Category Archives: Arts & Culture

When Bloomsday feels like doomsday

This post was originally published June 15, 2016. MH

It’s 16 June: Bloomsday! The nearly global celebration marks the day in 1904 when the character Leopold Bloom treks through Dublin in James Joyce’s ”Ulysses.” Think literary St. Patrick’s Day with nicer weather.

Now, however, the date has a darker meaning in Ireland. It’s the anniversary of the 2015 collapse of a fifth-floor apartment balcony in Berkeley, Calif. Five Dublin students and an Irish-American woman were killed, another seven were injured. Most were in the U.S. on J-1 Summer Work and Travel visas.

U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Kevin F. O’Malley issued a statement to media, which said in part:

On the first anniversary of the unimaginable tragedy that unfolded in Berkeley, California on June 16 last year and affected all of Irish society, the people of the United States extend our heartfelt sympathies to the families, friends, and loved ones of the students who lost their lives or were injured. In a remembrance ceremony today in Ballsbridge with U.S. Embassy personnel, we planted an apple tree in the Embassy’s front courtyard and unveiled a memorial plaque to serve as a living tribute to those affected by the tragedy.

As serious readers of “Ulysses” know, the novel references the horrific fire and sinking of the steamboat “General Slocum,” which occurred a day earlier in New York City. An estimated 1,021 of the 1,342 passengers were killed, mostly German-American women and school children, though some historians suggest the death toll was higher. It was the worst disaster in New York history until 9/11.

general_slocum_1.jpg (744×447)

The “General Slocum,” before the 1904 tragedy.

In The Freeman’s Journal, a national paper in Ireland until 1924, the story was reported on page 5 of the 16 June 1904 edition. Contemporaries of Leopold Bloom read these multi-deck headlines:

Appalling American Disaster

Excursion Steamer on Fire

500 Lives Lost

Wild Scene of Panic

Children Thrown Overboard

Women Trampled to Death

Here’s the passage from “Ulysses,” which was serialized between 1918 and 1920, before being published in full in 1922:

Terrible affair that “General Slocum” explosion. Terrible, terrible. A thousand casualties. And heartrending scenes. Men trampling down women and children. Most brutal thing. What do they say was the cause? Spontaneous combustion. Most scandalous revelation. Not a single lifeboat would float and the fire hose all burst. What I can’t understand is how the inspectors ever allowed a boat like that . . .

Or how 111 years later Berkeley inspectors ever allowed a balcony like that …

A Journey In Ireland, 1921, Revisited: Final thoughts

Novelist and journalist Wilfrid Ewart traveled through Ireland from mid-April to early May 1921. His dispatches for London newspapers were later collected and revised in the book, ‘A Journey in Ireland, 1921.’ Previous installments of this centenary series are collected at American Reporting of Irish Independence, which also includes my earlier work on Ruth Russell. By coincidence, Russell is included in the just released ‘Toward America‘ video at the new Mná100 website, part of the Irish government’s Decade of Centenaries commemorative program.

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Ruth Russell reported from Ireland in spring 1919, shortly after the separatist Dáil Éireann opened in Dublin and the first shots of the War of Independence. Wilfrid Ewart traveled through Ireland in spring 1921, shortly before the truce that helped end the war later that year.

Ruth Russell, 1919 passport photo.

Both journalists recorded their observations of Ireland for newspapers: Russell in America, Ewart in Britain. Each expanded their work into books that combined their journalism with literary flourishes: Russell’s What’s The Matter With Ireland?, and Ewart’s A Journey In Ireland, 1921.

The two books are complementary, similarly-styled snapshots from opposite ends of the war. Both reporters interviewed and quoted key people who are still remembered in histories of the period. Both also mingled with the Irish living in the shadows of the revolution: Russell among women and children of the Dublin slums and the west of Ireland; Ewart with characters he encountered on several 20-mile walks between towns and at markets and rail stations. Both journalists sought to calculate nationalist and unionist enthusiasm and measure Catholic and Protestant division.

Though written two decades into the 20th century, the two books each offer glimpses of the long dusk of 19th century Irish rural life. They also offer wartime descriptions of Cork, Limerick, Belfast, and Dublin.

From Russell:

In the evening I heard the murmur of revolution. With the shawled mothers who line the lane on a pleasant evening, I stood between the widow and a twenty-year-old girl who held her tiny blind baby in her arms. Across the narrow street with its water-filled gutters, barefoot children in holey sweaters or with burlap tied about their shoulders, slapped their feet as they jigged, or jumped at hop-scotch. Back of them in typical Dublin decay rose the stables of an anciently prosperous shipping concern; in the v dip of the roofless walls, spiky grass grew and through the barred windows the wet gray sky was slotted. 

From Ewart:

When night did finally close down and as curfew hour approached, the tide of the people set hurrying, over O’Connell Bridge towards the tram junction at the Nelson Pillar. The street lamps were lit and there were vague, shadowy crowds through which one had to press one’s way. Black motor cars containing mysterious-looking men rushed out of College Green at breakneck speed like bats or night-insects. Half an hour later–silence. I looked out of a window high up and saw spires, chimneys, rooftops bathed in moonlight, and heard one sound–a rifle shot.

Wilfrid Ewart

Both writers were college educated. Neither arrived in Ireland as wide-eyed innocents, nor were they as hardened and cynical as many journalists and politicians. Russell, 29, was the daughter of a Chicago newspaper editor who cut her reporting teeth on undercover assignments about women munitions plant workers. Ewart, 28, witnessed the horrors of Great War battlefields, where he survived wounds and illness. 

To be sure, Russell and Ewart each missed some nuisances of Irish revolutionary politics. Both appear to have allowed some personal bias to creep into their reporting. The same could probably be said of most journalists or historians.

On her return to America, Russell joined a Washington, D.C. protest against British rule in Ireland and testified about her experiences at the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland. Ewart, a former British military officer, published an acclaimed debut novel about the Great War. 

Year-long delays in publishing their Ireland books and rapidly evolving events minimized the impact of their reporting in the country. Russell disappeared into the career of a Chicago public school teacher; Ewart was accidentally killed at the end of 1922. His book has received more attention and reissues than hers. One reason could be a sexist bias for the male military officer over the American woman. Another, I believe, is that Ewart wrote the better book.

This blog occasionally considers the cinematic possibilities of Irish history, such as the 1913 travels of two French women who produced the first color photographs of the country, and the Lartigue monorail of County Kerry. There is an opportunity for a movie about Russell and Ewart traveling through revolutionary Ireland, at the same time instead of two years apart. They compete for scoops, dodge danger, and, of course, fall in love. The film has either a tragic ending amid the ambushes and reprisals, or a happy one at the threshold of Irish independence.

For now, their accounts stand together as companions on my bookshelf.

Below: Adverts for Russell’s and Ewart’s Ireland books.

 

A Journey in Ireland, 1921, Revisited: Ewart reviewed

Novelist and journalist Wilfrid Ewart traveled through Ireland from mid-April to early May 1921. His dispatches for London newspapers were later collected and revised in the book, ‘A Journey in Ireland, 1921.’ Previous installments can be found in my American Reporting of Irish Independence series.

***

Wilfrid Ewart from a painting by Nora Cundell, used as front matter in Stephen Graham’s 1924 biography.

In his Introduction to Journey, Edward Turnour, the 6th Earl Winterton, writes that Ewart made “an honest attempt to record, without prejudice, the extraordinary conflict of views and of right in present-day Ireland.” Winterton also makes an insensitive, if unintentional, comment that “any man or woman with two eyes” could have seen Ireland’s condition in 1921 was “a disgrace to civilization and an outrage upon humanity.”

Ewart was blind in one eye.

Punch, the acerbic London weekly, noted that many people traveled to Ireland during the war, “but they intelligently refrained from writing books about it.” The review continued:

If Captain Ewart had published his experiences immediately after his return to England in May 1921, they might have had some interest for the general English reader, who at that time was amiably prepared to swallow any Irish propaganda that was served out to him. Captain Ewart is not a propagandist, but his experiences consisted of talking to Irishmen who are propagandists … The strange thing is not that Captain Ewart was being gulled from the day he set foot in Ireland, but that he should have decided, a whole year after this event, to erect this literary monument to his own gullibility.[1]“A Journey in Ireland, 1921”, Punch, Oct. 4, 1922.

Ewart biographer Stephen Graham revealed the book’s publisher delayed Journey‘s release to avoid conflicting with his friend’s 1921 novel, The Way of Revelation. Journey should have “appeared within a few weeks to be of any news value,” Graham wrote in 1924, two years after the author’s accidental death at age 30. “Excellent as it is, [Journey] fell flat, as it was really out of date. Ireland by then had entered a new phase,”[2]Grahan, Stephen, Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, London, 1924, pp.158-159.

Irish reviews 

Ewart’s book enjoyed a measure of success among Irish and American readers.

The Irish Examiner praised how Ewart “obtained the views of prominent citizens of all shades of opinion” and presented their views “with fairness and impartiality.” It said the book “will interest the reader to note how far the prophecies and the prognostications, the diagnoses, the recommendations, the hopes and fears expressed in it, have come within reach of realization, or been discounted.”[3]“The World of Books: A Journey In Ireland, 1921”, Irish Examiner, June 26, 1922. That remains more true 100 years later.

Screenshot of scanned original edition cuts off bottom portion.

Sophie Raffalovich O’Brien, wife of Irish nationalist William O’Brien, said that Ewart sent her husband an account of the April 1921 interview at their home “for revision”, followed later by a copy of the published book. It “was a very friendly one and gave a very good impression of the author,” she wrote. A friend of the couple was so “charmed” that he “carried it off,” presumably never to be returned.[4]”Introduction”, Journey, UCD Press edition, 2009, pp. xvi-xvii, citing SRO’s Recollections of a Long Life.

Ewart also interviewed Irish nationalist George Russell in April 1921. The Irish Homestead, the weekly edited by Russell, reviewed Ewart’s book in summer 1922, but I have not been able to access an archived copy.[5]This review is referenced in “Ireland’s Destiny: The Only Way to Achieve It”, Irish Independent, Aug. 8, 1922.

 American reaction

In the United States, reviews and advertisements for Journey also appeared in summer 1922. Many reviews were just blurbs. Several mention The Way of Revelation, or Ewart’s U.S. travels with Graham at the time.

North Carolina educator and historian William Thornton Whitsett syndicated his review to newspapers a few weeks after the Aug. 22, 1922, ambush death of Michael Collins. Whitsett found “extraordinary timeliness” in Journey’s publication “for a world stunned by such a catastrophe … and altogether baffled by the whole bloody course of events in Ireland.[6]“Outlooks On Books”, The Charlotte Observer, Sept. 10, 1922, and other N.C. papers.

Anna L. Hooper, literary editor of the Courier Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, offered the contradictory conclusion that Journey “is not a book of any great weight or value, but it is an entertaining and unbiased account of conditions during a very important period in modern history, and it is well worth reading.”[7]“New Books of Fiction, Criticism, Description”, Courier Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, Nov. 5, 1922.

The Brooklyn (N.Y.) Daily Eagle included Journey in a roundup with two other Irish books: Andrew Gerrie’s Ireland’s Woes and Britain’s Wiles, and Ronald McNeill’s Ulster’s Stand For Freedom. Reviewer F.W. Davidson said Ewart’s book:

…is as almost detached as were the writings of [William] Wordsworth in the days of the French revolution. Such detachment of mind is a great service to the present moment … [but] Ewart has no theory to advance in this volume; he has no remedy to propose for quieting and better government of the country.[8]“Books on Ireland”, Brooklyn (N.Y.) Daily Eagle, Dec. 16, 1922.

Aug. 27, 1922, book advert in the New York Tribune.

Modern reviews

In a review of the 2009 University College Dublin Press edition of Journey, Rory Brennan opined:

Ewart comes across as a decent man, if a plodding writer. These pedestrian attributes tend to make him a credible commentator, one not to over-egg the pudding with orange or green additives.[9]”Dramatis Personae”, Books Ireland, No. 312 (May, 2009), pp. 108-110.

At the 2003 release of The Tourist Gaze: Travelers to Ireland: 1800-2000, reviewer Willie Nolan wrote “my favorite piece in this anthology has to be the extract from” Ewart’s Journey.[10]“The Tourist’s Gaze: Travellers to Ireland 1800-2000”, Béaloideas, vol. 71, 2003, pp. 259–260. Gaze contains 72 selections.

As mentioned earlier in this series, Maurice Walsh included Journey in the “Literary Tourists” chapter of his 2008 book, The News from Ireland, and also quoted from it in his 2016 Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World: 1918-1923. I’m sure there are other academic citations and reviews.

Abe Books advertises a G. P. Putnam, London, first edition hardback in very good condition for $99. Other sites offer used first editions for as little as $10. In addition to on-demand reprints, A Journey In Ireland, 1921 is digitized.

NEXT: Final thoughts

References

References
↑1 “A Journey in Ireland, 1921”, Punch, Oct. 4, 1922.
↑2 Grahan, Stephen, Life and Last Words of Wilfrid Ewart, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, London, 1924, pp.158-159.
↑3 “The World of Books: A Journey In Ireland, 1921”, Irish Examiner, June 26, 1922.
↑4 ”Introduction”, Journey, UCD Press edition, 2009, pp. xvi-xvii, citing SRO’s Recollections of a Long Life.
↑5 This review is referenced in “Ireland’s Destiny: The Only Way to Achieve It”, Irish Independent, Aug. 8, 1922.
↑6 “Outlooks On Books”, The Charlotte Observer, Sept. 10, 1922, and other N.C. papers.
↑7 “New Books of Fiction, Criticism, Description”, Courier Journal, Louisville, Kentucky, Nov. 5, 1922.
↑8 “Books on Ireland”, Brooklyn (N.Y.) Daily Eagle, Dec. 16, 1922.
↑9 ”Dramatis Personae”, Books Ireland, No. 312 (May, 2009), pp. 108-110.
↑10 “The Tourist’s Gaze: Travellers to Ireland 1800-2000”, Béaloideas, vol. 71, 2003, pp. 259–260.

Catching up with modern Ireland: January

There wasn’t much good news from Ireland in January, at least that I found in my reading. The three stories on the future of Dublin linked from the last bullet are interesting. Here’s the monthly roundup:

  • The COVID-19 death toll surpassed 3,000 in the Republic of Ireland and approaching 2,000 in Northern Ireland. Quarantine and other restrictions are being extended to March.
  • In a month-end poll by the TheJournal.ie, 46 percent surveyed said the Irish government is doing a good job at rolling out vaccines as quickly as possible, while 47 percent disagreed. Willingness to take vaccines hit 85 percent.
  • Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin apologized for the state’s “profound failure” in its treatment of unmarried mothers and their babies in a network of Catholic Church-run homes from the 1920s to the 1990s. A government-commissioned report found an “appalling” mortality rate of around 15 percent among children born at the homes, reflecting brutal living conditions. Around 9,000 children died in all.
  • Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission is taking legal action against the U.K. government over what it calls the failure to provide abortion access in the region. Abortion was legalized in Northern Ireland in October 2019. (Apparently the commission does not believe in “human rights” for unborn children.)
  • Norman Houston, who led the Northern Ireland Bureau in Washington, D.C., through late 2019, died in Belfast, age 62. He was a regular guest at Irish Network-DC events. I always appreciated his candor.
  • Horse Racing Ireland reported 2020 attendance declined 91 percent compared to 2019, with on-course betting falling by 89 percent to €7.7 million from €68.3 M. “The continued absence of attendance is having a significant impact on racecourses,” HRI chief executive Brian Kavanagh told Blood Horse.
  • In The Irish Times ended the month with three stories about the future of Dublin: David McWilliams says “Covid-19 and Zoom will not finish off Dublin,” arguing the city needs to change from a shopping and work entrepot to a living, artisanal center”; Frank McDonald charges the capital has “shamelessly surrendered” to market forces and the ‘Planning Industrial Complex’’; and Fintan O’Toole writes  the “Georgian core of the city can become a ghost town dotted with a few grand Government buildings and prestige cultural institutions and hotels. Or it can be reimagined and reoccupied as a living and lively public space.”
  • See our monthly roundup and annual Best of the Blog archives.

How will the pandemic change Dublin?

On Irish poets and an American president

The new Holy Trinity of Irish-American relations is Biden-Heaney-Yeats. To wit:

“President Biden has never hidden his enthusiasm for Irish poetry. Reciting W.B. Yeats’s poetry helped him overcome a childhood stutter. In the latter part of the campaign, he released a video of his stellar reading of Seamus Heaney’s powerful poem, The Cure at Troy, with its brilliant phrase about making ‘hope and history rhyme’.” — Irish Ambassador to the U.S. Dan Mulhall on The Inauguration of President Biden.

“In some of his most important speeches over the course of a long career, Joe Biden has repeatedly quoted the work of Seamus Heaney, an Irish, Nobel Prize-winning poet and playwright. … He’s also a fan of William Butler Yeats, dating back to the days when he used to recite Yeats’ words in the mirror, working to overcome his stutter.” — Town & Country

“In his four decades-long career from a Senator in Delaware to the man at the helm of affairs at the Democratic party, Mr Biden earned a reputation of peppering his speeches with Heaney and his contemporary, WB Yeats.” — The U.K. Independent

Biden in 2013.

There are more examples. Biden’s Jan. 20 inaugural address1 only lightly evoked the Heaney line as he described “a day of history and hope.” He did not directly quote either Irish poet. Instead, Biden quoted from the song American Anthem, written by songwriter Gene Scheer and first sung by Denyce Graves in 1998 for President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton at a Smithsonian Institution event. It was subsequently performed at other ceremonies, covered by Patti Labelle, and sung by Graves at George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration, says Variety.

Biden became only the fourth U.S. president to invite a poet to join his inauguration platform, following John F. Kennedy (1961), Clinton (1993, 1997) and Barack Obama (2009, 2013), The Week reports. Biden’s inaugural committee selected 22-year-old Amanda Gorman to read her poem The Hill We Climb, which drew wide praise. Watch it here.

Irish Poets

Heaney

Heaney died in 2013, while Biden was Obama’s vice president. Heaney lived part-time in the United States from 1981 to 2006, including time as Harvard’s poet in residence. American poet Robert Lowell described him as “the most important Irish poet since Yeats.” Last summer, when Biden accepted the Democratic nomination, The Washington Post detailed the candidate’s citations of The Cure at Troy.

Yeats

Yeats, who died in 1939, visited America in 1903/4, 1911, 1914, 1920, and 1932/33. Cumulatively, he spent more than a year of his life in the United States, according to the Embassy of Ireland, USA. Washington, D.C. trial lawyer and literary critic Joseph M. Hassett has just published his third book about the poet, Yeats Now: Echoing into Life. By focusing on Yeats’s most memorable lines of poetry, it reveals new ways of enjoying a body of work that speaks eloquently and urgently to the 21st century, the publisher says.

On Jan. 27, Solas Nua, the D.C.-based contemporary Irish arts organization, and New York University, will present an experimental non-narrative film-poem drawing on the life of Yeats and using only his writings. Click here for more information and free registration.

MacSwiney’s ‘Principles of Freedom’ makes U.S. debut

Terence MacSwiney

Nearly 150 Irish civilians were killed by military and police forces from the Oct. 25, 1920, voluntary hunger strike death of Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney to the January 1921 U.S. publication of Principles of Freedom, a collection of his essays.2 Many of these deaths were reported in U.S. newspapers, most notably “Bloody Sunday” in November 1920, but few received as much ongoing attention as MacSwiney’s martyrdom. Three months after his death, the posthumous book prompted a new round of headlines. 

E.P. Dutton & Co. of New York published the 244-page book six months before the first Irish edition from Talbot Press Limited, Dublin.3 The book contained 19 chapters, what MacSwiney called “articles,” all but one of which was previously published in the Irish republican newspaper Irish Freedom during 1911-1912. In the preface, MacSwiney said:

It was my intention to publish these articles in book form as soon as possible. I had them typed for the purpose. I had no time for revision save to insert in the typed copy words or lines omitted from the original printed matter. I also made an occasional verbal alteration in the original. One article, however, that on “Intellectual Freedom,” though written in the series in the place in which it now stands, was not printed with them. It is now published for the first time.”

MacSwiney devoted three pages of the preface to explain his essay “Religion” to “avoid a possible misconception amongst people outside of Ireland.” He continued:

In Ireland there is no religious dissension, but there is religious insincerity. English politicians, to serve the end of dividing Ireland, have worked on the religious feelings of the North, suggesting the dangers of Catholic ascendancy. There is not now, and there never was, any such danger, but our enemies, by raising the cry, sowed discord in the North, with the aim of destroying Irish unity. 

Arrested Aug. 12, 1920, for possession of “seditious articles and documents,” MacSwiney was tried four days later and sentenced to two years at Brixton Prison in south London. He probably wrote the preface and finalized the book deal during his hunger strike.

E.P. Dutton & Co.’s correspondence related to the book is held by Syracuse University.4 My request for copies of this material is backlogged by COVID-19 slowdowns and lower priority due to being unaffiliated with the university. I’ll update in a future post.

U.S. Reviews

Reviews of MacSwiney’s book began to appear in U.S. newspapers the last week of January 1921, a month after his wife, Muriel, and sister, Mary, testified at American Commission on Conditions in Ireland hearings in Washington, D.C. The widow returned quickly to Ireland, but the sister remained in America to make the rounds of pro-Irish independence speaking engagements. 

MacSwiney’s “dying plea for Ireland” was “the peroration of a poet, an idealist, a dreamer, who possessed, nevertheless, a sense of humor, a leaning toward the practical, an insight into human nature which illuminate at frequent intervals the pages of the book,” The Evening World’s Martin Green wrote in one of the earliest reviews.5

“The martyr to the Irish cause was strong for the ‘dreamers, cranks and fools’. In his opinion those so designated are the backbone of a movement such as Ireland is undergoing.”

The Irish Press, a Philadelphia weekly with direct ties to the separatist government in Dublin, said the book was “a valuable contribution to philosophy … universal in its viewpoints; it happens to have Ireland as a particular and living illustration … though it can hardly be called a piece of Irish republican propaganda.”6

An editorial in the St. Louis Star said MacSwiney’s book “will not only prove a memorial to his life and his sacrifice, but it furnish the world a fresh insight into the spirit of the Irish people.”7

Period newspaper adverts show the book retailed for $2, or just under $30 with a century of inflation.8 Today, a California antiquarian and used book dealer advertises a 1921 first edition of the E.P. Dutton version in “Very Good Plus” condition for $150. (Digitized U.S. and Irish editions are linked in Note 2.)  

“Here is a document of extraordinary interest,” says the book’s original dust jacket. “It is the mind of an Irish irreconcilable turned inside out by himself for our inspection.”

From New York Herald, March 13, 1921.

Catching up with modern Ireland: November

Joe Biden’s election as U.S. president was the big story of November on both sides of the Atlantic. Here’s a sampling of early analysis:

Ballina, Co. Mayo artists Padraig ‘Smiler’ Mitchell and Leslie Lackey in September installed this mural of Biden in his ancestral hometown. Biden visited Ballina in 2016 as vice president. RTÉ photo.

More news:

  • The Republic of Ireland is set to begin easing second-round COVID-19 restrictions on Dec. 1, as Northern Ireland tightens measures to control the spread of the virus. “For months, public health officials have argued in vain that the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland should be coordinating pandemic restrictions, taking advantage of their island status as a natural barrier to disease. Instead, government leaders in Dublin and Belfast complain that they learn of each other’s divergent plans only through the media,” Politico.eu reported.
  • “Many whose attendance at church services before the pandemic was fragile will never return to public worship. … The post-pandemic church will look significantly different to the church we traditionally knew.” Archbishop of Dublin Diarmuid Martin said in a  mid-month homily at St. Mary’s Pro Cathedral.
  • A Belfast man was arrested in connection with the 1974 bombings of two pubs in Birmingham, England, which killed 21 people and wounded nearly 200 others. The IRA has been accused of the bombings. Six men were jailed in 1975, then released in 1991 when their convictions were overturned.
  • Ireland inflicts the ninth highest level of lost tax revenue on other countries around the globe–3.7 percent of total worldwide losses, or the equivalent of $15.83 billion, according to the first “State of Tax Justice” study compiled by Tax Justice Network.
  • A new freight ferry route will open Jan. 2, 2021, linking Rosslare, Ireland, and Dunkirk, France, bypassing non-EU member England, the Independent (UK) reported.
  • Paleontologists have found the fossilized remains of two Jurassic dinosaur species in Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland. These are the first dinosaur remains reported from anywhere in Ireland and some of the most westerly in Europe, says Sci-News.com.
  • Solas Nua, Washington D.C.’s contemporary Irish arts organization, named Miranda Driscoll as its interim executive director. She formerly served for five years as director/CEO of Sirius Arts Centre in Co. Cork. Watch her video message. These are challenging times for all non-profit arts groups, to say the least.

Previous months:

Irish government launches 5-year diaspora strategy

The Republic of Ireland has issued a new strategy to support and engage the state’s dispersed communities. “It takes a broad and inclusive definition of the diaspora, reflecting the diversity of the global Irish community today,” the government said.

At just 20 pages, Global Ireland: Ireland’s Diaspora Strategy 2020-2025 “is slender, but it contains real substance,” Minister of State for the Diaspora, Colm Brophy T.D., said during the report’s Nov. 19 virtual American debut, which was hosted by Irish Ambassador to the United States Daniel Muhall.

The plan has five strategic objectives:

  • People: ensure that the welfare of the Irish abroad remains at the heart of the state’s diaspora support.
  • Values: work with diaspora to promote Irish values abroad and celebrate the diversity of the diaspora.
  • Prosperity: build mutually beneficial economic ties with the diaspora.
  • Culture: support cultural expression among the diaspora.
  • Influence: extend Ireland’s global reach by connecting with the next generation.

The strategy vows to establish pathways to legal migration by Irish citizens to the US, continuing to support the E3 Visa bill, and seeking solutions for undocumented Irish citizens in the US to regularize their status. U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden figures to be a helpful partner in this regard.

The strategy also promises to “deepen our connection to people for whom Irish heritage is more distant, including the African-American and Hispanic communities in the United States.” The Embassy of Ireland in Washington and its U.S. consulates currently are partnering with organizations on both sides of the Atlantic to mark the 175th anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s 1845-46 visit to Ireland.

The strategy contains only one reference to Northern Ireland, a vow to build ties to the Ulster-Scots diaspora.

Brophy, a Fine Gael T.D. who has represented Dublin-South-West since 2016, assumed the role of diaspora minister in July. He has been unable to travel outside Ireland due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The cover image of the Global Ireland report (at top) is the lamp at Áras an Uachtaráin, a symbolic beacon, lighting the way for Irish emigrants and their descendants, welcoming them to their homeland.

See my recent article for the Irish Diaspora Histories Network: Home at War, 1920: Diaspora Witness Statements to the American Commission on Conditions in Ireland.

Guest post: The Fall of the Fitzmaurices

County Kerry native Kay Caball is a professional genealogist and author of the definitive Finding Your Ancestors in Kerry. (She has helped me.) Kay also wrote The Kerry Girls: Emigration and the Earl Grey Scheme, about the young women shipped to Australia in 1849/1850 from four of the county’s workhouses. Her new book is The Fall of the Fitzmaurices: The Demise of Kerry’s First Family, available through Kay’s My Kerry Ancenstors website, and O’Mahony’s Booksellers in Limerick. Kay provided this overview of the story. MH

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Ennobled as the 1st Earl of Kerry in 1723, Thomas Fitzmaurice, 21st Lord of Kerry, Baron of Lixnaw  and his wife, the former Lady Anne Petty, presided over great estates in Kerry and elsewhere. They and their family enjoyed prestige, influence and immense wealth. Within 100 years their land was gone, the Fitzmaurice earldom was no more. 

So what could have happened to this Kerry dynasty after almost 500 years of acquisition and expansion, which was then so reduced  in such a short space of time? We would have to say improvidence, extravagance, careless management, and improvidence.

Thomas, 21st lord, inaugurated a span of lavish spending; the main result of his expenditure on the ancestral seat of Old Court was a magnificent demesne and a well-appointed house run on a grand scale. His raised status as an earl in 1723 would appear to have spurred him to take on all the trappings expected of the title. He purchased and furnished a Dublin home in the prime fashionable area of St Stephen’s Green,9 while continuing to improve and develop his Kerry estates. His three daughters, Anne, Arbella, and Charlotte, made good if not spectacular marriages: each into new families with generous dowries. His sons, William and John, enjoyed exclusive educations at Westminster School and at the University of Oxford.

Thomas’ eldest son and heir, William, was not the wisest of men. After his father’s death in 1741, William became 2nd earl, and was head of the family fortunes and estate for just over six years. 

William was involved in a number of expensive court cases and family settlements, the most spectacular of which arose from his dalliance with a mistress that led to a scandal of epic proportions in the exclusive aristocratic circles of 18th century Dublin. Elizabeth Leeson, his mistress of two years, declared they were married, and though neither Church nor state had been involved in any nuptials, the courts decided there had been a valid marriage, and he was ordered to proceed with a Church ceremony or be excommunicated. William does not appear to have followed up with the Church ceremony, but Elizabeth, now titled Lady Elizabeth Fitzmaurice, conveniently died three years later. William then married the daughter of the earl of Cavan, against his father’s wishes.

So we come to Francis, who became the 3rd earl of Kerry in 1747 on the death of his father.  Francis was not then seven years of age. His mother initially became his guardian, but when she remarried and moved to England three years later, he became a ward in Chancery, and was left in the care of a tutor and servants. The Old Court estate and demesne in Kerry were closed up and allowed to deteriorate. Incompetent agents were responsible for managing and collecting the land rents. Francis, although left to fend for himself, had a good tutor, and he attended and graduated from Trinity College, Dublin at the age of 15, but afterwards led a lazy and indulgent life. To compound matters, he got involved with a married woman, Anastasia Daly, herself an heiress. Francis’ cousin, British Prime Minister William Petty-Fitzmaurice, 2nd earl of Shelburne and 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, said of Francis:

He fell in love with a married lady twenty years older than himself, the daughter of an eminent Roman Catholic lawyer, and she having obtained a divorce, married her – [she was] an extraordinarily vain person. Having to fight their way up into good society, and having no children, they sold every acre of land that had been in our family since Henry II’s time.10

Anastasia’s husband took an action against Francis Fitzmaurice, and there followed a sensational court case which revealed lurid and explicit descriptions of their sexual encounters. The aggrieved husband was awarded £5,000 compensation for the loss of the company of his wife. This would be over €974,235 in 2019,11 and resulted in the commencement of the large-scale sale of land and assets from the Fitzmaurice Lixnaw estates. Soon after, a divorce was granted by the Westminster Parliament, and Francis and Anastasia married in England in 1768. Initially, they settled in London, where they furnished three large houses lavishly within the space of 10 years, before moving to Paris in 1778. Even though Anastasia, now Countess of Kerry, had the pleasure of being presented at court, the couple were not given the recognition they felt they were due as part of the respected old Norman Irish nobility. Although they moved in aristocratic circles, British society at that time was conservative and rigid, and the young Protestant earl married to the older Irish Catholic divorcee, with a scandalous past, did not command the cream of invitations or acceptance into the milieu to which they aspired.

Their sojourn in Paris from 1771 to 1792 – where they lived extravagantly, dined, wined, entertained and shopped – came to an abrupt end when they had to flee during the Reign of Terror at the time of the French Revolution. Francis and Anastasia were lucky to escape with their lives, but their servants were executed. 

Though they had to abandon their possessions in Paris, their papers – letters, bills, receipts, invitations – were saved, and this collection of eight boxes of documents is now housed in the Archives Nationales, Paris. Their extravagant spending had meant frequent letters home to the earl’s agent, solicitors and auctioneers with instructions to sell or unload land or leases at almost any cost to keep banks and creditors at bay, copies of which survive in Paris.

Back in London in 1795, Anastasia was to live for only four more years. She died in 1799 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, where Francis erected a large monument to her. Francis died in 1818 and was buried with Anastasia. This, then, is the story of the fall of the Fitzmaurices, the premier family of Kerry for 583 years. 

Catching up with modern Ireland: October

Monument in Eyre Square, Galway city, marks JFK’s June 1963 visit. November 2018 photo.

In a few days (or weeks?) we should know whether Irish-American-Catholic Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidency, 60 years after the historic election of Irish-American-Catholic John F. Kennedy. A sentimental milestone for some (and eye roll for others), a Biden administration appears poised to pay close attention to the impact of Brexit on the Irish border and any U.S.-U.K trade deal, as well as visa and citizenship issues for Irish people in America. A Biden win would help take some of the sting from this year’s cancelled St. Patrick’s Day events on both sides of the Atlantic and the lost summer of tourism in Ireland. Let Trump rule his links at Doonbeg.

Here’s the October roundup:

  • On Oct. 22, the Republic of Ireland became the first European country to reimpose a nationwide lockdown following a surge in coronavirus cases. New quarantine rules apply until Dec. 1.
  • The five-year Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes report is to be finalized Oct. 30, though its public release date remains unclear. Expect a wave of damning coverage about how the Catholic Church and the State handled Ireland’s most vulnerable citizens.
  • “I continue to be amazed by the lack of knowledge or interest in the political and social affairs of both a part of the UK – the North – and also of our near neighbour – the Republic,” Conservative MP Simon Hoare wrote in a column for The Irish Times.
  • The Police Service of Northern Ireland began a three-month pilot program for new-look uniforms, but a proposal to drop the words “Northern Ireland” from the force’s official crest, replaced only with NI, was rejected, the Belfast Telegraph reported. PSNI was formed after the Good Friday Agreement as a more inclusive successor to the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
  • “Sublime Chaos” is the headline of a short New Yorker piece about the “mystical Irish Dadaism” of Dublin composer Jennifer Walshe. “When I was younger, I wanted to run away from Irish identity, which at times can be so narrow and confining and politically problematic,” said Walshe, born in 1974. “But it’s part of me, and it belongs to everyone here.” (Thanks ADH.)
  • The Book of Lismore, created in the late 15th century, has been donated to University College Cork (UCC) after centuries in a British estate. This major medieval manuscript, created at Kilbrittain, Co. Cork, in a golden age of Irish literature, is considered as one of the Great Books of Ireland.

Three from Kerry:

  • Europe’s rarest fern has been discovered in Killarney. Stenogrammitis myosuroides, has only ever previously been found in the mountainous cloud forests of Jamaica, Cuba, and Dominican Republic, according to The Guardian. “Kerry mousetail” has been suggested as the common name for the plant.
  • A plant appears, an animal disappears: Fungie, the resident male, bottlenose dolphin that helped transform Dingle from a small fishing and farming community into a global tourist destination, has vanished after 37 years, The New York Times (with lovely photos) and other media reported.
  • Finally, there’s some anthropologic evidence that natives of the Kingdom are less susceptible to COVID-19, says Maynooth University’s Ciarán Walsh.

Alas, the annual November conference of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland is cancelled due to COVID. See details of previous conferences. Best wishes to members and past participants.

See past monthy and annual roundups.

The grounds of the Belfast Botanic Gardens and Palm House. November 2019 photo.