Hogan’s father is a wheelwright and musician who also crafts flutes and fiddles, instruments Hogan himself plays. He and his family endure the hardships of the Great Famine (1845–1852), an experience he later reflects upon in his poetry. In his youth, he works at Russell’s Mill and Lock Quay, later joining Limerick Corporation. In 1858, he marries Ann Lynch, with whom he has no children.
Hogan’s first poems appears in Irish language newspapers such as The Anglo-Celt, The Irishman, The Nation, The Munster News, and the Limerick Leader. His debut collection, Lays and Legends of Thomond, is published in Limerick in 1861, with a larger Dublin edition in 1867. He also gains fame for a series of satirical poems lampooning prominent Limerick figures, which achieves enormous circulation and causes a sensation at the time. A new edition of his Lays and Legends is published in Dublin in 1880.
In September 1886, Hogan emigrates to New York, where, already hampered by failing eyesight, he fails to make a living for himself as a poet and soon finds himself in financial difficulties. Having received assistance from friends in Limerick, he returns to Ireland in 1889.
Hogan dies on April 19, 1899, at Limerick and is buried in Mount St. Lawrence Cemetery.
Hogan’s work remains a significant part of Irish literary history. In 2005, a life-size statue (pictured) of him is erected at King John’s Castle Plaza in Limerick to honor his memory.
In 1880, while living in Bordentown, New Jersey, Parnell becomes active in fundraising for the Land League in the United States. Her 1880 pamphlet The Hovels of Ireland explains the Irish land crisis to American audiences, and she also works for the Famine Relief Fund in New York.
By October 1880, Parnell has taken the initiative to launch a Ladies’ Land League in New York. This is an auxiliary group aimed at supporting the Irish National Land League’s work, especially after its leaders become at risk of imprisonment. The New York committee she sets up is part of a broader plan by Michael Davitt to ensure the movement can continue if male leaders are jailed. Davitt and the League’s treasurer, Patrick Egan, later persuade the Central Committee to formally establish the Ladies’ Land League in Dublin on January 31, 1881, with Anna Parnell as its first president.
The Ladies’ Land League quickly becomes the first political association of Irish women, organizing branches in Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. They maintain a detailed “Book of Kells” register of estates, tenants, and evictions, and provide financial and material aid to evicted tenants, including erecting prefabricated huts when possible. Their work is both political and humanitarian, challenging gender norms while maintaining a public image of respectability.
Fanny Parnell’s October 1880 launch in New York is thus a key early step in mobilizing Irish American women for the Land War, laying the groundwork for the League’s transnational activism and its role in sustaining the movement during its most turbulent years.
Brooke is the son of The Reverend William Brooke, the well-off Church of Ireland Rector of Killinkere and Mullagh within the Church of Ireland Diocese of Kilmore. He first begins his career as a poet. His now forgotten philosophical poem Universal Beauty is published in 1735, and Alexander Pope thinks its sentiments and poetry fine. He then turns dramatist by adapting extant plays, such as The Earl of Essex. He writes from the Tory point of view and becomes one of the most important figures in Augustan drama, although not for his successes.
Brooke’s Gustavus Vasa (1739) has the distinction of being the first play banned by the Licensing Act 1737. The play concerns the liberation of Sweden from Denmark in 1521 by Riksföreståndare (Protector of the Realm or Regent) Gustav Vasa (who later becomes King Gustav I of Sweden). Sir Robert Walpole believes that the villain of the play resembles him. Further, a facetious “attack” on it is the first public writing of Samuel Johnson, whose A Complete Vindication of the Licensers of the English Stage feigns support for Walpole while it drives the censor’s argument to reductio ad absurdum.
Brooke lives in Ireland most of his life, but he spends time in London when his plays are on the stage. In politics, he is somewhat radical in arguing publicly for loosening the laws persecuting Roman Catholics in the United Kingdom. His daughter, Charlotte Brooke, is herself an important figure in the history of Irish literature, publishing Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) and working to increase the profile of Irish language poetry.
Later, Brook’s Earl of Essex comes back to the boards in a revival. Again, Samuel Johnson offers his public support of Brooke, but when he hears the Earl saying at the end of Act II, “Who rules o’er free men must himself be free,” Johnson replies, “Who drives fat oxen must himself be fat.” Although Johnson is objecting to the misuse and overuse of “freedom” and is at that time in a vexatious debate over the American Revolutionary War (saying, “Why is it that we hear the loudest cries for liberty from the drivers of Negroes?”), Brooke is mortified by Johnson’s parody and changes the line for his Collected Works.
Brooke has a difficult life and makes a very poor living. The Licensing Act 1737 robs him of his primary avenue to making a living, for, after the Act, he is the first man banned by it. Whatever fame this lends him is made up for by his inability to get new plays performed. His greatest commercial successes come from the Earl of Essex and his two novels, The Fool of Quality (1760-1772) and Juliet Grenville (1774), which are two of the finest sentimental novels. John Wesley is so fond of The Fool of Quality, in which Brooke declares his belief in universal salvation, that he seeks to have a copy of it given out to all new Methodist churches.
Brooke has twenty-two children. Of these, only Charlotte survives adolescence. She shepherds his Works through the press after his death.
The death of Brooke’s wife after a long illness and the loss of so many of his children, leaves Brooke’s physical and mental health increasingly unstable. His decline is evident in the last volume of The Fool of Quality and his final three-volume novel Juliet Grenville. He dies in Dublin on October 10, 1783, and is buried in his father’s churchyard in Mullagh.
The Hot Press Irish Music Hall of Fame is created to celebrate and preserve the best of Irish musical talent over decades, from traditional acts like Christy Moore and The Dubliners to modern icons such as U2, Boyzone, and Ash. It is based around a new multimedia exhibition in Dublin city centre, highlighting the history and development of Irish rock and pop.
Morrison, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is widely regarded as Ireland’s greatest living legend. Hall of Fame director Niall Stokes, the editor of Hot Press, praises him as a “multi-talented creative force” with an “astonishing body of work of great depth and beauty.” Geldof calls him “the only genius in Irish music.”
This induction marks Morrison’s first major honour in Ireland, though he has already been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1993. The Hot Press Irish Music Hall of Fame is distinct from the U.S. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which has been operating since 1983.
The 1999 induction cements Morrison’s status not only as a global rock icon but also as a defining figure in Irish music history. It is a milestone moment for the Hall of Fame, setting the stage for future inductees chosen by a panel of industry experts.
Born to George and Susan Goodfellow (née Nicholson), Goodfellow is raised in a Quaker family. Her father and uncle are builders who construct a row of houses on Morehampton Road, Donnybrook, where she lives for the rest of her life. She is educated at Alexandra College and graduates with an Arts degree from Trinity College Dublin (TCD).
Under the pseudonym Michael Scot, Goodfellow publishes Three Tales of the Times in 1921, a work about life in Ireland under the Black and Tans. She also writes poetry and translates French poetry, notably the works of 15th-century poet François Villon, publishing these translations in The Dublin Magazine between 1924 and 1928.
Goodfellow is independently wealthy, inheriting property in Ireland and England after her mother’s death in 1932. She is a generous patron of the arts, supporting The Dublin Magazine, a literary journal owned by her friend Seumas O’Sullivan, to which she contributes articles, poems, and reviews. She also supports children’s charities and serves on the Board of Governors of the Royal Hospital in Donnybrook.
Her philanthropy extends to securing funding for The Dublin Magazine (1926–1958) and gifting a bird sanctuary, The Grove, in Donnybrook to An Taisce. Despite her influence, she remains modest and private about her contributions, and her own photographic collection is destroyed after her death.
In 1939, Goodfellow falls while getting off a tram and breaks her leg badly, which leaves her with a limp. She dies at the aged of 89 on May 20, 1980, and is buried with her parents in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.
A plaque is erected in memory of Goodfellow’s donation at The Grove, a woodland area at the corner of Morehampton Road and Wellington Place, on October 19, 2022. A plaque commemorating Estella Solomons is placed on the opposite gatepost. Goodfellow’s diaries, poems and literary manuscripts are held in the Trinity College Dublin archives.
Goodfellow’s work and life reflect the intersection of Irish literary culture, nationalist history, and cultural patronage in early-to-mid 20th-century Ireland.
The Dublin Harp Society is founded on July 13, 1809, by John Bernard Trotter, a former secretary to Charles James Fox and a passionate supporter of Irish music, to revive and preserve the ancient Irish harp tradition, and it flourishes briefly with contributions from prominent patrons and musicians before closing in 1812 due to financial difficulties.
Inspired by the Belfast Irish Harp Society, Trotter aims to create a society that will extend the revival of the Irish harp to the capital and broaden its audience across Ireland. The society’s purpose is to rescue the old Irish harp from oblivion, teach blind and talented harpers, and promote Irish music through public events, publications, and performances.
Trotter gathers an influential list of subscribers, including Thomas Moore, the poet and songwriter, and Sir Walter Scott, the Scottish novelist. He brings to Dublin Patrick Quin (pictured), a blind harper from Portadown, County Armagh, as the society’s instructor. Quin is one of the last of the traditional blind harpers and performs extensively at society events, including Turlough O’Carolan commemorations, delighting patrons and audiences. The Bishop of Kildare, Charles Dalrymple Lindsay, also supports the society by providing a house in Glasnevin for the instruction of harpers.
The society engages in multiple avenues to revive Irish harp music. In addition to the previously mentioned Turlough O’Carolan commemorations, circulars and subscription notices are published to drum up public support and secure funding. The Society hosts concerts and gatherings at prominent Dublin locations, offering elaborate performances for subscribers. Tuition and mentorship to young Irish harpers is provided, particularly to blind musicians, as part of a broader cultural and philanthropic effort. Trotter also personally subsidizes the society, contributing £200 annually, which helps maintain performances and attract participants.
Despite early enthusiasm, the society struggles financially due to Trotter’s generous hospitality and personal funding of its activities. By the close of 1812, the Dublin Harp Society becomes defunct when Trotter goes bankrupt. The society attempts to publish rules and regulations in 1810 and conduct active recruitment of subscribers and pupils, but it cannot be sustained beyond three years.
Although short-lived, the Dublin Harp Society contributes significantly to the preservation and promotion of the Irish harp, inspiring subsequent societies and harp revival initiatives in Ireland. It highlights the importance of cultural patrimony, music education, and public patronage, acting as a bridge between the older harp traditions and the modern revival movements seen in later 19th-century Ireland.
In summary, the Dublin Harp Society represents an early 19th-century endeavor to revive Ireland’s venerable harp tradition through education, sponsorship, and celebration of master harpers, leaving a lasting mark on the cultural memory of Irish music.
Maude is born on May 22, 1941, in Casla, County Galway, and reared in the Irish language. Her mother, Máire Nic an Iomaire, is a school teacher, and she receives her primary education from her on a small island off the coast of Rosmuc. Her father, John Maude, is from Cill Bhriocáin township near Rosmuc. She attends secondary school at Coláiste Chroí Mhuire, Spiddal, an all-Irish language school in County Galway. She later credits one of her Irish language teachers there, Sister Ailbhe, as an early influence in cultivating her writing confidence.
Maude begins writing modern literature in Irish in secondary school and develops a rhythm of poetry closely attuned to the rhythms of the Conamara Theas dialect of Connacht Irish, spoken in her native district. Though not conventionally religious, she admits in an interview that she has a deep interest in spirituality and that this has left its mark on her poetry. She is noted as a highly effective reciter of her own verse. Géibheann is the best-known of her poems, and is studied at Leaving Certificate Higher Level Irish in the Republic of Ireland. A posthumous collected edition, Caitlín Maude, Dánta, is published in 1984, Caitlín Maude: file in 1985 in Ireland and Italy, and Coiscéim in 1985.
Maude is widely known as an actress. She acts at the university, at An Taibhdhearc in Galway and the Damer Theatre in Dublin, and is particularly successful in a production of An Triail by Máiréad Ní Ghráda at the Damer Theatre in 1964. She plays the protagonist, Máire Ní Chathasaigh, an unmarried mother who experiences family rejection, a stay in a Magdalene laundry, and ultimately murders her infant child followed by suicide. In 2017, Former Irish Minister For JusticeMáire Geoghegan-Quinn cites this performance as “pathbreaking”: “Caitlín Maude played the role, when nobody talked about the issue and when, as we know, women were still devalued, still caricatured, still incarcerated and disenfranchised if they became mothers out of wedlock.” Maude herself is a playwright and co-authors An Lasair Choille with poet Michael Hartnett.
Maude is very active in the Celtic Revival. She founds An Bonnán Buí, an Irish-speaking social club in the 1970s in Dublin. As a member of the Dublin Metropolitan Gaelgeoir community, she is active in many direct action campaigns by the language revival organization Gluaiseacht Chearta Sibhialta na Gaeltachta, including the campaign that forces the Irish State to establish a Gaelscoil (Irish-medium primary school) Scoil Santain in the suburb of Tallaght, County Dublin. A second Irish language school, Scoil Chaitlin Maude, opens in Tallaght in 1985 shortly after her death. It begins as a two-room school with 35 children and has grown to a 16 room new building serving 345 children as of 2023.
Maude is also a distinguished sean-nós singer. She makes one album in this genre, Caitlín, released in 1975 on Gael Linn Records and now available as a CD. It contains both traditional songs and a selection of readings of her poetry.
Maude marries Cathal Ó Luain in 1969. They have one child Caomhán, their son.
Maude dies of complications from cancer on June 6, 1982, at the age of 41. She is buried in Bohernabreena graveyard, which overlooks the city from the Wicklow Mountains.
In 2001, a new writers’ centre in Galway is named after her: Ionad Scríbhneoirí Chaitlín Maude, Gaillimh.
Since Maude’s death, critics in several languages have continued to study her literary works. Irish writer and The Irish Times columnist Michael Harding cites her as one of a few examples of groundbreaking women to “spin the hurt and wound of their oppression, and weave new loves songs and laments.” Irish Studies professor Sarah McKibben notes that Maude’s innovation in the poem represents an instance of recent Irish writers transgressing “literary, nationalistic, sociolinguistic and gender norms to craft new ways of writing in Irish.”
According to Louis de Paor, “Although no collection of her work was published during her lifetime, Caitlín Maude had a considerable influence on Irish language poetry and poets, including Máirtín Ó Direáin, Micheál Ó hAirtnéide, Tomás Mac Síomóin, and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. That influence is a measure of the dramatic force of her personality, her exemplary ingenuity and commitment to the language, and her ability as a singer to embody the emotional disturbance at the heart of a song. Her collected poems are relatively slight, including incomplete drafts and fragments, but reveal a poetic voice confident of its own authority, drawing on the spoken language of the Connemara Gaeltacht but rarely on its conventions of oral composition or, indeed, on precedents in Irish poetry in either language. The best of her work is closer to the American poetry of the 1960s in its use of looser forms that follow the rhythms of the spoken word and the sense of the poem as direct utterance without artifice, a technique requiring a high degree of linguistic precision and formal control.”
Maude’s work has also been translated into English and Spanish. Spanish language critic Pura Coloma notes that Maude’s work played a role in preserving Connemaran culture, as she “utilizes her own style to replicate the deep rhythms and tonalities of the regional voice.”
Boland is born in Dublin on September 24, 1944. Her father, Frederick Boland, is a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted painter.
When she is six, Boland’s father is appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the family moves to London, where she has her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. Her dealing with this hostility strengthens her identification with her Irish heritage. She speaks of this time in her poem, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.”
In 1969, Boland marries the novelist Kevin Casey. They have two daughters together. Her experiences as a wife and mother influence her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes. According to her friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi, she “loved gossip like fish love water.”
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland teaches at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she is a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University where she is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program. She divides her time between Palo Alto and her home in Dublin.
Boland’s first book of poetry is New Territory published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This is followed by The War Horse (1975) and In Her Own Image (1980). Night Feed (1982) establishes her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world. While she is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin in 1994, she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.
In March 2018, RTÉ broadcasts a documentary on Boland’s life as a poet called “Eavan Boland: Is it Still the Same?” In the same year, she is commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) to write the poem “Our future will become the past of other women” to be read at the United Nations (UN) and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of women gaining the vote in Ireland in 1918.
Boland co-edits The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). She also publishes a volume of translations in 2004 called After Every War (Princeton University Press). With Edward Hirsch, she co-edits “The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology of the Sonnet” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).
In 1976, Boland wins a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio. Her other awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Her collection In a Time of Violence (1994) receives a Lannan Award and is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Boland receives the Bucknell Medal of Distinction 2000 from Bucknell University, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence by Centenary College of Louisiana in 2002, the Smartt Family prize from The Yale Review and the John Frederick Nims Award from Poetry magazine 2002. Her volume of poems Against Love Poetry is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her volume Domestic Violence (2007) is shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the United Kingdom. Her poem “Violence Against Women” from the same volume is awarded the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry for the best poem published in 2007 in Shenandoah magazine. In 2012, she wins a PEN Award for creative nonfiction with her collection of essays, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, published in 2012.
On May 25, 2018, Boland is elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She receives the Irish PEN Award for Literature in 2019. She is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, in 1994. During this time she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.
Boland dies in Dublin on April 27, 2020, at the age of 75. Later that year she is posthumously awarded the Costa Book Award for poetry for her final collection The Historians.
In 2024, Trinity College Dublin announces the renaming of the “denamed” former Berkeley Library as the Eavan Boland Library. This makes it the first building named after any woman on Trinity’s city centre campus. The name is made official in March 2025.
Milligan is the son of an Irish father, Leo Alphonso Milligan, a regimental sergeant major in the British Indian Army, and English mother, Florence Mary Winifred (née Kettleband). He is raised in India and Burma (Myanmar). He is educated at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Poona, and later at St. Paul’s High School, Rangoon. He moves to England with his family in 1933. He serves in the army during World War II and, when he is wounded in combat, begins a struggle with manic-depressive illness that lasts the rest of his life. Toward the end of the war, he meets Harry Secombe, and they work together entertaining the troops. After the war the pair, along with Peter Sellers and Michael Bentine, begin spending time at the Grafton Arms pub, where they develope their comedy routines. BBC radio begins broadcasting the group’s work in 1951, as Crazy People, and in 1952 it is renamed The Goon Show. As such it continues until early 1960 (though Bentine soon leaves the show) and becomes a cult classic.
Milligan later acts onstage and in small parts in movies—including Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979)—and writes numerous books of poems, war memoirs, the play The Bedsitting Room (with John Antrobus; first performed 1962), and a number of television series. He also supports a multitude of causes, especially those involving the environment. Because his father is Irish and he is born in India—and despite his years of military service—the British government does not consider him a citizen. Rather than take an oath of allegiance, he takes Irish citizenship. Nonetheless, he is made an honorary Commander of the British Empire in 1992 and is given an honorary knighthood in 2000.
Milligan dies from kidney failure, at the age of 83, on February 27, 2002, at his home on Dumb Woman’s Lane near Rye, East Sussex. On the day of his funeral, March 8, 2002, his coffin is carried to St. Thomas Church in Winchelsea, East Sussex, and is draped in the flag of Ireland. He had once quipped that he wanted his headstone to bear the words: “I told you I was ill.” He is buried at St. Thomas’ churchyard but the Chichester diocese refuses to allow this epitaph. A compromise is reached with the Gaelic translation of “I told you I was ill,” Dúirt mé leat go mé breoite, and in English, “Love, light, peace.” The additional epitaph Grá mhór ort Shelagh can be read as “Great love for you Shelagh.”
According to a letter published in the Rye and Battle Observer in 2011, Milligan’s headstone is removed from St. Thomas’ churchyard in Winchelsea and moved to be alongside the grave of his wife, but is later returned.
Holohan is chairman of the Association of Irish Composers from 1987 to 1989 and is later appointed chairman of the Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda, County Louth, where he has lived since 1983.
Holohan is elected to Aosdána in 1999 and later serves as a member and chair of its Toscaireacht, its ten-member steering body.
Holohan’s music has been performed and broadcast in Ireland and internationally. Career highlights in Drogheda include performances of Cromwell (1994), The Mass of Fire (1995) and No Sanctuary (1997).
Holohan’s work has been reviewed in Irish music journalism. Writing in The Journal of Music following a National Concert Hall composers’ showcase, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly describes The Dream of Aengus as demonstrating Holohan’s “orchestrational control,” and characterises Portrait of the Artist as “captivating,” while noting the influence of Irish traditional music within his choral writing.
Regional press coverage has also documented performances and recordings of his work, including reports on the release of the piano album Fields of Blue and Whiteand concerts of his music in Drogheda.
