Doran tours with Benson and other managements, and plays in the West End before setting up his own company in 1920. He leads it for eleven years, before leaving Britain to work in India. On his return he works on stage and makes occasional television appearances.
Doran is the son of Charles Jenkins Doran. He is educated in Cork and privately. In 1899, he makes his stage debut as a member of Frank Benson’s touring company, in Julius Caesar at the Theatre Royal, Belfast. He remains with Benson for two and a half years, during which he makes his London debut, as Captain MacMorris in Henry V at the Lyceum Theatre.
In October 1910, returning to England, Doran plays La Tribe in Count Hannibal at the New Theatre, after which he is Pistol in The Merry Wives of Windsor at the Garrick Theatre to the Falstaff of Asche. For the next ten years he plays in new, ephemeral works, interspersed with classics. Among his roles in the latter are Constantine Levin in Anna Karenina (1913), Douglas in Henry IV, Part 1and the Constable of France in Henry V (1914) in London, and a variety of Shakespeare parts at the Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon (1919).
In February 1920, Doran begins touring with his own Shakespearean company, playing Hamlet, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, Brutus in Julius Caesar, Malvolio in Twelfth Night, Prospero in The Tempest, Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, Falstaff, Henry V, and Jaques in As You Like It. He has a keen eye for rising talent, and among his recruits are Noel Streatfeild, Cecil Parker, Ralph Richardson, Edith Sharpe, Norman Shelley, Abraham Sofaer, Francis L. Sullivan and Donald Wolfit.
In 1931, Doran goes to India as director of Shakespeare’s plays at the State Theatre in Jhalawar and then on to Bombay where he performs primarily in Shakespeare on the radio. He returns to England in 1937. His last London appearance is in Song of Norway (1949). His last Shakespearean role in the theatre is Time in The Winter’s Tale (1951). He continues to act on stage in other parts until 1954. He appears on BBC Television as a senator in Othello in 1950 and Adabashev, the tragedian in Curtain Down in 1952.
Doran dies in Folkestone on the south coast of England on April 5, 1964, at the age of 87. An article on him published by Emory University in 2003 sums up his career thus:
On stage in one role or another, Doran’s fifty-seven years in the theatre made him a major force in the profession, particularly in his productions of Shakespeare. Such was his energy and enthusiasm that he kept alive for a few more years the actor-manager system when the major talents, men like Tree, Benson, and Irving, had dissolved their companies. Doran was indeed the last of his theatrical breed.
Cusack achieves his most famous victory on April 15, 1974, by winning the Boston Marathon, becoming the first and only Irishman to do so. His time of 2:13:39 is the third-fastest in Boston Marathon history at that point. His Boston win is a source of immense pride for the Irish community, especially in Boston. He recalls receiving $10 and $20 bills from Irish Americans in the mail with notes like “Have a beer on us, we’re proud of you!” His victory helps soothe the disappointment of local Irish fans who had seen fellow Irish runner Pat McMahon come close in previous years.
In 2024, on the 50th anniversary of his Boston win, Cusack returns to serve as the official race starter for the professional men’s division of the Boston Marathon.
Now in his 70s, Cusack remains a celebrated figure in Irish athletics and marathon history.
O’Hegarty is born to John and Katherine (née Hallahan) Hegarty. His parents’ families emigrate to the United States after the Great Famine, and his parents are married in Boston, Massachusetts. His father is a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB).
O’Hegarty is educated at North Monastery CBS, where he forms an enduring friendship with Terence MacSwiney. In 1888, his father dies of tuberculosis at the age of 42. Left destitute, his mother pawns her wedding ring to pay for an advertisement looking for work, and eventually becomes a cook.
O’Hegarty serves at the main Postal Sorting Office in Mount Pleasant, London, from 1902 to 1913. Along with J. J. Walsh, he spends three years at King’s College London, studying for the Secretary’s Office. While he succeeds in his studies, Walsh does not and returns to Ireland. O’Hegarty becomes the IRB representative for South East England and joins the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin and becomes a strong advocate of the Irish language. In 1905, he is elected secretary of the local Dungannon Club, which draws in as members Robert Lynd, Herbert Hughes and George Cavan. In 1907, as Sinn Féin’s London Secretary, he approves and signs the membership card of Michael Collins, later becoming friend and mentor to Collins.
O’Hegarty has to return to Ireland for a break due to overwork in 1909 and gives up some of his work for the Gaelic League. However, he takes over as editor of the IRB publication, Irish Freedom. It is in this publication that he famously writes, concerning the visit of King George V to Ireland in 1911: “Damn your concessions, England: we want our country!” In 1912, at the height of the Playboy riots, he writes four articles entitled “Art and the Nation” in Irish Freedom, which take a very liberal and inclusionist approach to Anglo-Irish literature and art in general but invokes the wrath of many of the paper’s readers.
In 1913, he is re-posted to Queenstown (present-day Cobh) as postmaster. He continues editing nationalist newspapers such as Irish Freedom (founded in 1910 and suppressed in December 1914 on account of its seditious content) and An tÉireannach and joins the Irish Volunteers. At the outbreak of war he is moved to Shrewsbury, probably on account of his political activities. In 1915, he marries Wilhelmina “Mina” Smyth, a schoolteacher and suffragist, and is then moved to Welshpool, Montgomeryshire. In the aftermath of the 1916 Easter Rising, he is opposed to physical force. In 1918, he refuses to take the British Oath of Allegiance and resigns his position in the Post Office.
O’Hegarty feels that the Abbey Theatre is “doing good for Ireland” and supports W. B. Yeats against attacks from Arthur Griffith and like-minded Nationalists. He opposes the extremist views of D. P. Moran, who seeks a Roman Catholic Irish-speaking Ireland.
O’Hegarty is Secretary of the Irish Department of Post and Telegraphs from 1922 to 1945. He is elected a member of the Irish Academy of Letters in 1954.
O’Hegarty’s son, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, is a founder of the Irish-language publishing house Sáirséal agus Dill. His daughter Gráinne, a harpist, marries Senator Michael Yeats, son of W. B. Yeats.
Hammond is the son of Leslie Hammond, a tram driver, and his wife Annie (née Lamont). His parents are not city people; his mother grew up near Ballybogy in the Ballymoney area of County Antrim, and his father, though from a family with roots in south County Londonderry, had lived in Ballymoney as a boy, and had been apprenticed to a blacksmith there. Both have a strong sense of their rural identity and maintain the Ulster Scots dialect of their childhood. They are never quite at home in the Belfast suburb of Cregagh, and in particular do not share the sectarian attitudes that are much more present in 1930s Belfast than they had been in north Antrim, one of the last strongholds of Presbyterian radicalism. Even as a boy, Hammond is interested in the old songs that his mother sang and realises that the traditions in which his parents had been nurtured are disappearing quickly in an increasingly urbanising and modernising world. When he encounters the work of Emyr Estyn Evans in the early 1940s, he is encouraged to document both rural tradition and the street life of the city, and he and a couple of friends, though still just teenagers, ride off on their bicycles to look for folklore in the hinterland of Belfast.
After primary school, Hammond wins a scholarship in 1941 to Methodist College Belfast, where he does well in examinations, and then goes to Stranmillis University College to train as a teacher. In his first job, in Harding Memorial primary school in east Belfast, he proves to be a popular, idealistic teacher, and is remembered by his pupils fifty years later as a fine singer and a teller of ghost stories, who had taken the class on memorable youth-hosteling trips to the Mourne Mountains. Youth hosteling and folklore collecting increases his awareness and understanding of the rich traditions of the whole community in the north of Ireland, and he is never constrained by political or religious barriers. His early career mirrors closely that of James Hawthorne, and their paths are to cross in later life.
Hammond is friendly with many others active in the cultural life of Northern Ireland and makes a name for himself as a song collector and eventually as an expert on all aspects of traditional singing. In 1956, he is awarded a scholarship to travel in the United States to meet the important pioneers of folk-music collecting and performance there. He records his first LP record of Ulster songs, I Am The Wee Falorie Man (1958), in the United States, and becomes friends with Pete Seeger, the Appalachian singer Jean Ritchie, with old blues singers, and notably with Liam Clancy, one of the three Clancy brothers who as a quartet with Tommy Makem are to popularise Irish folk music in the United States and elsewhere.
On returning to Belfast, Hammond takes a job in 1958 in Orangefield secondary school in the east of the city, where the highly regarded headmaster John Malone encourages new approaches to education. Among his pupils at Orangefield is George Ivan “Van” Morrison, who credits him with inspiring his interest in Irish traditional music. Hammond enjoys teaching but is increasingly drawn to folk-song performance and recording. He appears regularly on radio programmes of the BBC and Radio Éireann, and in 1964 joins the school’s department in BBC Northern Ireland. There, with colleagues like Sam Hanna Bell, James Hawthorne and others, he works on programmes such as Today and Yesterday in Northern Ireland, which for the first time introduces pupils (and many adults) to local history and to aspects of tradition. In 1968, with two friends, the poets Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, he puts on poetry and traditional music events in schools all over the province. The Arts Council funds the Room to Rhyme project, which is immensely influential and inspiring, and is still talked about many years later by those who attended as children.
Hammond is creatively involved with hundreds of hours of broadcasting, in television as well as radio, and eventually for adults as well as children. He writes scripts, produces documentary series such as Ulster in Focusand Explorations, and brings an artistic sensibility to filming, as well as working sympathetically with traditional singers and craftspeople. Dusty Bluebells, a sensitively made film of Belfast children’s street games, wins the prestigious Golden Harp award in 1972. After he leaves the BBC to work as a freelance, and founds Flying Fox Films in 1986, he continues making documentaries on many aspects of Ulster life and heritage. His film called Steel Chest, Nail in the Boot and the Barking Dog (1986), about working in the Belfast shipyards, also wins a Golden Harp award. A companion book of the same name is published. Another book is Belfast, City of Song(1989), with Maurice Leyden. In 1979, he edits a volume of the songs of Thomas Moore. His documentary programmes include films about singers from Boho, County Fermanagh, and about the big houses of the gentry in Ireland. The Magic Fiddle (1991/2) examines the role of the instrument in the folk music of Ireland, Scandinavia, Canada, and the American south, while Another Kind of Freedom (1993) is about the experiences of a former Orangefield pupil, the Beirut hostage Brian Keenan. He also produces and directs the films Something to Write Home About (1998), Where Are You Now? (1999), and Bogland (1999), all of which explore Seamus Heaney’s home region and experiences.
The first poem in Heaney’s collection Wintering Out (1972) is entitled “For David Hammond and Michael Longley.” Their lifelong friendship leads to several other creative collaborations. In particular, after a distressing evening in 1972 when Hammond, affected by the despair and terror unleashed by Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing of his city, is for once unable to sing, Heaney meditates on the experience in an essay and in an important poem, “The singer’s house” (subsequently included in his 1979 Field Work collection). The poem urges the singer to keep singing, to defend the values of art and friendship in a hostile time. Hammond collaborates with Dónal Lunny and other traditional musicians to bring out an LP also called The Singer’s House(1978), which includes Heaney’s poem on the album sleeve, and features some of the songs that he had made famous, such as “My Aunt Jane” and “Bonny Woodgreen,” from his vast repertoire of songs from Ulster. The album is reissued in 1980.
In 1995, Hammond is one of Heaney’s personal guests at the award of his Nobel prize in Stockholm, characteristically wearing his usual, mustard-yellow, cattle-dealer boots with evening dress. On another formal occasion, when he is awarded an honorary doctorate by Dublin City University in November 2003, he surprises the audience by standing up in his academic robes to sing “My Lagan love,” instead of giving an address. His unique, light mellow voice is an ideal vehicle for the traditional ballads which he knows so well. He records a number of records in the 1960s, including Belfast Street Songs, and publishes the book Songs of Belfast (1978). He also encourages traditional musicians like Arty McGlynn, and collaborates with them on various recording projects. He is well known for live and often impromptu performances at festivals and venues in Ireland and the United States. He also performs at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C.
Hammond is also a notable collaborator with poets and dramatists, especially in the important Field Day Theatre Company project, of which he is a director, along with Seamus Heaney, Tom Paulin, Seamus Deane, Thomas Kilroy, and the project’s founders, Brian Friel and Stephen Rea. He supports the Field Day search for a “fifth province,” where history and community and culture can intersect, believing that to speak unthinkingly of “two traditions” is to perpetuate superficial political divisions. As he says in an interview in The Irish Times on July 4, 1998, songs can “take you out of yourself” and become bridges to unite people.
Hammond receives many honours. In 1994, he receives the Estyn Evans award for his contribution to mutual understanding, and his work is featured in several major events in his honour: in the University of North Florida (1999), in the Celtic Film Festival in Belfast (2003), and in Belfast’s Linen Hall Library (2005). A Time to Dream, a film about his life and work, is broadcast on BBC Northern Ireland in December 2008.
Hammond dies in hospital in Belfast, after a long illness, on August 25, 2008, survived by his wife Eileen (née Hambleton), whom he marries on July 19, 1954, and by their son and three daughters. His funeral in St. Finnian’s Church is a major cultural event, where friends sing, play and speak in his honour.
In Seamus Heaney’s last collection of poetry, Human Chain (2010), he includes a poignant farewell to Hammond. The poet imagines (or perhaps dreams) of another visit to the singer’s house, but this time “The door was open, and the house was dark.”
(From: “Hammond, David Andrew (‘Davy’)” by Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, December 2014)
According to Sam Smyth in the Irish Independent, Mac Mathúna is “on a mission to collect songs and stories, music, poetry and dance before they were buried under the coming tsunami of pop music.”
Mac Mathúna presents the radio programme, Mo Cheol Thú, for 35 years. Upon his retirement in 2005, the managing director of RTÉ Radio, Adrian Moynes, describes him as “inseparable from RTÉ Radio.” Upon his death in 2009, the Irish Independent describes him as “a national treasure.”
After college Mac Mathúna works as a teacher and later at the Placenames Commission. In 1954, he joins Radio Éireann where his job is to record Irish traditional musicians playing in their own locales. This entails visiting such places as Sliabh Luachra, County Clare and County Sligo, and the resulting recordings feature in his radio programmes: Ceolta Tire, A Job of Journeywork and Humours of Donnybrook.
Mac Mathúna’s long-running Sunday morning radio series, Mo Cheol Thú (You are my music), begins in 1970 and continues until November 2005, when he retires from broadcasting. Each 45-minute programme offers a miscellany of archive music, poetry and folklore, mainly of Irish origin. It is one of radio’s longest running programmes. The last episode is broadcast on November 27, 2005, at 8:10 a.m.
Mac Mathúna wins two Jacob’s Awards, in 1969 and 1990, for his RTÉ Radio programmes promoting Irish traditional music. He receives the Freedom of Limerick city in June 2004. He is also awarded honorary doctorates by NUI Galway and the University of Limerick. In 2007, he receives the Musicians Award at the 10th annual TG4 Traditional Music Awards.
Joe Kennedy in the Sunday Independent in 2007 compares Mac Mathúna to “an amiable rock, rolling gently along, still picking up some moss and morsels of music that he may have missed.”
Mac Mathúna‘s wife, Dolly MacMahon (using the English version of her surname), is a singer of traditional songs. She comes from Galway and meets her husband in 1955. He has two sons named Padraic and Ciarán, one daughter named Déirdre, and four grandchildren at the time of his death: Eoin, Colm, Conor and Liam.
Musicians performing at the ceremony include Peadar Ó Riada, Cór Cúil Aodha and members of The Chieftains and Planxty. The corpse is then taken to Mount Jerome Crematorium. Journalist Kevin Myers says Mac Mathúna’s legacy will be the “rebirth of Irish music,” adding, “Well, if Ciarán Mac Mathúna can die, I suppose anyone can. Actually, I had always thought that he was immortal. He certainly appeared to have all the ingredients.”
Norman Derek Mahon, Irish poet, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 23, 1941, but lives in a number of cities around the world. At his death it is noted that his “influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense.” President of IrelandMichael D. Higgins says of Mahon, “he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness.”
At Inst Mahon encounters fellow students who share his interest in literature and poetry. The school produces a magazine in which he produces some of his early poems. According to the critic Hugh Haughton, his early poems are highly fluent and extraordinary for a person so young. His parents cannot see the point of poetry, but he sets out to prove them wrong after he wins his school’s Forrest Reid Memorial Prize for the poem ”The power that gives the water breath.”
At times expressing anti-establishment values, Mahon describes himself as an “aesthete” with a penchant “for left-wingery […] to which, perhaps naively, I adhere.”
In March 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, RTÉ News ends its evening broadcast with Mahon reading his poem Everything Is Going to Be All Right.
Mahon dies in Cork, County Cork, on October 1, 2020, after a short illness, aged 78. He is survived by his partner, Sarah Iremonger, and his three children, Rory, Katy, and Maisie. His papers are held at Emory University.
Mahon features on the Irish Leaving Certificate course with ten of his poems (Grandfather, Day Trip to Donegal, Ecclesiastes, After the Titanic, As It Should Be, A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford, Rathlin, The Chinese Restaurant in Portrush, Kinsale and Antarctica)
The gunmen, who are wearing workmen’s overalls, escape in a car afterward, killing Ken Campbell, a caretaker, as they leave. The people with whom Bradford had been meeting, most of them elderly, dive under tables for cover, and dozens of teenagers dancing nearby break into hysterical tears, but there are no injuries.
The killing is part of an escalation of IRA violence, both in London and in Northern Ireland, after the collapse of the prison hunger strike the previous month. The previous night an IRA bomb damages the London home of Britain’s Attorney General for Northern Ireland, Michael Havers. The home is empty and no one is seriously injured.
Bradford, a 40-year-old Methodist minister who is married and has a 6-year-old daughter, is shot several times, according to witnesses, and he dies almost immediately. His brother, Roy, who lives near the scene of the killing, in South Belfast, is at his side within moments. “But he was unconscious when I reached him, and he only lived for about a minute,” Roy Bradford says. News of the killing arouses fears of a Protestant reaction that could lead to serious civil unrest in Northern Ireland.
John “Jack” Hermon, the Chief Constable of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, issues an appeal to both the Protestant majority and the Roman Catholics to show “good sense and restraint.” He says security is being tightened in the province as a precautionary measure. He orders a wide-ranging search for the gunmen, who number at least three and possibly four, a point upon which the witnesses differ.
Bradford, who has been in Parliament since 1974, is an outspoken critic of the Irish nationalist guerrillas. He repeatedly calls for the reimposition of capital punishment in the province and for other strong deterrent measures.
With the Rev. Ian Paisley, another hard-line Member of Parliament, Bradford had planned to visit the United States In early 1982 to counteract the publicity of the IRA, which depends heavily on the money it receives from its American sympathizers. “There is a need for Americans to recognize that Ulster is not an occupied country,” Bradford says the previous month, “and that our political history is one of which we can be proud.”
The IRA, in a statement claiming responsibility for the killing, calls Bradford “one of the key people responsible for winding up the loyalistparamilitarysectarian machine in the North.” All twelve of Northern Ireland’s Members of Parliament – ten Protestants and two Catholics – are considered likely targets in the sectarian struggle that has claimed 2,100 lives in the province since 1969.
Mary Esperance (“Nancy”) Wynne-Jones is born on December 10, 1922, in Penmaenucha, Wales, to landowner Charles Llewellyn Wynne-Jones and Sybil Mary Gella Scott. The family spends half the year in Wales and half the year in Thornhill, Stalbridge, Dorset. She has two brothers, Andrew and Ronald (“Polly”), both of whom die in Africa during World War II.
Wynne-Jones is educated at home. Her skill in art leads to her getting lessons in Sherborne from a children’s book illustrator. Her music is encouraged by the family doctor and she begins to compose and study the violin, receiving lessons in Bournemouth with the first violinist of the symphony orchestra. After the start of World War II, she continues in Aberystwyth. She goes on to study the violin and composition at the Royal Academy of Music, London (1940–43). While in London she also serves as a Voluntary Aid Detachment nurse until 1943 and later as a draughtswoman at the Ordnance Survey.
After the war, Wynne-Jones purchases and manages a bookshop on the King’s Road in Chelsea, but it is not a financial success. She returns to painting, studying at the Heatherley School of Fine Art, London, from 1951 to 1952 and the Chelsea School of Art from 1952 to 1955. She travels extensively through Portugal and Italy painting landscapes. An interest in completing landscapes in an abstract manner leads her to study with Peter Lanyon in St. Ives, Cornwall.
In 1962, Wynne-Jones purchases Trevaylor House near Penzance and provides accommodation for other artists including renowned Irish painter Tony O’Malley, sculptor Conor Fallon and English poet and writer W. S. ‘Sydney’ Graham. In the 1970s she exhibits in Ireland at the Project Arts Centre, Dublin (1970) and at the Emmet Gallery, Dublin (1975 and 1977). During the 1980s she exhibits at the Lincoln and Hendricks galleries in Dublin before joining the Taylor Gallery, run by John and Patrick Taylor. She is elected an honorary member of the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) in 1994 and becomes a member of Aosdána in 1996. Originally an abstract artist, her contact with the Irish countryside slowly transforms her work to that of a landscape artist, albeit with an influence of abstraction attached to it. She becomes well-known in Irish art circles as an eminent Irish landscape artist.
Wynne-Jones is involved with artist Derek Middleton before moving to Cornwall. There she becomes romantically involved with Graham who is in an open marriage, however, it is the death of her mentor Peter Lanyon which devastates her. She meets the sculptor Conor Fallon through their mutual friend, Tony O’Malley. Fallon had arrived in Cornwall ostensibly to meet Lanyon. They marry in 1966. Their honeymoon in Provence is immortalised in expressionist paintings done by her. The couple adopts a boy and a girl, siblings, John and Bridget. In 1972, she moves with her family to Kinsale, County Cork. It is in the area around here that a number of her paintings are created. Later she paints the mountain visible from her Wicklow home after the family moves in the late 1980s. She moves to Ballard House, near Rathdrum, County Wicklow in 1987.
Wynne-Jones dies on November 9, 2006, and is buried in Ballinatone (Church of Ireland), Rathdrum.
Brennan is born in Dublin on January 6, 1917, one of four siblings, and grows up at 48 Cherryfield Avenue in the Dublin suburb of Ranelagh. She and her sisters are each named after ancient Irish Queens: Emer, Deirdre and Maeve. Her parents, Robert and Úna Brennan, both from County Wexford, are republicans and are deeply involved in the Irish political and cultural struggles of the early twentieth century. They participate in the 1916 Easter Rising but while Úna is imprisoned for a few days, Robert is sentenced to death. The sentence is commuted to penal servitude.
Robert’s continuing political activity results in further imprisonments in 1917 and 1920. Brennan is born while he was in prison. He is director of publicity for the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army during the Irish Civil War. He also founds and is the director of The Irish Press newspaper. His imprisonments and activities greatly fragment her childhood. In her story The Day We Got Our Own Back she recounts her memory of how, when she was five, her home was raided by Irish Free State forces looking for her father, who was on the run.
Robert Brennan is appointed the Irish Free State’s first minister to the United States, and the family moves to Washington, D.C. in 1934, when Brennan is seventeen. She attends the Sisters of ProvidenceCatholic school in Washington, Immaculata Seminary, graduating in 1936. She then graduates with a degree in English from American University in 1938. She and her two sisters remain in the United States when her parents and brother return to Ireland in 1944.
Brennan moves to New York City and finds work as a fashion copywriter at Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s. She also writes a Manhattan column for the Dublin society magazine Social and Personal, and writes several short pieces for The New Yorker magazine. In 1949, she is offered a staff job by William Shawn, The New Yorker‘s managing editor.
Brennan first writes for The New Yorker as a social diarist. She writ’s sketches about New York life in The Talk of the Town section under the pseudonym “The Long-Winded Lady.” She also contributes fiction criticism, fashion notes, and essays. She writes about both Ireland and the United States.
The New Yorker begins publishing Brennan’s short stories in 1950. The first of these stories is called The Holy Terror. In it, Mary Ramsay, a “garrulous, greedy heap of a woman” tries to keep her job as a ladies’ room attendant in a Dublin hotel.
Brennan’s work is fostered by William Keepers Maxwell, Jr., and she writes under The New Yorker managing editors Harold Ross and William Shawn. Although she is widely read in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, she is almost unknown in Ireland, even though Dublin is the setting of many of her short stories.
A compendium of Brennan’s New Yorker articles called The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from the New Yorker is published in 1969. Two collections of short stories, In and Out of Never-Never Land (1969) and Christmas Eve (1974) are also published.
Brennan’s career does not really take off until after her death which leads many of her stories to be reintroduced to the public and many articles written about her up until her passing.
The love of Brennan’s life is reportedly writer and theatre critic/director Walter Kerr but he breaks off their engagement and marries writer Bridget Jean Collins.
In 1954, Brennan marries St. Clair McKelway, The New Yorker‘s managing editor. McKelway has a history of alcoholism, womanizing and manic depression and has already been divorced four times. She and McKelway divorce after five years.
Brennan is writing consistently and productively in the late 1960s. By the time her first books are published, however, she is showing signs of mental illness. Her previously immaculate appearance becomes unkempt. Her friends begin to find her eccentricities disturbing rather than entertaining. She becomes obsessive.
In the 1970s, Brennan becomes paranoid and alcoholic. Hospitalized on numerous occasions, she becomes destitute and homeless, frequently sleeping in the women’s lavatory at The New Yorker. She is last seen at the magazine’s offices in 1981.
In the 1980s, Brennan vanishes from view and her work is forgotten. After wandering from one transient hotel to another along 42nd Street, she is admitted to Lawrence Nursing Home in Arverne.
Brennan dies of a heart attack on November 1, 1993, aged 76, and is buried in Queens, New York City.
Concannon is educated by the Loreto nuns in Coleraine, County Londonderry. In 1897, she studies modern languages at the Royal University of Ireland on a three-year scholarship. She studies abroad during these years as in 1899, she travels to Germany and studies German in Berlin University accompanied by her friend, Mary Macken. She then travels to France to study French at Sorbonne University. In 1900, she graduates Bachelor of Arts with first class honours and goes on to study Master of Arts in 1902 at the Royal University of Ireland. She is fortunate to being one of the first generation of educated women.
In 1906, Concannon marries Tomás Bán Ó Conceanainn, who she met in 1900 when he arrived home from the United States. They settle down in County Galway where they share the same love for the Irish language and write many Irish texts. They have no children. In Galway, she is a professor at University College Galway where she teaches history, which mainly involves the history of Irish women. In 1909, she is offered a lectureship at University College Dublin, in Italian, but the offer is then withdrawn before she can accept it, so she decides to pursue a writing career.
Concannon produces over twenty books, including works on religion, the history of Ireland and Irish women’s history. Her works are highly impacted by her political and nationalist views. Her analyses of Irish history is based on Catholicism and patriotism. She is also an advocate of Irish language restoration. Her first writings are love poems to her husband. These poems are ”simple, sensuous and passionate.”
Concannon also produces a number of imaginative historical text for children. She uses her married name for her publications and her first book, entitled A Garden of girls, or the famous schoolgirls of former days, is published in 1914. It is about “school life and education of real little girls” Her next well known piece is the Life of St. Columban in 1915, which is a study about the Irish ancient monastic life and a biography of a sixth-century saint.
Two of Concannon’s books, Daughters of Banba (1922) and St. Patrick (1932), receive the Tailteann Medal for Literature, and The Poor Clares in Ireland (1929) wins the National University Prize, a D.Litt. higher doctorate degree for historical research.
Concannon’s most common publication, Women of ‘Ninety Eight, is dedicated to all the dead women and all the living ones who have given their loved ones. This book emerges on the ideologies of Catholicism and patriotism “praising the devotion of Irish nationalist women while emphasising the centrality of women’s spiritual and domestic role in the home to the well-being of the nation.” As this work is written during the time of the Irish War of Independence, she stresses the importance of women help during the rebellion as “they acted as messengers and intelligence officers,” and in some cases, they fought as any men.
Concerning the Land Purchase (Guarantee Fund) Bill 1935, which according to George Cecil Bennett will negatively impact the rural middle class of which he is a representative, Bennett accuses Concannon and her fellow Dublin men of not caring about the people of the country. Concannon goes on to vote that the Dáil should disagree with the Seanad Éireann-proposed bill with 71 others.
Though Concannon is a TD as a university representative, she votes with her party to remove university representation from the Dáil, leading one TD to say, “I am very much surprised to see such a distinguished scholar and such a great contributor to Irish literature as Deputy Mrs. Concannon voting for the disfranchisement of the University that she has so well and so ably represented.”
Concannon speaks on behalf of Irish women in the Dáil in 1936. She speaks on how Irish women play a fundamental role in Ireland’s agricultural economy and therefore more money should be put toward educating these women.
Concannon is one of the minority voices against the role appointed to women in Éamon de Valera‘s constitution. She does not contest the Dáil election of 1937.
After the adoption of the Constitution of Ireland in 1937, the National University of Ireland constituency is reconstituted in the new Seanad Éireann. The first election takes place in 1938, and Concannon is elected. She is a popular figure and is re-elected each election in the Seanad until she dies in office on February 27, 1952.
seamus dubhghaill 