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Tag Archives: University College Dublin


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Birth of Father Ted, Dermot John Morgan

dermot-john-morgan

Dermot John Morgan, Irish comedian and actor who achieves international renown for his role as Father Ted Crilly in the Channel 4 sitcom Father Ted, is born in Dublin on March 31, 1952.

Educated at Oatlands College, Stillorgan, and University College, Dublin (UCD), Morgan comes to prominence as part of the team behind the highly successful RTÉ television show The Live Mike. Morgan makes his debut in the media on the Morning Ireland radio show produced by Gene Martin. Between 1979 and 1982 Morgan, who has been a teacher at St. Michael’s College, Ailesbury Road, plays a range of comic characters who appear between segments of the show, including Father Trendy, an unctuous trying-to-be-cool Catholic priest given to drawing ludicrous parallels with non-religious life in two-minute ‘chats’ to camera.

Morgan’s success as Father Trendy and other characters leads him to leave teaching and become a full-time comedian.

Morgan’s biggest Irish broadcasting success occurs in the late 1980s on the Saturday morning radio comedy show Scrap Saturday, which mocks Ireland’s political, business, and media establishment. The show’s treatment of the relationship between the ever-controversial Taoiseach Charles Haughey and his press secretary P.J. Mara prove particularly popular. When RTÉ axes the show in the early 1990s a national outcry ensues. Morgan lashes the decision, calling it “a shameless act of broadcasting cowardice and political subservience.”

Already a celebrity in Ireland, Morgan’s big break comes in Channel 4‘s Irish sitcom Father Ted, which runs for three series from April 21, 1995 until May 1, 1998. Writers Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews audition many actors for the title role, but Morgan’s enthusiasm wins him the part.

Father Ted centres on three disparate characters. Father Ted Crilly, played by Morgan, lives a frustrated life trapped on the fictional Craggy Island. Irish TV comedy actor Frank Kelly plays Father Jack Hackett, a foul-mouthed and apparently brain-damaged alcoholic, while child-minded Father Dougal McGuire is played by comedian Ardal O’Hanlon. The three priests are looked after by their housekeeper, Mrs. Doyle, played by Pauline McLynn, with whom Morgan had worked on Scrap Saturday. Father Ted enjoys widespread popularity and critical acclaim. In 1998, the show wins a BAFTA award for the best comedy, Morgan wins a BAFTA for best actor, and McLynn is named best actress.

On February 28, 1998, one day after recording the last episode of Father Ted, Morgan has a heart attack while hosting a dinner party at his home in southwest London. He is rushed to hospital but dies soon afterwards. Morgan’s Requiem Mass in St. Therese’s Church in Mount Merrion, south Dublin, is attended by the President of Ireland Mary McAleese, her predecessor, Mary Robinson, and by political and church leaders, many of whom had been the targets of his humour in Scrap Saturday. He is cremated at Glasnevin Cemetery and his ashes are buried in the family plot in Deansgrange Cemetery.


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Laying of the Foundation Stone of Nelson Pillar

nelson-pillar

Construction of Nelson Pillar, a large granite pillar topped by a statue of Horatio Nelson in the middle of O’Connell Street (formerly Sackville Street) in Dublin, begins with the laying of the foundation stone on February 15, 1808, by the Lord Lieutenant the Duke of Richmond.

News of Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar reaches Dublin on November 8, 1805, and is greeted with boisterous celebrations in the streets, alongside mourning for the death of the hero. Within a month the Lord Mayor of Dublin, James Vance, calls a meeting of nobility, clergy, bankers, merchants, and citizens to plan a monument in Nelson’s memory, which is to be funded by public subscription.

The duke, dressed in a general’s uniform and accompanied by the Duchess in deep mourning for the dead hero, arrive at the foundation stone laying in a state coach drawn by six horses. The procession from Dublin Castle to the site includes Horse Yeomanry and Foot Yeomanry, sailors, officers of the Army and the Navy, subscribers, the committee, the Provost and Fellows of Trinity College, the Lord Mayor, the Common Council, sheriffs, aldermen, and peers according to their degrees.

The pillar is a Doric column that rises 121 feet from the ground and is topped by a 13-foot-tall statue of Nelson carved in Portland stone, giving it a total height of 134 feet, some 35 feet shorter than Nelson’s Column in London. The diameter of the column is 13 feet at the bottom and 10 feet at the top. All of the outer and visible parts of the pillar are granite from the quarry of Goldenhill, Manor Kilbride, County Wicklow. The interior is black limestone.

The pillar is completed by August 1809 and the statue of Nelson is hoisted into place. The statue is the work of Thomas Kirk, a young Cork-born sculptor then at the beginning of a successful career. The statue adds £630 to the cost of the pillar, which totals almost £7,000.

The monument is opened to the public on Trafalgar Day, October 21, 1809, the fourth anniversary of the battle. It offers the citizens of Dublin an unprecedented perspective on their city. For the payment of ten pence, they can climb the 168 steps of the inner stone staircase to the viewing platform.

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On October 29, 1955, a group of University College Dublin students lock themselves inside the pillar and try to melt the statue with flame throwers. From the top they hang a poster of Kevin Barry, a Dublin Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer who is executed by the British during the Irish War of Independence. Gardaí force their way inside with sledgehammers. They take the students’ names and addresses and bring them downstairs. Rather than arrest the students, the Gardaí merely confiscate their equipment and tell everyone to leave quietly. None are ever charged.

At 1:32 AM on March 8, 1966, a bomb destroys the upper half of the pillar, throwing the statue of Nelson into the street. The bomb is planted by a group of former Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteers in what is believed to mark the commemoration the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising.

Six days after the original damage, on the morning of Monday, March 14, 1966, Irish Army engineers blow up the rest of the pillar after judging the structure to be too unsafe to restore. This planned demolition causes more damage on O’Connell Street than the original blast, breaking many windows.

The rubble from the monument is taken to the East Wall dump and the lettering from the plinth is moved to the gardens of Butler House, Kilkenny.


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Birth of Dr. Douglas Hyde, First President of Ireland

douglas-hyde

Dr. Douglas Hyde, Gaelic scholar and the first President of Ireland, is born at Longford House in Castlerea, County Roscommon, on January 17, 1860. In 1867, his father is appointed prebendary and rector of Tibohine, and the family moves to neighbouring Frenchpark, in County Roscommon. He is home schooled by his father and his aunt due to a childhood illness. While a young man, he becomes fascinated with hearing the old people in the locality speak the Irish language.

Rejecting family pressure to follow previous generations with a career in the Church, Hyde instead becomes an academic. He enters Trinity College, Dublin, where he gains a great facility for languages, learning Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German, but his great passion in life is the preservation of the Irish language.

After spending a year teaching modern languages in Canada, Hyde returns to Ireland. For much of the rest of his life he writes and collects hundreds of stories, poems, and folktales in Irish, and translates others. His work in Irish helps to inspire many other literary writers, such as W.B. Yeats and Lady Gregory.

In 1892, Hyde helps establish the Gaelic Journal and in November of that year writes a manifesto called The necessity for de-anglicising the Irish nation, arguing that Ireland should follow her own traditions in language, literature, and even in dress.

In 1893, Hyde founds the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaeilge) along with Eoin MacNeill and Fr. Eugene O’Growney and serves as its first president. Many of the new generation of Irish leaders who play a central role in the fight for Irish independence in the early twentieth century, including Patrick Pearse, Éamon de Valera, Michael Collins, and Ernest Blythe first become politicised and passionate about Irish independence through their involvement in the Gaelic League. Hyde does not want the Gaelic League to be a political entity, so when the surge of Irish nationalism that the Gaelic League helps to foster begins to take control of many in the League and politicize it in 1915, Hyde resigns as president.

Hyde takes no active part in the armed upheaval of the 1910s and 1920s, but does serve in Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Free State’s Oireachtas, as a Free State senator in 1925-26. He then returns to academia, as Professor of Irish at University College Dublin, where one of his students is future Attorney General and President of Ireland Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh.

In 1938, Hyde is unanimously elected to the newly created position of President of Ireland, a post he holds until 1945. Hyde is inaugurated on June 26, 1938, in the first inaugural ceremony in the nation’s history. Despite being placed in a position to shape the office of the presidency via precedent, Hyde by and large opts for a quiet, conservative interpretation of the office. In April 1940 he suffers a massive stroke and plans are made for his lying-in-state and state funeral, but to the surprise of everyone he survives, albeit paralysed and confined to a wheelchair. One of Hyde’s last presidential acts is a visit to the German ambassador Eduard Hempel on May 3, 1945 to offer his condolences on the death of Adolf Hitler, a visit which remains a secret until 2005.

Hyde leaves office on June 25, 1945, opting not to nominate himself for a second term. He opts not return to his Roscommon home due to his ill-health, but rather moves into the former Secretary to the Lord Lieutenant’s residence in the grounds of Áras an Uachtaráin, where he lived out the remaining four years of his life.

Hyde dies in Dublin on July 12, 1949 at age 89. As a former President of Ireland he is accorded a state funeral which, as a member of the Church of Ireland, takes place in Dublin’s Church of Ireland St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Since contemporary rules of the Roman Catholic Church in Ireland at the time prohibit Roman Catholics from attending services in non-Catholic churches, all but one member of the Catholic cabinet remain outside the cathedral grounds while Hyde’s funeral takes place. Hyde is buried in Frenchpark, County Roscommon at Portahard Church.