Antisell is born in Dublin on January 16, 1817, the youngest son of Thomas Christopher Antisell KC (home circuit) and Margaret (née) Daly. He attends the Dublin School of Medicine, the Apothecaries’ Hall of Ireland, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London, graduating from the latter with an MD in November 1839. He studies chemistry in Paris and Berlin in 1844. Upon his return to Dublin in 1845, he secures a lectureship in botany at the Peter St. School of Medicine, teaching there until 1848. After this, he opens a clinic at his residence of 25 Richmond Street, Portobello. He works as an assistant to Robert Kane, and between 1845 and 1847, produces textbooks on Irish geology and chemistry. He becomes a member of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in 1844.
Antisell is a member of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, and joins the Irish Confederation in 1847. With a group of five friends in the republican movement, including Richard D’Alton Williams and Kevin O’Doherty, he sets up a short-lived revolutionary newspaper, The Irish Tribune, in June 1848 to take the place of the suppressed United Irishman, founded by John Mitchel. The paper is closed down on the grounds of sedition in July 1848 after just five issues. Following the closure of the paper, he emigrates to the United States, arriving in New York City on November 22, 1848. Some sources claim this departure is to evade arrest or charges relating to sedition. Although he is no longer politically active following his departure from Ireland, he is a close friend of John Mitchel and his family. He marries his first wife, Eliza Ann Nowlan, in 1841. She dies shortly after their arrival in the United States.
Antisell sets up and operates a clinic and medical laboratory in New York City from 1848 to 1854, while also lecturing in chemistry in a number of medical colleges in Massachusetts and Vermont. He takes up a post as expedition geologist and botanist on state surveys in southern Arizona, New Mexico, and California, working primarily with Lt. John Parke investigating the proposed routes for the Southern Pacific Railroad from 1854 to 1856. His work on the geology of the region adds to greater understanding of the science in America. In 1856, he is employed as chief examiner in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., with responsibility for chemical inventions. This work allows him to also lecture in chemistry at Georgetown University, eventually covering other subjects such as toxicology, military surgery, physiology, hygiene, and pathology, over the periods 1858 to 1869, and 1880 to 1882.
Breaking with Mitchel who, as defender of slavery, supports the southern secessionist cause, Antisell serves in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He is a brigade surgeon in the United States Volunteers from 1861, and later the medical director of the 12th army corps. He concludes his service as surgeon-in-charge of Harewood Hospital, Washington, D.C., in October 1865, being granted a brevet commission as colonel. From 1866 to 1871, he is chief chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He marries his second wife, Marion Stuart Forsyth from Detroit, in 1854. They go on to have twelve children, six daughters and six sons.
Antisell is one of several scientists that are hired in 1871 as foreign government advisors to work in Hokkaido in northern Japan under Horace Capron. He is selected for his strong background in chemistry coupled with geology. However, he disagrees with Capron on whether or not Hokkaido’s severe winter climate will hinder development, and he also comes into conflict with the Japanese government over his salary. As a result, Hokkaido Colonisation Office hires another geologist, and Antisell’s report is excluded in the 1875 compilation of official reports. He serves his remaining time in Japan as a chemist for the Ministry of Finance, where he develops inks used for the printing of paper currency. For his services, he is awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by Emperor Meiji before his departure in 1876.
Upon returning to the United States, Antisell is conferred with a PhD in 1876 by Georgetown University, and once again takes up duties at the Patent Office, remaining there until his retirement. He publishes widely in numerous journals on topics such as agricultural chemistry, botany, oceanography, city sanitation, and animal disease, but he does not publish a significant treatise.
Antisell dies in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 1893, and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery.
O’Connor’s father, Andrew O’Connor (1846–1924), of Lanarkshire, Scotland, is a stonecutter who becones a professional sculptor. As a teenager, he apprentices to his father, helping him to design monuments for cemeteries.
O’Connor is involved in a minor controversy in 1909 when he is commissioned to design a statue for Commodore John Barry, of the American Revolutionary-era navy. His first design is heatedly attacked by Irish American groups. He submits a second version, but it too is ultimately rejected, and the sculptor John J. Boyle received the commission.
Maude is born on May 22, 1941, in Casla, County Galway, and reared in the Irish language. Her mother, Máire Nic an Iomaire, is a school teacher, and she receives her primary education from her on a small island off the coast of Rosmuc. Her father, John Maude, is from Cill Bhriocáin township near Rosmuc. She attends secondary school at Coláiste Chroí Mhuire, Spiddal, an all-Irish language school in County Galway. She later credits one of her Irish language teachers there, Sister Ailbhe, as an early influence in cultivating her writing confidence.
Maude begins writing modern literature in Irish in secondary school and develops a rhythm of poetry closely attuned to the rhythms of the Conamara Theas dialect of Connacht Irish, spoken in her native district. Though not conventionally religious, she admits in an interview that she has a deep interest in spirituality and that this has left its mark on her poetry. She is noted as a highly effective reciter of her own verse. Géibheann is the best-known of her poems, and is studied at Leaving Certificate Higher Level Irish in the Republic of Ireland. A posthumous collected edition, Caitlín Maude, Dánta, is published in 1984, Caitlín Maude: file in 1985 in Ireland and Italy, and Coiscéim in 1985.
Maude is widely known as an actress. She acts at the university, at An Taibhdhearc in Galway and the Damer Theatre in Dublin, and is particularly successful in a production of An Triail by Máiréad Ní Ghráda at the Damer Theatre in 1964. She plays the protagonist, Máire Ní Chathasaigh, an unmarried mother who experiences family rejection, a stay in a Magdalene laundry, and ultimately murders her infant child followed by suicide. In 2017, Former Irish Minister For JusticeMáire Geoghegan-Quinn cites this performance as “pathbreaking”: “Caitlín Maude played the role, when nobody talked about the issue and when, as we know, women were still devalued, still caricatured, still incarcerated and disenfranchised if they became mothers out of wedlock.” Maude herself is a playwright and co-authors An Lasair Choille with poet Michael Hartnett.
Maude is very active in the Celtic Revival. She founds An Bonnán Buí, an Irish-speaking social club in the 1970s in Dublin. As a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Gaelgeoir community, she is active in many direct action campaigns by the language revival organization Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, including the campaign that forces the Irish State to establish a Gaelscoil (Irish-medium primary school) Scoil Santain in the suburb of Tallaght, County Dublin. A second Irish language school, Scoil Chaitlin Maude, opens in Tallaght in 1985 shortly after her death. It begins as a two-room school with 35 children and has grown to a 16 room new building serving 345 children as of 2023.
Maude is also a distinguished sean-nós singer. She makes one album in this genre, Caitlín, released in 1975 on Gael Linn Records and now available as a CD. It contains both traditional songs and a selection of readings of her poetry.
Maude marries Cathal Ó Luain in 1969. They have one child Caomhán, their son.
Maude dies of complications from cancer on June 6, 1982, at the age of 41. She is buried in Bohernabreena graveyard, which overlooks the city from the Wicklow Mountains.
In 2001, a new writers’ centre in Galway is named after her: Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude, Gaillimh.
Since Maude’s death, critics in several languages have continued to study her literary works. Irish writer and The Irish Times columnist Michael Harding cites her as one of a few examples of groundbreaking women to “spin the hurt and wound of their oppression, and weave new loves songs and laments.” Irish Studies professor Sarah McKibben notes that Maude’s innovation in the poem represents an instance of recent Irish writers transgressing “literary, nationalistic, sociolinguistic and gender norms to craft new ways of writing in Irish.”
According to Louis de Paor, “Although no collection of her work was published during her lifetime, Caitlín Maude had a considerable influence on Irish language poetry and poets, including Máirtín Ó Direáin, Micheál Ó hAirtnéide, Tomás Mac Síomóin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. That influence is a measure of the dramatic force of her personality, her exemplary ingenuity and commitment to the language, and her ability as a singer to embody the emotional disturbance at the heart of a song. Her collected poems are relatively slight, including incomplete drafts and fragments, but reveal a poetic voice confident of its own authority, drawing on the spoken language of the Connemara Gaeltacht but rarely on its conventions of oral composition or, indeed, on precedents in Irish poetry in either language. The best of her work is closer to the American poetry of the 1960s in its use of looser forms that follow the rhythms of the spoken word and the sense of the poem as direct utterance without artifice, a technique requiring a high degree of linguistic precision and formal control.”
Maude’s work has also been translated into English and Spanish. Spanish language critic Pura Coloma notes that Maude’s work played a role in preserving Connemaran culture, as she “utilizes her own style to replicate the deep rhythms and tonalities of the regional voice.”
F. J. McCormick (real name Peter Christopher Judge), an Irish actor who becomes known for his work at Dublin‘s Abbey Theatre, is born in Skerries, County Dublin, on June 1, 1890. He acquires the stage name “F.J. McCormick” to disguise his identity from his current and future employers, and to avoid parental disapproval. He joins the Abbey at age 19, and acts in some 500 productions there. He is especially remembered for his work in the plays of Seán O’Casey.
After living in Skerries in his early years, at age ten McCormick moves to Dublin and proceeds to live there for the majority of the duration of his life. He is educated locally in Skerries. His father, Michael Judge, is a maltser and later becomes a brewery manager. He is of medium height, with “expressive eyes” and thick brown hair. As a young man, he begins writing by contributing articles to the press. He works briefly as a post office clerk in London but returns to Dublin to work as a junior clerk in the Civil Service. He resigns from his public service career in 1918 and decides to embrace acting as a full-time career as a member of the Abbey Theatre at age 19.
McCormick’s mother dies when he is 2 years old. He and his family move to Dublin when he is 10 or 12 years old. He is raised in Skerries and attends the Holy Faith Convent for primary education. He describes his childhood in Skerries “as a very happy one.” He marries Eileen Crowe on December 2, 1925, in Rathdown. They meet at the Abbey where Crowe is also an actor. In describing their performances together, Seamus De Burca writes, “F. J. McCormick and Eileen Crowe lived a life together of perfect bliss.” The couple has two children, a son, David, and a daughter, Marie.
After moving briefly to London, McCormick returns to Dublin, where he works in the Civil Service. He also takes acting roles in the Workmen’s Club on York Street, and for the first time under the pseudonym by which he becomes known for roles with the Queen’s Theatre, Dublin. By May 1919, he has a leading role in an independent production of The Curate of St. Chad’s by Constance Powell Anderson at the Abbey Theatre. An attack on Irish acting by Edward Martyn is answered by McCormick in the pages of the journal Banba in June 1921.
McCormick acts in over 500 plays at the Abbey Theatre, becoming particularly associated with the plays of Sean O’Casey staged there. From 1923 to 1925, he is also stage manager at the Abbey. Of his performance as Seumus Sheilds in The Shadow of a Gunman, O’Casey says that the actor created a character greater than that which he had written. He plays Capt. Brennan in the filmed version of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars but it is his return to film in Carol Reed‘s Odd Man Out (1947) that sees him singled out for praise in contemporaneous reviews. The Irish Times writes that “the acting of the Irish players was unremittingly professional, and, in the case of F. J. McCormick, as Shell, a weak-minded and elderly corner-boy, quite outstanding.” The Times of London finds “it is Mr. F. J. McCormick as a sly, bird-like creature, who stops just the right side of informing, who catches most surely at the imagination.”
In their review of the film Hungry Hill (1947), The New York Times writes, “As the butler who served John Brodrick, his sons, and their sons in turn, the late F. J. McCormick is truly magnificent, giving an even more subtle portrayal of Irish character than he did as the wily tramp in Odd Man Out.”
In the last five years of McCormick’s life he continues to work in the Abbey where he acts in over 70 plays before his death. He only stars in one play in the theatre in the final year of his life, the play They Got What They Wanted playing the role of Bartley Murnaghan. He secures more leading roles in the film industry. He dies in Dublin at the age of 56 from a brain tumour on April 24, 1947. He is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery, Deansgrange, County Dublin. He continues to work right up until his death.
It is said that people regarded McCormick as one of the greatest actors in his era. This comes from his work in 500 plays and 4 films over his career. A year after his death, Barry Fitzgerald says he only knew of two actors with the gift that McCormick had and they were Charles Laughton and Charlie Chaplin.
There are many popular plays and films that McCormick is part of which are still remembered to this day by many, some of them include the original The Plough and the Stars in 1926 where he originates the role of Commandant Jack Clitheroe. He also plays the role of Captain Brennan in the John Ford film version of the play in 1936. In his appreciation for McCormick, Gabriel Fallon remembers him as both a great actor and a great man.
It is said that McCormick was one of the most versatile actors of his generation, his early death was a huge loss to the Irish arts and more specifically the Abbey Theatre where he carried most of his work.
Charles is the eldest surviving son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France. His early years are unremarkable, but before he is twenty his conventional education has been completely overshadowed by the harsh lessons of defeat in the English Civil War against the Puritans and subsequent isolation and poverty. Thus he emerges into precocious maturity, cynical, self-indulgent, skilled in the sort of moral evasions that make life comfortable even in adversity.
Though the early years of tawdry dissipation tarnish the romance of Charles’s adventures, not all his actions are discreditable. He tries to fight his father’s battles in the west of England in 1645. He resists the attempts of his mother and his sister Henrietta Anne to convert him to Catholicism and remains openly loyal to his Protestant faith. In 1648, he makes strenuous efforts to save his father, and when, after Charles I’s execution in 1649, he is proclaimed Charles II by the Scots in defiance of the English republic. He is prepared to go to Scotland and swallow the stringently anti-Catholic and anti-Anglican Presbyterian Covenant as the price for alliance. But the sacrifice of friends and principles was futile and leaves him deeply embittered. The Scottish army is routed by the English under Oliver Cromwell at Dunbar in September 1650, and in 1651 Charles’s invasion of England ends in defeat at Worcester. The young king becomes a fugitive, hunted through England for forty days but protected by a handful of his loyal subjects until he escapes to France in October 1651.
Charles’s safety is comfortless, however. He is destitute and friendless, unable to bring pressure against an increasingly powerful England. France and the Dutch Republic are closed to him by Cromwell’s diplomacy, and he turns to Spain, with whom he concludes a treaty in April 1656. He persuades his brother James to relinquish his command in the French army and gives him some regiments of Anglo-Irish troops in Spanish service, but poverty dooms this nucleus of a royalist army to impotence. European princes take little interest in Charles and his cause, and his proffers of marriage are declined. Even Cromwell’s death does little to improve his prospects. But George Monck, one of Cromwell’s leading generals, realized that under Cromwell’s successors the country is in danger of being torn apart and with his formidable army creates the situation favourable to Charles’s restoration in 1660.
Most Englishmen now favour a return to a stable and legitimate monarchy, and, although more is known of Charles II’s vices than his virtues, he has, under the steadying influence of Edward Hyde, his chief adviser, avoided any damaging compromise of his religion or constitutional principles. With Hyde’s help, Charles issues in April 1660 his Declaration of Breda, expressing his personal desire for a general amnesty, liberty of conscience, an equitable settlement of land disputes, and full payment of arrears to the army. The actual terms are left to a free parliament, and on this provisional basis Charles is proclaimed king in May 1660. Landing at Dover on May 25, he reaches a rejoicing London on his 30th birthday.
The unconditional nature of the settlement that takes shape between 1660 and 1662 owes little to Charles’s intervention and likely exceeds his expectations. He is bound by the concessions made by his father in 1640 and 1641, but the Parliament elected in 1661 is determined on an uncompromising Anglican and royalist settlement. The Militia Act of 1661 gives Charles unprecedented authority to maintain a standing army, and the Corporation Act 1661 allows him to purge the boroughs of dissident officials. Other legislation places strict limits on the press and on public assembly, and the Act of Uniformity 1662 creates controls of education. An exclusive body of Anglican clergy and a well-armed landed gentry are the principal beneficiaries of Charles II’s restoration.
But within this narrow structure of upper-class loyalism there are irksome limitations on Charles’s independence. His efforts to extend religious toleration to his Nonconformist and Roman Catholic subjects are sharply rebuffed in 1663, and throughout his reign the House of Commons thwarts the more generous impulses of his religious policy. A more pervasive and damaging limitation is on his financial independence. Although the Parliament votes the king an estimated annual income of £1,200,000, Charles has to wait many years before his revenues produce such a sum, and by then the damage of debt and discredit is irreparable. He is incapable of thrift and finds it painful to refuse petitioners. With the expensive disasters of the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665–67 the reputation of the restored king sinks to its lowest level. His vigorous attempts to save London during the Great Fire of September 1666 cannot make up for the negligence and maladministration that leads to England’s naval defeat in June 1667.
Charles clears himself by dismissing his old adviser, Edward Hyde, and tries to assert himself through a more adventurous foreign policy. So far, his reign has made only modest contributions to England’s commercial advancement. The Navigation Acts of 1660 and 1663, which are prompted by the threat to British shipping by the rise of the Dutch carrying trade, are valuable extensions of Cromwellian policies, and the capture of New York in 1664 is one of his few gains from the Dutch. Although marriage to Princess Catherine of Braganza of Portugal in 1662 brings him the possession of Tangier and Bombay, they are of less strategic value than Dunkirk, which he sells to Louis XIV in 1662. He Is, however, prepared to sacrifice much for the alliance of his young cousin. Through his sister Henrietta Anne, Duchess of Orléans, he has direct contact with the French court, and it is through her that he negotiates the startling reversal of the Protestant Triple Alliance (England, the Dutch Republic, Sweden) of 1668. By the terms of the so-called Secret Treaty of Dover of May 1670, not only does England and France join in an offensive alliance against the Dutch, but Charles promises to announce his conversion to Roman Catholicism. If this provokes trouble from his subjects, he is assured of French military and financial support. He sees to it that the conversion clause of the treaty is not made public.
This clause, which is the most controversial act of Charles II’s reign, can be explained as a shortsighted bid for Louis XIV’s confidence. In this, however, it fails. Louis neither welcomes Charles’s intentions nor believes in them, and, in the event, it is only upon his deathbed that Charles is received into the Roman Catholic Church. But he has now fatally compromised himself. Although he subsequently attempts to pursue policies independent of Louis, he remains bound to him by inclination as well as by the fear of blackmail. More seriously, he has lost the confidence of his subjects, who deplore the French alliance and distrust the whole tendency of his policies.
Other circumstances deepen Englishmen’s discontent with their king. By the 1670s the miscarriages of the queen have reduced hopes that Charles will have a legitimate heir, and in 1673 the second marriage of his brother James, Duke of York, to Mary of Modena, increases the possibility of the Catholic line of succession, for James’s conversion to the Roman church is well known. But it is for his autocratic character as much as for his religion that James is feared as his brother is not, and it is on his brother’s behalf that Charles eventually has to face the severest political storm of his reign.
The Popish Plot of 1678 is an elaborate tissue of fictions built around a skeleton of even stranger truths. The allegations of Titus Oates, a former Anglican cleric who has been expelled from a Jesuit seminary, that Roman Catholics plan to murder Charles to make James king, seem to be confirmed by scraps of evidence of which Charles is justifiably skeptical. But he is obliged to bow before the gusts of national hysteria that seek to bar his brother from the line of succession. Between 1679 and 1681, Charles very nearly loses control of his government. Deprived of his chief minister, the Earl of Danby, who has been compromised by his negotiations with France, he has to allow Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 2nd Earl of Shaftesbury, and his Whig supporters, who uphold the power of the Parliament—men whom he detests—to occupy positions of power in central and local government. Three general elections produce three equally unmanageable parliaments, and, although Charles publicly denies the legitimacy of his first son, the Protestant Duke of Monmouth, he has to send his Catholic brother James out of the country and offer a plan of limitations that will bind James if he comes to the throne. The plan proves to be unacceptable both to the Whigs and to James, and, when Charles falls seriously ill in the summer of 1679, there is real danger of civil conflict.
But Charles keeps his nerve. He defends his queen against slanders, dismisses the intractable parliaments, and recovers control of his government. His subjects’ dread of republican anarchy proves stronger than their suspicion of James, and from March 1681, when he dissolves his last Parliament, Charles enjoys a nationwide surge of loyalty almost as fervent as that of 1660. He has made yet another secret treaty with France and in addition to a French subsidy can now count upon a healthy public revenue. Reforms at the Treasury, which he inaugurates in 1667, provide the crown with a firm basis of administrative control that is among Charles II’s most valuable legacies to English government.
As a result of these actions, Charles, who dies on February 6, 1685, at Whitehall in London, is able to end his reign in the kind of tranquil prosperity he has always sought.
Robb is the daughter of the managing director of J. Robb & Co., Charles Robb and his wife Agnes (née Arnold), daughter of Dr. Wilberforce Arnold. She attends Richmond Lodge, and then Somerville College, Oxford to study modern languages in 1924. She receives a Bachelor of Arts (BA) in 1927, a Master of Arts (MA) in 1931 and then a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) in 1932. She publishes her research as Neoplatonism of the Italian renaissance in 1935. She is a member of the Northern Ireland committee of the National Trust, to which she presents the family home, Lisnabreeny House, Castlereagh, in 1937. She engages in social and voluntary work for a time, before moving to London in 1938 to take up a position at the London Institute of Italian Studies.
Robb publishes her first volume with Wiley-Blackwell in 1939 as Poems. She is the registrar and advisory officer to the Women’s Employment Federation between 1940 and 1944, during which time she writes a partial account of her experiences in An Ulsterwoman in England in 1942. She returns to Northern Ireland in 1944, working for a number of public bodies including International PEN and the National Trust, and writing. She serves as a member of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts in 1951. In the same year she edits The Arts in Ulster with John Hewitt and Sam Hanna Bell, which argues that any mention of politics should be excluded from collections.
In 1962 and 1966 Robb produces a large two-volume history of William of Orange. In 1963, she becomes a member of the Maatschappij der Nederlandse Letterkunde. She produces a final volume of poetry in 1970, Ards eclogues, and is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Over her lifetime she writes seven volumes of poetry, history and art criticism.
Gannon is born on August 1, 1910, in Harold’s Cross, Dublin, into a craftsmen family of carpenters, many of whom worked in the famous Guinness Brewery. His education, in two local schools, is rudimentary and at the age of fifteen he starts working as an apprentice carpenter in the Guinness Brewery. His apprenticeship involves learning to make office furniture and attending evening classes in nearby colleges, where he is able to improve his education in a more congenial atmosphere. A love of music and the arts had been encouraged by two maiden aunts. His parents subsequently purchase an upright piano and he learns to play it at the Read Pianoforte School. When his apprenticeship is completed and he is on the dole for some years, he spends much of his spare time buying pictures, books, antiques and old clocks and watches in the various auction rooms and antique shops in Dublin.
While reading a series of articles about Tibet in a magazine, Gannon stumbles across an article, which, he believes, is by Violet Gordon-Woodhouse, a British harpsichordist and clavichord player of the period. The article is about the revival of the harpsichord, which interests him. He asks permission to examine the harpsichords on display in the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin, but is given no encouragement by the staff. He is finally allowed to see the instruments when he is in his early twenties. Dismayed, he concludes that they are too expensive to buy and too complicated to make.
In London with Margaret, who is visiting her parents, Gannon goes to the Benton Fletcher collection of keyboard instruments, which is then in Chelsea, and measures a harpsichord by Jacob and Abraham Kirckman. Back home, he makes a copy of the instrument in a tiny conservatory at the back of his house in the Dublin suburb of Rialto. The harpsichord is played by John S. Beckett for the first time in public in 1959 as the continuo for Johann Sebastian Bach‘s St. Matthew Passion and is praised in the national press. Beckett subsequently persuades the authorities in the Guinness Brewery to provide Gannon with a special workshop, in which he makes five harpsichords and restores several antique pianos. The first harpsichord made in the Brewery is donated to the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin. The second is sold to Harrods of London, and the third is sold to Ireland’s national radio and television station RTÉ. This third instrument is used regularly by the RTÉ Symphony and Concert orchestras and also by the well-known composer and performer of Irish traditional music, Seán Ó Riada.
Gannon continues to make many more harpsichords and restore more pianos during the years to come. In all, he completes twenty harpsichords during his lifetime – the final four are completed by a friend, Patrick Horsley, in England. One of the harpsichords made by Gannon-Horsley returns to Ireland and is presented to NUI Maynooth. A piano of note that he restores is a Broadwood square piano owned by the poet and composer, Thomas Moore, which belonged to Lord and Lady Elveden (later Iveagh).
Gannon is the subject of several RTÉ radio programmes, three RTÉ television programmes (including The Late Late Show) and a television programme, Gallery, made by BBC Northern Ireland. He befriends a great many people, including the artist, writer and conservationist Peter Pearson, and regular musical evenings are held at the family home in Bryan Guinness‘s grounds in the suburbs of Dublin. Because of his interest in antique clocks and watches, he becomes a member of the Irish branch of the Antiquarian Horological Society, founded by his friend William Stuart.
In 1978, Trinity College Dublin (TCD) gives Gannon an honorary MA degree for his contribution to the authentic performance of early music in Ireland. Two years later, he is invited to travel with the New Irish Chamber Orchestra to China, where he tunes and maintains one of his harpsichords and celebrates his seventieth birthday. In 1989, a second honorary MA is given to him, this time by NUI Maynooth.
Following Gannon’s 80th birthday, which is attended by fifty people, he finally settles down to retirement. A series of minor strokes follow, which eventually lead to dementia and ultimately to his death, aged 88, on May 23, 1999.
The Cathal Gannon Early Music Room is opened in the Royal Irish Academy of Music in May 2003. It contains a harpsichord and clavichord made by Gannon, a Broadwood grand piano restored by him, and a square piano.
Part of a transmitted RTÉ programme, Nationwide (January 17, 2007), features archive footage of Gannon and his instruments. Three RTÉ radio programmes, Bowman: Sunday Morning, broadcast in November 2006, feature a 1983 interview with Gannon.
MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.
MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).
The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”
Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.
The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.
When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.
Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”
In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.
MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.
On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.
On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.
MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.
MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.
MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.
In 1910, Elvery moves to South Africa to marry Hobart Kay, FRCS. By 1916 they have settled in Port Elizabeth.
Kay is a founder member of the Eastern Province Society of Arts and Crafts. In 1924 she is elected a member of the Royal British Colonial Society of Artists. She paints and makes etchings, and in 1926 her etching Romance is bought by Mary of Teck, Queen of the United Kingdom, at the Dominion Artists’ Exhibition in London. She travels widely in South Africa and sketches as she goes, and is also commissioned to make many portraits of mayors of Port Elizabeth, many of them lost when the City Hall burns down in 1977. During World War II she is commissioned by the government to record the war on the home front, and some of her work is held in the South African National Museum of Military History. From 1927 to 1945 she produces two to four illustrations each week for The Outspan.
Kay’s largest painting is the 1937 work Surgery, showing a patient undergoing abdominal surgery (a cholecystectomy). She portrays herself as the scrub nurse and her husband Hobart as the surgeon. In preparation for this painting she visits three hospitals and observes at least two operations, making 27 pages of preliminary sketches of people and equipment used in surgery. During World War II she paints further medical paintings: Operation in a Base Hospital and Blood to Save Lives.
Kay holds one-woman exhibitions from 1922 to 1955, and retrospective exhibitions of her work are held at the Iziko South African National Gallery in 1965 and 1982.
In her early days at Port Elizabeth, Kay is a keen sailor and is described as “for a time the fastest spinnaker-hand in South Africa.”
Kay has three daughters and one son. Her daughter Joan Wright (1911-91) teaches painting at the Port Elizabeth Technical College School of Art and Design, and her daughter Marjorie Reynolds writes and publishes a biography of her mother in 1989, and a further book about the Elvery family in 1991, and also donates her mother’s collection of works and archives to the Iziko South African National Gallery as “The Kay Bequest” in 1992.
The Catholic Association is the latest in a series of similar associations formed over the previous ten years or so, none of which had prospered. Like the other associations, this new association is composed mainly of the middle class elite: an annual subscription amounting to a guinea, an amount equivalent to what an average farmer would pay for six months’ rent. In 1824, the Catholic Association begins to use the money that it has raised to campaign for Catholic emancipation.
In 1824, the association creates a new category of associate members at the cost of a penny per month, the so-called Catholic Rent. The reasoning behind the creation of this new membership category is to stimulate a swelling in association numbers. This new, cheaper category ensures Catholics from a poorer background can join, and thus the association’s initial class-based entry barriers are removed. The Catholic rent transforms the association and Catholic political advocacy more broadly. In terms of the association, the rent catalyzes a transformation in a number of ways. Firstly, as previously mentioned, it gives the Catholic Association a constant source of money, which enables O’Connell to run a consistent campaign. Secondly, it facilitates easy calculation of total association membership numbers so that O’Connell can say with confidence that he has the support of so many people. This is important as it can be used to apply pressure against the British government. Third, and perhaps most importantly, however, it announces the arrival of mass mobilization politics, being the first such populist movement in Europe. O’Connell decides to add this additional membership level, at a reduced price of a penny a month, deliberately. The benefits are clear. With the membership subscription set at a relatively cheap price, a large number of the peasant and working classes can join. Affordability ensures large numbers. In effect, it becomes a universal Catholic organization that is transparent and populist. The fact that each member contributes financially to the association also ensures that they are more deeply involved in pushing the cause of Catholic emancipation. People want value for their money. Thus, this ensures a cheap method for O’Connell to get the message of Catholic emancipation spread throughout Ireland.
The Catholic Association’s funds are diffused widely in a variety of areas. Some is spent campaigning for Catholic emancipation, defraying the costs of sending petitions to Westminster, and training of priests. Following the 1826 election campaign, funds are used to support the members of the organization who had voted against their landlords. The money is used for those who have been evicted from land by the landlords because of their connection to the Catholic organization or for those who were boycottingabsentee landlord. For the Catholic peasants that are in this situation, the future would be grim as they would be unable to continue the boycott without food and money, and they would be unable to lease land from any landlord as the peasants would be boycotted against in return. The Catholic Association’s funds are used to support these boycotts so that they can continue and live well enough to have enough food to survive.
The Catholic Association is originally aristocratic in its composition, and some of the gentry (such as Richard Lalor Sheil) hold relatively conservative views. However, O’Connell holds an enormous influence over society and largely dictates the policies it pursues. It is radical in nature but also extremely loyal to the Crown in appearance. This had been the strategy of the previous major Catholic group, the Catholic Committee of the 1790s, which achieved major Catholic Relief in 1793.
Since the aims of the Catholic Association are fairly moderate and the organization remains loyal to the monarch, British MPs are conceptually more willing to pass Catholic emancipation. The matter had been discussed in London since the Acts of Union 1800, when Prime MinisterWilliam Pitt and most of his colleagues resign from the cabinet when emancipation is denied by the king. Henry Grattan continues to support the cause, and Catholic emancipation had been passed by the House of Commons previously by a majority of six, but it is rejected in the House of Lords and generally by King George III, who reigns until 1820.
The biggest strength of the Catholic Association is that the Catholic Church helps in the collection of the Catholic rent. Catholic priests also hold sermons in favor of Catholic emancipation. This means that it is easy for the members to pay the Catholic rent, and it will attract more members as the message of Catholic emancipation is being spread throughout Ireland. Sir Robert Peel believes the alliance of the Catholic Association and the Catholic Church is a “powerful combination.”
In 1826, the Catholic Association begins to use its funds to support pro-emancipation MPs in elections. They use their money and manpower to campaign for the candidate to be elected into parliament to pressure the government from within to pass Catholic emancipation.
The turning point comes in 1828, when two factors come into play. The first is that the Catholic Church takes over the collection of the Catholic Rent and effectively the Catholic Association itself. The other is that by 1828, O’Connell’s reputation has increased dramatically. He is an internationally recognized figure and is seen as one of the leading figures in liberal thinking. This successful campaign leads on to, but is distinguished from, his later efforts to end the union with Britain, to increase the franchise, and to end the payment of tithes. His particular talent is to push the emancipation process along in an organized way.
In May 1828, the Sacramental Test Act 1828 repeals the Test Acts 1673 & 1678 against non-AnglicanProtestants. This gives non-Catholic non-conformists greater political freedom and equality in Britain. The repeal has two effects: it gives Catholics hope that a similar act will be passed that will include Catholics; it also alienates Catholics, as they have become the only Christians not to have political freedom and equality.
In May 1828, William Huskisson resigns from the cabinet, and William Vesey-Fitzgerald is chosen as the President of the Board of Trade. According to the law, there is to be a by-election in his constituency of Clare. O’Connell decides to exploit a loophole in the Acts of Union 1800. It requires MPs to take the Oath of Allegiance, but the oath is not required of candidates for election. He stands in the by-election and wins. Since he is a Catholic, he cannot take his seat in parliament. Demand rises to allow him to become an MP for Clare, as it does not have representation.
Sir Robert Peel and Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, see that if O’Connell is not allowed to take his seat, then there could be a revolution in Ireland. While using non-violent methods, O’Connell hints that he will get more Catholics elected to force the situation. In an emotive speech, he says, “They must crush us or conciliate us.”
Peel decides to change the government’s approach and submits the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829 in February 1829. The bill is passed. It is a momentous victory for O’Connell and the Catholic middle class, and he becomes known as “the liberator” and the “uncrowned king of Ireland.” However, the simultaneous enactment of the Parliamentary Elections (Ireland) Act 1829 restricts the franchise in the county constituencies in Ireland. The archive of the Catholic Association is housed with the archives of Dublin Diocese in Holy Cross College, Dublin.
(Pictured: “Daniel O’Connell: The Champion of Liberty” poster published in Pennsylvania, 1847)
