seamus dubhghaill

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Tag Archives: Merrion Square (Dublin)


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Death of Vincent Dowling, Actor, Director & Producer

Vincent Gerard Dowling, Irish theatre actor, director and producer, dies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on May 10, 2013.

Dowling is born in Kimmage, Dublin, on September 7, 1929, the sixth of four sons and three daughters of William Dowling, a ship’s captain, and his wife Mary (née Kelly). His father is violent toward the family and leaves when he is a toddler. Helped by money provided by a priest, the Dowlings move in 1934 from the basement of his maternal uncle’s flat in Merrion Square, Dublin, to a house in Mount Merrion, County Dublin. In 1942, financial necessity forces the family’s move to a smaller residence in Marlborough Road, Donnybrook, Dublin.

Dowling is educated at St. Mary’s College in Rathmines, Dublin, having previously attended Kilmacud National School and CBS Dún Laoghaire, both in County Dublin. He is a bright student, but with his fees in arrears, the dean of studies induces him to leave school early in September 1945 for a clerkship with the Standard Life Assurance Company. A few years later, he finds his vocation when he accompanies a girlfriend to the academy of acting run by Brendan Smith. He signs up in 1948 for a two-year course during which he performs in and stage-manages academy plays and stage-manages for Smith’s professional company. Upon quitting Standard Life in June 1950, he spends a year touring Ireland with Smith’s company, both as an actor and the touring group’s manager.

Dowling comes to prominence in the 1950s for his role as Christy Kennedy in the long-running radio soap opera, The Kennedys of Castleross, and as a member of the Abbey Theatre company. He returns to the Abbey as artistic director from 1987 to 1990.

Following two months in the United States in 1969 lecturing and directing at Loyola University Chicago, he spends periods during 1972–74 directing for the Missouri Repertory Theatre and lecturing and directing at the University of Missouri – Kansas City. On extended leave from the Abbey, he directs in various American theatres throughout 1975, the year he married Olwen O’Herlihy, daughter of the Irish actor Dan O’Herlihy. After his request for six months leave each year is refused, he quits the Abbey in 1976, having done over a hundred major roles for the company.

In 1976, Dowling becomes a U.S. citizen and is appointed artistic and producing director of the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival (GLSF) in Cleveland, Ohio, from 1976 to 1984, where he directs, produces and acts in many classical works, by William Shakespeare and others. He is credited with discovering actor Tom Hanks. He receives an Ohio Valley Emmy Award for the 1983 PBS broadcast of his 1982 GLSF production of The Playboy of the Western World.

Dowling is visiting professor at the College of Wooster in Ohio during the 1986-87 academic year. He founds the Miniature Theatre of Chester (now the Chester Theatre Company), in Chester, Massachusetts, in 1990.

Dowling marries actress Brenda Doyle in 1952. They have four daughters, including actress Bairbre Dowling, before divorcing in 1975. In 1975, he marries Olwen O’Herlihy, with whom he has a son.

Politician Richard Boyd Barrett is the biological son of Dowling and recording artist and actress Sinéad Cusack from a 1966 relationship while both are at the Abbey Theatre. Boyd Barrett is adopted as an infant. Dowling contacts Boyd Barrett after his connection with Cusack is publicly revealed in 2007. Their relationship is made known after his death.

Dowling dies on May 10, 2013, in Massachusetts General Hospital due to complications arising from surgery. Following a funeral service at the First Congregational Church of Chester, his remains are interred in the nearby cemetery.

Dowling receives honorary doctorates from Westfield State University in Massachusetts, and from Kent State University, John Carroll University and the College of Wooster, all in Ohio. His papers, from 1976 onward, are housed at the Kent State University and John Carroll University libraries.


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Birth of William Brownlow, MP and Landowner

William Brownlow, MP and landowner, is born on April 10, 1726, the son of William Brownlow (1683–1739), landowner and MP for County Armagh (1711–27), and Lady Elizabeth Brownlow of County Armagh, and grandson of Arthur Brownlow. His mother is a daughter of James Hamilton, 6th Earl of Abercorn. He inherits the family estates around Lurgan in 1739 and spends some of his youth in France and Italy with his mother.

Brownlow’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been MPs, and in 1753 he wins a hotly contested by-election in which his opponents accuse him of papist and Jacobite sympathies. The unsuccessful candidate is Francis Caulfeild, brother of James, 1st Earl of Charlemont, his petition to parliament causing a furor and is defeated by only one vote in one of the most celebrated electoral struggles of the day. Brownlow represents the county for over forty years, from 1753 until his death. In 1753, he supports the government on the controversial money bill.

Brownlow marries Judith, daughter of the Rev. Charles Meredyth, Dean of Ardfert, of County Meath, on May 25, 1754. They have two sons. After her death in Lyon, France, in October 1763, he marries Catherine, daughter of Roger Hall of Newry, County Down, on November 25, 1765. They have two sons and five daughters, three who marry into the nobility. In 1758, he is one of the Wide Streets commissioners in Dublin and owns an imposing house in Merrion Square. He is a trustee of the linen board in Ulster, and makes many improvements to his estate, castle, and demesne, the local church, and the town of Lurgan. However, it is alleged that private roads in his demesne were built with public money. He is one of a few landowners in County Armagh who are believed to have misappropriated the unusually high county cess levied by the grand jury, of which he is a member. In 1758, he suggests that salaries be paid to government officials, and one official, Henry Meredyth, his first wife’s uncle, subsequently receives an annual salary of £500.

In June 1763, large numbers of Presbyterian farmers and weavers, calling themselves the Hearts of Oak, in a notable show of dissatisfaction with the privileges of landlords, march on the homes of the gentry to demand redress. Brownlow is in England and avoids a confrontation. Despite the allegations of abuse of public money, he is generally recognised as one of the more independent and reform-minded MPs of the day. He captains a Volunteer troop of dragoons which march from Lurgan to assist Belfast after the French commander François Thurot lands at Carrickfergus in 1760. As one of the supporters of Henry Grattan, he is prominent in the Volunteer movement of the 1780s. He is captain of the Lurgan Volunteer company and lieutenant-colonel of the northern battalion and backs the movement in parliament until displeased by the Volunteer national convention (November 10 – December 2, 1783), which seeks franchise reform and seems to challenge the authority of the existing parliament.

Brownlow subscribes £9,000 to help found the Bank of Ireland in 1783, and in parliament on February 7, 1785, vigorously opposes William Pitt‘s proposals on Ireland’s commercial relations with England, seeing in them the danger that Ireland would become a “tributary nation.” He is appointed a privy councilor in 1765. He organises horse races in his locality and is a talented harpsichord player. After his death on October 28, 1794, the Belfast News Letter prints an unusually long and glowing tribute, expressing admiration for his “incorruptible integrity” and patriotism, as well as two poetic elegies. He is succeeded by his son William Brownlow.

(From: “Brownlow, William” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Portrait of the Right Honorable William Brownlow, oil on canvas by Gilbert Stuart, circa 1790)


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The Pearse Street Ambush

The Pearse Street Ambush takes place in Dublin on March 14, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. Dublin awakes to the news that six Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers, captured in an ambush at Drumcondra two months earlier, have been hanged. The gates of Mountjoy Gaol are opened at 8:25 a.m. and news of the executions is read out to the distraught relatives of the dead. As many as 40,000 people gather outside and many mournfully say the Rosary for the executed men.

The Labour movement calls a half-day general strike in the city in protest at the hangings. The clandestine Republican government declares a day of national mourning. All public transport comes to a halt and republican activists make sure the strike is observed.

By the evening, the streets clear rapidly as the British-imposed curfew comes into effect at 9:00 p.m. each night. The city is patrolled by regular British troops and the much-feared paramilitary police, or Auxiliaries, as people scurry home and await IRA retaliation for the hangings. This is not long in coming.

Pearse Street is just south of the River Liffey, running from Ringsend, an old fishing port, to the city centre. Number 144 Pearse Street houses the company headquarters of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade 3rd Battalion at St. Andrews Catholic Hall. It has been used for this purpose since before the 1916 Easter Rising.

On the evening of March 14, Captain Peadar O’Meara sends the 3rd Battalion out to attack police or military targets. As many as thirty-four IRA men prowl the area, armed with the standard urban guerrilla arms of easily hidden handguns and grenades. One young volunteer, Sean Dolan, throws a grenade at a police station on nearby Merrion Square, which bounces back before it explodes, blowing off his own leg.

At around 8:00 p.m., with the curfew approaching, a company of Auxiliaries, based in Dublin Castle is sent to the area to investigate the explosion. It consists of one Rolls-Royce armoured car and two tenders holding about 16 men. Apparently, the Auxiliaries have some inside information as they made straight for the local IRA headquarters at 144 Pearse Street. One later testifies in court that “I had been notified there were a certain number of gunmen there.”

However, the IRA is waiting. As soon as the Auxiliaries approach the building, they are fired upon from three sides. What the newspapers describe as “hail of fire” tears into the Auxiliaries’ vehicles. Five of the eight Auxiliaries in the first tender are hit in the opening fusillade. Two of them are fatally injured, including the driver, an Irishman named O’Farrell, and an Auxiliary named L. Beard.

The IRA fighters, however, are seriously outgunned. The Rolls Royce armoured car is impervious to small arms fire (except its tyres, which are shot out) and the mounted Vickers heavy machine gun sprays the surrounding houses with bullets. The unwounded Auxiliaries also clamber out of their tenders and return fire at the gun flashes from street corners and rooftops.

Civilian passersby thow themselves to the ground to avoid the bullets but four are hit, by which side it is impossible to tell. The British military court of inquiry into the incident finds that the civilians had been killed by persons unknown, if by the IRA then they were “murdered,” if hit by Auxiliaries the shootings were “accidental.” This, aside from demonstrating the court’s bias, shows that no one is sure who had killed them.

Firing lasts for only five minutes but in that time seven people, including the two Auxiliaries, are killed or fatally wounded and at least six more are wounded. Eighteen-year-old Bernard O’Hanlon, originally from Dundalk, lay sprawled, dead, outside 145 Pearse Street, his British Bull Dog revolver under him which has five chambers, two of which contain expended rounds and three of which contain live rounds, indicating he had gotten off just two shots before being cut down.

Another IRA Volunteer, Leo Fitzgerald, is also killed outright. Two more guerrillas are wounded, one in the hip and one in the back. They, along with Sean Dolan, who had been wounded by his own grenade, are spirited away by sympathetic fire brigade members and members of Cumann na mBan and treated in nearby Mercer’s Hospital.

Three civilians lay dead on the street. One, Thomas Asquith, is a 68-year-old caretaker, another, David Kelly, is a prominent Sinn Féin member and head of the Sinn Féin Bank. His brother, Thomas Kelly, is a veteran Sinn Féin politician and a Member of Parliament since 1918. The third, Stephen Clarke, aged 22, is an ex-soldier and may have been the one who had tipped off the Auxiliaries about the whereabouts of the IRA meeting house. An internal IRA report notes that he was “under observation… as he was a tout [informant] for the enemy.”

Two IRA men are captured as they flee the scene. One, Thomas Traynor, a 40-year-old veteran of the Easter Rising, is carrying an automatic pistol, but claims to have had no part in the ambush itself. He had, he maintains, simply been asked to bring in the weapon to 144 Great Brunswick Street. The other is Joseph Donnelly, a youth of just 17 years of age.

As most of the IRA fighters get away through houses, over walls and into backstreets, the Auxiliaries ransack St. Andrew’s Catholic Hall at number 144 Pearse Street but find little of value. Regular British Army troops quickly arrive from nearby Beggars Bush Barracks and cordon off the area, but no further arrests are made. Desultory sniping carries on in the city for several hours into the night.

March 14, 1921, was bloody day in Dublin. Thirteen people had died violently in the city by the end of the day – six IRA Volunteers executed that morning, two more killed in action at Pearse Street, two Auxiliaries killed in action and three civilians in the crossfire. It is the worst day of political violence in the city since Bloody Sunday on November 21, 1920, when 31 had been killed.

(From: “The Pearse Street Ambush, Dublin, March 14, 1921” by John Dorney, The Irish Story, http://www.theirishstory.com, January 26, 2015 | Pictured: British Army troops keep crowds back from Mountjoy Prison during the executions, March 14 1921.)


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Birth of Valentine Browne Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry

Valentine Browne Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry, Irish peer, politician and landowner, is born in Merrion Square in Dublin on August 19, 1773.

Lawless is the only surviving son of Nicholas Lawless, wool merchant, brewer, and banker, who becomes 1st Baron Cloncurry in 1789, and Margaret Lawless (née Browne), only daughter and heiress of Valentine Browne of Mount Browne, County Limerick. He is educated privately at Portarlington, Queen’s County (now County Laois), and at Blackrock, County Dublin. He enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) in 1789, graduating BA in 1792. After completing a tour of Europe (1792–95) he returns to Ireland, where he joins the Society of United Irishmen and the loyalist yeomanry. Pressurized by his father, he decides to study law, and is at Middle Temple from 1795 to 1798. He later claims that at a dinner party in the spring of 1797 he hears the prime minister, William Pitt, discuss his plans for a legislative union with Ireland, prompting him to write an anti-union pamphlet in response. Like many of the claims in his published recollections, the story is unreliable.

During 1797 Lawless helps Arthur O’Connor form his United Irishman newspaper The Press, and Leonard McNally informs Dublin Castle that Lawless is its principal shareholder. In October 1797 Lawless attends a meeting of the executive directory of the United Irishmen, of which he is elected a member. Throughout this period and after his return to London he is carefully watched by the British secret service. His friendship with O’Connor, and the fact that he provides funds for Fr. James Coigly, arouse deep suspicion. After the outbreak of open rebellion in Ireland he is arrested at his lodgings in Pall Mall on May 31, 1798, on suspicion of high treason, and imprisoned for six weeks in the Tower of London. Arabella Jefferyes, sister of the Earl of Clare, apparently tries to extort money from Lawless in return for pleading his case to the Duke of Portland. He refuses the offer. On his release he tours England on horseback but is rearrested on April 14, 1799, and held until March 1801. His father votes for the Act of Union, hoping to secure his son’s release, and dies on August 28, 1799. Lawless succeeds him as 2nd Baron Cloncurry. His grandfather and his fiancée, Mary Ryal, also die while he is imprisoned.

Embittered by his experience, Lawless tours the Continent from 1801 to 1805 before returning to his family estate at Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare. Throwing himself into improving his estates and into local concerns, he founds the County Kildare Farming Society in 1814. He is also involved in canal developments and agricultural improvements in the country. Opposed to the rural constabulary bill of 1822, he supports Catholic emancipation and the attempts of Daniel O’Connell to repeal the Act of Union. He breaks with O’Connell in the 1830s when his friend, Henry Paget, 1st Marquess of Anglesey, is viceroy, because he believes repeal can now be achieved through official means. The rift is never healed.

In 1831, Lawless is admitted to the Privy Council of Ireland (PC) and an English peer but rarely attends the House of Lords. Involved in anti-tithe campaigns, he retires from politics in 1840. Travelling on the Continent in 1841 and 1842, he returns to defend O’Connell’s planned Clontarf meeting in the privy council but refuses to attend any further meetings after his advice on dealing with the Great Famine is ignored in 1846. In 1849 he publishes his personal reminiscences, which appear to have been ghost-written.

Lawless’s health begins to fail in 1851. He dies at the older family home, Maretimo House, Blackrock, on October 28, 1853, and is buried in the family vault at Lyons Hill.

Lawless first marries Elizabeth Georgiana, youngest daughter of Lieutenant-General Charles Morgan, at Rome on April 16, 1803. They have one son and one daughter. The marriage ends in divorce in 1811 after her adultery with Sir John Piers. In 1811, he then marries Emily, daughter of Archibald Douglas of England, and widow of Joseph Leeson. They have two sons and a daughter. The elder son, Edward, succeeds as 3rd Baron Cloncurry. He commits suicide in 1869 by throwing himself out of a third-floor window at Lyons Hill. The younger, Cecil-John, is an MP, but catches a chill at his father’s funeral and dies on November 5, 1853.

(From: “Lawless, Valentine Browne” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Lyons House, Lyons Hill, Ardclough, County Kildare)


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Death of Mary Hayden, Campaigner for Women’s Causes

Mary Teresa Hayden, Irish historian, Irish language activist and campaigner for women’s causes, dies at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin, on July 12, 1942.

Hayden is born on May 19, 1862, in Merrion Square, Dublin, the only daughter of Thomas Hayden, physician and later vice-president of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and Mary Anne Hayden (née Ryan). Mary Hayden is educated initially at the Dominican College, Eccles Street, Dublin, and then at Alexandra College at Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin. She attends the Royal University of Ireland (RUI) where she graduates with a BA in 1885 and an MA in 1887 in Modern Languages.

She meets the Robertson commission in 1901 on behalf of St. Mary’s Dominican convent, Eccles Street, Dublin, where, as well as presenting the results of a questionnaire survey of women graduates, compiles in conjunction with Agnes O’Farrelly and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, she argues for the right of women to receive education on the same terms as men and in the same colleges, and to be employed by the universities on identical conditions (which is not realised until the Irish Universities Act of 1908). Along with Sheehy-Skeffington, she is a key figure in the formation of the Irish Association of Women Graduates in 1902, which concerns itself with various questions regarding women graduates’ employment in government departments, hospitals, and schools, as well as attempting to influence public policy in relation to sex discrimination.

A campaigner for gender equality and noted as a public speaker, Hayden is a prominent member of the Dublin Women’s Suffrage Association. She is a member of the Gaelic League and friends with Patrick Pearse. However, she opposes violence and disapproves of the 1916 Easter Rising.

After the passage of the Irish Universities Act in 1908, Hayden is appointed a member of both the senate of the National University of Ireland (NUI) and the governing body of the new University College Dublin (UCD), the first woman to hold such positions. In November 1909 she is appointed a lecturer in history, and in July 1911 first professor of modern Irish history at UCD, a position she holds until her retirement in 1938.

In 1915, along with Mary Louise Gwynn, Hayden founds the Irish Catholic Women’s Suffrage Association, and is also active in the Irish Women’s Franchise League, which mix campaigning for the vote with a variety of intellectual pursuits. She also becomes involved in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. She is more moderate a nationalist than contemporary feminists such as Constance Markievicz and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington and supports the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP) rather than Sinn Féin.

Hayden’s last major public campaign, at the age of 75, is in the lead-up to the referendum on the 1937 Constitution of Ireland, in opposition to articles 40, 41, and 45 concerning the status of women. Reversing her lifelong non-party-political stance, she helps to form the Women’s Social and Progressive League as a political party committed to opposing the constitution and any regressive consequences it would entail.

Hayden receives an honorary doctorate from the NUI in 1935, three years before her retirement. A dedicated cyclist and swimmer, she is fluent in Irish, Greek, and Hindustani, and after retirement devotes her efforts to improving the welfare of Dublin children through her newly formed social club. She dies on July 12, 1942, at her residence in Rathmines, Dublin. Her unpublished diaries are deposited in the NLI.

A biography of Hayden, Mary Hayden: Irish Historian and Feminist, by Joyce Padbury is published by Arlen House in 2020.


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Death of William Wilde, Surgeon, Author & Father of Oscar Wilde

Sir William Robert Wills Wilde, Irish oto–ophthalmologic surgeon and the author of significant works on medicine, archaeology and folklore, particularly concerning his native Ireland dies on April 19, 1876. He is the father of poet and playwright Oscar Wilde.

Wilde is born in March 1815 at Kilkeevin, near Castlerea, County Roscommon, the youngest of the three sons and two daughters of a prominent local medical practitioner, Thomas Wills Wilde, and his wife, Amelia Flynne. His family are members of the Church of Ireland, and he is descended from a Dutchman, Colonel de Wilde, who came to Ireland with King William of Orange‘s invading army in 1690, and numerous Anglo-Irish ancestors. He receives his initial education at the Elphin Diocesan School in Elphin, County Roscommon. In 1832, he is bound as an apprentice to Abraham Colles, the pre-eminent Irish surgeon of the day, at Dr. Steevens’ Hospital in Dublin. He is also taught by the surgeons James Cusack and Sir Philip Crampton and the physician Sir Henry Marsh. He also studies at the private and highly respected school of anatomy, medicine, and surgery in Park Street (later Lincoln Place), Dublin. In 1837, he earns his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. In the same year, he embarks on an eight-month-cruise to the Holy Land with a recovering patient, visiting various cities and islands throughout the Mediterranean. Porpoises are flung on board the ship, Crusader, and Wilde dissects them. Taking notes, he eventually composes a two-volume book on the nursing habits of the creatures. Among the places he visits on this tour is Egypt. In a tomb he finds the mummified remains of a dwarf and salvages the torso to bring back to Ireland. He also collects embalmed ibises.

Once back in Ireland, Wilde publishes an article in the Dublin University Magazine suggesting that one of the “Cleopatra’s Needles” be transported to England. In 1878, one of the Needles is transported to London, and in 1880 the other one is brought to New York City‘s Central Park. In 1873 he is awarded the Cunningham Gold Medal by the Royal Irish Academy.

Wilde runs his own hospital, St. Mark’s Ophthalmic Hospital for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, in Dublin and is appointed to serve as Oculist-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. At one point, he performs surgery on the father of another famous Irish dramatist, George Bernard Shaw.

Wilde had a very successful medical practice and is assisted in it by his natural son, Henry Wilson, who had been trained in Dublin, Vienna, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Paris. Wilson’s presence enables him to travel, and he visits Scandinavia, where he receives an honorary degree from Uppsala University, and is welcomed in Stockholm by Anders Retzius, among others. King Charles XV of Sweden confers on him the Nordstjärneorden (Order of the Polar Star). In 1853, he is appointed Surgeon Occulist in Ordinary to the Queen in Ireland, the first position of its kind, probably created for him.

Wilde is awarded a knighthood in a ceremony at Dublin Castle on January 28, 1864, more for his involvement with the Irish census than for his medical contributions, although he had been appointed medical commissioner to the Irish census in 1841. In 1845, he becomes editor of the Dublin Journal of Medical & Chemical Science, to which he contributes many articles.

Wilde marries the poet Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee on November 12, 1851, who writes and publishes under the pen name of Speranza. The couple has two sons, William (Willie) and Oscar, and a daughter, Isola Francesca, who dies in childhood.

In addition to his children with his wife, Wilde is the father of three children born out of wedlock before his marriage: Henry Wilson, born in 1838, and Emily and Mary Wilde, born in 1847 and 1849, respectively, of different parentage to Henry. He acknowledges paternity of his illegitimate children and provides for their education, but they are reared by his relatives rather than with his wife and legitimate children. Emily and Mary both die in 1871 following a Halloween party at which their dresses accidentally catch fire.

From 1855 until his death in 1876, Wilde lives at 1 Merrion Square, now the headquarters of American College Dublin. The building is named Oscar Wilde House after William Wilde’s son, who also lives at the address from 1855 until 1878. There is a plaque at 1 Merrion Square dedicated to him.

Wilde’s reputation suffers when Mary Travers, a long-term patient of his and the daughter of a colleague, claims that he had seduced her two years earlier. She writes a pamphlet crudely parodying Wilde and Lady Wilde as Dr. and Mrs. Quilp, and portraying Dr. Quilp as the rapist of a female patient anaesthetised under chloroform. She distributes the pamphlets outside the building where Wilde is about to give a public lecture. Lady Wilde complains to Mary’s father, Robert Travers, which results in Mary bringing a libel case against her. Mary Travers wins her case but is awarded a mere farthing in damages by the jury. Legal costs of £2,000 are awarded against Lady Wilde. The case is the talk of all Dublin, and Wilde’s refusal to enter the witness box during the trial is widely held against him as ungentlemanly behaviour.

From this time onwards, Wilde begins to withdraw from Dublin to the west of Ireland, where he had started in 1864 to build what becomes Moytura, his house overlooking Lough Corrib in Connemara, County Galway. His health deteriorates in 1875. He dies, likely of cancer, at the age of 61 on April 19, 1876. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.

(Pictured: Sketch of William Wilde by J.H. Maguire, 1847)


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Death of Dermot Ryan, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin

Dermot Joseph Ryan, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Dublin from 1972 until 1984, dies in Rome, Italy, on February 21, 1985.

Ryan is born on June 26, 1924, to Andrew Ryan, a medical doctor, and Therese (née McKenna), in Clondalkin, Dublin. In 1932 he goes to Belvedere College, Dublin. In 1942 he enters Holy Cross College, Drumcondra, and graduates with a first in Hebrew and Aramaic at University College Dublin in 1945. He spends a year at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth before attending the Pontifical Irish College in Rome gaining his BD in 1948 at the Pontifical Lateran University, Rome. He returns to Clonliffe to complete his formation, and where he is ordained a priest on May 28, 1950. He returns to Rome to study at the Pontifical Gregorian University, gaining a Licentiate in Sacred Theology in 1952. In 1954 he is awarded an MA in Semitic Languages from the National University of Ireland (NUI), followed by a licentiate in sacred scripture at the Pontifical Biblical Institute.

Ryan is Professor of Oriental Languages at University College Dublin before his appointment by Pope Paul VI as Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland on December 29, 1971. Maintaining his connection and interest in oriental studies, he serves as chairman of the trustees of the Chester Beatty Library from 1978 to 1984.

Ryan is ordained a bishop by Pope Paul VI in Rome, assisted by Cardinals Bernardus Johannes Alfrink and William Conway (Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland), on February 13, 1972. At the time of his appointment, he is seen as a liberal and a reformer in the Church.

During his term, Ryan consolidates much of the expansion of the archdiocese which had taken place during the term of his predecessor. He also oversees the fuller implementation of the reforms of Vatican II. He is particularly interested in liturgical reform.

Seen as a Liberal, following the episcopacy of John Charles McQuaid, in November 1972, Ryan becomes the first Roman Catholic archbishop to attend a Church of Ireland service in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and holds an interdenominational service in St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral. He also supports “Ballymascanlon talks,” an inter-church initiative to try to bring communities together and bring peace to Northern Ireland.

Ryan also takes a traditional stand on social issues, including poverty, family life and opposition to abortion. He strongly promotes the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland in 1983, granting the equal right to life to mother and unborn.

As Archbishop, Ryan gives the people of Dublin a public park on a site earmarked by his predecessors for a proposed cathedral. It is named “Archbishop Ryan Park” in his honour. The land, at Merrion Square, is a gift from the archbishop to the city of Dublin.

Ryan also serves as Pro-Prefect of Congregation for the Evangelization of Peoples from April 8, 1984, until his death in Rome on February 21, 1985, following a heart attack at the age of sixty.

Ryan is named in the Murphy Report, released in 2009, on sexual abuse of children in Dublin. His actions in respect of complaints against priest Fr. McNamee are described in the report as “an example of how, throughout the 1970s, the church authorities were more concerned with the scandal that would be created by revealing Fr. McNamee’s abuse rather than any concern for the abused.” He also does not act on complaints against other priests who are also subsequently confirmed to be abusers.

In January 2010, after Ryan has been criticised in the Murphy Report the previous year, Dublin City Council seeks public views on renaming “Archbishop Ryan Park.” Later that same year it is renamed “Merrion Square Park” by the City Council.


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Birth of Isaac Corry, Lawyer & Member of Parliament

Isaac Corry FRS, PC (I), PC, an Irish and British Member of Parliament and lawyer, is born on May 15, 1753, in Newry, County Down.

Corry is the son of Edward Corry, sometime Member of Parliament, and Catharine Bristow. His cousin is the writer Catherine Dorothea Burdett. He is educated at the Royal School, Armagh, where his contemporaries include Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, and later at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he graduates in 1773. On October 18, 1771, he is admitted to the Middle Temple and called to the bar at King’s Inns in 1779.

Corry succeeds his father as Member of Parliament for Newry in 1776, sitting in the Irish House of Commons until the Acts of Union 1800. From 1782 to 1789 he serves as equerry to Prince Henry, Duke of Cumberland, being described in 1794 by Rt. Hon. Sylvester Douglas as “a well-bred man…He has no brogue…He once acted as a sort of groom of the bedchamber to the late Duke of Cumberland.” In 1798, he is also elected for Randalstown, but chooses not to sit and, in 1802, he is returned to the British House of Commons for Newry. He serves as a Whig at Westminster until 1806. It is written in 1783 that he would expect to enter high office, given that “he lives expensively and does not pursue his profession, which is the law.” In 1788 he becomes Clerk of the Irish Board of Ordnance. The following year he is appointed a commissioner of the revenue. Finally in 1799 he is appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer of Ireland and a Lord High Treasurer of Ireland in place of Sir John Parnell, who quarreled violently with William Pitt the Younger over the projected union, which he categorically refuses to support. In 1795 he becomes a Privy Councillor.

In 1802 Corry is dismissed from the Exchequer and replaced by John Foster (later Lord Oriel), he is awarded, however, £2,000 p.a. in compensation. In 1806 the changes in ownership of the Newry estates alters his position. The lands pass to a senior line of the Needham family and they support General Francis Needham, 1st Earl of Kilmorey, at the general election. Corry does not have the funds needed, in excess of £5000, to purchase a seat elsewhere. However, Lady Downshire is inclined to support the Grenville ministry and comes to a formal agreement with Corry to give him £1000 towards his expenses should he be successful in Newry, and, if not, to bring him in for another borough. He fails against the Needham interest in Newry, but a seat at Newport, Isle of Wight, is purchased for him, with £4000 from Lady Downshire, and he is appointed to the Board of Trade. Six months later Grenville’s ministry has fallen and there is another general election. Corry stands, again unsuccessfully, for Newry.

Corry is unmarried but has a long-term relationship with Jane Symms. They have three sons and three daughters. His daughter Ann marries Lt. Col. Henry Westenra, the brother of Robert Cuninghame, 1st Baron Rossmore. His residence in Newry is the Abbey Yard, now a school, and Derrymore House, Bessbrook, County Armagh, which he had inherited from his father and sold in 1810. It is now the property of the National Trust. During his life, a road is constructed from near the main entrance of Derrymore House around Newry and links up with the Dublin Road on the southern side of the town primarily for his use. This road subsequently becomes known as “The Chancellor’s Road,” as a result of his term as the Irish Chancellor of the Exchequer. A local legend has it that the road is constructed after an incident in which Corry’s stagecoach is stoned while passing through Newry by people angry at an unpopular window tax he had introduced. The road has retained this name, but it is cut in half by the Newry by-pass in the mid-1990s, however, as a result of works associated with the new A1 dual carriageway, the two-halves of the road are now reconnected.

Corry dies at his house in Merrion Square, Dublin, on May 15, 1813, his 60th birthday. He is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin.


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Birth of Anne Butler Yeats, Painter and Costume and Stage Designer

Anne Butler Yeats, Irish painter, costume and stage designer, is born in Dublin on February 26, 1919.

Yeats is the daughter of the poet William Butler Yeats and Georgie Hyde-Lees, a niece of the painter Jack B. Yeats, and of Lily Yeats and of Elizabeth Corbet Yeats. Her birth is commemorated by her father with the poem A Prayer for My Daughter. Her aunts are associated with the arts and crafts movement in Ireland and are associated with the Dun Emer Press, Cuala Press, and Dun Emer industries. Her brother Michael Yeats is a politician. She is known as “feathers” by her family.

Yeats spends her first three years between Ballylee, County Galway, and Oxford before her family moves to 82 Merrion Square, Dublin in 1922. She is very sick as a child and spends three years in two different hospitals, St. Margaret’s Hall, 50 Mespil Road, and Nightingale Hall, Morehampton Road, Dublin. She then goes to the Pension Henriette, a boarding school in Villars-sur-Bex, Switzerland from 1928–30. In 1923 her Aunt Elizabeth “Lolly” gives her brush drawing lessons which aid her in winning first prize in the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) National Art competition for children under eight years old in 1925 and 1926.

Yeats trains in the Royal Hibernian Academy school from 1933 to 1936 and works as a stage designer with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In 1936, at the age of 16, she is hired by the Abbey Theatre as assistant to Tanya Moiseiwitsch. She studies for four months at the School of Theatrical Design in Paris with Paul Colin in 1937. At 18, she begins her costume career on sets with Ria Mooney‘s company. At the Abbey, she designs the sets and costumes for revivals of W.B. Yeats’ plays The Resurrection and On Baile’s Strand (1938).

In 1938 Yeats designs the first production of W.B. Yeats’ play Purgatory. The designs for Purgatory are her most successful achievement. Purgatory is the last play that W.B Yeats sees on stage, and when it is performed it is a full house. When working on Purgatory, Hugh Hunt wants to have a moon on the back cloth of the production, but she refuses. “If she does not win, she is going to say that she doesn’t wish to have her name on the programme as a designer of the setting.” This could be the main reason why her name is not on many productions that she worked on. She also designs the first play of her uncle Jack Yeats to receive professional production, Harlequin’s Positions.

In 1939 Yeats is promoted to head of design at the Abbey until her departure in May 1941. In 1939 it is commented that her designs are “getting arty” and not in keeping with style of the Abbey. One of her last designs is her father’s last play, The Death of Cuchulain, for the Lyric Theatre on the Abbey stage in 1949. She designs and stage-manages for the Peacock Theatre, the Cork Opera House, the Olympia Theatre, the Gaiety Theatre, the Lyric Theatre, the Abbey Theatre and the Players Theatre.

Among the work Yeats is credited with in the Abbey Theatre, she also works on five productions in the Peacock Theatre with the Theatre Company: Alarm Among the Clerks (1937), The Phoenix (1937), Harlequin’s Positions (1939), The Wild Cat (1940), and Cavaliero (The Life of a Hawk) (1948).

Yeats chooses to move towards painting full-time beginning a brief study at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art in 1941. She experiments with watercolour and wax. She has a touching naive expressionist style and is interested in representing domestic humanity. She designs many of the covers for the books of Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill over a twenty-year period from 1958. She does illustrations for books by Denis Devlin, Thomas Kinsella and Louis MacNeice, and works with many young designers, such as Louis le Brocquy.

Yeats participates in group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Monaco, and Scotland, along with the Irish Exhibition of Living Art and Taispeántas an Oireachtas.

Yeats dies at the age of 82 on July 4, 2001, and is buried in Shanganagh Cemetery, south Dublin.

The Royal Hibernian Academy holds a retrospective of her work in 1995, as does the National Gallery of Ireland in 2002. She donates her collection of Jack B. Yeats’ sketch books to the National Gallery of Ireland, leading to the creation of the Yeats Museum within the Gallery. Her brother, Michael, in turn, donates her sketchbooks to the Museum.

(Pictured: “Coole Park,” oil on board by Anne Butler Yeats, Duke Street Gallery, Dublin)


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Tribunal of Inquiry Into Bloody Sunday 1972 Announced

On January 31, 1972, the day after Bloody Sunday, British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling announces a tribunal of inquiry “into the circumstances of the march and the incidents leading up to the casualties which resulted.”

The official British Army position, backed by Maudling in the House of Commons, is that the paratroopers reacted to gun and nail bomb attacks from suspected Irish Republican Army (IRA) members. Apart from the soldiers, all eyewitnesses — including marchers, local residents, and British and Irish journalists present — maintain that soldiers fired into an unarmed crowd or were aiming at fleeing people and those tending the wounded, whereas the soldiers themselves were not fired upon. No British soldier is wounded by gunfire or reports any injuries, nor are any bullets or nail bombs recovered to back up their claims.

On February 2, 1972, the day that twelve of those killed are buried, there is a general strike in the Republic of Ireland, the biggest such strike in Europe since World War II relative to population. Memorial services are held in Catholic and Protestant churches, as well as synagogues, throughout the Republic. The same day, irate crowds burn down the British embassy in Merrion Square in Dublin. Anglo-Irish relations hit one of their lowest ebbs with the Irish Minister for Foreign Affairs, Patrick Hillery, going to the United Nations Security Council to demand the involvement of a UN peacekeeping force in the Northern Ireland conflict.

In the days following Bloody Sunday, Bernadette Devlin, the independent Irish nationalist Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Ulster, expresses anger at what she perceives as British government attempts to stifle accounts being reported about the shootings. Having witnessed the events firsthand, she is infuriated that the Speaker of the House of Commons, Selwyn Lloyd, consistently denies her the chance to speak in Parliament about the shootings, although parliamentary convention decrees that any MP witnessing an incident under discussion will be granted an opportunity to speak about it in Parliament. Devlin slaps Reginald Maudling and calls him a “murdering hypocrite” when he makes a statement to Parliament that the British Army had fired only in self-defence. She is temporarily suspended from Parliament as a result.

An inquest into the deaths is held in August 1973. The city’s coroner, Hubert O’Neill, a retired British Army major, issues a statement at the completion of the inquest. He declares:

“This Sunday became known as Bloody Sunday and bloody it was. It was quite unnecessary. It strikes me that the Army ran amok that day and shot without thinking what they were doing. They were shooting innocent people. These people may have been taking part in a march that was banned but that does not justify the troops coming in and firing live rounds indiscriminately. I would say without hesitation that it was sheer, unadulterated murder. It was murder.”

(Pictured: Home Secretary Reginald Maudling (left) and Member of Parliament for Mid Ulster Bernadette Devlin)