seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland


by Leave a comment

Death of Thekla Beere, Irish Civil Servant

Thekla Beere, an Irish civil servant who chairs Ireland’s Commission on the Status of Women in 1970 and is secretary of the Department of Transport and Power, dies on February 19, 1991, in Killiney, County Dublin. She is the first woman to lead a government department in Ireland.

Beere is born on June 20, 1901, in Kilmore, Columbkille, near Granard, County Longford, one of two daughters of the Rev. Francis John Armstrong Beere, Church of Ireland vicar of Streete, County Westmeath, and Lucie Beere (née Potterton). She attends Alexandra College in Milltown, Dublin, and does a moderatorship in Legal and Political Sciences and an LL.B. at Trinity College Dublin.

Beere joins the Civil Service of the Republic of Ireland in 1924 and works initially in the Statistics Branch. In 1925, she wins a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship and travels extensively in the United States before resuming her Civil Service career. From 1939, she works in the Department of Industry and Commerce where during The Emergency, as World War II is known in Ireland, she works in the area of supply with Minister Seán Lemass. She becomes Assistant Secretary of that Department in 1953. She is the first woman to achieve the rank of Department Secretary, the highest-ranking post in a government department, doing so at the Department of Transport and Power in 1959. President Mary McAleese calls her the “ultimate civil servant.”

Trinity College Dublin confers an honorary doctorate of Doctor of Laws upon her in 1960. After her retirement in 1967 she is active in public life, serving as a governor of Alexandra College and as a director of The Irish Times. She is requested by the Government to chair the Commission on the Status of Women in 1970, and the Beere Report is presented to the Minister for Finance in December 1972. The report provides a model for change in equal pay, the Civil Service marriage bar (which requires female civil servants to resign from their position upon marriage) and the widow’s pension. Her name is mentioned as a possible candidate for the Irish presidency in 1976.

Beere has a lifelong interest in the proceedings of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland and serves as its President. She is a Governor of The Irish Times Trust and chairwoman of the International Labour Organization office in Geneva, Switzerland. She is a member of the organising committee, which on May 7, 1931, sets up An Óige (the Irish Youth Hostel Association), of which she is President from 1968 to 1974. She also has an extensive interest in the arts, in particular the paintings of Cecil King.

Beere dies on February 19, 1991, in Killiney, County Dublin. She never marries but has a 40-year companionship with businessman JJ O’Leary.


by Leave a comment

Birth of John Kells Ingram, Economist & Poet

CREATOR: gd-jpeg v1.0 (using IJG JPEG v62), quality = 90

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.