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.
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.
Declan Costello was born in Dublin on August 1, 1926. His father, John A Costello, served twice as Taoiseach, in 1948-51 and 1954-57, having previously been Attorney General in the government of WT Cosgrove. His mother was Ida Mary O’Malley, and he was one of four children. He was educated at St Xavier’s School, Donnybrook, and graduated in law and economics with first-class honours from UCD, where he had been auditor of the Law Society.
He went to King’s Inns with every prospect of a bright career, but TB kept him in Switzerland for the period of his law studies. Nevertheless, he qualified at 22 and was called to the Inner Bar in 1965.
At 25 he became the youngest member of the Dail after being elected in Dublin North West in 1951 and remained a TD until he quit parliamentary politics in 1969.
Widely tipped for ministerial office in 1954, he was overlooked by his father, fearing claims of nepotism. He was active on a variety of fronts: in 1951 he called for the de facto acceptance of the Northern Ireland government, and for economic co-operation between North and South.
In 1952 he became chairman of the Irish national committee of the European Youth Campaign, an organisation founded to counteract communism. He was one of the Irish representatives at the consultative assembly of the Council of Europe at Strasbourg. He contributed articles to Studies and the Tablet.
With like-minded colleagues such as Alexis Fitzgerald and Tom O’Higgins, he established the Fine Gael research and information centre, which argued that since the private sector was not capable of driving economic development, the public sector would have to play a more active role.
Later he was involved in launching the National Observer, a publication devoted to providing informed, unbiased political comment.
Appointed to the Fine Gael front bench in 1957, he proposed a Dáil motion criticising the Irish delegation’s actions at the United Nations. He focused on two issues in particular: the government’s support for the withdrawal of Russian and US forces from Europe, and the support given for the resolution favouring the inclusion of “Communist China” as a member of the UN.
A profile in The Irish Times noted: “If to many it seemed that Declan Costello’s opposition to Mr Aiken’s policies was reactionary, his case was based, not on any desire to please the timid pious at home, but on a sincere conviction that the proper aim of Irish policy is a close bond with America. We cannot make it our aim to insult all our potential allies.”
However, in 2006 he wrote that the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 was illegal and had weakened the power of international law to prevent war.
As a TD he was concerned with securing full employment, decent wages, adequate housing, improved health services and better access to education.
He came to believe in the need for a fundamental change in Irish politics, which resulted in the Just Society policy of 1964. Its origins lay in the grinding deprivation and appalling housing conditions of the poor he first encountered in Dublin North-West.
Declan Costello believed that the role of government should be to instigate economic development and then redistribute wealth. These included economic planning carefully targeted at both the public and private sectors (as opposed to what he dismissed as the merely aspirational economic programming of the Sean Lemass governments); the appointment of a Minister for Economic Affairs; government control of the banks’ credit policies; and an emphasis on direct instead of indirect taxation.
He knew that his ideas would never win the support of the Fine Gael leader James Dillon, or of the party’s front bench. Nor was it viewed favourably by Dillon’s successor Liam Cosgrave.
His decision to withdraw from politics in 1969 prompted the then Labour TD Michael O’Leary to lament the departure of a “young man of great courage and idealism”.
Declan Costello practised at the Bar until the early 1970s, successfully defending Sean Bourke, the Limerick man whose extradition was sought by English police for aiding the escape of Soviet spy George Blake from Wormwood Scrubs in 1966. In 1972 he defended journalist Kevin O’Kelly, who was charged with contempt of court arising from a radio interview with Provisional IRA leader Seán Mac Stiofáin.
He returned to politics and was elected to the Dáil in 1973, having been invited by Jim Mitchell to stand in Dublin South West. He was appointed Attorney General in the Fine Gael-Labour government. In this capacity he established the Law Reform Commission to codify, rationalise and prepare legislation. He separated the offices of attorney general and director of public prosecutions, creating a new role independent of the Executive. He also played a major role in the Sunningdale Agreement.
After retiring from politics he was appointed a judge of the High Court in 1977. Two years later he presided over the inquiry into the Whiddy Island oil tanker disaster.
In 1985 he upheld the dismissal of Eileen Flynn, the single woman sacked from her teaching post at the Holy Faith convent, New Ross, after she gave birth to a son. He supported the nuns’ view that her “conduct was capable of damaging” their efforts to uphold Catholic “norms of behaviour”.
His most controversial judgment was in the X Case in February 1992, when he granted an order to then Attorney General Harry Whelehan preventing a 14-year-old girl from travelling to Britain for an abortion. The Supreme Court subsequently lifted the injunction.
In 1995 he bacame High Court president, retiring in 1997.
A founder and staunch supporter of St Michael’s House, which provides services for people with an intellectual disability, he also was a former chairman of the council of the Catholic Communications Centre.
Declan Costello died on June 6, 2011. He is survived by his wife Joan (née Fitzsimons), sons John, Declan, Mark and David and daughters Joan and Caroline.
Garret FitzGerald was born in Dublin on February 9, 1926. At the time, his father Desmond was Minister for External Affairs. His mother, Mabel McConnell, was from a Northern Protestant family. Desmond had taken the pro-Treaty side in the Civil War, while Mabel was strongly opposed, but not in an active way. The family moved to Bray where the young boy recalled distinguished men of letters such as WB Yeats, TS Eliot and Jacques Maritain visiting his father, who had been a poet himself in pre-war London, linked with the Imagist movement.
Garret FitzGerald was educated in Belvedere College. By the age of 14 he had spent two summers in France learning the language. He was precocious in other ways and campaigned in school against the Nazi persecution of Jews and Christians even before the second World War had begun.
He joined the Local Defence Force in 1942, although under age. In UCD he studied history, French and Spanish. He also met Joan O’Farrell whom he married in 1947. Charles Haughey was a student contemporary.
While his father wanted him to study law, Garret, instead joined Aer Lingus where he worked for 11 years, becoming an expert an expert on statistics and airline schedules. He supplemented his salary with freelance journalism for newspapers around the world. At various times he was correspondent in Dublin for the Financial Times, the Economist and the BBC.
He campaigned for Fine Gael in the 1948 general election, assuming the party was pro-Commonwealth and sympathetic to Nato, but was disillusioned when the new government led by John A Costello declared a Republic and left the Commonwealth.
In 1958 he left Aer Lingus to continue his journalism and start up an economic consultancy and do part-time lecturing.
His articles on the economy, at first rejected by Independent Newspapers, appeared in The Irish Times had become required reading for Ministers and senior civil servants, although he had no formal qualifications in economics. He was later awarded a PhD for his thesis on planning in Ireland, which he turned into a book. He also published a book on semi-State companies. In 1959 he was appointed a junior lecturer in UCD, while continuing his journalism and consultancy work.
Politics re-entered his busy life when Declan Costello asked him in 1964 to help in the drafting his blueprint for Fine Gael, The Just Society.
Seanad
He declined to stand for Fine Gael in the 1965 general election in Dublin South-East but was elected to the Seanad several months later and he was appointed to the party front bench by the new Fine Gael leader, Liam Cosgrave, with whom he was to have an uneasy relationship in the years to come. During his four years in the Seanad, FitzGerald promoted Ireland’s entry into the EEC.
The publication of the Humanae Vitae encyclical condemning artificial contraception in 1968 reawakened his interest in theology and he worked with a group of lay Catholics to submit a highly critical report on the document to the Irish bishops. He had come to believe his previous objections to artificial contraception had been “aesthetic rather than moral”.
He was elected in 1969 to the Dáil where was able to display his expertise in all areas and one newspaper cartoon portrayed a Fine Gael front bench of 24 Garret FitzGeralds.
In 1971 he became spokesman on Finance but his relations with Liam Cosgrave were becoming more strained as the latter suspected the liberal wing of the party, leading to Cosgrave’s infamous “mongrel foxes” speech at the 1972 ardfheis.
A Fine Gael/Labour Coalition won power in the 1973 election and Garret Fitzgerald became Minister for Foreign Affairs. The EEC and Northern Ireland were to dominate his life over the next four years. He ensured the first Irish presidency of the EEC in 1975 was a success.
On Northern Ireland, he was prominent in the lead-up to the Sunningdale negotiations to give a cross-Border dimension to the new power-sharing system set up in Stormont. He had already set out his ideas on the subject in his 1972 book Towards a New Ireland.
FitzGerald found his relations with Liam Cosgrave improved while they were in government, despite the latter’s decision to vote against his own government’s Bill to legalise contraception. FitzGerald even toyed with the idea of resigning over the debacle.
When Cosgrave resigned immediately after the Coalition’s rout by Fianna Fáil in the 1977 election, Garret FitzGerald took over as leader of Fine Gael.
He embarked on his new role with customary enthusiasm, producing a 25,000-word document for his colleagues on his ideas for resolving problems in the social, political and educational areas, among others. He ensured the party would now be firmly behind the “social democratic principles of The Just Society”. He set about a radical overhaul of the Fine Gael organisation, appointing two key assistants, Peter Prendergast and Ted Nealon.
Haughey
When Charles Haughey succeeded Jack Lynch as leader of Fianna Fáil and Taoiseach in December 1979, the stage was set for a confrontation between the two leaders which was to dominate Irish politics over the next seven years. Garret FitzGerald’s “flawed pedigree” criticism of Haughey on the day of his nomination did not strike the right note and FitzGerald subsequently expressed regret at using the phrase”.
By the time of the next general election in June 1981, Fine Gael morale was high and the party machine was in top gear after four years of preparation. A programme had been agreed with Labour and his whistle-stop tour by train in which Joan FitzGerald took part, galvanised the Fine Gael campaign.
Fine Gael triumphed, which increased its number of seats in an enlarged Dáil from 43 to 65 and raised its vote to its highest level in more than 50 years. But the new Coalition needed the support of three Independent TDs to get FitzGerald elected as Taoiseach.
He made headlines that September when he announced a “constitutional crusade” for a “genuine Republic” freed from sectarian laws. But a pledge he had given the anti-abortion campaign before the election to hold a referendum to put a clause in the Constitution would come back to haunt him.
The inexperience of the new ministers was exposed in the 1982 budget, which included cuts in some food subsidies and the imposition of VAT on clothing and footwear. The Independents were not consulted beforehand and the government fell when Jim Kemmy and Seán Loftus voted with Fianna Fáil. FitzGerald wrote later that with the announcement of the Dáil vote, he experienced “a moment of total exhilaration” that they would be “going into battle on a budget we could defend with conviction and enthusiasm”. It is unlikely many in his party felt similarly.
The ensuing election in February 1982 resulted in a slight improvement in Fianna Fáil’s position, while Fine Gael had a net loss of only two seats.
The spell in opposition lasted only nine months as Haughey’s Fianna Fáil minority government gradually crumbled in the face of internal dissension and the GUBU scandal involving the murderer, Malcolm Macarthur, who had sought refuge with the attorney general, Patrick Connolly, who was unaware of his crimes.
Fine Gael and Labour swept back into power in November, with Fine Gael recording its best ever result with 39 per cent of the votes and 70 seats, bringing them within five seats of Fianna Fáil. But the Coalition was again faced with a serious situation in the public finances, which would involve cutbacks and economic stringency. Again, this would create strains between the two parties but Garret FitzGerald tried hard to establish good relations with Dick Spring, the new Labour leader, who was younger than the Taoiseach’s eldest son.
Cabinet meetings became long-drawn-out affairs that exhausted the participants as FitzGerald tried to ensure there was consensus and not rule by majority. Some Ministers complained the meetings were at times like “academic tutorials”. It became all downhill for the coalition following the initial euphoria of regaining office. The top rate of income tax rose to 65 per cent, a property tax was introduced, unemployment rose, emigration soared to levels not seen since the 1950s and the interest on the national debt threatened to absorb all taxation.
FitzGerald inherited what he called a “disastrous” situation in Anglo-Irish relations following the rift between Haughey and the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, over the Falklands War and her displeasure at how Haughey had allowed the results of their 1980 summit in Dublin on Northern Ireland to be exaggerated. FitzGerald set out to mend the relationship between Dublin and London and to break the impasse in Northern Ireland since the breakdown of power-sharing in 1974. The first step was to set up the New Ireland Forum, out of which FitzGerald hoped a nationalist consensus would emerge from which he could negotiate a new agreement with Britain. Personally, he hoped for an agreement incorporating a joint-authority model for Northern Ireland and power-sharing, in return for amendments of Articles Two and Three of the Constitution, but Mrs Thatcher baulked at this.
The 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement was the highlight of his second term as Taoiseach. For the first time since 1921, a British government gave Dublin a formal consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. It was to take another 13 years, however, before the Unionists and Sinn Féin could be drawn into the wider Belfast Agreement.
Garret FitzGerald’s final 18 months in power were increasingly difficult on the domestic front. The divorce referendum was another defeat but his government did get through progressive contraception legislation. When the time came to draft the 1987 budget, the coalition partners recognised, in amicable enough fashion thanks to the good relationship between FitzGerald and Dick Spring, that they had come to the parting of the ways over spending on health and social welfare.
On a personal level, it had been a sad year for Garret FitzGerald. Two of his brothers, Desmond and Pierce, had died in a nine-month period. Another brother, Fergus, had died in 1983. Joan’s health was also a constant preoccupation. For many years she battled a crippling disease and was confined to a wheelchair, frequently pushed by her husband.
The arrival of the Progressive Democrats was at first seen by Garret FitzGerald as well as many others as a major threat to Fianna Fáil in the 1987 election but the new party’s 14 seats were won largely at the expense of Fine Gael, which lost 19 seats. He resigned as party leader.
Retirement
After two years on the backbenches Garret Fitzgerald resigned from active politics, but retirement only meant more time for intellectual pursuits as well as for his family. And in September 1991, he resumed writing his Saturday column for The Irish Times, which he was to continue writing until the time of his death.
He produced his memoirs, All in a Life, in 1991, amounting to 674. It was the first time a Taoiseach had written his autobiography.
He also became an active chancellor of the National University of Ireland. In 2003, he published a study of contemporary problems entitled Reflections on the Irish State.
Although retired from active politics, he took a keen interest in politics right up to the end, campaigning in the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in 2009 through his writing and handing out leaflets on the street as well.
Garret FitzGerald had to deal with some personal as well as public financial crises during his long career. On his first appointment as a Minister in 1973, his after-tax income fell suddenly by 40 per cent because he had to give up his work as economic consultant, university lecturer and freelance journalist.
He was obliged to sell his large house on Dublin’s Eglinton Road and move to a smaller one. Several years later, he moved to what became the permanent home on Palmerston Road, parts of which were shared by different members of his family.
A more serious crisis occurred as a result of his association with Guinness Peat Aviation, founded by Tony Ryan. He was appointed a director of GPA after leaving politics and in anticipation of the public flotation of the company he and others in GPA borrowed substantial amounts of money to purchase shares at a favourable price, which was expected to rise when the company went public.
When the flotation was cancelled due to a stock market downfall, FitzGerald was left owing several hundred thousand pounds to AIB. He sold his house to his son Mark and lived in an apartment in the house but still owed an estimated £230,000 to AIB. He paid around £50,000 and the rest was written off by the bank.
Few politicians who have attained the top rank have had so few political enemies. He visited his old adversary, the dying Charles Haughey in Kinsealy. “Garret the Good”, the nickname given to him by the journalist John Healy was meant to be ironic, but it reflected a truth about him.
He was seen, for all his mistakes, to be a man of integrity, devoted to the good of the State and with an enthusiasm for the rough and tumble of politics.
Garret FitzGerald died on May 19, 2011, and was accorded a State funeral. He was predeceased by Joan in 1999 and is survived by his sons, John and Mark, and his daughter, Mary.
Brian Lenihan was born in Dublin on May 21, 1959. His father, also Brian, served in a range of cabinet positions, including Tanaiste, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Justice. His grandfather PJ Lenihan was a Fianna Fail TD for Longford-Westmeath and his aunt Mary O’Rourke also served in cabinet. His brother Conor Lenihan was a Minister for State. Brian grew up in Athlone, where he attended the Marist primary school, and at the age of 12 moved to Dublin. He went to Belvedere College and studied law in Trinity College and Cambridge and was called to the Irish Bar in 1984.
In 1996 he became a Dail deputy when he won the Dublin West by election caused by the death of his father, Brian Lenihan snr. In 1997, he married Patricia Ryan.
Brian Lenihan topped the poll in Dublin West in the 2002 general election, but was overlooked by Bertie Ahern for promotion to the Cabinet and was appointed Minister of State for Children. There was press comment that his talents were being overlooked and that he was a man that Ahern was said “not to like”.
The long-awaited promotion to the Cabinet came following the 2007 election when he again topped the poll in Dublin West. This time he was appointed Minister for Justice. His career in the Department of Justice ended abruptly in May 2008 when Mr Ahern resigned amid critical reports on his personal finances from the Mahon Tribunal.
The new Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, unexpectedly promoted Mr Lenihan to succeed him in Finance after less than a year as a senior Minister.
Brian Lenihan called it a “fantastic honour” but soon realised he had been handed a poisoned chalice as tax revenues plummeted and the construction industry went into nose dive. He told a conference of the industry that he had “the misfortune to have become Minister a few weeks ago as the building boom was coming to a shuddering end”.
The €3 billion deficit Mr Lenihan was forecasting for 2008 had ballooned to €7 billion several months later, and there was serious concern about the situation of the Irish banks following the collapse of Lehman Brothers in New York.
After only four months in office, he and his predecessor at the Department of Finance, Brian Cowen, would be confronted with an ultimatum to guarantee the depositors and bond holders of the Irish banks or face a run on these banks that could collapse the Irish economy.
For the next two-and-a-half years, Mr Lenihan had the unpopular task of introducing budgets that imposed levies on pensions, cut incomes, reduced public expenditure and standards of living while bank debts spiralled to fearful heights. In the early stages he was admired for his no-nonsense stance, but his last months in the Department of Finance were a politician’s nightmare as he endured mounting criticism for key decisions while battling recently diagnosed pancreatic cancer.
The economist and journalist, David McWilliams described receiving a visit late at night on September 17 at his home from Mr Lenihan who arrived chewing garlic. Over cups of tea, Mr Lenihan for several hours asked McWilliams for advice about the worsening situation. He said Mr Lenihan indicated his civil servants were nervous about offering a full bank guarantee.
Following a crisis meeting in Government Buildings on the night of September 29, the Government decided to guarantee all deposits and “certain debt” of the six Irish banks and building societies. This was estimated as totalling €440 billion of liabilities. Mr Lenihan described the guarantee, which other countries soon copied, as “the cheapest bailout in the world”, words that would come back to haunt him.
Presenting his 2010 budget in December, described as “the harshest in decades”, Mr Lenihan confidently asserted that “the worst is over”. However, international disquiet at the size of Ireland’s bank debts and the effect of zero economic growth on the public finances drove the cost of borrowing ever higher. Mr Lenihan was obliged to deny in October 2010 that Ireland would soon need an IMF-EU bailout as the interest rate on Government bonds surged over 8 per cent.
Following a spate of further denials from various Ministers, Mr Lenihan returned from a meeting of EU finance ministers in Brussels on November 16th to announce that the IMF-EU team was arriving in Dublin.
It was some months later after Fianna Fáil had been driven out of Government in the March 2011 general election that Brian Lenihan revealed his inner feelings on the bailout saga. He was especially bitter about the role of the European Central Bank which he virtually accused of forcing Ireland to accept the bailout.
On the final terms of the bailout, Mr Lenihan said the interest rate charged was “above what was required” and the schedule to downsize the banking system “unimplementable”. Of his own role, he said: “I believed that I had fought the good fight and taken every measure possible to delay such an eventuality and now hell was at the gates.
“I’ve a very vivid memory of going to Brussels on the final Monday to sign the agreement and being on my own at the airport and looking at the snow gradually thawing and thinking to myself: this is terrible. No Irish minister has ever had to do this before.”
By the time of these revelations, his world had greatly changed. In January 2011, he was defeated by Michéal Martin in the contest for the leadership of Fianna Fáil and in the March election the party was ousted from Government.
He was an extremely likable and able politician and lawyer, once seen as a future leader of Fianna Fáil. However he unsuccessfully contested the Fianna Fáil leadership after Brian Cowen’s resignation but was the only Fianna Fáil TD elected in Dublin in February’s General Election. A fluent French speaker, he also studied piano and was a lifelong lover of classical music.
He was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in December, 2009, and he died on June 10, 2011. He is survived by his wife Circuit Court judge Patricia Ryan and his children, Tom and Clare, his mother Ann, brothers, Conor, Niall and Paul, sister Anita and aunt Mary O’Rourke.
Hector Grey was born Alexander Scott in Scotland in 1904. When he moved to Ireland he became a “turf adviser”, selling racing information outside racetracks. It was in this period he became Hector Grey, borrowing the name of a famous Australian jockey of the same name. In the beginning he used the assumed name only at racecourses, but later on when he became a successful businessman, he decided the name was lucky for him.
His was Dublin’s original bargain store. He bought and sold inexpensive light hardware, ornaments and souvenirs goods, travelling to Hong Kong and Taiwan to purchase his stock. The actor Noel Purcell recalled meeting him in Honk Kong. “It very was funny to hear him doing business with a Chinese businessman from whom he was buying his novelties, bric-a-brac and ashtrays.” Hector Grey and Purcell became lifelong friends, often going racing together, including trips to the Grand National in Liverpool.
Ali Hewson, wife of Bono, is a grandaughter.
In his book Penny Apples, Dublin businessman Bill Cullen, who knew him well, recalls Hector Grey’s sales “spiel” on Sunday mornings at his pitch outside the Dublin Wollen Mill at the Ha’penny Bridge on the north bank of the Liffey:
“Yes indeed, me auld flowers, the finest soaps of the Orient … and there isn’t one bar of scented soap in this box, nor is there two bars, nor three, nor four nor five. You have, ladies and gentlemen, six different-bars of scented soap for the delicate skin. leave the carbolic and the Sunlight Soap for the gurriers and try the secrets of this Mandarin Soap for yourself. And the six bars are at half price this morning. Four shillings in Harrods of London but two bob here today. No, I won’t charge you fine people two shillings; let’s reduce it to one shilling and sixpence. No I won’t ask you for one shilling and sixpence on this beautiful May morning, nor will I ask you for one and thruppence.” Hector threw the box in the air and gave three almighty claps with his hands before catching the box again, as he roared, “I’m only charging you one little shilling piece for this beautiful box of soaps. Six bars for one shilling – that’s only twopence each. I’m giving it away and who’s first for the bargain? Thank you sir,” he said as he handed two boxes to one of his sidekicks and took the two bob, which started the ball rolling.”
Bill Cullen adds: “Hector had a flow about him. A way with words. A laugh, a joke, a smile, all with perfect timing. A different spiel for every product. And Dublin came to watch and wonder and to buy.”
Hector Grey died in 1995.
Alfie Byrne was born in Dublin on March 17, 1882. He was the son of a docker, who died when he was only 13 years old. Alfie sold theatre programmes and worked as a barman before buying his own pub, The Vernon in Talbot Street. He entered politics at the age of 27, being elected to Dublin Corporation for North Dock ward with a large majority.
Alfie Byrne.
He was elected MP to the British House of Commons for Dublin Harbour in a by-election on October 1, 1915, but lost his seat in 1918. In the 1922 elections, the first to be held in Ireland after the Treaty, he was elected to Dáil Éireann for the Dublin Mid constituency. From then until his death he was an Independent TD, except from 1944 until 1948 when he was a member of the Seanad.
Alfie Byrne was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin a record ten times between 1930 and 1955. The by-election caused by his death was won by his son Patrick Byrne.
He was a well known figure around Dublin, partly because of his style of dress which was considered to be old-fashioned. He always carried sweets in his pocket and gave these out to all the children he met. He made a habit of shaking hands with everybody he met on the street. Such was his notoriety for shaking hands that the Dublin comedian Jimmy O’Dea called him “Alfie the Shaker”. John Ryan, the editor of Envoy magazine, referred to him as the perennial Mayor “of the immaculate cutaway coat and waxed moustache.” One of Maureen Potter’s stage costumes was based on the suit he wore.
However there was a serious political side to him and he treasured his independant status, but this meant he could be voted down by the established political parties. He failed to be nominated by his fellow politicians to run for the Irish Presidency. More importantly he failed in an attempt to amend a new Children’s Bill in 1946 which, prophetically, would have offered more protection to the children being sent to Industrial Schools.
On New Year’s Day, 1933, he made what became known as the Mansion House appeal for the establishment of a new political party. He had supported the Treaty and was politically close to WT Cosgrave, and his appeal was for a party made up of all parties other than Fianna Fail. He laid out four priorities: an end to the Economic War, friendly relations with Britain, the full working of the Treaty, and the unity of the country. Although welcomed by The Irish Times, the move was unsuccessful.
Alfie Byrne died on March 13, 1956. His funeral attracted thousands, especially from the ranks of the poor in the inner city and docklands who believed, in spite of his old-fashioned style of dress, that “his heart was in the right place.” The by-election caused by his death, was won by his son Patrick Byrne. Two other sons, Alfred P. Byrne and Thomas Byrne, were also TDs for various Dublin constituencies. In 1956 his grandson, Paddy, on Alfie Jnr’s death, standing as an independent, had the distinction of defeating Charles Haughey by 4,000 votes in Dublin North East.
Alfie Byrne Road, linking East Wall Road and Clontarf Road, has been named after him.
Eoin O’Duffy was born at Cargaghdoo, near Lough Egish, Co Monaghan, on October 20, 1892. He became an engineer and worked as a surveyor for Monaghan County Council in the Clones area.
Eoin O'Duffy
He was active in the IRA during the War of Independence and was imprisoned several times. He led “Siege of Ballytrain” barracks in February 1920, resulting in the RIC garrison surrendering. In March 1921 he was made commander of the IRA’s 2nd Northern Division and in May of that year was elected as a Sinn Féin Dail deputy for Monaghan.
He took the Treaty side and served as a general in the new Irish Army in the ensuing Irish Civil War. In September 1922 he was appointed Commissioner of the recently formed Garda Siochana. The first Commissioner, Michael Staines, had only lasted a short time in the post.
He was Garda Commissioner until 1933 when Eamon de Valera, as head of the new Fianna Fail Government, dismissed him. In the Dáil de Valera offered as reason for the dismissal – “he [O'Duffy] was likely to be biased in his attitude because of past political affiliations”. O Duffy refused the offer of another position in the public service.
Soon after, Eoin O’Duffy became leader of the Army Comrades Association, which soon became the National Guard, complete with fascist-style uniforms. It protected meetings of the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal party from attacks by republicans. Its members became known as the Blueshirts.
Events moved quickly in the summer of 1933. In August, de Valera banned a planned march in Dublin, fearing that it could turn into a repeat of Mussolini’s infamous march on Rome in 1922.
By September the Blueshirts were declared an illegal organisation. O’Duffy was arrested while trying to address a meeting in Westport, Co Mayo, in December on the grounds he was a member of a banned organisation. He successfully sued the two Garda superintendents who had arrested him for wrongful imprisonment and assault.
To circumvent the ban the movement changed its name to the League of Youth.
Then on September 8, 1933, the Fine Gael United Ireland party was formed from O’Duffy’s National Guard, Cumann na nGaedheal and the National Centre Party. O’Duffy became the first leader of the new party, while WT Cosgrave was its parliamentary leader. Cosgrave had been instrumental in founding Cumann na nGaedheal in 1923 as the pro-Treaty wing of Sinn Fein.
But O’Duffy was erratic and extremely right wing in his views and within a year he was ousted from the leadership of Fine Gael and replaced by Cosgrave. The Blueshirt movement had begun to disintegrate also, so much so that by 1935 the organisation no longer existed. Eoin O’Duffy formed the National Corporate Party.
He went on to take 700 of his supporters to Spain to fight on Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War. However they saw little fighting and deciding they had nothing to contribute, Franco ordered them home in June 1937. O’Duffy returned to Ireland from Spain in disarray and more or less retired from politics.
In his youth he was active in Monaghan GAA and became secretary of the Ulster Council and was treasurer from 1925 until 1934. He later became president of the NACA, the body controlling Irish athletics, and held this position until his death. He was also a chronic alcoholic.
Remarkably, when he died at the end of November 1944 at the age of 52, de Valera ordered that he be given a State funeral.
The distant political events of Ireland of the 1930s linger on in just one word – Blueshirt, still used to denounce the Fine Gael party.
