Hendron is the Member of Parliament (MP) for Belfast West between April 1992 and May 1997 in the UK Parliament in London. He takes the seat from Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams at his third attempt with a majority of one percent. He becomes the only nationalist MP to defeat Adams. The seat had previously been held for the SDLP by Gerry Fitt, later Lord Fitt, until 1983. He attracts unprecedented cross-community support from Nationalists and Unionists in the constituency. This is the only example where an SDLP candidate receives a high enough number of Unionist votes in Belfast West to help unseat a Sinn Féin candidate. Adams regains the seat at the 1997 United Kingdom general election.
Hendron is appointed a member of the Northern Ireland Parades Commission in 2005. He retires from this role in December 2010.
On June 11, 2019, Hendron escapes with just bruising and a damaged collarbone after he is struck by a van and thrown up into the air while crossing Balmoral Avenue. He says he is probably partly to blame for the accident as he decided to cross the street in front of a van that was trying to pull out onto the main road. Apparently, the driver of the van did not see Hendron and began to pull out, striking him.
In April 1919, Terence MacSwiney proposes the establishment of a daily paper by the Dáil for the purpose of publicity. His suggestion is not implemented until November, when Desmond FitzGerald decides that some form of printed counterpropaganda is vital to republican aims and to take advantage of the success of Sinn Féin and the increasing international interest in Ireland. Fitzgerald succeeds Laurence Ginnell in the Ministry following the latter’s arrest in April 1919, though he does not take up the position until July. At a Cabinet meeting held on November 7, there is agreement that there should be “A scheme for daily news bulletin to foreign correspondents, weekly lists of atrocities; entertainment of friendly journalists approved, and £500 voted for expenses under Mr. Griffith’s personal supervision.” Four days later the Irish Bulletin makes its debut, in a run consisting of just thirty copies. Five issues of the bulletin are issued each week for the next two years, despite efforts by the British authorities to suppress it.
The Irish Bulletin‘s offices are originally located at No. 6 Harcourt Street, Dublin. FitzGerald is the paper’s first editor, until his arrest and replacement by Erskine Childers. In the early days, the paper is produced mainly by Frank Gallagher and Robert Brennan. Brennan, as Sinn Féin’s Director of Publicity since April 1918, had played a leading role in that party’s success in the 1918 Irish General Election.
Following FitzGerald’s arrest in 1921, Childers is appointed Director of Propaganda taking charge of publicity and thus becoming the paper’s new editor. On May 9, 1921, both Childers and Gallagher are arrested and taken to Dublin Castle. Following the intervention of Sir Alfred Cope, both are released that night and go on the run. The hasty release of the two leads to speculation between Art O’Brien and Michael Collins that there is a rift developing between the British military authorities and the civil administration. Despite the arrests, the Irish Bulletin continues to appear on schedule. Alan J. Ellis, a journalist with The Cork Examiner makes occasional contributions to the paper. Kathleen Napoli McKenna is “a key force behind the daily newssheet.”
In the early days, the Irish Bulletin consists mainly of lists of raids by the security forces and the arrests of suspects. In order to stimulate interest, this is expanded in 1921 at the behest of the Irish President, Éamon de Valera, in his direction to Childers to give more detailed accounts of events. Extracts from foreign publications, particularly sympathetic English papers, are frequently included. A regular feature is accounts from the Dáil Courts, which are reported in detail.
The Irish Bulletin is more graphic in its coverage of violence than is usual for its time. An example is its reporting on the deaths of two prominent Sinn Féin leaders, Henry and Patrick Loughnane, from Shanaglish, Gort, County Galway. The men had been handed over by the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) to local members of the Auxiliary Division. On December 6, the bodies are found in a pond. The skulls had been battered in and the flesh was hanging loose on both bodies.The two men were evidently tied by the neck to a motor lorry and dragged behind it until they were dead. Before the bodies were hidden in a pond an effort was made to burn them.
On the night of March 26-27, 1921, the offices of the Irish Bulletin are discovered by the British authorities. Captured typewriters and duplicators are used to fabricate bogus issues of the paper. These are distributed to the usual subscribers using lists found at the office. Lord Henry Cavendish-BentinckMP on receiving some of the counterfeit papers through the post, asks in the House that those responsible “not (to) waste their money in sending me any more of their forgeries.” The initial efforts of the forgers, Captains Hugh Pollard and William Darling, are of poor quality and easily identified as counterfeit.
(Pictured: The “Irish Bulletin” issue of October 12, 1920, National Museum of Ireland)
Edgeworth Lysaght, later Edward Anthony Edgeworth Lysaght, and from 1920 Edward MacLysaght (Irish: Éamonn Mac Giolla Iasachta), a genealogist of twentieth century Ireland, is born on November 6, 1887, at Flax Bourton, Somerset, England. His numerous books on Irish surnames build upon the work of Rev. Patrick Woulfe’s Irish Names and Surnames (1923).
Lysaght is born to Sidney Royse Lysaght (1856-1941), of Irish origin, a director of the family iron and steel firm John Lysaght and Co. and a writer of novels and poetry, and Katherine (died 1953), daughter of Joseph Clarke, of Waddington, Lincolnshire. His grandfather, Thomas Royse Lysaght, is an architect, and his great-grandfather, William Lysaght, a small landowner distantly connected with the Barons Lisle. He is named “Edgeworth Lysaght” after his father’s friend, the economist Francis Ysidro Edgeworth. He loses the sight in one eye after a childhood accident.
Lysaght is educated at Nash House preparatory school, Bristol, and Rugby School at Rugby, Warwickshire, where he is unhappy, his parents’ frequent absence due to his father’s business responsibilities necessitating travel to South America, South Africa, and Australia contributing to this. He is a contemporary there of Rupert Brooke, whose father is Lysaght’s housemaster. Eighteen months after leaving Rugby, on the advice of Francis Edgeworth, he goes to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, to study law, but, having on his own account “had a wild time as part of the smart set” and anticipating rustication after a drunken incident, he leaves after three terms.
Lysaght takes up residence in a caravan at Lahinch, County Clare, where he had previously holidayed and become friendly with local people. His father, himself strongly connected to his Irish boyhood and wanting to establish himself as a “country gentleman,” recognizes his son’s enthusiasm for Ireland and in 1909 purchases a 600-acre estate at Tuamgraney, at which Lysaght farms until 1913, introducing an electrical generator and other forms of modernization including the development of a lime kiln, nursery, and school where young men of means can learn the basics of farming. This is the beginning of a metamorphosis for him. Although of English upbringing, he dislikes the local gentry, considering them “layabout rentiers,” and prefers to make friendships amongst employees and his neighbours. He seeks to replace his English accent with a Clare accent, eschews his lack of religion of a few years before in favour of Roman Catholicism, and becomes involved in the Gaelic League.
An integral factor in Lysaght’s reinvention is his relationship with Mabel (“Maureen”) Pattison. Five years his senior, they meet when he spends a period at a Dublin hospital. She is born and raised in South Africa, her father a civil servant there, but has Irish family including a local postmistress. His family seeks to avoid what they consider an unsuitable marriage, sending him and his brother Patrick on a world tour, but the couple are nevertheless married at the Brompton Oratory on September 4, 1913. Mabel introduces him to friends in the Arts Club, and he enters Dublin literary society. His father invests £300 in Maunsell’s publishers, who produces Lysaght’s book of poems, Irish Eclogues. As of the early 1930s, he serves on the General Committee of the Munster Agricultural Society.
By 1915, Lysaght’s command of the Irish language has improved dramatically, and in that year he founds the Nua-Ghaeltacht at Raheen, County Clare. He is an independent delegate to the 1917-18 Irish Convention in which he opposes John Redmond‘s compromise on Home Rule. By 1918 his involvement in all aspects of the Irish independence movement have deepened greatly. Although not known if he is actually a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), he is very active in the Irish War of Independence as a supporter, financially and otherwise, of the East Clare Brigade of the IRA and its legendary leaders, Michael and Conn Brennan.
In 1920, Lysaght, along with others of the name, changes his name to “MacLysaght,” “so as to emphasise its Gaelic origin.”
MacLysaght’s Raheen office serves as a meeting place for the Volunteers and guns, documents and ammunition are stored there. However, the war leads to a sharp decline in the fortunes of his farm. The execution of close friends such as Conor Clune of Quin in November 1920 and the subsequent devastating raids on his farm result in his playing a far more active role in Sinn Féin as a loyal supporter of the new TD for Clare, Éamon de Valera. For this he is imprisoned following his return from Britain as part of a Sinn Féin delegation which is publicising the Black and Tans atrocities.
Shanahan is involved in the Easter Rising in Dublin in April 1916. This leads to him having legal difficulties over the licence of his public house. He consults the lawyer and politician Tim Healy who comments:
“I had with me today a solicitor with his client, a Dublin publican named Phil Shanahan, whose licence is being opposed, and whose house was closed by the military because he was in Jacob’s during Easter week. I was astonished at the type of man – about 40 years of age, jolly and respectable. He said he ‘rose out’ to have a ‘crack at the English’ and seemed not at all concerned at the question of success or failure. He was a Tipperary hurler in the old days. For such a man to join the Rebellion and sacrifice the splendid trade he enjoyed makes one think there are disinterested Nationalists to be found. I thought a publican was the last man in the world to join a rising! Alfred Byrne, MP, was with him, and is bitter against the Party. I think I can save Shanahan’s property.”
Shanahan is elected for Dublin Harbour at the 1918 Irish general election, defeating Alfred Byrne. Like other Sinn Féin MPs, he does not take his seat at Westminster, but becomes a member of the revolutionary Dáil. He represents Dublin Harbour in the First Dáil from 1919 to 1921. He is arrested and detained in custody by the British government in April 1920 but is released in time to attend the next meeting of the Dáil on June 29, 1920.
During the Irish War of Independence, Billy Dunleavy recalls, “The IRA were the best men we ever had at that time. The Tans used to go around in the tenders with a wire over the top and if it was going by up there in Talbot Street they’d (IRA) say, ‘Get out of the way, quick!’ and they’d throw a hand grenade into the car. Now Phil Shanahan, he owned a pub over there on the corner, he was a great man and he used to hide them after they’d been out on a job. He had cellars and all the IRA men used to go there and hide their stuff.”
O’Connor is the eldest son of Thomas O’Connor, an Athlone shopkeeper, and his wife Teresa (née Power), the daughter of a non-commissioned officer in the Connaught Rangers. He is educated at The College of the Immaculate Conception in Athlone, and Queen’s College Galway, where he wins scholarships in history and modern languages and builds up a reputation as an orator, serving as auditor of the college’s Literary and Debating Society.
O’Connor enters journalism as a junior reporter on Saunders’ Newsletter, a Dublin journal, in 1867. In 1870, he moves to London and is appointed a sub-editor on The Daily Telegraph, principally on account of the utility of his mastery of French and German in reportage of the Franco-Prussian War. He later becomes London correspondent for the New York Herald. He compiles the society magazine Mainly About People (M.A.P.) from 1898 to 1911.
O’Connor is elected Member of Parliament for Galway Borough in the 1880 United Kingdom general election, as a representative of the Home Rule League, which is under the leadership of William Shaw, though virtually led by Charles Stewart Parnell, who wins the party’s leadership a short time later. At the next general election in 1885, he is returned both for Galway Borough and for the Liverpool Scotland constituencies, which has a large Irish population. He chooses to sit for Liverpool and represents that constituency in the House of Commons from 1885 until his death in 1929. He remains the only British MP from an Irish nationalist party ever to be elected to a constituency outside of the island of Ireland. He continues to be re-elected in Liverpool under this label unopposed in the 1918, 1922, 1923, 1924 and 1929 general elections, despite the declaration of a de factoIrish Republic in early 1919, and the establishment by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty of a quasi-independent Irish Free State in late 1922.
From 1905, O’Connor belongs to the central leadership of the United Irish League. During much of his time in parliament, he writes a nightly sketch of proceedings there for The Pall Mall Gazette. He becomes “Father of the House,” with unbroken service of 49 years, 215 days. The Irish Nationalist Party ceases to exist effectively after the Sinn Féin landslide of 1918, and thereafter he effectively sits as an independent. On April 13, 1920, he warns the House of Commons that the death on hunger strike of Thomas Ashe will galvanise opinion in Ireland and unite all Irishmen in opposition to British rule.
O’Connor founds and is the first editor of several newspapers and journals: The Star, the Weekly Sun (1891), The Sun (1893), M.A.P. and T.P.’s Weekly (1902). In August 1906, he is instrumental in the passing by Parliament of the Musical Copyright Act 1906, also known as the T.P. O’Connor Bill, following many of the popular music writers at the time dying in poverty due to extensive piracy by gangs during the piracy crisis of sheet music in the early 20th century. The gangs often buy a copy of the music at full price, copy it, and resell it, often at half the price of the original. The film I’ll Be Your Sweetheart (1945), commissioned by the British Ministry of Information, is based on the events of the day.
O’Connor is appointed as the second president of the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC) in 1916 and appears in front of the Cinema Commission of Inquiry (1916), set up by the National Council of Public Morals where he outlines the BBFC’s position on protecting public morals by listing forty-three infractions, from the BBFC 1913–1915 reports, on why scenes in a film may be cut. He is appointed to the Privy Council by the first Labour government in 1924. He is also a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the world’s oldest journalists’ organisation. It continues to honour him by having a T.P. O’Connor charity fund.
In 1885, O’Connor marries Elizabeth Paschal, the daughter of a judge of the Supreme Court of Texas.
Ó Brádaigh is born into a middle-class republican family. His father, Matt Brady, is an IRA volunteer who is severely wounded in an encounter with the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in 1919. His mother, May Caffrey, is a Cumann na mBan volunteer and a 1922 graduate of University College Dublin (UCD). His father dies when he is ten and is given a paramilitary funeral led by his former IRA colleagues. His mother, prominent as the Secretary for the County Longford Board of Health, lives until 1974. He is educated at Melview National School at primary level and attends secondary school at St. Mel’s College, leaving in 1950, and graduates from University College Dublin in 1954. That year he takes a job teaching Irish language at Roscommon Vocational School in Roscommon. He is a deeply religious Catholic who refrains from smoking or drinking.
Ó Brádaigh joins Sinn Féin in 1950. While at university, in 1951, he joins the Irish Republican Army. In September 1951, he marches with the IRA at the unveiling of the Seán Russell monument in Fairview Park, Dublin. A teacher by profession, he is also a Training Officer for the IRA. In 1954, he is appointed to the Military Council of the IRA, a subcommittee set up by the IRA Army Council in 1950 to plan a military campaign against Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) barracks in Northern Ireland.
On August 13, 1955, Ó Brádaigh leads a ten-member IRA group in an arms raid on Hazebrouck Barracks, near Arborfield, Berkshire, England, a depot for the No. 5 Radar Training Battalion of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. It is the biggest IRA arms raid in Britain. Most, if not all, of the weapons are recovered in a relatively short period of time. A van, traveling too fast, is stopped by the police and IRA personnel are arrested. Careful police work leads to weapons that had been transported in a second van and stored in London.
The IRA Border Campaign commences on December 12, 1956. As an IRA General Headquarters Staff (GHQ) officer, Ó Brádaigh is responsible for training the Teeling Column in the west of Ireland. During the Campaign, he serves as second-in-command of the Teeling Column. On December 30, 1956, he partakes in the Teeling Column attack on RUC barracks in Derrylin, County Fermanagh. RUC Constable John Scally is killed in the attack and is the first fatality of the new IRA campaign. Ó Brádaigh and others are arrested by the Garda Síochána across the border in County Cavan the day after the attack. They are tried and jailed for six months in Mountjoy Prison. A leading abstentionist, upon his arrest he refuses to recognize the authority of the Irish government and refuses to renounce violence in exchange for his release.
Upon completing his prison sentence, Ó Brádaigh is immediately interned at the Curragh Camp along with other republicans. On September 27, 1958, he escapes from the camp along with Dáithí Ó Conaill. While a football match is in progress, the pair cuts through a wire fence and escapes from the camp under a camouflage grass blanket. This is an official escape, authorised by the officer commanding (OC) of the IRA internees, Tomás Óg Mac Curtain. He is the first Sinn Féin TD on the run since the 1920s.
In October 1958, Ó Brádaigh becomes the IRA Chief of Staff, a position he holds until May 1959, when Seán Cronin is elected as his replacement. He is arrested in November 1959, refuses to answer questions, and is jailed in Mountjoy Prison under the Offences against the State Act. He is released in May 1960 and, after Cronin is arrested, again becomes Chief of Staff. Although he always emphasises that it is a collective declaration, he is the primary author of the statement ending the IRA Border Campaign in 1962. At the IRA 1962 Convention he indicates that he is not interested in continuing as Chief of Staff.
After Ó Brádaigh’s arrest in December 1956, he takes a leave from teaching at Roscommon Vocational School. He is re-instated and begins teaching again in late 1962, just after he is succeeded by Cathal Goulding in the position of Chief of Staff of the IRA. He remains an active member of Sinn Féin and is also a member of the IRA Army Council throughout the decade.
Ó Brádaigh opposes the decision of the IRA and Sinn Féin to drop abstentionism and to recognise the Westminster parliament in London, the Stormont parliament in Belfast and the Leinster House parliament in 1969/1970. On January 11, 1970, along with Seán Mac Stíofáin, he leads the walkout from the 1970 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis after the majority votes to end the policy of abstentionism, although the vote to change the Sinn Féin constitution fails to receive the required two-thirds majority. The delegates who walk out reconvene at the Kevin Barry Hall in Parnell Square, Dublin, and establish Provisional Sinn Féin.
Ó Brádaigh is voted chairman of the Caretaker Executive of Provisional Sinn Féin. That October, he formally becomes president of the party. He holds this position until 1983. In his presidential address to the 1971 Provisional Sinn Féin Ard Fheis, he says that the first step to achieving a United Ireland is to make Northern Ireland ungovernable. He apparently also serves on the Army Council or the executive of the Provisional Irish Republican Army until he is seriously injured in a car accident on January 1, 1984.
On May 31, 1972, Ó Brádaigh is arrested under the Offences Against the State Act and immediately commences a hunger strike. A fortnight later the charges against him are dropped and he is released. With Dáithí Ó Conaill he develops the Éire Nua policy, which is launched on June 28, 1972. The policy calls for a federal Ireland.
On December 3, 1972, Ó Brádaigh appears on the London Weekend TelevisionWeekend World programme. He is arrested by the Gardaí again on December 29, 1972, and charged in the newly established Special Criminal Court with Provisional IRA membership. In January 1973 he is the first person convicted under the Offences Against the State (Amendment) Act 1972 and is sentenced to six months in the Curragh Camp.
On December 10, 1974, Ó Brádaigh participates in the Feakle talks between the IRA Army Council and Sinn Féin leadership and the leaders of the Protestant churches in Ireland. Although the meeting is raided and broken up by the Gardaí, the Protestant churchmen pass on proposals from the IRA leadership to the British government. These proposals call on the British government to declare a commitment to withdraw, the election of an all-Ireland assembly to draft a new constitution and an amnesty for political prisoners.
The IRA subsequently calls a “total and complete” ceasefire intended to last from December 22, 1974, to January 2, 1975, to allow the British government to respond to proposals. British government officials also hold talks with Ó Brádaigh in his position as president of Sinn Féin from late December to January 17, 1975.
On February 10, 1975, the IRA Army Council, unanimously endorses an open-ended cessation of IRA “hostilities against Crown forces,” which becomes known as the 1975 truce. The IRA Chief of Staff at the time is Seamus Twomey of Belfast. It is reported in some quarters that the IRA leaders mistakenly believe they had persuaded the British Government to withdraw from Ireland and the protracted negotiations between themselves and British officials are the preamble to a public declaration of intent to withdraw. In fact, as British government papers now show, the British entertain talks with the IRA in the hope that this would fragment the movement further and score several intelligence coups during the talks. This bad faith embitters many in the republican movement, and another ceasefire does not happen until 1994.
In late December 1976, along with Joe Cahill, Ó Brádaigh meets two representatives of the Ulster Loyalist Central Co-ordinating Committee (ULCCC), John McKeague and John McClure, at the request of the latter body. Their purpose is to try to find a way to accommodate the ULCCC proposals for an independent Northern Ireland with the Sinn Féin’s Éire Nua programme. It is agreed that if this can be done, a joint Loyalist-Republican approach can then be made to request the British government to leave Ireland. Desmond BoalQC and Seán MacBrideSC are requested and accepted to represent the loyalist and republican positions. For months they have meetings in various places including Paris. The dialogue eventually collapses when Conor Cruise O’Brien, then Minister for Posts and Telegraphs and vociferous opponent of the Provisional IRA, becomes aware of it and condemns it on RTÉ Radio. As the loyalists had insisted on absolute secrecy, they feel unable to continue with the talks as a result.
In the aftermath of the 1975 truce, the Ó Brádaigh/Ó Conaill leadership comes under severe criticism from a younger generation of activists from Northern Ireland, headed by Gerry Adams, who becomes a vice-president of Sinn Féin in 1978. By the early 1980s, Ó Brádaigh’s position as president of Sinn Féin is openly under challenge and the Éire Nua policy is targeted in an effort to oust him. The policy is rejected at the 1981 Sinn Féin Ard Fheis and finally removed from the Sinn Féin constitution at the 1982 Ard Fheis. At the following year’s Ard Fheis, Ó Brádaigh and Ó Conaill resign from their leadership positions, voicing opposition to the dropping of the Éire Nua policy by the party.
On November 2, 1986, the majority of delegates to the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis vote to drop the policy of abstentionism if elected to Dáil Éireann, but not the British House of Commons or the Northern Ireland parliament at Stormont, thus ending the self-imposed ban on Sinn Féin elected representatives from taking seats at Leinster House. Ó Brádaigh and several supporters walk out and immediately assemble at Dublin’s West County Hotel and set up Republican Sinn Féin (RSF). As an ordinary member, he had earlier spoken out against the motion (resolution 162) in an impassioned speech. The Continuity IRA becomes publicly known in 1996. Republican Sinn Féin’s relationship with the Continuity IRA is similar to the relationship between Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA when Ó Brádaigh was Sinn Féin’s president.
Ó Brádaigh believes RSF to be the sole legitimate continuation of the pre-1986 Sinn Féin, arguing that RSF has kept the original Sinn Féin constitution. RSF readopts and enhances his Éire Nua policy. His party has electoral success in only a few local elections.
Ó Brádaigh remains a vociferous opponent of the Good Friday Agreement, viewing it as a programme to copperfasten Irish partition and entrench sectarian divisions in the north. He condemns his erstwhile comrades in Provisional Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA for decommissioning weapons while British troops remain in the country. In his opinion, “the Provo sell-out is the worst yet – unprecedented in Irish history.” He condemns the Provisional IRA’s decision to seal off a number of its arms dumps as “an overt act of treachery,” “treachery punishable by death” under IRA General Army Order Number 11.
In July 2005, Ó Brádaigh hands over a portion of his personal political papers detailing discussions between Irish Republican leaders and representatives of the British Government during 1974–1975 to the James Hardiman Library, National University of Ireland, Galway.
In September 2009, Ó Brádaigh announces his retirement as leader of Republican Sinn Féin. His successor is Des Dalton. He is also a long-standing member of the Celtic League, an organization which fosters cooperation between the Celtic people and promotes the culture, identity and eventual self-determination for the people, in the form of six sovereign states, for the Celtic nations – Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, Scotland, Isle of Man and Ireland.
After suffering a period of ill-health, Ó Brádaigh dies on June 5, 2013, at Roscommon County Hospital. His funeral is attended by 1,800 mourners including Fine Gael TD Frank Feighan and is policed by the Garda Emergency Response Unit and Gardaí in riot gear, for “operational reasons,” a show of force believed to have been to deter the republican tradition of firing a three-volley salute of shots over the final place of rest during the graveyard oration. As a result, there are some minor scuffles between gardai and mourners.
Smithson is christened Margaret Anne Jane but takes the names Anne Mary Patricia on her conversion to Catholicism. Her mother and father are first cousins, and her father dies when she is young. About 1881 her mother marries her second husband, Peter Longshaw, who owns a chemical factory in Warrington, Lancashire, England. She dislikes her stepfather and refers to him always as Mr. Longshaw. There are five children of the second marriage.
Smithson abandons her ambition to become a journalist in order to train as a nurse and a midwife. She trains in London and Edinburgh, before returning to Dublin in 1900. In 1901 she takes up a post as district nurse in Millton, County Down. There she falls in love with her colleague Dr. James Manton, a married man. Deciding that a relationship is impossible, she leaves Millton in 1906. They keep up a correspondence until her conversion, when she burns his letters.
Smithson takes the Republican side in the Irish Civil War and nurses participants in the siege at Moran’s Hotel. In 1922 she is imprisoned by Irish Free State forces and is rescued from Mullingar prison by Linda Kearns McWhinney and Muriel MacSwiney, posing as a Red Cross delegation. Her political views lead to her resignation from the Queen’s Nurses Committee and a move into private nursing. In 1924 she writes a series of articles on child welfare work for the Evening Mail newspaper, based on her work in tenements in the Dublin Liberties, one of the poorest areas of the city, where she continues to work until 1929.
Smithson is Secretary and Organiser of the Irish Nurse Organisation from 1929 to 1942. She writes for the Irish Nurses’ Magazine and edits the Irish Nurses Union Gazette.
In 1917 Smithson publishes her first novel, Her Irish Heritage, which becomes a best-seller. It is dedicated to those who died in the Easter Rising of 1916. In all, she publishes twenty novels and two short story collections. Other successful novels include By Strange Paths and The Walk of a Queen. Many of her works are highly romantic and draw on her own life experiences, with nationalism and Catholicism featured as recurrent themes. In 1944 she publishes her autobiography, Myself – and Others.
From 1932 onwards Smithson shares a house in Rathmines, Dublin, with her stepsister and her stepsister’s family. She dies of heart failure on February 21, 1948, at 12 Richmond Hill, Dublin, and is buried in Whitechurch, Dublin.
O’Grady’s father is the Reverend Thomas O’Grady, the scholarly Church of Ireland minister of Castletown Berehaven, County Cork, and his mother Susanna Doe (or Dowe). The Glebe, his childhood home, lies a mile west of Castletownbere near a famine mass grave and ruined Roman Catholic chapel. He is a cousin of Standish Hayes O’Grady, another noted figure in Celtic literature, and of Standish O’Grady, 1st Viscount Guillamore. After a rather severe education at Tipperary Grammar School, he follows his father to Trinity College, Dublin, where he wins several prize medals and distinguishes himself in several sports.
O’Grady is a paradox for his times, proud of his Gaelic heritage, he is also a member of the Church of Ireland, a champion of aristocratic virtues (particularly decrying bourgeois values and the uprooting cosmopolitanism of modernity) and at one point advocates a revitalised Irish people taking over the British Empire and renaming it the Anglo-Irish Empire.
O’Grady proves too unconventional of mind to settle into a career in the church, and takes a job as a schoolmaster at Midleton College, then in a period of expansion. He also qualifies as a barrister, while earning much of his living by writing for the Irish newspapers. Reading Sylvester O’Halloran’s A general history of Ireland (1778) sparks an interest in early Irish history. After an initial lukewarm response to his writing on the legendary past in History of Ireland: The Heroic Period (1878) and Early Bardic Literature of Ireland (1879), he realises that the public wants romance, and so follows the example of James Macpherson in recasting Irish legends in literary form, producing historical novels including Finn and his Companions (1891), The Coming of Cuculain (1894), The Chain of Gold (1895), Ulrick the Ready (1896) and The Flight of the Eagle (1897), and The Departure of Dermot (1913).
O’Grady also studies Irish history of the Elizabethan period, presenting in his edition of Sir Thomas Stafford‘s Pacata Hibernia (1896) the view that the Irish people had made the Tudors into kings of Ireland to overthrow their unpopular landlords, the Irish chieftains. His The Story of Ireland (1894) is not well received, as it sheds too positive a light on the rule of Oliver Cromwell for the taste of many Irish readers. He is also active in social and political campaigns in connection with such issues as unemployment and taxation.
Until 1898, O’Grady works as a journalist for the Daily Express of Dublin, but in that year, finding Dublin journalism in decline, he moves to Kilkenny to become editor of the Kilkenny Moderator, which is printed at 28 High Street. It is here he becomes involved with Ellen Cuffe, Countess of Desart, and Captain Otway Cuffe. He engages in the revival of the local woolen and woodworking industries. In 1900 he founds the All-Ireland Review and returns to Dublin to manage it until it ceases publication in 1908. He also contributes to James Larkins‘ The Irish Worker paper.
O’Grady’s influence crosses the divide of the Anglo-Irish and Irish-Ireland traditions in literature. His influence is explicitly stated by the Abbey Theatre set with Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats and George William Russell attributing their interest in the Fenian Cycle of Gaelic tradition in part to him. This leads to him being known as the “Father of the Celtic Revival.” Some of the figures associated with the political party Sinn Féin, including its founder Arthur Griffith, have positive things to say about his efforts in helping to retrieve from the past the Gaelic heroic outlook.
O’Grady marries Margaret Allen Fisher, daughter of William Allen Fisher, and they have three sons. Advised to move away from Ireland for the sake of his health, they leave Ireland in 1918. After living in the north of France and Northamptonshire, they move to the Isle of Wight. He is working on a final exposition of his ideas when he dies suddenly on May 18, 1928.
James Green Douglas, Irish businessman and politician dies on September 16, 1954. In 1922 he serves as the first-ever Leas-Chathaoirleach (deputy chairperson) of Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the newly independent Irish parliament. He goes on to serve in the Seanad for 30 years.
Douglas is born July 11, 1887, at 19 Brighton Square, Dublin, the eldest of nine children of John Douglas, proprietor of John Douglas & Sons Ltd, drapers and outfitters of Wexford St. and originally of Grange, County Tyrone, and his wife, Emily, daughter of John and Mary Mitton of Gortin, Coalisland, County Tyrone. The genealogy of the Douglas family to which he belongs can be traced to Samuel Douglas of Coolhill, Killyman, County Tyrone.
Douglas attends (1895–98) a small school for Quaker children and is a boarder (1898–1902) in the Friends’ School, Lisburn. In 1902 he begins a three-year apprenticeship in his father’s business.
On February 14, 1911, Douglas marries Georgina (Ena) Culley (1883–1959), originally of Tirsogue, Lurgan, County Armagh, whom he meets during his apprenticeship. Their children are John Harold Douglas, who succeeds to the family busines and replaces his father as senator, and James Arthur Douglas, who becomes a well-known architect.
From an early age Douglas is fascinated by politics and influenced by the newspapers edited by Arthur Griffith. He becomes a member of the Dublin Liberal Association, whose members for the most part are Protestanthome rulers. After the 1916 Easter Rising, with George Russell and others, who also regard themselves as neither unionists nor nationalists, he sets out to promote what they term “full dominion status” for Ireland. This paves the way for the Irish Convention (1917–18), which, however, fails to reconcile the polarised political attitudes of the time.
Douglas goes on to become a very active member of Seanad Éireann between 1922 and 1936 under the constitution he had helped to prepare. In 1922, he is elected as the first vice-chairman of the Senate. The Senate is abolished in 1936 and re-established under the terms of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland. He is again an active Senator between 1938 and 1943, and from 1944 to 1954. The topics most associated with him during his work as Senator are international refugees and the League of Nations.
For some thirty years he runs the family business, and is also a director of Aspro (Ireland) Ltd, Nugent & Cooper Ltd, Philips Lamps (Ireland) Ltd, and the Greenmount & Boyne Linen Co. Ltd. In addition, he serves as president of the Linen and Cotton Textile Manufacturers Association and as a member of the council of the Federated Union of Employers.
Warfield is a singer, songwriter, mandolin player and a founding member of The Wolfe Tones, performing with the band for nearly thirty-seven years, writing and recording over 60 songs. As a founding member, he is featured on every album recorded by the band from 1965’s debut album The Foggy Dew through to 1989’s 25th Anniversary.
In 1989, a contract is signed by Warfield, signing rights to an American distributor, Shanachie Records. The contents of this contract are apparently misrepresented to the other members of The Wolfe Tones, resulting in a clause that prevents them from recording any new material. Unable to reverse this agreement, they continue to tour, albeit without any new material. As of July 2017, Warfield has not spoken to his brother and former bandmate Brian Warfield since he left The Wolfe Tones in 2001.
A solo album, Legacy, is released in 1995 as he is still eligible to record under his own name. With Warfield on vocals and mandolin, the music on this album is performed by a new band, although he is still touring with The Wolfe Tones. Legacy is followed by Liberte’ ’98, Sons of Erin, Take Me Home To Mayo and Clear The Way. He also has a video Legacy and two books, The Songs and Ballads of 1798 and The Irish Songster of the American Civil War.
In 2001, after a show played in Limerick, Warfield leaves The Wolfe Tones to concentrate on his own career. Calling themselves “Brian Warfield, Tommy Byrne and Noel Nagle, formerly of The Wolfe Tones,” the remaining three go on to release You’ll Never Beat the Irish (2001) and the subsequent album Child of Destiny (2011).
Warfield has performed his music and songs at American Civil War events and commemorations at such sites as Gettysburg, Sharpsburg and Harrisburg with his band, The Sons of Erin. His 2002 release, Clear the Way, is the second in his Irish Songs in the Civil War series.
The ballad “Take Me Home to Mayo,” written by Belfastman Seamus Robinson as a tribute to Michael Gaughan, is recorded as a duet with Irish American Andy Cooney and is the title track of another 2002 Warfield release.
In 2003, following a complaint by an Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician, Roy Beggs, Jr., a radio channel dedicated to the music of Derek Warfield is removed from the in-flight entertainment of Aer Lingus. Beggs complains of the “Blatant promotion of militant, armed republicanism” by the playing of this music, saying it is the same as “the speeches of Osama bin Laden being played on a trans-Atlantic Arabian airline.” Aer Lingus removes the material from their flights stating: “It is something that should not have been on board and we removed it immediately we became aware of it.”
In March 2006, Warfield releases his ninth solo album, a 36-song double CD of Irish songs. On March 1, 2006, his wife Nuala dies, followed by the death of his eldest daughter on September 28, 2007.
Warfield now tours with his new band, Derek Warfield and The Young Wolfe Tones.
A biography of Robert Emmet in two volumes, although not written by Warfield, has been published by him, and a collaboration with Raymond Daly of Tullamore has resulted in the publishing of a critically acclaimed book of lyrics and histories of Irish songs called Celtic and Ireland in Song and Story.
seamus dubhghaill 