Josephine McNeill, Irish diplomat, dies in Dublin on November 19, 1969. She is the first Irish female diplomat appointed to represent Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity.
McNeill is born Josephine Ahearne on March 31, 1895, in Fermoy, County Cork, the daughter of shopkeeper and hotelier, James Ahearne, and his wife Ellen Ahearne (née O’Brien). She attends the Loretto Convent, Fermoy, and goes on to graduate from University College Dublin (UCD) with a BA, H.Dip.Ed. in French and German. With this she begins a teaching career, at St. Louis’ Convent, Kiltimagh, at the Ursuline Convent, Thurles, and at Scoil Íde. Scoil Íde, the female counterpart to St. Enda’s School, had been established by her friend, Louise Gavan Duffy. She is fluent in the Irish language and takes an active part in the cultural elements of the Irish independence movement, such as literature and music. She is a member of Cumann na mBan, serving as a member of the executive committee in 1921.
After the death of her husband in 1938, McNeill becomes the honorary secretary of the council of the Friends of the National Collections, as well as serving as chair of the executive committee of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association until 1950. As a member of the Department of External Affairs advisory committee on cultural relations, she writes on economic, social and cultural issues. She represents Ireland at the UNESCO general assembly in Paris in 1949.
McNeill is an active member of Clann na Poblachta from its foundation in 1946. She is appointed the minister to the Netherlands in 1950 by Seán MacBride, making her the first Irish female diplomat to represent the Republic of Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity. This appointment is not well received by diplomats in the Department of External Affairs. Her reports from The Hague focus on the issues the Netherlands faces with decolonisation. In 1955, she becomes the minister to Sweden, going on to hold the joint appointment to Austria and Switzerland from 1956 to 1960, after which she retires. While serving in Switzerland she puts aside the resentment she feels towards Éamon de Valera based on how he had treated her husband, to sit with him during a convalescence while de Valera recovers from an eye operation.
McNeill is an amateur pianist and collects paintings and porcelains. In 1933, she publishes the Irish language book, Finnsgéalta ó India.
Hanafin marries Mona Brady, daughter of J. P. Brady, on August 2, 1958, in Clonmel, County Tipperary. The wedding is followed by a reception at the Galtee Hotel, Cahir, which is attended by various notables including Rev. Father J. J. Hampson, president of Blackrock College. Their first child, Mary Hanafin, is born in June 1959, followed by John Hanafin in September 1960. Mary Hanafin is a former Fianna Fáil TD and government minister, and John Hanafin is a former Fianna Fáil senator.
Hanafin operates the Anner Hotel, located in Thurles during the 1960s. Initially successful, the business fails in 1967, which Mary Hanafin later blames on her father’s excess drinking. Subsequently, Hanafin is a director of the Transinternational Oil Company.
Hanafin’s first attempt for election to public office proves unsuccessful. In 1953, he seeks to be co-opted to fill the vacancy on North Tipperary County Council created by the death of his father. In the event councillors co-opt a Labour Party nominee, Michael Treacy, by eleven votes to seven.
Hanafin is elected a member of North Tipperary County Council in 1955, polling 934 first preference votes. Subsequently, in 1956, drawing support from the Clann na Poblachta representatives, he is elected Chairman of the County Council.
Hanafin is re-elected to North Tipperary County Council in 1960, polling 797 first preference votes. In 1961, he votes against the Fianna Fáil nominee for Chair of the County Council, Thomas F. Meagher, and in favour of the Clann na Poblachta nominee, Michael F. Cronin, who is elected by 10 votes to 9. In 1964, he controversially votes in favour of Jeremiah Mockler, “a former school mate,” who is elected by 10 votes to 9 to the office of Rate Collector for Borrisokane, County Tipperary.
Hanafin holds the seat until 1985. He is first elected to Seanad Éireann in 1969 and retains his seat until the 1993 Seanad election at which he loses his seat by one vote. He regains his seat in the 1997 elections, and in 2002 announces his retirement from politics. He unsuccessfully contests the 1977 and 1981 Irish general elections for the Tipperary North constituency. He is a chief fundraiser of the Fianna Fáil party for many years.
In May 2015, Hanafin accuses “Yes” campaigners in the same-sex marriage referendum of spreading a “palpable climate of fear,” and calls for a “No” vote.
Hanafin opposes the legalisation of divorce, which is introduced in 1995, and attempts to overturn the referendum result in the Supreme Court, but is refused by the court.
An opponent of abortion, Hanafin is one of the promoters of the constitutional amendment that enshrines the legal ban on abortion in the Constitution of Ireland. He is co-founder, chairman and later honorary president of the Pro Life Campaign.
Hanafin dies in County Tipperary at the age of 86 on June 22, 2017. A Requiem Mass is held at the Cathedral of the Assumption, Thurles, on June 25, with burial afterward in St. Patrick’s Cemetery.
O’Toole is the second son among five children of John O’Toole and Bridie O’Toole (née Doran). Of farming stock on both sides, he is educated at the local national school at Ballycumber and at a Dublinsecondary school. When in the mid-1890s he moves to Dublin, he joins the Benburb Gaelic Football Club at Donnybrook, where his teammates include the future nationalist parliamentarian Thomas M. Kettle, who is killed in 1916 near Ginchy, France, during World War I. The proprietor of two newsagents’ shops near his home in Mount Pleasant Square, he soon becomes his club’s delegate to the Dublin county committee of the Gaelic Athletic Association about 1899. Founded in 1884 by Michael Cusack, the GAA by the late 1890s is insolvent and almost moribund, having been riven by rival nationalist factions. However, a group of younger officials which includes O’Toole is determined not to allow the Association to die, and at its annual congress in Thurles on September 22, 1901, stages what is in effect a palace coup. Alderman James Nowlan of Kilkenny, County Kilkenny, a labour activist and Gaelic League enthusiast, is elected president, and in a contest for the post of secretary, O’Toole defeats Cusack.
O’Toole holds the post of chief officer of the GAA until his death almost thirty years later. During this period, despite major political and military turmoil, including the world war, the Irish War of Independence, and the Irish Civil War, he is instrumental in turning the Association into the biggest Irish sports body, and some leading members, such as Michael Collins and Harry Boland, play major political roles between 1913 and 1923. Essentially a backroom administrator, O’Toole rarely appears in public apart from GAA events, one notable exception being on November 25, 1913, at the foundation meeting of the Irish Volunteers at the Rotunda Rink, Dublin, where he is one of the platform party. After the suppression of the 1916 Easter Rising, he goes into hiding temporarily in his native Wicklow. From then until the cessation of hostilities in mid-1921 he manages to evade the notice of the authorities though he is always a close associate of Sinn Féin leaders. He plays a big part in reviving the fortunes of the GAA after the Irish Civil War and is a principal organiser of the Tailteann Games in 1924 and 1928. His career, however, is cut short at the age of 56 by his sudden death at his desk on July 17, 1929.
For most of his life O’Toole resides in a house provided by the GAA beside Croke Park, the Association’s headquarters and principal stadium. He marries Bridget Doyle, a shopkeeper of Dublin. They have four sons and four daughters.
(From: “O’Toole, Luke” by Marcus de Búrca, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009 | Pictured: Michael Collins, Luke O’Toole and Harry Boland in 1921, Image credit: GAA)
Mulcahy is second-in-command to Thomas Ashe in an encounter with the armed Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) at Ashbourne, County Meath, during the 1916 Easter Rising, one of the few stand-out victories won by republicans in that week and generally credited to Mulcahy’s grasp of tactics. In his book on the Rising, Charles Townshend principally credits Mulcahy with the defeat of the RIC at Ashbourne, for conceiving and leading a flanking movement on the RIC column that had engaged with the Irish Volunteers. Arrested after the Rising, he is interned at Knutsford and at the Frongoch internment camp in Wales until his release on December 24, 1916.
Mulcahy and Michael Collins are largely responsible for directing the military campaign against the British during the Irish War of Independence. During this period of upheaval in 1919, he marries Mary Josephine (Min) Ryan, sister of Kate and Phyllis Ryan, the successive wives of Seán T. O’Kelly. Her brother is James Ryan. O’Kelly and Ryan both later serve in Fianna Fáil governments.
Mulcahy supports the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. Archive film shows that Mulcahy, as Minister of Defence, is the Irish officer who raises the Irish tricolour at the first hand-over of a British barracks to the National Army in January 1922. He is defence minister in the Provisional Government on its creation and succeeds Collins, after the latter’s assassination, as Commander-in-Chief of the Provisional Government’s forces during the subsequent Irish Civil War.
Mulcahy earns notoriety through his order that anti-Treaty activists captured carrying arms are liable for execution. A total of 77 anti-Treaty prisoners are executed by the Provisional Government. He serves as Minister for Defence in the new Free State government from January 1924 until March 1924, but resigns in protest because of the sacking of the Army Council after criticism by the Executive Council over the handling of the “Army Mutiny,” when some National Army War of Independence officers almost revolt after he demobilises many of them at the end of the Irish Civil War. He re-enters the cabinet as Minister for Local Government and Public Health in 1927.
After the resignation of W. T. Cosgrave as Leader of Fine Gael in 1944, Mulcahy becomes party leader while still a member of the Seanad. Thomas F. O’Higgins is parliamentary leader of the party in the Dáil at the time and Leader of the Opposition. Facing his first general election as party leader, Mulcahy draws up a list of 13 young candidates to contest seats for Fine Gael. Of the eight who run, four are elected. He is returned again to the 12th Dáil as a TD for Tipperary at the 1944 Irish general election. While Fine Gael’s decline had been slowed, its future is still in doubt.
Following the 1948 Irish general election Mulcahy is elected for Tipperary South, but the dominant Fianna Fáil party finishes six seats short of a majority. However, it is 37 seats ahead of Fine Gael, and conventional wisdom suggests that Fianna Fáil is the only party that can possibly form a government. Just as negotiations get underway, however, Mulcahy realises that if Fine Gael, the Labour Party, the National Labour Party, Clann na Poblachta and Clann na Talmhan band together, they would have only one seat fewer than Fianna Fáil and, if they can get support from seven independents, they will be able to form a government. He plays a leading role in persuading the other parties to put aside their differences and join forces to consign the then Taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Éamon de Valera, to the opposition benches.
Mulcahy initially seems set to become Taoiseach in a coalition government. However, he is not acceptable to Clann na Poblachta’s leader, Seán MacBride. Many Irish republicans had never forgiven him for his role in the Irish Civil War executions carried out under the Cosgrave government in the 1920s. Consequently, MacBride lets it be known that he and his party will not serve under Mulcahy. Without Clann na Poblachta, the other parties would have 57 seats between them — 17 seats short of a majority in the 147-seat Dáil. According to Mulcahy, the suggestion that another person serve as Taoiseach comes from Labour leader William Norton. He steps aside and encourages his party colleague John A. Costello, a former Attorney General of Ireland, to become the parliamentary leader of Fine Gael and the coalition’s candidate for Taoiseach. For the next decade, Costello serves as the party’s parliamentary leader while Mulcahy remained the nominal leader of the party.
Mulcahy goes on to serve as Minister for Education under Costello from 1948 until 1951. Another coalition government comes to power at the 1954 Irish general election, with Mulcahy once again stepping aside to become Minister for Education in the Second Inter-Party Government. The government falls in 1957, but he remains as Fine Gael leader until October 1959. In October the following year, he tells his Tipperary constituents that he does not intend to contest the next election.
Moving to Dublin by September 1916, MacDonagh is headmaster for a time of Patrick Pearse‘s St. Enda’s School, the bilingual school where his brother Thomas had formerly served on the staff under Pearse, which had reopened after the rising in Cullenswood House, Oakley Road, Rathmines. By 1918 he is in private practice as an income tax recovery expert. He later quips that by recovering thousands of pounds annually for clients, he has done greater harm to the British government than any other Irishman. He is also partner by 1919 in an insurance brokerage with fellow Sinn FéinTDWilliam Cosgrave. Following Cosgrave’s departure, the firm trades from 1920 as MacDonagh & Boland, with offices first on Dame Street, and latterly on College Green.
MacDonagh’s prominence in the post-1916 reorganisation of Sinn Féin commences at the April 19, 1917, convention of advanced nationalists summoned by George Noble Plunkett after his parliamentary by-election victory. MacDonagh makes a resounding speech ratifying Plunkett’s determination not only to abstain from attendance at Westminster, but also to affirm the principles of the republican Easter Week proclamation rather than the dual-monarchy programme of Sinn Féin under Arthur Griffith. After campaigning vigorously on behalf of the successful by-election candidacy of Éamon de Valera in East Clare, he is arrested on August 30 and sentenced to six-months’ imprisonment for making a seditious speech. He joins in the hunger strike of republican prisoners seeking prisoner-of-war status in Mountjoy Gaol, on which Thomas Ashe dies on September 25 after enduring forcible feeding. Released with the other surviving strikers, he is a principal witness at the emotional inquest into the circumstances of Ashe’s death.
Elected to the Sinn Féin executive at the October 1917 ardfheis, at which the party adopts a republican constitution, MacDonagh is alternately rearrested and released on several occasions under the “cat-and-mouse act,” enduring further hunger strikes in both Belfast and Dundalk jails, before serving out in its entirety the original six-month sentence (1917–18). After deportation to England and while incarcerated in Reading Gaol, he is returned unopposed in the 1918 United Kingdom general election in Ireland as Sinn Féin candidate in North Tipperary and is released in time to attend the second session of the first Dáil Éireann on April 10, 1919. With the Dáil driven underground in September 1919 after its proscription, he protests against the infrequency of sessions, querying whether “private members [were] to abstain from Dublin as well as Westminster.”
Elected in January 1920 to both Dublin Corporation and Rathmines town council, MacDonagh concentrates his political energies on local government until appointment in January 1921 as acting Dáil Minister for Labour, and director of the Belfast boycott. Exercising effective authority over the labour department because of the imprisonment of the minister, Constance Markievicz, he seeks to define a comprehensive industrial and economic strategy and establishes a labour commission to formulate proposals. The resultant radical plan for supplanting capitalist ownership by developing cooperative and distributive industrial structures is ignored by his cabinet colleagues. His organisation and enforcement of the Belfast boycott – a response to the anti-Catholic rioting of July 1920, and expulsion of workers from jobs and families from homes – is relentless and efficient. He appoints a team of boycott organisers and local boycott committees empowered to impose fines and to seize goods, and blacklists firms that are facilitating circumvention of the boycott by trans-shipment of Belfast goods through non-boycotted northern towns or through British ports.
Throughout the Irish War of Independence MacDonagh is constantly on the run, usually under disguise as a priest, and is imprisoned for a time in Mountjoy Gaol in 1920. One of four Sinn Féin candidates returned unopposed to the Second Dáil for Tipperary Mid, North, and South, after a cabinet reorganisation in August 1921 following the truce, he remains as boycott director but is removed from the Labour Department. Bitterly opposed to the Anglo–Irish Treaty, in the Dáil debates he responds to Griffith’s assertion that the agreement is indeed a treaty concluded between two sovereign nations by asking why the pro-Treatyites are conducting the sovereign Irish nation into the British empire, and whether they are doing so “with their heads up or their hands up.”
Manager of the anti-Treaty bulletin Poblacht na hÉireann, in the 1922 Irish general election MacDonagh is returned on the first count to the third seat in his constituency. Arrested soon after the outbreak of the Irish Civil War, he escapes from Portobello military barracks. Rearrested on September 30 and imprisoned in Mountjoy Gaol, he falls seriously ill with acute appendicitis but refuses to sign the required form to secure release for medical treatment because it implicitly recognises the legitimacy of the Free State government. Transferred at length to the Mater Misericordiae private nursing home, he undergoes an operation, but two days later, having developed peritonitis, he dies on December 25, 1922. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery.
A small, supple man with alert blue eyes, MacDonagh wielded a swift and stinging tongue in debate. It is said that he indulged his caustic wit more for the delight in the bon mot than for the bitterness of the invective. Genial in company, with a store of amusing anecdote, he was celebrated for hearty humour even in the face of hardship and danger. On a prison sickbed days before his death, he referred to another inmate, bald-headed like himself, “who wears his hair like mine.” In 1913, he married Margaret O’Toole of Dublin. They had one daughter and two sons. They resided in Rathmines, first at 86 Moyne Road, before moving during 1922 to 9 Palmerston Road.
(From: “MacDonagh, Joseph” by Lawrence William White, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)
Harty is born on August 11, 1867, in Knocknagurteeny, Murroe, County Limerick, the son of Francis Harty and his wife, Johana (née Ryan). He is educated locally and at the Jesuits‘ Crescent College, Limerick. In 1884, he goes to St. Patrick’s College, Thurles, and two years later proceeds to Maynooth College, where he trains for the priesthood. After ordination at Clonliffe College, Dublin, on May 20, 1894, he returns to Maynooth. The following year he is appointed to the chair of philosophy and theology there. However, he defers this for a year while he attends lectures at the Ecclesiastical university in Rome, as one of two professors who has been granted the new privilege of leave of absence on full salary to study abroad.
Back at Maynooth Harty is a prominent member of staff. In 1906, he co-founds the Irish Theological Quarterly, of which he is for many years editor, and is also editor for a time of the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. His contributions to these and other periodicals are numerous and include an essay on the “Sacredness of fetal life” for the Irish Theological Quarterly in 1906. As a founder member of the Maynooth manuscripts publication committee, which runs from 1906 to 1915, he helps oversee the publication of the edition of the Black Book of Limerick (1907) by his colleague James MacCaffrey and of some impressive student publications, including Gadaidhe Géar na Geamh-oidche (1915), a volume of tales from the Fenian cycle from manuscripts in the library. He is appointed senior professor of moral theology but ceases teaching after he is consecrated Archbishop of Cashel on January 18, 1914.
Harty is early involved with the Gaelic Athletic Association – he had been a hurler in his youth – and is a strong supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP). In late 1915 he furnishes John Redmond with a letter of support, and a few months later is denouncing the Easter Rising and congratulating the people of Cashel for abstaining from insurrection. Later that year he is involved in a French propaganda drive to boost the war effort in Ireland. As one of the four bishop delegates to the 1917 Irish Convention, he speaks against a Methodist delegate’s call for mixed education. Criticising the Protestant educational system in Belfast, he claims the Catholic church has a right to teach its own children, and effectively closes down the discussion. By April 1918 he has moved toward tacit acceptance of Sinn Féin and is at the forefront of the anti-conscription campaign. In a speech he calls conscription unjust and hypocritical and calls for “every man with a drop of Irish blood in his veins” to sign the protest against it.
On the establishment of the Free State, Harty preaches support for Cumann na nGaedheal, but by the 1930s is closer to Éamon de Valera, and is a strong advocate of protectionism, which he feels will ensure a self-sufficient Ireland of traditional values. In 1933, he applauds the tax set on imported daily papers, as he believes English papers are corrupting the young. At the golden jubilee of the GAA the following year he makes a speech in Cashel calling for Irish industries, Irish music, and Irish dances. As president of the congress committee, he is a key organiser of the massive Eucharistic Congress of 1932. His other great concerns are the foreign missions and the promotion of Catholic literature – he is president of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland. His practical work for his diocese includes heading a deputation to the minister for agriculture in October 1932 to press Thurles’s claims for the new sugar beet factory. It opens there in December 1934.
Although tall, athletic, and fond of open air, Harty is for many years in poor health and from about 1933 petitions the Holy See for a coadjutor-archbishop. This finally comes about in 1942 when Bishop Jeremiah Kissane of Waterford comes to Cashel as his dean and coadjutor. Four years later Harty dies at his residence in Thurles on September 11, 1946, and is buried at the Cathedral of the Assumption, Thurles. He is survived by a brother and a sister. The GAA ground in his native Murroe is named after him.
(From: “Harty, John” by Bridget Hourican, Dictionary of Irish Biography, www. dib.ie, October 2009)
Muriel Enid Gifford is born at 12 Cowper Road, Rathmines, on December 18, 1884. She is the fourth daughter and eighth child of twelve of Frederick and Isabella Gifford. As a child, she suffers at different times from rheumatic fever and phlebitis. She attends Alexandra College and spends a brief time in England training to as a poultry instructor. Returning to Ireland, she trains at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital, Dublin, as a student nurse, but her health suffers from the work.
Along with her sisters, MacDonagh is active in the Irish Women’s Franchise League and Inghinidhe na hÉireann, a nationalist organisation. She is involved in the school meals programme of 1910 to 1911, takes part in a 1914 Women’s Franchise League fundraiser, appearing in a tableau vivant as Maeve, the Warrior Queen. Less ardently feminist than her sisters, she takes delight in inviting home activists and artists for a “proper meal.” In an outgoing family, she is shy and reserved, known for her gentle manner. In 1908, she is introduced to Thomas MacDonagh by suffragette journalist Nannie Dryhurst along with her sisters, Grace and Sidney, on a visit to St. Enda’s School. Dryhurst advises Thomas to “fall in love with one of these girls and marry her,” to which he replies laughingly, “That would be easy; the only difficulty would be to decide which one.” The Gifford sisters remain acquaintances with Thomas until the autumn of 1911, when the couple has a short and intense courtship. They meet secretly in galleries and museums and have copious correspondence. When he is appointed assistant lecturer to University College Dublin (UCD) in December 1911, they marry on January 3, 1912. They have one son, Donagh MacDonagh, and one daughter, Barbara MacDonagh Redmond. The family lives first at 32 Baggot Street, and later at 29 Oakley Road, Rathmines.
MacDonagh suffers with poor health and depression, which leads to periods of convalescence and confinement. When her husband is arrested after the Easter Rising, she is unable to see him before his execution on May 3, 1916, which heightens the intensity of her bereavement. Devastated by his death and estranged from her parents due to their disapproval of his involvement in the Rising, she briefly lives with the Plunketts at Larkfield, Kimmage, and then with relatives of her husband in Thurles, County Tipperary. She later returns to Dublin to rent rooms in a Plunkett family property, 50 Marlborough Road. With two young children to support, she is nearly destitute, but like the other widows and orphans of the executed leaders of the Rising, they are aided by the Irish Volunteers Dependents’ Fund, in her case with £250. She also serves as an officer and committee member on this aid association. Her husband had named her as his literary executor, and she prepares a collected edition of his poetry that is published in October 1916. The success of this volume, and his bestselling Literature in Ireland, published at the time he is executed, ease her financial difficulties somewhat.
MacDonagh dies while swimming in the sea during a holiday with other 1916 widows and orphans in Skerries, County Dublin, on July 9, 1917. She almost does not attend the holiday, as her son is in hospital having been injured in a fall. It is believed that she is attempting to swim to Shenick Island from Skerries, possibly to place a tricolour flag on the island’s Martello tower. Her body is found near Loughshinny Beach and, as there is no water in her lungs, it is concluded that she died of heart failure and not drowning. As there is great interest in the 1916 widows and their families, her funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery attracts a large crowd of mourners estimated at 5,000 in the funeral procession.
Following MacDonagh’s death, there is a legal custody battle between the Giffords and the MacDonaghs over Donagh and Barbara. Their aunt Mary MacDonagh, a nun known as Sister Francesca and with whom MacDonagh had grown close, wins custody. Even though several of her siblings offer to take the children, she places them in a foster home.
On the centenary of MacDonagh’s death, a festival takes place in Skerries in her memory.
Josephine McNeill, Irish diplomat, is born on March 31, 1895, in Fermoy, County Cork. She is the first Irish female diplomat appointed to represent Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity.
McNeill is born Josephine Ahearne, the daughter of shopkeeper and hotelier, James Ahearne, and his wife Ellen Ahearne (née O’Brien). She attends the Loretto Convent, Fermoy, and goes on to graduate from University College Dublin (UCD) with a BA, H.Dip.Ed. in French and German. With this she begins a teaching career, at St. Louis’ Convent, Kiltimagh, at the Ursuline Convent, Thurles, and at Scoil Íde. Scoil Íde, the female counterpart to St. Enda’s School, had been established by her friend, Louise Gavan Duffy. She is fluent in the Irish language and takes an active part in the cultural elements of the Irish independence movement, such as literature and music. She is a member of Cumann na mBan, serving as a member of the executive committee in 1921.
After the death of her husband in 1938, McNeill becomes the honorary secretary of the council of the Friends of the National Collections, as well as serving as chair of the executive committee of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association until 1950. As a member of the Department of External Affairs advisory committee on cultural relations, she writes on economic, social and cultural issues. She represents Ireland at the UNESCO general assembly in Paris in 1949.
McNeill is an active member of Clann na Poblachta from its foundation in 1946. She is appointed the minister to the Netherlands in 1950 by Seán MacBride, making her the first Irish female diplomat to represent the Republic of Ireland abroad in a ministerial capacity. This appointment is not well received by diplomats in the Department of External Affairs. Her reports from The Hague focus on the issues the Netherlands faces with decolonisation. In 1955, she becomes the minister to Sweden, going on to hold the joint appointment to Austria and Switzerland from 1956 to 1960, after which she retires. While serving in Switzerland she puts aside the resentment she feels towards Éamon de Valera based on how he had treated her husband, to sit with him during a convalescence while de Valera recovers from an eye operation.
McNeill is an amateur pianist and collects paintings and porcelains. In 1933, she publishes the Irish language book, Finnsgéalta ó India.
Burke starts playing traditional at age four and purchases his first accordion in the 1950s. He wins the All-Ireland Senior Accordion Championship in Thurles in 1959 and again in Boyle the following year. Together with fiddler Aggie Whyte, he wins the All-Ireland duet championship in 1962 in Gorey, County Wexford.
Burke co-founds the Leitrim Ceili Band with Padden Downey in 1956. Other members of the east Galway-based band, which wins All-Ireland Championships in 1959 and 1962, includes Irish flute players Paddy Carty, Ambrose Moloney and Tony Molloy, button accordionists Mick Darcy and Sean McGlynn, fiddlers Michael Joe Dooley, Paddy Doorhy, Aggie Whyte and Séamus Connolly, drummer Sean Curley and pianist Anne-Marie Courtney. The band tours in England and releases an LP on the New York-based Dublin label.
Burke first tours in the United States in 1961, and lives mainly in New York from 1962 to 1965, during which period he forms a musical partnership with fiddler Andy McGann. With McGann and pianist Felix Dolan, he records an LP, A Tribute to Michael Coleman, first released in 1966 on his own Shaskeen label. He records again with this trio, issuing The Funny Reel LP on the Shanachie Records label in 1979. Other musical collaborators over the years include Belfast fiddle great Sean McGuire, piper Michael Cooney, harpist Máire Ní Chathasaigh, fiddler Kevin Burke, pianist Charlie Lennon and his wife Anne Conroy Burke, whom he marries in 1990, on guitar and button accordion.
Burke’s first solo LP, Galway’s Own, is released in 1971. He also tours extensively for the next two decades, including with groups sponsored by Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann. From 1988 to 1991, he lives in St. Louis, Missouri, where he has a musical residency at John D. McGurk’s Pub and hosts radio programmes at two stations, one of them the “Ireland in America” programme on KDHX. He represents Ireland in 1989 and 1992 at the International Accordion Festivals, in Montmagny, Quebec, along with accordion greats who include Cajun accordion player Marc Savoy and jazz accordionist Art Van Damme.
After residing in the United States from 1988 until 1991, Burke returns to Kilnadeema in 1992. There, he carries on teaching and performing music. He dies at the age of 81 on February 20, 2021, at Galway Hospice.
Burke is named RTÉ‘s Traditional Musician of the Year in 1970. He goes on to win both the AIB Traditional Musician of the Year and the Lifetime Achievement Award from The Irish World in 1997. A Joe Burke Tribute Concert is held in April 1997 at the Town Hall Theatre in Galway, on his reception of the AIB award. Three years later, he receives an award in Musical Mastery from Boston College. He is later conferred Gradam an Chomhaltais in 2003.
After some years as curate at St. Paul’s Church, Dublin, Murray is transferred to Arklow and is there in 1798 when the rebellion breaks out. The yeomanry shoots the parish priest in bed and Murray, to escape a similar fate, flees to the city where for two years he serves as curate at St. Andrew’s Chapel on Hawkins Street. As a preacher, he is said to be particularly effective, especially in appeals for charitable causes, such as the schools. He is then assigned to the Chapel of St. Mary in Upper Liffey Street where Archbishop John Troy is the parish priest.
Murray is an uncompromising opponent of a proposal granting the British government a “veto” over Catholic ecclesiastical appointments in Ireland, and in 1814 and 1815, makes two separate trips to Rome concerning the controversy.
Murray becomes Archbishop of Dublin in 1825 and on November 14, 1825, celebrates the completion of St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral. He enjoys the confidence of successive popes and is held in high respect by the British government. His life is mainly devoted to ecclesiastical affairs, the establishment and organisation of religious associations for the education and relief of the poor. With the outbreak of cholera in the 1830s, in 1834 he and Mother Aikenhead found St. Vincent’s Hospital. He persuades Edmund Rice to send members of the Christian Brothers to Dublin to start a school for boys. The first is opened in a lumber yard on the city-quay. He assists Catherine McAuley in founding the Sisters of Mercy, and in 1831 professes the first three members.
Edward Bouverie Pusey has an interview with Murray in 1841, and bears testimony to his moderation, and John Henry Newman has some correspondence with him prior to Newman’s conversion from the Anglican Church to the Roman Catholic Church in 1845. A seat in the privy council at Dublin, officially offered to him in 1846, is not accepted. He takes part in the synod of the Roman Catholic clergy at Thurles in 1850.
Towards the end of his life, Murray’s eyesight is impaired, and he reads and writes with difficulty. Among his last priestly functions is a funeral service for Richard Lalor Sheil who had died in Italy, and whose body had been brought back to Ireland for burial. Murray dies in Dublin on February 26, 1852, at the age of eighty-four. He is interred in the St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral, Dublin, where a marble statue of him has been erected in connection with a monument to his memory, executed by James Farrell, president of the Royal Hibernian Academy of Fine Arts.
(Pictured: Portrait of Daniel Murray, Archbishop of Dublin, by unknown 19th century Irish portrait painter)
seamus dubhghaill 