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Death of Adam Loftus, First Provost of Trinity College, Dublin

adam-loftusAdam Loftus, Archbishop of Armagh, and later Dublin, and Lord Chancellor of Ireland from 1581, dies in Dublin on April 5, 1605. He is also the first Provost of Trinity College, Dublin.

Loftus is born in 1533, the second son of a monastic bailiff, Edward Loftus, in the heart of the English Yorkshire Dales. He embraces the Protestant faith early in his development. He is an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he reportedly attracts the notice of the young Queen Elizabeth, as much by his physique as through the power of his intellect. Although this encounter may never have happened, Loftus certainly meets with the Queen more than once, and she becomes his patron for the rest of her reign. At Cambridge Loftus takes holy orders as a Catholic priest and is appointed rector of Outwell St. Clement in Norfolk. He comes to the attention of the Catholic Queen Mary, who names him vicar of Gedney, Lincolnshire. On Elizabeth’s accession in 1558 he declares himself Anglican.

Loftus makes the acquaintance of the Queen’s favourite Thomas Radclyffe, 3rd Earl of Sussex and serves as his chaplain in Ireland in 1560. In 1561 he becomes chaplain to Alexander Craike, Bishop of Kildare and Dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Later that year he is appointed rector of Painstown in Meath, and evidently earns a reputation as a learned and discreet advisor to the English authorities in Dublin. In 1563, he is consecrated Archbishop of Armagh at the unprecedented age of 28 by Hugh Curwen, Archbishop of Dublin.

Following a clash with Shane O’Neill, the real power in Ulster during these years, he comes to Dublin in 1564. To supplement the meager income of his troubled archbishopric he is temporarily appointed to the Deanery of St. Patrick’s Cathedral by the queen in the following year. He is also appointed president of the new commission for ecclesiastical causes. This leads to a serious quarrel with the highly respected Bishop of Meath, Hugh Brady.

In 1567 Loftus, having lobbied successfully for the removal of Hugh Curwen, who becomes Bishop of Oxford, and having defeated the rival claims of the Bishop of Meath, is appointed Archbishop of Dublin, where the queen expects him to carry out reforms in the Church. On several occasions he temporarily carries out the functions of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, and in August 1581 he is appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland after an involved dispute with Nicholas White, Master of the Rolls in Ireland. He is constantly occupied in attempts to improve his financial position by obtaining additional preferment, and is subject to repeated accusations of corruption in public office.

In 1582 Loftus acquires land and builds a castle at Rathfarnham, which he inhabits from 1585. In 1569–1570 the divisions in Irish politics take on a religious tinge with the First Desmond Rebellion in Munster and Pope Pius V‘s 1570 papal bull Regnans in Excelsis. The bull questions Elizabeth’s authority and thereafter Roman Catholics are suspected of disloyalty by the official class unless they are discreet.

Loftus takes a leading part in the execution of Dermot O’Hurley, Archbishop of Cashel. When O’Hurley refuses to give information, Francis Walsingham suggests he should be tortured. Although the Irish judges repeatedly decide that there is no case against O’Hurley, on June 19, 1584 Loftus and Sir Henry Wallop write to Walsingham “We gave warrant to the knight-marshal to do execution upon him, which accordingly was performed, and thereby the realm rid of a most pestilent member.”

Between 1584 and 1591 Loftus has a series of clashes with Sir John Perrot on the location of an Irish University. Perrot wants to use St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin as the site of the new University, which Loftus seeks to preserve as the principal place of Protestant worship in Dublin, as well as a valuable source of income for himself. The Archbishop wins the argument with the help of his patron, Queen Elizabeth I, and Trinity College, Dublin is founded at its current location, named after his old college at Cambridge, leaving the Cathedral unaffected. Loftus is named as its first Provost in 1593.

The issue of religious and political rivalry continue during the two Desmond Rebellions (1569–83) and the Nine Years’ War (1594–1603), both of which overlap with the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604), during which some rebellious Irish nobles are helped by the Papacy and by Elizabeth’s arch-enemy Philip II of Spain. Due to the unsettled state of the country Protestantism makes little progress, unlike in Celtic Scotland and Wales at that time. It comes to be associated with military conquest and is therefore hated by many. The political-religious overlap is personified by Loftus, who serves as Archbishop and as Lord Chancellor of Ireland. An unlikely alliance forms between Gaelic Irish families and the Norman “Old English“, who had been enemies for centuries but who now mostly remain Roman Catholic.

Adam Loftus dies in Dublin on April 5, 1605 and is interred in the building he had helped to preserve for future generations, while many of his portraits hang today within the walls of the University which he helped found. Having buried his wife Jane (Purdon) and two sons (of their 20 children) in the family vault at St. Patrick’s, Loftus dies at his Episcopal Palace in Kevin Street “worn out with age” and joins his family in the same vault. His zeal and efficiency are commended by James I upon the king’s accession.


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Death of Bishop James Ussher

james-ussherJames Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland, dies in Reigate, Surrey, England on March 21, 1656. He is best known for his massive compendium of ancient history, The Annals of the World, in which he attempts to calculate the number of years that had elapsed since creation.

Ussher is born in Dublin on January 4, 1581. Early in life he is determined to pursue a career with the Church of England, a resolve quite similar to that of the Biblical Judge, Samuel.

A gifted polyglot, Ussher enters Dublin Free School and then the newly founded Trinity College, Dublin on January 9, 1594, at the age of thirteen (not an unusual age at the time). He receives his Bachelor of Arts degree by 1598, and is a fellow and MA by 1600. In May 1602, he is ordained in the Trinity College Chapel as a deacon (and possibly priest on the same day) in the Protestant Church of Ireland by his uncle Henry Ussher, the Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland.

At the age of 26, Ussher becomes Professor and Chairman of the Department of Divinity at the University of Dublin, and he holds his professorship from 1609 to 1621. In 1625, he becomes Archbishop of Armagh, an office he apparently holds until his death. In 1628, King James I makes him a Privy Councillor.

Ussher is considered well-read and well-versed in history, a subject that soon becomes his primary focus. He writes several histories of the doings of the Irish and English churches dating back to Roman times. He also makes himself an expert in Semitic languages, an expertise that informs his argument in favor of the Masoretic Text of the Bible in preference to the Septuagint.

Ussher’s Confessions appear in 1643, followed in 1646 by his fifth work, Here I Stand. His most famous work, the dating of the creation as calculated from the Biblical record, appears in writing in the 1650s.

In 1656, Ussher goes to stay in the Countess of Peterborough’s house in Reigate, Surrey. On March 19, he feels a sharp pain in his side after supper and takes to his bed. His symptoms seem to have been those of a severe internal haemorrhage. Two days later, on March 21, 1656, he dies at the age of 75. His last words are reported as: “O Lord, forgive me, especially my sins of omission.” His body is embalmed and is to have been buried in Reigate, but at Oliver Cromwell‘s insistence he was given a state funeral on April 17 and is buried in the chapel of St. Erasmus in Westminster Abbey.

Ussher’s extensive library of manuscripts, many of them Middle Eastern originals, become part of the collection at the University of Dublin.


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Birth of Grace Gifford Plunkett, Artist & Irish Republican

grace-gifford-plunkettGrace Evelyn Gifford Plunkett, artist and cartoonist who is active in the Republican movement, is born in Rathmines, Dublin on March 4, 1888. She marries her fiancé, Joseph Plunkett, in Kilmainham Gaol only a few hours before he is executed for his part in the 1916 Easter Rising.

Gifford is the second youngest of 12 children born to Frederick Gifford, a solicitor and a Roman Catholic, and Isabella Julia Burton Gifford, a Protestant. The boys are baptised as Catholics and the girls as Protestant, but effectively the children are all raised as Protestants with the girls attending Alexandra College in Earlsfort Terrace.

At the age of 16, Gifford goes to the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art, where she studies under the Irish artist William Orpen. Orpen regards her as one of his most talented pupils. Around this time, her talent for caricature is discovered and developed. In 1907 she attends the course in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art, London.

Gifford returns to Dublin in 1908 and, with great difficulty, tries to earn a living as a caricaturist, publishing her cartoons in The Shanachie, Irish Life, Meadowstreet and The Irish Review, which is edited from 1913 by Joseph Plunkett. She considers emigrating but gives up the idea. Nora Dryhurst, a journalist from London, brings her to the opening of the new bilingual school Scoil Éanna in Ranelagh, Dublin. It is here that she meets Plunkett for the first time. He is a friend of her brother-in-law, another of the future leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising, Thomas MacDonagh, who is married to her sister Muriel.

Gifford’s growing interest in the Roman Catholic religion leads to the deepening of Gifford and Plunkett’s relationship as she begins to discuss Catholic mystical ideas with him. Plunkett proposes to her in 1915 and she accepts and takes formal instruction in Catholic doctrine. She is received into the Catholic Church in April 1916. The couple plans to marry on Easter Sunday that year, in a double wedding with his sister and her fiancé.

After the Rising, Gifford’s brother-in-law Thomas MacDonagh is shot with Patrick Pearse and Thomas Clarke by firing squad on May 3. That day, she hears that Plunkett is to be shot at dawn. She purchases a ring in a jeweler’s shop in Dublin and, with the help of a priest, persuades the military authorities to allow them to marry. She and Joseph are married on the night of May 3 in the chapel of Kilmainham Gaol, a few hours before he is executed.

Grace Plunkett decides to devote herself through her art to the promotion of Sinn Féin policies and resumes her commercial work to earn a living. She is elected to the Sinn Féin executive in 1917.

During the Irish Civil War, Plunkett is arrested with many others in February 1923 and interned at Kilmainham Gaol for three months. She paints pictures on the walls of her cell, including one of the Blessed Virgin and the Christ Child. She is released in May 1923.

When the Civil War ends, Plunkett has no home of her own and little money. Like many Anti-Treaty Republicans, she is the target of social ostracism and has difficulty finding work. Her talent as an artist is her only real asset and her cartoons are published in various newspapers and magazines. She moves from one apartment to another and eats in the city-centre restaurants but has no wish to remarry. Her material circumstances improve in 1932 when she receives a Civil List pension from Éamon de Valera‘s Fianna Fáil government. She lives for many years in a flat in Nassau Street with a balcony overlooking the sports ground of Trinity College.

Plunkett’s in-laws refuse to honour her husband’s will, in which he leaves everything to his widow. Legally, the will is invalid because there is only one witness, rather than the required two, and the marriage takes place after the will is made, automatically revoking it. For years she receives nothing, so she begins legal proceedings against her in-laws in 1934. The Count and Countess Plunkett settle out of court and she is paid £700, plus costs.

At around this time Plunkett joins the Old Dublin Society, where she meets the noted Irish harpsichord maker Cathal Gannon. When Cathal marries, she gives him and his wife Margaret a present of two single beds and a picture. From the late 1940s onwards, her health declines. In 1950 she is brought to St. Vincent’s Hospital. She convalesces in a nursing home, which she does not like, mainly because it restricts her freedom.

Grace Gifford Plunkett dies suddenly on December 13, 1955 in her apartment in South Richmond Street, Portobello. Her body is removed to St. Kevin’s Church, Harrington Street and among the attendees at her funeral is President Seán T. O’Kelly. She is buried with full military honours close to the republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.


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Birth of Sophie Bryant, Mathematician, Educator & Feminist

sophie-bryantSophie Willock Bryant, Anglo-Irish mathematician, educator, feminist and activist, is born Sophie Willock in Dublin on February 15, 1850.

Bryant’s father is Rev. Dr. William Willock DD, Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin. She is educated at home, largely by her father. As a teenager she moves to London when her father is appointed Professor of Geometry at the University of London in 1863, and she attends Bedford College. At the age of nineteen she marries Dr. William Hicks Bryant, a surgeon ten years her senior, who dies of cirrhosis within a year.

In 1875 Bryant becomes a teacher and is invited by Frances Mary Buss to join the staff of North London Collegiate School. In 1895 she succeed Buss as headmistress of North London Collegiate, serving until 1918.

When the University of London opens its degree courses to women in 1878, Bryant becomes one of the first women to obtain First Class Honours, in Mental and Moral Sciences, together with a degree in mathematics in 1881, and three years later is awarded the degree of Doctor of Science. In 1882 she is the third woman to be elected to the London Mathematical Society and is the first active female member, publishing her first paper with the Society in 1884. Together with Charles Smith, Bryant edits three volumes of Euclid‘s Elements, for the use of schools (Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, books I and II (1897); Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, books III and IV (1899); Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, books VI and IX (1901)).

Bryant is a pioneer in education for women. She is the first woman to receive a Doctor of Science in England, one of the first three women to be appointed to a Royal Commission, the Bryce commission on Secondary Education in 1894–1895, and one of the first three women to be appointed to the Senate of the University of London. When Trinity College Dublin opens its degrees to women, she is one of the first to be awarded an honorary doctorate. She is also instrumental in setting up the Cambridge Training College for Women, now Hughes Hall, Cambridge. She is also said to be one of the first women to own a bicycle.

Bryant is interested in Irish politics, writes books on Irish history and ancient Irish law (Celtic Ireland (1889), The Genius of the Gael (1913)), and is an ardent Protestant Irish nationalist. She is president of the Irish National Literary Society in 1914. She supports women’s suffrage but advocates postponement until women were better educated.

Bryant loves physical activity and the outdoors. She rows, cycles, swims, and twice climbs the Matterhorn. She dies at the age of 72 in a hiking accident in the Alps near Chamonix, France on August 14, 1922.


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Death of Irish Artist John Butler Yeats

john-butler-yeatsJohn Butler Yeats, Irish artist and the father of William Butler Yeats, Lily Yeats, Elizabeth Corbett Yeats and Jack Butler Yeats, dies in New York City on February 3, 1922. The National Gallery of Ireland holds a number of his portraits in oil and works on paper, including one of his portraits of his son William, painted in 1900. His portrait of John O’Leary (1904) is considered his masterpiece.

Yeats is born on March 16, 1839 in Lawrencetown, County Down, in what is now Northern Ireland. His parents are William Butler Yeats (1806–1862) and Jane Grace Corbert. He is the eldest of nine children. Educated in Trinity College Dublin and a member of the University Philosophical Society, Yeats begins his career as a lawyer and junior assistant briefly with Isaac Butt before he takes up painting in 1867 and studies at the Heatherley School of Fine Art.

Yeats marries Susan Pollexfen (13 July 1841 – 3 January 1900) on September 10, 1863 at St. John’s Church in Sligo. Susan Yeats is dismayed when her husband abandons the study of law to become an artist. She is described as a “shadowy figure” who goes “quietly, pitifully, mad.” They have six children: William Butler Yeats, Susan Mary “Lily” Yeats, Elizabeth Corbett “Lolly” Yeats, Robert Corbet Yeats, John “Jack” Butler Yeats and Jane Grace Yeats.

There are few records of his sales, so there is no catalogue of his work in private collections. It is possible that some of his early work may have been destroyed by fire in World War II. It is clear that he has no trouble getting commissions as his sketches and oils are found in private homes in Ireland, England and the United States. His later portraits show great sensitivity to the sitter. However, he is a poor businessman and is never financially secure. He moves frequently and shifts several times between England and Ireland.

In 1907, at the age of 68, he travels to New York aboard the RMS Campania, with his daughter Lily, and never returns to Ireland. In October 1909 he moves into his final home, a boarding house run by the Petitpas sisters which is located at 317 West Twenty-Ninth Street. In New York, he is friendly with members of the Ashcan School of painters.

John Butler Yeats dies in the boarding house on February 3, 1922. Edmund Quinn makes a death mask which is now in the collection of the Yeats Society in Sligo. Yeats is buried in Chestertown Rural Cemetery in Chestertown, New York, next to his friend, Jeanne Robert Foster.


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Birth of Irish Billionaire Tony Ryan

tony-ryanThomas Anthony “Tony” Ryan, Irish billionaire, philanthropist and businessman, is born in Thurles, County Tipperary on February 2, 1936. He works for Aer Lingus, before going on to found their aircraft leasing arm, wet-leasing out their aircraft in the quieter winter months.

In 1975, with Aer Lingus and the Guinness Peat Group, Ryan founds Guinness Peat Aviation (later GPA Group), an aircraft leasing company, with a $50,000 investment. GPA grows to be the world’s biggest aircraft lessor, worth $4 billion at its peak. However its value dramatically collapses in 1992 after the cancellation of its planned IPO.

Ryan makes €55m from the sale of AerFi, the successor to GPA, in 2000. In 2001, he acquires Castleton Farm near Lexington, Kentucky from the Van Lennep Family Trust. He renames it Castleton Lyons and undertakes renovations to the property while returning to its original roots as a thoroughbred operation. He is a tax exile who lives in Monte Carlo, but also owns a stud farm near his home in Dolla, County Tipperary. He is the 7th wealthiest individual from Ireland in the Sunday Times Rich List 2007 with over €1.5bn(£1bn).

Ryan is best known in the public mind as the founder of the eponymous Ryanair with Christopher Ryan and Liam Lonergan. Ryanair is believed to be the main source of his wealth in later life. Ryanair is now one of the biggest airlines in Europe and is valued at over 15 billion Euros as of December 2019.

Ryan over the years helps nurture two successful business protégés, Denis O’Brien and Michael O’Leary, both of whom become billionaires.

Ryan holds honorary doctorates from several universities, including Trinity College, Dublin, the National University of Ireland, Galway and the University of Limerick.

Ryan is an active and innovative funder of university education in Ireland. He donates a marine science institute to NUI Galway in 1993 which is named the Martin Ryan Marine Science Institute in honour of his father. He shows interest in marine science and aquaculture development in the west of Ireland. He also funds The Ryan Academy for Entrepreneurship at the Citywest park, that is run by Dublin City University.

At the time of his death Ryan owns 16% of Tiger Airways, a discount carrier based in Singapore which is founded in December 2003.

Ryan dies on October 3, 2007 at Celbridge, County Kildare following an 18-month battle with pancreatic cancer. His eldest son, Cathal, dies just three months later, aged 48, after being diagnosed with cancer.


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Birth of Poet & Linguist Michael O’Siadhail

michael-o-siadhailMicheal O’Siadhail, poet and linguist, is born in Dublin on January 12, 1947. Among his awards are The Marten Toonder Prize and The Irish American Culture Institute Prize for Literature.

O’Siadhail is born into a middle-class Dublin family. His father, a chartered accountant, is born in County Monaghan and works most of his life in Dublin, and his mother is a Dubliner with roots in County Tipperary. Both of them are portrayed in his work in several poems such as “Kinsmen” and “Promise”. From the age of twelve, he is educated at the Jesuit boarding school Clongowes Wood College, an experience he is later to describe in a sequence of poems “Departure” (The Chosen Garden).

At Clongowes O’Siadhail is influenced by his English teacher, the writer Tom MacIntyre, who introduces him to contemporary poetry. At thirteen he first visits the Aran Islands. This pre-industrial society with its large-scale emigration has a profound impact on him. His earlier work reflects this tension between his love of his native Dublin and his emotional involvement with those outlying communities and which features in the sequence “Fists of Stone” (The Chosen Garden).

O’Siadhail studies at Trinity College Dublin (1964–68) where his teachers include David H. Greene and Máirtín Ó Cadhain. He is elected a Scholar of the College and takes a First Class Honours Degree. His circle at Trinity includes David McConnell (later professor of genetics), Mary Robinson and David F. Ford (later Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge). He subsequently embarks on a government exchange scholarship studying folklore and the Icelandic language at the University of Oslo. He retains lifelong contacts with Norwegian friends and sees Scandinavian literature as a major influence.

In 1970 O’Siadhail marries Bríd Ní Chearbhaill, who is born in Gweedore, County Donegal. She is for most of her life a teacher and later head mistress in an inner-city Dublin primary school until her retirement in 1995 due to Parkinson’s disease. She is a central figure in his oeuvre celebrated in the sequence “Rerooting” in The Chosen Garden and in Love Life, which is a meditation on their lifelong relationship. One Crimson Thread travels with the progression of her Parkinson’s Disease. She dies on June, 17, 2013.

For seventeen years, O’Siadhail earns his living as an academic; firstly as a lecturer at Trinity College (1969–73) where he is awarded a Master of Letters degree in 1971 and then as a research professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. During these years he gives named lectures in Dublin and at Harvard University and Yale University and is a visiting professor at the University of Iceland in 1982. In 1987 he resigns his professorship to devote himself to writing poetry which he describes as “a quantum leap.”

During his years as an academic, O’Siadhail, writing under the Irish spelling of his name, published works on the linguistics of Irish and a textbook for learners of Irish.

O’Siadhail serves as a member of the Arts Council of the Republic of Ireland (1987–93), of the Advisory Committee on Cultural Relations (1989–97) and is editor of Poetry Ireland Review. He is the founding chairman of ILE (Ireland Literature Exchange). As a founder member of Aosdána (Academy of Distinguished Irish Artists) he is part of a circle of artists and works with his friend the composer Seóirse Bodley, the painters Cecil King and Mick O’Dea and in 2008 gives a reading as part of Brian Friel‘s eightieth birthday celebration.

O’Siadhail represents Ireland at the Poetry Society‘s European Poetry Festival in London in 1981 and at the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1997. He is writer-in-residence at the Yeats Summer School in 1991 and writer in residence at the University of British Columbia in 2002.

O’Siadhail is now married to Christina Weltz, who is a native of New York, and Assistant Professor of surgical oncology at Mount Sinai Hospital. They reside in New York.