Jim Stynes was born in on April 23, 1966, to Brian Stynes and Theresa (Tess; née Davey), from Tipperary, and grew up in the Dublin suburb of Ballyboden. His parents were Gaelic games enthusiasts – a grand uncle, Joe, had played on the 1923 All-Ireland winning Dublin team – and his father, a public servant, had played for the Civil Service club. He was a member of Ballyboden St Enda’s GAA Club from a young age and his father was among his coaches.
Jim was on the first Ballyboden juvenile team to win a championship – U16 football, 1981. He later played rugby at De la Salle College, Churchtown. But his greatest love was Gaelic football, playing for Ballyboden alongsid his brother Brian, who went on to captain the Dublin senior football team. In 1984 Jim won an All-Ireland Minor football medal with the Dublin team.
Jim Stynes
Jim Stynes’ first contact with Australian rules football came in 1984 when, with no prior knowledge of the game, he answered an ad in a local paper from the Melbourne Demons Football Club seeking talented Gaelic footballers as possible recruits as part of what was later described as “The Irish experiment”.
Melbourne officials were impressed and he was brought to Victoria in November 1984 to undergo a crash course in Australian rules. He made his debut for the Melbourne under-19s team in 1985 and was sent to Victorian Football Association’s Prahran Football Club to compete at senior level.
Jim Stynes was a slow developer. His skills were raw, particularly his kicking of the oval ball, but he showed outstanding endurance and the height and leap of a potential ruckman.
In 1987 he played in a night premiership side. The Melbourne coaching panel’s perseverance with him paid off when he made his senior debut for Melbourne in 1987 at Waverley Park against the Geelong Football Club. He was dropped after a poor performance but returned to the senior side later in the season against the Brisbane Bears.
In the 1987 preliminary final Melbourne were leading Hawthorn with a minute to go when Stynes made the mistake of running across a mark, which resulted in a free for the opposition. His error resulted in a 15 metre penalty which denied Melbourne the chance to reach its first grand final in 23 years. Stynes went to Europe to get away from the shame and disappointment, but on a crowded train in Paris a voice said to him: ”Aren’t you the bloke who ran across the mark in the preliminary final?”, and he knew there was no escape.The next year, Melbourne made the grand final. Despite being beaten by 96 points, Stynes was voted best on ground for the Demons.
Jim Stynes’ best year came in 1991 where he won the Brownlow Medal for Player of the Year, becoming the first – and so far only – overseas-born player to win the award.
He went on to have a record breaking run of consecutive games, however it almost ended with a severe rib injury in 1993 resulting from a collision with teammate David Neitz in a match against North Melbourne Football Club. He was rushed to Epworth Hospital with a compound rib fracture. In 1994, he suffered a medial ligament tear, but continued to play through it. His streak of consecutive games finally ended at 244 (an Australian Football League record) when he broke his hand early in the 1998 season.
Meanwhile back in Ireland his brother Brian was making his mark as a Gaelic footballer with the Dublin GAA team and won an All-Ireland football championship medal in 1995. Jim played against his brother in the International Rules Series against Ireland many times. Brian Stynes also played two senior AFL games with the Melbourne Football Club in 1992.
Another younger brother, David, played for Ireland’s winning team in the 2002 Australian Football International Cup in Melbourne and returned with the team which reached the semi-finals of the 2005 cup. He also won a Leinster Minor Football Championship medal with Dublin.
The long list of honours Jim achieved during his career included both main AFL “best and fairest” awards, the Brownlow Medal and AFL Players Association MVP award (now known as the Leigh Matthews Trophy) in 1991, four club best and fairest awards with Melbourne and All-Australian honours in 1991 and 1993
Following retirement from the game in 1998, Jim Stynes assumed the role of an anti-racism officer within the AFL, a cause close to his heart, owing to the level of racial abuse he (and players of non-white Australian background) had experienced throughout his career. In 2008 he became chairman of the Melbourne Football Club and played a key role in eliminating the club’s A$5,000,000 debt.
Jim Stynes with wife Samantha and children Tiernan and Matisse.
After finishing his AFL career, Jim Stynes could have enjoyed a lucrative media career but instead concentrated on youth development. With actor Peter Currie he had established the Reach Foundation in 1994, a project to promote mental health and wellbeing among young people. He served on government advisory boards including the 1997 Victorian Government Suicide Task Force and the Youth Advisory Consultative Forum Committee. In 2010 he was named Melburnian of the Year for his Reach Foundation work..
Jim Stynes was the author of several books, including an autobiography Whatever It Takes (1996). As part of his work with Reach Youth he also co-wrote children’s self-help books with Dr Jon Carnegie, including Heroes (2003) and Finding Heroes (2006).
He was inducted into the Australian Football Hall of Fame in 2003.
In July 2009, Stynes revealed he had developed cancer and over the next three years underwent brain surgery six times and had more than 20 tumours. Although clearly unwell and frail, he appeared in Melbourne’s Etihad Stadium in October 2011 to throw in the ball for the first test in the 2011 Australia v Ireland series, which was won by the visitors.
Jim Stynes died at home in St Kilda, Melbourne, on March 20, 2012. He is survived by his wife Sam and children Matisse and Tiernan, parents Tess and Brian, and siblings Brian jnr, David, Terri-Ann, Dearbhla and Sharon.
He was accorded a state funeral. Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard paying tribute to him said:‘‘He’s come into the hearts of Australians for so much more than his footballing career.’’
Actor David Kelly was born in Clonskeagh, Dublin, on July 11, 1929, and acted from the age of eight at the Gaiety Theatre. He was educated at Synge Street CBS and the National College of Art. He trained as an actor at The Abbey School of Acting. In addition, he trained as a draughtsman and calligrapher. A tall and flamboyant figure, he was always attired off stage in hand-stitched shirts, Jermyn Street suits and a trademark bow tie.
He met his future wife, the actor Lauri Morton, while acting at the Pike Theatre Club in Dublin. There they appeared in the late-night satirical revues written and produced by Alan Simpson and Carolyn Swift in the 1950s before the small theatre was forced to close by the conservative interests of church and state. It was here also that he met up with Milo O’Shea and the pair worked on and off together over many years, most memorably in the Gate Theatre production of Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys and in Hugh Leonard’s BBC series Me Mammy. He worked with Jimmy O’Dea in the Telefis Eireann weekly comedy series The Signalman by Flann O’Brien.
He was equally accomplished playing straight or comic roles. He appeared onstage in the original production of Brendan Behan’sThe Quare Fellow. he had made his screen debut in a small part in director John Pomeroy’s 1958 film noir Dublin Nightmare. He was the first Irish actor to play Krapp in Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, in 1959, in a summer season of plays produced by Louis Lentin in Trinity College, Dublin. Thirty years later he gave an even more accomplished performance of that demanding role under the direction of Pat Laffan in the Gate.
Although he became known to British TV audiences through1970s sitcoms such as Oh, Father! (with Derek Nimmo) – and played a hapless builder, O’Reilly, in an episode of Fawlty Towers – he first endeared himself to Irish viewers in Telefis Eireann’s 1980 memorable series Strumpet City, based on James Plunkett’s novel about the Dublin 1913 lock-out, in which he played the homeless and captivating “Rashers” Tierney. He maintained his Irish popularity in two long-running television soaps, RTE’s Glenroe and the BBC’s Ballykissangel, screened from 1996 to 2001.
He went on to perform in a remarkable variety of guises: from a reading of Yeats with Siobhan McKenna to opening Ursula White-Lennon’s Pocket Theatre in 1966; as Titus Oates in Desmond Forristal’s The True Story of the Horrid Popish Plot, which Hilton Edwards directed in 1972, and as Ferapont in Chekov’s Three Sisters in the late 1980s
David Kelly worked consistently in films from 1969, when he played the vicar in a funeral scene in The Italian Job, starring Michael Caine. He appeared again with Caine in Terence Young’s spy movie The Jigsaw Man (1984). His most notable film appearances in the 1990s were in two delightful Irish movies: Mike Newell’s Into the West (1992), scripted by Jim Sheridan, with Gabriel Byrne and Ellen Barkin, in which he played an old storyteller in a community of travellers; and Kirk Jones’s Waking Ned (1998) in which, with his best friend, played by Ian Bannen, he engineered a small village’s response to an unexpected lottery windfall and set about fooling the claims inspector.
He appeared with Kevin Spacey in the Irish crime caper Ordinary Decent Criminal (1999), and with Helen Mirren and Clive Owen in Greenfingers (2000). His last major movie appearance was in Matthew Vaughn’s Stardust (2007).
In later years he gained international recognition for playing Grandpa Joe in Tim Burton’s movie adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005), a performance that was honoured with a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Film and Television Academy. Johnny Depp, who played Willy Wonka, paid a touching tribute on a video link from Hollywood.
He certainly caught filmgoers’ attention in Waking Ned Devine where he provided enormous audience satisfaction for the sheer, yet subtly controlled, exuberance of his performances. Many will remember him as the elderly codger, speeding across the strands of the Isle of Man on a motorbike clad in his birthday suit. It amused him when he was deemed by fans to be a sex symbol at 70. This won him a Golden Satellite Award.
His career spanned over 50 years, and he never considered retirement.
David Kelly died on February 13, 2012. He is survived by his wife, Laurie Morton; his son David and his daughter, the actor Miriam Kelly. His sister Marie, a much-loved stage director, predeceased him.
Poet Pearse Hutchinson was born in Glasgow on February 16, 1927, to Harry and Cathleen Hutchinson. The family moved to Dublin in 1932 and he was the last pupil to be enrolled in Scoil Éanna, founded by Padraig Pearse. He later attended Synge Street CBS, where he remembered being “a happy swot, with a natural liking for language”.
In 1948 he went to UCD where he studied Castilian and Italian. His poetic development was further spurred by a holiday in Spain and Portugal in 1950. In 1951 he returned to Spain, intending to settle there. Unable to find work, he travelled to Geneva, where he joined the International Labour Office as a translator.
Returning to Dublin in 1953, he rekindled his interest in the Irish language. He was attracted to the work of Máirtín Ó Direáin and Seán Ó Ríordáin. He read everything he could find by Aonghus Fionn Ó Dálaigh, Dáibhí Ó Bruadair and Piaras Feiritéar, who became one of his favourite poets.
He began writing in Irish, finding it less difficult to be direct, simple and natural. His first Irish-language poems appeared in Comhar in 1954. That year he travelled again to Spain, where he learned the Catalan and Galician languages. He returned to Ireland in 1957 but was back in Barcelona in 1961. There his first book, a volume of translations from the Catalan of Josep Carner, was published. His first collection, Tongue Without Hands (1963), followed. By the late 1960s he was making his living in Ireland from poetry and journalism. From 1957 to 1961 he reviewed drama for Raidió Éireann, and in the 1970s presented Oró Domhnaigh, a weekly programme of poetry, music and folklore. He also wrote a weekly column for the RTÉ Guide. From 1971 to 1973 was Gregory fellow in poetry at the University of Leeds.
In 1968 a collection of poems, Faoistin Bhacach, was published. Expansions (1969) contains much social and political comment. Friend Songs (1970) is a collection of medieval love poems translated from Galacio-Portuguese. Two volumes of his own work followed, Watching the Morning Grow (1972) and The Frost Is All Over (1975).
His 75th birthday in 2002 was marked by the publication of his Collected Poems, followed a year later by Done into English, a selection of translated works by more than 60 poets.
His last collection, At Least for a While, was published in 2008. He was awarded the Butler Prize in 1969 and an Arts Council bursary in 1978. He was a founding editor of the magazine Cyphers and a member of Aosdána.
Poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin described him as a poet of seriousness and integrity. “His poetry is not preoccupied with the literary, but it explores all the resonances and realities of words and language.”
William Patrick Henry Pearse Hutchinson died on January 14, 2012. His life partner, Alan Biddle, predeceased him in 1994.
Bridie Gallagher greeted by Daniel O'Donnell in 2000.
Singer Bridie Gallagher was born on September 7, 1924, in Creeslough, Co Donegal, the second youngest of ten children. Her father James was from Ards and her mother, Bridget Sweeney, who played the melodeon, was from Creeslough. She was educated at Massinass national school and started her singing in the Creeslough Hall with a local ceili band formed by Bill Gallagher.
She shot to fame in 1956 with her recording of A Mother’s Love’s A Blessing and achieved international acclaim with her rendition of The Boys From County Armagh. During her career, which spanned six decades, she appeared in many leading venues across the globe. She also made songs such as The Homes of Donegal famous. She was spotted in the 1950s by Billy Livingstone who was a talent scout for Decca records, and she moved to Belfast, which she made home. She married George Livingstone (no relation) and had two boys, Jim and Peter. One son, Peter, died at the age of 21 in a motor accident in 1976 while Jim was to later tour with her. “She never really got over that (accident),” said Jim, “but she just kept going.”
She held the record for the largest number of people in attendance in the Albert Hall London, a record that was never equalled as it went on to be come an all-seater venue. She toured North America, Europe, Australia and was known as “The Girl from Donegal”. As well as the Albert Hall, she sang in the Sydney Opera House and Carnegie Hall in New York.”She brought glamour to the Irish stage, she dressed like an international star and that was unheard of in Ireland at that time,” said Dec Cluskey of the Bachelors.
Bridie Gallagher had her own radio show on RTÉ and appearaned on television on RTE, BBC, UTV, and coast to coast in the United States. However endless touring took its toll and her marriage eventually broke-up – a fact she hid from the public for many years.
She was honoured by the people of Creeslough in July 2000 with an event to celebrate her career. Members of her family from Creeslough and Donegal attended along with her two sisters and their families who travelled from Glasgow to be there, plus 2,500 fans. A plaque in her honour was unveiled. Although she never officially retired, she gave her last performance in Letterkenny in 2000.
Bridie Gallagher’s death came just a few weeks after UTV broadcast a tribute show, on December 18, 2011. Her granddaughter Teresa Livingstone was involved in making the UTV programme. “The most significant part of the journey for me was meeting with her fans in New York who could recall the details of her performances over 50 years later.
“The stories of Irish immigrants and how important her music had been to so many were quite overwhelming to listen to first-hand,” she said.
Daniel O’Donnell said of her: “I always say Bridie was the first from Donegal to pave the way for all of us that came after.
He added: “And I would say anyone that you would talk to of the Donegal singers would say that, because coming from Creeslough, or coming from where I come from, it’s a world away from where we ended up.”
Bridie Gallagher suffered a fractured hip after a fall before Christmas and died at the Royal Victoria Hospital, Belfast, after succumbing to pneumonia, on January 9, 2012, aged 87.
John de Courcy Ireland was born on October 11, 1911, in the Indian city of Lucknow, the son of a British army major from Co Kildare. His father died of fever in China when John was very young. His mother continued to live in Beijing for several years, but John was sent back to England, to Marlborough College.
John de Courcy Ireland
Just before his 17th birthday he ran away to sea, serving as a deckhand on a Dutch vessel sailing to South America. He consented to return to read History and Spanish at New College, Oxford, which offered him a scholarship. After Oxford he and his wife Betty (Haigh, whom he married in 1933) spent time on the Aran Islands and in Co Donegal, where he mastered the Irish language.
In 1943 he was a founder of the Maritime Institute of Ireland, an educational charity first sited at Dún Laoghaire, and in 1959 of the Maritime Museum in Dún Laoghaire. He undertook research into Ireland’s maritime history and campaigned for recognition of the country’s maritime heritage.
In 1949 he taught at St Patrick’s Cathedral School in Dublin and the next year received his doctorate on the sea in education from Trinity College. In 1951 he moved to Drogheda Grammar School and subsequently taught at Bandon Grammar School, Co Cork, and from 1968 at Kingstown Grammar School, Dun Laoghaire, which was absorbed into Newpark Comprehensive school in Blackrock, where he stayed till 1986. There in 1983 he produced Ireland’s Sea Fisheries: A History, the first of a wide-ranging series of books on the sea.
Living in Dun Laoghaire, he become involved in running the lifeboat and became its secretary, directing its operations for more than a quarter of a century. Secretaryship of the Maritime Museum was combined with writing prolifically on the subject. Newspaper articles were followed by books. Topics included the seamen of Spain, Algeria and France, the maritime aspects of the 1916 Rising. In 1995 he published The Admiral from Mayo, a life of Admiral William Brown, the Irish-born founder of the Argentine navy. The governments of Argentina, China, France, Portugal and Spain granted him honours for his work, as did the British Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
He was also a political activist and with his wife was an early member of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and at the end of his life its president. He feared for the health of the seas and the potential disaster from nuclear fall-out that could ruin the water and do away with its potential as a source of clean renewable energy.
He also spoke French, Spanish, Italian, German, Serbo-Croat and Portuguese, and regretted that he could only read Norwegian. President Tito decorated him for his support for the Yugoslav resistance to wartime occupation. Post-war Yugoslavia was a “fascinating, non-aligned example of workable socialism,” according to John.
Betty, who had been a nurse in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, and he were supporters, at various times, of the Irish Labour Party, the Communist Party, the Democratic Socialist Party, the Democratic Left and latterly the Socialist Workers’ Party. He campaigned in favour of a continuance of Ireland’s neutrality and argued that all wars were crimes against humanity. They emphasised differences between peoples, he said, when to achieve a peaceful world, the common humanity of all people had to be emphasised.
Later he espoused the “two nations” approach to the North, joining Jim Kemmy’s Democratic Socialist Party, and in his 70s contesting an election in which he won 1,000 first preference votes.
John de Courcy Ireland was a director of the National Museum. In 1975 he was a founder member of the Irish-Chinese Cultural Society, keeping up the strong links with China which went back to his early childhood.
In 1996 he brought out The Sea and the Easter Rising and in 2001 History of Dún Laoghaire Harbour. He was active till the end of his life and celebrated his 90th birthday in Melilla, the Spanish possession on the coast of Morocco, where he was researching what seems to have been the world’s first organised lifeboat service.
John de Courcy Ireland died in Dublin on April 4, 2006. He was predeceased by Betty who died in 1999. They had a son and two daughters.
Tony Gregory was born in Ballybough in Dublin’s Northside on December 5, 1947. His mother was from County Offaly and father from Dublin. He was educated at the Christian Brothers at O’Connell School and University College, Dublin, from which he graduated with a BA degree. He became involved in republican politics joining Sinn Fein in 1966 and then siding with the Officials in the 1970 split within Sinn Féin. However he left the party in 1972 over the Official IRA ceasfire. He was briefly a member of Seamus Costello’s IRSP, but left after Costello’s assasination in 1977. He was then briefly involved with the Socialist Labour Party.
Tony Gregory worked as a secondary school teacher at Colaiste Eoin, an Irish language secondary school in Booterstown, where he taught History and French, before becoming involved in politics as a member of Dublin City Council in 1979. He was elected to Dáil Éireann as an Independent TD in the 1982 general election.
On his election he immediately achieved national prominence through the famous “Gregory Deal”, which he negotiated with Fianna Fail leader Charles Haughey. In return for supporting Haughey as Taoiseach, Tony Gregory was guaranteed a massive cash injection for his badly run down, inner-city Dublin constituency.
The written agreement included commitments to nationalise a 27-acre site at Dublin Port. A total of £4 million was to be allocated to employ 500 extra people in the inner city, while 3,746 jobs were to be created over three years. State funding would be provided to build 440 new houses in the constituency and another 1,600 in the rest of Dublin. It also included the dropping of a proposed eastern motorway bypass for the city. The whole deal was worth an estimated £100 million at the time in comparison to the £850,000 deal offered by Fine Gael leader Garret FitzGearld.
Although he was reviled in certain quarters for political horse trading, his uncompromising commitment to the poor was widely admired. Fianna Fáil lost power in the November 1982 general election, and a lot of the promises made in the Gregory Deal were reneged upon by the incoming Fine Gael-Labour Party coalition.
Tony Gregory continued to campaign on local issues and issues of social justice, particularly the drugs problem. He used his local knowledge to press politicians and the Gardai to take more effective action. He showed personal courage in naming and confronting local pushers at angry and emotional community meetings.
In 2004, four years before the collapse of Anglo Irish Bank, he raised in the Dail the conflict of interest of dual membership of the board of Anglo and the Dublin Docklands Development Authority.
In 1986 he spent two weeks in Mountjoy jail for refusing to sign a bond to keep the peace arising from protest activities during a campaign in support of inner city traders.
He remained a TD from 1982 and was one of the country’s most recognised Dáil deputies. Long before Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary introduced the practice into the higher rungs of the business ladder, he always refused to wear a tie in the Dáil chamber, stating that many of his constituents could not afford them.
He died on January 2, 2009, following a long struggle with cancer. His election agent, Maureen O’Sullivan, won his seat in the June 2009 by-election. Tony Gregory: The Biography of a True Irish Political Legend, by Robbie Gilligan, was published O’Brien Press in 2011.
Golfer Philomena Garvey was born on April 26, 1927, in Baltray, Co Louth, daughter of James and Kathleen Garvey (née Owens). She dominated Irish women’s golf for a period of 25 years after the Second World War, winning the Close Championship a record 15 times, starting at Lahinch in 1946. This was a particularly notable occasion for the Baltray club in that the runner-up, Clarrie Reddan, was also a member. An indication of her dominance of Irish golf is that she never lost a final, which meant the only hope her rivals had of a breakthrough was that she would be beaten unexpectedly in one of the earlier rounds. Her greatest sequence of Irish Championship triumphs was four in a row, from 1957 to 1960, though she had earlier completed hat-trick successes in 1948 and 1955.
A fine and powerful striker of the ball with both woods and irons, she was one of the few top women golfers of her time to use the inter-lock grip.
She became a controversial figure in 1958 when informing the organisers of the biennial British and Irish Curtis Cup team that she would not wear the Union Jack emblem on her blazer. This became a serious issue, not least for the fact that she had been a member of every team from 1948 until 1956 and had captured the British Ladies Championship in 1957.
By way of compromise, she offered to wear the old badge which incorporated the emblems of the four home countries, but the Ladies Golf Union (LGU) refused to budge on the issue. So the Union Jack was retained and Philomena Garvey didn’t play. But she had made her point and when she was chosen again on the Curtis Cup side in 1960, the badge was changed.
In sharp contrast to her Irish exploits, she had to endure near-misses in the British Championship in which she lost five finals. Of these, the 1960 decider was especially memorable. Against the American Barbara McIntyre she came from eight down to cover the next six holes in a stunning 20 strokes, winning five of them before eventually losing by 4 and 2.
A lifetime member of Co Louth GC, she lived close by in Termonfeckin. She was employed for most of her working life in the sports department of Clerys in O’Connell Street, Dublin.
Though she flirted with professional ranks from 1964, she regained her amateur status in 1968 and won her last Irish Championship two years later. She has been described by the golf writer Dermot Gilleece as “quite simply, the greatest woman golfer this country has produced”.
Philomena Garvey died on May 5, 2009, aged 82. Biography
Philomena Garvey: Queen of the Irish Fairways, by Paul Garvey, The Liffey Press. ISBN 978-1-905785-71-1
Conor Cruise O’Brien was born on November 3, 1917, in Rathmines, Dublin. He was the only child of Francis Cruise O’Brien, a journalist who worked for the Freeman’s Journal and later the Irish Independent, and Kathleen Sheehy, a teacher, feminist, pacifist and author of a book on Irish grammar. She had three sisters, all of whom lost their husbands in 1916. These included Hanna, wife of murdered pacifist Francis Sheehy-Skeffington, and Mary, wife of Thomas Kettle, an officer of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who died during the Battle of the Somme. His father died when Conor was ten, so the dominant influence was his strong-minded mother.
Conor Cruise O'Brien
Although his father was an agnostic, Conor Cruise O’Brien’s first school was Muckross College, a Catholic convent school. Later he went to Sandford Park, nominally secular but in effect imbued with the Protestant ethos. His mother’s influence had made him fluent in Irish, and he won a sizarship to study Irish and French at Trinity College, Dublin. He was a brilliant student and won a scholarship at the end of his first year, which brought an allowance of £30 a year and rooms in the college – a coveted privilege – at half price. His roommate was Vivian Mercier, later a professor of English literature and author of books about Samuel Beckett and the Irish comic tradition.
After his mother’s death in 1938, he supported himself by giving grinds and by dabbling in journalism. Meanwhile, he kept winning prizes. He was active in the college debating society, edited the college magazine, and joined the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. In his final year, 1939, he married Christine Foster, a headmaster’s daughter from a liberal Belfast Presbyterian family. He graduated with a first in history.
Remarkably, he failed the Civil Service entrance exam, but passed on his second attempt in 1942. He joined the Department of Finance for two years before moving to External (now Foreign) Affairs. In view of his later stances on Northern Ireland and republicanism, ironically he worked on the Government’s campaign against Partition. Meanwhile, he tried his hand at writing poetry, which was tactfully rejected by Sean O’Faolain, editor of The Bell magazine. But he soon made his mark as a critic and commentator.
When the Government decided to set up the Irish News Agency, he became its first managing director, staying for the seven years. Under the Coalition government that replaced De Valera’s Fianna Fail, he was sent as a counselor to the Irish embassy in Paris.
With the return to power of Fianna Fail, Conor Cruise O’Brien for a time had a good working relationship with the veteran Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken. Ireland by now was playing an active and vocal role in the UN Assembly, and Cruise O’Brien was generally credited with being one of the people who formulated its policies – which included bringing on to the agenda China’s admission to the UN, much to the annoyance of the USA.
Conor Cruise O’Brien was in his 40s when he entered into the most fateful and controversial chapter of his life – his posting to the Congo by the direct initiative of Dag Hammerskjold, then secretary-general of the UN. He arrived in Elizabethville, the capital of Katanga province, in June 1961 to find himself in the epicentre of an international hotbed. The secession of Katanga, the murder of the first prime minister Patrice Lumumba (often ascribed to European-paid mercenaries), the dubious role of Union Minière, made the front pages of the world press for months on end. In the end Cruise O’Brien, apparently acting on what he thought was a UN resolution, ordered the UN peacekeeping force into action against the mercenaries and against Katanga’s secession.
He had stirred up a hornets’ nest internationally. One of the most vocal critics was Paul-Henri Spaak, then Belgian Foreign Minister and now remembered as an architect of European unity. “Who is Conor Cruise O’Brien?” asked Harold Macmillan, and answered his own question: “An unimportant, expendable man.” Pressures on him, on the UN and on the Irish Government multiplied. Hammarskjold was forced to desert his protege, then died in a plane crash and his successor, U Thant, formally agreed to a request from Frank Aiken that Cruise O’Brien be released from further UN duty. Almost immediately, he announced his resignation from the Civil Service.
The controversy continued when he later published his version of events in the book To Katanga and Back (1962). Meanwhile, he divorced his wife and married the poet Maire Mhac an tSaoi, daughter of Sean McEntee, a Fianna Fail Cabinet Minister. They adopted two Congolese children.
The Congo chapter had earned him one important admirer – President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, who invited him to become vice-chancellor of the university there. For a time this relationship went well, but the two drifted apart and Cruise O’Brien – never a man to stay silent long – was occasionally outspoken about what he felt were local breaches in civil rights and free speech. Nkrumah, becoming somewhat paranoid after an assassination attempt, deported several of Cruise O’Brien’s European colleagues at the university. After an interval, Cruise O’Brien followed them voluntarily, becoming Albert Schweitzer professor of humanities at New York University.
There he became a vocal critic of the Vietnam war, attending protest marches. In one, he was kicked by a policeman, and was in considerable pain for days afterwards. During this period, his play Murderous Angels was staged in Los Angeles and later had a brief run in New York.
Eventually he returned to Ireland, where there had been a swing to the left politically, and stood as a Labour candidate in Dublin North East. Unexpectedly, he won a big vote and became embroiled with his bete noire, Charles Haughey, about whom he later coined the word Gubu – standing for “grotesque, unusual, bizarre and unprecedented”. He attacked Haughey over his role in the Arms Crisis, in which certain Fianna Fail politicians were alleged to have tried to smuggle arms shipments to nationalists in the North.
He became Minister for Posts and Telegraphs (1973-77) in the Fine Gael-Labour coalition government. His anti-republican line resulted in the amendment to Section 31 of the Broadcasting Act that virtually denied active or even strongly vocal republicans access to radio or TV channels. The section has since been repealed. Cruise O’Brien believed that there was too much sympathy for Sinn Fein in RTE in particular. His stated view was: “If the Provos are successful, there will be civil war into which the South will be drawn.”
He became the Labour Party’s spokesman on the North. To many, his attitude seemed anti-nationalist, maintaining that his stance made things harder rather than easier for men such as John Hume, who was striving to maintain a moderately nationalist line, as an alternative to IRA violence. When told that his pronouncements – widely reported at home and abroad – were close to official London policy, O’Brien retorted: “Yes, I am pro-British. I am also pro-French and pro-American. I am even pro-Russian in that I am pro the Russian people. But I am more pro-Irish than I am any of these things. Ireland is my country, and I am just as Irish as any bloody IRA man.”
Time was running out for the coalition, and in the 1977 election Fianna Fail came back to power and Cruise O’Brien lost his seat. He was elected by Trinity College graduates to the Seanad (from 1977 to 1979), before getting the job as editor-in-chief of The Observer in London, to which he was appointed in 1978. The following year he received Granada TV’s columnist of the year award for his journalism and in 1984 he won the Channel 4 What the Papers Say award for his work for the Irish Times and The Observer. Of his career as a politician, he said that his election defeat had liberated him from the necessity of saying things he did not believe: “It sickened me, and I am glad to get out of it.”
In 1987 he was embroiled in controversy again, this time as a result of a visit to South Africa, where his lectures at the University of Cape Town angered black students. However, as his writings show, Cruise O’Brien was no friend to racial policies, and his 1986 book on Israel, The Siege, was characteristically independent in its viewpoint.
Of his later writings, undoubtedly his most important book was the biography of Edmund Burke, The Great Melody – a phrase borrowed from Yeats. A degree of autobiographical self-identification with Burke was noticed by several commentators.
He continued to denounce nationalism vehemently: “Nationalism everywhere tends to be xenophobic.” He also attacked the “insidious and demoralising peace process” in the North, and he shocked some of his liberal followers by canvassing for Robert McCartney of United Kingdom Unionist Party in North Down.
He was a long time columnist for the Irish Times and later the Irish Independent and his articles were distinguished by hostility to the peace process in Northern Ireland, regular predictions of civil war in the Republic and a pro-Unionist stance. In 1997, a successful libel action was brought against him by relatives of Bloody Sunday victims for alleging in one article that the marchers were “Sinn Féin activists operating for the IRA”. In 1963, his script for a Telefís Éireann programme on Charles Stewart Parnell won him a Jacob’s Award
With his family he lived Howth, County Dublin. In 1992 he told Fergus Pyle of the Irish Times: “I have never spent an entire year away from Ireland. In every year of my life I have been able to come back here for some part of the summer – what the lawyers call the animus revertandi. It is quite strong.”
Many still believe that Conor Cruise O’Brien was at his best as an academic historian, and that the book Parnell and his Party, which grew out of a student thesis, is his most valuable work. A Concise History of Ireland, published in 1972 under the joint names of himself and Maire Mac An tSaoi, has gone through several editions. His essays and occasional pieces also contain some excellent literary criticism, without the contemporary polemics that intrude into so much of what he wrote and said.
Conor Cruise O’Brien was a maverick, both as a writer and politician. Some analysts viewed him as a fine intellectual led astray into public life by ambition and the desire to prove himself a man of action. Others saw him as a courageous radical nonconformist who challenged the forces of obscurantism. Others again argue that, like Burke, he began as a Whig radical and ended up as almost a reactionary.
Conor Cruise O’Brien had a son and two daughters (one of whom, Kate, a writer, predeceased him) by his first marriage, and adopted a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Margaret, with Maire Mhac an tSaoi.
He died in Howth on December 18, 2008
Historian RB (Robert Brendan) McDowell was born in Belfast on September14, 1913, the eldest of two sons. His father was a tea merchant. He was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institute. He entered Trinity College, Dublin, to read history and political science in 1932 and graduated with honours in 1936. When a PhD was conferred on him three years later, he was required to read his final degree papers aloud to the examiners as his writing was too difficult to decipher. His politics, rooted in the context of the British Isles, remained unionist to the end.
As a student, he immersed himself in the work of Hobbes, Locke, Machiavelli, Rousseau, JS Mill and Marx. He had a particular liking for Lecky, and admired and enjoyed Marx as an economic historian. “I was influenced by the whole concept of the economic factor in history and was fascinated by class divisions.”
Three years spent working in Marsh’s Library, Dublin’s first public library, founded in 1701, were followed by teaching at Radley college, Oxfordshire. In 1945 he became a lecturer in the modern history department at TCD, and was elected a fellow in 1951.
Well-liked and a familiar sight at student parties, he also became well known at Hist debates. To students, he presented a highly contrasting impression of cheerful enthusiasm, youthful energy, approachability and earnestness. Many would not miss his lectures for the world, despite his inevitable late arrival and his tendency to forget his notes.
His style of dress made him instantly recognisable – a battered pork-pie hat, crumpled suit, shabby coat and long woollen scarf that were worn in all weathers. Small of stature, he had a high-pitched voice and a rapid-fire style of delivery. As he walked, jingling a bunch of keys, he could usually be heard muttering to himself. Giving lectures, his pyjama legs might peep out from under his trousers. He nevertheless managed to date some of the most attractive women in Trinity.
A compulsive newspaper reader, his rooms were described as “delightfully untidy”, with newspapers and books piled high everywhere, paintings stacked against the walls and coffee cups all over the floor. When he entertained, guests were served “mulled” wine (heated in a kettle) and given a seat beside the gas fire.
He was junior Dean of Students from 1956 – 69. His reputation for eccentricity convinced some students that he would be a soft touch. “They soon found out their mistake,” Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote. “McDowell was effortlessly and effectively tough as a disciplinarian where discipline was required, while otherwise being unfailingly helpful to the majority of undergraduates who behaved themselves appropriately.”
As part of his duties, he was required to collect students’ completed census forms. Spotting the reply “Lapsed Catholic” under the heading “Religion” on one form, he asked, “What’s this, what’s this? The officials don’t want to know your spiritual odyssey, young man, they want to know what you are now.”
In the early 1960s he appeared regularly on Telefís Éireann as a member of the Postbag panel, answering viewers’ questions. He was an outstanding after-dinner speaker.
In the 1980s he lived in London, where his life centred upon five institutions – three clubs (one a night club), the Institute of Historical Research and the London Library. He joined the Conservative party and helped out in the 1992 election campaign. On turning 90 he decided to return to Dublin.
He was widely travelled, often holidaying on the Continent as a guest of former students. One graduate remembered driving him to Monte Carlo and watching him climbing the steps of the Grand Hotel in pork-pie hat and coat, fully expecting to see him being refused entry. Towards the end of his life many of his friends contributed to two books in his honour, The Junior Dean: Encounters with a Legend and The Magnificent McDowell: Trinity in the Golden Era.
He coxed a Staff Four to victory at Trinity Regatta in 1952 on the one occasion that he took to the water, and regularly attended the club’s “often pretty wild social occasions”, which he always seemed to enjoy.
But he also enjoyed more formal occasions.At a reception in the Provost’s House, during the Hist’s bicentenary after Senator Edward Kennedy had made a televised speech from the Examination Hall, Kennedy’s then wife Joan asked why academic staff members were on the platform and she was not. “Madam,” he replied, “it is a simple case of having been around for four hundred years.”
He was appointed Erasmus Smith’s professor of oratory and history in 1980. His publications include: Irish Public Opinion 1750-1800 (1944); Ireland in the Age of Imperialism and Revolution (1975); The Fate of the Ulster Unionists (1997); Crisis and Decline: The Fate of the Southern Unionists (1997); and Historical Essays 1938-2001: A McDowell Miscellany (2004) .
RB McDowell died on August 28, 2011, aged 97.
Singer Bernadette Greevy was born in Clontarf, Dublin, on July 3, 1940. She was educated there at the Holy Faith convent. Her vocal studies were in Dublin with Jean Nolan and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, in London, with Helene Isepp.
Her first operatic appearance was in Dublin, aged 18, as Siebel in Gounod’s Faust; this was followed by her professional debut in 1961 as Maddalena in the Dublin Grand Opera Society’s Rigoletto. At the 1962 Wexford Festival, she took the role of Beppe in Mascagni’s comedy L’Amico Fritz, thus initiating a happy association with the festival that saw her in such roles as Federica in Verdi’s Luisa Miller (1970), the formidable Hérodiade in Massenet’s opera of that name (1977), Medoro in Handel’s Orlando (1980) – a role she recorded to acclaim – Costanza in Haydn’s L’Isola Disabitata (1982) and the title role of Ariodante (1985).
Some felt she could have worked on her acting. “Her undeveloped thespian skills were to be commented on more than once”, stated her obituary in The Guardian. “Her Anna in Berlioz’s Les Troyens for Scottish Opera (1969), for example, was said to be ‘imposing’ but dramatically unconvincing. This was undoubtedly one of the chief reasons that Greevy’s operatic career failed to blossom abroad. Her Covent Garden debut did not take place until 1982, when she sang Geneviève in Pelléas et Mélisande, and although other significant roles were to follow in houses around the world – Britten’s Lucretia, Gluck’s Orfeo, Eboli in Don Carlos, Azucena in Il Trovatore among them – her career was defined by concerts and recitals.”
She was to be heard at her finest and most characteristic in works such as Elgar’s Sea Pictures, recorded successfully with Vernon Handley and the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 1981.
Another well-received recording was that of Mahler songs (Songs of a Wayfaring Lad, Rückert Lieder and Kindertotenlieder) with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland and János Fürst for Naxos. Both the power of her instrument and a disarmingly genial quality were demonstrated here by Bernadette Greevy, who deployed a seamless legato line and admirable tonal control to achieve moments of searing intensity. Mahler was something of a speciality for her, and she sang on many occasions Das Lied von der Erde at performances of Kenneth MacMillan’s ballet at Covent Garden.
Passionate about fostering young Irish talent, she fought to establish the Anna Livia International Opera Festival in Dublin, of which she became the artistic director, in 2000. Her many honours included the Harriet Cohen international music award for outstanding artistry, the Order of Merit of Malta, honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland and Trinity College, Dublin, and the papal cross Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice conferred by the Holy See. She was acclaimed as one of the finest mezzos of her generation, having lifted her range from the original contralto.
In her later years, she gave the benefit of her long experience to a new generation of singers with an annual series of masterclasses conducted at the Irish Museum of Modern Art.
Bernadette Greevy died on September 26, 2008. She is survived by her son, Hugh. Her husband, Peter Tattan, died in 1983. In line with her wishes, she was given a private burial before any public announement was made.
