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.

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.

Playwright Hugh Leonard was born John Joseph Byrne in Dublin on November 9, 1926; his mother immediately giving him up for adoption. Later in life he changed his name to Hugh Leonard, but he was always known as Jack. Though deeply affected after discovering his background, he nevertheless made light of it. Of his mother, he said: “She never said a word to my father about the adoption. A few years later she did the exact same thing with a dog, and didn’t consult my father that time either. The dog’s name was Jack too, which made for some confusion.”
Although he eventually found his mother, he was unable to bring himself to approach her and she died without meeting him.
Leonard was raised as Jack Keyes by his adoptive parents, and educated at the Harold Boys’ School at Glasthule, Co Dublin, winning a scholarship to the local Presentation College.
Fascinated by the cinema and film-making, Hugh Leonard worked as an extra in the Agincourt scenes of Olivier’s Henry V, which were shot in Ireland in 1944. “I can pick myself out, drowning in a French swamp,” he recalled. “We were paid £4 a day; but if you had a horse, it was paid £8.”
After a stint as an office boy at Columbia Pictures’s Dublin office, he got a temporary civil service job. During his 14 years there he wrote a play, Nightingale in the Branches, which was presented by Lancos, the civil service dramatic society.
His first theatre play was The Big Birthday, produced at the Abbey in 1956, which was followed by A Leap in the Dark (1957), and Madigan’s Lock (1958), after which he left the civil service and became a full-time writer. Moving to London, he became a script editor for Granada Television. He adapted several books for BBC Television, including Dickens’s Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities. He also wrote the script for the film of Bernard Shaw’s Great Catherine (1968), which starred Peter O’Toole.
Stephen D (1962), a skilful conflation of two James Joyce works, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Stephen Hero, made him a name to reckon with at the Dublin Theatre Festival, alongside his fellow dramatists Brian Friel, Tom Murphy and John B Keane. Bernard Levin said that Stephen D really took us inside Joyce’s mind and “the excitement, passion and colour of so great a mind are fine things to be among.”
More plays and television work were followed by The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971) at the Gaiety in Dublin, opening one month after the IRA killed the first British soldier in Northern Ireland. Set in Dublin’s vodka-and-bitter-lemon belt, the comedy resonated as a Feydeau-esque farce, an attack on the Irish nouveau riche and as a metaphor for the new heritage-conscious tourist industry, with its bedrooms named after patriots and its ageing caretaker, Hoolihan, obliquely flying the flag as a veteran of the Easter Rising.
His most successful play, Da, reached Broadway at the tail end of the 1977-78 season and won Tonys for best play, best director (Melvin Bernhardt), best featured actor (Lester Rawlins) and, perhaps most famously, best actor: It was a career-making performance in the title role for Barnard Hughes, who went on to star in the movie version, with Martin Sheen.

Shortly before the play opened on Broadway, Mr. Leonard said in an interview with The New York Times that it is “pretty nearly totally autobiographical.” The title character was based on his own his own adoptive da, a man named Nicholas Keyes who worked as gardener for a wealthy Dublin family.
Two other plays reached Broadway: The Au Pair Man, a semi-allegorical tale about relations between England and Ireland, and A Life, which fleshed out a minor character from Da, a curmudgeon named Drumm, who reveres grammar and punctuality but does not care for people much.
As a fixture of the Dublin Theatre Festival for many years, and the literary manager of the Abbey for a short time (1976-77),  Hugh Leonard had become one of the city’s most notable artistic figures. He enjoyed flaunting his financial success, but was also keen to live close to his childhood home. He bought a large mansion in Killiney, and drove a Rolls-Royce, which was repeatedly vandalised. The tranquillity of his home was shattered by noise from a disco in a newly-opened neighbouring hotel, prompting a prolonged legal battle.
Moving to a more secure apartment block, and driving an anonymous Toyota, he contented himself with a fine collection of pictures, including some Lowrys.

However, his comfortable middle age was upset when his accountant and trusted friend, Russell Murphy, embezzled and spent more than £2 million of his theatrical clients’ money, including £258,000 belonging to Leonard. Gay Byrne was another of his victims. Particularly galling was the revelation that Murphy’s extravagance had included taking large parties of clients and friends to the theatre, sometimes occupying the more expensive seats at Leonard’s own plays.
He resented what he saw as his exclusion from the Irish arts world. The trouble with Ireland, he said, was that it was “a country full of genius, but with absolutely no talent”. His critics were equally forthright about his ego.
Hugh Leonard retorted in kind. He eagerly debunked other famous names, including Brendan Behan, who, he said, owed all his success to Joan Littlewood’s editing. This critique was later extended to others of the Behan tribe. Brian Behan was, he said, similar to Salman Rushdie in that, given the quality of his writing, his life could be in danger if he did not disappear. Behan replied that Leonard had no enemies in Dublin. “It is his friends who hate him”, he said.
His prickly and shy personality prompted him to imagine snubs and slights everywhere, and he was merciless in retribution. In Home Before Night, his memoir which later became Da, he recalled how he developed this art at school. “Being useless at fighting, I cultivated a skill at deadly insult.” On hearing that his long-time sparring partner Ulick O’Connor was in hospital, he remarked: “It must have been something he wrote”.
Hugh Leonard argued that “you can write a serious play through the medium of comedy, but in Ireland comedy seems to be suspect; if it is accessible it is deemed shallow. If your work is liked, something must be wrong; he’s not boring, so he must be slight.”
His other television work included adaptations of Flaubert, Dostoevsky and Emily Brontë, as well as Somerville and Large’s The Irish RM (1985). Films included Herself Surprised (1977), Da (1984), and Widow’s Peak (1994). As well as two volumes of autobiography he wrote a memoir Rover and other Cats (1990) and a novel The Offshore Island (1993). He wrote a regular column for the Sunday Independent.
He married Paule Jacquet in 1955. After her death he married Kathy Hayes, who survives him, along with his daughter Danielle from his first marriage.
Hugh Leonard (John Keyes Byrne) died on February 12, 2009.

Author James Plunkett Kelly was born in Dublin on May 21, 1920, the son of a chauffeur. His middle name, from St Oliver Plunkett, was imposed by an enthusiastic parish priest
He was educated by the Christian Brothers at Synge Street and at Dublin Municipal School of Music, where he studied the violin and viola; he also played Gaelic football to provincial level. His father died early, and young James found himself the family’s breadwinner. He worked intermittently as a musician, but then took a job as a clerk at the Dublin Gas Company. It led him to join the Workers’ Union of Ireland at a time when trades unions were neither popular nor profitable, and in 1946 he became a branch organiser, reporting to Jim Larkin, and working in the next office.

James Plunkett Kelly

Using the nom-de-plume James Plunkett, he was already writing, mainly in The Bell, which had been publishing his short stories – beginning with The Mother – since the early 1940s. A collection published by Hutchinson in 1958 led to the commission for Strumpet City. Within a decade, he was also a prolific contributor to radio dramas and talks for Radio Eireann.
In 1955, he was pilloried by the Church – prompted by the Catholic Standard – after he paid a visit to the Soviet Union; he overcame calls for his dismissal, as did Jim Larkin, but voluntarily resigned later the same year. He then joined Radio Eireann as assistant head of drama; his own play Big Jim which, like Strumpet City, was set during the 1913 strike, provided the basis for The Risen People, which was produced at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, in 1958.
After some time at the BBC, James Plunkett Kelly joined Telefis Eireann as a producer and director. He made his mark with a drama based on the rebellion of 1798, When Do You Die Friend?, and scripted Bird’s Eye View, a documentary which inspired The Gems She Wore: A Book of Irish Places (1972).
Strumpet City extends to 200,000 words, and the writing of it took James Plunkett Kelly ten years, working in the evenings while a producer at Telefis Eireann; during that period he spent much time doubting that he would ever finish the book. When all seemed lost, his conscience kept him going – he had received a £500 advance from Hutchinson in 1958.
Every Christmas came a card from Hutchinson’s managing director Robert Lusty, with a plaintive note: “How’s the novel coming along?” As the book grew, James Plunkett Kelly hardly dared reply, having become depressed that Hutchinson would turn it down as being too long.
He need not have worried. By the time the hardback came out in May 1969, the book had earned him £100,000 from the sale of foreign and paperback rights, then a record sum. It was later filmed for RTE with Peter O’Toole, Donal McCann and Cyril Cusack.
Despite the success of Strumpet City, he continued with his day job in broadcasting, but associated with writers rather than television personalities. Once, with O’Casey, he went to visit Brian O’Nolan, who wrote under the names Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen. The pair found the writer sitting up in bed with a paperback of his novel  At Swim Two Birds, which he was copying into an exercise book. “I hear the American universities are paying great money for manuscripts,” O’Nolan explained.
He wrote two further novels: Farewell Companions (1977), set in the period following Strumpet City, and The Circus Animals (1990), which examined the Church during the years immediately after the Second World War.
He was one of the first drama directors with RTÉ Television a nd went on to be Executive Producer and Head of Features. He won two Jacob’s Awards, in 1965 and 1969, for his TV productions. He was a member of Aosdana. He remained a fine fiddle player and lived latterly at Kilmacanogue, near Bray, Co Wicklow.
James Plunkett Kelly died on May 28, 2003, aged 83. He had married Valerie Koblitz, who died in 1986. They had three sons, and a daughter who predeceased him.

Desmond John Villiers FitzGerald, the Knight of Glin, was born on July 13, 1937, the youngest of three children and an only son. His father, the 28th Knight of Glin, was a keen fisherman and driver of vintage sports cars, for which he was known locally as “the Nippy Knight”. His English mother, Veronica Villiers, was a considerable beauty and a cousin of Winston Churchill.
His parents’ marriage was tempestuous, but the children did not see them much. Desmond, along with his sisters, Rachel and Fiola, lived in four dilapidated rooms on the unfinished third floor of a castle, while their parents occupied the main floor. He described his childhood as lonely.
He was sent to school in England at eight. He inherited the castle and title aged 12, on the death of his father from tuberculosis in 1949. By this time, all that remained of the estate on the Shannon Estuary in Co Limerick was 500 acres of park and grazing land. The castle was dilapidated and there was very little good furniture.
He studied art history and architecture at the University of British Columbia and Harvard. After graduation he worked for 11 years as a curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It was around this time he met his first wife, Loulou de la Falaise, who would become famous as the muse of Yves St Laurent, but the marriage lasted less than a year. They remained friends, however, and in 1970 he married Olda Willes, a close friend of Loulou’s.
Back in 1954 his mother, Veronica, had married again. Her second husband was the Canadian millionaire, Ray Milner. Together they set about restoring Glin Castle after centuries of neglect and, after moving back to Glin from London in 1975, Desmond and his wife Olda threw their own energies into the project. He was also appointed Christie’s agent in Ireland.
They spent decades combing auction rooms in an attempt to buy back the pictures, drawings and china that had been sold in leaner times, steadily restoring the fabric of the building and “filling in the incomplete pretensions of the 18th and 19th century” as Desmond put it, including completing the top floor. A plaque in the garden bears the legend 1785-2002 — a construction span of 217 years.
They started a bed and breakfast business and in 2002 turned the castle into a luxury hotel which did well for a number of years, and where the 29th Knight, a youthful and handsome figure into his 70s, continued to cut a dash in his signature tweed jacket and black polo neck sweater. But the international credit crunch and the Irish economic nosedive hit them hard and finances became increasingly strained.
In 2009 hundreds of paintings and objets d’art from Glin Castle went under the hammer at Christie’s, raising two million euros: “Glin has been the ancestral property of my family for over 700 years,” FitzGerald explained. “It is my greatest hope that it will continue to remain in the family and be enjoyed and cherished long into the future.
Desmond FitzGerald played an important role in developing an awareness of Ireland’s architectural heritage and Irish decorative arts in the US, where he lectured and raised funds for restoration projects.
He was president of the Irish Georgian Society, author of many books on landscape, gardens, painting, architecture, and father of three daughters. As there is no male heir to succeed to the title his death breaks an ancient line of knights living at Glin for the past 700 years.
Latter day successes include the restored eating parlour at Headfort House, Co Meath, the only significant surviving interior in Ireland by Robert Adam, and the 18th century garden at 63 Merrion Square, Dublin, open to the public by appointment. He came from hospital to launch this project in 2011.
He was the driving force in the planned restoration of the City Assembly House in South William Street in Dublin. The Irish Georgian Society plans to make this building its headquarters and a centre of promotion for culture and heritage in the heart of the capital.
The acuity of his eye was as legendary as his generosity with his extensive knowledge. As Christie’s agent in Ireland from the mid-1970s he was responsible for many “finds”. Undoubtedly, the most important of them was An Early View of Dublin by Joseph Tudor, which dates from the 1740s. From a house in Scotland it had been attributed to various Italian masters and valued at about £20,000. After he identified the scene and the artist it was sold at Christie’s for £400,000.
He loved family history, particularly a story about an earlier knight who, when threatened with the execution of a young son seized by besieging forces, responded: “I’m very virile, my wife is very fertile and there is plenty more where that one came from.”
The Knights of Glin were a branch of the FitzGeralds or Geraldines, Earls of Desmond, who were granted extensive lands in Co Limerick in the early 14th century. The Desmond family was descended from the Norman Maurice FitzGerald, a companion-in-arms to Strongbow.
Desmond FitzGerald was awarded a doctorate of letters by Trinity College, Dublin and served as a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland. He sat on the boards of the Irish Landmark Trust, the Castletown Foundation and the Irish Heritage Trust.
He published a family history, The Knights Of Glin in 2009. Other books included Irish Furniture (2007) and The Irish Country House (2010, both co-written with James Peill). He was also elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy and served on the boards of the Irish Landmark Trust and the Castletown Foundation.
He is survived by his wife Olda Willes, and their three daughters, Catherine, Nesta and Honor. In 2010 Catherine married the English actor Dominic West in Glin last where 300 guests enjoyed a lavish reception.
Desmond FitzGerald died on September 15, 2011, aged 74.

Poet, playwright and folk singer Patrick Galvin was born in Cork on August 15, 1927, the second of seven children of Patrick Galvin and his wife Bridget (née O’Brien). The family lived in a two-roomed attic flat in Margaret Street in the shadow of St Finn Barre’s Cathedral, and he was educated by the Presentation Brothers.
His mother worked as an office cleaner while his father was a casual docker. His parents’ opposing political allegiances – his mother was a republican, his father a Free State supporter – made for heated debate in the politically volatile 1930s.
His literary leanings were inherited from his father who, though illiterate, had an extraordinary knowledge of Irish ballads and folk songs. He was taught to read and write by Mannie Goldman, a local “scribe” who introduced him to Tolstoy, Emile Zola, Voltaire and Marlowe among others – “and for good measure, the ballad history of my native city”.
He left school at 11 and became a messenger boy, later working as an assistant cinema projectionist. At the age of 14, and deemed to be beyond his parents’ control, he was sent to St Conleth’s reformatory school, Daingean, Co Offaly. There he survived beatings, cut turf in the bog and heard first-hand accounts of the Spanish Civil War from an Oblate brother who had fought on the Republican side. After two years he was released, walking barefoot to catch the train home to Cork.
Unable to find employment, he travelled to Belfast to join the American Air Force but instead enlisted in the Royal Air Force. He described serving in West Africa during World War II as “sheer absolute boredom”.
Demobbed, he worked briefly at Cork docks before moving to London. He earned enough from odd jobs to support himself while he wrote poems and songs. He also sang on the BBC radio programme As I Roved Out, presented by Séamus Ennis. As a folk singer, he recorded seven albums of Irish ballads in Britain and the USA. He wrote the song Where, Oh Where, is our James Connolly?, recorded by Christy Moore and Andy Irvine. His first published poems appeared in Poetry Ireland.
Writers he met in London included Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Brendan Behan. His first poetry collection, Heart of Grace, published in 1957, was followed by Christ in London (1960). These two volumes harked back to the folk ballad tradition and were noteworthy for their enthusiasm and stylish bravado.
The Woodburners (1973) was more contemplative, partly in response to the eruption of violence in Northern Ireland. One of his best-known poems, The Mad Woman of Cork, which has been compared to Yeats’s Crazy Jane sequence, reflects a deep compassion for the poor and deprived.
In the early 1960s he spent 18 months working in an Israeli kibbutz. Invited to lecture on Irish folksongs in Berlin and Leipzig, he was intrigued by East Germany but dismayed by its political culture. The state’s promotion of world peace was so aggressive, he recalled, “that it was almost frightening”.
Two early plays, And Him Stretched (1960) and Cry the Believers (1961), were staged in London and Dublin. A television play, Boy in the Smoke, followed in 1965. Awarded a Leverhulme Fellowship, he wrote a series of plays for the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, that included Nightfall to Belfast (1973), The Last Burning (1974) and My Silver Bird (1981).
We Do It for Love (1974) was his biggest commercial success. Ambitious, romantic and sentimental, it nevertheless inspired a generation of Northern playwrights. At its core was the proposition that ordinary working people held the key to a resolution of the Troubles.
This provoked strong criticism. Berated for refusing to acknowledge that the Border was at the heart of the conflict, he replied: “I’m afraid that particular heart went out of me the first time I saw the remains of my fellow-Irishmen being swept into plastic bags.”
He was a founding editor of the literary magazine Chanticleer and with John Boyd edited the Lyric Theatre’s journal Threshold. Following a term as writer-in-residence for the British East Midlands Arts Council, he returned to Cork in the early 1980s.
Folk Tales for the General (1989) is regarded by some critics as the high point of his poetic career. His New and Selected Poems was published in 1996. Singers Christy Moore and John Spillane put some of his poems to music.
The final volume of his memoirs, Song for a Fly Boy, was published in The Raggy Boy Trilogy (2002), together with the preceding volumes, Song for a Poor Boy and Song for a Raggy Boy. The memoirs combine Galvin’s ability to tell a compelling story with his natural dramatic flair and contain some of his best writing. A successful film version of Song for a Raggy Boy, featuring Aidan Quinn, was released in 2003.
A member of Aosdána and the Arts Council, he took part in writer-in-residence programmes in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown and Co Kerry. He received the Irish-American Cultural Institute’s O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry in 1995. A founder of both the Munster Literature Centre and Poetry Now festival, in 2006 he received an honorary from University College, Cork.
He had been mostly confined to a wheelchair since suffering a stroke in 2003. Three of his four marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife Mary Johnson, children Gráinne, Macdara, Christine and Liam; his son Patrick Newley predeceased him.
Patrick Galvin died on May 9, 2011.

Frank McCourt was born on August 19, 1930, on Classon Avenue on the edge of the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, to Irish parents, Malachy McCourt (1901–1986) and Angela Sheehan (1908–1981). His parents had emigrated to New York to make a better life. It was not to be, largely because his father, Malachy, usually spent his scant labourer’s earnings at the local bar. Beaten, the family returned to Limerick when Frank was four, and the pattern repeated itself.
Three of Franks’s six siblings died in early childhood.
Their father, Malachy, from Toome in County Antrim, was often without work, but drank with the little money he did earn. When Frank was 11, his father left to work in the factories of wartime Coventry in England. He sent little money to the family, leaving Frank’s mother to raise four surviving children, often by begging. At home, the staple meal was tea and bread, which his mother jokingly referred to as a balanced diet.
Frank’s schooling ended at 13, when the Christian Brothers rejected him. He then held odd jobs and even stole bread and milk in an effort to provide for his mother and three surviving brothers, Malachy, Michael (San Francisco), and Alphie (Manhattan).
When he was 19 he left Ireland in October, 1949,  on the MS Irish Oak that was supposed to stop in New York City but instead went up to Albany, NY. He took a train into New York City with a priest he had met on the ship, who got him a room to stay in and his job at New York City’s Biltmore Hotel making about $26 a week and sending $10 of it to his mother in Limerick.
In 1951 he was drafted during the Korean War and was sent to Bavaria, Germany, for two years initially training dogs, then as a clerk. Upon his discharge from the US army, he returned to New York City, where he held a series of jobs on docks, in warehouses, and in banks.
Using his GI Bill, Frank talked his way into NYU by claiming he was intelligent and read a lot and was allowed in on one year’s probation provided he maintained a B average. He graduated in 1957 with a Bachelor’s degree in English. A year later he began teaching at McKee Vocational High School on Staten Island, an eye-opening experience that he recalled, in often hilarious detail, in his third volume of memoirs, Teacher Man.
In his first week, an unruly student threw a homemade sandwich on the floor, an act that astonished Mr. McCourt, not so much for its brazenness as for the waste of good food. After appraising the sandwich, he picked it up and ate it.
He developed an idiosyncratic teaching style that found a somewhat more receptive audience at the elite Stuyvesant High School, where he taught creative writing after earning a master’s degree in English from Brooklyn College in 1967. He had students sing Irish songs to break down their resistance to poetry. After discovering a sheaf of written excuses from past years, he recognised an unexplored literary genre and asked students to write, say, an excuse letter from Adam or Eve to God, explaining why he or she should not be punished for eating the apple.
He made fitful stabs at writing on the side. He contributed articles on Ireland to The Village Voice. He kept notebooks. But at the Lion’s Head in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with Pete Hamill and Jimmy Breslin, he felt like an interloper, he said. They were writers. He was just a teacher.
In 1977, Frank McCourt and his brother Malachy, who was acting and bartending in New York, cobbled together a series of autobiographical sketches into a two-man play, “A Couple of Blaguards,” which opened off  Broadway at the Billymunk Theater on East 45th Street. They performed a revised version at the Village Gate in 1984 and again at the Billymunk in 1986 and took their show to several other cities.
This excursion into the past, along with his nagging sense that a writing teacher should write, motivated Mr. McCourt to undertake his childhood memoirs after he retired from teaching in 1987. An early attempt, when he was studying at New York University, had fizzled out, but three decades later, he said, he had worked through his awkward, self-conscious James Joyce phase and had gotten beyond the crippling anger that darkened his memories.

A Note to Myself

“After 20 pages of standard omniscient author, I wrote something that I thought was just a note to myself, about sitting on a seesaw in a playground, and I found my voice, the voice of a child,” he told The Providence Journal in 1997. “That was it. It carried me through to the end of the book.”
Still, his plans were vague. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, but I had to write it anyway,” he said in another interview. “I had to get it out of my system.” The result was Angela’s Ashes, published in 1977.
Critics, enchanted by his language and gripped by his story, delivered the kind of reviews that writers can only dream of. But the book was ultimately a word-of-mouth success.
An instant celebrity, Mr. McCourt did his utmost to resist becoming the designated spokesman for all things Irish, “from agriculture to the decline in the consumption of claret in the West of Ireland,” as he once joked.
In Ireland itself, the reaction was mixed. “When the book was published in Ireland, I was denounced from hill, pulpit and barstool,” he told the online magazine Slate in 2007. “Certain citizens claimed I had disgraced the fair name of the city of Limerick, that I had attacked the church, that I had despoiled my mother’s name and that if I returned to Limerick, I would surely be found hanging from a lamppost.”
Time healed at least some wounds. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by Limerick University, and curious tourists can now take Angela’s Ashes tours of the city.
In 1999 Alan Parker translated the memoir to the screen, with Emily Watson as Angela, Robert Carlyle as Malachy Sr, and three actors in the roles of Frank McCourt as a small, medium-size and grown boy.
However, his second volume of memoirs, ’Tis, which began with his arrival in New York, also encountered rough weather from critics still giddy from the memory of Angela’s Ashes. Although his storytelling gifts were fully evident, he was taken to task by many critics for being bitter and self-pitying, a marked contrast to the stoic tone of Angela’s Ashes.”
With Teacher Man, he rallied. Although criticised as lumpy and episodic, the book was praised for its humane inquiry into the role of the teacher and the possibilities of education.
Frank McCourt’s first two marriages ended in divorce. In 1994 he married Ellen Frey McCourt. She survived him, as did his daughter, Maggie McCourt of Burlington, Vt., and three grandchildren. He died in Manhattan on July 19, 2009. The cause was metastatic melanoma.

Biblio
* Angela’s Ashes (1996)
* ‘Tis (1999)
* Teacher Man (2005)
* Angela and the Baby Jesus (2007)

Benedict Kiely was born in Dromore, County Tyrone, on August 15, 1919, to Tom and Sara Alice (née Gormley) Kiely. He was the youngest of six children and grew up in Omagh. Tom, a native of Moville, Co Donegal, was a Boer War veteran and later worked as a survey measurer, or “chain man”, for the Ordnance Survey.
At  the Mount St Columba CBS he was once impressed by a teacher who interrupted a trigonometry lesson to make an impassioned defence of James Joyce – a remarkable introduction to the great writer from an Irish Christian Brother who, as Kiely later remarked, “made us realise that there was a world where books mattered”.
On leaving school he went to work as a sorting clerk in Omagh Post Office.
In 1937 Ben Kiely entered a Jesuit seminary in Portlaoise to study for the priesthood. But during a lengthy convalescence in a Dublin hospital from a tubercular spinal ailment, he decided that the religious life was not for him. He enrolled at UCD, where he was involved in the production of a poetry broadsheet and was a member of the literature society. He graduated in 1943 with a BA in History and Letters. In 1944 he married Maureen O’Connell and they had four children.
By the time his first novel, Land Without Stars, was published in 1946, Kiely had joined the Irish Independent as a journalist and critic. The banning of his novel In a Harbour Green (1949) had not endeared him to the management; furthermore, a positive review he wrote of George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer prompted complaint from readers and he was no longer asked to review plays. He resigned in 1950. A friend suggested he would be happier at the Irish Press, where he then spent almost 15 years as literary editor. He retired from full-time journalism in the mid-1960s, became a visiting professor of creative writing at several American universities, and later lectured at UCD.
Kiely’s narrative style owes much to the tradition of country storytelling and shares some characteristics with Joyce and Flann O’Brien. He drew on his abandoned religious vocation and the experience of illness in such novels as Honey Seems Bitter (1952), There Was an Ancient House (1955) and Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968). The Cards of the Gambler (1953) is regarded as one of his best, and others combine elements of fantasy and reality.
He was at his best with the short story. An early story, King’s Shilling, was published in the Irish Bookman, and later stories appeared in the New Yorker, the Kenyon Review and other American magazines. At his best, Kiely came close to matching Frank O’Connor, who championed his work, and Sean O Faolain.
Two volumes of memoirs deal mainly with the Dublin of the 1940s and 1950s. A renowned raconteur, he was also a popular broadcaster. He received the Award for Literature from the Irish Academy of Letters. In 1996, he was named Saoi of Aosdána, the highest honour given by the Arts Council of Ireland. His nephew is the country singer Brian Coll.
Ben Kiely died on February 9, 2007. He was survived by his second wife Frances, his daughters Anne Kiely and Emer Cronin and his son John Kiely. He was predeceased by his first wife and a daughter, Mary.

Novels
Nothing Happens in Carmincross (1985)
All the Way to Bantry Bay and Other Irish Journeys (1978)
Proxopera: A Tale of Modern Ireland (1977)
Dogs Enjoy the Morning (1968)
The Captain with the Whiskers (1960)
There Was an Ancient House (1955)
The Cards of the Gambler (1953)
Honey Seems Bitter (1952)
In a Harbour Green (1949)
Call for a Miracle (1948)
Poor Scholar (1947)
Land Without Stars (1946)
Countries of Contention (1945)

Short Stories
The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely (2001)
The Trout in the Turnhole (1996)
A Letter to Peachtree (1987)
The State of Ireland: A Novella and Seven Short Stories (1981)
A Cow in the House (1978)
A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973)
A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963)

Autobiography
Drink to the Bird: An Omagh Boyhood (1992)
The Waves Behind Us: A Memoir (1999)

Also
Benedict Kiely, A Raid into Dark Corners and Other Essays (1999)

Modern Irish Fiction: A Critique (1950)