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Tag Archives: University of Galway


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Birth of Fr. Alec Reid, Facilitator in the Northern Ireland Peace Process

Alexander Reid CSsR, Irish Catholic priest noted for his facilitator role in the Northern Ireland peace process, is born in Dublin on August 5, 1931. BBC journalist Peter Taylor subsequently describes Reid’s role as “absolutely critical” to the success of the peace process.

Reid is raised in Nenagh, County Tipperary, from the age of six following the death of his father. He studies English, history and philosophy at University College Galway.

Reid is professed as a Redemptorist in 1950 and ordained a priest seven years later. For the next four years, he gives Parish Missions in Limerick, Dundalk and Galway (Esker), before moving to Clonard Monastery in Belfast, where he spends almost the next forty years. The Redemptorist Monastery at Clonard stands on the interface between the Catholic nationalist Falls Road and the Protestant loyalist Shankill Road areas of west Belfast.

In the late 1980s, Reid facilitates a series of meetings between Gerry Adams and John Hume, in an effort to establish a “Pan-Nationalist front” to enable a move toward renouncing violence in favour of negotiation. Reid, himself a staunch nationalist who favours a united Ireland and the withdrawal of British forces from Northern Ireland, then acts as their contact person with the Irish Government in Dublin from a 1987 meeting with Charles Haughey up to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. In this role, which is not public knowledge at the time, he holds meetings with various Taoisigh, and particularly with Martin Mansergh, advisor to various Fianna Fáil leaders. After the eventual success of the peace negotiations, Gerry Adams says, “there would not be a peace process at this time without [Father Reid’s] diligent doggedness and his refusal to give up.”

In 1988 in Belfast, Reid delivers the last rites to two British Army corporals, David Howes and Derek Wood of the Royal Corps of Signals, who are killed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) – an event known as the corporals killings – after they drive into the funeral cortège of IRA member Kevin Brady, who had been killed in the Milltown Cemetery attack. A photograph of his involvement in that incident becomes one of the starkest and most enduring images of the Troubles. Unknown until years later, he is carrying a letter from Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams to Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) leader John Hume outlining Adams’ suggestions for a political solution to the Troubles. Adams later tells the BBC in 2019 that Reid also advised U.S Ambassador to Ireland Jean Kennedy Smith during the peace process, stating “He was talking to her on the side and she was talking to her brother Teddy.”

After he moves to Dublin, Reid is involved in peace efforts in the Basque Country. In January 2003, he is awarded the Sabino Arana 2002 “World Mirror” prize, by the Sabino Arana Foundation in Bilbao, in recognition of his efforts at promoting peace and reconciliation. He and a Methodist minister, the Rev. Harold Good, announce that the IRA has decommissioned their arms at a news conference in September 2005.

Reid is involved in controversy in November 2005 when he makes comments during a meeting in Fitzroy Presbyterian Church concerning the Unionist community in Northern Ireland. When the loyalist activist Willie Frazer makes remarks that Catholics had butchered Protestants during the Troubles, Reid angrily responds, “You don’t want to hear the truth. The reality is that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland were treated almost like animals by the unionist community. They were not treated like human beings. They were treated like the Nazis treated the Jews.” Reid later apologises, saying his remarks had been made in the heat of the moment. In an interview with CNN, he says that “The IRA were, if you like, a violent response to the suppression of human rights.”

Reid dies in a Dublin hospital on November 22, 2013. He is survived by two sisters and an aunt, and is buried in Milltown Cemetery, Belfast.


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Death of George Derwent Thomson, Philosopher & Scholar of the Irish Language

George Derwent Thomson (Irish: Seoirse Mac Tomáis), English classical scholar, Marxist philosopher, and scholar of the Irish language, dies on February 3, 1987, at his home in Moseley, Birmingham, England.

Thomson is born on August 19, 1903, in West Dulwich, London, the eldest of a family of three sons and two daughters born to William Henry Thomson, an accountant, and his wife Minnie (née Clements). Inheriting an interest in Ireland from his maternal grandfather, an Ulsterman of Orange stock, and his mother, he attends Irish language classes run by the Gaelic League in London while a pupil at Dulwich College (1916–22).

Awarded a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, in 1922, Thomson studies classics, where he attains First Class Honours in the Classical Tripos and subsequently wins a scholarship to Trinity College, Dublin (TCD). At TCD he works on his first book, Greek Lyric Metre, and begins visiting the Blasket Islands in the early 1920s. He becomes lecturer and then Professor of Greek at University College Galway.

Thomson moves back to England in 1934, when he returns to King’s College, Cambridge, to lecture in Greek. He becomes a professor at the University of Birmingham in 1936, the year he joins the Communist Party of Great Britain. He pioneers a Marxist interpretation of Greek drama. His Aeschylus and Athens (1941) and Marxism and Poetry (1945) win him international attention. In the latter book he argues a connection between the work song and poetry, and that pre-industrial songs are connected to ritual.

Thomson befriends and is an important influence on Alfred Sohn-Rethel and his theory of the genesis of occidental thought in Ancient Greece through the invention of coining.

Thomson first visits the Blasket Islands off the west coast of Ireland in 1923. Mac Tomáis, as he quickly becomes known to the islanders, had attended rudimentary Irish classes at a branch of Conradh na Gaeilge in London before he went to Cambridge. When he arrives on the island, he immerses himself in the language. In six weeks of walking around, talking with Muiris Ó Súilleabháin and others, he achieves near complete fluency in the language.

Thomson spends several years with the people of the islands studying their language, history and culture. He maintains a special study of the now extinct community in Ireland, in which he perceives elements of surviving cultural resonances with historical society prior to the development of private property as a means of production. He becomes a champion of the Irish language.

Thomson has a role in the publication of the memoirs of Muiris Ó Súilleabháin, Fiche Bliain Ag Fás (Twenty Years Growing) in 1933. The introduction to Ó Súilleabháin’s autobiography by E. M. Forster can also be attributed to Thomson.

When Thomson applies for the new position of lecturer of Greek at the National University of Ireland, Galway, in 1931 he, in the words of Richard Roche, “astonished the interview board with a flow of Blasket Irish” and is awarded the post.

In 1951, Thomson is the only member of the Communist Party’s Executive Committee to vote against the Party’s programme, The British Road to Socialism, because “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing.” He also serves on the Party’s Cultural Committee.

The Chinese revolution of 1949 has a profound effect on Thomson and leads to differences with the British Communist Party, from which he eventually drifts. He never loses his political beliefs. He is committed to working class education, including giving lectures to factory workers at Birmingham’s Austin car plant. He also maintains a special affection and support for the Morning Star in his later years.

Thomson authors three popular expositions on Marxism published by the China Policy Study Group in the early 1970s. From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: A study in revolutionary dialectics (1971), Capitalism and After: The rise and fall of commodity production (1973), and The Human Essence: The sources of science and art (1974). He is also the author of Marxism and Poetry (1945).


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Birth of Breandán Ó hEithir, Writer & Broadcaster

Breandán Ó hEithir, Irish writer and broadcaster, is born in Cill Rónáin, Aran, County Galway, on January 18, 1930.

Ó hEithir’s parents are national school teachers, Pádraic Ó hEithir and Delia Ní Fhlaithearta. He is a nephew of Aran Islands authors Liam Ó Flaithearta and Tom Maidhc Ó Flaithearta, the brothers of his mother. He attends the Kilronan national school where his parents teach. He receives his secondary school education at Coláiste Éinde (St. Enda’s College), Galway. He attends University College Galway for three years, finishing his university course in 1952 but leaves without sitting his final examinations. He writes in both Irish and English and is highly regarded for the originality and liveliness of his journalism, especially his work in Irish.

Ó hEithir marries Catherine von Hildebrand, a young student recently arrived in Dublin from Colombia, in 1957 and they have five children: Ruairí, Máirín, Brian, Aindriú, and Rónán. Catherine is born in Paris, the daughter of Deirdre Mulcahy from Sligo and Franz von Hildebrand from Munich, son of the noted philosopher and theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand.

After college, Ó hEithir spends a number of years working as an itinerant bookseller for Comhdháil Náisiúnta na Gaeilge. He serves as an editor at Sáirséal agus Dill, the Irish language publishing house, and as Irish language editor for The Irish Press from 1957 to 1963. He also writes a column for The Sunday Press. He is a regular columnist with the journal Comhar and also contributes a weekly column to The Irish Times. He also serves as a staff journalist with Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ), working on the current affairs programmes Cúrsaí and Féach.

In 1975 the Irish American Cultural Institute awards Ó hEithir a scholarship of £2,000 to allow him to devote more time to writing. The following year his first novel, Lig sinn i gcathú (1976), loosely based on his student days in Galway, becomes a best-seller. He and Catherine move to Paris in 1986, where most of his second novel, Sionnach ar mo Dhuán (1988), is written. Hopes of having produced his definitive novel are soon dashed by a series of devastating reviews.

Ó hEithir visits Colombia with his wife in the summer of 1990. On his return, he is presented with the Butler literary award of $10,000 in further recognition of his writing in Irish. A month later, after a very short illness, he dies of cancer in St. Vincent’s University Hospital in Dublin on October 26, 1990. He is survived by his wife, Catherine, daughter Máirín, and sons Ruairí, Brian, and Aindriú.

A biography of Ó hEithir has been written by Liam Mac Con Iomaire.


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Birth of Political Economist John Elliott Cairnes

John Elliott Cairnes, Irish-born political economist, is born on December 26, 1823, at Castlebellingham, County Louth. He has been described as the “last of the classical economists.”

Cairnes is the son of William Elliott Cairnes (1787–1863) of Stameen, near Drogheda, and Marianne Woolsey, whose mother is the sister of Sir William Bellingham, 1st Baronet of Castlebellingham. William decides upon a business career, against the wishes of his mother, Catherine Moore of Moore Hall, Killinchy, and becomes a partner in the Woolsey Brewery at Castlebellingham. In 1825, he starts on his own account in Drogheda, making the Drogheda Brewery an unqualified success. He is remembered for his great business capacity and for the deep interest he takes in charity.

After leaving school, Cairnes spends some years in the counting house of his father at Drogheda. His tastes, however, lay altogether in the direction of study, and he is permitted to enter Trinity College Dublin, where he takes the degree of BA in 1848, and six years later that of MA. After passing through the curriculum of Arts, he engages in the study of Law and is called to the Irish bar. But he lacks a desire to pursue the legal profession, and over some ensuing years, he devotes himself to writing in various publications about social and economic questions and treatises that relate to Ireland. He focuses mostly on political economy, which he studies thoroughly.

While residing in Dublin, Cairnes makes the acquaintance of the Archbishop of Dublin Richard Whately, who conceives a very high respect for Cairnes’ character and abilities. In 1856, a vacancy occurs in the chair of political economy at Dublin, founded by Whately, and Cairnes receives the appointment. In accordance with the regulations of the foundation, the lectures of his first year’s course are published. The book appears in 1857 with the title Character and Logical Method of Political Economy. It follows up on and expands John Stuart Mill‘s treatment in the Essays on some Unsettled Questions in Political Economy and forms an admirable introduction to the study of economics as a science. In it the author’s peculiar powers of thought and expression are displayed to the best advantage. Logical exactness, precision of language, and firm grasp of the true nature of economic facts, are the qualities characteristic of this as of all his other works. If the book had done nothing more, it would still have conferred inestimable benefit on political economists by its clear exposition of the true nature and meaning of the ambiguous term law. To the view of the province and method of political economy expounded in this early work the author always remains true, and several of his later essays, such as those on Political Economy and Land, Political Economy and Laissez-Faire, are but reiterations of the same doctrine. His next contribution to economical science is a series of articles on the gold question, published partly in Fraser’s Magazine, in which the probable consequences of the increased supply of gold attendant on the Australian and Californian gold discoveries are analysed with great skill and ability. And a critical article on Michel Chevalier‘s work, On the Probable Fall in the Value of Gold, appears in the Edinburgh Review for July 1860.

In 1861, Cairnes is appointed to the professorship of jurisprudence and political economy in Queens College Galway, and in the following year he publishes his admirable work The Slave Power, one of the finest specimens of applied economic philosophy. The inherent disadvantages of the employment of slave labour are exposed with great fullness and ability, and the conclusions arrived at have taken their place among the recognised doctrines of political economy. The opinions expressed by Cairnes as to the probable issue of American Civil War are largely verified by the actual course of events, and the appearance of the book has a marked influence on the attitude taken by serious political thinkers in England towards the Confederate States of America.

During the remainder of his residence at Galway, Cairnes publishes nothing beyond some fragments and pamphlets, mainly upon Irish questions. The most valuable of these papers are the series devoted to the consideration of university education. His health, at no time very good, is still further weakened in 1865 by a fall from his horse. He is ever afterwards incapacitated from active exertion and is constantly liable to have his work interfered with by attacks of illness.

In 1866 Cairnes is appointed professor of political economy in University College, London. He is compelled to spend the session 1868–1869 in Italy, but on his return continues to lecture until 1872. During his last session he conducts a mixed class, ladies being admitted to his lectures. His health soon renders it impossible for him to discharge his public duties. He resigns his post in 1872 and retires with the honorary title of professor emeritus of political economy. In 1873 his own university confers on him the degree of LL.D.

Cairnes dies at the age of 51 at Blackheath, London, England, on July 8, 1875.


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Birth of Criostóir Mac Aonghusa, Teacher, Author, & Campaigner for Irish Language

Criostóir Mac Aonghusa, teacher, author, critic, and campaigner for the Irish language, is born on December 13, 1905, in Gort an Ghabhainn, Banagher, King’s County (now County Offaly), son of Francis McGuiness (surname thus on his birth certificate), farmer, and his wife, Rosanna (née Egan). He is educated at La Sainte Foi, Banagher, Reachra national school, Shannonbridge, and Naas CBS. He qualifies as a primary school teacher from De La Salle Training College, Waterford, in 1926 and has the distinction of being the first person to sit all exams through the medium of Irish. He graduates BA at University College Galway (UCG) in 1933 and his further education includes a diploma in Spanish literature from University of Barcelona and an MA on the Irish scholar Tomás Ó Máille.

Mac Aonghusa’s teaching career begins in 1926 when he becomes headmaster on Inis Treabhair, County Galway, spending fourteen months there. Afterwards he transfers to Gort Mór, Rosmuc, County Galway, where he continues teaching until 1962. He remains an active member of Cumann na Múinteoirí Náisiúnta throughout his life. Between 1962 and 1972 he is employed as an ad-hoc examiner at the civil service commission. An active member of Fianna Fáil, he helps to organise the party in County Galway in the 1920s and 1930s and is elected a member of Galway County Council in 1934.

Mac Aonghusa is a prominent advocate of the Irish language and together with his close friend Máirtín Ó Cadhain and another Connemara schoolteacher, Seosamh Mac Mathúna, founds Cumann na Gaeltachta to agitate for the civil rights of the Gaeltacht communities and of Irish speakers in general. He is one of the main campaigners for the establishment of the Rath Carn Gaeltacht in County Meath and forms part of the delegation that meets Éamon de Valera on November 11, 1932, and receives from him a promise to provide land in County Meath for that purpose. The Gaeltacht is established in 1935. Mac Aonghusa continues to support the project throughout his life and is involved in further campaigns relating to the area, including the recognition of Rath Carn’s Gaeltacht status. He is also an active member of Conradh na Gaeilge in the 1940s and is later involved in the campaign for the establishment of an Irish-language television broadcasting service.

Mac Aonghusa is a prolific writer and begins publishing short stories and articles from 1926 onward. His contributions appear in An tÉireannach, An Phoblacht, The Irish Tribune, An Stoc, and Ar Aghaidh. From 1948, he is a regular contributor to Feasta and his essays and reviews on Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s works appear in Comhar. He is a member of several literary organisations, including Cumann na Scríbhneoirí and the Galway Literary Society. His first book, An Cladóir agus scéalta eile, appears in 1952. Between 1963 and 1972 he is a contributor to The Irish Press and works also as a literary journalist. An essay on Pádraic Ó Conaire earns him a prize from Acadamh Liteartha na hÉireann.

Mac Aonghusa speaks a number of European languages including German, Spanish, French, Romanian, and Greek and travels widely throughout Europe. In the early 1970s he lives in Russia, and a collection of essays entitled Ó Rosmuc go Rostov is published in 1972. For health reasons he lives in Málaga, Spain, from the middle of the 1970s until 1987. While there, RTÉ produces a documentary on his life entitled Ó Ros Muc go Malaga.

Mac Aonghusa dies on April 9, 1991, in Portiuncula General Hospital, Ballinasloe, County Galway, and is interred in Clonmacnoise. In 1930 he marries Mairéad Ní Lupain, a nurse from Annaghvane in Connemara, and has four children, Proinsias (1933), Micheál (1937), Róisín (1939), and Máirín (1944). The couple separates in the 1940s. Proinsias follows in his father’s footsteps as a writer and journalist and becomes president of Conradh na Gaeilge and chairman of Bord na Gaeilge.

(From: “Mac Aonghusa, Criostóir” by Lesa Ní Mhunghaile, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Death of Frank Hugh O’Donnell, Writer, Journalist & Politician

Frank Hugh O’Donnell, Irish writer, journalist and nationalist politician, dies in London on November 2, 1916.

O’Donnell is born in an army barracks in Devon, England, where his father, Sergeant Bernard MacDonald, is stationed. His mother, Mary Kain, is a native of Ballybane, close to Galway city. He is educated at the Erasmus Smith School in Galway, Coláiste Iognáid (the “Jes”), and later enrolls in Queen’s College Galway, where he studies English literature, history and political economy. While a student at the college, he acquires a considerable reputation as an orator, and is a frequent contributor to meetings of the college’s Literary and Debating Society, of which he becomes vice-auditor for the 1864–65 session.

Even in his student days, O’Donnell seems to be quick to voice his opinions, and revells in controversy. In November 1866, addressing the Literary and Debating Society on the question “Was the character of Warren Hastings as Governor-General of India praiseworthy?” he causes uproar by denouncing “the principle and the system which have lain at the root of the international and intercolonial policy of England, from the days when Elizabeth, the Infamous, chartered for profit two of the first ships which opened the African slave trade.” His remarks cause the chairman of the meeting, Professor Thomas Moffett, to prevent him from continuing his speech, stating that “such an epithet ought not to be applied to any predecessor of our present gracious Queen.” O’Donnell regards such action as an unwarranted restriction on his freedom of speech, and in a letter published in the local press gives an early example of his high-flown literary style:

“I hold that Debating Societies are the nurseries of independent thought, and the training schools of sober criticism. I believe in the power and impartiality of an enlightened studenthood … I have followed the mind of Austin. I have sat at the feet of Cairnes. I have drunk of the philosophy of Mill. I claim for Judicial Science, for Economic Science, for the Philosophy of History, a place in the discussions of our society, I pity, and I scorn the formidable confederacy of fools who dare not call a spade a spade.”

This incident, combined with the reluctance of the society to prevent O’Donnell from addressing its meetings, eventually leads to the suspension of the society from the Queen’s College and its temporary migration to rooms in the city of Galway.

O’Donnell graduates from the Queen’s College with an M.A. degree in 1868, winning several gold medals for his academic performance. By this stage, he has begun to style himself ‘Frank Hugh O’Donnell,’ believing himself to be a descendant of Hugh O’Donnell, 2nd Earl of Tyrconnell.

Leaving Galway, O’Donnell moves to London, where he embarks on a career in journalism, following his college contemporary T. P. O’Connor. O’Connor’s knowledge of modern European languages has helped him to establish himself as a correspondent on European affairs, and he assists O’Donnell in developing a similar reputation. He spends a brief period on the staff of The Morning Post.

In the 1874 United Kingdom general election, O’Donnell is elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Galway Borough but is unseated by the courts in what appears to be a politically inspired judgment which uses certain unsavoury campaigning tactics in which O’Donnell had indulged as its basis. He is succeeded in the seat by his election agent, Dr. Michael Francis Ward, who is himself succeeded in 1880 by T. P. O’Connor in an unusual succession, all three having been either auditor or vice-auditor of the Queen’s College Literary and Debating Society in the same era.

In 1875, O’Donnell is a founding member of the Constitutional Society of India, a group promoting political autonomy for India. In 1877, he secures a more permanent election to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom as MP for Dungarvan. He holds the seat until 1885, when the constituency is abolished. He strikes a colourful and controversial figure in parliament and becomes renowned for his declamatory speech-making. He is a prominent obstructionist and claims credit for inventing the tactic of obstructionism which is to yield such results for the Home Rule League under Charles Stewart Parnell. Indeed, he sees himself as a natural leader and becomes disillusioned when Parnell is selected in May 1880 to succeed William Shaw as leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party. He calls the British ‘Imperial pirates’ and inaugurates the Constitutional Society of India. Its aim is Home Rule for India, “Mr. O’Donnell’s grand passion in politics was a confederation of all the discontented races of the Empire under the lead of the Irish party. He once brought down some scores of dusky students of all the races and creeds of Hindustan to the House of Commons.”

Parnell refuses to let O’Donnell be nominated in 1885. He leaves the Irish Parliamentary Party and conventional politics, but not its general aims of promoting home rule and tenant farmers’ rights. His last and perhaps most important contribution to the fortunes of the party is the libel case he launches against The Times in 1888 over the series “Parnellism and Crime.” Though the case is lost, it results in the establishment of the Parnell Commission which exonerates Parnell from condoning the Phoenix Park Murders and exposes the Pigott Forgeries.

In his later years O’Donnell begins investigating misconduct by both the British Civil Service and the Roman Catholic church in Ireland. His Paraguay on Shannon (1908) is an amusing but serious critique of unethical practices by the Catholic clergy in local politics, education, and their involvement in the Congested Districts Board for Ireland that is financed by Parliament in order to improve the depressed economy of western Ireland. Parliament believes that by improving the living standards of the Irish peasant class, they can “kill Home Rule with kindness.”

After careful investigation, O’Donnell accuses members of the Catholic clergy of illegally diverting Government money earmarked for economic development into new Cathedrals, parish churches, and other ecclesiastical building projects. He argues that the British Government needs to provide better oversight of how the Congested Districts Board’s funds are being used. He believes that “in Ireland material ruin has accompanied clerical despotism.” His hostility to the Church draws the ire of Catholic historians who systematically undermine his credibility.

Ernest Belfort Bax writes that O’Donnell’s “matter is better than his manner.”

O’Donnell dies a bachelor in London on November 2, 1916, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.


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Birth of Thomas Kilroy, Playwright & Novelist

Thomas F. Kilroy, Irish playwright and novelist, is born on September 23, 1934, in Green Street, Callan, County Kilkenny. He is a difficult writer to categorize, having written plays ranging from the conventional The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche to more technically innovative and avant-garde works such as Talbot’s Box and The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde. Nevertheless, common thematic concerns run throughout many of his plays, including the issue of personal and cultural—specifically, Irish versus English—identity and the mythologizing of the past. Best known as a playwright, he is also the author of the Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Big Chapel (1971).

Kilroy is the son of Thomas and Mary (née Devine) Kilroy. He attends St. Kieran’s College and plays hurling for the school team, captaining the senior team in 1952. He studies at University College Dublin, where his first play, The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche, is produced to great success at the Olympia Theatre. In his early career he is play editor at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin. In the 1980s, he sits on the board of Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980, and is Director of its touring company.

In 1978, Kilroy is appointed Professor of English at University College Galway, a post from which he resigns in 1989 to concentrate on writing.

In 2008, Kilroy receives the Irish PEN Award, given to honour an Irish-born writer who has made an outstanding contribution to Irish literature.

While some of Kilroy’s plays hit a lighter note than others, the common thread in most of them is his attempt to address some of the social upheavals that have occurred in Ireland in the past and present. This has been a concern of his since he was in his twenties and wrote in the 1959 essay “Groundwork for an Irish Theatre” that his contemporaries were “inclined to shirk the painful, sometimes tragic problems of a modern Ireland which is undergoing considerable social and ideological stress.” Although he has not been one of Ireland’s most prolific playwrights, his plays may certainly be considered important contributions to the modern stage.

Kilroy now lives in County Mayo and is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and Aosdána.

The Thomas Kilroy Collection, his personal archive, is deposited at the James Hardiman Library at the National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway). Kilroy addresses the launch event in March 2011, which is attended by, amongst others, Brian Friel and the future President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins.


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Birth of Charles Patrick Meehan, Priest & Historian

Charles Patrick Meehan, priest and historian, is born on July 12, 1812, at 141 Great Britain Street (now Parnell Street), Dublin.

Meehan’s father, a native of Manorhamilton, County Leitrim, is a prosperous farmer at Ballymahon, County Longford. He receives his early education in a hedge school and from a local curate at Ballymahon. In 1828 he enters the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, where he is a brilliant student, acquiring fluency in several languages. As a child he had loved to listen to stories of the Flight of the Earls and the Flight of the Wild Geese, and during his time in Rome he discovers the neglected graves of Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donnell in the church of San Pietro in Montorio. He begins his lifelong research on the seventeenth century by locating and transcribing hitherto unstudied documents held in Roman repositories. Ordained in 1835, he is appointed curate at Rathdrum, County Wicklow in August and five months later is transferred to the parish of Saints Michael and John, Dublin. He is an excellent preacher and a strong advocate of temperance, and zealously discharges his parish duties.

A supporter of Daniel O’Connell and the repeal movement, Meehan is particularly attracted by the ideals of Young Ireland and becomes friendly with the principal writers of The Nation, especially Charles Gavan Duffy and James Clarence Mangan. He is Mangan’s confessor and attends his deathbed in 1849. The Young Irelanders often meet in his presbytery in Lower Exchange Street. From 1842 he contributes occasional verse and translations to The Nation using the pseudonym ‘Clericus’ and the initials ‘C. P. M.’ He defends the Young Irelanders from accusations of irreligion. During the debates on physical force in Conciliation Hall in July 1846 he supports the Young Ireland position and is shouted down by O’Connellites.

He secedes with the Young Irelanders from the Repeal Association and becomes a member of their Irish Confederation on its foundation in January 1847. Later that year he becomes president of the St. Patrick’s Confederate Club and delivers lectures to it on Irish history. A strong believer in the importance of history in creating national pride and awareness, he contributes The Confederation of Kilkenny (1846) and a translation of Daniel O’Daly, The Geraldines, their Rise, Increase and Ruin (1847) to The Nation‘s Library of Ireland historical series. He publishes a translation, with a valuable introduction and notes, of John Lynch‘s Latin life of Francis Kirwan, bishop of Killala 1645–61, as Portrait of a Christian Bishop (1848). In 1848 he resigns his presidency of the St. Patrick’s Confederate Club in the hope of becoming librarian or professor of modern languages at Queen’s College Galway but is unsuccessful.

For the rest of his life Meehan devotes himself to parish work and historical research, occasionally publishing articles and poems in the Hibernian Magazine and Irish Catholic Magazine. He also edits six volumes of the second series of James Duffy‘s Duffy’s Hibernian Magazine (1862–65). Having acquired a vast store of anecdotes and curious information from his research, he is an interesting companion who loves the company of poets and scholars and forms friendships with many young nationalist writers, including Denis Florence MacCarthy, John Keegan Casey and John Francis O’Donnell.

Most of Meehan’s research is devoted to Irish history, but he occasionally tackles other subjects, such as his translation from the Italian of Vincenzo Marchese’s Lives of the most eminent sculptors and architects of the order of St Dominic (2 vols, 1852). Although his work is marked by a strong sympathy for Catholicism and Irish nationalism, he is among the more scholarly historians associated with the Young Ireland movement. He is elected Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA) in February 1865. Gavan Duffy lauds his efforts and ranks him with the great patriotic clerical scholars of the past who had devoted their lives to the study of Irish history.

Meehan repeatedly takes the opportunity to amend and expand his published works, producing revised editions of The Geraldines (as The Geraldines, their Rise, Increase and Ruin (reprinted 1878)), Confederation of Kilkenny (1882), and Lynch’s Life of Kirwan (1884). His other important publications are The Fate and Fortunes of the Earls of Tyrone (Hugh O’Neill) and Tyrconnel (Rory O’Donel), their flight from Ireland and death in exile (1868), and Rise and Fall of the Irish Franciscan Monasteries and Memoirs of the Irish Hierarchy in the Seventeenth Century (1870). He edits the essays of the Young Irelanders in The Spirit of the Nation (1882) and publishes editions of the poetry of Mangan in The Poets and Poetry of Munster (1883), with an important biographical memoir. His last scholarly work is to re-edit Literary Remains of the United Irishmen (1887) to include material left in manuscript by Richard R. Madden.

A small man, Meehan always wears a monocle attached to a silk ribbon, a tall silk hat, and a stout blackthorn stick. He suffers badly from indigestion for most of his life, and this aggravates a testy personality and a waspish tongue. He regularly falls out with friends, and few parishioners are foolhardy enough to brave his confessional. He retains strong anti-English views all his life. In the 1880s he encounters the young Arthur Griffith pulling down a union flag from a lamppost in Dublin and astounds the boy by congratulating rather than chastising him. His Young Ireland nationalism and irascible personality ensure that he never progresses beyond the position of curate in his forty-five years at Saints Michael and John. Here, he works alongside Fr. James Healy, a renowned wit, and the two men delight in trading caustic remarks. Healy is present at Meehan’s deathbed and admits to brushing away a tear – the only thing, he remarks, that had been brushed in that room for many years.

Meehan dies on March 14, 1890, at his presbytery in Dublin, and is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery. He is survived by two brothers, one of whom is also a priest. He is commemorated by a mural tablet erected by his parishioners in the church of Saints Michael and John.

(From: “Meehan, Charles Patrick” by James Quinn and Linde Lunney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie)


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Birth of Garbhan Downey, Novelist & Editor

Garbhan Downey, novelist and editor, is born in Derry, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland, on February 24, 1966. He is the former Director of Communications and Marketing for Culture Company 2013, which delivers Derry’s City of Culture year.

Downey is a product of St. Columb’s College, the Catholic grammar school whose past pupils include John Hume, Seamus Heaney and Brian Friel.

Downey cuts his teeth in journalism editing University College Galway’s student magazine in the late 1980s. After graduating with an MSc in computing from the University of Ulster, he works as an entertainment columnist with the Derry Journal and then as a staff reporter with the Londonderry Sentinel, before moving to The Irish News to become the paper’s Derry correspondent.

Downey’s offbeat reports of the 1994 FIFA World Cup for The Irish News are subsequently compiled for his first book, Just One Big Party. He spends six years as a BBC news producer in Derry and Belfast, before joining the Derry News as editor in 2001. During his period as editor (2001–2004), the Derry News wins two Newspaper Society awards for Fastest Circulation Growth in the United Kingdom.

Since 2004, Downey has published six comic novels set in the criminal underbelly of post-ceasefire Ireland. His books have been described as “a superb blend of comedy, political dirty tricks, grisly murder and bizarre twists.”

A former deputy-president of the Union of Students in Ireland, Downey is one of the organisers of a student occupation of government offices in Dublin on Budget Day 1988 in protest against education cutbacks.

In June 2002, the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) get a court order to force Downey to hand over pictures the Derry News had captured of the Real Irish Republican Army attacking a communications post.

In 2006, Downey helps establish the new Northern Ireland literary review Verbal and edits the publication for its first six issues.

A lifelong political anorak, in 2007, Downey works as an election pundit for TV3 (Ireland), alongside the Irish comedian Brendan O’Carroll. In 2010, he wins a contest to predict the winners of Northern Ireland’s 18 Westminster constituencies, missing out on just one, Naomi Long, who surprisingly beat First Minister Peter Robinson in Belfast East. He donates his prize, a framed Ian Knox cartoon, to Long by way of apology.

Downey’s 2010 comedy-thriller The American Envoy is the first novel issued by an Irish publishing house as a Kindle e-book, simultaneously with its paperback release.

In June 2011, Downey is appointed Director of Media for Culture Company 2013, the body tasked with delivering Derry’s UK City of Culture year.

Downey is married to Una McNally, and they have two children.


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Death of Pat Upton, Labour Party Politician & Veterinarian

Pat Upton, Irish Labour Party politician and veterinarian, dies of a heart attack on February 22, 1999.

Upton is born in Kilrush, County Clare and educated at St. Flannan’s College in Ennis, at University College Galway, and at University College Dublin (UCD) where he receives a doctorate in veterinary medicine. He then works as a lecturer.

Upton is first elected to public office as a Labour Party member of Dublin County Council for Terenure at the 1991 Irish local elections, where he serves until the Council’s abolition in 1994, and then as a member of South Dublin County Council until 1999.

Upton unsuccessfully contests the Dublin South-Central constituency at the 1989 Irish general election. However, he is then elected to the 19th Seanad on the Agricultural Panel and becomes the Labour Party’s leader in Seanad Éireann.

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 is a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in 1994–95.

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.