The Molly Maguires is an Irish secret society that is allegedly responsible for some incidents of vigilante justice in the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania. They defend their actions as attempts to protect exploited Irish American workers. They are, in fact, often regarded as one of the first organized labor groups.
In the first five years of the Great Famine in Ireland that begins in 1845, 500,000 immigrants come to the United States from Ireland — nearly half of all immigrants to the United States during these years. The tough economic circumstances facing the immigrants lead many Irish men to the anthracite fields in the mountains of eastern Pennsylvania. Miners work under dangerous conditions and are severely underpaid. Small towns owned by the mining companies further exploit workers by charging rent for company housing. In response to these abuses, secret societies like the Molly Maguires spring up, leading sporadic terrorist campaigns to settle worker/owner disputes.
Members of the Molly Maguires are accused of murder, arson, kidnapping, and other crimes. Industry owners become increasingly concerned about the threat posed by the Molly Maguires. Franklin B. Gowen, president of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad, hires the Pinkerton Detective Agency to infiltrate the secret society and find evidence that can be used against them. James McParland, who later becomes the most celebrated private detective of the era, takes the high-risk assignment and goes undercover within the organization. For more than two years, he establishes his place in the Molly Maguires and builds trust among his fellow members.
Eventually, several Molly Maguires confess their roles in a murder to McParland. When he is finally pulled out of the society in February 1876, his information leads to the arrest and conviction of nineteen men.
In June 1877, ten Molly Maguires are hanged on a single day in what becomes known as “Pennsylvania’s Day of the Rope.” In December of the following year, Kehoe is arrested and hanged for the 1862 murder of Frank W. S. Langdon, a mine foreman, despite the fact that it is widely believed he is wrongly accused and not actually responsible for anyone’s death. Although the governor of Pennsylvania, John F. Hartranft, believes Kehoe’s innocence, he signs the death warrant anyway. Kehoe’s hanging at the gallows is officially hailed as “the Death of Molly-ism.”
Though the deaths of the vigilante Molly Maguires help quell the activity of the secret society, the increased assimilation of the Irish into mainstream society and their upward mobility out of the coal jobs is the real reason that protective secret societies like the Molly Maguires eventually fade into obscurity.
In 1979, Pennsylvania Governor Milton Shapp grants a posthumous pardon to Kehoe after an investigation by the Pennsylvania Board of Pardons. The request for a pardon is made by one of Kehoe’s descendants. Kehoe proclaims his innocence until his death. The Board recommends the pardon after investigating Kehoe’s trial and the circumstances surrounding it. Shapp praises Kehoe, saying the men called “Molly Maguires” are “martyrs to labour” and heroes in the struggle to establish a union and fair treatment for workers.
O’Hegarty is born on December 29, 1879, at Carrignavar, County Cork, 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).
He 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.
He 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.
He 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.
He 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.
His 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.
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 Catholictenant 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.
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.
Heighway’s early education takes place in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, where he attends Ecclesall Junior School until 1959, followed by High Storrs School and latterly Moseley Hall Grammar School for Boys in Cheadle, near Stockport.
Heighway’s early promise as a winger is not spotted by professionals. Instead, he concentrates on his studies in economics and politics at the University of Warwick in Coventry achieving a 2:1.
In 1970, Heighway is studying for his final exams and playing for Skelmersdale United F.C. when he is spotted by Liverpool’s scouting system. With manager Bill Shankly keen to rebuild his ageing, underachieving team of the 1960s, Heighway is signed up swiftly in May of that year. It is due to his academic achievements that he gets his nickname “Big Bamber,” while teammate and fellow university graduate Brian Hall is dubbed “Little Bamber” – both after the television programme University Challenge host Bamber Gascoigne.
A strong and fast left winger with two good feet, Heighway settles into topflight football after making his debut on September 22, 1970, in a League Cup 2nd round replay at Anfield against Mansfield Town F.C. (3-2). He opens his goalscoring account in the 51st minute of a 2–0 home league win over Burnley F.C. on October 1, 1970.
A month later, Heighway scores against Merseyside rivals Everton F.C. in a hard-fought 3–2 win, after his team had found themselves down 2–0 early in the second half. He stays in the side for the rest of the season as Liverpool’s new charges finish the league campaign strongly and also defeat Everton in the semi-finals of the FA Cup to reach the final at Wembley Stadium.
Their opponents are Arsenal F.C., who are after a coveted “double” having won the Football League First Division championship. Heighway plays confidently in a match that is goalless after 90 minutes and therefore needs a period of extra-time. Just two minutes into the added half-hour, he receives the ball wide on his left flank from substitute Peter Thompson and starts a run toward the Arsenal penalty area, with Gunners full back Pat Rice tracking his run but unwilling to put in a tackle. With a swift turn outside, he gains a yard on Rice and hits a low drive into the net past Arsenal goalkeeperBob Wilson, who had committed the cardinal goalkeeping sin of coming out too far from his near post to anticipate a cross, thereby leaving a gap that Heighway exploits. Sadly, for Heighway and Liverpool, their opponents scored two goals in response.
Heighway settles into the Liverpool team for the next decade, winning the first of four League titles in 1973, along with the UEFA Cup. He returns to Wembley for another FA Cup final a year later as Liverpool faces Newcastle United F.C. He scores again with 16 minutes remaining in the match to make the score 2–0, latching on to a flick from John Toshack after a long clearance from goalkeeper Ray Clemence to slot a right-footed shot into the far corner. The game ends 3–0.
By now, Heighway is a regular for the Republic of Ireland national football team, making his debut on September 23, 1970, against the Poland national football team. He remains so for the whole of the 1970s, winning a total of 34 caps but never managing to score. He does have a goal disallowed in a qualifier for the 1978 FIFA World Cup against the Bulgaria national football team in Sofia. On the domestic front, he attains another League and UEFA Cup double with Liverpool in 1976 and then forms part of the side which comes so close to the “treble” of League, FA Cup and European Cup.
Liverpool wins the League by a single point and again defeats rivals Everton in the semi-final to reach the FA Cup final, this time to face bitter rival Manchester United F.C. at Wembley. Liverpool loses 2–1 and the “treble” dream is dead.
Heighway scores his first goal of the 1977 European Cup in a 5–0 first round second leg win over Crusaders F.C. He then scores in a 3–0 second round win against Trabzonspor and in the 3–1 semi-final first leg win over FC Zürich. Liverpool beats Borussia Mönchengladbach 3–1 to win their first European Cup, with Heighway setting up both outfield goals for Terry McDermott, a defence-splitting pass, and Tommy Smith, a corner.
In 1978, Heighway is on the bench as Liverpool retains the European Cup with a 1–0 victory over Club Brugge KV at Wembley, coming on as a substitute for Jimmy Case. The following year he is again in the side frequently as Liverpool wins another League title, but from 1980 onward his opportunities in the side diminish.
Heighway stays for two more seasons, appearing only occasionally in the team and missing out on two more League title medals, another European Cup triumph and a first EFL Cup medal, which is successfully defended a year later. He leaves Anfield in 1982 after 444 matches and 76 goals.
Heighway then prolongs his career with a move to the United States, joining the Minnesota Kicks for the 1981 season. He plays 26 games, scoring four goals. He then joins the coaching staff of Umbro, which leads to a position with the Clearwater Chargers where he pioneers the role of director of coaching in the United States. In 1989 he is asked to rejoin Liverpool to run their youth academy, bringing promising youngsters up through the system until they were ready for the professional game. Among his successes are Steve McManaman, Robbie Fowler, Steven Gerrard, Jamie Carragher, Dominic Matteo, David Thompson and Michael Owen.
On September 4, 2006, a poll on Liverpool’s official web site names Heighway 23rd out of 100 Players Who Shook the Kop.
Heighway announces his retirement from Liverpool on April 26, 2007, immediately after the side he manages won the FA Youth Cup for the second year running. He comments, “I don’t know what the future holds just yet, we’ll have to wait and see.”
Heighway returns to working at Liverpool’s Academy part-time in 2015, at the request of Academy Director Alex Inglethorpe, before taking up a full-time consultancy role later that year. After seven years in this position, he retires for a second time in December 2022.
Heighway also features in the popular Liverpool chant, The Fields of Anfield Road, which is frequently sung by Liverpool fans during matches.
O’Kelly is born on August 25, 1882, on Capel Street in the north inner-city of Dublin. He joins the National Library of Ireland in 1898 as a junior assistant. That same year, he joins the Gaelic League, becoming a member of the governing body in 1910 and General Secretary in 1915.
In 1905 O’Kelly joins Sinn Féin who, at the time, supports a dual monarchy. He is an honorary secretary of the party from 1908 until 1925. In 1906 he is elected to Dublin Corporation, which is Dublin’s city council. He retains the seat for the Inns Quay Ward until 1924.
O’Kelly is elected Sinn Féin MP for Dublin College Green in the 1918 Irish general election. Along with other Sinn Féin MPs he refuses to take his seat in the British House of Commons. Instead, they set up an Irish parliament, called Dáil Éireann, in Dublin. O’Kelly is Ceann Comhairle (Chairman) of the First Dáil. He is the Irish Republic’s envoy to the post-World War I peace treaty negotiations at the Palace of Versailles, but the other countries refuse to allow him to speak as they do not recognise the Irish Republic.
O’Kelly is a close friend of Éamon de Valera, and both he and de Valera oppose the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921. When de Valera resigns as President of the Irish Republic on January 6, 1922, O’Kelly returns from Paris to try to persuade de Valera to return to the presidency but de Valera orders him to return to Paris.
During the Irish Civil War, O’Kelly is jailed until December 1923. Afterwards he spends the next two years as a Sinn Féin envoy to the United States.
In 1926 when de Valera leaves Sinn Féin to found his own republican party, Fianna Fáil, O’Kelly follows him, becoming one of the party’s founding members. In 1932, when de Valera is appointed President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, he makes O’Kelly the Minister for Local Government and Public Health. He often tries to publicly humiliate the Governor-General of the Irish Free State, James McNeill, which damages O’Kelly’s reputation and image, particularly when the campaign backfires.
In 1938, many believe that de Valera wants to make O’Kelly the Fianna Fáil choice to become President of Ireland, under the new Irish constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann. When Lord Mayor of Dublin, Alfie Byrne, says he wants to be president there is an all-party agreement to nominate Douglas Hyde, a Protestant Irish Senator, Irish language enthusiast and founder of the Gaelic League. They believe Hyde to be the only person who might win an election against Alfie Byrne. O’Kelly is instead appointed Minister of Finance and helps create Central Bank in 1942.
O’Kelly leaves the cabinet when he is elected President of Ireland on June 18, 1945, in a popular vote of the people, defeating two other candidates. He is re-elected unopposed in 1952. During his second term he visits many nations in Europe and speaks before the United States Congress in 1959. He retires at the end of his second term in 1959, to be replaced by his old friend, Éamon de Valera. Following his retirement, he is described as a model president by the normally hostile newspaper, The Irish Times. Though controversial, he is widely seen as genuine and honest, but tactless.
O’Kelly’s strong Roman Catholic beliefs sometimes cause problems. Éamon de Valera often thinks that O’Kelly either deliberately or accidentally leaks information to the Knights of Saint Columbanus and the Church leaders. He ensures that his first state visit, following the creation of the Republic of Ireland in 1949, is to the Vatican City to meet Pope Pius XII. He accidentally reveals the Pope’s private views on communism. This angers the Pope and Joseph Stalin and is why he is not given the papal Supreme Order of Christ which is given to many Catholic heads of state.
On his retirement O’Kelly gives a series of radio talks about his early life and the independence movement. These form the basis of an account serialised in TheIrish Press (July 3 to August 9, 1961) and subsequently translated into Irish and published as Seán T. (1963), echoing the nickname by which he is commonly known. The book relies heavily on memory and its accuracy on points of detail has been questioned by scholars such as F. X. Martin. In retirement he lived at his home, Roundwood Park in County Wicklow.
O’Kelly dies at the Mater Private Nursing Home in Dublin on November 23, 1966, at the age of 84, fifty years after the Easter Rising that first brought him to prominence. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Glasnevin, Dublin. His perceived unctuousness and his opportunistic tendencies in his later career should not efface his significance as a separatist organiser and an effective populist politician, who played a major role in the establishment of Fianna Fáil political hegemony.
Three years after moving to the United States, Moloney co-founds Green Fields of America, an ensemble of Irish musicians, singers, and dancers which tour across the country on several occasions. He also serves as the artistic director for several major arts tours. One of these is the 1985 festival in Manhattan titled “Cherish the Ladies” to highlight female musicians in the area of Irish traditional music, which had been dominated by men until that decade. He produces an album for the female group by the same name titled Irish Women Musicians in America. The group’s leader, Joanie Madden, is one of several future fellows of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) to be mentored by Moloney. He produces and performs on over 70 albums and serves as advisor for numerous festivals and concerts across America, with ethnomusicologist and musician Daniel T. Neely putting the figure as high as 125 albums.
In addition to music performance, Moloney writes Far from the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish American History Through Song, which is published by Crown Publications in February 2002 with a supplementary CD on Shanachie Records. He hosts three nationally syndicated series covering folk music on American Public Television (APT). He works as a consultant, performer, and interviewee on the RTÉ special Bringing It All Back Home, and is also a participant, consultant, and music arranger for Out of Ireland, a documentary film by PBS. He performs on the PBS special The Irish in America: Long Journey Home.
Moloney is married three times over the course of his life. His first marriage is to Miriam Murphy. His second marriage is to Philomena Murray. Together, they have one child but eventually divorce. His third marriage to Judy Sherman also ends in divorce. He is in a domestic partnership with Sangjan Chailungka at the time of his death. During his later years, he divides his time between Bangkok, where he resides with Chailungka, and his apartment in Greenwich Village. In Bangkok, he volunteers as a music therapist and teacher for abandoned children with HIV at the Mercy Center in the Khlong Toei district, which is founded by the Redemptorist priest Joseph H. Maier.
Moloney dies at the age of 77 on July 27, 2022, at his home in Manhattan, having played at the Maine Celtic Festival less than a week before. The cause of death is not announced.
Emmett is born in the Hammond’s Marsh area of Cork, County Cork, on April 24, 1764, the son of Dr. Robert Emmet from County Tipperary (later to become State Physician of Ireland) and Elizabeth Mason of County Kerry, both of whose portraits are today displayed at Cork’s Crawford Art Gallery. He is the elder brother of Robert Emmet, who is executed for leading the Irish Rebellion of 1803, becoming one of Ireland’s most famous republican martyrs. His sister, Mary Anne Holmes, holds similar political beliefs.
Emmet is a man of liberal political sympathies and becomes involved with a campaign to extend the democratic franchise for the Irish Parliament and to end discrimination against Catholics. He is called to the Irish bar in 1790 and quickly obtains a practice, principally as counsel for prisoners charged with political offenses. He also becomes the legal adviser of the Society of the United Irishmen.
When the Dublin Corporation issues a declaration of support of the Protestant Ascendancy in 1792, the response of the United Irishmen is their nonsectarian manifesto which is largely drawn up by Emmet. In 1795 he formally takes the oath of the United Irishmen, becoming secretary in the same year and a member of the executive in 1797. As by this time the United Irishmen had been declared illegal and driven underground, any efforts at peaceful reform of government and Catholic emancipation in Ireland are abandoned as futile, and their goal is now the creation of a non-sectarian Irish republic, independent from Britain and to be achieved by armed rebellion. Although Emmet supports this policy, he believes that the rebellion should not commence until French aid has arrived, differing from more radical members such as Lord Edward FitzGerald.
British intelligence infiltrates the United Irishmen and manages to arrest most of their leaders on the eve of the rebellion. Though not among those taken at the house of Oliver Bond on March 12, 1798, Emmet is arrested about the same time and is one of the leaders imprisoned initially at Kilmainham Gaol and later in Scotland at Fort George until 1802. Upon his release he goes to Brussels where he is visited by his brother Robert in October 1802 and is informed of the preparations for a fresh rising in Ireland in conjunction with French aid. However, at that stage France and Britain are briefly at peace, and the Emmets’ pleas for help are turned down by Napoleon.
Emmet receives news of the failure of his brother’s rising in July 1803 in Paris, where he is in communication with Napoleon. He then emigrates to the United States and joins the New York bar where he obtains a lucrative practice.
After the death of Matthias B. Hildreth, Emmet is appointed New York State Attorney General in August 1812 but is removed from office in February 1813 when the opposing Federalist Party obtains a majority in the Council of Appointment.
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.
Thompson is the youngest child of the social historians and peace activists E. P. Thompson and Dorothy Towers. She has lived in Ireland since 1981 and many of her books are set there. She trains racehorses in the UK and United States and travels extensively in India before settling in 1984 in Inagh, County Clare, in the west of Ireland with her partner Conor Minogue. They have two daughters, Cliodhna and Dearbhla. She is an accomplished fiddler with an interest in Irish traditional music, which is reflected in The New Policeman (2005).
In September 1914 Cregan goes to Dublin to study music in the Leinster School of Music, under Madame Coslett Heller. It is while she is in Dublin that she becomes friends with the Ryan family, who are strong nationalists as well as interested in the Gaelic League and Sinn Féin. She begins to sing for concerts which are fundraisers for the Irish Volunteers. The last concert is just two weeks before the Easter Rising.
During Easter week Cregan is sent to Tralee with “automatics and ammunition” by Seán Mac Diarmada. While she is carrying a violin case of munitions, she is also carrying details for the wireless technology needed for communicating with the SS Aud, the boat which is carrying more weapons for the rebellion. The communications with the SS Aud go wrong when the car carrying the Volunteers goes off a pier and the occupants are drowned. She is still in the area to assist with the surviving Volunteer, who unfortunately knows nothing of the details for the SS Aud. She is not easily able to get back to Dublin, because owing to the Rising the city is cut off. By the time she gets back, her friends have been arrested.
When Cregan is going to school in Dublin she is also working in a school in Rathmines. Like many of the teachers, she loses her job after the rising because of her connection to the rebels. However, she is able to get new positions over the next few years in both Ballyshannon and Portstewart until she marries. In Ballyshannon she experiences the early expressions of support and sympathy, but Portstewart is a Unionist enclave with many houses flying union flags on polling day in 1918.
Cregan is a member of Cumann na mBan and with them is active during the Irish War of Independence. She is given a medal for her participation. On July 23, 1919, she marries Dr. James Ryan in Athenry, County Galway. His entire family had been deeply involved in the Easter Rising, as well as the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. They have three children, Eoin, who becomes a Senator, Nuala (Colgan) and Seamus.
The family is initially based in Wexford during the War. The house is often raided when the British soldiers are looking for her husband and Cregan herself is arrested in February 1921 for refusing to put up martial law posters. Later the family sells the house and remains mobile while she works for the Sinn Féin government, and her husband is in prison. It is during this time that she works as a courier to the continent and to London. After the war, they purchase Kindlestown House in Delgany, County Wicklow, where they remain for the rest of their lives.
Cregan’s first book for children is Old John and gains her considerable international success and attention. Sean Eoin is also published in Irish and is illustrated by Jack Butler Yeats. Her work is also aired on the BBC and RTÉ. Rathina wins the Downey Award in the United States in 1943. She also writes two plays: Hunger strike (1933), based on experience of her husband’s involvement in such a strike, which is broadcast on Radio Éireann on May 5, 1936, and Curlew’s call (1940).
Cregan dies on November 9, 1975, in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, and is buried in Redford cemetery near her home in County Wicklow.
(Pictured: Máirín Cregan and her husband, Dr. James Ryan)
seamus dubhghaill 