seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

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Birth of George Noble Plunkett, Scholar & Revolutionary

George Noble Plunkett, scholar and revolutionary, is born on December 3, 1851, at 1 Aungier Street, Dublin, the youngest and only survivor from infancy of the three children of Patrick Joseph Plunkett (1817–1918), builder and politician, and his wife, Elizabeth (née Noble). The Plunketts are Catholic, claiming collateral descent from Archbishop of Armagh Oliver Plunkett, and nationalist: the two drummers from the republican army at Vinegar Hill in 1798 visit George’s cradle.

Plunkett is educated expensively: at a primary school in Nice, making him fluent in French and Italian, then at Clongowes Wood College, and, from 1872, at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), where his generous allowance allows him to study renaissance and medieval art. He enrolls at King’s Inns in 1870 and the Middle Temple in 1874, but is not called to the bar until 1886. While there he befriends Oscar Wilde and Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa. In 1877, he endows a university gold medal for Irish speakers and publishes a book of poems, God’s Chosen Festival, and the following year he issues a pamphlet, The Early Life of Henry Grattan. He also writes articles for magazines, editing a short-lived one, Hibernia, for eighteen months from 1882. In 1883, he donates funds and property to the nursing order of the Little Company of Mary (Blue Sisters), and on April 4, 1884, Pope Leo XIII makes him a count.

On June 26, 1884, Plunkett marries Mary Josephine Cranny (1858–1944). The couple has seven children: Philomena (Mimi) (b. 1886), Joseph (b. 1887), Mary Josephine (Moya) (b. 1889), Geraldine (b. 1891), George Oliver (b. 1894), Fiona (b. 1896), and Eoin (Jack) (b. 1897).

Plunkett surprises many in 1890 by declaring for Charles Stewart Parnell against the Catholic hierarchy. In the 1892 United Kingdom general election in Ireland he is a Parnellite candidate for Mid Tyrone but withdraws from a potential three-cornered fight lest he let in the unionist. He is sole nationalist candidate for Dublin St. Stephen’s Green in the 1895 United Kingdom general election in Ireland, and at an 1898 by-election there he cuts the unionist majority to 138 votes. The reunited Irish Party wins the seat in 1900.

In 1894, Plunkett part-edits Charles O’Kelly‘s memoir The Jacobite War in Ireland. By 1900, when he publishes the standard biography Sandro Botticelli, he is supplementing his income by renewed artistic studies, which until 1923 finances his lease of Kilternan Abbey, County Dublin. His Pinelli (1908) is followed by Architecture of Dublin, and, in 1911, by his revised edition of Margaret McNair Stokes‘s Early Christian Art in Ireland. In 1907, he becomes director of the National Museum of Ireland, where he increases annual visits from 100 to 3,000.

Joseph Plunkett swears his father into the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) in April 1916, sending him secretly to seek German aid and a papal blessing for the projected Easter rising. After its defeat, Plunkett is sacked by the National Museum of Ireland and deported with the countess to Oxford, and the following January he is expelled by the Royal Dublin Society (RDS). This earns him nomination as the surviving rebels’ candidate in the North Roscommon by-election. He returns to Ireland illegally on January 31, 1917, and wins the seat easily three days later. Pledging abstention from attendance at Westminster in accordance with Sinn Féin policy, he initiates a Republican Liberty League, which coalesces with similar groups such as Sinn Féin. In October this front becomes the new Sinn Féin, committed to Plunkett’s republic rather than to the “king, lords and commons“ of Arthur Griffith. Plunkett and Griffith become the new party’s vice-presidents, under Éamon de Valera.

On May 18, 1918, Plunkett is interned again. Released after Sinn Féin’s general election landslide (in which he is returned unopposed), he presides, Sinn Féin’s oldest MP, at the planning meeting for Dáil Éireann on January 17, 1919, and at its opening session on January 21. On the 22nd he is made foreign affairs minister by Cathal Brugha, an appointment reaffirmed by de Valera on April 10. He criticises his president for advocating a continuing Irish external relationship with Britain, and fails to organise an Irish foreign service. In February 1921, de Valera makes Robert Brennan his departmental secretary and a ministry takes shape, while Plunkett publishes a book of poems, Ariel. After uncontested “southern Irish“ elections to the Second Dáil, de Valera moves his implacable foreign minister from the cabinet to a tailor-made portfolio of fine arts. Plunkett’s Dante sexcentenary commemoration is overshadowed by news of the Anglo–Irish Treaty. Opposing this, Plunkett cites his oath to the republic and its martyrs including his son. He leaves his ministry on January 9, 1922.

Plunkett chairs the anti-treaty Cumann na Poblachta, which loses the June general election, though he is returned again unopposed. In the Irish Civil War the treatyites intern him and the republicans appoint him to their council of state. In the August 1923 Irish general election, his first electoral contest since 1917, the interned count tops the poll in County Roscommon. He is released in December.

When de Valera forms Fianna Fáil in 1926, Plunkett stays with Sinn Féin, and loses his deposit in the June 1927 Irish general election. A year later he publishes his last poetry collection, Eros. He runs for a new Cumann Poblachta na hÉireann in a County Galway by-election in 1936, but loses his deposit again. On December 8, 1938, with the other six surviving abstentionist Second Dáil TDs, he transfers republican sovereignty to the IRA Army Council.

Plunkett is a big man with a black beard which whitens steadily after his fiftieth birthday. He is always formally pleasant and courteous. His oratory is described by M. J. MacManus as “level, cultured tones . . . [more] used to addressing the members of a learned society than to the rough and tumble of the hustings” (The Irish Press, March 15, 1948). Theoretically and practically, he is more scholar than politician. His portrait is on display at the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland (RSAI).

Plunkett dies from cancer on March 12, 1948, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, survived by his children Geraldine (wife of Thomas Dillon), Fiona, and Jack. His grandson Joseph (1928–66), son of George Oliver Plunkett, inherits the title.

(From: “Plunkett, Count George Noble” by D. R. O’Connor Lysaght, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Louise Gavan Duffy, Educator & Irish Language Enthusiast

Louise Gavan Duffy, educator, Irish language enthusiast and a Gaelic revivalist, dies in Dublin on October 12, 1969. She sets up the first Gaelscoil in Ireland. She is also a suffragist and Irish nationalist who is present in the General Post Office, the main headquarters during the 1916 Easter Rising.

Duffy is born in Nice, France, on July 17, 1884, the daughter of the Irish nationalist Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, one of the founders of The Nation and his third wife, Louise (née Hall) from Cheshire, England. Her mother dies when she is four. She is then raised in Nice by her Australian half-sisters from her father’s second marriage. It is a well-to-do and culturally vibrant home where she is exposed to political figures and ideas.

Duffy’s brother George Gavan Duffy, one of the signatories to the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921, is an Irish politician, barrister and judge. Her half-brother Sir Frank Gavan Duffy is the fourth Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, sitting on the bench from 1913 to 1935. Another brother works most of his life as a missionary in the French colony of Pondicherry.

Duffy’s first visit to Ireland is in 1903, at the age of 18, when her father dies and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. This is when she first hears Irish spoken. She finds a grammar book in a bookshop and becomes curious. Her father was not an Irish speaker, though her grandmother in the early 1800s was likely fluent.

Duffy spends the years between 1903 and 1907 between France and England. She takes courses through Cusack’s College in London so that she can matriculate.

Duffy decides to continue her studies in Dublin but cannot afford to move until she receives a small inheritance from her grandmother on the Hall side of the family. Once in Ireland in 1907, at the age of 23, she begins her university studies, taking arts. She lives in the Women’s College, Dominican Convent, as women are not allowed to attend lectures in the Royal University of Ireland. She goes occasionally to the Gaeltacht to learn Irish. Graduating in 1911 with a Bachelor of Arts from University College Dublin (UCD), she is one of the first women to do so.

Given the lack of teachers, even without a full qualification, Duffy then teaches in Patrick Pearse‘s St. Ita’s school for girls in Ranelagh. She studies with the Dominicans again in Eccles Street, gaining a Teaching Diploma from Cambridge University.

A supporter of women’s suffrage, Duffy speaks at a mass meeting in Dublin in 1912 in favour of having the Home Rule bill include a section to grant women the vote. She also joins the Irish republican women’s paramilitary organisation Cumann na mBan, as a founding member in April 1914, serving on the provisional committee with Mary Colum, as a co-secretary.

Duffy is aware that being a suffragist and a nationalist are not necessarily the same thing, realising her involvement in Cumann na mBan is in support of nationalism. When St. Ita’s closes due to funding problems in 1912, she takes the opportunity to complete her qualifications. After receiving her Cambridge teacher’s diploma in 1913, she returns to UCD to study for a Master of Arts degree.

Duffy is in fact working on her master’s thesis during the Easter break in 1916 when the rumour comes to her that the Rising has begun in Dublin city centre. She walks to the Rebel headquarters in the GPO where she tells Pearse, one of the leaders, that she does not agree with the violent uprising.

Duffy spends all of Easter week working in the GPO kitchens with other volunteers like Desmond FitzGerald and a couple of captured British soldiers, ensuring the volunteers are cared for. The women in the GPO are given the opportunity to leave under the protection of the Red Cross on the Thursday as the shelling of the building has caused fires, but almost all of them refuse. In the end, she is among the second group of the people to leave the GPO on the Friday, tunnelling through the walls of the buildings to avoid coming under fire.

Duffy’s group makes it to Jervis Street Hospital where they spend the night. The next day, Saturday, Pearse formally surrenders. She heads for Jacob’s Biscuit Factory, another volunteer position, on the morning after the surrender, to see what is happening. There she finds a holdout of volunteers who are unaware of the surrender or that the fighting is over.

After 1916 Duffy is elected to the Cumann na mBan’s executive and in 1918 is one of the signatories to a petition for self-determination for Ireland which is presented to President Woodrow Wilson by Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. During her time in the GPO, she had collected names of the volunteers and promised to take messages to their families. This possibly influences her in being involved in the National Aid Association and Volunteers Dependants Fund. In the aftermath of the rebellion there are 64 known dead among the volunteers, while 3,430 men and 79 women are arrested. Families need support. These organisations are able to arrange funding from the United States.

In 1917, Duffy co-founds and runs Scoil Bhríde, as a secondary school for girls in Dublin through the medium of Gaelic. It is still in operation as a primary school. Her co-founder is Annie McHugh, who later marries Ernest Blythe. The end of the Rising leads to the Irish War of Independence (1919-21). During this time, she is mostly focused on the school. However, it is raided by the military and Duffy later admits it is in fact used for rebel meetings and to safeguard documents. In October 1920, the Irish leader Michael Collins meets Archbishop Patrick Clune there in secret. In an effort to support the nationwide boycott of the police, the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), in 1920, she has a leaflet sent to all branches of Cumann na mBan which states in part that the RIC are the “eyes and ears of the enemy. Let those eyes and ears know no friendship.”

The war ends with the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921. The result is the Irish Civil War which lasts until 1923. Duffy is a supporter of the Treaty, which her brother had signed, and as such she leaves Cumann na mBan and joins Cumann na Saoirse, in which she is instrumental in founding as an Irish republican women’s organisation which supports the Pro-Treaty side.

Once the civil war is over, Duffy leaves the political arena and returns to education. She especially needs to focus on funding in the early years of the school. She works with UCD’s Department of Education from 1926, once Scoil Bhríde is recognised as a teacher training school. She publishes educational documents like School Studies in The Appreciation of Art with Elizabeth Aughney and published by UCD in 1932.

Until her retirement, Duffy also lectures on the teaching of French. She retires as principal in 1944.

Once retired, Duffy gives much of her time to the Legion of Mary and to an association which works with French au pairs in Dublin. In 1948 she is awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the National University of Ireland.

Recognising the importance of her first-hand experience and with a good political understanding, Duffy records her memories of the events in which she has taken part. In 1949, she gives an account of her life in relation to nationalist activities to the Bureau of Military History. She is involved in a Radio Éireann broadcast in 1956 about the women in the Rising. In 1962, she takes part in the RTÉ TV program Self Portrait broadcast on March 20, 1962. In March 1966 she gives a lecture in UCD to mark the 50th anniversary of the Rising which is published in The Easter rising, 1916, and University College Dublin (1966).

Duffy dies, unmarried, on October 12, 1969, aged 85, and is interred in the family plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.

In 2014, An Post issues a stamp to commemorate the centenary of the founding of Cumann na mBan. In 2016, for the centenary, a documentary is produced, discussing seven of the women, including Duffy, who were involved in the Easter Rising.


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Birth of Mary Devenport O’Neill, Poet & Dramatist

Mary Devenport O’Neill, Irish poet and dramatist and a friend and colleague of W. B. Yeats, George Russell, and Austin Clarke, is born in Barrack Street, Loughrea, County Galway, on August 3, 1879.

O’Neill is born Mary Devenport, the daughter of Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) sub-constable, John Devenport, and his wife Bridget (née Burke). She attends the Dominican convent, Eccles Street, Dublin before enrolling in the Metropolitan School of Art from 1898 to 1903. In 1900 she wins the year’s prize in the School of Art. She apparently considers teaching as a career, as she is listed on the college register as a teacher in training from 1901 to 1903. It is while an art student that she starts to correspond with the writer she admires, Joseph O’Neill. Their relationship develops, and the couple marries on June 19, 1908, settling in Kenilworth Square, Dublin.

Many of O’Neill’s husband’s friends disapprove of her modern and unconventional ideas, but she is popular with “the Rathgar Group” who attends George Russell’s Sunday salons. After a few years, she establishes her own salon referred to as “Thursdays at home,” attended by Russell, Padraic Colum, W. B. Yeats, Richard Irvine Best, Frank O’Connor, Francis Stuart and Iseult Gonne. She becomes particularly close to Yeats, who she confides in. Yeats records their weekly consultations in his diary while working on A Vision (1925). In his Oxford anthology of English verse from 1936, he includes one of O’Neill’s poems. In 1917, she contributes lyrics to her husband’s play The Kingdom Maker. She publishes her only book in 1929, Prometheus and other poems. After this she occasionally contributes primarily modernist plays and poetry to The Dublin Magazine, The Irish Times and The Bell. She collaborates with Austin Clarke from the Lyric Theatre Company on her plays Bluebeard (1933) and Cain (1945).

O’Neill suffers with poor health, which sees her and her husband spending extended periods in the south of France and Switzerland. They sell their home in Dublin in August 1950 and move to Nice, with the intention of settling there. However, due to rapidly depleting finances they are forced to return to Ireland in April 1951. They rent a cottage in Wicklow from their friend Con Curran. When her husband dies in 1953, she goes to live with relatives in Dublin. She dies there in 1967.


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Death of Maximilian Ulysses Browne, Austrian Military Officer

Maximilian Ulysses, Reichsgraf von Browne, Baron de Camus and Mountany, an Irish refugee, scion of the Wild Geese and an Austrian military officer, dies in Prague, Kingdom of Bohemia on June 26, 1757. He is one of the highest-ranking officers serving the Hapsburg Emperor during the middle of the 18th century and one of the most prominent Irish soldiers never to fight for Ireland.

Browne is born in Basel, Switzerland, the son of Count Ulysses von Browne (b. Limerick 1659) and his wife Annabella Fitzgerald, a daughter of the House of Desmond. Both families had been exiled from Ireland in the aftermath of the Nine Years’ War.

Browne’s early career is helped by family and marital connections. His father and his father’s brother, George (b. Limerick 1657), are created Counts of the Holy Roman Empire by Emperor Charles VI in 1716 after serving with distinction in the service of the Holy Roman Emperors. The brothers enjoy a lengthy, close friendship with John Churchill, 1st Duke of Marlborough, who is primarily responsible for their establishment in the Imperial Service of Austria. On his father’s death he becomes third Earl of Browne in the Jacobite peerage. His wife, Countess Marie Philippine von Martinitz, has valuable connections at court and his sister, Barbara (b. Limerick 1700), is married to Freiherr Francis Patrick O’Neillan, a Major General in the Austrian Service. So, by the age of 29 Browne is already colonel of an Austrian infantry regiment.

Browne justifies his early promotion in the field, and in the Italian campaign of 1734 he greatly distinguishes himself. In the Tirolese fighting of 1735, and in the Turkish war, he wins further distinction as a general officer.

Browne is a lieutenant field marshal in command of the Silesian garrisons when in 1740 Frederick II and the Prussian army overruns the province. His careful employment of such resources as he possesses materially hinders the king in his conquest and allows time for Austria to collect a field army. He is present at Mollwitz, where he receives a severe wound. His vehement opposition to all half-hearted measures brings him frequently into conflict with his superiors but contributes materially to the unusual energy displayed by the Austrian armies in 1742 and 1743.

In the following campaigns Browne exhibits the same qualities of generalship and the same impatience of control. In 1745 he serves under Count Traun and is promoted to the rank of Feldzeugmeister. In 1746 he is present in the Italian campaign and the battles of Piacenza and Rottofreddo. He and an advanced guard force their way across the Apennine Mountains and enter Genoa. He is thereafter placed in command of the invasion of France mounted in winter 1746-47, leading to the Siege of Antibes, but he is obliged to break off the invasion and return to Italy in February 1747 after Genoa rises in rebellion against the Austrian garrison he had left behind. In early 1747 he is appointed commander of all imperial forces in Italy, replacing Antoniotto Botta Adorno. At the end of the war, he is engaged in the negotiations on troop withdrawals from Italy, which leads to the convention of Nice on January 21, 1749. He becomes commander-in-chief in Bohemia in 1751, and field marshal two years later.

Browne is still in Bohemia when the Seven Years’ War opens with Frederick’s invasion of Saxony in 1756. His army, advancing to the relief of Pirna, is met, and, after a hard struggle, defeated by the king at the Battle of Lobositz, but he draws off in excellent order, and soon makes another attempt with a picked force to reach Pirna, by wild mountain tracks. He never spares himself, bivouacking in the snow with his men, and Thomas Carlyle records that private soldiers made rough shelters over him as he slept.

Brown actually reaches the Elbe at Bad Schandau, but as the Saxons are unable to break out, he retires, having succeeded, however, in delaying the development of Frederick’s operations for a whole campaign. In the campaign of 1757, he voluntarily serves under Prince Charles Alexander of Lorraine who is made commander-in-chief. On May 6 of that year, while leading a bayonet charge at the Battle of Prague, Browne, like Kurt Christoph, Graf von Schwerin, on the same day, meets his death. He is carried mortally wounded into Prague, and there dies on June 26, 1757.


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Birth of Frank Harris, Journalist & Novelist

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Frank Harris, Irish American editor, novelist, short story writer, journalist and publisher, is born James Thomas Harris to Welsh parents in Galway, County Galway on February 14, 1855. He is friendly with many well-known figures of his day.

Harris’s father, Thomas Vernon Harris, is a naval officer from Fishguard, Pembrokeshire, Wales. While living with his older brother he is, for a year or more, a pupil at The Royal School, Armagh. At the age of twelve he is sent to Wales to continue his education as a boarder at the Ruabon Grammar School in Denbighshire, a time he is to remember later in My Life and Loves. He is unhappy at the school and runs away within a year.

Harris runs away to the United States in late 1869, arriving in New York City virtually penniless. The 13-year-old takes a series of odd jobs to support himself, working first as a shoeshiner, a porter, a general laborer, and a construction worker on the erection of the Brooklyn Bridge. He later turns these early occupational experiences into art, incorporating tales from them into his book The Bomb (1908).

From New York Harris moves to Chicago, where he takes a job as a hotel clerk and eventually a manager. Owing to Chicago’s central place in the meat packing industry, he makes the acquaintance of various cattlemen, who inspire him to leave the big city to take up work as a cowboy. He eventually grows tired of life in the cattle industry and enrolls at the University of Kansas, where he studies law and earns a degree, gaining admission to the Kansas Bar Association.

Harris is not cut out to be a lawyer and soon decides to turn his attention to literature. He returns to England in 1882, later traveling to various cities in Germany, Austria, France, and Greece on his literary quest. He works briefly as an American newspaper correspondent before settling down in England to seriously pursue the vocation of journalism.

Harris first comes to general notice as the editor of a series of London papers including The Evening News, The Fortnightly Review and the Saturday Review, the latter being the high point of his journalistic career, with H. G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw as regular contributors.

From 1908 to 1914 Harris concentrates on working as a novelist, authoring a series of popular books such as The Bomb, The Man Shakespeare, and The Yellow Ticket and Other Stories. With the advent of World War I in the summer of 1914, he decides to return to the United States.

From 1916 to 1922 Harris edits the U.S. edition of Pearson’s Magazine, a popular monthly which combines short story fiction with socialist-tinted features on contemporary news topics. One issue of the publication is banned from the mails by United States Postmaster General Albert S. Burleson during the period of American participation in World War I. Despite this Harris manages to navigate the delicate situation which faces the left-wing press and keeps Pearson’s Magazine functioning and solvent during the war years.

Harris becomes an American citizen in April 1921. In 1922 he travels to Berlin to publish his best-known work, his four-volume autobiography My Life and Loves (1922–1927). It is notorious for its graphic descriptions of his purported sexual encounters and for its exaggeration of the scope of his adventures and his role in history. A fifth volume, supposedly taken from his notes but of doubtful provenance, is published in 1954, long after his death.

Harris also writes short stories and novels, two books on William Shakespeare, a series of biographical sketches in five volumes under the title Contemporary Portraits and biographies of his friends Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. His attempts as a playwright are less successful. Only Mr. and Mrs. Daventry (1900), which is based on an idea by Oscar Wilde, is produced on the stage.

Married three times, Harris dies of a heart attack in Nice, France on August 26, 1931. He is buried at Cimetière Sainte-Marguerite, adjacent to the Cimetière Caucade, in Nice. Just after his death a biography written by Hugh Kingsmill (pseudonym of Hugh Kingsmill Lunn) is published.


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Death of Charles Gavan Duffy

charles-gavin-duffy

Charles Gavan Duffy, Irish nationalist, journalist, poet, and Australian politician, dies on February 9, 1903, in Nice, France. He is the 8th Premier of Victoria and one of the most colourful figures in Victorian political history.

Duffy is born on April 12, 1816, in Dublin Street, Monaghan, County Monaghan. Both of his parents die while he is still a child and his uncle, Fr. James Duffy, who is the Catholic Parish Priest of Castleblayney, becomes his guardian for a number of years. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College in Belfast and is admitted to the Irish Bar in 1845. Duffy becomes a leading figure in Irish literary circles.

Duffy, along with Thomas Osborne Davis and John Blake Dillon, founds The Nation and becomes its first editor. Davis and Dillon later become Young Irelanders. All three are members of Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association. This paper, under Duffy, transforms from a literary voice into a “rebellious organisation.”

In August 1850, Duffy forms the Tenant Right League to bring about reforms in the Irish land system and protect tenants’ rights, and in 1852 is elected to the House of Commons for New Ross. By 1855, the cause of Irish tenants seems more hopeless than ever. Broken in health and spirit, Duffy publishes a farewell address to his constituency, declaring that he has resolved to retire from parliament, as it is no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he has solicited their votes.

In 1856, emigrates with his family to Australia, settling in the newly formed Colony of Victoria. A public appeal is held to enable him to buy the freehold property necessary to stand for the colonial Parliament. He is immediately elected to the Legislative Assembly for Villiers and Heytesbury in the Western District in 1856. He later represented Dalhousie and then North Gippsland. With the collapse of the Victorian Government‘s Haines Ministry during 1857, another Irish Catholic, John O’Shanassy, unexpectedly becomes Premier with Duffy his second-in-charge.

In 1871, Duffy leads the opposition to Premier Sir James McCulloch‘s plan to introduce a land tax, on the grounds that it unfairly penalises small farmers. When McCulloch’s government is defeated on this issue, Duffy becomes Premier and Chief Secretary.  The majority of the colony is Protestant, and Duffy is accused of favouring Catholics in government appointments. In June 1872, his government is defeated in the Assembly on a confidence motion allegedly motivated by sectarianism.

When Graham Berry becomes Premier in 1877, he makes Duffy Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, a post he holds without much enthusiasm until 1880, when he quits politics and retires to the south of France. He remains interested in both the politics of his adoptive country and of Ireland. He is knighted in 1873 and is made KCMG in 1877. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy dies in Nice, France, at the age of 86 in 1903.


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Birth of Sculptor John Hughes

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John Hughes, Irish sculptor, is born in Dublin on January 30, 1865.

Hughes is educated at North Richmond Street CBS. He enters the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1878 and trains as a part-time student for ten years. In 1890 he wins a scholarship to the South Kensington School of Art in London, after which another scholarship takes him to Paris, France. He then studies further in Italy.

Hughes is appointed as teacher to the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin in 1894 and in 1902 becomes Professor of Sculpture in the Royal Hibernian Academy School. His last residence in Dublin is at 28 Lennox Street, Portobello.

From 1903 Hughes lives in Italy and in France, dying in Nice in 1941.

Hughes’s influences are mainly from the Italian Renaissance and include:


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Death of Padraic Colum, Poet & Novelist

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Padraic Colum, Irish-born American poet, novelist, biographer, playwright, and children’s author whose lyrics capture the traditions and folklore of rural Ireland, dies in Enfield, Connecticut on January 11, 1972. He is one of the leading figures of the Irish Literary Revival.

Colum was born on December 8, 1881, in Columcille, County Longford, the first of eight children born to Patrick and Susan Columb. In 1892, the family moves to Glasthule, near Dublin and he attends the local national school. He starts writing after he finishes school and meets a number of the leading Irish writers of the time, including W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory and Æ. He also joins the Gaelic League and is a member of the first board of the Abbey Theatre. He becomes a regular user of the National Library of Ireland, where he meets James Joyce and the two become lifelong friends.

Influenced by the literary activity of the Celtic revival centered in Dublin at the turn of the century, Colum publishes the collection of poetry Wild Earth (1907). He co-founds The Irish Review in 1911, then three years later settles permanently in the United States. His varied literary output includes volumes of poetry including Dramatic Legends (1922) and Creatures (1927), plays such as Broken Soil (first performed 1903) and The Land (1905), novels, anthologies of folklore and children’s books. The reminiscence Our Friend James Joyce (1959) is written with his wife Mary (Maguire), a well-known literary critic.

The Colums spent the years from 1930 to 1933 living in Paris and Nice, where Padraic renews his friendship with James Joyce and becomes involved in the transcription of Finnegans Wake. After their time in France, the couple moves to New York City, where they do some teaching at Columbia University and City College of New York. He is a prolific author and publishes a total of 61 books, not counting his plays. While in New York, he writes the screenplay for the 1954 stop-motion animated film Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy. It is his only screenplay.

Mary dies in 1957, and Colum completes Our Friend James Joyce, which they had worked on together. It is published in 1958. He divides his later years between the United States and Ireland. In 1961 the Catholic Library Association awards him the Regina Medal.

Padraic Colum dies on January 11, 1972, at the age of 90, in Enfield, Connecticut. He is buried in St. Fintan’s Cemetery in Sutton, Dublin.


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Birth of Poet John Montague

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Irish poet John Montague is born on Bushwick Avenue at St. Catherine’s Hospital in Brooklyn, New York City, New York, on February 28, 1929. His father, James Montague, an Ulster Catholic, from County Tyrone, had come to the United States in 1925.

Life in New York is difficult during the Great Depression, so John and his two brothers are shipped back to Ireland in 1933. The two eldest are sent to their maternal grandmother’s house in Fintona, County Tyrone, but John is sent to his father’s ancestral home at Garvaghey, then maintained by two spinster aunts.

John studied at University College Dublin in 1946. Stirred by the example of other student poets he begins to publish his first poems in The Dublin Magazine, Envoy, and The Bell, edited by Peadar O’Donnell. But the atmosphere in Dublin is constrained and he leaves for Yale University on a Fulbright Fellowship in 1953.

A year of graduate school at University of California, Berkeley convinces Montague that he should return to Ireland. He settles in Dublin working at the Irish Tourist Office. In 1961 he moves to Bray, County Wicklow. A regular rhythm of publication sees his first book of stories, Death of a Chieftain (1964) after which the musical group The Chieftains is named, his second book of poems, A Chosen Light (1967), Tides (1970).

All during the 1960s, Montague continues to work on his long poem, The Rough Field, a task that coincides with the outbreak of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. A Patriotic Suite appears in 1966, Hymn to the New Omagh Road and The Bread God in 1968, and A New Siege, dedicated to Bernadette Devlin which he reads outside Armagh Jail in 1970.

In 1972, Montague takes a teaching job at University College Cork, at the request of his friend, the composer Seán Ó Riada, where he inspires an impressive field of young writers including Gregory O’Donoghue, Seán Dunne, Thomas McCarthy, William Wall, Maurice Riordan, Gerry Murphy, Greg Delanty and Theo Dorgan.

Montague settles in Cork in 1974 and publishes an anthology, the Faber Book of Irish Verse (1974) with a book of lyrics, A Slow Dance (1975). Recognition is now beginning to come, with the award of the Irish American Cultural Institute in 1976, the first Marten Toonder Award in 1977, and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award for The Great Cloak in 1978.

In 1987, Montague is awarded an honorary doctor of letters by the State University of New York at Buffalo. He serves as distinguished writer-in-residence for the New York State Writers Institute during each spring semester, teaching workshops in fiction and poetry and a class in the English Department of the University at Albany. In 1998, he is named the first Irish professor of poetry, a three-year appointment to be divided among Queen’s University Belfast, Trinity College Dublin, and University College Dublin. In 2008, he publishes A Ball of Fire, a collection of all his fiction including the short novella The Lost Notebook.

John Montague dies at the age of 87 in Nice, France on December 10, 2016, after complications from a recent surgery.


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Birth of Charles Gavin Duffy in County Monaghan

charles-gavin-duffy

Charles Gavan Duffy, Irish nationalist, journalist, poet, and Australian politician, is born on April 12, 1816, in Dublin Street, Monaghan Town, County Monaghan. Duffy is the 8th Premier of Victoria and one of the most colourful figures in Victorian political history.

Both of his parents die while he is still a child and his uncle, Fr. James Duffy, who is the Catholic Parish Priest of Castleblayney, becomes his guardian for a number of years. He is educated at St. Malachy’s College in Belfast and is admitted to the Irish Bar in 1845. Duffy becomes a leading figure in Irish literary circles.

Duffy, along with Thomas Osborne Davis and John Blake Dillon, founds The Nation and becomes its first editor. Davis and Dillon later become Young Irelanders. All three are members of Daniel O’Connell‘s Repeal Association. This paper, under Duffy, transforms from a literary voice into a “rebellious organisation.”

In August 1850, Duffy forms the Tenant Right League to bring about reforms in the Irish land system and protect tenants’ rights, and in 1852 is elected to the House of Commons for New Ross. By 1855, the cause of Irish tenants seems more hopeless than ever. Broken in health and spirit, Duffy publishes a farewell address to his constituency, declaring that he has resolved to retire from parliament, as it is no longer possible to accomplish the task for which he has solicited their votes.

In 1856, emigrates with his family to Australia, settling in the newly formed Colony of Victoria. A public appeal is held to enable him to buy the freehold property necessary to stand for the colonial Parliament. He is immediately elected to the Legislative Assembly for Villiers and Heytesbury in the Western District in 1856. He later represented Dalhousie and then North Gippsland. With the collapse of the Victorian Government‘s Haines Ministry during 1857, another Irish Catholic, John O’Shanassy, unexpectedly becomes Premier with Duffy his second-in-charge.

In 1871, Duffy leads the opposition to Premier Sir James McCulloch‘s plan to introduce a land tax, on the grounds that it unfairly penalised small farmers. When McCulloch’s government is defeated on this issue, Duffy becomes Premier and Chief Secretary.  The majority of the colony is Protestant, and Duffy is accused of favouring Catholics in government appointments. In June 1872, his government is defeated in the Assembly on a confidence motion allegedly motivated by sectarianism.

When Graham Berry becomes Premier in 1877, he makes Duffy Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, a post he holds without much enthusiasm until 1880, when he quits politics and retires to the south of France. Duffy remains interested in both the politics of his adoptive country and of Ireland. He is knighted in 1873 and is made KCMG in 1877. Sir Charles Gavan Duffy dies in Nice, France, at the age of 86 in 1903.