As part of the 2008 Cork Midsummer Festival, 1,100 volunteers gather on the grounds of Blarney Castle in the early hours of Tuesday, June 17, 2008, and strip naked to have their picture taken at the famous location.
The occasion is the first shoot in Ireland by the American photographic artist Spencer Tunick, who has already made quite a name for himself shooting large groups of naked people in public spaces in New York City, Montreal, London and Amsterdam.
Like many of Tunick’s projects, the event in Cork comes about by invitation. “It was Mary McCarthy, the art curator at Dublin Docklands, who contacted me first,” says Tunick, via Zoom from his office in New York, of the organiser who is director of the Crawford Art Gallery in Cork. “Mary thought to make it a two-city project, in Cork and Dublin, and brought Cork Midsummer Festival on board. People think I can choose where I want to work, but it’s not as if I can get up and say, ‘hmm, I want to photograph 1,000 people in a volcanic crater in Hawaii.’ In reality, I need a team on the other side, helping me. And it was Mary who established that team in Ireland.”
McCarthy’s crew works with Tunick on selecting locations for his shoots. Blarney Castle appeals to Tunick. “When you think of a castle, you think of swords, you think of dreams, you think of battle and war,” he says. “But you might also think of the rose. I tried to combine a lot of different ideas or fantasies about the castle and connect them to the body. But there were also a lot of grounds around the castle, so I could have different set-ups and positions to shoot in.”
When Cork Midsummer Festival puts out a call for volunteers, it is inundated with applications. Those chosen are of all ages, and from all walks of life. “I think sometimes people associate my live works with young people. But there’s often a lot of people over 50, and into their 80s, at this great unifying event that touches on the idea of group photo gatherings from the 1920s. When you see a big haul of people lined up, undressed of course, it combines group portraiture with abstraction and the naked body.”
At Blarney Castle, beginning around 5:30 a.m., he shoots the crowd in a variety of poses on the castle lawns, facing toward and away from the camera, then lying on their backs as they each held a single rose aloft (pictured above), red for the women and white for the men. He then photographs a small number on their knees in the river that runs through the grounds, and a smaller number again kissing the Blarney Stone. Some participants see the photo shoot as an opportunity to challenge the general disapproval of nakedness that prevails in the Ireland of their youth. Others see it as a way to make peace with their body image.
Later that morning, Tunick photographs about 50 naked volunteers covered in foam at White Street Carpark in Cork city centre. “As a kid, I was always fascinated by the bubble scene in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, the film,” says Tunick. “So, I wanted, in a whimsical and surreal way, to amplify my memories of that. But I also wanted to work with the history of the area, so I infused Murphy’s beer into four bubble machines and created a snow globe effect with the nudes. That was beautiful.”
Looking back on the photographs, one is struck by how most of the bodies are white. If it is true that Cork has become far more ethnically diverse city since that day in 2008, one must also wonder if Tunick’s call for volunteers appealed to a certain demographic. “I always ask the organisers to do community outreach in different areas, so we can get more colour and ethnicities into the work,” he says. “But sometimes it doesn’t really resonate, and sometimes the population is not there, you know. And often, where that population exists, it might not be connected to the body in contemporary art. But I’ve always tried, and now I insist that the organisers make an extra effort.”
Tunick’s shoots at Blarney Castle and White Street attract lavish coverage in the media, a reflection perhaps on how they coincide with a change in the public perception of nudity. The project would almost certainly have caused an uproar even twenty years previously. Participants describe a sense of joy and liberation. “This was definitely pre-Instagram, right? And now when we’re on Instagram, we think the whole world is accepting of nudity in public, but back then, there was not that same outlet for my images. But there was that documentation by the press, and through that, I think people realised that something had happened that went against the grain in a positive way.”
Four days later, Tunick photographs 2,500 naked volunteers on the South Wall in Dublin. Again, the event attracts headlines, but already, it seems, the culture has moved on, and there is not quite that same element of surprise and delight as there had been in Cork.
Tunick has done many projects since. Some of his favourites include those in Kingston upon Hull in 2016 and on the Dead Sea in 2011 and again in 2021. “I like working with props. In Cork, I used roses and beer foam. But now I like working with body paint. In Hull, we covered around 4,000 people in four shades of blue. The blues were those of the water I saw in a number of paintings in the Maritime Museum in the city. I asked Pantone to replicate the colours, and those were the blues we used. Not many people know that.”
“My projects in the Dead Sea were partly about showing how the salt in the water could elevate the body. That created a very interesting, otherworldly effect in the photographs. But they also aimed to raise awareness of how the Dead Sea is disappearing because of irrigation to serve the need for drinking water by adjoining countries such as Israel and Jordan. It’s a very difficult situation.”
Many photographers find their work curtailed by pandemic restrictions of the early 2020s. Tunick too is forced to postpone photographing groups of people on location, but he does find a way to go on creating. “An art collective called Studio 333 in Mexico asked me if I wanted to do group works on video chats, and offered to manage it technically. So we started making group works with people from all walks of life, all around the world. We had someone in Saudi Arabia posing with someone in Israel. We had people in Australia, people in Europe, people all over the world. I think the only place we weren’t able to work with was Antarctica, but who knows? Maybe that’s in the future.” The resulting images are published online, on Tunick and Studio 333’s websites and social media accounts, under the collective title ”Stay Apart Together.”
As for the future, Tunick would love to work in Ireland again, he says. “It’s always been my dream to do a work in Northern Ireland, maybe with 100 or 200 people on the Giant’s Causeway? I can’t have too many, because then you wouldn’t see the rocks. Northern Ireland, the Giant’s Causeway… that project’s been on my mind for a long time, so hopefully some museum or curator will invite me to do it.”
(From: “Cork in 50 Artworks, No 49: Spencer Tunick’s nude installation at Blarney Castle” by Marc O’Sullivan, Irish Examiner, http://www.irishexaminer.com, April 11, 2022 | Pictured: Blarney Castle with the crowd assembled by Spencer Tunick)
Antisell is born in Dublin on January 16, 1817, the youngest son of Thomas Christopher Antisell KC (home circuit) and Margaret (née) Daly. He attends the Dublin School of Medicine, the Apothecaries’ Hall of Ireland, and the Royal College of Surgeons of England in London, graduating from the latter with an MD in November 1839. He studies chemistry in Paris and Berlin in 1844. Upon his return to Dublin in 1845, he secures a lectureship in botany at the Peter St. School of Medicine, teaching there until 1848. After this, he opens a clinic at his residence of 25 Richmond Street, Portobello. He works as an assistant to Robert Kane, and between 1845 and 1847, produces textbooks on Irish geology and chemistry. He becomes a member of the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in 1844.
Antisell is a member of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, and joins the Irish Confederation in 1847. With a group of five friends in the republican movement, including Richard D’Alton Williams and Kevin O’Doherty, he sets up a short-lived revolutionary newspaper, The Irish Tribune, in June 1848 to take the place of the suppressed United Irishman, founded by John Mitchel. The paper is closed down on the grounds of sedition in July 1848 after just five issues. Following the closure of the paper, he emigrates to the United States, arriving in New York City on November 22, 1848. Some sources claim this departure is to evade arrest or charges relating to sedition. Although he is no longer politically active following his departure from Ireland, he is a close friend of John Mitchel and his family. He marries his first wife, Eliza Ann Nowlan, in 1841. She dies shortly after their arrival in the United States.
Antisell sets up and operates a clinic and medical laboratory in New York City from 1848 to 1854, while also lecturing in chemistry in a number of medical colleges in Massachusetts and Vermont. He takes up a post as expedition geologist and botanist on state surveys in southern Arizona, New Mexico, and California, working primarily with Lt. John Parke investigating the proposed routes for the Southern Pacific Railroad from 1854 to 1856. His work on the geology of the region adds to greater understanding of the science in America. In 1856, he is employed as chief examiner in the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, D.C., with responsibility for chemical inventions. This work allows him to also lecture in chemistry at Georgetown University, eventually covering other subjects such as toxicology, military surgery, physiology, hygiene, and pathology, over the periods 1858 to 1869, and 1880 to 1882.
Breaking with Mitchel who, as defender of slavery, supports the southern secessionist cause, Antisell serves in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He is a brigade surgeon in the United States Volunteers from 1861, and later the medical director of the 12th army corps. He concludes his service as surgeon-in-charge of Harewood Hospital, Washington, D.C., in October 1865, being granted a brevet commission as colonel. From 1866 to 1871, he is chief chemist in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He marries his second wife, Marion Stuart Forsyth from Detroit, in 1854. They go on to have twelve children, six daughters and six sons.
Antisell is one of several scientists that are hired in 1871 as foreign government advisors to work in Hokkaido in northern Japan under Horace Capron. He is selected for his strong background in chemistry coupled with geology. However, he disagrees with Capron on whether or not Hokkaido’s severe winter climate will hinder development, and he also comes into conflict with the Japanese government over his salary. As a result, Hokkaido Colonisation Office hires another geologist, and Antisell’s report is excluded in the 1875 compilation of official reports. He serves his remaining time in Japan as a chemist for the Ministry of Finance, where he develops inks used for the printing of paper currency. For his services, he is awarded the Order of the Rising Sun by Emperor Meiji before his departure in 1876.
Upon returning to the United States, Antisell is conferred with a PhD in 1876 by Georgetown University, and once again takes up duties at the Patent Office, remaining there until his retirement. He publishes widely in numerous journals on topics such as agricultural chemistry, botany, oceanography, city sanitation, and animal disease, but he does not publish a significant treatise.
Antisell dies in Washington, D.C., on June 14, 1893, and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery.
John Dudley Digges, Irish stage actor, director, and producer as well as a film actor, is born in Ranelagh, Dublin, on June 9, 1879. Although he gains his initial theatre training and acting experience in Ireland, the vast majority of his career is spent in the United States, where over the span of 43 years he works in hundreds of stage productions and performs in over 50 films.
Digges is the child of James Digges and Catherine Forsythe. He becomes acquainted with theatre directors William and Frank Fay and takes an interest in acting. He joins W. G. Fay’s Irish National Dramatic Company, along with others including Máire Nic Shiubhlaigh, James H. Cousins, Frederick Ryan and Maire Quinn (who becomes his wife). Their first production, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, with Maud Gonne in the lead role, and Déirdre, is on April 2, 1902. The company, which has no funds to speak of, acquires a couple of bare rooms at 34 Lower Camden Street, which with the help of friends from Irish-revival societies they turn into a small theatre. However, this proves too small for the plays they are planning to stage. They rehearse at the Coffee Palace in Westmoreland Street and also use the Molesworth Hall for productions.
In 1903, the playwrights and most of the actors and staff from these productions go on to form the Irish National Theatre Society, which has its registered offices in Camden Street. The society founds the Abbey Theatre.
Digges goes to the United States with a group of fellow-actors in 1904, and becomes successful as both actor and producer. He is stage manager for a time to both Charles Frohman and George Arliss, and by the 1920s he has become a notable performer on Broadway. One of his best-known roles there is as Ficsur in the original 1921 production of Ferenc Molnár‘s Liliom (later adapted into the musical Carousel by Rodgers and Hammerstein). In 1924, in Woodstock, New York, he founds the Maverick Theater with the assistance of Hervey White, who had established the Maverick Arts Colony. He is also artistic director of a company that includes Helen Hayes and Edward G. Robinson.
Digges expands his career into films by 1929, and over nearly two decades he performs in more than 50 films, including the original pre-Hays Code adaptation of The Maltese Falcon (1931). He Is cast in that feature as Casper Gutman, the character later portrayed by Sydney Greenstreet in the 1941 version. In The Invisible Man (1933) he plays the Chief Detective who plots to capture the title character, opposite the unseen Claude Rains. He plays the role of the Heavenly Examiner in both the original Broadway production and the 1930 screen version of Sutton Vane‘s Outward Bound. He also works as a director on Broadway.
Digges marries only once, to Irish actress Maire Quinn. The couple wed on August 27, 1907, in New York City and remain together until Maire’s death in August 1947. On October 24, 1947, just two months after his wife’s death, he dies of a stroke in his Manhattan apartment at 1 West 64th Street. He is survived by three siblings, all living in Ireland: a sister, Mrs. Mai Gannen, and two brothers, James and Ernst. Following a requiem mass at Blessed Sacrament Roman Catholic Church on October 28, he is buried next to his wife at Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Hawthorne, New York.
(Pictured: Digges as Boss Mangan in the 1920 Broadway production Heartbreak House, which he also directs)
Pilkington is born to John Pilkington and Margaret Mary Pilkington (née Torsney), the second of twelve children born to the couple. Only nine of his siblings survive into adulthood. He receives his education at the local Marist Brothers convent school and the Day Trades Preparatory School. Later he is a student at the Department of Agriculture Forestry College in County Wicklow. When the Irish War of Independence begins, the college is closed and he is forced to return to Sligo. He then gains employment with Wehrly Brothers Ltd., a jewelry and watchmaking store in Sligo.
Several notable incidents occur in Pilkington’s military career. On October 25, 1920, at Moneygold, eight miles from Sligo (between Grange and Cliffoney), IRA men led by him ambush a nine-man Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) patrol, killing four (Sergeant Patrick Perry, Constables Patrick Keown, Patrick Laffey, Patrick Lynch) and wounding two others (Constables Clarke and O’Rourke). In January 1922, he makes clear his opposition to the IRAs General Headquarters (GHQ) support for the Anglo-Irish Treaty. “We intend to cut away from this headquarters, all of you (pointing to the staff and officers of the GHQ) want to build up a Free State Army so you can march in step into the British Empire. Do it openly. We stand by the Republic.” On April 6, 1922, a meeting addressed by Arthur Griffith in Sligo, is proclaimed illegal by Pilkington, who is the local Anti-Treaty IRA divisional commander. His troops take over a number of buildings in the town. Seán Mac Eoin brings Provisional Government troops from Athlone and on the day of the meeting, he is joined by further troops led by J. J. “Ginger” O’Connell. A tense situation ensues but, at the last minute, Pilkington backs down and the meeting goes ahead. On September 4, 1922, an Anti-Treaty IRA unit under Pilkington takes the Dromhaire barracks in County Sligo after the Free State garrison surrenders.
On August 27, 1923, Pilkington runs unsuccessfully in the general election for the 4th Dáil as a Republican candidate, polling 2,089 first preference votes.
Pilkington is a prominent member of the Anti-Treaty IRA for many years, but his most important role as part of the Anti-Treaty IRA comes on April 20, 1923. The Executive of the Anti-Treaty IRA meets in Poulacappal (four miles southwest of Callan and three miles from Mullinahone). Present in addition to Pilkington (who is replacing Liam Lynch) are Frank Aiken, Sean Hyde, Sean Dowling, Bill Quirke, Tom Barry, Tom Ruane (replacing Michael Kilroy), Tom Sullivan (replacing Sean Lehane), Sean McSwiney, Tom Crofts, P. J. Ruttledge and Sean O’Meara (substitute for Séumas Robinson). Frank Aiken is elected Chief-of-Staff and an Army Council of Aiken, Pilkington and Barry is appointed. Aiken proposes that peace should be made with the Pro-Treaty Government on the basis that “the sovereignty of the Irish Nation and the integrity of its territory is inalienable.” This is passed by nine votes to two.
Pilkington becomes a Catholic priest after his foray into politics and due to the disillusionment of the Irish War of Independence. He joins the Redemptorist Order and becomes known as Father William Pilkington CSsR. He serves as a priest in the Archdiocese of Cape Town, South Africa, priest of Monmouthshire, Wales, and retires to Bishop Eton Monastery, Liverpool.
In 1954, Pilkington is guest of honour at a dinner sponsored by Clan na Gael and the IRA Veterans of America in New York City where he says he is returning to the mission fields of Africa, but he remains faithful to the All Ireland Republic. He dies at Bishop Eton Monastery on March 26, 1977, and is buried in Liverpool.
Boland is enrolled in the IRB along with his younger brothers Harry in 1904, following in the footsteps of his father. He and his brothers Harry and Ned subsequently join the Irish Volunteers when that organisation is established in 1913, serving in the same company as Arthur Griffith. When news breaks out of the Easter Rising in 1916 he immediately leaves his job, however, he is bitterly disappointed when he finds out that the order has been countermanded. When the rebellion begins in earnest on Easter Monday, he makes his way to Jacob’s Mill where he fights under Thomas MacDonagh. Following the official surrender, he is arrested and interned at Frongoch internment camp in Wales, where he comes into contact with other notable revolutionary leaders, including his brother Harry’s friend Michael Collins.
Boland is released after a general amnesty in December 1916, however, he remains involved in revolutionary circles, although he declines to rejoin the IRB, believing the organisation is no longer needed. He is arrested and imprisoned in Belfast from May to December 1918 for practising military drills in the Dublin Mountains. Meanwhile, a number of his colleagues secure their release by winning seats in the 1918 United Kingdom general election.
Boland and his brothers are opposed to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. He is Battalion Commandant of 3 Battalion, 2 Dublin Brigade (South Dublin) in Blessington, County Wicklow, but is captured early on in the Irish Civil War on July 7, 1922, and is interned until his release in July 1924. On the outside, his brother Harry dies some days after being shot, in August 1922, after two National Army officers attempt to arrest him at the Grand Hotel in Skerries, County Dublin. Boland applies to the Irish government for a service pension under the Military Service Pensions Act of 1934 and is awarded 11 and 5/12 years of service at Grade C for his service with the Irish Volunteers and the IRA between April 1, 1916 and September 30, 1923.
Following the end of the Irish Civil War, Boland helps to build up Sinn Féin as the main Republican party. While still imprisoned, he is selected to stand for Dáil Éireann as the Teachta Dála (TD) for Roscommon, Harry’s old seat, for the 1923 Irish general election, in which he is successful. He is among those in Kilmainham Gaol who go on hunger strike in October 1923. The hunger strike does not result in his release and he credits his practice of yoga with keeping him alive at the time.[3]
Boland is eventually released from the custody of the state in July 1924. Upon his release, he becomes secretary of Sinn Féin and stands on the executive of the party.
Boland is among the first in Sinn Féin to call for an end to the party’s abstentionism from DáilÉireann, believing it to be a political dead end. Party leader Éamon de Valera proposes that the party abandon this policy and take their seats in the Dáil if changes are made to the oath of allegiance to the British monarch. His proposal is defeated and de Valera and his supporters, including Boland, leave Sinn Féin. Shortly after this split, a new party emerges called Fianna Fáil, with de Valera acting as leader and the other disillusioned Republican TDs joining. Boland is vital in transferring many members from Sinn Féin to Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil briefly also has an abstentionist policy but in 1927 a new law forces Fianna Fáil TDs to take the oath of allegiance and take their seats in the Dáil. Fianna Fáil dismisses the oath as “an empty formula.”
Boland works alongside Seán Lemass in building up Fianna Fáil’s grassroots support and organisation, giving particular attention to the party’s rural apparatus. In the September 1927 Irish general election Fianna Fáil comes within four seats of the ruling Cumann na nGaedheal party. The latter forms a coalition of sorts with the Farmers’ Party and returns to government.
Following the 1932 Irish general election, Fianna Fáil forms a new government. Boland is appointed Government Chief Whip, a position which allows him to attend cabinet meetings but not vote at them.
Fianna Fáil remains in power with an increased mandate following the 1933 Irish general election and Boland is promoted to the position of Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. Despite being the Minister in charge of the postal service, he does not own a telephone until some time later. During his tenure, the postal service makes considerable progress. It is also during this time that the Post Office becomes a paying concern. During his time as minister, he oversees a major expansion of the telephone service in Ireland, improvements in the transmission capacity of Radio Éireann, and construction of new provincial post offices and a new central postal sorting office.
Boland is acting Minister for Justice briefly for a time when P. J. Ruttledge is ill. It is during this time that he declares the Irish Republican Army a proscribed organisation.
A cabinet reshuffle in 1936 sees Boland become Minister for Lands. The Land Act 1939 reforms land distribution, broadening the criteria by which the state can take control over undeveloped land while offering the tenant of the land more favourable terms of compensation. He is critical of the policy of the Minister for Industry and Commerce, Seán Lemass, of centralising industrial development in Dublin. He instead wishes to see a more decentralised economy based around food production. The differing viewpoint causes a rift between Boland and Lemass, but despite this Boland favoured Lemass’s policy of state intervention in the economy over Seán MacEntee‘s more laissez-faire approach.
In 1937 Boland is highly vocal during the drafting of a new constitution of Ireland by Fianna Fáil against any word which would give the Catholic Church special status, something heavily considered at the time. He declares that if the constitution elevates the position of the Catholic Church above others, it would be sectarian, anti-republican, and a hindrance to any prospects of Irish reunification. As a compromise, the term “special position” is used in the approved text of the Constitution.
Following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, known in Ireland as the Emergency, there is a cabinet reshuffle, and Boland is appointed as Minister for Justice. He takes over at a time when the IRA has once again declared war against the British state and has begun their Sabotage Campaign. He is charged with the task of crushing the organisation and preventing the IRA from drawing the Irish state into conflict with the United Kingdom. Although he always considers himself a republican, he takes a hardline against the IRA and uses his powers to order the internment of hundreds of IRA members before introducing military courts and special criminal courts.
In 1940, several imprisoned IRA members go on hunger strike but Boland refuses to grant their release. Two of the men eventually die, one of whom is the nephew of one of his Fianna Fáil colleagues. Tony D’Arcy dies at the age of 32 on April 16, 1940, as a result of a 52-day hunger strike, and Jack McNeela dies three days later after 55 days on hunger strike. These deaths spark reprisals by the IRA on the Garda Síochána. Boland subsequently introduces tougher measures by setting up a military court with the death penalty and no provision for appeal except for a review by the government. In all, twelve men are found guilty with six of them facing death and the remaining six having their sentences changed to imprisonment. Among those executed is Charlie Kerins, an acting Chief of Staff of the IRA.
As Minister of Justice, Boland is also asked to enforce policies of wartime censorship, however, finding the idea of the state censorship distasteful he establishes a censorship board to avoid accusations of bias.
During the Emergency, Boland is also responsible for the detention of several foreign agents in pursuit of Ireland’s strict policy of neutrality. During this time some 500 individuals are interned and 600 are sentenced under the newly introduced Offences against the State Act, 1939. By 1943 the IRA is in disarray, particularly after the Chief of Staff is arrested and imprisoned, leaving the organisation without leadership. Boland and Fianna Fáil feel their hardline is backed by the electorate following strong returns for the party at the 1944 Irish general election.
In 1947, Boland is among four leading Fianna Fáil figures (including de Valera) involved in the “Locke’s Distillery Scandal”, an accusation brought by Oliver J. Flanagan that foreign businessmen are bribing members of Fianna Fáil to gain the right to purchase the distillery. A tribunal of inquiry finds no evidence to support the claims, but the event taints the public’s view of Fianna Fáil.
By 1948, Fianna Fáil has been in government for an uninterrupted 16 years. With World War II finally over, the electorate seeks change and a fresh start. Arising to meet this desire is the new political party Clann na Poblachta. Led by Seán MacBride, this new party seeks to kick off a new post-war political era in Ireland, and to do this means removing Fianna Fáil from power. Many in Clann na Poblachta have republican backgrounds and in some ways, the party can be partially described as an organic reaction to Fianna Fáil and Boland’s hardline stance during the war years. Many in political circles, including inside Fianna Fáil, believe Clann na Poblachta can be a new force to reckon with.
However, de Valera always holds a reputation for being cunning in selecting the dates of general elections, and he once again cements that notion, when he calls for a general election in early 1948 before Clann na Poblachta is completely ready to contest a national election. At the 1948 Irish general election Clann na Poblachta and other Fianna Fáil opponents do well, but not as well as expected. To remove Fianna Fáil from government, every single party in the Dáil and several independents have to form the unwieldy “First Inter-Party Government.” The coalition sees Clann na Poblachta forced to work with Fine Gael, considered the traditional “enemy” of Irish republicanism. By 1951, the coalition collapses and Fianna Fáil returns to government following that year’s election, with Boland re-appointed Minister for Justice.
Boland does not seek ministerial office in 1957 when Fianna Fáil returns to power after its defeat in 1954. However, his son, Kevin, is appointed to the cabinet as Minister for Defence at the beginning of his first term in the Dáil. By this stage, Boland is beginning to be seen as an aging warhorse, with his base in Roscommon starting to slip and Fianna Fáil unhappy that he is unable to get a Fianna Fáil running mate elected alongside himself.
At the 1961 Irish general election, Boland is defeated for the first time in fourteen general election campaigns. Despite losing his Dáil seat, he subsequently secures election to Seanad Éireann. Four years later in 1965, he returns to the Seanad, this time as a nominee by the Taoiseach Seán Lemass.
In 1970, the outbreak of the Arms Crisis sees Kevin Boland resign as a Minister and as Secretary of Fianna Fáil in protest at the government’s policy on Northern Ireland and in response to the sackings of Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney from the cabinet over allegations they had arranged for weapons to be provided to the Provisional IRA. Gerald Boland, in a similar protest, resigns as a vice president and as a trustee of Fianna Fáil, although he remains a member of the party. He also articulates his loss of confidence in the leadership of TaoiseachJack Lynch.
Boland dies in Dublin at the age of 87 on January 5, 1973. He is buried in the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery, Glasnevin, County Dublin. His wife, Annie Boland, predeceases him in 1970. He is survived by his three daughters and four sons.
Whyte is born on April 30, 1928, in Penang, Malaysia. His father is manager of a rubber plantation on the mainland. His family leaves Malaysia and returns to Europe when he is three, eventually settling in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland. The Whytes are a well-known County Down family recorded in the area since at least 1713. The family is said to have come to Ireland from South Wales with Strongbow in 1170 and settled in Leinster. He is educated locally, at Ampleforth College and Oriel College Oxford, from which he takes a degree in Modern History in 1949. Continuing studies some two years later he is awarded a B.Litt degree for further research, which is to form the nebula of his first book which is published in 1958.
Whyte undertakes national service during the 1950s and works as a history teacher in his old school before being appointed lecturer in Modern History at Makerere University, Uganda. In 1962, he returns to Ireland having been appointed first “lecturer in empirical politics” at the then expanding University College Dublin (UCD). In 1966, he weds fellow academic Dr. Jean Murray and moves to Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) to undertake further studies.
In his book, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long?, Whyte’s successor as Professor of Politics at UCD, Tom Garvin, gives an account as to the clerical politics prevalent at the time at UCD which causes Whyte’s untimely departure:
A little later, in 1966, McQuaid provoked, possibly unintentionally, the resignation of John Whyte, a distinguished Catholic political scientist, from University College Dublin’s Department of Ethics and Politics. This resignation and move to Belfast on Whyte’s part in 1966 almost certainly was the unintended result of an extraordinary piece of clerical interference and bullying that rebounded upon McQuaid and on UCD. Whyte was in the midst of writing his standard history of the Catholic Church in independent Ireland, later published in 1969; at McQuaid’s apparent instigation, his professor and head of Department attempted to forbid him from continuing with this work. The irony was that the resultant scholarly book, finished in Belfast rather than Dublin, deeply underestimated clerical power in the Irish state and gave the Catholic Church a rather easy ride. Another irony was that Whyte, as a Roman Catholic historian and political scientist, was apparently rather favoured by McQuaid. However in 1966 bishops didn’t know they needed friends. Whyte was to come back to UCD and was professor of Ethics and Politics between 1984 and 1990. In a very real sense, McQuaid was the patriarchal and eccentric governor of Dublin Archdiocese, where one-third of the stat’s population lived; he attempted to run an urban society of a million people as though it were a large feudal community.
At Queen’s, Whyte spends seventeen years as lecturer and reader, and from 1982 Professor of Irish Politics during which he seeks to bring together political scientists from across the island and develop an All-Ireland political science fellowship. From 1973 to 1974 he works at as a research fellow at Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs, and in 1975 he helps lead a team of researchers investigating the Northern Ireland conflict, then at its height. He also works as research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies during the late 1970s and is elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1977, serving as Vice-President from 1989 to 1990.
In 1984, Whyte returns to University College Dublin, then faced with stringent fiscal cuts and wider problems in Irish third-level education. In his second period at UCD, he leads the Department, which he now heads, through a troubled period of financial cuts while supervising a reorganisation of the undergraduate curriculum. In his last years at UCD he completes his seminal work, the widely regarded Interpreting Northern Ireland. He finishes correcting the proofs and compiling the index of this work only a week before his death. While en route to an academic conference at Airley House, Virginia, he collapses at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, is taken to a local hospital, and dies there on May 16, 1990. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and one daughter.
Following his death, Whyte’s family, friends, and colleagues set up the John Whyte Trust Fund to continue Whyte’s work, honour his memory and encourage “informed dialogue and interaction at graduate level among people who are likely to be leaders and opinion-shapers.” To date the fund has awarded one fully paid scholarship and a number of part-paid scholarships as well as essay prizes annually. The fund also hosts an annual John Whyte Memorial Lecture. Speakers have included Paul Bew and Brendan O’Leary.
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.
Morrison grows up in a community steeped in traditional Irish culture especially music and at the age of seventeen he is employed by the Gaelic League to tutor the Connacht style of step dancing at the Gaelic League school in County Mayo.
In 1915, at the age of 21, Morrison immigrates to the United States and settles in New York City. In 1918, he wins the fiddle competition at the New York Feis. He becomes associated with other leading Irish musicians such as Michael Coleman and Paddy Killoran, who are also from County Sligo.
Morrison is one of the leading Irish music teachers in New York in the 1930s and 1940s. In addition to the fiddle, he can play the flute, tenor banjo and button accordion, and teaches hundreds of young Irish American students to play traditional music.
The Sligo style of fiddle music Morrison plays is typically highly ornamented and fast, with a fluid bowing style. Recordings of his playing are imported to Ireland in great numbers, and have an extraordinary impact. In many areas, local playing styles fall into disuse because of the popularity of the style and repertoire of Morrison and Michael Coleman. This repertoire includes predominantly reels, rather than jigs and hornpipes, and are often played by Irish musicians in the same order as on the original recordings. According to Séamus Mac Mathúna, “More than thirty years after Coleman’s death … one seldom hears ‘Bonny Kate’ without ‘Jenny’s Chickens.’ ‘Tarbolton’ is inevitably followed by ‘The Longford Collector’ and the ‘Sailor’s Bonnet.'” The great Canadian fiddler Jean Carignan was is influenced by Morrison. Morrison is well regarded by Frankie Gavin: “the approach he had to fiddle playing and the approach he had to any tune he touched just…can’t be beaten…nobody can play like that today.”
Morrison dies on November 11, 1947, and is interred, like many of his great musical contemporaries, in Saint Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx.
Ginnell is born in Delvin, County Westmeath, in 1852, (baptised April 9, 1852) the son of Laurence Ginnell and Mary Monaghan and twin to Michael Ginnell. He is self-educated and is called to the Irish bar as well as the Bar of England and Wales. In his youth, he is involved with the Land War and acts as private secretary to John Dillon.
The last great social and agrarian campaign of the Irish home rule movement, the Ranch War (1906 and 1909), is largely led and organised by Ginnell from the central office of the United Irish League. He is elected an MP in 1906, takes his seat at Westminster and swears allegiance to Edward VII. On October 14, 1906, he launches the “war” at Downs, County Westmeath.
The purpose of the war is to bring relief to the large numbers of landless and smallholders, particularly in the West, who are relatively untouched by the Wyndham Land Act (1903) and by the larger policy of purchase. The strategy that Ginnell pursues is the Down’s Policy, or cattle driving, a proceeding designed to harass the prosperous grazier interests, whose “ranches” occupy large, under populated and under worked tracts. The Down’s Policy is also meant to draw public attention to the scandalous inequalities that survive in the Irish countryside. The conservatives within the home rule leadership are understandably suspicious about the revival of agrarian disturbances, but the mood of the party organisation is hardening in the aftermath of a disappointing devolution bill in May 1907, from the new Liberal government, so that it seems logical to turn to the traditional mechanism for reactivating the national question: agrarian agitation.
Ginnell’s cattle drives begin to tail off after the summer of 1908, and the agitation is finally dissolved with the passage of a 1909 Act by the Liberal Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell that allows the transfer to the Irish Land Commission of farmland by compulsory purchase, which is hailed by the national movement as an historic victory. In reality, the Ranch War involves an implosion within sectors of the Irish Parliamentary Party, as its leadership has not facilitated the working of the Wyndham Land Act in the first place because John Dillon and his like want conflict above victory.
In 1909, Ginnell is expelled from the Irish Parliamentary Party for the offence of asking to see the party accounts after which he sits as an Independent Nationalist. During this time, he is addressed frequently as “The MP for Ireland.” At Westminster, he is highly critical of the British government‘s war policy and its holding of executions of certain participants in the Easter Rising of 1916. On May 9, he accuses British Prime MinisterH. H. Asquith, of “Murder” and is forcibly ejected from the Chamber. He visits many of the prisoners who are interned in various prisons in Wales and England.
At the Sinn Féin ardfheis in 1917, at which the party is reconstituted as a republican party with de Valera as president, Ginnell and W. T. Cosgrave are elected Honorary Treasurers. He is imprisoned in March 1918 for encouraging land agitation and later deported to Reading Gaol. In the 1918 United Kingdom general election, he is elected as a Sinn Féin MP for the Westmeath constituency by comfortably defeating his IPP challenger. After his release from prison, he attends the proceedings of the First Dáil. Along with fellow TDJames O’Mara, he is one of the only TDs to serve as a member in both the House of Commons and Dáil Éireann.
He is one of the few people to have served in the House of Commons and in the Oireachtas. He is appointed Director of Propaganda in the Second Ministry of the Irish Republic. After spending a year as a republican campaigner in Chicago, he is appointed the Representative of the Irish Republic in Argentina and South America by de Valera. He carries out his propaganda work here to distribute copies of the Irish Bulletin and to provide the Sinn Féin version of the conflict during the Irish War of Independence. On August 16, 1921, he returns home to attend the first meeting of the Second Dáil. He travels back to Argentina some months later to serve as the Representative of the Republic there.
On September 9, 1922, Ginnell is the only anti-Treaty TD to attend the inaugural meeting of the Provisional Parliament or Third Dáil. Before signing the roll, he says, “I want some explanation before I sign. I have been elected in pursuance of a decree by Dáil Éireann, which decree embodies the decree of May 20, 1922. I have heard nothing read in reference to that decree, nothing but an Act of a foreign Parliament. I have been elected as a member of Dáil Éireann. I have not been elected to attend any such Parliament. Will anyone tell me with authority whether it is…”.
Ginnell is at this point interrupted but resumes by saying that he will sign the roll and take his seat in the Assembly if the Assembly is Dáil Éireann. He is informed he is not allowed raise any such question until a Ceann Comhairle has been elected. He continues to ask questions regardless to which he gets no answer including his question: “Will any member of the Six Counties be allowed to sit in this Dáil?” W. T. Cosgrave moves at this point that he be excluded from the House. Ginnell protests, and he is dragged out by force.
De Valera later appoints Ginnell a member of his “Council of State,” a twelve-member body set up to advise him on the deteriorating situation in the civil war. He returns to the United States soon afterward to serve as the Republic‘s envoy in the country. He orders Robert Briscoe and some of his friends to take possession of the Consular Offices in Nassau Street, New York City, then in the hands of the Irish Free State Government, to obtain the list of the subscribers to the bond drive organized to aid the struggle in the War of Independence. At the time, a court case is ongoing to decide on who has the right to the funds: the newly installed Provisional Government or de Valera, as one of the three trustees among the anti-Treatyites.
Ginnell dies in Washington, D.C. on April 17, 1923, at the age of 71, still campaigning against the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Mitchel is born in Camnish, near Dungiven, County Derry, on November 3, 1815, the son of a Presbyterian minister. At the age of four, he is sent to a classical school, run by an old minister named Moor, nicknamed “Gospel Moor” by the students. He reads books from a very early age. When a little over five years old, he is introduced to Latin grammar by his teacher and makes quick progress. In 1830, not yet 15 years old, he enters Trinity College, Dublin (TCD) and obtains a law degree in 1834.
In the spring of 1836, Mitchel meets Jane Verner, the only daughter of Captain James Verner. Though both families are opposed to the relationship, they become engaged in the autumn and are married on February 3, 1837, by the Rev. David Babington in Drumcree Church, the parish church of Drumcree.
Mitchel works in a law office in Banbridge, County Down, where he eventually comes into conflict with the local Orange Order. He meets Thomas Davis and Charles Gavan Duffy during visits to Dublin. He joins the Young Ireland movement and begins to write for The Nation. Deeply affected by the misery and death caused by the Great Famine, he becomes convinced that nothing will ever come of the constitutional efforts to gain Irish freedom. He then forms his own paper, United Irishmen, to advocate passive resistance by Ireland’s starving masses.
In May 1848, the British tire of Mitchel’s open defiance. Ever the legal innovators in Ireland, they invent a crime especially for the Young Irelanders – felony-treason. They arrest him for violating this new law and close down his paper. A rigged jury convicts him, and he is deported first to Bermuda and then to Australia. However, in June 1853, he escapes to the United States.
Mitchel works as a journalist in New York City and then moves to the South. When the American Civil War erupts, he is a strong supporter of the Southern cause, seeing parallels with the position of the Irish. His family fully backs his commitment to the Southern cause. He loses two sons in the war, one at the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863 and another at the Battle of Fort Sumter in 1864, and another son loses an arm. His outspoken support of the Confederacy causes him to be jailed for a time at Fort Monroe, where one of his fellow prisoners is Confederate PresidentJefferson Davis.
In 1874, the British allow Mitchel to return to Ireland and in 1875 he is elected in a by-election to be a member of the Parliament of the United Kingdom representing the Tipperary constituency. However, his election is invalidated on the grounds that he is a convicted felon. He contests the seat again in the resulting by-election and is again elected, this time with an increased vote.
Unfortunately, Mitchel, one of the staunchest enemies to English rule of Ireland in history, dies in Newry on March 20, 1875. He is buried in his parents’ grave in the unitarian cemetery, High Street, Newry, where a monument is later erected by his widow. He is also commemorated by a statue in Newry. Thirty-eight years later, his grandson, John Purroy Mitchel, is elected Mayor of New York City.
seamus dubhghaill 