Blackham is born in London, England, on December 16, 1891. His father, William George Blackham, is an Ulster Protestant from Newry, while his mother is an Englishwoman named Evison Elizabeth Saunders. An uncle is Robert J. Blackham who is the Surgeon-General to the British Army in Ireland. The family are evangelical Protestants, against which he rebels. Having been brought up to take the Bible literally, he suffers a religious crisis upon the realisation his teachers at school do not. He finds the transition to adulthood difficult, particularly due to the early death of his father.
For a time, Blackham moves in socialist circles, under the influence of Ulster socialist Robert Wilson Lynd. However, upon the discovery that his father had been a Protestant who had been in favour of Irish home rule and also had some republican sympathies, he turns toward Irish nationalism.
Blackham becomes involved in the Gaelic League while in London. he Gaelicizes his name to Aodh Sandrach de Blácam or Hugh de Blácam, despite his non-Gaelic ethnic origin. He learns the Irish language from the essayist Robert Wilson Lynd. During this time, he seeks to synthesize his urge to reclaim his sense of Irish nationality with the works and thoughts of hardline Catholic author G. K. Chesterton. It is partially because of Chesterton’s influence that he converts to Catholicism, although the conversion of Protestant Irish Nationalists to Catholicism is common throughout the early 20th century. Another influence upon his decision to convert is his desire to marry Catholic Mary McCarville of County Monaghan.
In May 1914 de Blácam returns to Ireland and begins working as a freelance journalist. He joins the Enniscorthy Echo as a journalist in 1915.
During the Irish War of Independence de Blácam writes nationalist propaganda alongside Arthur Griffith and Herbert Moore Pim. He is interned by the British in 1919. During this time period he writes two political manifestoes: Towards the Republic; a study of new Ireland’s social and political aims (1918) and What Sinn Féin Stands For (1921). The two books argue that at their root, Catholic social teaching (CST) and Bolshevism are essentially identical and that Ireland, having only experienced feudalism and capitalism because of external forces, can skip many of the phrases normally described in the Marxist Trajectory of historical development and go straight to a soviet-type society, an idea not dissimilar to the two-stage theory. He imagines this soviet-type society to be an Irish-speaking decentralised rural cooperative commonwealth. Critics of Sinn Féin frequently cite his works as proof of the infeasibility of Sinn Féin’s aims.
De Blácam opposes the Anglo-Irish Treaty and subsequently aids the Anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War. For this he is interned by the newly created Irish Free State in 1922. Following his release, he continues to pin his flag to the mast of Éamon de Valera and his newly formed Fianna Fáil party. He believes De Valera fully embodies his own political ideas.
During the 1920s de Blácam joins The Irish Times, which he later leaves to become editor of The Catholic Standard. For seventeen years he writes a feature in the Fianna Fáil aligned The Irish Press called “Roddy the Rover.”
It was also during the 1920s that de Blácam moves to Dublin, where he begins to move in the same circles as George Bernard Shaw, George Russell, and W. B. Yeats. He hopes all three men might one day convert to Catholicism as he did and is sorely disappointed when each do not. Upon the death of Yeats, he goes so far as to refer to Yeats’ poem as “Demonic.” He has similar hopes for Peadar O’Donnell but is similarly disappointed in his lack of interest in conversion.
In 1938 de Blácam publishes The Black North, a book which carries an introduction by de Valera. In the book he argues that Ulster Protestants are in actuality both Irish and Catholic, but they simply do not realise it. Among his arguments to support this idea are the suggestions that the presbyterian emphasis on self-government is derived from the Gaelic clan tradition, that presbyterian “kailyard” writers of rural nostalgia such as Lydia Mary Foster exemplify the naturally Irish piety and purity of her co-religionists, and that the fact that some workers commute from the Armagh borderland to work in Dundalk factories prove that the south is better off economically than the north.
It is suggested de Blácam is an influence upon de Valera’s 1943 broadcast “The Ireland That We Dreamed Of.” Politically he is highly considered about rural depopulation and is involved in a number of organisations seeking to end it. He advocates more economic autarky and cultural protectionism to combat rural depopulation and lamented urbanisation and industrialisation. He also tries to convince the Fianna Fáil executive that they should ban women from emigration as well as ban women from factories in order to force women to remain in rural Ireland. His ideas fail to impress the executive, with Seán MacEntee in particular standing in strong disagreement.
De Blácam is a member of the Fianna Fáil executive until 1947, when he defects to the upstart Irish Republican party Clann na Poblachta. For this move he is immediately fired from The Irish Press. He stands for Clann na Poblachta in the Louth constituency at the 1948 Irish general election but is not elected.
During the brief period in which Clann na Poblachta is in government, de Blácam serves as an official spokesman for the Department of Health and as a speechwriter to Noël Browne, the embattled Minister for Health.
De Blácam dies while working in the Custom House on January 16, 1951. His funeral is attended by many dignitaries including TaoiseachJohn A. Costello and former Taoiseach Éamon de Valera. He is buried in New Mellifont Abbey, County Louth.
Mary G. Harris Jones, known as Mother Jones, an Irish-born American schoolteacher and dressmaker who becomes a prominent union organiser, community organiser, and activist, dies in Silver Spring, Maryland, on November 30, 1930. She is once deemed “the most dangerous woman in America” because of her union activities.
Jones is the daughter of Richard Harris, a Roman Catholictenant farmer and railway labourer, and Ellen (née Cotter) Harris. She is baptised on August 1, 1837, in Cork, County Cork. Her exact date of birth is uncertain. She and her family are victims of the Great Famine, as are many other Irish families of the time. The famine forces more than a million families, including the Harrises, to immigrate to North America when she is ten years old. She lives in the United States and Canada, where she attends and later teaches in a Roman Catholic normal school in Toronto. In the United States she teaches in a convent school in Monroe, Michigan and works as a seamstress. In 1861 she marries George Jones, an iron-moulder and labour union member in Memphis, Tennessee. After the death of her husband and their four children in a yellow fever epidemic in 1867, she relocates to Chicago, Illinois, where she becomes involved with an early industrial union, the Knights of Labor. Her seamstress shop is destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.
In the 1890s Jones becomes known as ‘Mother’ Jones and begins a long association with socialist causes and the United Mine Workers of America. She attends the founding convention of Social Democracy of America, later known as the Cooperative Brotherhood, in 1897 and in the same year organises support and publicity for striking bituminous coal miners in West Virginia, including a children’s march and parades of farmers delivering food to the miners’ camp. These types of defiant mass action become her trademark. Notable activities include organising women in support of an 1899 anthracite coal strike in eastern Pennsylvania, directing strikes of young women working in textile mills, a 1903 ‘children’s crusade’ against child labour which includes a ninety-mile march from Philadelphia to New York City, participating in 1905 in the founding convention of the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labour union committed to the organisation of unskilled workers, campaigning for the release of Mexican revolutionaries imprisoned in American jails, and testifying in 1915 in congressional hearings against the abuse of corporate power by Rockefeller interests.
Jones reportedly meets with James Connolly, Irish socialist and labour organiser, in New York City in 1910. She is arrested for the first time for violating a federal injunction during a miners’ strike in West Virginia in 1902. In 1904, during a Colorado miners’ campaign, she has to avoid the authorities to escape possible deportation. During a 1914 strike in Ludlow, Colorado, she is imprisoned without trial for nine weeks. In 1919 she is arrested in Pennsylvania during a steelworkers’ strike for defending freedom of speech and the right of workers to organise unions. She remains active in the labour movement and radical causes into her nineties.
During her later years, Jones lives with her friends Walter and Lillie May Burgess on their farm in what is now Adelphi, Maryland. She celebrates her self-proclaimed 100th birthday there on May 1, 1930, and is filmed making a statement for a newsreel.
In 1932, about 15,000 Illinois mine workers gather in Mount Olive to protest against the United Mine Workers, which soon becomes the Progressive Mine Workers of America. Convinced that they have acted in the spirit of Mother Jones, the miners decide to place a proper headstone on her grave. By 1936, the miners have saved up more than $16,000 and are able to purchase “eighty tons of Minnesota pink granite, with bronze statues of two miners flanking a twenty-foot shaft featuring a bas-relief of Mother Jones at its center.” On October 11, 1936, also known as Miners’ Day, an estimated 50,000 people arrive at Mother Jones’s grave to see the new gravestone and memorial. Since then, October 11 is not only known as Miners’ Day but is also referred to and celebrated in Mount Olive as “Mother Jones’s Day.”
The farm where she died begins to advertise itself as the “Mother Jones Rest Home” in 1932, before being sold to a Baptist church in 1956. The site is now marked with a Maryland Historical Trust marker, and a nearby elementary school is named in her honor.
McKee joins Fianna Éireann in 1936. He is arrested following a raid on a Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) club in 1938, being imprisoned in Crumlin Road Gaol for several months. Following his release from prison, he joins the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1939. During World War II, the IRA carries out a number of armed actions in Northern Ireland known as the Northern Campaign. He is arrested and imprisoned in Crumlin Road Gaol until 1946 for his role in this campaign. In 1956, the IRA embarks on another armed campaign against partition, known as the Border Campaign. He is again arrested and interned for the duration of the campaign. He is released in 1962.
As the 1960s proceed, McKee drifts away from the IRA. He grows very disillusioned with the organisation’s increasing emphasis on socialism and reformist politics over “armed struggle.” He is a devout Roman Catholic, who attends Mass daily. As a result, he is very uncomfortable with what he feels are “communist” ideas coming into the republican movement.
During the 1969 Northern Ireland riots, severe rioting breaks out in Belfast between Irish Catholicnationalists, Protestantloyalists, and the RUC. McKee is highly critical of the IRA’s failure to defend Catholic areas during these disturbances. On August 14, 1969, McKee, Joe Cahill and a number of other Irish Republican activists occupy houses at Kashmir Street, however, being poorly armed they fail to prevent Irish Catholics in Bombay Street and parts of Cupar Street and Kashmir Street being driven from their homes in the sectarian rioting that engulfs parts of the city. In the aftermath of the riots, he accuses Billy McMillen, the IRA’s Belfast commander, and the Dublin-based IRA leadership, of having failed to direct a clear course of action for the organization in civil disturbances. On September 22, 1969, he and a number of other IRA men arrive with weapons at a meeting called by McMillen and try to oust him as head of the Belfast IRA. They are unsuccessful but announce that they will no longer be taking orders from the IRA leadership in Dublin. In December 1969, the IRA splits into the Provisional IRA which is composed of traditional militarists like McKee, and the Official IRA which is composed of the remnants of the pre-split Marxist leadership and their followers. He sides with the Provisionals and joins the IRA Army Council in September 1970.
McKee becomes the first OC of the Provisional IRA Belfast Brigade. From the start, there is intermittent feuding between McKee’s men and his former comrades in the Official IRA, as they vie for control of nationalist areas. However, the Provisionals rapidly gain the upper hand, due to their projection of themselves as the most reliable defenders of the Catholic community.
McKee himself contributes greatly to this image by an action he undertakes on June 27, 1970, the Battle of St Matthew’s. Rioting breaks out in the Ardoyne area of north Belfast after an Orange Order parade, and three Protestants are killed in gun battles between the Provisional IRA and loyalists. In response, loyalists prepare to attack the vulnerable Catholic enclave of Short Strand in east Belfast. When McKee hears about this, he drives to Short Strand with some men and weapons and takes up position at St Matthew’s Church. In the ensuing five-hour gun battle, he is wounded and one of his men is killed, along with at least four Protestants.
On April 15, 1971, McKee, along with Proinsias Mac Airt, is arrested by the British Army when found in possession of a handgun. He is charged and convicted for possession of the weapon and imprisoned in Crumlin Road Gaol, and Joe Cahill takes over as OC of the Belfast Brigade.
In 1972, McKee leads a hunger strike protest in an effort to win recognition of IRA prisoners as political prisoners. Republicans who are interned already have special status, but those convicted of crimes do not. On June 19, the 35th day of hunger strike, he is close to death, William Whitelaw concedes Special Category Status (SCS) which, although not officially awarding political status, is tacit recognition of the political nature of the incarceration. Prisoners wear their own clothes, have no prison work, can receive one visit and food parcel per week and unlimited letters.
McKee is released on September 4, 1974, and resumes his position as OC of the Belfast Brigade. At this time the Provisional IRA calls a ceasefire, and he is involved, with Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, in secret peace talks in Derry with the Northern Ireland Office. He is also involved in talks with Protestant clergy in Feakle, County Clare, in December 1974, where he voices his desire to end the violence.
However, in the same period, McKee authorises a number of sectarian attacks on Protestants as well as renewed attacks on rival republicans in the Official IRA. For this he is heavily criticised by a group of Provisional IRA activists grouped around Gerry Adams.
A faction led by Adams manages to get McKee voted off the IRA Army Council in 1977, effectively forcing him out of the leadership of the organisation. His health suffers in this period, and he does not resume his IRA activities. He joins Republican Sinn Féin after a split in Sinn Féin in 1986. At age 89, reflecting on his involvement in the Republican cause he says, “From the time I was 15 until 65 I was in some way involved. I have had plenty of time since to think if I was right or I was wrong. I regret nothing.”
In later years McKee, Brendan Hughes and Tommy McKearney are critical of the Belfast Agreement and of the reformist politics of Sinn Féin. In 2016 he sends a message of support to the launch of the hardline new Republican party Saoradh, reportedly the political wing of the New IRA.
McKee dies in Belfast at the age of 97 on June 11, 2019. His funeral takes place on June 15, 2019, in west Belfast. His coffin is carried on a gun carriage. He is buried in Milltown Cemetery.
MacEoin is born Vincent O’Rahilly McGuone to Malachy McGuone, owner of the Central Hotel in Pomeroy and a wine and spirit merchant, and Catherine (née Fox). He has three siblings. Both of his parents are nationalists, and name all their children after leaders of the Easter Rising in 1916. Under the First Dáil in 1918, his father is appointed a judge. This results in him being interned on the prison ship Argenta on Larne Lough from 1922 to 1923. The family moves to Dublin after his release. His father dies in 1933, which leads to his wife running a workingmen’s café in East Essex Street. The family later lives on Marlborough Road, Donnybrook.
MacEoin attends boarding school at Blackrock College and is then articled to the architectural practice of Vincent Kelly in Merrion Square. As an active republican, he lives in a house on Northumberland Road from late 1939 to May 1940 where he helps in the production and distribution of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) weekly newspaper, War News. The IRA is banned by the Irish government in 1936, and its bombing campaign in Britain in 1939 is viewed by the government as a threat to Irish neutrality. MacEoin is among a group of republicans arrested in June 1940 and imprisoned in Arbour Hill Prison for a year. Once released, he is rearrested and interned at the Curragh for three years. He is sentenced to 3-months imprisonment in October 1943 for possession of incriminating documents. He is also charged with possession of ammunition, but testifies he was given the rounds against his will and never appears to have engaged in any violence. During his internment, he is taught the Irish language by Máirtín Ó Cadhain and is exposed to the socialist views of his fellow inmates. It is at this time that he adopts the Irish form of his name, Uinseann MacEoin.
While imprisoned in the 1940s, MacEoin continues his studies by correspondence and qualifies as an architect in 1945 at University College Dublin (UCD). His designs for a memorial garden in 1946 to those who died during the Irish War of Independence are commended. In 1959, he designs the site in Ballyseedy, County Kerry, for a monument by Yann Goulet commemorating those killed in the Irish Civil War and members of the IRA from Kerry who died. In 1948, he qualifies in town planning and takes up a position with Michael Scott‘s architectural practice. He works for a short time with Dublin Corporation, with their housing department, before establishing his own practice in 1955.
During the 1950s, MacEoin is a contributing editor on interior design in Hugh McLaughlin‘s magazine Creation, becoming editor of Irish Architect and Contractor in 1955. He enters into a partnership with Aidan Kelly in 1969 as MacEoin Kelly and Associates. In the early 1970s, he designs a shopping and housing development outside Dundalk, called Ard Easmuinn. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he continues as an influential architectural journalist, founding and editing Build from 1965 to 1969, and later Plan. His company, Pomeroy Press, publishes Plan along with other serials such as Stream and Field. He writes a large proportion of the copy in these periodicals, much under his own name, but he also uses pseudonyms, in particular in Plan as “Michael O’Brien.” He writes about his strong views on social housing, national infrastructure, and foreign and slum landlords, often libelously.
Despite his republican and socialist views, MacEoin is a staunch advocate for the preservation of Georgian Dublin, and campaigns for their preservation. On this topic, he writes letters to newspapers, takes part in television and radio discussions, writes comment pieces and editorials, speaks at public hearings, and takes part in direct protests such as sit-ins in buildings including those on Baggot Street, Pembroke Street, Hume Street, and Molesworth Street. He is also an active member of the Irish Georgian Society, and he campaigns actively against the road widening schemes in Dublin the 1970s and 1980s.
MacEoin and his wife purchase five Georgian houses on Mountjoy Square and three on Henrietta Street in the 1960s, all almost derelict. They refurbish them and lease them out, under the company name Luke Gardiner Ltd. He renames the 5 Henrietta Street property James Bryson House. His architectural practice moves into one of the Mountjoy Square houses. Along with fellow campaigners, Mariga Guinness and Deirdre Kelly, this demonstrates that these buildings can be salvaged and are not the dangerous structures other architects and developers claim them to be. He also purchases and saves Heath House, near Portlaoise, County Laois, living there toward the end of his life. He offers free conservation and architectural advice to community groups and is a volunteer on the renovation works on projects including Tailors’ Hall.
MacEoin remains politically active, joining Clann na Poblachta, the Wolfe Tone Societies (WTS), the Dublin Civic Group, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement. To what extent he is involved in republican or IRA activities after 1945 is not clear. However, in March 1963, he is called a witness to a case in Scotland involving a Glasgowbookmaker by the name of Samuel Docherty and the Royal Bank of Scotland. Docherty claims the bank owes him £50,000. MacEoin testifies that in February 1962 he had travelled with £50,000 in cash from Dublin to lodge to Docherty’s account in the Royal Bank of Scotland in Belfast, as a loan. When asked about the origin of this large sum of money, he states it was supplied by another person but does not divulge that person’s name. This immediately triggers the court’s suspicions, and the judge warns MacEoin he will be contempt of court if he does not name the supplier of the money. He is placed in police custody for the day, and eventually he agrees to give the name in writing in confidence to the judge. The judge ultimately rules that Docherty is guilty of attempted fraud and perjury and that MacEoin’s involvement reeks of criminality. However, no further action is ever brought forward against Docherty or MacEoin.
In Sinn Féin‘s 1971 Éire Nua social and economic programme, MacEoin writes the chapter on “Planning,” and attends meetings in Monaghan in the early 1970s on the Dáil Uladh, a parliament for the 9-county Ulster province. In 1981, during the republican hunger strikes, one of his Mountyjoy Square houses is used as the national headquarters of the National H-Block Committee. Following the 1986 Sinn Féin split, he supports Republican Sinn Féin. He is a founding member of the Constitutional Rights Campaign in 1987, a group which aims to protect the rights of Irish citizens in the European Economic Community (EEC), having campaigned against Ireland joining the EEC in the early 1970s. In 1978, he is sentenced to two weeks in Mountjoy Prison for non-payment of a fine issued for not having a television licence. He had refused to buy one to protest the lack of Irish language programming.
As an environmentalist, MacEoin opposes private car ownership, and advocates for cycleways and the redevelopment of the railway lines. He writes about the “greenhouse effect” as early as 1969. As a hill walker and mountaineer, he claims to be the first Irishman to register successful climbs of all 284 Scottish peaks, known as the Munros, in 1987. He also climbs in the Alps and the Pyrenees.
MacEoin writes three books on his memories, and those of his former comrades: Survivors (1980), on the lives of leading Irish republicans, Harry (1986), a part biography part autobiography of Harry White, and The IRA in the twilight years 1923–48 (1997). He also publishes a novel, Sybil: a tale of innocence (1992) with his publishing house, Argenta, under the name Eoin O’Rahilly. He also interviews and records dozens of Republicans as part of his research for his books. These recordings are later converted into a digital oral history archive held in trust by the Irish Defence Forces.
MacEoin marries Margaret Russell in 1956 in Navan, County Meath. They have a daughter and two sons.
MacEoin dies in a nursing home in Shankill, Dublin, on December 21, 2007. His estate at the time of his death is valued at over €3 million. His son, Nuada, takes over his father’s architectural practice.
Mac Aonghusa is the son of Criostóir Mac Aonghusa, a writer and Irish language activist, and Mairéad Ní Lupain, a nurse and native Irish speaker. The eldest of four siblings, he grows up speaking Irish as his first language and allegedly does not learn English until the age of eleven. His parents are left-wing Irish republicans who support Fianna Fáil and associate with the like-minded Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Peadar O’Donnell. His parents split when he is ten years of age. His mother takes his siblings away to Dublin while he and his father remain in Rosmuc, a remote village and part of the Galway Gaeltacht. As a teenager he is educated at Coláiste Iognáid (also known as St. Ignatius College), a bilingual school in Galway.
Upon leaving school, Mac Aonghusa first works as an actor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, performing in Irish language productions. In 1952, he becomes involved in Radio Éireann, first as an actor but later as a reader of short stories before advancing to becoming a newsreader, presenter and interviewer. As he advances his career, he works for RTÉ, UTV and BBC television from the 1960s. In 1962, he begins presenting An Fear agus An Sceal (The Man & his Story) on RTÉ television, an Irish language show which sees him interviewing a different guest of note about their life each episode. That same year he wins a Jacob’s Award for An Fear agus an Sceal, which he continues to host until 1964.
As well as attracting awards, An Fear agus an Sceal also brings controversy. Two interviews, one with Máirtín Ó Cadhain, one with Con Lehane, both criticise the measures practised by the Fianna Fáil government during World War II to suppress and imprison Irish republicans. In response, the Fianna Fáil government intervenes with RTÉ, and those episodes are not aired. This is not to be Mac Aonghusa’s only run-in with the Fianna Fáil government. After he recorded a programme in which he questioned the effectiveness of Ireland’s civil defence measures in the face of nuclear war, then Minister for DefenceKevin Boland has the episode suppressed. He once again runs afoul of the Fianna Fáil government when, after criticising the party in his anonymous weekly political gossip column in the Sunday Independent, then Minister for AgricultureNeil Blaney sees to it that the column is dropped. He is not deterred and returns anonymously as “Gulliver” in The Sunday Press and a gossip column on the back page of The Hibernia Magazine.
The latter half of Mac Aonghusa’s 1960s/70s broadcasting career is primarily associated with the Irish language current events show Féach, which he both presents and edits. He resigns from Féach in 1972 following a bitter dispute with the broadcaster and commentator Eoghan Harris.
In 1959, Mac Aonghusa writes a series of six articles for The Irish Times in which he vehemently opposes the Fianna Fáil government’s proposal to abolish single transferable vote in Ireland in favour of first-past-the-post voting. He contends that first-past-the-post voting gives too much influence to party bosses, while proportional representation gives even small minorities representation, preventing them from feeling excluded by the state such as nationalists in Northern Ireland. In the referendum held on the matter on June 17, 1959, voters reject first past the vote by a margin of 2%. Fianna Fáil attempts to repeal proportional representation again in the late 60s, at which point Mac Aonghusa once again throws himself into the fight, leading a group called “Citizens for PR.” In the referendum of 1968, voters reject the first past the post system by over 20%. He later recalls that his defence of proportional representation his greatest achievement in politics.
In the 1960s, both Mac Aonghusa and his wife, Catherine, join the Sean Connolly branch of the Labour Party in Dublin. The branch had established a reputation as a haven for intellectuals who want a branch to themselves away from the many other Labour branches dominated by trade unionists. The branch comes to advocate for expressly socialist policies combined with on-the-ground grass-roots campaigning. Through the Sean Connolly Branch, both he and his wife begin to develop significant influence over the leader of the Labour party Brendan Corish.
In the 1965 Irish general election, Mac Aonghusa stands on behalf of the Labour party in the Louth constituency but is not elected. In 1966, he publishes a book of speeches by Corish, the speeches themselves mostly having been ghostwritten by his wife Catherine. The introduction of the book proclaims that Corish had developed a “brand of democratic republican socialism … broadened by experience and built firmly on Irish‐Ireland roots” and had rid the party of “do‐nothing backwoodsmen”, thereby becoming the “first plausible and respected Labour leader in Ireland”. It is at this same time that he is elevated to vice-chairman of the party. As vice-chair, he tries to convince Corish to stand in the 1966 Irish presidential election. When he fails to do so, he supports Fine Gael‘s Tom O’Higgins in his bid for the presidency. O’Higgins comes within 0.5% of beating the incumbent, an ageing Éamon de Valera.
It was around this same time that Mac Aonghusa becomes active in the Wolfe Tone Societies, a republican organisation linked almost directly to Sinn Féin. He suggests that republicans with “progressive views” should join the Labour party. In 1966, alongside Máirtín Ó Cadhain and other Gaeilgeoirí, he counter-protests and disrupts the Language Freedom Movement, an organisation seeking the abolition of compulsory Irish in the education system. For this, he and his allies are criticised as acting illiberally, while he maintains that those who oppose the Irish language are “slaves” unworthy of tolerance.
Mac Aonghusa’s open disdain for the conservative and trade union wings of the Labour, as well as his open embrace of republican sensibilities and tendency to make pronouncements on Labour policy without first consulting the party’s structures, bring him many internal enemies. An attempt is made to censure him for backing breakaway trade unions, but he is able to survive this. In 1966, he encourages the formation of the Young Labour League, an unofficial youth wing of the party led by Brian Og O’Higgins, son of former Sinn Féin president Brian O’Higgins. Mirroring his own position, the Youth League are Corish loyalists that openly rebel against the views of Labour’s conservative deputy leader James Tully. When the youth league begins publishing their own weekly newsletter, Labour’s administrative council condemns it after discovering material which is “violently” critical of Tully and other Labour conservatives. An ensuing investigation into the newsletter leads to Mac Aonghusa admitting that he had financed it and written some of the content, but not the anti-Tully material. After he refuses to co-operate with further investigations into the matter, he is expelled on January 12, 1967 for “activities injurious” to the party. In the aftermath, he portrays himself a left-wing martyr purged by a right-wing “Star chamber,” a tactic that garners him sympathy. Nevertheless, his expulsion is confirmed at the October 1967 party conference, despite one last appeal. His wife leaves the party alongside him.
In the aftermath of his expulsion from Labour, Mac Aonghusa expresses an interest in the social democratic wing of Fine Gael, which had been developing under Declan Costello since the mid-1960s. However, he does not join the party and instead runs as an independent candidate in the 1969 Irish general election in Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown. When he is not elected, he begins to refocus on the revival of the Irish language and with nationalist politics rather than being elected himself.
Upon the onset of the Troubles, Mac Aonghusa is initially supportive of Official Sinn Féin, however by 1972 he comes to resent them and, through the Ned Stapleton Cumann, their secret influence over RTÉ. During the Arms Crisis in 1970, he supports Charles Haughey and Neil Blaney, who stand accused of arranging to supply weapons to the Provisional IRA, in the pages of the New Statesman and other left‐wing journals. In this time period, he warns editors not to reprint his material in the Republic of Ireland as there is a de facto ban on him, and indeed, official attempts are made to block the transmission of his telexed reports.
Despite his earlier famed stark criticism of Fianna Fáil, Mac Aonghusa’s defence of Haughey leads to a friendship between the two men which results in him becoming one of Haughey’s loudest defenders throughout the rest of his career. His columns in The Sunday Press and Irish language paper Anois are accused of descending into self-parody in their stringent defences of Haughey.
During the 1970s, Mac Aonghusa writes a number of books covering significant figures in Irish republicanism. In order, he releases books on James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Wolfe Tone and Éamon de Valera. In his work on De Valera, he emphasises what he perceives as the more radical aspects of the Fianna Fáil founder. During 1974 and 1975, he works as a United Nations Special Representative to the Southern Africa region with Seán MacBride, where they involve themselves in the South African Border War, and during which time Mac Aonghusa becomes involved in setting up a radio station in Namibia, linked to the South West Africa People’s Organisation (SWAPO) nationalist party.
In the 1980s, Haughey twice appoints Mac Aonghusa to the Arts Council as well as naming him president of Bord na Gaeilge (1989-93). This is an issue as Mac Aonghusa is already president of Conradh na Gaeilge. Being head of the main Irish language lobbying body as well as the state body responsible for the Irish language has an obvious conflict of interest. In 1991, following the announcement by Haughey that the government is to fund the creation of an Irish-language television station (launched in 1996 as Teilifís na Gaeilge), an elated Mac Aonghusa suggests that Haughey would be “remembered among the families of the Gael as long as the Gaelic nation shall survive.”
In 1992 there are calls for Mac Aonghusa to step down from Bord na Gaeilge after he pronounces that “every respectable nationalist” in West Belfast should vote for Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams over the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) candidate Joe Hendron in the 1992 United Kingdom general election as he considers a defeat for Adams “a victory for British imperialism.” Nevertheless, he simultaneously advises voters in South Down to vote for the SDLP’s Eddie McGrady over Sinn Féin. He rails against his detractors at the Conradh na Gaeilge ardfheis that year, declaring that “The mind of the slave, of the slíomadóir, of the hireling and the vagabond is still fairly dominant in Ireland.”
As of 1995, Mac Aonghusa continues to label himself a socialist. In the foreword to the book, he writes about James Connolly that is released that year, he declares that “the abolition of capitalism is essential if the great mass of the people in all parts of the globe are to be emancipated.”
However, with the recent collapse of the Soviet Union in mind, Mac Aonghusa declares that the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe have not been socialist and argues that the social democracies of Scandinavia are what James Connolly had envisioned as the desired socialist society. In the same text, he accuses the Irish education system as well as Ireland’s media of obfuscating Connolly’s views on socialism and nationalism.
Mac Aonghusa battles through ill health in his final years but remains able to continue writing a number of books. His last publication, Súil Tharam (2001), comes just two years before his death in Dublin on September 28, 2003.
In 1955, Mac Aonghusa marries Catherine Ellis, a member of the Church of Ireland from Belfast. For her married name, she chooses to use “McGuinness,” the English language equivalent of Mac Aonghusa. Catherine McGuinness goes on to become a Senator and a Judge of the Circuit Court, High Court and Supreme Court over the course of her legal career. Together they have three children together.
Gallagher is always on time. He often reprimands colleagues for their lack of punctuality. He arrives to sign on at the social security office on the Falls Road at exactly 11:00 a.m. every two weeks. Usually a friend goes with him, however, on this day he goes alone. He is talking to the woman at the counter when a man approaches from behind. He does not get a chance to turn around. Four bullets are fired into the back of his head. He slumps to the ground and dies instantly.
As the office descends into chaos, the killer calmly walks out. He is in his mid-20s but well disguised in a woolen cap, pony-tail wig and glasses. He was only 5’3″ tall.
The INLA vows revenge and immediately begins an investigation. Early on there are no concrete clues. “It was an unbelievably clean killing,” says one source in the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), the INLA`s political wing. “People in the dole office, the street, the houses nearby were all questioned. Nobody really saw anything. We don’t know if the gunman acted with others or alone. We don’t know where he drove to. No car has been found. He did a very professional job.”
In June 1994, Gallagher had shot dead three loyalists on the Shankill. But the INLA rules out possible retaliation by the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) or Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), believing that a loyalist assassin would not move so confidently in a republican area.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and Sinn Féin politicians point to an INLA feud. The group has historically been riven by internal disputes and it suffered serious difficulties the previous April. A statement read aloud in a Dublin courtroom by four Northern Irish men arrested following an arms find in Balbriggan announces an unconditional INLA ceasefire.
Gallagher, supported by others, says that the men lack the authority to make the statement. He takes over as Chief-of-Staff, and the four are expelled from the republican socialist movement. They receive almost no internal backing, and a violent split is avoided.
The gut reaction of some members of the INLA is that people loyal to these former members could have carried out the attack on Gallagher. But others think it unlikely. “I don’t believe these people are leading suspects,” says one source. “They’re a beaten docket. It would be illogical anyway. They wanted an end to violence so why provoke conflict with us by killing Gino?”
Gallagher’s killing bears no resemblance to previous INLA feuds, when attacks were claimed by each faction. No one admits responsibility for his death. No splinter group is set up claiming to be the “real INLA” and no gang warfare breaks out on the streets.
There is some speculation that elements of British intelligence could be responsible. The INLA, which describes itself as Marxist, is the only paramilitary group in Northern Ireland which refuses to call a ceasefire. Although substantially smaller than the IRA, it is well armed. It has engaged in an 18-month suspension of violence, but there is a strong possibility it will eventually return to conflict. Gallagher had said that Irish unity and socialism could not be achieved through constitutional politics. He foresaw violence “having some part to play in our strategy.”
“He was a real threat to the state, and some of its agents could have wanted him out of the way before he caused any trouble,” says an IRSP source.
One of the most popular and controversial theories is that the IRA had killed Gallagher. In an internal IRSP document two weeks prior to his assassination, Gallagher expresses fear that his life is in danger from the IRA. He has also been warned by contacts in the Provisionals that he is at risk.
Gallagher was reorganising the INLA into a more formidable force than it had been in years. It was building a base in areas where it had been dormant. He had also taken over as the IRSP’s national organiser.
In December 1996, the IRSP refused to make a submission to the Mitchell Commission, saying to do so would be “collaborating” with the peace process. It had just started giving regular media interviews and had reopened offices on the Falls Road. It was considering contesting any elections to a talk’s convention in the North and challenging Sinn Féin in nationalist areas. Gallagher’s high profile as a gunman made him popular with IRA grassroots and it was feared that he could become a rallying point for dissidents.
“He led an organisation which was nowhere near the size of the Provos,” says one republican source, “but he really had them worried. He saw a vacuum emerging as republican supporters became disillusioned with the peace process and he wanted to fill it. Given time, he could have caused trouble. It wouldn’t be surprising if the Provos wanted to nip that in the bud.”
Notably, Sinn Féin does not condemn the killing. An unnamed spokesman, an unusual move, describes it as “tragic.” Similar language has been used about the assassination of drug dealers when the IRA has not wanted to admit responsibility.
The IRA issues a statement denying responsibility but, as one source says, “they aren’t likely to admit it.” If IRA involvement is established, the INLA will have to decide whether or not to retaliate. Arguments are made not to allow the Provisionals to walk over the INLA, but the organisation also fears being wiped out in a bitter republican feud.
If clues about the killing remain scarce, the less likely it is that former INLA members are involved. “They wouldn’t be able to fully cover their tracks,” says one source. “If the group responsible is able to do that, then it’s a really professional outfit. That points to the IRA or elements of British intelligence.”
(From: “Gallagher murder ‘an unbelievably clean killing'” by Susanne Breen, The Irish Times, http://www.irishtimes.com, February 3, 1996)
Browne is an important and outspoken member of the Irish hierarchy. His time as Bishop has been described by the historian James S. Donnelly Jr. as “far-reaching and … controversial,” while the historian of Irish CatholicismJohn Henry Whyte claims that Browne’s “readiness to put forward his views bluntly is welcome at least to the historian.”
On August 6, 1937, at the relatively young age of 41, Browne is appointed Bishop of Galway and Kilmacduagh by Pope Pius XI, receiving his episcopal consecration from Archbishop Thomas Gilmartin on the following August 10. He supports TaoiseachÉamon de Valera‘s defence of arrests and police searches for cached Irish Republican Army (IRA) arms, declaring, “Any Irishman who assists any foreign power to attack the legitimate authority of his own land is guilty of the most terrible crime against God’s law, and there can be no excuse for that crime – not even the pretext of solving partition or of securing unity.”
In 1939, Browne is selected by Éamon de Valera to chair the Commission on Vocational Organisation.
Browne is attentive to the state of public morality in the diocese, and James S. Donnelly Jr. has noted his role in directing episcopal and clerical censorship of newsagents and county librarians. He is also concerned about public intoxication and other misconduct at the Galway Races, controversies over dancing and the commercial dance halls, as well as immodesty in dress and the closely related issue of so-called “mixed bathing” in Galway and Salthill.
In 1957, in response to a growing tension between Catholics and Protestants at Fethard-on-Sea, including the Fethard-on-Sea boycott, Browne says, “non-Catholics do not protest against the crime of conspiring to steal the children of a Catholic father, but they try to make political capital when a Catholic people make a peaceful and moderate protest.”
The most enduring monument or physical legacy of Browne’s time as Bishop is the Cathedral of Our Lady Assumed into Heaven and St Nicholas, commonly known as Galway Cathedral, which is dedicated in 1965 by CardinalRichard James Cushing of Boston, Massachusetts. The site of the old jail had come into the possession of the diocese in 1941 and Browne leads the campaign to construct a new Cathedral. This includes a 1957 audience with Pope Pius XII where the plans are approved.
Browne attends the Second Vatican Council from 1962 to 1965 and retires in 1976. He dies four years later, at the age of 84, on February 24, 1980.
Browne is parodied in Breandán Ó hÉithir`s novel Lig Sinn i gCathu, which fictionalises late 1940s Galway as “Baile an Chaisil” and Browne as “An tEaspag Ó Maoláin.”
The Irish cabinet minister Noël Browne (no known relation) in his 1986 memoir Against the Tide describes the physical attributes of his episcopal namesake:
“The bishop had a round soft baby face with shimmering clear cornflower-blue eyes, but his mouth was small and mean. Around his great neck was an elegant glinting gold episcopal chain with a simple pectoral gold cross. He wore a ruby ring on his plump finger and wore a slightly ridiculous tiny scullcap on his noble head. The well-filled semi-circular scarlet silk cummerbund and sash neatly divided the lordly prince into two.”
Corish’s father, Richard Corish, a well-known trade union official and Sinn Féin member, had been elected to the Second Dáil shortly after the birth of his son and later joins the Labour Party, serving as a local and national politician until his death in 1945. His mother is Catherine Bergin. He is educated locally at Wexford CBS and, in his youth, is a member of the 1st Wexford Scout troop (Scouting Ireland). At the age of nineteen, he joins the clerical staff of Wexford County Council. He spends several years playing Gaelic football for the Wexford county team. He was married to Phyllis Donohoe, and they have three sons.
Corish is elected to Dáil Éireann as a Labour Party candidate in the Wexford by-election in 1945, necessitated by the death of his father who was the sitting TD. He takes a seat on the fractured opposition benches, as Fianna Fáil‘s grip on power continues.
In 1960, Corish succeeds William Norton as Labour Party leader. He introduces new policies which make the party more socialist in outlook and describes the party program as Christian socialist. He considers that the party principles are those endorsed by Pope John XXIII and greatly admires the Pope who he says is “one of the greatest contributors of all changes in Irish attitudes.” However, the party moves carefully because “socialism” is still considered a dirty word in 1960s Ireland. He claims that Ireland will be “Socialist in the Seventies.” To a certain extent he is right because Fine Gael and the Labour Party form a coalition government between 1973 and 1977.
Corish becomes Tánaiste and Minister for Health and Social Welfare. A wide range of social security benefits are introduced during his time as a government minister, including a Deserted Wife’s Benefit and Unmarried Mother’s Allowance, Prisoner’s Wife’s Allowance, Single Woman’s Allowance, and the Supplementary Welfare Allowance, providing supplementary income to individuals and families with low incomes. In 1974, compulsory social insurance is extended to virtually all employees, and that same year short-term social insurance benefits (occupational injury, maternity, unemployment and sickness benefits) become partially index-linked. According to one study, this signals “an extension in the function of the income maintenance system from basic income support to proportional replacement of market earnings for some groups.” The replacement of the existing flat-rate unemployment benefit with an earnings-related benefit means that the average unemployment replacement rate goes up from about 30% to 60%.
Corish is deeply religious, telling the Dáil in 1953 that “I am an Irishman second, I am a Catholic first…if the hierarchy give me any direction with regard to Catholic social teaching or Catholic moral teaching, I accept without qualification in all respects the teaching of the hierarchy and the church to which I belong.”
In 1977, the TaoiseachLiam Cosgrave calls a general election, and Fianna Fáil is returned to power in a landslide victory. Corish resigns as leader of the Labour Party, having signaled his intent to do so before the election. He is succeeded as party leader by Frank Cluskey. He retires from politics completely at the February 1982 Irish general election.
Corish dies in Wexford at the age of 71 on February 17, 1990.
Greacen is the only child of Henry Greacen and his wife Elizabeth (née McCrea). His father comes from a Presbyterian farming background in County Monaghan and, at one time, holds a position as a creamery manager, but is a heavy drinker and fails in several businesses. Most of his childhood is spent with his maternal grandmother and aunts when his parents temporarily separate. He briefly attends two local primary schools in Belfast, but when his father receives insurance compensation after his Belfast business burned down, he takes his family to the Castleblayney area in County Monaghan and for a short time goes back to farming. He goes to a national school there, but after another fire destroys the farmhouse, the Greacens return to Belfast to run the Kenilworth, a tobacconist’s shop on the Newtownards Road. He attends Templemore primary school and then enters Methodist College Belfast in 1933.
Greacen mostly enjoys school, though he is too short-sighted to participate with success in any sport, and sometimes, because of his background, feels out of his depth among middle-class children. He is always ashamed of his father’s drunken outbursts and is terrified of the violent temper which accompanies them. Literature provides both a temporary escape and the promise of future success. His first poems are published in school magazines, and he decides at a young age to try to make a career as a writer. He fails examinations and interviews for positions in a bank and an insurance company and instead starts studying history and English at Queen’s University Belfast.
At Queen’s, as earlier at Methodist College, the interests which characterise Greacen’s later career are apparent. Largely thanks to meeting John Boyd, he develops sympathies with left-wing political ideas, as well as a deepened commitment to poetry. His youthful 1930s enthusiasm for Marxism disappears after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, but up to his later years he describes himself as a socialist. The formation of enduring friendships and mutually supportive coteries, a phenomenon particularly characteristic of the Ulster literary scene of the period, continues to be of great importance throughout his life. He makes friends with almost all the significant figures in Belfast, especially Roy McFadden, John Hewitt and Sam Hanna Bell. At Queen’s, he and a friend take over in 1940 the editing of a student magazine, The Northman. They try with short-lived, limited success to make it a literary journal for the whole region, so as to enable aspiring poets to get work into print. His own early poems appear in The Bell, and he writes some pieces for the left-wing Irish Democrat newspaper. His poem The Bird (1941) is well reviewed and later appears in anthologies. In 1942 he publishes Poems from Ulster, a small anthology including work by his friends.
For several months, Greacen worships from afar a fellow student named Irene. When he fails to form a relationship with her, he stops going to lectures so that he does not have to see her and does not finish his degree. His McCrea relatives pay for him to go to Trinity College Dublin in 1943 to take a diploma in social work. He is glad to get away from wartime Belfast and never lives there again. At first, he enjoys Dublin, and again makes many friends, among them Brendan and Beatrice Behan, Blanaid Salkeld, Cecil ffrench Salkeld, Joseph and Mary O’Neill, Douglas Gageby, Arland Ussher and Hubert Butler. He and Patrick Kavanagh live in the same boarding house on Raglan Road for several months in 1945, but Kavanagh takes offence at a review in Horizon by Greacen of his poem The Great Hunger and calls him a “Protestant bastard.” Greacen is upset, as he had thought the review favourable, and is disappointed but not surprised when Kavanagh refuses to allow any of his poems to appear in the prestigious Faber and Faber book Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Greacen and Valentin Iremonger in 1949.
The collaborative compilation of anthologies of poetry is Greacen’s characteristic way of working. In 1942, he and Alex Comfort edit Lyra: An Anthology of New Lyric. With Roy McFadden, he edits Ulster Voices in 1943. He is sole editor of Northern Harvest in 1944 and, in the same year, he, Bruce Williamson and Valentin Iremonger publish their own work in On the Barricades. His own first solo collection, One Recent Evening, is also a 1944 imprint. In 1946, with support from Maurice Fridberg, a Jewish Dublin and London bookseller, his publishing company, New Frontiers Press, produces Irish Harvest, which, though designed on more ambitious lines, still consists chiefly of poems by his friends. He feels much more affinity with the modernism and social protest that he finds in contemporary English poetry, especially in the “new apocalypse” movement associated with Herbert Read, and later the “new romantics,” than with what he regards as the outmoded Celtic nationalism of W. B. Yeats and his followers. Like others of his contemporaries, he comes to resent the unquestioned shibboleths of life in Ireland, and particularly objects to the censorship of literature and film.
Consequently, when Greacen’s second small volume of poems, The Undying Day (1948), sells badly, and other avenues seem unpromising, he and his wife give up on Dublin and move to London. He finds a job with the United Nations Association, which suits his outlook and ideals. However, when he is made redundant, he has to take various jobs in adult education, in creative-writing courses, and in teaching English as a foreign language, in the City of London College, the City Literary Institute, and West London College. He retires in 1986. His involvement with the London literary world continues throughout his career, as he gets to know many of the leading figures, including Stephen Spender and T. S. Eliot, and he organises poetry readings and other projects, though he himself writes no poetry for more than twenty years. At one time he considers taking up journalism and continues to produce book reviews and articles in journals, as well as many letters to newspapers. He writes several, well-received short works of criticism, in particular, The Art of Noël Coward (1953) and The World of C. P. Snow (1962). After returning to Dublin in 1986, he writes an interesting memoir about his many friends and acquaintances, Brief Encounters: Literary Dublin and Belfast in the 1940s (1991) and Rooted in Ulster: Nine Northern Writers (2000).
Greacen marries Patricia Hutchins in Fisherwick Presbyterian Church in Belfast on April 10, 1946. She is from a Protestant family who has a small estate at Ardnagashel, near Bantry, County Cork, and is related to the botanist Ellen Hutchins. They have one daughter, Arethusa, but, after four years of separation, the marriage ends in divorce in 1966. He resents his wife’s conversion to vegetarianism and seems also to disapprove of her desire to achieve her own career goals. Probably also the depression he experiences throughout the 1950s contributes to the breakdown of the marriage, but he feels that twelve experiences in the early 1960s with the hallucinogenic drug LSD, under the guidance of a psychiatrist, had cured him. After the LSD treatments he feels that he is ready to begin working on an autobiography, Even Without Irene, published several years later in 1969. This comes out again in an enlarged version in 1995, and, still further augmented, as The Sash My Father Wore (1997).
Greacen begins to publish poetry again in his fifties, in A Garland for Captain Fox (1975). Poems about the career and friends of an imaginary, sophisticated adventurer do not always strike the exactly right note but are popular and mark a new beginning for him, who increasingly writes elegiacally about personalities, real and fictional, in more restrained diction and with careful irony. In interviews, he denies that Captain Fox is his own alter ego, but the interplay between the character of Fox and elements of his creator’s own life suggests a metaphor for the poet’s creative process, as well as reminding the reader of the poet friends whose support means much to his writing in real life. At the very least, Captain Fox becomes what could be called a character of virtual reality for his creator.
Greacen’s later poetry collections include Young Mr. Gibbon (1979), A Bright Mask (1985), Carnival at the River (1990), Collected Poems 1944–1994 (1995; awarded The Irish Times Literature Prize for Poetry in that year), Protestant Without a Horse (1997), Captain Fox: A Life (2000), Lunch at the Ivy (2002), Shelley Plain (2002), and Selected and New Poems (2006).
On his return to Dublin in 1986, Greacen for a time shares a flat on Anglesea Road with Beatrice Behan, until he finds her dead in her bed in 1993. In later years he lives in a flat in Sandymount. He is elected to membership of Aosdána in 1986, and during his later years in Dublin enjoys the status of a senior figure in the world of literature. He gives readings in the United States, appears often on RTÉ radio programmes, and has poems republished in anthologies. There was even one poem displayed on the Dublin Dart suburban rail network, St. Andrew’s Day: An Elegy for Patricia Hutchins, perhaps his best work. Perhaps only a few of his poems have been lodged in the public memory, but it is appropriate, given the themes of his career, that his work will be read with most attention by poets and by scholars, and that his reputation in the future may largely be based on his friendships with other poets.
Anne Harris, the former editor of the Sunday Independent, is born on August 25, 1947. She is the former wife of Eoghan Harris who was an opinion columnist for the newspaper. Her daughter, Constance Harris, writes for the newspaper as a fashion writer.
In 1972, Harris writes a controversial article defending the 1972 Aldershot Bombing, an article she later expresses regret for. She also works for The Irish Press, as well as the political magazine Hibernia and the fashion magazine Image.
Harris lives with Sunday Independent editor Aengus Fanning until his death on January 17, 2012. On February 5, 2012, the Sunday Independent announces that she will succeed Fanning as the publication’s editor.
On the evening of Saturday, July 19, 2014, group editor of INM newspaper publishers, Stephen Rae, orders the presses to be stopped to amend a column written by Harris, the Sunday Independent editor, which features references to Denis O’Brien. Copies of the original article do however appear, allowing comparisons between the two. Harris originally writes: “Denis O’Brien is the major shareholder in INM. In theory, with 29% of the shares, he does not control it. In practice, he does.” Rae has the last sentence deleted. She also writes: “The question is whether he understands newspapers. In order to confront the truths in our society, we must have a free press. With the restrictive charter for journalists proposed last year, and some garrotive (sic) new structures, Denis O’Brien does not make this easy.” This is changed to: “The question is whether he understands newspapers. In order to confront the truths in our society, we must have a free press. If the restrictive charter for journalists proposed last year, along with some other structural changes, are anything to go by, it might be instructive for him to listen to journalists, troublesome and all as they are.“
Harris leaves the newspaper some months later, with The Irish Times noting her departing speech to staff as follows: “She is understood to have spoken only about journalists and journalism and not about newspapers and their owners, a subject matter she has previously addressed in several columns.”
seamus dubhghaill 