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

Tag Archives: Sociology


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Birth of Andrew Ranken, Drummer for The Pogues

Andrew Ranken, English drummer who plays with several bands including the Pogues, is born on November 13, 1953, in the Ladbroke Grove area of London. He plays with the Pogues from 1983 until their second breakup in 2014.

Ranken spends his early childhood listening to his parents’ jazz records before moving to Abbots Langley when he is five and Heathfield, East Sussex, a year later. He attends Priory School, Lewes, where he is in the same year as Pete Thomas and Wreckless Eric, and is inspired by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He becomes a musician after an older cousin gives him a guitar he has tired of trying to learn and becomes a drummer after being given a pair of bongos. At the age of 14, he joins a blues rock band, Joshua Bagmat, which is led by Stephen Warbeck, features Thomas, and disbands when the members leave school. Ranken subsequently works with Warbeck and Paul Bradley as part of The hKippers.

After leaving school, Ranken moves to London to spend a year at the Central School of Art and Design, where he forms the band Lola Cobra with three members of the sculpture department including Lene Lovich and her boyfriend Les Chappell. After losing interest in the course, he drops out and sells his drum kit to fund a series of travels with the intention of writing a book of writings and drawings. He settles first to a squat in Amsterdam, which he leaves after it is ransacked, followed by a tent in a campsite in suburban Holland, where he spends several weeks while working in a peanut factory. He then moves to France and then Italy, where his manuscript is stolen. He develops a dental abscess after returning to France and returns to his parents, now living in Epsom.

Ranken becomes the singer for a new wave and R&B band while living with his parents called The Stickers and later moves to Islington with a bandmember. He has a number of unpleasant jobs including spells as a painter and decorator, a builder, a screw factory operative, and a porter at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. After his temp agency assigns him to work the incinerator at St. Leonard’s Hospital in Hackney, he walks out after finding a half-burnt Alsatian that smelled like bacon. He subsequently decides to take a three-year course in media studies and sociology at Goldsmiths in 1980. The Stickers disband around this time after it becomes impossible to keep members in the band, prompting Ranken to become the singer for The Operation with numerous friends and family members. He then moves into a squat in Huntley Street with his girlfriend and then to the Hillview Estate following an eviction.

In March 1983, Ranken joins the Pogues, then known as Pogue Mahone, replacing John Hasler on drums. He juggles both the Operation and the Pogues for a while until leaving the former to concentrate on the latter. With the Pogues, he spends the first two and a half years playing the drums while standing up, until he contracts blood poisoning and has to play one-handed while he recovers. He plays on every song from their 1984 debut Red Roses for Me, on which he is credited as The Clobberer, until their 1996 album Pogue Mahone, including on “Fairytale of New York” and “The Irish Rover.” Their 1991 compilation album, The Best of The Pogues, is dedicated to Ranken’s long-term partner Deborah Korner, who died earlier in the year from an aneurysm. Two songs on subsequent albums are also dedicated to Korner.

Ranken also performs with the Pogues from their reunion in 2001 until their official break up in 2014. Ranken releases the charity single “Take Me Down to St. Joe’s” in July 2023 with The Mysterious Wheels, a band containing two of Korner’s brothers. The single is released in support of St. Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney following Ranken’s own diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Health issues cause Ranken to withdraw from The Pogues’ 2024 tour.

Ranken dies on February 10, 2026, at the age of 72. He had been married with two children.


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Birth of Jeremiah Newman, Bishop of Limerick

Jeremiah Newman, Bishop of Limerick from 1974 to 1995 after having served as Professor and President of St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, is born in Dromcolliher, County Limerick, on March 31, 1926.

Following a local primary education, Newman attends St. Munchin’s College, Limerick. He studies for the priesthood at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and is ordained there on June 18, 1950.

Newman begins postgraduate studies in Philosophy at the Catholic University of Leuven and is awarded a Doctorate in Philosophy there in 1951. After that he takes up studies in Sociology at the University of Oxford for four years before taking up a teaching post at Queen’s University, Belfast.

In 1953 Newman is appointed Professor of Sociology at St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, succeeding Peter McKevitt. It is an institution he remains within, and eventually leads with distinction, until he is appointed Bishop of Limerick in May 1974. He publishes two books about the college: Maynooth and Georgian Ireland (1979) followed by Maynooth and Victorian Ireland (1983).

Newman arrives in Limerick with a strong reputation for reform having served a number of years as President of Maynooth where he adapted and shaped the college to the new challenges of the 1970s. His academic background in sociology gives him an informed understanding of the changing dynamic in Irish life, especially rural life which he has been writing about since the early 1960s, especially the dangers of depopulation.

Newman often makes comment on national matters particularly about church-state relations which has been his special area of study for over 20 years. He takes what might be called a broadly ‘conservative’ approach which, as time goes on, jars with wider public opinion especially as Ireland faces a number of constitutional referenda in the 1980s. At least one modern author has quoted the epithet alleged to have been conferred on Newman by Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Mullah of Limerick, for articulating a neo-conservative position more commonly associated with the United States.

Newman’s later years are dogged by periodic bouts of ill-health, and he dies in office on April 3, 1995, of hepatoma. He is buried in St. John’s Cathedral, Limerick. He is the subject of many obituaries not least because of his extensive public statements in his years as Bishop of Limerick. The Tablet suggests he was most “well known for his conservatism and taste for controversial remarks” before quoting the homily by Cardinal Cahal Daly that “he seemed to have a strange sense of inadequacy; and, for one who was so lovable, he seemed to have difficulties in believing that others respected and admired and indeed loved him.” The Irish Times obituary says he was a man “who kept fighting the battles of long ago.”

Newman is succeeded as Bishop of Limerick by Bishop Donal Murray.

Limerick City Library holds an extensive set of newspaper articles about Bishop Jeremiah Newman which have been made available online.


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Mo Mowlam Presented International Woman of the Year Award

mo-mowlan

Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, English Labour Party politician, is presented with the International Woman of the Year Award at a ceremony in Dublin on October 23, 2001. United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson wins the Overall Award at the Irish Tatler Women of the Year Awards.

Mowlam is born on September 18, 1949 in Watford, Hertfordshire, England but grows up in Coventry. She starts her education at Chiswick Girls’ grammar school in West London, then moves to Coundon Court school in Coventry which, at the time, is one of the first comprehensive schools in the country. She then studies at Trevelyan College, Durham University, reading sociology and anthropology. She joins the Labour Party in her first year.

Mowlam becomes the Secretary of the Durham Union Society in 1969 and later goes on to become the Vice-President of the Durham Student’s Union. She works for then-MP Tony Benn in London and American writer Alvin Toffler in New York, moving to the United States with her then-boyfriend and studying for a PhD in political science at the University of Iowa.

Mowlam is a lecturer in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1977 and at Florida State University in Tallahassee from 1977 to 1979. During her time in Tallahassee, someone breaks into her apartment. She suspects that it is Ted Bundy, the serial killer and rapist who is thought to have murdered at least 35 young women and attacked several others. She returns to England in 1979 to take up an appointment at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Having failed to win selection for the 1983 general election, Mowlam is selected as Labour candidate for the safe seat of Redcar after James Tinn stands down. She takes the seat in the 1987 general election, becoming the Labour spokesperson on Northern Ireland later that year. Together with Shadow Chancellor John Smith, she is one of the architects of Labour’s “Prawn Cocktail Offensive” dedicated to reassuring the UK’s financial sector about Labour’s financial rectitude.

Mowlam joins the Shadow Cabinet when John Smith becomes leader of the Labour Party in 1992, holding the title of Shadow Secretary of State for National Heritage. During this time, she antagonises both monarchists and republicans by calling for Buckingham Palace to be demolished and replaced by a “modern” palace built at public expense. Later, her willingness to speak her mind, often without regard to the consequences, is seen as her greatest strength by her supporters.

Following Smith’s death in 1994, Mowlam, alongside Peter Kilfoyle, becomes a principal organiser of Tony Blair‘s campaign for the Labour leadership. After his victory, Blair makes her Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. She initially resists being appointed to the position, preferring an economic portfolio, but, after accepting it, she throws her weight into the job.

Mowlam oversees the negotiations which lead to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. She is successful in helping to restore an Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire and including Sinn Féin in multi-party talks about the future of Northern Ireland. In an attempt to persuade the Ulster loyalists to participate in the peace process, she pays an unprecedented and potentially dangerous visit to loyalist prisoners in HM Prison Maze, meeting convicted murderers face-to-face and unaccompanied.

Mowlam witnesses the Good Friday Agreement signing in 1998, which leads to the temporary establishment of a devolved power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly. However, an increasingly difficult relationship with Unionist parties means her role in the talks is ultimately taken over by Tony Blair and his staff.

Mowlam’s deteriorating relationship with Unionists is the key reason she is replaced by Peter Mandelson as Northern Ireland Secretary in October 1999. Her move to the relatively lowly position of Minister for the Cabinet Office possibly involves other factors, notably her health and her popularity. On September 4, 2000, she announces her intention to retire from Parliament and relinquishes her seat at the 2001 general election.

Five months before the 1997 general election, Mowlam is diagnosed with a brain tumor, a fact that she tries to keep private. She appears to suffer from balance problems as a result of her radiotherapy. According to her husband, she falls on July 30, 2005, receiving head injuries and never regaining consciousness. Her living will, in which she asks not to be resuscitated, is honoured. On August 12, 2005, Mowlan is moved to Pilgrims Hospice in Canterbury, Kent, where she dies seven days later, on August 19, 2005, aged 55.

Mowlam is an atheist and is cremated in Sittingbourne on September 1, 2005 at a non-religious service conducted by Reverend Richard Coles, formerly of the 1980s band The Communards. Half of her ashes were scattered at Hillsborough Castle, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland’s official residence, and the other half in her former parliamentary constituency of Redcar.


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Birth of John Kells Ingram, Economist & Poet

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John Kells Ingram, economist and poet who starts his career as a mathematician, is born into an Ulster Scots family on July 7, 1823, at the Rectory of Templecarne (Aghnahoo), just south of Pettigo, County Donegal. He has been co-credited, along with John William Stubbs, with introducing the geometric concept of inversive geometry.

Ingram enters Trinity College, Dublin on October 13, 1837. He is elected a Scholar of Trinity College in 1840, graduates with a BA in mathematics in 1842, and is awarded an MA in 1850. In 1852 he becomes a professor of oratory at Trinity and writes extensively on Shakespeare. He shows considerable promise in both mathematics and classics and achieves early popularity as a poet. He has a distinguished career at Trinity, spanning over fifty-five years, as a student, fellow and professor, successively of Oratory, English Literature, Jurisprudence and Greek, subsequently becoming the College Librarian and ultimately its Vice Provost.

One evening in March 1843 Ingram writes a poem for which he is best remembered, a political ballad called “The Memory of the Dead” in honour of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the Society of United Irishmen. The poem is published anonymously on April 1, 1843, in Thomas Davis‘s The Nation newspaper although its authorship is an open secret in Dublin. It is set to music for voice and piano in 1845 by John Edward Pigot and becomes a popular Irish nationalist anthem. It is one of the best-known of Irish Republican songs and is often played by the piper at Republican funerals.

In 1847 Ingram helps to found the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland. His early economic writings deal mainly with the Poor Law, which in theory is supposed to provide relief for the poor but in reality, does little to alleviate the distress in Ireland. Strongly influenced by the French sociologist Auguste Comte, he rejects the more isolated approach of classical economics which builds on the assumption that people try to do the best they can. Instead, he seeks to develop a unified theory of economics along the lines of Comtean positivist philosophy, which seeks ways for economic policies to contribute to the good of society. His writings on this topic include the essay “Present Position and Prospects of Political Economy” (1878) and A History of Political Economy (1888).

John Kells Ingram dies on May 1, 1907, in his home at 38 Upper Mount Street, Dublin, where he had lived since 1884. He is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery.