Christy O’Connor Snr, an Irish professional golfer born Patrick Christopher O’Connor, dies in Dublin on May 14, 2016. He is one of the leading golfers on the British and Irish circuit from the mid-1950s.
O’Connor wins over twenty tournaments on the British PGA and finishes in the top 10 in The Open Championship many times. Later he has considerable success in senior events, twice winning the World Senior Championship. In team events he plays in ten successive Ryder Cup matches and plays in fifteen Canada Cup/World Cup matches for Ireland, winning the Canada Cup in 1958 in partnership with Harry Bradshaw.
O’Connor is born in Knocknacarra, a village in Galway, on December 21, 1924. He catches his first glimpse of golf at the nearby Galway Golf Club, and from the age of 10 spends most of his spare time there. His foray into professional golf begins with caddying, first at Galway and then over at Tuam Golf Club.
In 1951, O’Connor turns professional with Tuam members funding his first tournament at The Open Championship at Royal Portrush Golf Club in County Antrim, Northern Ireland, that same year. His 19th-place finish garners a membership invitation from Bundoran Golf Club in Bundoran, County Donegal, which he accepts.
O’Connor’s first professional win is at the Swallow-Penfold Tournament held in 1955, the first £1,000 prize to be offered in British golf. He goes on to win the 1956 and 1959 British Masters. In 1958, he helps Ireland to win the Canada Cup in Mexico City playing with Harry Bradshaw. A year later, he moves to Dublin and joins The Royal Dublin Golf Club. Throughout the 1960s he wins at least one professional event during each year on the British Tour, a level of consistent success matched by very few other players. He rarely plays professional tournaments outside Britain or Ireland, at one stage saying he forwent playing at the Masters Tournament in Augusta, Georgia, because he could not afford to participate.
The only major championship O’Connor plays is The Open Championship. He plays the event twenty-six times between 1951 and 1979. His best performance comes at the 1965 Open Championship where he ties for second place with Brian Huggett, two behind five-time winner Peter Thomson. He easily outplays international stars like Jack Nicklaus, Arnold Palmer, Sam Snead, and Gary Player. He receives an astonishing twenty invitations to play in the Masters Tournament but rejected all of them, citing prohibitive financial costs.
O’Connor plays in every Ryder Cup from 1955 to 1973, setting a record of ten appearances in the event which stands until it is surpassed by Nick Faldo in 1997. He is the Irish professional champion on ten occasions, including in 1978 (at the age of 53), and is twice (1961 and 1962) recipient of the Harry Vardon Trophy for leading the British Tour’s “Order of Merit.”
In the 1966 Carroll’s International at The Royal Dublin Golf Club, O’Connor finishes 2-3-3 (eagle-birdie-eagle) to win the tournament by two strokes. At the par-4 16th, he drives the green and holes a 20-foot putt. He then holes a 12-foot putt at the 17th and, at the par-5 18th, hits a 3-iron to eight feet and holes the putt. A plaque by the 16th tee commemorates the achievement. In 1970, he wins the John Player Classic, at the time its £25,000 first prize is the richest offered in golf (in 1970, even The Open Championship winner receives just a little over £5,000), making him the season’s leading money-winner, although not “Order of Merit” leader, which is decided by a points system not directly related to prize money.
Later in his career, O’Connor becomes the leading “senior” (over-50s) professional player of his day, just before the lucrative U.S.-based Senior PGA Tour, now known as the PGA Tour Champions, takes off. He wins the PGA Seniors Championship six times and the World Senior Championship in 1976 and 1977. He is elected to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 2009 in the Veterans category.
O’Connor meets his wife, Mary Collins, in Donegal while he is a member of Bundoran Golf Club. They marry in 1954 and have six children together. During his early career he is known simply as Christy O’Connor, but his nephew of the same name also becomes a prominent golfer, and from that point forward they are referred to as Christy O’Connor Senior and Christy O’Connor Junior, respectively. He is known as “Himself” among his golfing peers. He dies at the age of 91 in Dublin’s Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, on May 14, 2016.
Moving to Dublin by September 1916, MacDonagh is headmaster for a time of Patrick Pearse‘s St. Enda’s School, the bilingual school where his brother Thomas had formerly served on the staff under Pearse, which had reopened after the rising in Cullenswood House, Oakley Road, Rathmines. By 1918 he is in private practice as an income tax recovery expert. He later quips that by recovering thousands of pounds annually for clients, he has done greater harm to the British government than any other Irishman. He is also partner by 1919 in an insurance brokerage with fellow Sinn FéinTDWilliam Cosgrave. Following Cosgrave’s departure, the firm trades from 1920 as MacDonagh & Boland, with offices first on Dame Street, and latterly on College Green.
MacDonagh’s prominence in the post-1916 reorganisation of Sinn Féin commences at the April 19, 1917, convention of advanced nationalists summoned by George Noble Plunkett after his parliamentary by-election victory. MacDonagh makes a resounding speech ratifying Plunkett’s determination not only to abstain from attendance at Westminster, but also to affirm the principles of the republican Easter Week proclamation rather than the dual-monarchy programme of Sinn Féin under Arthur Griffith. After campaigning vigorously on behalf of the successful by-election candidacy of Éamon de Valera in East Clare, he is arrested on August 30 and sentenced to six-months’ imprisonment for making a seditious speech. He joins in the hunger strike of republican prisoners seeking prisoner-of-war status in Mountjoy Gaol, on which Thomas Ashe dies on September 25 after enduring forcible feeding. Released with the other surviving strikers, he is a principal witness at the emotional inquest into the circumstances of Ashe’s death.
Elected to the Sinn Féin executive at the October 1917 ardfheis, at which the party adopts a republican constitution, MacDonagh is alternately rearrested and released on several occasions under the “cat-and-mouse act,” enduring further hunger strikes in both Belfast and Dundalk jails, before serving out in its entirety the original six-month sentence (1917–18). After deportation to England and while incarcerated in Reading Gaol, he is returned unopposed in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland as Sinn Féin candidate in North Tipperary and is released in time to attend the second session of the first Dáil Éireann on April 10, 1919. With the Dáil driven underground in September 1919 after its proscription, he protests against the infrequency of sessions, querying whether “private members [were] to abstain from Dublin as well as Westminster.”
Elected in January 1920 to both Dublin Corporation and Rathmines town council, MacDonagh concentrates his political energies on local government until appointment in January 1921 as acting Dáil Minister for Labour, and director of the Belfast boycott. Exercising effective authority over the labour department because of the imprisonment of the minister, Constance Markievicz, he seeks to define a comprehensive industrial and economic strategy and establishes a labour commission to formulate proposals. The resultant radical plan for supplanting capitalist ownership by developing cooperative and distributive industrial structures is ignored by his cabinet colleagues. His organisation and enforcement of the Belfast boycott – a response to the anti-Catholic rioting of July 1920, and expulsion of workers from jobs and families from homes – is relentless and efficient. He appoints a team of boycott organisers and local boycott committees empowered to impose fines and to seize goods, and blacklists firms that are facilitating circumvention of the boycott by trans-shipment of Belfast goods through non-boycotted northern towns or through British ports.
Throughout the Irish War of Independence MacDonagh is constantly on the run, usually under disguise as a priest, and is imprisoned for a time in Mountjoy Gaol in 1920. One of four Sinn Féin candidates returned unopposed to the Second Dáil for Tipperary Mid, North, and South, after a cabinet reorganisation in August 1921 following the truce, he remains as boycott director but is removed from the Labour Department. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo–Irish Treaty, in the Dáil debates he responds to Griffith’s assertion that the agreement is indeed a treaty concluded between two sovereign nations by asking why the pro-Treatyites are conducting the sovereign Irish nation into the British empire, and whether they are doing so “with their heads up or their hands up.”
Manager of the anti-Treaty bulletin Poblacht na hÉireann, in the 1922 Irish general election MacDonagh is returned on the first count to the third seat in his constituency. Arrested soon after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, he escapes from Portobello military barracks. Rearrested on September 30 and imprisoned in Mountjoy Gaol, he falls seriously ill with acute appendicitis but refuses to sign the required form to secure release for medical treatment because it implicitly recognises the legitimacy of the Free State government. Transferred at length to the Mater Misericordiae private nursing home, he undergoes an operation, but two days later, having developed peritonitis, he dies on December 25, 1922. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
A small, supple man with alert blue eyes, MacDonagh wielded a swift and stinging tongue in debate. It is said that he indulged his caustic wit more for the delight in the bon mot than for the bitterness of the invective. Genial in company, with a store of amusing anecdote, he was celebrated for hearty humour even in the face of hardship and danger. On a prison sickbed days before his death, he referred to another inmate, bald-headed like himself, “who wears his hair like mine.” In 1913, he married Margaret O’Toole of Dublin. They had one daughter and two sons. They resided in Rathmines, first at 86 Moyne Road, before moving during 1922 to 9 Palmerston Road.
(From: “MacDonagh, Joseph” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
The first of four paramilitary bombings in the centre of Dublin between November 26, 1972, and January 20, 1973, takes place in the Burgh Quay area of the city on Sunday, November 26, 1972. A total of three civilians are killed and 185 people are injured in the four bombings.
The bombings occur at the end of what is the bloodiest year in the entire 30-year-old religious-political conflict known as the Troubles, which had erupted at the end of the 1960s. Many of the bombs that detonate in Northern Ireland and the ingredients used to make them (mostly stolen from Irish construction sites provided to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) by local sympathisers) originate from the Republic of Ireland, where the IRA Southern Command, headquartered in Dublin, is located and tasked in recruiting and training volunteers and manufacturing weapons for operations in the North and to provide shelter for fleeing IRA members from British security forces who are not permitted to enter the country.
No group ever claims responsibility for the attacks and nobody is ever charged in connection with the bombings. The November 26 bombing in Burgh Quay is possibly carried out by former associates of the Littlejohn brothers who are Secret Intelligence Service provocateurs, in a successful attempt to provoke an Irish government clampdown against the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), while the other three bombings are possibly perpetrated by loyalist paramilitaries, specifically the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), with British military or intelligence assistance.
The first of the four bombs explodes at 1:25 a.m. on November 26, 1972, outside the rear exit door of the Film Centre Cinema, O’Connell Bridge House, during a late night showing of a film. The bomb goes off in the laneway connecting Burgh Quay with Leinster Market injuring 40 people, some very badly, including facial, leg and serious bowel wounds. There are 156 patrons and three employees inside the cinema at the time of the blast, although there are no fatalities. The force of the explosion hurls customers out of their seats and onto the floor. There is much panic as people, fearing a second bomb might explode in their midst, rush to escape from the crowded cinema. Shops and buildings in the immediate vicinity receive extensive damage.
The area is sealed off by the Garda Síochána and they launch an investigation. A ballistic officer determines that the explosion’s epicentre had been on a doorstep outside an emergency door leading to the laneway. However, no trace of the bomb or explosives used are ever found at the scene. The Gardaí interviews a number of witnesses who came forward alleging to have seen the bombers in the laneway prior to the explosion and although photofits of the suspects are drawn up, the bombers are never apprehended. The Garda believes the bombing was carried out by republican subversives, including former associates of the Littlejohn brothers.
The night following the bombing an eight-man IRA unit unsuccessfully attempts to free Provisional IRA Chief of StaffSeán Mac Stíofáin, who had been taken to Dublin’s Mater Hospital for treatment due to adverse effects of his hunger and thirst strike on his health. The ward in which he is kept is under heavy police guard. The armed IRA unit exchanges shots with two members of the Garda Special Branch. One detective, two civilians and one IRA volunteer suffer minor injuries from gunfire.
(Pictured: The O’Connell Bridge House, 2 D’Olier Street, Dublin, where a bomb was detonated outside the rear exit door of the Film Centre Cinema)
O’Riordan joins the Communist Party of Ireland in 1935 while still in the IRA and works on the communist newspaper The Irish Workers’ Voice. In 1937, following the urgings of Peadar O’Donnell, several hundred Irishmen, mostly IRA or ex-IRA men, go to fight for the Spanish Republic in the Spanish Civil War with the XVth International Brigade. They are motivated in part by enmity towards the 800 or so Blueshirts, led by Eoin O’Duffy who go to Spain to fight on the “nationalist” side in the Irish Brigade. He accompanies a party led by Frank Ryan. In the Republic’s final offensive of July 25, 1938, he carries the flag of Catalonia across the River Ebro. On August 1, he is severely injured by shrapnel on the Ebro front. He is repatriated to Ireland the following month, after the International Brigades are disbanded.
In 1938 O’Riordan is offered an Irish Army commission by the Irish Free State but chooses instead to train IRA units in Cork. As a result of his IRA activities during World War II, or the Emergency as it is known in neutral Ireland, he is interned in the Curragh internment camp from 1939 until 1943 where he is Officer Commanding of the Cork Hut and partakes in Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Gaelic League classes as well as publishing Splannc (Irish for “Spark,” named after Vladimir Lenin‘s newspaper).
In 1944 O’Riordan is founding secretary of the Liam Mellows Branch of the Labour Party and in 1945 is a founding secretary of the Cork Socialist Party, whose other notable members include Derry Kelleher, Kevin Neville and Máire Keohane-Sheehan.
In 1947, O’Riordan is a founding secretary of the Irish Workers’ League and general secretary thereafter, and of its successor organisation the Irish Workers’ Party from 1962–70.
In all O’Riordan runs for election five times, campaigning throughout for the establishment of a socialist republic in Ireland but given Ireland’s Catholic conservatism and fear of communism, he does so without success. He does, however, receive playwright Sean O’Casey‘s endorsement in 1951.
O’Riordan’s participation in the Spanish Civil War is always an important part of his political identity. In 1966 he attends the International Brigades’ Reunion in Berlin and is instrumental in having Frank Ryan’s remains repatriated from Germany to Ireland in 1979.
O’Riordan is a member of the Irish Chile Solidarity Committee and attends the 1st Party Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba in 1984. He also campaigns on behalf of the Birmingham Six and attends their Appeal trial in 1990. He serves as General Secretary of the Communist Party of Ireland (1970–83) and as National Chairman of the party (1983–88). He publishes many articles under the auspices of the CPI.
O’Riordan’s last major public outing comes in 2005 at the re-dedication of the memorial outside Dublin’s Liberty Hall to the Irish veterans of the Spanish Civil War. He and other veterans are received by President of IrelandMary McAleese. He is also presented with Cuba’s Medal of Friendship by the Cuban Consul Teresita Trujillo to Ireland on behalf of Cuban President Fidel Castro.
In 1969, according to Soviet dissident Vasili Mitrokhin, O’Riordan is approached by IRA leaders Cathal Goulding and Seamus Costello with a view to obtaining guns from the Soviet KGB to defend Irish republican areas of Belfast during the communal violence that marks the outbreak of the Troubles. Mitrokhin alleges that O’Riordan then contacts the Kremlin, but the consignment of arms does not reach Ireland until 1972. The operation is known as Operation Splash. The IRA splits in the meantime between the Provisional IRA and the Official IRA and it is the latter faction who receives the Soviet arms. Mitrokhin’s allegations are repeated in Boris Yeltsin‘s autobiography.
O’Riordan’s book, Connolly Column – The Story of the Irishmen who fought for the Spanish Republic 1936–1939, is published in 1979 and deals with the Irish volunteers of the International Brigade who fought in support of the Spanish Republic against Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939). An updated version of the book is reprinted in 2005 and is launched by the Lord Mayor of Dublin, Cllr. Michael Conaghan at a book launch at SIPTU headquarters, Liberty Hall. The book is the inspiration for Irish singer-songwriter Christy Moore‘s famous song “Viva la Quinta Brigada.”
In 1991, O’Riordan’s wife dies at the age of 81 at their home. He continues to live in their family home before moving to Glasnevin in 2000 to be close to his son Manus who lives nearby. He lives there until falling ill in November 2005 and is taken to the Mater Hospital. His health rapidly deteriorates, and he quickly develops Alzheimer’s disease. Soon afterwards he is moved to St. Mary’s Hospital in the Phoenix Park where he spends the final few months of his life, before his death at the age of 88 on May 18, 2006.
O’Riordan’s funeral at Glasnevin Crematorium is attended by over a thousand mourners. Following a wake the previous night at Finglas Road, hundreds turn up outside the house of his son Manus and traffic grounds to a halt as family, friends and comrades – many of whom are waving the red flag of the Communist Party of Ireland – escort O’Riordan to Glasnevin Cemetery. A secular ceremony takes place led by Manus O’Riordan, Head of Research at SIPTU, with contributions from O’Riordan’s family, Communist Party general secretary Eugene McCartan and IBMT representative Pauline Frasier.
By 1972, Ahern has met his future wife, Miriam Kelly, a bank official who lives near the Aherns’ family home. They marry in St. Columba’s Church, Iona Road in 1975. They have two daughters from the marriage, Georgina and Cecelia. Georgina is the wife of Westlife member Nicky Byrne. Cecelia is a best-selling author. The Aherns separate in 1992.
Ahern is elected to the Dáil, the lower house of the Oireachtas, in 1977 as a member of the Fianna Fáil party for the newly created Dublin Finglas constituency. He is elected to the Dublin City Council in 1979, later becoming Lord Mayor of Dublin (1986–87). An assistant whip (1980–81) in the first government of Taoiseach Charles Haughey, he becomes a junior minister in Haughey’s second government (1982) and Minister for Labour in his third (1987–89) and fourth (1989–91) governments.
Ahern’s success in establishing general economic agreements with employers, unions, and farmers in 1987 and 1990 and his role in constructing the first Fianna Fáil coalition government (with the Progressive Democrats) in 1989 confirms his reputation as a skillful negotiator. He is made Minister for Finance in 1991. In the contest to choose Haughey’s successor, Ahern withdraws in favour of Albert Reynolds, and he remains Minister for Finance in each of Reynolds’s two governments (February–November 1992 and 1993–94). In November 1994, following the fall of the Fianna Fáil–Labour Party government, Reynolds resigns, and Ahern is elected party leader. He is set to become Taoiseach in a new coalition with the Labour Party, but at the eleventh-hour Labour opts to join a government with Fine Gael and Democratic Left.
Ahern forms a Fianna Fáil–Progressive Democrats minority government following elections in 1997. Credited with overseeing a thriving economy, he is reelected Taoiseach in 2002. He plays a major role in securing peace in Northern Ireland, participating in the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and helping negotiate the return of devolution to Northern Ireland in 2007. On May 15, 2007, he becomes the first Taoiseach to address a joint session of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
Soon afterward Ahern wins a third term as Taoiseach. He is reelected despite implications of his involvement in an influence-peddling scandal. The Tribunal of Inquiry into Certain Planning Matters & Payments, ultimately better known as the Mahon Tribunal, which is investigating alleged illegal payments by developers to politicians to influence zoning decisions in and around Dublin during the early 1990s, subsequently questions Ahern about his personal finances during his tenure as Minister for Finance. In early April 2008, as the investigation of Ahern’s involvement mounts, he announces that he will step down as Taoiseach and Leader of Fianna Fáil in May. He is succeeded in both posts by Brian Cowen. In the Mahon Tribunal’s final report, issued on March 22, 2012, it indicates that it does not believe Ahern had told the truth when questioned by the commission about alleged financial improprieties, though it does not directly accuse him of corruption. Ahern, threatened with expulsion from Fianna Fáil in the wake of the report, resigns from the party later in March while still maintaining that he had testified truthfully to the tribunal.
Ahern says in April 2018 that he is considering running for President of Ireland in 2025 as an independent candidate. That same month he walks out of an interview with DW News after being questioned on the findings of the Mahon Tribunal.
In October 2018, Ahern is appointed to chair the Bougainville Referendum Commission, which is responsible for preparing an independence referendum in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, which takes place in December 2019.
Flanagan also plays senior Gaelic football for Mayo. He captains the All-Ireland final-winning sides of 1950 and 1951 and wins five Connacht senior championship medals in all. He also wins two National Football League titles in 1949 and 1954. While still a footballer, he enters into a career in politics.
Flanagan comes from a Fianna Fáil family and is recruited into the party in east Mayo. He is elected a Fianna Fáil TD for Mayo South at the 1951 Irish general election and then wins a seat from 1969 in Mayo East at each subsequent election until he loses his seat at the 1977 Irish general election.
Flanagan rises rapidly through the party ranks and is appointed a Parliamentary Secretary under TaoiseachSeán Lemass in 1959. In the 1966 Fianna Fáil leadership election he supports Jack Lynch. When Lynch becomes Taoiseach, he is promoted to the Cabinet as Minister for Health. Three years later in 1969, he becomes Minister for Lands. He loses his seat at the 1977 Irish general election and effectively retires from domestic politics. However, he is elected to the European Parliament in the first direct elections in 1979. He is re-elected in 1984 and retires from politics in 1989.
Flanagan marries Mary Patricia Doherty in 1950. They have two sons and five daughters, including Dermot, who also plays All-Ireland senior football for Mayo.
Flanagan dies at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin on February 5, 1993, at the age of 71. Following his death, a Mayo sports journalist comments, “Above all, we’ll miss that noble link with an era when, as children, Seán Flanagan was our second God.”
Childers is educated at Gresham’s School, Holt, and the University of Cambridge, hence his striking British upper-class accent. On November 24, 1922, when he is sixteen, his father, Robert Erskine Childers, is executed by the new Irish Free State on politically inspired charges of gun-possession. The pistol he had been found with had been given to him by Michael Collins. Before his execution, in a spirit of reconciliation, the elder Childers obtains a promise from his son to seek out and shake the hand of every man who had signed his death warrant.
Following his father’s funeral, he returns to Gresham’s, then two years later he goes on to Trinity College, Cambridge. He returns to Ireland in 1932 and becomes advertising manager of The Irish Press, the newly founded newspaper owned by the family of Éamon de Valera.
Childers is nominated as the presidential candidate of Fianna Fáil at the behest of de Valera, who pressures Jack Lynch in the selection of the presidential candidate. He is a controversial nominee, owing not only to his British birth and upbringing but to his Protestantism. However, on the campaign trail his personal popularity proved enormous, and in a political upset at the 1973 Irish presidential election, he is elected the fourth President of Ireland on May 30, 1973, defeating Tom O’Higgins by 635,867 (52%) votes to 578,771 (48%). He becomes the second Protestant to hold the office, the first being Douglas Hyde (1938–1945).
Prevented from transforming the presidency as he desires, Childers instead throws his energy into a busy schedule of official visits and speeches, which is physically taxing.
John McGahern, regarded as one of the most important Irish writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, dies in Dublin on March 30, 2006. Known for the detailed dissection of Irish life found in works such as The Barracks, The Dark and Amongst Women, The Observer hails him as “the greatest living Irish novelist” before his death and in its obituary The Guardian describes him as “arguably the most important Irish novelist since Samuel Beckett.”
Born in Knockanroe about half a mile from Ballinamore, County Leitrim, McGahern is the eldest child of seven. Raised alongside his six young siblings on a small farm in Knockanroe, his mother runs the farm (with some local help) while maintaining a job as a primary school teacher in the local school. His father, a Garda sergeant, lives in the Garda barracks at Cootehall in County Roscommon, a somewhat sizeable distant away from his family at the time. His mother subsequently dies of cancer in 1944, when the young McGahern is ten years old resulting in the unrooting of the McGahern children to their new home with their father in the aforementioned Garda barracks, Cootehall.
In the years following his mother’s death, McGahern completes his primary schooling in the local primary school, and ultimately wins a scholarship to the Presentation Brothers secondary school in Carrick-on-Shannon. Having traveled daily to complete his second level education, he continues to accumulate academic accolades by winning the county scholarship in his Leaving Certificate enabling him to continue his education to third level.
Following on from his second level success, McGahern is offered a place at St. Patrick’s College of Education in Drumcondra where he trains to be a teacher. Upon graduation from third level education, he begins his career as a primary schoolteacher at Scoil Eoin Báiste (Belgrove) primary school in Clontarf where, for a period, he teaches the eminent academic Declan Kiberd. He is dismissed from Scoil Eoin Báiste on the order of the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. He is first published by the London literary and arts review, X magazine, which publishes in 1961 an extract from his abandoned first novel, The End or Beginning of Love.
McGahern marries his first wife, Finnish-born Annikki Laaksi, in 1965 and in the same year publishes his second novel, The Dark, which is banned by the Censorship of Publications Board for its alleged pornographic content along with its implied sexual abuse by the protagonist’s father. Due to the controversy which is stirred by the book’s publication McGahern is dismissed from his teaching post and forced to move to England where he works in a variety of jobs before returning to Ireland to live and work on a small farm near Fenagh in County Leitrim.
John McGahern dies from cancer in the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin on March 30, 2006, at the age of 71. He is buried in St. Patrick’s Church, Aughawillan alongside his mother.
The Stardust nightclub in Artane, Dublin goes up in flames in the early hours of February 14, 1981. Some 841 people had attended a disco there, of whom 48 die and 214 are injured as a result of the fire.
The fire starts due to an electrical fault in a first-floor storeroom inside the building that is open to the roof space. The non-compliant storage room contains dangerously flammable materials including drums of cooking oil. The staff observes a small fire outbreak on a seat in an alcove behind a curtain and fail in an attempt to extinguish it. This fire apparently starts after fire in the roof space comes through the roof tiles and falls onto the seat. The fire then spreads to tables and chairs and patrons notice smoke. The disc jockey announces that there is a small fire and requests a calm evacuation.
Outside, the fire is first spotted by a lady 200 metres from the Stardust and she calls the Dublin Fire Brigade. Within the same minute of her call, two other calls are made from the Stardust building to tell the Fire Brigade that there is a small fire on a seat in the ballroom. The fire is very small when first seen in the ballroom. Within two minutes a ferocious burst of heat and lots of thick black smoke quickly start coming from the ceiling, causing the material in the ceiling to melt and drip on top of patrons and other highly flammable materials including the seats and carpet tiles on the walls. The fire flashover envelopes the club and the lights fail.
The attendees at a trade union function taking place in the same building make their escape but the escape of some of the Stardust patrons is hampered by a number of obstructions. Some of the main fire exits are padlocked around the push bars and consequently are impossible to open.
The failure of the lighting in the club leads to widespread panic causing mass trampling as many of the patrons instinctively run for the main entrance. Many people mistake the entrance to the men’s toilets for the main entrance doors but the windows there have metal plates fixed on the inside and iron bars on the outside. Firemen attempt in vain to pull off the metal bars using a chain attached to a fire engine. Firemen rescue 25 to 30 of those trapped in the front toilets.
The investigation at the time reports that the cause of the fire is arson. The finding of arson has recently been ruled out by investigators, as there was never any evidence to support the arson finding, even at the time of the tragedy.
There are allegations of a huge cover-up as to the cause of so many fatalities. There is a meeting before the public inquiry in 1981 of all of the experts including the Judge when the concept of arson is determined to be the cause to protect the Dublin Corporation from having to pay out millions in compensation to the victims and families. The Coolock Garda investigation is excellent, but the Tribunal distorts the evidence. The Inquiry Report and the team of experts and coached witnesses conspire to conceal the truth and determine arson to be the cause without any evidence.
The club was located where Butterly Business Park now lies, opposite Artane Castle Shopping Centre.
After finishing his education, Childers works for a period in a tourism board in Paris. In 1931, Éamon de Valera invites him to work for his recently founded newspaper, The Irish Press, where Childers becomes advertising manager. He becomes a naturalised Irish citizen in 1938. That same year, he is first elected as a Fianna Fáil Teachta Dála (TD) for Athlone–Longford. He remains in the Dáil Éireann until 1973, when he resigns to become President.
Childers joins the cabinet in 1951 as Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in the de Valera government. He then serves as Minister for Lands in de Valera’s 1957–59 cabinet, as Minister for Transport and Power under Seán Lemass, and, successively, as Transport Minister, Posts and Telegraphs Minister, and Health Minister under Jack Lynch. He becomes Tánaiste in 1969.
Fine Gael TD Tom O’Higgins, who had almost won the 1966 presidential election, is widely expected to win the 1973 election when he is again the Fine Gael nominee. Childers is nominated by Fianna Fáil at the behest of de Valera, who pressures Jack Lynch in the selection of the presidential candidate. He is a controversial nominee, owing not only to his British birth and upbringing but to his Protestantism. However, on the campaign trail his personal popularity proves enormous, and in a political upset, Childers is elected the fourth President of Ireland on May 30, 1973, defeating O’Higgins by 635,867 votes to 578,771.
Childers quickly gains a reputation as a vibrant, extremely hard-working president, and becomes highly popular and respected. However, he has a strained relationship with the incumbent government, led by TaoiseachLiam Cosgrave of Fine Gael. Childers had campaigned on a platform of making the presidency more open and hands-on, which Cosgrave views as a threat to his own agenda as head of government. Childers considers resigning from the presidency but is convinced to remain by Cosgrave’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Garret FitzGerald.
seamus dubhghaill 