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Birth of Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens

augustus-saint-gaudensAugustus Saint-Gaudens, sculptor of the statue for the Charles Stewart Parnell monument which is installed at the North end of Dublin‘s O’Connell Street in 1911, is born in Dublin on March 1, 1848. He is generally acknowledged to be the foremost American sculptor of the late 19th century, noted for his evocative memorial statues and for the subtle modeling of his low reliefs.

Saint-Gaudens is born to a French father and an Irish mother. His family moves to New York City when he is an infant and at age 13 he is apprenticed to a cameo cutter. He earns his living at this craft, while studying at night at Cooper Union (1861–65) and the National Academy of Design (1865–66) in New York. In 1867 he travels to Paris and is admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts. Along with Olin Levi Warner and Howard Roberts, he is one of the first Americans to study sculpture in Paris. Late in 1870 he sets out for Rome, where, still supporting himself by cameo cutting, he works for two years copying famous antique statues on commission. He also starts to create his first imaginative compositions during this period.

After 1875 Saint-Gaudens settles in New York, where he befriends and collaborates with a circle of men who form the nucleus of an American artistic renaissance. The group includes the architects Henry Hobson Richardson, Stanford White, and Charles Follen McKim and the painter John La Farge. The most important work of Saint-Gaudens’s early career is the monument to Admiral David Farragut (1880, Madison Square Garden, New York), the base of which is designed by White.

From 1880 to 1897 Saint-Gaudens executes most of the well-known works that gain him his great reputation and many honours. Working with La Farge, in 1881 he creates two caryatids for a fireplace in Cornelius Vanderbilt’s residence. In 1887 he begins the Amor Caritas, which, with variations, preoccupies him from about 1880 to 1898, and also a statue of a standing Abraham Lincoln (Lincoln Park, Chicago). The memorial to Marian Hooper Adams (1891) in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C., is considered by many to be his greatest work. In 1897 he completes a monument in Boston depicting Robert Gould Shaw, colonel of an African American regiment in the American Civil War. The statue is remarkable for its expression of movement. Shortly thereafter, he leaves for Paris, where, over the next three years, he prepares his final major public sculpture, the Sherman Monument (1903), which is eventually erected in Grand Army Plaza in New York.

Saint-Gaudens also makes many medallions, originally as a diversion from more serious tasks. These works show the influence of Renaissance medals as well as his early cameos. Among them are designs for U.S. coins and a considerable number of portraits. His autobiography, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, is published in 1913.

Diagnosed with cancer in 1900, Saint-Gaudens dies at the age of 59 on August 3, 1907 in Cornish, New Hampshire.


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Birth of Francis Sylvester Mahony, Humorist & Journalist

francis-sylvester-mahonyFrancis Sylvester Mahony, Irish humorist and journalist also known by the pen name Father Prout, is born on December 31, 1804 in Cork, County Cork.

Mahony is born to Martin Mahony and Mary Reynolds. He is educated at the Jesuit Clongowes Wood College, in County Kildare, and later in the Abbey of Saint-Acheul, a similar school in Amiens, France and then at Rue de Sèvres, Paris, and later in Rome. He begins teaching at the Jesuit school of Clongowes as master of rhetoric, but is soon after expelled. He then goes to London and becomes a leading contributor to Fraser’s Magazine, under the signature of “Father Prout” (the original Father Prout, whom Mahony knew in his youth, born in 1757, was parish priest of Watergrasshill, County Cork). At one point he is director of this magazine.

Mahony is witty and learned in many languages. One form which his humour takes is the professed discovery of the originals in Latin, Greek, or mediaeval French of popular modern poems and songs. Many of these jeux d’esprit are collected as Reliques of Father Prout. He pretends that these poems had been found in Fr. Prout’s trunk after his death. He wittily describes himself as “an Irish potato seasoned with Attic salt.” Later he acts as foreign correspondent to various newspapers, and during the last eight years of his life his articles form a main attraction of The Globe.

In his native Cork Mahoney is best remembered for his poem “The Bells of Shandon” and his pen-name is synonymous with the city and the Church of St. Anne, Shandon.

Mahony spends the last two years of his life in a monastery and dies on May 18, 1866 in Paris reconciled to the Church.

The Reliques of Father Prout originally appear in two volumes in 1836 with illustrations by Maclise. They are reissued in Henry George Bohn‘s Bohn’s Libraries in 1860. Another volume, Final Reliques, is edited by Douglas Jerrold and published in 1876. The Works of Father Prout, edited by Charles Kent, is published in 1881. Facts and Figures from Italy (1847) is made from his Rome letters to London’s The Daily News.


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Birth of Sir Oliver Plunkett, Archbishop of Armagh

oliver-plunkettSir Oliver Plunkett,  Catholic Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland who was the last victim of the Popish Plot, is born on November 1, 1625 in Loughcrew, County Meath, to parents of Hiberno-Norman ancestors.

Until his sixteenth year, Plunkett’s education is entrusted to his cousin Patrick Plunkett, Abbot of St. Mary’s, Dublin, and brother of Luke Plunkett, the first Earl of Fingall, who later becomes successively Bishop of Ardagh and of Meath. As an aspirant to the priesthood, he sets out for Rome in 1647.

Plunkett is admitted to the Pontifical Irish College in Rome and proves to be an able pupil. He is ordained a priest in 1654, and deputed by the Irish bishops to act as their representative in Rome. Meanwhile, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–1653) has defeated the Roman Catholic cause in Ireland. As a result, it is impossible for Plunkett to return to Ireland for many years so he petitions to remain in Rome. At the Congregation of Propaganda Fide on July 9, 1669, he is appointed Archbishop of Armagh and is consecrated on November 30 at Ghent. He returns to Ireland on March 7, 1670, as the English Restoration of 1660 has begun on a basis of toleration.

Plunkett sets about reorganising the ravaged Roman Church and builds schools both for the young and for clergy. The Penal Laws have been relaxed in line with the Declaration of Breda in 1660 and he is able to establish a Jesuit College in Drogheda in 1670, which becomes the first Catholic-Protestant integrated school in Ireland.

On the enactment of the Test Act in 1673, to which Plunkett does not agree for doctrinal reasons, the college is closed and demolished. Plunkett goes into hiding, travelling only in disguise, and refuses a government edict to register at a seaport to await passage into exile.

In 1678 the so-called Popish Plot, concocted in England by clergyman Titus Oates, leads to further anti-Roman Catholic action. Archbishop Peter Talbot of Dublin is arrested, and Plunkett again goes into hiding. Despite being on the run and with a price on his head, Plunkett refuses to leave his flock.

Plunkett is arrested in Dublin in December 1679 and imprisoned in Dublin Castle. He is tried at Dundalk for conspiring against the state by allegedly plotting to bring 20,000 French soldiers into the country, and for levying a tax on his clergy to support 70,000 men for rebellion. The trial soon collapses as the prosecution witnesses are themselves wanted men and afraid to appear in court. Plunkett is moved to Newgate Prison in London in order to face trial at Westminster Hall. The first grand jury finds no true bill, but he is not released. The second trial is generally regarded as a serious miscarriage of justice as Plunkett is denied defending counsel.

Archbishop Plunkett is found guilty of high treason in June 1681 “for promoting the Roman faith,” and is condemned to death. Plunkett is hanged, drawn, and quartered at Tyburn on July 1, 1681, the last Roman Catholic martyr to die in England. His body is initially buried in two tin boxes in the courtyard of St. Giles in the Fields church. The remains are exhumed in 1683 and moved to the Benedictine monastery at Lamspringe, near Hildesheim in Germany. His head is brought to Rome, and from there to Armagh, and eventually to Drogheda where it has rested in St. Peter’s Church since June 29, 1921. Most of the body is brought to Downside Abbey, England, where the major part is located today, with some parts remaining at Lamspringe.

Sir Oliver Plunkett is canonised in Rome by Pope Paul VI on October 12, 1975, the first new Irish saint in almost seven hundred years, and the first of the Irish martyrs to be beatified. For the canonisation, the customary second miracle is waived.


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Death of Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich

tomas-o-fiaichRoman Catholic Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich, the Primate of All Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh and an ardent Irish nationalist, dies of cardiac arrest in a hospital at Toulouse, France at the age of 66 on May 8, 1990 after falling ill on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Lourdes is a Catholic shrine where a peasant girl reported a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1858. Miraculous cures have been reported there.

Ó Fiaich is born Thomas Fee on November 3, 1923 in Cullyhanna, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, within sight of the border with the Republic of Ireland. He changes his name to the Gaelic form as his love of the Irish language and nationalist sentiments develop.

An announcement of the death, issued by the church’s press office in both Belfast and Dublin, says Ó Fiaich had appeared unwell to doctors accompanying the group of 600 pilgrims from his seat at Armagh in Northern Ireland.

Ó Fiaich is admitted first to a hospital in Lourdes, then flown by helicopter to Toulouse. Philippe Giovanni, director of the Rangueil Hospital there, says the cardinal died of a brutal cardiac arrest soon after being admitted.

While calling for a unified Ireland and criticizing British policy in Northern Ireland, Ó Fiaich, whose name is pronounced O’Fee, also castigates the violence of the Irish Republican Army, the predominantly Catholic outlawed guerrilla army that seeks to end British rule in Northern Ireland and unite it with the Republic of Ireland.

Ó Fiaich is appointed spiritual leader of Ireland’s four million Catholics in in 1977. Two years later Pope John Paul II makes him one of the first cardinals of his papacy.

Tributes to Ó Fiaich poured in from some both sides of the Irish border. In Dublin, Taoiseach Charles Haughey says he is “devastated, … deeply grieved.” Britain’s top official in Northern Ireland, Secretary of State Peter Brooke, also expresses sadness. “We did not always agree about everything, but he treated me with the greatest possible courtesy, friendliness and warmth.”

However hardline Protestant leader Ian Paisley of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party says Ó Fiaich is “the mallet of Rome against the Protestants of Northern Ireland.” He claims Ó Fiaich had “made an outrageous statement that the majority of bigotry in Ulster stemmed from the Protestant section of the community” and added, “He did not seem to realize that the IRA, which is carrying out the most atrocious of outrages … were the people who needed to be indicted with bigotry.”

In Belfast, Ulster Television suspends scheduled programs for an hour and airs a religious program and a news program about the cardinal.

Ó Fiaich retains close ties to Armagh, which had been dubbed “bandit country” because of the IRA activity. From the time he becomes primate, he speaks publicly of his wishes for a united Ireland. He visits IRA guerrillas in jail, calls the British Army’s fatal shooting of an Irish civilian murder, and says the border dividing Ireland is “unnatural.”

Following his death, Ó Fiaich lies in state at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, where thousands of people line up to pay their respects.

(From: AP News, apnews.com, May 8, 1990)


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Birth of Denis Devlin, Poet & Diplomat

denis-devlinDenis Devlin, poet, translator, and career diplomat, is born in Greenock, Scotland of Irish parents on April 15, 1908. Along with Samuel Beckett and Brian Coffey, he is one of the generation of Irish modernist poets to emerge at the end of the 1920s.

Devlin and his family return to live in Dublin in 1918. He studies at Belvedere College and, from 1926, as a seminarian for the Roman Catholic priesthood at Clonliffe College. As part of his studies he attends a degree course in modern languages at University College Dublin (UCD), where he meets and befriends Brian Coffey. Together they publish a joint collection, Poems, in 1930.

In 1927, Devlin abandons the priesthood and leaves Clonliffe. He graduates with his BA from UCD in 1930 and spends that summer on the Blasket Islands to improve his spoken Irish. Between 1930 and 1933, he studies literature at the University of Munich and the Sorbonne in Paris, meeting, amongst others, Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy. He then returns to UCD to complete his MA thesis on Michel de Montaigne.

Devlin joins the Irish Diplomatic Service in 1935 and spends a number of years in Rome, New York and Washington, D.C.. During this time he meets the French poet Saint-John Perse, and the Americans Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren. He goes on to publish a translation of Exile and Other Poems by Saint-John Perse, and Tate and Warren edit his posthumous Selected Poems.

Since his death on August 21, 1959, there have been two Collected Poems published; the first in 1964 is edited by Coffey and the second in 1989 by J.C.C. Mays.

Devlin’s personal papers are held in University College Dublin Archives. His niece goes on to become writer Denyse Woods.


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Birth of Ron Delany, Olympic Gold Medalist

ron-delanyRonald Michael Delany, athlete who specialises in middle distance running, is born in Arklow, County Wicklow on March 6, 1935. He wins a gold medal in the 1500 metres event at the 1956 Summer Olympics in Melbourne. He later earns a bronze medal in the 1500 metres event at the 1958 European Athletics Championships in Stockholm.

Delany moves with his family to Sandymount, Dublin 4 when he is six. He later goes to Sandymount High School and then to Catholic University School. He studies commerce and finance at Villanova University in the United States. While there he is coached by the well-known track coach James F. “Jumbo” Elliott.

Delany’s first achievement of note is reaching the final of the 800 metres at the 1954 European Athletics Championships in Bern. In 1956, he becomes the seventh runner to join the club of four-minute milers, but nonetheless struggles to make the Irish team for the 1956 Summer Olympics, held in Melbourne.

Delany qualifies for the Olympic 1500 metres final, in which local runner John Landy is the big favourite. Delany keeps close to Landy until the final lap, when he starts a crushing final sprint, winning the race in a new Olympic record. He thereby becomes the first Irishman to win an Olympic gold medal in athletics since Bob Tisdall in 1932. The Irish people learn of its new champion at breakfast time. He would be Ireland’s last Olympic champion for 36 years, until Michael Carruth wins the gold medal in boxing at the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

Delany wins the bronze medal in the 1500 metres event at the 1958 European Athletics Championships. He goes on to represent Ireland once again at the 1960 Summer Olympics held in Rome, this time in the 800 metres. He finishes sixth in his quarter-final heat.

Delany continues his running career in North America, winning four successive Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) titles in the mile, adding to his total of four Irish national titles, and three NCAA titles. He is next to unbeatable on indoor tracks over that period, which includes a 40-race winning streak. He breaks the World Indoor Mile Record on three occasions. In 1961 he wins the gold medal in the World University Games in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Delany retires from competitive running in 1962, securing his status as Ireland’s most recognisable Olympian as well as one of the greatest sportsmen and international ambassadors in his country’s history.


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Birth of Daniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne

daniel-mannixDaniel Mannix, Archbishop of Melbourne, advocate of Irish independence, and one of the most influential and controversial public figures in 20th-century Australia, is born near Charleville, County Cork on March 4, 1864.

Mannix is the son of a tenant farmer, Timothy Mannix, and his wife Ellen (née Cagney). He is educated at Congregation of Christian Brothers schools and at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, County Kildare, where he is ordained priest in 1890. He teaches philosophy (1891) and theology (1894) at St. Patrick’s and from 1903 to 1912 he serves as president of the college. During his presidency, he welcomes both King Edward VII in 1905 and King George V in 1911 with loyal displays, which attract criticism by supporters of the Irish Home Rule movement.

Consecrated titular archbishop of Pharsalus in 1912, Mannix arrives in Melbourne in the following year as coadjutor archbishop, becoming archbishop of Melbourne in 1917.

Mannix’s forthright demands for state aid for the education of Roman Catholics in return for their taxes and his opposition to drafting soldiers for World War I make him the subject of controversy. A zealous supporter of Irish independence, he makes an official journey to Rome in 1920 via the United States, where his lengthy speech making attracts enthusiastic crowds. His campaign on behalf of the Irish, however, causes the British government to prevent him from landing in Ireland, which he finally visits in 1925.

After World War II Mannix seeks to stop Communist infiltration of the Australian trade unions. He plays a controversial part in the dissensions within the Australian Labor Party and backs the largely right-wing Catholic Democratic Labor Party, which breaks away. A promoter of Catholic Action (i.e., lay apostolic activity in the temporal society) and of the Catholic social movement, he is responsible for the establishment of 181 schools, including Newman College and St. Mary’s College at the University of Melbourne, and 108 parishes.

By the 1960s the distinct identity of the Irish community in Melbourne is fading, and Irish Catholics are increasingly outnumbered by Italians, Maltese and other postwar immigrant Catholic communities. Mannix, who turned 90 in 1954, remains active and in full authority, but he is no longer a central figure in the city’s politics. He dies suddenly on November 6, 1963, aged 99, while the Archdiocese of Melbourne is preparing to celebrate his 100th birthday. He is buried in the crypt of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Melbourne.