seamus dubhghaill

Promoting Irish Culture and History from Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

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Death of Máirtín Ó Direáin, Irish Poet

Máirtín Ó Direáin, Irish poet, dies in Dublin on March 19, 1988.

Ó Direáin is born on November 26, 1910, in Inis Mór, Aran Islands, County Galway, the eldest of the three sons and one daughter of Seán Ó Direáin, a small farmer, and Mairéad Ní Dhireáin (widow of Labhrás Mac Confhaola), both of Inis Mór. His father dies in 1917, aged forty-three, leaving his mother to rear a family of four on less than 20 acres of land. Educated at the local national school, he leaves Aran to join the post office in Galway in January 1928.

Ó Direáin is involved with the Irish language movement during the late 1920s and 1930s, during which time he is secretary of the Galway branch of the Gaelic League and writes for and acts on the stage of the Taibhdhearc Theatre. In July 1937 he moves to Dublin to work as a clerical officer in the Department of Posts and Telegraphs and later in the Department of Education. Inspired by a lecture given by the poet and Gaelic scholar Tadhg Ó Donnchadha, he begins writing poetry in Irish in the winter of 1938. Unlike Ó Donnchadha, however, who advocates and practises a poetry based on traditional Gaelic metres, he favours a rhythmically measured form of free verse. He publishes his first collection, Coinnle geala, in 1942, quickly followed by Dánta aniar (1943), both at his own expense. In 1949, a volume of selected poems, Rogha dánta, is one of the first books published by the newly founded Irish language publisher Sáirséal agus Dill.

These books herald not just a new voice, but a new generation of modern poets in Irish, distinct in outlook and ambition from most of the revivalist poets who precede them. The leading figures of this generation, Ó Direáin, Seán Ó Ríordáin and Máire Mhac an tSaoi, all publish poems in various Irish language journals during the 1940s, though the latter two poets do not produce their first collections until the 1950s. Ó Direáin’s poetry is less thematically and linguistically adventurous than that of Ó Ríordáin (whom he nevertheless defends in print against the dogmatic criticism of Ó Ríordáin’s traditionalist detractors), and less consciously indebted to tradition than that of Mhac an tSaoi.

Ó Direáin’s early lyrics celebrate the traditional virtues of island life and mourn its passing because of increasing modernisation and population shifts toward the major cities. One of the best known of these poems, “Stoite“ (“Uprooted”), sets up a gloomy contrast between a traditional life in tune with nature’s rhythms, destined to endure in communal memory, and the fruitless urban existence of the contemporary office worker. This theme of uprootedness haunts his work throughout the 1950s and early 1960s. During this period he publishes his two most significant collections, Ó Mórna agus dánta eile (1957) and Ár ré dhearóil (1962), both of which take their titles from ambitious, and uncharacteristically long, poems. Ó Mórna, a poem of which there are two published versions, charts the colourful life of a proud, amoral tyrant, a figure based loosely on traditional accounts of a hard-living nineteenth-century landlord’s agent from Aran. Ó Mórna represents, in the poet’s view, the timeless Übermensch whose will to power is boundless and awesome. Ár ré dhearóil (“Our wretched era”) is an excoriation of the loveless hedonism of a middle-class Dublin populated by lonely bachelors, bitter spinsters, and immoral, though free-spirited and well-educated, women. The poem, which ends with an ominous if oblique warning against the threat of nuclear annihilation, bears some comparison with T. S. Eliot‘s “The waste land.” Eliot, Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats are key influences alongside the canonical figures of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gaelic poetry. His strong social conscience is registered early on in poems such as “An Stailc“ (“The strike“). His life-long adherence to traditional nationalist values and his scornful attitude to what he perceives as the mercenary embrace of American-style capitalism in the changing economic climate of Ireland in the 1960s is most trenchantly voiced in poems such as “Éire ina bhfuil romhainn” (“Ireland in times ahead”) and “Mar chaitheamar an choinneal” (“As we spent the candle”).

Ó Direáin is an active member of the Irish language literary groups Cumann na Scríbhneoirí and Cumann na hÉigse, and publishes essays on a variety of topics throughout the 1940s and 1950s in magazines such as Ar Aghaidh, An Glór, Comhar and Feasta. A selection of mostly autobiographical essays, Feamainn Bhealtaine (1961), casts valuable light on the Aran of his youth and early adulthood. He is registrar for the National College of Art (1948–55), where he gets to know such prominent artists as Seán Keating, Maurice MacGonigal and Nano Reid, whose artwork adorns Rogha Dánta. From 1955 until his retirement from the civil service in 1975, he is a staff officer in the Department of Education. Cloch choirnéil appears in 1966, followed by Crainn is cairde (1970) and Ceacht an éin (1979).

The most comprehensive selection of Ó Direáin‘s poetry, Máirtín Ó Direáin: dánta 1939–1979 (1980), edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain, covers all but two final volumes, Béasa an túir (1984) and Craobhóg dán (1986), neither of which add much of major significance to his oeuvre. A bilingual selection, Selected poems: Tacar dánta (1984), includes translations by Tomás Mac Síomóin and Douglas Sealy. In 1969, Ó Direáin delivers a series of lectures on his own work at University College Dublin (UCD), later edited by Eoghan Ó hAnluain as Ón ulán ramhar siar (2002), which provides useful background information on many individual poems. He receives the Irish American Cultural Institute (IACI) award in 1967 and is made a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1970. In 1977, he receives an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from the National University of Ireland and the Ossian-Preis of the Freiherr von Stein Foundation in Hamburg. He is a full-time visiting lecturer in the department of Irish at University College Galway for the academic year 1978–79. He was also a member of Aosdána.

Ó Direáin marries Áine Colivet, a Dubliner of French extraction, in 1945. Their only child, Niamh, is born in 1947. He dies in Dublin on March 19, 1988.

A selection of Ó Direáin’s essays, An chuid eile díom féin, edited by Síobhra Aiken, and a bilingual volume of poems Máirtin Ó Direáin: Selected poems/ Rogha dánta, translated by Frank Sewell, are both published in 2018.

(From: “Ó Direáin, Máirtín” by Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Dictionary of Irish Biography, www dib.ie, October 2009, last revised March 2021)


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Birth of Mary Leadbeater, Irish Quaker Author & Diarist

Mary Leadbeater (née Shackleton), Irish Quaker author and diarist, is born in the planned Quaker settlement of Ballitore, County Kildare, on December 1, 1758. She writes and publishes extensively on both secular and religious topics ranging from translation, poetry, letters, children’s literature and biography. Her accounts of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 provide an insight into the effects of the Rebellion on the community in Ballitore.

Shackleton is the daughter of Richard Shackleton (1726–92) by his second wife, Elizabeth Carleton (1726–66), and granddaughter of Abraham Shackleton, schoolmaster of Edmund Burke. Her parents are Quakers. She keeps a personal diary for most of her life, beginning at the age of eleven and writing in it almost daily. There 55 extant volumes of her diaries in the National Library of Ireland.

Shackleton is educated, and her literary studies are aided by Aldborough Wrightson, a man who had been educated at Ballitore school and had returned to die there. In 1784, she travels to London with her father and pays several visits to Burke’s town house, where she meets Sir Joshua Reynolds and George Crabbe. She also goes to Beaconsfield, and on her return writes a poem in praise of the place and its owner, which is acknowledged by Burke on December 13, 1784, in a long letter. On her way home she visits, at Selby, North Yorkshire, some primitive Quakers whom she describes in her journal.

On January 6, 1791, Shackleton marries William Leadbeater, a former pupil of her father and a descendent of the Huguenot Le Batre and Gilliard families. He becomes a prosperous farmer and landowner in Ballitore. She spends many years working in the village post office and also works as a bonnet-maker and a herbal healer for the village. The couple lives in Ballitore and have six children. Their daughter Jane dies at a young age from injuries sustained after an accident with a wax taper. Another daughter, Lydia, is a friend and possible patron of the poet and novelist Gerald Griffin.

On her father’s death in 1792, Leadbeater receives a letter of consolation from Burke. Besides receiving letters from Burke, she corresponds with, among others, Maria Edgeworth, George Crabbe, and Melesina Trench. On May 28, 1797, Burke writes one of his last letters to her.

Leadbeater describes in detail the effects of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 on the lives of her family and neighbours in Ballitore. She is in Carlow on Christmas Day 1796 attending a Quaker meeting when the news arrives that the French fleet has been seen off Bantry. She describes the troops marching out of the town and the ensuing confusion in Carlow and Ballitore.

Leadbeater’s first literary work, Extracts and Original Anecdotes for the Improvement of Youth, is published anonymously in 1794 in Dublin. It contains an account of the history of Quakerism and several poems on secular and religious subjects.

In 1808, Leadbeater publishes Poems with a metrical version of her husband’s prose translation of Maffeo Vegio‘s Thirteenth Book of the Æneid. She next publishes in 1811 Cottage Dialogues among the Irish Peasantry, of which four editions, with some alterations and additions, appear by 1813. In 1813, she tries to instruct the rich on a similar plan in The Landlord’s Friend. Intended as a sequel to Cottage Dialogues, in which persons of quality are made to discourse on such topics as beggars, spinning-wheels, and Sunday in the village, Tales for Cottagers, which she brings out in 1814 in conjunction with Elizabeth Shackleton, is a return to the original design. The tales illustrate perseverance, temper, economy, and are followed by a moral play, Honesty is the Best Policy.

In 1822, Leadbeater concludes this series with Cottage Biography, being a Collection of Lives of the Irish Peasantry. The lives are those of real persons, and contain some interesting passages, especially in the life of James Dunn, a pilgrim to Lough Derg. Many traits of Irish country life appear in these books, and they preserve several of the idioms of the English-speaking inhabitants of the Pale. Memoirs and Letters of Richard and Elizabeth Shackleton … compiled by their Daughter is also issued in 1822. Her Biographical Notices of Members of the Society of Friends who were resident in Ireland appears in 1823, and is a summary of their spiritual lives, with a scanty narrative of events. Her last work is The Pedlars, a Tale, published in 1824.

Leadbeater’s best known work, the Annals of Ballitore, is not printed until 1862, when it is brought out with the general title of The Leadbeater Papers (2 vols.) by Richard Davis Webb, a printer who wants to preserve a description on rural Irish life. It tells of the inhabitants and events of Ballitore from 1766 to 1823, and few books give a better idea of the character and feelings of Irish cottagers, of the premonitory signs of the rebellion of 1798, and the Rebellion itself. The second volume includes unpublished letters of Burke and the correspondence with Mrs. Richard Trench and with Crabbe.

Leadbeater dies at Ballitore on June 27, 1826, and is buried in the Quaker burial-ground there.


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The West Ham Station Attack

The West Ham station attack is a bombing and shooting attack at West Ham station in east London on March 15, 1976. One person dies in the attack and nine are injured.

A 5-lb. (2.3 kg) bomb on a Metropolitan line train explodes prematurely in the front carriage of the train, injuring seven passengers. The bomb detonates prior to reaching the City of London, where it is thought the intended target to be Liverpool Street station at rush hour. Adrian Vincent Donnelly, a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer, then shoots Post Office engineer Peter Chalk in the chest, and kills train driver Julius Stephen, who had attempted to catch him. Donelly exits the station to the street and threatens people with his revolver before Police Constable Raymond Kiff catches up with him. Shouting “You English bastards!” Donelly shoots himself in the chest but survives and is apprehended by Kiff.

Adrian Donelly, 36 at the time, is originally from Castlefin, County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland but lives in London from 1971. He is part of an active service unit (ASU) involved in planting sixteen bombs. In 1977, at the Old Bailey, he is convicted of murder and attempted murder. He is sentenced to life imprisonment by Justice David Croom-Johnson with a minimum of 30 years. He is released after 21 years in August 1998 as one of the earliest beneficiaries of the Good Friday Agreement‘s prisoner release scheme. He dies on August 25, 2019.

Eleven days prior to the West Ham station attack, an IRA bomb explodes in a train at Cannon Street station. The day after the West Ham attack, a bomb on a train at Wood Green tube station explodes, injuring a man. On March 17, a 9-lb. (4.1 kg) bomb is discovered in a train at Neasden Depot. After these events, the London Transport Executive launches a security operation and assigns 1,000 plainclothed policemen on the London Underground system.

An appeal to raise money is launched for the family of the driver of the train, Julius Stephen, who left behind a widow and a family. As of August 1976, £17,000 had been raised.

(Pictured: The underground train damaged in the explosion, The Times, March 16, 1976)