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Death of Donal McCann, Stage, Film & Television Actor

Donal McCann, Irish stage, film, and television actor, dies from pancreatic cancer in Dublin on July 17, 1999. He is best known for his roles in the works of Brian Friel and for his lead role in John Huston‘s last film, The Dead (1987). In 2020, he is listed as number 45 on The Irish Times list of Ireland’s greatest film actors.

McCann is born on May 7, 1943, in Terenure, Dublin. His father is John J. McCann, a playwright and politician who serves twice as Lord Mayor of Dublin. Although he acts in a production of his father’s Give Me a Bed of Roses at Terenure College in 1962, he briefly studies architecture before taking a job as a trainee sub-editor at the Evening Press which allows him to pursue part-time acting classes at the Abbey School of Acting at the same time. He joins the Abbey Players in the late 1960s.

Among his most important early roles are Cú Chulainn in W. B. Yeats‘s On Baile Strand (1966), and as Estragon in a seminal production of Samuel Beckett‘s Waiting for Godot, partnering with Peter O’Toole as Vladimir (1969).

McCann’s career includes parts in many plays from the Irish literary canon, including Tarry Flynn, The Shaughran, and the Gate Theatre‘s highly acclaimed production of Seán O’Casey‘s classic Juno and the Paycock in the 1980s (McCann plays the “Paycock” (Captain Boyle) opposite Geraldine Plunkett as Juno and John Kavanagh as Joxer Daly) as well as a subsequent production of O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars.

McCann develops a particularly fruitful relationship with the playwright Brian Friel. He plays the role of Gar O’Donnell, the public figure, in a film adaptation of Philadelphia, Here I Come! in 1970 and, despite popular belief, he never plays either public or private Gar on stage. He gives a landmark performance as Frank Hardy, the title character, in Faith Healer in 1980 (a role he reprised in 1994), continuing his relationship with Friel through productions of Translations (1988) and Wonderful Tennessee (1993).

Friel says that McCann’s work “contains extraordinary characteristics that go beyond acting … it is deeply spiritual.” Perhaps McCann’s most renowned role is as Thomas Dunne in Sebastian Barry‘s The Steward of Christendom. He wins the London Critics’ Circle Theatre Award (Drama Theatre) as best actor for this role in 1995. He reprises this role in a 1996 production at the Gate Theatre, Dublin and, following a twelve-week run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1997, his “performance of unarguable greatness” (The New York Observer) had Newsweek hailing him as “a world-class star,” and The New York Times referring to this “astonishing Irish actor…widely regarded as the finest of them all.”

On the London stage, McCann plays in Prayer for My Daughter opposite Antony Sher (1978), and is Jean to Dame Helen Mirren‘s Julie in Miss Julie (1971). This is filmed for the BBC, and he much later plays Judge Brack with Fiona Shaw in the title role of Henrik Ibsen‘s Hedda Gabler, a production filmed for the BBC in 1993.

McCann begins his film career early, in 1966, in Walt Disney Pictures’s The Fighting Prince of Donegal (this later becomes a TV series). More significant roles include the title character’s father Shamie in Cal and one of the feuding brothers in Thaddeus O’Sullivan‘s December Bride (1990). He works a number of times with Neil Jordan (in Angel, The Miracle and High Spirits).

His best-known film role is as Gabriel Conroy in The Dead (1987), starring opposite Anjelica Huston and directed by her father, John Huston. Significant late roles include Bernardo Bertolucci‘s Stealing Beauty (1996) and in John Turturro‘s Illuminata (released in 1999, after McCann’s death).

McCann’s television work includes the featured role of Phineas Finn in the BBC’s serialised adaptation of Anthony Trollope‘s The Pallisers, Willie Burke in RTÉ‘s Prix Italia drama entry The Burke Enigma (1979) and Barney Mulhall in RTÉ’s Strumpet City (1980), as well as many one-off parts.

McCann plays in Bob Quinn‘s Irish language film Poitín (1979) and in Quinn’s somewhat experimental The Bishop’s Story (1995). After hearing that McCann is ill, Tom Collins asks Quinn to make a TV documentary about McCann for RTÉ called It Must Be Done Right (1999), after a remark by McCann on his craft. The film airs on RTÉ a week before McCann’s death.

In his private life, McCann is a quiet and unassuming man, but he battles both depression and alcoholism all his life. He has many friends in Irish theatre and artistic circles but also across all strata of life. His hobbies include sketching and he is passionate about horse racing.

Remembering McCann on the 25th anniversary of his death, Gerald Smyth writes, “In the melancholy of that life-worn voice could be heard the cadences of a lyric heart.”


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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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Death of Playwright T. C. Murray

Thomas Cornelius Murray, Irish dramatist who is closely associated with the Abbey Theatre, dies on March 7, 1959, at his home on Sandymount Strand, Ballsbridge, Dublin, of viral pneumonia.

Murray is born in Macroom, County Cork on January 17, 1873, the seventh of the eleven children of Cornelius Murray and Honora Murray (née Kelleher). He is educated at St. Patrick’s Teacher Training College in Drumcondra, Dublin. He works as a schoolteacher and in 1900 is appointed headmaster of the national school in Rathduff, County Cork. His first play, The Wheel of Fortune, is produced in 1909 by the Little Theatre in Cork, a theatre he co-founded with Daniel Corkery, Con O’Leary and Terence MacSwiney. The play is revised and renamed Sovereign Love in 1913. In 1915, he moves to Dublin as headmaster of the Model Schools at Inchicore, where he remains until his retirement from teaching in 1932.

Murray’s play Birthright is performed in the Abbey Theatre in 1910 and establishes him as a writer of force. In all, he writes fifteen plays, all of which are produced by the Abbey. His two most highly regarded works are Maurice Harte (1912) and Autumn Fire (1924). Both of these and Birthright are performed in New York City on Broadway, with Autumn Fire having a run of 71 performances. He also writes an autobiographical novel Spring Horizon (1937).

It has been stated both by A. DeGiacomo and by R. Allen Cave that, in the Art competitions at the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, Murray is awarded a bronze medal for his play Birthright. However, according to the official record for the games, although Murray is a participant in the literature category with this play and also with Maurice Harte, he does not win a medal.

In his later years, Murray holds a number of significant positions: director of the Authors’ Guild of Ireland, vice-president of the Irish Academy of Letters and president of the Irish Playwrights’ Association. He is awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters (D.Litt.) by the National University of Ireland in 1949. He dies on March 7, 1959, at his home on Sandymount Strand, Ballsbridge, Dublin, of viral pneumonia, his wife having predeceased him by fifteen years. His extensive papers, containing scripts of almost all of his fifteen plays, correspondence, clippings, reviews, and other material, are held in the National Library of Ireland (NLI).


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Birth of Jake Burns, Frontman of Stiff Little Fingers

John “Jake” Burns, singer and guitarist best known as the frontman of Stiff Little Fingers, is born on February 21, 1958, in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He also records with Jake Burns and the Big Wheel, 3 Men + Black, and as a solo artist.

Burns grows up in Joanmount in Ballysillan. His mother is a seamstress, and his father is a machinist in a textile machinery factory/steel foundry, where he is a shop steward, and his socialist views are an influence on his son. Prior to punk, Burns’s musical influences include Rory Gallagher, Dr. Feelgood, Graham Parker, and Bob Marley.

Burns starts off his career at Belfast Boys’ Model School with a rock covers band, Highway Star, which consists of Burns, Gordon Blair, Henry Cluney, and Brian Faloon. Blair subsequently leaves the group to join Rudi, and Ali McMordie joins at about the time the band discovers punk.

The band is briefly named the Fast, but as there is already a group of that name, they change it to Stiff Little Fingers, taken from the song of the same name that had appeared on Pure Mania, the 1977 album by the Vibrators. Apart from a five-year gap from 1983 to 1987, Stiff Little Fingers has been active since 1977 to the present day and have released ten studio albums.

In 1981, Burns makes his acting debut in an episode of the BBC‘s Play for Today series entitled Iris in the Traffic, Ruby in the Rain, written by Belfast-born poet and playwright Stewart Parker, which also features the rest of Stiff Little Fingers effectively playing themselves as “The Band.”

After the breakup of Stiff Little Fingers in 1983, Burns forms Jake Burns and the Big Wheel. The band consists of Burns on vocals and guitar, Steve Grantley on drums, Sean Martin on bass guitar, and Pete Saunders on keyboards. Big Wheel records a total of three singles, “On Fortune Street,” “She Grew Up” and “Breathless.” A compilation album, also called On Fortune Street, is released in 2002 after the band’s demise.

In 1987, Burns disbands Big Wheel, and Stiff Little Fingers reforms, because they are “skint and wanted to make a bit of cash to get back to Ireland for Christmas.”

From about 2001 to 2005, Burns is involved in a side project with Pauline Black of the Selecter, called 3 Men and Black. This involves Black touring with three male artists from the late 1970s and early 1980s doing acoustic versions of songs they are famous for and talking a little about how they came to write the songs. The lineup for the concerts is fairly fluid, and includes such people as Bruce Foxton, Jean-Jacques Burnel, Eric Faulkner and Nick Welsh.

On March 27, 2006, Burns releases a solo album titled Drinkin’ Again.

In 2009, Burns forms a Chicago punk rock supergroup called the Nefarious Fat Cats to raise money for local charities. Notable members include John Haggerty (Pegboy, Naked Raygun), Joe Haggerty (Pegboy), Joe Principe (Rise Against), Scott Lucas (Local H), Herb Rosen (Beer Nuts, Right of the Accused) and Mark DeRosa (Dummy). Burns also contributes guitar and vocals on a track of the Black Sheep Band charity record for Children’s Memorial Hospital, A Chicago Punk Rock Collaboration for the Kids, Vol 1.

In 2016, Burns joins an acoustic “supergroup” formed by Kirk Brandon of Spear of Destiny, called Dead Men Walking which also includes David Ruffy and John “Segs” Jennings, both of Ruts DC.

Burns lives in London for over ten years from 1978 after Stiff Little Fingers relocates there. His first wife lives in Newcastle upon Tyne, and after their marriage, he moves to Newcastle, where he lives for 16 years, becoming a supporter of Newcastle United F.C. He is also an avid supporter of the Northern Ireland national football team.

Burns’s second wife, Shirley, is American and they have lived in Chicago since 2004. Burns eventually becomes a U.S. citizen, partially so he can help vote out Donald Trump.

(Pictured: Jake Burns, performing with Stiff Little Fingers in 2019)


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Death of James Bernard Fagan, Actor, Producer & Playwright

James Bernard Fagan, Irish-born actor, theatre manager, producer and playwright in England, dies of a heart attack in Hollywood, Los Angeles, California, on February 17, 1933, following a bout of influenza.

Fagan is born in Belfast on May 18, 1873, the eldest of the five children of Sir James Fagan, a surgeon at the Belfast Royal Hospital and an inspector of Irish reformatories, and Mary Catherine Fagan (née Hughes). He attends Clongowes Wood College near Clane, County Kildare and then moves to England. Initially interested in a career in the church, he begins studying law at Trinity College, Oxford in 1892 but leaves in 1893 without a degree. He works for a time in the Indian Civil Service but abandons this career for the stage.

Fagan begins his career as an actor with the company of Sir Frank Benson for two years, then joining, from 1895 to 1899, the company of Herbert Beerbohm Tree at Her Majesty’s Theatre. There he appears in Katherine and Petruchio, A Man’s Shadow, Julius Caesar, The Musketeers and Carnac Sahib. He starts writing plays in 1899, with The Rebels, for the time forsaking acting. In 1913, he returns to the stage touring as the Rt. Hon. Denzil Trevena in his own play, The Earth. He next writes The Fourth of August (1914) and Doctor O’Toole (1917). In 1917 he produces his first play, his own adaptation of the Eugène Brieux play Damaged Goods at St. Martin’s Theatre. He next produces The Wonder Tales and The Little Brother at the Ambassadors Theatre in London.

Fagan takes over the Court Theatre in London’s Sloane Square as a Shakespearean playhouse in 1920. The Times calls his revivals of Twelfth Night, The Merchant of Venice, Henry the Fourth (Part Two) and A Midsummer Night’s Dream “memorable for their freshness, sanity and distinction, and [deserving of] a place in theatrical history.” At the Court, he revives Damaged Goods and, in 1921, with the assistance of the author, produces George Bernard Shaw‘s Heartbreak House, with Edith Evans as “Lady Utterwood.” In 1922 he produces his play The Wheel at the Apollo Theatre. Its success allows him to repay his creditors. Even more successful is his adaptation of Treasure Island at the Savoy Theatre with Arthur Bourchier as “Long John Silver,” which opens December 26, 1922. It is revived every Christmas until the outbreak of World War II.

Fagan is persuaded by Jane Ellis, the actress who with Alfred Ballard founds the Oxford Playhouse “Red Barn” in 1923, to be its first manager. His first production at the Oxford Playhouse is a restaging of Shaw’s Heartbreak House and numbered Shaw among the audience. He produces The Cherry Orchard, at various theatres, to favourable reviews, popularising Anton Chekhov in Britain. From November 16, 1925, with Dennis Eadie, he presents Juno and the Paycock at the Royalty Theatre, thus bringing Seán O’Casey to the attention of London’s theatre-going public. O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars follows the next year.

Fagan receives little support from the University of Oxford or the play-going public and resigns in 1929. His successor is Stanford Holme, who broadens its appeal and, despite the straitened times, makes it financially viable. In 1929, he is a director of the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, where his friend Terence Gray is director. He also produces many works for the Irish Players.

Beginning in the 1920s, several of Fagan’s plays are adapted for film. He moves to Hollywood in 1929 for the filming by Paramount Pictures of his play The Wheel as The Wheel of Life. Other film work includes his co-adaptation of the screenplay for the 1932 film Smilin’ Through, and he co-writes Paramount’s Forgotten Commandments the same year. His play Bella Donna is filmed four times, including posthumously in 1946, and a 1936 film, The Improper Duchess is based on his 1931 play of the same name.

James Bernard Fagan dies in Hollywood, California, on February 17, 1933, at the age of 59 of a heart attack following a bout of influenza.


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Birth of Máire Ní Chinnéide, Language Activist & Playwright

Máire Ní Chinnéide (English: Mary or Molly O’Kennedy) Irish language activist, playwright, first president of the Camogie Association and first female president of Oireachtas na Gaeilge, is born in Rathmines, an affluent inner suburb on the Southside of Dublin, on January 17, 1879.

Ní Chinnéide attends Muckross Park College and the Royal University of Ireland (later the National University of Ireland) where she is a classmate of Agnes O’Farrelly, Helena Concannon, and Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington. She learns the Irish language on holiday in Ballyvourney, County Cork, and earns the first scholarship in Irish language from the Royal University of Ireland, worth £100 a year, which is spent on visits to the Irish college in Ballingeary.

She studies in the school of Old Irish established by Professor Osborn Bergin and is strongly influenced by the Irish Australian professor O’Daly. She later teaches Latin through Irish at Ballingeary and becomes proficient in French, German, Italian and Spanish.

She spends the last £100 of her scholarship on a dowry for her marriage to Sean MacGearailt, later first Accountant General of Revenue in the Irish civil service, with whom she lives originally in Glasnevin and then in Dalkey.

She is a founder member of the radical Craobh an Chéitinnigh, the Keating branch of Conradh na Gaeilge, composed mainly of Dublin-based Kerry people and regarded, by themselves at least, as the intellectual focus of the League.

In August 1904, some six years after the establishment of the earliest women’s hurling teams, the rules of camogie (then called camoguidheacht), first appears in Banba, a journal produced by Craobh an Chéitinnigh. Camogie had come to public attention when it was showcased at the annual Oireachtas (Conradh na Gaeilge Festival) earlier that year, and it differed from men’s hurling in its use of a lighter ball and a smaller playing-field. Ní Chinnéide and Cáit Ní Dhonnchadha, like Ní Chinnéide, an Irish-language enthusiast and cultural nationalist, are credited with having created the game, with the assistance of Ní Dhonnchadha’s scholarly brother Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, who drew up its rules. She is on the first camogie team to play an exhibition match in Navan, County Meath, in July 1904, becomes an early propagandist for the game and, in 1905, is elected president of the infant Camogie Association.

Ní Chinnéide later serves as Vice-President of Craobh an Chéitinnigh, to Cathal Brugha. She is active in Cumann na mBan during the Irish War of Independence and takes the pro-treaty side during the Irish Civil War and attempts to set up a woman’s organisation “in support of the Free State” alongside Jennie Wyse Power.

She first visits the Blasket Islands in 1932 with her daughter Niamh, who dies tragically young. In the summer of 1934, she puts the idea into Peig Sayers‘s head to write a memoir. According to a later interview with Ní Chinnéide “she knew and admired her gift for easy conversation, her gracious charm as a hostess, her talent for illustrating a point she was making by a story out of her own experience that was as rich in philosophy and thought as it was limited geographically.” Peig answers that she has “nothing to write.” She had learned only to read and write in English at school and most of it has been forgotten.

Ní Chinnéide suggests Peig should dictate her memoir to her son Micheal, known to everyone on the island as An File (“The Poet”), but Peig “only shook her head doubtfully.” At Christmas, a packet arrives from the Blaskets with a manuscript, she transcribes it word for word and the following summer brings it back to the Blaskets to read it to Peig. She then edits the manuscript for the Talbot Press. Peig becomes well known as a prescribed text on the Leaving Certificate curriculum in Irish.

Ní Chinnéide has an acting part in the first modern play performed in Irish on the stage, Casadh an tSugáin by Douglas Hyde in 1901. She is later author of children’s plays staged by An Comhar Drámuidhachta at the Oireachtas and the Peacock Theatre, of which Gleann na Sidheóg and An Dúthchas (1908) are published. She is a broadcaster in Irish on 2RN, a wholly owned subsidiary of Raidió Teilifís Éireann, after its foundation in 1926 and author of a translation of Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1923). She is president of the Gaelic Players Dramatic group during the 1930s and a founder of the Gaelic Writers Association in 1939.

She soon becomes interested in writing children’s plays, including Gleann na Sidheóg (Fairy Glen, 1905) and Sidheoga na mBláth (Flower Fairies, 1909. Although there is little information available on the staging of her first play, by the time her second children’s play, Sidheóga na mBláth, is published in An Claidheamh Soluis in December 1907, “Éire Óg” (“Young Ireland”) branches of Conradh na Gaeilge have been established in conjunction with adults’ branches. Patrick Pearse in particular voices the expectation that this play will be staged by many “Éire Óg” branches “before the New Year is very old,” thus indicating the immediate take up of such plays. Indeed, a week after the play’s publication, it is staged in the Dominican College in Donnybrook, Dublin, where Ní Chinnéide had spent several years as an Irish teacher.

Ní Chinnéide dies on April 25, 1967, and is buried in Dean’s Grange Cemetery.

In 2007 the camogie trophy (Máire Ní Chinnéide Cup) for the annual inter-county All-Ireland Junior Camogie Championship is named in her honour.

(Pictured: Máire Ní Chinéide at her graduation, photograph from Banba, 1903)


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Death of Frank Fay, Actor & Co-founder of the Abbey Theatre

Frank J. (Francis John) Fay, actor, theatrical producer and co-founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, dies on January 2, 1931.

Fay is born on August 30, 1870, at 10 Lower Dorset Street, Dublin, the eldest son of four children of William Patrick Fay, a government clerk, and his wife, Martha Fay (née Dowling). He is educated at Belvedere College, Dublin, where he learns shorthand and typing, before leaving to become a secretary for an accountancy firm in Dublin. From an early age he has a passion for the theatre and immerses himself in books on the subject, becoming a drama expert. His brother, William George Fay, shares his enthusiasm and they take part in many amateur productions, setting up the Ormonde Dramatic Company in 1891.

Fay is an ardent nationalist, and Arthur Griffith appoints him drama critic for his newspaper, the United Irishman (1899–1902), where he develops his ideas on how the theatre should be run. Initially in favour of plays in the Irish language, he soon abandons this as unworkable. In May 1901 he attacks W. B. Yeats for his faulty notions about theatre and even his work as a dramatist, ending with the fiercely nationalistic assertion that “there is a herd of Saxon and other swine fattening on us. They must be swept into the sea with the pestilent breed of West Britons with which we are troubled, or they will sweep us there.” Yeats’s and Lady Gregory‘s next play is Cathleen ni Houlihan.

In 1902, Fay writes a famous article advocating a national theatre company that will “be the nursery of an Irish dramatic literature which, while making a world-wide appeal, would see life through Irish eyes.” He is a member of his brother’s National Dramatic Society, which merges with the Irish Literary Theatre in 1902 to form the Irish National Theatre Society, the originating body of the Abbey Theatre. The following year Yeats declares that the national theatre owes its existence to the two Fay brothers. Fay soon abandons Griffith and begins to champion the cause of Yeats.

An excellent tragic actor, Fay can make audiences forget his less than five feet six-inch stature through the power of his voice. When the Abbey Theatre opens on December 27, 1904, he stars in Yeats’s On Baile’s Strand as Cú Chulainn, a role he makes his own. He spends much time training the other actors. As an elocution teacher he has no equal. One play has Yeats leaving with his “head on fire” because of the quality of the voices on stage. Yeats dedicates his play The King’s Threshold (1904) with the words: “In memory of Frank Fay and his beautiful speaking in the character of Seanchan.”

Fay has a close but turbulent relationship with his brother William, whom he defers to in all theatrical matters except acting. Their heated arguments sometimes lead to blows. His temper is always volatile, and he is prone to histrionics and fits of depression. After 1905, the Abbey Theatre becomes a limited company owing to the patronage of Annie Horniman, and the Fays lose most of their control, which results in much tension and bitterness. In 1907, Fay plays Shawn Keogh in the first production of The Playboy of the Western World by John Millington Synge.

Disagreements with Yeats over the approach to choosing and staging of plays comes to a head late in late 1907 and the Fays resign on January 13, 1908. On March 13 they are suspended from the Irish National Theatre Society. They tour the United States with Charles Frohman before separating. Fay then tours England in minor Shakespearean roles and melodrama. Between 1912 and 1914, Thomas MacDonagh and Joseph Mary Plunkett attempt to persuade him to become actor-manager of an Irish theatre. In 1918 he returns to the Abbey Theatre in two short-lived revivals of Yeats’s The Hour Glass and The King’s Threshold. He retires to Dublin permanently in 1921, teaching elocution and directing plays in local colleges.

Fay marries, in 1912, Freda, known as “Bird.” They live at Upper Mount Street, Dublin, and have one son, Gerard, who becomes a popular writer and memoirist. Fay dies on January 2, 1931, having never really recovered from the death of his wife, and is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery. He is credited with creating the Abbey Theatre style of acting, which becomes internationally known, and influences many other schools of acting. He wanted actors to behave as naturally as possible and to speak the lines as people would in real life, rather than with an exaggerated stage delivery. His training is a major influence on subsequent generations, as actors learned to “speak words with quiet force, like feathers borne on puffs of wind.”

(From: “Fay, Frank J. (Francis John)” by Patrick M. Geoghegan, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009) | Pictured: Portrait of Frank Fay by John Butler Yeats, commissioned by Annie Horniman for the opening of the Abbey Theatre, December 27, 1904)


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Death of Seán Hales, Political Activist & Member of Dáil Éireann

Seán Hales, Irish political activist and member of Dáil Éireann from May 1921 to December 1922, is shot and killed in Dublin on December 7, 1922, by republican gunmen on orders from Liam Lynch directing the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to kill, amongst others, all deputies and senators who had voted for the Public Safety Act (September 28, 1922) which established military courts with the power to impose the death penalty.

Hales is born John Hales in Ballinadee, Bandon, County Cork, on March 30, 1880, the eldest child of five sons and four daughters of Robert Hales, a farmer, and Margaret (née Fitzgerald) Hales. He is educated at Ballinadee national school and Warner’s Lane school, Bandon. After leaving school he goes to work on his father’s farm. He plays hurling with Valley Rovers GAA club and is the Munster champion in the 56-lb. weight-throwing competition. From an early age he follows in his father’s footsteps and becomes involved in the republican movement.

Hales joins the Irish Volunteers in 1915 and becomes captain of the Ballinadee company in 1916. Arrested under the Defence of the Realm Act after the 1916 Easter Rising, he is imprisoned in Frongoch internment camp in Wales. After his release, in April 1917 he becomes executive of the short-lived Liberty League promoted by Count George Plunkett. When the League merges with Sinn Féin, he helps reorganise the Volunteers. With his brothers, Tom, William, and Donal, he continues his father’s fight on behalf of evicted tenants and becomes involved with the anti-British Bandon People’s Food Committee and the anti-landlord Unpurchased Tenants’ Association. He helps in the Sinn Féin takeover of The Southern Star newspaper and is a member of the new board of directors. In 1919 he becomes battalion commander of the first (Bandon) battalion 3rd Cork Brigade of the Irish Republican Army, the name by which the Irish Volunteers increasingly became known. He leads the attack on Timoleague Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) barracks in February 1920, and the ambush of an Essex Regiment patrol at Brinny in August 1920. The military patrol at Brinny manages to surprise the ambushers and Lieutenant Tim Fitzgerald of Bandon is the first Volunteer to be killed in action in west Cork. Hales then commands the assault on two truckloads of British troops at Newcestown Cross in which a British officer is killed and several soldiers are wounded.

Hales is appointed section commander of the west Cork flying column in 1920 and takes part in the major action at Crossbarry on March 19, 1921. In retaliation for the burning of the Hales home in March 1921, he leads a contingent of Volunteers and burns Castle Bernard, the residence of the Earl of Bandon. The occupant, Lord Bandon, is held hostage until General Strickland, the British OC in Cork, guarantees he will not execute Volunteers in Cork prison. The British authorities yield and there is an end to the policy of executing prisoners of war in the Cork area.

At the 1921 Irish elections, Hales is elected to the Second Dáil as a Sinn Féin member for the Cork Mid, North, South, South East and West constituency.

At the 1922 Irish general election, Hales is elected to the Third Dáil as a pro-Treaty Sinn Féin Teachta Dála (TD) for the same constituency. He receives 4,374 first preference votes (7.9%). Shortly afterward, the Irish Civil War breaks out between the pro-Treaty faction, who are in favour of setting up the Irish Free State and the anti-Treaty faction, who would not accept the abolition of the Irish Republic.

On December 7, 1922, Hales is killed by anti-Treaty IRA men as he leaves the Dáil. Another TD, Pádraic Ó Máille, is also shot and badly wounded in the incident. His killing is in reprisal for the Free State’s execution of anti-treaty prisoners. In revenge for Hales’ killing, four republican leaders, Joe McKelvey, Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows and Richard Barrett, are executed the following day, December 8, 1922.

Hales is given a military funeral to the family burial place at St. Patrick’s Cemetery, Bandon.

According to information passed on to playwright Ulick O’Connor, an anti-Treaty IRA volunteer named Owen Donnelly of Glasnevin is responsible for the killing of Hales. Seán Caffrey, an anti-treaty intelligence officer told O’Connor that Donnelly had not been ordered to kill Hales specifically but was following the general order issued by Liam Lynch to shoot all deputies and senators they could who had voted for the Public Safety Act (September 28, 1922) which established military courts with the power to impose the death penalty.

A commemorative statue of Hayes is unveiled at Bank Place in Bandon in 1930.


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Death of Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany FRSL, Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist, dies in hospital in Dublin on October 25, 1957, following an attack of appendicitis. Over 90 volumes of fiction, essays, poems and plays appear in his lifetime, and a modest amount of material is published posthumously.

Plunkett, known to his family as “Eddie,” is born in London, England, on July 24, 1878, the first son of John William Plunkett, 17th Baron of Dunsany (1853–1899), and his wife, Ernle Elizabeth Louisa Maria Grosvenor Ernle-Erle-Drax, (née Burton) (1855–1916). From a historically wealthy and famous family, he is related to many well-known Irish figures. He is a kinsman of the Catholic Saint Oliver Plunkett, the martyred Archbishop of Armagh. He is also related to the prominent Anglo-Irish unionist and later nationalist Home Rule politician Sir Horace Plunkett and George Noble Plunkett, Papal Count and Republican politician, father of Joseph Plunkett, executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Plunkett’s only grown sibling, a younger brother, from whom he is estranged from about 1916, for reasons not fully clear but connected to his mother’s will, is the noted British naval officer Sir Reginald Drax. Another younger brother dies in infancy.

Plunkett grows up at the family properties, notably, Dunstall Priory in Shoreham, Kent, and Dunsany Castle in County Meath, but also in family homes such as in London. His schooling is at Cheam School, Eton College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, which he enters in 1896.

The title passes to Plunkett at his father’s death in 1899 at a fairly young age. The young Lord Dunsany returns to Dunsany Castle in 1901 after war duty. In that year he is also confirmed as an elector for the Representative Peers for Ireland in the House of Lords.

In 1903, Plunkett meets Lady Beatrice Child Villiers (1880–1970), youngest daughter of Victor Child Villiers, 7th Earl of Jersey, who is then living at Osterley Park. They marry in 1904. Their one child, Randal, is born in 1906. Lady Beatrice is supportive of her husband’s interests and helps him by typing his manuscripts, selecting work for his collections, including the 1954 retrospective short story collection, and overseeing his literary heritage after his death.

The Plunketts are socially active in Dublin and London and travel between homes in Meath, London and Kent, other than during the First and Second World Wars and the Irish War of Independence. He circulates with many literary figures of the time. To many of these in Ireland he is first introduced by his uncle, the co-operative pioneer Sir Horace Plunkett, who also helps to manage his estate and investments for a time. He is friendly, for example, with George William Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, and for a time, W. B. Yeats. He also socialises at times with George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells and is a friend of Rudyard Kipling.

In 1910 Plunkett commissions a two-story extension to Dunsany Castle, with a billiard room, bedrooms and other facilities. The billiard room includes the crests of all the Lords Dunsany up to the 18th.

Plunkett serves as a second lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards in the Second Boer War. Volunteering in World War I and appointed Captain in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, he is stationed for a time at Ebrington Barracks in Derry, Northern Ireland. Hearing while on leave of disturbances in Dublin during the Easter Rising of 1916, he drives in to offer help and is wounded by a bullet lodged in his skull. After recovery at Jervis Street Hospital and what is then the King George V Hospital (now St. Bricin’s Military Hospital), he returns to duty. His military belt is lost in the episode and later used at the burial of Michael Collins. Having been refused forward positioning in 1916 and listed as valuable as a trainer, he serves in the later war stages in the trenches and in the final period writing propaganda material for the War Office with MI7b. There is a book at Dunsany Castle with wartime photographs, on which lost members of his command are marked.

During the Irish War of Independence, Plunkett is charged with violating the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act 1920, tried by court-martial on February 4, 1921, convicted, and sentenced to pay a fine of 25 pounds or serve three months in prison without labour. The Crown Forces had searched Dunsany Castle and had found two double-barreled shotguns, two rook rifles, four Very pistols, an automatic pistol and a large quantity of pistol ammunition, along with shotgun and rifle ammunition.

During World War II, Plunkett signs up for the Irish Army Reserve and the British Home Guard, the two countries’ local defence forces, and is especially active in Shoreham, Kent, the English village bombed most during the Battle of Britain.

Plunkett’s fame arises chiefly from his prolific writings. He is involved in the Irish Literary Revival. Supporting the Revival, he is a major donor to the Abbey Theatre, and he moves in Irish literary circles. He is well acquainted with W. B. Yeats, Lady Gregory, Percy French, George “AE” Russell, Oliver St. John Gogarty, Padraic Colum and others. He befriends and supports Francis Ledwidge, to whom he gives the use of his library, and Mary Lavin.

Plunkett makes his first literary tour to the United States in 1919 and further such visits up to the 1950s, in the early years mostly to the eastern seaboard and later, notably, to California. His own work and contribution to the Irish literary heritage are recognised with an honorary degree from Trinity College Dublin.

In 1940, Plunkett is appointed Byron Professor of English in the University of Athens in Greece. Having reached Athens by a circuitous route, he is so successful that he is offered a post as Professor of English in Istanbul. However, he has to be evacuated due to the German invasion of Greece in April 1941, returning home by an even more complex route, his travels forming a basis for a long poem published in book form (A Journey, in 5 cantos: The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Greece, The Battle of the Mediterranean, Battles Long Ago, The Battle of the Atlantic, special edition January 1944). Olivia Manning‘s character Lord Pinkrose in her novel sequence the Fortunes of War is a mocking portrait of Dunsany in that period.

In 1947, Plunkett transfers his Meath estate in trust to his son and heir and settles in Kent at his Shoreham house, Dunstall Priory, not far from the home of Rudyard Kipling. He visits Ireland only occasionally thereafter and engages actively in life in Shoreham and London. He also begins a new series of visits to the United States, notably California, as recounted in Hazel Littlefield-Smith’s biographical Dunsany, King of Dreams.

In 1957, Plunkett becomes ill while dining with the Earl and Countess of Fingall at Dunsany, in what proves to be an attack of appendicitis. He dies in hospital in Dublin, at the age of 79, on October 25, 1957. He is buried in the churchyard of the ancient church of St. Peter and St. Paul, Shoreham, Kent. His funeral is attended by many family members, representatives of his old regiment and various bodies in which he had taken an interest, and figures from Shoreham. A memorial service is held at Kilmessan in County Meath, with a reading of “Crossing the Bar,” which coincides with the passing of a flock of geese.

Beatrice survives Plunkett, living mainly at Shoreham and overseeing his literary legacy until her death in 1970. Their son Randal succeeds to the barony and is in turn succeeded by his grandson, the artist Edward Plunkett. Plunkett’s literary rights pass from Beatrice to Edward.


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Birth of Janet McNeill, Novelist & Playwright

Janet McNeill, prolific Irish novelist and playwright, is born on September 14, 1907, in Dublin. Author of more than 20 children’s books, as well as adult novels, plays, and two opera libretti, she is best known for her children’s comic fantasy series My Friend Specs McCann.

McNeill is born to Rev. William McNeill, a minister at Adelaide Road Presbyterian Church, and Jeannie Patterson (Hogg) McNeill. In 1913, the family moves to Birkenhead, Merseyside, England, where her father becomes minister at Trinity Road Church. She attends public school in Birkenhead and studies classics at the University of St. Andrews in St. Andrews, Scotland, completing a MA degree in 1929. While at university, she is involved in writing and acting with the College Players. In 1924, the family returns to Ireland due to her father’s failing health, and Rev. McNeill becomes the minister of a village church in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland, while Janet joins the Belfast Telegraph as a secretary.

In 1933, McNeill marries Robert Alexander, the chief engineer in the Belfast city surveyor’s department, and the couple settles in Lisburn, where they raise their four sons. One son is the zoologist Professor Robert McNeill Alexander, CBE, FRS. Though she plans to write her first novel early on, she finds it impossible to write seriously until the children grow up, saying, “It was four years before I had a baby and twenty-five before I produced the book.”

In 1946, McNeill wins a prize in a BBC competition for her play Gospel Truth. She begins writing radio dramas, which are broadcast by the BBC. She suffers an intracerebral hemorrhage in 1953. During her recovery, she begins writing novels both for adults and children, producing a large body of work between 1955 and 1964. Her popular children’s character, Specs McCann, who debuts in a 1955 book and makes several reappearances, also inspires a newspaper cartoon strip by Rowel Friers, a Belfast artist and friend of hers.

Her 1944 novel The Maiden Dinosaur is her first to be published in the United States, twenty-two years later. She also has three writing credits on television with series and plays. Several of her plays are staged at the Ulster Group Theatre.

In 1964, McNeill’s husband retires, and the couple moves to Bristol, South West England. She writes one more novel after she leaves Northern Ireland but continues to write children’s books for another decade. During this time, she writes her only children’s play, published as Switch On, Switch Off, and other plays (1968), which presents different moral themes in scenes set in “domestic and workplace settings in contemporary England.” Her children’s book The Battle of St. George Without is televised by the BBC in 1969.

In her adult fiction, McNeill focuses on the lifestyle and social mores of Belfast and Ulster in the mid-twentieth century. Her characters are primarily “menopausal, middle-aged, middle-class Protestants.” She depicts the “dreary, Ulster religiosity” of ministers and laymen alike, and the class conventions and sexual repression of middle-aged, upper-middle-class women. The theme of suppressing self-identity and goals, both by wives in deference to their husbands and parents on behalf of their children, pervades her adult novels.

McNeill has a number of health problems and dies in Bristol in October 1994.