One of Ó Ceallaigh’s classmates in school is Sinéad O’Connor. He once tells an interviewer, “She told me she wanted to become famous and I tried to talk her out of it.”
Ó Ceallaigh graduates from University College Dublin (UCD) with a degree in philosophy. After receiving his degree, he travels the world, doing a variety of jobs, including waiter, newspaper editor, freelance journalist and volunteer for clinical trials. He moves to Bucharest, Romania, so that he can live cheaply and pursue his desire to write.
Ó Ceallaigh has spent much of his adult life in Eastern Europe, starting in Russia in the early 1990s. Since 1995 he has lived mostly in Bucharest, Romania. He has also lived for a while in the United States.
Ó Ceallaigh has published over 40 short stories, as well as essays and criticism. His work has appeared in Granta, The Irish Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2010, he edits Sharp Sticks, Driven Nails, an anthology of new short stories by twenty-two Irish and international writers, for The Stinging Fly Press. He translates Mihail Sebastian‘s autobiographical novel For Two Thousand Years. It tells the story of the author’s early years as a Jew in Romania during the 1920s. It is published in 2016.
Ó Ceallaigh has written an unpublished novel but reduces it to a long short story and believes “if you’ve got something to say and you can say it with less, that’s the way to go.”
The first story in Ó Ceallaigh’s third collection, Trouble, involves a security guard and the theft of sum of money from a gangster. He uses time he spent as a security guard in Dublin to form the basis of this fiction.
Ó Ceallaigh eschews the prevailing style of Irish short story writing in that his works are rarely set in Ireland, and instead are set in a variety of locations across the world, predominately in Romania. His stories generally feature solitary men, with women playing more incidental roles. He acknowledges being influenced in his writing style by Charles Bukowski, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, and Ivan Turgenev.
Ó Ceallaigh wins the Hennessy Award for his first published work in 1998. He wins the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award for his collection Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse in 2006. His second collection, The Pleasant Light of Day, is shortlisted for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. He is the first Irish writer to receive this honour.
Hone’s most important works are probably the East Window, depicting the Crucifixion, for the Chapel at Eton College, Windsor (1949–1952) and My Four Green Fields, now located in Government Buildings, Dublin. This latter work, commissioned for the Irish Government’s Pavilion, wins first prize for stained glass in the 1939 New York World’s Fair. It graces CIÉ‘s Head Office in O’Connell Street from 1960 to about 1983. The window is then taken into storage by Abbey Glass in Kilmainham, Dublin at the request of the Office of Public Works.
The East Window of Eton College is commissioned following the destruction of the building after a bomb is dropped on the school in 1940 during World War II. She is commissioned to design the East Window in 1949, and the new window is inserted in 1952. This work is featured on an Irish postage stamp in 1969. From December 2005 to June 2006, an exhibition of her work is on display at the National Gallery of Ireland. Saint Mary’s church in Clonsilla also features her stained glass windows.
Hone is extremely devout. She spends time in an Anglican Convent in 1925 at Truro in Cornwall and converts to Catholicism in 1937. This may have influenced her decision to begin working in stained glass. Initially she works as a member of the An Túr Gloine stained glass co-operative before setting up a studio of her own in Rathfarnham.
Unmarried, Hone dies on March 13, 1955, while entering her parish church at Rathfarnham. She is survived by two of her sisters. Over 20,000 people visit a memorial exhibition of her work at University College Dublin (UCD), Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin, in 1958.
(Pictured: “My Four Green Fields” by Evie Hone, which depicts the four provinces of Ireland)
O’Sullivan is educated locally at Mount Carmel school. After completing a BA at University College Dublin (UCD), she then goes on to work as an English and History teacher and guidance counsellor in a secondary school in Baldoyle, a position she holds for thirty years.
O’Sullivan is a member of Tony Gregory‘s local political organisation in the 1970s, first canvassing for him and later serving as his election agent. She is co-opted onto Dublin City Council for the North Inner City local electoral area from September 2008 to June 2009, after the retirement of Mick Rafferty. After the death of Tony Gregory, she wins the resulting by-election which is held on the same day as the local elections where she also wins a seat on Dublin City Council, for the North Inner City local electoral area. Marie Metcalfe is co-opted to take the seat due to the dual mandate rule. Subsequently Anna Quigley replaces Metcalfe on Dublin City Council, who is in turn replaced by Mel MacGiobúin in March 2014. MacGiobúin fails to be elected at the local elections held in May.
O’Sullivan is re-elected to the Dáil at the 2011 Irish general election. She joins the Dáil technical group which gives independents and minor parties more speaking time in Dáil debates. She describes a proposal for political gender quota legislation as “tokenistic” and that women are able to get themselves nominated for election.
In December 2015, O’Sullivan and fellow independent TDs Clare Daly and Mick Wallace each put forward offers of a €5,000 surety for a 23-year-old man being prosecuted under terrorism legislation in the Special Criminal Court in Dublin charged with membership of an illegal dissident republican terrorist organisation.
After the 2016 Irish general election O’Sullivan unsuccessfully stands for election as Ceann Comhairle. She joins a technical group aligned with Independents 4 Change, while remaining outside the Independents 4 Change party. She is criticised by the brother of late TD Tony Gregory, over an allegedly false claim made in her election literature.
On January 16, 2020, O’Sullivan announces she will not be standing in the 2020 Irish general election in February.
Adrian Hardiman, Irish judge who serves as a Judge of the Supreme Court of Ireland from 2000 to 2016, dies in Portobello, Dublin, on March 7, 2016. He writes a number of important judgments while serving on the Court. He also presides, as does each Supreme Court judge on a rotating basis, over the Court of Criminal Appeal.
Hardiman joins Fianna Fáil while a student in University College Dublin and stands unsuccessfully for the party in the local elections in Dún Laoghaire in 1985. In 1985, he becomes a founder member of the Progressive Democrats but leaves the party when he is appointed to the Supreme Court. He remains very friendly with the former party leader and ex-Tánaiste, Michael McDowell, who is a close friend at college, a fellow founding member of the party, and best man at his wedding.
Hardiman is called to the Irish Bar in 1974 and receives the rare honour of being appointed directly from the Bar to Ireland’s highest court. Prior to his elevation to the Supreme Court in 2000, he has a successful practice as a barrister, focusing on criminal law and defamation.
Politically, Hardiman supports the liberal side in Ireland’s debates over abortion, being active in the “anti-amendment” campaign during the 1982 Abortion Referendum and later represents the Well Woman Centre in the early 1990s. After his death, he is described by Joan Burton as a liberal on social issues. But he could be an outspoken opponent of Political Correctness, such as when he rejects the Equality Authority‘s attempt to force Portmarnock Golf Club to accept women as full members. He also believes that certain decisions, such as those involving public spending, are better left to elected politicians rather than unelected judges, regardless of how unpopular that might sometimes be in the media (which he tends to hold in low esteem) and among what he describes as the “chattering classes.”
Hardiman’s concern for individual rights is not confined to Ireland. In February 2016, he criticizes what he describes as the radical undermining of the presumption of innocence, especially in sex cases, by the methods used in the UK‘s Operation Yewtree inquiry into historical sex allegations against celebrities, and he also criticizes “experienced lawyer” and then United States presidential candidate Hillary Clinton for allegedly declaring in January that “every accuser was to be believed, only to amend her view when asked if it applied to women who had made allegations against her husband”, former U.S. PresidentBill Clinton.
In a tribute following his death in 2016, PresidentMichael D. Higgins says Justice Hardiman “was one of the great legal minds of his generation”, who was “always committed to the ideals of public service.” He is described as a “colossus of the legal world” by Chief JusticeSusan Denham.
One commentator writes that “Hardiman’s greatest contribution …was the steadfast defence of civil liberties and individual rights” and that “He was a champion of defendants’ rights and a bulwark against any attempt by the Garda Síochána to abuse its powers.”
At the 1992 Irish general election, Upton stands again in Dublin South-Central, and in Labour’s “Spring Tide” surge at that election, he tops the poll with nearly 12,000 first-preference votes, a remarkable 1.48 quotas. He is re-elected at the 1997 Irish general election with a considerably reduced vote.
In the 28th Dáil Upton is appointed as Labour’s spokesperson on Justice, Equality and Law Reform. A leading critic of Labour’s 1999 merger with the Democratic Left, he nonetheless becomes the party’s spokesman on communications and sport after the merger.
Upton dies suddenly of a heart attack on February 22, 1999, at the UCD Veterinary College, where he is an occasional lecturer. He is taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, and his death is officially confirmed. He is survived by his wife and their four children. Politicians of all parties pay glowing tributes to him for his outspoken but “erudite and incisive” contributions to politics and to Irish culture.
The by-election for Upton’s Dáil seat in Dublin South-Central is held on October 27, 1999, and won for the Labour Party by his sister Mary Upton.
Following Upton’s death, the University College Dublin branch of the Labour party is named in his honour due to his involvement with the college. It has since been renamed to honour the Spanish Civil War veteran Charlie Donnelly.
Hutchinson’s father, Harry Hutchinson, a Scottish printer whose own father had left Dublin to find work in Scotland, is Sinn Féin treasurer in Glasgow and is interned in Frongoch internment camp in 1919–21. His mother, Cathleen Sara, is born in Cowcaddens, Glasgow, of emigrant parents from County Donegal. She is a friend of Constance Markievicz. In response to a letter from Cathleen, Éamon de Valera finds work in Dublin for Harry as a clerk in the Labour Exchange, and later he holds a post in Stationery Office.
Hutchinson is five years old when the family moves to Dublin and is the last to be enrolled in St. Enda’s School before it closes. He then goes to school at Synge Street CBS where he learns Irish and Latin. One of his close friends there is the poet and literary critic John Jordan. In 1948 he attends University College Dublin (UCD) where he spends a year and a half, learning Spanish and Italian.
Having published some poems in The Bell in 1945, Hutchinson’s poetic development is greatly influenced by a 1950 holiday in Spain and Portugal. A short stop en route at Vigo brings him into contact for the first time with the culture of Galicia. Later, in Andalusia, he is entranced by the landscape and by the works of the Spanish poets Federico García Lorca, Emilio Prados and Luis Cernuda.
In 1951 Hutchinson leaves Ireland again, determined to live in Spain. Unable to get work in Madrid, as he had hoped, he travels instead to Geneva, where he gets a job as a translator with the International Labour Organization, which brings him into contact with Catalan exiles, speaking a language then largely suppressed in Spain. An invitation by a Dutch friend leads to a visit to the Netherlands, in preparation for which he teaches himself the Dutch language.
Hutchinson returns to Ireland in 1953 and becomes interested in the Irish language poetry of writers such as Piaras Feiritéar and Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh and publishes a number of poems in Irish in the magazine Comhar in 1954. The same year he travels again to Spain, this time to Barcelona, where he learns the Catalan and Galician languages, and gets to know Catalan poets such as Salvador Espriu and Carles Riba. With the British poet P. J. Kavanagh, he organises a reading of Catalan poetry in the British Institute.
Hutchinson goes home to Ireland in 1957 but returns to Barcelona in 1961 and continues to support Catalan poets. An invitation by the publisher Joan Gili to translate some poems by Josep Carner leads to the publication of his first book, a collection of thirty of Carner’s poems in Catalan and English, in 1962. A project to publish his translation of Espriu’s La Pell de brau (The Bull-skin), falls through some years later. Some of the poems from this project are included in the collection Done into English.
In 1963, Hutchinson’s first collection of original poems in English, Tongue Without Hands, is published by Dolmen Press in Ireland. In 1967, having spent nearly ten years altogether in Spain, he returns to Ireland, making a living as a poet and journalist writing in both Irish and English. In 1968, a collection of poems in Irish, Faoistin Bhacach (A Lame Confession), is published. Expansions, a collection in English, follows in 1969. Friend Songs (1970) is a new collection of translations, this time of medieval poems originally written in Galician-Portuguese. In 1972 Watching the Morning Grow, a new collection of original poems in English, comes out, followed in 1975 by another, The Frost Is All Over.
In October 1971, Hutchinson takes up the Gregory Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Leeds, on the recommendation of Professor A. Norman Jeffares. There is some controversy around the appointment following accusations, later retracted, that Jeffares had been guilty of bias in the selection because of their joint Irish heritage. He holds tenure at the University for three years, and during that time contributes to the University’s influential poetry magazine Poetry & Audience.
From 1977 to 1978 Hutchinsonn compiles and presents Oró Domhnaigh, a weekly radio programme of Irish poetry, music and folklore for Ireland’s national network, RTÉ. He also contributes a weekly column on the Irish language to the station’s magazine RTÉ Guide for over ten years. A collaboration with Melita Cataldi of Old Irish lyrics into Italian is published in 1981. Another collection in English, Climbing the Light (1985), which also includes translations from Irish, Italian and Galician, is followed in 1989 by his last Irish collection, Le Cead na Gréine (By Leave of the Sun). The Soul that Kissed the Body (1990) is a selection of his Irish poems translated into English. His most recent English collection is Barnsley Main Seam (1995). His Collected Poems is published in 2002 to mark his 75th birthday. This is followed in 2003 by Done into English, a selection of many of the translated works he produced over the years.
A co-editor and founder of the literary journal Cyphers, Hutchinson receives the Butler Award for Irish writing in 1969. He is a member of Aosdána, the state-supported association of artists, from which he receives a cnuas (stipend) to allow him to continue writing. He describes this as “a miracle and a godsend” as he is fifty-four when invited to become a member and is at the end of his tether. A two-day symposium of events is held at Trinity College Dublin, to celebrate his 80th birthday in 2007, with readings from his works by writers including Macdara Woods, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Paul Durcan and Sujata Bhatt. His most recent collection, At Least for a While (2008), is shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award.
Hutchinson lives in Rathgar, Dublin, and dies of pneumonia in Dublin on January 14, 2012.
Gallagher is commissioned to write essays for The Irish Times, the Irish Medical Times and various journals. She takes up writing screenplays and stage plays. The result is a prolific list of productions which have been staged around the world as well as broadcast by RTÉ and the BBC.
Gallagher varies work from plays to speech therapy, as well as working with prisoners, and this leads her to be a visiting lecturer at universities across the globe. She is deeply involved in the organisations of her craft, leading her to being a member of Irish PEN, both on its committee and as vice president, on the Irish Writers’ Union committee as well as a council member of the Society of Irish Playwrights. Over the years she wins a number of awards including the Arts Council and European Script Fund Awards, the MHA TV Script Award, and the EU Theatre Award.
Gallagher’s husband is Gerhardt Gallagher. They live in Dublin and have three children, Mia, Donnacha, and Etain. In 2012 she is diagnosed with cancer and kidney disease. She dies on January 15, 2018.
Deane is the fourth child of Frank Deane and Winifred (Doherty) and is brought up as part of a Catholicnationalist family. He attends St. Columb’s College in his hometown, where he befriends fellow student Seamus Heaney. He then attends Queen’s University Belfast (BA and MA) and Pembroke College, Cambridge (PhD). Although he too becomes noted for his poetry, he chooses to go into academia instead. He workws as a teacher in Derry, with Martin McGuinness being one of his students. McGuinness later recalls how Deane was “gentle, kind and never raised his voice at all, an ideal teacher who was very highly thought of.”
Deane is the co-editor of Field Day Review, an annual journal of Irish studies. He also serves as general editor of the Penguin Classic James Joyce series and of Critical Conditions, a series in Irish Studies which is jointly published by the University of Notre Dame Press and Cork University Press. He co-founds the book series Field Day Files, which contains key works by David Lloyd, Joe Cleary, Marjorie Howes, and Kerby A. Miller.
The first collection of Deane’s poetry, Gradual Wars, is published in 1972 and receives the AE Memorial Award for Literature. His first novel, Reading in the Dark, is published in 1996 and is partly autobiographical. It wins the 1996 Guardian Fiction Prize and the 1996 South Bank Show Award for Literature, is a New York Times Notable Book, wins The Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, besides being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996. The novel is translated into more than twenty languages. He is also the general editor of the monumental Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, which is 4,000 pages long and whose first volumes are released in 1990. It is later criticised for excluding the voices and experiences of Irish women. He responds to this by stating, “To my astonishment and dismay, I have found that I myself have been subject to the same kind of critique to which I have subjected colonialism … I find that I exemplify some of the faults and erasures which I analyse and characterize in the earlier period.”
Deane’s first marriage is to Marion Treacy. Together, they have four children. He is in a civil partnership with Emer Nolan until his death. They have one child together.
Following a short illness, Deane dies at the age of 81 on May 12, 2021 at Beaumont Hospital in Dublin.
Boyd Barrett is adopted as a baby and is raised as a Roman Catholic in Glenageary, County Dublin, by his parents, David Boyd Barrett, an accountant, and his wife, Valerie. He attends St. Michael’s College in Dublin. He holds a master’s degree in English literature from University College Dublin (UCD). His birth mother is Sinéad Cusack, with whom he is later reunited in public. Since their reunion, he has had a good relationship with Cusack, her husband Jeremy Irons, and his half-brothers, Sam and Max. In May 2013, he reveals that theatre director Vincent Dowling is his biological father.
Boyd Barrett again contests the Dún Laoghaire constituency at the 2011 Irish general election as part of the United Left Alliance. On the ballot paper, he is named a member of People Before Profit, because the United Left Alliance had not yet been registered as a political party. Following a “nail-biting two days” of counting and recounting votes, he is elected on the 10th count without reaching the quota.
As a TD, Boyd Barrett, supports protests against cuts to Dublin Bus services. In Dáil Éireann, he condemns the 2011 murder of PSNI officer Ronan Kerr as “an utterly brutal action, which leads back down a road which has failed.” Marie O’Halloran in The Irish Times describes his “consistently passionate outrage and opposition to the Government’s handling of the financial and banking crisis.”
Boyd Barrett speaks at the Dublin location of the October 15, 2011 global protests, inspired by the Spanish “Indignants” and the Occupy Wall Street movements. The same month he says Enda Kenny‘s government is engaging in “spin and disingenuity” to cover up its austerity policies, decrying the closure of hospital emergency departments around the country for “health and safety” reasons.
On November 2, 2011, Boyd Barrett leads the United Left Alliance TDs out of the Dáil, in protest against the government’s decision not to hold a debate on the payment of more than €700 million to Anglo Irish Bank bondholders. On December 15, 2011, he helps launch a nationwide campaign against a proposed household charge being brought in as part of the 2012 Irish budget. He is part of an Oireachtas delegation that meets the Bundestag‘s Budgetary and European Affairs committees in Berlin in late January 2012.
Flanagan also plays senior Gaelic football for Mayo. He captains the All-Ireland final-winning sides of 1950 and 1951 and wins five Connacht senior championship medals in all. He also wins two National Football League titles in 1949 and 1954. While still a footballer, he enters into a career in politics.
Flanagan comes from a Fianna Fáil family and is recruited into the party in east Mayo. He is elected a Fianna Fáil TD for Mayo South at the 1951 Irish general election and then wins a seat from 1969 in Mayo East at each subsequent election until he loses his seat at the 1977 Irish general election.
Flanagan rises rapidly through the party ranks and is appointed a Parliamentary Secretary under TaoiseachSeán Lemass in 1959. In the 1966 Fianna Fáil leadership election he supports Jack Lynch. When Lynch becomes Taoiseach, he is promoted to the Cabinet as Minister for Health. Three years later in 1969, he becomes Minister for Lands. He loses his seat at the 1977 Irish general election and effectively retires from domestic politics. However, he is elected to the European Parliament in the first direct elections in 1979. He is re-elected in 1984 and retires from politics in 1989.
Flanagan marries Mary Patricia Doherty in 1950. They have two sons and five daughters, including Dermot, who also plays All-Ireland senior football for Mayo.
Flanagan dies at the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin on February 5, 1993, at the age of 71. Following his death, a Mayo sports journalist comments, “Above all, we’ll miss that noble link with an era when, as children, Seán Flanagan was our second God.”
seamus dubhghaill 