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Death of Dorothy Macardle, Writer, Playwright, Journalist

Dorothy Macardle, Irish writer, novelist, playwright, journalist and non-academic historian, dies in Drogheda, County Louth, on December 23, 1958. Associated throughout her life with Irish republicanism, she is a founding member of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and is considered to be closely aligned with Éamon de Valera until her death, although she is vocal critic of how women are represented in the 1937 constitution created by Fianna Fáil. She is also unable to respect de Valera’s attitudes adopted during World War II. Her book, The Irish Republic, is one of the more frequently cited narrative accounts of the Irish War of Independence and its aftermath, particularly for its exposition of the anti-treaty viewpoint.

Macardle is born in Dundalk, County Louth, on March 7, 1889, into a wealthy brewing family famous for producing Macardle’s Ale. Her father, Sir Thomas Callan Macardle, is a Catholic who supports John Redmond and the Irish Home Rule movement, while her mother, Lucy “Minnie” Macardle, comes from an English Anglican background and is politically a unionist. Lucy converts to Catholicism upon her marriage to Thomas. Macardle and her siblings are raised as Catholics, but Lucy, who is politically isolated in Ireland, “inculcated in her children an idealised view of England and an enthusiasm for the British empire“. She receives her secondary education in Alexandra College, Dublin—a school under the management of the Church of Ireland—and later attends University College Dublin (UCD). Upon graduating, she returns to teach English at Alexandra where she had first encountered Irish nationalism as a student. This is further developed by her first experiences of Dublin’s slums, which “convinced her that an autonomous Ireland might be better able to look after its own affairs” than the Dublin Castle administration could.

Between 1914 and 1916, Macardle lives and works in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. There, her encounters with upper-class English people who express anti-Irish sentiment and support keeping Ireland in the British Empire by force further weakens her Anglophilia. Upon the outbreak of World War I, she supports the Allies, as does the rest of her family. Her father leads the County Louth recruiting committee while two of her brothers volunteer for the British Army. Her brother, Lieutenant Kenneth Callan Macardle, is killed at the Battle of the Somme, while another brother, Major John Ross Macardle, survives the war and earns the Military Cross. While Macardle is a student, the Easter Rising occurs, an experience credited for a further divergence of her views regarding republicanism and her family.

Macardle is a member of the Gaelic League and later joins both Sinn Féin and Cumann na mBan in 1917. In 1918, she is arrested by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) while teaching at Alexandra.

On January 19, 1919, Macardle is in the public gallery for the inaugural meeting of the First Dáil and witnesses it declare unilateral independence from the United Kingdom, which is ultimately the catalyst for the Irish War of Independence.

By 1919 Macardle has befriended Maud Gonne MacBride, the widow of the 1916 Easter Rising participant John MacBride, and together the two work at the Irish White Cross, attending to those injured in the war. It is during this period she also becomes a propagandist for the nationalist side.

In December 1920, Macardle travel to London to meet with Margot Asquith, the wife of the former British prime minister H. H. Asquith, hoping to establish a line of communication between the Irish and British governments. It is during this trip that she comes into contact with Charlotte Despard, sister of the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland John French. Despard takes the pro-Irish side in the war and returns with Macardle to Dublin.

Following the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921, Macardle takes the anti-treaty side in the ensuing Irish Civil War. Alongside Gonne MacBride and Despard, she helps found the Women Prisoners’ Defence League, which campaigns and advocates for republicans imprisoned by the newly established Irish Free State government. It is also during this same time that she begins working alongside Erskine Childers in writing for anti-treaty publications An Phoblacht and Irish Freedom.

In October 1922, Despard, Gonne MacBride and Macardle are speaking at a protest on O’Connell Street, Dublin against the arrest of Mary MacSwiney, a sitting Teachta Dála, by the Free State when Free State authorities move to break it up. Rioting follows and Free State forces open fire, resulting in 14 people being seriously wounded while hundreds of others are harmed in the subsequent stampede to flee. Following the event, Macardle announces she is going to pursue support of the Anti-treaty side full-time in a letter to Alexandra College, which ultimately leads to her dismissal on November 15, 1922. In the following days Macardle is captured and imprisoned by the Free State government and subsequently serves time in both Mountjoy Prison and Kilmainham Gaol, with Rosamond Jacob as her cellmate. During one point at her time in Kilmainham, Macardle is beaten unconscious by male wardens. She becomes close friends with Jacob and shares a flat with her in Rathmines later in the 1920s.

The Irish Civil War concludes in the spring of 1923, and Macardle is released from prison on May 9.

Following the Irish Civil War, Macardle remains active in Sinn Féin and is drawn into the camp of its leader Éamon de Valera and his wife Sinéad. She travels alongside the de Valeras as they tour the country and she is a frequent visitor to their home. As the trust between Macardle and de Valera develops, de Valera asks her to travel to County Kerry to investigate and document what later becomes known as the Ballyseedy massacre of March 1923, in which a number of unarmed republican prisoners are reportedly killed in reprisals. She obliges, and by May 1924 she has compiled a report that is released under the title of The Tragedies of Kerry.” Immediately upon the release of the report, the Minister for Defence Richard Mulcahy sets up an inquiry in June 1924 to carry out a separate investigation by the government. However, the government’s inquiry comes to the conclusion there had been no wrongdoing committed. Her book The Tragedies of Kerry remains in print and is the first journalistic historical account of the Irish Civil War from those on the republican side detailing Ballyseedy, Countess Bridge and various other incidents that occur in Kerry during this time.

In 1926, Éamon de Valera resigns as President of Sinn Féin and walks out of the party following a vote against his motion that members of the party should end their policy of abstentionism against Dáil Éireann. De Valera and his supporters, including Macardle, form the new political party Fianna Fáil in May 1926, with Macardle immediately elected to the party’s National Executive|Ard Chomhairle, one of six female members out of twelve on the original party National Executive, the others being Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, Kathleen Clarke, Countess Constance Markievicz and Linda Kearns. Macardle is made the party’s director of publicity. However, she resigns from Fianna Fáil in 1927 when the new party endorses taking their seats in Dáil Eireann. Nevertheless, her views remain relatively pro-Fianna Fáil and pro-de Valera.

Macardle recounts her civil war experiences in Earthbound: Nine Stories of Ireland (1924). She continues as a playwright for the next two decades. In her dramatic writing, she uses the pseudonym Margaret Callan. In many of her plays a domineering female character is always present. This is thought to be symbolic of her own relationship with her own mother. Her parents’ marriage had broken up as her mother returned to England and her father raised the children with servants in Cambrickville and they were sent away for school. This female character holds back the growth and development of the younger female character in Dorothy’s plays and writings. 

By 1931, Macardle takes up work as a writer for The Irish Press, which is owned by de Valera and leans heavily toward supporting Fianna Fáil and Irish republicanism in general. In addition to being a theatre and literary critic for the paper, she also occasionally writes pieces of investigative journalism such as reports on Dublin’s slums. In the mid-1930s she also becomes a broadcaster for the newly created national radio station Radio Éireann.

In 1937, Macardle writes and publishes the work by which she is best known, The Irish Republic, an in-depth account of the history of Ireland between 1919 until 1923. Because of the book, political opponents and some modern historians consider her to have been a hagiographer toward de Valera’s political views. In 1939 she admits, “I am a propagandist, unrepentant and unashamed.” Overall, however, the book is well-received, with reviews ranging from “glowing” to measured praise. She is widely praised for her research, thorough documentation, range of sources and narration of dramatic events, alongside reservations about the book’s political slant. The book is reprinted several times, most recently in 2005. Éamon de Valera considers The Irish Republic the only authoritative account of the period from 1916 to 1926, and the book is widely used by de Valera and Fianna Fáil over the years and by history and political students. She spends seven years writing the book in a cottage in Delgany, County Wicklow, and it is a day-by-day account of the history of the events in Ireland from 1919 to 1923 recorded in painstaking detail together with voluminous source material.

In 1937, de Valera’s Fianna Fáil government is able to create a new Constitution of Ireland following a successful referendum. However, there is widespread criticism of the new Constitution from women, particularly republican women, as the language of the new Constitution emphasises that a woman’s place should be in the home. Macardle is among them, deploring what she sees as the reduced status of women in this new Constitution. Furthermore, she notes that the new Constitution drops the commitment of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic to guarantee equal rights and opportunities “without distinction of sex” and writes to de Valera questioning how anyone “with advanced views on the rights of women” can support it. DeValera also finds her criticising compulsory Irish language teaching in schools.

The entire matter of the new Constitution leads Macardle to join Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington’s Women’s Social and Progressive League.

While working as a journalist with the League of Nations in the late 1930s, Macardle acquires a considerable affinity with the plight of Czechoslovakia being pressed to make territorial concessions to Nazi Germany. Believing that “Hitler‘s war should be everybody’s war,” she disagrees with de Valera’s policy of neutrality. She goes to work for the BBC in London, develops her fiction and, in the war’s aftermath, campaigns for refugee children – a crisis described in her book Children of Europe (1949). In 1951, she becomes the first president of the Irish Society of Civil Liberties.

Macardle dies of cancer on December 23, 1958, in a hospital in Drogheda, at the age of 69. Though she is somewhat disillusioned with the new Irish State, she leaves the royalties from The Irish Republic to her close friend Éamon de Valera, who had written the foreword to the book. De Valera visits her when she is dying. She is accorded a state funeral, with de Valera giving the oration. She is buried in Sutton, Dublin.


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Birth of Novelist John Banville

William John Banville, novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas, and screenwriter, is born in Wexford, County Wexford, on December 8, 1945. He also has a 30-year career working in the Irish newspaper industry and serves as literary editor of The Irish Times from 1988 until 1999.

Banville is born to Agnes (née Doran) and Martin Banville, a garage clerk, in Wexford. He is the youngest of three siblings. He is educated at CBS Primary, Wexford, a Christian Brothers school, and at St. Peter’s College, Wexford. Despite having intentions of being a painter and an architect, he does not attend university. After school, he works as a clerk at Aer Lingus, which allows him to travel at deeply discounted rates. He takes advantage of these rates to travel to Greece and Italy. He begins working as a sub-editor at The Irish Press in 1969.

Banville publishes his first book, a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin, in 1970. His first novel, Nightspawn, appears in 1971, followed by his second, Birchwood, two years later. His The Revolutions Trilogy, published between 1976 and 1982, comprises works named after renowned scientists: Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter. His next work, Mefisto, has a mathematical theme, and, in combination with the three books from The Revolutions Trilogy, is the fourth book from the “Scientific Tetralogy.” His 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence, begins The Frames Trilogy, dealing with the work of art. It is completed by Ghosts and Athena. His thirteenth novel, The Sea, wins the Booker Prize in 2005. In addition, he publishes crime novels as Benjamin Black, most of which feature the character of Quirke, an Irish pathologist based in 1950s Dublin. His alternative history novel, The Secret Guests (2020), is published under the name B. W. Black.

Banville wins the 1976 James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the 2003 International Nonino Prize, the 2005 Booker Prize, the 2011 Franz Kafka Prize, the 2013 Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the 2014 Prince of Asturias Award for Literature. He is elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007. Italy makes him a Cavaliere of the Ordine della Stella d’Italia (a knighthood) in 2017. He is a former member of Aosdána, having voluntarily relinquished the financial stipend in 2001 to another, more impoverished, writer. He is considered a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In 1969, Banville marries the American textile artist Janet Dunham, whom he met in San Francisco the previous year while she is a student at the University of California, Berkeley. The couple has two sons together. The marriage breaks down after Banville has an affair with a neighbour, Patricia Quinn, who subsequently becomes director of the Arts Council of Ireland. Banville has two daughters with Quinn, born around 1990 and 1997. Despite separating, Banville and Dunham never divorce and he describes them as remaining “on good terms.” Dunham dies at Blackrock Clinic on November 22, 2021, after which Banville states that he experienced “brain fog” due to grief and is unable to write for six months. In a 2024 interview, he expresses regret over his relationship history, saying, “I caused Janet such anguish. I have caused Patricia Quinn such anguish. I wasn’t good with my children. I was not a good parent. I am not a good person. I am selfish. But I have to have responsibility.”

Banville currently lives in Howth, Dublin.


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Death of William Trevor, Writer & Playwright

William Trevor Cox KBE, Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer, dies in Crediton, Devon, England, on November 20, 2016. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language. He wins the Whitbread Prize three times and is nominated five times for the Booker Prize, the last for his novel Love and Summer (2009), which is also shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2011. His name is also mentioned in relation to the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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 born as William Trevor Cox on May 24, 1928, in Mitchelstown, County Cork, to a middle class, Anglo-Irish Protestant (Church of Ireland) family. He moves several times to other provincial locations, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy, as a result of his father’s work as a bank official.

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.


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Birth of Sam Hanna Bell, Novelist, Playwright & Broadcaster

Sam Hanna Bell, Scottish-born Northern Irish novelist, short story writer, playwright, and broadcaster, is born in Glasgow to Ulster Scots parents on October 16, 1909.

Following the sudden death of his father in 1918, Bell is brought at the age of seven to live near Raffery in the Strangford Lough area of County Down. He lives with his mother and two brothers in a cottage with no electricity or running water. This is the setting of his acclaimed novel of Ulster rural life, December Bride (1951). He moves to Belfast in 1921, where he works at a variety of manual jobs before securing a post with the BBC in 1945. He is a co-founder of the left-leaning literary journal, Lagan, in 1943.

Bel’s first collection of short stories, Summer Loanen and Other Stories, is published in 1943. His novels include December Bride (1951), The Hollow Ball (1961), A Man Flourishing (1973) and Across the Narrow Sea (1987).

Bell is recruited to the BBC in 1946, along with fellow writer, W. R. Rodgers, by poet and radio producer, Louis MacNeice. Some of his work as a radio producer is highly innovative. This is Northern Ireland, An Ulster Journey (1949) is a classic radio feature incorporating actuality, poetry, music and narration. In later work, Bell incorporates the voices of “ordinary people” in his attempt to paint a picture of Ulster as rooted in the lives and traditions of its people. His collaboration with W. R. Rodgers, The Return Room (1955), is one of the most important post-war Irish radio features and shows the influence of Dylan Thomas on Rodgers, the poet.

In the 1940s, along with his BBC colleague John Boyd, the essayist (and anti-Partition activist) Denis Ireland, actors Joseph Tomelty and J. G. Devlin, poets John Hewitt and Robert Greacen, and the Rev. Arthur Agnew, Bell is one of an intellectual set, “the club of ten” Linen Hall Library members that meets weekly next to the library in Campbell’s cafe.

In 1977, Bell is honoured with an MBE in recognition of his contribution to the cultural life of Northern Ireland.

December Bride is made into an acclaimed film in 1990. Reviewing the film, The Irish Times columnist and literary critic Fintan O’Toole says it is “not just a remarkable artistic achievement, but also a remarkable political one…restoring a richness and complexity to a history that has been deliberately narrowed.” In April 1999, December Bride is selected by award-winning novelist and critic Colm Tóibín and publisher, writer and critic Dame Carmen Callil, for inclusion in The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950 (Picador).

Bell dies on February 9, 1990, at 190 King’s Road, Knock, Belfast, aged 80, shortly before the premiere of the film of December Bride. On October 15, 2009, the eve of what would have been Bell’s centenary, a blue plaque is unveiled by Northern Ireland Minister of Culture, Arts and Leisure Nelson McCausland on the Belfast house where Bell had written December Bride. Such plaques are erected to commemorate and honour notable people.


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Birth of Irish Novelist Joseph O’Connor

Joseph Victor O’Connor, an Irish novelist, is born in Dublin on September 20, 1963. His 2002 historical novel Star of the Sea is an international number one bestseller. Before success as an author, he is a journalist with the Sunday Tribune newspaper and Esquire. He is a regular contributor to RTÉ and a member of the Irish artists’ association Aosdána.

O’Connor is the eldest of five children and brother of singer Sinéad O’Connor. He is from the Glenageary area of south Dublin. His parents are Sean O’Connor, a structural engineer who later turns barrister, and Marie O’Connor.

Educated at Blackrock College, O’Connor graduates from University College Dublin (UCD)with an MA in Anglo-Irish literature. He does post-graduate work at Oxford University and receives a second MA from Leeds Metropolitan University‘s Northern School of Film and Television in screenwriting. In the late 1980s, he works for the British Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign. His second novel, Desperadoes (1993), draws on his experiences in revolutionary Nicaragua.

O’Connor’s novel Cowboys and Indians (1991) is on the shortlist for the Whitbread Book Award.

On February 10, 1985, O’Connor’s mother is killed in a car accident. The mother of his character Sweeney in The Salesman (1998) dies in the same manner.

In 2002, O’Connor writes the novel Star of the Sea, which The Economist lists as one of the top books of 2003. His 2010 novel Ghost Light is loosely based on the life of the actress Maire O’Neill, born Mary “Molly” Allgood, and her relationship with the Irish playwright John Millington Synge. It is published by Harvill Secker of London in 2010.

O’Connor is a Research Fellow at the New York Public Library and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/Writer in Residence at Baruch College, the City University of New York.

In 2014, O’Connor is announced as the inaugural Frank McCourt Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, where he teaches on the MA in Creative Writing.

O’Connor is a regular contributor to Drivetime, an evening news and current affairs programme on RTÉ Radio 1.

O’Connor’s Shadowplay, published in 2019, is shortlisted for the2019 Costa Book Award in the Novel category.

O’Connor is married to television and film writer Anne-Marie Casey. They have two sons. He and his family have lived in London and Dublin, and occasionally reside in New York City.


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Death of Teresa Brayton, Irish Republican & Poet

Teresa Brayton, an Irish republican and poet who uses the pen name T. B. Kilbrook, dies in Kilbrook, a small village near Kilcock, County Kildare, on August 19, 1943.

Brayton is born Teresa Coca Boulanger in Kilbrook, the youngest daughter and fifth child of Hugh Boylan and Elizabeth Boylan (née Downes). Her family are long-time nationalists, with her great grandfather previously leading a battalion of pikesmen at the Battle of Prosperous.

Brayton later becomes a notable member of Irish national parties, the United Irish League and Cumann na mBan. She is described as “a patriot, but never in the vulgar sense a politician” in The Irish Times. She is closely associated with leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, and writes poems in honour of Irish patriots including Charles Stewart Parnell, Roger Casement and Patrick Pearse.

Brayton is educated from the age of 5 in Newtown National School. She writes her first poem at the age of twelve, and soon after wins her first literary award. Later on, she trains to be a teacher, and then becomes an assistant teacher to her older sister Elizabeth in the same school she received her education.

Brayton’s father is a tenant farmer, and from a young age she witnesses the effects of the land wars in Ireland. She is a supporter of Parnell, the Irish National Land League and the Irish Home Rule movement. Her work is largely influenced by her family history and Irish nationalism.

In September 1895, Brayton emigrates to the United States at the age of 27. She first lives in Boston, Chicago, and later moves to New York City. She meets Richard H. Brayton, a French-Canadian who works as an executive in the Municipal Revenue Department, who she then marries. She looks after their home and focuses on her career as a freelance journalist. She lives in the United States for 40 years and becomes well known in Irish American circles as a prominent figure in the Celtic Fellowship. It was in the United States that her reputation is established.

In the 1880s, Brayton begins her career as a poet, writing poetry for both national and provincial Irish newspapers, including Young Ireland and the King’s County Chronicle. She uses the pseudonym “T. B. Kilbrook” while contributing to these papers.

Brayton continues writing under the pseudonym until moving to the United States, where she becomes an acclaimed writer and continues to contribute to papers including the Boston newspaper The Pilot, New York Monitor and Rosary Magazine. Her target audience is the Irish immigrant population of the United States. After establishing herself she releases her poetry in collections including Songs of Dawn (1913) and The Flame of Ireland (1926).

Brayton makes return trips to Ireland regularly and develops a relationship with nationalist peers, and the leaders of the Easter Rising. Upon returning to the United States, she becomes an activist for the Irish Republic and participates in organising the distribution of information to the Irish population through pamphlets and public speaking. Her contribution is acknowledged by Constance Markievicz. Her patriotism to Ireland admit her to the Celtic Fellowship in America, where she shares her poetry at events.

Brayton’s best-known poem is “The Old Bog Road,” which is later set to music by Madeline King O’Farrelly. It has since been recorded and released by many Irish musicians including Finbar Furey, Daniel O’Donnell and Eileen Donaghy, among many others. Many more of her best-known ballads include, The Cuckoo’s Call, By the Old Fireside and Takin’ Tea in Reilly’s.

Brayton makes her permanent return to Ireland at the age of 64 following the death of her husband in 1932 and continues her career as a journalist writing for Irish newspapers and publishes religious poetry in the volume Christmas Verses in 1934. A short story called The New Lodger written by Brayton is published by the Catholic Trust Society in 1933. She dedicates much of her work to the exiled Irish living in the United States, incorporating themes of nostalgia, the familiarity of home and religion throughout her poetry.

Initially upon moving back to Ireland, she lives for a few years with her sister in Bray, County Wicklow. She then moves to Waterloo Avenue, North Strand, County Dublin. Here, she witnesses the bombing of the North Strand on May 31, 1941 during World War II. Shortly after the bombing, she eventually settles back in Kilbrook, where she was born, and lives there for the rest of her life. She spends a brief period of time in the Edenderry Hospital before her death. During her stay there she becomes a good friend with Padraig O’Kennedy, the “Leinster Leader,” who is able to reveal to her something that is linked to a family member of his. A copy of her The Old Bog Road which had been set to music and autographed by her while she was living in the United States. She had it sent to O’Kennedy’s eldest son and on it she wrote the words: “To the boy who sings the Old Bog Road so sweetly.”

Two years after her return to Kilbrook, on August 19, 1943, Brayton dies in the same room where her mother had given birth to her over 75 years previously. She is buried at the Cloncurry cemetery in County Kildare. Her funeral is attended by many, including the then Taoiseach, Éamon de Valera.

From the vivid imagery she speaks of in her poetry, Brayton, both a poet and a novelist, is described by some as “the poet of the homes of Ireland.” Such scenes include the vivid imagery of the fireside chats, the sound of her latch lifting as neighbours in to visit at night from her poem “The Old Boreen” and about her home cooking and work from “When the Leaves Begin to Fall.” Such images can be compared to most Irish households and can depict a vivid picture to those reading her poetry.

Brayton’s poetry leaves a lasting sense of Irish beauty and community. This can be seen in such poems as “A Christmas Blessing” where she speaks of “taking and giving in friendship” during Christmas. Since her passing she has continued to keep an audience from overseas from Boston and New York primarily, this as a result of the reminder her poems give to Irish exiles of Irish traditions and music which was close to them. While her poems are more often serious, some portray an almost comical undertone tone. In an article in The Irish Times, her poetry is also said to have a racy feel to them.


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Birth of Dame Jean Iris Murdoch, Novelist & Philosopher

Dame Jean Iris Murdoch DBE, Irish and British novelist and philosopher, is born on July 15, 1919, in Phibsborough, Dublin. She is best known for her novels about good and evil, sexual relationships, morality, and the power of the unconscious. In 2008, The Times ranks her twelfth on a list of “The 50 greatest British writers since 1945.”

Murdoch is the daughter of Irene Alice (née Richardson) and Wills John Hughes Murdoch. Her father, a civil servant, comes from a mainly Presbyterian sheep farming family from Hillhall, County Down. In 1915, he enlists as a soldier in King Edward’s Horse and serves in France during World War I before being commissioned as a second lieutenant. Her mother trains as a singer before Iris is born and is from a middle-class Church of Ireland family in Dublin. Her parents first meet in Dublin when her father is on leave and are married in 1918.  Iris is the couple’s only child. When she is a few weeks old the family moves to London, where her father had joined the Ministry of Health as a second-class clerk.  She is a second cousin of the Irish mathematician Brian Murdoch.

Murdoch is brought up in Chiswick and educated in progressive independent schools, entering the Froebel Demonstration School in 1925 and attending Badminton School in Bristol as a boarder from 1932 to 1938. In 1938 she goes up to Somerville College, Oxford, with the intention of studying English, but switches to “Greats“, a course of study combining classics, ancient history, and philosophy. At Oxford she studies philosophy with Donald M. MacKinnon and attends Eduard Fraenkel‘s seminars on Agamemnon. She is awarded a first-class honours degree in 1942. After leaving Oxford she goes to work in London for HM Treasury. In June 1944 she leaves the Treasury and goes to work for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). At first, she is stationed in London at the agency’s European Regional Office. In 1945 she is transferred first to Brussels, then to Innsbruck, and finally to Graz, Austria, where she works in a refugee camp. She leaves the UNRRA in 1946.

From 1947 to 1948 Murdoch studies philosophy as a postgraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge. She meets Ludwig Wittgenstein at Cambridge but does not hear him lecture, as he had left his Trinity College professorship before she arrives. In 1948 she becomes a fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford, where she teaches philosophy until 1963. From 1963 to 1967 she teaches one day a week in the General Studies department at the Royal College of Art.

In 1956 Murdoch marries John Bayley, a literary critic, novelist, and from 1974 to 1992 Warton Professor of English at Oxford University, whom she had met in Oxford in 1954. The unusual romantic partnership lasts more than forty years until Murdoch’s death. Bayley thinks that sex is “inescapably ridiculous.” She in contrast has “multiple affairs with both men and women which, on discomposing occasions, Bayley witnesses for himself.”

Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, is published in 1954 and is selected in 1998 as one of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. She had previously published essays on philosophy, and the first monograph about Jean-Paul Sartre published in English. She goes on to produce 25 more novels and additional works of philosophy, as well as poetry and drama.

Murdoch’s 1978 novel The Sea, the Sea wins the Booker Prize. Her other books include The Bell (1958), A Severed Head (1961), The Red and the Green (1965), The Nice and the Good (1968), The Black Prince (1973), Henry and Cato (1976), The Philosopher’s Pupil (1983), The Good Apprentice (1985), The Book and the Brotherhood (1987), The Message to the Planet (1989), and The Green Knight (1993).

In 1976, Murdoch is named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and in 1987 is made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for services to literature.  She is awarded honorary degrees by the University of Bath (D.Litt, 1983), University of Cambridge (1993) and Kingston University (1994), among others. She is elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1982.

Murdoch’s last novel, Jackson’s Dilemma, is published in 1995. She is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1997 and dies on February 8, 1999, in Oxford, England. There is a bench dedicated to her in the grounds of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she enjoyed walking.


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Death of Dermot Healy, Novelist, Playwright, Poet & Short Story Writer

Dermot Healy, Irish novelist, playwright, poet and short story writer, dies at his home in Ballyconnell, Sligo, County Sligo, on June 29, 2014. A member of Aosdána, he is also part of its governing body, the Toscaireacht. He is described variously as a “master,” a “Celtic Hemingway” and as “Ireland’s finest living novelist.”

Healy is born in Finnea, County Westmeath, on November 9, 1947, the son of a Guard. As a child the family moves to Cavan, County Cavan, where he attends the local secondary school. In his late teens he moves to London and works in a succession of jobs, including barman, security man and as a labourer. He later returns to Ireland, settling in Ballyconnell, County Sligo, a small settlement on the Atlantic coast.

Often overlooked due to his relatively low public profile, Healy’s work is admired by his Irish literary predecessors, peers and successors alike, many of whom idolise him. Among the writers to have spoken highly of him are Seamus Heaney, Eugene McCabe, Roddy Doyle, Patrick McCabe and Anne Enright.

Healy’s work is influenced by an eclectic range of writers from around the world, including Anna Akhmatova, John Arden, Isaac Babel, Matsuo Bashō, Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Angela Carter, J. M. Coetzee, Emily Dickinson, Maria Edgeworth, T. S. Eliot, Hermann Hesse, Nâzım Hikmet, Aidan Higgins, Miroslav Holub, Eugène Ionesco, Franz Kafka, Mary Lavin, Federico García Lorca, Guy de Maupassant, Edgar Allan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare and Robert Louis Stevenson. Healy writes in a shed and is fascinated by etymology. However, on being a writer, he is quoted as saying, “I know writing is what I do but I still don’t see myself as one.”

Healy is longlisted for the Booker Prize with his novel A Goats Song. He wins the Hennessy Literary Award (1974 and 1976), the Tom-Gallon Trust Award (1983), and the Encore Award (1995). In 2011, he is shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award for his 2010 poetry collection, A Fool’s Errand. Long Time, No See is nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the world’s most valuable literary award for a single work in the English language, by libraries in Russia and Norway.

Healy dies at his home in Ballyconnell on June 29, 2014, while awaiting an ambulance after suddenly being taken ill. He is laid to rest at Carrigans Cemetery following funeral mass by Fr. Michael Donnelly at St. Patrick’s Church in Maugherow, County Sligo.


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Birth of Charles Kickham, Novelist, Poet, Journalist & Revolutionary

Charles Joseph Kickham, Irish revolutionary, novelist, poet, journalist and one of the most prominent members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), is born at Mullinahone, County Tipperary, on May 9, 1828.

Kickham’s father, John Kickham, is the proprietor of the principal drapery in the locality and is held in high esteem for his patriotic spirit. His mother, Anne O’Mahony, is related to the Fenian leader John O’Mahony. He grows up largely deaf and almost blind, the result of an explosion with a powder flask when he is thirteen. He is educated locally, where it is intended that he study for the medical profession. During his boyhood the campaign for a repeal of the Acts of Union 1800 between Great Britain and Ireland is at its height, and he soon becomes versed in its arguments and is inspired by its principles. He often hears the issues discussed in his father’s shop and at home amongst all his friends and acquaintances.

From a young age Kickham is imbued with these patriotic ideals. He becomes acquainted with the teaching of the Young Irelanders through their newspaper The Nation from its foundation in October 1842. His father read the paper aloud every week for the family. Like all the young people of the time, and a great many of the old ones, his sympathies are with the Young Irelanders on their secession from the Repeal Association.

When he is 22 years old, Kickham contributes The Harvest Moon sung to the air of “The Young May Moon,” to The Nation on August 17, 1850. Other verses are to follow, but the finest of his poems according to A. M. O’Sullivan, appear in other journals. Rory of the Hill, The Irish Peasant Girl, and Home Longings, better known as Slievenamon, are published in the Celt. The First Felon appears in the Irishman. Patrick Sheehan, the story of an old soldier, is published in the Kilkenny Journal, and becomes very popular as an anti-recruiting song.

Kickham begins to write for a number of papers, including The Nation, but also the Celt, the Irishman, the Shamrock, and becomes one of the leading writers of The Irish People, the Fenian newspaper, in which many of his poems appear. His writings are signed using his initials, his full name, or the pseudonyms, “Slievenamon” and “Momonia.”

Kickham is the leading member of the Confederation Club in Mullinahone, which he is instrumental in founding. When the revolutionary spirit begins to grip the people in 1848, he turns out with a freshly made pike to join William Smith O’Brien and John Blake Dillon when they arrive in Mullinahone in July 1848. On hearing of the progress of O’Brien through the country, he sets to work manufacturing pikes and is in the forge when news reaches him that the leaders are looking for him. It is here that he meets James Stephens for the first time. At O’Brien’s request, he rings the chapel bell to summon the people and before midnight a Brigade has answered the summons. He later writes a detailed account about this period which brings his connection with the attempted Rising of 1848 to a close.

After the failed 1848 uprising at Ballingarry, Kickham has to hide for some time, as a result of the part he had played in rousing the people of his native village to action. When the excitement has subsided, he returns to his father’s house and resumes his interests in the sports of fishing and fowling and spends much of his time in literary pursuits. Some of the authors in which he is well versed are Alfred Tennyson and Charles Dickens and he greatly admires George Eliot, and after William Shakespeare, is Robert Burns.

In the autumn of 1857, a messenger arrives from New York with a message for James Stephens from members of the Emmet Monument Association, calling on him to get up an organization in Ireland. On December 23, Stephens dispatches Joseph Denieffe to the United States with his reply and outlines his conditions and his requirements from the organisation in America. Denieffe returnd on March 17, 1858, with the acceptance of Stephens’ terms and £80. That evening the Irish Republican Brotherhood commences. Those present in Langan’s, lathe-maker and timber merchant, 16 Lombard Street, for that first meeting are Stephens, Kickham, Thomas Clarke Luby, Peter Langan, Denieffe and Garrett O’Shaughnessy. Later it includes members of the Phoenix National and Literary Society, which is formed in 1856 by Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa in Skibbereen, County Cork.

In mid-1863, Stephens informs his colleagues that he wishes to start a newspaper, with financial aid from O’Mahony and the Fenian Brotherhood in America. The offices are established at 12 Parliament Street, almost at the gates of Dublin Castle. The first issue of The Irish People appears on November 28, 1863. The staff of the paper along with Kickham are Luby and Denis Dowling Mulcahy as the editorial staff, O’Donovan Rossa and James O’Connor in charge of the business office, with John Haltigan being the printer. John O’Leary is brought from London to take charge in the role of Editor. Shortly after the establishment of the paper, Stephens departs on an America tour, and to attend to organizational matters. Before leaving, he entrusts to Luby a document containing secret resolutions on the Committee of Organization or Executive of the IRB. Though Luby intimates its existence to O’Leary, he does not inform Kickham as there seems no necessity. This document later forms the basis of the prosecution against the staff of The Irish People.

Kickham’s first contribution to The Irish People, entitled Leaves from a Journal, appears in the third issue and is based on a journal he kept on his way to America in 1863. This article leaves no doubt as to his literary capacity according to O’Leary. It falls to Kickham, as a good Catholic, to tackle the priests, though not exclusively with articles such as “Two Sets of Principles,” a rebuff to the doctrines laid down by Lord Carlisle, and “A Retrospect,” dealing with the tenant-right movement chiefly but also the events of the recent past and their bearing on the present. Kickham articulates the attitude held by the IRB in relation to priests, or more particularly in politics.

On July 15, 1865, American-made plans for a rising in Ireland are discovered when the emissary loses them at Kingstown railway station. They find their way to Dublin Castle and to Superintendent Daniel Ryan, head of G Division. Ryan has an informer within the offices of The Irish People named Pierce Nagle. He supplies Ryan with an “action this year” message on its way to the IRB unit in Tipperary. With this information, Ryan raids the offices of The Irish People on September 15, followed by the arrests of O’Leary, Luby, and O’Donovan Rossa. Kickham is caught after a month on the run. Stephens is also caught but with the support of Fenian prison warders John J. Breslin and Daniel Byrne is less than a fortnight in Richmond Bridewell when he vanishes and escapes to France. The last issue of The Irish People is dated September 16, 1865.

On November 11, 1865, Kickham is convicted of treason. Judge William Keogh, with many expressions of sympathy for the prisoner, and many compliments in reference to his intellectual attainments, sentences him to fourteen years’ penal servitude. The prisoners’ refusal to disown their opposition to British rule in any way, even when facing charges of life-imprisonment, earn them the nickname of “the bold Fenian men.” Kickham spends time from 1866 until his release in the Woking Convict Invalid Prison.

Kickham is given a free pardon from Queen Victoria on February 24, 1869, because of ill-health, and upon his release he is made Chairman of the Supreme Council of the IRB and the unchallenged leader of the reorganized movement. He is an effective orator and chairman of meetings despite his physical handicaps. He wears an ear trumpet and can only read when he holds books or papers within a few inches of his eyes. For many years he carries on conversations by means of the deaf and dumb alphabet.

Kickham is the author of three well-known stories, dealing sympathetically with Irish life and manners and the simple faith, the joys and sorrows, the quaint customs and the insuppressible humour of the peasantry. Knocknagow is deemed one of the finest tales of peasant life ever written. Sally Cavanagh is a touching story illustrating the evils of landlordism and emigration. For the Old Land deals with the fortunes of a small farmer’s family.

Kickham dies on August 22, 1882, at the house of James O’Connor, a former member of the IRB and afterward MP for West Wicklow, 2 Montpelier Place, Blackrock, Dublin, where he had been living for many years, and had been cared for by the poet Rose Kavanagh. He is buried in Mullinahone, County Tipperary.


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Death of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Novelist, Essayist & Screenwriter

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, Irish American novelist, essayist, short story writer and screenwriter, whose works are the paradigmatic writings of the Jazz Age, dies of a heart attack at the age of forty-four on December 21, 1940, in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California.

Fitzgerald is born into an Irish Catholic middle-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.