Trevor wins the 2008 International Nonino Prize in Italy. In 2014, he is bestowed with the title of Saoi within Aosdána. He resides in England from 1954 until his death in 2016, at the age of 88.
Trevor is educated at a succession of schools including St Columba’s College, Dublin (where he is taught by Oisín Kelly) and at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), from which he receives a degree in history. He works as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox following his graduation from TCD, supplementing his income by teaching.
Trevor marries Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrates to England, working as a teacher, a sculptor and then as a copywriter for an advertising agency. During this time he and his wife have their first son. In 1952, he becomes an art teacher at Bilton Grange, a prep school near Rugby. He is commissioned to carve reliefs for several churches, including All Saints’ Church, Braunston, Northamptonshire. In 1956, he moves to Somerset to work as a sculptor and carries out commissions for churches. He stops wood carving in 1960.
Trevor’s first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, is published in 1958 by Hutchinson & Co. of London, but receives little critical success. He later disowns this work, and, according to his obituary in The Irish Times, “refused to have it republished.” It is, in fact, republished in 1982 and in 1989.
In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor is awarded the Hawthornden Prize for The Old Boys. This success encourages him to become a full-time writer.
In 1971, he and his family move from London to Devon in South West England, first to Dunkeswell, then in 1980 to Shobrooke, where he lives until his death. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considers himself to be “Irish in every vein”.
Trevor dies peacefully in his sleep, at the age of 88, at Crediton, Devon, England, on November 20, 2016.
Concannon is educated by the Loreto nuns in Coleraine, County Londonderry. In 1897, she studies modern languages at the Royal University of Ireland on a three-year scholarship. She studies abroad during these years as in 1899, she travels to Germany and studies German in Berlin University accompanied by her friend, Mary Macken. She then travels to France to study French at Sorbonne University. In 1900, she graduates Bachelor of Arts with first class honours and goes on to study Master of Arts in 1902 at the Royal University of Ireland. She is fortunate to being one of the first generation of educated women.
In 1906, Concannon marries Tomás Bán Ó Conceanainn, who she met in 1900 when he arrived home from the United States. They settle down in County Galway where they share the same love for the Irish language and write many Irish texts. They have no children. In Galway, she is a professor at University College Galway where she teaches history, which mainly involves the history of Irish women. In 1909, she is offered a lectureship at University College Dublin, in Italian, but the offer is then withdrawn before she can accept it, so she decides to pursue a writing career.
Concannon produces over twenty books, including works on religion, the history of Ireland and Irish women’s history. Her works are highly impacted by her political and nationalist views. Her analyses of Irish history is based on Catholicism and patriotism. She is also an advocate of Irish language restoration. Her first writings are love poems to her husband. These poems are ”simple, sensuous and passionate.”
Concannon also produces a number of imaginative historical text for children. She uses her married name for her publications and her first book, entitled A Garden of girls, or the famous schoolgirls of former days, is published in 1914. It is about “school life and education of real little girls” Her next well known piece is the Life of St. Columban in 1915, which is a study about the Irish ancient monastic life and a biography of a sixth-century saint.
Two of Concannon’s books, Daughters of Banba (1922) and St. Patrick (1932), receive the Tailteann Medal for Literature, and The Poor Clares in Ireland (1929) wins the National University Prize, a D.Litt. higher doctorate degree for historical research.
Concannon’s most common publication, Women of ‘Ninety Eight, is dedicated to all the dead women and all the living ones who have given their loved ones. This book emerges on the ideologies of Catholicism and patriotism “praising the devotion of Irish nationalist women while emphasising the centrality of women’s spiritual and domestic role in the home to the well-being of the nation.” As this work is written during the time of the Irish War of Independence, she stresses the importance of women help during the rebellion as “they acted as messengers and intelligence officers,” and in some cases, they fought as any men.
Concerning the Land Purchase (Guarantee Fund) Bill 1935, which according to George Cecil Bennett will negatively impact the rural middle class of which he is a representative, Bennett accuses Concannon and her fellow Dublin men of not caring about the people of the country. Concannon goes on to vote that the Dáil should disagree with the Seanad Éireann-proposed bill with 71 others.
Though Concannon is a TD as a university representative, she votes with her party to remove university representation from the Dáil, leading one TD to say, “I am very much surprised to see such a distinguished scholar and such a great contributor to Irish literature as Deputy Mrs. Concannon voting for the disfranchisement of the University that she has so well and so ably represented.”
Concannon speaks on behalf of Irish women in the Dáil in 1936. She speaks on how Irish women play a fundamental role in Ireland’s agricultural economy and therefore more money should be put toward educating these women.
Concannon is one of the minority voices against the role appointed to women in Éamon de Valera‘s constitution. She does not contest the Dáil election of 1937.
After the adoption of the Constitution of Ireland in 1937, the National University of Ireland constituency is reconstituted in the new Seanad Éireann. The first election takes place in 1938, and Concannon is elected. She is a popular figure and is re-elected each election in the Seanad until she dies in office on February 27, 1952.
In the 19th century, association football outside of Ulster is largely confined to Dublin and a few provincial towns. The British Army teams play a role in the spread of the game to these areas, especially in Munster, as local clubs are initially reliant on them to form opposition teams, leading to the nickname “the garrison game.” Association football is played in relatively few Catholic schools as middle-class schools favour rugby union while others favour Gaelic games. The Irish Football Association (IFA) had been founded in 1880 in Belfast as the football governing body for the whole of Ireland, which was then a part of the United Kingdom and considered a Home Nation. The Leinster Football Association was an affiliate, founded in 1892 to foster the game in Leinster, outside of the Ulster heartlands. This was followed by the establishment of the Munster Football Association in 1901.
By 1913, the Leinster FA becomes the largest divisional association within the IFA, displacing the North East Ulster Football Association, yet all but two clubs in the 1913–14 Irish League are based in Ulster. While this largely reflects the balance of footballing strength within Ireland, southern members feel the IFA is doing little to promote the game outside of the professional clubs in its northern province. In the other provinces, association football is also under pressure from the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA), which has banned members from playing or watching the sport as it is considered a “foreign” game. Furthermore, there is a growing feeling in Dublin of alleged Belfast bias when it comes to hosting matches and player selection for internationals. This view is not helped by the composition of the IFA’s sub-committees, with over half of the membership consisting of delegates hailing from the North-East, and the International Committee, who chooses the national team, containing just one member from Leinster. The Belfast members are mainly unionist, while the Dublin members are largely nationalist. World War I increases the gulf between the northern teams and the clubs in the south as the Irish League is suspended and replaced by regional leagues, foreshadowing the ultimate split. Tensions are then exacerbated by the Irish War of Independence of 1919–21, which disrupts contact between northern and southern clubs further and prevents resumption of the Irish League. The security situation prompts the IFA to order the March 1920-21 Irish Cup semi-final replay between Glenavon and Shelbourne to be replayed in Belfast, rather than in Dublin as convention dictates. This proves to be the final straw and the Leinster FA confirms their decision to disaffiliate from the IFA at a meeting on June 8, 1921.
The Football Association of Ireland (FAI) is formed in Dublin on September 2, 1921, by the Leinster FA. The Free State League (originally the Football League of Ireland and now the League of Ireland) is founded in June of that year when the Leinster FA withdraws from the IFA. This is the climax of a series of disputes about the alleged Belfast bias of the IFA. Both bodies initially claim to represent the entire island. The split between Southern Ireland (which becomes the Irish Free State in December 1922) and Northern Ireland (which comes into existence as a jurisdiction in 1921) does not produce a split in the governing bodies of other sports, such as the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU). The Munster Football Association, originally dominated by British Army regiments, falls into abeyance on the outbreak of World War I, and is re-established in 1922 with the help of the FAI, to which it affiliates. The Falls League, based in the Falls Road of nationalist West Belfast, affiliates to the FAI, and from there Alton United wins the FAI Cup in 1923. However, when the FAI applies to join FIFA in 1923, it is admitted as the Football Association of the Irish Free State (FAIFS) based on a 26-county jurisdiction. (This jurisdiction remains, although Derry City, from Northern Ireland, are given an exemption, by agreement of FIFA and the IFA, to join the League of Ireland in 1985.) Attempts at reconciliation followed. At a 1923 meeting, the IFA rejects an FAIFS proposal for it to be an autonomous subsidiary of the FAIFS. A 1924 meeting in Liverpool, brokered by the English FA, almost reaches agreement on a federated solution, but the IFA insists on providing the chairman of the International team selection committee. A 1932 meeting agrees on sharing this role, but founders when the FAIFS demands one of the IFA’s two places on the International Football Association Board (IFAB). Further efforts to reach agreement are made through a series of conferences between the IFA and FAI from 1973 to 1980 during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
The IFA does not feel obliged to refrain from selecting Free State players for its international team. The name Football Association of Ireland is readopted by the FAIFS in 1936, in anticipation of the change of the state’s name in the pending Constitution of Ireland, and the FAI begins to select players from Northern Ireland based on the Constitution’s claim to sovereignty there. A number of players play for both the FAI “Ireland” (against FIFA members from mainland Europe) and the IFA “Ireland” (in the British Home Championship, whose members had withdrawn from FIFA in 1920). Shortly after the IFA rejoins FIFA in 1946, the FAI stops selecting Northern players. The IFA stops selecting southern players after the FAI complains to FIFA in 1950.
From the late 1960s, association football begins to achieve more widespread popularity. Donogh O’Malley, TD and then Minister for Education, begins a new programme of state-funded schools in 1966, many with association football pitches and teams. The Gaelic Athletic Association’s ban on members playing “foreign” games is lifted in 1971. RTÉ television, founded in 1962, and British television (available nearly everywhere on cable or microwave relay from the 1970s), broadcast association football regularly. Above all, the increasing success of the international side from the late 1980s gives increased television exposure, more fans, and more funds to the FAI.
However, increased media exposure also highlights some inadequacies of its hitherto largely amateur organisation. In January 1999, the FAI announces a planned national association football stadium, to be called Eircom Park after primary sponsors Eircom. This is to be a 45,000-seat stadium in City West, modeled on the GelreDome in Arnhem. It gradually becomes apparent that the initial forecasts of cost and revenue have been very optimistic. FAI and public support for the project is also undermined by the announcement of the Stadium Ireland in Abbotstown, which would have 65,000 seats and be available free to the FAI, being funded by the state. The Eircom Park project is finally abandoned in March 2001, amid much rancour within the FAI.
During preparation for the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the captain of the senior football team, Roy Keane, leaves the training camp and returns to his home. He is critical of many aspects of the organisation and preparation of the team for the upcoming games, and public opinion in Ireland is divided. As a result of the incident, the FAI commissions a report from consultants Genesis into its World Cup preparations. The “Genesis Report” makes a number of damning criticisms regarding corruption and cronyism within the association, but is largely ignored. The complete report is never published for legal reasons. The FAI subsequently produces its own report of itself titled “Genesis II” and implements a number of its recommendations.
In 2002, the FAI announces a deal with British Sky Broadcasting to sell broadcasting rights to Ireland’s international matches, as well as domestic association football, to be televised on its satellite subscription service. The general public feels it should be on RTÉ, the free-to-air terrestrial service, in spite of their offering much lower rates. Faced with the prospect of the government legislating to prevent any deal, the FAI agrees to accept an improved, but still lower, offer from RTÉ.
Following the respectable performance of the national team in the 2002 FIFA World Cup, the team’s fortunes decline under the management of Mick McCarthy, Brian Kerr and Steve Staunton.
In September 2006, Lars-Christer Olsson, CEO of UEFA, is quoted as anticipating that Lansdowne Road in Dublin (actually owned by the Irish Rugby Football Union) will stage the UEFA Cup Final in 2010, and that the FAI and the IFA will co-host the 2011 UEFA European Under-21 Championship. The 2010 final is ultimately awarded to Hamburg, but in January 2009, UEFA nameS Lansdowne Road as the host stadium for the renamed 2011 UEFA Europa League Final. In August 2010, an FAI spokesman says they will have repaid all of their stadium debt of €46 million within 10 years despite the disastrous sale of 10-year tickets for premium seats at the Aviva Stadium.
In November 2007, the FAI moves to new headquarters at the National Sports Campus in Abbotstown. Its headquarters since the 1930s had been a Georgian terraced house at 80 Merrion Square, which is sold for a sum variously reported as “in excess of €6m” and “almost €9m.”
James NesbittMBE, a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) Detective Chief Inspector who is best known for heading the Murder Squad team investigating the notorious Shankill Butchers‘ killings in the mid-1970s, dies on August 27, 2014, following a brief illness.
Nesbitt is born on September 29, 1934, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the son of James, an electrician, and Ellen. He is brought up in the Church of Ireland religion and lives with his parents and elder sister, Maureen, in a terraced house in Cavehill Road, North Belfast, which is considered to be a middle class area at the time. Having first attended the Model Primary School in Ballysillan Road, in 1946 he moves on to Belfast Technical High School where he excels as a pupil. From an early age, he is fascinated by detective stories and dreams about becoming a detective himself.
As a child, Nesbitt avidly reads about all the celebrated murder trials in the newspapers. At the age of 16, he opts to leave school and goes to work as a sales representative for a linen company where he remains for seven years.
At the age of 23, Nesbitt seeks a more exciting career and realises his childhood dream by joining the Royal Ulster Constabulary as a uniformed constable. He applies at the York Road station in Belfast and passes his entry exams. His first duty station is at Swatragh, County Londonderry. During this period, the Irish Republican Army‘s Border Campaign is being waged. He earns two commendations during the twelve months he spends at the Swatragh station, having fought off two separate IRA gun attacks which had seen an Ulster Special Constabulary man shot. In 1958, he is transferred to the Coleraine RUC station where his superiors grant him the opportunity to assist in detective work. Three years later he is promoted to the rank of detective.
Nesbitt marries Marion Wilson in 1967 and begins to raise a family. By 1971 he is back in his native Belfast and holds the rank of Detective Sergeant. He enters the RUC’s Criminal Investigation Department (CID) section and is based at Musgrave Street station. Many members of the RUC find themselves targeted by both republican and loyalistparamilitaries as the conflict known as The Troubles grows in intensity during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In September 1973, Nesbitt is promoted to Detective Inspector and moves to head up the RUC’s C or “Charlie” Division based in Tennent Street, off the Shankill Road, the heartland of loyalism and home of many loyalist paramilitaries. C Division covers not only the Shankill but also the republican Ardoyne and “The Bone” areas. Although he encounters considerable suspicion from his subordinates when he arrives at Tennent Street, he manages to eventually create much camaraderie within the ranks of those under his command when before there had been rivalry and discord. C Division loses a total of twelve men as a result of IRA attacks. During his tenure as Detective Chief Inspector at Tennent Street, he and his team investigate a total of 311 killings and solve around 250 of the cases.
By 1975, Nesbitt is encountering death and serious injury on a daily basis as the violence in Northern Ireland shows no signs of abating. However, toward the end of the year, he is faced with the first of a series of brutal killings that add a new dimension to the relentless tit-for-tat killings between Catholics and Protestants that has already made 1975 “one of the bloodiest years of the conflict.”
The Shankill Butchers are an Ulster loyalist paramilitary gang, many of whom are members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), that is active between 1975 and 1982 in Belfast. It is based in the Shankill area and is responsible for the deaths of at least 23 people, most of whom are killed in sectarian attacks.
The gang kidnaps, tortures and murders random civilians suspected of being Catholics. Each is beaten ferociously and has their throat slashed with a butcher knife. Some are also tortured and attacked with a hatchet. The gang also kills six Ulster Protestants over personal disputes and two other Protestants mistaken for Catholics.
Most of the gang are eventually caught by Nesbitt and his Murder Squad and, in February 1979, receive the longest combined prison sentences in United Kingdom legal history.
In 1991, after Channel 4 broadcasts a documentary claiming that the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee had been reorganised as an alliance between loyalist paramilitaries, senior RUC members and leader figures in Northern Irish business and finance, Nesbitt and Detective Inspector Chris Webster are appointed by Chief Constable Hugh Annesley to head up an internal inquiry into the collusion allegations. The investigation delivers its verdict in February 1993 and exonerates all those named as Committee members who did not have previous terrorist convictions arguing that they are “respectable members of the community” and in some cases “the aristocracy of the country.”
Prior to his retirement, Nesbitt has received a total of 67 commendations, which is the highest number ever given to a policeman in the history of the United Kingdom. In 1980, he is awarded the MBE “in recognition of his courage and success in combating terrorism.”
Nesbitt dies on August 27, 2014, after a brief illness.
McDonald is born into a middle-class family in south Dublin. Her father Patrick McDonald, a builder and surveyor, and her mother Joan, separate when she is nine years old, and she stays with her mother in Rathgar. She has three siblings, one older and two younger. Her great-uncle, James O’Connor, was a member of the Anti-Treaty IRA and was executed at the Curragh Camp during the Irish Civil War.
She works as a researcher for the Institute of European Affairs, a consultant for the Irish Productivity Centre, a human resources consultancy that is jointly operated by Ibec and Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), and a trainer in the Partnership Unit of the Educational and Training Services Trust.
McDonald starts her political career by first joining Fianna Fáil in 1998 but leaves the party after a year due to core policy differences, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland and social justice. She quickly realises that Sinn Féin is a more appropriate party for her Republican views after meeting Sinn Féin members through the Irish National Congress.
She first runs for office at the 2002 Irish general election when she unsuccessfully contests the Dublin West constituency for Sinn Féin, polling 8.02% of first preference votes.
In 2004, McDonald becomes Sinn Féin’s first Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in Ireland, when she is elected at the 2004 European Parliament election in Ireland for the Dublin constituency, receiving over 60,000 first preference votes. She serves until 2009 and is a prominent member of the Employment and Social Affairs committee and Civil Liberties committee.
McDonald contests the Dublin Central constituency again at the 2011 Irish general election, this time picking up 13.1% of first preference votes. She is successful in taking the last seat in the constituency. Following the election, she becomes Sinn Féin’s Spokesperson for Public Expenditure and Reform and is a member of the Public Accounts Committee from then until 2017.
After her re-election to the Dáil at the 2016 Irish general election, in which she tops the poll in Dublin Central, she becomes Sinn Féin’s All-Ireland Spokesperson for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, which she holds until being elected president of Sinn Féin in 2018.
At a Sinn Féin party conference on November 18, 2017, Gerry Adams is re-elected party leader but announces that he will ask party leadership to call for a special Ard Fheis to be held within three months to choose a new president, and that he will not stand for re-election as TD for the Louth constituency in the next election.
At the close of nominations to succeed Adams on January 20, 2018, McDonald is announced as the president-elect of Sinn Féin, as she is the sole nominee to enter the race. She is confirmed as president at a special Ard Fheis on February 10, 2018, in Dublin.
McDonald is nominated as Taoiseach on February 20, 2020, but is defeated 45 to 84. On June 26, 2020, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party form a coalition government, leaving Sinn Féin as the largest opposition party, and McDonald as Leader of the Opposition. She dismisses the coalition agreement as a “marriage of convenience,” and accuses Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of conspiring to exclude Sinn Féin from government.
At the 2024 Irish general election, McDonald is re-elected to the Dáil topping the poll in Dublin Central with Sinn Féin increasing their seat share by two seats, remaining the second largest party by representation in the Dáil and attaining 19% of the first preference votes, a fall of 5.5% from 2020 and fall behind Fianna Fáil by 2.9% and Fine Gael by 1.8%.
McDonald is again nominated as Taoiseach on December 18, 2024, but is defeated 44 to 110.
McDonald’s husband, Martin Lanigan, works as a gas control superintendent for the emergency dispatch division of Gas Networks Ireland, a state infrastructure provider. They have two children and live in Cabra, Dublin.
Fitzgerald is born into an Irish Catholicmiddle-class family on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. His mother, Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, is of Irish descent and his father, Edward Fitzgerald, has Irish and English ancestry. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he publishes four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieves temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, he receives critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
Fitzgerald is raised primarily in New York. He attends Princeton University but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he drops out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romances Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belongs to Montgomery‘s exclusive country-club set. Although she rejects Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, she agrees to marry him after he publishes the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel becomes a cultural sensation and cements his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propels him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he writes numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s: The National Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, he frequents Europe, where he befriends modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), receives generally favorable reviews but is a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel.” Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, he completes his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turns to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While living in Hollywood, he cohabits with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attains sobriety only to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completes and publishes an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald’s death.
At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denies the family’s request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. He is buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in 1948, she is originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter, Scottie, successfully petitions to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents’ remains are moved to the family plot in St. Mary’s Cemetery.
Mangan is born on May 1, 1803, in Dublin. His poetry fits into a variety of literary traditions. Most obviously, and frequently, his work is read alongside such nationalist political authors as John Mitchel, as they appear in The Nation, The Vindicator and the United Irishman newspapers or as a manifestation of the 19th-century Irish Cultural Revival. He is also frequently read as a Romantic poet.
Mangan is the son of James Mangan, a former hedge school teacher and native of Shanagolden, County Limerick, and Catherine Smith from Kiltale, County Meath. Following his marriage to Smith, James Mangan takes over a grocery business in Dublin owned by the Smith family, eventually becoming bankrupt as a result. Mangan describes his father as having “a princely soul but no prudence,” and attributes his family’s bankruptcy to his father’s suspect business speculations and tendency to throw expensive parties. Thanks to poor record keeping, inconsistent biographies, and his own semi-fictional and sensationalized autobiographical accounts, his early years are the subject of much speculation. However, despite the popular image of him as a long-suffering, poor poet, there is reason to believe that his early years are spent in middle class comfort.
Mangan is educated at a Jesuit school where he learns Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. He attends three schools before the age of fifteen. Obliged to find a job in order to support his family, he then becomes a lawyer’s clerk, and is later an employee of the Ordnance Survey and an assistant in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
Mangan’s first verses are published in 1818. From 1820 he adopts the middle name Clarence. In 1830 he begins producing translations – generally free interpretations rather than strict transliterations – from German, a language he had taught himself. Of interest are his translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. From 1834 his contributions begin appearing in the Dublin University Magazine. In 1840 he begins producing translations from Turkish, Persian, Arabic and Irish. He is also known for literary hoaxes as some of his “translations” are in fact works of his own, like Twenty Golden Years Ago, attributed to a certain Selber.
Mangan is friends with the patriotic journalists Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, who ultimately writes his biography. His poems are published in their newspaper The Nation.
Although Mangan’s early poetry is often apolitical, after the Great Famine he begins writing patriotic poems, including influential works such as Dark Rosaleen, a translation of “Róisín Dubh,” and A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century.
Mangan’s best known poems include Dark Rosaleen, Siberia, Nameless One, A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century, The Funerals, To the Ruins of Donegal Castle, Pleasant Prospects for the Land-eaters and Woman of Three Cows. He writes a brief autobiography, on the advice of his friend Charles Patrick Meehan, which ends mid-sentence. This is apparently written in the last months of his life, since he mentions his narrative poem of the Italian Gasparo Bandollo, which is published in the Dublin University Magazine in May 1849.
Mangan is a lonely and often difficult man who suffers from mood swings, depression and irrational fears, and becomes a heavy drinker and opium user. His appearance grows eccentric, and he is described by the artist WF Wakeman as frequently wearing “a huge pair of green spectacles,” padded shirts to hide his malnourished figure and a hat which “resembled those which broomstick-riding witches are usually represented with.” On June 20, 1849, weakened by poverty, alcoholism and malnutrition, he succumbs to cholera at the age of 46. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
(Pictured: Memorial bust of James Mangan in St. Stephen’s Green, sculpted by Oliver Sheppard)
James Clarence Mangan, Irish poet, is born on May 1, 1803, in Dublin. His poetry fits into a variety of literary traditions. Most obviously, and frequently, his work is read alongside such nationalist political authors as John Mitchel, as they appear in The Nation, The Vindicator and the United Irishman newspapers or as a manifestation of the 19th-century Irish Cultural Revival. He is also frequently read as a Romantic poet.
Mangan is the son of James Mangan, a former hedge school teacher and native of Shanagolden, County Limerick, and Catherine Smith from Kiltale, County Meath. Following his marriage to Smith, James Mangan takes over a grocery business in Dublin owned by the Smith family, eventually becoming bankrupt as a result. Mangan describes his father as having “a princely soul but no prudence,” and attributes his family’s bankruptcy to his father’s suspect business speculations and tendency to throw expensive parties. Thanks to poor record keeping, inconsistent biographies, and his own semi-fictional and sensationalized autobiographical accounts, his early years are the subject of much speculation. However, despite the popular image of him as a long-suffering, poor poet, there is reason to believe that his early years are spent in middle class comfort.
Mangan is educated at a Jesuit school where he learns Latin, Spanish, French, and Italian. He attends three schools before the age of fifteen. Obliged to find a job in order to support his family, he then becomes a lawyer’s clerk, and is later an employee of the Ordnance Survey and an assistant in the library of Trinity College, Dublin.
Mangan’s first verses are published in 1818. From 1820 he adopts the middle name Clarence. In 1830 he begins producing translations – generally free interpretations rather than strict transliterations – from German, a language he had taught himself. Of interest are his translations of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. From 1834 his contributions begin appearing in the Dublin University Magazine. In 1840 he begins producing translations from Turkish, Persian, Arabic and Irish. He is also known for literary hoaxes as some of his “translations” are in fact works of his own, like Twenty Golden Years Ago, attributed to a certain Selber.
Mangan is friends with the patriotic journalists Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, who ultimately writes his biography. His poems are published in their newspaper The Nation.
Although Mangan’s early poetry is often apolitical, after the Great Famine he begins writing patriotic poems, including influential works such as Dark Rosaleen, a translation of “Róisín Dubh,” and A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century.
Mangan’s best known poems include Dark Rosaleen, Siberia, Nameless One, A Vision of Connaught in the Thirteenth Century, The Funerals, To the Ruins of Donegal Castle, Pleasant Prospects for the Land-eaters and Woman of Three Cows. He writes a brief autobiography, on the advice of his friend Charles Patrick Meehan, which ends mid-sentence. This is apparently written in the last months of his life, since he mentions his narrative poem of the Italian Gasparo Bandollo, which is published in the Dublin University Magazine in May 1849.
Mangan is a lonely and often difficult man who suffers from mood swings, depression and irrational fears, and becomes a heavy drinker and opium user. His appearance grows eccentric, and he is described by the artist WF Wakeman as frequently wearing “a huge pair of green spectacles,” padded shirts to hide his malnourished figure and a hat which “resembled those which broomstick-riding witches are usually represented with.” On June 20, 1849, weakened by poverty, alcoholism and malnutrition, he succumbs to cholera at the age of 46. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
(Pictured: Memorial bust of James Mangan in St. Stephen’s Green, sculpted by Oliver Sheppard)
seamus dubhghaill 