seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Social Justice


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Birth of Mary Lou McDonald, Current President of Sinn Féin

Mary Louise McDonald, Irish politician and President of Sinn Féin since February 2018, is born in Dublin on May 1, 1969.

McDonald is born into a middle-class family in south Dublin. Her father Patrick McDonald, a builder and surveyor, and her mother Joan, separate when she is nine years old, and she stays with her mother in Rathgar. She has three siblings, one older and two younger. Her great-uncle, James O’Connor, was a member of the Anti-Treaty IRA and was executed at the Curragh Camp during the Irish Civil War.

McDonald is educated at Rathgar National School and at the Catholic all-girls, Notre Dame des Missions in Churchtown, South Dublin, where she is involved in debating. She then attends Trinity College Dublin (TCD), the University of Limerick and Dublin City University (DCU), studying English Literature, European Integration Studies and Human Resource Management.

She works as a researcher for the Institute of European Affairs, a consultant for the Irish Productivity Centre, a human resources consultancy that is jointly operated by Ibec and Irish Congress of Trade Unions (ICTU), and a trainer in the Partnership Unit of the Educational and Training Services Trust.

McDonald starts her political career by first joining Fianna Fáil in 1998 but leaves the party after a year due to core policy differences, particularly in relation to Northern Ireland and social justice. She quickly realises that Sinn Féin is a more appropriate party for her Republican views after meeting Sinn Féin members through the Irish National Congress.

She first runs for office at the 2002 Irish general election when she unsuccessfully contests the Dublin West constituency for Sinn Féin, polling 8.02% of first preference votes.

In 2004, McDonald becomes Sinn Féin’s first Member of the European Parliament (MEP) in Ireland, when she is elected at the 2004 European Parliament election in Ireland for the Dublin constituency, receiving over 60,000 first preference votes. She serves until 2009 and is a prominent member of the Employment and Social Affairs committee and Civil Liberties committee.

McDonald is an unsuccessful candidate in the Dublin Central constituency at the 2007 Irish general election. In 2009 she becomes the vice president of Sinn Féin.

McDonald contests the Dublin Central constituency again at the 2011 Irish general election, this time picking up 13.1% of first preference votes. She is successful in taking the last seat in the constituency. Following the election, she becomes Sinn Féin’s Spokesperson for Public Expenditure and Reform and is a member of the Public Accounts Committee from then until 2017.

After her re-election to the Dáil at the 2016 Irish general election, in which she tops the poll in Dublin Central, she becomes Sinn Féin’s All-Ireland Spokesperson for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention, which she holds until being elected president of Sinn Féin in 2018.

At a Sinn Féin party conference on November 18, 2017, Gerry Adams is re-elected party leader but announces that he will ask party leadership to call for a special Ard Fheis to be held within three months to choose a new president, and that he will not stand for re-election as TD for the Louth constituency in the next election.

At the close of nominations to succeed Adams on January 20, 2018, McDonald is announced as the president-elect of Sinn Féin, as she is the sole nominee to enter the race. She is confirmed as president at a special Ard Fheis on February 10, 2018, in Dublin.

McDonald is nominated as Taoiseach on February 20, 2020, but is defeated 45 to 84. On June 26, 2020, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the Green Party form a coalition government, leaving Sinn Féin as the largest opposition party, and McDonald as Leader of the Opposition. She dismisses the coalition agreement as a “marriage of convenience,” and accuses Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael of conspiring to exclude Sinn Féin from government.

At the 2024 Irish general election, McDonald is re-elected to the Dáil topping the poll in Dublin Central with Sinn Féin increasing their seat share by two seats, remaining the second largest party by representation in the Dáil and attaining 19% of the first preference votes, a fall of 5.5% from 2020 and fall behind Fianna Fáil by 2.9% and Fine Gael by 1.8%.

McDonald is again nominated as Taoiseach on December 18, 2024, but is defeated 44 to 110.

McDonald’s husband, Martin Lanigan, works as a gas control superintendent for the emergency dispatch division of Gas Networks Ireland, a state infrastructure provider. They have two children and live in Cabra, Dublin.


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Birth of Nuala O’Faolain, Journalist, TV Producer, Teacher & Writer

Nuala O’Faolain, Irish journalist, television producer, book reviewer, teacher and writer, is born in Clontarf, Dublin on March 1, 1940. She becomes well known after the publication of her memoirs Are You Somebody? and Almost There. She also writes a biography of Irish criminal Chicago May and two novels.

O’Faolain is the second eldest of nine children. Her father, known as ‘TerryO’ is a well-known Irish journalist, writing the “Dubliners Diary” social column under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan for the Evening Press. She is educated at University College Dublin (UCD), the University of Hull, and the University of Oxford. She teaches for a time at Morley College in London and works as a television producer for the BBC and Raidió Teilifís Éireann.

O’Faolain describes her early life as growing up in a Catholic country which, in her view, fears sexuality and forbids her even information about her body. In her writings she often discusses her frustration at the sexism and rigidity of roles in Catholic Ireland that expect her to marry and have children, neither of which she does.

O’Faolain becomes internationally well known for her two volumes of memoir, Are You Somebody? and Almost There; a novel, My Dream of You; and a history with commentary, The Story of Chicago May. The first three are all featured on The New York Times Best Seller list. Her posthumous novel Best Love, Rosie is published in 2009.

O’Faolain’s formative years coincide with the emergence of the women’s movement, and her ability to expose misogyny in all its forms is formidable, forensic and unremitting. However, her feminism stems from a fundamental belief in social justice. Unlike most commentators, who maintain a detached, lofty tone, she places herself at the centre of things, a high-risk strategy that works because of her broad range of erudition, worn lightly, her courage and a truthfulness that sometimes borders on the self-destructive.

O’Faolain is engaged at least once but never marries. In Are You Somebody? she speaks candidly about her fifteen-year relationship with the journalist Nell McCafferty, who publishes her own memoir, Nell. From 2002 until her death, she lives much of the time with Brooklyn-based attorney John Low-Beer and his daughter Anna. They are registered as domestic partners in 2003.

O’Faolain splits her time between Ireland and New York City. She is diagnosed with metastatic cancer and is interviewed on the Marian Finucane radio show on RTÉ Radio 1 on April 12, 2008, in relation to her terminal illness. She tells Finucane, “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life.”

In a last attempt to grasp as much of life as she can, O’Faolain holidays with family members in Sicily and visits Berlin with a group of friends to hear music and see art. She previously tended to avoid Berlin because, through contact with Jewish friends and lovers, she associated it with the Holocaust. She dies at the Blackrock Hospice, Dublin, on May 9, 2008.

O’Faolain wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985 for her work as the producer of the RTÉ One television programme Plain Tales. In 2006, she wins the Prix Femina étranger, a French literary award, for The Story of Chicago May.

O’Faolain is the subject of a film documentary, Nuala: A Life and Death (2011), directed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O’Callaghan, and produced and narrated by Marian Finucane. Hugo Hamilton‘s novel Every Single Minute (2014) is based on his experiences when accompanying O’Faolain to Berlin shortly before her death.


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Death of Father Austin Flannery

Fr. Austin Flannery OP, was a Dominican priest, scholar, editor, journalist and social justice campaigner, dies of a heart attack at Kiltipper Woods Care Centre, Dublin, on October 21, 2008.

Born William “Liam” Flannery at Rearcross, County Tipperary, on January 10, 1925, he is the eldest of seven children produced by William K. Flannery and his wife Margaret (née Butler), merchants, publicans and hoteliers there and later at New Ross, County Wexford. After national school in Rearcross, he is educated at St. Flannan’s College in Ennis, County Clare, completing his secondary education at Newbridge College, Newbridge, County Kildare, a Dominican institution where he revels in an environment spurring independent thinking.

Flannery joins the Dominican Order in 1943, making his first profession in September 1944. After studies in theology at St. Mary’s Priory, Tallaght, County Dublin, and then at Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, he is ordained a Catholic priest on September 2, 1950, and adopts the forename Austin. He continues his studies at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in Rome where he is awarded a doctorate in dogmatic theology. After his studies he teaches theology at Glenstal Abbey, County Limerick, for two years in the mid-1950s, before returning to Newbridge College for a year to teach Latin.

Flannery edits the Dominican bi-monthly journal entitled Doctrine and Life from 1958 to 1988, while at St. Saviour’s Priory, Dublin, where he also serves as prior from 1957 to 1960. He also edits the Religious Life Review. During and after the Second Vatican Council he makes available in English all the documents from the event.

Flannery’s campaigning to end apartheid in South Africa leads to involvement with Kader Asmal, and the founding the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, of which he serves as chairman and president. In the late sixties his campaigning on behalf of the Dublin Housing Action Committee, due to its association with republicans and left-wing activists, leads him to being accused of being a communist. He is dismissed in the Dáil by the then Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, as “a gullible cleric.”

From August 1969, Flannery is a member of the executive committee of the Northern Relief Coordination Committee, raising funds on behalf of the families of those interned without trial in Northern Ireland during the early 1970s.

Flannery embodies the post-Vatican II conception of the priest as a social catalyst engaged by the gospel, closer to his flock than to the clerical hierarchy. He has a great gift for friendship, is indefatigably interested in people, and courts religious affairs commentators and journalists at a time when the hierarchy ignores them, magnifying his influence.

Flannery dies of a heart attack on October 21, 2008, at Kiltipper Woods Care Centre, Dublin. Following a funeral mass at St. Saviour’s Priory, he is buried in the Dominican plot at Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin, on October 24, 2008.


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Birth of Father Austin Flannery

Father Austin (Liam) Flannery OP, Dominican priest, editor, publisher and social justice campaigner is born Liam Flannery at Rearcross, County Tipperary, on January 10, 1925.

Flannery is the eldest of seven children produced by William K. Flannery and his wife Margaret (née Butler). He is educated at St. Flannan’s College in Ennis, County Clare, completing his secondary education at Dominican College Newbridge in Newbridge, County Kildare.

Flannery joins the Dominican Order in September 1944, leading to studies in theology at St. Mary’s Dominican Priory in Tallaght, Dublin, and then at Blackfriars Priory in Oxford, England. Joining the Dominicans he chooses the name Austin and is ordained a priest in 1950. He continues his studies at the Pontificium Athenaeum Internationale Angelicum in Rome. After his studies he teaches Latin at Newbridge College in Newbridge, County Kildare, and then theology at Glenstal Abbey in Murroe, County Limerick.

Flannery edits the Dominican bi-monthly journal entitled Doctrine and Life from 1958 to 1988, while at St. Saviour’s Priory, Dublin, where he also serves as prior from 1957 to 1960. He also edits the Religious Life Review. He publishes many English language documents on the Second Vatican Council.

Flannery’s campaigning to end apartheid in South Africa leads to involvement with Kader Asmal, and the founding the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement, of which he serves as chairman and president. In the late 1960s his campaigning on behalf of the Dublin Housing Action Committee, due to its association with republicans and left-wing activists, leads him to being accused of being a communist. He is dismissed in the Dáil by the then Minister for Finance, Charles Haughey, as “a gullible cleric.”

Flannery dies of a heart attack at the age of 83 on October 21, 2008. He is buried in the Dominican plot at Glasnevin Cemetery in Glasnevin, Dublin.


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Birth of Andy Irvine, Musician & Singer-Songwriter

Andrew Kennedy Irvine, known as Andy Irvine, Irish folk musician and singer-songwriter, is born on June 14, 1942 in St. John’s Wood, London, England to an Irish mother from Lisburn, County Antrim, and a Scottish father from Glasgow. He is a founding member of popular bands Sweeney’s Men, Planxty, Patrick Street, Mozaik, LAPD and Usher’s Island. He plays the mandolin, mandola, bouzouki, harmonica and hurdy-gurdy.

Irvine has been influential in folk music for over five decades, during which he records a large repertoire of songs and tunes he assembles from books, old recordings and folk-song collectors rooted in the Irish, English, Scottish, Eastern European, Australian and American old-time and folk traditions. He sets these songs to new music and also writes songs about his personal experiences or the lives and struggles of his heroes, including Tom Barker, Michael Davitt, Mother Jones, Douglas Mawson, Raoul Wallenberg, and Emiliano Zapata.

Imbued with a sense of social justice, Irvine often selects or writes songs that are based on historical events and presented from the victim’s perspective. Some of these songs chronicle the abject living and working conditions imposed on groups of people such as the emigrants, the brutalized migrant workers, the exploited textile strikers or coalminers. Other songs recall the archetypal experiences of single individuals – the woman seduced by an unfaithful man or disowned by her father, the destitute young man ostracized or murdered on the order of his sweetheart’s rich father, the down-on-his-luck farmer or the unemployed worker, the young man inveigled by the army’s recruiting sergeant, the scapegoats. Irvine’s songs also denounce worker deaths and industrial diseases, and lament the plight of hunted animals. His repertoire includes humorous songs, but also bittersweet ones of unrequited love, or of lovers cruelly separated or dramatically reunited. He also sings about famous racehorses, men or women masquerading in various disguises, a fantastical fox preying on young maidens, and the violent lives of outlaws.

As a child actor, Irvine hones his performing talent from an early age and learns the classical guitar. He switches to folk music after discovering Woody Guthrie, also adopting the latter’s other instruments, the harmonica and mandolin. While extending Guthrie’s guitar picking technique to the mandolin, he further develops his playing of this instrument and, later, of the mandola and the bouzouki, into a decorative, harmonic style and embraces the modes and rhythms of Bulgarian folk music. Along with Johnny Moynihan and Dónal Lunny, Irvine is one of the pioneers who adapts the Greek bouzouki into an Irish instrument. He contributes to advancing the design of his instruments in cooperation with English luthier Stefan Sobell, and he occasionally plays a hurdy-gurdy made for him in 1972 by Peter Abnett, another English luthier.

Although touring mainly as a soloist, Irvine has also enjoyed great success in pursuing collaborations through many projects that have influenced contemporary folk music. He continues to tour and perform extensively in Ireland, Great Britain, Europe, North and South America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand.