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.
Esther Vanhomrigh, Irish woman of Dutch descent and a longtime lover and correspondent of Jonathan Swift, dies in Celbridge, County Kildare, on June 2, 1723. Swift’s letters to her are published after her death. Her fictional name “Vanessa” is created by Swift by taking Van from her surname, Vanhomrigh, and adding Esse, a pet form of her first name, Esther.
Vanhomrigh is born in Dublin on February 14, 1688, the eldest of four children of Bartholomew Van Homrigh, a merchant of Amsterdam and afterwards of Dublin, who is appointed commissary of the stores by King William III upon his expedition into Ireland. He serves as Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1697–98. Her mother, also named Esther, is the daughter of John Stone, an Irish commissioner of revenue. She grows up at Celbridge Abbey in County Kildare.
Vanhomrigh’s father dies in 1703, and his widow moves her family to London in 1707. She becomes acquainted with Swift in December of that year while the family is en route for London, at Dunstable, and it is here that their intense 17-year relationship begins. She is 22 years younger than Swift, and it is obvious from the beginning that he admires her for her rugged qualities, as he does not admire very delicate women. She is said “not to be a beauty,” although it is difficult to be sure about this since no contemporary portrait of her exists (the famous 1868 Millais portrait is a work of artistic imagination). Swift later serves as her tutor. After her mother dies in 1714, she follows Swift to Ireland, and returns to Celbridge Abbey, but she is desperately miserable there.
Their relationship is fraught. It is broken up after 17 years by Swift’s relationship with another woman, Esther Johnson, whom he calls “Stella,” in 1723. Swift has known Stella since about 1690, when she is a little girl in the household of his employer Sir William Temple; their relationship is intense and it is possible that they secretly married in 1716. Vanhomrigh is thought to have asked Swift not to see Stella again, and he apparently refuses, thus putting an end to their relationship.
Vanhomrigh never recovers from his rejection and dies on June 2, 1723, likely from tuberculosis contracted from nursing her sister Mary, who had died of the same disease in 1720, as had their mother before her. Some accuse Swift of inadvertently causing her death.
Vanhomrigh’s father had left her well provided for, but she is burdened by debts accumulated by her mother and her spendthrift brother Bartholomew. In her will, she names the barristerRobert Marshall and George Berkeley, the celebrated philosopher and future Bishop of Cloyne, executors and joint residuary legatees of her estate, although she knew neither man well. Due to the debts, a protracted lawsuit ensues and a large part of the estate is lost in legal costs. It is widely reported that she had made it a condition of the inheritance that her executors publish all her correspondence with Swift, but in fact, no such stipulation seems to have been made.
Swift, whose letters to her are published after her death, is not mentioned in her will, perhaps a final retaliation against a man whose neglect made her “live a life like a languishing death.”
Chicago May, the nickname of Mary Anne Duignan, an Irish-born criminal who becomes notorious in the United States, United Kingdom and France, dies in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on May 30, 1929. She refers to herself as the “queen of crooks” and sometimes uses the name May Churchill.
Duignan is born in Edenmore, Ballinamuck, County Longford, on December 26, 1871. In 1890, at the age of 19, she steals the proceeds earned by her parents from a recent cattle fair and runs away to Liverpool, England where she buys new clothes and books a ticket to America. Upon arrival in New York City she supports herself by prostitution and picking pockets.
She moves to Chicago to take advantage of the large influx of visitors at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. She teams up with another prostitute. One robs customers while the other is having sex with them. She returns to New York City, where she works as a dancer, but is soon arrested for stealing a wallet, earning her first jail sentence. She briefly marries friend Jim Sharpe but the couple soon separates. After this, she calls herself May Churchill Sharpe. She soon establishes herself with the local criminal underworld, becoming involved in various crimes, mostly of a petty nature, including fraud, assault, brawling, drunk and disorderly behaviour, beggary and pickpocketing.
Duignan has various criminal lovers, but she graduates from petty criminality to major crime when she meets Eddie Guerin, who organises a robbery of the American Express office in Paris. She is imprisoned for her role in the crime. She operates her schemes on four continents and in nine countries. She reaches the height of her career in England when she is taken up by aristocrat Sir Sidney Hamilton Gore, who supposedly proposes marriage to her, shortly before he shoots himself.
After Guerin escapes from a French prison island, he makes his way to London where he meets Duignan again, but the relationship turns sour. She takes up with a burglar named Charley Smith. In 1907, during an altercation with Guerin, Smith shoots him, wounding him in the foot. Smith and Duignan are both accused of attempted murder. She is convicted and sentenced to 15 years. She is released in 1917, and returns to the United States.
By the 1920s, Duignan is living in Detroit and has become destitute. No longer young, she is reduced to propositioning men on the streets and is repeatedly arrested for soliciting and common prostitution. She hopes to make money from her former notoriety by writing magazine articles and an autobiography with the help of a journalist, which is published in 1928 as Chicago May, Her Story, by the Queen of Crooks. Her former lover Guerin publishes his own life story at the same time, under the title I Was a Bandit. She dies at the age of 58 in Philadelphia on May 30, 1929.
The eldest of the three sons and one daughter of Daniel Sheehan, tenant farmer, and his wife, Ellen (née Fitzgerald). He is educated at the local primary school. In his book Ireland since Parnell (1921) he states that witnessing the ragged poverty of labourers’ and smallholders’ children who attended the school made him determined to do something for the poor. The family’s Fenian tradition and his parents’ eviction from their holding in 1880 form his early years. At the age of sixteen he becomes a schoolteacher.
In 1890, Sheehan takes up journalism, serving as correspondent of the Kerry Sentinel and special correspondent of the Cork Daily Herald in Killarney. He also becomes correspondence secretary to the Kanturk trade and labour council, which campaigns on behalf of agricultural labourers. He manages to get reports of meetings into the Cork papers, and this helps the rapid spread of the association, which in 1890 becomes the Irish Democratic Trade and Labour Federation, under the leadership of Michael Davitt. It is, however, fatally disrupted by the Parnell split. While Sheehan continues to admire Davitt, and despite the pre-split Irish party leadership having opposed the federation as a threat to Charles Stewart Parnell‘s leadership, he becomes a Parnellite, and always remembers his only meeting with Parnell at Tralee, when the chief is presented with a loyal address (drafted by Sheehan) from his Killarney supporters. After Parnell’s death and the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill, he temporarily drops out of Irish politics.
Following his marriage on February 6, 1894, to Mary Pauline O’Connor of Tralee, Sheehan joins the staff of the Glasgow Observer in pursuit of journalistic experience, then becomes editor of the Catholic News in Preston, Lancashire. In 1898, he returns to Ireland and works on various papers, including the Cork Constitution, before serving as editor of the Skibbereen-based Cork County Southern Star (1899–1901), where his Parnellism brings him into conflict with the Bishop of Ross, Denis Kelly. He expresses sympathy for the newly founded United Irish League (UIL), established by William O’Brien in Connacht with the dual aim of representing western smallholders and using a new land agitation as a vehicle for Irish Party reunion. He does not, however, join the UIL himself.
In August 1894, the Clonmel solicitor J. J. O’Shee, anti-Parnellite MP for West Waterford from 1895, forms the Irish Land and Labour Association (ILLA) to agitate on behalf of agricultural labourers and small tenant farmers. Its appearance reflects the breakdown of the centralised party discipline which had existed before the Parnell split, and recognition that the land war’s prime beneficiaries had been large and middle-sized tenant farmers rather than the nation as a whole. On returning from Britain in 1898, Sheehan throws himself into organising the ILLA and becomes its president. In 1900 there are 100 branches, mostly in Cork, Tipperary, and Limerick. The Irish Party leadership look on this organisation with some suspicion.
At the 1900 United Kingdom general election in Ireland Sheehan seeks the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) nomination for South Cork but was defeated by Edward Barry. After the death of Dr Charles Tanner, however, he succeeds in obtaining the IPP nomination for the constituency of Mid Cork, despite the party leadership’s attempts to deny recognition to ILLA branches in order to hand the nomination to its favoured candidate. Sheehan is elected unopposed on May 17, 1901. At the age of 28, he is the youngest Irish member of parliament. Although he has been admitted to the party, his position as a labour representative and his perceived independent base make him something of an outsider.
From October 1904 Sheehan allies himself with O’Brien, writing regularly for the latter’s weekly a TheIrish People. Redmondites accuse him of opportunism, but he always maintains that his personal inclination as an old Parnellite has been towards John Redmond and that his support for O’Brien derives from the older man’s willingness from 1904 to identify himself with the labourers’ campaign. Although their alliance originally likely contains elements of expediency, Sheehan and O’Brien develop a deep personal friendship.
Sheehan’s support for O’Brien leads to a split in the ILLA in 1906, with Tipperary and Waterford branches following O’Shee and Redmond, and Sheehan retaining the support of his Cork base and of some branches in Limerick and Kerry. He serves on the Cork advisory committee which represents tenant interests in land purchase negotiations under the Wyndham Land Act. It’s policy of “conference plus business” combines an offer to negotiate with willing landlords and a threat of agitation against those unwilling to give satisfactory terms. His faction of the ILLA becomes the basis for the grassroots organisation of O’Brien’s followers, and sporadic attempts, financed by O’Brien, are made to spread it outside its Munster base. Both factions of the ILLA claim credit for the passage of the 1906 and 1911 Labourers’ (Ireland) Acts which provide for the allocation of cottages and smallholdings to labourers. In Cork and some other parts of Munster these buildings become popularly known as “Sheehan’s cottages,” a term which long outlives Sheehan’s political career. He also helps to bring about the creation of a “model village” at Tower, near Blarney, the result of cooperation between the local ILLA branch and the rural district council.
At the 1906 general election the Redmond leadership attempts to avoid an open split by allowing O’Brien’s supporters to return unopposed. However, the continuing conflict between the two factions rapidly leads to a formal break. Shortly after the election Sheehan is excluded from the IPP, and thereby deprived of the parliamentary stipend paid to MPs with insufficient resources to maintain themselves. With the support of O’Brien and the small group of O’Brienite MPs, he maintains that the party has no right to exclude an elected MP willing to take the party pledge. After resigning his seat to which he was re-elected without opposition on December 31, 1906, he demands readmission to the party and mounts an unsuccessful lawsuit demanding payment of the stipend. He is subsequently supported from the proceeds of collections outside church gates on Sundays.
Sheehan and the other O’Brienite MPs are readmitted to the party in 1908 as part of an attempt at general reconciliation after the disruptions following the rejection of the Irish Council Bill. Dissensions rapidly reappear over Augustine Birrell‘s 1909 land act, which the O’Brienites see as wriggling out of the financial responsibilities accepted by the British government in the Wyndham land act and as sabotaging land purchase, since landlords will not accept the terms offered. Sheehan’s section of the ILLA is denied official recognition and thereby prevented from sending delegates to a party convention called to consider the bill. At the convention, groups of “heavies”recruited from Joseph Devlin‘s Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) exclude delegates with Cork accents, while O’Brienite speakers are howled down. This leads to the formation in March 1909 of the All-for-Ireland League (AFIL), a body based on the existing O’Brienite organisation and advocating O’Brien’s policy of gradually implementing home rule through step-by-step cooperation with moderate unionist supporters of devolution. Although O’Brien’s temporary retirement for health reasons in April 1909 leads to the suspension of the AFIL, it is revived in response to an attempted purge of the O’Brienite MPs by the leadership and by O’Brien’s reappearance in response to the January 1910 general election. Sheehan writes regularly for its paper, the Cork Free Press.
In the general election the O’Brienites hold their seats while two Cork Redmondites are displaced. Sheehan is re-elected for Mid Cork, defeating the Redmondite W. G. Fallon in a campaign marked by widespread rioting and impassioned clerical denunciations of Sheehan. Fallon subsequently attempts to get up a “red scare” against the ILLA. The Cork ILLA later splits over Sheehan’s slightly erratic leadership. While the split is initially personality-driven, the breakaway faction, led by Patrick Bradley and centred in east Cork, moves back toward alignment with Redmond. At the December 1910 election the AFIL consolidates its position in Cork, but is defeated everywhere else. Sheehan retains his Mid Cork seat against a local candidate but is defeated in a simultaneous contest in East Limerick. He is also defeated when he stands for Cork County Council in June 1911, though the AFIL wins control of that body.
Sheehan studies law at University College Cork (UCC) (1908–09), where he is an exhibitioner and prizeman, and at King’s Inns, where he graduated with honours. He is called to the bar in 1911 and practised on the Munster circuit. In 1913–14 he is active in the AFIL’s attempts to avert partition by trying to recruit sections of British political opinion in favour of a conference between the parties. He becomes vice-chairman of the Imperial Federation League. This receives considerable attention among the British political classes but contributes to the decline of the AFIL’s electoral base. The policy of conciliation has been driven to a considerable extent by the belief that it is the only way of achieving home rule. The abolition of the House of Lords’ veto and the introduction of the third home rule bill by the Asquith government undercuts this argument and increases Redmond’s prestige, while AFIL denunciations of Redmondism are seen as driven by personal resentment and playing into the hands of unionists. The decision of the AFIL MPs to abstain from supporting the bill on its final passage through the House of Commons in 1914 as a protest against the prospect of a partition-based compromise is represented by Redmondites as a vote against home rule itself and contributed to AFIL loss of Cork County Council in June 1914.
On the outbreak of World War I, Sheehan supports O’Brien in calling for Irish enlistment for foreign service. In November 1914, at the age of forty-two, he enlists himself and is gazetted as a lieutenant in the Royal Munster Fusiliers. It is claimed that he is almost single-handedly responsible for raising the 9th (service) battalion of this regiment. Three of his sons also enlist. Two of his sons are killed in action with the Royal Flying Corps, and a daughter is disabled by injuries received in an air raid while serving as a nurse. In the spring and summer of 1915 he organises and leads recruiting campaigns in Cork, Limerick, and Clare. This is part of a nationwide drive for recruits, aimed in particular at the farming community, which reflects the realisation that the war is going to last much longer than expected.
In 1915, Sheehan is promoted to the rank of captain and serves with his battalion on the Loos-en-Gohellesalient and at the Battle of the Somme, contributing a series of articles from the trenches to the London Daily Express. Various ailments, including deafness caused by shellfire, and hospitalisation necessitate his transfer to the 3rd Royal Munster Fusiliers (Reserve) Battalion, and he resigns his commission on January 13, 1918, due to ill health. In April 1918 he speaks at Westminster against the bill extending conscription to Ireland, threatening to resist it by force. One of his last parliamentary speeches (in October 1918) is in support of a bill providing land grants for Irish ex-servicemen. With the growth of Sinn Féin and the virtual demise of the AFIL, his position in Cork grows increasingly untenable. The Sheehan family faces intimidation and are obliged to leave their home on the Victoria Road for London, where he has secured the Labour Party nomination for the Limehouse–Stepney division of the East End, later represented by Clement Attlee.
Sheehan is unsuccessful in the 1918 United Kingdom general election, and is obliged to leave politics after a financially disastrous involvement in an Achill Island mining company leads to his bankruptcy. Unable to practise at the bar because of the hearing loss caused by his war service, he returns to journalism and becomes editor and publisher of TheStadium, a daily newspaper for sportsmen. In 1921, shortly before the Anglo-Irish truce, he publishes Ireland since Parnell, a history of recent events heavily dependent on the writings of O’Brien but incorporating some personal reminiscences. It concludes by blaming the outbreak of the IRA guerrilla campaign on provocation by Crown forces, denouncing reprisals, and pleading for British recognition of Dáil Éireann and dominion home rule for an undivided Ireland.
Sheehan moves to Dublin in 1926 after hearing that the threats against him have been lifted. His wife, who has never fully recovered from the stresses and bereavements she has experienced since 1914, dies soon afterward. Sheehan himself becomes managing editor of Irish Press and Publicity Services and, in 1928, publisher and editor of the South Dublin Chronicle. The paper gives critical support to the Irish Labour Party, publishes campaigning articles on slum conditions, and advocates housing reform. In September 1930, he is an unsuccessful Labour candidate for Dublin County Council. In the 1930s, as his health deteriorates further, he works as coordinator for the ex-servicemen’s group the Old Comrades’ Association, editing both northern and southern editions of its annual journal. In 1942, he offers himself to Richard Mulcahy as a Fine Gael candidate for Cork South-East, but is turned down. He dies on November 28, 1948, while visiting his daughter at Queen Anne Street, London. Both he and his wife are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
(From: “Sheehan, Daniel Desmond (‘D. D.’)” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
seamus dubhghaill 