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Death of Olive Henry, Northern Irish Artist

Olive Henry, Northern Irish artist known for her painting, photography and stained glass design, dies on November 8, 1989, in Crawfordsburn, County Down, Northern Ireland. She is a founding member of the Ulster Society of Women Artists and is believed to be the only female stained glass artist working in Northern Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.

Henry is born in Belfast on January 15, 1902, the daughter of the tea merchant George Adams Henry. She attends Mount Pottinger National School, and Victoria College, before expanding her studies at night classes at the Belfast School of Art.

Henry completes an apprenticeship at Clokey Stained Glass Studios founded by Walter Francis Clokey where she is to work for over fifty years designing stained glass windows. Her appointment in the autumn of 1919 comes by a chance visit to Victoria College by the firm’s owner who is seeking a suitable apprentice. She retires from the firm at Easter 1972.

In addition to her stained glass work, Henry exhibits her paintings widely in the Oireachtas, Belfast Art Society, Royal Ulster Academy, Royal Hibernian Academy, the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, Water Colour Society of Ireland, Belfast Museum and Art Gallery (now the Ulster Museum) and the National Society in London. She is a founding member, with Gladys Maccabe, of the Ulster Society of Women Artists and is president of the society from 1979 to 1981.

Henry exhibits at the Belfast Art Society for the first time in 1928. She exhibits four works, all landscapes in oil, and then a further two works in the following year. In 1931, she shows a further two works with the successor to the Belfast Art Society, the Ulster Academy of Arts. In 1932, she shows A Derbyshire Village, described by one critic as “a delightful English rural scene.” Between 1931 and 1942 she shows with more than twenty paintings at the Ulster Academy of Arts, exhibiting at each annual show in that time.

Henry has a keen interest in photography from an early age and wins various awards for her photographs. In 1934, she wins the August prize from the Photographic Dealers’ Association for a shot of a child playing with toys in the bath, having received a consolation prize of five shillings in September of the previous year for a shot of a traditional market scene in Boulogne. She goes on to write a regular column for Amateur Photographer throughout the 1930s.

In January 1935, Henry is appointed leader of a local sketching group by the Youth Hostel Association. In December 1935, she is commended for a sketch called River Pool, submitted to a competition judged by James Humbert Craig on behalf of the Youth Hostel Association, presented alongside Port Muckin a show with the sketching group. Maurice Canning Wilks contributes Skernaghan Point, Brown’s Bay to the same show.

The Robinson and Cleaver Art Gallery stages a display of works from Four Ulster Artists in 1936 consisting of paintings from Henry, her sister Marjorie, Theo Gracey and F. H. Hummel. She contributes Green Boat, which she had presented earlier in the year to the Ulster Academy of Arts, and includes Off the Scilly Isles among pictures from Brittany and Bavaria. The reviewer in Belfast’s News Letter refers to her style as “Post-Impressionism.”

In 1937, Henry is elected an Associate of the Ulster Academy of Arts and presents three watercolours to the institution the following year. The exhibition is opened by Oliver St. John Gogarty with participants such as John Luke, Maurice Wilks, James Humbert Craig, Rosamund Praeger and Colin Middleton, who shows three Surrealist works including Angelus.

The Royal Hibernian Academy displays two small works, Flight, 1941 and Lakeside, among an unusually large contingent of Ulster artists in the annual exhibition in the spring of 1942. The Ulster Academy of Arts is united in their commitment to raise funds for the bomb damaged Ulster Hospital for Children and Women in their Spring Exhibition of 1942. Henry displays a sense of humour in her use of black-out paint, roadblocks and air raid shelters in one of the watercolours on show.

Henry is a regular exhibitor with the Water Colour Society of Ireland, and contributes more than one hundred works to their exhibitions between 1943 and 1986.

Henry joins Violet McAdoo in a joint exhibition at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery in 1944. McAdoo presents with watercolours, however, Henry also presents oils. The paintings are primarily of landscapes but included a number urban scenes.

In 1945, Henry and her sister Margaret join Arthur and George Campbell, Colin Middleton, Gladys and Max Maccabe, Thomas Carr, Maurice Wilks, James McIntyre and others, in the only official exhibition from the Ulster branch of the Artists’ International Association sponsored by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (NI) at the Belfast Museum.

The MacGaffin Gallery at Pottinger’s Entry is the venue for a group exhibition of experimental and modernist works with Nevill Johnson, Aaron McAfee and the MacCabes in 1946, where Henry exhibits seven paintings. Quayside is one of three pictures that she presents at the Ulster Academy in 1946. She also shows it with the Water Colour Society of Ireland in the following year and at CEMA’s Some Ulster Paintings exhibition in that same year.

In 1946, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art (CEMA) purchases a painting by Henry, in addition to works by other contemporary Ulster artists. Twenty-four of the works from the CEMA collection, including her painting, are later presented at their Donegall Place gallery in 1954.

Henry debuts at the 1948 Irish Exhibition of Living Art with one painting and returns in each of the subsequent ten years with a total of 20 paintings. She is also elected as an Honorary Academician of the Ulster Academy of Arts in 1948.

Henry displays one work, Harbour, Northern Ireland, with Violet McAdoo at the 88th exhibition of the Society of Women Artists at the Royal Institute Galleries in London during the summer of 1949. Just a few months later her work is back in London for the United Society of Artists annual exhibition where she shows Gossip and Shell and Sail.

Henry is awarded a travel scholarship from the Soroptomists of Belgium in 1957, which enables her to study stained glass in the country. She is the President of Soroptomist Club of Belfast from 1960 to 1961, where she had been a member since its foundation in 1932.

Upon her return from Belgium, CEMA stages a solo exhibition with thirty-five of Henry’s oils and watercolours at their Belfast gallery. The exhibition is arranged at short notice when another is unexpectedly cancelled. Writer Nesca Robb opens the exhibition where it is claimed a new painting technique, “monopainting,” is revealed, described as paint drawn through a gauze over glass. The exhibition includes a ‘Breton’ series, Kerry Tangle, Ship Pattern, Barrack Shapes, Lough Shapes, and Backs. In addition, she displays In the Park, an oil previously seen at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1955 and at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art in 1956, and a second oil, City Lunch Hour, exhibited at the Royal Ulster Academy in 1956.

The Ulster Society of Women Artists is founded in 1957 by Gladys Maccabe with the support of Henry and a number of others at a time when no arts societies are accepting female artists into their ranks. The main objective is to ensure the development of quality art and women artists in Ulster. The organisation begins with ten invited artists. Henry exhibits with the society throughout her life.

Henry receives a mention in the local press referring to her exhibits in the Royal Ulster Academy show of 1959 with Kenneth Jamison comparing her work with that of Deborah Brown, “Olive Henry is more decadent by instinct, a fine formaliser. Her pictures Man and Ropes and Riviera Port, well defined and carefully abstracted, contrast in form with Deborah Brown’s freer Oil Over Tempra,[sic] 1959.”

A group exhibition in 1964 at the New Gallery in Belfast includes work from Henry alongside Neil Shawcross, Max Maccabe, Kathleen Bell, Richard Croft and Helen Ross. Among other works she shows Easter and Long Garden.

In 1965, Henry joins twelve Ulster artists including Alice Berger-Hammerschlag, Basil Blackshaw, Colin Middleton, Romeo Toogood, and Mercy Hunter in a diverse exhibition of landscape paintings at the Arts Council of Northern Ireland gallery. In the same year, she completes a commission from the Sullivan Association of Former Pupils to design a window for Sullivan Upper School in Holywood, County Down.

In 1981, the Ulster Society of Womens Artists elects Henry as President. A retrospective of her studio works is hosted by the Shambles Gallery in Hillsborough, County Down in 1986, some thirty years since her last solo exhibition. Henry shows at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition in 1987 for the last time.

Henry dies on November 8, 1989, at Crawfordsburn, County Down. Her paintings are held in the collections of the Northern Ireland Civil Service, Ulster Museum, Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum, and the Royal Ulster Academy of Arts Diploma Collection.

(Pictured: “The Gardener,” watercolour by Olive Henry)


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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 Robin Jackson, Northern Irish Loyalist Paramilitary

Robin Jackson, also known as The Jackal, a Northern Irish loyalist paramilitary and part-time soldier, is born on September 27, 1948, in Tullynarry Cottages, Donaghmore, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

Jackson is one of seven children of John Jackson, farmhand, and his wife Eileen. As a teenager he participates in Paisleyite demonstrations against the Northern Ireland civil rights movement. He is already a local “hard man” who cultivates an air of menace. After a brief period in Australia, he returns home and serves in the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) from 1972 to 1975. He also joins the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and is alleged to have committed his first murders in 1973. He is arrested in 1973 after the doorstep killing of a Banbridge Catholic who works in the shoe factory that employs Jackson. The victim’s wife identifies Jackson as the murderer, but the charge is withdrawn after she admits to a degree of prompting by the police.

Jackson is a leading member of a UVF gang linked to about 100 murders carried out at random against Catholic civilians between 1973 and 1979, earning for the north Armagh and east Tyrone area the nickname “the murder triangle.” He also allegedly helps to plan the Dublin and Monaghan car bombings of May 17, 1974, killing thirty-three civilians, and orchestrates the attack on the Miami Showband on July 31, 1975. He becomes UVF Mid-Ulster Brigade commander in 1975. Never convicted of any of the numerous murders attributed to him, he is however jailed between 1979 and 1983 for arms possession.

Jackson marries Eileen Maxwell in the late 1960s. They have a son and two daughters. The marriage does not survive his imprisonment and after his release he moves to Donaghcloney, County Down, where he lives with a much younger girlfriend. He remains active in loyalist paramilitarism but takes a less prominent role. He survives several Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempts on his life, including the detonation of a car bomb outside his house. In 1984, the editor of the Belfast edition of the Sunday World  is shot and wounded after publishing articles denouncing “the Jackal,” the nickname by which the press calls Jackson during his lifetime.

After the Anglo–Irish Agreement of 1985, Jackson is briefly linked to Ulster Resistance (UR), a paramilitary group founded by associates of Ian Paisley. He allegedly assists the rearming and reorganisation of the Mid-Ulster UVF under Billy Wright after the killing of his brother-in-law and alleged accomplice, Roy Metcalf, by the IRA in 1988. Relations between Wright and Jackson cool after the killing of a Catholic in Donaghcloney by Wright’s men leads to Jackson being called in for questioning, and he supports the UVF leadership in its 1996–97 dispute with Wright. He is also the focus of recurring allegations about collusion between loyalist paramilitaries and elements of the security forces in mid-Ulster, including claims that he operated on behalf of British military intelligence who shielded him from prosecution.

Jackson dies of lung cancer at the age of 49 at his Donaghcloney home on May 30, 1998. He is buried on June 1 in a private ceremony in the St. Bartholomew Church of Ireland churchyard in his native Donaghmore, County Down. His grave, close to that of his parents, is unmarked apart from a steel poppy cross. His father had died in 1985 and his mother outlives him by five years.

Considerable uncertainty surrounds his involvement in many of the crimes attributed to him, but there is no doubt that he is a cold-blooded multiple murderer and one of the most sinister “hard men” of loyalist paramilitarism.

(From: “Jackson, Robin” by Patrick Maume, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Brendan Foley, Writer, Film Producer & Director

Brendan Foley is a Northern Irish writer, film producer and director. Raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, he has written feature film and TV series scripts for producers and studios in the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hollywood, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Poland, South Africa, China and Thailand. He writes and produces the 2005 action-thriller Johnny Was, starring Vinnie Jones, Eriq La Salle and Patrick Bergin. The film wins awards including Audience Awards and Best Feature Awards from six film festivals.

Foley’s most recent work includes Cold Courage, a TV series thriller for Lionsgate, Viaplay and Luminoir shot in Europe in 2019 and The Man Who Died, a series for Elisa-Viaplay.

Foley writes, produces and directs The Riddle in 2006, starring Jones, Sir Derek Jacobi and Vanessa Redgrave. In September 2007, The Riddle becomes the world’s first feature film to be released as a DVD premiere by a national newspaper. The UK’s The Mail on Sunday buys UK DVD rights and distributes 2.6 million copies, making the film one of the most widely watched independent films in the UK.

During 2006–07, Foley writes and directs Assault of Darkness, a satirical horror film set in rural Ireland, starring Jones, Jason Barry and Nora-Jane Noone. It is released by Lionsgate in the United States on DVD in 2009. He co-creates and is a writer on Shelldon, a children’s environmental animated TV series on NBC (2010–12) and Byrdland (five seasons of animated TV series in Asia with GMM Grammy).

In 2015, Foley starts developing a new TV detective series for BBC Television, Farmoor (makers of The Fall) and Northern Ireland Screen (UK home of Game of Thrones) and, in 2016, he develops Tunnel Kings, a mini-series on World War II POW “escape-artists” for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Dream Street, Canada. He completes pilot scripts for SOS, a new eco-thriller series by Finnish producers Luminoir, and Kvenland, set in the Dark Ages. Previously he writes the pilot for drama Dr. Feelgood for Monday TV (Denmark).

Cold Courage, described as a Nordic noir series involving Finnish characters in present-day London made by Finnish producers Luminoir for Lionsgate and Viaplay, shot in London, Dublin, Belgium and Finland in 2019. Actor John Simm tells Variety that he is attracted to the series by the quality of the writing and the fact that it is a pan-European thriller.

In 2019, Foley is attached to produce an adaptation of Freeman Wills Crofts‘ Inspector French novels.

In 2025, Foley is Writer-Creator and Executive Producer for Sherlock & Daughter, a drama series starring David Thewlis and Blu Hunt for The CW, WarnerBrosDiscovery UK, Federation, Starlings and StoryFirst (UK).

Foley has written books for U.S. and UK publishers. Under The Wire, a World War II POW escape drama, which he writes along with its subject, pilot William Ash, is published by  Random House, London and St. Martin’s Press, New York, in 2005 and 2006. It becomes a best-seller, reaching number one on Amazon UK‘s history and biography charts. In 2018/19, a related TV series is developed as a future miniseries by CBC in Canada and Northern Ireland Screen.

Foley’s next book, Archerfield, a novel, published in 2015, covers 16,000 years of history in one square mile of Scotland.

Foley is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain, a Fellow of the British Association of Communicators in Business, and is made an honorary life member of the National Union of Journalists in June 2006.


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Birth of James Kilfedder, Northern Ireland Unionist Politician

Sir James Alexander Kilfedder, Northern Irish unionist politician usually known as Sir Jim Kilfedder, is born on July 16, 1928, in Kinlough, County Leitrim, in what is then the Irish Free State. He is the last unionist to represent Belfast West in the House of Commons.

Kilfedder’s family later moves to Enniskillen in neighbouring County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, where he is raised. He is educated at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen and at Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). During his time at TCD, he acts as Auditor of the College Historical Society (CHS), one of the oldest undergraduate debating societies in the world. He becomes a barrister, called to the Irish Bar at King’s Inns, Dublin, in 1952 and to the English Bar at Gray’s Inn in 1958. He practises law in London.

At the 1964 United Kingdom general election, Kilfedder is elected as an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Member of Parliament for Belfast West. During the campaign, there are riots in Divis Street when the Royal Ulster Constabulary(RUC) remove an Irish flag from the Sinn Féin offices of Billy McMillen. This follows a complaint by Kilfedder in the form of a telegram to the Minister of Home Affairs, Brian McConnell. It reads, “Remove tricolour in Divis Street which is aimed to provoke and insult loyalists of Belfast.” Kilfedder loses his seat at the 1966 United Kingdom general election to Gerry Fitt. He is elected again in the 1970 United Kingdom general election for North Down, and holds the seat until his death in 1995.

Kilfedder is elected for North Down in the 1973 Northern Ireland Assembly election, signing Brian Faulkner‘s pledge to support the White Paper which eventually establishes the Sunningdale Agreement, but becoming an anti-White Paper Unionist after the election. In 1975, he stands for the same constituency in the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention election, polling over three quotas as a UUP member of the United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC) although he refuses to sign the UUUC’s pledge of conduct.

Kilfedder leaves the UUP in 1977 in opposition to the party’s policies tending to integrationism, preferring to advocate the restoration of the Stormont administration. For a time he sits as an “Independent Ulster Unionist.” He contests the 1979 European Parliament election under that label, finishing fourth in the count for the three seats, having overtaken the UUP leader Harry West on transfers.

In 1980, Kilfedder forms the Ulster Popular Unionist Party (UPUP) and is re-elected under that label in all subsequent elections. He again tops the poll in the 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly election and is elected as Speaker of the Assembly, serving in the position until 1986. He generally takes the Conservative whip at Westminster. While Speaker, he is paid more than the Prime Minister.

On March 20, 1995, while traveling by train into London from Gatwick Airport, Kilfedder dies of a heart attack. This is the same day that the Belfast Telegraph carries a front-page story saying that an Ulster MP has been targeted as one of twenty MPs invited by the LGBT rights organisation OutRage! in a letter to come out. He dies unmarried and is survived by two sisters.

Kilfedder is described by Democratic Unionist Party MLA Peter Weir as “the best MP North Down ever had.”

The UPUP does not outlive Kilfedder, and the by-election for his Commons seat is won by Robert McCartney, standing for the UK Unionist Party (UKUP). McCartney had fought the seat in the 1987 United Kingdom general election as a “Real Unionist” with the backing of the Campaign for Equal Citizenship. At the 1987 election count, in his victory speech, Kilfedder “attacked his rival’s supporters as ‘a rag tag collection of people who shame the name of civil rights.’ He said they included communists, Protestant paramilitaries and Gay Rights supporters and he promised to expose more in future.” McCartney loses North Down in 2001 to Sylvia Hermon of the UUP.

Kilfedder’s personal and political papers (including constituency affairs) are held at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, reference D4127.

Kilfedder is buried in Roselawn Cemetery in East Belfast.


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Death of John MacDermott

John Clarke MacDermott, Baron MacDermott, MC, PC, PC (NI), Northern Irish politician, barrister, and judge, dies at his home in Belfast on July 13, 1979. He serves as Attorney General for Northern Ireland, a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, and Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. He is the first law lord to be appointed from Northern Ireland.

MacDermott is born in Belfast on April 12, 1896, the third surviving son and sixth of seven children of the Reverend John MacDermott DD, a Presbyterian clergyman who is minister of Belmont and moderator of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, and of his wife Lydia Allen MacDermott (née Wilson), the daughter of a Strabane solicitor. He is educated at Campbell College, Belfast, from where he wins a scholarship to read Law at the Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) in 1914.

During the World War I, he serves with the machine gun battalion of the 51st (Highland) Division in France, Belgium and Germany, winning the Military Cross in 1918 and reaching the rank of Lieutenant. After the war he is called to the Bar of Ireland in 1921.

Eight years later MacDermott is appointed to determine industrial assurance disputes in Northern Ireland, and in 1931 becomes a lecturer in Jurisprudence at Queen’s University Belfast, teaching for four years.

In 1936, he is made a King’s Counsel, and two years later he is elected to the Northern Ireland House of Commons as an Ulster Unionist member for Queen’s University.

In 1940, MacDermott is appointed Minister of Public Security in the Government of Northern Ireland, and the following year becomes the Attorney General for Northern Ireland. He is succeeded in this post by William Lowry, whose son, Lord Lowry, would eventually succeed MacDermott as Lord Chief Justice. In 1944, he resigns his parliamentary seat on appointment as a High Court Judge for Northern Ireland, and three years later, on April 23, 1947, is made a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, becoming a life peer as Baron MacDermott, of Belmont in the city of Belfast.

MacDermott returns from the House of Lords to take up his appointment as Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. His successors to the latter office become Law Lords subsequently. Whilst Lord Chief Justice, he is affectionately known as “the Baron.”

In 1977, aged over eighty, MacDermott offers to redeliver a lecture at the Ulster College, which had been interrupted by a bomb meant for him and which had severely wounded him.

Having been made a Northern Ireland Privy Counsellor seven years earlier, MacDermott is sworn of the British Privy Council in 1947.

Four years later, in 1951, MacDermott is appointed Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, a post he holds for twenty years. He is also Pro-Chancellor of his alma mater from 1951 to 1969. In 1958, he chairs the commission on the Isle of Man Constitution. He dies at his home in Belfast on July 13, 1979.

In 1926, MacDermott weds Louise Palmer Johnston, later Lady MacDermott. Their son, Sir John MacDermott, is also sworn into the British Privy Council in 1987, as a Lord Justice of Appeal in Northern Ireland. He later became a Surveillance Commissioner for Northern Ireland.


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Birth of John Kelly, Northern Irish Politician & IRA Volunteer

John Kelly, Northern Irish republican politician, is born in the New Lodge area of Belfast, Northern Ireland, on April 5, 1936. He joins the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1950s and is a founder member and a leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the early 1970s.

Kelly is one of five sons and four daughters born to William Kelly, retail and wholesale fruitier, and his wife Margaret (née Maginness). Living off Carlisle Circus in a flashpoint area of north Belfast and close to Crumlin Road Gaol, the Kellys are a strongly republican family, regularly supplying republican inmates with fruit and assisting them on their release.

Later in life Kelly moves to Maghera, County Londonderry, where he lives until his death in 2007. He and his wife have a daughter. He is a dedicated member of local Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) club Watty Graham’s GAC, Glen and a keen supporter of Gaelic games and the Irish language.

Kelly joins the IRA in the early 1950s when he is eighteen and takes part in the Border Campaign of 1956–62 but is arrested in December 1956 and imprisoned until 1963. He is a member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in 1967–69 which leads on to sectarian riots in Belfast. A leader of the newly formed Provisional IRA in 1969, he is involved in the formation of “citizens’ defence groups” to protect nationalist areas of Belfast from loyalist rioters who are largely unhampered by the police.

Kelly is jailed on three occasions for IRA related activity spending a total of fifteen years in prison in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. His first term is for his activity in the 1956 IRA border campaign. He also serves a six-month term in 1973 in the Republic of Ireland for being a member of the IRA.

Commenting later on the Troubles, Kelly says, “Yes, it was a terrible period. But you can’t turn the clock back. The Irish government did not create the Provisional IRA. What happened was as inevitable as the changing seasons.”

The citizens’ defence groups seek help from the government in Dublin in 1969, then led by Jack Lynch. Several ministers respond and arrange a fund of £100,000 but the planned arms shipment fails. Kelly later says, “These discussions were all about guns. The whole thing was government-sponsored, government-backed and government-related.” The planning includes travel to Britain, Europe, and on to the United States where he meets the founders of NORAID. He is one of the co-defendants in the subsequent Dublin “Arms Trial” with ministers Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, accused of conspiring to import arms illegally into the Republic of Ireland. The trial eventually collapses from a lack of evidence, as the relevant government files are kept secret, but the Irish government sacks several ministers as a result.

Kelly goes into electoral politics, serving on Magherafelt District Council from 1997. At the 1998 Northern Ireland Assembly election he is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly as a Sinn Féin member for Mid Ulster. He is deselected before the 2003 election, and criticises the decision by the Sinn Féin leadership to support policing reforms. In January 2006 he co-writes a letter with Brendan Hughes which casts doubt on the claims that dissident republicans have threatened Sinn Féin leaders and claims that the real threats are being made by the Sinn Féin leadership against those who seek a debate on policing. He leaves Sinn Féin which he considers too controlled from the centre, opposing the leadership “deceit and the philosophy of creative ambiguity,” and he retires from politics.

Kelly dies in Maghera following a long battle with cancer on September 5, 2007. Many tributes are paid to him including a minute’s silence before the Derry Senior Football Championship quarter final between St. Patrick’s GAC, Loup, and Dungiven GAC on September 8, 2007, at the home of his local club, Watty Graham GAC, Glen. A Na Piarsaigh Belfast GAC jersey is draped over his coffin before he is interred at Maghera Catholic Graveyard.


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Birth of Linda Martin, Singer & Television Presenter

Linda Martin, Northern Irish singer and television presenter, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland on March 27, 1952. She is best known as the winner of the 1992 Eurovision Song Contest during which she represents Ireland with the song “Why Me?,” the first of a record three consecutive wins by Ireland. She is also known within Ireland as a member of the band Chips.

Martin is of Irish, Scottish and Italian ancestry. Her father’s family’s surname is originally Martini. Her paternal great-grandfather, Francis Martini, is born in Dublin to immigrants from Saronno, north of Milan, Italy. Two of her maternal great-grandparents, William Green and Elizabeth Nangle, have a coal-mining background and transferred to Belfast from Larkhall, Scotland.

Martin begins her musical career when she joins the band Chips in Omagh in 1969. They quickly become one of the top bands in Ireland on the live circuit, and release hit singles “Love Matters,” “Twice a Week” and “Goodbye Goodbye” during the mid-to-late 1970s. In 1972, she leaves Chips to be a vocalist with the new group Lyttle People but rejoins her former bandmates the following year.

The group appears on Opportunity Knocks in 1974 and appears a number of times on British television promoting their singles, but never scores a UK hit. With multiple entries to the Irish National finals of the Eurovision Song Contest, the band carries on into the 1980s. They score a final Irish hit in 1982 with “David’s Song (Who’ll Come With Me),” after which Martin leaves when she wins the Castlebar Song Contest with “Edge of the Universe” in 1983. From this point, she concentrates on a solo career as well as occasional live appearances with Chips until they recruit a new lead singer, Valerie Roe, in the late 1980s.

Martin participates in the National Song Contest four times as a member of Chips; however, they do not score successfully. She participates another four times in the contest as a soloist and once more as part of the group “Linda Martin and Friends.” With nine participations, she has been the most frequent entrant in the National Song Contest’s history. She wins the contest twice, going on to represent Ireland twice at the Eurovision Song Contest.

The first of these victories is in 1984 with the song “Terminal 3,” written by Johnny Logan. The song comes in second in the final, being beaten by eight points. “Terminal 3” reaches No. 7 in the Irish charts. The second victory is in 1992 when her song “Why Me?,” also written by Logan, goes on to win the final in Sweden. This becomes Ireland’s fourth victory in the Eurovision Song Contest, and the song reaches No. 1 in the Irish chart as well as becoming a hit in many European countries.

Martin is, at the time, one of only three artists to finish both first and second at Eurovision, behind Lys Assia and Gigliola Cinquetti. Since then, only Elisabeth Andreassen and Dima Bilan have achieved this, raising the number to five.

Martin is one of the hosts on the RTÉ quiz show The Lyrics Board and also serves as one of Louis Walsh‘s behind-the-scenes team on the first series of ITV‘s The X Factor. She also serves as a judge on the first, second and fourth seasons of RTÉ’s You’re a Star and on Charity You’re a Star in 2005 and 2006. While she is dismissed from later seasons, speaking on Saturday Night with Miriam on RTÉ television on July 28, 2007, she says that she is “open” to being invited back to the show. She does not rule out a return to Eurovision following Ireland’s dismal performance in the 2007 contest, finishing last with only five points.

Martin is a guest performer at Congratulations: 50 Years of the Eurovision Song Contest concert in Copenhagen, Denmark, in October 2005. She is also the Irish spokesperson for Eurovision Song Contest 2007 and is one of the five judges for Eurosong 2009. In 2012, she is the mentor for Jedward in the Irish Eurovision final Eurosong 2012.

During the interval of Eurovision 2013, the host Petra Mede presents a light-hearted history of the contest, during which she explains to viewers that Johnny Logan had won the competition three times, in 1980, 1987 and 1992. Appearing alongside Linda Martin in some vintage footage she jokes that he had won the third time disguised as a woman, saying, “I recognise a drag queen when I see one.” The joke proves controversial, particularly in the Irish media. However, on June 1, 2013, during an appearance on RTÉ’s The Saturday Night Show Martin says that she has actually benefited from all the publicity. On the same show she performs a cover of the song “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk.

Martin also appears in pantomime, in Dublin. She stars in Cinderella as the Wicked Stepmother, Snow White as the Evil Queen and Robin Hood as herself, at the Olympia Theatre. She tours Menopause The Musical with Irish entertainer Twink. While on tour, Twink describes Martin as a “cunt” during a tirade in May 2010. The two had been friends for 30 years but both say afterwards that they have no plans to speak to each other again.


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Birth of David Ford, Northern Irish Politician

David Ford, former Northern Irish politician, is born on February 24, 1951, to Irish and Welsh parents in Orpington, Kent, England. He serves as leader of the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland from October 2001 until October 2016 and is Northern Ireland Minister of Justice from April 2010 until May 2016. He is a Member of the Northern Ireland Assembly (MLA) for South Antrim from 1998 to 2018.

Ford is educated at Warren Road Primary School, Orpington, and Dulwich College, London. He spends summer holidays on his uncle’s farm in Gortin, County Tyrone, and moves to Northern Ireland permanently in 1969 when he goes to study Economics at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB). There he joins the university’s student Alliance Party grouping. After graduating, he takes a year out to work as a volunteer at the ecumenical Corrymeela Community in Ballycastle, County Antrim, before starting work as a social worker in 1973.

Ford stands unsuccessfully for Antrim Borough Council in 1989 and enters politics full-time when he becomes general secretary of the Alliance Party. In that role, he is best known as a strong supporter of the then-leader John Alderdice and an advocate of better political organisation and community politics. He is elected to Antrim Borough Council in 1993, 1997 and – after leaving the Council in 2001 to concentrate on Assembly business – again in 2005.

In 1996, Ford stands unsuccessfully for election to the Northern Ireland Forum in South Antrim. In 1997, he obtains 12% of the vote in the general election in South Antrim, and in 1998 is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly in the constituency of the same name. He sought South Antrim again in the 2000 South Antrim by-election and in the 2001 and 2005 United Kingdom general elections.

In 2001, Seán Neeson resigns from the Party leadership following poor election results. Ford wins the leadership election on October 6 by 86 votes to 45, ahead of Eileen Bell.

Ford gives Alliance a stability which it has lacked since the departure of John Alderdice, but the Party has declined seriously in the late 1990s and all he can do is stabilise the situation. Within a month of taking over the leadership, however, he has a chance to establish Alliance’s relevancy in the post-Good Friday Agreement environment. On November 6, 2001, the Northern Ireland Executive is to be re-established. Due to defections within his own Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), First Minister David Trimble has insufficient support within the Unionist bloc in the Assembly to be re-elected to his post. Ford and two of his five colleagues re-designate as Unionist for just 22 minutes in order to secure Trimble’s position and thereby enable the devolved institutions to operate for another year. However, Alliance fails to make any political gains from their move, and the UUP and Sinn Féin fail to reach agreement on the decommissioning issue, ensuring that the institutions collapse again in October 2002.

In the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly election, Ford’s seat in the Assembly is perceived to be under severe threat from Sinn Féin’s Martin Meehan, with many commentators expecting him to lose it. However, his expertise in nuts-and-bolts electioneering stands him in good stead. Although Alliance’s vote almost halved, his own vote in South Antrim increases from 8.6% to 9.1%. Meehan’s vote increases dramatically, from 7.3% to 11.5%, and he starts the election count ahead. Ford has much greater transfer appeal and finishes 180 votes ahead of Meehan at the end of a dramatic three-way fight for the last two seats, with Thomas Burns of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) just 14 votes ahead of Ford. Despite the dramatic fall in vote, Alliance holds on to its six seats in the Assembly, which remains suspended.

In 2004, Ford makes good his leadership election pledge to work with other parties, as Alliance joins with the Workers’ Party, Northern Ireland Conservatives and elements of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition to support Independent candidate John Gilliland in the European elections, achieving the best result for the centre ground for 25 years.

Ford’s greatest triumph comes in the 2007 Northern Ireland Assembly election, when the party achieves its highest vote share since Alderdice’s departure and picks up a seat in what is an otherwise poor election for the moderates. Despite media predictions once again of his demise, Ford himself is elected third in South Antrim, with over 13% of the poll.

On April 12, 2010, Ford is chosen by the Assembly to become Northern Ireland’s first Justice Minister in 38 years. He is supported in the Assembly by the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), Sinn Féin, the Alliance Party, the Green Party and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP). Separate candidates for the position are put forward by both the UUP and the SDLP, being Danny Kennedy and Alban Maginness respectively.

In the 2011 Northern Ireland Assembly election, the Alliance Party manages to increase their vote by 50% gaining an extra seat in Belfast East and surpassing the UUP in Belfast.

Ford announces his resignation as Leader in October 2016 on the fifteenth anniversary of his election as leader noting, “The team is working well, and I think it’s an appropriate time to hand over to a new leader who will lead the party forward in the next stage of its development and growth.”

Ford and his wife Anne have four grown children and live in rural County Antrim. Until the spring of 2013, he is an elder in the Second Donegore congregation of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. He is removed from his role as a ruling elder over differences with fellow congregants on the subject of same-sex marriage. In a 2016 interview he says he is still hurt by the decision by his fellow elders who chose not to work with him because of his support for equal marriage. “It saddened me that there was, if I may put it, a lack of understanding from some people about the role I had as a legislator, compared to the role I have within the church.”


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The Killing of Richard Jameson, Businessman & Loyalist

Richard Jameson, Northern Irish businessman and loyalist, who serves as the leader of the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force‘s (UVF) Mid-Ulster Brigade, is killed on January 10, 2000, outside his home in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, during a feud with the rival Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). Following his death, the feud between the UVF and LVF escalates into a series of retaliatory killings. These go on intermittently until the LVF disbands in 2005.

Jameson is born in Portadown to a Protestant Church of Ireland family in about 1953, one of five sons. He has a twin brother, Stuart. A former reservist in the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) (1973-81), he works as a manager in the Jameson Group, a building firm which is a family-owned business. The building firm is regularly awarded government contracts to carry out work for the security forces and it is for this reason that his brother David loses a leg in a 1991 Provisional Irish Republican Army bombing attack. He is a member of the Orange Order‘s Drumherriff Star of Erin LOL 8 Portadown district.

It is not known exactly when Jameson becomes a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) nor the leader of its Mid-Ulster Brigade. The Portadown unit of the Mid-Ulster Brigade had been officially stood down by the Brigade Staff in Belfast in August 1996 when it carried out an unauthorised sectarian killing while the UVF were on ceasefire. The Mid-Ulster Brigade’s commander at the time, Billy Wright, was expelled from the UVF. Wright brazenly defies a Combined Loyalist Military Command (CLMC) order to leave Northern Ireland or face execution by establishing the breakaway Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), taking most of the Portadown Mid-Ulster UVF with him. The units of the Mid-Ulster Brigade that remain loyal to the Brigade Staff continue to operate and Jameson becomes commander. He is said by The Guardian to be a “staunch supporter of the Good Friday Agreement.”

In the weeks prior to his killing, Jameson is in a violent street altercation with LVF member Muriel Gibson, whom he accuses of involvement in drugs and slaps forcefully in the face. This is followed by a fracas at the Portadown F.C. Social Club on December 27, 1999, where LVF members are commemorating the death of their comrade Billy Wright, shot and killed inside the Maze Prison by the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA) exactly two years previously. When he enters the club, several LVF men begin to push and jostle him and challenge him to a fight, telling him to hit them instead of women. Deeply offended, he leaves and soon returns with a UVF gang armed with pickaxe handles and baseball bats. In the violent brawl that ensues, twelve people, including three LVF prisoners out on Christmas parole, receive severe injuries. The LVF leaders subsequently make the decision that Jameson is to pay for the attack with his life.

One of the LVF members, who lives near Dungannon, gets in touch with a family of north Belfast loyalists who had been members of the UVF but who had left after Wright’s expulsion. From these former UVF members the LVF obtains the gun with which to shoot Jameson. On the evening of January 10, 2000, Jameson returns from work and drives his Isuzu Trooper jeep into the driveway outside his home on the Derrylettiff Road near Portadown. Waiting in ambush, a single gunman suddenly approaches from the passenger side of the parked jeep. Before Jameson can emerge from the vehicle and with the engine still running, the gunman opens fire through the window with a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, shooting Jameson five times in the head and chest. His assassin escapes to a nearby getaway car. He is rushed to Craigavon Area Hospital but dies of his wounds minutes after his arrival. The RUC immediately begins a murder inquiry. Within hours of the killing, the UVF Brigade Staff convene an emergency meeting at “the Eagle,” their headquarters on the Shankill Road, where they compile a list of all those they believe to be involved in Jameson’s death and plan their retaliation against the LVF.

Among those who condemn the killing is Northern Ireland’s First Minister David Trimble who releases the following statement: “This is exactly the sort of thing we thought we had finally put behind us. I’m shocked by the news.”

Jameson’s funeral is held on January 13 at the Tartaraghan Parish Church and attended by several thousand mourners including Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) leaders David Ervine and Billy Hutchinson. Drumcree Orangeman Harold Gracey and Gary McMichael, the son of slain Ulster Defence Association (UDA) brigadier John McMichael, also attend as does local politicians representing the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The service is officiated by Reverend David Hilliard who speaks out against vengeance and describes Jameson as a “man admired and loved by many” and who “had been so cruelly murdered.” He is buried in the adjacent churchyard.

Despite Reverend Hilliard’s pleas and LVF leader Mark “Swinger” Fulton‘s claim that his organisation had nothing to do with Jameson’s shooting, the UVF/LVF feud intensifies. In the immediate aftermath members of Jameson’s family are filmed angrily defacing LVF murals in Portadown. A month after his killing, two Protestant teenagers, Andrew Robb (19) and David McIlwaine (18), are savagely beaten and repeatedly stabbed to death in a country lane outside Tandragee, County Armagh by a local UVF gang. The young men, believed to have been LVF members, are targeted by their UVF killers after they leave a nightclub together in search of a party. However, neither teenager is part of any paramilitary organisation and only Robb had tenuous links to the LVF. It is reported in the Belfast Telegraph that according to court hearings Robb had made disparaging remarks about Jameson’s death. Two of the UVF men, Stephen Leslie Brown and Noel Dillon, are infuriated by the comments and afterward Brown drives the victims to Druminure Road where he, Dillon and another man carry out the double killing. One of Jameson’s brothers, Bobby, is among the mourners at David McIlwaine’s funeral. The West Belfast Brigade of the Ulster Defence Association, whose brigadier Johnny Adair is close to the LVF, briefly becomes involved in the feud after Adair attends Andrew Robb’s funeral and joins LVF members at the Drumcree conflict. After the UVF track down Jameson’s killer to the Oldpark area of Belfast and attempt to shoot him, he is taken away under the protection of the West Belfast Brigade. The tit-for-tat killings continue intermittently until 2005 when the UVF makes a final assault against the LVF, leaving four members dead and the LVF leadership with no alternative but to order its military units to permanently disband.

Jameson’s family has persistently denied that he was a UVF member. They maintain that he was a vigilante who was murdered in retaliation for the firm stand he had taken against drug dealing in the Portadown area. The late PUP leader David Ervine expressed the same opinion the day after the killing by stating, “Mr. Jameson had been murdered by drug dealers masquerading as loyalists because he had been a bulwark in his community against dealers.” Ervine also described him as having been a “fine and honourable man, widely respected in the community.” Northern Ireland security sources, however, have repeatedly named Jameson as the Mid-Ulster UVF commander. He is listed as a UVF member in the CAIN: Sutton Index of Deaths, an online University of Ulster-sponsored project which chronicles the Northern Ireland conflict. It also emerges that for several days prior to his killing, he had been working at the Ballykinler British Army base. Immediately after his murder by the LVF, his family begins an anti-drug campaign in Portadown by putting up posters and handing out leaflets to passing motorists.