1851 he is a regular visitor to London, and from 1857 makes frequent trips to Continental Europe, attending the Beethoven and Schumann festivals at Bonn in 1871 and 1873 respectively and Wagner’s first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. On the initiative of the Dublin University Choral Society, he is conferred with the simultaneous degrees of Mus.B. and Mus.D. at a special ceremony on April 9, 1851. On February 28, 1872, he is knighted at Dublin Castle by John Poyntz Spencer, 5th Earl Spencer, a social climb that Stewart, who has no independent income, can afford only by accumulating professional appointments and by relentless private teaching. In addition to successive townhouses in the vicinity of Merrion Square, he owns a smaller property on Bray Esplanade, named Holyrood.

Among Stewart’s compositions, his disciple James Culwick lists about forty part songs (of which several win prizes), more than twenty solo songs, fifteen anthems, several church services, a quantity of shorter liturgical music, and sixteen choral cantatas with orchestra. Three of the cantatas set texts by John Francis Waller: the 24-movement A Winter Night’s Wake (1858), The Eve of St. John (1860) and Inauguration Ode for the Opening of the National Exhibition of Cork (1852) for the opening of the Irish Industrial Exhibition in Cork. Other occasional pieces are Who Shall Raise the Bell? (The Belfry Cantata) for the inauguration of Trinity College campanile in 1854, Ode to Shakespeare (1870) for the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival, Orchestral Fantasia (1872) for the Boston Peace Festival, How Shall We Close Our Gates? (1873) for the Dublin Exhibition and Tercentenary Ode (1892) for the tercentenary of Trinity College Dublin.

Though Stewart destroys many of his works, his surviving music is consistently well crafted, and the rapid decline in the popularity of the odes is at least partly attributable to the tawdry and ephemeral character of their texts. Yet despite his esteem for Wagner, he never shakes off the conservative stylistic influences of Handel, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn, and the posthumous performance of his music has been restricted almost entirely to the Dublin cathedrals.

In August 1846 Stewart marries Mary Emily Browne, the daughter of Peter Browne of Rahins House, Castlebar, County Mayo. They have four daughters, of whom the eldest dies in 1858. Following Mary’s death on August 7, 1887, he marries on August 9, 1888, Marie Wheeler of Hyde, Isle of Wight, the daughter of Joseph Wheeler of Westlands, Queenstown (now Cobh).

Stewart dies in Dublin on March 24, 1894, and is buried at Mount Jerome Cemetery alongside his first wife and eldest daughter. Portraits of him are in the possession of the Dublin University Choral Society and the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM), and his statue, erected on Leinster Lawn in 1898, still stands.

(From: “Stewart, Sir Robert Prescott” by Andrew Johnstone, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Irish Writer Michael McLaverty

Michael McLaverty, Irish writer of novels and short stories, dies on March 22, 1992, in County Down, Northern Ireland.

McLaverty is born on July 5, 1904, at Magheross, near Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, the son of Michael McLaverty, a waiter, and Kathleen McLaverty (née Brady). His father works in a hotel in the town until they move to Rathlin Island, and later to Belfast, when he is five years old. He attends St. Malachy’s College in the city, where an inspiring teacher instills in him a love of William Shakespeare‘s writings. He entered Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in October 1924 and studies physics. He obtains a B.Sc. in 1928 and immediately takes his H.Dip.Ed., completing his teaching practice in St. Mary’s University College, Strawberry Hill, London. The following year he begins teaching at St. John’s Primary School in Colinward Street, west Belfast. He is admitted to the degree of M.Sc. at QUB in 1933.

In 1933, McLaverty marries Mary Conroy (formerly Giles), a young widow and fellow teacher at St. John’s. They have two sons and two daughters.

During his time at St. John’s, McLaverty writes his first five novels and fifteen short stories. In the 1930s he has developed a distinctive style in precise, unsentimental, but compassionate short stories. By the late 1930s, however, he switches his energies from short stories to the novel. Call My Brother Back (1939) contrasts the traditional world of Rathlin Island with the northern troubles in a family context. Another novel, Lost Fields (1941), and his collection of short stories, The White Mare (1943), explore the Belfast of his childhood and deal with the underlying tensions in Irish rural life. In the period 1949–55 he publishes five other novels: Three Brothers (1948), Truth in the Night (1951), School for Love (1954), The Choice (1958), and Brightening Day (1965). These novels deal with ordinary people and the dilemmas they encounter in their families and communities. His writings are influenced by Anton Chekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Katherine Mansfield, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the Irish short story writers Liam O’Flaherty and Daniel Corkery.

As headmaster of St. Thomas’s intermediate school, a large school for boys in Ballymurphy, off the Falls Road, McLaverty gives his first job to the young Seamus Heaney, in whom he cultivates an interest in the writings of Chekhov and Tolstoy and the Irish writers Mary Lavin and Patrick Kavanagh. He deems Heaney to be the only genius he has ever met, and his work and success are a great source of pride and joy to him. His encouragement of the young John McGahern is of as much benefit to McLaverty himself, as their short but intense correspondence give him the energy to resume his writings.

Between his resignation from St. Thomas’s in 1963 and the early 1970s he teaches part-time at St. Joseph’s training college and St. Dominic’s High School, one of Belfast’s best-known grammar schools. In 1981 his old alma mater recognises his contribution to literature by awarding him an honorary master’s degree. In the same year he wins the American Irish literary fellowship, a prestigious literary award of $10,000, in recognition of his “impressive body of work as a short story writer and novelist.”

McLaverty dies on March 22, 1992, in County Down, Northern Ireland.

(From: “McLaverty, Michael” by Éamonn Ó Ciardha, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Lawrence Sterne, Humorist & Author

Lawrence Sterne, Anglican clergyman, humorist, and author of the experimental novel The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, dies in London on March 18, 1768. Though popular during his lifetime, he becomes even more celebrated in the 20th century, when modernist and postmodernist writers rediscover him as an innovator in textual and narrative forms.

Sterne is born on November 24, 1713, in Clonmel, County Tipperary, to a British military officer stationed there. Following his father’s postings, the family moves briefly to Yorkshire before returning to Ireland, where they live largely in poverty and move frequently throughout the rest of Sterne’s youth. When the elder Sterne is dispatched to Jamaica, where he would die in 1731, he places his son with a wealthy uncle who supports the boy’s education.

Sterne attends Jesus College, Cambridge, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, Richard Sterne, who had been Master of the College. After being ordained as an Anglican priest, he takes up the vicarship of Sutton-on-the-Forest, where he marries Elizabeth Lumley. The couple lives there for the next 20 years.

Through his paternal family line, Sterne is connected to several powerful clergymen. His uncle, Archdeacon Jaques Sterne, encourages him to contribute to Whig political journals, and consequently he writes several articles supporting Sir Robert Walpole. However, when his political fervency fails to match his uncle’s, prompting him to abandon the role of political controversialist, Jaques Sterne cuts ties with his nephew and refuses to support his career. Nevertheless, Sterne continues writing.

Sterne’s first long work, a sharp satire of the spiritual courts entitled A Political Romance, makes him as many enemies as allies. Though the work is not widely distributed and indeed is burned at the request of those targeted by its Swiftian-style criticism, it represents Sterne’s first foray into the kind of humorous satire for which he would become famous. At age 46, he steps back from managing his parishes and turns his full attention to writing.

Sterne begins what becomes his best-known work, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, at a moment of personal crisis. He and his wife are both ill with tuberculosis and, in the same year that the first volumes of his long comic novel appear, his mother and uncle Jaques die. The blend of sentiment, humour and philosophical exploration that characterises his works matures during this difficult period. Tristram Shandy is an enormous success, and Sterne becomes, for the first time in his life, a famous literary figure in London. Still suffering from tuberculosis, he leaves England for Continental Europe, where his travels influence his second major work, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768).

Sterne’s narrator in A Sentimental Journey is Parson Yorick, a sensitive but also comic figure who first appears in Tristram Shandy and who becomes Sterne’s fictive alter ego. In A Sentimental Journey, Parson Yorick wears a “little picture of Eliza around his neck,” and in the last year of his life Sterne writes the autobiographical Journal to Eliza under the pseudonym Yorick. Eliza is Eliza Draper, the wife of an East India Company official, and the literary and emotional muse of Sterne’s final years. After Draper returns to India, the two continue to exchange letters, some of which Draper allows to be published after Sterne’s death in the volume Letters from Yorick to Eliza.

In early 1768, less than a month after A Sentimental Journey is published, Sterne’s strength fails him and he dies in his lodgings at 41 Old Bond Street in London on March 18, 1768, at the age of 54. He is buried in the churchyard of St. George’s Hanover Square Church.

(Pictured: Portrait of Laurence Sterne (1713-1768), oil on canvas by Joshua Reynolds, 1760)


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Death of Sir Thomas Drew, Architect & Antiquarian

Sir Thomas Drew, Anglo-Irish architect and antiquarian, dies in Dublin on March 13, 1910.

Drew is born on September 18, 1838, in Victoria Place, Belfast, into the large family of Rev. Thomas Drew, son of a Limerick grocer, and Isabella Drew (née Dalton). He is one of four sons and eight daughters of the couple, although most of the children die young. His sister, Catherine Drew, is a prominent London journalist and an early champion of women’s rights.

Drew is educated in Belfast and in 1854 articled to the Antrim county surveyor and architect Sir Charles Lanyon, before moving to work in Dublin in 1862, where he becomes principal assistant to William George Murray. In 1865, he becomes the diocesan architect of the united dioceses of Down, Connor and Dromore. From this point forward, church architecture is his principal activity. He is consulting architect for both St. Patrick’s Cathedral and Christ Church Cathedral in Dublin.

Drew marries Adelaide Anne, sister of William George Murray, in 1871.

Among other projects, Drew is responsible for the design of the Ulster Bank on Dame Street, Rathmines Town Hall and the Graduates’ Building at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He takes an interest in historic buildings and is the first to draw serious attention to the architectural and historic importance of the St. Audoen’s Church, Dublin’s oldest parish church, in 1866. He produces detailed plans of the church for which he wins the Fitzgerald medal from the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), carries out excavations and draws up a paper on the church and its history.

From 1885 to 1892, Richard Orpen works with Drew as a managing assistant. Drew’s most significant work in Belfast is St. Anne’s Cathedral, completed in 1899.

Drew is knighted in the 1900 Birthday Honours and is the inaugural president of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA), serving from 1901 to 1903. In addition, he is president of the Royal Institute of the Architects of Ireland (RIAI), the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) and the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) and holds the chair in architecture at the National University of Ireland (NUI).

From 1879 onward Drew lives in Gortnadrew, one half of a pair of semi-detached houses of his own design, on Alma Road in Monkstown, County Dublin. For many years he serves as a commissioner of the local township of Blackrock, Dublin. He dies on March 13, 1910, a month after an unsuccessful operation for appendicitis. He is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery in the suburban area of Deansgrange in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown, County Dublin.

Drew is commemorated in a memorial brass in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin. His wife survives him by three years and in her will bequeaths back to the RIAI the loving cup presented to her husband in commemoration of his knighthood, and to the Belfast Municipal Museum and Art Gallery (Ulster Museum since 1962) an 1852 portrait of his father Thomas. A portrait of Drew by Walter Osborne is held in the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI) in Dublin.


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Death of Timothy Harrington, Journalist, Barrister & Politician

Timothy Charles Harrington, Irish journalist, barrister, nationalist politician and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom, dies in Dublin on March 12, 1910, following a stroke.

Harrington is born on September 20, 1851, in Castletownbere, County Cork, son of Denis Harrington and his wife, Eileen (née O’Sullivan). He is educated at the Catholic University of Ireland and Trinity College Dublin (TCD).

As a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), Harrington represents Westmeath from February 1883 to November 1885. In 1885 he is elected for the new constituency of Dublin Harbour, which he represents until his death. He serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin three times from 1901 to 1904.

Harrington owns two newspapers, United Ireland and the Kerry Sentinel, and is a member of the so-called Bantry band of prominent nationalist politicians from the Bantry vicinity. They are also more pejoratively known as the Pope’s brass band. Tim Healy is another prominent member of this unofficial group.

In 1884, Harrington publishes a pamphlet, “Maamtrasna Massacres – Impeachment of the Trials,” in which he dismantles the Crown Prosecution’s case against the eight men accused of the murders of the Joyce family on August 17, 1882. He provides evidence that Crown Prosecutor George Bolton had deliberately suppressed evidence that would have acquitted Maolra Seoighe (English: Myles Joyce), who was hanged, and four men who were sentenced to twenty years of penal servitude.

Harrington is secretary and chief organiser of the Irish National League (INL), a supporter of Charles Stewart Parnell and is largely responsible for devising the agrarian Plan of Campaign in 1886. He becomes a Parnellite Nationalist when the party splits in 1891, continuing as secretary of the INL. In 1897 he proclaims himself an Independent Nationalist and sides with William O’Brien‘s United Irish League (UIL) from its early days. He is briefly considered as a possible alternative to John Redmond as leader of the re-united Irish Parliamentary Party in 1900 when he stands in the 1900 United Kingdom general election Ireland as a Nationalist again.

Thereafter Harrington becomes excluded from Redmond’s closed circle of confidants, retains sympathy with O’Brien, and represents the interests of the tenant farmers at the 1902 Land Conference negotiations which lead to the enactment of the unprecedented Wyndham Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903.

On September 7, 1901, as the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Harrington kicks off at the official ceremony to open Bohemian F.C.‘s new home, Dalymount Park.

Harrington retains the party nomination for the Dublin Harbour constituency in the January 1910 United Kingdom general election, largely because of local divisions about who should succeed him and because an O’Brienite offer to pay his election expenses deters rivals from going to the polls. He decides that the finely balanced result of the general election means that every nationalist vote would be required at Westminster. He therefore travels to London, but shortly after attending the parliamentary party meeting on February 23 he suffers a stroke. After some days’ recuperation he is brought home to Dublin, but his condition deteriorates and he dies on March 12, 1910, at his home, 70 Harcourt Street. He is buried near the Parnell circle at Glasnevin Cemetery.

Harrington is celebrated by a statue erected in 2001 at the east end of Castletownbere near the Millbrook bar.