Edgeworth is born on February 8, 1845, at Edgeworthstown, County Longford, the fifth of six sons of Francis Beaufort Edgeworth and his Spanish wife Rosa Florentina Eroles, daughter of exiled Catalan general Antonio Eroles. He is a grandson of Richard Lovell Edgeworth. His father dies when he is two years old, followed by his aunt Maria Edgeworth two years later. He is educated at home by tutors until he enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD) at the age of seventeen. Leaving to become a scholar at Magdalen Hall, he then proceeds to Balliol College, Oxford, where he takes a first-class degree in literae humaniores. After studying law at the Inner Temple, he is called to the bar in 1877, but never practises, choosing instead to lecture in logic at King’s College, London, where in 1888 he is appointed Professor of Political Economy, and in 1890 Tooke Professor of Economic Science and Statistics.
In 1891, Edgeworth becomes Drummond Professor of Political Economy at Oxford and is elected a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he resides principally for the remainder of his career. In the same year he is appointed the founding editor of The Economic Journal and is credited with its success by the economist (and later joint editor) John Maynard Keynes. He writes seven small books and numerous articles and reviews but does not develop a systematic approach to economics. Thus, he never produces a treatise, once informing Keynes that it is for the same reason he never married – large-scale enterprises do not appeal to him. Instead, he applies a highly abstract, mathematical approach to economics, a methodology that is not helped by a difficult writing style. Although his work is sometimes controversial, he makes many original contributions to economics and statistics, which are still recognised. For example, in his own lifetime he is the finest exponent of what he himself calls “mathematical psychics,” the application of quasi-mathematical methods to the social sciences. His career, however, never quite fulfills its promise.
In 1911, Edgeworth inherits the Edgeworthstown estate, and shortly afterward becomes president of the Royal Economic Society (1912–14) and Fellow of the British Academy. Ahead of his time in many areas, he argues against the inequality of men’s and women’s wages. He has an eccentric character and is, according to Keynes, a difficult mixture of reserve, pride, kindness, modesty, courtesy, and stubbornness. His friend and fellow economist Alfred Marshall once says, “Francis is a charming fellow, but you must be careful with Ysidro.” He is never particularly happy, and dies a bachelor, although Keynes admits that it is not from want of susceptibility to women.
Edgeworth resigns his chair in 1922 and is appointed emeritus professor. In 1925, his essays are published in three volumes as his Collected Economic Papers, and for the first time his reputation is properly established throughout the world. He dies at Oxford on February 13, 1926.
(From: “Edgeworth, Francis Ysidro” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
The road and castle are on the northern bank of the Newry River, which marks the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The Republic’s side of the river, the Cooley Peninsula in County Louth, is an ideal spot from which to launch an ambush. It is thickly wooded, which gives cover to the ambushers, and the river border prevents British forces from giving chase.
On the afternoon of August 27, a British Army convoy of one Land Rover and two four-ton lorries carrying soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, Parachute Regiment is driving from Ballykinlar Barracks to Newry. The British Army is aware of the dangers of using the stretch of road along the Newry River and often declares it out of bounds. However, they sometimes use it to avoid setting a pattern. At 4:40 p.m., as the convoy is driving past Narrow Water Castle, an 800-pound fertiliser bomb, hidden among bales of straw on a parked flatbed trailer, is detonated by remote control by IRA members watching from across the border in County Louth. The explosion catches the last lorry in the convoy, hurling it onto its side and instantly killing six paratroopers, whose bodies are scattered across the road. There are only two survivors amongst the soldiers traveling in the lorry, both of whom receive serious injuries. The lorry’s driver, Anthony Wood (19), is one of those killed. All that remains of his body is his pelvis, welded to the seat by the fierce heat of the blast.
According to the soldiers, immediately after the blast they are targeted by rifle fire from the woods on the Cooley Peninsula on the other side of the border, with this view supported by two part-time firefighters assisting the wounded. Shortly afterwards, the two IRA members arrested by the Garda Síochána and suspected of being behind the ambush, are found to have traces of gunsmoke residue on their hands and on the motorbike they are riding. The IRA’s first statement on the incident, however, denies that any shots had been fired at the troops, and according to Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) researchers, the soldiers might have mistaken the sound of ammunition cooking off for enemy gunfire. Nevertheless, at the official inquiry the soldiers declare on oath that they had been fired on.
The surviving paratroopers radio for urgent assistance, and reinforcements are dispatched to the scene by road. A rapid reaction unit is sent by Gazelle helicopter, consisting of Lieutenant Colonel David Blair, commanding officer of the Queen’s Own Highlanders, his signaler Lance Corporal Victor MacLeod, and army medics. Another helicopter, a Wessex, lands to pick up the wounded. Colonel Blair assumes command once at the site.
William Hudson, a 29-year-old from London, is killed by the British Army and his cousin Barry Hudson, a 25-year-old native of Dingle, is wounded when shots are fired across the Newry River into the Republic of Ireland about 3 km from the village of Omeath, County Louth.
The pair are partners in ‘Hudson Amusements’ and had been operating their amusements in Omeath for the duration of the Omeath Gala. When the first explosion is heard across the Lough, the pair go down to the shore to see what is unfolding. The pair makes their way to Narrow Water on the southern side of the border to get a better view of what is happening on the northern side. Barry Hudson is shot in the arm and as he falls to the ground he sees his cousin, who is the son of a coachman at Buckingham Palace, fall to the ground, shot in the head. He dies almost immediately.
The IRA had been studying how the British Army behaves after a bombing and correctly predicts that they would set up an incident command point (ICP) at the stone gateway on the other side of the road. At 5:12 p.m., thirty-two minutes after the first explosion, another 800-pound bomb hidden in milk pails explodes at the gateway, destroying it and hurling lumps of granite through the air. It detonates as the Wessex helicopter is taking off carrying wounded soldiers. The helicopter is damaged by the blast but does not crash.
The second explosion kills twelve soldiers, ten from the Parachute Regiment and the two from the Queen’s Own Highlanders. Lieutenant Colonel Blair is the second Lieutenant Colonel to be killed in the Troubles up until then, following Lieutenant Colonel Corden-Lloyd of the 2nd Battalion Royal Green Jackets in 1978. Only one of Colonel Blair’s epaulettes remains to identify him as his body had been vaporised in the blast. The epaulette is taken from the scene by BrigadierDavid Thorne to a security briefing with Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher to “illustrate the human factor” of the attack. Mike Jackson, then a major in the Parachute Regiment, is at the scene soon after the second explosion and later describes seeing human remains scattered over the road, in the water and hanging from the trees. He is asked to identify the face of his friend, Major Peter Fursman, still recognisable after it had been ripped from his head by the explosion and recovered from the water by divers from the Royal Engineers.
Press photographer Peter Molloy, who arrives at the scene after the first explosion, comes close to being shot by an angry paratrooper who sees him taking photographs of the dead and dying instead of offering to help the wounded. The soldier is tackled by his comrades. Molloy says, “I was shouted at and called all sorts of things, but I understood why. I had trespassed on the worst day of these fellas’ lives and taken pictures of it.”
The Warrenpoint ambush is a victory for the IRA. It is the deadliest attack on the British Army during the Troubles and the Parachute Regiment’s biggest loss since World War II, with sixteen paratroopers killed. General Sir James Glover, Commander of British forces in Northern Ireland, later says it was “arguably the most successful and certainly one of the best planned IRA attacks of the whole campaign.” The ambush happens on the same day that Lord Mountbatten, a prominent member of the British royal family, is killed by an IRA bomb aboard his boat at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, along with three others.
Republicans portray the attack as retaliation for Bloody Sunday in 1972 when the Parachute Regiment shot dead 13 unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry. Graffiti appears in republican areas declaring “13 gone and not forgotten, we got 18 and Mountbatten.” The day after the Mountbatten and Warrenpoint attacks, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) retaliates by shooting dead a Catholic man, John Patrick Hardy (43), at his home in Belfast‘s New Lodge estate. Hardy is targeted in the mistaken belief that he is an IRA member.
Very shortly after the ambush, IRA volunteers Brendan Burns and Joe Brennan are arrested by the Gardaí. They are stopped while riding a motorbike on a road opposite Narrow Water Castle. They are later released on bail due to lack of evidence. Burns dies in 1988 when a bomb he is handling explodes prematurely. In 1998, former IRA member Eamon Collins claims that Burns had been one of those who carried out the Warrenpoint ambush. No one has ever been criminally charged.
According to Toby Harnden, the attack “drove a wedge” between the Army and the RUC. Lieutenant General Sir Timothy Creasey, General Officer Commanding Northern Ireland, suggests to Margaret Thatcher that internment should be brought back and that liaison with the Gardaí should be left in the hands of the military. Sir Kenneth Newman, the RUC Chief Constable, claims instead that the British Army practice since 1975 of supplying their garrisons in south County Armagh by helicopter gives too much freedom of movement to the IRA. One result is the appointment of Sir Maurice Oldfield to a new position of Co-ordinator of Security Intelligence in Northern Ireland. His role is to co-ordinate intelligence between the military, MI5 and the RUC. Another is the expansion of the RUC by 1,000 members. Tim Pat Coogan asserts that the deaths of the 18 soldiers hastens the move to Ulsterisation.
Bullock is born on May 17, 1865 at Inisherk, County Fermanagh just outside the County Cavan border near Belturbet, in what is now Northern Ireland. His father, Thomas Bullock, is a strict man who has eleven children and drives several to emigration because of his stern demeanour. Thomas Bullock works on the Crom Castle estate which runs along the Cavan/Fermanagh border and has both Catholic and Protestant workers. Protestant workers have the prime jobs and are employed as craftsmen and supervisors while Catholics work in the outer area of the estate at unskilled jobs. Folk memories of the Battle of Newtownbutler in 1689 remain long in the memory in the area where up to 1,500 Jacobite troops are hacked down or drowned in Upper Lough Erne when pursued by the Williamite cavalry. Many of the Williamite army is drawn from the local Protestant population.
Bullock is educated at Crom estate primary school run by the Church of Ireland and Farra School near Bunbrosna, County Westmeath. He fails the entrance exams at the University of Dublin. He tries his hand at farming but finds he is not suited. He moves to London in 1883 and becomes a Civil Service clerk. He takes to journalism to supplement his salary and publishes his first book of stories, The Awkward squads, in 1893. His stories are centered on Irish Catholic and Protestant small farmers and labourers and their struggles and tensions. He marries Emma Mitchell in 1899 and they have a son and daughter.
Bullock is well respected in literary circles but his books are never successful enough for him to become a full time writer. He says that the English are not interested in Irish stories and that there is no reading public in Ireland. He dislikes Orangesectarianism and is ambivalent to Irish nationalism. His novel The Red Leaguers looks at sectarianism conflict and Robert Thorne examines the lives of London clerks which is a popular theme at the time. His last and best novel The Loughsiders is published in 1924 and is the story of a conniving smallholder based on William Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Bullock’s wife dies in 1922. He spends the final years of his life in Sutton, Surrey and dies there on February 27, 1935.
Bullock’s daughter presents his literary papers, including two unpublished novels, two plays, numerous short stories and essays, and some correspondence to the Queen’s University Belfast library in the 1960s. A portrait of Bullock by Dermod O’Brien, RHA, is also at Queen’s University Belfast. His correspondence with Sir Horace Plunkett is in the archives of the Plunkett Foundation, Long Hanborough Business Park, Woodstock, Oxfordshire. Enniskillen public library has a collection of cuttings on Bullock, including some photocopied letters.
Yeats is married to Gráinne Ni hEigeartaigh, a singer and Irish harpist. They have four children: daughters Caitríona (a concert harpist), Siobhán (a patents professional) and Síle (a broadcaster with RTÉ who also dies in 2007), and a son, Pádraig (an engineer).
Yeats dies on January 3, 2007, in St. Michael’s Hospital in Dún Laoghaire. His funeral service takes place in St. Patrick’s Church, Harbour Road, Dalkey, on January 8, 2007, followed by burial in Shanganagh Cemetery.
In 1991, On a Friday sign a six-album record contract with EMI and changes their name to Radiohead. They find early success with their 1992 single “Creep“. Their third album, OK Computer (1997), propels them to international fame and is often acclaimed as one of the best albums of all time. O’Brien becomes depressed during the extensive OK Computer tour. After the tour, he returns to Oxford and falls further into depression.
Radiohead’s next albums, Kid A (2000) and Amnesiac (2001), are recorded simultaneously and mark a dramatic change in sound, incorporating influences from electronic music, classical music, jazz and krautrock. O’Brien keeps an online diary of Radiohead’s progress during the recording and initially struggles with the band’s change in direction. At the suggestion of Michael Brook, creator of the Infinite Guitar, he begins using sustain units, which allow guitar notes to be sustained infinitely. He combines these with looping and delay effects to create synthesiser-like sounds. By 2011, Radiohead has sold more than 30 million albums worldwide.
O’Brien lives in London with his wife, Susan Kobrin, who worked for Amnesty International. The couple have a son, Salvador, born in January 2004, and a daughter, Oona, born in 2006. He is a cricket fan and supports Manchester United Football Club. Around 2000, he gives up alcohol and takes up meditation. In 2011, he and his family move to Brazil and live for a year on a farm near Ubatuba. In 2020, he announces that he believes he has contracted COVID-19 but is recovering in isolation.
Edgeworth is born at Black Bourton, Oxfordshire, England on January 1, 1768. She is the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth and Anna Maria Edgeworth (née Elers). She spends her early years with her mother’s family in England, until her mother’s death when Maria is five. When her father marries his second wife Honora Sneyd in 1773, she goes with him to his estate, Edgeworthstown, in County Longford. There, she assists her father in managing his estate. In this way she acquires the knowledge of rural economy and of the Irish peasantry that is to become the backbone of her novels.
Domestic life at Edgeworthstown is busy and happy. Encouraged by her father, Edgeworth begins her writing in the common sitting room, where the 21 other children in the family provide material and audience for her stories. She publishes them in 1796 as The Parent’s Assistant. Even the intrusive moralizing, attributed to her father’s editing, does not wholly suppress their vitality, and the children who appear in them, especially the impetuous Rosamond, are the first real children in English literature since William Shakespeare.
Her first novel, Castle Rackrent (1800), written without her father’s interference, reveals her gift for social observation, character sketch, and authentic dialogue and is free from lengthy lecturing. It establishes the genre of the “regional novel,” and its influence is enormous. Sir Walter Scott acknowledges his debt to Edgeworth in writing Waverley. Her next work, Belinda (1801), a society novel unfortunately marred by her father’s insistence on a happy ending, is particularly admired by Jane Austen.
Edgeworth never marries. She has a wide acquaintance in literary and scientific circles. Between 1809 and 1812 she publishes her Tales of Fashionable Life in six volumes. They include one of her best novels, The Absentee, which focuses attention on a great contemporary abuse in Irish society: absentee English landowning.
Before her father’s death in 1817 she publishes three more novels, two of them, Patronage (1814) and Ormond (1817), of considerable power. After 1817 she writes less. She completes her father’s Memoirs (1820) and devotes herself to the estate. She enjoys a European reputation and exchanges cordial visits with Scott. Her last years are saddened by the Irish famine of 1846, during which she works for the relief of stricken peasants.
After a visit to see her relations in Trim, Maria, now in her eighties, begins to feel heart pains and dies suddenly of a heart attack in Edgeworthstown on May 22, 1849. She is laid to rest in a vault at Edgeworthstown Church.
The feminist movement of the 1960s leads to the reprinting of her Moral Tales for Young People, 5 vol. (1801) and Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) in the 1970s. Her novels continue to be regularly reprinted in the 21st century.
Du Cros is the third of seven sons of Harvey du Cros. He is brought up in modest circumstances. His father, later a well-known manufacturer, is at the time only a bookkeeper with an income of £170 a year. He attends a national school in Dublin and then enters the civil service at the lowest grade. In 1892 he joins the Pneumatic Tyre and Booth’s Cycle Agency Ltd, of which his father is now the chairman, and is made a joint managing director in 1896 when it is floated as a public company.
In 1895 du Cros marries Maude Gooding, the daughter of a Coventry watch manufacturer. They have two sons and two daughters before a divorce in 1923.
In 1901 du Cros founds the Dunlop Rubber Company, converting 400 acres of land in Birmingham to produce and manufacture tires, with the area henceforth being known as Fort Dunlop. The firm eventually diversifies into making other rubber products as well as tires, and du Cros selects plantations in Malaya and Sri Lanka for the company, which by 1917 owns 60,000 acres of rubber-producing land.
In 1906 du Cros enters politics, unsuccessfully contesting the seat of Bow & Bromley as a Conservative Party candidate, a seat his brother is elected to in 1910. In 1908 he is elected Member of Parliament for Hastings, a position his father had held immediately before.
In 1909 du Cros forms, and is director of, the Parliamentary Aerial Defence Committee to ensure funding for military aeronautical development, of which he is a strong proponent. During World War I he works for the Ministry of Munitions on an honorary basis, buying two motorised ambulance convoys out of his own money and helping raise an infantry battalion, being a former captain of the Royal Warwickshires and for some years being the honorary colonel of the 8th battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. In 1916 he is created a baronet. He continues to represent Hastings until 1918, when he is elected as a Member of Parliament for Clapham, a position he resigns four years later.
His later career is awash with financial impropriety. He finds it difficult to distinguish between personal and company assets, using company funds to sponsor family investments and appointing family members to senior position with no regard for merit. He also participates in financial manipulation, being a close associate of James White, a financial expert who specialises in share rigging and whose actions leave Dunlop, had already lost influence within the company, close to collapse in 1921. He is quietly removed after the 1921 crash.
Caulfeild, the son of the 3rd Viscount Charlemont, succeeds his father as 4th Viscount in 1734. The title of Charlemont descends from Sir Toby Caulfeild, 1st Baron Caulfeild (1565–1627) of Oxfordshire, England, who is given lands in Ireland, and creates Baron Charlemont (the name of a fort on the Blackwater), for his services to King James I in 1620. The 1st Viscount is the 5th Baron (d. 1671), who is advanced by Charles II.
Lord Charlemont is well known for his love of Classical art and culture and spends nine years on the Grand Tour in Italy, Greece, Turkey and Egypt. He returns to Dublin and employs the Scottish architect Sir William Chambers to remodel his main residence Marino House, to design his town house Charlemont House and the unique Neoclassical Garden pavilion building, the Casino at Marino.
Lord Charlemont is historically interesting for his political connection with Henry Flood and Henry Grattan. He is a cultivated man with literary and artistic tastes, and both in Dublin and in London he has considerable social influence. He is the first President of the Royal Irish Academy and is a member of the Royal Dublin Society. He is appointed Custos Rotulorum of County Armagh for life in 1760. For various early services in Ireland, he is made an earl in 1763, but he disregards court favours and cordially joins Grattan in 1780 in the assertion of Irish independence. In 1783 he is made a founding Knight of the Order of St. Patrick.
Lord Charlemont is president of the volunteer convention in Dublin in November 1783, having taken a leading part in the formation of the Irish Volunteers, and he is a strong opponent of the proposals for the Acts of Union 1800. His eldest son, who succeeds him, is subsequently created an English Baron in 1837.
Lord Charlemont dies on August 4, 1799.
(Pictured: Charlemont as painted by Pompeo Batoni, c. 1753-56)
Sir John de Wogan, Cambro-Norman judge styled lord of Picton, ceases to be Justiciar of Ireland on August 6, 1312 although remaining nominally justiciar until April 1313. He serves as Justiciar of Ireland from 1295 to 1313.
In February 1308, under orders from the new king Edward II, Wogan suppresses the Knights Templar in Ireland. In June 1308 his forces are defeated by the O’Tooles and O’Byrnes, who are harrying The Pale from the Wicklow Mountains. From September 1308 to May 1309 Piers Gaveston, 1st Earl of Cornwall is in Ireland as “king’s lieutenant,” a new position outranking the justiciar, and he has more success against the Gaels. Wogan leaves Ireland in August 1312 although remaining nominally justiciar until April 1313.
Clayton is the oldest child of Brian and Jo Clayton. His father is a pilot with the Royal Air Force, who moves into civil aviation, and his mother is a former airline flight attendant. When he is 4 years old his father works in Kenya as a pilot with East African Airways. Clayton regards this as the happiest period of his childhood. In 1965 the family moves to Malahide, County Dublin, where Clayton’s brother Sebastian is born. The Clayton family becomes friends with the Evans family, including their son, David, who later becomes a fellow U2 band-member with Clayton.
When he is eight years old Clayton is sent to the private junior boarding Castle Park School in Dalkey, Dublin, which he did not enjoy because he is not particularly sports orientated. At age 13 he enters the private St. Columba’s College secondary school in Rathfarnham, Dublin. Here he makes friends with other pupils who are enthusiastic about pop/rock music. It is here in the school band where Clayton plays the bass guitar for the first time.
Clayton later changes school to Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, where he meets future bandmates, Paul Hewson (aka “Bono“) and Larry Mullen Jr., and is reunited with his childhood friend David Evans (aka “The Edge”). In September 1976, Mullen puts an advert onto the school’s bulletin board seeking other musicians to form a band. The original band is a five-piece band known as “Feedback,” consisting of Bono, The Edge, Mullen, Dik Evans, and Clayton. The name is subsequently changed to “The Hype,” but changes to “U2” soon after Dik Evans leaves the band. Clayton stands in as the nearest thing that the band has to a manager in its early life, handing over the duties to Paul McGuinness in May 1978.
In 1981, around the time of U2’s second, spiritually charged October album, a rift is created in the band between Clayton and McGuinness, and the three other band members. Bono, The Edge, and Mullen have joined a Christian group, and are questioning the compatibility of rock music with their spirituality. However, Clayton, with his more ambiguous religious views, is less concerned, and so is more of an outsider, until Bono’s wedding to Alison Hewson (née Stewart), in which Clayton is the best man.
Clayton makes international headlines in August 1989 when he is arrested in Dublin for carrying a small amount of marijuana. He avoids conviction by making a large donation to charity. Clayton also has alcohol problems, which come to a head on November 26, 1993, when he is so hung over that he is unable to play that night’s show in Sydney, the dress rehearsal for their Zoo TV concert film. Bass duties are fulfilled by Clayton’s technician Stuart Morgan. After that incident, however, Clayton gives up alcohol.
In 1995, after the Zoo TV Tour and Zooropa album, Clayton heads to New York City with bandmate Mullen to receive formal training in the bass as until then Clayton has been entirely self-taught. Bono says of Clayton’s early bass playing, “Adam used to pretend he could play bass. He came round and started using words like ‘action’ and ‘fret’ and he had us baffled. He had the only amplifier, so we never argued with him. We thought this guy must be a musician; he knows what he’s talking about. And then one day, we discovered he wasn’t playing the right notes. That’s what’s wrong, y’know?”
In 2011 Clayton becomes an ambassador for the Dublin-based St. Patrick’s Hospital‘s Mental Health Service “Walk in My Shoes” facility.
seamus dubhghaill 