seamus dubhghaill

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

Tag Archives: Toronto (Canada)


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Death of Leslie Mary de Barra, Irish Nationalist & Republican

Leslie Mary de Barra (née Price), Irish nationalist and republican active during the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, dies in Cork, County Cork, on April 9, 1984. She becomes Director of Cumann na mBan and goes on to be chairman and President of the Irish Red Cross.

She is born Leslie Mary Price in Dublin on January 9, 1893, to Michael and Mary Price. Her father is a blacksmith, and she is one of six children. She wants to be a teacher and by 1911 has become a Monitress, a common way for girls to get into the teaching profession. Two of her brothers are involved in the Irish Volunteers and she is a member of Cumann na mBan. In advance of the Easter Rising, with the confusion over orders and lack of information, she states that she “did not question anything” as, with all that was happening, there are often odd events in her house. But they all wait for the mobilisation orders for the Rising.

De Barra’s role during the republican rebellion in Ireland, Easter 1916, is to act as a courier carrying messages and ammunition between the main headquarters in the General Post Office (GPO) and other posts. She does her role well during the Rising and gains the respect of many Irish Republicans. On the orders of Seán Mac Diarmada, one of the principal leaders of the rising, she and fellow Cumann na mBan member Bríd Dixon are promoted in the field and treated as officers. She later admits that the job was stressful. She is stationed both in the GPO and in the Hibernian Bank. It is while she is in the bank that she comes closest to death, standing beside Captain Thomas Weafer while he is shot. Another soldier who goes to his aid is also shot. She barely has time to grab Captain Weafer before he dies. She is the person sent to fetch a priest for the dying and wounded soldiers on the Thursday. By Friday evening, she is in the GPO and is with the group evacuated with Louise Gavan Duffy. Once they reach the hospital on Jervis Street, she parts company from Duffy and heads to Jacob’s factory to see how the rebels are getting on there. She is also arrested and held in Broadstone Station but quickly released.

By 1918, de Barra represents West Cork in the Cumann na mBan convention and becomes a member of the executive committee. She leaves her teaching career to focus fully on the organisation required by the republican movement in 1918. She travels the country by train and by bicycle to get women to join the local branches of the Cumann and take part in the activities needed by the movement. She is tasked by the Irish Republican Army’s (IRA) General Headquarters to set up specific lines of communication between Dublin and the Provincial commands. Within the year the organisation has grown from 17 to over 600 branches. She is Director of the organisation during the period up to the end of the war.

De Barra marries Tom Barry on August 22, 1921, in Cork during the Truce period in the lead up to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. At the wedding are men who later end up on opposite sides. Both Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins are guests. Her husband is staunchly Anti-Treaty even though he has been friends with Collins. Although her husband is a staunch republican and a major figure in the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War, while she is serving in the GPO in Dublin during the rising, he is in Mesopotamia serving in the British Army in World War I.

In later years de Barra is central to the Irish Red Cross. Initially she gets involved by organising the care of children orphaned by World War II. She represents the Irish Red Cross at conferences in Toronto, Oslo, Monaco, New Delhi, Geneva, Vienna, The Hague, Athens, Istanbul and Prague. She and her husband handle refugees from Czechoslovakia and Poland. Through the Red Cross she is able to ascertain the status of Irish held by the Spanish during the Spanish Civil War, as officially Ireland remains neutral and cannot get involved. She is Chairman of the Irish Red Cross from 1950 to 1973.

De Barra is instrumental in the setting up of the Voluntary Health Insurance organisation in the late 1950s. In 1962, with the Red Cross she launches the “Freedom from hunger” campaign in Ireland which later becomes the organisation Gorta. She serves as chairman of Gorta also.

In 1956, a memorial to 1916 is unveiled in Limerick. It is designed by Albert Power and the commemoration of the Rising is held in May 1956 and the monument is unveiled by de Barra. In 1963 she is awarded an honorary degree from University College Dublin (UCD) along with Éamon de Valera and others.

In 1971, de Barra is part of a series to look back on the events leading to Irish Independence and her story is broadcast by Raidió Teilifís Eireann. In 1979 she wins the Henry Dunant Medal which is the highest award of the Red Cross Movement.

De Barra and her husband live on St. Patrick’s Street in Cork from the 1940s until his death in 1980. She dies in Cork on April 9, 1984, and is buried with her husband in St. Finbarr’s Cemetery. She is remembered today in the Leslie Bean de Barra Trophy awarded for the Cork Area Carer of the Year.


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Death of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Union Organizer & Activist

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 Catholic tenant 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.

Jones dies on November 30, 1930, at the Burgess farm then in Silver Spring, Maryland, though now part of Adelphi. There is a funeral Mass at St. Gabriel’s Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. She is buried in the Union Miners Cemetery in Mount Olive, Illinois, alongside miners who died in the 1898 Battle of Virden.

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.


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Death of Patrick Michael Clancy, Irish Folk Singer

Patrick Michael Clancy, Irish folk singer best known as a member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, dies of lung cancer at home on November 11, 1998. In addition to singing and storytelling, Clancy plays the harmonica with the group, which is widely credited with popularizing Irish traditional music in the United States and revitalizing it in Ireland. He also starts and runs the folk music label Tradition Records, which records many of the key figures of the American folk music revival.

Clancy is born on March 7, 1922, at Carrick-on-Suir, County Tipperary, one of eleven children and the eldest of four boys born to Johanna McGrath and Bob Clancy. During World War II he serves as a flight engineer in the Royal Air Force in India. After his demobilization, Clancy works as a baker in London. In 1947 he emigrates to Toronto, Canada with his brother Tom Clancy. The following year, the two brothers move to Cleveland, Ohio to stay with relatives. Later, they attempt to move to California, but their car breaks down and they relocate to the New York City area instead.

After moving to Greenwich Village in 1951, both Patrick and Tom devote themselves primarily to careers in the theater. In addition to appearing in various Off-Broadway productions and television shows, they produce and star in plays at the Cherry Lane Theatre in Greenwich Village and at a playhouse in Martha’s Vineyard. After losing money on some unsuccessful plays, the brothers begin singing concerts of folk songs after their evening acting jobs are over. They soon dub these concerts “Midnight Specials” and the “Swapping Song Fair.” Patrick and Tom are often joined by other prominent folk singers of the day, including Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, and Jean Ritchie.

In 1956 their younger brother, Liam Clancy, immigrates to New York, where he teams up with Tommy Makem, whom he had met while collecting folk songs in Ireland. The two begin singing together at Gerde’s Folk City, a club in Greenwich Village. Patrick and Tom sing with them on occasion, usually in informal folk “sing-songs” in the Village. Around the same time, Patrick founds Tradition Records with folk-song collector and heiress Diane Hamilton, and in 1956 the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem release their first album, The Rising of the Moon, with only Patrick’s harmonica as musical accompaniment. However, the Clancys and Makem do not become a permanent singing group until 1959.

In the late 1950s, Clancy with his brothers and Makem begin to take singing more seriously as a permanent career, and soon they record their second album, Come Fill Your Glass with Us. This album proves to be more successful than their debut album, and they begin receiving job offers as singers at important nightclubs, including the Gate of Horn in Chicago and the Blue Angel in New York City. The group garners nationwide fame in the United States after an appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, which leads to a contract with Columbia Records in 1961. Over the course of the 1960s, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem record approximately two albums a year for Columbia. By 1964, Billboard magazine reports that the group was outselling Elvis Presley in Ireland.

The group performs together on stage, recordings, and television to great acclaim in the United States, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia until Tommy Makem leaves to pursue a solo career in 1969. They continue performing first with Bobby Clancy and then with Louis Killen until Liam leaves in 1976 also to pursue a solo career. In 1977 after a short hiatus, the group reforms with Patrick, Tom, and Bobby Clancy and their nephew Robbie O’Connell. Liam returns in 1990 after the death of Tom Clancy.

In 1968, after two decades in North America, Clancy returns to live in Carrick-on-Suir, where he purchases a dairy farm and breeds exotic cattle. When not on tour or working on his farm, he spends much of his time fishing, reading, and doing crossword puzzles. In the late 1990s, he is diagnosed with a brain tumor. The tumor is successfully removed, but he is also stricken with terminal lung cancer around the same time. He continues performing until his failing health prevents him from doing so any longer.

Patrick Clancy dies at home of lung cancer on November 11, 1998, at the age of 76. He is buried, wearing his trademark white cap, in the tiny village of Faugheen, near Carrick-on-Suir.


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Birth of Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, Gaelic Games Commentator

Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh, an Irish Gaelic games commentator for the Irish national radio and television, RTÉ, is born in Doonshean just outside Dingle, County Kerry, on August 20, 1930. In a career that spans six decades he comes to be regarded as the “voice of Gaelic games.” He has been described as a national treasure. His prolific career earns him a place in Guinness World Records.

Ó Muircheartaigh grows up on the family farm and is educated locally in Dingle. In September 1945, he begins studying at Coláiste Íosagáin in Ballyvourney in the County Cork Gaeltacht where he trains to be a teacher. It is at this all-Irish language school that his name changes from Michael Moriarty to the Irish version Mícheál Ó Muircheartaigh. He says that Irish is his stronger language. In September 1948, he begins the final year of his teacher training at St. Patrick’s College of Education in Drumcondra, Dublin.

In early March 1949, Ó Muircheartaigh, along with ten other students from the college, and several from other colleges, do a test commentary on a hurling match at Croke Park. Each student has to commentate for five minutes in Irish and the most successful is to be selected for further commentary work. Up to this point, he has never seen a game of hurling before in his life. He is the one selected and his first assignment is to provide an all-Irish commentary on the 1949 Railway Cup final on Saint Patrick’s Day.

Ó Muircheartaigh graduates from St. Patrick’s College a little later and also completes a Bachelor of Arts degree from University College Dublin (UCD) in 1952. He also completes a Higher Diploma in Education in 1953. He teaches economics, accountancy and Irish in both primary and secondary schools throughout Dublin, the majority of which are run by the Christian Brothers. He continues teaching up until the 1980s, when he becomes a full-time broadcaster with RTÉ.

For the early part of his broadcasting career, Ó Muircheartaigh commentates on Minor GAA matches, in the Irish language. He also replaces the legendary Michael O’Hehir when he is not available to commentate. Eventually when O’Hehir is forced to retire in the mid-1980s Ó Muircheartaigh takes over as the station’s premier radio commentator. He develops his own inimitable style of commentary, and his accent is unmistakably that of a native Irish speaker. He is a true lover of Gaelic Athletic Association, and it is reflected in the enthusiasm he brings to matches. His unusual turn of phrase makes him a much-loved broadcaster and often imitated character. He becomes particularly famous in Ireland for his unusual turns of phrase in the heat of the moment while commentating. Towards the end of his life, he commentates on RTÉ Radio 1. In 2004, he publishes his autobiography, From Dún Sion to Croke Park.

On March 5, 1988, Ó Muircheartaigh presents the Saturday Live show on RTÉ 1. In 1990, he holds an impromptu interview with Britain’s Prince Edward, after his greyhound had won at the English Greyhound Derby qualifier when he was commentating.

Ó Muircheartaigh’s commentaries for RTÉ Radio 1’s Sunday Sport show win him a Jacob’s Award in 1992. He is also the Parade Grand Marshal for the 2007 St. Patrick’s Festival, having been given the honour by the chairman of the festival in recognition and appreciation of his unique contribution to Irish culture. He is the Parade Grand Marshal for the 2011 St. Patrick’s Parade in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, also in recognition and appreciation of his unique contribution to Irish culture.

On September 16, 2010, Ó Muircheartaigh announces his retirement from broadcasting. The last All-Ireland he commentates on is the 2010 All-Ireland Senior Football Championship Final on September 19, 2010.

On October 29, 2010, it is announced that the 2nd International Rules test at Croke Park would be Ó Muircheartaigh’s final broadcast as commentator on RTÉ Radio 1. The following day he commentates his final commentary alongside RTÉ’s pundit and former Meath footballer Bernard Flynn.

Ó Muircheartaigh is contracted to officiate at the 2011–2012 Volvo Ocean Race finish in Galway where he commentates on the finish to the round-the-world race, giving it a uniquely Irish conclusion. Sailing is his longtime hobby.

Ó Muircheartaigh writes a weekly sports column for Foinse, the Irish-language newspaper free with the Irish Independent each Wednesday. He is invited to read out a piece in Irish and in English at an event called “Laochra” in Croke Park on April 24, 2016, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising.

In 2007, Ó Muircheartaigh is awarded the UCD Foundation Day Medal. His nephew by marriage, John McGuire, has presented several programmes on RTÉ.

Ó Muircheartaigh dies in hospital in Dublin at the age of 93 on June 25, 2024.

Ó Muircheartaigh is awarded an honorary doctorate by NUI Galway in 1999 for his lifetime service to broadcasting. Shortly after his 90th birthday, he is awarded the only GAA GPA All Stars Award of 2020. No further All Stars can be awarded as competition is suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic and only completed that December.


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Birth of Adrian Long, Civil Engineer & QUB Professor

Adrian Ernest Long OBE, civil engineer and professor at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), is born on April 15, 1941, in Dungannon, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. He has a particular interest in concrete structures and patents FlexiArch, a precast concrete arch product. He serves as president of the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) for 2002–03, the first Northern Irish engineer to do so.

Long comes from a carpentry and blacksmithing background. In 1959, he enters Queen’s University Belfast to study civil engineering. He graduates with first class honours and then takes a PhD at Queens. In 1967, he moves to Canada, working as a bridge designer for Fenco Engineering in Toronto.

Long, however, spends only a year in Canada, returning to Belfast in 1968 to become an associate professor of civil engineering at Queen’s University Belfast. In 1976, he is promoted to a full professorship. His work is largely in the field of concrete structures, particularly in chloride resistance, maintenance problems and arch bridge structures. He publishes twenty papers in journals managed by the Institution of Civil Engineers and wins eight of the institution’s medals for these, including the ICE Gold Medal.

From 1997 Long works on the FlexiArch, a precast concrete arch in which the individual voussoirs are joined by a flexible polymeric membrane. The arch arrives to site flat packed and when lifted into position by a crane, the gaps between the voussoirs close under gravity and form the correct arch profile. He patents the product, which is produced by Irish precast manufacturer Macrete, in 2004. The product can be constructed within a day and, containing no corrodible elements, has been stated to have a design lifespan of 300 years. More than fifty FlexiArch bridges have been constructed in the UK and Ireland and spans up to 30m are possible.

By 2002, Long is appointed dean of the faculty of engineering at QUB. In November of that year, he is appointed president of the ICE for the 2002–2003 session, the first Northern Irish person to hold that position. He is also a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and of the Institute for the Advancement of Engineering.

Long is appointed an officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2006 New Year Honours for services to higher education and civil engineering. He resigns as professor at QUB in 2006 but remains there as an emeritus professor in the School of Natural and Built Environment. Since 2015, the ICE Northern Ireland awards the Adrian Long medal to the best paper in an ICE journal to be authored by a Northern Ireland member. The medal features a bust of Long.

Long is married to Elaine and they have two children, Michael and Alison. Michael serves as the 80th Lord Mayor of Belfast from May 9 to June 1, 2022. He also serves as High Sheriff of Belfast in 2021 and serves on Belfast City Council since 2001, where he is the Alliance group leader from 2015 to 2021. He is married to Alliance Party leader and Minister of Justice Naomi Long.

Long dies at the age of 81 at the Ulster Hospital on April 23, 2022.


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Birth of Theatre Producer Pádraig Cusack

Pádraig Cusack, Irish theatre producer who has worked with the National Theatre of Great Britain, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA) in Mumbai and numerous international festivals, is born on March 16, 1962, in Dalkey, County Dublin.

Cusack, the youngest son of the Irish actor Cyril Cusack and actress Maureen Cusack, is the brother of actresses Niamh Cusack, Sinéad Cusack and Sorcha Cusack, and half-brother of Catherine Cusack. He has one brother, Paul Cusack, who is a television producer. He is married and has two daughters, Megan, an actress, who in 2020 joins the leading cast in the Netflix/BBC popular series Call the Midwife in the recurring role of Nurse Nancy Corrigan, and Kitty, a psychology student. Two of his nephews are also actors, Max Irons and Calam Lynch.

Cusack is educated bi-lingually in Irish and English, initially at Scoil Lorcáin in Monkstown, County Dublin, and subsequently at Coláiste Eoin, Booterstown, County Dublin. He is a Taylor Exhibition music scholar at Trinity College Dublin (TCD), before winning a scholarship to train to be a professional cellist at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. In 1995, he returns to education to take a post-graduate degree in Business at University College Cork (UCC).

Having begun his career as a freelance musician, playing with the BBC Philharmonic orchestra and English National Opera North, an accident ends Cusack’s career as a musician, resulting in him pursuing a career in arts administration. Initially he focuses on the classical music sector, working at two leading concert venues in London, the Wigmore Hall and the Southbank Centre.

In 1992, Cusack makes his first move into theatre following his appointment as Administrative Director of West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, alongside Jude Kelly, where he produces a number of plays including the touring production of Five Guys Named Moe for Cameron Mackintosh Limited. In 1996, he is appointed Head of Planning of the Royal National Theatre under the outgoing artistic director, Sir Richard Eyre, and subsequently with Sir Trevor Nunn and Sir Nicholas Hytner. In 2009, he becomes the National Theatre’s Associate Producer. During this period, he produces numerous productions for tour both in the UK and internationally, taking the work of the National Theatre to five continents. Alongside this, he works as a touring consultant for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, the Royal Court Theatre, London, Fiery Angel in London’s West End, Canadian Stage in Toronto, Bangarra Dance Theatre in Sydney, TheEmergencyRoom and Corn Exchange in Dublin and Galway International Arts Festival. In June 2016, he is appointed Executive Producer of Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. In addition to this, he is Consultant Producer to the National Centre for the Performing Arts (India) in Mumbai.

As well as his theatre producing work, Cusack offers representation to a number of Irish artists including the director Annie Ryan, the composer Mel Mercier and the British playwright Matt Wilkinson.

In 2023, Cusack is the recipient of the Olwen Wymark Award from the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain for his championing of new writing which is presented at the 18th Annual Awards Ceremony in London.


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Birth of Thomas Paterson, Historian & Museum Curator

Thomas George Farquhar Paterson, local historian, folklore collector and museum curator, is born on February 29, 1888, in or near Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Paterson is the eldest child in a family of seven sons and one daughter born to John and Rachel (née Farquhar) Paterson. His parents had emigrated from County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. Their first three children are born in Canada, but the family returns to Ireland in the early 1890s, to the family farm in Cornascreeb, five miles south of Portadown, County Armagh. Also known as George, he attends Aghory national school, and leaves at age 14 to be apprenticed to a grocer in Portadown. In 1911, he takes a position in Couser’s, the leading grocery and wine merchant’s business in Armagh. In time becoming the manager, he is acquainted with the local gentry and clergy.

However, the grocery trade is never Paterson’s main interest. From an early age, he is fascinated by the history and folklore of his native place. He becomes an expert on the genealogy of the gentry as well as of the farming families around Armagh, and also collects material on many aspects of Armagh life. His notebooks eventually contain well over a million words of notes on history, archaeology, dialect, folkways and natural history, as well as drawings and plans of traditional houses, fireside accoutrements and farm implements. His knowledge of history, archaeology and natural history is widely recognised, and in 1931 Armagh County Council asks him to become honorary curator of the small museum established by the Armagh Natural History and Philosophical Society. Four years later, he leaves Couser’s and becomes full-time curator of the museum, re-named the Armagh County Museum. He greatly augments and improves the collections, and in the late 1950s oversees the enlargement of the building. His life’s work culminates in the opening of the new building in 1962. He retires a year later at the age of 75.

Paterson’s work wins the respect of scholars, including Emyr Estyn Evans, a lifelong friend, and material that he records has been cited in a wide variety of books and journal articles. Over one hundred citations are listed in a posthumous bibliography in 1972, and since then hundreds of scholarly works have drawn on his published and unpublished material. His manuscripts are in Armagh County Museum, where they form an important resource.

Paterson publishes a book, Country Cracks: Old Tales from the County of Armagh (1939), and a very large number of articles in newspapers and journals, especially in Seanchas Ardmhacha, Ulster Journal of Archaeology and Ulster Folklife. He sometimes uses the pseudonym “Cornascreeb.” He greatly assists researchers interested in the Armagh background of Alexander Campbell and his father Thomas Campbell and is made an honorary member of the Disciples of Christ Historical Society, based in Nashville, Tennessee.

Paterson is a founder member of the committee that re-establishes the Ulster Journal of Archaeology. He is active in local history societies, and for many years is a member of the Ancient Monuments Advisory Council. He records many local sites for the register of ancient monuments. He is a member of the Northern Ireland committee of the National Trust and seeks to preserve Armagh’s architectural heritage and local industrial archaeology. He donates much important archive material to the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. He describes and collects folk artefacts, at least thirty years before most academic historians are interested in such objects, and he is a foundation trustee of the Ulster Folk Museum in Cultra, County Down. He is also a member of the first board of the Institute of Irish Studies in Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), from 1965.

Membership of the Royal Irish Academy is an honour not often accorded to someone who has not had a university education, still less to someone who leaves school at the age of 14, but Paterson is elected MRIA in 1941. He is conferred with an honorary MA by QUB in 1944. His service on many public bodies is acknowledged by the award of an Order of the British Empire (OBE).

Paterson never marries and dies in Armagh on April 6, 1971. Hundreds of people contribute to a memorial fund. Some of the money subscribed is used to purchase nineteenth-century drawings for the county museum, and in 1975 the memorial committee also publishes Harvest home: the last sheaf: a selection from the writings of T. G. F. Paterson relating to County Armagh, edited by Emyr Estyn Evans.


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Birth of Shelah Richards, Actress, Manager, Director & Producer

Shelah Geraldine Richards, Irish actress, manager, director and producer, is born in Dublin on May 23, 1903.

Richards is born to John William Richards, a lawyer, and Adelaide Roper, suffragist who had chained herself to the railings in St. Stephen’s Green. She goes to school at Alexandra College, Dublin, and after that she attends a finishing school in Paris. Though her family is not in the arts, her godmother is Beatrice Elvery. Shes attends Elvery’s salons with her parents as a child. She meets W. B. Yeats when she is sixteen. Her niece, Geraldine Fitzgerald, daughter of her sister, Edith Catherine Richards, is also one of Ireland’s pre-eminent actresses.

Richards’s acting career starts while attending the Dublin drama league and she is asked at short notice to replace Eileen Crowe in Juno and the Paycock, playing the role of Mary Boyle in the Abbey Theatre production. Richards gets the role of Nora Clithero in the 1926 production of The Plough and the Stars, Seán O’Casey‘s next production. This role means that she ends up with police protection for the duration of the run due to the disturbances the play engenders. Another important role is to take on playing the lead in The Player Queen by Yeats. Maire O’Neill had previously made the role her own and Yeats had let no one perform the part since then so taking on such a challenge is intimidating. Richards continues to take on leading roles with the Abbey Theatre but in 1926 she also begins to direct.

On December 28, 1928, Richards marries playwright Denis Johnston in St. Anne’s Church in Dublin. She tours the United States with the Abbey players in 1932 and with the Irish Players in the mid 1930s. A role in 1938 in Molly Keane‘s Spring Meeting starring Gladys Cooper and A. E. Matthews takes her to Broadway in New York City. War in Europe breaks out while the run is still going on and Richards is advised to stay in the United States. However, by then she has two children, producer Micheal and novelist Jennifer Johnston, so she returns to Dublin. There she runs her own theater company at the Olympia Theatre with Nigel Heseltine. Her marriage to Johnston, broken in 1938, ends with divorce in February 1945.

Richards next challenge is to take over the Abbey School of Acting. During her time there one of the designers she works with is Louis le Brocquy. With Siobhán McKenna she produces The Playboy of the Western World in Edinburgh to huge success allowing her to stage it in London and Dublin and later in Toronto‘s Library Theater. She brings Marcel Marceau to Dublin for the first time. She continues to act and has some film roles.

In 1961 Ireland launches its first television service, Raidió Teilifís Éireann. Richards is one of the first producers, recommended to the station by Hilton Edwards. She is one of the few women in the new station. The first Irish play produced during the opening week is directed by her and she is nominated for a Best Actress award in another production, Inquiry at Lisieux. She works as producer on a wide number of programs for the station including documentaries, soap operas and religious programming. Both Tolka Row and The Riordans are produced by her as well as Denis Johnston’s The Moon on the Yellow River, George Bernard Shaw‘s Arms and the Man and John Millington Synge‘s Riders to the Sea.

Richards retires from her RTÉ career in the early 1970s though she continues to raise funds for the Gate Theatre through the Edwards–MacLiammóir Playhouse Society. In 1983, for her 80th birthday, the Abbey puts on a party for her which includes a special rendition of “Nora” from The Plough and the Stars. Richards is the last living member of the original 1926 cast. The song is repeated at her funeral in 1985. She died in Ballybrack, County Dublin, on January 19, 1985. Her funeral is held in St. Anne’s Church in Dublin and she is cremated in Glasnevin Cemetery.


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Birth of Betty Williams, Peace Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Elizabeth “Betty” Williams (née Smyth), peace activist and co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on May 22, 1943.

Williams’s father works as a butcher and her mother is a housewife. She receives her primary education from St. Teresa Primary School in Belfast and attends St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls for her secondary school studies. Upon completing her formal education, she takes up a job of office receptionist.

Rare for the time in Northern Ireland, Williams’s father is Protestant and her mother is Catholic, a family background from which she later says she derived religious tolerance and a breadth of vision that motivated her to work for peace. Early in the 1970s she joins an anti-violence campaign headed by a Protestant priest. She credits this experience for preparing her to eventually found her own peace movement, which focuses on creating peace groups composed of former opponents, practicing confidence-building measures, and the development of a grassroots peace process.

Williams is drawn into the public arena after witnessing the death of three children on August 10, 1976, when they are hit by a car whose driver, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitary named Danny Lennon, had been fatally shot in return fire by a soldier of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment. As she turns the corner to her home, she sees the three Maguire children crushed by the swerving car and rushes to help. Their mother, Anne Maguire, who is with the children, dies by suicide in January 1980.

Williams is so moved by the incident that within two days of the tragic event, she obtains 6,000 signatures on a petition for peace and gains wide media attention. With Mairead Corrigan, she co-founds the Women for Peace which, with Ciaran McKeown, later becomes the Community of Peace People.

Williams soon organises a peace march to the graves of the slain children, which is attended by 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women. However, the peaceful march is violently disrupted by members of the IRA, who accuse them of being “dupes of the British.” The following week, she leads another march in Ormeau Park that concludes successfully without incident – this time with 20,000 participants.

In recognition of her efforts for peace, Williams, together with Corrigan, become joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976.

The Peace Prize money is divided equally between Williams and Corrigan. Williams keeeps her share of the money, stating that her intention is to use it to promote peace beyond Ireland, but faces criticism for her decision. She and Corrigan have no contact after 1976. In 1978, Williams breaks off links with the Peace People movement and becomes instead an activist for peace in other areas around the world.

Williams receives the People’s Peace Prize of Norway in 1976, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1977, the Schweitzer Medallion for Courage, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Award in 1984, and the Frank Foundation Child Care International Oliver Award. In 1995, she is awarded the Rotary International “Paul Harris Fellowship” and the Together for Peace Building Award.

At the 2006 Earth Dialogues forum in Brisbane, Williams tells an audience of schoolchildren during a speech on Iraq War casualties that “Right now, I would like to kill George W. Bush.” From September 17 to 20, 2007, she gives a series of lectures in Southern California. On September 18, she presents a lecture to the academic community of Orange County entitled “Peace in the World Is Everybody’s Business” and on September 20 she gives a lecture to 2,232 members of the general public, including 1,100 high school sophomores, at Soka University of America. In 2010, she gives a lecture at WE Day Toronto, a WE Charity event that empowers students to be active within their communities, and worldwide.

Speaking at the University of Bradford before an audience of 200 in March 2011, Williams warns that young Muslim women on campus are vulnerable to attacks from angry family members, while the university does little to help protect them. “If you had someone on this campus these young women could go to say, ‘I am frightened’ – if you are not doing that here, you are dehumanising them by not helping these young women, don’t you think?”

At the time she receives the Nobel Prize, Williams works as a receptionist and is raising her two children with her first husband Ralph Williams. This marriage is dissolved in 1981. She marries businessman James Perkins in December 1982 and they live in Florida in the United States.

In 2004, Williams returns to live in Northern Ireland. She dies on March 17, 2020, at the age of 76 in Belfast.


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Birth of John Lighton Synge, Mathematician & Physicist

John Lighton Synge FRSC FRS, mathematician and physicist, whose seven-decade career includes significant periods in Ireland, Canada, and the United States, is born in Dublin on March 23, 1897. He is a prolific author and influential mentor and is credited with the introduction of a new geometrical approach to the theory of relativity.

Synge is born into a prominent Church of Ireland family. His uncle, John Millington Synge, is a famous playwright. He is more distantly related to the winner of the 1952 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Richard Laurence Millington Synge. He is a great-great-great-grandson of the mathematician and bishop Hugh Hamilton.

Synge attends St. Andrew’s College, Dublin and in 1915 enters Trinity College Dublin (TCD). He is elected a Foundation Scholar his first year, which is unusual as it is normally won by more advanced students. While an undergraduate at TCD, he spots a non-trivial error in Analytical Dynamics of Particles and Rigid Bodies, a textbook by E. T. Whittaker, who had recently taught there, and notifies Whittaker of the error. In 1919 he is awarded a BA in Mathematics and Experimental Physics, and also a gold medal for outstanding merit. In 1922 he is awarded an MA, and in 1926 a Sc.D., the latter upon submission of his published papers up to then.

In 1918, Synge marries Elizabeth Eleanor Mabel Allen. She is also a student at TCD, first of mathematics, then of history, but family finances forced her to leave without graduating. Their daughters Margaret (Pegeen), Cathleen and Isabel are born in 1921, 1923 and 1930 respectively. The middle girl grows up to become the distinguished Canadian mathematician Cathleen Synge Morawetz.

Synge is appointed to the position of lecturer at Trinity College, and then accepts a position at the University of Toronto in 1920, where he is an assistant professor of mathematics until 1925. There he attends lectures by Ludwik Silberstein on the theory of relativity, stimulating him to contribute “A system of space-time co-ordinates,” a letter in Nature in 1921.

Synge returns to Trinity College Dublin, in 1925, where he is elected to a fellowship and is appointed the University Professor of Natural Philosophy (later to be known as “physics”). He is a member of the American Mathematical Society and the London Mathematical Society. He is treasurer of the Royal Irish Academy in 1929. He goes back to Toronto in 1930, where he is appointed Professor of Applied Mathematics and becomes Head of the Department of Applied Mathematics. In 1940, he supervises three Chinese students, Guo Yonghuai, Qian Weichang and Chia-Chiao Lin, who later become leading applied mathematicians in China and the United States.

Synge spends some of 1939 at Princeton University, and in 1941, he is a visiting professor at Brown University. In 1943 he is appointed as Chairman of the Mathematics Department of Ohio State University. Three years later he becomes Head of the Mathematics Department of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, where John Nash, Jr. is one of his students. He spends a short time as a ballistic mathematician in the United States Air Force between 1944 and 1945.

Synge returns to Ireland in 1948, accepting the position of Senior Professor in the School of Theoretical Physics at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. This school had been set up in 1940, and had several outstanding members, including Erwin Schrödinger, a contributor to quantum mechanics, who is also a Senior Professor.

Synge makes outstanding contributions to different fields of work including classical mechanics, general mechanics and geometrical optics, gas dynamics, hydrodynamics, elasticity, electrical networks, mathematical methods, differential geometry, and Albert Einstein‘s theory of relativity. He studies an extensive range of mathematical physics problems, but his best-known work revolves around using geometrical methods in general relativity.

Synge is one of the first physicists to seriously study the interior of a black hole, and his early work is cited by both Martin David Kruskal and George Szekeres in their independent discoveries of the true structure of the Schwarzschild black hole. Synge’s later derivation of the Szekeres-Kruskal metric solution, which is motivated by a desire to avoid “using ‘bad’ coordinates to obtain ‘good’ coordinates,” has been generally under-appreciated in the literature, but is adopted by Chandrasekhar in his black hole monograph.

In pure mathematics, Synge is perhaps best known for Synge’s theorem, which concerns the topology of closed orientable Riemannian manifold of positive sectional curvature. When such a space is even-dimensional and orientable, the theorem says it must be simply connected. In odd dimensions, it instead says that such a space is necessarily orientable.

Synge also creates the game of Vish in which players compete to find circularity (vicious circles) in dictionary definitions.

Synge retires in 1972. He receives many honours for his works. He is elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1943. He is elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and in 1943 is the first recipient of the society’s Henry Marshall Tory Medal, as one of the first mathematicians working in Canada to be internationally recognised for his research in mathematics. In 1954 he is elected an honorary fellow of Trinity College Dublin. He is president of the Royal Irish Academy from 1961 until 1964. The Royal Society of Canada establishes the John L. Synge Award in his honour in 1986.

Synge dies on March 30, 1995, in Dublin, exactly one week after his ninety-eighth birthday.