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Death of Tom Barry, Prominent Irish Republican Leader

Thomas Bernadine Barry, prominent guerrilla leader in the Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, dies in Cork, County Cork, on July 2, 1980, the day after his 83rd birthday.

Barry is born on July 1, 1897, in Killorglin, County Kerry, the second child and son among eleven children of Thomas Barry, small farmer, Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) member and shopkeeper, and his wife, Margaret Donovan, daughter of a Liscarroll businessman. Educated at Ardagh Boys’ National School and Mungret College, near Limerick, he leaves school at 17, is employed as a clerk for a Protestant merchant in Bandon, County Cork, and joins the British Army in 1915 after falsifying his age. More committed, it appears, to the British Army than he is later to admit, he is mentioned in dispatches and serves in Mesopotamia, Asiatic Russia (where he is wounded), Egypt, Italy, and France.

Barry returns to Bandon in early 1919. He describes in his guerilla days in Ireland a Damascus-like conversion to Irish nationalism on hearing of the Easter Rising while with the Mesopotamian expeditionary force, but he is only accepted into the IRA with considerable caution. Initially tested in intelligence and training work, in mid-1920 he takes charge of the new brigade flying column, which is used both to train officers and to stage offensive actions.

Barry adapts his military experience successfully to the demands of guerrilla warfare, becoming the most famed of column leaders during the Irish War of Independence. In his memoirs, he pours scorn on the obsession of many with military titles and orthodox procedure, complaining of a “paper army.” He stresses the need for spontaneity, initiative, and knowledge of local conditions. “The reality,” he writes, “was a group of fellows, mostly in caps and not-too-expensive clothing, wondering how to tackle their job and where they would sleep that night or get their supper.” (The Reality of the Anglo–Irish War (1974)). He well realises that the war’s character does not permit any close control from the IRA’s GHQ in Dublin, hence increasing the importance of local leaders. His tactics put strong emphasis on speed of movement and on the need to attack the enemy at his weakest point. The column’s ambush successes are small in number but among the best-remembered of the war. He admits, however, that his own and his column’s lack of experience with mines frequently weakened their offensives.

The column’s first successful ambush is at Tooreen on October 22, 1920, followed on November 28 by the dramatic ambushing of a patrol of auxiliaries at Kilmichael while traveling from their Macroom base. A column of thirty-six men, divided into three sections, kill sixteen auxiliaries, with one captured and later shot, suffering two fatalities of their own. Controversy has raged since over whether a false surrender by the British force caused the brutality of some of the deaths. Together with the Bloody Sunday killings of a week earlier in Dublin, Kilmichael has a profound effect on the British military and political establishment, with the declaration in December of martial law for much of Munster and the implementation of wide-ranging internment, together with the authorisation of official reprisals.

After a short period in hospital with a heart condition, in early 1921 Barry leads unsuccessful attacks on Kilbrittain, Innishannon, Drimoleague, and Bandon barracks. The seizure of Burgatia House, outside Rosscarbery, in early February, and the successful resistance made there to British troops, wins much publicity but has little military significance. He is a leading figure in the brutal final stage of the war in the first six months of 1921, which sees widespread shooting of suspected spies and destruction of loyalist property. By March 1921, his flying column, with 104 men, is easily the largest in Ireland, and an explosives expert, Capt. McCarthy, has joined them.

The protracted engagement between Barry’s column and encircling British forces at Crossbarry on March 19, 1921, comes at a time when large-scale sweeps are making life increasingly difficult for the IRA. It consists of a daring and courageous breakout. Crossbarry is the largest action of the war, and Barry is to regard it as even more important than Kilmichael. Soon afterwards, Rosscarbery barracks is successfully attacked by a Barry-led party, representing one of the few successful such initiatives in 1921. Isolated triumphs, however, cannot hide the fact that pressure is increasing on the column, and he becomes increasingly critical of inactive regions. He is later to say that all County Kerry does during the war is to shoot one decent police inspector at Listowel Racecourse and a colleague of his. He is strongly critical also of the lack of assistance from GHQ and of the divisionalisation policy. He visits Dublin in May, travels around with Michael Collins, and is present when two American officers demonstrate the Thompson submachine gun. He is more aware than most of his 1st Southern Division colleagues of the scarcity of arms and ammunition at the war’s end.

During the truce, Barry becomes liaison officer for Munster, riling the British by insisting on his military rank, and criticising the IRA liaison men in Dublin for being overly deferential. He joins the overwhelming majority of the Cork IRA in opposing the Anglo–Irish Treaty but plays a characteristically maverick role throughout the treaty split. His independent attitude is heightened by his dislike of Liam Lynch, the republican IRA’s Chief of Staff, and his continuing respect for Michael Collins. He shows impatience at the long-drawn-out peace initiatives. In March 1922, therefore, he advocates armed confrontation with pro-treaty units over the occupation of barracks in Limerick, and on June 18 he submits a resolution, which only narrowly fails, at the army convention, giving British troops seventy-two hours to leave Dublin.

At the beginning of the Irish Civil War, Barry is arrested entering the Four Courts disguised as a woman. He escapes from an internment camp at Gormanston in early September 1922. For the rest of the war his actions mirror its confused nature. In late October 1922, he leads successful raids on the small towns of Ballineen and Enniskean, and later on Inchigeelagh and Ballyvourney. In December his column takes Carrick-on-Suir, demonstrating the weakness of the Free State army, but his talk of advancing on the Curragh and of large-scale actions does not materialise. There is no evidence that he is acting in accordance with any coordinated plan. By February 1923, he realises that the Republican IRA cause is hopeless and he is involved with Fr. Tom Duggan in efforts to get 1st Southern Division to declare a ceasefire. He journeys to Dublin to put pressure on the intransigent Lynch in this connection, telling Lynch, “I did more fighting in one week than you did in your whole life.”

Barry avoids capture in roundups after the war, remaining on the run until 1924. Unlike many republicans, he does not turn to constitutionalism, remaining strongly militaristic. He is always an unreconstructed republican, though by no means a naive one. In 1924 he becomes attached to Cleeves Milk Co., based in Limerick and Clonmel, and from 1927 to retirement in 1965 is general superintendent with the Cork harbour commissioners. He strongly advocates preserving the independence of the IRA army executive during the republican split of 1925–27. He is instrumental in continuing the drilling of IRA members and is a strong supporter of armed opposition to the Blueshirts.

During the 1930s Barry is arrested at various times for possession of arms and seditious utterances. He promotes an attack against a Freemasons’ meeting in Cork in 1936 and gives the orders for the killing on March 4 of that year of Vice-Admiral Henry Boyle Somerville. He is opposed to the use by Frank Ryan of IRA volunteers to support the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and to the proposals of Seán Russell for a bombing campaign in England. To maintain the link with traditional republicanism, he is elected IRA chief of staff in 1937. His plan, however, for the seizure of Armagh city, as part of a direct northern offensive, quickly collapses due to a leak of information, and he soon resigns his position. He forcefully attacks the bombing of English cities in 1938, regarding attacks on innocent civilians as immoral and counterproductive. He enlists in the National Army on July 12, 1940, only to be demobilised a month later. In 1946, he stands as an independent candidate in a by-election in the Cork Borough constituency, finishing at the bottom of the poll. He is more comfortable the following year touring the United States on an anti-partition platform.

In 1949 his Guerilla Days in Ireland is published. It proves a best-seller and has frequently been reprinted. It is well written in a forceful and direct style, one memoir needing no assistance from a ghost writer. Age does not mellow him: lawyers and bank managers are threatened by him over matters relating to his own column, and in 1974 he publishes a fierce pamphlet, angry at perceived slights in the Irish War of Independence memoir of Liam Deasy. He does strive to achieve a public reconciliation with Collins’s memory by unveiling the memorial to Collins at Sam’s Cross in 1966. On the outbreak of the Northern Ireland crisis in the late 1960s, he takes a militant line, castigating the argument that the Six Counties can be brought into the Republic by peaceful means, and asking when had peaceful means existed there. At the memorial meeting in Carrowkennedy, County Mayo, in 1971, he claims that there is a perfect right at the opportune time to take the Six Counties by force. He remains opposed to IRA bombing of civilian targets.

Barry dies in Cork on July 2, 1980. He is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery, Cork. Early in the truce of 1921 he marries Leslie Price, one of the most active of Cumann na mBan members during and after the rising. They have no children.

While Barry always remains an influential figure in republican circles, he will be remembered best as the pioneer of guerrilla warfare, the hero of Kilmichael and Crossbarry. His military flair, individualism, and ruthlessness are well suited to the 1919–21 conflict. After that, his strained relations with colleagues and his lack of flexibility reduce his importance. While his life after the revolutionary era appears anti-climactic, he retains much of his charisma. In later years, he is ever willing to remind politicians and historians how far Ireland has retreated from republican ideals. He is often prickly and autocratic yet could be generous to old colleagues of either side of the treaty split. He is arguably the most intelligent but also the most intolerant of the revolutionary leaders.

(From: “Barry, Thomas Bernadine (‘Tom’)” by M. A. Hopkinson, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Charles Owen O’Conor, Irish Politician

Charles Owen O’Conor, Irish politician, dies at Clonalis, Castlerea, County Roscommon, on June 30, 1906.

O’Conor is born on May 7, 1838, in Dublin, eldest son among seven children of Denis O’Conor, MP for Roscommon, and his wife Mary, daughter of Maj. Maurice Blake of County Mayo. The O’Conors, descended from the kings of Connacht, trace their lineage to 971. He is educated by Benedictines at Downside School in Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Somerset, England, and then proceeds to the University of London, where he matriculates in 1853 but does not graduate. He enters public life early as liberal MP for Roscommon (1860–80).

O’Conor is an active member of parliament, an effective though not an eloquent speaker, and a leading exponent of Catholic opinion. He is deeply involved in the education question, being a critic of the queen’s colleges. In 1867 he introduces a measure to extend the industrial schools act to Ireland, which becomes law the following year. He opposes William Ewart Gladstone‘s university bill of 1873, is appointed to the intermediate education board in 1878, and in May 1879 proposes the transformation of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, into a chartered Catholic university. He withdraws this in July, following a government bill creating the Royal University of Ireland. He is on the senate of the university for many years, and is conferred with the honorary degree of LL.D. in 1892. A leading exponent of the Irish language, in 1878 he proposes that it be introduced into secondary schools.

O’Conor is a supporter of Isaac Butt and a keen advocate of land law reform, which leads to his proposing in 1870 the extension of Ulster tenant right to the rest of the country. His brother Denis, MP for County Sligo 1868–83, is a home ruler, but Charles is only ever described as a camp follower. The Nation (October 18, 1873) observes that he “achieved the feat of speaking for two hours at a home rule meeting in Roscommon without telling his audience if he was a home ruler.” He has concrete criticisms such as the hostility of the northern counties, and wants to be allowed to take an independent stance, but Butt strongly deprecates his ambiguity. He does stand on the home rule platform in 1874 and 1880, but his tentative sympathy does nothing to protect him from the drive by Charles Stewart Parnell to establish the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). In March 1880, Parnell goes to Roscommon to support his candidate James O’Kelly against O’Conor, who is a popular representative. Parnell calls him a “sample of West Britonism in Ireland . . . if you deprive him of the representation of Roscommon you strike the greatest blow that has been struck against English misgovernment in Ireland since Isaac Butt was elected for the city of Limerick,” which successfully leads to O’Conor’s being ousted. Ironically, he had briefly been Parnell’s landlord when in 1860 he rented a house near Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) to the recently widowed Delia Parnell and her family, including the 13-year-old Charles Stewart.

Appointed to the Bessborough commission into the workings of the 1870 land act some months later, O’Conor answers Parnell by going even further than the commission’s proposal to reform land law on the basis of the “three Fs.” He supports outright peasant proprietorship as the only effective and lasting remedy. In 1883, he makes an attempt to return to parliament as a liberal candidate for Wexford Borough, but is defeated by the home ruler Willie Redmond. Always an inveterate committee member, he spends the last twenty-five years of his life on various committees, including the parliamentary committee of 1885 and the royal commission of 1894 on the financial relations between Great Britain and Ireland. He is elected to Roscommon County Council in 1899 and is Lord Lieutenant of Roscommon from 1888 until his death. In 1881 he is sworn to the Privy Council of Ireland.

An ancestor is Charles O’Conor, the noted antiquarian, and O’Conor has his own interest in this area. He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) from 1867 and joins the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI) in 1869, is a fellow in 1888, and president 1897–9. His antiquarian research is largely confined to his own family. In 1891, he publishes The O’Conors of Connaught, an historical memoir compiled from the manuscripts of John O’Donovan. He first marries Georgina Mary, daughter of Thomas Perry of Warwickshire, England, on April 21, 1868. Secondly he marries Ellen, daughter of John Lewis More O’Ferrall of County Longford, on September 16, 1879. He has four sons by his first marriage.

O’Conor dies at Clonalis, Castlerea, County Roscommon, on June 30, 1906. He is buried in St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Castlerea.

(From: “O’Conor, Charles Owen” by Bridget Hourican, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Nuala O’Faolain, Journalist & Writer

Nuala Brigid Anne O’Faolain, journalist and writer, dies in Blackrock, Dublin, on May 9, 2008. Her debut memoir, Are You Somebody?, published when she is in her mid-fifties, becomes a sensation in Ireland and a worldwide bestseller.

O’Faolain is born in Dublin on March 1, 1940, the second of nine children of Tomás O’Faolain and Kathleen O’Sullivan. Originally a schoolteacher and Army lieutenant, under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan, her father becomes a prominent social diarist for the Evening Press in Dublin. He is distant from his children and engages in extra-marital affairs which produce at least two half-siblings. Despite earning as much money as the newspaper’s editor, Douglas Gageby, he does not share his income with his family. The family lives in poor conditions, frequently going hungry. Her mother becomes an alcoholic, going to the pub every day at 4 p.m. and not returning home until midnight.

O’Faolain attends convent school in Dublin but is expelled at the age of fourteen after going home from dances with a married man. She then goes to a boarding school in County Monaghan, whose austere environment and strict educational standards benefit her. From there, she studies English literature at University College Dublin (UCD), where she runs in a social circle that includes Mary Lavin, John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. Although she drops out of her studies temporarily and spends time working menial jobs in England, with financial assistance from Lavin and others, she graduates in 1961. On scholarships, she studies medieval English at the University of Hull before completing a postgraduate degree in 19th-century English literature at the University of Oxford. She then returns to Dublin to work at UCD as an academic in the English literature department, which brings her into contact with the bohemian Dublin literary scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In 1970, O’Faolain moves to London to work for the BBC. She is a producer at the Community Programme Unit, which seeks to allow members of the public to create programmes for national broadcast on human interest topics like transgender people, anti-pornography protests, and community organising in the Bogside. She also makes programmes with the arts faculty of the Open University, and teaches evening classes at Morley College. During this period, she shows little interest in Ireland, regarding the country as backward and unsophisticated, but a visit to the Merriman Summer School in County Clare in 1974 sparks new enthusiasm. In 1977, she moves back to Dublin to work for the public broadcaster, RTÉ, where she becomes a colleague of female journalists like Doireann Ní Bhriain, Marian Finucane, and Nell McCafferty – later her partner – who are making programmes about Irish society with a feminist bent. She Is the producer of Women Today, a pioneering radio programme, from 1983 to 1986. One series she works on, Plain Tales, a televised interview programme in which women speak directly to camera about their life experiences, wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985.

O’Faolain has an interest in books from an early age, and credits voracious reading for helping her through a difficult childhood. She works as a book reviewer for The Times. Between 1990 and 1993, she co-presents Booklines, a television programme about books for RTÉ, a programme she says “nobody ever watched because it was on terribly late at night.”

In 1986, Conor Brady, the editor of The Irish Times, offers O’Faolain a newspaper column after hearing her being interviewed by Gay Byrne on the radio. Brady is struck by her ability to “infuse ordinary people’s everyday activities with value and interest.” The column becomes a major success and she is awarded journalist of the year in 1986.

O’Faolain acts as a roving commentator for The Irish Times, covering the 1994 Cregg Wood murders in County Clare, and visiting Northern Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Following periods of leave while she works on her books, she leaves the paper in 2002, and writes a column in the Sunday Tribune from 2005 until her death.

O’Faolain never marries and has no children. Although she writes about her relationships with men and women, she does not identify as bisexual, though others have described her as such. She suffers from alcoholism. After Are You Somebody?, she divides her time between Ireland and New York City. During the final years of her life, she is in a relationship with a Brooklyn-based lawyer, John Low-Beer, whom she meets on Match.com.

O’Faolain is diagnosed with metastatic cancer while living in New York City in early 2008. She experiences a strange feeling in the right side of her body and presents at the emergency department of a hospital, where she is told that she has primary tumours in her lungs which has spread to her brain and liver, and that her cancer is incurable. She refuses chemotherapy.

O’Faolain returns to Ireland and is interviewed by her friend, Marian Finucane, on her radio show about her terminal illness on April 12, 2008. Both O’Faolain and Finucane are in tears during the interview, which is recorded in Galway, where she is undergoing radiotherapy. She tells Finucane: “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life”. Her frank discussion of her illness leads to the interview being preceded by a warning that her comments may be upsetting to others with life-threatening conditions. She says that she does not believe in God or an afterlife, but as in the song “Thíos i Lár an Ghleanna,” she is asking for help she knows will not come from a god she does not believe in. The interview has a major public impact in Ireland. After Finucane’s death in 2020, the Irish Independent describes it as “one of the most extraordinary [interviews] in the history of Irish broadcasting.”

In the final weeks of her life, O’Faolain travels Europe with close friends and family, staying in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and visiting the Berlin State Opera and the Prado Museum in Madrid for the first time. She dies in a hospice in Blackrock, Dublin, late on May 9, 2008. Her funeral takes place in the Church of Our Lady of the Visitation in Fairview in north Dublin on May 13. Her ashes are buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery in north Dublin with her maternal grandparents, Terence and Marion O’Sullivan, and her brother, Dermot Phelan.


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Birth of Liam Deasy, Irish Republican Army Officer

Liam Deasy, Irish Republican Army (IRA) officer who fights in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, is born in Kilmacsimon, Bandon, County Cork on May 6, 1896. In the latter conflict, he is second-in-command of the anti-Treaty forces for a period in late 1922 and early 1923. Before the anti-Treaty and pro-Treaty split, he is considered closely associated with Michael Collins.

Deasy is the third among six sons of William Deasy, seaman, and Mary Deasy (née Murray). He is educated locally at Ballinadee before leaving school at the age of thirteen to work in nearby Bandon.

During the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), Deasy is adjutant of the IRA’s 3rd Cork Brigade (West Cork). He serves under Tom Barry in one of the unit’s best known actions, the Crossbarry ambush in March 1921. His younger brother, Pat, dies in action at the Kilmichael ambush in November 1920, an engagement at which Deasy is not present. He also takes part in the Tooreen ambush.

Deasy opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty. In the months that follow he tries to persuade Collins to renegotiate aspects of the treaty, especially to remove an oath to the British king from the constitution of the new Irish Free State. When fighting breaks out in Dublin in June 1922 between pro and anti-Treaty forces, he sides with the Anti-Treaty IRA in the ensuing Irish Civil War. However, he is reluctant to fight his former comrades and voices the opinion that the fighting should have ended with the Free State seizure of the Four Courts.

In late July 1922, Deasy commands 1,500 anti-Treaty fighters who hold a line around Kilmallock south of Limerick city against about 2,000 Free State troops under Eoin O’Duffy. His men are the most experienced IRA fighters of the 1919-21 war and hold their position until August 8, when they are outflanked by seaborne landings on the southern coast. His men then disperse. He goes on the run in the southeast of the country.

In August 1922, Deasy is in command of a band of republican guerrillas in West Cork when they hear that Collins is in the area. Deasy has his men prepare an ambush for Collins’ convoy at Béal na Bláth, should it return by the same route it had taken earlier.

Deasy and most of his men do not take part in the ambush as they had retired to a nearby pub, assuming that they had missed Collins. However, Collins arrives as the last of Deasy’s men are clearing the mine and barricade that had been erected on the road at Béal na Bláth. Collins is killed in the ensuing firefight. Deasy later writes in his memoirs that he profoundly regrets the death of his former commander.

In January 1923, by which time Deasy has become Deputy Chief of Staff of the IRA, he is captured by Free State forces near Clonmel, County Tipperary, and sentenced to death. He is aware that the newly formed government plans on wholesale executions and knows that the IRA will retaliate with reprisals. He decides that it is now time to end the war. He signs a document (written by his captors) ordering the men under his command to surrender themselves and their arms to the government. He is spared execution. On the day that his order is published, Free State authorities demand that the prisoners in a jail in Limerick sign a statement agreeing to unconditional surrender, threatening wholescale executions to those who refused. Some republicans denounce Deasy as a traitor and a coward for this action, but he argues in his book, Brother against Brother, that he was opposed to continuing the civil war anyway and would have called on republicans to surrender whether or not he had been captured.

Deasy takes no further part in politics following the end of the Irish Civil War. In 1924, he sets up a business making weatherproof textiles. On November 24, 1927, he marries Margaret Mary O’Donoghue. They have three daughters together.

During The Emergency, Deasy serves in the Irish Army from 1940 to 1945, reaching the rank of commandant. He later writes two memoirs about his experiences during the revolutionary period: Toward Ireland Free and Brother against Brother, the latter being published after his death.

Deasy dies at St. Anne’s Hospital, Northbrook Road, Dublin, on August 20, 1974. He is buried in Bohernabreena Cemetery in Dublin.


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Birth of Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Diplomat, Poet & Memoirist

Máire Mhac an tSaoi, Irish civil service diplomat, writer of Modernist poetry in the Dingle Peninsula dialect of Munster Irish, a memoirist, and a highly important figure within modern literature in Irish, is born Máire MacEntee in Dublin on April 4, 1922. Along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, she is, in the words of Louis de Paor, “one of a trinity of poets who revolutionised Irish language poetry in the 1940s and 50s.” She has a lifelong passion for the Irish language and is one of the leading authorities on Munster Irish.

Mhac an tSaoi’s father, Seán MacEntee, is born in Belfast and is a veteran of the Irish Volunteers during the 1916 Easter Rising and the subsequent Irish War of Independence, and of the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War. He is also a founding member of Fianna Fáil, a long-serving TD and Tánaiste in the Dáil. Her mother, Margaret Browne (or de Brún) of County Tipperary, is also an Irish republican and a distinguished Celticist who teaches courses in Irish literature in the Irish language at Alexandra College and University College Dublin (UCD).

Mhac an tSaoi is influenced by her stays in the Dingle Peninsula in County Kerry with her uncle, Monsignor De Brún, at his parish of Dún Chaoin. Monsignor de Brún, similarly to his sister, is a distinguished linguist and Celticist, the literary translator of Homer, Dante Alighieri, Sophocles, and Jean Racine into Modern Irish, “and one of the most distinguished literary figures of his time.”

Mhac an tSaoi studies Modern Languages and Celtic Studies at UCD, before going to further research at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and at the University of Paris. She writes the famous work of Christian poetry in Munster Irish, Oíche Nollag (“Christmas Eve”), when she is only 15-years of age.

Mhac an tSaoi spends two years studying in post-war Paris (1945–47) before joining the Irish diplomatic service and is working at the Irish embassy in Madrid when she commits herself to writing poetry in Irish following her discovery of the works of Federico García Lorca.

She remains a prolific poet and is credited, along with Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máirtín Ó Direáin, with reintroducing literary modernism into Irish literature in the Irish language, where it had been dormant since the 1916 execution of Patrick Pearse, in the years and decades following World War II. Her poetry draws on the vernacular spoken by the native Irish speakers of the Munster Gaeltacht of West Kerry during the first half of the twentieth century. Formally, she draws on the song metres of the oral tradition and on older models from the earlier literary tradition. In later work, she explores looser verse forms but continues to draw on the remembered dialect of Dún Chaoin and on a scholarly knowledge of the older literature.

Mhac an tSaoi is elected to Aosdána in 1996 but resigns in 1997 after Francis Stuart is elevated to the position of Saoi. She had voted against Stuart because of his role as an Abwehr spy and in radio propaganda broadcasts from Nazi Germany aimed at neutral Ireland during World War II.

In 2001, she publishes an award-winning novel A Bhean Óg Ón… about the relationship between the 17th-century County Kerry poet and Irish clan chief Piaras Feiritéar and Meg Russell, the woman for whom he composed some of the greatest works of love poetry ever written in the Irish language.

Her poems Jack and An Bhean Óg Ón are both featured on the Leaving Certificate Irish course, at both Higher and Ordinary Levels, from 2006 to 2010. Her literary translation of Rainer Maria Rilke‘s Duino Elegies from Austrian German into the Irish language is published in 2013.

Mhac an tSaoi marries Irish politician, writer, and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien in a Roman Catholic wedding Mass in Dublin in 1962. This makes her the stepmother to O’Brien’s children from his 1939 civil marriage. Her mother is deeply embarrassed by the exposure of the relationship and staunchly opposes the match, as she has long been a close friend of O’Brien’s Presbyterian first wife. Despite their subsequent marriage, the exposure of their extramarital relationship ends Mhac an tSaoi’s diplomatic and civil service career. They later adopted two children, Patrick and Margaret.

She then lives with her husband in New York City, where he becomes a professor at New York University (NYU) after the Congo Crisis destroys O’Brien’s diplomatic career. He is long blamed by the United Nations for the escalation of the Congo Crisis.

Mhac an tSaoi and her husband, who is then serving as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at NYU, are both staunchly opposed to the Vietnam War. They are both arrested by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), along with Dr. Benjamin Spock and Beat Generation poet Allen Ginsberg, during an allegedly violent protest outside a United States military induction centre in New York City on December 5, 1967. Afterward, during an interview with The New York Times, she accuses the NYPD of using excessive force both during and after her husband’s arrest.

She later returns with O’Brien to live in Dublin, where she attends another protest rally against the Vietnam War along O’Connell Street in 1969.

Mhac an tSaoi dies peacefully at the age of 99 on October 16, 2021, at home where she has been cared for by her daughter Margaret.


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Birth of Charles O’Conor, Priest & Historical Author

Charles O’Conor, Irish priest and historical author, is born at Bellanagare, County Roscommon, on March 15, 1764. He is chaplain and librarian to the Marchioness of Buckingham and catalogues many manuscripts, including the famous Stowe Missal, now in the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in Dublin.

O’Conor is the second of six sons of Denis O’Conor and Catharine O’Conor (neé Browne), who also have six daughters. The O’Conors are Catholic, descendants of a princely family in the west of Ireland. His grandfather is the historian Charles O’Conor, his brother the historian Matthew O’Conor.

O’Conor is educated at the Pontifical Irish College, Rome, from 1779 to 1791 and is appointed parish priest of Kilkeevan, County Roscommon, in 1789. In 1796 he prepares for publication a memoir of his grandfather, the historian Charles O’Connor, which highlights the efforts made by him and other Irish Catholics of substance to obtain the constitutional repeal of the penal laws. The first volume is suppressed as dangerous to the family and the manuscript of the second is burned by O’Conor before reaching the printer. He destroys what he believes to be the whole run of the first volume and ten folios of the second, by casting them into a sewer, which communicates with the River Poddle. However, copies of the first volume survive in Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the Barrister at Law (BL).

In 1798 O’Conor is invited to become chaplain to Mary Nugent, the Marchioness of Buckingham, and to organize and translate a collection of Gaelic manuscripts at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, England. With him he brings papers of his grandfather to Stowe, including fifty-nine Gaelic manuscripts. There he writes Columbanus ad Hibernos (1810–13), a series of letters supporting the royal veto on Catholic episcopal appointments in Ireland. These are answered by Francis Plowden and see him suspended from duties of parish priest by John Troy, Archbishop of Dublin. In his duties as librarian, he edits the Annals of the Four Masters, and other chronicles from the Stowe Library as Rerum Hibernicarum Scriptores Veteres (1814–26), an edition regarded as unreliable.

O’Conor experiences mental illness and by 1827 is suffering from the delusion that he is deliberately being starved by order of the Marquess of Buckingham. He leaves Stowe on July 4, 1827. The Nation (March 26, 1853) claims that he is thereafter a patient at Dr. Harty’s asylum in Finglas, Dublin, apparently along with John Lanigan, whom he knew in the Irish College. His family twice unavailingly demands that the paper’s editor issue a correction.

O’Conor dies on July 29, 1828, in his family’s house at Bellanagare. He is buried in Ballintober Cemetery, Castlerea, County Roscommon.


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Birth of Nuala O’Faolain, Journalist, TV Producer, Teacher & Writer

Nuala O’Faolain, Irish journalist, television producer, book reviewer, teacher and writer, is born in Clontarf, Dublin on March 1, 1940. She becomes well known after the publication of her memoirs Are You Somebody? and Almost There. She also writes a biography of Irish criminal Chicago May and two novels.

O’Faolain is the second eldest of nine children. Her father, known as ‘TerryO’ is a well-known Irish journalist, writing the “Dubliners Diary” social column under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan for the Evening Press. She is educated at University College Dublin (UCD), the University of Hull, and the University of Oxford. She teaches for a time at Morley College in London and works as a television producer for the BBC and Raidió Teilifís Éireann.

O’Faolain describes her early life as growing up in a Catholic country which, in her view, fears sexuality and forbids her even information about her body. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expect her to marry and have children, neither of which she does.

O’Faolain becomes internationally well known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There; a novel, My Dream of You; and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. The first three are all featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her posthumous novel Best Love, Rosie is published in 2009.

O’Faolain’s formative years coincide with the emergence of the women’s movement, and her ability to expose misogyny in all its forms is formidable, forensic and unremitting. However, her feminism stems from a fundamental belief in social justice. Unlike most commentators, who maintain a detached, lofty tone, she places herself at the centre of things, a high-risk strategy that works because of her broad range of erudition, worn lightly, her courage and a truthfulness that sometimes borders on the self-destructive.

O’Faolain is engaged at least once but never marries. In Are You Somebody? she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who publishes her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, she lives much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They are registered as domestic partners in 2003.

O’Faolain splits her time between Ireland and New York City. She is diagnosed with metastatic cancer and is interviewed on the Marian Finucane radio show on RTÉ Radio 1 on April 12, 2008, in relation to her terminal illness. She tells Finucane, “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life.”

In a last attempt to grasp as much of life as she can, O’Faolain holidays with family members in Sicily and visits Berlin with a group of friends to hear music and see art. She previously tended to avoid Berlin because, through contact with Jewish friends and lovers, she associated it with the Holocaust. She dies at the Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, on May 9, 2008.

O’Faolain wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985 for her work as the producer of the RTÉ One television programme Plain Tales. In 2006, she wins the Prix Femina étranger, a French literary award, for The Story of Chicago May.

O’Faolain is the subject of a film documentary, Nuala: A Life and Death (2011), directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, and produced and narrated by Marian Finucane. Hugo Hamilton‘s novel Every Single Minute (2014) is based on his experiences when accompanying O’Faolain to Berlin shortly before her death.


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Death of J. J. Walsh, Politician & Businessman

James Joseph Walsh, generally referred to as J. J. Walsh, Postmaster General (later Minister for Posts and Telegraphs) of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1927, dies in Dublin on February 3, 1948. He is also a senior Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) organiser and Cumann na nGaedheal politician. Later, he has heavy connections with fascism, including his association with Ailtirí na hAiséirghe.

Walsh is born in the townland of Rathroon, near Bandon, County Cork, on February 20, 1880. His family comes from a farming background, “working a substantial holding of medium but well-cultivated land.” Until the age of fifteen, he attends a local school in Bandon, but by his own account “as far as learning went, I may as well have been at home.” Together with his school friend P. S. O’Hegarty, he passes the Civil Service exams for the Postal service. He later works locally as a clerk in the Post Office. Like O’Hegarty, he spends three years in London at King’s College, studying for the Secretary’s Office “a syllabus (which) differed little from the Indian Civil Service.” While O’Hegarty succeeds in his studies, Walsh does not, and returns to Cork where a friend, Sir Edward Fitzgerald, arranges work for him on the Entertainments Committee of the Cork International Exhibition.

Walsh is active in the GAA, promoting Gaelic games in many areas, but particularly in Cork city and county. His interest in organised sports has a strong political dimension.

“I happened to be one of those who realised the potentialities of the GAA as a training ground for Physical Force. Contamination with the alien and all his works was taboo. I gathered around me a force of youthful enthusiasts from the University, Civil Service and Business. With this intensely organised instrument, war was declared on foreign games which were made to feel the shock so heavily that one by one, Soccer and Rugby Clubs began to disappear.”

Walsh is also instrumental in establishing the “revived” Tailteann Games. He is Chairman of the Cork County Council GAA and is involved in the founding of the Cork City Irish Volunteers.

Walsh participates in the Easter Rising in 1916 in the General Post Office (GPO). He claims he is responsible for mobilising 20 members of the Hibernian Rifles and takes them to the GPO. However, Rifles commandant John J. Scollan contradicts this account. He is promoted from Rifleman to Vice-Commandant of the Hibernian Rifles in 1915.

Walsh is arrested following the general surrender and sentenced to death after a court-martial at Richmond Barracks. This is almost immediately commuted to life imprisonment, but he is released the following year under a general amnesty.

In later 1917 Walsh is arrested and imprisoned after making a speech declaring “the only way to address John Bull is through the barrel of a rifle.”

In the autumn of 1919 Walsh is involved in a failed assassination attempt on John French, 1st Earl of Ypres.

Walsh is elected as a Sinn Féin Member of Parliament (MP) in the 1918 United Kingdom general election for the Cork City constituency. As a member of the First Dáil he is arrested for partaking in an illegal government. He is released in 1921 and supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty and goes on to become a founding member of the new political party, Cumann na nGaedheal. He serves as Postmaster General from 1922 until 1924 and joins the cabinet of W. T. Cosgrave between 1924 and 1927, after the office is reconstituted as the Department of Posts and Telegraphs. He is elected at every election for the Cork Borough constituency until 1927 when he retires from government.

In August 1922 Walsh is part of a government committee which is intended to consider what the Irish Free State’s policy towards north-east Ulster will be.

During World War II, known at the time in Ireland as “the Emergency,” Walsh’s connections with fascism, including his association with Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, bring him to the attention of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, the Intelligence branch of the Irish Army. Their request to the Minister for Justice, Gerald Boland, to place a tap on Walsh’s phone is, however, refused. He is closely associated with Irish-based pro-Nazi initiatives through his association with Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, frequently expressing his views with anti-semitic rhetoric.

After leaving politics Walsh founds a bus company which operates with great success between the city centre and south Dublin. When private bus services are bought out by the Dublin Tramway Co., he invests his profits in other Irish companies including Clondalkin Paper Mills, Solus Teoranta and Benbulben Barytes. He is also a director of Killeen and Newbrook Paper Mills, timber exporters Dinan Dowds, the Moore Clothing Co., and Fancy Goods. In 1937 he is elected president of the Federation of Irish Manufacturers, having previously held the vice-presidency. His businesses benefit greatly from the protectionist measures introduced by Fianna Fáil after 1932. Nonetheless, he complains that not enough has been done to make capital available to native entrepreneurs, and that “alien” interests are allowed too much scope to penetrate the Irish market.

In 1944 Walsh publishes a short memoir, Recollections of a Rebel. In his later years he suffers from deteriorating health, leading to his resignation from the presidency of the Federation of Irish Manufacturers in 1946. He dies in Dublin on February 3, 1948. He is buried in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery, Cork, County Cork.

On April 24, 2016, a plaque commemorating Walsh is unveiled in Kilbrittain, County Cork.


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Birth of Máire Ní Chinnéide, Language Activist & Playwright

Máire Ní Chinnéide (English: Mary or Molly O’Kennedy) Irish language activist, playwright, first president of the Camogie Association and first female president of Oireachtas na Gaeilge, is born in Rathmines, an affluent inner suburb on the Southside of Dublin, on January 17, 1879.

Ní Chinnéide attends Muckross Park College and the Royal University of Ireland (later the National University of Ireland) where she is a classmate of Agnes O’Farrelly, Helena Concannon, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. She learns the Irish language on holiday in Ballyvourney, County Cork, and earns the first scholarship in Irish language from the Royal University of Ireland, worth £100 a year, which is spent on visits to the Irish college in Ballingeary.

She studies in the school of Old Irish established by Professor Osborn Bergin and is strongly influenced by the Irish Australian professor O’Daly. She later teaches Latin through Irish at Ballingeary and becomes proficient in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

She spends the last £100 of her scholarship on a dowry for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the Irish civil service, with whom she lives originally in Glasnevin and then in Dalkey.

She is a founder member of the radical Craobh an Chéitinnigh, the Keating branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, composed mainly of Dublin-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.

In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women’s hurling teams, the rules of camogie (then called camoguidheacht), first appears in Banba, a journal produced by Craobh an Chéitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Conradh na Gaeilge Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men’s hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Ní Chinnéide and Cáit Ní Dhonnchadha, like Ní Chinnéide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist, are credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ní Dhonnchadha’s scholarly brother Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who drew up its rules. She is on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan, County Meath, in July 1904, becomes an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905, is elected president of the infant Camogie Association.

Ní Chinnéide later serves as Vice-President of Craobh an Chéitinnigh, to Cathal Brugha. She is active in Cumann na mBan during the Irish War of Independence and takes the pro-treaty side during the Irish Civil War and attempts to set up a woman’s organisation “in support of the Free State” alongside Jennie Wyse Power.

She first visits the Blasket Islands in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who dies tragically young. In the summer of 1934, she puts the idea into Peig Sayers‘s head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ní Chinnéide “she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically.” Peig answers that she has “nothing to write.” She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it has been forgotten.

Ní Chinnéide suggests Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File (“The Poet”), but Peig “only shook her head doubtfully.” At Christmas, a packet arrives from the Blaskets with a manuscript, she transcribes it word for word and the following summer brings it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig. She then edits the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig becomes well known as a prescribed text on the Leaving Certificate curriculum in Irish.

Ní Chinnéide has an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage, Casadh an tSugáin by Douglas Hyde in 1901. She is later author of children’s plays staged by An Comhar Drámuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the Peacock Theatre, of which Gleann na Sidheóg and An Dúthchas (1908) are published. She is a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1923). She is president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.

She soon becomes interested in writing children’s plays, including Gleann na Sidheóg (Fairy Glen, 1905) and Sidheoga na mBláth (Flower Fairies, 1909. Although there is little information available on the staging of her first play, by the time her second children’s play, Sidheóga na mBláth, is published in An Claidheamh Soluis in December 1907, “Éire Óg” (“Young Ireland”) branches of Conradh na Gaeilge have been established in conjunction with adults’ branches. Patrick Pearse in particular voices the expectation that this play will be staged by many “Éire Óg” branches “before the New Year is very old,” thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play’s publication, it is staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ní Chinnéide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.

Ní Chinnéide dies on April 25, 1967, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

In 2007 the camogie trophy (Máire Ní Chinnéide Cup) for the annual inter-county All-Ireland Junior Camogie Championship is named in her honour.

(Pictured: Máire Ní Chinéide at her graduation, photograph from Banba, 1903)


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Birth of “Alphie” McCourt, Irish American Writer

Alphonsus Joseph “Alphie” McCourt, Irish American writer and memoirist, is born in Limerick, County Limerick, on July 29, 1940. He is the youngest son of Malachy Gerard McCourt, Sr. (1901–1985) and Angela Sheehan (1908–1981), and brother of Michael McCourt, Frank McCourt, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angela’s Ashes, and Malachy McCourt, the writer and actor.

McCourt comes to New York as a young man to live for a time with Frank, ten years his elder. He finds work wherever he can and eventually owns two restaurants in Manhattan. In 1975, he marries Lynn Rockman, with whom he has a daughter, Allison.

For twenty years, from 1993 until he retires in 2013, McCourt works for the Penn South Co-op in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, in charge of apartment restorations in the 2,800-unit residential complex.

Brendan Keany, general manager of Penn South, recalls meeting McCourt in the late 1980s at Allison’s, a restaurant named for his daughter. The restaurant on Eighth Avenue near Penn South closes after a time, but McCourt goes on to run Los Panchos on Columbus Avenue near 71st Street. However, as a man with a family, running bars and restaurants is not ideal, so he finds the job at Penn South, inspecting apartments and directing their restoration.

The author of short stories, newspaper essays, songs, and verse, McCourt, in 2008, publishes a memoir, A Long Stone’s Throw. Surveying the range of jobs he had taken on in a review of that memoir in Manhattan Express’ sister publication The Villager, the late Jerry Tallmer writes, “Working on a great glop-a-da-glop mainframe computer on Wall Street; issuing tickets for British and Irish Railways; a one-day job as bellhop in a Montreal hotel; a bank teller in Montreal; an encyclopedia salesman — for a month; working at the Army and Air Force Exchange Service on 14th Street as a buyer of luggage and musical instruments, knowing nothing about luggage and less about musical instruments; filing clerk; and, oh yes, teacher.”

Lynn McCourt recalls first meeting her future husband. “We were friends for a long time before we were married,” she says. “He was working as a bartender at the White Horse Tavern when I came in with a writer friend. He told me that he ‘saw the light behind’ me when I came in. He could twist words and turn something ordinary into something poignant. Just before he went to California around 1970, we spent a whole night walking and talking. He came back from California in 1974 and we got married in 1975.”

Then, recalling the devoted relationship McCourt has with Allison, Lynn continues, “Our daughter has special needs and has learning and speech problems. Alphie sang to her every night as a baby and eventually she sang back to him. They were inseparable. He’d have breakfast with her every morning. He was a great father — he, who hadn’t seen his own father very much. When we went to Ireland in 1980, he went north to find his father, and he did find him. I’m a Jewish girl from the Bronx who wanted to marry an Irishman with a brogue, and I did.”

Joe Hurley, of Joe Hurley’s Allstar Irish Rock Review, says McCourt, in his later years, had gotten into singing with the group, performing tunes from “The Great Irish Songbook,” like “The Auld Triangle.” He recalls, “He just performed with us at the Highline Ballroom in March. He loved being around young people. The place was full of young people and rock and roll, and then Alphie comes out — you could hear a pin drop. He would talk about how he had these incredible older brothers… fantastic storyteller. He never tooted his own horn.”

McCourt dies suddenly on July 2, 2016, at his home on the Upper West Side while taking an afternoon nap, just 27 days before his 76th birthday. His brother Michael dies the previous September, nine months earlier. He is survived by his brother Malachy.