literary transcript

 

 

Peter Costello's

THE IRISH 100

 

A RANKING OF THE MOST

INFLUENTIAL IRISH

MEN AND WOMEN OF ALL TIME

 

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INTRODUCTION

 

Ireland is a small island, with a small population.  Yet over the centuries she has exerted an influence in the wider world out of all proportion both to her size and her resources.

      This is partly through those Irish people who have lived and worked in Ireland itself, but also through those others, representative of a diaspora of many millions, who have immigrated to Britain, Europe, Australia, and Canada, but most especially to the United States of America.  More Irish people live in the United States than anywhere else in the world (including Ireland), and a great many have an intense involvement with the history and culture of their ancestral home, which has moulded their lives as Americans.

      In the summer of 1998, a survey of national pride by the University of Chicago showed that the Irish led the world in their admiration of specific achievements by their countrymen in such areas as the arts, history, the armed forces, the economy, and sports.  Americans came in second.

      The survey also showed that many young people had less overall pride than their elders.  This was thought to reflect the growth of globalism and multilateralism, or perhaps a reaction to the nationalistic extremism of the past.  But it may be that the younger generation has simply never heard of the great achievers of the past, whose influence has done so much to shape the world they live in.  The Irish and the Irish Americans, as communities, have kept alive that pride, and it is reflected in this book.

      The influence of the Irish can be said to be universal, and the contribution of the Irish-born to the development of the modern world has been an important one.  Influence, of course, is not a matter of mere fame.  The passing notoriety of a celebrity such as a film star (of which there have been many from Ireland) is not the same as the influence exerted by a great patriot, artist, writer, or humanitarian.  To be truly influential, the contribution of any of our Irish 100 must be a lasting one.

      Yet the persons I have chosen presented a problem.  Inevitably, there has to be great difficulty in choosing individuals from such an array of talented people.  I may seem to have been somewhat arbitrary in my choices.  Personal preference has been restrained, however, in order to collect together as wide and as historic a range of cultural heroes as possible.

      Some of the persons included here will be familiar, others almost unknown.  In any selection based on a specific ethnic group, as this book is, it has been especially important to choose individuals with no regard to gender or sexuality.  Likewise, it is too easy to lead with those who have been public figures in politics over those whose achievements and influence have been in the arts, sciences, or religion.

      Influence works in strange ways.  Though our newspapers make us aware of the influence which public figures such as politicians or millionaires think they wield in the world, our everyday lives are actually more affected by the activities of scientists, inventors, and trade unionists.  We have to be careful not to take people at their own estimation.

      These days, many people have a great interest in tracing their roots.  Irish-American politicians are always keen to recall their roots.  In the summer of 1998, for instance, no less a person than Newt Gingrich was in Ireland, and after his talks with the various communities in the Ulster conflict, one of his purposes was to search out his family connections in Donegal.  Thomas 'Tip' O'Neill, one of his predecessors in the office of Speaker of the House of Representatives, was an old-style Irish American, but who would have thought Newt Gingrich was too!  History is full of surprises, as we shall see.

      Perhaps a note on the historical background of Ireland and the Irish may be of use to some readers using this book as a reference tool.

      The history of Ireland and of the various peoples who have inhabited the island is a long and complex one.  It is also very controversial.  The earliest evidence for man in Ireland dates from about 6500 B.C., at Mount Sandel near Coleraine, in Northern Ireland.  These people are the original Irish, and would have been followed in time by Neolithic and Bronze Age people.  These peoples are the architects of Newgrange, and the dolmens and tombs scattered throughout the country.  But they left no written records of their culture or history.  We have to appreciate their achievement through the discoveries of archaeologists.

      The first evidence of Celtic culture in Ireland is about 300 B.C.  These invaders wiped out the original language of the island, and imposed their own Gaelic language on the Irish natives.  This race would have intermarried with the earlier inhabitants to begin the process of producing the Irish of today.  Other waves of invaders followed: Romans in the first centuries, Christian missionaries in fifth, the Vikings in the eighth.  Then the Normans in the twelfth, followed by English and eventually Scottish settlers (themselves the descendants of the Gaels who had colonized parts of Scotland).

      Irish history is not a simple tale of heroic Celtic warriors fighting to the death and brave Celtic women being raped by vicious Englishmen, the caricature that so often passes for history.  Much that is admired, and rightly admired in the history and culture of the island, is non-Celtic.  Ireland has also shared the political and religious fortunes of Europe to the full.  Every wave of European culture has in the end washed over Ireland.

      Many details of Irish history are alluded to in the course of this book, but in such a limited space it is difficult to enlarge upon them.  It is hoped that those using this book will also consult the books of historical background listed in 'Further Reading'.  Controversies over many details in the course of Irish history continue, as do disputes about exactly what it is to be Irish, and indeed who the Irish really are.

      Though many Irish people today are Roman Catholic, it is not the special destiny of the Irish to be Catholic.  The Protestant culture of Ireland, Anglican and Presbyterian, is a strong one, and the inhabitants of the island achieved great things when they were pagans, and may well do so again now that Ireland, like the rest of Europe, has passed into a post-Christian phase of history.

      These days an Irish person is someone who was born in Ireland, has made a permanent home in Ireland, or who is attached to Irish culture in some way, even though he lives in another country.  All these kinds of Irish people are represented in this book.  They are people who have been capable of great fortitude, great passion, and great charity.  They are also people who have been capable of great evil.  They must be taken as you find them.

      This book would fail to present a complete view of the influence of the Irish if it were necessary for inclusion that a person must have been born or worked in Ireland, or had Ireland as the main focus of their life.  Thus, many emigrants to other countries would have to be excluded.  So this book includes Irish people famous in the wider world, such as John F. Kennedy, Ned Kelly, and Bernardo O'Higgins.

      At the conclusion of a long process, I am struck not only by the achievements of those who are included here, but even more by the achievements of those for whom there was no space.

      It can safely be predicted that the influence which the Irish have had in the past will be as nothing compared to what they will achieve tomorrow, both in Europe, in America, and elsewhere.

      It is a matter of controversy whether one of Columbus' crew when the New World was discovered was an Irishman from Galway.  But certainly when Neil Armstrong landed on the moon in July 1969, that first step on another planet was made by a man of Irish descent.  Armstrong's ancestors hailed from Fermanagh in Ulster, and those of James Irwin, the first man to drive on the moon, came from Pomeroy, also in Ulster.

      It is only too likely that the first person to land on Mars will also be of Irish blood.

                                                                                                                                        Peter Costello

                                                                                                                                        Dublin, 2000

 

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THE IRISH 100

 

 

1

St Patrick

c. 389-c. 461

 

Everywhere the Irish are to be found, they have taken the name of Ireland's patron saint with them.  All over the world, schools, churches, and streets in towns and cities are dedicated to St Patrick.  Paddy is everywhere the nickname of Irishmen.

      His influence over Ireland was of the first importance.  To the ancient civilization of a country which had never been part of the Roman Empire, he added the Christian culture common to Europe.  Yet the irony of the matter is that St Patrick, for all that, was not born in Ireland.

      Who he was and where he came from are still matters of mystery.  He himself tells us in his Confession, which is really a defence of his life and actions written as an old man, that he was a native of Roman Britain, born in Bannavem Taberniae, and that his father was a deacon of the church called Calpurnius.  Where Bannavem Taberniae may have been is not known, though some think it was in the Clyde region of Scotland, others that it was far to the south, perhaps in Somerset.  (St Patrick's name is associated with Glastonbury, where is he even said to be buried.)

      His grandfather had been a priest, and his father was not only a deacon, but also a town councillor, all of which suggests a prosperous background and comfortable childhood.  At the age of sixteen he was captured by Irish pirates and carried into slavery in Ulster, the northern province of Ireland.  For six years he herded sheep and swine on the slopes of Slemish Mountain for a local chief.

      In his lonely exile he turned to the faith of his fathers, and prayed for release.  After six years, at the age of twenty-two, he escaped and made his way home, leaving Ireland by a boat from somewhere on the south coast.  However, he had been marked by his experience.  He relates (again in The Confession) that he heard the voices of the Irish, calling him to be among them again.  He took this as a personal mission, which he set out to fulfil.

      It seems clear that there were already Christians in Ireland at this time, for there had been a great deal of contact between Roman Britain and Ireland (perhaps even invasion and settlement).  Moreover, there had been earlier missions, one by a priest called Palladius, sent by the pope in 431.  But this was all in southern Ireland.  After training for the priesthood both in Britain and the Continent, Patrick found that his superiors were reluctant to let him go to Ireland.  However, Patrick returned to the north, where he had been held captive, and began his personal missionary journeys from a place called Saul, in County Down.  Though his name is linked with Armagh, where he had his chief church, he is said to be buried in Downpatrick, also in County Down.

      Many legends surround his name.  One of the most important tells of how he lit the special Paschal fire on the Hill of Slane in direct disobedience of the rule that no fire could be lit on that day before the Druids lit the fire of the High King of Ireland in their own pagan ceremonies.  The legend of his encounter with the High King of Ireland at Tara on the Paschal feast took on almost mythical importance.  Its meaning for later centuries was that the civil state was inferior to the church.

      As there were no real towns in Ireland, Patrick introduced a form of church rule by basing bishops in little monasteries, as was common in the Near East.  After Patrick's death, the church in Ireland developed its own peculiar Celtic features, such as the importance of the monasteries and the lesser role of bishops.  It also held Easter on a different date from Rome and used a different form of priestly tonsure.  But the church was always in union with Rome, and the country, once Christianized, retained the new religion, mingling it with aspects of the old Celtic culture.

      Many points about St Patrick's life and career are disputed.  It has even been claimed that there were two different men of the same name.  But these are the quarrels of scholars.  Patrick reveals himself in his own writing as an unlearned, straightforward man, but a man with a mission.  It is not the details of his life that have impressed Irish people over the centuries, but his vivid personality as the apostle of Ireland.

      Among the leading figures of the fifth century, he is almost alone in having left us writing in his own hand, in which he speaks for himself.  His voice can still be heard in The Confession, which includes a moving defence of his life against accusations of early sin, and his Letter to Coroticus, a British chief who had kidnapped some Irish Christians.  In the account of his life, he lays great emphasis on his lack of learning and his own unworthiness, but claims that through the grace God had granted him, he was able to achieve what might have seemed impossible.

      It is this voice that still exerts great influence.  Many of his characteristics - courage, perseverance, resistance to false authority, a love of nature, a direct appeal to individuals - are still those of the Irish as a whole.  To this day the religious outlook of the Irish people affects their ideas about many things.  Unhappily, the religion which Patrick brought later led to divisions which are still to be healed.

      St Patrick's Day, 17th March, is a day of celebration in Irish communities worldwide.  It had always been a Catholic feast day, but the first celebration outside the confines of the church was held in Boston in 1737 by the Charitable Irish Society, which was founded that year.  In 1784, in New York, the Friendly Sons of St Patrick followed the lead of Boston.  This New York society was a joint venture of Catholic and Presbyterian Irish, and the first president of the organization was a Presbyterian.  It was not until 1852 that a fully organized parade such as the one today was held in New York City.  By this time the middle-class Presbyterians had begun to develop an idea of themselves as Scotch Irish to distinguish their group from the Catholic working-class Irish, and the parade became a vehicle for an outpouring of Irish nationalist Catholic feeling.  St Patrick's Day began to play a special role in the complicated politics of major American cities from this day on (to the extent that it now includes members of the Irish-American gay community - a contentious addition to the festival).  The idea of a full-scale civic celebration was imported from America back to Ireland, where St Patrick's Day only became a public holiday in 1903.

      The saint's name is associated with two of the world's great places of religious pilgrimage: Croagh Patrick in Mayo, which is climbed by believers every year on the last Sunday in July, and St Patrick's Purgatory in Donegal, a place of vision and penance, which has enjoyed fame since the Middle Ages and may have inspired Dante in the writing of the Inferno.

      To St Patrick is ascribed the first use of the shamrock to illustrate the Christian dogma of the Holy Trinity - the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  But over the centuries the little plant became the symbol of Ireland and all things Irish, thanks largely to its legendary association with St Patrick.

 

 

2

Eamon de Valera

1882-1975

 

By common agreement of his admirers and foes, Eamon de Valera has exercised the greatest influence over modern Ireland, drawing on the past to create a present which he hoped would be cherished by his countrymen forever.

      Through a long life in which much was achieved as well as left unfinished, he has become a permanent feature of the Irish historical landscape.  He created the party with the largest popular support in Ireland, and it still dominates the present political scene.  He is the historical figure against whom all others are judged.

      De Valera first came to prominence during the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland in 1916, a rebellion organized by Irish republicans hoping to liberate their country from what they saw as eight hundred years of foreign rule.  Because of his American birth, de Valera was one of the two rebel commanders spared.  He was tried and imprisoned, but he gained great prestige from being the one survivor of this great patriotic act.  This prestige carried an otherwise obscure young man on to half a century of intense political activity.

      De Valera was born in New York, where his Irish immigrant mother had married a Spaniard who died soon after his birth.  Brought back to Ireland in 1885, he was reared among his mother's people in East Limerick.  Though never a farmer himself, he claimed to cherish these early experiences as a permanent model of Irish social life.  He also looked to America and to the Irish-American community as a source of support in the long struggle for Irish freedom.

      An intelligent child, he was sent to one of the country's leading schools, where he excelled in maths.  He lived quietly, working as a teacher.  He and his wife were little known among the vigorous and often colourful cultural circles in the Dublin of WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8].

      But politics soon took hold of him.  In 1912 the British government offered Ireland home rule, the option to run their own affairs, except defence and foreign affairs, but this was not acceptable to a Protestant minority in Northern Ireland, who wished to remain a full part of the United Kingdom.  A great political crisis ensued, which almost led to a mutiny of British army officers in Ireland.  Though the Home Rule Act became law, it was suspended for the duration of the First World War, which broke out in August 1914.

      De Valera joined the Irish Volunteers, a group which was organized to defend Ireland's rights to independence, and this led to his part in the Easter Rising, his work as 'President of the Irish Republic' in America, the controversies surrounding the treaty with Great Britain, and to the civil war in Ireland, which ended with him being imprisoned again, this time by the new Irish government.

      In 1924 he was released.  The anti-treaty republicans who had fought in the civil war were a disparate group, ranging from revolutionary radicals to deeply conservative Catholics.  In 1926 de Valera split from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to form a new republican party, Fianna Fáil, which quickly built up a following on the middle ground of Irish politics.  The party entered the Dáil (Ireland's national assembly) in 1927.

      In 1932 de Valera came to power and quickly consolidated his sway over the country.  On the world scene he began to play a useful but ultimately frustrating role in the League of Nations.

      At home he began to pick at the treaty solution, and in 1937 he introduced a new constitution which provided for a president as head of state within a legal framework based on the social teachings of the Catholic church.  The idea of a written constitution came from America.  Though amended from time to time, the constitution is de Valera's most lasting monument, and it still provides the basic law of Ireland.

      Adroitly, he managed to keep Ireland out of the Second World War.  Ireland prospered during the war, but there were social difficulties afterward which resulted in de Valera losing power in 1948.  In 1951 he returned to power, but was again ousted in 1954.  Re-elected in 1957, he was faced with worsening economic conditions.

      A solution to Ireland's economic malaise was begun by the Economic Plan of 1958, the basis of the country's development since.  But this was a scheme of his deputy SEÀN LEMASS [14], a young man impatient for power.  De Valera left politics and was elected to two terms as president.  In 1973 he retired to private life and died in 1975.

      In a famous speech at the end of the Second World War, de Valera spoke of his vision of an ideal Irish society based on traditional rural and spiritual values.  But by the time of his death, Ireland, with the advent of prosperity based on industry and electronics, and dominated by television and the wider interests of the day, had abandoned that vision.

      De Valera remains a controversial figure.  The details of his career are still debated.  To a generation of Irish people whom he saved from the scourge of a world war, he was seen as a giant among modern statesmen; a visionary with an unblemished record of probity.

      Like all people in public life, his political opponents differed.  He was often seen, even by his friends, as aloof and cold.  His years as a teacher of maths and languages had left him with a pedantic attitude of a calculating grammarian, delighting in the small points of a matter in hand, while others were impatient to settle larger issues.

      Yet he retained the lifelong devotion to men of great capacity and integrity, and his certainty of mind gave confidence to many others.  He once said that if he wished to know what the Irish people thought, he had only to look into his own heart.  This outlook lies at the heart of the separation of Northern Ireland, one of the great issues he never resolved (having done so much to create it).  He could not understand the unionist people of Belfast by looking in his heart.  These contradictions are all a part of the de Valera legend, an aspect of the hold which he retains over the minds and imaginations of the Irish people.

      A final judgement can be left to the historian Prof. J.J. Lee of Cork University, who writes of de Valera in his history of modern Ireland: 'He was, in a sense, greater than the sum of his parts.  Behind the ceaseless political calculation and the labyrinthine deviousness, there reposed a character of rare nobility.'

 

 

 

3

Michael Collins

1890-1922

 

Though he died fighting in the Irish civil war at the age of thirty-one, Michael Collins remains for many Irish people the very epitome of the Irish rebel - bold, handsome, and romantic.  He was the man who masterminded the guerrilla war against the British army in Ireland between 1919 and 1921, but also lived just long enough to firmly lay the foundations of a democratic state in Ireland.  Though divided from his former comrades by the civil war (1922 to 1923), he saw the Treaty with Great Britain as a stepping-stone to fully securing what many Irish people had longed for, a united thirty-two-country Irish republic.  But he had to place responsibilities before dreams and accept what was offered, even though it meant the partition of the island.  It had been effectively partitioned since 1880, and it has taken Irish nationalists another century to come to terms with the outlook of many Ulstermen.

      Michael Collins was born on 16th October 1890, in Woodfield, Clonakilty, in County Cork.  Like so many Irish leaders, he was the son of a small farmer.  After being educated in the local national school, he went to London at the age of sixteen, where he joined the civil service as a clerk in the post office.  Later he worked as a clerk for a stockbroker, which gave him some grasp of finance.

      In London he joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the main group plotting for an Irish revolution - their derived from the original Fenians who had attempted an invasion of Canada and an insurrection in Ireland back in the 1860s, a generation before Collins’ birth.  He returned to Dublin to take part in the Easter Rising in 1916, which the Brotherhood instigated.  He fought in the General Post Office in Dublin where the rebels had their headquarters, with PATRICK HENRY PEARSE [7] and was detained when the rebels surrendered.  On his release from prison, he quickly came to the fore as a leading figure in the political party Sinn Féin, as well as in the Irish Volunteers, the military wing of the movement that became known, from its Fenian roots, as the IRA.  Against the wishes of EAMON DE VALERA [2] and others, in 1917 he organized for a Sinn Féin candidate to run in a local election, and to win the seat.  Many felt that Irish republicans should have nothing to do with British institutions of any kind.

      In 1919, with the establishment of the first Dáil - the assembly of Irish representatives who had been elected to the imperial parliament in London but chose instead to sit in Dublin - and the declaration of Irish independence, he became the minister of home affairs and later the minister of finance in the underground Sinn Féin government of Ireland.  But it was not for these public roles that he became well known.  He was also director of intelligence for the Irish Volunteers.  While he was raising the National Loan to finance the activities of the new movement, with help from Irish Americans, he was also setting up an espionage system which infiltrated the British system in Ireland.

      A forceful personality of great energy, he was also famous for his personal courage and contempt for danger.  His coup in organizing the murder of fourteen British intelligence officers on a Sunday morning, 21 November 1921, led that afternoon to twelve fatalities in Croke Park when British soldiers opened fire on a crowd attending a Gaelic football match.

      The British prime minister Lloyd George, an astute Welshman, realized that the excesses of the war fought the length and breadth of Ireland during late 1920 and early 1921 could no longer be sustained.  A truce came into effect in July 1921, and a second Dáil was assembled in August.  Collins was one of those who went to London to negotiate the treaty in December 1921.

      What might have been the end of Ireland's troubles and the beginning of a new era became instead the object of fierce objections from some republicans.  Collins became chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State, and after the civil war broke out became commander in chief of the national army.  On a tour of west Cork his party was ambushed at Beal na Bláth on 22nd August 1922 and during the firefight which followed he was struck in the head by a ricocheting bullet and died almost at once.

      He had been in his own country, the countryside of his childhood.  As Cork writer Frank O'Connor later expressed it, 'The countryside he had seen in his dreams, the people he had loved, the tradition which had been his inspiration - they had risen in the falling light and struck him dead.'  His funeral, so soon after the sudden death of his colleague Arthur Griffith, was an occasion for an outpouring of national grief.  But there were other men to succeed them, and despite the turmoil and terror of the civil war (far worse than anything that had been seen in the short war against the British) the Irish state remained stable.

      This was, perhaps, Collins' greatest gift to his people, but his other qualities of bravery and leadership have given him almost mythical stature in modern Ireland.  That Ireland is today a mature and thriving democracy owes much to the life and struggle of Michael Collins.

 

 

4

John Fitzgerald Kennedy

1917-1963

 

The election of John F. Kennedy as thirty-fifth president of the United States in November 1960 marked for Irish people everywhere a peak of achievement and national pride.  He was the first Irishman and the first Catholic to be elected to that high office.  Until then the prejudices which were deeply ingrained in American life had prevented both the Irish and the Catholics from getting to the White House.  Though John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the wealthy son of a millionaire, was far removed from long-prevailing images of the Irish, his wit, handsome demeanour, love of written and spoken word and delight in politics of all kinds identified him as Irish through and through.

      Kennedy's eventual visit to Ireland (26-29th June 1963) was a momentous occasion, and a significant one.  He spoke to the Irish nation on behalf of millions of emigrants.  At the spot from which Patrick Kennedy had set out two generations before, he said: 'When my great-grandfather left here to become a cooper in East Boston, he carried nothing with him except a strong religious faith and a strong desire for liberty.  If he hadn't left, I would be working at the Albatross Company across the road.'

      The existence of that factory was an important development.  For those heady days in the 1960s marked a transition from the older rural Ireland his grandfather had emigrated from to a new modern, industrialized Ireland, a democracy very much in the American model.  For many commentators and historians, the Kennedy visit, coming so closely on the arrival of television in Ireland and the Vatican Council, brought about a rapid series of social and religious changes that transformed Ireland.

      To many young people, Kennedy seemed to suggest a new kind of model for public life.  Though his reputation has since been the object of much reassessment, his historical importance in the immediate days of the 1960s cannot be lessened.  To Irish people everywhere he became the leading example of what the Irish nation could achieve.

      His great-grandparents had gone to the United States from Ireland, part of that great wave of people whom he would write about as the makers of America in his brief book A Nation of Emigrants.  His grandfathers had been successful in business and politics, John Francis Fitzgerald being mayor of Boston.  His father, Joseph P. Kennedy, himself successful in business, was a supporter of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and served as American ambassador to London.

      Joe Kennedy was naturally ambitious for his children.  After the death of his eldest son, his ambitions became centred on Jack.  Though Jack's education had been indifferent, he was widely read.  As an explanation of why the war had come, he wrote Why England Slept (1940) during his father's time in London.  During the war he served with the US navy in the South Pacific, and when his PT boat was sunk an old back problem reasserted itself.  Illness was a problem for the rest of his life.  Though it was not obvious to many except his family and friends, half the days of his life were days of pain, as his brother Robert later pointed out.

      In 1946 he was elected to Congress from the eleventh Massachusetts district.  He proved to be liberal and farsighted.  In 1952 he was elected to the Senate and in 1953 he married.  Though he was independent-minded on many issues, Kennedy did not resist the demagoguery of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (a family friend).  Hospitalized by re-occurring trouble from his back injury, he was unable to be present for the vote on the motion of censure in the Senate against McCarthy.  It was during this illness that he wrote Profiles in Courage (1956), which won a Pulitzer Prize.

      In the book he defined his own outlook: 'A man does what he must, in spite of obstacles and dangers and pressures - and that is the basis of all human morality.'

      He failed to gain the vice-presidential nomination in 1956, but began a campaign to secure the Democratic nomination for president in 1960.  He gained this, and went on to fight Richard Nixon.  The race was marked by the innovation of television debates, which many felt Kennedy won.  Though he barely won the popular vote, he carried the electoral college, 303 to 219.  He was the second youngest man ever elected president, as well as the first Catholic and the first born in the twentieth century.

      The events of his brief presidency were memorable, but the most critical may have been the Cuban missile crisis.  The most serious East-West stand-off since the end of World War II evolved out of Russia's presence in Cuba, the obverse of American presence in Asia.  It was perceived as part of the world-wide menace of communism on the advance, especially in Southeast Asia.  The stand-off ended on 26th October 1962 when the Russians agreed to withdraw.

      It was under Kennedy that the inexorable growth of US involvement in the defence of South Vietnam against the liberation drive of northern patriots began, but Kennedy also began efforts to disengage from the problem.  He also met the Russian leader Nikita Khrushchev for a summit in Vienna in 1961.

      At home, too, Kennedy faced many problems, but on two fronts he made great strides.  He was a young man, and to the impatient but idealistic generation of the 1960s he seemed to speak with a recognizable voice.  To the black community, then in the throes of the civil rights movement, led by Martin Luther King, Jr, he won respect.  Kennedy, too, came from a community which had suffered exile, segregation, and intolerance.  But his liberal ideas were not always shared by other Americans, or other Irish Americans.  His admirers knew that John Kennedy had enemies, but they could not have guessed what final form that enmity would take.

      The achievements of John Kennedy have been eclipsed by the circumstances of his death (by assassination in Dallas, Texas, on 22 November 1963).  For many people of Irish descent, his real achievement was not what he did as president, but that he was elected to that office at all.  He remains one of the greatest of those of Irish descent.

 

 

5

Charles Stewart Parnell

1846-1891

 

One of the great influences on Parnell, the uncrowned king of Ireland, the almost mythical leader through the Land War to the edge of Home Rule, was his American-born mother.  She was the daughter of Adm. Stewart of the US Navy.  Many of his contemporaries thought, and recent historians have confirmed, that he derived his abiding dislike of the English and their ways from her.  An Irish journalist writing Parnell's life asked his mother why her son had such a rooted antipathy to the English.  'Why should he not?' she answered with American deliberation.  'Have not his ancestors always opposed England?  My grandfather Tudor fought against the English in the War of Independence.  My father fought against the English in the War of 1812, and I suppose the Parnells have no great love of them.'

      His grandfather, Sir John Parnell, had been chancellor of the Irish Exchequer in the last decades of the eighteenth century, when Ireland had its own independent parliament under Grattan, a parliament swept away by the Act of Union in 1801.

      Parnell was the son of a Protestant landowner in Wicklow who retained nationalist sympathies.  Parnell was, however, educated at Yeovil and Chipping Norton, places quintessentially English.  He went to Magdalen College in Oxford, but left the university without taking a degree.

      Parnell was not an intellectual in any way.  However, he took a great interest in practical matters, such as the mines on his Irish estates, and liked nothing better than chemical experiments as light entertainment.  He was solitary and difficult to know, but he was a master of men in public life, and of their emotions.

      Elected member of Parliament from Meath in 1875, he joined the Home Rule group of Irish MPs at Westminster, led by Isaac Butt.  He was in his element in the House of Commons, and soon mastered its procedures, and the techniques of obstruction, which the Irish party had used since they were created by Joseph Biggar.  If the Irish could not rule Ireland, they would attempt to make England ungovernable.  What is called filibustering in America drove the British parliament to distraction.

      After Butt died in 1879, Parnell was a dominant personality in the party, which had many colourful and energetic people in it.  He was asked by Michael Davitt to become the first president of the Land League in 1879, and it was through the Land War that he emerged as the pre-eminent leader of Ireland.

      The Land War involved a great deal of violence and intimidation, and the British government arrested Parnell and other leaders.  A compromise, called the Kilmainham Treaty, was reached while they were in jail in Kilmainham.  Parnell was released, but a few days later a terrorist group murdered the Irish secretary in the Phoenix Park outside Dublin.  Coercion returned.

      The Land League, however, was converted into the National League, and the efforts of Parnell were now directed not towards land reform, which eventually came, but to Home Rule - restoring to Ireland not full independence at once, but full control of its internal affairs.

      This was not fully acceptable to all advanced nationalists.  The Home Rule Bill of 1886 failed, and it was followed by the sensational accusations a year later by The Times of London that Parnell had been connected with the Phoenix Park murders.  But at a special inquiry the letters that they published were soon proved to be forgeries and though the violence of the Land War could not be concealed, Parnell was triumphantly vindicated in the eyes of his followers by the suicide of Richard Pigott, the forger of the letters.  (These events echo all through the work of JAMES JOYCE [25], especially in Ulysses.)

      However, later in 1890, Parnell faced another challenge.  For many years he had been living privately with Mrs Katharine O'Shea, the wife of a fellow Irish member of parliament, by whom he had several children.  In November 1890, Captain O'Shea sued her for divorce and named Parnell as the other man.  The scandal that ensued ruined Parnell in the eyes of many Catholics in Ireland, and the Irish bishops called on the Irish party to reject him as its leader.  In the course of the ensuing split between the two wings of the party, Parnell suddenly died.

      A few years after Parnell's death, a journalist put it to the prime minister, William Gladstone himself, that the Irish leader must have suffered intense pain in that last year.  'Poor fellow!  Poor fellow!  I suppose he did; dear, dear, what a tragedy!  I cannot tell you how much I think about him, and what an interest I take in everything concerning him.  A marvellous man, a terrible fall.'

      With him died any hope of Home Rule for the time being, as the Irish party remained split until 1900.  However, no sooner had it revived itself than it faced a new challenge from the rise of Sinn Féin, demanding outright independence and not merely Home Rule.  Home Rule was granted in 1914, but suspended for the duration of the war.  The Easter Rising and the following Anglo-Irish war led to the creation of the Irish Free State.  Though Parnell was not a republican, he retained the admiration of many of them.  His great achievement was to push the land question towards a conclusion, and to provide the Irish people with a quality of leadership they had not had since DANIEL O'CONNELL [20].

      He remains a man of mystery, for he all too often kept his views to himself.  He ruined himself over his love for Katharine O'Shea, and that was also, in the eyes of many of his followers, an admirable thing.

      A flawed and tragic figure, Parnell survives in the memory of the Irish as one of their greatest leaders.

 

 

6

Mary Robinson

1944-

 

Irishmen as a whole have often been seen as male chauvinists.  Yet in the past there have been great and influential Irishwomen, such as Queen Maeve, St Bridget, GRACE O'MALLEY [46] and the Daughters of Éireann during the Irish Revolution, such as MAUD GONNE [52] and the COUNTESS MARKIEVICZ [52].  But the rise of the modern women's movement has had its dramatic effects in Ireland, as elsewhere.  One of the fruits of this has been the extraordinary career of Mary Robinson.  In many ways her success has been more in the American style than anything seen in Ireland.

      She was born Mary Bourke into a prominent Mayo family (the Bourkes traced their origins back to the Normans in the twelfth century).  Her family were connected not only to Irish republican politics but also the British establishment.  Her father was a medical man, with a wife ambitious for their children.  Mary was sent to a leading convent school, and having attended a finishing school in Paris, she went on to study law at Trinity College at a time when entry to this Protestant university was forbidden to most Catholics.  Her education was not unusual for girls of her class, but her legal ambitions were.

      She also studied at Harvard, and her experiences in the United States during the turbulent days of the Vietnam War had an important effect on her outlook.

      She became a brilliant master of law at Trinity College, where she eventually was appointed Reid Professor of Law.  Trinity College had long been seen by many nationalists as one of the bastions of British rule in Ireland, but throughout the 1960s had emerged as one of the sources of Irish reform.  She married a Dublin lawyer with artistic interests, who also emerged as a person of influence himself in the heritage conservation field.   She managed to rear her three children away from the spotlight of controversy, which was also an achievement given the nature of modern media scrutiny.

      Her work as a practising lawyer and legal academic quickly brought Mary Robinson to the firing line.  She thought that matters of private conscience, such as homosexuality and contraception, should not be a matter of law.  Her legal practice concentrated largely on constitutional and civil rights matters, and through her success she was able to make changes that legislators had found difficult.  Though Ireland shares a common-law system with the rest of Great Britain, it also has a written constitution, and constitutional cases have become a testing ground for public opinion.

      She became involved in politics on the left wing of the Irish Labour party, but her relations with party politics were not always calm.  She was elected to the Irish Senate as a senator from Trinity College.  During her terms as senator she introduced many bills which attempted to change the social situation in Ireland.  One was for legalizing contraception, but this was dismissed in controversial circumstances, as many Catholics in the country objected to it.  She had promised on her election to use the Senate as a 'forum for new and possibly unpopular views.'

      What these might be were indicated by her support for and involvement in the newly emerging women's movement in Ireland.  However, these issues were, in her view, part of a wider spectrum of rights that had to be developed in Ireland.  These views alienated her from the more traditional and conservative elements of Irish life, which was tied to the fears of the old agricultural life on the land, which had often been insecure.  With changing economic conditions social attitudes changed, and Mary Robinson became a figurehead for changes already under way.  On contraception, for instance, though the church authorities denied it to Catholics, many theologians had already moved on, taking the mass of the faithful with them.

      But Mary Robinson was also committed to the European ideal, and this was one area in which most of her people agreed.  At Trinity College she ran, with her husband, a Centre for European Law.

      Though she had left the party, she was nominated for the office of president of Ireland by Labour Party leader Dick Spring in 1990.  In Ireland the post of president is a nominal, titular post rather than an administrative one, so she had no powers but the force of her own personality.  Previously, the post had been filled by a range of retired politicians and a judge, who had been content to relax in the post.  But the presidential campaign proved to be a watershed in Irish life and politics, dividing one era from another.  In the future, historians will certainly see it as a benchmark date.

      Mary Robinson quickly saw that even though she could not involve herself in party political matters, other social, academic, and cultural areas were wide open to her.  She emerged through the presidency as one of the new vitalizing influences on Ireland.  Her theme of reconciliation was echoed widely, but she also worked with the marginalized and disadvantaged.  She made many visits to Northern Ireland, meeting and shaking hands with GERRY ADAMS [100], for instance.  All over Ireland she concerned herself with those whom society and politics had previously excluded and ignored.  She also made a special point of remembering those who had been forced to emigrate and make up the Irish community worldwide.  A candle was kept burning in a window of the presidential residence in the Phoenix Park in their memory.

      She served only one seven-year term as president before advancing to a prominent post with the United Nations as high commissioner for Human Rights.  This may well turn out to be as important a post on a universal scale as the presidency was on a national scale.  For all that it has done in the past, the United Nations has not always managed to have done enough, caught as it so often was between political rivalries it could not control.

      Now, in a new era, Mary Robinson may be one of those who will give the United Nations new authority in a still badly divided world.  In Mary Robinson the younger generation of Irishwomen have an extraordinary role model, though their mothers had been content to live in a domestic scene, exerting a powerful influence over the formation of Irish life and opinion in that way.  She took herself into a wider world and triumphed.  After Mary Robinson, no post in Ireland, even the offices of the Catholic Church, were thought to exclude a woman.

 

 

7

Patrick Henry Pearse

1879-1916

 

The leading inspiration of the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland, Patrick Henry Pearse might seem to have been named for the American patriot Patrick Henry, whose battle cry was 'Give me liberty, or give me death'.  But Pearse was, in fact, named after an uncle.  Nothing was quite what it seemed in the life and career of Patrick Pearse.

      Surprisingly for an Irish patriot, his father was an Englishman, a monumental sculptor who worked widely on the many Catholic churches which were erected around Dublin in the second half of the nineteenth century.  His work, once neglected, is now much admired by art historians.  Pearse's mother was Irish, however, and her family connections were an important influence on the growing boy.

      He was born in Dublin at 27 Great Brunswick Street (now Pearse Street) - the name of the street was itself a constant reminder of the British royal family to Dubliners.  He was educated nearby at the Christian Brothers school in Westland Row and attended University College, then part of the Royal University of Ireland, and was called to the Irish bar as a barrister in 1901.  But the law was not his main interest in life.

      From 1895 he was an active member of the Gaelic League, an organization founded to revive the use of the old native language as the everyday tongue of the people of Ireland.  Though supposedly nonpolitical, it was distinctly nationalist in outlook and Pearse was the editor of its influential weekly paper.  He taught Irish in classes organized by the league, and one of his pupils, for a very short time, was the writer JAMES JOYCE [25].  Joyce thought Pearse's remarks on the infelicities of the English language were merely silly, so he gave up the course.  But many others were to find the mesmeric Pearse an inspiring figure.

      To further his educational ambitions for Ireland, in 1908 Pearse founded St Enda's, a Gaelic-speaking school which later moved to much larger premises in a mansion at Rathfarnham, in 1910.  The school was patronized by many advanced and liberal-minded parents, and included many distinguished people among its staff, such as the poet Thomas MacDonagh.

      In 1913 Pearse joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the underground movement that aimed to establish a republic in Ireland.  He was soon co-opted into the inner circle of the Supreme Council.  The IRB, which traced its origins back to the Fenians of the 1860s, was widely supported by Irish Americans and was a secret organization.  Pearse was also on the central committee of the Irish Volunteers, an open organization which had been set up by Professor Eoin MacNeill to counter the Ulster Volunteers, who had been set up to resist the Home Rule Bill then passing through the British Parliament in the years 1913 to 1914.  The Ulster Volunteers imported some thirty thousand rifles from Germany.  When the Irish Volunteers imported 1,500, the incident led to shootings on the streets in Dublin, at Bachelor's Walk, an incident which was later to be seen as the first bloodletting of the troubles.

      Pearse was largely responsible for organizing the funeral of the old Fenian revolutionary O'Donovan Rossa in 1915, who had died in exile in America.  Rossa had been responsible for an active bombing campaign against English cities in the 1880s, and was a great hero to many Irish republicans.  Rossa's belief that only physical force could drive the British out of Ireland was not, however, shared widely by all the population who supported the Irish party.  But this funeral was to be a symbolic occasion.  In his oration at the grave, Pearse claimed that 'Ireland unfree will never be at peace'.  It was a warning of what was to come.

      With the outbreak of the First World War, the Irish Volunteers split.  The vast majority went to fight with the Irish and British regiments on the western front, though a small number were determined to seize the opportunity for another insurrection.  Pearse and his IRB friends planned to have the rising on Easter week, making use of the general mobilization of the Irish Volunteers, which was supposed to be a mere exercise.  When he heard of these plans, Prof. MacNeill, the actual leader of the Irish Volunteers, tried to prevent the mobilization.  Only a tiny fraction of the original one hundred thousand volunteers turned out in support of the rising.

      During Easter week he was commander in chief of the Irish army, president of the republic, and one of those who signed the proclamation.  But the uprising failed from lack of widespread support among the people and its own military ineptitude.  The leaders were court-martialled and sentenced to death.

      Pearse bravely faced execution.  In death, his influence would be far more profound than it had been in life.  He remains for Irish nationalists of all kinds a central figure of history.  His ideas about the Irish language and the sources of Irish nationality are still those of many, but the growth of Ireland since 1922 has been away from his core beliefs.  His ideas of heroic blood sacrifice have been much criticized by revisionist historians and theologians, who see them as both mad and heretical.  But these comments have not shaken his many admirers.  Even today, Pearse remains for Irish people a controversial figure, capable of arousing fierce emotional debate.

      Pearse was also a poet and a teacher.  These sides of his personality are attractive in ways that the belligerent comic-opera figure of the uprising is not.  His ideas about education, through child-centred teaching, remain very potent.  Perhaps the real Pearse was not the militant, but the sensitive poet and dedicated teacher.  To later generations, these aspects of his life may well seem to represent the real importance of Patrick Pearse.

 

 

8

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

 

The first Irishman to win a Nobel Prize (in 1923), William Butler Yeats combined within himself contradictory elements of Irish life and culture, but it is from the tension of those contradictions that his greatness as a universally admired poet emerged.  Such poems as 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree' and 'Down by the Sally Gardens' won immediate appreciation, but he remained to the end of his long life a poet of increasing power and passion.

      His father, John Butler Yeats, was a painter, and Yeats was reared in a close family atmosphere where art and poetry were admired and encouraged.  As a painter, his brother JACK B. YEATS [26] took after the father, but William's interests were literary.

      His schooling was unsuccessful, and for many years he had to eke out a living as a literary journalist and editor of anthologies.  He barely scraped by until he was in his forties, but very quickly, when he was still in his teens, his exceptional talents as a poet were recognized.  The sources of his lyrical verses, which he began to publish in the late 1880s, lay in the newly discovered ancient mythology of Celtic Ireland and the landscapes of the west of Ireland.

      To these elements which would have been widely shared by many Irish artists, writers, and leaders of the day, he added his esoteric interest in the magical tradition of Europe.  His conjuring of spirits was not mere fancy, but part of an increasingly elaborate belief system.  But such was his skill as a poet that his personal symbols do not form an immediate barrier to the reader.

      Though he was born in Dublin (at Sandymount, on 13th June 1865), and lived there for long periods, and in London and Oxford, it is with the western landscapes, especially those of Sligo and Galway, that his poetry is most closely linked.

      Yeats' own people came from Sligo, which was a place of special significance to himself and his brother Jack.  He often stayed with his friend Lady Gregory at her home, Coole Park, in Galway, and tied to this sense of landscape was a sense of Ireland's mythical history.  Yeats was among the first Irish poets to draw upon the ancient literary tradition of Celtic Ireland for new purposes.  In the old Celtic myths and legends he found a depth and passion that other poets in Europe found in the mythology of ancient Greece.

      By the end of the 1890s, Yeats had been recognized as the most significant poet of modern Ireland.  For all his seemingly dreamy appearance, he was a man of wide interests and great energy.  His interest in drama led to the creation of the National Theatre, and later the Abbey Theatre.  Though his own austere and allusive plays, often in verse, were not to everyone's taste, those of his friend Lady Gregory, which were comedies of rural life as well as patriotic tragedies, were immensely popular and made the Abbey Theatre's name.

      The Abbey also provided an outlet for the genius of J.M. Synge, whose comedy The Playboy of the Western World provoked a riot in the theatre in 1907, and later for SEAN O'CASEY [55], whose plays of the Irish troubles, such as Juno and the Paycock, are classics of world literature.  For this alone Yeats would be remembered.  His own play, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in which his friend MAUD GONNE [52] appeared in 1902, is now seen as having had a powerful effect on the imaginations of many of those who were later to be involved in the national movement.

      However, it was as a poet that Yeats made his mark on the world.  He began as a lyric poet of misty landscapes and lost love.  His early passion for the elusive Maud Gonne was one of the great love stories of Irish literature.  But she did not take 'dear Willy' too seriously, and preferred a life devoted to the politics of revolutionary Ireland.  With maturity, his poetry took on more vigorous and sombre aspects.  He was deeply affected by events such as the Easter Rising and the troubles that followed, but his later poetry combines that sense of history with a mythical dimension which transcended the merely national.

      By the 1920s he had become one of the most important poets of the century in the English language.  Abroad, Yeats was seen as a great poet, but in Ireland he was also a leading public figure.  He served two terms as a senator, appointed in part to represent the interests and opinions of the Protestant Anglo-Irish minority.  In this role he helped to design Ireland's new coinage, but he also spoke out against the introduction of censorship and legislation to remove the right to divorce, fearing that the new state would pursue a public policy dominated by Catholic social and moral precepts.  His speeches won him few admirers at the time, but are now significant for what they reveal about the evolving nature of the new Ireland; by the 1890s, public policy had come around to agreeing with Yeats.

      By the time of his death he had become, for many, one of the greatest poets of all time.  Though it was his early verse that made the greatest impact on the general audience, his later poems, in all their allusive and symbolic complexity, have come to be of central importance to Irish readers of today.  They are often passionate, yet cold, combining the elements of ice and fire in a mysterious and powerful manner.

      After a long illness, Yeats died in the south of France on 28 January 1939.  His body was later brought back for a state funeral in Drumcliffe churchyard in Sligo.  After death, his influence continued.  He had gathered together a group of fellow poets, and his ideas and ideals pervaded his generation.  Though the poets of the younger generation of the 1930s would eventually resent this, he nevertheless became an ideal even with them, through his perseverance against poverty, hardship, and literary disdain.  Yeats was an Olympian, a man out of time, a genius.

 

 

9

John Boyle O'Reilly

1844-1890

 

When many Americans think of Irish poetry it is not always Yeats or Seamus Heaney that comes to mind, but the Bostonian John Boyle O'Reilly.  His poetry was quoted by John F. Kennedy when he spoke in 1963 to the Irish national assembly because it had been the poetry which had made Ireland come alive for many of the president's family in the nineteenth century.

      The Fenian poet and editor was born the child of William and Eliza (Boyle) O'Reilly at Dowth Castle, on the south bank of the Boyne, near Drogheda, on 28th June 1844.  His father was the master of the national school which had been established there by Lord Netterville as part of the Netterville Institute.

      A clever boy, at the age of fourteen John Boyle O'Reilly was apprenticed as a printer to the Drogheda Argus.  Local newspapers played an important part of the life of rural Ireland, and by this time many were becoming strongly nationalist in political tone.

      He later moved to England, working on the Guardian in Preston.  The north of England had drawn many Irish people to work in the thriving industries there when no work could be found at home.  It was in Preston that he joined the Fenians, or Irish Republican Brotherhood.  He was sent to Dublin in 1863 to enlist in the 10th Hussars as part of a Fenian scheme to subvert the empire by secretly recruiting Irishmen from the British Army into the ranks of the republican movement.  However, he was informed on in 1866, arrested and sentenced to death for failing to give information on an intended mutiny and conspiring to levy war against the queen.  His sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he passed a year in solitary confinement in the notorious Millbank Gaol in London, where hard labour meant climbing the treadmill for long hours every day.  He also passed a period of hard labour in the brickyards at Chatham.  He was then sent to the remote prison on Dartmoor, from which he managed to escape.  Recaptured, he was sentenced to twenty years in the penal colony in western Australia.

      O'Reilly was one of sixty-three political prisoners deported in 1867 to Australia - the first to be sent there since 1848.  As convict No. 9843, he landed at Fremantle on 1st January 1868, and was sent to a convict settlement nearby.  With the help of Fr Patrick McCabe, a local Catholic priest, he escaped on a New Bedford whaler to America.  At sea he was transferred from the whaler to an American barque, and at Liverpool was transformed into the third mate of the Bombay, landing in Philadelphia in November 1869.  The day he landed he applied for naturalization.

      Though he knew nobody in Boston, his fame as a poet and patriot had gone before him.  He settled down in Boston, where he joined the staff of the Boston Pilot, a long established Irish-American newspaper of Catholic interest, edited by Patrick Donahoe.  He frankly reported on the mismanagement of the Fenian invasion of Canada from St Albans, and within a few months of joining the paper he was appointed editor.  He married an Irish girl, Mary Murphy, in August 1872; they had two daughters.

      He quickly made a name as a writer and lecturer.  His Legends and Ballads went into eight large editions.  In 1876, along with Archbishop John Joseph Williams of Boston, he became part owner of the Pilot (which had a circulation of over one hundred thousand), and he remained its editor until his death.  For the next two decades the paper played an important role in the assimilation of Irish Catholics into American society, through O'Reilly's additional advice.  Slowly, his youthful revolutionary ideals matured into a more conservative outlook.

      Influenced by such men as Patrick Donahoe and Patrick Collins, his was a conservative, constructive, but still anti-British programme of Irish-American acculturation.  The paper supported Democratic candidates, and his own comments on the developing industrial nature of the United States placed him among the leading social reformers.  When members of the Catholic community faced financial ruin in Boston following the fire and panic of 1872 to 1873, he began with Archbishop Williams a scheme to help local businessmen.

      His novel Moondyne (1879), about his Australian experiences, was also a success.  His volume of poems, Statues in the Block (1881), was also popular.  Under his charge the Pilot became famous for its noted contributors, which included WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8] and other writers and poets of the new generation in Ireland.

      He was refused permission to enter Canada in 1885 by the government.  Liberal in his views, John Boyle O'Reilly opposed the anti-Semitic and anti-black prejudices of so many Irish Americans all his life.  He was also interested in sports, being an excellent athlete and an enthusiastic canoer.  He even wrote about sports: Ethics of Boxing and Manly Sports appeared in 1888.  He was also deeply involved in Catholic activities in Boston, in the Irish-Catholic Colonization Association, and in promoting Catholic education to the highest levels.

      Overworked and suffering from insomnia, he died from an accidental overdose of his sleeping potion at his summer home in Hull, on Boston harbour, in August 1890.  There is a memorial in Boston, which his many admirers paid for through subscription, as well as a bust in the city's Public Library.  He left a popular legacy of verse among the Irish at home and in America.

      He was a favourite poet for the special occasion, such as the O'Connell Centenary, or the dedication of the Crispus Attucks monument on Boston Common.  He had not fully developed as a poet when he died.  Like many of the Irish poets he admired, such ass Thomas Davis and D'Arcy Magee, his best work is in ballads.  Over the years many of these have perhaps faded from the collective memory and modern critics prefer the shorter poems reflecting his interest in things spiritual.

      Though his name as a poet has declined in Ireland, when he was quoted by that other famous son of Boston, President John F. Kennedy, on his visit to Ireland in 1963, it led to a revival of interest in him in both America, Ireland, and Australia, as the significant figures of the nineteenth century are reappraised.

      As editor of the Pilot or patriotic poet, John Boyle O'Reilly was one of the most influential Irish Americans of his day, reflecting their policies and piety in the editorials and poems he wrote, but never confusing the two.  He was an advocate of Ireland's right to home rule, and he provided leadership to the Irish-American community on the issue, but he also saw that they were making their lives in a new country and laid equal emphasis on the duties of the Irish as American citizens.

 

 

10

Seamus Heaney

1939-

 

Seamus Justin Heaney, who became in 1995 the fourth Irish person to win the Nobel Prize for literature, was born in County Derry on 13th April 1939, the eldest son of a small farmer, Patrick Heaney, and his wife Margaret.  It was the family's farm, 'Mossbawn' at Bellaghy, and the rural way of life around it, that have provided the constant background, the source and sounding board of Heaney's poetry.  Despite Heaney's later changes of habitation and the enlargement of his frame of reference, that early home was where the real world would remain.

      Having attended a local mixed school, Heaney was educated, benefiting from the Northern Ireland Education Act of 1947 (an extension to Ulster of R.A. Butler's landmark act of 1944), at St Columb's College in Londonderry (or what Heaney's Catholic community always called Derry).  He was among the first generation of Ulster's disadvantaged Catholics to be able to avail themselves of a university education.  In Northern Ireland, under British rule, he had advantages unknown to those living in Southern Ireland.  It was this educational and social revolution that brought about the resurgence of political and literary activity in Northern Ireland, beginning in the sixties, when the children who had benefited from the Act came of age, with new demands to be heard.

      At Queen's University in Belfast, to which he won a bursary in 1956, he took first-class honours in 1961.  He worked first as a teacher in St Thomas' Secondary School in Belfast during 1962-63, before going on to teach at St Joseph's College of Education, and then at Queen's itself.  In 1965 he married Marie Devlin, by whom he has two sons and a daughter.  Marie Heaney is herself an accomplished author.

      At school he had got to know Seamus Deane, the poet and writer.  Later at St Joseph's he would meet Michael McLaverty, a Catholic novelist or quietist tendencies.  However, the greatest literary influences came at university, among other young poets of his own age group, who were greatly influenced by the visiting English poet Philip Hobsbaum.  The discovery at the same time of the poetry of Patrick Kavanagh, so rooted in the fields of Monaghan, and the work of a younger generation of British poets, would affect Heaney's own outlook and writing.  The ancient rituals of rural life combined with the technical efficiency of the polished modern lyric to create his own particular poetry.

      His first poems appeared in fugitive publications, but the publication of Death of a Naturalist in 1966 seemed to many to mark the emergence of a major talent, a successor to Yeats.  He compared the work of his father in cultivating the soil and reaping his harvests, to his own work, cultivating expression in a smaller harvest of poems.  The book was a great popular success, especially in Ireland.  This, it must be emphasised, was a remarkable achievement.

      In 1969, the year in which he published the ominously entitled collected Door into the Dark, the present troubles began in Ulster.  In 1972 he gave up teaching to freelance, and emigrated from Ulster with his family to the south of Ireland to live in a cottage in rural Wicklow.  This period in the real literary world, so to speak, did not last long, however, and by 1975 he was back teaching, taking a job at Carysfort Teacher Training College in Blackrock, outside Dublin, where he stayed until 1981 as a head of department.  The family moved to a house facing the sea in Sandymount, where he still lives.  Since then his teaching appointments have been largely temporary visiting ones of distinction at colleges in the USA, Ireland and Britain.  Again this dependency of the modern poet on the world of academia, in contrast to the careers of Kavanagh and Clarke, was very much in the modern Anglo-American mode.

      Heaney had perhaps a distinct advantage for an Irish poet in that his work was published in Britain by Faber and Faber, a firm which had developed a major modern poetry list under T.S. Eliot since the 1920s.  From the start of his career his work had its place in a ready-made establishment as a Faber poet.  Some of his contemporaries, who chose to publish in Ireland for various reasons, were not so lucky in reaching a wider international audience so readily.

      Many of the important themes of his work were established in that first collection, though others, such as a fascination with the language and mythology of Northern Europe (especially the bog bodies of Denmark) developed later.  'The North' was a culture, a state of mind to be contrasted with the civilization of 'the South', not only of Dublin, but eventually of the Italy of Dante.

      He also had a distinct talent as a prose writer, largely as a critic.  He was elected to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford for the years 1989-94.  A member of the Irish Academy of Letters (a largely moribund organization founded by Yeats), Heaney has developed into a major figure in world literature, well worthy, many thought, of his eventual Nobel Prize.  (Though for others a prize which was withheld from the writers Joyce and Graham Greene, cannot be said to be fully worthy of the status accorded it by the world's press, more concerned with the value of the prize than the quality of the authors it is given to.)

      His poetry reflects a modern temperament, much influenced by currents of modern Anglo-American poetry, in which can still be detected echoes of the older languages of Ireland, not only Gaelic, of course, but also the particular speech patterns of his own place, over the small fields of which several cultures in history have contended for mastery.

      However, the recent experience of Ulster, which he occasionally draws upon, is not to be equated with the modern experience of Ireland as a whole.  Also these rural and archaeological themes contrast strangely with the life of most modern Irish people, which is largely urbanized and heavily affected by the grosser forms of modern Anglo-American culture and lifestyle.  Like so many Irish poets, he cultivates what Frank O'Connor once called 'the backward look', peculiar to Irish literature.  What may be the basic appeal of his poetry, in contrast, say, to the modern school of Dublin urban novelists such as Dermot Bolger and Roddy Doyle, is a harking back to the sentiments of the soil and of history.  This may be seen by later generations as a dangerously sentimental and limited view of what the Irish experience in his time has been.

      Nevertheless, despite these few critics, perhaps inevitable in the smaller world of Irish literature (as Yeats said 'great hatred, little room, maimed us from the start'), he has undoubtedly brought poetry into the lives of many.  With Ted Hughes, another Faber poet, he edited two vital and enthusiastic anthologies of poetry for children, which have transformed its teaching for many.

      Compared with his Irish peers and contemporaries, such as Austin Clarke, Thomas Kinsella, and John Montague, whose poetry speaks with a clarity of language and image, Heaney's more allusive and elliptical lyrics are also elusive.  The influence of Patrick Kavanagh is perhaps stronger, the same longing of an urbanized man for the muddy puddles of his childhood; but what was also puzzling for many readers was his careful avoidance of plain statement.

      The appearance in 1999 of a new version of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, saw the continuance of Heaney's fascination with the theme of northern life in Europe, as well as his attempt to bring his own Irish perspective to bear on the traditions that underlie the wider culture of the British Isles.  It enlarged the context in which the struggle against those other monsters of the outer darkness in his native Ulster have to be seen, by providing an Irish poet's novel interpretation of the idea of the 'Anglo-Saxon' which lies at the heart of Britain's identity.

      Of all the many poets writing in Ireland, Heaney's work almost alone has won a universal audience.  Whatever may be the countercurrent of local opinion about Heaney, for a wider world he has become the voice of Irish poetry and so exerts an extraordinary influence on literary ideas of modern Ireland.

 

 

11

Wolfe Tone

1763-1798

 

It is to Wolfe Tone, and his enthusiasm for the French revolution, that modern Irish republicanism in its various forms traces its origins.  Every year several political parties of different outlooks make their individual pious pilgrimages to his burial place in Bodenstown, County Kildare, to pay homage to his memory and re-dedicate themselves to eliminating the divisions in Ireland that they see as having been fostered by a foreign invader.  But Tone's lasting influence over Irish life and politics is not as straightforward as they would hope to suggest.

      Theobald Wolfe Tone was born in Dublin on 20th June 1763, the son of a prosperous coach maker with family connections with Kildare.  A Protestant, he was educated at Trinity College, in Dublin.  While a student he eloped with a girl of sixteen, and the marriage, though affected by his politics, was happy.  Later Tone studied at the Middle Temple, the lawyer's college in London.  He was called to the Irish bar in 1789, but like many impatient revolutionaries, he never had much taste for the law.

      Like other lawyers of the day, he turned instead to politics, agitation, and writing.  In 1791 he published what proved to be a most influential pamphlet, An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland.  Along with Thomas Russell and Napper Tandy, he founded the Society of United Irishmen.  Their aims were 'to break the connection with England, the never-failing source of all our political evils ... and to substitute the common name of Irishman in place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter ...'

      He was active in the Catholic Committee, and called the Catholic Convention in Dublin in 1792.  The Catholic Relief Act of 1793 (one of a series that would end with full Catholic Emancipation in 1829) gave partial concessions to the aspirations of the native Irish, but not enough for Tone and his friends, who were deeply influenced by the French Revolution, just as the Irish Volunteers had been influenced by the American Revolution.

      It should be remembered that at this time Ireland had its own parliament and could legislate for itself.  Though dominated by Protestant landowners, this parliament could have evolved along the lines suggested by the American Revolution.  But it was not to America that Wolfe Tone looked for either inspiration or help.

      In 1794 Ireland was visited by a clergyman named William Jackson, an emissary of the French revolutionary government.  Wolfe Tone prepared a note for him, claiming that Ireland was ripe for revolution.  Jackson was arrested, but the authorities agreed that Tone would not give evidence against him, and that he could leave for America.

      This he did, taking his young family with him.  In Philadelphia he got letters of introduction to the French Directory, and was soon in France plotting an invasion of Ireland.  For the French, of course, there was a great advantage in a sideshow in Ireland, which would distract the British from events elsewhere.

      An expedition sailed in 1796, but was driven off by the weather.  A second expedition, planned with Gen. Lazare Hoche, came to nothing with the general's death.  When the uprising in Ireland broke out in the spring of 1798, Wolfe Tone renewed his efforts with the French, and other forces sailed later in the year - while Napoleon was invading Egypt, directly threatening British interests in the East.

      One expedition landed in Mayo in support of the rebels there.  Tone himself reached Lough Swilly onboard a French ship in October, but was captured.  He was quickly court-martialled, treated as a British traitor rather than a French officer.  Though he pleaded to be shot like a soldier, the authorities wished to hang him like a criminal.  On the morning of the day appointed for his execution, in November 1798, he used a penknife to open a vein in his neck.  Inevitably, Irish nationalists, rather than accept that Wolfe Tone, a deist, had committed suicide, claimed he had been murdered by the British government.

      Though Tone's influence was immense, his ambition to bring the French to Ireland was unlikely to have brought either independence or peace to Ireland.  The rebellion in 1798, which he had fostered, proved to be an appalling bloodbath in which Catholic insurgents murdered Protestants and local Protestant yeomanry exacted appalling revenge in their turn.  This led to the Act of Union, which Irish Protestants saw as the only way in which their interests could be protected.  Rather than break the connection with England, Tone's activities strengthened it.  As is so often the case, the revolutionaries brought about a result quite the opposite of what they intended.

      Though Tone's words are still quoted today, the development of the French Revolution, whose support he had sought, cast a shadow over all of Irish nationalism that has still not been thrown off.  Nominally democratic, the French Revolution quickly became arbitrary.  In the cause of one kind of freedom, its deistic leaders attacked the church.  Despite Tone's rhetoric, none of this could have had wide appeal to the Irish people, for subservience to Napoleon would have been an even worse fate than union with England.

      High-minded and idealistic, the results of his life brought destruction and ruin to many.  Yet in the end they also brought about the independence of a large part of Ireland.  His autobiography, edited by his son in America, became one of the sacred texts of Irish republicanism.

      Yet it was the parliamentary tradition which he rejected that the Irish people as a whole clung to, and which forms the basis of the modern advanced democracy which Ireland enjoys today.  Tone may be honoured, but his revolutionary ideals have not found a place in the public life of modern Ireland.

 

 

12

George Best

1946-

 

By the time he was twenty-five, the true inner purpose of George Best's life was over: he was finished as a soccer player.  Though newspapers in Ireland and Britain remain interested in the continuing saga of Best's troubles with women, money, and the effects of fame, his admirers realize that it was what he achieved in those first years, rather than the sorry decline of his later ones, that will keep his name alive as one of the greatest footballers who ever played.  In the opinion of Matt Busby, his manager at Manchester United, he was a player of world class, a young man who had it all.

      George Best was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on 22nd May 1946.  His father Richard Best ('Dickie') worked in the Harland and Wolfe shipyard as a lathe operator; his mother, formerly Anne Withers, worked in Gallagher’s Tobacco factory.  They were working-class Presbyterians of Scottish origins, and epitomized in their own lives the substance of Ulster folk.

      In true working-class style his life as a small child centred on his Granny Withers.  At home his father was a gentle enough man, his mother a strict woman, who administered a good slap as required.  However, the young George was no tearaway.  From soon after he could walk, kicking a ball around was his joy.  If he was out of sight, his father knew he would be found in the nearest field, with a tennis ball at his feet.  Dickie Best had played as an amateur up to the age of thirty-six but he did nothing to force his son's undoubted talents.  George honed those early skills playing street soccer, a thing which has now vanished from the lives of children.  He was shy almost to the point of introversion; though lonely he was not a loner, and had his own gang of friends.  He was essentially a good, church-going boy.   At that time the troubles were largely in abeyance in Ulster (they did not break out until 1969), and he was hardly aware of the rifts in Ulster society.

      He won a scholarship to a grammar school, Grosvenor High, but he lost his place, and so was sent to a secondary modern, the Intermediate at Lisnahannagh.  He was not academic, and his father hoped that he would take up a trade. Printing was the preferred option.

      Like many Irish boys though, he went to local matches played by semi-amateurs, but his real enthusiasm was for the professional English League.  His talents were picked up on, and he flew across the Irish Sea to join Manchester United in 1961.  His great adventure had begun.  From the back streets of Belfast he was plucked into the heart of the English North.  Though he found a happy home away from home with a landlady, Mrs Fullaway, where he lived for many years, the money he began to earn went to his head, and many nights of the weeks were spent out on the town, drinking and chasing girls.

      At first his talents were hardly noticed, but when he went down to London to play against Chelsea in the 1964-65 season, the spectacle of what he was capable of aroused the interest of the national press.  George Best quickly became a household name.  His wonderful balance, his sprinting pace, his extraordinary close control (the result of all those long hours as a child dribbling a tennis ball), all combined to make him unbeatable.  He rarely suffered foul play, even though he was slightly built.  He had, however, what some saw as a go-it-alone greediness to score himself, and he had a notable falling out with Bobby Charlton, who disliked Best's way of life.

      Best was part of the team that won the Football Association Youth Football cup in 1964, and were League champions in the season of 1964/65 and 1966/67, and European Cup winners in 1968.  He made some 361 League appearances, scoring 137 goals.  He also played in forty-six FA Cup competitions, scoring twenty-one times and played in thirty-four European competitions, and represented Northern Ireland thirty-seven times.

      Fame and wealth followed.  By 1970, for instance, he was the owner of a chain of men's boutiques - a class of shop redolent of the swinging Sixties lifestyle which George Best was so much a part of; smart, superficial and throwaway.

      However, it became increasingly obvious that George Best was throwing it all away.  His lifestyle became erratic, as he found himself unable to cope with the pressures under which he worked.  After he left Manchester United in December 1973, he made several efforts at a comeback, playing for smaller clubs in England, Scotland and the United States.

      But by now he was unstable.  Sometime between 1970 and 1973 his drinking had turned into alcoholism.  One thing which deeply affected him was what happened to his mother.  True to her Presbyterian Ulster background, she had never touched alcohol till past forty, but at forty-three she had an unexpected pregnancy.  Post-natal depression set in and it looked as if all she wanted was a share of the good times with her son.  But then she too became an alcoholic and died at fifty-four, in large part a victim of her son's fame.  While she was ill Best was unable to visit her, and is said to feel guilt about this failure ever since.

      A long line of girlfriends and wives has ended with Best currently married (since July 1995) to Alexandra Pursey.  By his divorced first wife, Angela James, whom he married in January 1978, he had a son, Calum Milan, born in 1981.  Between, there were a number of other women, the number depending on his flow of stories.  These included Mary Stavin - a Miss World - and the actress Sinead Cusack.

      For the greatest footballer Ireland has ever produced, the years after football have proved meaningless, and his newspaper appearances are now largely reports of personal and business disasters of one kind or another.  All of which has little to do with his natural gift.  Yet at the heart of that talent there was the great frustration that because he had been born in Belfast, he could not play for England at international level.  Playing for Northern Ireland was playing for a third-rate team in his opinion.  Best triumphed everywhere, except where he would have most wanted to, on the great stage of the World Cup.

      Today Best remains visible through celebrity appearances of all kinds, such as opening supermarkets, and through football commentaries on television.  Aside from this work, he keeps his mind alive with crosswords and general knowledge quizzes.  Other rewards have come his way since he was voted Irish Footballer of the Year in 1967.  He won the Sky TV award for Greatest Sportsman and Total Sport magazine voted him 'Greatest Sportsman of All Time'.  But his feelings of guilt, and the underlying fears have not vanished, and were perhaps made worse by the death of Matt Busby in 1994.

      Since the rise of the professional sportsman in the early nineteenth century, sport has been the route out of poverty for many a working-class boy.  A classic example was the Irish-American boxer John L. Sullivan in the 1880s, whose career as a boxer had an immense following in America and Europe.  Worth a fortune at the height of his fame, he eventually died in poverty and obscurity.  The joy and delight given to millions by a sportsman's skill, however long it may be recalled, does not always provide for old age.  Yet the influence such figures wield over their followers is an ever-growing one.  Sport has become warfare by other means, and these are the natural heroes of the modern age.  Best's benefit match at Belfast in August 1988 brought in 25,000 fans and netted £110,000.  This was the repayment for what he had given his native place, especially an epic match against Scotland in October 1967, which he called 'my game for Belfast'.  For that reason there will always be small Irish boys ambitious enough to try and be better than Best.

 

 

13

George Boole

1815-1864

 

Science has never seemed a very strong part of the Irish tradition, yet Irish people and others whose life's work was spent in Ireland have made important scientific advances.  George Boole, whose name is still honoured in Irish scientific circles, was one of these.  But scientists work in an international, not a national, mode.  Boole is important not only because, as Bertrand Russell observed, he discovered pure mathematics, but because his work lies behind the modern computer revolution.

      He was born in Lincoln, in the east of England, on 2nd November 1815 - the year of Waterloo.  His father was a poor tradesman, which did not give young George much of a start in life.  Indeed, if he had been poorer, initially things might have gone better for him.  But he was clever, and at sixteen was appointed an assistant master in a small school in Doncaster.  This was the beginning of a distinguished teaching career, and at the age of twenty he opened his own school back in Lincoln.  This was more civilized than the others he had attended or taught in, and it was here, while trying to teach mathematics to his own pupils, that his own deepening interest in the subject was aroused.

      He worked alone.  At first his main interest was invariants, without which Einstein's theory of relativity would have been impossible.  He was almost the only mathematician in the British Isles to write about logic.  His first thoughts were contained in a small booklet he published in 1847 called Mathematical Analysis of Logic, but he later came to think of this as quite inadequate.  It required more work, but what his contemporary, Prof. William de Morgan, called the 'splendid invention' of symbolic, or mathematical, logic was a major advance.  It brought him the friendship of de Morgan and other workers, who urged him to go to Cambridge University as a student and begin an academic career.  But Boole was happy enough to persist with his schoolwork.

      Boole was not unambitious, however, and in 1849 was appointed professor of mathematics at the Queen's College in Cork (now University College Cork, a constituent college of the National University of Ireland).  Here at last was an opening in which he could develop his thoughts almost free from monetary pressures and concern for the care of his elderly parents, who depended on him.  In 1855 he married a relative of the explorer Sir George Everest, for whom Mount Everest is named, and 'with whom he lived in perfect domestic happiness', as Mrs Boole later told one of her husband's biographers.  They had five daughters.

      By this time his reputation as an advanced mathematician was already known.  A decade before he had published a paper entitled 'Theory of Analytical Transformation', in the Cambridge Mathematical Journal.  This led to a long friendship with the editor D.F. Gregory.  He wrote what were then considered two important textbooks, Differential Equations (1859) and Finite Differences (1860).

      But his most important and far-reaching work was The Laws of Thought (1854), in which symbolic language and notation were employed to express purely logical processes.  'The design of the following treatise,' he wrote, 'is to investigate the fundamental laws of those operations of the mind by which reasoning is performed; to give expression to them in the language of a Calculus, and upon this foundation to establish the science of Logic and construct its method; and to make that method itself the basis of a general method for the application of the mathematical doctrine of probabilities; and, finally, to collect from the various elements of truth brought to view in the course of these inquiries some probable intimation concerning the nature and constitution of the human mind.'

      This ambitious work was widely influential, being followed up by workers in Britain, Europe, and America, and it lies at the very root of the dependence of the modern world on computers, for it reduced the theoretical basis of logic to a choice between 0 and 1, the key to all modern computing science.

      As professor E.T. Bell, the historian of mathematical thought, wrote, 'The intricacy and delicacy of the difficulties explored by the symbolic reasoning methods would, it is safe to say, defy human reason if only the old, pre-Boole methods of verbal logical arguments were at our disposal.  The daring originality of Boole's whole project needs no signpost.  It is a landmark in itself.'

      After writing his masterpiece, Boole did not live much longer.  His health had not always been good, and he worked long hours.  He was also involved in the difficult academic politics of the college, which were often very overheated and outspoken.  Going into college in the winter of 1864 he contracted a cough, which was followed by pneumonia, from which he died on 8th December 1864.

      Nineteenth-century mathematics laid the foundation for twentieth-century physics.  Early last century, Boole's work was brought to a wider audience by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, and it has been further developed by many others since.  Boole's creative work in The Laws of Thought laid the foundations for the computer revolution, a fact which only became clear as modern machines began to develop from the primitive devices of the 1940s.  The modern information revolution which is transforming the whole nature of life itself owes an immense debt to the work and influence of George Boole and his studies at Cork a century-and-a-half ago.  Every computer that is turned on in the world today is a child of George Boole's genius.

 

 

14

Seán Lemass

1899-1971

 

Now seen as the architect of modern industrialized Ireland, Seán Lemass had for much of his life been the follower of EAMON DE VALERA [2], whose vision of Ireland was based on the rural nation he had grown up in.  But Lemass was a city man, and realized that in large part the future of Ireland would lie in its cities.  Even by 1959 the contrast between the two cultures of Ireland had become an extreme one.

      A Dubliner, Seán Francis Lemass was born on 15th July 1899.  He was educated by the Christian Brothers at the O'Connell's Schools, where a special brand of Catholic nationalism was imparted to all the boys.  He was a clever student, winning the Junior Grade Scholarship in the state exams.  For a whole year after he left school he attended a practical business college.

      In January 1915, at age fifteen, he joined the Irish Volunteers, serving at first in de Valera's own company.  He and his elder brother Noel took part in the Easter Rising in 1916, but because Seán was so young he was not deported.  A Dublin policeman who knew the family recognized him and drew to 'the nipper' the attention of a British officer.  'But he's old enough to handle a rifle,' said the officer.  He was released nevertheless.  To his annoyance, his parents sent him back to his studies.

      Lemass began his working life in the family hat shop and drapery business in Capel Street in the heart of the city, but he also continued his activities with the reorganized volunteers (by then a republican movement), and was soon a full-time officer.  He was arrested in December 1920, and this time was sent to Ballykinlar concentration camp to join other leading figures in the movement.

      In the summer, after the truce came into force, he was released, but was among those who rejected the treaty settlement, again following the lead of de Valera.  During the civil war he fought with the republicans in the Four Courts, an important city centre building, which had been occupied by Rory O'Connor, in imitation of the Easter Rising of 1916.  When the garrison fell he was arrested, but managed to escape and rejoin the republicans in the field.  But he was captured again in December 1922, and this time was interned in the Curragh in Kildare until the end of 1923.  His brother Noel was captured and murdered by free-state agents, and his body dumped in the Dublin Mountains - one of the grimmest events of that war of comrades.

      Lemass was released in December 1923, but by then he had read every book on economics and history he could find on the camp bookshelves.  He was elected to the Dáil (the Irish assembly) in 1924, and sat for the same constituency until he retired from politics in 1968.  He was already a leading figure in the new party, Fianna Fáil, which de Valera formed to escape from the dead end of the civil war.

      In 1932, at the early age of thirty-two, he became the minister of industry and commerce in de Valera's first government.  He began to reverse the sorry state of Irish industry through a protectionist policy.  The war years, with materials of all kinds in very short supply, were a major challenge to the country, which he largely dealt with.  He founded Irish Shipping to create an independent Irish merchant fleet.  He also set up the Tourist Board, which created a major new industry in Ireland.  Lemass held the same office until he was elected Taoiseach (first minister) in June 1959.  He had been de Valera's deputy since 1945.

      He achieved a cover story in Time magazine, which featured a traditional leprechaun drawing aside a green curtain to reveal a spanking new factory.  This coverage was typical of a change in the international media's interest in Ireland.  From the mid-1960s onward a new economic and social situation emerged, leaving the old, traditional Ireland behind.  In this new scheme of things he was ably assisted by a new professional class, among whom T.K. WHITAKER [98] was outstanding.

      From now on the dark shadow of emigration and a falling population, coupled with high unemployment, began to pass from Ireland.  Indeed, in 1965 it had reverse migration - more people entered than left - and the country at last began to retain many of its young people, especially those with higher educations.  Everyone knew that Ireland had a past; now it seemed that it might also have a future.

      In January 1965 he also began a serious rapprochement with Ulster when he visited the new prime minister, Captain Terence O'Neill in Belfast - a visit brought about by earlier discussions between O'Neill and T,K. Whitaker at the United Nations in New York.  Lemass hoped to promote a federal solution to the problem of the island's partition, though this did not appeal to Belfast.  The visit had important results, but may also have generated a rising tide of expectation that in 1969 exploded into a quarter of a century of bloody warfare.  The new policy represented another break with the past policy of his party and of other Irish governments.

      Lemass resigned as first minister in November 1966, just after the celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising.  In retirement he left his successors to run the country without having to look over their shoulder all the time.  This, too, was a sign of a new maturity in the country.  He died in Dublin on 11th May 1971.

      In time, the shy schoolboy who had taken part in the uprising grew into an accomplished, if reserved and enigmatic, man of affairs.  By far and away, Seán Lemass was the key man in the making of Ireland as it is today.  He had presided over what came to be called the managerial revolution in contrast to the earlier political revolution.  The generation which has followed since he left public life owes him a debt which it has not fully realized.

 

 

15

James Craig,

Lord Craigavon

1871-1940

 

A central figure in the creation of Northern Ireland, and a staunch unionist in the face of a rising tide of Irish nationalism, James Craig, the son of James Craig of Craigavon, a wealthy Belfast distiller, was born on 8th January 1871.

      By this time Belfast was beginning to emerge as the major industrial centre on the island of Ireland, imitating Glasgow in its growth and outstripping Dublin, Cork, and Limerick.  Indeed, it rivalled some of its Scottish counterparts.  It was this new industrial growth, and the prosperity that it generated largely for Ulster Protestants, that Ulster Unionists were anxious to protect by retaining what they saw as their essential link to the United Kingdom.

      Craig's childhood was dominated by the emergence of the Orange Order from being a quasi-secret society.  It had once even been banned, accused of plotting to put the Duke of Cumberland on the throne in place of Queen Victoria.  It now established itself as a powerful element in Ulster life and Irish politics.  Though feared by the Catholic majority, the Orange Order had important links of religion and friendship with influential persons in high places in British society and government.

      Craig was privately educated in Ulster, and then at Merchiston's college in Edinburgh.  He became a stockbroker by profession, and fought with the Royal Irish Rifles in the Boer War, that great imperial adventure in which some Irish nationalists supported the Boers.

      He was elected a unionist member of Parliament from East Down, a strongly Protestant area of Ulster, in 1906.  With Edward Carson, a Dublin-born barrister, he became a leading figure in the party, which was allied with the British Conservative party.  They were determined to resist the intention of the Liberal government to grant home rule to Ireland.  Carson, with a busy London legal practice, was active in government at Westminster, while Craig was the organizer of the Ulster volunteers at home in Belfast.  They armed in defence of the union in 1912, importing weapons from Germany to do so.  It was their actions, together with a series of rebellions by women suffragettes, trade unionists, and Irish Nationalists which doomed the Liberal Party, leaving open the way to the rise of the Labour Party.

      Craig was the Ulster representative at the Buckingham Palace Conference on the Third Home Rule Bill, when the king hoped to hold all the parties together.  Home rule was passed by Parliament and given royal assent, but it was suspended for the duration of the First World War.  Craig fought on the western front from 1914 to 1916.  He was quartermaster general of the 36th (Ulster) Division, which consisted mostly of Ulster volunteers.  He was knighted in 1918, and served as a parliamentary secretary in the government from 1919 to 1921.

      By now home rule, in the old sense, was a dead letter.  But if the rest of Ireland was to have some measure of self-government, Ulster unionists were determined that they would have home rule for themselves.  This they received under the Government of Ireland Act of 1920.  Its measures were not enough for the south, but they gave Craig (by now first lord of the admiralty) and his followers a parliament in Belfast, which the king opened for them the following year.

      Elected for North Down in 1921, in June of that year Craig became the first prime minister of Northern Ireland.  The rest of Ireland came to different terms with the British, and in 1922 the Irish Free State under MICHAEL COLLINS [3] and Arthur Griffith came into existence.  With Collins, Craig agreed on the protection of northern Catholics, who had been the victims of pogroms in 1920, in return for a settlement of the border.  Though a commission investigated the border and reached a settlement, hopes that Northern Ireland would be unviable were not to come true.  Craig maintained himself and his statelet.  He was elevated to the peerage as Lord Craigavon of Stormount in 1927.

      In 1929 he abolished proportional representation, which had been intended to secure the rights of the Catholic minority in the six counties of the north, saying the people did not understand the dangers of it.  The nationalists had adopted a policy of not attending the Belfast parliament (for a time EAMON DE VALERA [2] was an Ulster MP!).  In 1934 Craig could tell the Ulster assembly, 'We are a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people.'  It was a definition that excluded the Catholics from the civic life of the country they lived in.  Whatever he did of practical value for the status and economy of Northern Ireland was balanced by policies of discrimination and prejudice.  It was the same racial intolerance that in other forms stalked other parts of Europe.  The Ulster unionists may have felt that they were defending an outpost of Christian civilization against barbarians, but the Catholics of the country felt they were being treated like blacks in the southern United States.

      A friend spoke of his 'sagacity, honesty of purpose, and courage,' and that he possessed qualities of a high order, that he was 'a man of undoubted courage, high character, sound judgement, and devotion to duty, and his powers of leadership were conspicuous.'  To his political opponents among the liberals and nationalists, he had every appearance of being bigoted, outdated, and vindictive.

      Craigavon died on 20th November 1940, soon after the Second World War began, leaving Northern Ireland with an entrenched unionism which would take another two generations to resolve into a state that had room for all.  Yet in politics, the spirit of 'that old bull Craigavon', as the poet Louis MacNeice called him, roams free whenever the Orange Order parades through Catholic streets or defies the will of the British government.  Among all the elements that affect the future of Northern Ireland, the heritage of Lord Craigavon looms large.

 

 

16

James Connolly

1868-1916

 

Though his career was brutally cut short, James Connolly remains the most influential personality in Irish left-wing politics, and his many writings have remained widely read and influential to this day, even in an Ireland that heartily embraces the market economy.  All cultures need such a critic.

      He was born of Irish parents living in Scotland, in the Cowgate district of Edinburgh, then a slum, on 5th June 1868.  Like so many working-class children, he was sent to work at the early age of eleven.  At fourteen, however, he joined the British army, then, as now, a resort for those with ambitions to escape a background of poverty.  For a time he was stationed in Ireland.  He was determined, however, to marry a Wicklow girl he had met in Scotland.  To support his family he left the army to work as a carter.

      At this time he began to take an interest in socialist and trade union matters.  In 1896 he was sent to Ireland as a paid organizer for the Dublin Socialist Club, one of the first organizations of its kind in Ireland.  He founded the Workers' Republic, the very first Irish socialist paper.

      From these first tentative beginnings grew the Irish Socialist Republican party, whose main aim was to secure 'the national and economic freedom of the Irish people'.  These activities soon brought him to the attention of the British authorities, and the secret police in Dublin began to make regular reports on his activities.

      Life was hard for his family.  Having made a tour of Britain and the United States in 1902, he eventually returned to America with his family in 1903.  He stayed in the United States for seven years, working under the auspices of the Socialist Labour party.  He established the Irish Socialist Federation in New York and published a monthly journal of Irish interest called the Harp.  He was one of those who helped to found the Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), whose aim was the creation of 'one big union' which all working men could join to defend their interests in the era of the great trusts.

      But as an almost unknown figure from Ireland, Connolly was an outsider in the Irish-American communities with their Catholic, conservative leadership.  His espousal of trades unionism and women's rights, when added to a raising of class consciousness, was not popular among the established nationalist groups.  Though admired by many, he could not break through the parochial and racial prejudices of the Irish Americans, to many of whom socialism, in any shape or form, was anathema.

      Even among American socialists he had difficulties.  His Irish nationalism, religious and spiritual ideas, and Catholic-inspired opposition to divorce were intolerable to many other socialists, largely of European, and especially German, background.  He received little support among American socialists for the Harp, which soon failed.

      He then turned to the Industrial Workers of the World, and in 1910 became editor of the Newcastle Free Press, a Wobbly-supported paper published for workers in the heartlands of the industrial district dominated by the steel trust.

      Convinced that his American venture had been a regrettable mistake, he went back to Ireland in 1910 and worked as the Ulster organizer of the Transport and General Workers Union.  It was at this time he wrote his most extended work, Labour in Irish History.  This was an attempt to discover, or perhaps create, a legitimate role for the left in the course of Irish history - to justify his claim on the future by calling on the country's past struggles against oppression.

      Among employers there was widespread resistance to accepting trade unions, and this led to the great lockout in Dublin in 1913, in which the workers were led by JAMES LARKIN [37].  When Larkin was eventually jailed, Connolly took over the union leadership.

      The families of the Dublin workers suffered greatly at this time, as did the protesting workers themselves when they were attacked by the police in the city centre.  Along with Capt. Jack White, Connolly set about organizing the Irish Citizen army, based in the union's headquarters in Liberty Hall.

      Afterwards Larkin went to America.  Connolly, on the outbreak of the First World War, opposed it.  He saw capitalism, whether in Britain, America, or Germany, as the real enemy of peace and social justice.  Working people were being led away from their true interests by the siren call of nationalism.

      But Irish nationalism would be Connolly's own nemesis.  In 1916 he was inveigled into taking part in the Easter Rising by PATRICK HENRY PEARSE [7] and Thomas MacDonagh, even though the aims of his organization were very different from those of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which they led.  He was appointed military commander of the Dublin district, and the members of the Irish Citizen army that could be mobilized fought alongside the Irish Volunteers in the city garrisons.  While in command at the General Post Office he was badly wounded in the leg, but still gave orders from a mattress laid out on the floor of the building.

      After the rebels surrendered he was detained in Dublin Castle, but after a court-martial he was executed by shooting, sitting in a chair in Kilmainham Gaol, on 12th May 1916.

      Like the other leaders of the uprising, Connolly took on even greater significance in death.  His ideas remain influential not only among members of the general trade-union movement in Ireland, but also among more radical republicans, in both Northern Ireland and the south.  His son and daughter carried on his work in radical politics into the middle decades of the century.

      To the Irish left, Connolly remains a hero.  To Irish people in general, many of whom would not share all his views, his life is a constant reminder that social justice, rather than the pursuit of wealth, must remain the ultimate aim of all social organization.  In recognition of his role in Irish history, a statue of him now stands in Beresford Place in Dublin, facing the new Liberty Hall, one of Dublin's first high-rise buildings, erected in the 1960s.  Times change, and even trade unions change with them.

 

 

17

Brian Boru

c. 941-1014

 

One of the most important figures in ancient Irish history, Brian Boru was always thought of in the popular imagination as having broken the power of the Viking invaders, or Danes, as they were once called in Ireland.  But the actual situation was more complicated.

      When he was born in north Munster about 941, the Vikings were well established in strongholds around the Irish coast, and the Irish annalists made much of their raids into the Irish interior.  Incidentally, at this time the Irish themselves had colonies in Scotland and Wales, and had made past excursions into Europe itself.  The Vikings are now seen more in the light of colonists and settlers rather than raiders, and their role in Irish culture a more positive one.

      The problem that faced Ireland was its own political structure.  Though the island of Ireland shared a common culture, it was divided into many small petty kingdoms.  To achieve unity among them was a hard task.  (The analogy is with the American colonies, which would have collapsed if they had not managed to unite in 1786.)

      In 976 Brian succeeded his brother as king of Dál Cais, in Thomond, an area now covered by County Clare in the southwest of Ireland.  At once he laid claim to the kingship of the province of Munster.  He became king of Munster in 978, and then began to grapple with the high king of Ireland, based at Tara.  Brian himself raided with his armies far into the northern half of the island.  Máel Sechnaill, the high king of Ireland, was eventually forced to concede power to Brian, and in 997 at a meeting at Clonfert they partitioned the country between them.

      However, in 999 the Leinstermen revolted and allied themselves with the Norse in Dublin.  Brian counterattacked, defeated them, and seized and plundered Dublin.  But this was not the end of the Norse; rather, it was the beginning of an alliance with them.  Brian married Gormlaith, the mother of King Sitric of Dublin, and married his own daughter to the king - a double marriage, cementing the alliance.

      Brian now felt secure enough to make claim to the northern part of the island.  Máel Sechnaill failed to obtain the support of the northern O'Neills, and yielded to Brian, who became high king of Ireland at the age of sixty-one.  In 1005, with a great army, he marched north to Armagh, the city of St Patrick in which the church in Ireland was centred, where he made a gift of gold and confirmed the city's bishop as the primate of Ireland.  Into a page of the Book of Armagh his secretary wrote an inscription in Latin referring to Brain as imperator scotorum, 'the Emperor of the Irish'.  The next year he made a circuit of the north, subduing the O'Neills by taking hostages.  This was how he got his traditional Irish name - Brian Boru means 'Brian of the Tributes'.

      In 1012 the O'Neills and the Leinstermen rebelled against his authority.  Brain, now an old man of seventy-two, laid siege to Dublin in 1013 but failed to take the city and returned home for Christmas to his own stronghold of Kincora on the shores of Lough Ree on the Shannon above Killaloe.

      Before spring, the Norse had summoned help from abroad and allies came from the Orkneys and Man.  The armies met on the field of Clontarf, a little to the north of Dublin, on Good Friday, 23rd April 1014.  The Norse and the Leinstermen were defeated, though Brian himself was slain by a fleeing Norse warrior while praying in his tent.  Brian's son and grandson also died in the battle.

      This battle, far from being an attempt to drive out the Norse, was part of an internal Irish struggle.  From recent investigations, the Vikings have now emerged in modern eyes as the bearers into Ireland of new cultural norms, such as coinage, towns, ships and international trade.  They are no longer seen as some earlier version of the English, ravishing the ideal Celtic nation of Ireland.

      The death of Brian marked the last chance Ireland had to create a centralized state under a principal king, as was emerging all over Europe.  Brian was called the Emperor of the Irish in imitation of the achievements of Charlemagne (who had died in 814), the protagonist of European unity and Christian culture.  Though he had been styled Emperor of the Irish, his empire was short-lived.  Again the Irish petty kings fell to local quarrels, and the Irish people failed to create the unitary state which alone would have preserved the integrity of the island from invasion and usurpation.

      As it was, despite the achievements of Brian Boru, the country and its ill-led people lay open for a more determined invasion by the Normans, which followed in due course.  Brian ultimately failed in what he had hoped for, but it was a noble failure of the kind that the Irish admire, and which her poets and annalists have lamented ever since.

 

 

18

Alfred Harmsworth,

Lord Northcliffe

1865-1922

 

The power of the modern press, for both good and evil, was created by men like the Irish-born Alfred Harmsworth.  His chief titles remain to this day, and the influence he had hoped to exert through them continues.  We live today in an era of immediate mass media largely because of his activities a century ago.  His notions transformed the nature of the modern world.

      Alfred Harmsworth was born in 1865 in the little village of Chapelizod, just outside Dublin, the setting for JAMES JOYCE'S [25] book Finnegans Wake.  But that epic of noncommunication had little in common with Harmsworth's driving ambition to be a great communicator.  His father was a Dublin-born land agent.  Two years after Alfred's birth he moved to London to work as a barrister.  His health broke down when Alfred was still in his late teens, so Alfred was largely self-educated.  He was also the virtual head of a family.

      After leaving school, Alfred Harmsworth began in a small way as the editor of Bicycling News in Coventry, where many of the bicycles which were then the latest craze were made.  They were a new means of mass transport, and changed the lives, and courting habits, of a generation.  The mobility provided by the bicycle was a symptom of the age.

      It was an era of mass demand, and Harmsworth conceived the idea of a new kind of newspaper which would cater to the new class of readers which had been produced in England by the Education Act of 1870.  By making elementary education compulsory for all throughout the United Kingdom, the act had given new importance to the printed word.

      The Reform Act of 1867 had extended the franchise to city workers, and that of 1884 to labourers in the countryside.  The working class, of which the working-class Irish were an important element, was now of political importance.  They were becoming the new masters, and newspaper proprietors were keen to gain their support.  Harmsworth was one of the first to sense the new drift of things.  After some years as an active freelancer he decided to go into publishing himself.  His entry into publishing in 1888 marks a distinct new phase in the history of the free press.

      His paper was called Answers to Correspondents, and was exactly what it said it was, a kind of Notes and Queries for the working classes - or ill-educated upstarts, as his critics said.  (Notes and Queries was a well-known magazine of the academic classes.)  The title was soon shortened to Answers, but it was the first outpost of an empire.  He was joined by his brother Harold (later Lord Rothermere), and within five years the paper was selling over a million copies a week.  Other papers and magazines followed, which became the Amalgamated Press, then the largest publishing group in the world.

      In 1894 Harmsworth bought the London Evening News and returned it to profit, an achievement in itself.  Then, in 1896, along with Kennedy Jones, he launched the Daily Mail, intended to be a new kind of newspaper.  His staff was instructed to 'explain, simplify, clarify': it was a paper for the busy person in a modern democracy.  Its circulation rapidly rose from a daily average of 202,000 in its first year to 543,000 at the end of its third.  Yet many grandees saw it as a vulgarization of government and public life.

      The essential feature of the new journalism was not to inform its readers or to support reforming causes, but simply to make money.  Its sensationalism was in the cause of pure commercialism, and circulation figures were all that mattered.  The large circulations naturally attracted the even richer reward of large-scale advertising, and the smaller papers quaked in the advent of these new giants.

      A weekend paper followed called the Sunday Dispatch.  Seeing that 'the new woman' was another force to be reckoned with, Harmsworth began an illustrated paper, the Daily Mirror, in 1904.  Though originally aimed at the female market, the Daily Mirror quickly established itself as a cheap picture paper.  Finally, in 1908, he acquired the Times of London, perhaps the most august paper in the British Empire, whose reputation as 'the Thunderer' was supposed to make the great of the world quake.  This brought Harmsworth to the heart of the establishment that ruled the United Kingdom and the expanding British Empire beyond.

      Harmsworth (like newspaper proprietors in the United States) conceived that his keen touch for what the public wanted gave him the duty to mould their minds.  The backing of the Times was an important influence in bringing about the settlement of the Irish situation, in 1921.  Though his own influence on politicians was now slight, his later years were marked by a megalomania that resulted in his breakdown and death on 14th August 1922.

      Yet Harmsworth's real influence over history was in the creation of the advertising practice which is so well developed today.  Special circumstances brought about the expansion of the press in the 1890s: paper, now made of wood pulp, was cheaper, and machinery was better and faster.  Readers, especially businessmen, wanted a digest of the previous day's news rather than long opinion articles.  All these factors came together for Alfred Harmsworth.

      Modern daily life in America or Europe is inconceivable without the daily paper and its range of wonderful advertisements for a consumer lifestyle.  Whether or not this is a good thing has become for many social critics a pressing question of the day, for consumerism affects everything from the health of individuals to the survival of the planet itself.

      Harmsworth was not self-consciously Irish, but he was representative of those countless millions from his native land who made their way in Britain, America, and Australia through their pertinacity for commerce.  They are not always counted among the cultural heroes of Ireland, but in their own spheres they have helped to make the modern world what it is.

      Though his influence over day-to-day politics was not as great as he would have hoped, Harmsworth created a whole new market for periodicals.  This made his fortune, but it also opened the way for many others.  He remains among the giants of press history.

 

 

19

Edmund Rice

1762-1844

 

In 1993, Pope John Paul II declared Edmund Rice, the founder of the Christian Brothers and Presentation Brothers, to be a man of heroic virtue - the first step on the road to his canonization as a saint.  Among all the Irishmen of his day and since, Edmund Rice has affected more people than can be imagined through the foundation of these two Irish teaching orders as a force in education worldwide.  'Educate that you may be free' was a maxim of the Irish patriot Thomas Davis.  Edmund Rice helped to make this a reality.

      He was born at Westcourt near Callan, in County Kilkenny, and into a well-connected family on 1st June 1862.  His father was a prosperous farmer, so he did not lack either material comfort or an education.  He received his early education at a 'hedge school', an informal school often in the open or in a cottage, for the children of Catholics living in the Callan area.  Having gone on to a commercial academy in 1777 at Kilkenny as a preparation for a business career, he went to work in Waterford in 1778 with his uncle, who died and left him the business.  He married Mary Elliott, the daughter of a Waterford merchant, in 1785.  His great wealth did little to cushion the shock of his wife's death in 1789, when she fell from her horse while out hunting.  The child she was expecting was born prematurely and disabled.

      Her death was the turning point of Rice's life.  Having made ample provision for his daughter Mary, he now decided to retire from business and devote himself to charitable work.  At first he thought he might go to Europe and join an enclosed order.  One day he called on his friend, Fr John Power.  While they were talking they heard the shouts of young boys fighting in the street outside.  Power's sister remarked, 'Well, Mr Rice, you are thinking of burying yourself in a monastery on the Continent.  Will you leave these poor boys uncared for?  Can't you do something for them?'  He realized then that a truer vocation lay at home, helping his own people.

      In 1796 Rice sought permission from Rome to create a religious society which would provide the poor with free education, and he helped establish a Presentation convent for girls in Waterford in 1798.  With the approval of the church authorities in Rome and Ireland, he opened a school for poor boys in Waterford in 1800.  Rice was joined by two companions, and they began to live as a community in rooms over the school, which was in a converted stable.  Then, in 1803, they moved into a specially-built school and monastery called Mount Sion.  The town itself was a prosperous seaport with glass and other industries, with a thriving trade to Newfoundland, the United States, and the West Indies.  Nevertheless, in the midst of plenty, it also had its poor.

      This first venture was a success; other schools followed, but the arrangements for their control were unsatisfactory.  Yet, from the success of the schools sprang a congregation of men (approved by the pope in 1820) called the Institute of the Brothers of Christian Schools of Ireland.  These men were not priests like the Jesuits or other teaching orders, but unordained brothers who nevertheless took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience.  As Rice saw it, they were there to serve a pressing need.  However, they faced opposition from Bishop Daniel Murray of Cork, which led eventually to the creation of another congregation, the Presentation Brothers.

      In 1829 came Catholic emancipation, which would open up many new opportunities for young Catholics to advance their careers.  But it had the rather absurd consequence of bringing with it a new penal law to provide for 'the gradual suppression and final prohibition' of male religious orders.  This did not apply to the Jesuits and others, but did apply to the brothers.  Rice and his colleagues found they were in an illegal situation, but though there were some difficulties, in the end the regulation proved a dead letter.

      The introduction of the National School system in 1831 provided another problem for the brothers.  Though some of their schools at first joined the state system, it proved unappealing and controversial, and eventually Rice withdrew.  Rather than depend on state funds, the schools survived through the goodwill of benefactors.

      Rice himself retired in 1838; there were then twenty-two houses of the Christian Brothers in the British Isles.  Among them was the O'Connell's Schools in north Dublin, founded in 1828, a place of great influence in the city.  His last years were clouded by further controversy and dissension within the order, as his successor found it hard to live so closely with the founder.  In 1840 Rice made a farewell tour of the schools he had brought into being.  Soon afterwards his health and mental faculties began to give way.

      Edmund Rice died at Mount Sion in Waterford on 29th August 1844, but since then the system he inaugurated has spread with the Irish people throughout the world.  The Christian Brothers combined practical teaching for boys with deep religious influence and a patriotic fervour which has marked the lives of countless people since.  Their discipline was harsh to present-day eyes, but they gave to generations of Irish people with few advantages in the world the greatest boon of all - a decent education.

      They also gave nearly all of them a sense of national identity, fostered through their own specially prepared schoolbooks, which is seen as one of the most important elements in the creation of modern Ireland.  For everyone in public life who had attended a fashionable Jesuit school there were scores who had gone to the Christian Brothers.  They all left a mark somewhere.

 

 

20

Daniel O'Connell

1775-1847

 

It may seem strange to place Daniel O'Connell only in twentieth place in this list, long after other patriots and public figures.  Gladstone called O'Connell 'the greatest popular leader the world has ever seen'.  His influence was certainly great, but it was also marred.  If he had managed to achieve all he wished or his people wanted, he would have been further up the scale.  But he did not, and that was his tragedy and Ireland's.

      The creator of the modern Irish democracy sprang from the old Irish rural world of Kerry. O'Connell's people were not peasants, however, but Catholic landlords in their own right, whose wealth derived partly from a vigorous smuggling business.

      He was born near Cahirciveen in August 1775, and was adopted by his uncle Maurice (Hunting Cap) O'Connell, the head of the family.  Daniel spoke Gaelic and was reared in contact with the realities of rural Irish life.  He knew country people thoroughly, a knowledge that served him well in later life, both as a lawyer and a political leader.

      As there were then no schools in Ireland for landed Catholics, he was sent to college abroad at St Omer and Douai in France.  There he was exposed to the bloodier sights of revolutionary France, which gave him a lifelong loathing of political violence.  The school was expelled from France by order of the government, the boys being jeered by the crowds and forced to wear the tricoleur of the revolution.  O'Connell's last gesture as the boat sailed out of Calais was to tear the cockade from his hat and throw it into the sea.  His contemporary WOLFE TONE [11] saw such violence as the nation's salvation.  O'Connell was wiser.

      He studied law in London at the Lincoln's Inns and read widely in European literature.  His reading took him to the position of Catholic liberalism and laissez-faire economics, which would remain his political view to the end of his life.  He was called to the Irish bar in 1798, the year of rebellion in Ireland, in which Tone took part.  The appalling scenes throughout the island in the wake of that aborted uprising confirmed his prejudice against revolution.

      In 1805, he married his cousin, Mary O'Connell, raising with her a large and energetic family.  He got up at four o'clock every morning and worked on his papers till ten.  With hard work he became a figure of substance on the southern legal circuit.  Surprisingly for a Catholic, he was also an active Freemason, involved in lodges in Tralee, Cork, and Dublin.

      Dublin, of which he was later to be lord mayor and over whose main thoroughfare a huge statue of him now looms, was resolutely controlled by Protestant interests.  In 1815 he bitterly attacked the corporation, and the exchange of personalities led to him being challenged to a duel by alderman John D'Esterre.  O'Connell did not have the reputation as a duellist that D'Esterre did, but in the duel it was D'Esterre who was fatally wounded.  The memory of the duel haunted O'Connell for the rest of his life.  He wrote at once to Mrs D'Esterre, who accepted a pension from O'Connell for her daughter, which was paid for thirty years, until his death.  He never went to communion again without wearing a white glove on his right hand, and in passing the D'Esterre house he would raise his hat and pray for the repose of D'Esterre's soul.

      After 1798, the Act of Union had promised Catholic emancipation, but this was resisted.  In 1823 O'Connell began the Catholic Association, which introduced a new notion.  Hitherto politics had been the preserve of the few, and was financed by them.  O'Connell now proposed a 'Catholic rent'; 'a penny a month, a shilling a year' was to be the basic contribution.  Backed by the clergy, it yielded £1,000 a week.  O'Connell did not become rich out of this, for it was for party purposes.  But in an age of democracy it introduced the technique by which political parties of all kinds would fund themselves.

      O'Connell's great work was toward the achievement of the Catholic Relief Bill of 1829.  In Ireland this is often seen as a measure only for Ireland, but of course it affected Catholics in the public life of the United Kingdom as a whole.  Through the Catholic Association he created the first countrywide political organization, the forerunner of the modern parliamentary parties.  He was elected from Clare in 1828, and emancipation was conceded the next year.

      Leaving the bar and relying on an annual collection to maintain his family, he turned to the frustration of repealing, if he could, the Act of Union.  But though he was not a separatist in the way Wolfe Tone and other republicans had been, the fear of an independent Ireland (such as had flourished briefly under Henry Grattan in the last two decades of the eighteenth century) was not appealing to British leaders.  Through the difficult 1830s he persisted, but it was only when the Whigs fell from power in 1841 that the repeal movement began to take on energy.  O'Connell was elected lord mayor of Dublin, and began to hold enormous meetings around the country, one at Tara attracting three-quarters of a million people.  Another was to be held at Clontarf and people were already gathering when the government banned it.  O'Connell, fearful of exposing his unarmed followers to army guns, called it off.  This loss of nerve, as it seemed to young men around the nation, was a turning point.  O'Connell was arrested and jailed but soon released.  Old, tired, and ill, he had no resources left; there were rifts in the association and crop failures.  He left Ireland, and after a last speech in the House of Commons, set out to visit Rome, but died on the way in Genoa in May 1847,

      Balzac said that O'Connell 'incarnated a whole people', and his European reputation among liberals was immense.  He remains a controversial figure, but there is no doubting the extraordinary effect he had (for all his faults) on the Irish people.  That Ireland remains a democracy, which has been unswayed by the further assaults of revolutionary violence upon its civic institutions, can be seen as his greatest legacy.  In the distracted decades since his death it is no small one.

 

 

21

Arthur Guinness

1725-1803

 

Ireland was once seen as a purely agricultural country.  Lacking natural resources other than its green fields, industry seemed a hopeless dream.  The figure who above all helped Ireland begin the transition from field to factory was the first Arthur Guinness, the founder of the now world-famous Guinness brewery in Dublin.  It is one of only a handful of businesses that have survived in Ireland from the eighteenth century, and as such it has a historic and influential place in Irish life.

      Arthur Guinness was a Protestant born in Leixlip, though both his ancestry and his paternity are mysterious.  Though the family later claimed to be descended from an ancient Ulster clan called Magennis, this was not so.  More likely, they were the descendants of a Cromwellian soldier from Cornwall called Gennys.  It has also been suggested that Arthur Guinness was the natural son of Dr Arthur Price, Anglican bishop of Cashel, who lived in Celbridge, employed his 'father' and left Arthur a legacy of £100, with which he was able to start his first small brewery.

      In September 1756 he leased a brewery in Leixlip, and this was the first stage of his career.  When he was thirty-four he moved into Dublin to continue his business there.  Such were the regulations against Irish exports at the time that at first he thought he might move to Wales to work, but in the end he settled in Dublin.

      In 1759 he bought a brewery at St James' Gate from another businessman.  At first he brewed beer and ale, but in 1768 he began to make porter, a dark beer made with roasted barley, which was named after the porters in the London markets who had begun to bring the dark brew into favour.  For a long time, until the middle of the twentieth century, porter was the mainstay of the business.  But stout, a heavier, even darker roasted beer, came to replace it.

      By 1799 the dark beers were the sole product of the firm.  At this time he began to develop an export trade to England and elsewhere.  Guinness was a leading figure among Dublin brewers, and was their member on the city council.  A religious man, he founded the first Protestant Sunday school in Ireland in 1786.  When the Orange Order was founded in Dublin, the toast was drunk with Arthur Guinness' Protestant beer.

      In 1803 Arthur died.  The business passed to his son Arthur, and when he died it passed to Benjamin Lee Guinness (who was made a baronet in 1867).  When he died he was followed by Sir Arthur Guinness, late Lord Ardilaun.  His son Edward Guinness, later earl of Iveagh, broke the immediate connection with Dublin, as he lived largely in London after 1900.

      His son, the second Lord Iveagh, presided not only over the growth of the business in Ireland and Britain, but also in the establishment of breweries in Nigeria and Malaysia.  His son, Viscount Elveden, was killed in the Second World War, and the business passed to his son.  It was in this generation that Guinness became a public company and control passed from the family.

      Arthur Guinness and his descendants are among the more remarkable Irish families of the last three centuries.  The extent of their success in business surpassed all others at home.  They were also generous to Dublin, to Ireland, and to charities elsewhere.  Their history was a mixed one, however, heavily marked with personal tragedies, so much so that many thought some kind of curse hung over the more recent generations, with deaths by suicide, drugs, and driving accidents.  Indeed, the social life of the Guinnesses and the scandals attached to them have kept countless journalists and several authors busy over the years.  (Books by the novelist Frederic Mullally and Michael Guinness give details not only of the main branches of the family, but also the multifarious side shoots, which are as full of human interest as the main ones.  They include respectable bankers, reckless jockeys, and dedicated missionaries.)

      Yet, in their overall impact on the Irish economy, they have been, until recently, one of Ireland's most successful companies.  Naturally, this meant personal wealth for the family, but it also meant prosperity for Dublin.

      The economic value of the firm was and is immense.  The materials were supplied by Irish farmers; the product employed thousands of Dubliners to make it, and even more thousands of people to sell and drink it.  Though now drunk and made around the world, Guinness stout is so closely associated with the image of Ireland as to be safely called its national drink.  It has become de rigueur for visiting dignitaries, whether American presidents or British prime ministers, to be photographed drinking the stuff - whether they like it or not.

 

 

22

Sybil Connolly

1921-1998

 

For nearly her whole life, Sybil Connolly was synonymous with Irish high fashion, a genre she could be said to have invented.  Irish people of fashion had been accustomed to follow the lead of Paris and London.  A la mode meant designs and fabrics conceived and created abroad.  She changed that.

      Connolly was brought up in Wales with two sisters.  As a young girl, she was taken by her mother to see Balenciaga, and this made a great impression on her.  Educated at the Convent of Mercy at Waterford, she joined Bradleys in London as an apprentice at the age of eighteen, where she studied design.  Almost forgotten now, the firm was one of the big names between the wars in London, and employed some fifty apprentices.  The ninety-eight fitting rooms were always busy with fashionable customers, and once or twice she was even sent to Buckingham Palace to assist in royal fittings for the imposing Queen Mary.

      At the outbreak of the war, in 1940, she was persuaded by her family to return to live in Dublin.  There she brought her London experience to Richard Alan, a leading Dublin shop then owned by Jack Clarke, of which she became a director in 1943.  The firm specialized in tweedy country wear, stylish but far from high fashion.  The owner of the firm gave her the opportunity to design her own dress line in 1952.  One dress, called Bal Masque, created a stir.  She then established her own firm in 1953.

      Success on an international scale followed.  Three dresses from the first show went to New York to be shown in an international show which included the likes of Dior, Jacques Fath, and Hardy Amies.  She held a fashion show at Dunsany Castle (the ancient home of the Plunketts) for American buyers and fashion writers.  Sheila, Lady Dunsany, was among her first clients, and when she visited the United States with her husband Lord Dunsany, she wore clothes designed by Sybil Connolly.  This collection crossed the Atlantic and was shown in 'The World of Fashion' exhibition in Boston along with gowns from other great European couturiers such as Schiaparelli, Patou, and Fath.  She was on the cover of Life magazine, with five pages featuring her inside.

      Gabrielle Williams, long-time fashion correspondent of the Irish Times, records that her first shows received immediate and wild enthusiasm.  'She had done the unthinkable: transforming the clothing of the Irish peasant into haute couture, using traditional Irish fabrics throughout.  It had never been done before.'

      Orders soon followed from the United States, which she often visited.  There she met her great friend, the doyenne of the American fashion world, Eleanor Lambert.  She also made many visits to Australia.

      It was not merely her flair for line and colour, but her desire to use Irish fabrics, light tweeds, linens, and lace woollen fabrics of other kinds that made her work distinctive.  From the beginning her work was distinctive and unmistakable.

      She was, it must be admitted, lucky in her connections, for she managed to establish herself with Bergdofs in New York, and it was her clientele in the United States that made her famous worldwide, with features on her work in Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Time and other magazines.  She made dresses for Jacqueline Kennedy and other society hostesses in New York, Boston and San Francisco.  Mrs Kennedy was painted wearing a Sybil Connolly dress for her White House portrait.

      Miss Connolly diversified her range of designs, moving in fabrics and interiors, becoming in due course a designer for Tiffanys in New York of china, pottery, and crystal, all made by Irish craftspeople.  Watercolours of floral subjects were converted into chintzes for Brunschwig and Fils and bed linens for Martex.  She became a popular lecturer in North America, and wrote two books, In an Irish Garden (of which she was co-author) and In an Irish House.  From time to time she served on various committees involved with the arts, yet at home she lived quietly enough, as her imagination and energy was concentrated on the American market rather than the Irish social scene.

      However, she remained clearly identified with Ireland.  Her own magnificent home in Dublin's famous Georgian area, Merrion Square, made an elegant showroom for her creations, and for several decades this was her base, where her clients could view her creations, come for advice and also buy antiques or other items of Irish design.

      Her most influential years were the critical ones of the late 1950s and 1960s.  Today, when fashion has broken out of its old rigid moulds, Sybil Connolly can be seen as a figure who united the best of both approaches.  Her clothes were lovely in an elegant, classical way, but they were also bold and often daring in the choice of materials and colours.  She brought Ireland as a fashion centre into the consciousness of the world, and so opened the way for two generations of other Irish designers who have followed her, such as Irene Gilbert, Paul Costelloe, John Rocha and Louise Kennedy.

      There was a deep irony here, in that she based her most successful designs on the clothes and fabrics of the rural Irish, whom poverty had driven out to America.  Yet in her hands they became romantic, charming, and beautiful.

 

 

23

Thomas Davis

1814-1845

 

For a man with so short a career, Thomas Osborne Davis has exerted an influence over generations of Irishmen of all kinds which is surprising.  Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish Free State government in 1922, said Davis was 'the prophet I followed throughout my life, the man whose words and teaching I tried to translate into practice in politics'.  It is to Thomas Davis, a Protestant, that Catholic Ireland owed much of its political maturity.

      He was born in Mallow, a town in Cork, on 14th October 1814, the posthumous son of a British army doctor who had died in September.  His mother was a Cork woman.  With her child she moved to Dublin, taking a house at 67 Lower Baggot Street, which was Davis' home for the rest of his life.

      He was an indifferent scholar, and a worse athlete at school.  In 1831 he entered Trinity College, in Dublin, and enjoyed himself there, graduating in 1835.  He then set off on a tour of Britain and Europe.  On his return he was called to the Irish Bar in 1838.  On renewing his studies for the law at Trinity he became auditor of the college historical society.  He joined the Repeal Association in 1839, which DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] had created to campaign to repeal the Act of Union, passed in 1800, which bound Ireland to Great Britain.

      He found much of the inspiration for his own ideas in the Irish past, then only being opened up by native scholars, and in a famous speech at Trinity College, then seen as a bastion of British rule, he pleaded for Irish historical studies.  His great slogan was 'Educate that you may be free'.  (The annual lectures by Irish scholars and writers which are broadcast by the Irish public service are named for him.)

      He was one of the group of young men, impatient as young men often are with their elders, who banded together to found the Nation newspaper in Dublin in 1842.  The paper was the brainchild of Davis and his friend John Blake Dillon, another barrister.  While walking in the Phoenix Park they discussed the matter with another friend, CHARLES GAVIN DUFFY [82], who agreed to put up the money.

      The first issue appeared on 15th October 1842.  An augury of things to come, it contained a poem by James Clarence Mangan.  It was in its pages that Davis published much of his poetry and ballads.  Such songs as 'A Nation Once Again' and 'The West's Asleep' are still sung today.  Among the other contributors was Jane Elgee, later the mother of OSCAR WILDE [97].

      The paper proved to be a great success and soon the Nation had a countrywide readership.  Rather than the gleanings of a foreign newspaper, shipping news, and parliamentary reports, which is what most papers of the day contained, the Nation set about a programme of practical education and liberal enlightenment.  The songs and ballads were published as The Spirit of the Nation in July 1843 and became an instant bestseller.  This was the first of a series of inexpensive publications on history and politics called The Library of Ireland.

      Thomas Davis was one of the founders of Young Ireland, a political movement which would instigate a rebellion in the summer of 1848.  But Davis contracted scarlet fever and failed to throw it off.  He died at the age of thirty-one in his mother's house in Dublin in September 1845, but his ideas became the shaping inspiration of generations of Irish people.

      The national ideal as espoused by Davis and his friends might have claimed to be an ancient notion, but was in fact a new and lately fashionable mystique.  All across Europe the provinces of the empires and large states were discovering their 'nationalities', so Young Ireland had parallels in many other countries.  Though it was an idea hailed with enthusiasm in the nineteenth century, it was the cause of two world wars in the twentieth.

      The problem was not in the idea of nationality itself - the sense of a shared heritage and culture.  It lay in the idea that a nation had exclusive claim to one piece of land and was therefore entitled to drive out anyone who did not share that culture, or to make them second-class citizens.

      Of course, Davis and his friends were high-minded idealists, but their ideas were responsible not only for much bloodshed, but eventually for the partition of Ireland, for their nationalism could leave no room for other aspirations.  It has taken Ireland and other countries of Europe many decades to undo the damage and to find new grounds for allegiance in the European Union.

      Though Davis was the Protestant son of an Englishman, many of his ideas have proved influential, especially that of reviving the Irish language and the knowledge of ancient Irish history and culture.  So, too, were his ideas about education in Ireland, and the need for the widespread use of the Queen's Colleges.  He was also right about the industrial development of Ireland, expounding the need to use turf and water as sources of power.  An early death cut off the full development of his ideas, though what he did manage to say and publish was wonderfully effective.

 

 

24

Michael Davitt

1846-1906

 

The title of one of Davitt's six books, The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland, encapsulates the work of his life and his influence in Irish history.  He dedicated himself to making the Irish the owners of Ireland.  His career covers the whole spectrum of Irish politics, from revolutionary action to parliamentary debate.

      Davitt was the son of a small Mayo farmer, born on 25th March 1846, who saw his family evicted from their smallholding at Straide in 1851 and forced to immigrate to industrial Lancashire in England.  He went to work at a very early age.  At the age of eleven, in 1857, he lost his right arm while working in a cotton mill.  However, he never let this disability restrain him in anything he wanted to do.  He might have lost his arm, but he was far from incapacitated.

      He joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1865 - they were strong among the Irish workers of the north of England - and became an organizing secretary of the IRB by 1868.  The year before, in February 1867, he was one of the party of Fenians who attempted to seize Chester Castle, a preliminary to the general Fenian uprising in March.

      In May 1870 he was sentenced to fifteen years in jail with penal servitude for arms trafficking - which meant breaking stones in Portland.  Through the agitation of Isaac Butt and CHARLES PARNELL [5] he was eventually released on ticket of leave (a form of release conditional on not re-offending) in 1877.  He invited Parnell to join the IRB (on the train from London to St Helen's in Lancashire, of all places), but Parnell wisely declined.

      Davitt then left for America, and there, with other former Fenians like JOHN DEVOY [43], he worked out the so-called New Departure policy, which aimed at gaining for Ireland the twin achievements of self-government and land reform.  It would also give a new direction to many Fenians, taking them from furtive rebellion to constitutional activity.

      Davitt returned to Ireland in 1878, but he found the IRB still dedicated to revolutionary action and Parnell equally reluctant to take up the challenge of land reform.  But he brought Parnell to speak in Westport, and this was the beginning of the Land League, with Parnell as president, and of the Land War.  This mean political and social turmoil in Ireland during 1879 and the following year, at a time when agriculture was passing through a difficult period in Ireland, with crop failures and new famine.

      This ended with the Land Act of 1881, which gave Irish tenants fair rents, fixity of tenure, and free sale.  The league, however, also wanted tenant ownership, and this was resisted.  The leaders were jailed.  Davitt was arrested and returned to penal servitude in 1881, having broken his ticket-of-leave pledge.  Released again in May 1882, just after the Kilmainham Treaty, he was arrested yet again for a seditious speech in 1883.

      Davitt's followers saw his political slogan, 'Land for the People' as a small-farmer proprietorship, while what Davitt meant was the actual nationalization of the land.  Davitt was influenced by the American theorist Henry George, but his notion was not popular.  Davitt this lost his leading role in politics, but he continued in public life.  He was elected MP for Meath in 1882, for North Mayo in 1892, and for South Mayo in 1895.

      He and Parnell saw the Land War as a step on the road to securing home rule, and ultimately independence.  But the fall and death of Parnell left the Irish party divided and impotent.  Davitt was never again to be quite at the forefront of Irish politics.  His role became that of a sort of freelance nationalist and democratic reformer working for Irish independence and social justice through constitutional means.  He was widely known as an MP throughout Ireland and Britain and all over the world.  The last twenty-four years of his life were striking and active.

      He went on to visit Australia, writing Life and Progress in Australia (1898).  He was delighted with what he saw there, and with the country's progressive political developments, so different from the state of affairs at home.  He left Parliament in 1899.  During the Boer War, like many other Irish people, he identified with the Boer stand, visiting South Africa and publishing The Boer Fight for Freedom (1902).  He was disappointed that the Irish Americans had not made more of this situation when they might have aided the Boers, some of Britain's most resolute opponents.  He also made further visits to the United States in 1901 and 1902.

      Unlike many Irish patriots, Davitt was a man of international interests.  In The Crime of Kishineff (1903) he exposed the contemporary massacres of the Jewish population of the capital of Bessarabia, north of Odessa.  He visited the city on behalf of the Hearst papers in America.  The sufferings of the Jews aroused his every sympathy, and the book, one of the best he wrote, is a passionate plea for Zionism.

      'When in Palestine, nearly twenty years before,' his first biographer Frank Sheehy-Skeffington noted, 'he had been greatly impressed by that country, and imbued with the idea that something should be done to preserve its unique character ... But when he saw the evils endured by the Russian Jews, he came to the conclusion that the root of their sufferings was the fact that they possessed no national home; and the suggestion that they should be allowed to settle in Palestine, the original home of their race, appealed to him irresistibly.'  His experiences there made him not only 'a convinced believer in the remedy of Zionism' but an effective opponent of anti-Semitism in Ireland, Britain, Russia and elsewhere.

      His most famous work, however, is none of the above, but Leaves from a Prison Journal (1884), a chilling account of his life as a prisoner of the Queen, which has achieved the status of an Irish classic.

      He died in Dublin on 31st May 1906.  Though he had requested no ceremonies, huge crowds visited the church in Dublin where his body rested before it was taken to Mayo for burial at Straide.  As a model of what an Irish patriot should be, Davitt comes high on the list, both as a man of courage and a man of conviction.

 

 

25

James Joyce

1882-1941

 

Along with W.B. YEATS [8], James Joyce has exerted an immense influence on the development of modern literature both in Europe and America.  Though in his own day Ulysses was seen as a scandalous work, it quickly achieved the status of a modern classic.  There can be few writers since who in some way or another have not been aware of the literary and moral example of James Joyce.

      He was born in Dublin on 2nd February 1882, the eldest surviving child of a Corkman, John Stanislaus Joyce, and his wife, formerly May Murray, whose people came from Longford.  At the age of six-and-a-half he was sent to the Jesuit college at Clongowes Wood.  He eventually transferred to Belvedere College, a day school in Dublin, from where he went on to University College, but these, too, were run by the Jesuits.  Joyce revolted against his religious training, but to the end his mind remained imbued with the tenets and traditions of the Catholic church, his mind working with and reacting to the Thomistic philosophy of his teachers.

      He was a brilliant, indeed precocious, child.  From an early age he was interested in the use of words and the study of language.  At college he studied modern languages, and later taught English as a foreign language.  Through his studies he became widely read not only in older literatures, but also in contemporary writers such as Henrik Ibsen.

      He had abandoned a medical career to go and live in Paris when he was summoned home to the harrowing scenes of his mother's death from cancer in 1903.  After an idle, drifting year, he left Ireland accompanied by Nora Barnacle, a Galway girl who was to be the mother of his two children.  Though he revisited Ireland briefly in 1909 and 1912, he spent the rest of his life in Europe, first at Trieste (then the port city of the Austrian Empire), in Switzerland for much of the First World War, and finally in Paris until he was forced to flee after the German invasion.  He and some of his family escaped to Switzerland and settled in Zurich, where he died unexpectedly on 13th January 1941.

      Ireland was a largely rural country in the nineteenth century, and the art of Yeats and other writers of the Irish literary revival looked to the ancient traditions and language of the countryside for their inspiration.  Not so James Joyce.  He was a distinctly urban genius.  The city and its people were the perennial source of his inspiration.   But the culture and history of the city, as he showed in later work, was as rich in linguistic and mythological overtones and undertones as the west of Ireland, beloved of Yeats and John Synge.

      He began his career in an unexceptional way as a poet of some very slight lyrical poems, but these and some later ones are very minor works indeed, and largely of autobiographical interest.  But with Dubliners (1914), a collection of sharply observed short stories, he instantly established his place as a distinctive voice in modern Irish literature.  The impression which these stories had made was reinforced by the publication of the deeply autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), which provided an account of an Irish-Catholic upbringing which was often unsparing in its painful detail, but executed with cool precision.  The character based most closely on Joyce himself, Stephen Dedalus, closes the novel with a passage in his diary as he is about to leave Ireland: 'I go to fashion in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.'

      He wrote a play, Exiles (1918), which was largely considered a failure and even a minor work until it was given a triumphant production by Harold Pinter in London in 1971, which at last restored its tortured intimacies to their proper place in the Joyce canon.

      If his short stories had been objective, and his novel subjective, these two modes were combined in his next work.  He moved on to explore his personal urban world, which he developed in Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939), which represent, respectively, the hectic day and the dreaming night of a great modern city.  Leopold Bloom, the central figure of Ulysses, represents the moral conscience of the city through his encounters with its diverse citizens, while Finnegans Wake, through the dreaming hotel keeper H.C. Earwicker, contains the backward and forward history of the universe.  Neither work is capable of simple explication.  They have to be read and experienced for themselves.

      But just as important in Ulysses is the figure of Molly Bloom, the wayward wife of the wandering Leopold.  Joyce's women are of two kinds, the icy virgin and the voluptuous mother goddess.  Molly Bloom's rambling thoughts on the verge of sleep fill out the end of the novel, and are among the most remarkable impressions of the female psyche achieved by a male writer.  They close with her passing into sleep, the sleep where Mr Earwicker and his family are discovered at the opening of Finnegans Wake, reminding us that Joyce's books are not separate items, but parts of one long and continuous creative work.

      These books, especially Ulysses, broke new ground in that they dealt with human actions in words which many thought broke down the proper amenities of literature.  However, for writers of the early part of the century, Joyce's linguistic and technical experiments were of profound consequence.

      In Ireland he was the inspiration of two generations of writers who found their material in the life of the city, and his influence can be traced in such diverse figures as Flann O'Brien and J.P. Donleavy.

      In America, where Ulysses was banned, Joyce was seen as the leader of the vanguard of modern literature.  This was not a comfortable place to be.  It obscured many of the classical features of his writings and the profound debt which it owed to the medieval thought of the Catholic Church.  Though it might seem that Joyce had renounced, indeed denounced, the God of his fathers, his own mind and imagination was deeply grained by the history, culture, and mental attitudes of the Irish people.

 

 

26

Jack B. Yeats

1871-1957

 

Jack Yeats was the brother of the poet WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8], and the son of the painter John Butler Yeats.  Without doubt, he is the greatest Irish painter of the twentieth century, in a class which includes whatever great masters one would like to mention.  Some would say he is the greatest Irish painter of all time.  These may seem to be extravagant claims, but his work has these important distinctions.

      Jack Butler Yeats was born in London on 29th August 1871, while his father was living there in hopes of making a career as an artist.  But though delighted with many aspects of city life, it was rural Ireland that awakened the boy's imagination when he was sent home at the age of eight to stay with his grandparents in Sligo, on the western coast of Ireland.  To the end of his life his drawings and paintings were filled with images and scenes from the world that he then began to explore.

      Though his education was skimpy, he began studying in art colleges in his teens, and contributed black-and-white drawings to various papers and magazines in London.  He even did work for the Boy's Own Paper.  For thirty years, beginning in 1890, he worked as a professional illustrator at a time when journalism depended on the facile pens of many artists in a way which is no longer the case.  He also worked in watercolours, of which he had several exhibitions.

      He married Mary Cottenham ('Cottie') White in 1894, but they had no children.  In 1897 they moved away from London to live in rural Devon.  At this time he was a close friend of the poet John Masefield, who shared his delight in ships, pirates, and the sea.  In 1910 he returned to live in Ireland - he had never felt fully at home in England.  At first he and his wife lived in Wicklow, but later moved back into Dublin, where Yeats had a studio on fashionable Fitzwilliam Square, high up in an old Georgian mansion.

      He had travelled in the west of Ireland with John Synge, illustrating the playwright's articles for the Manchester Guardian with drawings of life in the west of Ireland.  He returned to these scenes in his book of 1912, actually called Life in the West of Ireland.  He began painting in oils, at first as a continuation of the close observational style of his earlier work, but over the years moved into a looser, more mythopoetic style.  This growth as an artist was much like that of his brother the poet, who moved from the lyrical to the great poems of his old age.  Jack Yeats was among the significant artists who exhibited at the influential show of international modern art held in 1913 at the New York Armoury.

      His imagination was much engaged by the troubles, and he was far more radical in his politics than his brother.  Jack painted several scenes of incidents in the troubles, such as Bachelor's Walk - In Memory and Communicating with the Prisoners, which have become icons of Irish history.  Though his poet brother supported the Free State and accepted office as a senator, Jack Yeats' sympathies were with the republicans, and images of heroic defeat which echo events in the civil war can be found in his later paintings.

      Living quietly in Dublin, he exhibited from time to time.  His painting, however, continued to mature and to become technically looser and more expressionist, with a vivid sense of colour while beginning to employ a personal symbolism drawn from the life he loved in the west.

      He was also a writer, but his plays and novels are largely of interest for what they reveal about the painter rather than for themselves, though all share the beguiling tenderness for past scenes that makes his work so attractive to many.  His inspiration, he once said, for both his paintings and writings was 'affection, wide, devious, and sometimes, handsome'.

      He was brought to the attention of the wider world by the critical writings of Sir Kenneth Clark, then the director of the National Gallery in London.  'Colour,' he wrote, 'is Yeats' element in which he dives and splashes with the shameless abandon of a porpoise.'  In 1945 a major exhibition of his works was held at the National Gallery, and another in Dublin.  From then he held regular, almost annual exhibitions in both cities.

      Jack Yeats' friend, the Irish poet Thomas MacGreevy, thought that the painter was the equal of Titian and Rembrandt: 'If universality of outlook and the last refinements of artistic technique were attainable for a religious painter in the little republic of Venice, and for a bourgeois painter in the little republic of Holland in the seventeenth century, why should they not be attainable for an artist of the life of the people in the little almost-republic of Ireland in the twentieth?  Universality of outlook and technical mastery of art are both a question of the capacity to understand, the capacity that is the second gift of the Holy Ghost, that was the one gift Solomon asked of the Lord.  I am of the opinion that the Lord bestowed the capacity to understand on Jack Yeats.'

      His work has often been compared with the poetry of his brother, but as an expression of the Irish imagination he had far more in common with JAMES JOYCE [25].  Both share an early realism, a mature and humane middle style based on city life, and a final late stage in which the words of Finnegans Wake, so complex in their symbolic allusiveness, parallel late paintings such as Men of Destiny.  Joyce even owned a Jack Yeats picture of the River Liffey.  Yet, oddly, despite the fame he achieved in his lifetime, his paintings remained at a price which enabled many to buy them from his exhibitions.

      Yeats died in Dublin in 1957, but since his death his reputation has grown continually, and his paintings now achieve astronomical prices which would have come as a great shock to such an essentially shy and retiring man.  His paintings have an intense literary quality, unusual for a twentieth-century artist, which makes them accessible to a wide audience.  They are a pageant of the spiritual odyssey of the Irish people over the last two centuries, the full depths of which are only now coming to be appreciated.  In time he will, indeed, be ranked with Titian and Rembrandt.

 

 

27

Archbishop Thomas Croke

1823-1902

 

Every year the finals of the All Ireland Gaelic games of hurling and football are held in Croke Park in Dublin.  The most important dates in the sports calendar of Ireland, they draw crowds not only from Ireland but from abroad, especially from the United States.

      The stadium, now one of the most up-to-date in the country, belongs to the Gaelic Athletic Association, and is named after Archbishop Thomas Croke, the great nineteenth-century archbishop of Cashel, who promoted Gaelic games as a patriotic movement, and so helped to create in a large way the popular national identity of modern Ireland.

      Thomas William Croke was born in Castlecor, in County Cork, in January 1823.  His father William was a Catholic, but his mother, formerly Isabelle Plummer, was a Protestant, though she converted to her husband's religion four years before she died.  Such mixed marriages were by no means uncommon in nineteenth-century Ireland, especially in the southern counties where intolerance was less than in Ulster.  But most Protestants in the south were Anglicans, and hence closer to their Catholic neighbours than the Calvinistic Presbyterians of the north in many aspects of their beliefs.

      Croke studied for the priesthood at the Irish College in Paris between 1840 and 1844.  He spent a final year, 1847, in Rome before being ordained.  He taught for a time at the diocesan college in Carlow, and then again in Paris until 1849.  Being abroad, he was away from the devastation caused by the famine, especially in parts of Cork.  Yet no-one of any sensitivity could be unaware of its effect on the Irish character.  During the post-famine years of 1849 to 1858 he did mission work in the Diocese of Cloyne, in the south of Cork.  He was made the first president of St Colman's College in Fermoy, where one of his pupils for a brief time was the father-to-be of JAMES JOYCE [25].  He was then parish priest of Doneraile in County Cork from 1865 to 1870.

      Croke attended the Vatican Council as theologian to Bishop William Keane of Cloyne.  This was one of the defining events for Catholics in the nineteenth century, leading as it did to the definition of papal infallibility.  But for Croke it had a surprising outcome.  From there he was sent, as so many priests of the day were, from Ireland to New Zealand.  The Irish community in New Zealand was an active one, but not as significant as that in Australia.  His stay lasted only five years, as on a visit to Ireland in 1875 he was elevated to the archdiocese of Cashel and Emly, one of the most important in the country, covering as it did not only the fertile areas of Munster, but also the impoverished hill country in the Galtee Mountains.

      Croke, conscious of these contrasts in Irish life, was a keen advocate of education, and everywhere he went he promoted the building of churches and schools.  Like most Irish clergy he supported the temperance movement, which had begun in Cork in the 1830s, but he was also an enthusiast for the Gaelic League and the revival of the Irish language.

      These activities as a pastor were as nothing compared to his national work.  In his younger days he had been a follower of DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] in his campaign for the repeal of the Act of Union.  After O'Connell's death he supported the Young Ireland movement, that had ended in the abortive uprising of 1848, which took place in Munster.  That unhappy failure did not prevent him from being a supporter of the Irish Tenant League in the 1850s at a time when there was no real Irish party, merely a group of Irish MPs with nationalist interests.

      However, when Croke became archbishop in 1875, a distinctive political movement was emerging under Isaac Butt, and he also became an advocate of home rule.  Butt was followed by the more aggressive CHARLES PARNELL [5], and the Land League.  Though these were looked upon with dismay by more conservative figures like CARDINAL PAUL CULLEN [44], Croke happily embraced them.

      Croke was a nationalist to the core.  This inevitably got him into trouble with the government.  The British, through influential English Catholics, attempted to poison Rome's opinion of him.  In 1887 he wrote an unwise letter to the main nationalist paper the Freeman's Journal, criticizing the government's use of Irish taxes to fund the repression by the police of those who paid them.  This seemed to have overstepped the mark, and to be encouraging Catholics to not pay legal taxes, so he was denounced in Rome.  However, his friends Archbishop William Walsh of Dublin (himself a nationalist) and Cardinal Henry Edward Manning of Westminster, smoothed the troubled waters.

      Croke was as dismayed, as many other followers of the Irish party were, by the shocking revelations of the private life of Parnell and Mrs O'Shea, during the divorce action naming Parnell, brought against her by her husband, Captain O'Shea, between 1890 and 1891.  The Irish party split when the Irish bishops announced that they could no longer support such a public sinner.  Disillusioned by party politics, he slowly withdrew from that arena.

      But his enthusiasm for the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) remained.  Started in the early 1880s by Michael Cusack and some other enthusiasts at a time when both rugby and soccer were being organized on a more professional basis, the aim was to bring the benefits of healthy sport and competition to the parishes of Ireland.  Rugby and soccer were denounced as 'foreign' games, played only, it was claimed, by the garrison and 'Castle Catholics'.  Gaelic football and hurling, which had been played since time immemorial, were provided with new rules and a league.  The GAA was organized everywhere, and soon had a large following.

      Many of its members shared Croke's disillusionment with the Irish Party and the older politics.  In time, of course, it formed a parish-by-parish ready-made organization for Irish republicans to infiltrate in order to promote a new wave of revolution in the early twentieth century.  Croke remained a great heroic figure to the movement, which now has world-wide links.  The promotion of sport has been one of the great social movements of modern Ireland; its influence has been for the most part wonderfully beneficial, and is indissolubly linked with the name of Archbishop Croke.

      However, Croke died at Thurles on 22nd July 1902, and did not live to see the emergence of the new nation exactly a century after he was born.

 

 

28

Cyrus Hall McCormick

1809-1884

 

History (in the schoolbook sense of the word) seems to be dominated by political figures who create their own self-importance.  It is often forgotten what profounder social changes are brought about in the human condition by those who push forward not political but technical change.  Their influence is what really creates and changes the world.

      Americans in the nineteenth century felt themselves less bound by conventional ideas than Europeans did, and this was especially true of inventors.  The McCormick dynasty, Ulstermen by origin, are among these.  Robert McCormick (1870-1846) was a farmer dependent on labour, which was often in short supply, so he contrived many labour-saving devices for work on the farm and fields.  In 1809 he invented a reaping machine, which he improved by degrees over the years, incorporating into it a horizontal reel and vibrating sickle.  Though he was a pioneer of mechanized farming and popularized harvesting machines throughout the United States, he was not the first.

      The first application of steam to the plough was patented by the Irish landlord Richard Lovell Edgeworth (the father of the novelist MARIA EDGEWORTH [91]), but this was not developed until 1852.  A reaping machine had been invented by the Rev. Mr Bell of Carmylie, Forfarshire.  But invention was one thing, development for widespread use another.  In the opening up of the American continent, the nation was faced with what seemed to be limitless acres of arable land on the western prairies.  As the founder of the McCormick Harvesting Machine Corporation, which was influential in the introduction of the harvesting machine throughout the United States, Robert McCormick was the true pioneer of industrialized agriculture.

      His son was Cyrus Hall McCormick, who inherited his father's interests.  He was born in Walnut Grove, Rockbridge County, Virginia - a name redolent of the older forms of agriculture.  In 1831, at the age of twenty-two, he took up the challenge that had defeated his father, to construct a really workable grain-cutting machine.  His reaper, a development of his father's earlier and cruder machine, was first used in the late harvest of 1831 and patented in 1834.  It transformed the nature of agriculture and the provision of food to the great urban centres, which were emerging in America and Europe in the nineteenth century.

      It should be remembered that in 1820, the population of the United States was 12, 866, 020, centred in Moorefield, West Virginia.  By 1880 the population, now demographically centred in Ohio, had grown to 50, 155, 783; the state of New York alone had a population of five million.  By the turn of the century the national population had grown to nearly seventy-six million.  It was to feed these teeming masses that mass-produced food was needed.

      The Irish writer JONATHAN SWIFT [34] had remarked that whoever could make two ears of corn grow where only one grew before deserved better of mankind and did a more essential service to his country 'than the whole race of politicians put together'.  Growing ears of corn was one thing; harvesting them for the market, as the McCormicks did, was just as important a service to humanity.

      Further years perfected the harvesting machine.  By 1843 McCormick was able to sell the rights, and with the capital set up a factory in Chicago in 1847.  One of his new machines was exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 - perhaps the most important showcase of new ideas ever held.  The Times of London, the leading British paper of the day, said that if McCormick's machine fulfilled its promise, it alone was worth the cost of the whole exhibition.

      Like most inventors and manufacturers, McCormick was beset by legal problems: inventors are notoriously litigious.  There were other inventors in the field as well, such as Obed Hussey, who announced his invention of a reaping machine in 1834.  Yet the factory flourished.  During the Civil War, McCormick's machines helped to make the Union victory possible by ensuring a food supply to the armies in the field.

      The firm expanded in the years after the Civil War, when the western regions of both the United States and Canada began to develop.  New markets were found in Europe and elsewhere.  In 1871 the family, having lived in Washington, New York and Europe, settled permanently in Chicago.  Cyrus was awarded many prizes and distinctions.  In 1879 the Academy of Sciences in France elected him a corresponding member for having done more for agriculture than any other living man.

      Cyrus Sr died in Chicago on May 13th, 1884, and was in turn succeeded by his son, Cyrus Hall McCormick II (1859-1936), then only twenty-four.  A serious-minded young man, he was already well versed in the details of both the machines and the business.  He settled all the outstanding legal problems with fellow inventors, and began a new stage in the development of the firm.

      In 1902 the firm became the International Harvester Company, one of the largest corporations in the world.  Inevitably, the size and near monopoly of the firm attracted the attention of federal trust-busters, but the company eventually came out of this confrontation intact.  Cyrus II ceased the day-to-day direction of the firm in 1918, and died in June 1936.

      As befitted their Ulster origins, the McCormicks were Presbyterians and gave freely to many church and philanthropic causes, especially the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA).  Yet their inventions more profoundly shaped western life than any charity.  They literally helped put bread on the tables of the industrial masses for a century or more, and their enterprise lies behind the extraordinary agribusinesses of today.  While such people as Cyrus Hall McCormick may not always appear in history books, the influence they have exerted over the shape and structure of modern life is profound.  But mere inventors do not often receive their just honours.

 

 

29

Van Morrison

1945-

 

Van Morrison was born George Ivan Morrison in Belfast city, Northern Ireland, on 31st August 1945.  The imaginative roots of the musical developments of his later career owe much to the unique nature of that post-war, industrial city.  During WWII American soldiers had been based in Northern Ireland and had made a great impression, reinforcing in local minds the style, dash, and vivacity of the American way of life.

      His musical interests owed a great deal to his father George's interest in American music, especially jazz and the blues, of which he owned a huge collection of imported records.  His mother Violet too was an opera and jazz singer, and his early tastes were formed by their repertoire.  The young Van was reared to the sound of recorded American music of a kind the national radio did not provide in those days.

      Largely self-taught, he learned the saxophone and the guitar while still a schoolboy.  In 1957, he joined a skiffle group, the epitome of do-it-yourself garage music, called Deannie Sands and The Javelins, playing in local clubs.  He left school at fifteen, learnt the tenor sax, and became a member of the Monarchs, a showband that played largely for Saturday night dances in small halls.   The showbands then provided a touch of glamour and glitz, but would be swept away by the relentless rise of American rock and roll.

      The band moved away from the usual fare of the showband scene towards rhythm & blues and soul.  With this group Van toured Scotland, England and American army bases in Germany.  While in Germany he was offered and played the part of a jazz musician in a film.  The Monarchs recorded one single before going their own ways.  By now Morrison had developed his talents not only as a singer, but also as saxophonist and harmonica player, the two instruments that later gave many of his compositions their unique sound.

      Back in Belfast he opened a music club called the R&B Club and together with another Belfast group he formed a band called Them in 1964, which played in the club.  Them toured in England in 1965, and had two hits, one of which was 'Here Comes the Night'.  Already Morrison had developed his active dislike of the pop music and showbiz hyperbole, a distaste that still lasts.  These singles were produced by Bert Berns, a leading American record producer.

      In 1966 Morrison was invited to tour Europe with a group of musicians that included not only Bo Diddley, but also Little Walter, from whom he learnt a great deal about harmonica technique.  In May 1966 Them toured in the USA, part of that British 'invasion' that included The Beatles and the Rolling Stones.  They issued an album, Them Again, with a classic interpretation of Bob Dylan's 'It's All over Now Baby Blue'.  While in California they played with the emerging group the Doors, who later recorded a version of Morrison's 'Gloria'.

      Back in Europe Van found himself worn out by the constant work and travel and simply went back to Belfast, where he tried to recoup himself, writing and planning what to do next.  The band broke up in 1967, but Morrison decided to go back to Boston, where he worked again under the influence of the producer Bert Berns.  From this period came 'Brown Eyed Girl', and the follow-up album Blowin' Your Mind, which appeared without his sanction.  Though material on this album was mixed and hurriedly issued, one of the songs was 'T.B. Sheets' in which the free flowing imagery of so many later songs made its first appearance.  This hectic period came to an end with Bert Berns' death.

      During a year of occasional live sessions, Van set to work on a new album, Astral Weeks, with the support of a set of talented jazz musicians.  The album is now recognized as an important landmark in modern popular music.  Moondance in 1969 confirmed the range of his talent, establishing elements that would persist in his work over the following years.  Several others followed, including the disappointing Hard Nose the Highway, though this was succeeded by the mesmeric It's Too Late to Stop Now, and by Veedon Fleece in 1974.  Then followed a period of silence in the mid 1970s, the result perhaps of the mixed reactions to these albums.

      Curiously, though his music and singing has its special intensities, Van Morrison never quite made it into the class of mega-rock star.  Perhaps this was as well, for his unique style comes from somewhere else, in the social and literary background of Ireland.  After his prolonged absence from the scene he returned to recording in 1977 with A Period of Transition.

      Van returned to Europe, at first to live in London, later still moving back to Ireland for long sojourns.  As a young man in Belfast it had been the attractions of American music that had set his course.  Actually living in America turned his mind back to Ireland and Irish music.  The influence of this could be heard on Veedon Fleece (1974).  Morrison never again lost touch with his Irish background, and from 1974 onwards there was a conscious combination of Irish elements into his work, in the choice of instruments such as the uilleann pipes and the use of Irish artists such as the Chieftains, with whom he recorded Irish Heartbeat in 1988, and in playing the Belfast Opera House.  His later albums began to reveal a sense of almost Celtic mysticism, with religious and literary references much in evidence.  From 1974 quasi-religious themes entered his songs, with evocations of Romantic poets such as Blake.  Some critics attempted to link him with the cult of Scientology, denied in the title of his 1986 album, No Guru, No Method, No Teacher.

      His song 'Days Like These' has become part of the Ulster landscape, and was used by the government to support advertisement for the peace process.  But that is the sort of thing that affects one's standing in the eyes of a younger audience, some of whom dismissed anything after It's Too Late to Stop Now, and speak with greater reverence of another Belfast group of the period, the Undertones.  Such is the price of fame in the music business, however great a name a singer makes.

      Van Morrison's varied adaptations of music from the disparate sources of modern rock and roll, as well as the literary dimensions added to later albums, make an absorbing body of work, one of the most distinctive produced by an Irish musician.  His varied output is well represented on his 1998 double CD album The Philosopher's Stone - an allusion to that mystical substance sought by the alchemists of old that was supposed to turn the dross of daily life into the gold of art.  For his steady admirers, retained through a sustained stream of regular and appreciated albums, Van Morrison remains a unique and influential artist, a distinctive and exhilarating performer, an enigmatic icon of Irish music.

 

 

30

Richard Croker

1841-1922

 

On 1st July 1907, the city council of Dublin elected and admitted Richard Wellsted Croker as the twenty-first honorary burgess of the city.  To a list that included Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and CHARLES PARNELL [5], Richard Croker, the former head of Tammany Hall and a byword for civic corruption, made a curious addition.  If the life of the Irish American was city centred, men like Richard 'Boss' Croker were at the heart of it, as the architects of Irish-American urban politics.

      Croker was born just before the famine in Clonakilty in west Cork in the south of Ireland on 23rd November 1841.  Though in later years he allowed his followers the impression that he came from an impoverished peasant background, this was not true.  Impoverished his father, Eyre Coote Croker, may have been, but he came from landed gentry of largely English extraction.  The family, in which there were nine children, immigrated to New York City when Richard was three.  He was educated there in public schools, beginning his working life at the age of thirteen.

      His first job was as a machinist, but he was big and strong, and in his late teens was a fighter with a reputation on the Upper East Side as leader of the Fourth Avenue Tunnel Gang.  All his life he retained the outlook and morality of the street gang.

      He soon entered local politics, disguising his past.  He even became a Catholic to forward his political ambitions.  He joined Tammany Hall, then led by its notorious 'Boss' William M. Tweed, and soon had the ambition to lead it himself.  Croker became an alderman in 1868, putting his foot on the first rung of city promotion.  He was later appointed coroner of New York City at a salary of $25,000 a year.

      He succeeded 'Honest John' Kelly, a leading Democrat, as Tammany leader in 1866 and held power for seventeen years.  He added to his positions the equally lucrative ones of fire commissioner and city chamberlain.  Croker had opposed Tweed, and claimed that his only ambition was to save a great city from that crook's clutches.  However the investigations into the corruption of local politics made life more difficult for him in New York.  He was already tainted by a rumour that he had murdered a man.  Certainly, on election day in 1874 an opponent of Croker's was shot and killed.  Though Croker later claimed that one of his henchmen had done the deed, some thought that 'Boss' Croker himself was responsible.

      Through a system of local patronage, he creamed off the spoils from a great city, allowing, however, his henchmen their share.  The investigations of the Lexow Committee marked the beginning of a move against Tammany.  In 1894, to put some distance between himself and the law, he retired to England, though he later moved to Clencairn, a large mansion outside Dublin.

      There he was the greatest of the 'returned Yanks', as people in Ireland called their countrymen who returned laden with money from the New World.  His income had always been something of a mystery.  The British tax authorities, a more rigid organization than he was used to dealing with in New York, estimated his income in 1900 at $100,000, and fixed his tax at $5,000.  He adopted the style and manners of the country squires from whom he sprang, breeding a famous Derby winner, Orby, in 1907 - the first Irish horse to win that classic race.  From the chief herald of Ireland he gained a grant of a coat of arms; given his true family background this posed little problem.  The New York crook had become the complete Irish gentleman.

      When his first wife, from whom he had long been estranged, died in 1914, he married Beula Benton Edmondson, a princess of the Cherokee Nation from Oklahoma, who was many years younger.  This alliance led to disagreements with his children, which continued after his death in 1922, resulting in a spectacular law case heard in Dublin at which it was alleged that the beautiful Beula, far from being an Indian princess, was actually the wife of an Italian plumber.  The citizens of Dublin queued around the block for weeks to hear the evidence.

      For Irish people, 'Boss' Croker was an extraordinary personality, though silent and reserved.  His funeral at the end of April 1922, when his remains were buried in the grounds of Glencairn, was attended by leading members of the new Irish government with an honour guard of Irish Free State soldiers.

      Undoubtedly 'Boss' Croker was corrupt to the core, but from the point of view of his Irish constituents, he was the man who made the system, so long controlled by American Protestants, serve the needs of the new Catholic Irish.  The whole basis of the Democratic Party in the great cities of the northeast rested on this arrangement.  In that he served the interests of his own community well, Richard Wellsted Croker's influence was immense.  What was unforgivable in the eyes of many others was the corruption of the civic institutions of a great city which accompanied it.

 

 

31

Joseph R. McCarthy

1908-1957

 

The senator who led the campaign to root out Reds from the public service and other areas of American life was in his day seen as a dangerous threat to American civil liberties.  This remains true, but there were other dimensions to the senator from Wisconsin.  He remains perhaps the most controversial Irish-American politician of recent times, having given his name to a particular brand of free-wheeling vitriolic political activity.

      Joe McCarthy was born in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, on 14th November 1908.  His family were Catholics of mixed Irish and German origins.  His early education was in the public school system, at Underhill County School rather than the parish system.  Having worked on a farm, he started his own chicken farm.  Then, at nineteen, he moved to Manawa, enrolled in Little Wolf High School, paying his way by working in a grocery store and ushering in a theatre.  Ambitious, he was also bright, for he completed the four-year-school course in one.

      In 1930 he entered Marquette University to study engineering, but changed to the law school, graduating in 1935.  He was then in private practice as lawyer until he was elected circuit court judge of the tenth district in 1939, and he remained a judge until his election to the US Senate in 1945.  Between 1942 and 1944 he fought with the US Marines in the South Pacific.

      The war had been won by a grand alliance of the western democracies and the Soviet Union.  After the way and the occupation of Eastern Europe, and the establishment of Communist regimes in the countries under the control of the Soviets, this alliance changed into a cold war.  An iron curtain, in Winston Churchill's famous phrase, divided Europe.

      In 1946 McCarthy was elected to the Senate, and served there until his death.  In his first year as senator, McCarthy took up what he saw as the challenge of the penetration of members of the Communist party into the government and other areas of American life.  In this he had the support of a section of the Republican Party, led by Robert A. Taft.  In 1950, in a speech in Wheeling, West Virginia, he levelled the charge that the Communist presence in the State Department was influencing American foreign policy.  This was followed up by a hearing of the Tydings Committee.

      The House Un-American Activities Committee, also active at this date, gave rise to alarming notions, though President Harry Truman dismissed these as red herrings.  Yet some two million federal employees were investigated, 526 of whom resigned and 98 were dismissed.  In 1948 twelve Communists were tried for attempting to overthrow the government.

      Under Truman, McCarthy attacked George C. Marshall, then secretary of state and creator of the Marshall Plan, to aid the recovery of post-war Europe - a plan deeply resented by many conservative Americans.

      Others such as Asian adviser Owen Lattimore, who had been involved in policy in the Far East, were also suspect.  A narrow test of loyalty was espoused that focused on attitudes to the alliance with the Soviets during the Second World War.

      In 1950, the beginning of the Korean War and the conviction of Alger Hiss, the country was alive to the Communist menace.  Alger Hiss, a State department official, was accused by Whittaker Chambers of passing documents to communist spies or agents, which he denied.  Hiss was convicted, not of espionage, but of perjury, and the matter remains deeply controversial to this day.  J. Edgar Hoover announced that there were fifty-five thousand party members in the United States and some five hundred thousand sympathizers and fellow-travellers, that is those non-communists whose radical sympathies for the poor and oppressed in America were traded upon by communists for the advantage of the party.  HUAC had records of 750,000 'subversives'.

      The election of President Dwight D. Eisenhower (who took office in 1953) led to increased government resistance to McCarthy and his methods.  On 2nd January a report by a Senate privileges committee on the activities of the senator found that some had been 'motivated by self-interest'.  McCarthy's investigation of the army, conducted in hearings from 23rd April to 17th June 1954, came at a time when he was already losing influence in Washington and the Eisenhower administration was following a line more or less like that of Truman.  These hearings were televised, and the counsel for the army, John G. Adams, dramatically defeated McCarthy's charges.

      These hearings led the army to charge that McCarthy and his counsel Roy Cohn had attempted to obtain special privileges of leave for a committee aide (with whom, it seems, Cohn was sexually involved) who had been drafted into the army as a private.  This was controversial and unpleasant material, though not fully aired at the time.

      Eventually the Republican Party distanced itself from McCarthy, and he was censured by the Senate.  The censure resolution was passed on 30th July 1954, and in a vote of a special session of the Senate on 2nd December he was condemned for his conduct in chairing the Senate committees.

      His early death in Washington, D.C., on 2nd May 1957 - he was only forty-eight - did not, however, end the right-wing attack on either American liberal policies or Communists in places of influence.  McCarthy had achieved a large following among conservatives of all religions and had a large Irish-Catholic following.  His influence was immense and remained so.

      McCarthy's extravagant style reflected the intense patriotism of an Irish American deeply anxious to prove his loyalty and that of his part of the community by focusing on the disloyalty of another one.  A generation before, much of what he said about Communist America had been said about the Irish themselves as agents of papal power attempting to subvert American democracy.  That had not been true, and for many, Senator McCarthy's claims also belong to what has been characterized as 'the paranoid style' of American politics.

      With the fall of the Soviet Union and further investigations by historians, the actual extent of Communist influence has become clear.  Paranoid though McCarthy was, the American Communist party had nevertheless infiltrated many areas of American life as a matter of policy.

      Yet even today, when communism has disappeared as a force in international politics, and so long after his death, Joseph Raymond McCarthy remains a model of a particular kind of American patriot for a significant number of Americans.  As the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman points out, he introduced into public life a notion that all men were suspect, and therefore engendered a culture of total security at all levels of public and private life that has become the great obsession of modern times.  This shows, adds von Hoffman, that 'the view championed by Joe [McCarthy], that the world is a perilous place penetrated by treachery and poised to attack, has gained wide acceptance'.

 

 

32

Robert Boyle

1627-1691

 

Ireland is not always thought of as the cradle of scientists, perhaps because science at its purest has little in the way of national character.  However, Robert Boyle is a figure which any country would be proud of.  'Boyle's Law', as we are taught at school, is a key scientific fact.  He was interesting as both a philosopher and a physicist and chemist.  His contemporaries were aware of his curious position, as a friendly Irish epitaph described him as the 'Father of Chemistry and the Uncle of the Earl of Cork'.

      He was born on 25th January 1627, at Lismore Castle in County Waterford, in the south of Ireland, the seventh son of the famous first earl of Cork, an important figure in the plantation of Munster.  He was a serious child with a taste for study which impressed his father.  He was sent to Eton College at the age of eight, and there (according to a fragment of autobiography that he left unpublished) a chance reading of Quintus Curtius 'conjured up in me that unsatisfied appetite for knowledge that is yet as greedy as when it was first raised'.

      After four years study at Eton he returned home to be taught by tutors, and was then sent around Europe with his French tutor, becoming fluent in French and Italian, then the languages of culture.  In Florence in the winter of 1641 to 1642 he came into contact with the new ideas of Galileo.  These travels were made difficult because the money sent by his father was stolen, and the party had to return to England slowly by a roundabout route.  In 1644 he returned to live in Dorset, in the south of England, on an estate he had inherited from his father.

      Boyle was one of what was called 'the invisible college' of scientists and philosophers, which was to become the Royal Society, and though he was still in his late teens he acquired an impulse toward investigation that lasted his lifetime.  He visited Ireland in 1652 to deal with his estates, but found it 'a barbarous country, where chemical spirits were so misunderstood, and chemical instruments unprocurable, that it was hard to have any Hermetic thoughts in it'.  Instead, he turned to anatomy, Ireland having a ready supply of dead bodies in those days.  On returning to England in 1654 he settled in Oxford, where he lived until moving finally to London in 1668 to be nearer the centre of things in the capital.

      He erected a laboratory where he and his assistants worked, and created a small scientific society around him.  In 1659 he invented, with the help of Robert Hooke, the 'machina Boyleana', the first air pump, which he used in experiments that led up to the propounding of Boyle's Law.

      His first experiments with the properties of air were published in 1660.  In 1661 he published what came to be seen as his magnum opus, The Skeptical Chymist ... Touching the Experiments Whereby Vulgar Spagirists Are Wont to Endeavour to Evince Their Salt, Sulphur, and Mercy to the True Principles of Things.  In this work he overthrew the Aristotelian concept of the four elements of earth, fire, water, and air.  In proposing the modern idea of an element as a substance which cannot be decomposed into simpler ones, he had grasped the idea on which all modern chemistry was later founded.

      His interests covered many areas, including the possibility of transmuting base metals into gold.  But he is remembered for proving that air is a material substance, having weight, its volume being inversely proportional to its pressure.  This relationship is Boyle's Law, which he defined and which Edme Mariotte later proved.  This is still among the first basic facts of science that all students learn at school.

      He also made observations on the effect of a change in atmospheric pressure on the boiling point of water, collected many new facts in relation to magnetism and electricity, and explained the action of heat as a 'brisk' agitation of particles.

      But it was as a chemist that Boyle excelled.  He was not a theorist, but an experimenter, and as such, the first modern chemist.  He distinguished elements, mixtures, and compounds, prepared phosphorus (though he did not discover it), collected hydrogen in a vessel over water (though he called it 'air generated de novo') and inquired into the forms of crystals as an indicator of their chemical structures.  He introduced the vegetable colour tests for acidity and alkalinity, the construction of hermetically sealed thermometers, and the use of freezing mixtures.

      He was also a deeply devout Christian, and learned Hebrew, Syrian, and Greek, the better to understand the scriptures.  He used a large part of his personal fortune in the propagation of the faith, and in his will left a sum of money to support the annual Boyle Lectures, eight sermons a year by a minister 'for proving the Christian religion against Atheists, Theists, Pagans, Jews, and Mohammedans, not descending to any controversies among Christians themselves'.

      As a philosopher he thought that God had made the world in the beginning and that His 'general concourse' was continually needed to maintain its being and motion.  This was a return in part to earlier Hindu and Islamic ideas of continuous creation and recreation, but also expressed the physical aspect of the Christian doctrine of immanence.

      Boyle died in London on 31st December 1691.  He was thought by all to be a man of fine character, and was very popular among his colleagues.  His reputation was an international one, and he was always at the service of visitors to the Royal Society.  But his fame will rest on his invention of 'the experimental method' by which all scientific research now proceeds.

 

 

33

Hugh O'Neill

1550-1616

 

The departure in 1607 of Hugh O'Neill and other leaders from Ireland - what later came to be called the Flight of the Earls, was seen by many as the end of the old Gaelic order and any chance of its restoration.  If a date is needed for the start of modern Irish history, with its saga of war, famine, and exile, this might be it.

      O'Neill's career was a hectic one, in which all the vacillations of Ireland under the Tudors were displayed.  With his departure and eventual death in Rome, an epoch had been reached.  If he had succeeded in what he had hoped, he might have made himself a king of a united Ireland (fulfilling that old dream of Brian Boru), and with Spanish aid driven the English out of Ireland.  But this was not to be.

      Hugh O'Neill was the son of Matthew O'Neill, himself the natural son of Conn, the first earl of Tyrone.  In Irish eyes the earl was 'The O'Neill', the English feudal title that had been bestowed on him by the queen on the surrender and regranting of his (or rather his people's) land.  In 1559 he was taken by Sir Henry Sidney, the viceroy, to his castle and Ludlow, converted to Anglicanism, and taught English manners.  In 1562 Huge succeeded his brother Brian as baron of Dungannon.

      The English historian William Camden described O'Neill at this time as a man 'whose industry was great, his mind large and fit for the weightiest businesses ... he had much knowledge in military affairs and a profound, dissembling heart, so as many deemed him born either for the great good or ill of his country'.

      O'Neill returned to Ireland in 1568.  Having been educated in both Ireland and England, he approximated more the English idea of a nobleman than an Irish chieftain.  Unlike his relative Shane O'Neill, who was cast more in the old Gaelic mould, Hugh tried to avoid direct conflict with the powerful English.  Indeed, he helped them in their campaign between 1574 and 1587.  He was rewarded for his supposed loyalty by Queen Elizabeth, who made him earl of Tyrone in his own right in 1587,

      But all was not well.  In 1588 he aided the survivors of the Spanish Armada that were cast up in Donegal.  In 1593 he revived for himself the ancient Irish title of 'The O'Neill', the use of which had been banned under English law.  He was thought to be in league with Hugh Roe O'Donnell and Hugh Maguire when they rebelled in 1594.  Accused of treason, he finally joined their revolt in 1595.

      He proved to be a great asset to the Irish forces through his skills as a diplomat and a soldier.  He was cool, farsighted, and calculating.  Allowed a certain number of men under arms, he changed them frequently, so that a large number of his clansmen were trained in modern arms.  Claiming he needed the metal to roof his castles, he had bought large quantities of lead and saved it for bullets.  His careful planning and cautious strategy provided the Irish with the natural leader they have long lacked.  He also sought the help of both Scotland and Spain against the common English enemy.

      The true campaign began in 1596, and O'Neill led the Irish to a great victory at the Yellow Ford (on 15th August 1598).  But the English began to strike back.  Anxious for Spanish aid, O'Neill made an interim peace with the Earl of Essex.  But Lord Mountjoy deployed his army, and O'Neill and his allies were cornered at Kinsale, where he was defeated after rashly choosing to attack.

      The war went on until O'Neill was pardoned and his land holdings were confirmed by James I.  But it was obvious which way the tide was running.  English interference continued.  Soon O'Neill had had enough of it all.  On 14th September 1607, O'Neill, together with Rory O'Donnell, left Ireland, sailing from Rathmullen on the shores of Lough Swilly with an entourage of a hundred or so of the Ulster nobility.  Landing in Le Havre, they made their way to Flanders, and from there to Rome.  Outlawed by the Irish parliament, the last of his estates were now confiscated and planted.

      The Flight of the Earls left the way open for a final solution, so to speak, of the Irish problem.  The lands of O'Neill and O'Donnell to the west of Lough Neagh were confiscated and planted with settlers from England and Scotland.  Derry became Londonderry, having been granted to companies in the City of London.  This plantation might have worked if it had been wholesale, but the policy was not consistently applied, and so there remained enough of the old stock of the Irish to foment further troubles in later centuries.  W.B. YEATS [8] spoke of the Flight of the Earls as one of 'Four bells - four deep, tragic notes in Irish history'.  Though the Gaelic ways lingered on here and there, they had been badly damaged by Mountjoy's campaign.  The old rulers never again came anywhere near achieving the success they had had under O'Neill at the battle of the Yellow Ford.

      O'Neill heard little of this.  The last years of his life were passed in melancholy and idleness in Rome as a pensioner of the pope and the king of Spain.  He died there on 20th July 1616.

 

 

34

Jonathan Swift

1667-1745

 

Though the author of Gulliver's Travels is often spoken of as an English writer, he was a Dubliner by birth and death.  Though he enjoys universal fame as a writer, Jonathan Swift also has a more local reputation as an Irish patriot of an unusual kind.

      The posthumous child of an English father, he was born on 30th November 1667, in a little square in the shadow of Dublin Castle.  He was educated at Kilkenny College and at Trinity College in Dublin, where his training was strictly Anglican.  Though he enjoyed literature at the university, he did not care for either philosophy or the formalities of rhetoric.  He was no student, and his degree was specially granted to him.  In 1689, having sought his mother's advice, he was appointed secretary to Sir William Temple (whom some have suggested was his real father) at Moor Park near London.  There he stayed between 1689 and 1694.

      Having been ordained in the Church of Ireland in 1695, he was given a living in a small Ulster prebend at Kilroot, outside Belfast.  He did not find this agreeable, as the parishes were rundown and the local people mostly dour Presbyterians.  He went home to Moor Park, where, among other duties, he had to tutor Esther Johnson (or Stella, as he calls her in his writings), the daughter of a companion of Temple's sister.  It has been supposed (again, by a few) that Stella was also Temple's child, Swift's half-sister.

      At this time he wrote his earliest poems anonymously, as well as The Battle of the Books, which deals with the superiority of the classics over the modern writers, and A Tale of a Tub, a satirical account of the consequences of the Reformation and Christian divisions.  In January 1699 Sir William Temple died, so Swift had to seek another place.  In 1700 he was given another clerical living in Ireland, at Laracor in Meath.  He took a doctorate degree at Trinity College in 1701.  For a while he divided his time between Dublin, where he was a social success, and London, where he gained a reputation as a political writer.  A natural conservative, he took the Tory side in politics, satirizing the dominant Whigs (who had been in power since the fall of James II).  His life in the heat of English politics is described in his Journal to Stella.  She too had gone to live in Dublin after their patron died.

      When the Tories came to power Swift had hoped for a bishopric, but the queen's advisors influenced her to refuse him.  However, he was given the deanery of St Patrick's in Dublin.  The return of his political foes, the Whigs, ensured there would be no further advancement in the Anglican Church for him.  Initially he saw himself as exiled in Dublin from the real life in London, and with no hope of an English bishopric.

      When he returned to Dublin, Swift was followed there by Esther van Homrigh - the Vanessa of his later writings - whose family had been prominent in the life of the city.  She was infatuated with him, and he was unable to untangle himself from her.  Swift's relationships with Stella and Vanessa remain shadowy and mysterious, though the notion that Swift and Stella were half siblings might go a long way in explaining odd aspects of his behaviour.  It may be that he was married to Stella secretly in 1716, and that he might have had sexual relations with Vanessa, but none of this is certain.

      To many of his contemporaries he appeared as what one writer called a 'scabrous, mad misanthrope, faithless priest, and heartless lover'.  The modern judgement would be different.  Now we are more aware of the literary and rhetorical devices by which he masked his own personality with that of others, from Isaac Bickerstaff to Capt. Lemuel Gulliver.

      It was in Ireland that Swift wrote Gulliver's Travels, published anonymously in 1726.  Though this became, in part, a children's favourite, the book itself has a very adult theme, for it is filled with Swift's loathing of mankind.

      In Dublin and his own journeys around the countryside, Swift became conscious of the condition of Ireland itself.  The English politician grew into the Irish patriot.  The Ireland he was defending was, of course, largely that of English settlement, but Ireland was changing at the time, and the defence of Ireland's interests was to the benefit of all.

      His satirical writings, such as his essay 'A Modest Proposal' (1729), in which an 'economist' (of a kind we still have with us!) argues that the surplus babies of Ireland should be fattened for eating, concerned the abuses of English rule in Ireland.  In the Drapier Letters (1724-25) he defended the economic interests of Ireland against the exploitation of English adventurers, in particular William Wood of Wolverhampton, who had been granted coinage rights.

      Swift remained in touch with his friends in England, but his mind slowly gave way.  He was not insane, but it is now thought he suffered from Ménières disease, which began to affect him about 1736.  In 1742 he retreated into depression, was declared legally insane, and was confined to a home, where he died on 19th October 1745.

      Swift left all he owned to found St Patrick's Hospital for the mentally ill, an institution which survives to this day.  At midnight he was buried in his cathedral, beside Stella.  His epitaph, in his own words, is on a plaque above the spot:

 

Here lies Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral.

Go traveller and imitate if you can

his brave struggle for human liberty.

 

That, at least, is the record of the patriotic dean who was admired by the Dubliners he lived among.  Swift was among those who began the process of creating the identity of modern Ireland as a country with mixed cultures.

      For the world at large, Gulliver's Travels remains one of the great books of all time.  Swift's satiric anger has been a major influence on writers since.  In clear and limpid language, he lashed out not only at the passing abuses of the day, but also those perennial failings of human nature which he scorned.

 

 

35

George Berkeley

1685-1753

 

 

George Berkeley was one of the most important and interesting philosophers which Ireland has produced, though his career ranged from England to America.  He was born at Dysart Castle near Kilkenny on 12th March 1685, and educated at Trinity College.  He became a fellow in 1701, and taught at the university as a fellow and tutor until 1713.

      His main studies were of Descartes and Newton, at a time when Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (published in 1609) was already influencing philosophical investigations.  From 1705 to 1706, he kept his Commonplace Book (published in 1871) which reveals the general trend of his thinking.  In this he first outlined his new principle of philosophy that matter, substance, and cause have no meaning apart from the conscious spirit of man.

      His first books were Arithmetica and Miscellanea Mathematica (both in 1707), and in 1709 he took holy orders.  He made a wide impression in 1709 with the publication of An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision.  The idealistic ideas in this were developed further in A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710).  In 1711 he published A Discourse on Passive Obedience.

      JONATHAN SWIFT [34], then at the height of his London years, introduced Berkeley to the Court and into the intellectual circles of the city. Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonus (1713) was a popular outline of his ideas.  He told Dr Samuel Johnson, 'I had no inclination to trouble the world with large volumes.  What I have [published] was rather a view to giving hints to thinking men who have leisure and curiosity to go to the bottom of things and pursue them in their own minds.'

      Though worked out before he was thirty, his chief ideas were expressed in these publications.  As a philosopher, Berkeley attempted to solve problems Locke left unresolved.  It was Locke's work that suggested to Berkeley the central principle that nothing existed apart from perception (esse est percipi, 'to be is to be perceived').  He said that this principle was intuitively obvious and manifest common sense.  Dr Johnson, a bluff, down-to-earth personality, thought that kicking a stone - what in the world could be a more densely material object? - was proof enough that Berkeley's extreme idealism was absurd, and other contemporary people of common sense would have agreed with him.

      Hume claimed that Berkeley was attempting to show the non-existence of matter, and that everything in the universe was merely idea.

      Berkeley argued that everything that is seen, felt, or heard, or in any way observed is a real being, that it actually exists, while a thing not perceived cannot be known, and without being known (that is perceived by a mind) cannot exist.  The only intelligible cause of all phenomena is mind.  Pain and pleasure cannot exist apart from their being felt.

      Between 1714 and 1721 Berkeley travelled in Europe as the chaplain to Lord Peterborough, and then as the tutor to Bishop Ashe's son, but his mind was as much on the countries he had left behind, as shown by the publication of a further essay on the state of the nation, which he blamed on the decline of religion and public spirit.  The collapse of the South Sea Bubble, a huge investment scheme that swept the country like a mania and proved a disaster for investors of all kinds, had just taken place (with an effect rather like the stock market crash in New York in 1929).

      Berkeley was appointed dean of Dromore in 1722, and dean of Derry in 1724.  He then became involved in a scheme to create a college in Bermuda.  This was intended to be an intellectual base from which the American continents could be Christianized and brought within the pale of civilization.  Through Robert Walpole, the prime minister, he received a promise of a government grant of £20,000 for this, and in 1728 left for the Americas.

      However, he never reached Bermuda, but spent three years (1728-1731) in the colony of Rhode Island.  There he made a contribution to the growth of American academic life and philosophy.  One of his innovations was the introduction of the seminar as a teaching device.  At last he realized that his grant (as is so often the way with government promises) would not be forthcoming.

      His Alciphron, or The Minute Philosopher, a defence of religion against deists and others, was written in Rhode Island and published in London (1733).  A supplement, Visual Language, showing the immediate present providence of a deity, appeared the next year.

      Berkeley returned to Ireland, where he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, in Cork, in 1734, through the favouritism of Queen Caroline.  This found him on the verge of a controversy concerning mysteries, that is, the spiritual, transcendent elements in religion, which rationalists denied.  This arose from a passage in Alciphron.  Some free-thinking mathematicians (influenced perhaps by JOHN TOLAND [38] and the ancestors of many of today's scientists) held that mysteries were fatal to the moral authority of religion.  The Analyst (1734) was Berkeley's answer, and The Querist, which dealt with matters of social economic policy, followed serially from 1735 to 1737.

      He turned his mind to other inventions, maths, the social problems of Ireland, and questions of religious toleration.  In 1739 the diocese of Cloyne was greatly affected by famine and the associated cholera fever.  From his experiences in America, Berkeley had been much taken with the medicinal properties of tar water.  (Tar water was a preparation of pine resin, which was steeped in water for several weeks, strained, and then taken with milk three times a day as a remedy for all kinds of illnessess.)  His experiences set off a train of thought.  In his mind the properties of tar water became associated with the studies of Plato, the neo-platonists, and other mystics which he had been following for years.  Tar water, as a universal healer, a panacea in the literal sense, suggested to him the final interpretation of the universe.

      Siris, published in 1744, was ostensibly about the benefits of tar water, but its pages contain some of Berkeley's most profound metaphysical speculations.  Though it was to be George Berkeley's last word on philosophy, it was also a most curious book on metaphysics.  But his high flights of speculation were obscured by the controversy that followed on just whether or not tar water was a panacea.

      He resigned in 1752 due to ill health, and left Ireland to live in the calmer academic atmosphere of Oxford, where he died in January 1753.  Berkeley's idealism was very influential on both Hume and Kant, but it was not perhaps until the middle of the nineteenth century that his ideas began to receive more sympathetic treatment.  Since then they have had a critical influence on the development of philosophy in both Europe and America.  Among his other Irish admirers was W.B. YEATS [8], who saw Berkeley as an exemplar of that Anglo-Irish tradition which he elevated to one of the great cultures of the world.

 

 

36

U2

late twentieth century

 

Though Ireland had long been famous for its poetry and music, these had nearly always taken traditional forms.  With the advent of the rock group U2 - a sly allusion to the famous American high-flying spy plane - the country of W.B. YEATS [8] and JAMES JOYCE [25] produced a new phenomenon, a world-famous rock band.  Completely breaking with what had been thought of as traditional Irish music, they achieved world-wide fame, and their style of music and approach to life has proved immensely influential.  Their tours, especially of North America, have brought a new meaning to the words Irish Culture.

      The band consists of four Dublin musicians: Bono, or Paul Hewson, born 10th  May 1960; the Edge, or David Evans, born 8th August 1961, at Barking in Essex; Adam Clayton, born 13th March at Chinnor in Oxfordshire, England; and Larry Mullen, born in Dublin, 1st October 1960.  They were the band's vocals, guitar, bass, and drums, respectively.

      They met at school on the north side of Dublin, in one of the rapidly expanding suburbs that represented the new Ireland of today, often rough, raw, and Americanised.  In 1976 Larry Mullen pinned a note to the notice board of Mount Temple School, a formerly Protestant school that had been turned into a co-educational comprehensive.  He was looking for others to form a rock band, and out of the responses chose three.  Initially they played versions of the Rolling Stones and Beach Boys as a group called Feedback, then they called themselves Hype.  Their final name, U2, came in 1978.

      Hewson was supposed to play guitar.  'I was such a lousy guitar player,' he told a local magazine in 1982, 'that one day they broke it to me that maybe I should sign instead.  I had tried before but found I had no voice at all.  I remember the day I found I could sing.  I said: "Oh, that's how you do it."'

      For the boys, rock would be 'about sweat, about the real world'.  In 1978 they won a competition in Limerick and were taken up by manager Paul McGuinness.  A signing with CBS records followed and a song from their first album, Out of Control, in 1979 rose rapidly to number one on the Irish charts.  This was followed the next year by another number one, Another Day.  Oddly, CBS did not want to take them on in the United Kingdom, so they signed with the more innovative Island Records.  The first singles for their new company made little impact, but early in 1980 readers of the Irish music magazine Hot Press voted U2 the number one band in five categories.  They had arrived.

      The first Island album, Boy, released in October 1980, was produced by Steve Lillywhite.  It drew on all of the feeling of adolescence in a new style which listeners found both moving and inspired.  But U2 was not studio-bound.  They went on tour to support the album, and the effects of Bono's singing and the tight playing of the others showed them to be an outstanding new band.

      In November 1980 the band toured the east coast of America - always important these days in building a universal reputation.  Their second album, October, released in October 1981, had an impassioned religious feeling powerfully evangelical in its effect.  A song inspired by the Polish Solidarity movement, which had begun to crack open the Communist colossus, was called 'New Year's Day'.  The critical welcome continued with War (February 1983), on which the song 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' reflected the same theme of religion and politics.  Under a Blood Red Sky reached number two on the UK album chart.

      The band was now on its way to joining the all-time greats of rock music.  Playing with Bob Dylan at Slane Castle, an Irish venue, united the old guard with the young Turks of rock.  As Ireland at this time seemed to be bubbling with talent, the band set up its own company to bring some of it on.

      The growth of their own talent was seen on Unforgettable Fire (1984) which won a place on the US charts.  The ideals of the band were supported by their appearance at Live Aid and at Self-Aid, a similar charity event in Ireland.  They were also involved with Amnesty International.  In these concerns they carried many of their young followers with them, as posters of U2 and Amnesty International crowded bedroom walls and school dormitories.  A world tour brought them further audiences outside of their core areas.  The Joshua Tree, released in March 1987, elevated U2 into being one of the most important bands in the world.  The album rose to the top of the charts in the United Kingdom and the United States.  Two more albums brought the decade to a close.

      Inevitably in a competitive world, other bands now began to make their appearance.  Though U2 continued to grow and mature, its music had to be seen in this wider musical context.  The band commanded immense attention from Irish commentators and writers.  Whatever the further development of its music may be, it had an authentic voice that had come out of the contemporary culture of Ireland.  Its concerns of spiritual quest, social commitment, and awareness of the real dangers lurking in the modern world were those of its admirers.  Where in the past an important Irish poet, at the age of forty-five, might have accumulated a few thousand constant readers, the lyrics of a rock band such as U2 reach countless millions.  They moved those millions with the same power which Irish poetry has always had, but in a new context which transcended the narrow borders of national identity and leaked into the realm of universal humanity.

      There is little doubt of the stature which the band achieved on the Irish scene.  This had great benefit not only for raising the mood of the young population as a whole, but in demonstrating to other ambitious bands that no heights were barred to Irish people of talent.  They could challenge the world and triumph.  But to triumph with material as deeply felt, and as resonant of centuries of spirituality, was another great achievement.  Though now an international supergroup deeply committed to selected causes, for U2 rock is still 'about sweat, about the real world'.

 

 

37

James Larkin

1876-1947

 

Along with JAMES CONNOLLY [16], James Larkin was one of the leading figures in the development of both the trade union movement and democratic socialism in Ireland.  But where Connolly was more of a thinker, Larkin was a man of action, a street rebel.

      One of his biographers, the historian Emmet Larkin, wrote: 'His accomplishment was unique and representative - unique partly because it was representative.  His rich and complex personality allowed him to harmonize the three most dissonant themes of his day.  For he claimed to be at one and the same time a Socialist, a Nationalist, and a Roman Catholic.'  His career was representative because it 'mirrored to a larger extent than did that of his equally colourful comrades [Eugene Debbs, Tom Mann, and James Connolly] those attributes that were the hallmark of this generation of working-class leaders'.

      He was born in the slums of Liverpool, the great English seaport, in 1876 to poor Irish parents.  As a child he witnessed not only the grim poverty of the families around him, but also had to watch the death of his father from tuberculosis.  He had hardly any schooling, but was sent away to spend at least part of his childhood with his grandparents in Ulster.  He returned to Liverpool at the age of nine, and began his own working life at the age of eleven.

      He spent some time at sea - he stowed away in search of adventure; and then became a labourer on the Liverpool docks.  When not yet seventeen he joined the Liverpool branch of the Independent Labour Party.  He rose from docker to foreman.  He lost his job for attempting to organize his men and joined the National Union of Dockers in 1901.  In 1905, after a bitter strike at his firm, he was appointed an organizer for the union.

      In Belfast in 1907, Larkin began the blacking of goods - that is the refusal to handle any goods which had not been made or transported by unionized labour.  However, he fell out with the union and went to Dublin, where in 1909 he set up his own union, the Irish Transport and General Workers Union (TGWU).

      Perhaps no other city had such scenes of poverty as Dublin had then.  He strove to improve not only working conditions, but workers' lives by widening their cultural horizons.  His union grew rapidly, and the inevitable clash with employers came to a head in 1913.  Though the workers were forced back to work, their rights had been established.  Larkin had drawn a line in the sand.

      The epic days of the long summer of 1913 have entered into the folklore of Dublin - the hardship caused by the employers' lockout, the riots and deaths on O'Connell Street, the clash with the clerical authorities over the sending of workers' children to England to be fed.  For six months, twenty thousand men and women, on whom another eighty thousand depended for their bread and shelter, were locked out because they would not sign the pledge of the Employers Organization not to join the TGWU.  For trade unionists throughout Britain it became the battlefront of the day.  Larkin won support in England and America, and even Lenin, then lurking in Zurich, had to admire Larkin's revolutionary zeal.

      Larkin then went to America, where he lectured and wrote about the causes close to him.  But socialism was already in decline.  As in Europe, its failure to resist the First World War had shaken its whole edifice.  And there were others problems for Larkin.  He was out of the country during the crucial years of the troubles, when Ireland took new directions he could play no part in.  In 1920 he was sentenced to ten years and jailed in Sing Sing for attempting to overthrow the US government at a time when the United States was passing through its first 'Red scare'.  He explained his point of view as best he could: '[A]t an early age, I took my mind to this question of the age - why are the many poor?  It was true to me.  I don't know whether the light of God or the light of humanity or the light of my own intelligence brought it to me, but it came to me like a flash.  The thing is wrong because the basis of society is wrong.'

      He became the focus of an international campaign to free him from prison.  In 1923 he was pardoned and released and returned to Ireland, but once again he fell out with his union, and left it to set up the Workers Union of Ireland.  Elected to the Dáil (the Irish national assembly) and the Dublin city council, he continued his struggle for workers' rights.

      For Larkin and the labour movement these were often difficult years.  He played an important part in the making of the new Ireland, where the needs of the economy were tempered with the equally important needs of the workers.  When he died on 30th January 1947, his funeral was a huge one even by the standards of political Dublin.

      'It is hard to believe this great man is dead,' the playwright SEAN O'CASEY [55], himself the product of the Dublin slums, wrote on the day of Larkin's death, 'for all thoughts and all activities surged in the soul of this labour leader, for he combined within himself the imagination of the artist, with the fire and determination of a leader of a downtrodden class.'

      Yet for all his admirers said, there was an element of the maverick in Larkin.  His critics could admit that he was a powerful and charismatic figure, but he was also demagogic, abrasive, and all too often divisive.  His support for the International and the Communist movements made him anathema to many, but to others closer to the streets of Dublin he was a giant among men, a prophet of a better life for all.  He remains a complex but powerfully influential figure, a legend among Irish leaders.

 

 

38

John Toland

1670-1722

 

The Irish hold themselves to be a deeply religious people, but that religion can often take curious forms.  None were more so than the career of the theologian John Toland, the man who gave the concept of 'free thinker' to the world.

      Born into a Catholic family at Inishowen near Derry on 30th November 1670, Janus Junius Toland, as he was christened, became a zealous Protestant in 1686 at the age of sixteen.  He was educated at Glasgow University, where he received his master's degree in 1690.  In 1692 Daniel Williams' Presbyterian congregation sent Toland to Leyden (where he studied with the famous scholar of the day, Fredrich Spanheim).  He had plans to become a non-Conformist minister.  Losing his faith, he settled to be simply a nonconformist.

      By 1694 Toland was at Oxford.  In 1696 he anonymously published Christianity Not Mysterious, or, A Treatise Shewing That There Is Nothing in the Gospels Contrary to Reason, Nor Above It; and That No Christian Doctrine Can Be Properly Called a Mystery, a book which aroused immense controversy.  Toland wished to show that true religion (deism, in fact), and natural morality were practically synonymous.  Any notions which transcended reason, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, and Grace, ought to be discarded as mere superstitions.  What he sought was a religion (or more properly an ethical position) 'as old as creation' and not dependent on church views.  Though these were scandalous notions in the seventeenth century, such ideas can be found today among advanced theologians of many Christian outlooks.

      He acknowledged the book as his own on its second edition the same year, and was prosecuted for irreligion by the grand jury of Middlesex, which covered part of London.  He escaped to Dublin in 1697, but found further troubles in his native land.  He was attacked by churchmen and others, and in September the Irish parliament ordered his book burned by the common hangman for being godless and subversive of morals.  An order for his arrest was made.  In a country rife with persecution, Toland was soon driven back to England.

      The term free thinker was used for the first time in history by William Molyneaux of Dublin in a letter to John Locke in 1679, in which he calls Toland 'a candid free thinker'.  (Molyneaux's own book, The Case of Ireland Stated, advocating Irish independence, had also been burned by the hangman in Dublin.)  Fifteen years later JONATHAN SWIFT [34] referred to 'atheists, libertines, despisers of religion, that is to say, all those who usually pass under the name Free Thinker'.  It is an achievement of the first order to bring a new concept and term like this into use.

      Toland later wrote A Life of Milton, which proved almost as controversial.  In the manner of so many outspoken young men since, intent on shocking their elders, he referred to 'the numerous suppositious pieces under the name of Christ and His apostles and other great persons'.  He was accused of doubting the authentic nature of the New Testament, and replied to these charges in a book entitled Amyntor, or a Defence of Milton's Life, which attempted to open up the whole question of the canon of scripture and how it had come down to us.  This is still a vexing question in this day, but in Toland's time a critic of biblical texts put his life in danger.

      Toland was in Hanover in 1701 as part of a government embassy, and was received by the Electress Sophia on account of his recent book Vindicius Liberius (1702), a defence of the Hanoverian succession which, of course, affected the throne of England.  In this book he admitted that Christianity Not Mysterious had been 'a youthful indiscretion'.  In 1703 he was again in Hanover and in Berlin, where he was received at court once more.

      His travels to Hanover and Prussia brought him into contact with German philosophers and contributed in a small way to the emergence of the German enlightenment.  In a book which resulted from these visits, Letters to Serena, he attacked Spinoza and anticipated some of the ideas of modern materialism.  In 1707 he also published his An Account of the Courts of Prussia and Hanover, which remains an important source for the career of Frederick the Great.

      The rest of his life was lived in some obscurity.  He seems to have been a spy for the British government from time to time.  He continued to publish on politics and religion, and in 1709 was in the Hague, where he published Adeisidaemon and Origines Judaicae.  Another theological work appeared in 1718 called Nazerenus, or Jewish, Gentile, and Mahometan Christianity.  In this he claimed that the early Christians of the first century had been Jewish Christians following the old Mosaic law.  They were the later Nazarenes (or Ebionites) and Elkesaites, condemned by the church as heretics.  To Toland's mind it was nicely ironic that the organized church should persecute true Christians, so to speak.

      His Pantheisticon (1720) introduced the term pantheism, that is an identification of the deity with the universe, of God and Nature, and it outlined a society of pantheists.  This caused as much offence to the pious as his first book.  To his critics, it seemed that he had reduced God to the material universe and to have made him little more than a mechanical law of nature.

      Toland lived these years in great poverty, sinking to the position of a semi-political hack writer, dependent on the patronage of Harley, Shaftesbury, and others.  He died, pen in hand, in Putney outside London on 11th March 1722.

      In 1726 a collection of his writings was published, which included his History of the Druids, a key work in the development of ideas about the ancient past of Ireland.  He asserted that the Druids (about whom little is known) were, like him, pantheistic philosophers.  This view is maintained to this day by the Druid orders.  One of these, the British Circle of the Universal Bond, claims to descend (through the poet William Blake) from a group organized by Toland in 1717 at a meeting on Primrose Hill north of London.  This curious claim may have arisen from a group related to the Socratic Society, which Toland wrote about and which he seems to have been organizing at the time of his death.

      Toland was one of the most influential Irish philosophers; deism as a notion begins with him in 1696, largely a consequence of the application of the Cartesian method to religion.  The eighteenth-century encyclopediaists in France, the German enlightenment, and the religious debate in England continued his ideas and developed them as an increasingly rationalist approach to religion.

      Deism was never a mass movement, though its influence can be seen in the Unitarian church.  Toland's ideas were effective elsewhere, for deism easily moves away from any kind of theism and into atheism.  He certainly contributed to the beginning of the decline of religion as a social force.

      His ideas about pantheism can be traced through some of the poets and writers of the Romantic Movement, and even among some like Wordsworth, who were Christians.  Again, like deism and free thought, John Toland had brought a new idea before the world.  He can therefore be seen as an important source of many New Age notions which remain current to this day.

 

 

39

Tony O'Reilly

1936-

 

Today, Tony O'Reilly is widely seen as one of the most remarkable Irishmen of his generation.  His extraordinary career, not just as chief executive officer of H.J. Heinz in Pittsburgh, but as the owner of a host of companies around the world, makes him one of the most notable Irishmen of all time.

      Born in Dublin during the difficult years of the Depression, he had to work hard for success from early on.  He makes no secret of his illegitimate birth, but it seems to have given him a drive that many of his Irish contemporaries lacked.  He never rested.  He was educated by the Jesuits at Belvedere, JAMES JOYCE'S [25] old school.  There he was a success, in the classroom and on the sports field.  At college he played rugby for Ireland on the international level.

      His first job was with the Irish Sugar Company, a state-owned and directed firm which was organized along old-fashioned, semi-socialist lines.  The Irish economy was not very developed then, and the Irish Sugar Company was among one of the country's larger employers.  In an economy where agriculture was a core business, the Irish Sugar Company was important.

      O'Reilly took over from a former military man who had run the business with an eye on the best interests of the small farmers who supplied the sugar beet to the factories.  O'Reilly promoted new management techniques and introduced new products.  In these early days his greatest coup was the rebranding of Irish butter as Kerrygold for the British and European markets, and it remains one of the most successful operations of its kind.

      Some of these ventures were done in association with Heinz, and in 1969, when O'Reilly was only thirty-three, he was head hunted for their London operations.  Four years later he was made president of the company, and in 1979 he was named CEO of Heinz.

      O'Reilly had undoubted business flair, but this was based not only on his great intelligence but also his immense charm.  'He has a million stories and tells them well,' according to Richard M. Cyert, a fellow director at Heinz.  'When you sit down to lunch with him, it's like going to a movie theatre for entertainment.'  O'Reilly's native-Irish wit was only part of his character.  He could also make hard decisions.

      He proved to be a charismatic leader of the company, among the most important in the United States even then, and he quickly revived its fortunes through the 1980s.  Investors on Wall Street were impressed.  He cut expenses, improved Heinz's market share, and expanded sales worldwide.  Profits rose rapidly.  The total shareholder returns averaged 31 per cent a year in the 1980s, which was twice the average stock index of 16.8 per cent.  He had his reward, for during the first six years of the 1990s he earned $182.9 million, placing him near the top of the world's highest paid executives.  But this was by no means all there was to Tony O'Reilly.

      Though he spent much of his time in the United States, he remained an Irishman.  Through an Irish investment company called Fitzwilton he bought into such international household names as Wedgewood China.  He bought up the Irish Independent newspapers, Ireland's largest newspaper chain with several national and provincial titles.  Newspaper interests were also developed in Australia and South Africa.  He owns the Sowetan, one of the most influential papers among black readers in the politically sensitive townships around Johannesburg.  This makes him an important player in the public life of South Africa, struggling to overcome the disadvantages of decades of apartheid.

      In Ireland he is also the major shareholder of Dromoland Castle, a country mansion hotel of world class, and through Arcon, an Irish oil-exploration company, he shares in the new fields being sought around the coasts of the British Isles.

      By the middle of the 1990s his investments were values at over $787 million, moving him up among the richest men in the world.  In any year he may travel up to three hundred thousand miles around the world on business matters.  Though always keen to improve and expand his interests, especially in the rapidly developing area of telecommunications, O'Reilly never lost sight of Ireland or her historical problems.

      In the United States he became one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Ireland Funds, now an international trust with associations among Irish people not only in the United States, but also in Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.  The aim of the fund is to support the social and cultural infrastructure in Ireland, north and south, and in this way to promote peace and reconciliation, social development, and economic welfare.  Since its inception, the Ireland Funds have had a major impact providing seed money and support for countless projects, large and small.  In many ways they transformed aspects of Ireland.  In North America, businessmen of Irish descent saw a way of sharing their good fortune with a country which their ancestors had had to leave generations before, often in great poverty.  In Ireland this aid was much appreciated.

      Tony O'Reilly has emerged as a new kind of Irishman, deeply imbued with pride in his country and its achievements, keen that these should be improved upon and appreciated, but also a man whose influence reaches far beyond Ireland or the United States.  At home in Ireland or elsewhere, he and his family lead a hectic social life, which is all part of the life of modern businessmen of his stature.  Yet in a small country like Ireland, where social life was once lived on a less lavish scale, he has brought about a change of style which is widely influential.

      In financial circles in the United States and in Europe, he is a man widely respected for his achievements.  Upon his retirement from Heinz he was able to devote more of his time and energy to his own business interests.  These included not only those already in hand (like Waterford Wedgewood), but also new acquisitions, such as the London Independent in 1998.

      O'Reilly is also the sort of man from whom great surprises can be expected in the future.  He was even talked about as a possible president of Ireland.  Though this is a non-political office of honour, it would have been a final crown to his career, and some think a just tribute to his achievements.

 

 

40

David Trimble

1944-

 

It takes a man of talent to lead people in a new direction, and over the recent years, some have hoped that David Trimble may be the man to resolve the Ulster situation.

      He was born on 15th October 1944, the son of William Trimble and his wife Ivy, and baptized William David.  He was educated at Bangor Grammar School, before taking a law degree at Queen's University in Belfast.  In 1978 he married Daphne Orr, the daughter of Gerald Orr of Warrenpoint, and they have two sons and two daughters.  Trimble currently lives in Lurgan Town.

      All of these places, Bangor, Warrenpoint, and Lurgan, are strongly Protestant, and Unionist, parts of Ulster.  This early background has defined David Trimble's emotional attachments to his own place and his own kin.

      From 1968 to 1990 he taught in the law faculty at Queen's, first as a lecturer, and then from 1977 as a Senior Lecturer.  He was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1969.  At this time he edited the Northern Ireland Law Reports, as well as publishing a work on Northern Ireland Housing Law (1986) - housing having a central and contentious role in the politics of Northern Ireland.  He was also co-author of Human Rights and Responsibilities in Britain and Ireland published in 1986.

      David Trimble began his political career as an extension of his profession.  For him the law was there to protect his community, and he was keen to insist on the letter of the law.  Good intentions were not enough - in life, as in law, good faith could only be shown by acts.  In pursuit of this he was a founder of the Vanguard Unionist group.

      Elected as member for South Belfast to the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention of 1975-76, he was also chair of the Lagan Valley Unionist Association between 1985 and 1990.  He has been the member for the constituency of Upper Bann, the same strongly Protestant area of his youth, since 17th May 1990, after winning a by-election.  Trimble became the Ulster Unionist Party's spokesman on Constitutional Affairs in 1995.  As an outcome of the debate over the Framework documents, James Molyneaux, the leader of the Unionist Party, was forced to resign on 28th August 1995.  On 8th September 1995, in what some saw as a surprise outcome, Trimble, who had been prominent in demonstrations at Drumcree earlier that year, was elected leader instead.  In 1996 he was elected to the Northern Ireland forum, and was appointed to the Privy Council.

      As an outcome of the Good Friday Agreement, Trimble was elected First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998, though that body remained inactive until a further settlement was reached on the contentious issue of arms still remaining in the hands of terrorist groups on both sides of the community divide.

      In the autumn of 1998 he and JOHN HUME [57] shared the Nobel Prize for Peace, an award posited on the idealistic notion that the Good Friday Agreement meant peace at last in Northern Ireland.  However, though the guns were silent - for the most part - the 'troubles' were very far from over.

      As an indication of his political outlook, he was not only in favour of the introduction of the death penalty for killing a policeman, he has been resolutely anti-European in his attitudes.  Though he voted for keeping Sunday Special, he abstained on the proposition to reduce the age of sexual consent for minors to sixteen in February 1994 - a matter on which many persons of a conservative outlook were highly excited.

      This social conservatism married nicely with his strong Unionism.  But it is perhaps his legalistic mind that dominates his activities, a care of the meaning of words and the interpretation which they might bear.  Lawyers are nothing new in Irish politics, but academics as leaders are a recent phenomenon.  An Orangeman, he has from time to time made populist appearances at such contentious places as Drumcree in July 1996, a place around which much of the fears and anxieties of the Unionist community crystallised, but baiting and brawling do not seem to be his métier (as they are for Ian Paisley).  A local residents group, motivated by Sinn Féin workers, prevented Orangemen marching along a 'traditional route' through the Nationalist estate on the Garvaghy Road in Portadown.

      Once the Ulster Unionist party had been dominated by working-class Orangemen led by landed grandees and rich captains of industry.  Many of Trimble's followers, however, belong to that upper working class, lower middle class, shopkeeping class, that have always lived in fear of social and political change.  The broader middle class has, as a whole, abandoned politics to Ulster's loss but Trimble, as a former academic and a middle-class Protestant, may be able to provide the right leadership to carry the elements of the Unionist party into a new harmony with their fellow citizens.

      Whether his skills as a lawyer and speaker and his nimbleness as a politician can help him carry his party forward, past their demand to the IRA of 'No Guns.  No Government.' remains to be seen.  With wise counselling Trimble may be able to achieve the breakthrough that returned local rule to Ulster, but without the gerrymandering and Protestant domination that it involved in the past.  It will also remain to be seen if the member for Upper Bann and leader of the Northern Ireland Assembly can continue to be the actual Prime Minister of an evolving state.

      Late in 2000 David Trimble has struggled to balance the demands of his party against the needs of the Ulster people.  His legalistic mind is very different from that of previous Unionist leaders, yet his public attitude of toughness, appealing to a small section of his own community, may be what is needed to make progress towards the peace that the majority voted for.  His has been perhaps the hardest task in leadership, and his efforts should be appreciated for what they have achieved in moving on the outlook of the nineteenth century into the twenty-first century.  Against angry voices within and without his party, David Trimble maintained his course.  But as always the future could bring sudden and devastating reversals.

 

 

41

John Louis O'Sullivan

1813-1895

 

If there is one phrase that sums up the ambitions of many Americans in the nineteenth century for the future of their young republic, it is 'manifest destiny'.  That highly influential idea was the original concept of John Louis O'Sullivan.  He came from a long line of Irishmen involved in the struggle for Irish freedom, a lost cause in the eyes of many sensible men.  O'Sullivan saw that the future lay in America, but he espoused it with all the enthusiasm of his ancestors for their native land.

      His great-grandfather, John O'Sullivan, who had been born in Kerry, was an adjutant general in the army of Prince Charles that invaded England in 1745, and was lucky to escape from the field of Culloden when the Jacobite cause was finally defeated.  His grandfather, T.H. O'Sullivan, had been a member of the Irish Brigade in the service of France, but during the American Revolution he had fought with the British in New York.  His father had settled in America as merchant and sea captain, and served in Francisco de Miranda's expedition of 1806 to liberate Venezuela.

      According to family tradition (not always a reliable source), John Louis was born on a British warship in the harbour of Gibraltar in November 1813.  He was educated at a military school in France, then at Westminster School in London, and finally entered Columbia University.  He received law degrees in 1831 and 1837 and practised law in New York City until 1837.

      In that year he began publishing the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in Washington, D.C., with S.D. Langtree.  Later they moved the journal to New York City.  O'Sullivan's aim, so he claimed, was 'to strike the hitherto silent string of the democratic genius of the age and the country.'  America was in an expansionist and nationalist mood, and the westward course of empire excited him and his friends.  They saw it as enclosing not only the whole North American continent (including Canada), but also Cuba.  It was in an article he wrote in the summer of 1845 for the July issue of the magazine that O'Sullivan coined the phrase 'manifest destiny'.  No words could better have exemplified the nationalist spirit of the day.  Dealing with the annexation of Texas the year before, which had basically been seized from Mexico by America, he wrote of 'our manifest destiny to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions'.

      Soon the terms gained wider currency in the dispute with Britain over the Oregon Territory and the border with Canada.  It was also made use of by those interested in seizing Cuba from Spain.  To many Europeans, the 'freedom-loving' Americans were merely on a course of colonial occupation, leading to the creation of an American empire.

      There was another side to the journal, for it had contributions from Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, William Cullen Bryant, and many others.  This was a splendid gallery of talent.  Among his other interests were the New York Morning News, which he edited from 1844 to 1846.  He was also a member of the New York state legislature, in which he advocated for the abolition of capital punishment, a novel and progressive idea for that day and age.

      He married a daughter of Dr Kearney Rodgers in 1846, and from 1849 to 1851 supported Narisco Lopez on his expeditions against Cuba, then a Spanish colony.  Twice he was charged with violation of the neutrality laws.  Though he was not convicted, he later claimed that through these schemes he had 'been ruined for Cuba'.

      However, in February 1854 he was made chargé d'affaires in Portugal and later resident minister.  He stayed there until 1858, expounding the doctrines of American expansion and manifest destiny.  In 1858 he resigned and lived first in Lisbon, then in London, and finally in Paris, until 1871.

      O'Sullivan's last years were spent in obscurity in New York.  Julian Hawthorne, the son of his old friend the novelist, knew him during these years.  He described O'Sullivan as 'handsome, charming, affectionate and unlucky, but an optimist to the last'.  He died in New York City on 24th February 1895.  By that time, the idea of manifest destiny had returned again to inspire the American imagination.  The United States had already taken California and the south-western states from Mexico, and a large part of Oregon from Britain.  Alaska had been bought from the Russians.  Part of Samoa was placed under American control in 1889.  In 1898 the United States annexed Hawaii (American settlers having overthrown the native government of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 with the assistance of three hundred US marines).  At the end of the Spanish-American war in 1898 the United States seized Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines from Spain.  Cuba was liberated under American domination, while Spain assumed its national debt.

      Many Americans were appalled.  The steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie even offered to buy the Philippines for $20 million and give the people their freedom.  But other Americans invoked John Louis O'Sullivan's heady concept of manifest destiny.  This was the beginning of imperial America as a world power, which would eventually see the decline of the other imperial powers, including the British, from whose grasp the O'Sullivans had fled.

      Later still, America would hold further territories in the Pacific and seek to maintain its influence in China before the Communist revolution, and later in Laos and Vietnam.  What began with ambition in 1845 ended in tragedy in 1975 with the fall of Saigon.  John Louis O'Sullivan's manifest destiny was a concept that changed the course of world history.

 

 

42

Cardinal James Gibbons

1834-1921

 

Cardinal James Gibbons served fifty-two years as a bishop and thirty-five years as a cardinal of the Catholic Church during a period which saw the emergence of modern America.  He became symbolic of the place won by both the Irish and the Catholic Church in the new, vigorous life of what had becomes almost inevitably the world's most powerful nation.

      James Gibbons was born in Baltimore, Maryland, but at the age of three was taken back to his father's native Ireland.  A decade later Thomas Gibbons died, and in 1853 his widow returned to the United States and settled in New Orleans with her children.  James began his working life in a grocery store, but feeling a call to the priesthood, he entered a college in Maryland and went on to the local seminary.  He was ordained in June 1860.

      At first he worked as a local pastor and as a chaplain to the Civil War soldiers stationed nearby.  Then, in 1865, he was appointed secretary to the archbishop of Baltimore and began his own rise to ecclesiastical eminence.  In the changes after a Plenary Council in 1866, he was made a bishop (with a title in partibus infidelium - that is, a title to an ancient bishopric in one of those lands lost to the church by the advance of Islam, as in North Africa) in 1868, and was placed over the new Vicariate Apostolic of North Carolina.

      At that time the Catholics in North Carolina were few and scattered.  Gibbons attended the Vatican Council (October 1869-July 1870) but returned to find his district suffering in the aftermath of the Civil War under the excesses of carpetbagging rule.  He was appointed to Richmond in 1872 and almost alone carried the heavy burden of a difficult period in the history of the South.

      From his varied experiences, in 1876 he wrote The Faith of Our Fathers, a simple exposition of the Catholic faith which would be of use not only to members of the church but to potential converts.  This became the most successful work of its kind ever published in North America.

      In May 1877 Gibbons was named coadjutor bishop of Baltimore and succeeded to the See in October.  He was now in charge of the leading Catholic See in the United States.  This made him at once one of the leading figures in the American Catholic church, and the world.  As the archbishop of New York was of a retiring personality, Gibbons stood out as the leader of Catholics.

      Gibbons was not an initiator in a cutting-edge fashion, but once a scheme was under way he gave it all his energy.  This was the case with the Third Plenary Council, and the creation of the Catholic University of America.  His successes led to Gibbons being raised to the status of cardinal in 1886.  He also became chancellor of the university and was instrumental in saving it from ruin in 1904 when it fell into grim financial difficulties.

      The last decades of the nineteenth century were ones of great change and great difficulty for America and for the church.  There was a huge increase in emigrants from Europe, many of whom were Catholics from Germany, Poland, and Italy.  These new Americans transformed the nature of not only American society, but the largely Irish nature of the Catholic Church.  Gibbons played a major rule in contriving solutions to the problems of the day.

      America was an industrial democracy and had needs different from the old nations of Europe, with which the officials in Rome were most familiar.  Gibbons counselled against too hasty a condemnation of 'secret societies' and supported the Knights of Labour, preventing that movement from being condemned.  He also prevented the writings of Henry George from being placed on the Index (the Church's list of banned books), though these had been the cause of much dissension in New York, where a priest named Edward McGlynn supported George for mayor.  Catholic workers were central to the growth of America, and Gibbons represented to Rome that the American way had its own protections, and that it would be harmful to the church to act the same as it had in Europe (for instance in Ireland, where many nationalists felt that Rome acted more at the behest of the British government than the Irish bishops.)

      'It is necessary to recognize that, in our age and in our country, obedience cannot be blind,' he remarked, apropos of the church and the unions.  'To lose the heart of the people would be a misfortune for which the friendship of the few rich and powerful would be no compensation.'

      Gibbons worked to create a sense of unity among the various Catholic nationalities, emphasizing that whatever their backgrounds they were all now united as Americans and as Catholics.  Yet he also defended the Catholic Church’s claim to its own parochial school system (as against an imposed state system), and also against European writers who saw the emergence of a new kind of heresy in what they identified as 'Americanism'.

      Gibbons had sprung from Irish roots, but his greatest pride was in being an American.  He admired the American Constitution as the greatest document ever to spring from the pen of man.  A strong American patriot, he drew admiration from many other Americans such as William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt.  Indeed, in 1917 Roosevelt said that 'taking your life as a whole, I think you now occupy the position of being the most respected, venerated, and useful citizen of our country'.

      His emphasis on the benefits of the separation of church and state were very American and not always echoed by European writers, but in America they were important in creating a climate of religious tolerance in which the church could flourish.  The civil government provided the protection in which the civil liberties of all could be exercised.

      Gibbons died in Baltimore in March 1921, after a long and active life.  He had ordained 2, 471 priests and consecrated twenty-three bishops, a record which remained until the end of the Second World War.  These figures alone speak of the extraordinary growth over which he presided, and the vitality which this Irish American brought to the creation of modern America.

 

 

43

John Devoy

1842-1928

 

When John Devoy died in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on 29th September 1928, the eighty-six-year-old Irish patriot was virtually penniless.  The last of the old Fenian leaders, he had given his whole life to the cause of Ireland.  In its report of his death, The Times said he was 'the most bitter and persistent, as well as the most dangerous enemy of this country which Ireland has produced since Wolfe Tone'.  He had lived to see Ireland gain her freedom, but it had brought him no reward beyond the joy of being proved right.

      Devoy had been born in Kill, County Kildare, on 3rd September 1842, the son of a small farmer.  His father was involved in both the movement for Catholic emancipation led by DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] and in the more revolutionary Young Ireland.  Their house was full of debate on the future of Ireland and what direction it should take.  For John Devoy there would be no doubt: it was to be the revolutionary road.

      After the famine, the family moved to the city, where his father worked in a brewery.  While working as a clerk, John also attended some courses at the new Catholic University (then in the charge of its founder, the famous priest John Henry Newman).  He joined the Fenians, and in 1861 the French Foreign Legion in order to learn the art of war.  He spent a year in Algeria, which the French were in the long process of subduing.

      Returning to Ireland in 1862, recognized as a born conspirator, he was placed in charge of the Fenian scheme to subvert the British army by placing Fenians widely throughout its ranks.  Efforts were made to arrest him in September 1865, but it was not until he was captured in the aftermath of the escape of James Stephens, the Fenian 'Head Centre', in February 1866, that he was betrayed and sentenced to fifteen years in prison.  In 1871 he was released with four other Fenians on condition that they left the British Empire.

      Devoy immigrated to the United States, where he and his friends were greeted warmly by the Irish community.  He joined the New York Herald as a reporter, and rose to being in charge of the foreign desk.  But in 1879 James Gordon Bennett dismissed him for supporting CHARLES PARNELL [5], whom the proprietor opposed.

      In New York, Devoy worked in succession on the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Journal, and on the Herald and Evening Post in Chicago.  Then, in 1881, he set up his own paper in New York, the Irish Nation, and became a leading figure in Clann na Gael, the Fenian party.  From 1875 to 1876 he helped to organize the rescue of the exiled Fenian prisoners from Fremantle Prison in Australia.  He obtained funds from the Clan to support the work of the submarine pioneer John Philip Holland in building his Fenian Ram, intended to help destroy the British navy.  But his greatest achievement was through his journalism and his role as a pivotal figure around which others banded.

      In 1878 MICHAEL DAVITT [24] arrived to lecture in the United States.  In October, he and Devoy called for a new policy for the Fenian movement, which was to be called the New Departure.  This meant that the revolutionaries would rally behind Charles Parnell and the parliamentary party in Ireland and support the Land League.  Devoy then sent a telegram to the party, offering conditional support to Parnell.  He travelled to Europe, but at a meeting in Paris in January 1879 the supreme council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood rejected the notion of the New Departure as put to them by Devoy and Davitt.  In April and June, Devoy and Davitt met Parnell in Dublin, and the New Departure went ahead.

      Devoy reported on his mission to Europe at the Clan na Gael convention in August in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania.  The Irish Americans were left divided among themselves over what should be done.  Their interests were now involved both in Ireland and, more complexly, in America.

      In the US census of 1880 the Irish were estimated at 27.8 per cent of the foreign-born population.  The children of Irish-born parents were estimated at 2,756,054.  At a convention of the New York Irish Republicans in Saratoga, John Devoy and others planned to detach the Irish vote from the Democrats and move it, if they could, to the Republicans.

      In 1882, a crucial year in Irish history, which saw the murder of the chief secretary of Ireland and one of his officials in Dublin's Phoenix Park by terrorists, and the reintroduction of rigorous measures to suppress protest and discontent in Ireland, Devoy published The Land of Erin, a statement of his views on the terrible past and the possible future of the country.  In the Irish Nation he focused on trying to break the relationship between England and America, but the paper was closed down in 1885.  On 30th August 1900, before the US presidential election, Devoy formed with Patrick Egan and Patrick Ford the Irish-American Union to oppose the policies of the Republican William McKinley, who they saw as advocating imperialism and an understanding with Britain.  Instead, they urged support for William Jennings Bryan, the Democratic and populist candidate - a reverse of what they had wanted in 1880.  McKinley won.

      In 1903 Devoy founded a weekly, The Gaelic American, which expounded the ideas of the Fenians and Clan na Gael, which had now withdrawn its support from the reunited Irish party.  With Judge Daniel Cohalan, Devoy then worked in the coming decade to unite the disparate aspects of the Irish movement.

      During the first years of the First World War, up to 1917, when America came in on the Allied side, Devoy was in touch with German agents eliciting support for the Irish cause by way of guns for the Easter week uprising and defence funds for ROGER CASEMENT [94].  Yet when the new nation emerged and EAMON DE VALERA [2] visited America as president of the Irish republic in 1920, relations were difficult; the leadership of Ireland was evidently passing from Irish Americans back to native Irish.  This generated a certain sense of ill feeling.  However, Devoy supported the Irish Free State when it came into existence, and he finally returned to Ireland on a brief visit in 1924, the year after the civil war ended.  As an American, he opposed the League of Nations and the World Court, those brainchildren of Woodrow Wilson's 'new order', because he felt they posed entangling external alliances to American freedom.

      He was then working on his memoirs, Recollections of an Irish Rebel.  His collected correspondence has proved a rich source for historians interested in the details of the Irish revolutionary movements.  He kept alive the old Fenian tradition, at last passing it on to a younger generation who had fought in 1916 and in the troubles.  For that reason his remains were brought back for burial in Ireland, with honours from the new government, but his best work had been the creation of not only the modern Irish state, but the unity of the Irish-American community.

 

 

44

Cardinal Paul Cullen

1803-1878

 

At the Vatican Council held in Rome in 1870, Cardinal Cullen is said to have drafted the terms of the dogma of papal infallibility.  This was typical of the man, who since he had been appointed archbishop of Armagh in 1850 had sought to impose on the Catholic church in Ireland a rigid and unquestioning obedience to authority.

      Paul Cullen was born at Ballitore in County Kildare on 29th April 1803, just after the Act of Union.  His first studies were at a nearby Quaker school and then at Carlow College.  In 1820 he went to Rome to study at the College of Propaganda in Rome, where he was ordained a priest in 1822.  His first appointment was as professor of sacred scripture and Hebrew in the college.  He was then made rector of the Irish College in Rome in 1829.  The influence of British diplomats was very strong in the Vatican, for the popes were, at all times, keen to secure the favour of the great powers.  In Ireland this was seen as a distinct disadvantage.  Cullen acted as the Roman agent of the Irish and Australian bishops in making their views, which did not always coincide with those of the British government, known to the Vatican.

      One of these issues, which arose in 1840, was the question of the national school system, which the government proposed.  This would have provided for a type of school in which the bishops thought that state influence might overwhelm any Catholic or Irish ethos.  Cullen cautiously proposed to Rome that each bishop should be free in his own diocese to choose whether or not to join the scheme.  In the end, the schools passed under the management of the local parish priests (or rectors in the case of those for the Protestant communities).  A secularizing scheme was defeated.

      Cullen, however, opposed the Queen's Colleges; Rome duly condemned these, and urged the Irish bishops to establish a Catholic university.  In Rome he witnessed the excess of the Italian revolution of 1848.  When the Roman republic was established and overthrew the papal government, Cullen was made rector of the College of Propaganda.  When the republican authorities ordered the closure of the college, Cullen called upon the protection of the US minister to protect his American students and so saved the institution.  But this experience gave Cullen an abiding distaste for revolutionary republicans of any kind, especially in Ireland.

      For the rest of his life he sternly countered any revolutionary action in Ireland, while supporting the constitutional parties that respected the position of the church.  He was appointed archbishop of Armagh in 1850, despite the fact that he had absolutely no pastoral or administrative experience of the country.  At Thurles in 1850, the year from which the reorganized church in Ireland can be dated, he called the first synod of the church in Ireland since the twelfth century.

      Cullen was the chief architect of what is now thought of as the 'traditional' Irish Catholic church, with its discipline, modes of devotion, and social and political attitudes.  He was often at odds with other leaders, such as John McHale of Tuam, but Cullen had the ear of Rome, and that was what counted.

      His activities were varied and of consequence.  He defended tenants' rights, championed poorhouse reforms, advocated the creation of industrial schools, and sought to raise the quality of education.  He brought Newman to Ireland to help establish the Catholic University that he had urged upon the hierarchy.  Because it could not grant degrees this was a failure, though it medical school survived and flourished.  He founded Clonliffe College to improve the training of Irish priests.

      To generations of Irish nationalists, the theme of Cullen's whole career, to make the Catholic Church the dominant force in Irish society, was one to be approved.  But it has left the country was a tragic heritage.  Before Cullen there had been a growing sense of accommodation between the different churches and traditions in Ireland.  Cullen's extreme ultra-montanism thwarted this and threw up barriers between them.  Cullen, it has been said, had no political theories, but only the interest of his own church at heart.

      'Once Ireland began to be regarded as a Catholic nation,' Professor F.S.L. Lyons wrote, 'there was built into the separate identity an element of puritanical exclusiveness very far from the vision of a WOLFE  TONE [11], or a THOMAS  DAVIS [23], of an Ireland in which the different cultures would eventually be reconciled.

      Though it would have appalled Cullen to think of it, in due course his brooding influence brought about the long, quarter century of war in Northern Ireland.  Seeking only to ensure the influence of his own church, he cast his country into the hands of revolutionaries merely interested in using the Catholic identity of their community as a mask for ambitions that stood totally opposed to his.

      By seeking to make the Catholic Church ascendant in Ireland, Cullen had contributed to its decline.  His contemporaries in the United States, who sought to benefit from the protection offered by the constitution of a pluralist republican society, were much wiser.

      Cardinal Cullen died in Dublin on 24th October 1878.  He left a church outwardly powerful, triumphantly self-satisfied.  But his policies had sowed within it the seeds of its own decline a century later.

 

 

45

Eugene O'Neill

1888-1953

 

The first American to win the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1936), Eugene O'Neill was also the major dramatist of the Irish community in America.  All his plays, with their sense of doomed misfortune, reflect not only his own personal experience but also those of many Irish people, in Ireland and abroad.

      His grim patriarchs, his doomed mothers, the curse of alcohol - all of this was presented with an almost Greek sense of tragedy as an essential part of the human condition.  After his death, Time magazine commented that 'Before O'Neill, the US had theatre; after him it had drama.'

      The Nobel citation said that the reward was 'for the power, honesty, and deep-felt emotion of his dramatic work, which embodies an original concept of tragedy'.  That sense of tragedy arose from his experiences as an Irish American.

      Eugene Gladstone O'Neill was born in a New York hotel room on 16th October 1888.  His parents sprang directly from Irish roots.  His father, James O'Neill, was a prominent actor and a theatrical idol of the day; his mother was Ella Quinlan.  James O'Neill had been born in Ireland in 1849 and was brought to America by his parents at the age of five.  He was on the stage and getting leading roles in New York when he became typecast in 1882 as Edmond Dantes in The Count of Monte Cristo.  Such was his success that he played the role over six thousand times.  An Irish nationalist, he gave his son the second name of Gladstone out of admiration for the British prime minister who introduced the first Irish home rule bill in 1886.

      Ella O'Neill was neurotic, shy, and mystically inclined, and the over-emotional nature of his parents' relationship deeply affected Eugene.  Both his parents were Catholics, but despite his education from the Sisters of Charity and the De La Salle Brothers, he had lost his faith by the age of fifteen and refused to go to church any longer.  Religion became merely an episode of growth, but it lingered in the depths of his feelings nevertheless.  Here there is a strong parallel with that other creative artist of the Irish tradition, JAMES JOYCE [25].  At this time O'Neill also learned that his mother had become addicted to the morphine she took to ease her post-childbirth pains.  All his life he would struggle with a sense of the cruel nature of God, fate, or the universe, whatever it was that made people's lives hell.

      O'Neill completed his early education at Betts Academy in Stamford, Connecticut, in 1906, and secured entry to Princeton University.  But this lasted only a year, and he was thrown out.  His only other formal education was a playwriting course taken in 1914 at Harvard in Professor G.P. Baker's famous Forty-seven Workshop.

      Between 1907, when he dropped out of college, and 1913, O'Neill did many things.  For a while he lived a rakish life in Greenwich Village; he toured with his father's production of The Count of Monte Cristo as assistant manager, worked as a secretary, sailed as a seaman, prospected for gold in Honduras (where he suffered from malaria), and starved as a newspaper reporter.  He wrote poetry, and later contracted tuberculosis.  He also tried to commit suicide.  If nothing else, these adventures gave him a wider view of life than the college classroom would have provided.

      While recovering from tuberculosis, then an often fatal condition, he began to write.  Thirst, his first play, was produced in 1916 by the Provincetown Players, and started a long association.  However, it was his next play, Beyond the Horizon, in 1920, that confirmed the arrival of a major new American dramatic talent.  It won the Pulitzer Prize, and brought recognition to O'Neill as one of America's most important playwrights.

      This was followed by Anna Christie, Emperor Jones, and The Hairy Ape.  All were vivid, powerful plays.  Of Anna Christie (1921), he said, 'The play has no ending.  Three characters have been revealed in all their intrinsic verity, under the acid test of a fateful crisis in their lives'.

      He produced an immense body of work, some forty-five plays, varying from elaborate tragedies to light entertainments, and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize four times.  The Nobel Prize was his final crown.  During his career, in search of a deeper meaning and a broader significance to life, O'Neill moved to more symbolic and experimental forms.

      Though the influence of Euripides, Strindberg and Nietzsche can be traced through his work and outlook, there is also an important personal strain.  This lies not only in the highly autobiographical nature of his plays (especially Long Day's Journey into Night), but in the general attempt to recreate the American experience onstage.  He was the first important playwright to attempt this.

      Just as important was the influence of his father, whose always popular melodramas Eugene claimed to despise.  Yet he could not escape his theatrical childhood, nor could he quite escape the Catholic religion, so deeply ingrained in so many Irish Americans.  His own marriage and family life was painful.  He brooded on his sense of sin and guilt, but his characters find little or no forgiveness, grace, or reconciliation.  They are pitted against each other in a narrow space, his themes drawn from the incidents of his own life but given no larger context.  This makes his plays often seem airless and claustrophobic, but this, too, reflects much of the inner American experience.

      Illness forced him to give up writing, and after long years of isolation, Eugene O'Neill died in a Boston hotel room on 27th November 1953.  His last words reflected his sense of doom: 'Born in a hotel room - and God damn it - died in a hotel room.'  Arthur Miller, a playwright of the new generation, said: 'O'Neill was the great wrestler, fighting God to a standstill.  The theatre will forever need the towering rebuke of his life and his work and his agony.'

      In Eugene O'Neill, America possessed a great writer, one whose life and work influence both his contemporaries and a younger generation of writers.  But the heart of this American dramatist drew on the inner life of the Irish-American community, and on the dark secrets of the emigrants that success in business and politics often hid.

 

 

46

Grace O'Malley

1530-1603

 

Ireland has had many women heroes over the centuries, but few have been of such romantic stature as Grace O'Malley, the courageous pirate 'Queen of the West'.  She has come down to us in legend as one of the most remarkable women of Irish history.

      The western province of Connaught has always been something of a 'Wild West', the last frontier which the invaders had to face.  It is a place that has long lived by the sea, and Grace came from a family of seafarers.  Her name in Gaelic, Granuaile, means 'Grace of the Short Hair' - suggesting a manly cast of features.  She was born (it is thought) about 1530, and was the only daughter of Owen O'Malley, the chief of the O'Malleys who ruled the western coast from Achill Island in the north to Inishbofin in the south.

      At the age of sixteen she married Donal O'Flaherty, one of the clan who held the lands to the south of the O'Malleys in Connemara.  These were lawless days, with feuds, raids, land grabbings, and piracy, though English historians perhaps made it all sound even wilder than it was.  Donal was nicknamed the Cock due to his flashy courage in battle.  He was murdered by the Joyces, who held the land to the east.  Bereft of her husband, Grace did not despair.  She rallied her own people and had to defend his castle, Castlekirk, on the shores of Lough Corrib, earning herself the title the Hen - hence the Gaelic title of the fortress, Caisleàn na Circe - the Hen's Castle'.

      Grace established her own base on Clare Island, one protected by a ring of forts around the shores of Clew Bay.  From this lair, her fleets of ships and galleys would sail out to prey on the cargo vessels that were rounding the Irish coast en route from Spain to Scotland.  She also built Carrickkildavnet Castle, which stands guard over the mouth of Clew Bay.  This is an elegant fifteenth-century tower house, but was only one of her strongholds.

      In 1566 Grace married again, this time to Richard Burke, the chief of the Mayo Burkes, another powerful clan.  Legend has it that when she married Richard, they agreed that either of them could annul the marriage after a year.  Richard had his own stronghold at Carrighowley Castle, where they lived in what seems to the modern eye to have been very cramped quarters.  A year later, when Richard returned from one of his own expeditions, she had locked the castle door.  From the parapet above she called down to the unfortunate man, 'I dismiss you'.

      In 1577 Grace was captured while looting the territory of the earl of Desmond in Munster, and was imprisoned for eighteen months in Limerick.  She was released on condition that she reform her old piratical ways.  Law of a new kind was coming to the west of Ireland - English law.  When the viceroy Sir Richard Bingham began to enforce that law by violent means in Connaught, Grace decided she would appeal directly to Queen Elizabeth I, as one queen to another.  She left Mayo to seek an audience with the queen in London, and got her wish.  In September 1593 the meeting took place.

      Lively Irish legend asserts that Grace O'Malley did indeed speak ass one sovereign to another, and was forthright to the point of insult.  She was offered the title of countess, and retorted that Queen Elizabeth had no right to think of offering such a title, for they were equals; she was no vassal.  However, the reality may have been different.  It is likely that Queen Elizabeth admired the powerful intelligence of the pirate queen.

      Grace was allowed to return to her home in the west and to live there unmolested.  She is thought to have died about 1603, though this, like other details of her life, is uncertain.  Today she remains a legend of the west, and at Louisburgh in Mayo an interpretative centre presents her life and legend for visitors.  Her son, Tiobaid na Long, 'Theobald of the Ships', was murdered in 1629 near Ballintober, where his elaborate tomb can be seen in the de Burgo (or Burke) chapel.

      Whatever legend has done to enhance the life of Grace O'Malley, she remains a striking figure and a reminder that the role of women in past periods of Irish society was not always a subservient one.  In the feudal society of the fifteenth century, men did not always have their way.  The legendary queen became something of a model for the powerful women who ran Ireland's homes in later centuries.

      The sad remains of her tower house can still be seen on Clare Island.  The house was used as a coastguard station in the nineteenth century, but is a ruin today.  A mile and a half across the island are the remains of a Cistercian church from the Middle Ages.  Here there is a tomb that is said to be the final resting place of 'the Pirate Queen'.  The O'Malley crest is carved on the stonework, bearing the proud O'Malley motto: Terra Marique Potens, 'Mighty by Land and Sea'.

 

 

47

St Columban

c. 543-615

 

In the age when Ireland was 'the island of Saints and Scholars', St Columban was one of its leading figures, a personality of international reputation.

      Also known as Columbanus, Columban was born in Leinster about 543.  He studied at the monastic school of St Sinell at Cluaninis, on the shores of Lough Erne in Ulster.  He then entered the monastery of St Comgall at Bangor, which was renowned for both its sanctity and learning.  Here he taught for some thirty years, wrote a commentary on the psalms, and composed poems.

      About 583 he was sent by St Comgall with twelve others to conduct a mission to Europe.  He preached in Brittany and the Vosges, having been invited there by the Merovingian kind Childebert.  He settled in Burgundy and founded the monasteries of Anegray, Luxeuil, and Fontaines.  From these three motherhouses some two hundred other monasteries were later established.  (From Anegray, St Killian later travelled to Germany to Wurtzburg and founded a monastery in 742; St Emmeram went up into Regensburg and founded one in 739.)  St Columban also composed sets of rules and regulations for both monks and hermits.

      Coming from Ireland, he was dismayed with what he found in Burgundy.  He thought the local clergy were degenerate, the Frankish court immoral, and some of the local customs shocking.  With missionary zeal he introduced the strict Irish system of penance, which involved auricular confession - personal confession to an individual priest, an innovation which the church has maintained.

      He also kept to the Celtic style of tonsure and celebrated Easter by a different calculation than the rest of the church.  He had difficulties with the local bishops about this confusing matter, and tried to enlist the support of Pope Gregory I to his position.  In this letter he used the term totius Europae, 'the whole of Europe', to express the Irish concept of the West as a common cultural unit.

      Columban was eventually expelled in 608 from Burgundy by King Theudric, whom he had attacked for maintaining a concubine (these Irish monks were nothing if not strict).  He passed through Neustria, where he had been invited by King Clothar, and settled near Zurich in what is now Switzerland, where his companion St Gall founded the monastery of St Gallen.  But he was driven out by the natives for his attack on their paganism.

      He passed over the Alps into what is now northern Italy and founded yet another monastery at Bobbio in 612.  From this new foundation his influence spread over all of Europe.  He died at Bobbio on 23rd November 615, and was buried in the church abbey, now dedicated to St Columban.

      Columban's letters, monastic rules, and poetry belong to the great canon of Irish medieval literature.  One of these is a song of encouragement to his companions rowing against the current of the Rhine.  Austere though their religion may have been, these monks found new delight in nature, and the margins of the manuscripts for which their monasteries are famous have scribbled in them delightful little verses about the birds and trees and waters that surrounded them.

      They had a lasting effect on the high culture of the Middle Ages.  In Ireland, the culture of Christian civilization was preserved during the long night of the barbarian invasions.  It was then carried back to rekindle the civilization of Europe as a whole - the totius Europae of St Columban.

      His successors at Bobbio, however, ameliorated the strictness of the Irish rule he had introduced with less severe elements from the rule of St Benedict, and exercised important influence on Western civilization.  for centuries to come, the Irish monasteries, from Clonmacnoise in the West to Vienna in the east, provided Europe with its scholarship.

      St Columban's work marked the dawn of a new age and the rise of Charlemagne and the Carolingian empire, which gave Europe a new sense of its identity, to which the new European Union looks back.

 

 

48

Samuel Beckett

1906-1989

 

Yet another of Ireland's Nobel Prize winners, Samuel Beckett, in his spare, bleak plays, seems to many of his admirers to epitomize the sense of despair many felt immediately after the war, the sense of alienation and isolation, of suppressed rage with life, which characterize the modern age.  In 1969, the citation of the Nobel committee spoke of 'his writings, in which - in new forms for the novel and drama - the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation'.  According to Robert Hogan, 'He remains perhaps the century's most acclaimed and influential avant-garde writer'.

      Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in Foxrock, a genteel, largely Protestant suburb of Dublin, on 13th April 1906.  He had a comfortable upbringing in a material sense.  He was educated at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland – OSCAR WILDE'S [97] old school.  He entered Trinity College in the autumn of 1923, where he studied modern languages (French in particular) and took his bachelor's degree in 1927.  For a few months he taught French at a Protestant school in Belfast before going to the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris as a lecturer.

      It was in Paris that he made friends with the Irish poet and art critic Thomas McGreevy, through whom he was introduced into the circle of JAMES JOYCE [25].  Joyce was to be the greatest literary influence on Beckett's own work.  He was one of a number of the friends who assisted the nearly blind Joyce by reading and researching material for 'Work in Progress' eventually published as Finnegans Wake.  Beckett was also one of the young men in whom Joyce's daughter took a romantic interest.

      Beckett had literary ambitions of his own.  His first publications were a long poem called 'Whoroscope' in 1930, and a short study of Proust for a London publishers in 1931.  In the autumn of 1930 he went back to Dublin to teach French at Trinity College, where McGreevy introduced him to JACK YEATS [26], whom Beckett deeply admired.  Indeed the later pictures of Yeats, with their isolated figures and blasted landscapes, have much in common with Beckett's writing.

      Beckett's stay in Dublin was fraught with ill health and personal and emotional problems, especially with his demanding mother.  Having taken his master's degree, he went back to Paris in December 1931.  There he began a novel (which remained unpublished till after his death) and a collection of stories, More Pricks Than Kicks, which makes use of familiar Dublin in a unique way, pointing towards his later work.

      Beckett now identified with his French friends, and during the occupation he worked with the French Resistance, though in 1942 he was forced to flee south to Roussillon.  Later he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.  Ireland may have been neutral - Samuel Beckett was not.

      On his return to Paris, Beckett settled into his major period of production.  He was now writing in French rather than English.  Molloy was finished in 1948, and was followed by Malone Meurt.  By the first months of 1950 he had finished L'Innommable.

      But these books, when published, either in French or English, made little impact compared with the sensation that was caused by the production of his play En Attendant Godot in a theatre studio early in 1953.  As Waiting for Godot, it was successfully produced in London and New York.  Its novelty and strange atmosphere at once made it a talking point not only among the avant-garde, but the general public.  It was the beginning of the Theatre of the Absurd, which many saw as growing out of the existential philosophies of Sartre and Camus.

      His earlier work came back into print, often in his own translations.  In 1956 came Fin de Partie (Endgame in English).  He ceased to write novels, and his plays became briefer and more etiolated.  In 1961 he married his long-time companion Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil.  Though they maintained flats beside each other in Paris, much of their time was spent in the country or in North Africa.  In July 1989 Beckett's wife died, and he himself passed away on 22nd December.

      The following year one critic observed that 'by the year 2000 Beckett criticism will equal that of Wagner and Napoleon, who are the most written about personae in history'.  Beckett himself was an obsessively private person, and his biographers have not even yet fully plumbed the depths of his experiences.  It is clear now, however, that though he wrote in French and published in Paris as a European author, much of his initial inspiration draws on his early experiences in Dublin.  Indeed, it was the ambition of the actor Peter O'Toole to film Waiting for Godot in the bleak rocky district of the Burren in the west of Ireland, as its windswept acres seemed to echo the barren isolation of the play.  Like Joyce, who influenced him greatly, Beckett never escaped from Ireland, and a haunted childhood and illness were major matters in his life.  Many would now regard as his best work not the later briefer items, but the more closely grained world of his novels and early plays.

      When the Nobel committee spoke of destitution, they seemed to be thinking of the bleakness of life and soul which his work reflects, and thinking how appropriate this was for an era threatened with annihilation at a moment's notice.  Personal courage would have no place in an atomic war, but for Beckett, waiting for the end had become intolerable, while life itself was even more so.

      Quite how his work will wear with time is still a matter of controversy, but his influence on the literature of the late twentieth century was very great.  'Beckettian' is an adjective that everyone understands the meaning of, even if they cannot understand the meaning of Beckett.

 

 

49

George Bernard Shaw

1856-1950

 

In contrast to SAMUEL BECKETT [48] and EUGENE O'NEILL [45], George Bernard Shaw epitomizes a sense of optimism about man and his achievements.  He was another of the Irish artists to be awarded the Nobel Prize for his work, 'which is marked by both idealism and humanity, its stimulating satire often being infused with a singular poetic beauty'.

      These comments provide an insight into the work of one of the world's most important dramatists, who was born in Dublin on 26th July 1856, a decade after the famine, and lived to see the arrival of the atom bomb.  His family was middle-class, decayed gentry, in financial difficulties.  A poor student at school, Shaw found employment in an estate agent's office, but did not find the work agreeable.

      In 1876 he migrated to London to join his mother and sister.  There he found desultory work as a journalist.  He attempted to write novels, but these were either failures or sold badly.  But he was tenacious.  He later commented that poverty threw his mother into the struggle for survival, and vowed never again to do 'an honest day's work'.  He thought his later success validated this early decision to disregard 'all the quack duties which lead the poor lad of fiction to the White House'.

      From his mother he had inherited a love and knowledge of music; music, indeed, had been the constant factor in his upbringing.  And it was as a music critic, and then an art critic for the newspapers that he began to be better known.  He then added drama critic to the list.  Having commented on the work of others, he thought that he might do better.

      Since 1884 he had been a socialist and member of the Fabian Society, a group of socialists who worked for the evolutionary improvement of society rather than immediate revolution.  He had been converted to socialism after hearing the American Henry George speak in London.  He was deeply involved in the society, editing Fabian Essays in 1887.  For many years he was also involved in municipal politics.

      For thirteen years Shaw wrote for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, his views on art and drama proving effective in their impact on taste.  Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he railed against the settled, comfortable nature of London theatre.  He was also a champion of Wagner.  His strong opinions about art, society, and politics proved from the beginning to be the material for his plays.

      Between 1885 and 1913 he wrote some twenty-five plays, of all lengths.  Over the length of his career, up to 1939, he wrote an average of a play a year.  These were not only produced, but were published as books, equipped with long prefaces treating not only the plays, but their subject matter and background, some of which dealt with medicine, housing, religion, and so on.  These were published by the author himself, his ostensible publisher being his agent, so that Shaw could control all details of their production.

      His first play was Widower's Houses, which attacked slum landlords.  This was followed by Arms and the Man in 1894, which lampooned the romance attached to soldiering, especially in the British Empire and America.  Mrs Warren's Profession, which dealt with a prostitute of great capacity who runs a series of brothels, continued his attack on social problems.  It was so shocking that it was banned by the censor and not produced until 1902.

      His plays have little in the way of mere mechanical plot.  They are dramas of conflict and debate, the clash of the old and the new, the young and the aged.  He remained at work until the age of eighty-three, when he wrote In Good King Charles' Golden Days.  Mentally he remained alert and caustic till the end of his life.

      In 1898 Shaw married Charlotte Payne Townshend, an Irish heiress.  Though he maintained a London flat, in 1906 they moved to 'Shaw's Corner' at Ayot St Lawrence in Hertfordshire.

      In old age Shaw became one of those public figures whom the newspaper could rely on for comments on everything from nudism to the atom bomb.  To a vast public unacquainted with his plays and books, he became best known for My Fair Lady, a musical based on his play Pygmalion.  The estate of this strong-minded socialist benefited by many millions of dollars.

      Eccentric to the end, he had also left money for alphabet reform, another one of his quirks.  A novel revision of the alphabet was eventually awarded a prize, and a version of Androcles and the Lion was published, using the new forms - but alas the Shaw alphabet failed to gain acceptance.

      Stripped of all its merely ephemeral details, Shaw's career is still an extraordinary one.  His plays are still alive on the stage.  Though many of the issues which he addressed are now dead ones, his hatred of hypocrisy and cant is still very much alive.  He was, in the eyes of many of his admirers in Europe and America, the greatest dramatist of the twentieth century, and a rival of merit to William Shakespeare.

      Shaw had hated his youth in Dublin and was glad to leave it, but he and his wife and family had financial interests there.  The perennial problems of Ireland came under his review in John Bull's Other Island, which dealt with the mental barriers between the natives of both islands.  Here, the Englishman Tom Broadbent is mystically enchanted with Ireland's romantic past, while his friend Larry Doyle is a realist, intent on transforming the dying, dreaming nation.  In this debate Shaw's own mouthpiece is the former priest Peter Keegan, whose middle way is an ideal state, a Shavian socialist commonwealth.  The play was written for the Abbey Theatre in 1904, but rejected by them, and only performed in Dublin in September 1916, a year which had seen other kinds of dreamers at large with guns on the Irish streets.

      In her will, his wife left her money to an institution to improve the manners of Irishmen - perhaps a common on her husband's own abrasive nature.  When he died Shaw left part of his estate, later enriched by royalties from My Fair Lady, to the National Gallery in Dublin, where he had spent so many happy hours as a young man.  It was from the great European masters of that collection that he gained his first hint that the ideal of the artist was 'to shew us to ourselves as we really are'.

      As Shavian scholar William F. Feeney put it: 'Shaw, young man of Dublin, senior citizen of the world, continues to stand before us on his soapbox, Mephistophelian, nimble, provocative, outrageous, teasing, or brow-beating us to hear him out.'

 

 

50

Finley Peter Dunne

1867-1936

 

Finley Peter Dunne, the creator of Mr Dooley, one of the most famous Irish characters of all times, was born on 10th July 1867, and reared among the Irish of Chicago.  His parents were Irish immigrants who had come to America as children.  His father's sister was a prominent educator in Chicago, while a cousin was archbishop of San Francisco.

      Dunne was educated at a public school in Chicago.  When he left school in 1884, he went to work as messenger boy at the Chicago Tribune, which was his introduction to the hectic life of the newspapers.  He was promoted to reporter, and by the age of twenty-one, the talented young man was city editor of the Chicago Times.  He was also a staff man on the Chicago Evening Post (1892-97) and editor of the Chicago Journal (1897-1900).

      From 1892 he had been writing short humorous pieces for the Post in the Irish brogue.  It was only when he began writing for the Journal a series featuring the observations of life and current events by a tavern keeper, Mr Martin Dooley, that he achieved fame.  These were published widely, and even in England the Newnes press, and publishers like Routledge and Grant Richards, brought them to the attention of the British and Irish public.

      The first collection was called Mr Dooley in Peace and War (1898) - the war being the controversial Spanish-American War.  It was Martin Dooley's ironic commentary on that imperial enterprise that made Dunne even more famous.  His influence over foreign policy was recognized, and one of his biographers, Elmer Ellis, called him 'the wit and censor of the nation'.

      Dunne was on friendly terms with Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and William C. Whitney, politicians then, as now, being careful to cultivate influential columnists.  Many other collections followed, leading up to Mr Dooley Says (1910).  These widely read and influential books made Dunne world famous as the creator of a truly original character, and a humorist with a sharp eye.

      At the turn of the century he moved to New York City to edit the Morning Telegraph - that was when New York had a wife range of papers.  He married Margaret Abbott of Boston, by whom he had four children.  In New York he rose to become part owner of the American Magazine, and later still editor of Collier's Weekly.  In these journals he wrote nondialect columns which were acute and witty, but did not achieve the same universal fame as the Mr Dooley pieces.

      As is so often the case with creative talents, the money he received (more than a million dollars) snuffed out his talent as a writer.  He retired to Long Island in 1911.  After 1920 he wrote very little, though in 1936 he wrote some autobiographical pieces which his son Philip eventually edited as Mr Dooley Remembers (1963).  He died in New York City on 24th April 1936.

      Aside from his journalism, the only books Dunne published dealt with the musing of his saloon keeper philosopher Mr Dooley.  There were ten books in the series, nine of which appeared before his retirement.

      Philip Dunne saw his father's writings as being in the American rural cracker-barrel tradition of the humour of Poor Richard, Hosea Biglow, Artemus Ward, and Mark Twain.  But they had been rural writers, humorists of America's frontier experience.  Dunne was something new, an urban humorist, perhaps the first of a long line of Irish, Jewish, and Italian humorists in the twentieth century.  The dialogues of Mr Dooley are written in what native Irish writers might regard as a stage-Irish idiom, and they derive in part from the popularity of the Irish comic on the contemporary American stage.  But the language was in fact close to that actually spoken on the broadwalks of Chicago and New York.

      Mr Dooley represents not only the few whimsicality of the Irish temperament, but also all the solid common sense of a race underlying it, which had taken on the American ways, and won the fight.

      At an earlier time Mr Dooley would have been rejected.  His popularity derived in large part from the prominent, indeed, essential role which the Irish had begun to play in the life of urban America.  In a sense, Chicago and New York were Irish cities.

      Dunne, too, represented the gift of the Irish through language and storytelling, skills beyond their more taciturn neighbours in the cities, both American and immigrant.  Like JAMES JOYCE [25], Dunne was a bravely experimental writer who realized the full potential of the Irish brogue.

      The city is 'where there is nawthin' to eat but what ye can buy', says Mr Dooley to a friend.  'Where the dust is laid be th' sprinklin' cart, where th' ice-man comes reg'lar an' the roof garden is in bloom an' ye wake not by th' sun but by th' milkman, I says.  I want to be near th' doctor whin I'm sick an' near eatable food whin I'm hungry, an' where I can put me hand out early in th' morning an' hook a newspaper.  Th' city is th' on'y resort fr a man that has iver lived in the city.'

      The Irish had come as emigrants, but by the turn of the century policy was turning against immigration.  Mr Dooley had his comment on this as well.  As his son later pointed out, Dunne's humour 'always had a social purpose.  Mr Dooley was a weapon against hypocrisy and cant, the pompous and the predatory, in politics, business, and society in general'.

      Mr Dooley's 'philosophy' was widely shared by his Irish compatriots, many of whom lamented his later silence.  It coincided with the emergence of a modern Ireland with new notions, where the city was rejected.  Here in part was the emerging difference between Ireland and her exiled American children.

 

 

51

Archbishop Daniel Mannix

1864-1963

 

During a long and remarkable life, Daniel Mannix saw the transformation not only of Ireland, but also of Australia, his adopted land, from a frontier country into a leading nation of the world.  His was a crucial presence in the development of the Irish community in Australia.

      He was born in Charleville (now Ráth Luirc) in County Cork in March 1864, the third son of a family of four boys and a girl.  He was educated by the Sisters of Mercy and the Christian Brothers in Fermoy, and then went on to study for the priesthood, like so many clever young men in those days.  He was ordained at Maynooth in 1890, becoming professor of theology in 1894, and president of the college in 1903.

      This would have been an important enough career, but in 1912 he was sent out to Australia as co-adjutor (or deputy) to the archbishop of Melbourne, eventually taking the position himself in May 1917.

      He arrived in Australia in 1913.  During those crucial years of the First World War he came to the fore as a leader of the Irish community's opposition to conscription for overseas military service (not always seen as a patriotic position, however, by other elements in Australian society, where the returned servicemen's organizations are very powerful).  After the Easter Rising he also supported Ireland's claims for independence.

      He also fought for the independence of Catholic schools within the Australian system, an echo of a struggle that had gone on in Ireland and the United States.  He supported the creation of Newman College at the University of Melbourne, and to Corpus Christi College at Werribee.

      In 1920 Mannix had to visit Rome to make a periodic report to the pope in person.  He travelled to Europe by way of the United States, where he was met with great enthusiasm from Irish-American communities from San Francisco to New York.  On the way he made inflammatory speeches.  'All that Ireland asks of England is this - take one of your hands off my throat and the other out of my pocket.'

      The ship he was travelling on was met by a British warship off the coast of Cornwall, and he was arrested by order of Prime Minister Lloyd George 'in view of his disloyal statements'.  Mannix was told that he was free to stay in England, but he was not to visit Liverpool, Glasgow, or Manchester, the Irish population centres.  Instead he stayed in Leeds.  He could not go to Ireland, and was also forbidden to speak in England.  Inevitably, this left him with a tremendous reputation as an Irish patriot.

      He served for forty-seven years as archbishop, establishing new parishes, building schools, and opening colleges.  There had been sixty parishes and 180 churches in 1917; by 1963 there were 176 parishes and 300 churches.  He also promoted Catholic Action, the movement for Catholics to directly involve themselves in politics, and encouraged the Catholic press and Catholic social action.  In 1937 he established the National Secretariat of Catholic Action and assisted in the creation of the Catholic Social Movement in 1941.  Since his elevation he had opposed the influence of communism in Australia, and when the great labour split occurred in 1955 he supported the industrial groups.

      However, theologically and liturgically he was very conservative, like many other Irish bishops, but so also was the community he led.  He died in Melbourne in November 1963, on the eve of the vast changes in the church which were to be wrought by the Second Vatican Council.  By this time the Irish community in Australia had moved to a central position - emigration from non-white countries was beginning.  Though the rhetoric of the Australian Irish might often sound revolutionary and radical, as in the Labour party, it was also imbued with the same deeply held conservative views that marked Daniel Mannix.

      Mannix had many characteristics.  In Irish-Australian folklore he was a great patriotic hero.  He was also the subject of many humorous anecdotes.  Every day he would walk four miles from his home to the cathedral, and so came to know many of the city's poor.  Giving money to a drunk, Mannix warned him not to spend it in the next bar.  'No, Your Grace.  Well, then, which one would you recommend?'

      His most important contribution was his public leadership.  He derived his public style from the Irish examples of John McHale, archbishop of Tuam, and Thomas Croke, archbishop of Croke, men who identified the Catholic Church with the national aspirations of the Irish people.  It was a tradition (found elsewhere, of course) of combining ecclesiastical position with public leadership, championing the national cause against spiritual and political oppression.

      This was not only style.  There were other bishops who supported British rule, and those like CARDINAL CULLEN [44], who concentrated on the interests of the church alone.  To Australia he brought the experience of Irish history, the role of the Catholic clergy in Irish communities, and shaped a course which still influences the public life of the southern continent.

      In 1917 Mannix had seen that there was an emerging Australian interest which was not to be identified simply with the interests of the British.  Though this was controversial then, it has become the state of things today, when Australia finds itself having more in common with its own part of the world, and with the United States.  Mannix was one of the important influences on the emergence of an Australian national identity in the twentieth century.

      He had helped to mould the Irish-Australian community, but that community would have to face great changes, such as the rise in Asian immigration, which their English-speaking emigrant background made them unfamiliar with.  By the time he died, a new Australia was emerging, racially mixed, increasingly republican, which would provide many new challenges to the old faith of the Irish.

 

 

52

Maud Gonne MacBride

1866-1953

 

Constance Gore-Booth,

the Countess Markievicz

1867-1927

 

Given that Irishmen have, in general, a reputation for being male chauvinists, it is all the more remarkable that women have played major parts in all national movements.  Among the most outstanding and charismatic were Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz.  Even more astonishing was the fact that these champions of the poor and the oppressed came from socially privileged backgrounds.

    Constance was born Gore-Booth, of a Sligo landed family (members of which still serve in the British Foreign Service).  She was presented at court in 1887 and hailed as 'the new Irish beauty'.  She wished to become a painter, and was already a friend of W.B. Yeats and others in the Irish literary revival which was making such a heady, creative ferment at the time.  In pursuit of her ambitions as an artist she went to London, and later to Paris.

      In Paris she met and married Casimir Markievicz, a Polish nobleman by whom she had a daughter.  Though he had extensive estates in the Ukraine, they returned to live in Dublin, where they involved themselves in many artistic movements.  The count was a genial man, and with his wife helped to found the Dublin Arts Club.

      Constance, however, became interested in Irish nationalism and joined her friend Maud Gonne in her organization, the Daughters of Eireann, the feminist side of the nationalist cause.  In 1909 she established her own group of boy scouts, Na Fianna, who were taught the use of weapons as well as woodcraft.  Her husband did not find these activities quite so appealing, and returned to the Ukraine.  She never saw him again.

      She was involved in the Lockout of 1913, running a soup kitchen for the workers, who were verging on starvation.  She also took part in the Easter Rising, commanding the garrison which was installed in the College of Surgeons in St Stephen's Green.  She was sentenced to death, but reprieved because she was a woman.

      In the general election of November 1918, she was elected from a Dublin constituency, the first woman ever elected to the British Parliament - itself an historic achievement.  It might have been more notable if she had taken it up, but along with the rest of Sinn Féin, she refused to take her seat in London, and instead was one of those who met in Dublin in January 1919 and proclaimed the independence of the Irish republic to the world.

      She minister of labour in this government, which existed underground during the troubles.  When the war with the British came to an end, she opposed the treaty settlement and supported the republican cause.  She continued in politics, being elected again in 1923 after a defeat in 1922.  Arrested, she went on a hunger strike.  A founding member of Fianna Fáil, she was re-elected to the national assembly in 1926, but by now her activities had undermined her health, and she died on 15th July 1927.

      Maud Gonne, another social beauty, the daughter of a British army officer, was also the beloved of WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8].  But she refused to marry him, and instead devoted her life to the cause of Ireland.  Her love life was centred on a French politician, Lucian Millevoye, an ultra-nationalist supporter of General Georges Boulanger, whom she met in France in 1890 while recuperating from a serious illness.  They became lovers but never married.  By him she had two children, a boy who died, and a girl, Iseult (later Mrs Francis Stuart), who was described for many years as her niece, and who Dublin gossip saw as the daughter of Yeats.

      In Paris she edited a paper which supported Irish extremists and broke with her lover because of his failure to support her cause after Boulanger committed suicide.  She acted as an active gadfly of the period.

      When Queen Victoria visited Dublin in 1900 to thank the Irish for their support of the Boer War, Maud Gonne organized a counter-celebration.  She was still involved with literary matters - she acted in Yeats' play Cathleen Ni Houlihan in 1902.  She married Major John MacBride, who had commanded a Boer unit, and by him had two more children.  However, MacBride was, in Yeats' words, 'a drunken, vainglorious lout', from whom she soon separated.  He was one of those executed after the Rising in 1916.

      Maud worked for the White Cross and ambulance service during the troubles and opposed the treaty.  To the end of her life, she and her family remained deeply involved in republican activities.  She wrote an account of her life, A Servant of the Queen, in 1938 - the queen in question being Ireland rather than Victoria.

      Maud died on 27th April 1953, by which time her son Seán MacBride had risen to be foreign minister for Ireland, after a controversial career in republican politics.  It was his government that finally declared Ireland a republic and took it out of the commonwealth.  Her funeral was attended by huge crowds, gathered not only to see the passing of the grand dame of Irish politics, but the woman whose beauty in her youth had captured the heart of Ireland's greatest poet, W.B. Yeats.

      These two women, in very different ways, are representative of thousands of others who were involved with the labour and republican causes in Ireland and America.  At a time when women were seen as secondary figures, they created their own organizations and gathered their own followers.  For a while they were a significant force in Irish life and politics, and generations of women after them were less content with their conventional roles.  The Irish constitution of 1937, which recognized the special place of women as being in the home, seemed to many radicals to be a snub to the achievements of gallant women like Maud Gonne and Countess Markievicz, with men once again claiming the political arena exclusively for themselves.  When the women's liberation movement came to Ireland in the late 1960s, however, it was to Maud Gonne and Constance Markievicz that it turned for role models.  They remain icons of the women's movement to this day.

     

 

53

John O'Donovan

1809-1861

 

Eugene O'Curry

1796-1862

 

 

A nation's identity depends on more than patriots and politicians.  A crucial ingredient is a knowledge of its past and its traditions, and those traditions are bound up in many ways with the nature and history of the land itself.  In Ireland these had almost been lost when the appearance of the scholars John O'Donovan and Eugene O'Curry saved the remnants of the past that remains influential to this day.

      John O'Donovan was born on 9th July 1809, at Attateemore in rural Kilkenny.  His father died when he was a child, but he was educated in Dublin, thanks to the care of his uncle, Patrick O'Donovan.  Patrick proved to be an influential figure in the boy's career, for he was a native Gaelic speaker and loved all aspects of the old Gaelic culture, and he taught the boy about these.

      In 1826 John O'Donovan began his working life in the Irish Record Office, filing and translating Gaelic manuscripts, working on old law tracts, and assisting in the research for Peter O'Connell's English-Gaelic dictionary.  In 1829 he moved to the Ordnance Survey, which was then engaged with the first full-scale survey and mapping of Ireland.  In preparation for this O'Donovan travelled the country, visiting every townland (the basic land division of which there would be several per parish), to record and investigate locally and in manuscript sources the history of the place names.  He reported back to the head office in a series of letters that later filled fifty edited volumes.  At the time, however, only the first survey, relating to Derry, was published before the project was suspended.  The British authorities feared that the recording of the actual history of the places in Ireland, a record of dispossession and eviction, was not appropriate.  (This work lies behind Brian Friel's play, Translations.)

      With Eugene O'Curry he established the Irish Archaeological Society, which undertook the publication of a long series of scholarly works by both writers.  The greatest of O'Donovan's wide-ranging achievements was the editing and translating in seven volumes of the Annals of the Four Masters between 1848 and 1851 - a remarkable feat of applied industry and scholarship.

      At this time he contemplated immigrating to America, but in 1852, when the Brehon Law Commission was established, he was employed there at a much improved salary.  These laws were the old Celtic legal system, which had been supplanted by feudal and statutory law but which was vitally important for understanding all aspects of ancient Irish culture.

      His work was recognized with an honorary doctor of laws degree from Trinity College, but his real fame has come in the praise which later generations have heaped upon his skilled pioneering research into the manuscripts of ancient Ireland.  O'Donovan had lived in difficult circumstances all his life, and his health had never been good.  He died in 1861, before the appearance of the materials he had been working on.  He was only in his middle fifties, and left a widow, six small children, and an estate valued at a mere £570.

      Eugene O'Curry was also born in rural Ireland, at Dunaha in County Clare, in 1796.  He was never formally educated, but his father had a vast store of knowledge about the traditions and antiquities of Ireland and ancient Irish literature.  This he passed on to his son, and it was an education in itself.

      O'Curry worked on the small family farm and then struggled for four years to earn a living as a teacher.  With his brothers he moved to Limerick about 1824, and worked as a labourer and later a ganger.  He then managed to get appointed warden of the Limerick mental home.  At last his own scholarly skills were recognized, and he was invited to join the staff of the Ordnance Survey in 1835.

      He was employed on the survey with John O'Donovan, working with him on the survey of Clare, and when this project ended, in 1837, he was employed to catalogue and arrange the ancient Irish materials in the Royal Irish Academy, Trinity College, and the British Museum in London.

      The important person in the survey was George Petrie, an artist who became a member of the council of the Royal Irish Academy in 1829, and instigated the collection and recording of Gaelic manuscripts.  So O'Donovan, O'Curry, and Petrie came together.  O'Curry then began the even larger task of editing and publishing some of these manuscripts.

      When John Henry Newman established the Catholic University in Dublin, he was hired as the professor of Irish history and archaeology in 1854.  This was the first professorship of archaeology in the world.  His inaugural lectures, published in 1861, covered the whole range of Irish manuscript materials.  Though he died on 30th July 1862, a further set of lectures, The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish, appeared in 1873.

      The importance of the pioneering work undertaken by these two relatives (O'Donovan was married to O'Curry's sister-in-law) cannot be overestimated.  It laid the foundation for all further inquiry and research into what they revealed to be one of the most ancient cultures in the Western world, even older than Greece in some respects.

      What Patricia Boyne, the recent biographer of O'Donovan, wrote about the one, applies to both: 'His work was responsible for the marked growth in the study of Irish language, history, folklore, and poetry in the second half of the nineteenth century.  It promoted an awareness of the significance of the Irish language and of Irish antiquities, and of their value to the Irish people.  It also proved seminal to the great upsurge of drama and poetry manifested in the Irish literary revival.'

      A writer of an earlier generation, Patrick McSweeney, saw the matter in a more nationalist light: 'In the battle for intellectual freedom it is true to say that O'Donovan, O'Curry, and Petrie are national heroes.  They loved Ireland and the Irish people with a lasting love.  They cherished the Past of Ireland, they reverenced it; and they believed in it.  They determined that the Ireland of the Future should be bound to the Ireland of the Past by the links of knowledge and of love.  They forged these links in the white heat of patriotic research.  They were, in every true sense of the word, Nation-builders; and we, their heirs, must not forget them.'

      Today their pioneering work is continued by scholars in university departments and institutions around the world, but especially in Ireland and America.  The true value of what they did lies in the love of many millions for the ancient culture they uncovered.

 

 

54

Horace Plunkett

1854-1932

 

Though he was born and died in England, Horace Plunkett was a scion of the Dunsanys and passed much of his early life at Dunsany Castle, the ancient family seat of the Plunketts, in County Meath.  He was born in Gloucester on 24th October 1854, and was a son of the sixteenth Baron Dunsany and the uncle of the well-known writer, Lord Dunsany (a family in whose ancestry lay the Irish saint, Oliver Plunkett).

      Having been educated at Eton and Oxford, he was sent to Wyoming in 1879 to recover his health, and remained there for a decade.  It is often forgotten just how large the investment of Britain was in the cattle lands of the American west in the late nineteenth century.

      In 1888 he published an article on the value of cooperative stores for Ireland.  When he came back to Ireland in 1889 he threw himself into the cooperative movement, which aimed at improving Irish agriculture for small farmers.  By 1891 some eighteen societies had been formed by over a thousand farmers.  From 1894 to 1899 he was president of the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, which he founded.  He was appointed to the Congested Districts Board, where he served from 1891 to 1918, and was elected MP for South Dublin in 1892 as a Unionist.  Until 1900 he was a staunch advocate of the claims of Irish agriculture in the British Parliament.

      He was largely responsible for achieving the establishment of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction in Ireland.  He employed the poet George Russell to edit the movement's paper, the Irish Homestead, in which JAMES JOYCE'S [25] first stories from Dubliners appeared.

      Plunkett was convinced that the solution to the social and economic problems of rural Ireland depended on a mixture of self-help and state aid, but he had to fight hard for his cause against the lethargy and opposition of vested interests.  Nor did he believe in 'compulsory cooperation' - the Marxist solution.

      The Irish Agricultural Organization Society was one of the most influential agencies in the remaking of modern Ireland, and its influence can still be felt through the giant cooperative dairies which flourish all over Ireland and are now among the biggest businesses in the country.  He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1902, and was made a knight commander of the Victorian Order in 1903.

      His book, Ireland in the New Century, published in 1904, caused immense controversy, as he claimed that one of the drags on social and economic development in Ireland was the Catholic Church, which stifled any sense of personal enterprise.  This was angrily rebutted by Catholic apologists.  As a Protestant, Plunkett may have exaggerated the power of the church, for later it would be unable to hinder Irish rebels undertaking often radical reforms.  The inertia lay in the poor education and traditionalism of the farmers themselves.

      The controversy may well have damaged Plunkett in the eyes of the rising generation of Irish nationalists.  However, he was a Unionist in politics, and hoped to keep Ireland whole under one government.  He was strongly opposed to the partition of Ireland in 1922.  Like many, he saw the development of Canada and Australia as having relevance to Ireland.  He founded the Irish Dominion League to keep the Irish Free State within the British Commonwealth, but Irish nationalists were intent on full independence.

      He was a senator in the Irish Free State in 1922 and 1923, but republicans burned his house down and he left Ireland in some bitterness to pass the rest of his life in England, where he continued to promote the cooperative movement worldwide.  In 1924 a major conference on agricultural cooperation in the British Empire was held in London, over which he presided.  He visited South Africa in 1925, and in 1927 made a special study of the benefits of cooperation in India.

      In 1919 Plunkett endowed a trust under his name which encouraged the development of agriculture through cooperation.  He published other books, and to the end of his life was active in the causes to which he had devoted himself.  He died in Weybridge, in Surrey, on 26th March 1932.  He never married, but for much of his life retained a strong affection for Daisy Fingal, with whom many thought he was in love.

      Though Plunkett's enthusiasm might not have endeared him to the rich graziers and strong farmers of Ireland, the country, as a whole, has done well due to cooperation.  Some co-ops were tiny operations to begin with.  In the early days, perhaps the most famous co-op was at Templecrone in Donegal, largely the creation of Patrick Gallagher.  But since 1906, when that enterprise was founded, co-ops have grown into immense operations.  Small farmers were able to sell their milk or pigs into the co-op facility, where they could take their share of the profits through a monthly or even weekly cheque.  The co-op cheque became an essential feature of Irish rural life from the 1930s onwards.  The driving force behind the enterprise would often be a local priest, though today the small co-ops have almost disappeared.

      The transformation of Ireland that Plunkett had hoped for has been achieved, and it brought just the social changes he had hoped for.  Horace Plunkett was one of the great men whose services Ireland lost through the narrow sectarian action of political extremists, but his vision has survived all opposition.

 

 

55

Sean O'Casey

1880-1964

 

Sean O'Casey is among the most famous Irish dramatists of any century, largely due to his set of plays about the Irish troubles.  His life was a long and controversial one, and he affected life and literature in many other ways.

      He was born in Dublin on 30th March 1880.  His family had been upper-working class, but with the early death of the father, their social fortunes declined.  As an infant, Sean developed trouble with his eyes, an affliction which was to haunt him all his life.  The first volumes of his autobiographical series, I Knock at the Door and Pictures of the Hallway, describe these early years in vivid if often overcoloured detail.

      As a young man O'Casey combined hard manual work with omnivorous reading.  Like so many working-class writers, he was largely self-educated.  He delighted in all kinds of writers, from Shakespeare to Shaw.  He was also an energetic churchman, involved in the parish of St Barnabas.  He was an early and enthusiastic member first of an Orange lodge, then of the Gaelic League, and finally he joined the IRB.

      He was a follower of JAMES LARKIN [37] and was involved in the founding of the Irish Citizen Army (of which he wrote the first history), though he had broken with it before his comrades took part in the Easter Rising.  His early reading of Marx and Engels had convinced him that their social analysis was correct, or at least true to his experience.  For the rest of his life he remained a Communist, or at least a Communist supporter, if not a party member.

      His ambitions as a writer were encouraged by Lady Gregory, and eventually, after several rejections, his first serious play, The Shadow of a Gunman, was produced to great success in 1923.  This was followed by Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926).  If J.M. Synge had been a triumph of the Abbey Theatre's early years, O'Casey was the counterpart of its maturity.  His plays were both critical and commercial successes.

      He was now able to give up his life as a labourer, and moved, temporarily he thought, to London, where he married a young Irish actress in 1927.  But that year his next play, The Silver Tassie, about the First World War and its aftermath, was rejected by W.B. YEATS [8] and the Abbey management, largely for ideological reasons.  Nevertheless, the play had some success in London in 1928.  It has been revived several times since, and is viewed by some as the necessary conclusion to the earlier trilogy, bringing the experience of another way, which half a million Irish shared in, home to Dublin.

      O'Casey then vowed to stay out of Ireland, and never returned to Dublin.  He wrote many other plays, and remained a controversial personality into his old age.  These later works never achieved the stature or success of the early ones set during the years of revolution.  The plays of the late 1930s received only lukewarm critical praise and were commercial failures.  They were coloured by a vigorous anticlericalism and an overheated Marxism.

      However, for many of his admirers, his six-volume autobiography, which he began publishing in 1939, is a far greater work than his later plays.  Having left Ireland, O'Casey cut himself off from his roots.  His memory of a lost era in Dublin life sustained his creativity, and he was one of the most admired writers of the Irish literary revival, especially in America.

      He and his young wife were settled in Devon with their three children, where he remained for the rest of his life.  His new plays, such as The Star Turns Red, were produced by small companies; he was no longer a feature of the commercial theatre.  Two of his plays, The Bishop's Bonfire and The Drums of Father Ned, were produced in Dublin, and caused delightful rows of a peculiarly Irish kind.

      By now he was becoming of increasing interest to academic writers.  With the completion of his autobiographical series in 1954 his reputation began to climb again.  This was due in part to the appreciation of the autobiographies as works of art in their own right.

      O'Casey remains a figure of controversy, yet there is no doubt that the story of his own life and his early plays had shaped a view of Irish life, in all its tragedy and comedy, which has come to be better known outside Ireland than its real history.  When many think of Ireland's troubled past they think of it as Sean O'Casey showed it.

      He died at St Marychurch, near Torquay, in Devon, on 18th September 1964.  Whatever the final verdict of history will be, he will remain one of Ireland's, and the world's, greatest dramatists.

 

 

56

William Cosgrave

1880-1965

 

Though he had taken a large part in the Irish revolution, to W.T. Cosgrave fell the harder task of establishing the new Irish state in 1922.  That modern Ireland is an open stable democracy is largely a result of his work and it remains his greatest memorial, whatever the claims of other figures such as MICHAEL  COLLINS [3] and EAMON  DE  VALERA [2].

      Born in 1874 in the shadow of the Guinness brewery on St James Street, from his earliest years he was involved in nationalist activities.  He was educated by the Christian Brothers, then a certain way of being introduced to the notion of Ireland's special destiny.  His father, Thomas Cosgrave, had at one time been an elected town councillor and a poor-law guardian, these being the main offices of local government in Dublin.

      W.T. Cosgrave entered the grocery trade as a lad and seemed set to follow that mundane vocation.  But perhaps due to his education he was attracted to Sinn Féin.  From his business background he had a sound grasp of finance, and in 1916, another significant year, he was elected chairman of Sinn Féin's finance committee.

      In 1913 he joined the Irish Volunteers, which had been formed the year before.  When the volunteers, who then numbered about one hundred thousand men, split in August 1914 over the issue of the First World War, he was one of the ten thousand who refused to follow the lead given by John Redmond.  When the uprising was under way he was one of those who followed Pearse and Connolly, disobeying the order of Eoin MacNeill to stand down.  Only 600 men, a very small fraction of the Volunteer movement, took part in the Easter Week rebellion.  He was arrested after the uprising and interned at Frongoch in North Wales until July 1917, when most of the prisoners were released.

      In 1917 Cosgrave was nominated to stand in the Sinn Féin interest in a by-election in Kilkenny.  By now Sinn Féin had moved from its original non-violent espousal of a dual monarchy for Ireland to being a republican party.  In the December 1918 post-war election he was elected for Kilkenny County.  He was a member of the first Dáil that met in Dublin in January 1919 and declared the Irish republic.  He was appointed minister for local government in the underground administration because of his own experience in that area.

      During the troubles his main task was to coordinate the refusal of local authorities in Ireland to cooperate with the British authorities at Dublin Castle.  All this time he was on the run, and was more than once imprisoned.

      When the treaty was signed in December 1919, it split the movement again.  In the Dáil treaty debates, Cosgrave's speech was one of the very few that attracted widespread comment.  In the government of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins, he was once again minister of local government, now charged with easing the transition from the old administration to the new without a hitch.

      In the summer of 1922, when tensions were building toward the outbreak of the civil war, Cosgrave was appointed Griffith's deputy while he was in London discussing the administration of the treaty.  On 12th August 1922, Griffith suddenly died.  In his place, Collins was chosen as president of the provisional government.  Ten days later, Collins was also dead.  These two ill strokes of fortune moved W.T. Cosgrave, the straightforward Dublin man of business, into the chief place in the government of the Irish Free State.  Griffith had been a national figure since the turn of the century.  Michael Collins was the adored hero of the masses.  Cosgrave was almost unknown in comparison.

      Troubled times need heroes, but stable administration needs something else.  When the government came together again, Cosgrave made it plain that what was now required to run the country was not the clash of personalities, but effective teamwork.  There was a newly drafted constitution to be passed by the Dáil, a military campaign to finish, the cost of the civil war - estimated at the then astonishing sum of £7 million - as well as all the normal business of good government.  Some of his cabinet, such as Kevin O'Higgins, were strong men in their own right, but Cosgrave held them all together.  But more than that, he managed, through the appointment of Protestants and former Unionists to the Senate, to bring the Protestant minority into the councils of the Free State.  The appointments to the civil service, the judiciary, and the Senate reflect merit rather than friendship, religion, or politics.

      The civil war petered out and ended.  In September 1923 Cosgrave was welcomed to the League of Nations as the representative of the Irish Free State, and the following month he attended a conference of the Dominions, those self-governing states, such as Canada, South Africa, and Australia, that formed what later became the British Commonwealth.

      With the end of the fighting, order returned to Ireland and the task of rebuilding began.  Finances were a pressing concern, and there were handled in a careful, even mean manner.  But after the government had decided to keep the size of the force in line with peaceful conditions some army officers mutinied, and Cosgrave faced down what might have been a very serious threat to the new democracy from the military and the right wing.  A few months later another minister took over without a fuss.  Unlike Collins or de Valera, Cosgrave had no messianic ambitions, but his steady course and good sense won overseas admirers of the new state.

      It was under Cosgrave that the great task of building the Shannon hydroelectric plan was begun.  Though the taxes were high, the government spoke of free electricity in a decade, a promise it could not hope to keep.

      Cosgrave's party in the Dáil faced opposition only from the Labour party and some smaller groups.  The main body of the real opposition, de Valera's party, and the other republicans were outside the Dáil.  This was not a healthy situation and could not long continue.  In August 1927 the minister of justice, Kevin O'Higgins, identified by many as the real strongman of the new state, was assassinated by a republican splinter group.  Legislation was passed that forced anyone standing for election to take their seat if they won.  This forced the hand of de Valera and Fianna Fáil, and they came in out of the cold.  In October an election left Cosgrave's party the largest.  But a coalition of other parties could now outvote the government.  With the support of the Farmer's Party he maintained a narrow majority.

      In early 1928 Cosgrave paid a state visit to the United States, where he was received with great warmth not only by the Irish-American community, but also by President Calvin Coolidge.  He addressed the Senate and then went on to visit Canada before returning in triumph to Ireland.  He had achieved a recognized place for Ireland in the community of nations.  It was his greatest moment.

      In the election of 1932 de Valera gained a narrow majority, which he improved by quickly calling another election in 1933.  Cosgrave, however, remained the leader of his party, but these were to be troubled days.  His was by nature a conservative party, but it harboured within it a right wing that cast admiring glances at developments in Europe.  A fascist group under General Eoin O'Duffy, popularly called the Blueshirts, came into existence out of the Army Comrades Association, an anti-republican group.  There were street clashes between them and the republicans, by now a Communist group.

      De Valera acted with decision to deal with these elements.  Cosgrave split with O'Duffy, and something approaching normal politics was restored.  Ireland had had a very close brush with fascism and communism, but thanks to the leadership of de Valera and Cosgrave, avoided the disaster.

      Cosgrave was still party leader when the war broke out in September 1939.  He supported the measures of national unity, which the war entailed, until he retired from politics in 1945.

      His son, Liam Cosgrave, was the leader of Fine Gael, the successor party to his father's.  W.T. Cosgrave died in 1965, having lived to see the old divisions of the civil war effectively buried in the progress of the new Ireland.  That nation owed him a debt which the perspective of history will only enhance.  Though naturally cautious and careful, he carried his people through a perilous period, succeeding where a lesser man, or a more headstrong personality, would have failed.  For a quiet man, it was a great triumph.

 

 

57

John Hume

1937-

 

In 1998 John Hume, along with the Ulster Unionist Leader DAVID TRIMBLE [40], was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace.  Since 1969, during the long purgatory of the Northern Ireland troubles, John Hume, as leader of the largely Catholic Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), has carried the burden of the majority of the nationalist community.  He has tried to reach a permanent and just settlement in the face of Unionist determination to retain the tie to Britain on the one hand, and the terrorism of the IRA and the demands of Sinn Féin for a united Ireland on the other.  He has sought to achieve reform, reconciliation, and, eventually - very eventually - reunification.  Hume has proved very important to the breaking of the mould into which history has cast the politics of Ireland as a whole.

      John Hume is a Derryman, a native of a city that plays a large part in the imagined history of Northern Ireland.  To Catholics, Derry means Daire, the monastery founded by the great ST COLUMCILLE [58].  To unionists it is Londonderry, the brave city that closed its gates against the army of James II and resisted a long siege in the cause of William III.  Though its people share a common soil, they live in different countries.  Derry's politics has always been volatile, though it lacks the wealth of Belfast and was cut off by partition from its natural hinterland in Donegal.

      John Hume was born on 18th January 1937, the son of Samuel Hume, of Derry.  He was educated at St Columb's College in Derry, and at St Patrick's College in Maynooth, taking a master's degree from the National University of Ireland.  He married Patricia Hume in 1960.  They live in Derry, where they have reared a family of two sons and three daughters.

      John Hume was of the first generation of Ulster people to benefit from free secondary and university education provided by the Education Act of 1944.  He worked first as a teacher in Derry, but emerged into public life initially as a community leader, involved especially in the credit union movement, which was so important in working-class areas of Ireland, and served as president of the Credit Union League of Ireland from 1964 to 1968.

      With these strong roots in the community, he was inevitably drawn into a full-time political career, being elected MP to the Northern Ireland parliament for Foyle in 1969.  This was the year that the present troubles began, though for nationalists there had been troubles as far back as the 1880s.  When Stormont was dissolved by direct rule from London, Hume was elected to the British Parliament for Londonderry, now Foyle.  He was minister of commerce in the short-lived power-sharing executive of 1974.  He has also been a member of the European Parliament since 1979.

      Hume was a founding member of the Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP), serving as its deputy leader from 1970 to 1979.  He was elected leader in 1979, and since then has played a central and increasingly influential role in the resolution of the Ulster problem.  The party was intended to provide Ulster politics with a new beginning.  The old nationalist party was hopelessly out of touch with the new situation, and the resurgence of Sinn Féin posed as much of a threat to Catholics as to unionists.  The SDLP was intended to provide a party which was social democratic, would cross community boundaries, and provide a common party for the working-class voters of all traditions.

      Inevitably, however, it developed as a largely Catholic party due to the nature of community politics in Northern Ireland.  But the party has never lost its initial aspiration, and remains involved in the world-wide social democratic movement.  John Hume himself served on the bureau of the socialist group in the European Parliament - the largest political grouping in that body.

      But the growth of a new sense of unity that has affected the lives of all Europeans could not eradicate overnight the long and tangled history of Hume's homeland.  This is where John Hume's real purpose in life was to be.  The settlement in Northern Ireland, reached on Good Friday 1998, was due largely to his patience in drawing Sinn Féin and the IRA into a more conventional form of politics.

      Ireland has now moved on.  The Good Friday Agreement, representing the first time since 1918 that the whole island voted together on one issue, has hopefully provided a new way ahead.  The claims to a mandate by the IRA and the other terrorist groups have been shown to be empty.  A new way of dealing with the relations between the communities in the north, and the governments, north and south, east and west, may be developing.

      If this is so, Ireland as a whole owes John Hume (who retired at the end of 2000 as party leader) an unrepayable debt.  He and his party have brought about a sea change, but as is ever the case the future is not always in the hands of good men.  Though the Northern Ireland Assembly has become functional, Northern Ireland remains among the troubled places of the world.

 

 

58

St Columcille

521-597

 

Along with ST PATRICK [1] and St Bridget, Columcille (also known as Columba of Iona) is one of the three patron saints of Ireland, whose life's work was critical in the formation of early Christian Ireland.  The year of his death coincided with the arrival of the mission of St Augustine, in Kent.

      The two aspects of Western Christianity, the Celtic and the Continental, clashed for many decades until the Synod of Whitby extinguished the Celtic customs.  But the mission of Augustine was largely a failure.  The long Christian tradition of Scotland and England owes much more to the determination and courage of Irish missionaries such as Columcille than is often realized.

      He was born at Gartan in Donegal on 7th December 521, of aristocratic stock, being one of the clan of Conall, and an O'Donnell, who were the princes of Donegal.  He was educated at the monastic centres of Moville by St Finnian; at Clonard, where he was a pupil of another and greater St Finnian; and later at Glasnevin, in Dublin.  In 544 a plague forced his return to Ulster.

      He was ordained a priest in 541, and established his own monastery at Derry in 545.  He spent some fifteen years founding monasteries throughout Ireland, at Derry (546), Swords (about 550), Durrow (about 553), and at Kells (about 554).

      He was accused of being responsible for the bloody battle of Culdrevy in 561 between his own people, the Dalriada Scots, and King Diarmid, the overlord of eastern Ireland.  Taking his doubts to his own confessor, he was given the penance of going into Scotland to spread the gospel there.

      In 563 St Columcille went into exile with twelve followers as a missionary among the pagan Picts of Scotland.  The Irish had already carved out a kingdom along the western coast of Scotland.  (At this time the Irish were called Scots.)  He established a monastery on the island of Iona in Argyll, which was presented to him by his kinsman Conall.  From there he and other missionaries set out to spread the faith among the Picts of northern Scotland.  These journeys are described by his early biographer, Adamnan.  (On one of them he is reported to have encountered the Loch Ness monster.)

      The important result of this mission was not just to convert the Picts to Christianity, but to provide the ground on which the Scots and Picts could unite, and so create the nucleus of the modern kingdom of Scotland.  He revisited Ireland itself on only two occasions, and acted as a mediator at the Assembly of Druim-Cetta in 575.  He was the supposed author of poems in Latin and in Gaelic.  The oldest surviving manuscript of the Gallican Psalter, the so-called Cathac, is said to be in his own hand.  The record of his life by Adamnan gives a good account of the rule he established, and this too was also widely influential in the church.

      His ascetic way of life often led to him withdrawing from his companions and into the woods to pray and fast.  He impressed everyone with his holiness.

      Among some Protestant writers, the independence of the Celtic church has been overemphasized, while its essential loyalty to Rome was overplayed by Catholic writers.  In many ways, the atmosphere of this church was similar to the Ethiopian church; both worked beyond the bounds of the old Roman Empire among pagan tribes and out of direct communication with the more metropolitan centres.

      Iona was also a scholarly centre.  The Celtic church, however, developed its own extraordinary culture, especially in illuminated books, many of them produced by the monasteries with which Columcille was associated.  A key figure in the development of Scotland, he was thus a seminal person in the development of Western European civilization.  As Toynbee and other historian have pointed out, these monks were an essential link in the transmission of the older classical cultures of Greece and Rome, to their revival during the Middle Ages, following the Dark Ages, which fell upon most of the continent after the barbarian invasions.

      According to an old tradition, Columcille died while kneeling before the altar of his own church on Iona in 597.  He was buried on the island, but his remains were later removed to Kells in Meath, and some to Dunkeld.  The famous Stone of Scone, on which the ancient kings of Scotland and later the kings of England were crowned, is thought by some to actually be the pillow of St Columcille.

      The anniversary of his death in 1997 was the occasion of pilgrimages from all over Britain and Ireland to Iona.  As Scotland begins a new political era under its own parliament once again, it is now appreciated that Columcille's mission marks the beginning of the history of Scotland and the Scottish people.

 

 

59

John Scotus Eriugena

c. 820-877

 

The first Irish philosopher to attain universal fame, John Scotus Eriugena was a figure of controversy.  He was, as John O'Meara pointed out, 'the most considerable philosopher in the Western world between Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the greatest Irish philosopher (with the possible exception of Berkeley) ever'.

      John Scotus Eriugena (not to be confused with Duns Scotus, as he often is) introduced a radically new view of the universe, anticipating Copernicus by six hundred years.  But despite this eminence, Ireland has taken little interest in a man who was in the eyes of some, as one scholar notes, merely a boozy Irish monk given to sitting up and talking through the night.

      The date of his birth and his family background are unknown, though it seems certain that he was born in Ireland (for that is what the name, Eriugena means), and that his formidable learning, which included Greek and philosophy, was gained there.

      The year 851 found him at the court of the west Frankish king Charles the Bald, where he was in charge of the palace school.  But he had been trained as a theologian, so he also took part in the learned disputes arising from the doctrines of Gottschalk, a monk from Soissons, who had become indoctrinated with a heretical view of predestination and died in prison in 868.  There is, however, no real evidence that Eriugena was himself either a priest or a monk.

      He wrote a treatise, De Praedestione, which was condemned by the Council of Alence in 855; his ideas were called pultes scotorum, 'Irish stirabout'.  At the request of Charles the Bald, he translates the works of pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite into Latin; afterwards, these were to have a tremendous influence on the future development of medieval thought.

      Eriugena's own chief work was called De Divisione Naturae, which was also condemned by Pope Honorius III in 1225.  As late as 1658 it was seen as a danger to faith and morals, and was placed on the index of prohibited books by the Catholic Church.  He was not a scientist in the modern sense of the word - he did not make measurements or conduct experiments - but was more what the eighteenth century might have called a natural philosopher.

      In his system Eriugena placed the sun at the centre of the universe at a time when others believed (with Ptolemy) that the earth was at the centre.  He came to the conclusion that God and Heaven did not need to be physically above the stars, as was commonly conceived, nor was Hell located underground (as Dante was to imagine).  For these radical ideas Eriugena was accused by another theologian of being a pantheist - of identifying God with the material world.  But he was not in fact a pantheist.  As a rational person, he thought with firm logic and dismissed many superstitions.  On the evidence of Eriugena and his learning, the Dark Ages, so called, were not really quite so dark at all.

      After Charles the Bald died in 877, Eriugena was forced to leave France, suspected of being a heretic.  Some scholars assert he never left Europe and died there in 877.  But an early tradition asserts that he was called into England by Alfred the Great and was made abbot of Malmesbury.  Having lived by the pen he died by it, for he was murdered by his students - a fate wished upon many teachers, one suspects.  They stabbed him to death with their writing implements.

      Yet Eriugena's theories, neglected for so long, now appear to modern scholars fresh and newly relevant to a complete understanding of the early middle ages.

 

 

60

Fr Charles Coughlin

1891-1979

 

In a world seemingly dominated by television, it can be forgotten what a powerful force radio once was in the United States - and still is in other parts of the world.  As the Canadian media guru Marshal McLuhan observed, it is a hot medium, ideal for broadcasting of powerful nationalistic or political messages, and it remains much favoured by demagogues of the third world.

      One of the earliest exponents of the power of radio was Fr Charles Edward Coughlin, 'the Radio Priest' whose views dominated the public affairs of America in the days of the New Deal.  To a modern medium he brought the enthusiasm and passion of his Irish ancestors.

      He was born in Canada, in Hamilton, Ontario.  His father, Thomas J. Coughlin, was a sailor on the Great Lakes waterways and also a church sexton.  Thomas Coughlin was a US citizen, while Mrs Coughlin, Amelia Mahony by birth, was a Canadian.

      The Irish-Catholic culture was strong in Canada, and Coughlin was reared in a very traditional way.  He was sent first to St Mary's Elementary School in Hamilton, and then to St Michael's High School in Toronto.  His best subjects were maths and athletics.  He went on to St Michael's College, where he played rugby - too often seen as an upper-class sport - and made a name for himself as a debater.

      His religious upbringing prompted a vocation for the priesthood, and in 1911 he entered the novitiate for the Basilian order who ran St Michael's.  He was ordained in 1916 - the year of the Easter Rising - and sent to work at Assumption College in Windsor, Ontario.  Though his productions of Shakespeare were popular, he also taught English, psychology (from a Catholic point of view, a new, and potentially dangerous subject) and logic.

      Though Canadian, Windsor is near enough to Detroit to be heavily influenced by the culture of the United States.  When the Canadian Basilians separated from their French parent order, Coughlin became a priest under the rule of the archbishop of Detroit.  Like all the northern industrial cities, Detroit had a significant Irish population.  Fr Coughlin worked in the parish church of St Leo's, where his outspoken sermons became popular.  The local bishop, Dr Michael Gallagher, selected him to establish a new parish in the suburbs of Royal Oak.

      Though the Irish might have been well represented in the cities of Michigan, in the country it was different.  Fr Coughlin was welcomed into Royal Oak by the local Ku Klux Klan burning a fiery cross on the presbytery lawn.  Aside from this Protestant intolerance, typical of attitudes towards Irish Catholics at the time, there were few actual parishioners.

      For the masses, radio, literally broadcasting, was new.  The British Broadcasting Corporation had been established in 1922, and commercial radio was only getting under way in America.  In the northern cities many people were of European origin, and though they spoke and understood English they could not read it.  Coughlin hoped to teach them through radio.  On 17th October 1926, he made his first broadcast over WJR, the Detroit station.  He was an immediate hit, and soon his on-the-air sermons were being relayed to many other stations.  At first his message was purely a religious one, and he talked about the gospel message of Christ's life and told simple parables extolling traditional Christian values.  It was a very typical God-spot routine, as broadcasters of today would call it.

      But the times were changing.  In 1930 he began to attack bolshevism and socialism, which were making their way through the emigrant communities of the United States.  From this external threat of the new, godless philosophies, he moved on in 1931 to attack President Herbert Hoover for his failures to counter the rising unemployment of the Great Depression that was now sweeping the United States.  In Europe, the economic downturn was a fertile ground for the rise of Communist and Fascist parties.

      The message proved a popular one.  Fr Coughlin received over a million letters from listeners supporting his views.  He had touched a nerve, and though to some the departure of a priest into the hurly-burly of politics seemed improper, his radio 'sermons' from then on dealt with political, social, and economic matters.

      To his critics, he could point to the church's own concern with these matters, through the teachings outlined in Rerum Novarum (New Things), the famous and forceful papal encyclical of Leo XIII.  The church's social programme, and its care for the needs and legitimate aspirations of workers, was based on this document.  The pope had emphasized the duties of the capitalists to the workers whose labours created their fortunes.  This was not always a popular message, and Coughlin went further.  His enemies were the international bankers, those scapegoats of so many radicals and reformers between the wars.  By manipulating capital and credit they were controlling the world.  Real power lay not with the citizen, but with the shadowy men behind boardroom doors.

      Coughlin had used contribution from those millions of listeners to build a church in Detroit called the Shrine of the Little Flower - the cult of St Thérèse of Liseux was then a popular one.  He broadcast on Sunday afternoons, the radio signals going out from a high granite tower beside the church.

      These colourful activities made good copy.  Soon newspapers and magazines were running stories about the Radio Priest and his views.  The first edition of his complete radio sermons became a mammoth bestseller, selling a million copies in 1933.  By the following year he was getting ten thousand letters a day, many with contributions in cash.  He had four secretaries and a staff of over a hundred.  The simple sermons had become big business, and with size came influence.

      Personally, Coughlin was a charming and convivial person.  He had that special confidence of the born preacher and exuded a certainty that he had all the answers for an increasingly worried nation.  He was also a broadcasting genius, his firm voice with the slight Irish intonation was said to be 'without doubt one of the great speaking voices of the twentieth century'.

      In 1932 he had become an active supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt.  His support, he thought, had been partially responsible for bringing FDR to the White House - a large claim.  He insisted that 'the new deal is Christ's deal', and it was 'Roosevelt or ruin'.  But the wise president kept his distance from this overzealous support.

      The Columbia Broadcasting System, of which the Detroit station was an affiliate, had already asked Fr Coughlin to calm his rhetoric.  In the course of a broadcast in January 1931 he exposed their efforts to 'censor' him, and the network bosses were deluged with letters in support of Coughlin.  The priest now felt he could say what he wanted, with no regard to the church or capitalism.  CBS cancelled his contract.

      Coughlin was unfazed.  He put together a network of forty stations, crossing the continent from Maine to California.  His sermons, if they could still be called that, were heard at times by the largest radio audiences in the world, sometimes as many as forty million people.  He was the father of the radio and television evangelists which are now such a feature of broadcasting in North America and elsewhere.

      FDR was conscious, as all presidents must be, of the Irish-American and Catholic vote.  Coughlin's own solution to the Great Depression was to put more money into circulation, and claimed that FDR was planning to do this.  Such inflation would have been ruinous; it had undermined democracy in Germany, and many felt it could do the same in America.  This was not to be the policy of the New Deal, and Coughlin began to call for the nationalization of credit, money, and the Federal Reserve.

      From broadcasting, Coughlin's ambitions moved to actual politics.  In 1934 he founded the National Union for Social Justice.  This was not claimed to be a political party, but a movement to protect the rights of the workers.  It ran a newspaper, Social Justice, to carry its message.  Its one victory was a campaign to prevent the United States from joining the World Court, which he saw as undermining national sovereignty.  Though its membership rose to five million, it never again achieved the same impact as it had in the early 1930s.

      Now anti-Roosevelt, Coughlin established the Union party to fight in the election of 1936.  But third parties never do well in the United States, and their candidate polled only a million votes, even though it had drawn together the fragments of other political movements on the radical right.

      Failure left Coughlin undaunted.  He only moved further to the extreme right.  He reprinted the bogus 'Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion' in his paper, and accused the Jews and international Jewish financiers - those bogeymen of the right and left - of being responsible for America's problems.  Here he had the sympathies of some, like Henry Ford, who should have known better.  Coughlin said the Jews were behind communism and began to defend the Nazis.

      Some of his sentiments were shared widely in society, both in the United States and in Ireland.  In August 1938 he organized the Christian Front as an anti-Communist movement, but his young supporters spent their time attacking Jews.  Though he might defend this, using the example of Christ and the moneychangers in the temple, it was bringing the street politics of Europe into America.

      His enemies now confronted him.  At last, in 1940, his broadcasts were finally stopped by the National Association of Broadcasters.  Never again would a demagogue have free access to the airwaves of the United States in the unrestricted and unregulated way that Coughlin had had in the 1930s.

      Pearl Harbour and the entry of the United States into the war brought his career to an end.  He was silenced by his bishop in May 1942, and his papers were banned from the US mail.  He remained the parish priest at the Shrine of the Little Flower until he was forced to retire in 1966, and then lived privately in Birmingham, Michigan, until his death on 27th October 1979.

      He was, notes Francis R. Burns, 'undoubtedly one of the most powerful figures outside the government during the Depression era'.  The influence he exerted over the American people was powerful and immediate, but in the end the institutions of both church and state were stronger than a demagogue who had hoped to be America's Hitler.  At one time he was the most influential Irishman in the world, but in the end the will of the people prevailed.

 

 

61

Ian Paisley

1926-

 

Since the middle of the 1960s, the bulky figure of Ian Kyle Paisley has dominated the politics of Northern Ireland, causing concern in both Britain and America, as his fiery rhetoric has contributed to the dangerous situation there.  But Paisley's opinions are not his alone.  He represents the culmination of a long tradition of Presbyterian independence, and his religious views are widely shared all over the world.

      He was born in Armagh on 6th April 1926, the son of the Rev. J. Kyle Paisley, a Baptist minister who had been a member of Carson's Ulster Volunteers in 1912.  But as his name suggests his cultural connections are with Scotland and the United Kingdom.  It is these connections he has worked much of his life to maintain.

      When he was two his family moved to Ballymena, where he was reared on the vivid prose and sensational illustrations of Foxe's Book of Martyrs.  He was educated at Ballymena Model School, Ballymena Technical High School, and the South Wales Bible College in the Rhondda Valley.  His further studies were at the Reformed Presbyterian Theological College in Belfast, though his honorary doctorate in divinity came from the Bob Jones University in America, in 1966.

      He was ordained a minister of the Free Presbyterian Church in 1946, and was elected its moderator in 1951.  Since 1946, his own ministry has been at the Martyrs Memorial Free Presbyterian Church at Ravenhill in Belfast, which he erected.  He is also a director of the Protestant Telegraph (founded in 1966), a newspaper which expounds his views, and president of a local Bible college.  He is married to Eileen Emily Cassells, and has twin sons and three daughters (one of whom, Rhonda, has written a warmly affectionate account of him as a family man).

      As befits his public life, Paisley is interested in history (who in Ireland is not?) and in collecting antiquarian books, especially of religious interest.  'One of the worst contributions that the other media have made is to take people away from the art, the pleasure, and the gain of literature,' he told his daughter.  He is also, surprisingly, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society - as a boy he had ambitions to be a sea captain.  He is a humorous and jovial man - though not all his fellow citizens would appreciate him calling his pet collie 'Bishop'.

      His political career only started in the mid-1950s in answer to, he claimed, 'the call of the people'.  He founded the Ulster Protestant Volunteers - harking back in title to the heady days of Ulster revolt before the First World War in the summer of 1914.  He was imprisoned twice for his street politics, once in 1966 and again in 1969.  This activity was all before the present renewed IRA campaign.  His street-corner speeches were one of the factors that contributed to the real sense of fear felt by besieged Catholic communities in Belfast and Derry, and to which the Provisional IRA was an initial response.

      In due course Paisley was elected to Stormont, as the Northern Ireland Assembly was called, and campaigned for the assembly to be restored after it was suspended by the British government following the imposition of direct rule on the troubled province by Westminister, in 1972.  He was elected to the United Kingdom Parliament in 1970 as the MP for North Antrim, a largely rural and agricultural area with strong conservative traditions.

      His original political vehicle had been the Protestant Unionist party, but in 1974 he and other leaders came together to create the Ulster Democratic Unionist party, which he still leads today.  He was re-elected as a member of the European Parliament in 1979, a post he still retains.  He is the highest polling politician in Northern Ireland, but in the fractured politics of Ulster he still represents a minority view.  Among his own constituency, he wins over 50 per cent of the votes.

      He made a symbolic resignation from his North Antrim seat in 1985 as a protest over the Anglo-Irish Agreement, which has been the basis for what political progress has been made.  He saw the agreement as a step towards a united Ireland, which allowed the government of Ireland a say in the affairs of a portion of the United Kingdom.  In reality, the government and people of Ireland no longer have ambitions for a united Ireland; what they want is peace, and are fearful that the turmoil of Northern Ireland could be imported into the south.  However, the government of Ireland is bound to give support to the nationalists in the north.  Paisley was re-elected to the seat in 1986.  Talks on the future of Northern Ireland proved inconclusive in 1991, but since then, largely through the work of many others, affairs have moved on to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.  But Ian Paisley remains firmly committed to the maintenance of the union, so the road ahead will still be a rocky one.  Paisley and his party remain determined to undermine the Northern Ireland Assembly.

      As a local MP, Ian Paisley has a good reputation, and in Westminster he works hard to obtain all that he can for his own constituents, and for Ulster in the councils of Europe.  In this area he does not regard people's religion.  Nevertheless, belonging as he does to the extreme wing of Presbyterianism, he still believes that Roman Catholics are damned to perdition, that the pope in Rome is the Antichrist spoken of by St John the Divine, and that only through the retention of the union can the Protestant faith of Ulster be retained.  For him, personal and religious freedom are intertwined.

      For Ian Paisley, salvation is a gift, and only Christ can mediate between God and man.  This places him in opposition not only to the majority of Irish people, but to the majority in Britain.  Nevertheless, his views are those espoused by many millions across the United States.  Just as Irish nationalism has found rooted support in the cities of the north, so Ian Paisley finds support in parts of Canada and all across the southern states.

      Though presented as an ogre by the media, to many who meet him or hear him preach he expresses the fundamental truth.  He has carried into his politics the sense of personal witness he feels in his religion.  That courage has made him one of the most powerfully influential men in Irish history.

 

 

62

Bernardo O'Higgins

1776-1842

 

The apostle of Latin American independence was the natural son of Irish-born Ambrose O'Higgins, who was governor of Chile and viceroy of Peru.  Ambrose had been born near Dangan Castle, in County Meath, in 1720.  He was sent to Spain to be educated by a Jesuit uncle in Cadiz.  However, he found he had no vocation for the church, and went to South America.  Landing in Buenos Aires, he later went on to Lima, Peru.  He first worked as a pedlar, then as a road contractor.  He eventually joined the army and rose to the rank of brigadier general.  In 1786 he was made intendant of Conception, and was ennobled.  He was governor general of Chile and later was made viceroy of Peru, a country he defended during the war of 1797.  He died suddenly in Lima on 18th March 1801.

      Bernardo's mother was Chilean, and he was born at Chillán, on 20th August 1776.  When he was fifteen he was sent to Europe to complete his education.  For three years he lived in Richmond, outside London, attending a Catholic school.  There he met Francisco de Miranda and other Latin revolutionaries.  He joined a Masonic secret society dedicated to undermining the rule of Spain and the Catholic Church in Latin America.  In 1802, on inheriting his father's estate, he returned to Chile, becoming mayor of Chillán.  He also remained deeply involved in the plots against Spain.  An opportunity came in 1808, when Napoleon invaded Spain and overthrew the royal house.  In September 1810 the revolution began, and the National Congress of Chile was called in April 1811.

      O'Higgins and his reformist ideas stood out, while the Chilean patriots ineffectually argued among themselves.  In September 1812, José Miguel Carera declared himself dictator.  O'Higgins became a member of the junta, but resigned to care for his farms.  Though the revolutionaries had been inspired by the American example, their revolution was taking a different course.  At this time O'Higgins was ill, and was planning to leave Chile when the Spanish imperial forces arrived in 1813.  Faced with this new danger, he returned to public life.

      He was given the rank of colonel and fought at San Carlos, Chillán, and El Roble.  His battlecry, which urged on his troops, was 'Let us live in honour or die in glory'.  He was promoted to army commander, but had to come to terms with the Spaniards in May 1814.  However, the agreement was accepted by the viceroy in Peru, and the government that made it was overthrown by Carera.  The war went on, and O'Higgins, though he disapproved of the coup, joined Carera.  The Chilean Army was defeated at Rancagua in September 1814.  In the first days of October, O'Higgin's escape from the town square, by opening a path through the barricades with the help of some soldiers, was a moment of epic heroism in his life.

      O'Higgins fled to Argentina, where the government gave him a command in an army which San Martin was organizing to cross the Andes, invade Chile, and defeat the Spanish.  The campaign went ahead and the Andes were traversed.  On 12th February 1817, the Spanish were defeated at the battle of Chacabuco.  Soon afterwards the capital was seized and O'Higgins was proclaimed dictator of Chile.

      A further victory by the patriots at Maipo, in April 1818, secured Chilean freedom.  In 1820 O'Higgins began to organize a naval expedition to attack Peru, but the campaign did not go well.  He promulgated two political constitutions, intended to reinforce his position.  O'Higgins lost ground, largely because he had lost the support of the conservative elements in Chilean society, though he gave ample evidence of his abilities as an administrator.  He attempted to inaugurate land reforms, educational advances, and restrictions on gambling and bullfighting.  These seemed to threaten the landed class and the macho style of Latin American life.  Distrust of his liberal policy led to revolution in Chile in 1822.  Early in 1823 O'Higgins was forced into exile in Peru, where he lived until his death in Lima on 24th October 1842.  His ashes were brought back by the Chilean government and interred with state ceremonies in 1869, and in 1872 an equestrian statue of O'Higgins was dedicated in Santiago.  (Bernardo's son, Demetrio O'Higgins, a rich estate owner, died in 1869.)

      O'Higgins is representative of the many Irish people who lived and worked in Latin America, some in the days of the Spanish Empire, others in more recent centuries.  Like O'Higgins, these people brought to their new countries a love of freedom, courage, and a conviction that was often at odds with the typical Latino temperament.  Having often left Ireland and great hardship, they sought to build a new life in a new continent.  Yet their experiences were not as happy as in the United States or Australia, and Irishmen were always to be found among the small vanguard that kept liberal ideas of freedom alive in the republics of the south.  Their pervasive influence was, and is, of great importance.

 

 

63

Bob Geldof

1954-

 

Though he first made his name in the field of music, Bob Geldof was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for an extraordinary feat of organization which both astonished and delighted the world.

      Though Geldof himself seems essentially Irish in his outlook and attitudes, his grandfather was a Flemish pastry cook who ended up in Dublin.  He was born in middle-class Dublin.  His mother died when he was only seven, leaving his rearing largely to an older sister.  His father was now a businessman, which meant they were at least well off.

      He was educated at fashionable and elite Blackrock College, where he did not, he thought, do well.  Youthful rebelliousness took him away from home to England and then to Canada.  He took a series of varied jobs, as a truck driver, factory hand, street entertainer, and English language teacher.  He also did a stint as a pop music journalist on a newspaper in British Columbia called the Georgia Strait.

      However, his break came when in 1975 he returned to Dublin to start his own free community paper in the city and with others set up a rock group called the Boomtown Rats, of which he was the lead singer.  The band quickly achieved a certain local fame in their native city, due in part to Geldof's own personality and flair for publicity.

      In March 1977 they went to London, where they were signed by a record company.  They had two important hits, 'Rat Trap' in 1978 and 'I Don't Like Mondays' in 1979.  The early albums also sold well, but the band depended on Geldof, whose range was never wide, and the band began to fade in the early 1980s.  This was due largely to Geldof's own attitude to the music business, which he saw with refreshing cynicism.  In San Diego, in 1979, when they were playing a showcase gig that would have launched them onto US television and radio, he urged the crowd of youngsters to boo and heckle the radio company bosses sitting in the balcony.  The albums, not unnaturally, had their playtime cancelled.  This penchant for speaking his mind made him many enemies, though many others found him friendly, frank, and engaging.

      Geldof returned to London.  In October 1984 reports of the famine in Ethiopia appeared on British television; indeed, they were said to have contributed to the overthrow of the Emperor Haile Selassie and the installation of the Communist regime, which was equally unable to cope with an increasingly dire situation.  Children and adults were shown dying of starvation on the nightly news.  Many were moved, but Geldof decided something must be done.

      He organized his friends in the music business, and to aid Ethiopia they recorded and issued a single called 'Do They Know It's Christmas?'  The group was called Band-Aid, and that season the song became the biggest-selling single in British history, making over £8 million for the appeal.

      This was success enough, but Geldof was on a roll.  He now pulled in even more favours and from his base in London organized the Live Aid Concert, held simultaneously in both London and Philadelphia on 13th July 1985.  The show was a huge success, and was broadcast live around the world to an audience said to have numbered more than one and a half billion viewers.  It raised some £50 million, and a further effort in 1986 called Sport Aid raised yet another £50 million.  Geldof was chairman of the Ethiopian appeal, and for some years was actively involved in the distribution of the monies raised.  It was recognized that this achievement was due very largely to Bob Geldof's nerve and determination.  Whatever he had not been taught at school, he had been taught not to turn back.

      In 1986 he published his autobiography, Is That It?, which became a bestseller in Europe and America.  By now, however, his own musical career was dead.  His talent and drive were harnessed to various projects and companies in television.  A relationship with the television personality Paula Yates ended in separation, and was later followed by the tragic death of her new companion and of Paula herself in 2000.

      Heroes in the past had often been held up as being all of a piece, people of exemplary virtue in every way.  Geldof showed this was not the case.  He remained his sarky and abrasive self, despite receiving an honorary knighthood from the queen of England in July 1986.

      Yet he had shown what could be done on a universal scale to aid those unfortunate victims with which the modern world is filled.  No-one expected him to become a saint, and he didn't.  But he had given an example of what could be done with enthusiasm and passion when the right man met the right cause.  He had found that rock 'n' roll was not enough - even rock stars have to grow up.

      For anyone reared in Ireland, famine has a special meaning.  From the grim days of the Great Famine in the 1840s the Irish have been inspired when they can help the less fortunate though development aid and missionary work.  The efforts of Bob Geldof carried this national aspiration through the most spectacular ultimate achievement.  For a few days he enabled the whole world to feel as one.

 

 

64

Archbishop James Ussher

1581-1656

 

Though his name may not be widely known today, James Ussher, the Church of Ireland archbishop of Armagh in the early seventeenth century, is among the most influential men who ever existed.  For millions of Bible Christians, he is the one who settled the date of creation of the world, which they find printed in the margins of their King James translation of the sacred scriptures.

      Though most people today accept that the world is many millions of years old, for those who hold a literal, fundamentalist view of the Bible, the date of 4004 B.C., which he put forward, is not to be gainsaid.

      James Ussher was born in the parish of St Nicholas, in the city of Dublin, on 4th January 1581, a generation after the Reformation had begun.  From an early age his education was keenly Protestant.  He was sent to a school which had been set up in the city by two political agents of James VI of Scotland, the Presbyterian heir apparent to the English throne, who wished to establish a Presbyterian party for himself in Ireland in the event of Queen Elizabeth's death.  His education continued at Trinity College, then an almost new establishment, which had been founded with the blessing of Queen Elizabeth I by his uncle Henry Ussher.  He entered the college at the age of thirteen.

      He was admitted as a fellow of Trinity in 1599, earning his master's degree in 1600, and was ordained both a deacon and Anglican priest in 1601.  In 1607 he was given his bachelor in divinity.  He was chancellor of St Patrick's Cathedral and rector of Finglas, just outside the city.  In 1607 he was also appointed regius professor of divinity at Trinity, and received his doctorate in 1614.

      His education had filled him with enthusiasm for the Reformation, and he began an extended and intensive study of the Scriptures and the Fathers of the Church (such early scholars as St Augustine and St Jerome) in order to defend its positions.  In 1613, his first publication, though not his first composition, was a history of the church between the sixth and thirteenth centuries.

      He was vice chancellor of Trinity in 1614 and 1617.  During a two-year period in London he was presented to King James (now monarch of England as well as Scotland), was appointed bishop of Meath, and preached before the House of Commons at Westminster.  In 1625 the king transferred him to Armagh as archbishop and primate of all Ireland.

      Ussher was bitterly opposed to Catholicism.  In 1626 he prevented the viceroy from granting Catholics partial relief from the penal laws.  He objected to the use of Gaelic in the services of the established church, which was being promoted by William Bedell, who had made the first Gaelic translation of the Bible to be printed.  He was largely responsible for the Calvinistic canons drawn up for the Church of Ireland in 1634, though these were never accepted.  But he was also opposed to efforts to make the Church of Ireland conform in all points of teaching with the Church of England, which he felt was still tainted with Catholic ideas.  He was perhaps largely responsible for the austere outlook of the Church of Ireland, which was faced with a largely Catholic population in Ireland.

      He had a European reputation as a scholar and Protestant theologian.  He made many trips to England, searching out books to build up the library at the new Dublin University.  He was on friendly terms with such scholars as Sir Thomas Bodley, Sir Robert Cotton and the antiquarian William Camden.  While in England on a scholarly research trip the Great Rebellion broke out.  This was in 1641, and Ussher never returned to Ireland again.  During the rebellion he lost his house and property in the city of Armagh.  He had pleaded with Charles I not to abandon Strafford, but in vain.  He remained in England, and to compensate him for the loss of Armagh he was given the monies from the vacant see of Carlisle.  He refused a seat in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster in 1643 and never held office again, but spent his time preaching and writing.

      During the civil war he left Oxford and sought refuge in Wales.  He returned to London in 1645, and in 1647 he was appointed preacher to the lawyers at Lincoln's Inn.  In 1648 he discussed the question of the episcopacy with Charles I on the Isle of Wight, but the following year he witnessed the execution of the king at Whitehall.

      His greatest scholarly achievement was his work on the epistles of St Ignatius of Antioch.  In 1644 he added an authentic text of the seven genuine surviving letters, eliminating the spurious ones and later interpolations.

      By temper, Ussher was a Calvinist.  As a young man, his association with Walter Travers, the provost of Trinity, had given him Puritan sympathy with their position against the Anglicans.  His work Reduction of Episcopacy was written as a conciliatory attempt to prevent the outbreak of the civil war when tensions increased in both England and Ireland.  It proposed a scheme by which the Anglican and Presbyterian traditions could be united into an established church throughout the British Isles.  However, it was published only after his death.

      His works were eventually collected by the Irish scholars C.E. Elrington and James H. Todd (between 1847 and 1864).  The most influential of these was his Annales Veteris et Novi Testamenti, published in two volumes in Dublin between 1650 and 1654.

      His lengthy studies gave rise to his famous chronology of the Bible, which placed the creation of the world in 4004 B.C. by calculating the lives of the patriarchs as given in the texts.  The chronology he proposed was shortly after inserted into the margins of the authorized King James Bible, though by what authority it is not known.  Later it was even included in some editions of the Catholic Douay Bible, an indication of how wide its acceptance was.

      As A.D. White comments in the History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom, it was 'soon practically regarded as equally inspired with the sacred text itself'.  (In a less famous work published in 1642, Dr John Lightfoot of Cambridge suggested that 'man was created by the Trinity on 23rd October 4004 B.C. at nine o'clock in the evening'.  This chronology was widely accepted and could be found in many influential books, such as Joseph Hadyn's Dictionary of Dates, well into the nineteenth century.  Though historical and geological research during that period completely undermined his chronology, it is still widely accepted by many Protestants.

      Ussher died at Lady Peterborough's house at Reigate in Surrey, and was buried in Westminster Abbey by order of Oliver Cromwell.  His personal library, amounting to some ten thousand volumes, among which were many manuscripts in Gaelic and Oriental languages, was purchased by the state and eventually donated to Trinity College in Dublin.  But his real memorial may be in the millions who still follow his chronology and accept his date for the creation of the world unhesitatingly.

 

 

65

Patrick Sarsfield

c. 1650-1693

 

Patrick Sarsfield, early of Lucan, is one of Ireland's legendary military heroes, whose name was constantly evoked by patriots of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.  He was brave and dashing at a time when war seemed a calling still fit for gentlemen.

      He was born, it is thought, about 1650, at Lucan, where his family had an ancient castle (now replaced by a mansion built in 1772).  He was the second son of Sir Patrick Sarsfield, by Anne, daughter of Rory O'Moore, the leader of the Catholic confederacy in 1641.  The estate had been confiscated under Cromwell, but was restored to the Sarsfields in the 1670s.

      His early life is obscure, but he followed a military career from an early age, being educated at a French military academy.  In 1675, following the death of his elder brother, he unexpectedly inherited an estate valued at £2,000.  In 1678 he was a captain in Monmouth's regiment in France.  He returned to England with the regiment and remained there till 1685.

      This was the period, between 1678 and 1681, of the political turmoil that arose from the false allegations of Titus Oates that Catholic conspirators were plotting to overthrow the Protestant regime in England.  It led to some twenty-five executions and continued intolerance and distrust of many Catholics, especially Irish Catholics.  It was difficult being a Catholic officer in the army, especially because one depended on royal patronage.  The accession to the throne of the Catholic king James II improved matters.  Sarsfield was commissioned a captain of dragoons in June 1685, and later a lieutenant in the Horse Guards.  At the battle of Sedgemoor, in July of that year, he was wounded while fighting for the king against Monmouth.

      After this he returned to Ireland, where he served the Catholic viceroy Lord Tyrconnell in reforming the army in Ireland.  He was granted land in Kildare to add to his own estate, and married Honoria de Burgh, the daughter of the early of Clanrickard.

      Promoted to colonel in 1686, he was a strong supporter of the cause of the ousted James II.  In 1688 he was given command of a force of dragoons, which fought William III in England.  Later he joined James in France, returning to Ireland with him in 1689.  It was James who raised him to the title of Lord Lucan in February 1691, and promoted him to the rank of lieutenant colonel.

      Sarsfield drove the Williamites under Lord Kingston out of Sligo, gaining control of Connaught, and he fought in every important engagement of the Williamite wars.  In a more minor role he served in the king's own bodyguard at the battle of the Boyne in 1690.  As deputy military commander in Limerick, he forced the English to raise the siege of the city - his greatest triumph - by destroying the supply train of their army.  With the help of a Catholic bandit named 'Galloping Hogan', he ambushed and blew up the train in August 1690 at Ballyneety.  The siege was raised in September.  He opposed the ageing viceroy Richard Talbot, Earl of Tyrconnell, who wished to end the war, and secured the line of the Shannon against the Williamites.

      The Irish army, which was poorly paid, were largely Irish and Gaelic speaking.  The Williamite army was largely made up of foreign professional soldiers from Holland, Germany, Denmark, Scotland, and France, along with Irish Protestant and French Huguenots commanded by a Dutchman, Baron von Ginkel.

      The French general St Ruth arrived in May to take overall command.  Through vanity he lost the vital crossing of the Shannon at Athlone, and decided to make his stand at Aughrim on 12th July 1691.  Sarsfield protested.  He did not wish to hazard all on one throw of the dice.  He was sent to the rear of the army and given no hint of St Ruth's plans.  In fact, St Ruth refused to share his plans or intentions with any of his officers, so confusion reigned when a cannonball struck his head.  The Irish army, which had held the high ground until then, broke up.

      'Chance, skill, and treachery all hit the mark,' the Irish poet Richard Murphy said.  'The soldiers panicked, thinking God had struck.'  Colonel Luttrell betrayed the Jacobites to the Williamites and all was lost.  The battle of Aughrim was a bloody disaster in which some nine thousand soldiers died.  The bodies covered four miles of ground, like a flock of sheep.  It was the last decisive battle in Irish history.

      After this catastrophe for the Irish, Sarsfield miraculously led the defeated army back to Limerick, which was finally forced to surrender in 1691.  The Treaty of Limerick was signed in September, Limerick was given up on 3rd October, and Sarsfield went into exile in France with most of the Jacobite army, some twelve thousand soldiers.

      James II had already fled after the Boyne.  Afterwards, Sarsfield reportedly told the English, 'Change kings and we will fight it over with you again'.  But he was never to have that chance.  This was 'the Flight of the Wild Geese', what the poet W.B. YEATS [8] saw, with the flight of the Earls, as the two great disasters of the modern Irish nation.  With the ascendancy of William III, the Protestant conquest of Ireland was now complete.  The terms of the Treaty of Limerick relating to civilians were soon broken.

      The historian Conor Cruise O'Brien has written, 'The tragedy could not have been averted, or even notably softened, by the wisdom or humanity of any ruler.  The people of Ireland had been caught and crushed in the play of international and ideological forces ... English and Irish, pressed into closer contact by these forces, discovered how diversely history had formed them ... The weaker party was doomed to be oppressed, and the weaker party was the native population of the smaller and more remote island.'

      James gave Sarsfield the overall command of the Irish Brigade, which had been granted to him by France for an intended invasion of England in 1692.  But this scheme was abandoned.  Sarsfield continued to serve under the French king, fought at Steinkirk in 1692, and as a maréchal-de-camp was mortally wounded at Neerwinden, the French victory over William of Orange, during the battle of Landen on 19th August 1693.  He died a few days later in the village of Huy, in Liege province, in what is now Belgium.  On seeing his bleeding wounds, he is said to have exclaimed, 'Oh, that this was for Ireland'.

      Patrick Sarsfield was almost the last of a great Irish family.  He left a son, on whose death in 1719 the title became extinct.  The estate at Lucan then passed to a niece, who married a Vesey, and from them it passed by marriage to the Colthurst family.  They were Protestants.

      It was a tragic and pointless end to a man who had been 'the darling of the army' in Ireland.  An officer had exclaimed, 'The king is nothing to me.  I obey Sarsfield'.  It was this almost mythical figure that entered the imagination of later generations of soldiers and poets.  His exploits were the stuff on which the military enthusiasm of young Irish people of previous generations were fed.  He was the last cavalier of the Jacobite cause in Ireland.

 

 

66

William Thompson

c. 1785-1833

 

An Irish precursor of Karl Marx may seem an historical anomaly, but William Thompson, a wealthy landowner and apostle of social justice, was just such an anomaly.  According to Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the British socialists, Marx was 'Thompson's disciple'.  At one time, before the fall of communism, a bust of William Thompson was among the items displayed at the International Communist Museum in Prague.

      Perhaps the first Irish economist, William Thompson was born in Cork about 1785.  His father was Alderman John Thompson, a prosperous Protestant merchant who had been mayor of the city and high sheriff of the county.  In those days all such posts were not open to Catholics.  When his father died in 1814, William inherited not only the lucrative family business in Cork itself, but also 1,500 acres at Cloonkeen near Rosscarbery, overlooking Glandore harbour.

      He was now a man of property himself.  However, the social conditions of his own tenants, and the population of Ireland as a whole, led him into a course of wide reading in political economy.  He was not much interested in increasing his wealth.  He lived in a large town house with a fine library, and was a prominent member of many of Cork's literary and scientific groups.  But his ideas were not those of his own class.

      Thompson was atheist.  From his travels in Europe, he had returned filled with enthusiasm for the French Revolution.  He walked around his lands in Glandore with the tricolour tied to his walking stick.  In elections in 1812 and 1826 he supported Catholic interests, to the disdain of his relatives.

      On inheriting the estate he gave his tenants long leases and began to work for the improvement of the land and his tenants' lives.  He neither smoked nor drank, and by the end of his life had become a vegetarian.  'I am not what is usually called a labourer,' he remarked.  'Under equitable social arrangements, possessed of health and strength, I ought to blush in making this declaration.'

      After studying the writings of Jeremy Bentham, he became an enthusiast for utilitarianism and socialism.  He became an intimate friend of Bentham.  He also supported the cooperative community which the Scottish pioneer Robert Owen had established at New Lanark.

      Thompson made his own mark as a writer, making important contributions to early socialist thought, anticipating the theory of surplus value which Marx was to later expound at length in Das Kapital.

      'It is this exposition of the social right of the worker to the full product of his labour,' writes the Irish economist Dr Patrick Lynch, 'that makes Thompson the founder of "scientific" socialism and the most important forerunner of Karl Marx.'  Marx, of course, was far wider ranging in his study of economics than Thompson, and there is only one specific reference to Thompson in Das Kapital.  But his ideas are there.

      Thompson was also a pioneer in the advocacy of equal rights for women.  His most important book was An Inquiry Into the Principals of the Distribution of Wealth, Most Conductive to Human Happiness: Applied to the Newly-Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, published in 1824.  He considered unearned income from rents and stocks, as well as private property, as leading inexorably to social injustice.  He saw the just distribution of wealth as the key to political economy and the advance of social progress.

      His friend Robert Owen had based his appeal for social justice on the rich.  Thompson realized that if the working class was to move forward, it must rely on its own efforts.  Again, in his assessment of the influence of the economic environment on the shaping of political attitudes, he was certainly a most important pioneer in socialist thought.  But he did not believe in state intervention; what he had seen of it in Ireland had been corrupt.  He envisioned the state withering away to be replaced by a cooperative commonwealth.

      A visit by Robert Owen to Dublin had inspired one cooperative experiment on an estate in Clare, which lasted until 1833.  In 1830 Thompson himself published a work on establishing such communities, and pushed ahead with plans to transform his own estate at Glandore.  He drafted a constitution for it, giving women equal rights and allowing for the exclusion of the idle and the vicious.

      In these projects he had the assistance of Anna Wheeler, the daughter of an Anglican archbishop and the granddaughter of Henry Gratton.  With her help he had written his Appeal of One-half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political and Then in Civil and Domestic Slavery.

      He died at Cloonkeen, Rosscarbery, in West Cork on 28th March 1833.  Though he was without religion, a nephew who assumed he was his heir, had him buried as a Christian at Drumbed.  But Thompson had left his body for dissection, stipulating that the skeleton was to be preserved in a museum on the grounds of the first cooperative community to be established in the British Isles according to his ideas.

      What became of his remains is now a mystery, though the doctor who exhumed the body said that the bones had been sent to Anna Wheeler 'as a memento of love'.  When the will was read, the nephew was astonished to find that he and the family had been left nothing. William Thompson had left his estate to the benefit of the poor, to be run along the lines of New Lanark and according to the principles of Robert Owen.  But after a quarter of a century of legal litigation, this will was set aside.  Naturally, the lawyers profited the most.

      The memory of William Thompson the man has faded.  As Dr Patrick Lynch pointed out, 'His place in international socialist thought, and in the social democratic tradition in Ireland, deserves to be put into the proper setting and perspective.  Irish [people], at least, should recall the Cork landlord, who, like the United Irishmen, supported the people of no property; and who, in addition, furnished an important footnote, at least, to the history of economic thought wherever and by whom it is written.'

 

 

67

Michael O'Clery

c. 1590-1643

 

If there is one work in Gaelic which has proved to be more influential than any other, there would be general agreement that it must be The Annals of the Four Masters, which the lay Franciscan brother Michael O'Clery and his three colleagues were responsible for.  It is the essential work of reference to which everyone interested in the history of Ireland has to have recourse.

      Michael O'Clery (in Gaelic Micheál ó Clérigh) was born in Donegal in Ulster about 1590, though the earlier date of 1575 has also been suggested.  He was born the son of a local Gaelic chief at Kilbarron Castle, near Ballyshannon, and was baptized Tadhg, or Timothy.  The O'Clerys had inherited the office of historian of Tir Chonaill, and Michael O'Clery was imbued with the love of history and poetry from an early age.

      He was educated at various schools in Ireland before he went abroad to study in Europe, going into the Spanish Netherlands before 1621.  He became a Franciscan brother, taking the name in religion of Michael in or about 1622 at Louvain, where Franciscans from Ireland had established a college in 1607.

      Many writers and scholars of importance had been attached to this college, and it was a recognized centre of learning in things Irish.  It was intended to create religious literature in Gaelic that would be sent among the Irish in Ireland.  A printing press, set up in 1611, produced many books over the next sixty years.

      When O'Clery arrived, there was already in hand a plan by Fr Hugh Ward, Fr Patrick Fleming and others to collect and publish the lives of the Irish saints.  O'Clery already had a reputation as a historian, and in 1626 he was sent back to Ireland by the head of the college to collect materials for this work.  He was to stay in Ireland for the next eleven years.

      While he was collecting and copying manuscript materials, such as the Book of Lismore, which he studied in 1629, O'Clery also assembled works of his own calendars of saints' feasts, and genealogies of the families of kings and saints, which he finished at Athlone in November 1630.  He completed his copy of the Books of Invasions at Lisgoole, Fermanagh, in December 1631.  He also edited earlier works.

      It was in collaboration with three other scholars that he completed his greatest work, The Annals of the Four Masters (in Gaelic, Annála Rioghacta Eireann, 'Annals of the Kings of Ireland'), between 1632 and 1636.  His helpers were Farfasa O'Mulcrony, Peregrine O'Clery, and Peregrine O'Duignan.

      These annals had been collected from various earlier ones and edited into coherence.  They cover the history of Ireland from the remotest days of its legendary past reckoned from the day of creation up to 1616 A.D.  Though the early entries are sparse bare notes of lootings, burnings, murders, battles, and the deaths and reigns of kings, as time advances towards the compilers' own day the entries fill out to provide an almost continuous narrative.

      The book was compiled in a little house on the banks of the River Dowse where it flowed from Lough Melvin into Donegal Bay.  It was begun by the four of them on 22nd January 1632, and finished on 10th August 1636.  The work was given its more familiar name, The Annals of the Four Masters, by Fr John Colgan as a tribute to the compiler and his friends.  It was dedicated to their patron, Fergal O'Gara, lord of Moy Gara, the prince of Coolavin.  In his preface addressed to Fergal, O'Clery explains his purpose: 'I thought that I could get the assistance of the chroniclers for whom I had most esteem, in writing a book of annals in which these matters might be put on record, for that should the writing of them be neglected at present, they would not again be found to be put on record even to the end of the world.  All the best and most copious books of annals that I could find throughout all Ireland were collected by me - though it was difficult for me to collect them - into one place to write this book.'

      O'Clery was right about the dangers.  Hardly any of the original materials he saw have survived to this day, many perishing in the turmoil of the Cromwellian and Williamite wars.

      The great Dr Douglas Hyde, later the first president of Ireland, observed of the annals: 'It is not too much to say that there is not an event in the whole of Irish history from the birth of Christ down to the beginning of the seventeenth century that the first enquiry of the student about it must not be: "What do the Four Masters say about this?"'

      In 1637 O'Clery returned to Louvain, where he set about compiling a glossary of obscure words, a work which was printed in 1644, the year after his death.  His collections were later used by Fr John Colgan in his Acts of the Irish Saints, his triple work on the three patrons of Ireland - Patrick, Bridget, and Columba.  The original plan to publish the lives of the Irish saints as a whole came to nothing with the death of Colgan's successor.  In due course most of the material made its way into print during the nineteenth century, with the revival of interest in the Irish past.  The annals themselves were translated and annotated by John O'Donovan, and it is his much praised edition which is usually read today.

      O'Clery's own manuscripts are preserved in the Burgundian Library in Brussels.  His died as he had lived, a poor scholar in the service of his country's past.

 

 

68

Ernest Walton

1903-1995

 

Science has not always been seen as an area in which the Irish have been seen to be pre-eminent, but with Ernest Walton, one of Ireland's Nobel Prize winners, the idea is invalid.  Walton was at the leading edge of research into atomic energy, which has proved to be both the most contentious and most dangerous area of science in the twentieth century.

      When the first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on 16th July 1945, it was the end result of what Walton had begun, and the beginning of a new era of danger, and of awesome responsibility, for the United States.  Such are the profound changes that a small-scale scientific inquiry can precipitate.

      With his colleague John D. Cockcroft, he achieved the first artificial disintegration of the atomic nucleus.  In simple language, they 'split the atom' and opened the way for the atomic and hydrogen bombs.

      Ernest Walton was born in Dungarvan, County Waterford, in October 1906.  His father was a Methodist minister, while his mother came from a Protestant family long established in Armagh.

      He was sent to the Methodist College in Belfast, where it quickly became clear that he had a talent for mathematics and science.  He went on to study at Trinity College in Dublin, where he took a bachelor's degree in 1926, and a further master's degree in 1934.

      In 1935 he went on to Cambridge, where he joined the Cavendish Laboratory, then led by Ernest Rutherford.  Though the Irish student was given little working space, he found congenial company in T.E. Alibone and John D. Cockcroft.  At Rutherford's suggestion, he first began work on an experiment to increase the velocity of electrons by spinning them in an electric field produced by a changing circular magnetic field as a method of nuclear disintegration.  The initial experiment was not a success, but it cleared the way for a more important one.

      The problems they faced were illuminated by the arrival of the Russian (later American) physicist George Gamow.  He had been working with Niels Bohr in Denmark, where he had worked on a wave mechanical theory of penetration of the particles.  His ideas opened the way for Walton and Cockcroft, and Rutherford gave them both permission, money, and space to continue.  With a budget of £1,000 they created the first accelerator for atomic particles.  Today the machine itself can be seen in the South Kensington Science Museum.  It now looks like an amateur relic of the past, which it is, but its importance was immense.

      It was on 13th April 1932 that Walton and Cockcroft found that their first experiment had been successful.  Walton's first observation of the telltale scintillations that marked the breakup of the nuclei were quickly confirmed by the pair.

      Their achievement was historic for several reasons.  It was the first time that scientists had produced a change in the atomic nucleus in a controlled situation.  In the process they had found a new, and seemingly boundless, source of energy.  They had confirmed Gamow's theory about the movement of particles, and also Einstein's theory that energy and mass are interchangeable.

      Their discovery was announced in a letter to the science journal Nature, and described at a meeting of the Royal Society in London on 15th June 1932.  The news created a sensation worldwide.  Their work inspired many other scientists with results that transformed scientific knowledge and the social life of the late twentieth century.

      In 1932 Walton received his Ph.D., and in 1934 he returned to his alma mater, Trinity College in Dublin.  In Dublin he was seen as a quite unflamboyant personality.  He was not given to small talk, a very Ulster-like characteristic.  He had married Freda Wilson, who had also been a student at the Methodist College, and they had two sons and two daughters.

      Walton was content to develop his department in the Dublin university, and in 1946 was appointed Erasmus Smith professor of natural and experimental philosophy.  Eventually, in 1951, Walton was awarded the Nobel Prize for physics along with Cockcroft.  This was a recognition of the highest order, but his wife told a neighbour that for his family the prize meant they could now buy a car.

      Though his friend had followed a more high-profile career, Ernest Walton was content to concentrate his attention on more local developments in his native country.  In 1952 he became chairman of the school of cosmic physics at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies (which had been established by EAMON DE VALERA [2] to provide a base for the German scientist Erwin Schroedinger, exiled by the Nazis).  In 1960 he was elected a senior fellow of Trinity College, where the physics laboratory now bears his name.  He died on 25th June 1995, having lived to see both the triumph and, as many would think, the failure of the atomic age.

 

 

69

Phil Lynott

1951-1986

 

Whatever may be his final reputation as a musician, rock star Phil Lynott will gain a place in history as the first pre-eminent black Irishman.

      His mother was a Dublin girl who had gone to England to work as a nurse in the Midlands.  Black men, either American or West Indian, were then a novelty rather than a distinct class in Britain.  The father of her child was in fact a Brazilian, but as much a descendant of a freed slave as any other black in the Americas.

      Philip Lynott was born on 20th August 1951.  At the home where his mother gave birth to him, efforts were made by the nuns to have him given up for adoption: a young girl like her would not want to be saddled with a baby, especially a black baby.  However, his mother was stubborn and strong willed, and kept him.  But it was a difficult choice, and eventually little Phil was sent home to his grandmother and was raised as an Irish Catholic on a Dublin council estate along with his nephews.

      One of the earliest photographs of the rock musician is one taken of him in a demure suit on the day he made his first communion, the essential rite of passage in Irish culture.  Though a black child naturally stood out in the Dublin crowd, Phil Lynott grew up happily enough, well supported by his family, and encountered very little in Dublin by way of racial prejudice.

      From very early on, his mother noticed that he had a stage presence, and as he grew up in the developing era of rock and roll, he fell into playing music almost inevitably.  Music was as important to Phil and his friends as the air they breathed.

      In 1969, along with Eric Bell from Belfast, and Brian Downey from Dublin, he formed a band called Thin Lizzy.  Initially they made a name for themselves as something new at music venues in Dublin, before they were signed by Decca.  They made two albums, which went almost nowhere commercially, never getting into the charts.

      But everything changed for the band when they made a rocked-up version of an Irish traditional song called 'Whiskey in the Jar'.  It was a case of Irish folk meets rock and roll, and was a wondrous and instant success.  It reached the Top Ten chart in Britain, and popularized the band's curious combination of folk and hard-rock guitar.

      But as is the way with rock bands, changes caught up with Thin Lizzy.  Gary Moore replaced Eric Bell on guitar, and two other session men were hired.  Two other guitarists were then recruited, a Scot, Brian Robertson, and Scott Gorham, an American.

      The band was now fixed, and began the main phase of its musical development.  In 1976 they released an album called Jailbreak, which mounted the charts.  A single called 'The Boys Are Back in Town' went into the Top Ten in Britain and the Top Twenty in America, and was voted single of the year by the New Musical Express in London.  There were a series of concerts during 1979 which developed their reputation.

      In 1980 Phil Lynott married Caroline Crowther, the daughter of popular British television personality Leslie Crowther.  This was not a marriage made in heaven so far as Crowther was concerned.  Lynott reunited with the band after some solo work.  The hectic details of the changes of the band did not prevent its further progress.

      Since he moved out of his family home Lynott had been living the customary life of the modern rock musician, which meant sex, alcohol, and especially drugs.  Eventually it all caught up with him.  He had split up Thin Lizzy in the summer of 1984, and at the end of that year an album called Life-Live was issued.  But Lynott was on borrowed time.  After a drug overdose towards the end of 1985, his body systems finally collapsed.  His mother finally realized it was the end when a priest was called.  On 4th January 1986, Phil Lynott died in an English medical centre from pneumonia and heart failure, compounded with almost total liver dysfunction.  His death at thirty-four was a great shock to his fans.  His remains were brought back to Ireland for burial near his mother's home on the north side of Dublin.

      In May 1986 Thin Lizzy was reformed, with BOB GELDOF [63] replacing Lynott for the charity concert in Ireland called Self-Aid, an offshoot of Band Aid, aimed at raising funds for young people.

      Along with BOB GELDOF [63] and U2 [36], Phil Lynott had been among the best known of Irish musicians and most influential in modern Ireland.  His extraordinary presence and power made a deep impression on a generation.  Only in England and elsewhere did he feel any resentment or prejudice against him because he was black.  At home in Ireland the Irish-Brazilian was treated as part of the scene.

      His memory has been kept alive by a series of books, one by his mother, and by reissues of his and Thin Lizzy's material.  'Whiskey in the Jar', with its mixture of Irish folk and imported rock, was truly representative of Irish culture as it had evolved since 1945.  But in time Phil Lynott may well come to have a greater significance for cultural historians as the first window into the coming multiracial Ireland of the future.

 

 

70

Peter Lalor

1823-1889

 

The role of the Irish in the drama of creating the very idea of Australia is summed up in the career of Peter Lalor, and of the events at the Eureka Stockade in the goldfields of the 1880s.

      Born at Tinnakill, County Laois, on 5th February 1827, he was the younger brother of the Irish political leader James Fintan Lalor (himself a man of continuing importance in the Irish republican tradition), the child of a wealthy farmer and member of Parliament.  His father had radical views and had resisted the imposition of tithes and was an advocate of the repeal oft he Act of Union.  The family remained in good circumstances until the famine.  Latter in life, Lalor's father claimed, 'I have been for upwards of forty years struggling without ceasing in the cause of the people'.  Some of this passion was passed on to his sons.

      Peter Lalor was educated at Carlow College and Trinity College in Dublin, and became a civil engineer.  As a youth he did not share his family's political activities, and had no desire to mix himself up in them.

      Like so many of his countrymen, the discovery of gold at Golden Point, Victoria, in October 1851, tempted him to immigrate to Australia with his brother Richard.  They arrived in Melbourne in October 1852.  At first he found work as an engineer on the construction of the Melbourne-Geelong Railway.  He and his brother also had an interest in a provisions store in Melbourne.

      Richard returned to Ireland, where he was later a Parnellite MP.  In 1854 Peter moved to Ballarat (seventy-six miles west-northwest of Melbourne), where he held rich gold claims.  He intended to continue the provisions supply business in the fields.

      He was involved in a protest by the miners, though not as a leading figure.  'The people,' he said, recalling the language of Irish politics, 'were dissatisfied with the laws, because they excluded them from possession of the land, from being represented in the Legislative Council, and imposed on them an odious poll tax.'  The protest was one familiar to colonial America: no taxation without representation.

      A miners' strike broke out when they refused to continue paying a licence to the crown.  This had its origins in the imprisonment of three miners after Bentley's Hotel was burned.  The Ballarat Reform League then developed a programme of reforms.  A mass meeting was held on 29th November, 1854, to hear what the governor had to say, but his concessions were not enough.  The twelve thousand miners, over whose head flew a Southern Cross flag, were for resistance.

      The next day soldiers and police were sent to the goldfields, where they arrested some miners and withdrew with their prisoners.  Other miners crowded onto the scene and occupied Bakery Hill, where they raised their flag.  Lalor was the only one of the committee now present, and he called on the miners to arm and resist, swearing by the Southern Cross to defend their rights and liberties.

      The next day the miners marched from Bakery Hill to the Eureka site.  Lalor was elected commander, and a stockade was erected.  This followed the pattern planned by the Young Irish rebels that Lalor's brother Fintan had led.  Peter Lalor, however, had no military background, and an American was appointed to deal with military matters.

      The stockade was not intended as a complete defence.  The miners returned to their tents for the night, leaving only 120 men, mostly Irish, in the stockade.  Early on the morning of 3rd December, police and soldiers attacked.  In the fighting at the stockade over thirty miners were shot dead and twelve wounded.  Some 125 miners were then arrested.

      Lalor, who had been leading the striking miners, lost his arm but escaped in the confusion.  In due course the goldfields were granted representation, and Lalor was elected to the assembly as the member from Ballarat in November 1855.  In the next half century the mines there produced £70 million, making them of crucial importance to the Australian economy as a whole.

      Lalor defended the interests of the miners but did not follow their views on all matters.  He was especially conservative in his outlook.  He was not, he explained, actually a democrat if that meant 'Chartism, communism, or republicanism', but 'if democracy means opposition to a tyrannical press, a tyrannical people, or a tyrannical government, then I have ever been, I am still, and will ever remain, a democrat'.

      His political career belongs to the history of Australia, but his views, which were liberal but not fully democratic, were influenced by the ideas of Young Ireland and the Americans who had flooded into Australia from California.  In subsequent years Peter Lalor held several posts, such as Postmaster General and commissioner of customs.  He was Speaker of the House from 1880 to 1888.  He had to resign because of ill health, but was voted a grant of £4,000 for his patriotic services.  He died at Melbourne on 10th February 1889.

      The Eureka Stockade has entered into the mythology of Australia.  It was acclaimed by no less a person than Karl Marx as a truly revolutionary episode, but the later career of Peter Lalor and modern historians suggest otherwise.  The myth remains, enshrined in histories, novels, and films.  And that myth, of a people's uprising, still influences the populist politics of Australia.  Lalor brought to the new politics of Australia something of the passion that had informed his brother's efforts for land reform in Ireland.  Ever since, in the politics of Australia, the Irish element has been just as important as it has been in America.

 

 

71

James Gandon

1743-1823

 

Although widely accepted as the greatest Irish architect, a man who put his mark on the city of Dublin's public buildings in no uncertain manner, James Gandon was not Irish by birth.

      His father was a French Protestant with mystical leanings who nearly ruined himself with experiments in alchemy.  Young James was made of more practical stuff and from an early age he educated himself in the classics, drawing, and maths.  At fifteen he became an assistant in the office of an architect, Sir William Chambers, and later became his apprentice.  A few years later, about 1765, he struck out on his own.  In 1767 he published with John Woolfe a continuation of Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus, which was completed in 1771.  He won his first gold medal for architecture at the Royal Academy in London in 1768.  He continued to exhibit his drawings there between 1774 and 1780.

      In 1769 he won second prize in a competition for a design for the Dublin Royal Exchange; years later, having turned down an offer to go to Russia, he settled instead in Dublin, in 1781, to work on the new Customs House.

      There was a great deal of local opposition from the merchant classes to the cost of the new building, over which there were riots.  There was even armed opposition from residents near the old customs house further up the river.  However, it was brought to a triumphant conclusion in 1791.  By then Gandon had been asked to design an extension to the Houses of Parliament and the new Four Courts, and plan the King's Inns, the main base of Irish lawyers.

      He resigned in protest over interference with his plans in 1808 and retired from practice to a house in Lucan, outside of Dublin.  He was an original member of the Royal Irish Academy when it was established in 1785.  It was thought that when George IV, the first king of England to come to Ireland in peace, visited in 1821 that Gandon would be knighted.  But the visit passed without the old man receiving this indication of royal esteem.  However, with the admiration of his friends, Gandon had no need of royal favours.

      For many years Gandon had suffered from gout.  He died at home on 23rd December 1823.  Three days later he was buried as he had wished, in the same vault as his friend, 'the bibulous and altogether delightful antiquary' Capt. Francis Grose, in a private chapel in Drumcondra graveyard.

      Gandon's work in Dublin represents the culmination of the eighteenth-century confidence that had elevated the ambitions of Grattan's parliament.  But that was to end with the Act of Union and a more uncertain future.  In 1942, to mark the two-hundredth anniversary of Gandon's birth, the Royal Institute of Architects in Ireland erected a plaque to his memory in the Drumcondra church.

      In 1846 Gandon's biographer commented that Gandon was a man 'whose urbanity of heart and blandness of manner converted acquaintances into friends, rendering a long-protracted life one continued exercise of benevolence and affection'.  Gandon had made and kept a host of friends, but as Maurice Craig, the premier historian of Dublin's architecture, observed, 'even these private virtues are as nothing beside his services to architecture and to Dublin'.  Gandon was the man who did the most to create the stately appearance of the city, an appearance which has ruled and influenced the lives of Dubliners ever since.  The dignity of Dublin as the capital of Ireland is largely his creation.

 

 

72

William Parsons, Lord Rosse

1800-1867

 

William Parsons, third earl of Rosse, is among the giants of nineteenth-century science and one of the most remarkable Irishmen of his day.  Born in York on 17th June 1800, into a leading Irish family, he was a son of Lawrence Parsons, the second early of Rosse.  He was educated at Trinity College, where he became a student in 1818.  In 1821 he went on to Magdalen College in Oxford.  That year he was also elected to Parliament as the member for King's County (now Laois).  He held the seat until 1834, but resigned in order to pursue his scientific interests.  After he inherited his title he was a representative Irish peer at Westminster from 1845.

      He was already deeply interested in astronomy and had made experiments with telescopes at his father's estate at Parsonstown (now Birr).  The key element in a reflective telescope, such as Parsons had in mind, was its mirror.

      William Herschel had already been working with reflecting telescopes, but he had never published any information about how he cast and polished his specula.  Parsons had to make his own experiments.  He described his work in 1828 in the Edinburgh Journal of Science.  His speculum metal combined copper and tin in proportions to make a brilliant alloy.  Because this metal was very brittle, his first mirrors were made up of a number of thin plates of the metal soldered on the back of a strong light framework of a brass composed to have the same expansion rate.  He needed sixteen plates for a three-foot mirror.

      In 1839 the three-foot mirror was finished and mounted, but it presented difficulties due to its expansion, so Parsons decided to cast a solid three-foot mirror.  He achieved this, overcoming yet more technical difficulties, in 1840.  In 1842 he began work on an even larger six-foot mirror, which was finished in 1845.

      This was to be mounted in an instrument which came to be called the Leviathan, and was the largest telescope of the nineteenth century.  If was fifty-four feet long and the tube was so wide that a man could walk upright through it.

      The mirror of Leviathan was seventy-two inches wide.  The instrument took seventeen years to bring to completion.  Using local craftsmen - the sons of tenants on his estate whom he trained as technicians and chemists - he had first to build a steam engine to drive the tools needed to polish the mirror.  Five years were then spent on the composition of the metal alloy for the mirror.  At last he managed to compose an alloy of tin and copper of exceptional brilliance.  His first mirror was three feet wide, but this was followed by a six-foot one which weighed four tons.  This was mounted in the fifty-eight-foot wooden tube.  He let a ball and socket into the solid rock, and on this base laid out a platform of oak trunks over which were laid twenty-seven cast iron plates.  On this machinery the telescope could swing from left to right by a chain drive.  It was protected from the winds by two walls.  It looked for all the world like part of the Gothic castle in which the earl himself lived, surrounded by drawbridges, ladders, and the moving tower in the centre of it all.

      Strange as it appeared, this was not amateurish work.  The sheen which Parsons and his team achieved was created by polishing off a layer 1/10,000 of a millimetre thick from the pre-polished mirror, evenly from the centre to the edge.  This remarkable feat of precision made the mirror almost free of distortion, and was rightly considered an optical marvel.

      The Leviathan established Birr as a leading astronomical site for decades, for this was the largest telescope in existence until 1878.  Rosse and fellow astronomers invited to use the telescope made many extraordinary discoveries.  Parsons himself brought to light the spiral form of nebulae, those strange cloudlike formations in the distant reaches of the universe.  The telescope was powerful enough to reveal many previously unknown features of these mysterious objects.  A special study was undertaken of the nebulae of Orion, and the large drawings which resulted from the observations gave a remarkably clear idea of these objects.

      Though it was eventually stripped down, the telescope itself survives, and its speculum is kept in London at the South Kensington Science Museum.  Rosse's wife was a noted photographic pioneer; his son, the fourth earl (1840-1929) was a noted astronomer, while his third son, Charles Parsons (born in 1854), was the inventor of the steam turbine engine in 1884, which revolutionized shipping and was later applied to airplane jet engines.  Rosse was president of the Royal Society from 1849 to 1854, and chancellor of Dublin University in 1864.

      Though wealthy and indulgent of his scientific interests, Lord Rosse was also a good landlord, especially so during the grim famine years at Parsonstown.  He died at Monkstown on the seacoast south of Dublin on 30th October 1867.

      His great telescope continued to probe the deepest mysteries of the universe from the small town in the Irish midlands.  The discovery of the size and nature of the universe has been one of man's great intellectual adventures, probing as it does into the very first seconds of life itself.  Lord Rosse made his country a part of this great adventure.

 

 

73

James Armour

1841-1928

 

One of the most remarkable of Ulster's Presbyterians, 'Armour of Ballymoney', still remains a potent example of what human generosity can achieve in any community divided against itself.  Though he lived most of his life in a small country town, the Ulster writer Robert Lynd observed, 'his qualities of brain and heart made him one of the most eminent and ultimately beloved Ulstermen of his day'.  James Armour's life carries a moral for all the world.

      He saw all too clearly that the rival factions in Ireland were contending for and against a concept of empire that had ended at Yorktown.  He was a liberal and a democrat, and believed that no danger came to anyone, his opinion or religion, from the extension of liberal policies and democratic values.

      James Brown Armour was born at Lisboy, near Ballymoney, in County Antrim, the most Protestant part of Ulster, on 20th January 1841.  He was educated locally at the Ballymoney Model School.  Later he attended the Royal Academical Institute, the leading Presbyterian school in Belfast.

      He then studied classics at the University College in Belfast, and the Queen's College in Cork.  This experience of living in the deep Catholic south of Ireland affected his outlook in many ways.  He taught school to support himself during his studies, though his ambition was to become a barrister.  However, he gave way to the wishes of his family to become instead the Presbyterian minister in Ballymoney in 1869.

      Ballymoney is a small linen and agricultural centre between Coleraine and Ballymena.  A few miles away was the family home of William McKinley, the twenty-fifth president of the United States.  Lying in the heart of an area of good agricultural land, Ballymoney was very typical of the planter towns, created and settled by Scottish families who came over during the seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster.  Here they developed a prosperous linen industry and gave the little place its graceful airs with wide streets, fine Georgian terraces, and a final touch, the Masonic Hall, in 1852.  Ballymoney was all very typical of loyal Ulster.

      Unlike the McKinleys, Armour stayed in Ulster.  In March 1883 he married a widow who had two sons by her first husband.  Just as he had taught school to support his own studies, so he returned to teaching to support his new family.  In 1883 he became an assistant at Magee College in Derry, where he remained for twenty-three years.

      Like many Presbyterians, Armour was a man who valued not only private judgement, but forthright speech.  He spoke out from his pulpit and elsewhere on all the issues of the day.  From 1885 onwards these revolved largely around the issues of Ulster's future, raised by the Orange Order.

      These were largely issues of identity.  The Ulster people tended to favour union with England, while in the south the Irish party was moving towards home rule.  In March 1893 the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, whose members lived largely in the four counties of eastern Ulster, met in special session to debate the entire matter of home rule, and to condemn the Home Rule Bill.

      Armour, however, moved an amendment to the resolution in favour of self-government in Ireland, allied with protection for all the rights and interests of the Presbyterian Church.  This speech, as he might have expected, was hissed and booed.  He lost his amendment, and the original resolution was passed by a huge majority.  But it never worried a Presbyterian conscience to be in the minority.  At home in Ballymoney his congregation remained loyal to their minister.  However, his fellow churchmen and other unionist Ulstermen shunned him for a while.

      Armour campaigned for his views, collecting the signatures of 3,535 Presbyterians to a petition supporting the Home Rule Bill, to be sent as a memorial address to Gladstone, the British prime minister.  He had always supported the tenants' rights movement and condemned landlordism.  In a debate with Dr Anthony Traill of Trinity College, he argued in favour of the nationalists against the ascendancy (the largely Protestant landed class) in Ireland, which Traill represented.

      One of the great interests of many Catholics had long been the hope of establishing a Catholic university - Trinity and the Queen's Colleges being regarded as Protestant institutions.  A campaign was under way to dissolve the Royal University in Ireland and replace it with a truly national university into which the other colleges could be subsumed.  At the assembly in 1900 a report was presented condemning the proposed establishment of the Catholic university.  Armour opposed its adoption.

      With a relative now an official in Dublin Castle, Armour had a conduit to those in power, which he used well after the Liberal party victory of 1906.  Two years later he was told he had a critical heart condition, forcing him to leave public life.  At this time, many tributes were paid to him by all shades of opinion.

      But Armour of Ballymoney was not quite done with affairs of state, heart or no heart.  In 1912 the general assembly had decided that politics should not be allowed to bring divisions among Presbyterians.  This was the period of the unionist revolt.

      The following year a Layman's Memorial (a motion by church members) from the floor against home rule was introduced to the assembly, and Armour moved an amendment to reaffirm the previous year's decision.  In the heated atmosphere of the day this aroused great anger from his opponents.  Only forty-three members voted with Armour, against some 921 for the resolution.  He described the agitation being led by Edward Carson and James Craig, which had led to the setting up of the Ulster Volunteers to defend the Union, as 'a wicked bluff'.  The partition of Ireland which they proposed would be ruinous for Ulster.

      At the time of the Easter Rising he rightly pointed out that the insurgents had only been following the lead of the Ulster Volunteers.  As Prof. Eoin McNeill pointed out, Ulster had begun the rise of armed political parties in Ireland by smuggling in guns from Germany.  The summer of 1914 had very nearly brought about a mutiny in the British army.

      Armour warned the assembly of the dangers of denouncing minority views: 'If you deny the right of private judgement and of free speech, how much do you have of Protestantism worth keeping?' he asked.  'Nothing at all.'

      Armour was in favour of the First World War and helped to recruit for the imperial army; he also acted as an honorary chaplain to the viceroy.  To Armour, unionism meant the unity of all Ireland.  At the general assembly he again spoke out against the Government of Ireland Bill which brought Northern Ireland into existence.  He said that would only promote racial and religious division in the province, and ruin the moral and economic prospects of the whole island.  But, yet again, he was voted down.

      His son later wrote, 'One characteristic seems to have struck every observer, his fearless courage, his indomitable spirit, and the tenacity with which he held his ground against all-comers.'  An American admirer once wrote that he was 'fifty years before his time, an inconvenient gift in a province and indeed in a country, where past traditions are strong'.

      After fifty-six years, Armour finally retired from his ministry at Ballymoney, in September 1925.  He died on 25th January 1928.  To many of his countrymen, to whom the very notion of Presbyterianism means the union with Britain, Armour of Ballymoney is a beacon of another passage through the stormy waters of Irish history.

 

 

74

Charles Bianconi

1786-1875

 

With remarkable energy, this Italian emigrant to Ireland transformed the communications system of the country, helping to change what might have remained a poor country into a developing one.

      Joachim Carlo Giuseppe Bianconi was born at Tregolo, in the duchy of Milan (now Lombardy), on 24th September 1786.  Leaving school, where he had been an indifferent student, he set out from home to make his fortune.  He arrived in Ireland at the end of 1802 as an apprentice to an Italian print seller, bringing the benefit of 'art pictures' to the Irish.  A pretty boy who appealed to ladies, he became his employer's travelling salesman.  He soon went into business on his own, setting up his own shop in the country town of Carrick-on-Suir, and later in Clonmel.  This business thrived and he made many friends, including DANIEL  O'CONNELL [20].

      The end of the Napoleonic wars in 1815 - Waterloo had been fought on 18th June - brought ex-military horses onto the market at cheap prices, as well as the end of the carriage tax.  Having accumulated a little capital, Bianconi bought a horse and a jaunting car, and on 6th July 1815 he began a car service between Clonmel and Cahir in the south of Ireland.

      The idea prospered, and his cars, popularly called the 'Bians', were a common feature of the Irish roads.  By 1823 his services ran over some 1,800 miles of road from twenty-three centres.  By 1845 this network had grown to 3,800 miles and 120 centres.  In 1857 he told the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Dublin, that he still ran some nine hundred horses and sixty-seven cars over 4,244 miles a day.  In 1864, income from passengers and parcels amounted to £40,000.

      He charged passengers one-and-a-half pence per mile.  This made his service cheap enough to be of very real benefit in rural areas, where those of small means could travel about.  In 1843 Bianconi himself explained that 'the farmer who formerly drove and spent three days in making his market, can now do so in one for a few shillings; thereby saving two clear days and the expense of his horses'.

      The improvement of roads followed.  A report of 1838 noted that 'even small portions of those roads were scarcely out of the engineers' hands before they were covered with the carts of farmers, eager to take advantage of the improvement'.  People moved their cottages nearer the new roads, and new villages and towns grew up at their junctions, especially in the west of Ireland.  Charles Bianconi had become one of the agents of the social and economic transformation of Ireland.

      The improvement in service brought with it an increase in tourist traffic, and the beginnings of the tourist industry which is now of such importance to Ireland.  The advent of the tourists brought about an improvement in the hotels and inns, and an overall improvement of life for the local people as well.

      Bianconi, who was elected mayor of Clonmel in 1844, was a sincere Catholic, a fervent supporter of Daniel O'Connell, and a promoter himself of Catholic emancipation (which came in 1829).  He generously donated to many Catholic charities, including the foundation of the Catholic University of Ireland, for which he purchased what is now Newman House.

      In his annual report for 1857, the British postmaster general said that 'no living man has ever done more for the benefit of the sister kingdom'.  In the development of his extensive transport system, Bianconi displayed extraordinary energy as well as ingenuity.  While the promoted the social connections of Ireland, he also increased its economic resources by promoting increased trade.  His cars were the first stage in the development of increased speed in communication and transport, marked by the introduction of the railways and the electric telegraph in the 1830s, and by the use of telephones after 1875.  The nature and quality of life in Ireland was changed by these means.  In 1815 parts of the country might as well have been in the seventeenth century; by the time of Bianconi's death, communication with America was instantaneous.

      The heyday of the cars was soon over.  The railways, promoted initially by WILLIAM DARGAN [75], had arrived.  Bianconi saw where the future lay and bought shares in the new companies, and used his cars to provide local feeder services to their stations.  He retired in 1865, selling off his business to his agents in the county towns across the country.

      He lived out the rest of his life at Longfield, his house near Clonmel, in Tipperary, and died there on 22nd September 1875.  His daughter had married Daniel O'Connell's son Morgan John O'Connell, and in 1885 she published a biography of her father.

      Later still, the cars became a part of fond memories of many nineteenth-century childhoods.  The painter JACK YEATS [26] had especially happy recollections of them, for as a child he had travelled to and from Rosses Point in Sligo on one.  The first play he ever saw was the wild melodrama The Shaughran (1874), by the Irish-American Dion Boucicault.  In his painting In Memory of Boucicault and Bianconi, he has the hero and villain of the play at a local beauty spot striking poses in front of a long car.  What Bianconi had started as a business enterprise had entered the mythology of Irish art.

 

 

75

William Dargan

1799-1867

 

On the lawn outside the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin there stands a slightly larger-than-life statue.  On the plinth is carved a single word: Dargan.  This is a memorial not only to the originator of the National Gallery itself, but also to the creator of the first railway in Ireland.  Dargan (like Bianconi earlier) transformed the nature of life in Ireland for every one, both economically and culturally.

      William Dargan was born in County Carlow on 18th February 1799, the year after the great rebellion, which had deeply shocked the whole island.  His father was a farmer, but William was sent out of Ireland to be educated in England.  He began his working life with an apprenticeship in a surveyor's office.

      One of the first important jobs in which he was involved was aiding Thomas Telford, the great civil engineer, in laying the new road to Holyhead, the little port in north Wales from which the Irish ferries were to depart.  When this was completed Dargan came back to Ireland and worked on several other developments.  But the advent of the railways gave him his first real opening as a businessman.

      He found backers for his own scheme, a railway to run from Dublin to Kingstown, as it was then called, where the boats from Britain docked.  The construction was authorized in 1831 by Parliament.  The first train ran out of Dublin on 17th December 1834, and caused great excitement.

      Dargan now turned north to develop the Ulster railway, which opened on 12th August 1839.  This was planned to link up with the Ulster Canal (also his work) so that a new transport route was available across the province.  He created the line to Carrickfergus and Ballymena, and a line along the coast to Bangor.

      This was the heyday of the railway boom.  Tracks were being laid down everywhere, and Dargan was one of the main contractors for the jobs.  He grew wealthy, but railways were not the last of his innovations.

      Inspired by the great exhibition at the Crystal Palace, which the Prince Consort had promoted in London in 1851, he suggested that Dublin should also have a great exhibition.  A committee was gathered, and he agreed to underwrite the scheme.  A part of this exhibition was to be a display of fine art drawn from collections all over the British Isles, and from several European nations.

      This exhibition opened on what was then called the Duke's Lawn, the open area on Merrion Square behind the Duke of Leinster's townhouse.  The exhibition premises were huge, and it proved to be very popular when it was opened in May, 1853.  It was visited in August by Queen Victoria, who was much amused by what she saw.  However, Dargan lost money on it.  By now he was living in a large country house, Mount Anville, just outside Dublin, where Queen Victoria visited him and his family.  Dargan, however, refused the title she offered him.

      The pictures gathered for the exhibition inspired the idea of a National Gallery, which opened after many vicissitudes in 1864.  Though Dargan had inspired the idea, many other people were involved, including civil servants of the treasury.  As a result, the negotiations over the scheme, the planning and erection of a building to stand on the exhibition side, and the gathering of pictures for a collection, became a complicated sage in its own right.  Dargan's portrait was painted by the gallery's first director, George Mulvany.  A plaque on the east wall of the gallery recalls that it was erected 'by the contributions of the fellow-countrymen of William Dargan, Esquire, aided by the Imperial government in commemoration of his munificent liberality founding and sustaining the Dublin Industrial Exhibition of 1853'.  The last touch put to the building before it opened, in December 1863, was the hoisting into place of Farrell's statue of Dargan, more than a decade after his exhibition had opened.

      In the meantime, Dargan had been involved in many other schemes, one of which was a flax mill in Chapelizod on the Liffey.  However, not all of these ventures were successful.  In 1854 he opened the New Line to Bray and Wicklow, which was to lead to the development of Bray as a resort and even a commuter town.  By now he was chairman of the Dublin-Kingstown Railway, which, as the initiator of the railway age, had an important effect on Ireland's history.  Though it brought about many economic improvements, the railway also hastened the departure of emigrants to England and beyond.

      Dargan had always tried to keep the reins of his businesses in his own hands.  In 1866 he suffered a riding accident and was laid up, and matters began to go awry.  As a writer of the time remarked: 'His affairs became disordered and his health and spirit were undermined.'  Mount Anville had to be sold to an order of nuns who used it as an exclusive girls' school.  He died in his town house on 2nd February 1867.

      Dargan had played a part in many things: bringing the railways to rural and seacoast areas, promoting the development of resorts such as Bray, and the development of large-scale industries.  It was all very much in the nineteenth-century style of the pioneering man of business.

      Yet it may well be that the National Gallery was among his most important inspirations.  Generations of Dubliners have certainly thanked him for it.  It was a haven of peace and enlightenment for GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [49] when he was a young man in the 1870s, when the gallery was almost the only beacon of culture and civilization in the city of Dublin.

 

 

76

Sir William Hamilton

1805-1865

 

As a mathematician, William Hamilton is to be ranked with Descartes and Fermat, though to many the crown of his life's work (as he saw it) seems strange and obscure.

      He was born in Dublin at midnight between 3rd and 4th August 1805.  Though there was always some dispute about his origins, he always claimed to be Irish, and hoped his life's work in mathematics would reflect on the national credit of Ireland.

      His father was a successful attorney, an exuberant and eloquent man, but one also given to overindulgence in drink.  Hamilton inherited some of his characteristics, but his brains came from his mother, who died when he was only twelve.

      By then he had been sent away to live with his uncle, a clergyman in Trim who was a formidable scholar.  He imparted his love of languages to his nephew; Hamilton read Hebrew by the age of seven, and Latin, Greek, and four European languages by the age of twelve.  By then he had also acquired a smattering of Syrian, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Hindi and Malay - an extraordinary accomplishment even for a genius.  These language studies were posited on his father's notion that he might work for the East India Company.  In retrospect, all this seems to have been an extraordinary waste.

      However, even as a boy his mathematical talents became apparent.  When he was ten his mathematical skills were tested in a contest with Zerah Colburn, the now forgotten American child prodigy nicknamed 'The Calculating Boy', and did not come off too badly.  He read Euclid, doubtless in the original Greek, and soon moved on to Newton's Arithemetica Universalis and then the Principia.  By 1822, it was clear that he could understand much of this, and he continued to pursue these studies, becoming largely self-taught as a mathematician.

      At the age of seventeen, while reading the Celestial Mechanics of Laplace, his discovered an error.  This introduced him to Dr Brinkley, the astronomer royal for Ireland, whom he astonished with a paper on the osculation of certain curves of double curvature.  Clearly, this widely read young man was a mathematical genius of the first order.  He also caught the attention of Sir John Herschel and Professor George Airy, the leading British astronomers of the day.

      In 1823 he entered Trinity College in Dublin.  'This young man,' his friend Dr Brinkley remarked after Hamilton had presented his paper on light rays to the Royal Irish Academy, 'I do not say will be, but is, the first mathematician of his.'  To some it seemed that a second Newton had arrived.  He proved that certain rays of light emerge from a crystal, not as single or double rays, but as conical pencils.  This led to his convincing proof of the 'undulatory theory of light'.

      In 1827, while he was still an undergraduate, he was appointed Andrews professor of astronomy in the Dublin university.  He entered his undergraduate career by being elected Astronomer Royal at the age of twenty-two without even applying for the position, many distinguished astronomers being passed over.  But it gave him a post in which he could develop not only his astronomy, which had interested him since the age of fourteen, but have the time to do other work as well.

      This involved the elaboration of some 'curious discoveries' he had made at the age of seventeen, which he eventually published as A Theory of Systems of Rays.  The techniques he introduced were to prove of fundamental importance to the development of theoretical physics in the twentieth century.  His methods were just what was needed for the theory of wave mechanics associated today with quantum theory and the theory of atomic structure.  He presented an abstract of his work to the Royal Irish Academy in April 1827.

      He had well-developed literary tastes, and was a friend of Wordsworth and Southey.  His own poems, which one critic said, 'retain a straightforward clarity, strength, and dignity', were collected by his biographer, Robert Perceval Graves.  Wordsworth himself thought that Hamilton was one of the most remarkable men he had ever met, next only to Coleridge, his fellow poet.

      Hamilton had had two unhappy love affairs before he married an invalided lady.  It was a bad match which brought him little comfort.  After ten years he realized that he was slipping into alcoholism and gave up the conviviality that had been a feature of his younger years.  He was never quite free of this threat.

      While he and his wife were out walking one day (16th October 1843), he was suddenly struck by the notion of quaternions, his great discovery.  This was a new method of dealing with the science of space mathematically.  (It was a new system of algebra and geometry that expressed relations of space in regard to direction as well as quantity, and was based on the application of a new interpretation of what had been hitherto considered 'impossible quantities'.)  Having no paper on hand, Hamilton scratched the maths involved onto the stonework of a bridge over the Royal Canal at Ballyboggan, near Cabra.  A contemporary, Professor Peter Tait, later claimed that Hamilton's method was one 'which can only be compared with the Principia of Newton and the Mécanique Céleste of Laplace'.

      The last two decades of Hamilton's life were devoted to the elaboration of quaternions and their application to many fields; Elements of Quaternions was published after his death.  He left behind manuscript books and a huge collection of papers, which were found to be in an extraordinary muddle, largely due to his domestic difficulties.  Hidden deep in the piles of papers, dinner plates were found with still uneaten chops on them.

      The now reclusive Hamilton died in Dublin of gout on 2nd September 1865.  He had been described as the greatest man of science that Ireland ever produced.  Among the many honours that came to him (including a knighthood in 1835), none pleased him more than a last tribute awarded to him as he lay dying: he had been elected the first foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States.

 

 

77

Edmund Burke

1729-1797

 

Outside Trinity College in central Dublin stand two statues, one of the poet Goldsmith, the other of Edmund Burke.  For the nineteenth century, they represented the two aspects of Anglo-Irish culture which the college was most proud of.  Though Goldsmith is still much admired, it is Burke as a political writer and statesman who has come to be seen as the most influential.  He remains the great philosopher and expounder of the anti-revolutionary philosophy that Ireland has produced.

      Like that of his country, Burke's was a divided, perhaps even confused, identity.  His father came from a Catholic family, but being an attorney he had conformed to the Church of Ireland for professional reasons.  His mother was a Catholic from rural Cork.  Burke himself seems to have been born not at his father's house in Dublin but at his uncle's house in rural Cork.  As a small child he was sent to live among his Cork relatives, where he would have absorbed the Catholic culture.  From there he entered Trinity College, which he seems to have found intellectually stimulating, and where he distinguished himself.  He was to be a lawyer and was sent by his father to study at the Middle Temple in London.  In London he married a Catholic, Mary Nugent (who remained a Catholic all her life).  Burke's view of Christianity was an inclusive one, covering both the Catholicism of his mother and the nominal Anglicanism of his father.  In later life he was secretive about his background and his relations, as the nature of his upbringing might not have appealed to many in London political circles.

      Burke did not care for the law; his father did not care that his son wished to be a writer.  Breaking with his father, Burke entered on the lower rungs of a political career.  In 1756 he made his name with a satire on Bolingbroke called A Vindication of Natural Society, but the irony was easily misunderstood.  Far more successful was his essay on 'The Sublime on the Beautiful'.  His literary career continued, and among his books was one dealing with the political settlement with America, a continent always of interest to him.  He began the Annual Register, a record of political, social, and criminal events which still continues, and from the beginning proved a success and an essential source for later historians.

      When WILLIAM HAMILTON [76] was made Irish secretary, Burke accompanied him to Dublin.  His views on the social situation of his native country were reinforced by this stay.  As John Morley, himself immersed in Irish affairs, later wrote: 'He always took the interest of an ardent patriot in his unfortunate country; and made more than one weighty sacrifice on behalf of the principles which he deemed to be bound up with her welfare.'

      Though he was entitled to a small pension for his services, Burke quarrelled with Hamilton and gave it up.  England was now passing into a period of political change under George III, who wished to break with the settlement of 1688 and rule with more authority rather than the permission of a set of great families.  In July 1767, Lord Rockingham became prime minister in a reversal of fortune for the king, and appointed Burke his secretary.  This remained a lifelong friendship.  But Rockingham fell from power, largely because he was not supported by William Pitt.  This ended any possibility of a wise policy toward the American colonies.  Burke had now been elected a member of Parliament.  From the day of his election until 1790 he was to be one of the essential guides of a revival of the Whig party, from which, in due course, would spring the great Liberal party of the nineteenth century.  In opposition, Burke showed by his writings and speeches that he had a wide-ranging and firm grasp of the details and prospects of political life that was unrivalled.

      Oddly enough for a man who had been a penniless scribbler a few years before, Burke was now able to buy an estate costing £22,000, which brought him £500 a year in rents.  His finances were another mysterious aspect of his life.  He spent more than he made - far more - for he was a friendly man who kept up with his friends and others of interest in London.

      Burke was more than a politician; he was an eminent man of letters.  Until very recently, his description of Marie Antoinette was among those pieces of famous prose which every schoolchild in Ireland studied.

      The main themes of his political life, aside from his sympathy for Ireland, were the fate of the American colonies, the beginnings of the British imperial adventure in India, and the French Revolution.  These events inspired Burke's most eloquent pieces.  His desire for a policy of reconciliation in Ireland led to the loss of his seat.  But he was soon re-elected for another borough and held several offices in government.  However, these were small matters compared with the saga of the impeachment of Warren Hastings for his highhanded and cruel actions against the natives of India, which Burke pursued from 1787.

      In 1790 he published Reflections on the Revolution in France, which appeared in eleven editions at the time, and drew fierce responses from the romantic admirers of the bloody events in Paris; one of these being Tom Paine's Rights of Man.  Though it gained Burke a universal reputation, it also led to a break with the leader of his party, Charles James Fox, a more radical man than Burke, in May 1791.

      When the long trial of Warren Hastings concluded with his acquittal in April 1795, Burke gave up his seat in Parliament.  Though his writings and speeches on the whole defended the value of tradition and good order, he was not a great admirer of the landed oligarchs of the Whig party.  He was a representative of 'the new man', the sort of person who rose through the ranks of British society and would become a great feature of the nineteenth century.

      Burke died at his house in Beaconsfield on 9th July 1797.  He remains an outstanding figure, a proponent of a view of society which has many admirers.  Like many other Irishmen later, he had made a career for himself in British public life.  'There have been,' his admirer John Morley concluded, 'many subtler, more original, and more systematic thinkers about the condition of the social union.  But no one that ever lived used the general ideas of the thinker more successfully to judge the particular problems of statesmen.  No one has ever come so close to the details of practical politics, and at the same time remembered that these can only be understood and only dealt with by the aid of the broad conceptions of political philosophy.  And what is more than all for the perpetuity of fame, he was one of the great masters of the high and difficult art of elaborate composition.'

      It has been the lament of many Irish people since that these amazing talents could not have served his native country more directly than they did.  But Burke was caught by the political circumstances of his day, and like all leaders of men had to make what he could of them.

 

 

78

Ernest Shackleton

1874-1922

 

There have been notable Irish explorers who have made their contribution to the slow unveiling and discovery of the world.  Such figures as Sir Richard Burton, Admiral McClintock, and Surgeon Major T.H. Parke are well known.  But none achieved more, and more bravely, than Ernest Henry Shackleton, the polar explorer.

      He was born on 14th February 1874, at Kilkee in County Clare in the west of Ireland.  His family were of Anglo-Irish stock, and he was educated at Dulwich College (also the alma mater of P.G. Wodehouse and Raymond Chandler).  He entered the British merchant marine because it was a career likely to offer adventure.

      In the first of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott's expeditions to the Antarctic, from 1901 to 1904, he acted as a lieutenant.  Their ship Discovery had been specially built for the purpose of ice exploration.  It was the plan that the ship would remain for a winter in the ice of McMurdo Sound after a preliminary cruise along the coast of what Scott called King Edward Land.  It took a little time to develop the right techniques for sledging on the ice, but then the expedition began a series of shore journeys.  The principal one was made by Scott, Shackleton and Dr Edward Wilson over the ice towards the south.  Though they lost many dogs, they reached 82 degrees, 17 minutes south.  But on the return leg, Shackletons's health gave way and he had to be sent home on the relief ship.  He missed out on the excitement of the second year.

      On his arrival in London, Shackleton began planning another expedition of his own, which started in 1908 from a port in New Zealand in a small whaler called Nimrod, reaching a position ninety-seven miles from the South Pole.  This expedition made use of Mongolian ponies rather than dogs.  Its greatest achievement was a journey made by Shackleton himself with three companions up the Beardmore Glacier, opening a route to the polar plateau and the goal of the South Pole itself.  In all the annals of polar exploration, this ranks as one of the greatest journeys by sledge ever made without the aid of supporting parties.  (These days, so-called explorers have everything, including journalists, flown in by air.)  They narrowly escaped death from the cold and exhaustion, much the same causes that led to the disaster that overwhelmed Captain Scott and his party on their return from the pole in 1912.  But Shackleton managed to preserve his party and return to the ship, all without losing a single man.  On his return to the United Kingdom he was knighted, in 1909.  He described the adventures of the expedition in a book Heart of the Antarctic (1909).

      On 7th August 1914, unperturbed by the death of Scott, Shackleton left England on the Endurance, for the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which he had carefully planned.  It was intended to cross the continent from the Weddell Sea to the Ross by way of the South Pole.  The Endurance reached the Weddell Sea in December 1914, soon after the First World War had begun.  It moved slowly south, but though they made some significant discoveries, they could find nowhere to land, and drifted north again with the ice.  On 27th October 1915, the ship was crushed to destruction in the ice and had to be abandoned.  The party of twenty-eight camped on an ice floe.  They drifted north on this for 457 days, until it broke up.  The survivors took to their small boats, and six days later landed on Elephant Island, where they recamped on a small patch beneath the great cliffs of ice.

      Shackleton and five of the men now set off on an even more hazardous voyage.  By small boat they succeeded in reaching South Georgia, 759 miles away.  He then tried to return to the men on Elephant Island but failed.  However, with the help of a Chilean trawler, he managed to rescue all of the men on 30th August 1916.

      Though the men under Shackleton survived, some of the party in the Ross Sea perished when they were carried away by the ice.  Despite that, this epic boat journey, which had tested Shackleton's skills as a leader, is the most famous episode in the history of exploration.  His courage and sense of command seems to some to be superior to the often foolish attitudes of Scott and his party, who killed themselves by hauling their sledges to the pole and back by hand.  Shackleton's last book, South, published in 1919, describes the hazards of his trip.  The boat journey has been described in more detail in a book by one of the party, Cmdr F.A. Worsley, which is a classic of its kind.

      Shackleton had to wait until 1921 to mount another expedition.  In September 1922 he set out a third time, on the Quest.  But this was to be his last expedition.  On 5th January 1922, he died on South Georgia of angina following influenza.  His companions buried him on the island, and the expedition continued its work under the command of Frank Wild.

      Frank Worsley said of the funeral: 'When looking at Shackleton's grave and the cairn which we, his comrades, erected to his memory on a windswept hill of South Georgia, I meditated on his great deeds.  It seemed to me that among all his achievements and triumphs, great as they were, his one failure was the most glorious.  By self-sacrifice and throwing his own life into the balance he saved every one of his men - not a life was lost - although at times it looked unlikely that one could be saved.'

 

 

79

William James Pirrie

1847-1924

 

For a long time, Ireland was seen only as an agricultural country.  When heavy industry did begin to develop it was around Belfast, contiguous with Clydeside.  This was in the heartlands of Presbyterian Ireland, and naturally an association was seen between its firm Scottish principles and the fecklessness endemic in other, more Catholic parts of the country.  This concentration of industry was to play a part in the eventual partition of the island in 1922.

      A key figure in the industrial development of Ireland, and of the shipping business worldwide, was William James Pirrie.  He was, in fact, born in Quebec in May 1847.  His parents, however, were Irish: James Alexander Pirrie came from Little Clandeboye, his wife from Antrim.  The boy was brought up back in Ireland at Conlig, near Belfast, where he went to school at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution.

      When he left school at sixteen he entered the shipbuilding firm of Harland and Wolff as a pupil.  His native talent was soon manifest, and he was rapidly promoted, becoming a partner in 1874.  He was then only twenty-seven.  The rest of his life was spent at Harland and Wolff, which he saw grow into one of the most important shipbuilding companies in the world.  When it was converted into a limited liability company he became chairman of the board.

      Pirrie began his career at an opportune time.  The transition from wooden to steel-built ships was under way, and he followed, indeed promoted, many of the most important developments in the industry over the next few decades.  The shipping business was the making of Belfast.  In 1800 it was little more than a market town - the population was only 20,000.  The Queen's Island shipyard was opened in 1851, and by 1880 the population had grown to 230,000.  By 1901 the population was 348,965.  Whereas the population of Ireland as a whole was shrinking due to emigration, Belfast was happily expanding, with most of its citizens depending on the shipyard.  And by then, though much could be made of the city's radical past, it had become the centre of Protestant resistance to home rule.

      Though there had been giant ships before (Brunel's Great Eastern, for instance), Pirrie could be said to be the creator of the large modern ship.  As the decades advanced, the ships which the firm built grew larger and larger.  The Oceanic, the Celtic, the Cedric, and the Baltic were famous in their day.  This line of ships culminated in the Olympic (1912), the Titanic (1912), and the Brittanic (1914).  But these ships were unfortunate, the Titanic sinking on its maiden voyage in spectacular and famous circumstances; the Brittanic being sunk in the First World War while being used as a hospital ship.  That, too, was a mysterious event.  The superstitious spoke of a curse on the shipyard because of its intolerance to Catholic workers.

      Most of the advances made both with regard to the design of the ships and their engineering arose from suggestions made by Pirrie himself in these first decades of expansion.  As the ships grew in length and width he was conscious of the need to ensure strength in the frames through new methods of construction.

      The Pirrie ships were the first to place the passengers' accommodations amidships, and to create many of the arrangements and amenities now familiar to ocean-going liners.  There were also great changes on the engineering side.  New kinds of balance and expansion engines reduced vibration and improved efficiency.

      One important development was the change from coal-fired ships, which depended on a world-wide bunker system, to vessels that used oil and later diesel, engines.  This development was to have important consequences for the development of the oil industry, as marine shipping became a major consumer.

      The firm had connections with many important shipping companies, and was sole builder for the White Star Line in England and the Bibby Line in the United States.  It also built ships for the Peninsula and Orient line for use on routes to India and Australia, and for the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, among others.  As the ships and their capacity grew, the firm also emphasized the need for harbour facilities to develop in tandem.

      In 1902, Pirrie was one of the movers behind the creation of the Merchantile Marine Company, which brought many smaller interests on the North Atlantic routes into a more efficient conglomerate, or cartel.  Pirrie grew Harland and Wolff into a business filling 23 acres on the Belfast and Clyde shorelines, employing some fifty thousand men.  The First World War affected the yards dramatically.  Slipways were converted to war use, and gunboats and warships were built quickly.  A new airplane department was added as the fighter plane became the new instrument of war.

      In March 1918, Pirrie was made controller general of merchant shipping, in reaction to the effects of the German U-boat campaign against shipping on the Atlantic.  This he tackled with typical energy.

      Pirrie had been given a peerage in the House of Lords in 1906, and when the king visited Belfast to open the first sitting of the new parliament of Northern Ireland he was made a viscount.  He died at sea on 6th June 1924, while on a trip to see the ports of Latin America, and to urge the governments there to think of expanding their facilities to meet the rising trade in the post-war years.

      By 1922, 180 people had been killed in East Belfast in the sectarian struggles that arose over the partition of Ireland.  Again, in 1935 and in the 1960s troubles stalked the shipyards.  (This was the background to Ulster dramatist Sam Thompson's famous play Over the Bridge.)  The yards that Pirrie created became the core of the community strife in Northern Ireland.  But in serving the world-wide needs of shipping, he had also created the employment much needed by the Belfast community.  That the benefits would be shared by all was a problem beyond him to solve; that it was beyond the communities, too, is the tragedy of Ireland.  Yet, in August 1969, some eight thousand workers who remained in the Pirrie yards voted at a mass meeting to maintain 'peace and goodwill in the yard, and throughout the province'.  It may yet come.

 

 

80

Fr Theobald Mathew

1790-1856

 

When the United States embraced Prohibition in the 1920s, it was the culmination of a temperance movement that had begun a very long time before.  Among the first movers of the crusade against drink was an Irish priest known to all as the Apostle of Temperance.

      Theobald Mathew, called Tobias by his family, was born at Thomaston Castle, outside Cashel, in County Tipperary, on 10th October 1790.  His father, James Mathew, was a distinguished Catholic, and Theobald was the fourth of twelve children by his mother, Anney Whyte.  His charm and kindness stood out from childhood: 'Darlin' master Toby, a born saint', proclaimed his mother, who was hopeful that he would fulfil her dream of having a priest in the family.

      At the age of twelve, Mathew was sent to St Canice's Academy in Kilkenny, where he stayed for seven years.  In Kilkenny he came under the influence of two Capuchins and in 1807 he entered Maynooth College to study for the priesthood, but left.  The following year he was accepted into the Capuchins.  He was ordained on Easter Sunday, 1813, and spent a year in Kilkenny before being sent to join the Capuchin friars in Cork.  There he soon distinguished himself with his gentlemanly ways.  Based in the Little Friary, he set about creating a school, industrial classes, and benefit societies.  He created a cemetery for Cork's Catholics by buying up the botanic gardens in 1830.  In 1822 his superiors recognized his talents and appointed him provincial of the Capuchins.  He held this post for twenty-nine years, eventually resigning because of ill health.

      In Ireland, the temperance movement had been begun among the Quakers, but in 1838 Fr Mathew became head of the Cork Total Abstinence Society after much urging from a close friend.  The first meeting was held on 10th April 1838, and Fr Mathew was the first to record his own pledge of total abstinence.  He proved to be a wonderfully charismatic leader.  Very soon he had persuaded many thousands to 'take the pledge' not to drink again.

      The political situation was, as so often in Ireland, disturbed by troubles of one kind or another.  Fr Mathew kept the movement a non-partisan one and retained and expanded his support among Protestants in Munster.

      He had an extraordinary presence, and many simple folk credited him with healing powers, although he was always anxious to deny them.  As a preacher, Fr Mathew drew thousands all across Ireland to him.  He was in Limerick in 1839, and in Dublin in 1840.  By 1843 he could write to a friend, 'I have now, with the Divine Assistance, hoisted the banner of Temperance in almost every parish in Ireland'.

      The English novelist William Thackeray, no lover of either the Irish or the Catholic Church, met him during a visit to Cork in 1842.  'Avoiding all political questions, no man seems more eager than he for all the practical improvements of this country.  Leases and rents, farming improvements, reading societies, music societies - he was full of these, and his schemes of temperance above all.'  Thackeray's own countrymen would share in his crusade.  During the years 1842 and 1843 Fr Mathew travelled in Scotland and England, preaching temperance and signing up thousands more to the pledge.  It is said some two hundred thousand people were enrolled.

      The grim shadow of the famine passed over Ireland, beginning in 1845.  Fr Mathew had been among the first to alert the government as to what was happening, as want and distress grew in Cork and other areas of Munster.  In the cities he was deeply involved in famine relief; he even stopped the work on the Capuchin church and gave the money for food.  Ireland was left stunned by the disaster, and the temperance movement lost ground.  In 1847 Fr Mathew was the choice of the local clergy for bishop of Cork, but he was passed over by Rome.

      In the spring of 1848 his untiring work finally caught up with him; he suffered a stroke.  Despite his evident ill health, he went to America in 1849 and visited twenty-five states, pledging some hundreds of thousands of people.  These numbers seem extraordinary, but it is claimed that he enrolled up to seven million people in his travels at a time when the population of Ireland was 6,552,367 (1851 census).

      Temperance was not unknown in the United States.  In 1836, 'cold water societies' had been introduced by the Rev. Thomas Hunt, who provided pledge cards to children to take home for others to sign.  The first Prohibition law was passed in Tennessee in 1838.  By the early 1840s, temperance societies were much in vogue, supported by both Protestant clergymen and mill owners, who thought sober workers would be better for business.  A temperance novel by Lucius Sargent, My Mother's Gold Ring (1834), sold 113,000 copies.  By 1872 a Prohibition party was able to hold its first convention to nominate a candidate for the presidency.  With all this enthusiasm in America, it is not surprising that on his travels Fr Mathew managed to sign up a total of six-hundred thousand pledges.

      In December 1851 he returned to Cork, his health broken.  He was saddened that many of those millions who were said to have taken the pledge had gone back to the drinking once his presence had passed.  He felt his mission had failed, but his name and reputation would enable many others to carry on his work in later years, not only in Ireland but elsewhere in the world.  As the American experiment showed, there is no easy answer to the problem of drink, to which has now been added the even worse scourge of drug addiction.  But the success of Fr Mathew, as limited as it was, shows what can be done about social problems through energy, persistence, and personal charm.  Fr Mathew died in Queenstown (now Cobh), just outside Cork, on 8th December 1856, and his simple grave soon became a place of pilgrimage.

 

 

81

Turlough Carolan

1670-1738

 

Traditional Irish music, as performed by the Chieftans or the Riverdance Company, has swept the world in recent decades.  But these high-profile performers owe much more than they may realize to the lonely talent of the last of the old Irish harpers, Turlough Carolan, 'the last of the Irish bards'.

      Also known as O'Carolan and the descendant of an ancient family, he was born about 1670 at Nobber, in County Meath.  Sometime about 1684 the family moved to Ballyfernon, in Roscommon.  There they were patronized by the MacDermott family, who owned the local iron foundry.  Turlough was reared and educated with the children of the house.  At the age of fourteen he lost his sight due to smallpox.  Mrs MacDermott then took charge of his future.  She apprenticed him to a harper, and he was trained to play be ear.  In 1691, when he came of age, she provided him with a horse, a man to hold it, a small sum of money, and off he went on his travels about Ireland as a harper.  It was his custom to call on persons of rank and high station in big houses and play for them for either money or his supper.  His talents were equally popular among the poor of the cottages.  Carolan was not just a harper; he was also a composer, and would dedicate the tunes he composed on the road to the person who gave him food and lodging at the end of the day.  Though he found his way into most counties of Ireland, much of his time was passed in northern Connaught or southern Ulster.  He was welcomed not only by the old Gaelic families, but also by the newer, largely Protestant, gentry.

      The historian Charles O'Conor of Belangare said that Carolan was moral and religious, but convivial and 'seldom surprised by intoxication'.  He also wrote poems, addressed in a personal way to the ladies of the houses where he lodged.  Some two hundred of these are known.

      Carolan married Mary Maguire from Fermanagh, and they had seven children before she passed away in 1733.  He himself became ill at Tempo in Fermanagh in 1738, and returned to the only place he could then call home, the house of the MacDermotts at Adleford, in Roscommon.  He died there on 25th March.  In a manuscript diary, Charles O'Conor, his patron, recorded: 'Saturday the XXV day of March, 1738, Toirrdealbach O Cerbhallain died today, in the sixty-eighth year of his age.  The mercy of God may his soul find, for he was a moral and pious man.'  Carolan was buried at Kilronan, at Lough Meelagh, and it was said that his well-attended wake lasted four days.

      Donald O'Sullivan, who gathered all that could be learned of Carolan fifty years ago collected some two hundred tunes which had survived.  Some had been reprinted in his lifetime, others after his death by his son.  These surprisingly are lost.  Some fifty of his tunes were collected by Edward Bunting, the pioneer collector of Irish music.  Carolan worked in the very ancient tradition of Gaelic music, but he was also open to other European influences, notably the Italian music then fashionable in Dublin.  His harp is preserved in Clonalis, the home of the O'Conor Dons, in Roscommon.  James Handiman collected some twenty of his poems, and Dr Douglas Hyde another twelve.  An edition of some of his songs was published in Dublin by John and William Neale about 1720.  This is the earliest surviving example of music printing in Ireland.  Thomas Moore, in the settings of his poems, utilized some of Carolan's airs.  Others were introduced into the ballad operas popular in the eighteenth century.

      It is to Carolan, in one way or another, that the tradition of Irish music returns.  Much of what is played today is in fact eighteenth-century dance music, but his original compositions from the late seventeenth century are redolent of the thousands of years of Irish culture which lie behind them.  The harpers that followed him were not composers but merely players, who dwindled in number.  The harp itself, which had been well adapted to earlier forms of music, could not play the music of the eighteenth century well.  So it was displaced by the harpsichord, the violin, and then the piano.

      To preserve some of this heritage, harp festivals were held at Granard, in Longford, in 1781 to 1785, and in Belfast in 1792.  This last was organized by Edward Bunting, and it is to his notations of the tunes as eventually published some years later, that we owe much of what is known about this ancient music of Ireland.  The use of Carolan's music by Moore kept later generations in some way in touch with Ireland's music.  Now, three hundred years after his birth, a later generation is able to still enjoy the vital heritage of Carolan's genius.

 

 

82

Charles Gavan Duffy

1816-1903

 

As an Irish revolutionary and Australian statesman, Charles Gavan Duffy had a remarkable career indeed, for in both roles he was a man of importance and influence.

      The son of a shopkeeper in Monaghan, he was born on 12th April 1816.  His total formal education was a few months at a local school; otherwise he taught himself.  He read widely and voraciously, as perhaps only the genuine autodidact can.  Almost inevitably he grew up to become a journalist, contributing from an early age to the Northern Herald.  In 1836 he moved to Dublin, where he joined the staff of the Morning Register.  In 1839 he moved to Belfast to work as the editor of a new Catholic paper, The Vindicator, and remained in Belfast till 1842.  He found the time to study law and was called to the Irish bar, but he did not practise.

      Returning to Dublin in the summer of 1842, he came in contact with two young barristers, THOMAS DAVIS [23] and John Blake Dillon, with whom in October he founded the Nation, perhaps the most influential newspaper ever published in Ireland.  It supported DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] and the Repeal Association, and its efforts helped to fill the association's meetings.  O'Connell was duly grateful.  When the government prosecuted O'Connell in 1844, Duffy was tried with him and afterwards joined him in Kilmainham Gaol.

      All across Europe this was an era of reviving nationalism, as a younger generation rejected the cautious precedents of those who had survived the Napoleonic Wars.  In 1834 an international association of republican societies had been formed, which included Young Germany, Young Italy, Young Poland, and Young France.  In Britain, however, Young England was a reactionary group of young Tory aristocrats who sought a return to medieval ideals.  And so, in Ireland, a Young Ireland party was formed in imitation of the Continental movements.

      Among his most valued contributors, Duffy included the leading figures of Young Ireland.  The stated ambition of the paper was 'to create and foster public opinion in Ireland and to make it racy of the soil'.  As most of the writers were staunchly middle class, they did not mean anything crudely vulgar by this, rather, that all they wrote would have a national reference.  The paper was widely read and deeply influential.  From its pages were gathered the songs and ballads that made up The Spirit of the Nation, which became a bestseller and was read everywhere, or rather sung everywhere, for it contained the patriotic ballads that passed almost at once into popular currency, and are today part of the folk tradition of Ireland.

      Impatient young men that they were, the Young Irelanders soon broke with the ageing O'Connell.  The repeal movement had been a failure, and the famine had devastated the country.  The outbreak of rebellion across Europe in 1848, first in Paris, in February, and then in the German states and elsewhere, inspired Young Ireland also to rise in arms.  But in July 1848 Gavan Duffy was arrested and his paper suppressed.  This did not prevent a brief flurry of insurrection by William Smith O'Brien and others in Tipperary, but it was quickly put down and the leaders were imprisoned.

      Though some of the Young Irelanders were deported, Gavan Duffy survived four trials unconvicted and was released in 1849.  He revived the Nation and became involved in the land reform movement along purely constitutional lines with Frederick Lucas and others.  They founded the Tenant League in 1850, and at the general election of 1852 forty MPs (including Gavan Duffy from New Ross) were elected to Parliament, pledged to its aims and independent opposition.  This was the beginning of a true Irish party.  But its aims were betrayed when two leading members accepted offices from the government.  Lucas died, the reform measures failed in the House of Lords, and Gavan Duffy was in despair.

      Duffy left Ireland in ill health.  In 1855, he immigrated to Australia where he began a law practice.  He felt he had had enough of public life, but he could not resist politics.  He was elected to the colonial assembly in Victoria and became minister of public works, minister of public lands, and chief minister in 1871.  A knighthood followed in 1873.

      He championed the labourers and farmers, many of them Irish, against the capitalists and squatters (farmers with large spreads of land).  By the time he retired he had gained a reputation as one of the most distinguished Australian public figures.

      Duffy left Australia in 1880 and went to live in the south of France.  There he wrote a biography of his friend Thomas Davis, two histories of the Young Ireland movement, and his autobiography.  This last was called appropriately My Life in Two Hemispheres.  After he died, in Nice, on 9th February 1903, his remains were brought back to Ireland and were interred in Glasnevin, with the other heroes of Ireland.  His son, George, was a lawyer who acted for SIR ROGER CASEMENT [94], while his daughter, Louise, was a republican and educator.  To have radically influenced the public life of two countries, in two different parts of the world, is an achievement that ranks Gavan Duffy high in the pantheon of the great Irish.

 

 

83

Eileen Gray

1879-1976

 

In a culture for a long time dominated by words and music, artists and designers were once rare things in Ireland.  Eileen Gray was an even rarer thing: a designer in the modernist European style, a stylist whose influence is only now being appreciated.

      She was born in Brownswood, near Enniscorthy in County Wexford, on 9th August 1879.  She was the daughter of James Maclaren Smith (who died in 1900), and his wife, formerly Eveleen Pounden (1841-1918); the family home Brownswood belonged to Eveleen.  The Pounden family was of English origin, long settled in Ireland: an ancestor had died fighting the rebel Irish at the siege of Wexford in 1798.  Eileen's maternal grandmother had been Lady Jane, sister of the Scottish aristocrat the 14th Earl of Moray.  In 1895 her mother inherited the title Baroness Gray on the death of her uncle, and shortly after the family changed their name to Smith-Gray, afterwards simply Gray.

      This landed, wealthy, aristocratic background marked Eileen Gray for life.  In later years she often felt that she lacked any real education, for this had been placed in the hands of a series of governesses selected more for their pleasing manners than their sharp minds.

      Yet hers was a happy childhood.  She had fond memories of boating on the River Slaney, and perhaps some of the swirling shapes and colours of her later work derive from sights there.  On a rare later visit to Ireland she was disappointed to see that her brother had decorated the family home in a very provincial style, showing little imagination.

      Her father had worked as an illustrator in the 1870s - he showed some designs for wall decorations on Homeric themes at the Royal Academy in 1873.  Other work included landscapes of England and Switzerland, and illustrations to The Pearl Fountain, a children's book.  Though he ceased to exhibit after he married, he continued to paint, and often took his daughter on paintings tours of the Continent.

      The rest of Eileen Gray's time was divided between Ireland and her mother's home in London.  A noted society beauty of the day, Eileen led an adventurous life, even going ballooning with Mr Royce, the car maker, and flying in early airplanes.

      She enrolled at the Slade School of Art in 1898 and it was in London that she learnt the difficult art of lacquer work in the workshops of D. Charles in Soho.  Leaving the Slade in 1902, she migrated to Paris, to study drawing at the Académie Julian and at the Académie Colarossi, between 1902 and 1905.   She learnt yet more from the Japanese artist Seigo Sugawara in Paris, developing her skills in applying lacquer to furniture which would be her early claim to fame as a designer.  Sugawara urged her to be adventurous.  In 1905 Eileen fell seriously ill with typhus and to recover her health she visited Algeria, seeing there for the first time the traditional white, plain-walled, flat-roofed houses of the North African Berber culture, which were to affect all her later work.  (The vernacular cottage style of her native Ireland should not be overlooked, however, in the search for influences towards her minimalist style.)

      She did not plan to stay in Paris for the rest of her life; it just turned out that way.  In 1906 she bought an apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte that remained her base to the end.  Her ambition was to 'make useful things', but also she said on another occasion that she wanted 'to create things for our own time', in contrast to the persistent taste of Britain and France for sombre classic styles of furniture and design.

      It was her original interest in lacquer work which had brought her to Paris, and her furniture and designs using this material were seen as both imaginative and exotic, for of course lacquer work originated in the cultures of the distant Orient, but its tones and surfaces were very much in the modern idiom.  However, this rich decorative style had little in relation with the kind of architecture she evolved later on.

      Since 1909 she had been working for herself as an interior decorator and furniture designer, adding textiles and carpets to her repertoire in 1910.  These were made in her studio in the rue Visconti which was in the charge of her friend and colleague Evelyn Wyld.  Though all her life she was shy of publicity, by the end of 1913 she was well established.  She exhibited that year at the Salon de la Société des Artistes Décorateurs, and her work was already being purchased and collected by Paul Poiret and by the couturier Jacques Doucet whom she met first in 1912.  When the Great War broke out, she worked as an ambulance driver with the French army in 1914 and 1915.

      With her mentor Sugawara, Eileen opened a workshop in London in 1915, which returned to Paris in 1917.  The British edition of Vogue published a long and enthusiastic article about her that year and an important commission followed in 1919 from Mme Mathieu-Levy, for whom she created a sensational lacquered brick screen.

      From 1922 to 1930 Eileen Gray was director of the Jean Désert shop and showrooms (217 rue du Faubourg St Honoré), this lasted to 1930.  She showed her 1923 designs for a Bedroom-Boudoir in Monte Carlo at the Salon des Artistes Moderns where it attracted much attention.  In 1926 she created an interior for an exhibition, which was so unusual that it brought with it critical disdain.  Her ideas attracted the attention of the artists associated with the de Stijl group in Holland, where her work was admired and exhibited, and the Dutch journal Wendingen devoted an issue to her in 1924, but from 1926 her interests veered more towards architecture, working with Jean Badovici (1893-1936), a Roumanian-born, Paris-educated theorist of architecture.

      At Roquebrune, Cap Martin, in 1926 she created E.1027, her 'Maison en Bord de Mer', working with Badovici, which was for her personal use.  In 1929 she undertook the conversion of a Paris apartment for Badovici in rue de Chateaubriand.  At Castellar she built another house, again for her own use, 'Tempe á Pailla' at Castellar near Menton - a house in which Graham Southerland later lived.  In 1939 she created the interior design and decoration of a small apartment for herself at St Tropez, then beginning its rise as a chic resort.

      These and other schemes and projects led to a connection with the modern movement, represented by Gropius and Le Corbusier.  Her own house at Roquebrune, designed with Jan Badovici, attracted very great attention.  This was furnished with her own work, in tubular steel, glass, and aluminium - her use of steel and other 'new materials' was a hint of the international style that was to emerge in the 1950s in Europe and America.  Badovici, one of the leading exponents of modernism in France, was the editor of L'Architecture Vivante, and the major influence in moving her from interior design to total architecture, from making the furniture to creating the environment.  It was in a special issue of Badovici's journal that E.1027 was displayed to the architectural world, and acclaimed a classic of the period.

      She built other houses for herself, and did work for private clients, but all too many of her schemes remained merely design projects.  These included a holiday camp, for she had foreseen the effect that the introduction of paid summer holidays in France would have, though not all its consequences for her beloved Mediterranean littoral.  This was exhibited at the invitation of Le Corbusier, a friend of Badovici, at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition.  Her furniture, Le Corbusier admitted, had introduced the 'transatlantic style' two years before his better-known innovations.

      From 1937 onwards, through awards and exhibitions, her unique role as a modern designer was recognised.  In 1938 Le Corbusier painted, without her leave, a large mural of three female nudes in E.1027, which she thought ruined the house.  This ungracious act to a fellow architect's work led to a falling out with Le Corbusier.  Perhaps it was this split that caused her professional eclipse, though as a woman, a bisexual, and an Irish émigré in Europe, she was an outsider by nature in the world of modernist architecture.  In contrast to the dehumanising public schemes of Le Corbusier, Eileen Gray's designs are small, private and intimate, and so retain their appeal to this day.  (Ironically, Le Corbusier was to drown while swimming off the rocks below E.1027.)

      From 1938 onwards her achievements became obscured by the emergence of other artists and designers over the next two decades.  During the war she was interned as an enemy alien and she returned to find her homes had been wrecked and much of her work destroyed: her small apartment in St Tropez was gone, and the house at Castellar vandalized.

      Much of her later work also went into projects.  Her idea for a culture and social centre (1946-49) remained unrealized, even though it was published in a professional journal in 1959.  In 1956 she gave up 'Tempe á Pailla' and returned to Paris, only to begin work in 1958 on converting a small barn outside St Tropez into a small summer home ('Lou Pérou'), once again deploying many of her most characteristic ideas.

      Unrealized projects aside, Eileen Gray's talents were remarkable.  What placed her was the fact that she was one of the very few women working in architecture and design during the Art Deco and modern period between the wars.  In 1968 the Dutch architectural historian Joseph Rykwert wrote a critical article on her work, bringing her, after a thirty year period of obscurity, to the attention of a new generation of designers and artists.

      In 1972 a screen she had made in 1913 for Paul Drouet was sold to an American collector in a Paris auction for £18,000, a record price.  At an auction in the Hôtel Drouet in 1973 the collection of Jacques Doucet, her first real patron, included a screen sold for $41,700, a sofa for $31,000, and a table for $15,000.  The notion of monetary value had a wonderful effect on journalists who flocked to interview her.

      Commercial fame was followed by professional reappraisal.  An exhibition was held of her work at the RIBA Heinz Gallery, and at the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1973, followed by others in Paris, in 1976, and at the V&A in 1979.  She was elected a fellow of the Royal Institute of Irish Architects in 1973.  New editions of her furniture designs came on to the market.

      In her nineties Eileen Gray was once more as famous as she had been in the 1920s, her contributions to the trend of modern art and modern lifestyles fully recognized.  She lived on in the rue Bonaparte apartment, protected by her somewhat fiercesome Breton companion and housekeeper.

      She reminded one Irish visitor of one's very demure maiden aunt, but it had been a far from demure life that Eileen Gray lived.  At first she had developed her father's artistic tastes on the basis of clients in her mother's sort of wealthy social circle, eventually breaking through these to provide a modern minimalist house for an entirely new way of life that emerged in the decades between the wars.  All in all, it was a life of extraordinary achievement.  She died in Paris on 30th/31st October 1976, a much fêted lady.  Earlier that year she had told another visitor from Ireland, who was interested in her family's past, 'I am without roots, but if I have any, they are in Ireland.'

 

 

84

Count John McCormack

1884-1945

 

In the summer of 1932, at the climax of the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, John McCormack sand the 'Panis Angelicus' at an outdoor mass in the Phoenix Park, before an immense million-person audience, and a further radio and cinema audience worldwide.  This great religious gathering, in retrospect, represented the high point of the influence of the Catholic Church in modern Ireland.  For McCormack, too, Ireland's greatest tenor, this was indeed the summit of his career.

      McCormack had been born in Athlone, a provincial market and barracks town in County Westmeath on 14th June 1884.  His parents were Scottish in origin, his father working in the local woollen mills, the largest employer in the town.  His father was perhaps not the most encouraging person.  McCormack recalled later that 'My father told me I would never amount to anything in this world'.

      The family was not well off, but John was a bright child.  He was educated at the Marist Fathers school in Athlone, and later won a scholarship to Summerhill College in Sligo, also run by the Marists.  Singing and music was a feature of his home life and the remarkable qualities of his voice were recognized very early.  But his ideas of a career lay elsewhere.  At first he thought he might become a priest, but he was also good at languages and maths.  He just failed to earn a scholarship to the Royal College of Science, and turned to the Civil Service instead.

      A friend in Dublin brought him to the attention of Vincent O'Brien, who was then in charge of the famous Palestrina choir at the Catholic Pro-Cathedral.  Having sung at small concerts locally, in 1902 he won the gold medal for tenors at the Feis Ceóil in Dublin, winning a scholarship to study for a year in Italy and in 1903 he studied there with Vincenzo Sabatini.

      Back in Dublin, on one occasion in the summer of 1904 he shared the platform with JAMES  JOYCE [25], who was given higher billing!  (This earned McCormack a passing reference in Ulysses as a singing partner of Mrs Bloom.)  McCormack was now studying with Vincent O'Brien.  His singing with the Palestrina Choir at services made his name, and was followed by a tour of the United States.  He sang with the choir at the St Louis Exposition in Missouri in 1904.  Along with J.C. Doyle, he was now recognized as a leading figure in Irish music.

      McCormack made his operatic debut at Covent Garden in London in Cavalleria Rusticana.  Further operatic engagements followed over the next few years, in New York, Chicago, and Boston, with an Australian tour in 1911.

      He left the opera stage two years later, beginning a second career as concert singer.  These popular personal appearances were enhanced by recordings, which brought him even wider and greater fame.  In all, he made 561 recordings, some of which have been reissued in more recent years.  He sang not only with such operatic luminaries as Nellie Melba, Geraldine Farran, and Luisa Tettrazini, but also with popular crooners like Bing Crosby.  Some professional opera singers disdained his move to the concert hall, and his even more appalling penchant for ballads and sentimental Irish songs, but these were an essential element of his appeal to the mass audience he commanded.

      In 1914 he applied for United States citizenship, which was granted in 1919.  This and his support of the cause of Irish independence annoyed some early British admirers.  However, this did not seem to affect his general popularity when he returned to England in the 1920s, and during World War II he injured his health by singing at Red Cross concerts, at one of which he collapsed.

      An ardent Catholic, he was involved in charity work in several countries, and in recognition of these endeavours he was created a Papal Count in 1928.  As an even greater honour, the title was made hereditary, devolving in turn on his son, Cyril.

      In England he had lived in style in a mansion called Esher Place.  During the 1930s he and his family lived in an Irish Gothic mansion, Moore Abbey at Monasterevan in Kildare, where he could indulge his very Irish fondness for horse racing.  It was all a great contrast to his youthful poverty in Athlone, about which he retained a certain sensitivity to the end of his life.

      In his last years he lived in a house at Booterstown, looking out over Dublin Bay towards Howth Head.  There he died on 16th September 1945.  His wife, formerly Lily Foley, whom he had met at that Feis Ceóil in 1902 and married in 1906, and by whom he had two children (another was adopted), wrote the story of their life together in her autobiography I Hear You Calling Me.  This had been the title of the song which had been a very great favourite with concert audiences throughout his career, but which had a special resonance for her, recalling as it did the very early days of their happy marriage before the Great War.  To many, Count McCormack remains one of the greatest figures not only of Irish but of world music.  The folk museum in his native Athlone is not the only collection where recordings of his truly powerful yet lyric tenor voice are still treasured.

 

 

85

Joe McGrath

1887-1966

 

The founder of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes was one of the most remarkable Irish businessmen of his generation, a man who never said no to a challenge.

      Joseph McGrath was born in Dublin, and showed his talent by joining a firm of accountants, Messers Craig Gardner.  He also joined the Irish Republican Brotherhood and fought at Marrowbone Lane during the Easter week rebellion.  He was arrested and jailed in Wormwood Scrubs and Brixton.  In the general election of 1919 he was returned on the Sinn Féin ticket for the St James division of Dublin.  In early 1920 he and Robert Barton were among the prominent members of Sinn Féin arrested by the authorities, but by August 1921 he and Barton were acting as messengers between EAMON DE VALERA [2] and Lloyd George, after the truce between the two sides, and again to Gairloch in September with Harry Boland.  He supported the treaty, and in January 1922 was named Minister for Labour in the provisional government of the Irish Free State.  During the civil war he was a member of what might be called the War Cabinet.  In September his title was changed to Minister of Labour, Industry, Commerce, and Economic Affairs.  In the first election of the Irish Free State he was elected from north-west Dublin.  In the Free State government of 1922 he was Minister of Labour from January to August 1922, and then of Industry and Commerce from August 1922 to April 1924, in the interim being elected deputy from North Mayo.

      Early in 1924, at the time of the army mutiny (when some conservative officers protested at government reductions in the army), he supported the officers, and later that year he and eight others of the national group resigned from the Dáil, protesting at what he described in the group's paper the Nation as 'government by a clique and by officialdom of the old regime'.  He resigned his Dáil seat in October 1924, and left politics.

      One of the first great enterprises of the Free State government was the Shannon Hydroelectric Scheme at Arnacrusha.  In 1925, McGrath became labour adviser to Siemens-Schuckert, the German electrical firm contracted to build the giant installation.

      This was only part of his business interests.  In 1930 he and two others, Richard Duggan and Spencer Freeman, launched the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes, after the Free State government had legalized charity sweepstakes.  The Irish hospital system was in danger of collapsing through lack of funds.  The first race on which they ran a sweep was the November Handicap of 1930.  They sold an unbelievable £658,000 of tickets, about £22 million in today's funds.  The hospitals got £132,000, or one-fourth of the total expenditure of all the hospitals in the Irish Free State.  The promoters got £46,000.  And so it went, earning McGrath and his friends millions.

      Though illegal in many places, including the United States and Britain, the tickets were still sold.  In the United States, Joe McGrath was able to use the old IRA to outlet the tickets.  His contacts left Clann na Gael and went into business, their 'physical skills' as revolutionaries deterring the Mafia from moving in on the act.

      Though it was suspended during the war, the sweepstakes resumed in 1947 and went on till recently, when the need for it was no longer apparent.  Its overall value to the Irish economy was astonishing.  Tony Farmar notes: 'For the Sweep as a whole, the net income to Ireland in 1932, after deducting the overseas prizes, was £3.5 million - more than the government's receipts from income tax'.

      Its huge success, with tickets being sold worldwide, made Joe McGrath and his family exceptionally wealthy.  This provided him with the capital to enter into other areas of business, such as the long established Dublin Glass Bottle Company.  In 1950 he became involved with efforts in Waterford to revive the glassmaking industry.  This was the real beginning of Waterford Crystal, a firm which he built up over the next fifteen years into one of the most famous brand names in the world, worth another fortune in exports to the Irish economy.

      In his leisure time he was an avid racing fan, and became a well-known owner and breeder of racehorses.  In time his horses won all the classic Irish races, and Arctic Spruce won the Epson Derby in England in 1952.

      McGrath was a member of the Irish Racing Board from 1945 until his death, its chairman from 1956 to 1962, and president of the Bloodstock Breeding Association of Ireland in 1953.  He died at his Cabinteely home, outside Dublin, in March 1966.

      In a land starved for capital, Joe McGrath was perhaps its first real capitalist, a figure rare in Ireland at any time in the past.  He touched Irish life at so many points that it must have been hard for many to get a clear view of his achievements.  But the creator of the Irish Hospitals Sweepstakes and Waterford Crystal belongs in a special gallery of achievement.

 

 

86

Thomas Francis Meagher

1823-1867

 

To his contemporaries, Thomas Francis Meagher was simply known as Meagher of the Sword.  It was a tribute to his dramatic rhetoric, but though he had lived as a soldier for much of his life, he left his country several important inheritances, including the national flag of present-day Ireland.

      Thomas Francis Meagher was born on 3rd August 1823 in Waterford, where his father was a prosperous merchant.  The family fortune had been made a generation before in the Newfoundland trade, which was an important part of the economy of the thriving seaport.  His father, Thomas Meagher, had been an MP and mayor of Waterford.

      Thomas Francis was educated at Clongowes Wood College, a select college run by the Jesuits.  From there he was sent to a sister school, Stoneyhurst, in England, which provided elements of a university education.  At these schools Meagher was noted for his rhetorical and literary skills, both from reading the speeches of DANIEL O'CONNELL [20] and debating with other students.

      At first he became involved in Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association, having been dismayed at the incompetence of the authorities in the face of the famine.  But this was a constitutional movement which did not appeal to his more ardent nature.  In 1845 he joined the more revolutionary Young Ireland movement, and in 1847 was one of the founders of the Irish Confederation.

      In February 1848 revolution broke out in France.  Meagher went with William Smith O'Brien to Paris to support the revolutionaries as part of an Irish delegation to Lamartine to congratulate the people of France on the establishment of a republic.  He returned to Dublin with a French gift to the Irish nation - a new tricolour in imitation of the French flag.  It was green, white, and orange, as he explained that it was to represent the union of the two traditions in Ireland in peace.  This became the accepted flag of the republican movement, and is now the official flag of the Irish state.

      His highly dramatic and inflammatory speeches led to his arrest and prosecution, but the jury disagreed.  In July 1848, the Irish Confederation established a 'War Directory', of which Meagher was a member.  He and Smith O'Brien travelled throughout southern Ireland urging revolution among the people.  But the Young Ireland uprising in July 1848, Ireland's response to the European year of insurrection, was a comic failure and again led to his arrest.  He was tried for high treason and in October was sentenced to hang.

      His death sentence was commuted.  Instead, in July 1849 he was deported to Van Diemen's Land (now the Australian state of Tasmania) with Smith O'Brien and Terence Bellew MacManus.  In 1852 he made a dramatic escape from the penal colony, and when he reached New York in May he received a tremendous welcome from his countrymen.

      Meagher then took up the law and was admitted to the New York bar in 1855.  His talents soon brought him into prominence the leaders of the Irish community.  He founded and edited the Irish News, first issued on 1st June 1856, and was much in demand as an author and lecturer.  For Harper's Magazine he made two exploring trips through Central America, which provided new material for his lectures.

      When the Civil War broke out, Meagher raised, in New York, a company of Zouaves, of which he was the captain.  (The Zouaves had a distinctive uniform with baggy trousers, derived from those worn by native troops of the French army in Algeria after 1840, which had been suggested by Lincoln's friend, Elmer E. Ellsworth, for wear by the company of volunteer firemen from New York City who fought in the Civil War.)  They went to the front line with the 69th New York Volunteers and took part in the first battle of Bull Run, in July 1861.  Returning to New York, he organized an Irish Brigade for the Army of the Potomac.  On 3rd February 1862, he was promoted to brigadier general and appointed its commander.  He led his brigade through the Peninsular Campaign to the Battle of Chancellorsville, and it proved itself at the battle of Fair Oak in June 1862, and at Richmond, Antietam, and Chancellorsville.  At Fredericksburg, on 13th December 1862, the brigade was cut to pieces and Meagher was wounded in the field.  In December 1863 he resigned, complaining that he had not been allowed to withdraw his soldiers to recover their morale.

      However, he was recommissioned in December 1863, and was given command of the military district of Etowah, with his headquarters in Chattanooga, Tennessee.  Here he saw incidents of brutality by the Union Army against the Southern civilian population that reminded him of the worst excesses of British rule in Ireland.  After a very short time he resigned, and was then assigned to Sherman's army in Savannah, Georgia, from which he was discharged when the war ended.

      Meagher supported President Andrew Johnson's reconstruction policies.  The president then appointed him territorial secretary of Montana, in July 1865, and he was named acting governor in September 1866.  He had many problems in the gold-mining camps and plains settlements.  His support of Johnson and the Catholic religion did not make him a welcome figure to the powerful local vigilantes who actually ruled the territory.  His efforts to root them out were a failure.

      While on a scouting trip against hostile Indians near Fort Benton, on the night of 1st July 1867, he fell from the steamer on which he was travelling and drowned in the Missouri River.  His body was never recovered.  Unfriendly critics said he was drunk.

      It was the English novelist William Thackeray who gave Meagher his nom de guerre, Meagher of the Sword, as a consequence of a typically fiery speech the young man gave extolling the virtues of the sword at a meeting of the Repeal Association in Dublin, in July 1848:

 

      The soldier is proof against an argument - but he is not proof against a bullet.  The man that will listen to reason - let him be reasoned with, but it is the weaponed arm of the patriot that alone can prevail against the battalioned despotism.

      Then, my Lord, I do not condemn the use of arms as immoral, nor do I conceive it to be profane to say that the King of Heaven bestows His benediction upon those who unsheath the sword in the hour of a nation's peril.

      Abhor the sword?  No, my Lord, for in the passes of the Tyrol, it cut to pieces the banner of the Bavarian.

      Abhor the sword?  No, my Lord, for at its blow a great nation started from the waters of the Atlantic, and the crippled colony sprang into the attitude of a proud republic - prosperous, limitless, and invincible.

 

      Daniel O'Connell prevented him from saying more, so Meagher and the Young Irelanders turned their backs to him.  This appeal to the sword, to physical force, thrilled his audience and countless later admirers.  Meagher stands squarely in the centre of the Irish revolutionary tradition to this day, but as O'Connell realized, and as Meagher himself came to see in Tennessee and Montana, the sword may do in wartime, but the affairs of any community cannot be ruled by it on all occasions.  To prosper, the republic he was so proud to serve needed peace.  As a rhetorician Meagher was outstanding, but as the old Irish saying has it, 'Fine words butter no parsnips'.

 

 

87

Richard Martin

1754-1834

 

Known to his Georgian contemporaries as Humanity Dick, Richard Martin was a pioneer in the ethical treatment of animals.  Butt he had other claims to fame as well.

      He was the eldest son of Robert Martin, one of a family settled in Galway since the thirteenth century, and his first wife, Bridget Barnewell, a daughter of Lord Trimelston.  He was born in Dublin in February 1754, but he is associated with the rugged shore of the west of Ireland.

      He was the first of his family who was brought up a Protestant from childhood, for many Catholics became at least outwardly Protestant in order to hold on to their lands in the eighteenth century.  After attending Harrow School, he abandoned his studies at Cambridge to enter Parliament in 1776.  He was called to the Irish bar in 1778.  Although he joined the Connaught circuit, he was merely attempting to gain the qualification needed to act as a magistrate.  He acted in one case only, a famous action between two brothers named Fitzgeralds, which caused a social stir at the time.  He was High Sheriff of Galway in 1782, and continued his public life as colonel in both the Irish Volunteers, and the local Galway Yeomanry, as befitted his social position.

      His home was at the castle of Ballinahinch on an estate that covered two hundred thousand acres, all he could see for thirty miles, deep in the wilds of Connemara.  He was called the King of Connemara, but in the days of rapacious landlords he had a good reputation among the tenants.  This huge estate made him one of the largest landlords in the west, and it was he who built much of the present family house standing in a magnificent location overlooking the Owenmore River.  It is featured in William Thackeray's travel book An Irish Sketch Book and in MARIA EDGEWORTH'S [91] letters.  Martin was thought to have been the model for Godfrey O'Malley, the uncle of the hero in Charles Lever's novel Charles O'Malley, and the novel The Martin's of Cro Martin, also by Charles Lever, is based on this family history.

      Martin married twice.  By his first wife he had two sons and a daughter.  His second wife was the mother of three daughters and a son.

      He was a member of the Irish Parliament, representing several seats until it was abolished by the Act of Union, a measure he supported.  In 1801 he was re-elected from Galway, and he remained a member of Parliament until 1826, when his election by eighty-four votes was challenged and he was unseated.

      He was a friend of the Prince Regent, but fell out with him for a time when the prince became George IV, as Martin supported the rejected Queen Caroline.  Martin supported Catholic emancipation (granted in 1829), but, anxious for his seat, he made it known that he would not vote to suppress the Catholic Association, the power base of DANIEL  O'CONNELL  [20], and the Catholic church.  But it was not his role in Irish politics that made him famous, rather his love of animals and his readiness as a duellist.  His fights with 'Fighting' Fitzgerald and Eustace Stowell were relayed in his own words in Sir Jonah Barrington's Personal Sketches of His Times.

      He worked to abolish the death penalty for forgery, and introduced a bill to allow those charged with serious offences the benefit of legal counsel.  He twice refused a peerage.

      In spite of opposition from the political establishment, he managed to get through Parliament an act 'to prevent the cruel and improper treatment of cattle'.  This was the first act in the world to prevent cruelty to animals and was the beginning of a long campaign in Victorian and modern times against cruel practices on the farm, in racing, and nowadays in scientific research.  He was one of those who founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in 1824.

      After losing a seat he retired to Boulogne in the north of France, a haunt of British and Irish debtors, where he died on 6th January 1834, at the age of seventy-nine.

      His heir, Thomas Martin, died from a fever he contracted while visiting his tenants in Clifden Workhouse during the famine year of 1847.  His daughter, Mary Letitia Martin, was the author of a novel, Julia Howard, about the west of Ireland, but she was ruined by the famine, during which she had worked to relieve the suffering and died ten days after she and her husband reached New York in 1850.

      The huge estate had been mortgaged to an insurance company, which foreclosed on it and sold it off for very little in the Encumbered Estates Court.  In 1926 it was bought by the famous cricketer Prince Ranjit Sinjhi, the Jam Sahib of Nawanagar, and today it is a country house hotel of great elegance, where the memory of Richard Martin is honoured.

      These days it is fashionable to deride 'Victorian values', but it is often forgotten that those values are the source of much of the legislation that exists regarding the proper treatment of animals, factory workers, the mentally ill, and so on.  In this respect the modern world has little claim on the same moral authority.  Today, Richard Martin's name and his love of animals and of his Connemara wilderness is honoured all over the world by the innumerable groups and societies devoted to animal welfare, as well as important issues of ecology.  An enlightened landlord and a progressive legislator in his own day, Martin remains a moral example through his campaigns for the kinder treatment of animals.

 

 

88

Michael MacLiammoir

(Micheál mac Liammóir)

1899-1978

 

Though all his life Michael MacLiammoir claimed to have been born in Cork on 25th October 1899, this was a self-made legend.  The date was true, the place was not.  The actor and writer was in fact born in east London, and of English parents.  He was the son of Alfred Wilmore and his wife, formerly Mary Elizabeth Lawler Lee.  Called Alfred Wilmore after his father, he deliberately chose to create for himself an Irish identity in his twenties as Micheál mac Liammóir.  Mac Liammóir, 'son of great William', unknown as an Irish name, is a simple transliteration of Wilmore.  During his career, he signed his works with the Irish form of his name, though all his friends called him Michael.  Since his death the accented Gaelic version has become common amongst those writing about him, but not in the form he finally preferred, which is used here.

      Though little Alfred made his stage debut in London in 1911, at the age of eleven, playing a goldfish, it was to Ireland and its theatre that he dedicated his life, changing his name in the process and becoming, among other things, an accomplished writer and dramatist in Gaelic.

      That first appearance was at the Little Theatre in London.  Parts in West End plays followed between 1911 and 1915, and he rose to become one of the best known child actors on the English stage, as famous as the young Noel Coward.  He even worked with the legendary Beerbohm Tree.

      For the years 1915-16 he left the stage to enrol in the Slade School of Art, a device perhaps to cross that boundary from being a child actor into an adult one.  It was there he met an Irish girl, Máire O'Keefe, with whom he developed a platonic relationship which was to prove crucial.  After playing Lord Cornwallis at the Haymarket Theatre in February 1917, he moved to Ireland, largely to avoid conscription in London during the Great War, where it had not been introduced for political reasons.  There he worked on designs for the Irish Theatre and the Dublin Drama League, up to 1921.

      This was the true beginning of Micheál mac Liammóir.  More conscious now of his homosexual nature, he remade himself completely, casting off the London suburbs and adopting all things Irish, even the Gaelic language.  His sister was now married to Anew McMaster, whose famous Shakespearian touring company was such a feature of Irish theatrical life in the years before the war.

      For some years until 1927 he travelled in Europe, mainly painting, though this period of his life remains obscure.  He then returned to Ireland, then in its first years of independence, and joined Anew McMaster's company, in which he met his life-long companion, the English actor Hilton Edwards.

      With Hilton Edwards he opened a Gaelic theatre in Galway in 1928, which still thrives.  (He was also appointed a director of the Dublin Gaelic language theatre at the Peacock three years later.)  Later that year the pair moved back to Dublin where they opened the Gate Theatre.  The distinction of the Gate was its intention to bring to Irish audiences the best of modern and Continental theatre, at a time when the great Abbey Theatre, after the brusque rejection of O'Casey's play, The Silver Tassie, was retreating into folksy quaintness, living off its past reputation.

      Though greeted warmly by critics, all was not well at first.  By the end of 1930 they were £700 in debt and had to be bailed out by Lord Longford.  The greatest success of the Gate in these early years was the production of Denis Johnston's drama The Old Lady Says 'No' which the Abbey Theatre had also rejected (the 'old lady' in question being Lady Gregory).  Mac Liammóir, who played Robert Emmet, took the play to London in 1935, where the Gate also played Hamlet.  During his years at the Gate he was involved in over 300 productions.  The survival of the theatre, whose home was in the elegant building of the eighteenth century Dublin Rotunda, was largely due to the financial aid of Lord Longford, whose wealth underwrote the scheme until the 1960s.  London was not the only foreign tour.  The Gate Company went to Egypt in 1936-38, and toured the Balkan states in 1939.

      It was in the Gate, as a teenager lying about his age, that the youthful genius of Orson Welles was discovered.  James Mason was another discovery of man Liammóir's.

      After the war mac Liammóir appeared in his own play Ill Met by Moonlight in London, and the following year he made his debut on the New York stage, as Larry Doyle in Shaw's John Bull's Other Island.  He played Iago in Orson Welles' film version of Othello in 1949.  Many other distinguished plays followed, as well as many books including All for Hecuba, which was about theatre life in Ireland, and Each Actor on his Ass, about the making of Welles' film of Othello.

      Aside from modern plays and classics, the Gate also mounted lighter works, such as Christmas entertainments.  Adaptations were also produced: The Heart's a Wonder, a musical based on The Playboy of the Western World, and The Informer, from Liam O'Flaherty's novel, in which he played the unfortunate Gypo Nolan.

      However, it was his one-man show created in 1960, The Importance of Being Oscar, devoted to the career and wit of Oscar Wilde, that made him a famous figure worldwide.  Rarely have an actor and his material been so well matched, and his evocation of Wilde was magical.  Directed by Hilton Edwards, this entertainment was not only taken to London (twice), and the USA, but also to South America and the Antipodes.  During the tour of The Importance of Being Oscar, mac Liammóir was almost blind.  As a stage prop he is said to have had a carpet specially woven on which the strong pattern provided him with his cues to his stage movements, preventing him from walking off the stage and into the orchestra pit.  Wherever he went with the production he magic carpet went with him.

      This major success was followed by two other one-man shows, both of great charm but without the startling impact of the first one, I Must be Talking to My Friends and Talking About Yeats.

      Though mac Liammóir appeared in many films, cinema was not his métier.  He also wrote towards the end of his life a book about Yeats, on which he was assisted largely by the young poet Eavan Boland; though full of interesting asides, it demonstrated that biography too was not his métier.  Two memoirs followed, An Oscar of No Importance and Enter a Goldfish.  These being on Wilde and himself proved far more successful.  His art being largely confined to stage sets has unfortunately dropped out of sight.  His book illustrations have a fey, fin de siècle air about them.

      Though it has been claimed (on not fully convincing evidence) that he had a sexual relationship with the ultra-catholic Irish fascist General Eoin O'Duffy, leader of the Blueshirts in the 1930s, his one lasting relationship was with Hilton Edwards.  For many years the pair of them, 'The Boys' as they were known to their friends, both of whom enjoyed travel and the ballet, made their home in a Regency house in Harcourt Terrace, now graced by a plaque.

      Micheál mac Liammóir died on 6th March 1978, by which time both he and his partner and the theatre they had founded had become national institutions.  At a time when Ireland was supposedly wallowing in the extremist forms of Catholic reaction, he and Hilton lived opened as a homosexual couple.  This was not the least of the courageous things that they did, though for those with an experience of his profession, the long haul of maintaining a theatre as a functioning asset against all odds, was even more courageous.

      The talents of actors, especially when these are largely confined to the stage, are particularly hard for future generations to grasp.  But with all his multifarious talents, so lavishly used, at a professional and social level Michael MacLiammoir (under whatever name one wishes) was a man of exceptional influence.

 

 

89

F. Scott Fitzgerald

1896-1940

 

The name of Scott Fitzgerald is forever associated with the Jazz Age, but this has perhaps done him a disservice.  He represents a particular kind of Irish-American experience, one in total contrast to that of James T. Farrell and John O'Hara.  He reminds us, if we needed reminding, of the huge variation in the experiences of Irish Americans.  Some of them had not only lace curtains on the windows, they had polished silver on the sideboard.

      After his death, his daughter Scottie investigated the complicated family background of her father and the families with whom he was connected.  Fitzgerald had cherished the thought that he had rich Southern relatives, but far more important were his Irish ones.  His grandfather, Philip McQuillan, had been born in Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, though little is known of his paternal grandfather, Michael Fitzgerald.  Fitzgerald, however, married a Cecilia Scott, who had Southern connections to Francis Scott Key, the author of the American national anthem.

      Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in St Paul, Minnesota, on 24th September 1896.  He was baptized a Catholic and reared in a Catholic household - formative experiences (as we know from JAMES  JOYCE [25] and other writers) involving guilt and rebellion, which can never be forgotten, even when the religious basis of one's childhood is rejected in later life.  His early years were spent in St Paul, but then the family moved to Buffalo, New York.

      The last two years of his pre-school education were passed in the Newman School in Hackensack, New Jersey.  In the fall of 1913 he entered Princeton University, but with the advent of the First World War he left college without a degree, having obtained an army commission as a second lieutenant.  But during the war, which for Americans only began in 1917, he saw no military action.

      In March 1920 his first novel, This Side of Paradise, was published, and the following month, on 3rd April, he married Zelda Sayre in the rectory of St Patrick's Cathedral in New York City.  Such a private ceremony, in the parochial house rather than in the church, was the usual thing for a Catholic marrying a Protestant, but this seems to have been his last formal contact with the Catholic church of his youth and ancestors.  However, he never really escaped from the moral atmosphere of his early years and its strict rules.  His later life never seemed quite to live up to the standards he set himself, and it was this tension that forms much of his writing.

      It was as a short-story writer, especially of a popular literary yet commercial story, that made Fitzgerald's name.  In the days of the prosperous magazines, a living could be made from writing from them.  His first novel captured something of the hectic college life he had left behind, but always hankered after.  This was followed by The Beautiful and the Damned in 1922, but it was The Great Gatsby, published in 1925, which established him as a major literary figure, and it is generally agreed to be not only his masterpiece, but a novel of special significance to the American experience.

      After this, Fitzgerald began to suffer literary and personal difficulties.  He and his wife moved to Paris, met Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and other writers of the period.  He and Zelda lived in the south of France and began a life of travelling.  Then in the spring of 1930, Zelda's mental health collapsed, and she was placed in a sanatorium.  'I left my capacity for hoping on the little roads that led to Zelda's sanitarium,' Fitzgerald recorded in one of his notebooks.  Nothing in his later life assuaged his loss.

      His next book, Tender is the Night, did not appear until 1934, and from then on his career disintegrated.  The critics were, on the whole, kind to the book, which sold moderately well, but it was no great seller, and it left the author with unpaid debts and a feeling that there was some fault in the novel which could still be put right.

      His next novel The Last Tycoon was left unfinished at his death and had to be arranged for publication by his friend, the critic Edmund Wilson.  This book, which had cost him so much turmoil, was moving in a new direction.  However, Fitzgerald was unable to follow it - his talent was dying.

      He went out to that graveyard of talents, Hollywood, in 1937 to work on moves for money.  Here he met Sheilah Graham, a young journalist whom he spent a measure of time introducing to the intellectual history he himself had so enjoyed.  But little else seemed to go right.  His difficulties and debts mounted.  In his notebook he says: 'Then I was drunk for many years, and then I died.'  And so he did, on 21st December 1940.  His was a career of promise which was never quite realized, but his works have influenced our ideas about the 1920s, and America as a whole, in an important way.

 

 

90

Mother Mary Aikenhead

1787-1858

 

No account of the great and influential Irish would be complete if it did not include an Irish nun somewhere on its list.  There are many misconceptions about the life of a nun, but as the life of Mary Aikenhead, the founder in 1815 of the now world-wide order of the Irish Sisters of Charity, amply demonstrates, a religious life did not prevent a woman from having a full career or exercising immense influence on the world beyond the convent walls.

      Mary Aikenhead was born in Cork on 19th January 1787.  She was the daughter of a Church of Ireland physician, David Aikenhead, and his wife Mary Stackpole, who was a Catholic.  Mary was initially brought up in the Anglican tradition, but her father became a Catholic shortly before his death, and she, too, was received into the Catholic Church on 2nd June 1802.

      She had an early ambition to serve the poor, and looked to find some order that was actively engaged in community charitable work.  When she became a nun, she was selected (somewhat against her will, it is said) by Dr Daniel Murray, archbishop of Dublin, to form just such a religious community, which they did with the permission of the Roman authorities.

      Mary Aikenhead and one of her colleagues then spent three years at the Michlegate Bar Convent in York for the novitiate.  She took the name Sister Mary Augustine, though according to the custom that prevailed in the British Isles, she was always known as Mrs Aikenhead.  (This custom dated back to penal times, when communities of nuns claimed merely to be ladies living in common.)

      The Religious Sisters of Charity, as the order was called, were inspired by the original French sisters founded by St Vincent de Paul in Paris.  Their rule was modelled on that of the Jesuits.  The first vows were taken on 1st September 1815, and Mary Aikenhead was appointed superior general.  They began their work when the two nuns returned to an orphanage on North William Street in Dublin, which was to be their new home.  They took the usual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, to which was added a fourth vow - to serve the poor.

      They cared for the orphans, established a day school, and went out into the community to visit families in their homes.  Their numbers rose, and more institutions were added to the original.  They taught in the parish school, in free schools, and opened a Magdalen refuge for girls who were expecting babies outside marriage.

      Sixteen years of unrelenting work took their toll, and in 1831 Mary Aikenhead's health gave way, leaving her an invalid for the rest of her life.  But her mental energy remained.  This is perhaps the real significance of religious orders for women, that they provided what was in effect a professional role for them in areas of management and social action which would otherwise have been closed to them in those days.  Moreover, they attained what the women's movement of today espouses: a sense of community, sisterhood, and shared purpose far removed from the narrow confines of the domestic scene.

      In 1832 Ireland was visited by cholera, during which time Mary Aikenhead directed her sisters' heroic labours.  In 1834 the congregation received its papal approval.  It was also the year when she opened St Vincent's Hospital in Dublin, which was the first Catholic hospital in Ireland.  Removed to a new site at Elm Park, it still exists.  She pioneered the staffing and managing of hospitals by religious women, trained in modern nursing.  In time, convalescent homes, homes for the blind, deaf, and crippled, old people's homes, mothers' clinics, hostels and recreation centres were set up, all in addition to the original schools.

      The Irish nuns spread to England and Scotland.  In 1838 the Irish Sisters of Charity became the first nuns to go to work in Australia, with which Ireland had many connections.  (In Australia they are now called the Daughters of Mary Aikenhead.)  Later still, they went to the United States, where they are well established in Los Angeles, and to Zambia and Nigeria.

      In the middle of the nineteenth century, when much was made of the efforts of Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War, said by many to be the first modern war, the Irish Sisters of Charity also worked in the Scutari hospitals, but with far less personalized fanfare than the British 'Lady with the Lamp'.

      During the last twenty-seven years of her life, Mary Aikenhead had to direct these world-wide operations from her bed, for she had been crippled by an incurable spinal condition.  She died in Dublin on 22nd July 1858.  Aside from her great skills as an organizer, many had been impressed with her deep spiritual qualities and her sense of mission as a gift from God.  In 1921 the cause for her beatification was issued in Rome.  This process, always a long affair with the Catholic Church, makes progress.  Her name may yet be added to the small roster of modern Irish saints.

      In Ireland, it used to be said that if one wanted the country to be properly run, it should be given into the charge of a reverend mother and a Christian Brother.  At a time when management skills in many areas of public life and social action were lacking, Mary Aikenhead proved the truth behind the old joke.

 

 

91

Maria Edgeworth

1767-1849

 

Though her name may not be familiar to all, except, perhaps, students in Ireland who have to read her novel Castle Rackrent as part of their literature courses, Maria Edgeworth has an important place in the history of not only Irish but European and American literature.  Sir Walter Scott admitted that it was from her tales of Irish life, so racy of the soil, that he derived the notion of writing his own series of romantic novels of Scottish history.  His novels, in turn, inspired James Fenimore Cooper, Alessandro Manzoni, Ivan Turgenev, and many others who attempted to combine scenes of domestic life within a setting of national destiny.  Out of the novel so many Irish schoolchildren groan over arose a whole aspect of the Romantic Movement in literature.

      This was something of an achievement for a lady, and she was a lady, who lived much of her life in a mansion house on her father's estate isolated in the bogs of western Ireland.  Her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was an important figure, not only in the life of his daughter but in intellectual society in general.  He was a much married man, with a passion for invention and education.  Together with his daughter he wrote Practical Education, a book of great importance in the development of modern education, for they based their whole system, derived from Rousseau to some extent, on the reasoning and conversations of children, largely his own.  Like the best of modern education it was child-centred.

      Maria's life was not lived in the shadow of her father; indeed, if anyone hears of him it is through his connection with her.  Maria Edgeworth was the second child and eldest daughter of Richard and his first wife.  She was born in her grandparents' house at Black Bourton, in Oxfordshire, on New Year's Day 1767.  They were the kind of family that travelled much in England and France, but after 1793 much of their time was spent in Ireland at Edgeworthstown.  Her letters are a rich source, not only for her own life but for the hectic times they lived through.  She had rather grand families as neighbours, such as the family of Lord Longford and others.  She also got to know the ordinary people around town and on her father's estate.

      Though she wrote a great deal under her father's influence, her novels were her own.  Her first one, Castle Rackrent, appeared anonymously in 1800, the year of the Act of Union.  It tells the story of a tumbled and decayed great house in rural Ireland and the decline of the family over several generations through the eyes of Thady, a loyal family retainer, whose praise of their lifestyle reads as an ironic commentary on the whole state of Ireland that had just led to the uprising of 1798.  Maria Edgeworth wrote many other tales and stories, often of fashionable life, of which The Absentee (1812) is among the most important, dealing again with Irish affairs.

      In 1802 the family went to Europe, and she refused an offer of marriage from a Swedish count.  Though she seemed unperturbed, her stepmother thought she regretted the decision.  At home again, her work was done (like Jane Austen's) in the middle of family life crowding around her in the drawing room.  In 1813 the family was in London, where they were much sought after, and she met Sir Walter Scott.  When she read Waverly, the first of Walter Scott's novels, which was published anonymously, she knew from the style that it was by him.  She visited his home at Abbotsford, Scotland, in 1823, and Scott himself was at Edgeworthstown in 1825.

      During the famine years, Maria Edgeworth did all that she could for the stricken people of her district.  She died on 22nd May 1849, and is buried in the family vault in the parish graveyard.

      Her Castle Rackrent is undoubtedly the first realistic Irish novel.  It influenced the works of George Moore, JAMES JOYCE [25], and others.  She invented the regional novel, and though to some metropolitan tastes that may seem a small claim to fame, it is on her regional novels that the literature of many countries, including western America, rests.

 

 

92

John Barry

1745-1803

 

The creator of the American navy and its traditions, John Barry, was born in Ireland at Tacumshane, County Wexford, in 1745, the year of the last Jacobite uprising against the Hanoverians.  In the British Isles this was the last military gesture of the old Catholic order, to which his family belonged.  He was brought up with a strong religious sense, which he retained to the end of his life.

      Barry went to sea as a boy, at fourteen it is said, eventually becoming a shipmaster in the port of Philadelphia, which had many Irish connections even at that time.  He was engaged in the trade to and from Latin America and the ports of the West Indies up until 1774.

      In 1775 he sailed to British ports on the Black Prince, the largest, finest, and fastest of the American merchant marine fleet.  He was one of those involved in signing the non-importation act, which was one of the colonies' first moves towards breaking the link with Britain.

      When the American Revolution broke out, John Barry was one of the very first captains to be commissioned by the Continental Congress.  Seeing the trend of events at home, he hurriedly left Liverpool on the Black Prince to return to Philadelphia.  He arrived there on 13th October, the very day that the Continental Congress resolved to outfit two armed cruisers, one fourteen guns, the other of ten.

      Though he was then in the full flow of his own trading prosperity, he threw in his hand with the patriotic colonial movement and enlisted in the Continental navy.  From that day to his death, his name stood at the head of the Navy List in which the seniority of naval officers is recorded; he had no other commander over him and reported directly to Congress, the president, or the government committees.

      In command of the brig Lexington (with fourteen guns), names for one of the first battles of the Revolutionary War, he captured the British sloop Edward off Chesapeake Bay on 7th April 1776.  This action was historical, as it was the first capture of a foreign vessel by a commissioned American warship in which the enemy was forced to lower its flag to the Stars and Bars.  In fact, his vessel was the first to carry the Continental flag to victory at sea.  Later the same year, Barry led a raid of four ships on a British contingent on the Delaware River below Philadelphia, seizing important supplies.

      At sea he captured three more ships before returning to Philadelphia to superintend the construction of warships on the Delaware River.  He was given command of a ship, but it had to be destroyed - despite his protests - to prevent it from falling into the hands of the enemy.

      With four small boats he rowed down to Philadelphia and with his twenty-seven men captured a British ship which held 136 officers, men, and marines.  It was an extraordinary feat of arms that unsettled the British, and it is thought that it hastened their withdrawal from the city.   Then he came to the aid of Gen. George Washington, helping him and his despairing army cross the Delaware River.  For a while he served in the US army, commanding a volunteer artillery company at the Battle of Trenton on 26th December 1776.

      He took over the naval command at Philadelphia, and from 1780 to the end of the war commanded the frigate Alliance, engaging in several sea battles.  He carried the US envoy General Lafayette to France, and on the return trip captured two English men-of-war.  He was badly wounded in this engagement.

      On another cruise he captured nine prizes, that is enemy ships which would later be sold to reward his own men.  His engagement with the British man-of-war Sybil, on 10th March 1783, was the last sea battle of the American War of Independence.  (A log of the Alliance, kept by John Kessler, gives a vivid impression of the days at sea between 1781 and 1783.)

      With the peacetime reorganization of the navy, Barry was made senior captain, offered his services to Washington to fight the Barbary pirates.  From then until his early death he supervised the creation and progress of the US navy.  In 1794 he was given the command of the new frigate United States, and was named a commodore on the Navy List.

      During the sea war with revolutionary France, Barry's command covered all the US ships in the West Indies.  This war arose from the United States' failure to fulfil the treaty obligations it had entered into with France during the Revolution.  Under his command, the United States carried the commissioners who negotiated the end of the war to France.  On 22nd February 1797, the last birthday he spent in government, Washington personally conveyed to him a naval commission Number One, making him commander-in-chief of the naval forces of the United States.

      Though a strong man for discipline, Barry was much admired by his sailors and officers, and never had any trouble in making up a crew.  He was affable and humorous, and like many of his countrymen from Ireland he had a quick temper, but any excess violence he at once apologized for.  On his ships he saw to it that religious duties were strictly observed (even though he was a Catholic and his men mostly Protestants).

      For many years he had suffered from asthma, which finally killed him soon after he retired.  When John Barry died, at his home in Philadelphia on 13th September 1803, his name still headed the serving list of US Navy officers.  He was buried in St Mary's Catholic churchyard in Philadelphia, where his grave was almost lost sight of, though his reputation never faded.  There is now a statue of him in front of Independence Hall in Philadelphia.

      'Commander Barry,' Joseph Dennie wrote as early as 1813, 'may justly be considered the Father of our navy.  His eminent services during our struggle for independence, the fidelity and ability with which he discharged the duties of the importance which he filled, give him lasting claim upon the gratitude of this country.'

      For his countrymen he was an example of distinction in an area largely thought to be dominated by British talents.  Another statue of him now dominates the quays along the harbour in Wexford, one of the few memorials to sailors in Ireland.  For Irish nationalists, his courage was an example of just what the Irish race could achieve in war.  To Americans, he left a gallant naval tradition which has lasted to this day.

 

 

93

John Ford

1895-1973

 

Some of John Ford's films are among the most famous ever made.  Through them he created not only a lasting vision of America, but also an idea of Ireland which was accepted by many Irish Americans as a reality.  In truth, both were deeply personal to the man himself.

      Ford was born Sean Aloysius Feeney to Irish immigrants at Cape Elizabeth, Maine.  His family connections were with the west of Ireland, and he was a distant cousin of the celebrated Irish author Liam O'Flaherty, author of The Informer.  He was educated at Portland High School, but lasted only three weeks or so at the University of Maine.  Instead, he went to California to join his brother Francis, who was working in Hollywood for Universal Studios.  For four years he worked as a bit player, stuntman, and special-effects man at Universal, appearing in D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation.  In 1916 he changed his name to Jack Ford, and the following year he became a director.  He married Mary McBryde Smith in 1920 (they had one son and one daughter), and the next year he moved on to Fox Films, where he began his long-time association with the screenwriter Dudley Nichols.

      In later years, Ford claimed he made westerns, but they represented only a small part of his output.  He won an Oscar for his version of The Informer in 1935, but equally important were Stagecoach, Young Mr Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, My Darling Clementine, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

      Ford had a long struggle to get The Informer made, because the studio bosses were not enthusiastic about a novel of revolutionary vengeance set in Dublin during the troubles.  Ford astutely changed the setting of the film from the grim days of the Irish civil war of 1923 back a few years to the war of independence in 1920, making the police British rather than Irish.  The informer betrays his old comrade to get money to go to America, but he is tracked down by the 'organization' and killed.

      Indeed, it was grim stuff, but it represented a view of Ireland that was realistic and moving.  Ford had already made some Irish-related films (The Shamrock Handicap, Mother Machree, Riley the Cop), but his interest as a filmmaker was in creating an idea of America rather than Irish America.

      In 1952 he finished an Irish project that had been in the making since before the war: The Quiet Man, starring John Wayne as an American boxer who has vowed never to fight again and Maureen O'Hara as the girl he want to marry.  It enjoyed a huge success, and was of some importance in the emergence of a national film industry in Ireland.  In later years it also brought visitors by the hundreds of thousands to the beautiful country around Cong in Galway where it was filmed.  But in its details it presented an idealized Ireland, free of clashes of culture or politics (as when the Catholic villagers cheer lustily for the Protestant bishop to ensure that the local rector can stay).

      In 1965, Ford returned to Ireland and the earlier revolutionary years to make Young Cassidy (1965), based on the rich autobiographies of the playwright Sean O'Casey, which recounted the years of grim poverty he endured before he achieved fame and success.

      John Ford claimed to be apolitical, and that he loved only America.  He was a long-time member of the US naval reserve, fought with the marines in the South Pacific (being wounded at Midway), and was given the rank of rear admiral by President Nixon on retiring.

      The film critic John Baxter places John Ford very exactly: 'He was an immigrant, a Catholic Republican; he speaks for the generations that created the modern United States between the Civil and the Great Wars (1865-1917).  Like Walt Whitman, Ford chronicled the society of that half century, expansionist by design, mystical and religious by conviction, hierarchical by agreement, an association of equals within a structure of command, practical, patriotic, and devout.'  In his films, Ford mythologized the armed forces and the church as paradigms of structural integrity.  'All may speak in Ford films, but when divine order in invoked, the faithful fall silent, to fight and die as decreed by a general, president, or some other member of the God-anointed elite.'

      All of this comes directly from John Ford's Irish background, but these were values which were not confined to his community, but were shared by a significant number of other Americans, to make his vision of America, what it had been and what it was, their vision too.  He carried with him a sense of history, both Irish and American, that informed that vision.

      At the end of his film The Last Hurrah, based on Boston politics from which the Kennedys emerged, Mayor Frank Skeffington, an old-time Irish ward boss at heart, loses an election rather than compromise with the modern world.  John Ford had a great respect for tradition, the traditions of love, family, and community.  His people speak little; their actions speak for them.  In true Irish fashion, the dances and fights and feasts that are such a feature of his films, and reach their apex in The Quiet Man, reinforce a sense of community.  His people sing, eat, and get drunk as acts of communion.

      For his own generation and later ones, John Ford created an image of America.  For many Europeans, his America is the real America, but in his Irish films, too, he has created an ideal of a land that still captures the hearts and imaginations of many millions.  It is an epic achievement to be proud of.

 

 

94

Sir Roger Casement

1864-1916

 

A figure of controversy in his own lifetime, Sir Roger Casement is even more controversial today.  Before his execution in 1916 the controversy surrounded both his work as a diplomat and his activities as an Irish republican.  Now the focus is on the nature of his sexuality, and the authenticity of his notorious Black Diaries.  But the continuing influence and future reputation of Casement will depend on a reappraisal of him as a most unusual person - a gay Irish patriot.  Already acclaimed as a hero of the Easter Rising, in this role we are only beginning to understand him.

      Though he was born in Sandycove, outside Dublin (on 1st September 1864), Roger Casement was an Ulsterman, and was reared in the north, being educated at Ballymena Academy.  Going to sea, he went to Africa with the merchant marine in 1884.  There he eventually joined the British Colonial Service in 1894.

      He was posted to far parts of Africa in the consular service.  In 1904 he made an official report to the British Parliament on the inhuman treatment of black workers in the remoter parts of the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), then a personal domain of King Leopold of Belgium.  This report caused an international scandal, and led to the Belgian government taking over the administration of the colony from the king.

      Casement was then posted to South America, where he conducted a similar inquiry into the treatment of British West Indian workers of the wild rubber workings on the upper reaches of the Putumayo River, on the border of Ecuador and Peru.  Here rubber bosses ran the whole district with no regard to proper law and order.  Though he was empowered only to look into how the West Indian blacks were being treated, Casement was equally concerned about the treatment of the amerindians, who were little more than the brutalized slaves of the rubber companies.  His report causes another international outcry when it was released in 1912.  For these services Casement was knighted by the king.  He retired from the colonial service in 1912.

      By now his interests were engaged with Ireland and its affairs.  He joined the Irish National Volunteers when they were set up in 1913, and was involved in the importation of guns from Germany in 1914.  Thinking that the war would be a short one, like the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, he travelled to Berlin by way of Norway, to plead the case of Irish revolutionaries for military aid.

      He toured the prisoner of war camps to persuade Irish soldiers captured by the Germans to join a putative Irish brigade effectively in the service of the German Empire.  (Many of these would have been poor Dubliners who may have heard of the banner Connolly had strung across the front of Liberty Hall: 'We serve neither king nor kaiser, but Ireland.')  He found few to follow him.

      In April 1916 the German government at last dispatched a cargo boat, the Aud, to Ireland with a cargo of guns and ammunition.  Casement followed in a submarine.  He landed at night on Banna Strand, outside Tralee, and hid in an ancient fort, where he was arrested the next morning by the local police.  Meanwhile, the Aud failed to make contact with the local republicans, whom Casement intended to alert.  It was sighted by the British navy and had to be blown up by her crew to avoid capture.

      Within hours of his arrest, Casement was sent to London for interrogation.  Police had raided his flat in London and seized his papers.  Left among these, they alleged, were a series of diaries which revealed that Casement had for many years been an active homosexual.  Sexual relations between men was then a serious offence, but the charges laid against him were far more serious.  Under a medieval act he was charged with the treasonable offence of aiding and giving comfort to the king's enemies.

      He was duly convicted.  A campaign for his reprieve from a death sentence was begun and was backed by many influential people in England, Ireland, and the United States.  His supporters included Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and GEORGE BERNARD SHAW [49].  To counter this campaign, the British authorities called in the American ambassador and some British notables, and showed them either pages removed from the diaries or typed-up extracts - accounts differ as to the actual appearance of the documents.  No-one seems to have been shown the actual diaries themselves, and this later aroused the serious suspicion of fraud.

      Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said that as a doctor he was unsurprised by such things, and that treason was a more serious matter in any case, but he based his view of the affair on his opinion that Casement, whom he had known well at the time of the Congo revelations, was now quite insane.  Others, however, were shocked, and silenced.

      Casement was hanged in Pentonville Gaol on 3rd August 1916; his body was buried within the jail.  In March 1965, the year before the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising, his remains were brought back to Ireland and were reinterred with state honours among other Irish patriots in Glasnevin Cemetery.

      For most Irish people, Casement's fame rested on his role as one of the republican patriots of 1916, but the scandal of the diaries remained.  Many Irish writers, including W.B. YEATS [8] were convinced that the diaries produced in 1916 had been forged by the British Secret Service to discredit Casement with the Irish-American community; they simply could not countenance the possibility that the documents might be genuine.

      In the 1920s a set of the typed copies of the diaries had been passed to a British journalist, Peter Singleton-Gates, but he was prevented by the invocation of secrecy laws from publishing them.  At the time, this may have been as much to save the embarrassment of the Irish Free State government as to hide the guilt of the British authorities.  However, he retained the copies.  In 1959 he eventually issued them through a Paris publisher (better known for the first edition of Lolita) under the rather lurid title of The Black Diaries of Sir Roger Casement.  Further controversy followed, which eventually ended with the disputed documents being placed in the British Public Record Office.  Though they could be read, they could only be given limited technical examination.

      More recently, new editions of the diaries relating to the investigation of the Putumayo incident have been published, against causing controversy.  There seems little doubt that the diaries are genuine.  What should now concern the admirers of Casement is the totality of his public life rather than the details of his sex life.  Though he died for Ireland, his real life had been devoted to the welfare of Africans and Indians, in an effort to prevent them from being mercilessly exploited.  On the basis of the diaries, his love for them seems to have arisen initially from sexual admiration.  There would be nothing wrong with this, but it is the heroism of his campaign rather than the nature of his private life that should concern the future.

      In his lifetime, Casement exerted great influence in ameliorating conditions in wretched parts of the world - one of them the very 'heart of darkness' which Conrad wrote of.  He will remain a hero to those who work to free the world of slavery and exploitation.

 

 

95

Ned Kelly

1854-1880

 

To his contemporaries, the bushranger Edward Kelly was a criminal.  To modern Australians Ned Kelly is a national hero.  Such are the strange contrasts in the evolution of Irish feelings about Australia, and Australian feelings about the Irish.

      Ned Kelly was born in the state of Victoria at Wallan Wallan.  His father had been transported from Tipperary in Ireland as a convict.  His mother, also from Tipperary, was a Cody, a remote cousin of America's own Buffalo Bill.  As boys, Ned and his brothers were themselves always in trouble with the police because of charges of horse stealing.  Ned served three years in jail for this.

      In April 1878 the police attempted to arrest his brother Daniel on a horse-stealing charge.  The whole Kelly clan resisted, and Ned wounded one of the policemen.  Mrs Kelly and some of the family were detained, but Ned and Daniel escaped into the bush.  There they were joined by two other Irish bandits, Joe Byrne and Steve Hart.

      For the next two years, the 'Kelly Gang' haunted the states of Victoria and New South Wales.  Rewards were offered for their capture, but to no avail.  They held up towns, robbed two banks, and murdered three policemen and a civilian between October 1878 and June 1880.  But the police eventually caught up with them.

      On 29th June 1880, they were tracked to a wooden shanty at Glenrowan, near the town of Benalla.  They were surrounded by the police, and the little house was riddled with bullets and then set on fire.  Out of the flames and smoke emerged the almost phantom figure of Ned Kelly, clad in a suit of armour made from sheet iron.  But this did not protect his lower limbs.  He was shot and wounded in the leg, and was then captured when he fell over and could not rise.  He was taken to Beechworth, where he was tried and convicted of murdering a policeman.  The last of the bushrangers, he was hanged at Melbourne Old Gaol on 11th November 1880.  And very properly too, said respectable Australia.

      But Ned Kelly, his family, and the members of the Kelly Gang were Irish; they did not belong among respectable Australia.  When he was hanged, Ned's last words were, 'Such is life', but life for the poor Irish in Australia was cruel and hard.  The key feature of his life was not his bank robbing or horse stealing.  It was a semi-articulate message to the world, which has come to be called the Jerilderie Letter, his testament in which he attempted to explain what he was about, but it was basically an incoherent plea for social justice.  At the time (and later) there were rumours that he sought to create an outback republic, or a 'United States of Australia', but what Ned Kelly's political ideas really were is still much discussed.  Certainly an Irish hatred of all things English, imbibed from his parents, played a large part in them.

      The life he spoke of was an almost aboriginal one, nasty, brutish, and short.  Though he was branded a criminal, and still is by some who have adopted the police's view of his activities, to others he is something else: a bandit, or primitive rebel.  He is part of the remembered history of the people rather than the official history of the state, the history of ballads rather than the history of police reports.

      As concerns Ned Kelly, the Australians have 'printed the legend'.  He has become a part of the mythology of a young nation, their counterpart to Robin Hood, William Tell, or Davy Crockett.  This is due in part to the folklore of the early days, and in part to the extraordinary use to which Kelly's legend has been put by Australia's most important modern painter, Sir Sidney Nolan, himself of Irish extraction.  In a series of pictures, done at different times of the painter's career, the image of Ned Kelly in a black suit of armour is posed against the searing browns, reds, and yellows of the Outback.  This is an Australia of the imagination, the artist's Australia, where Ned Kelly has joined the immortals.  He has become an essential part of the Australian identity, the part belonging to the independent man, his own boss, the free man.

      As the historian Eric Hobsbawn explained: 'The bandit myth is also comprehensible in highly urbanized countries which still possess a few empty spaces of "outback" or "west" to remind them of a sometimes imaginary heroic past, and to provide concrete locus for nostalgia, a symbol of ancient and lost virtue, a spiritual Indian territory for which, like Huckleberry Finn, man can imagine himself "lighting out" when the constraints of civilization become too much for him.'

      He suggests that there is perhaps more than social documentation, or a longing for adventure to the literary or popular images of the bandit, to which Ned Kelly belongs: 'There is what remains when we strip away the local and social framework of brigandage: a permanent emotion and a permanent role.  There is freedom, heroism, and the dream of justice.'

 

 

96

John Boyd Dunlop

1840-1921

 

It is often remarkable from what small beginnings giant industries derive.  On the moonlit night of 28th February 1888, in a Belfast street, a small boy named Johnny Dunlop was to be seen riding his tricycle, under the supervision of his father.  The two rear wheels of the tricycle were the world's first pneumatic tyres and the boy was testing them for comfort over the rough cobblestones.

      The test was so successful that the boy's father, J.B. Dunlop, duly applied later that year for a patent.  Petitioned for on 23rd July 1888, patent no. 10607 was a provisional specification for 'a hollow tyre or tube made of India-rubber and cloth, or other suitable material, said tube or type to contain air under pressure or otherwise and to be attached to the wheel or wheels in such a method as may be found most suitable'.  It was dated 20th July 1888, and signed John Boyd Dunlop.  This is still, more or less, the specification of a tyre, but it initiated a revolution in the fields of industry and transport.

      John Boyd Dunlop was a veterinary surgeon, then living at 50 Gloucester Street, Belfast.  But he was not Irish, but Scottish by origins.  Though Ireland was his adopted country, he donated one of those first tyres to the Royal Scottish Museum, where it is still displayed.

      He was born at Dreghorn in Ayrshire.  At school he was a bright child, teaching maths to smaller children for small sums from the master.  He went on to Irvine Academy.  Qualifying as a vet, Dunlop went to live in Belfast in 1867, then at the start of its rapid industrial development.  Soon he had created what he said to be the largest animal medicine practice in the country.

      It was here he made his invention - or rather reinvention, for an earlier patent had been taken out on the basic principle by a Scottish inventor Robert William Thomson (1822-73) in 1846, which led to Dunlop's first patent being refused.  He began work on the idea in October 1887, the first tests being made in February 1888.  His 'sausages', as the new tyres were nicknamed, enabled a rider named Hume to win every race which he entered at the Queen's College sports in the summer of 1888.  'There is a demon in that machine', a bystander commented.  Edlin & Sinclair, a firm in Belfast, began to make Dunlop's 'safety tyres', the first advertisements for which appeared in March 1889.

      Next, in partnership with Harvey Du Cros, the Pneumatic Tyre Company was founded in Dublin in 1889, also taking over Booths Cycle Agency Ltd.  It was capitalized at £24,000, and the prospectus claimed that the new safety tyre was: 'indispensable for ladies and persons with delicate nerves'. 

      But a large part of this capital went on the Booth interest, and Dunlop was unhappy with the way in which the business was developing.  Like many inventors he was more at home in the workshop than in the boardroom or the back office.  He sold out his interest to Harvey du Cros, the president of the Irish Cyclists Association, in 1889, and it was Du Cros and his third son Arthur who actually developed the business as managing directors.  Dunlop went to live in Dublin in March 1892, where he was appointed chairman of Todd Burns, a large drapery and department store in the city centre.

      He retired from the board of Dunlop in 1895, and his last association with the business was in 1909 when he was guest of honour at a dinner given by the cycle and motor trade and related clubs.  Later he and his daughter boasted that they held no shares in the huge industrial concern that carried his name.  He also invented a carburettor, which had some small vogue, but his name would be forever linked with his tyre.  He had made investments in Australia and it was the success of these that provided most of his income when he died, on 23rd October 1921.

      The advent of the pneumatic rubber tyre heralded a social revolution.  Rubber had been known since the discovery of America, but it was only with the introduction of vulcanisation in 1844 that it became widely usable in industry.  What was used came largely from Brazil, where it was tapped from wild trees in the jungle.  This work was done largely by Indians and imported workers, who were ruthlessly exploited, which led to a scandal investigated by ROGER CASEMENT [94], on the River Putumayo.  Casement's revelations accelerated the shift of the rubber industry from South America to the Far East which had already begun some time earlier.  In June 1876 some 70,000 seeds were brought out from Brazil to Britain where they were reared at Kew Gardens; some 2,700 germinated, resulting in 1,919 plants being shipped to Ceylon.  In Brazil, rubber had been harvested from wild trees, in Asia it was to be cultivated in plantations.  By 1899 only four tons of rubber was produced in the Far East, but by 1922 these plantations were producing 95 per cent of the world's rubber, by 1932 it was 98 per cent.  An economic revolution had taken place, which advanced the British Empire and reduced Brazil.

      This rapid expansion was largely the result of the introduction of the pneumatic tyre.  It started a rage for cycling in the 1890s which altered life for the lower-middle and working classes.  Enthusiasts included H.G. Wells, who was not the only writer to pen 'cycling novels'.  With this freedom went a certain amount of sexual liberation; the new girl was a girl on a bicycle.

      The motorcar fitted with pneumatic tyres was also liberated by the abolition in 1896 of the Red Flag Act, which had restricted them to 4mph behind a man with a red flag.  Motoring, for the upper-middle classes and the rich, became the rage.  The consequences of the motorcar are something the world is still adjusting to, with many now hoping for a return to the city trams and buses of the 1880s!

      By the turn of the century Dunlop tyres were being made in France, Germany, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and a little later in Japan.  In 1902 a reorganized company, now the Dunlop Rubber Company, removed to Coventry, then the heart of the bicycle industry and the fledgling car industry.  At first the Dunlop company concentrated on making cycle tyres, but soon widened its ambitions to making car tyres, sports equipment and other rubber goods.  The company continued to grow and in 1908 began to make the rims and wheels too.  In 1916 the Dunlop Cotton Mills were set up, so that the firm now controlled all the basis materials it needed.

      In 1910 Dunlops acquired its first rubber plantation in Malaya.  By now the rubber plants exported to the Far East had been developed into an industry, especially in Malaya, where British imperial interest was expanding from Singapore into controlling the Malay native states on the mainland.

      Here in specially planted rubber estates the rubber was harvested as a regular business - rubber (along with tin) remains an essential part of the economy of modern Malaysia.  It was the need for rubber that brought about the Japanese invasion of Malaya in 1940, and the rubber plantations were the object of communist terrorists and the foundations of modern Malaysian wealth.  Elsewhere companies such as Goodyear and Firestone were involved in the political developments of such American quasi-colonies as Liberia and Guatemala.  Rubber for tyres became and still remains an economic motivator all over the world.

      Back in Britain, meanwhile, in 1916 the great tyre factory at Fort Dunlop was opened.  Here the production of the company would be based for a long time to come.  In 1917, the company was capitalized at £6 million, in 1919 at £7.5 million, and in 1920, the year before Dunlop died, at £10 million.  By now the motor industry in the Midlands, in America, and elsewhere had come of age.  Dunlop's tyres were what the twentieth century ran on.  Victory over the Americans in Vietnam, for instance, was achieved by the Viet Cong using bicycles which they would ride almost unobserved through the jungle.  It was a remarkable achievement for a company that began with the tests on little Johnny's trike that dark evening in 1888.

 

 

97

Oscar Wilde

1854-1900

 

Oscar Wilde was the remarkable son of remarkable parents.  His father was Sir William Wilde, surgeon and archaeologist, one of the most celebrated intellectual figures in nineteenth-century Ireland.  Sir William was the author of two books which are still read about the River Boyne, and Lough Corrib, in Galway.  Both of these mingle topography and archaeology in a most readable way.  However, it was his work on the medical aspects of the Irish census of 1851, which dealt in large part with the affects of the famine on the population of the country, for which he was knighted.  In 1851 he married Jane Elgee, who already had a reputation of her own as a patriotic poet under the pen name Speranza, and who had contributed fiery poetry and prose to the Nation when it was edited by GAVIN  DUFFY  [82].

      Wilde was a tiny little man with factual tastes, Jane was large, flamboyant and fanciful - she claimed to be a descendant of Dante.  Sir William suffered socially in the aftermath of a civil action in which it was alleged he had raped one of his patients, but he re-established himself before he died, in 1876.

      Their son, Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, was born on 16th October 1854, at 15 Westland Roe, although a little later the family moved to a larger mansion at 1 Merrion Square.  He was raised with an appreciation of what it meant to be in the public eye.  He was educated at Portora Royal School, and at Trinity College in Dublin, where he first began to emerge as a personality under the friendship of a celebrated don of the day, John Mahaffy, the professor of Greek.  He then went on to Oxford, where he became friends with the art critic John Ruskin.  The combination of Greek culture and aesthetics affected his own development.  He won a first-class degree and the Newdigate Prize for his poem 'Ravenna'.

      He moved to London at the age of twenty-five, and was, from then on, basically a Londoner.  There his novel aesthetic views added to his college reputation, and he was the subject of genial satire by Gilbert and Sullivan in the character of the poet Bunthorne in their comic opera Patience.

      Following this reputation, he went on a money-making lecture tour of America, where he proved to be a big success, even with the hard-bitten gold diggers of Montana.  However, his first play, Vera, produced in New York, was a failure.

      Wilde married an Irishwoman, Constance Lloyd, by whom he had two sons, born in 1885 and 1886.  But as his story 'The Portrait of Mr W.H.' showed, he was beginning to explore other aspects of his sexuality.  About this time he met Robert Ross and was initiated into homosexuality.

      In 1891 he first met his nemesis in the form of Lord Alfred Douglas, the dandyish son of the notorious marquis of Queensbury, who was responsible for drawing up the rules of prizefighting.  The Picture of Dorian Gray, with its hints at sinister dark sins, was a further step in a revolt against the morality of the day.  His essays 'The Decay of Lying' and 'The Soul of Man Under Socialism' followed.  But these paradoxical and political pieces were not a full demonstration of his evolving genius.

      In 1892 the first play of his last period, Lady Windermere's Fan, was produced in London.  He described this one as 'one of those modern drawing-room plays with pink lampshades'.  This was quickly followed by A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.  He was at the very height of success, with two plays running in London, when disaster fell upon him.

      By this time he was leading a dangerous life with Lord Alfred, and involved with male prostitutes and other shadowy figures in the homosexual underworld of London.  Lord Alfred and his father were feuding, and the marquis took exception to Wilde and began to hound him.

      On 18th February 1895, the marquis left a card with the porter of Wilde's club addressed 'Oscar Wilde posing as somdomite.'  The porter put it in an envelope and gave it to Wilde on his next visit.  Lord Alfred urged him to sue the marquis for libel, which he did.  At the trial all the details of his private life were exposed, and he lost the case.  Rather than flee the country, as was the custom with exposed homosexuals in the polite society of Victorian London, he lingered, and was arrested at the Cadogan Hotel and put on trial for sexual offences.  The jury disagreed at the first trial, but at a second he was convicted and sentenced to five years with hard labour in Reading Gaol.

      Wilde's prison experiences provided him with two important works: De Profundis, an attack on Lord Alfred Douglas, and a little later 'The Ballad of Reading Gaol', by far his most successful poem, perhaps because it was his most objective.

      Once released from prison, he went abroad.  His wife Constance, who had separated from him on the advice of her relatives to protect her two boys, gave him an allowance.  But this was stopped when he took up again with Lord Alfred.  Some old friends of a more decent kind, such as Robert Ross, remained friends, but otherwise he was shunned as an outlaw, gaped at in cafes and pointed out in public places.  He became fat, unhealthy, and finally ill.  He died on 30th November 1900, in the Hôtel D'Alsace in the Rue des Beaux Arts in Paris.  He was received into the Catholic Church shortly before he died.  He is buried in Père Lachaise cemetery, where his grave, now surmounted by a monumental sculpture be Jacob Epstein, is a place of literary pilgrimage.

      Wilde had been bankrupt, but Ross eventually recovered his copyrights for the benefit of his sons.  He deposited a copy of the full version of De Profundis in the British Library, protecting it from Lord Alfred, who had destroyed what he thought was the only copy.  Wilde's son Cyril was killed in the First World War.  Vyvyan lived on and wrote a memoir about his father, and his son, Merlin, is now the guardian of the Wilde estate.

      When Wilde was tried, his nationality was not in question.  At his trials it did not matter to the jury if he was Irish or British.  More recently, Irish writers and academics have attempted to recapture him for Irish, rather than English, literature.  His conversational style of story-telling has been related to the Gaelic style that so interested his parents.  More importantly, he was, like Sheridan and Goldsmith before him, an outsider in the society he depicted in his plays.  He was alert to the comic possibilities of the London drawing room in a way that the natives were not.  Thus, the social satirist was given full play.  Finally, his gift of language is thought to have its origins in the verbal skills native to the Irish of all periods.

      Whatever its background, The Importance of Being Earnest is a classic of the English-language theatre, but it is not Wilde's literary qualities that maintain his notoriety.   He is widely seen as a gay martyr in a repressive society, which is enough to keep large numbers of people interested in him and to keep his work alive.  For the scandal-ridden son of scandal-ridden parents, it is a strange but perhaps appropriate apotheosis.

 

 

98

T. K. Whitaker

1916-

 

When the full history of Ireland in the second half of the twentieth century is written, the name of T.K. Whitaker will be given a special place of honour.  Yet his entire life was passed as a public servant in the employment of the government.

      Thomas Kenneth Whitaker was born in Drogheda on 8th December 1916, the son of Edward Whitaker and his wife Jane, soon after the Easter Rising.  He was educated by the Christian Brothers in Drogheda.  After school, he joined the Irish Civil Service, then almost the only route to success for the intelligent in Ireland.  While in the civil service he took a bachelor's of science and a master's of science as an external student at London University.  Eventually, he rose to become secretary of the Department of Finance, in 1956.  Here he was given the lead in drawing up the plan for the economic development of Ireland, published by the government in 1958, to which the present prosperity of Ireland can be traced back.

      Though Ireland was an open democracy, at independence in 1922 it was not a rich country.  Though there were large brewing and distilling interests, there was very little other industry because the country lacked capital.  Under the governments of both WILLIAM COSGRAVE [56] and EAMON DE VALERA [2], much emphasis was placed on agricultural and rural development.  Keeping people on the land was a major priority, but it became clear that many people were still emigrating or leaving the country to live in the city.  To retain these young people and to provide new jobs in the cities, especially in Dublin, which was rapidly becoming the country's major population centre, remedies had to be found, and they could not be obtained merely from private resources.  So in Ireland a form of benign state intervention arose in which much capital investment came directly from the state.  The blue book on economic development laid out the criteria through which the Irish economy would be planned.  It allowed for the creation of the Industrial Development Authority, which funded the building of factories in specific locations and encouraged foreign and Irish manufacturers to make use of them.  These were largely placed for social reasons, but Ireland had many attractions for foreign investors, which have become increasingly important since the computer revolution.  Today there is a large, socially fluid, well-educated, English-speaking pool of labour which has proved to be both diligent and flexible.

      In the 1990s, Ireland came to be seen as the 'Celtic Tiger'.  Indeed, its prosperity has carried it to twenty-first place among the industrial nations, and in many ways its development eclipses those of some Far East economies, since it is not founded on a disguised sweatshop economy.  These astonishing triumphs in a country like Ireland, with a long-standing image of famine, poverty, and disorder, are a political and social triumph of the first order.

      This success is due in large measure to the foresight, good sense, and perception of T.K. Whitaker, but it also emphasizes how lucky Ireland was to have civil servants like him.  When Ireland gained its independence, it inherited a civil service system from the previous British administration.  Some civil servants retired, but many stayed on; others were recruited.  There were stiff exams to enter the service, and in the decades up to the 1960s the perception was that the best jobs were not in industry or business but in government service.

      The cream of the country's talents entered the civil service, so much so that the number of poets, playwrights, and historians in the service was astounding.  Like all civil services, it has its problems of delay and bungling, but it also has great reserves of intellectual power.  And it was these that resulted in the Whitaker regime.

      This notion of disinterested public service was of immense value to the country.  When other countries in Africa and Asia gained their independence, it could be seen that without this kind of well-paid and highly motivated civil service, corruption and tyranny soon took over.  Ireland developed as a democracy thanks to men of integrity like T.K. Whitaker.

      Today, Ireland's capital base has expanded, and investment can be made with less government intervention.  But the state socialism of the Whitaker era served Ireland well, and the influence of his ideas pervades the whole of Irish life to this day.

      When Whitaker retired from the civil service it did not mean more time for his interests of fishing, golf, and music.  He became a governor of the Central Bank of Ireland from 1969 to 1976.  He was also a director of the brewers Arthur Guinness, of an Bord Gaeilge, and the Agency for Service Overseas (Ireland's Peace Corps).  Among the final distinctions paid him was his election as chancellor of the National University of Ireland, a post which had once been filled by de Valera.

      From 1977 to 1982 Whitaker was a member of the Irish Senate.  Other honours include membership in the Council of State, chairman of the Constitution Review Board, and president of the Royal Irish Academy.  He has also received many honorary degrees for his service to the community.

 

 

99

Rex Ingram

1893-1950

 

In the heyday of the cinema between the wars, the world's largest film production company was the conglomerate Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, or MGM.  At the heart of this giant firm was the Irish-born film director Rex Ingram, who was one of the profoundest influences over the most popular entertainment of the day.  To some he was as mysteriously romantic as the films he created.

      He was born Reginald Ingram Montgomery Hitchcock, on 18th January 1893 at 50 Grosvenor Square in Rathmines.  This was a wealthy, exclusive district of Dublin, inhabited by many wealthy Protestants.  His father, the Rev. Francis Hitchcock, then a divinity lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, was not one of them.

      Rex Ingram was educated at St Columba's College in Rathfarnham, but there was no money to send him to university.  On leaving school at the age of eighteen he immigrated to the United States.  He reached New York on 3rd July 1911, and never saw Ireland again.  His original intention was to go into business, but the friend of the family who had invited him over provided Ingram with the means to study art at Yale University from January 1912.

      A little over a year later, in 1913, he went to work in the film industry, which by then was a decade old.  He worked for Edison, Vitagraph, and for the Fox Company both as an actor and as a script writer.  His tall, dark-haired, handsome figure was a striking presence in films such as The Artist's Madonna, with Lillian Walker in 1913, and many others.  Soon he moved out to Hollywood in California, where the sunlight and cheap land had attracted the bulk of American film makers.

      The film industry was then a young man's business, and at the age of twenty-three Ingram directed his first film for Universal, The Great Problem.  He set up his own production company, and went on to direct Black Orchids, Reward of the Faithless, The Flower of Doom, and Under Crimson Skies.  He joined Universal in 1916, where the full scope of his talents were realized by June Mathis, and more films followed.  During the Great War he served briefly with the Canadian Air Force.

      In 1920, then twenty-seven, he joined the Metro Company, which had been set up in 1915.  Here he made The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, from the international best-selling novel of 1916 by Vicente Blasco Ibañez (1867-1928).  This both brought to the screen Rudolph Valentino and made a star of Alice Terry.  The film was a huge international success, largely through the astonishing screen presence of Valentino, and it made a fortune for Metro - it also meant lasting fame for Ingram.  In 1924 the company became part of MGM, for whom Ingram developed his later pictures.

      Alice Terry, who also had Irish roots, was a beautiful, charming, and witty redhead - though always a blonde in her films - with whom Ingram at once fell in love.  They were married in November 1921, though there were to be no children.

      Ingram next made The Conquering Power, which again starred Alice Terry.  His next great discovery was another Latino star, the young Mexican Ramon Novarro, who played the two main roles in The Prisoner of Zenda.  Ingram went on to make Trifling Women, Scaramouche, and Where the Pavement Ends from the South Sea tales of John Russell.

      He had ambitiously hoped to direct the original Ben-Hur, which would have provided great scope for his visual imagination, and deprived of this he spoke about retiring, but his friends van Stroheim and Dmitri Buchowetzki insisted he return to work, claiming that he was the world's greatest director.  The friendship with the eminent von Stroheim, a notoriously difficult man, was an important one.  When von Stroheim's Greed ran into difficulties, Ingram saved the project by cutting the initial twenty-four reels down to eighteen.

      Like so many others, Rex Ingram began to feel constrained by the Hollywood studio system.  Alice Terry retired and they moved to Europe, establishing (with the help of MGM) the Victorine Studios in Nice (which still exist: it was there that Truffault filmed La Nuit Americaine or Day for Night).  Ingram sought out locations in Europe and especially in North Africa, to which he was especially attracted.  At one time he even thought of becoming a Muslim.  Here he made The Arab in 1924, filming in Tunisia with Ramon Novarro, Alice Terry and Haydee Chikly, daughter of the Arab film pioneer Albert Chikly.  (In their enthusiasm for Arab culture the Ingrams adopted a young Tunisian, Abd-el-Hader.)

      In these years he also made Mare Nostrum (1925), again based on an Ibañez novel of 1918.  This was followed by The Magician (1926), from the novel by Somerset Maugham, and The Garden of Allah (1927), from the Robert Hichens novel, which later gave its name to a famous Hollywood restaurant.  For The Garden of Allah Ingram had taken his crew over to Tunisia, where he now made friends with the local ruler.

      The film business was changed forever with the introduction of sound the following year.  The Three Passions in 1928 was his last silent film.  Ingram made one sound picture in 1931, Baroud (Les Hommes Bleus, issued in the US as Love in Morocco), again set in North Africa, this time against a Moroccan background, in which he also played a part.

      Ingram had started out as an artist, and in 1933 he gave up films, to return to his first loves, painting and sculpture, to which he gave powerful and expressive forms.  He now had time to travel and to write.  He published two novels, The Legion Advances, about North Africa, and Mars in the House of Death, about bull-fighting in Spain and Mexico - themes which suggest the continuing influence of Ibañez.  Like many men of great intelligence, Ingram was easily bored, and the attractions of Europe, Africa and Islam faded.  He and Alice Terry returned to Hollywood, to live in Los Angeles.

      He was recognized by an honorary degree from his alma mater, Yale University, and received the Legion d'Honneur from France, and the Order of Nichan Iftkar from the Bey of Tunis.

      Rex Ingram died unexpectedly in a Hollywood hospital on 22nd July 1950 at the age of fifty-seven.  Alice Terry survived him, only dying in 1987 at the age of eighty-seven.  She was a substantial source for the admiring and thorough biography by the Irish film historian Liam O'Leary, a man who did much at the National Film Foundation in London, and in retirement in Dublin, to restore to public view Ireland's contribution to the cinema.  His admiration of Rex Ingram was shared by such diverse cinematic talents as Kevin Brownlow, David Lean ('in everything he did the camerawork is impeccable'), and Michael Powell, who had been his apprentice in Nice ('the greatest stylist of his time').  The film historian David Thomson claims Rex Ingram remains 'an important director with a rapturous visual style'.

      In all, Ingram made more than twenty-seven films, and was one of the most distinguished figures in the silent cinema.  Like many of the great film makers of that era, his fame was eclipsed by the coming of the talkies, and by later remakes of his best films.  But by those who love the early cinema, and recognize talent in all its forms he has not been forgotten.  To this day The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is still one of the great landmarks in the development of the modern cinema.

 

 

100

Gerry Adams

1948-

 

In May 1998 the people of Ireland, north and south, voted their overwhelming support for the Good Friday Agreement.  After some thirty years of political turmoil and over two thousand deaths (the majority at the hands of terrorists), this new settlement in Ireland opened up the prospect of peace for the rising generation of young Irish people.

      A key figure in this agreement was Gerry Adams, an unemployed barman from Belfast, who had been a leading figure in Sinn Féin, the party of minority nationalist opinion in the north, widely accepted as the political wing of the IRA.

      Gerard Adams was born in Belfast on the Falls Road on 6th October 1948, the son of Gerard Adams and his wife Anne, formerly Hannaway.  Neither Adams nor Hannaway are Gaelic names, but rather the names of English families long settled in Ireland.  He was educated at St Mary's Christian Brothers School in Belfast.  He was in his early twenties when the troubles broke out in 1969, and he renewed his family's involvement with republican politics.  In 1971 he married Colette McArdle, by whom he has one son.

      In that same year he was interned for suspected terrorist activities, and it was while 'behind the wire' that his political education began as well as his rise to power among Republican ranks.  He was released and again interned in 1973.  Later he was imprisoned, though released in 1976.

      He was elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly as a Sinn Féin deputy in 1982, and to the United Kingdom parliament as the Sinn Féin representative from West Belfast, but refused to take his seat.  He lost this seat in 1992 to an SDLP candidate, but regained it in 1997.  But, again, he did not take his seat at Westminister.

      Among the leading Sinn Féin personalities, Gerry Adams has also made his mark as a writer.  He is the author of Falls Memories (1982), an autobiography of his childhood experiences growing up in that republican quarter of Belfast.  He has also written Politics of Irish Freedom and Pathway to Peace (both in 1988).  Cage Eleven (1990) is another chapter of his autobiography.  His short stories were collected in The Street (1992).  Yet another chapter of his autobiography appeared as Before the Dawn in 1996.

      Informed observers believe he has long been close to the Army Council of the Provisionals.  Though he has never claimed membership of the IRA, an offence in itself, he understands the outlook, for one of his stories describes in vivid detail the shooting of a British soldier.

      Over the long years of struggle he has moved, as MICHAEL  COLLINS  [3], EAMON  DE  VALERA  [2] and others before them, from the simplicities of physical force to the intricacies of political persuasion.  His experiences have led to this changed outlook.  Though many of this political opponents, north and south, still distrust him, he has exerted a tremendous influence not only over political events in Ireland, but also, through his frequent visits to the United States, over how those events are seen by the Irish-American community and the government of the Untied States.

      The deployment of Irish-American opinion has persuaded a series of American presidents to interest themselves in Irish affairs (against their will in some cases).  But this involvement has revealed in some ways how far apart the Irish and the Irish-American communities have grown.  They think about Ireland in terms of the past, and have little conception of how it has changed.

      Ireland is now a prosperous, indeed, over-prosperous country.  Appeals based on historic poverty have now little attraction to modern Irish people.  When the Good Friday Agreement came into force it left Gerry Adams with the even greater task of leading his party in a new political situation.  But this has been what Irish leaders have had to do in the past, what de Valera had to do in 1927.  He is unlikely to make much headway against the established parties in the south unless Sinn Féin develops policies for a new Ireland in a new millennium.

      This is a striking role for any man who values what he can do for his country, and who thinks, as all leaders do, of the verdict of history on their lives.  Gerry Adams is a man of immense influence whose greatest opportunity may be before him, but only if he can evolve along with the changing conditions.  In the summer of 1998, after an appalling bomb outrage in Omagh by a republican splinter group, Adams finally announced that the war was 'over, done with, finished'.  The promise of peace would have to be maintained with all the influence of his moral authority.

      His future, like that of Northern Ireland, remains uncertain.  Both will be followed with deep concern by Irish people everywhere, many of whom will hope that Gerry Adams will be able to find his way to a broader horizon, as have so many Irish patriots in the past.  The world will watch with interest as Sinn Féin begins to play a serious part in the government of Northern Ireland through the Northern Ireland Assembly.  Whether the men with guns have become a thing of the past in Ireland remains to be seen.

 

 

JOHN O'LOUGHLIN ON ADLIBRIS.COM