FitzGerald joins Fine Gael, attaching himself to the liberal wing of the party. and in 1969 is elected to Dáil Éireann, the lower house of the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament. He later gives up his university lectureship to become Minister for Foreign Affairs in the coalition government of Liam Cosgrave (1973–77). When the coalition government is resoundingly defeated in the 1977 Irish general election, Cosgrave yields leadership of Fine Gael to FitzGerald. In his new role as Leader of the Opposition and party leader, he proceeds to modernize and strengthen the party at the grass roots. He briefly loses power in 1982 when political instability triggers two snap elections.
By the time of the 1981 Irish general election, Fine Gael has a party machine that can easily match Fianna Fáil. The party wins 65 seats and forms a minority coalition government with the Labour Party and the support of a number of Independent TDs. FitzGerald is elected Taoiseach on June 30, 1981. To the surprise of many, FitzGerald excludes Richie Ryan, Richard Burke and Tom O’Donnell, former Fine Gael stalwarts, from the cabinet.
On May 5, 2011, it is reported that FitzGerald is seriously ill in a Dublin hospital. Newly elected Fine Gael Taoiseach Enda Kenny sends his regards and calls him an “institution.” On May 6 he is put on a ventilator. On May 19, after suffering from pneumonia, he dies at the Mater Private Hospital in Dublin at the age of 85.
In a statement, Irish PresidentMary McAleese hails FitzGerald as “a man steeped in the history of the State who constantly strove to make Ireland a better place for all its people.” Taoiseach Enda Kenny pays homage to “a truly remarkable man who made a truly remarkable contribution to Ireland.” Henry Kissinger, the former United States Secretary of State, who serves as an opposite number to FitzGerald in the 1970s, recalls “an intelligent and amusing man who was dedicated to his country.”
FitzGerald’s death occurs on the third day of Queen Elizabeth II‘s state visit to the Republic of Ireland, an event designed to mark the completion of the Northern Ireland peace process that had been “built on the foundations” of FitzGerald’s Anglo-Irish Agreement with Margaret Thatcher in 1985. In a personal message, the Queen offers her sympathies and says she is “saddened” to learn of FitzGerald’s death.
On his visit to Dublin, United States PresidentBarack Obama offers condolences on FitzGerald’s death. He speaks of him as “someone who believed in the power of education; someone who believed in the potential of youth; most of all, someone who believed in the potential of peace and who lived to see that peace realised.”
FitzGerald is the author of a number of books, including Planning in Ireland (1968), Towards a New Ireland (1972), Unequal Partners (1979), All in a Life: An Autobiography (1991), and Reflections on the Irish State (2003).
Whyte is born on April 30, 1928, in Penang, Malaysia. His father is manager of a rubber plantation on the mainland. His family leaves Malaysia and returns to Europe when he is three, eventually settling in Rostrevor, County Down, Northern Ireland. The Whytes are a well-known County Down family recorded in the area since at least 1713. The family is said to have come to Ireland from South Wales with Strongbow in 1170 and settled in Leinster. He is educated locally, at Ampleforth College and Oriel College Oxford, from which he takes a degree in Modern History in 1949. Continuing studies some two years later he is awarded a B.Litt degree for further research, which is to form the nebula of his first book which is published in 1958.
Whyte undertakes national service during the 1950s and works as a history teacher in his old school before being appointed lecturer in Modern History at Makerere University, Uganda. In 1962, he returns to Ireland having been appointed first “lecturer in empirical politics” at the then expanding University College Dublin (UCD). In 1966, he weds fellow academic Dr. Jean Murray and moves to Queen’s University Belfast (QUB) to undertake further studies.
In his book, Preventing the Future: Why Was Ireland So Poor for So Long?, Whyte’s successor as Professor of Politics at UCD, Tom Garvin, gives an account as to the clerical politics prevalent at the time at UCD which causes Whyte’s untimely departure:
A little later, in 1966, McQuaid provoked, possibly unintentionally, the resignation of John Whyte, a distinguished Catholic political scientist, from University College Dublin’s Department of Ethics and Politics. This resignation and move to Belfast on Whyte’s part in 1966 almost certainly was the unintended result of an extraordinary piece of clerical interference and bullying that rebounded upon McQuaid and on UCD. Whyte was in the midst of writing his standard history of the Catholic Church in independent Ireland, later published in 1969; at McQuaid’s apparent instigation, his professor and head of Department attempted to forbid him from continuing with this work. The irony was that the resultant scholarly book, finished in Belfast rather than Dublin, deeply underestimated clerical power in the Irish state and gave the Catholic Church a rather easy ride. Another irony was that Whyte, as a Roman Catholic historian and political scientist, was apparently rather favoured by McQuaid. However in 1966 bishops didn’t know they needed friends. Whyte was to come back to UCD and was professor of Ethics and Politics between 1984 and 1990. In a very real sense, McQuaid was the patriarchal and eccentric governor of Dublin Archdiocese, where one-third of the stat’s population lived; he attempted to run an urban society of a million people as though it were a large feudal community.
At Queen’s, Whyte spends seventeen years as lecturer and reader, and from 1982 Professor of Irish Politics during which he seeks to bring together political scientists from across the island and develop an All-Ireland political science fellowship. From 1973 to 1974 he works at as a research fellow at Harvard University’s Centre for International Affairs, and in 1975 he helps lead a team of researchers investigating the Northern Ireland conflict, then at its height. He also works as research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies during the late 1970s and is elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in 1977, serving as Vice-President from 1989 to 1990.
In 1984, Whyte returns to University College Dublin, then faced with stringent fiscal cuts and wider problems in Irish third-level education. In his second period at UCD, he leads the Department, which he now heads, through a troubled period of financial cuts while supervising a reorganisation of the undergraduate curriculum. In his last years at UCD he completes his seminal work, the widely regarded Interpreting Northern Ireland. He finishes correcting the proofs and compiling the index of this work only a week before his death. While en route to an academic conference at Airley House, Virginia, he collapses at John F. Kennedy International Airport, New York, is taken to a local hospital, and dies there on May 16, 1990. He is survived by his wife, two sons, and one daughter.
Following his death, Whyte’s family, friends, and colleagues set up the John Whyte Trust Fund to continue Whyte’s work, honour his memory and encourage “informed dialogue and interaction at graduate level among people who are likely to be leaders and opinion-shapers.” To date the fund has awarded one fully paid scholarship and a number of part-paid scholarships as well as essay prizes annually. The fund also hosts an annual John Whyte Memorial Lecture. Speakers have included Paul Bew and Brendan O’Leary.
MacNeill is one of five children born to Archibald McNeill, a Roman Catholic working-class baker, sailor and merchant, and his wife, Rosetta McNeill (née McAuley), also a Catholic. He is raised in Glenarm, an area which “still retained some Irish-language traditions.” His niece is nationalist and teacher, Máirín Beaumont.
MacNeill marries Agnes Moore on April 19, 1898. The couple has eight children, four sons and four daughters (though the 1911 census entry for MacNeill notes eleven children, seven of whom are still alive).
The Gaelic League is from the start strictly non-political, but in 1915, a proposal is put forward to abandon that policy and become a semi-political organisation. MacNeill strongly supports this and rallies to his side a majority of delegates at the 1915 Oireachtas. Douglas Hyde, a non-political Protestant, who had co-founded the League and been its president for 22 years, resigns immediately afterward.
Through the Gaelic League, MacNeill meets members of Sinn Féin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), and other nationalists and republicans. One such colleague, The O’Rahilly, runs the league’s newspaper An Claidheamh Soluis, and in October 1913 asks MacNeill to write an editorial for it on a subject broader than Irish language issues. He submits a piece called “The North Began,” encouraging the formation of a nationalist volunteer force committed to Irish Home Rule, much as the unionists had done earlier in the year with the Ulster Volunteers to thwart Home Rule in Ireland. In July 1915, he comments on the threat that the unarmed nationalists in Ulster might face: “…a demented…English driven Orange Army would be let loose upon the helpless Catholic people of Ulster, who would be driven out of the province or massacred where they stood.”
Bulmer Hobson, a member of the IRB, approaches MacNeill about bringing the idea to fruition, and, through a series of meetings, MacNeill becomes chair of the council that forms the Irish Volunteers, later becoming its chief of staff. Unlike the IRB, he is opposed to the idea of an armed rebellion, except in resisting any suppression of the Volunteers, seeing little hope of success in open battle against the British army.
The Irish Volunteers have been infiltrated by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which plan on using the organisation to stage an armed rebellion, to separate Ireland from the United Kingdom and establishing an Irish Republic. The entry of the UK into World War I is, in their view, a perfect opportunity to do that. With the cooperation of James Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army, a secret council of IRB officials plan a general rising at Easter 1916. On the Wednesday before Easter, they present MacNeill with a letter, allegedly stolen from high-ranking British staff in Dublin Castle, indicating that the British are going to arrest him and all the other nationalist leaders. Unbeknownst to MacNeill, the letter—called the Castle Document—is a forgery.
When MacNeill learns about the IRB’s plans, and when he is informed that Roger Casement is about to land in County Kerry with a shipment of German arms, he is reluctantly persuaded to go along with them, believing British action is now imminent and that mobilization of the Irish Volunteers will be justified as a defensive act. However, after learning that the German arms shipment has been intercepted and Casement arrested, and having confronted Patrick Pearse, who refuses to relent, MacNeill countermands the order for the Rising by sending written messages to leaders around the country, and placing a notice in the Sunday Independent cancelling the planned “manoeuvres.” This greatly reduces the number of volunteers who report for duty on the day of the Easter Rising.
Pearse, Connolly and the others agree that the uprising will go ahead anyway, but it begins one day later than originally intended to ensure that the authorities are taken by surprise. Beginning on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916, the Rising lasts less than a week. After the surrender of the rebels, MacNeill is arrested although he has taken no part in the insurrection. The rebel leader Tom Clarke, according to his wife Kathleen, warns her on the day before his execution, “I want you to see to it that our people know of his treachery to us. He must never be allowed back into the National life of this country, for so sure as he is, so sure will he act treacherously in a crisis. He is a weak man, but I know every effort will be made to whitewash him.”
In 1923, MacNeill, a committed internationalist, is also a key member of the diplomatic team that oversees Ireland’s entry to the League of Nations.
MacNeill’s family is split on the treaty issue. One son, Brian, takes the anti-Treaty side and is killed in disputed circumstances near Sligo by Free State troops during the Irish Civil War in September 1922. Two other sons, Niall and Turloch, as well as nephew Hugo MacNeill, serve as officers in the Free State Army. One of his brothers, James McNeill, is the second and penultimate Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
In 1924, the three-man Irish Boundary Commission is set up to settle the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Free State. MacNeill represents the Irish Free State. He is the only member of the Commission without legal training and has been described as being “pathetically out of his depth.” However, each of the Commissioners is selected out of political expediency rather than for any established competence or insight into boundary making. On November 7, 1925, a conservative British newspaper, The Morning Post, publishes a leaked map showing a part of eastern County Donegal (mainly The Laggan district) that is to be transferred to Northern Ireland, the opposite of the main aims of the commission. Perhaps embarrassed by that, especially since he said that it had declined to respect the terms of the Treaty, MacNeill resigns from the commission on November 20. Hus performance in the Boundary Commission has been deemed highly negative in a 2025 study The Root of All Evil: The Irish Boundary Commission.
On November 24, 1925, MacNeill also resign as Minister for Education, a position unrelated to his work on the commission.
On December 3, 1925, the Free State government agrees with the governments in London and Belfast to end its onerous treaty requirement to pay its share of the United Kingdom’s “imperial debt” and, in exchange, agrees that the 1920 boundary will remain as it is, overriding the commission. This angers many nationalists and MacNeill is the subject of much criticism, but in reality, he and the commission have been sidestepped by the intergovernmental debt renegotiation. In any case, despite his resignations, the intergovernmental boundary deal is approved by a Dáil vote of 71–20 on December 10, 1925, and MacNeill is listed as voting with the majority in favour. He loses his Dáil seat at the June 1927 Irish general election.
MacNeill is an important scholar of Irish history and among the first to study Early Irish law, offering both his interpretations, which at times are coloured by his nationalism, and translations into English. He is also the first to uncover the nature of succession in Irish kingship, and his theories are the foundation for modern ideas on the subject.
MacNeill is a contributor to the Royal Irish Academy‘s Clare Island Survey, recording the Irish place names of the island. His disagreements and disputes with Goddard Henry Orpen, particularly over the latter’s book Ireland under the Normans, generate controversy.
MacNeill retires from politics completely and becomes Chair of the Irish Manuscripts Commission. In his later years he devotes his life to scholarship and publishes several books on Irish history. He dies in Dublin of natural causes, aged 78, on October 15, 1945. He is buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery.
O’Faolain is born in Dublin on March 1, 1940, the second of nine children of Tomás O’Faolain and Kathleen O’Sullivan. Originally a schoolteacher and Army lieutenant, under the pen name Terry O’Sullivan, her father becomes a prominent social diarist for the Evening Press in Dublin. He is distant from his children and engages in extra-marital affairs which produce at least two half-siblings. Despite earning as much money as the newspaper’s editor, Douglas Gageby, he does not share his income with his family. The family lives in poor conditions, frequently going hungry. Her mother becomes an alcoholic, going to the pub every day at 4 p.m. and not returning home until midnight.
O’Faolain attends convent school in Dublin but is expelled at the age of fourteen after going home from dances with a married man. She then goes to a boarding school in County Monaghan, whose austere environment and strict educational standards benefit her. From there, she studies English literature at University College Dublin (UCD), where she runs in a social circle that includes Mary Lavin, John McGahern, Patrick Kavanagh, and Louis MacNeice. Although she drops out of her studies temporarily and spends time working menial jobs in England, with financial assistance from Lavin and others, she graduates in 1961. On scholarships, she studies medieval English at the University of Hull before completing a postgraduate degree in 19th-century English literature at the University of Oxford. She then returns to Dublin to work at UCD as an academic in the English literature department, which brings her into contact with the bohemian Dublin literary scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
In 1970, O’Faolain moves to London to work for the BBC. She is a producer at the Community Programme Unit, which seeks to allow members of the public to create programmes for national broadcast on human interest topics like transgender people, anti-pornography protests, and community organising in the Bogside. She also makes programmes with the arts faculty of the Open University, and teaches evening classes at Morley College. During this period, she shows little interest in Ireland, regarding the country as backward and unsophisticated, but a visit to the Merriman Summer School in County Clare in 1974 sparks new enthusiasm. In 1977, she moves back to Dublin to work for the public broadcaster, RTÉ, where she becomes a colleague of female journalists like Doireann Ní Bhriain, Marian Finucane, and Nell McCafferty – later her partner – who are making programmes about Irish society with a feminist bent. She Is the producer of Women Today, a pioneering radio programme, from 1983 to 1986. One series she works on, Plain Tales, a televised interview programme in which women speak directly to camera about their life experiences, wins a Jacob’s Award in 1985.
O’Faolain has an interest in books from an early age, and credits voracious reading for helping her through a difficult childhood. She works as a book reviewer for The Times. Between 1990 and 1993, she co-presents Booklines, a television programme about books for RTÉ, a programme she says “nobody ever watched because it was on terribly late at night.”
In 1986, Conor Brady, the editor of The Irish Times, offers O’Faolain a newspaper column after hearing her being interviewed by Gay Byrne on the radio. Brady is struck by her ability to “infuse ordinary people’s everyday activities with value and interest.” The column becomes a major success and she is awarded journalist of the year in 1986.
O’Faolain acts as a roving commentator for The Irish Times, covering the 1994 Cregg Wood murders in County Clare, and visiting Northern Ireland at the time of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Following periods of leave while she works on her books, she leaves the paper in 2002, and writes a column in the Sunday Tribune from 2005 until her death.
O’Faolain never marries and has no children. Although she writes about her relationships with men and women, she does not identify as bisexual, though others have described her as such. She suffers from alcoholism. After Are You Somebody?, she divides her time between Ireland and New York City. During the final years of her life, she is in a relationship with a Brooklyn-based lawyer, John Low-Beer, whom she meets on Match.com.
O’Faolain is diagnosed with metastatic cancer while living in New York City in early 2008. She experiences a strange feeling in the right side of her body and presents at the emergency department of a hospital, where she is told that she has primary tumours in her lungs which has spread to her brain and liver, and that her cancer is incurable. She refuses chemotherapy.
O’Faolain returns to Ireland and is interviewed by her friend, Marian Finucane, on her radio show about her terminal illness on April 12, 2008. Both O’Faolain and Finucane are in tears during the interview, which is recorded in Galway, where she is undergoing radiotherapy. She tells Finucane: “I don’t want more time. As soon as I heard I was going to die, the goodness went from life”. Her frank discussion of her illness leads to the interview being preceded by a warning that her comments may be upsetting to others with life-threatening conditions. She says that she does not believe in God or an afterlife, but as in the song “Thíos i Lár an Ghleanna,” she is asking for help she knows will not come from a god she does not believe in. The interview has a major public impact in Ireland. After Finucane’s death in 2020, the Irish Independent describes it as “one of the most extraordinary [interviews] in the history of Irish broadcasting.”
In the final weeks of her life, O’Faolain travels Europe with close friends and family, staying in the Ritz Hotel in Paris and visiting the Berlin State Opera and the Prado Museum in Madrid for the first time. She dies in a hospice in Blackrock, Dublin, late on May 9, 2008. Her funeral takes place in the Church of Our Lady of the Visitation in Fairview in north Dublin on May 13. Her ashes are buried in Kilbarrack Cemetery in north Dublin with her maternal grandparents, Terence and Marion O’Sullivan, and her brother, Dermot Phelan.
Boland is born in Dublin on September 24, 1944. Her father, Frederick Boland, is a career diplomat and her mother, Frances Kelly, was a noted painter.
When she is six, Boland’s father is appointed Irish Ambassador to the United Kingdom, and the family moves to London, where she has her first experiences of anti-Irish sentiment. Her dealing with this hostility strengthens her identification with her Irish heritage. She speaks of this time in her poem, “An Irish Childhood in England: 1951.”
In 1969, Boland marries the novelist Kevin Casey. They have two daughters together. Her experiences as a wife and mother influence her to write about the centrality of the ordinary, as well as providing a frame for more political and historical themes. According to her friend Gabrielle Calvocoressi, she “loved gossip like fish love water.”
In the late 1970s and 1980s, Boland teaches at the School of Irish Studies in Dublin. From 1996 she is a tenured Professor of English at Stanford University where she is the Bella Mabury and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor in the Humanities and Melvin and Bill Lane Professor for Director of the Creative Writing program. She divides her time between Palo Alto and her home in Dublin.
Boland’s first book of poetry is New Territory published in 1967 with Dublin publisher Allen Figgis. This is followed by The War Horse (1975) and In Her Own Image (1980). Night Feed (1982) establishes her reputation as a writer on the ordinary lives of women and on the difficulties faced by women poets in a male-dominated literary world. While she is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital in Dublin in 1994, she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.
In March 2018, RTÉ broadcasts a documentary on Boland’s life as a poet called “Eavan Boland: Is it Still the Same?” In the same year, she is commissioned by the Government of Ireland and the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) to write the poem “Our future will become the past of other women” to be read at the United Nations (UN) and in Ireland during the centenary commemorations of women gaining the vote in Ireland in 1918.
Boland co-edits The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms (with Mark Strand; W. W. Norton & Co., 2000). She also publishes a volume of translations in 2004 called After Every War (Princeton University Press). With Edward Hirsch, she co-edits “The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology of the Sonnet” (W. W. Norton & Co., 2008).
In 1976, Boland wins a Jacob’s Award for her involvement in The Arts Programme broadcast on RTÉ Radio. Her other awards include a Lannan Foundation Award in Poetry and an American Ireland Fund Literary Award. Her collection In a Time of Violence (1994) receives a Lannan Award and is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Boland receives the Bucknell Medal of Distinction 2000 from Bucknell University, the Corrington Medal for Literary Excellence by Centenary College of Louisiana in 2002, the Smartt Family prize from The Yale Review and the John Frederick Nims Award from Poetry magazine 2002. Her volume of poems Against Love Poetry is a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her volume Domestic Violence (2007) is shortlisted for the Forward Prize in the United Kingdom. Her poem “Violence Against Women” from the same volume is awarded the James Boatwright III Prize for Poetry for the best poem published in 2007 in Shenandoah magazine. In 2012, she wins a PEN Award for creative nonfiction with her collection of essays, A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, published in 2012.
On May 25, 2018, Boland is elected an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. She receives the Irish PEN Award for Literature in 2019. She is writer in residence at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin, in 1994. During this time she composes “Night Feed” and “The Tree of Life,” and her work remains on a plaque in the hospital garden.
Boland dies in Dublin on April 27, 2020, at the age of 75. Later that year she is posthumously awarded the Costa Book Award for poetry for her final collection The Historians.
In 2024, Trinity College Dublin announces the renaming of the “denamed” former Berkeley Library as the Eavan Boland Library. This makes it the first building named after any woman on Trinity’s city centre campus. The name is made official in March 2025.
Byrne is Head of Communications with the Higher Education Authority (HEA) until 2019, and has been Vice-President of the National Youth Council of Ireland. In 2014, he is named as one of the European 40 Under 40, in the European Young Leaders Programme.
In January 2006, The Sun includes Byrne’s picture on the cover of its Irish edition beneath the headline “Bertie‘s FF Man in Gay Web Shame,” revealing that Byrne has a profile on the dating website Gaydar. He responds at the time, “I have not, nor have I ever, done anything illegal and I am not a hypocrite in any way. My views on gay rights issues are well known. I am not married with four children or anything like that, so there is no suggestion of hypocrisy.” His family and political career suffer as a result and he is not selected for candidacy in the 2007 Irish general election following this incident. He later describes how a journalist from The Gorey Echo first approaches him, “The first few questions were about roads. Then the journalist said, ‘Are you aware you have a profile on this dating website?'” When he confirms that the profile is his, he experiences a sleepless night before The Gorey Echo outs him locally: “I was ringing around people I knew and my parents were ringing around people … my grandmother didn’t know and a lot of my extended family and my friends didn’t know.” Gorey Echo group editor Tom Mooney defends the publication by saying he believes Byrne’s behaviour to be “unfitting of a public representative.”
Byrne contests the 2019 European Parliament election for Fianna Fail in the South constituency, having unexpectedly beaten Cork TD Billy Kelleher in the vote for the party’s nomination. However, Kelleher is later added to the ticket. Fianna Fáil then divides the constituency geographically, asking people in counties Carlow, Kilkenny, Laois, Offaly, Tipperary, Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow to vote for Byrne, and those in counties Cork, Kerry, Clare and Limerick to vote for Kelleher. Kelleher wins 11.69% of the first-preference votes (FPV) and is elected on the 17th count. Byrne wins 9.62% of the FPV, and is eliminated on the 16th count.
Byrne is elected as a TD at the 2019 Wexford by-election. Andrew Bolger is co-opted to Byrne’s seat on Wexford County Council following his election to the Dáil. His maiden speech is about housing solutions and the need to address the challenges facing Generation Rent. In an interview he says he can envisage a United Ireland where the 12th of July and Saint Patrick’s Day are public holidays and speaks about how Ireland needs to ensure Unionists feel at home in a new agreed state and that may mean addressing issues such as Ireland joining the Commonwealth.
Byrne loses his Dáil seat at the 2020 Irish general election, following what he calls “a dirty campaign.” His defeat after only 71 days makes him the TD with the second-shortest term of service, after the Anti H-Block TD Kieran Doherty, who dies on hunger strike in August 1981, only 52 days after his election.
On March 31, 2020, Byrne is elected to Seanad Éireann at the 2020 Seanad election. He is named as Fianna Fáil spokesperson on Higher Education, Innovation and Science by TaoiseachMicheál Martin in July 2020.
At the 2024 Irish general election, Byrne is elected to the Dáil. He is subsequently appointed Cathaoirleach of the Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence.
Byrne is openly gay. As of 2020, he is single and describes politics as “almost like an addiction,” which makes relationships difficult. He lives in Gorey.
In March 2025, Byrne is injured during the theft of his phone in London.
De Bhaldraithe is born Thomas MacDonagh Waldron on December 14, 1916, in Ballincurra, County Limerick. He moves to Dublin with his family at the age of five. He is named after Thomas MacDonagh, one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, who had been executed after the Easter Rising earlier in the year. He adopts the use of the Irish language version of the name in both Irish and English. He receives his second-level education at Belvedere College in Dublin.
De Bhaldraithe’s stance on standard forms and spellings is supported by Éamon de Valera despite opposition from traditionalists in the Department of Education, and the work is widely seen as an important benchmark in Irish scholarship.
In 1942, de Bhaldraithe is appointed a professor at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS) in the department of Celtic Studies. In 1960 he is appointed professor of modern Irish language and literature in University College Dublin (UCD), where he develops an impressive archive of material on Irish dialects. Much of the material in this archive is later used as the basis of Niall Ó Dónaill‘s Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, published in 1978, for which he is consulting editor. Also during the 1970s, he translates the Irish language diary of Amhlaoibh Ó Súilleabháin into English. It is then published by Mercier Press as “The Diary of an Irish Countryman.”
The language laboratory which de Bhaldraithe sets up in UCD is the first of its kind in any university in Ireland. His interest in seanchas (folklore) leads to his publication of Seanchas Tomás Laighléis in 1977, while his earlier work includes the ground-breaking study of the Cois Fharraige dialect (a variety of Connacht Irish), Gaeilge Chois Fharraige: Deilbhíocht. In later years he works extensively on the definitive Irish dictionary, Foclóir Stairiúil na Nua-Ghaeilge, which remains unfinished when he dies on April 24, 1996, but which is still in progress today.
Nicholas “Nicky” Rackard, Irish hurler whose league and championship career with the Wexford senior team spans seventeen years from 1940 to 1957, dies from cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin on April 10, 1976. He establishes many championship scoring records, including being the top championship goal-scorer of all time with 59 goals. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest hurlers in the history of the game.
Rackard is born on April 28, 1922, in Killanne, County Wexford, the eldest son of five boys and four girls born to Robert (Bob) Rackard and Anastasia Doran, who had been married in 1918. He is introduced to sport by his father who had hoped he would become a cricketer. His uncle, John Doran, won an All-Ireland medal as a Gaelic footballer with Wexford in 1918 and it is hurling and Gaelic football that Rackard develops a talent for.
Rackard plays his club hurling with his local Rathnure club and enjoys much success. He wins his first senior county title in 1948. It was Rathnure’s first ever championship triumph. Two years later in 1950 he captures a second county title, a victory which allows him to take over the captaincy of the county senior team for the following year. He wins his third and final county medal in 1955.
Rackard makes his debut on the inter-county scene when he is selected for the Wexford minor panel. He is just out of the minor grade when he is selected for the Wexford senior team in 1940. Over the course of the next seventeen years, he wins two All-Ireland medals as part of the Wexford hurling breakthrough in 1955 and 1956. He also wins four Leinster Senior Hurling Championship medals, one National Hurling League medal and one Leinster Senior Football Championship medal as a Gaelic footballer. He plays his last game for Wexford in August 1957.
By the late 1940s, Rackard is a regular in the full-forward line on the Leinster inter-provincial team. Success comes in the twilight of his career and he claims his sole Railway Cup medal in 1956.
Rackard’s brothers, Billy and Bobby, also experience All-Ireland success with Wexford.
In retirement from playing Rackard becomes involved in team management and coaching. It is with the Wexford senior team that he enjoys his greatest successes as a selector when he helps the team secure the 1968 All-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship title.
Rackard is most famous for his scoring prowess and is the all-time top championship scorer at the time of his retirement from hurling. His private life is marred by periods of excessive drinking, which had started during his university studies, and eventually develops into alcoholism. After quitting drinking completely in 1970, he travels the country as a counsellor with Alcoholics Anonymous. In an interview in The Irish Press in 1975, he details his life as a recovering alcoholic and becomes one of the first sportspeople to break the taboo of alcoholism in Ireland.
Rackard death from cancer at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin on April 10, 1976, sees a huge outpouring of grief among the hurling community. He is posthumously honoured by being named on the Hurling Team of the Century in 1984, however, he is sensationally omitted from the Hurling Team of the Millennium in favour of Ray Cummins. His scoring prowess has also earned him a place on the top ten list of all-time scoring greats. In 2005 the GAA further honours him by naming the Nicky Rackard Cup, the hurling competition for Division 3 teams, in his honour.
In 2006, a Wexford author, Tom Williams, writes a long-overdue biography of Rackard entitled Cuchulainn’s Son – The Story of Nickey Rackard. The same author also pens a now well-known song about Rackard many years earlier. It too is called Cuchulainn’s Son and has been recorded by various artists over the last 20 years and is a lament for the great sportsman.
In Wexford town, there is a statue to commemorate Rackard, erected in 2012.
Ordained in 1924, the theology in which McQuaid is trained is conservative — strongly neo-scholastic and hostile to modernism and liberalism. His hatred of the French Revolution is expressed in several pastorals and speeches throughout his career. He also regards Protestantism as a fundamental error from which Irish Catholics should be quarantined as much as possible.
Appointed Dean of Studies at Blackrock College, McQuaid becomes a prominent figure in Catholic education and chairs the Catholic Headmasters’ Association for several years. In 1931 he is appointed president of Blackrock College, in which capacity he becomes acquainted with Éamon de Valera, the future Irish Taoiseach whose sons attend the school. In 1936, while drafting a new Irish constitution, de Valera consults McQuaid, although he rejects McQuaid’s draft “One, True Church” clause which states, among other things, that the Catholic Church is the one true church in Ireland.
When McQuaid is appointed Archbishop of Dublin in 1940, the appointment of a priest from the regular clergy causes considerable surprise. Irish government archives reveal that de Valera, as is suspected at the time, presses McQuaid’s claims at the Vatican. However, it is doubtful whether the Vatican needs much persuasion. There is a dearth of potential episcopal talent and McQuaid has an outstanding reputation as a Catholic educationalist.
Once appointed, McQuaid proves to be one of the ablest administrators in the history of the Irish Church. In the first two years of his episcopate, he sets up the Catholic Social Service Conference to alleviate the poverty and distress in Dublin which is aggravated by the war, and the Catholic Social Welfare Bureau to help the thousands of Irish emigrants going to Britain for war work. These two organizations fill a much-needed gap and continue to exist after the war. The expansion of Dublin city and its suburbs during his episcopate requires the building of new churches, schools, and hospitals. Meeting these demands also necessitates a considerable increase in the number of clergies, secular and regular, whose numbers more than double in the period from 1941 to 1972.
Given his previous career, the importance McQuaid assigns to education is not surprising. He is critical of the low priority accorded to education by successive governments and is particularly critical of the poor and pay conditions of teachers. His intervention in the primary teachers’ strike in 1946 is poorly received by the government and marks the souring of his relationship with de Valera. During his episcopate the number of primary schools increases by a third while the number of secondary schools more than double but, as with social welfare, the government increasingly assumes a dominant role in education from the 1960s onwards. Almost immediately after his appointment in 1940, he takes a hardline stand against the attendance of Catholic students at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). The ban lasts until 1970, when the increase in student numbers renders it untenable and he accedes reluctantly.
McQuaid has a formidable list of achievements in health care, especially maternity and pediatric services, physical and mental handicap services, and the treatment of alcoholism. It is ironic, therefore, that the most controversial episode of his career occurs in this area — the Irish hierarchy’s rejection in 1951 of a free mother-and-child health service. This leads to the resignation of the Minister for Health, Dr. Noël Browne, and is a watershed in Church-State relations in Ireland. With Irish tuberculosis and infant mortality statistics ranking among the highest in the world, the hierarchy, and particularly McQuaid, lose considerable support by lining up with the conservative medical establishment to resist efforts at socialized medicine.
From various pastorals that McQuaid issues at the time, it is clear that he does not see the need for the Second Vatican Council. As its deliberations proceed, his unease grows, and he becomes increasingly preoccupied with the issue of episcopal power and independence that he believes are being threatened by the Council. In the areas of liturgical reform, greater lay participation, and ecumenism, he is slow in implementing the Vatican II reforms. His views on ecumenism had always been lukewarm and had led to allegations that he was anti-Protestant. His personality and policies are criticized by a more assertive Dublin laity, but being a shy, reserved man who increasingly feels the isolation of office, he never responds to such comments. In 1968 the reaction to Humanae vitae causes open rebellion in the Dublin diocese, the force of which catches him unaware. His last pastoral as archbishop in 1971 betrays his anger and bemusement at the response to Humanae vitae in Dublin.
At the age of 75, McQuaid submits his resignation to the Vatican, and it is accepted. His resignation is announced in January 1972, when he is replaced by Dermot Ryan. McQuaid dies in Loughlinstown, County Dublin, the following year on April 7, 1973. He is buried in St. Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, the seat of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin.
McQuaid’s substantial archives are released by the Dublin Diocesan Archives in the late 1990s. In 1999 journalist John Cooney publishes a hostile biography of McQuaid, which makes controversial allegations of sexual abuse against McQuaid. The allegations are based on tenuous evidence gathered by McQuaid’s nemesis from the 1951 Mother and Child controversy, Dr. Noël Browne, who had died in 1997. No corroborating evidence is produced or has since emerged.
Holohan is chairman of the Association of Irish Composers from 1987 to 1989 and is later appointed chairman of the Droichead Arts Centre in Drogheda, County Louth, where he has lived since 1983.
Holohan is elected to Aosdána in 1999 and later serves as a member and chair of its Toscaireacht, its ten-member steering body.
Holohan’s music has been performed and broadcast in Ireland and internationally. Career highlights in Drogheda include performances of Cromwell (1994), The Mass of Fire (1995) and No Sanctuary (1997).
Holohan’s work has been reviewed in Irish music journalism. Writing in The Journal of Music following a National Concert Hall composers’ showcase, Benedict Schlepper-Connolly describes The Dream of Aengus as demonstrating Holohan’s “orchestrational control,” and characterises Portrait of the Artist as “captivating,” while noting the influence of Irish traditional music within his choral writing.
Regional press coverage has also documented performances and recordings of his work, including reports on the release of the piano album Fields of Blue and Whiteand concerts of his music in Drogheda.
seamus dubhghaill 