Bowes epitomizes the severity of the 18th century Penal Laws against Irish Catholics when he rules, in about 1759, that: “The law does not suppose any such person to exist as an Irish Roman Catholic, nor could such a person draw breath without the Crown’s permission”. Such views, given that Roman Catholics make up more than 90% of the Irish population at the time, inevitably make him bitterly unpopular, and in 1760 he is assaulted during a riot outside the House of Commons.
In spite of his religious bigotry, Bowes is considered one of the outstanding judges of his time. In particular, he is a reforming Lord Chancellor, who is praised for making the Court of Chancery “a terror for fraud, and a comfort and protection for honest men”. As Attorney-General he shows considerable courage in going on assize during the Irish Famine (1740–1741) despite the infectious fever which is raging at the time, and which claims the lives of three other judges who decide to brave the dangers.
Bowes is considered one of the finest speakers of his time. His speech for the prosecution at the trial of Henry Barry, 4th Baron Barry of Santry, who is charged with murder in 1739, is described by those who hear it as a masterpiece of eloquence and logic, and leads to the Irish House of Lords bringing in a unanimous verdict of guilty against Santry.
Bowes dies in Dublin on July 22, 1767, his mental faculties fully intact despite his bodily infirmities. He is buried in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, where his brother raises a memorial to him. He never marries, and his title becomes extinct on his death. He lives at Belvedere House, Drumcondra. His estates passes to his brother Rumsey Bowes of Binfield, Berkshire.
Kilfedder leaves the UUP in 1977 in opposition to the party’s policies tending to integrationism, preferring to advocate the restoration of the Stormont administration. For a time he sits as an “Independent Ulster Unionist.” He contests the 1979 European Parliament election under that label, finishing fourth in the count for the three seats, having overtaken the UUP leader Harry West on transfers.
On March 20, 1995, while traveling by train into London from Gatwick Airport, Kilfedder dies of a heart attack. This is the same day that the Belfast Telegraph carries a front-page story saying that an Ulster MP has been targeted as one of twenty MPs invited by the LGBT rights organisation OutRage! in a letter to come out. He dies unmarried and is survived by two sisters.
Murdoch is the daughter of Irene Alice (née Richardson) and Wills John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant, comes from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down. In 1915, he enlists as a soldier in King Edward’s Horse and serves in France during World War I before being commissioned as a second lieutenant. Her mother trains as a singer before Iris is born and is from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Her parents first meet in Dublin when her father is on leave and are married in 1918. Iris is the couple’s only child. When she is a few weeks old the family moves to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class clerk. She is a second cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch.
From 1947 to 1948 Murdoch studies philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. She meets Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge but does not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College professorship before she arrives. In 1948 she becomes a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she teaches philosophy until 1963. From 1963 to 1967 she teaches one day a week in the General Studies department at the Royal College of Art.
In 1956 Murdoch marries John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, whom she had met in Oxford in 1954. The unusual romantic partnership lasts more than forty years until Murdoch’s death. Bayley thinks that sex is “inescapably ridiculous.” She in contrast has “multiple affairs with both men and women which, on discomposing occasions, Bayley witnesses for himself.”
Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, is published in 1954 and is selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. She had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. She goes on to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well as poetry and drama.
Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, is published in 1995. She is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997 and dies on February 8, 1999, in Oxford, England. There is a bench dedicated to her in the grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she enjoyed walking.
Betty Ann Norton, Irish drama teacher and founder of the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School and actor agency, is born on July 5, 1936.
Norton grows up in Dublin near the South Circular Road. Her mother, Frances, plays the violin and her father, Eugene, is a baritone singer. Frances is a full-time homemaker while Eugene works as manager of the Bacon Shops on Grafton Street. One of two children, her younger brother, Jim Norton, also becomes a successful actor. She attends school at St. Louis High School, Rathmines.
Norton attends the Ena Mary Burke School of Drama and Elocution on Kildare Street, Dublin, where Hollywood starMaureen O’Hara had also trained. Her acting school offers an annual Ena Mary Burke scholarship in Burke’s honour.
Norton originally plans to become an actor, but her family does not approve and her mother encourages her to become a teacher. In 1959, she establishes the Betty Ann Norton Theatre School on Harcourt Street in Dublin. Her husband, Michael, is co-director of the school. According to Norton, changes to traffic by the new Luas tram system causes the business to change premises to her childhood school, St. Louis High School in Rathmines in 2006.
Norton meets her husband, Michael J. Cunneen, on the Aran Islands in 1965 and they marry in 1967. They lived in Dún Laoghaire. Michael dies in the Blackrock Clinic on May 12, 2017.
A 1966 review by Howard Klein in The New York Times of Greevy’s recording of Handel arias states: “The voice has the firm, compact resonance of a true contralto. She has endless breath and can move her voice with agility and precision.”
Greevy has a special affinity with Mahler, in particular his orchestral song cycles. In 1966, she performs Kindertotenlieder in London with the then RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. The Times praises the 26-year-old Greevy’s “full, glowing voice, rich and firm at the bottom, radiant at the top, and gloriously expressive phrasing.” Later, in the 1990s, she performs all Mahler’s vocal works with orchestra over a four-year period in the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Greevy chooses to live in her native Dublin throughout her career rather than be based in one of the world’s major music centres. She maintains confidently that “if you’re good enough you can live where you like.” Nevertheless, this decision undoubtedly curtails her opportunities in the recording studio and on the concert stage.
Greevy dies at the age of 68 on September 26, 2008, following a short illness. She is married to Peter Tattan, who predeceases her in 1983. They have one son, Hugh.
Two acts are passed in 1800 with the same long title: An Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. The short title of the act of the British Parliament is Union with Ireland Act 1800, assigned by the Short Titles Act 1896. The short title of the act of the Irish Parliament is Act of Union (Ireland) 1800, assigned by a 1951 act of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, and hence not effective in the Republic of Ireland, where it was referred to by its long title when repealed in 1962.
Before these acts, Ireland has been in personal union with England since 1542, when the Irish Parliament passes the Crown of Ireland Act 1542, proclaiming King Henry VIII of England to be King of Ireland. Since the 12th century, the King of England has been technical overlord of the Lordship of Ireland, a papal possession. Both the Kingdoms of Ireland and England later come into personal union with that of Scotland upon the Union of the Crowns in 1603.
In 1707, the Kingdom of England and the Kingdom of Scotland are united into a single kingdom: the Kingdom of Great Britain. Upon that union, each House of the Parliament of Ireland passes a congratulatory address to Queen Anne, praying her: “May God put it in your royal heart to add greater strength and lustre to your crown, by a still more comprehensive Union.” The Irish Parliament is both before then subject to certain restrictions that made it subordinate to the Parliament of England and after then, to the Parliament of Great Britain; however, Ireland gains effective legislative independence from Great Britain through the Constitution of 1782.
By this time access to institutional power in Ireland is restricted to a small minority: the Anglo-Irish of the Protestant Ascendancy. Frustration at the lack of reform among the Catholic majority eventually leads, along with other reasons, to a rebellion in 1798, involving a French invasion of Ireland and the seeking of complete independence from Great Britain. This rebellion is crushed with much bloodshed, and the motion for union is motivated at least in part by the belief that the union will alleviate the political rancour that led to the rebellion. The rebellion is felt to have been exacerbated as much by brutally reactionary loyalists as by United Irishmen (anti-unionists).
Furthermore, Catholic emancipation is being discussed in Great Britain, and fears that a newly enfranchised Catholic majority will drastically change the character of the Irish government and parliament also contributes to a desire from London to merge the Parliaments.
According to historian James Stafford, an Enlightenment critique of Empire in Ireland lays the intellectual foundations for the Acts of Union. He writes that Enlightenment thinkers connected “the exclusion of the Irish Kingdom from free participation in imperial and European trade with the exclusion of its Catholic subjects, under the terms of the ‘Penal Laws’, from the benefits of property and political representation.” These critiques are used to justify a parliamentary union between Britain and Ireland.
Complementary acts are enacted by the Parliament of Great Britain and the Parliament of Ireland.
The Parliament of Ireland gains a large measure of legislative independence under the Constitution of 1782. Many members of the Irish Parliament jealously guard that autonomy (notably Henry Grattan), and a motion for union is legally rejected in 1799. Only Anglicans are permitted to become members of the Parliament of Ireland though the great majority of the Irish population are Roman Catholic, with many Presbyterians in Ulster. Under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1793, Roman Catholics regain the right to vote if they own or rent property worth £2 annually. Wealthy Catholics are strongly in favour of union in the hope for rapid religious emancipation and the right to sit as MPs, which only comes to pass under the Roman Catholic Relief Act 1829.
From the perspective of Great Britain’s elites, the union is desirable because of the uncertainty that follows the French Revolution of 1789 and the Irish Rebellion of 1798. If Ireland adopts Catholic emancipation willingly or not, a Roman Catholic Parliament could break away from Britain and ally with the French, but the same measure within the United Kingdom would exclude that possibility. Also, in creating a regency during King George III‘s “madness”, the Irish and British Parliaments give the Prince Regent different powers. These considerations lead Great Britain to decide to attempt the merger of both kingdoms and Parliaments.
The final passage of the Act in the Irish House of Commons turns on an about 16% relative majority, garnering 58% of the votes, and similar in the Irish House of Lords, in part per contemporary accounts through bribery with the awarding of peerages and honours to critics to get votes. The first attempt is defeated in the Irish House of Commons by 109 votes to 104, but the second vote in 1800 passes by 158 to 115.
Dermot Healy, Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer, dies at his home in Ballyconnell, Sligo, County Sligo, on June 29, 2014. A member of Aosdána, he is also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. He is described variously as a “master,” a “Celtic Hemingway” and as “Ireland’s finest living novelist.”
Healy is born in Finnea, County Westmeath, on November 9, 1947, the son of a Guard. As a child the family moves to Cavan, County Cavan, where he attends the local secondary school. In his late teens he moves to London and works in a succession of jobs, including barman, security man and as a labourer. He later returns to Ireland, settling in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, a small settlement on the Atlantic coast.
Often overlooked due to his relatively low public profile, Healy’s work is admired by his Irish literary predecessors, peers and successors alike, many of whom idolise him. Among the writers to have spoken highly of him are Seamus Heaney, Eugene McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe and Anne Enright.
Healy dies at his home in Ballyconnell on June 29, 2014, while awaiting an ambulance after suddenly being taken ill. He is laid to rest at Carrigans Cemetery following funeral mass by Fr. Michael Donnelly at St. Patrick’s Church in Maugherow, County Sligo.
On June 25, 1990, shortly after 8:30 p.m., the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonates a bomb at the Carlton Club, a club in London popular among MPs and supporters of the ruling Conservative Party. The ground floor collapses to the basement and windows are shattered. The blast is felt up to half a mile away. The bombing injures twenty people, including Lord Donald Kaberry, a former Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party, and a much-loved porter, Charles Henry. Neither ever regains full health. Kaberry dies the following March, though Henry is able to return to his duties after a serious operation, but dies three years later.
In a statement, the IRA says, “Like Brighton in 1984, the IRA has brought the war directly to those who keep the British Army on the streets and in the fields of Ireland. While such occupation continues, and the Nationalist people face daily oppression, the policy makers and their military arm will not be safe.” The attack is part of the IRA’s escalating campaign that started in early 1990 and which has claimed two lives and 27 injuries since May of that year. The conservative MP for FulhamMatthew Carrington calls the attack very “worrying” as it is a non-military target, suggesting a dangerous tactic from the IRA against members of the public.
The bomb contains 15 lbs. (6.8 kg) of Semtex explosives. Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher arrives at the club shortly after the bombing and speaks with some of the victims.
(Pictured: Building of Arthur’s which has hosted the Carlton Club since 1943)
Dryhurst is born to Alexander Robinson and Emily Egan. Her father is a dyer. She is known as Nannie to her sisters and she decides to change her name to Nannie Florence in honour of a young friend who had died. As a result she is known variously (and following her marriage) as N.F. Dryhurst, Nannie, Nora and Florence Dryhurst.
After the death of her father, Dryhurst takes a position as a governess as she speaks fluent French, German and Irish, as well as having considerable skill as an artist. She works first in Ireland and then in London. She looks after a doctor’s daughter, Nellie Tenison, and through them she meets the Dryhurst family. In 1882, she becomes engaged to British Museum official Alfred Robert Dryhurst and marries him in August 1884. Their first daughter, Norah, is born in 1885 and the second, Sylvia, in 1888.
Dryhurst soon gets involved with an anarchist group and writes regularly for the Freedom newspaper. She is friends with Charlotte Wilson and acts as editor when Wilson is away. In the early 1890s she takes over as editor completely for a period of time. She also works as a translator for Peter Kropotkin‘s works. She spends time teaching with Wilson, Agnes Henry, and Cyril Bell at the International Anarchist School set up in Fitzroy Square in London by Louise Michel. She gives active support to Spanish refugees fleeing repression and gives money to support the colony at Clousden Hill from 1895 to 1902.
Dryhurst supports a number of different countries attempting to gain independence. She becomes secretary of the Nationalities and Subject Races Committee and uses her writing in working toward Irish independence. She writes for various Irish newspapers and assists with the creation of The Irish Citizen. A friend of W. B. Yeats, she appears in his play The Land of Heart’s Desire in June 1904. She speaks Georgian, having learned it from Varlam Cherkezishvili, a close associate of Kropotkin. In 1906, she is a member of the Georgian Relief Committee and travels to the country. She speaks at an international conference at The Hague in support of Georgia. She is also a supporter of Indian independence.
It was through Dryhurst that the Gifford sisters get their connection to the Irish independence movement. She introduces Muriel Gifford to Thomas McDonagh and Grace Gifford to James Plunkett. After the executions of fifteen leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin, she spends her time campaigning unsuccessfully for the reprieve of Roger Casement. Not all her activities are purely political. She is a neighbour of Martin Shaw and on her suggestion he founds the Purcell Operatic Society in 1899. She becomes the Society’s secretary. He rents accommodation near her and through her friends they find talented amateurs to put on their productions.
Dryhurst has a long affair with Henry Nevinson, a journalist she meets in 1892. The affair ends in 1912. She dies in 1930. Her papers are kept in the National Library of Ireland.
Campbell is born in Belfast on July 15, 1879, into a Catholic and Irish nationalist family from County Down. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College, Belfast. After working for his father he teaches for a while. He travels to Dublin in 1902, meeting leading nationalist figures. His literary activities begin with songs, as a collector in Antrim, County Antrim and working with the composer Herbert Hughes. He is then a founder of the Ulster Literary Theatre in 1904. He contributes a play, The Little Cowherd of Slainge, and several articles to its journal Uladh edited by Bulmer Hobson. The Little Cowherd of Slainge is performed by the Ulster Literary Theatre at the Clarence Place Hall in Belfast on May 4, 1905, along with Lewis Purcell’s The Enthusiast.
Campbell moves to Dublin in 1905 and, failing to find work, moves to London the following year where he is involved in Irish literary activities while working as a teacher. He marries Nancy Maude in 1910, and they move shortly thereafter to Dublin, and then later to County Wicklow. His play Judgement is performed at the Abbey Theatre in April 1912.
Campbell takes part as a supporter in the Easter Rising of 1916, doing rescue work. The following year he publishes a translation from Irish of the short stories of Patrick Pearse, one of the leaders of the Rising.
Campbell becomes a Sinn FéinCouncillor in Wicklow in 1921. Later in the Irish Civil War he is on the Republican side, and is interned in 1922-23. His marriage breaks up, and he emigrates to the United States in 1925 where he settles in New York City. He lectures at Fordham University, and works in academic Irish studies, founding the University’s School of Irish Studies in 1928, which lasts four years. He is the editor of The Irish Review (1934), a short lived “magazine of Irish expression.” The business manager is George Lennon, former Officer Commanding of the County WaterfordFlying Column during the Irish War of Independence. The managing editor is Lennon’s brother-in-law, George H. Sherwood.
Campbell returns to Ireland in 1939, settling at Glencree, County Wicklow. He dies at Lacken Daragh, Enniskerry, County Wicklow on June 6, 1944.
seamus dubhghaill 