Flanagan is born to Patrick and Elizabeth (née Mulligan) Flanagan, who are strongly nationalist and republican, and support the Republican Anti-Treaty during the Irish Civil War, both serving as Lord Mayor of Sligo. Her paternal family, originally from County Fermanagh, are driven out by anti‐Catholicpogroms and resettle in Sligo, where her parents manage a retail business. She is good friends with fellow Irish actresses Joan O’Hara and Paddy Croft. She spends much of the early 1950s touring with Anew McMaster, where she meets Harold Pinter at the Gate’s Pinter Festival.
In 1997, Flanagan wins the Barclays Theatre Awards for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her role in Jennifer Johnston‘s The Desert Lullaby: A Play in Two Acts, at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast. The Barclays Theatre Awards are for outstanding regional theatre (including opera and dance) in the United Kingdom.
A resident of Glen Rock, New Jersey, Flanagan dies at The Valley Hospital in Ridgewood, New Jersey, on June 28, 2003, one day before her 78th birthday, of heart failure following a battle with lung cancer. She is survived by her husband, George Vogel (whom she married in 1958), a sister, Maura McNally, and her daughters Melissa Brown and Jane Holtzen.
Adebari arrives in Dublin with his wife and two children in 2000. After he converts from Islam to Christianity, he flees Nigeria in 2000, and makes a claim for asylum on the grounds of religious persecution. His application is rejected because of a lack of evidence that he had personally suffered persecution. He does however gain automatic residency when his wife gives birth to a son in Ireland shortly after their arrival.
Adebari and his family settle in County Laois. He completes his master’s degree in intercultural studies at Dublin City University (DCU) and sets up a firm called Optimum Point Consultancy.
In 2004, Adebari is elected as a town councilor in local elections. On June 27, 2007, at the age of 43, he is elected mayor of the 9-member Portlaoise Town Council, by a vote of six to three and with support from Fine Gael, Sinn Féin and an Independent councilor. At a meeting attended by officials from the Nigerian, South African, and the United States embassies, the new mayor is quoted as saying his election is proof that “Ireland is not just a country of a thousand welcomes, but it is a country of equal opportunity.” In the 2009 local elections he is re-elected to the town council and also to Laois County Council for the Portlaoise electoral area.
In 2007, Adebari denies claims that he was a train operator in London who worked out of the Queen’s Park station on the Bakerloo line. Multiple London Underground employees, including Paddy Clarke, a retired tube driver from County Louth, state that Adebari worked as a train driver in London during the late 1990s before moving to Ireland. Clarke states, “at the very least fifty drivers and six or more managers will remember him. His photograph and signature are on file with London Underground’s personnel office which were used in the issue of his free travel-pass and identity card.” Adebari asserts he traveled to Ireland directly from Nigeria via Paris, and never worked or lived in London at any time.
Stoney is born into an old-established Anglo-Irish scientific family at 40 Wellington Road, Ballsbridge, Dublin, on January 6, 1869. The daughter of George Johnstone Stoney, FRS, an eminent physicist who coins the term “electron” in 1891 as the “fundamental unit quantity of electricity,” and his wife and cousin, Margaret Sophia Stoney. One of her two brothers, George Gerald, is an engineer and a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). One of her two sisters, Florence Stoney, is a radiologist and receives an OBE. Her cousin is the Dublin-based physicist George Francis FitzGerald FRS (1851–1901), and her uncle Bindon Blood Stoney FRS is Engineer of Dublin Port, renowned for building a number of the main Dublin bridges and developing the Quayside.
Stoney demonstrates considerable mathematical talent and gains a scholarship at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieves a First in the Part I Tripos examination in 1893. However, she is not awarded a University of Cambridge degree as women are excluded from graduation until 1948. During her time at Newnham, she is in charge of the College telescope. She is later awarded a BA and an MA from Trinity College Dublin, after they accept women in 1904.
Following the 1876 Medical Act, it is illegal for academic institutions to prevent access to medical education based on gender. The first medical school for women in Britain is established in 1874 by Dr. Sophia Jex-Blake in anticipation of this law. The London School of Medicine for Women quickly becomes part of the University of London, with clinical teaching at the Royal Free Hospital. Stoney’s sister Florence is a student at the school, graduates in medicine with honours in 1895 (MB BS) and obtains her MD in 1898. Meanwhile, Stoney gains an appointment as a physics lecturer at the school in 1899. Her first tasks are to set up a physics laboratory and design the physics course. The laboratory is planned for 20 students, and the course content is pure physics, as required by university regulations. It includes mechanics, magnetism, electricity, optics, sound, heat and energy. In her obituary in The Lancet, an ex-student of hers notes: “Her lectures on physics mostly developed into informal talks, during which Miss Stoney, usually in a blue pinafore, scratched on a blackboard with coloured chalks, turning anxiously at intervals to ask ‘Have you taken my point?’. She was perhaps too good a mathematician … to understand the difficulties of the average medical student, but experience had taught her how distressing these could be”.
In 1901, the Royal Free Hospital appoints Florence into a new part-time position of medical electrician. The following April, the two sisters open a new x-ray service in the electrical department. During their time at the Royal Free Hospital, the two sisters actively support the women’s suffrage movement, though oppose the direct violent action with which it is later associated.
During her time at the school, Stoney also plays a central role in the British Federation of University Women (BFUW). She is elected treasurer, in her absence, at the first executive meeting on October 9, 1909, a position she holds until the end of May 1915. She becomes increasingly engaged with the political lobbying of the Federation. At the executive meeting on October 19, 1912, she proposes the names of two members for a subcommittee to secure the passing into law of a bill to enable women to become barristers, solicitors or parliamentary agents. The legislation is eventually enacted after the war within the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.
Stoney resigns her post at the school in March 1915 and it is recorded that “with due regret and most unwillingly a change is desirable in the physics lectureship.” She is offered £300 on tendering her resignation.
Both Stoney and Florence offer their services to the British Red Cross at the War Office in London, to provide a radiological service to support the troops in Europe, on the day Britain declares war. Their offer is refused, because they are women. Florence sets up her own unit with the Women’s Imperial Service League and spends the next 6 months in Europe. Stoney organises supplies from London where she also serves on the League’s committee. Florence returns to London at the time Stoney resigns from the London School of Medicine for Women. She contacts the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), an organisation formed in 1914 to give medical support in the field of battle and financed by the women’s suffrage movement. The organisation has gained agreement to set up a new 250-bed tented hospital at Domaine de Chanteloup, Sainte-Savine, near Troyes (France), funded by the Cambridge women’s colleges of Girton and Newnham and it becomes her role to plan and operate the x-ray facilities. She establishes stereoscopy to localise bullets and shrapnel and introduces the use of x-rays in the diagnosis of gas gangrene, interstitial gas being a mandate for immediate amputation to give any chance of survival.
The hospital is near the front line and, in her own words, by September 1915, “the town had been evacuated, the station had been mined, and we heard the heavy guns ever going at nighttime.” The unit is entirely female, except for two part-time male drivers, and her technical assistant, Mr. Mallett.
They are assigned to the Corps Expéditionnaire d’Orient and ordered to move to Serbia. After boarding the steamship Mossoul in Marseille, they reach Salonika (known as Thessaloniki in modern Greece) on November 3, where they take the night train north to Ghevgheli (now Gevgelija in modern North Macedonia), on the Serbian side of the Greek border. They set up a hospital in an unused silk factory where they treat 100 patients with injuries ranging from frostbite to severe lung and head wounds. Following defeats at the hands of Bulgarian forces, Stoney and her staff retreat to Salonika by December 6, 1916. Eleven days later, they have re-established the hospital on a drained low swamp by the sea, and by New Year’s Day 1917 she has the lights on and the x-rays working. Despite the lack of equipment and resources, she establishes an electrotherapy department and various equipments for the muscular rehabilitation of the soldiers in their care. She also assists with problems on two British hospital ships, on which the x-ray systems have been damaged during a storm and gives support to the SWH unit in Ostrovo (now Arnissa on Lake Vegoritida formerly lake Ostrovo in Northern Greece), which arrives during September 1916. She has a break for sick leave in December 1917 and returns the following summer. She applies for an appointment as an army camp radiologist in Salonika, but her demand is blocked by the War Office.
In October 1917, Stoney returns to France to lead the x-ray departments at the SWH hospitals of Royaumont and Villers-Cotterêts. In March 1918, she has to supervise a camp closure and retreat for the third time, when Villers-Cotterêts is overrun by the German troops. During the final months of the war the fighting intensifies and there is a steep increase in workload. In the month of June alone the x-ray workload peaks at over 1,300, partly because of an increased use of fluoroscopy.
On returning to England, Stoney takes a post as lecturer in physics in the Household and Social Science department at King’s College for Women which she holds until retirement in 1925. After leaving King’s she moves to Bournemouth, where she lives with her sister Florence, who is suffering from spinal cancer, dying in 1932.
During her retirement, Stoney resumes her work with the BFUW for which she had acted as the first treasurer before the war. She becomes one of the earliest (and oldest) members of the Women’s Engineering Society and plays an active part in the organisation until shortly before her death. She travels widely and, in 1934, she speaks to the Australian Federation of University Women on the subject of women in engineering, highlighting the contribution made by women workers during the war. In 1936, she establishes the Johnstone and Florence Stoney Studentship in the BFUW, for “research in biological, geological, meteorological or radiological science undertaken preferably in Australia, New Zealand or South Africa.” The studentship is now administered by Newnham College, Cambridge, and supports clinical medical students going abroad for their elective period. The declaration of Trust is dated February 11, 1942 and the Johnstone And Florence Stoney Studentship Fund Charity is registered on March 25, 1976.
Stoney dies on June 25, 1938, at age 69, and obituaries are printed in both the scientific and medical press – Nature, The Lancet, The Woman Engineer and national newspapers in England, The Times and Australia.
Stoney is remembered for her considerable bravery and resourcefulness in the face of extreme danger, and her imagination in contributing to clinical care under the most difficult conditions of war. As a strong advocate of education for women, she enables young graduate women to spend time on research overseas and another to enable physicists to enter medical school thanks to the fund she created. Through her work and engagements, she is remembered as a pioneer of medical physics.
(Pictured: Edith Anne Stoney during her time in Cambridge in the early 1890s)
Kitchener is the second son of Lieutenant Colonel Henry Horatio Kitchener and his first wife, Frances Anne (née Chevallier), daughter of clergyman John Chevallier. Col. Kitchener resigns his commission in 1849 and purchases Ballygoghlan House estate near Tarbert, County Kerry, in early 1850 under the provisions of the Encumbered Estates Act of 1849. Ballygoghlan House is in a state of disrepair, however, and the family lives in Gunsborough Villa until the end of 1850. In 1857, Col. Kitchener purchases Crotta House, near Kilflynn, County Kerry, and the Kitcheners divide their time between the two residences. While innovative and successful in his agricultural methods, Col. Kitchener is harsh towards his tenants and, after carrying out many evictions, becomes extremely unpopular in the area. He is a rigid disciplinarian and occasionally punishes his son severely.
Although Kitchener attends Ballylongford village school, his education is largely neglected. When examined by his cousin Francis Elliot Kitchener, fellow of Trinity College Dublin (TCD), he is found to have only the most rudimentary knowledge of grammar and arithmetic. Education by private tutors follows. In 1864, his father sells his Irish estates and moves to Switzerland for the sake of his wife’s health. After further private tuition, he passes into the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, in 1868, and is commissioned into the Royal Engineers in December 1870.
Kitchener begins his career on survey missions and carries out such work in Palestine (1874–78) and Cyprus (1878–82). He then enters the Egyptian Army and takes part in the Sudan campaign of 1883–85, organised to relieve Genral Charles George Gordon. Subsequent appointments include governor of Suakin (1886–88), adjutant-general of the Egyptian Army (1888–92), and Sirdar (Commander-in-Chief) of the Egyptian Army (1892–96). After the Dongola Expedition in 1896, he is promoted to major-general. He commands the Khartoum Expedition of 1898, defeating Mahdist forces at Atbara and Omdurman, and is raised to the peerage.
At the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899, he is appointed chief of staff to Frederick Roberts, 1st Earl Roberts, and assumes total command, with the rank of lieutenant-general, in 1900. While acting as commander-in-chief in South Africa he reorganises the British forces and, using new tactics, manages finally to defeat the Boers. He is severely criticised in the world press for the conditions in the concentration camps where Boer families are confined, but is made a viscount, promoted to general, and awarded £50,000 by parliament at the end of the war.
Kitchener serves as commander-in-chief in India beginning in 1902, is promoted to Field Marshal in 1909, and is a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence (1910) and consul-general in Egypt (1911–14). At the outbreak of World War I he is made Secretary of State for War and begins to reorganise the British Army, an immense achievement, raising 1,700,000 men in service battalions by May 1915, creating an army of volunteers to reinforce the depleted regular army in Belgium and France. An archconservative, he totally opposes Home Rule for Ireland, and initially blocks plans by John Redmond for the formation of a southern Irish division from members of the National Volunteers. Convinced that an all-Irish brigade or division would be a security risk, he rejects Redmond’s suggestions in a meeting of August 1915 and originally proposes dispersing Irish recruits through the numerous regiments in the army. Impressed by Redmond’s persistence, and impelled by the recruiting crisis of late 1915, he finally reverses his decision and sanctions the establishment of the 16th (Irish) Division.
On June 5, 1916, Kitchener is making his way to Russia on HMS Hampshire to attend negotiations with Tsar Nicholas II when in bad weather the ship strikes a German mine 1.5 miles (2.4 km) west of Orkney, Scotland, and sinks. He is among 737 who perish. He is the highest-ranking British officer to die in action in the entire war.
Although he only spends his early years in Kerry, Kitchener occasionally returns to Ireland. While on leave in June 1910 he goes on a tour of County Kerry, visiting places connected to his childhood. There are numerous portraits and memorials to him in England, including a marble effigy by W. Reid Dick in St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and a statue by John Tweed in Horse Guards Parade, London. There is a commemorative bible in the Church of Ireland church at Kilflynn, County Kerry, where he regularly attended Sunday service as a boy. There are some Kitchener letters in the John Redmond papers in the National Library of Ireland.
(From: “Kitchener, Horatio Herbert” by David Murphy, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
As Governor-General of India, Wellesley uses military force and diplomacy to strengthen and expand British authority. East India Company forces defeat and kill Tipu Sultan, Indian Muslim ruler of the Kingdom of Mysore (present-day Mysuru) and sympathizer for Revolutionary France, in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War (1799), and he then restores the Hindu dynasty there that had been deposed by Tipu’s father, Hyder Ali. He annexes much territory after his brother Arthur and General Gerard Lake defeat the Maratha Confederacy of states in the Deccan Plateau (peninsular India). In addition, he forces the Oudh State to surrender numerous important cities to the British, and he contracts with other states a series of “subsidiary alliances” by which all parties recognize British preponderance. He receives a barony in the British peerage in 1797 at the time of his appointment as governor-general, and in 1799 he is awarded a marquessate in the Irish peerage for his victory in the Mysore War.
When Wellesley is faced with an invasion by Zaman Shah Durrani, ruler (1793–1800) of Kabul (Afghanistan), he utilizes his envoy, Captain John Malcolm, to induce Fatḥ-Alī Shah Qajar of Qajar Iran to restrain Zaman Shah Durrani and to give British political and commercial interests preference over the French. On receiving a British government order to restore to France its former possessions in India, he refuses to comply. His policy is vindicated when the Treaty of Amiens (1802) is violated, and Great Britain resumes war against Napoleonic France.
Wellesley’s annexations and the vast military expenditure that he had authorized alarms the court of directors of the East India Company. In 1805, he is recalled, and soon afterward he is threatened with impeachment, although two years later he refuses an offer of the foreign secretaryship. In 1809, he goes to Spain to make diplomatic arrangements for the Peninsular War against France and later that year becomes foreign secretary under Prime MinisterSpencer Perceval. In that office he antagonizes his colleagues, who consider him an indolent megalomaniac and welcome his resignation in February 1812. Unlike most of them, however, he had urged a stronger war effort in Spain and had advocated political rights for British Roman Catholics. After Perceval’s assassination on May 11, 1812, he attempts unsuccessfully to form a government at the request of the prince regent (the future King George IV).
As Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Wellesley disappoints the anti-Catholic George IV, and he is about to be removed when his brother, Arthur, is appointed prime minister in January 1828. He then resigns because his brother is opposed to Roman Catholic emancipation, although the duke is constrained to accept that policy as a political necessity in 1829. His second term as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1833–34) ends with the fall of Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey’s reform government. When the Whig Party returns to power in April 1835, he is not sent back to Ireland, and in his rage, he threatens to shoot the prime minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. He wants to be created Duke of Hindustan so that his rank will equal that of his brother.
Wellesley dies at the age of 82 on September 26, 1842, at Knightsbridge, London. He is buried in Eton College Chapel, at his old school. He and Arthur, after a long estrangement, had been once more on friendly terms for some years. Arthur weeps at the funeral and says that he knows of no honour greater than being Lord Wellesley’s brother.
Wellesley’s library is sold at auction in London by R. H. Evans on January 17, 1843 (and three following days); a copy of the catalogue, annotated with prices and buyers’ names, is held at Cambridge University Library.
Wellesley has several children, including three sons, but none are legitimate. The marquessate thus becomes extinct upon his death. The earldom of Mornington goes to his next surviving brother, William Wellesley-Pole.
(From: “Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess Wellesley, British statesman,” written and fact-checked by the Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, http://www.britannica.com, April 2024 | Pictured: “Richard Colley Wellesley, Marquess of Wellesley (1760-1842),” oil on canvas portrait by Thomas Lawrence, 1812-13)
Boycott is born on March 12, 1832, at Burgh St. Peter, Norfolk, England, eldest surviving son of William Boycatt (1798–1877), rector of Wheatacrebury, Norfolk, and Elizabeth Georgiana Boycatt (née Beevor). The family name is changed to Boycott by his father in 1862. Educated at a boarding school in Blackheath, London, and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, he is commissioned ensign in the 39th (Dorsetshire) Regiment of Foot on February 15, 1850, and serves briefly in Ireland. He sells his commission on December 17, 1852, having attained the rank of captain, marries Annie Dunne of Queen’s County (County Laois) in 1852, and leases a farm in south County Tipperary.
In 1855, Boycott leaves for Achill Island, County Mayo, where he sub-leases 2,000 acres and acts as land agent for a friend, Murray McGregor Blacker, a local magistrate. He settles initially near Keem Strand but after some years builds a fine house near Dooagh overlooking Clew Bay. He clashes with local landowners and agents and is regularly involved in litigation. Twice summonsed unsuccessfully for assault (1856, 1859), he is involved (1859–60) in a bitter dispute with a land agent over salvage rights for shipwrecks, one of the few lucrative activities on the island. Achill’s remoteness and the difficulties of wresting a living from its harsh environment adds a roughness to the island’s social relations and probably aggravates Boycott’s tendency to high-handedness.
In 1873, Boycott inherits money and moves to mainland County Mayo, leasing Lough Mask House near Ballinrobe and its surrounding 300 acres. He also becomes agent for John Crichton, 3rd Earl Erne‘s neighbouring estate of 1,500 acres, home to thirty-eight tenant farmers paying rents of £500 a year, of which he receives 10 per cent as agent. He also serves as a magistrate and is unpopular because of his brusque and authoritarian manner, and for denying locals such traditional indulgences as collecting wood from the Lough Mask estate or taking short cuts across his farm. In April 1879, he purchases the 95-acre Kildarra estate between Claremorris and Ballinlough and an adjoining wood for £1,125, taking out a mortgage of £600 which stretches his finances.
Boycott is no brutal tyrant, but he is aloof, stubborn, and pugnacious, and believes that the Irish peasantry is prone to idleness and require firm handling. Such qualities and beliefs are unremarkable enough, but in the peculiar circumstances of the land war in County Mayo, they are enough to catapult this rather ordinary man to worldwide notoriety.
In autumn 1879, concerted land agitation begins in County Mayo, and on August 1, 1879, Boycott receives a notice threatening his life unless he reduces rents. He ignores it and evicts three tenants, which embitter relations on the estate. Lough Mask House is placed under Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) surveillance beginning in November 1879. In August 1880, his farm labourers, encouraged by the Irish National Land League, strike successfully for a wage increase from 7s. –11s. to 9s. –15s. Since the harvest is poor, Lord Erne allows a 10 per cent rent abatement. But in September 1880, when Boycott demands the rent, most tenants seek a 25 per cent abatement. Lord Erne refuses, and on September 22, Boycott attempts to serve processes against eleven defaulters. Servers and police are attacked by an angry crowd of local women and forced to take refuge in Boycott’s house. Almost immediately he is subjected to the ostracism against land grabbers advocated by Charles Stewart Parnell in his September 19 speech at Ennis, County Clare. This weapon proves as devastating against an English land agent as an Irish land-grabber. His servants leave him, labourers refuse to work his land, his walls and fences are destroyed, and local traders refuse to do business with him. He is jeered on the roads, is hissed and hustled by hostile crowds in Ballinrobe, and requires police protection.
The campaign against Boycott is largely orchestrated by Fr. John O’Malley, a local parish priest and president of the Neale branch of the Irish National Land League. It is probably O’Malley who coins the term “boycott” as an alternative to the word “ostracise,” which he believes would mean little to the local peasantry. Propagated by O’Malley’s friend, the American journalist, James Redpath, it is adopted by advocates and opponents alike.
On October 22, 1880, before his story breaks on the world, Boycott gives evidence of his treatment to the Bessborough Commission in Galway. He publicises his plight in an October 18, 1880, letter to The Times, and in a long interview with The Daily News on October 24, which is reprinted in Irish unionist newspapers and arouses considerable sympathy for him. Although he rarely uses his former military rank, he becomes universally known as “Captain Boycott,” since it suits both sides to portray him as someone of social standing. Letters of support appear in unionist papers and the Belfast News Letter sets up a “Boycott Relief Fund” and proposes a relief expedition, portraying Boycott as a peaceable English gentleman unjustly subjected to intimidation.
The prospect of hundreds of armed loyalists descending on County Mayo alarms the government, who announced on November 8 that they will provide protection for a small group of labourers to harvest Boycott’s crops. On November 12, fifty-seven loyalists from counties Cavan and Monaghan, “the Boycott Relief Expedition,” arrive at Lough Mask with an escort of almost a thousand troops. After harvesting Boycott’s crops, they leave on November 26. The entire operation costs £10,000 – about thirty times the value of the crops. Although the expedition passes off largely without incident, it focuses international media attention on the affair and establishes the word “boycott” in English and several other languages as a standard term for communal ostracism.
On November 27, Boycott and his wife go to the Hammam hotel, Dublin, where he receives death threats. On December 1, he travels to London and then to the United States (March–May 1881) to see Murray McGregor Blacker, the friend from his time on Achill Island who has since settled in Virginia. In an interview with the New York Herald, he criticises the liberal government’s weakness toward the Land League and claims that the Irish land question is an intractable problem that can only be solved in the long term by emigration and industrialisation.
Boycott returns to Lough Mask on September 19, 1881, and at an auction in Westport is mobbed and burned in effigy. This, however, is the last outburst of hostility against him, and as the land agitation wanes so does his unpopularity. Although unsuccessful in efforts to win compensation from the government, he receives a public subscription of £2,000. He remains in County Mayo as Lord Erne’s agent until February 1886, when he obtains the post of land agent for Sir Hugh Adair in Flixton, Suffolk, but he keeps the small Kildarra estate, where he continues to holiday. On December 12, 1888, he gives evidence of his treatment to the parliamentary commission on “Parnellism and crime.”
After suffering from ill-health for some years, Boycott dies at Flixton on June 19, 1897, and is buried in the churchyard of Burgh St. Peter. A British-made film, Captain Boycott (1947), stars Cecil Parker in the title role.
The senior surviving leader of the 1916 Easter Rising, de Valera is jailed by the British after his death sentence for his participation in the Rising is reduced to life imprisonment. He likes to tell the story that his life was spared because of his American birth, a story he tells the visiting United States presidentJohn F. Kennedy at a State reception in 1963. However, it is most likely that his court-martial is scheduled too late after the public and popular pressure becomes too much on the British Government who call a stop to the executions. British prison authorities are surely glad to see him go. He had led Irish prisoners in acts of defiance in several different prisons.
At Dartmoor Prison, de Valera goes on hunger strike and gets a fellow prisoner off bread and water. When all the Irish prisoners are transferred to Lewes Jail, he organizes a work stoppage and gets another man off bread and water. The exasperated British then split up the Irish prisoners, sending de Valera to Maidstone Prison, whose governor has a reputation for breaking men. De Valera meets him head on, refusing to stand at attention or button his jacket as required in his presence, then piercing his pride by wondering aloud, to the delight of the British prison guards, why a military-age man such as he is not at the front. The governor avoids him after that.
Soon after this, de Valera is transferred to Pentonville Prison for early release. Most of the notable leaders of the 1916 Rising, including Dr. Kathleen Lynn, Thomas Ashe and others, had been released from various British prisons. Before his release, they congregate at Pentonville and say a prayer over the grave of Roger Casement, who had been hanged there.
As a free man, de Valera continues to plague Ireland’s foreign rulers. He is handed a telegram saying that he is going to stand as the Sinn Féin candidate in the East Clare by-election. This is the start of a political career that extends over fifty years.
D’Arcy is born to a Russian-Jewish mother and an Irish Catholic father. She works in small theatres in Dublin from the age of fifteen and later becomes an actress.
D’Arcy is married in 1957 to English playwright and author John Arden. They write several plays together which are highly critical of the British presence in Ireland. They settle in Galway in 1971 and establish the Galway Theatre Workshop in 1976. The couple has five sons, one of whom predeceases his mother.
The couple writes a number of stage pieces and improvisational works for amateur and student players, including The Happy Haven (1960) and The Workhouse Donkey (1964). She writes and produces many plays, including The Non-Stop Connolly Show (1977).
D’Arcy has also written a number of books, including Tell Them Everything (1981), Awkward Corners (with John Arden, 1988), and Galway’s Pirate Women: A Global Trawl (1996).
As an activist, in 1961, D’Arcy joins the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, led by Bertrand Russell. In 1981, her peace-activism results in her incarceration in Armagh Jail, after defacing a wall at the Ulster Museum. Her book Tell Them Everything (Pluto Press, 1981) tells the story of her time during the Armagh and H-Blockdirty protests and is one of the earliest accounts about the Armagh women, their republicanism and imprisonment.
D’Arcy also directs Yellow Gate Women (2007), a film about the attempts by women of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp to outwit the British and United States military at RAF Greenham Common with bolt cutters and legal challenges. Challenging censorship since 1987, she runs a women’s kitchen pirate radio from her home in Galway.
In 2011, D’Arcy refuses to stand for a minute’s silence to honour Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) officer Ronan Kerr, killed by dissident republicans, at an Aosdána meeting. Her actions are deliberate, she tells the media afterwards, which attracts fierce criticism of her perceived support for armed republican groups in Northern Ireland.
Along with Niall Farrell, D’Arcy is arrested in October 2012 for scaling the perimeter fence of Shannon Airport, in protest at the use of the airport as a stopover for U.S. military flights. As a consequence of her trespassing on airport property, she is imprisoned in 2014 after she refuses to sign a bond saying that she will not trespass on non-public parts of Shannon Airport.
Gwynn spends his early childhood in rural County Donegal, which is to shape his later view of Ireland. He attends Brasenose College, Oxford, where, as scholar, in 1884 he is awarded first-class honours in classical moderations and in 1886 literae humaniores. During term holidays he returns to Dublin, where he meets several of the political and literary figures of the day.
After graduating, Gwynn spends ten years from 1886 tutoring as a schoolmaster, for a time in France, which creates a lifelong interest in French culture, as expressed in his Praise of France (1927). By 1896 he has developed an interest in writing, becoming a writer and journalist in London focused on English themes, until he comes into contact with the emerging Irish literary revival, when he serves as secretary of the Irish Literary Society.
This is the beginning of a long and prolific career as a writer covering a wide range of literary genres, from poetry and biographical subjects to general historical works. The eighteenth century is Gwynn’s particular specialism. He writes numerous books on travel and on the topography of his own homeland, as well as on his other interests: wine, eighteenth-century painting and fishing.
Gwynn returns to Ireland in 1904 when he enters politics. In the 1906 Galway Borough by-election he wins a seat for Galway Borough, which he represents as a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party until 1918. During this period, he is active in the Gaelic League and is one of the few Irish MPs to have close links to the Irish literary revival. Along with Joseph Maunsel Hone and George Roberts he founds the Dublin publishing house of Maunsel and Company. He is opposed to the demand for the Irish language to be a compulsory subject for matriculation. He supports the campaign which wins the establishment of a Catholic university when he serves on the Irish University Royal Commission in 1908. During the debate on the third Home Rule Bill, and at the request of his party leader John Redmond, he writes The case for Home Rule (1911) and is in charge of much of the party’s official publicity and its replies to criticism from Sinn Féin.
On the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Gwynn strongly supports Redmond’s encouragement of Irish nationalists and the Irish National Volunteers to support the Allied and British war effort by enlisting in Irish regiments of the Irish Divisions, especially as a means to ensure the implementation of the suspended Home Rule Act at the end of an expectedly short war. Now over fifty, he enlists in January 1915 with the 7th Leinster Regiment in the 16th (Irish) Division. In July he is commissioned as a captain in the 6th (Service) Battalion, Connaught Rangers and serves with them on the Western Front at Messines, the Somme and elsewhere.
Gwynn is one of five Irish Nationalist MPs who enlist and serve in the army, the others being John L. Esmonde, Willie Redmond, William Redmond and D. D. Sheehan, as well as former MP Tom Kettle. Together with Kettle and William Redmond, he undertakes a recruitment drive for the Irish divisions, co-operating with Kettle on a collection of ballads called Battle Songs for the Irish Brigade (1915). He is made a chevalier of the Legion of Honour in July 1915. In 1916, he is appointed to the Dardanelles Commission.
Recalled to Ireland in late 1917 to participate in the Irish Convention chaired by Sir Horace Plunkett, Gwynn sides with the Redmondite faction of the Irish Party in supporting a compromise with the southern unionists in an attempt to reach consensus on a Home Rule settlement which would avoid partition. On the death of Redmond in March 1918, he takes over as leader of the moderate nationalists in the Convention. He opposes the threat of compulsory military service during the Conscription Crisis of 1918, though as a member of the Irish Recruiting Council he continues to support voluntary recruitment, encountering intense opposition led by Sinn Féin.
Gwynn forms the Irish Centre Party in 1919 and stands unsuccessfully as an Independent Nationalist for Dublin University in the 1918 Irish general election. The party merges with Plunkett’s Irish Dominion League to press for a settlement by consent on the basis of dominion status, but Gwynn subsequently breaks with Plunkett due to his willingness to accept partition as a temporary compromise. The polarities which divide Ireland during the Irish War of Independence and Irish Civil War increasingly sideline his brand of moderate cultural nationalism. Although he supports the newly emergent nation, he equally condemns some of the excesses, such as the burning of houses belonging to Free State senators.
Gwynn’s personal life also becomes complicated at this stage and around 1920. He has a romantic association with married artist Grace Henry who is perhaps the best-known female artist in Ireland at the time. During this period, he and Grace travel in France and Italy and at various stages in his life she painted portraits of him including a very distinguished looking one of him in his late 60s or early 70s. Their relationship contributes significantly to the separation of Henry from her artist husband Paul Henry in 1930.
During the 1920s, Gwynn also devotes himself to writing, covering political events as Irish correspondent to The Observer and The Times. Later in his career, he writes some substantial works, and together with his son Denis Gwynn (The Life of John Redmond, 1932) does much to shape the retrospective image and self-justification of John Redmond. In the mid-1930s he authors three books with a connecting theme of fishing with the artist Roy Beddington serving as illustrator: The Happy Fisherman (1936), From River to River (1937), and Two in a Valley (1938).
Gwynn is awarded an honorary D.Litt. by the National University of Ireland in 1940, and a Litt.D. by the University of Dublin in 1945. The Irish Academy of Letters awards him the Gregory Medal in April 1950. In his literary writings he stands for a humanism and tolerance, which qualities, due to political upheavals, were relatively rare in the Ireland of his day.
Gwynn dies on June 11, 1950, at his home in Terenure, Dublin, and is buried at Tallaght Cemetery, south County Dublin.
Gwynn marries his cousin Mary Louisa (d. 1941), daughter of Rev. James Gwynn. She later converts to Catholicism. They have three sons and two daughters who are brought up in her religion, of whom Aubrey (1892–1983) becomes a Jesuit priest and professor of medieval history at University College Dublin (UCD). Their second son, Denis Rolleston (1893–1971), is professor of modern Irish history at University College Cork (UCC).
Gwynn’s brother Edward John (1868–1941) becomes provost of Trinity College and another brother Robert Malcolm becomes its senior dean. His sister Lucy Gwynn is the first woman registrar of Trinity. A third brother, Charles, has a successful career in the British Army and retires as a Major General. Younger brothers Lucius and Jack are noted cricketers.
Patterson is born on October 5, 1938, in Clonmel, County Tipperary. As a boy Patterson performs with his local parish choir and is involved in maintaining the annual tradition of singing with the “Wrenboys.” He sings in the local St. Mary’s Choral Society and at a production of The Pirates of Penzance performed with both his parents. His interests extend beyond music and as a boy he represents Marlfield GAAhurling club, plays tennis at Hillview and golf at the Mountain Road course. He quits school at an early stage to work in the printing business of his mother’s family. He moves to Dublin in 1961 to enroll at the National Academy of Theatre and Allied Arts where he studies acting while at the same time receiving vocal training from Hans Waldemar Rosen. In 1964, he enters the Feis Ceoil, a nationwide music competition, in which he wins several sections including oratorio, lieder and the German Gold Cup.
Patterson gives classical recitals around Ireland and wins scholarships to study in London, Paris and in the Netherlands. While in Paris, he signs a contract with Philips Records and releases his first record, My Dear Native Land. He works with conductors and some of the most prestigious orchestras in Europe including the London Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre de Paris. He also gains a reputation as a singer of Handel, Mozart, and Bach oratorios and German, Italian and French song. He has a long-running programme on RTÉ titled For Your Pleasure.
In the early 1980s Patterson moves to the United States, making his home in rural Westchester County, New York. A resurgence of interest in Irish culture encourages him to turn towards a more traditional Irish repertoire. He adds hymns, ballads, and traditional as well as more popular tunes to his catalogue. In March 1988, he is featured host in a Saint Patrick’s Day celebration of music and dance at New York City’s famous Radio City Music Hall. He also gives an outdoor performance before an audience of 60,000 on the steps of the United States Capitol in Washington, D.C. with the National Symphony Orchestra.
Patterson is equally at home in more intimate settings. His singing in the role of the Evangelist in Bach’s St. John Passion is given fine reviews. Further recordings follow, of Beethoven arrangements, Irish songs, Berlioz songs, Purcell songs and others, all on the Philips label.
Patterson performs sold-out concerts from London’s Royal Albert Hall to New York’s Carnegie Hall, and with his family he presents two concerts at the White House, for presidents Ronald Reagan in 1982 and Bill Clinton in 1995. He records over thirty albums in six languages, wins silver, gold and platinum discs and is the first Irish singer to host his own show in Radio City Music Hall in New York.
Rising to greater prominence with the new popularity of Celtic music in the 1990s, Patterson sees many of his past recordings reissued for American audiences, and in 1998 he stars in the PBS special Ireland in Song. His last album outsells Pavarotti.
In 1999, Patterson learns he has a brain tumor. He has several operations in the following year and his condition appears to stabilise. He is diagnosed with a recurrence of his illness on May 7, 2000. He briefly recuperates and resumes performing. His last performance is on June 4, 2000, at Regis College in the Boston suburb of Weston, Massachusetts. Shortly thereafter he is admitted to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York where he lapses into a coma and dies on June 10, 2000, at the age of 61.
seamus dubhghaill 