Category Archives: Journalism

I am traveling and working on several projects this summer. New posts will be infrequent. The piece linked below appears in the July/August issue of the Dublin-based History Ireland magazine. MH

American author Leon Uris released his eighth novel, Trinity, shortly before St Patrick’s Day 1976 and the deadliest years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. In promotional interviews Uris emphasized that readers would ‘better understand the headlines coming out of Ireland today, because the past of Ireland is being constantly repeated’. This was a paraphrase of his novel’s soon-to-be-famous last sentence, that ‘in Ireland there is no future, only the past happening over and over’, which modified a line from Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten.

Read ‘When Irish History, And News, Became Best-Selling Fiction’ at History Ireland.

TCD offers Davitt exhibit onsite & online through June

Davitt

“Michael Davitt was a prolific writer, keeping diaries of his ideas and impressions while working as a freelance journalist for most of his career. Many of his articles took the form of letters to the press, which were later published as pamphlets. Through his journalism, Davitt practiced a form of activism, using his writing to highlight the struggles of society’s most marginalised and advocate for reforms and support.”

The quote is from the Character is better than wealth: The enduring legacy of Michael Davitt exhibition at Trinity College Dublin. It was curated by Ciara Daly, a project archivist at TCD, which holds some 7,000 items from Davitt’s lifetime, 1846-1906. He visited the United States six times between 1878 and 1901.

I spent a few days in February 2018 reviewing a portion of the Davitt archive, and visiting the Michael Davitt Musuem in Straide, County Mayo, where he was born and buried. The research related to my “Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited” project, mentioned in the previous post. See the posts Meeting Davitt and More Davitt. My piece “1888: An American Journalist In Ireland Meets Michael Davitt & Arthur Balfour” also published on The Irish Story later that year.

Davitt’s grave, Straide, County Mayo, February 2018.

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. I can be reached via contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

An American journalist’s connection to Ireland and Egypt

HIATIUS: I am traveling and working on other projects. New posts will be infrequent through the spring and summer. I can be reached via contact form on the “About Me” page. Thanks, MH

What does a 3,500-year-old Egyptian red granite obelisk in New York City’s Central Park have to do with Ireland or Irish America? Nothing. But there are indirect connections.

Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert, a late-nineteenth century editor of the New York World, determined the city should match London’s acquisition of a similar object. His campaign resulted in the June 1880 arrival of the seven-story (69 feet) obelisk, seen below. It was raised in February 1881 on a small hill behind the Metrololitian Museum of Art, which opened about the same time. The MET holds one of the world’s largest Egyptian collections under its roof, in addition to the so-called “Cleopatra’s Needle” in the park.

The link to Ireland comes through Hurlbert, who traveled throughout the island in early 1888. Later that year he published the book, Ireland Under Coercion: The Diary of an American. The conservative Hurlbert was pro-landlord and anti-home rule. Read about his work in my 2018 blog series: “Ireland Under Coercion, Revisited.”

I have visited numerous places in Ireland that Hurlbert described in his book. I was pleased to remember his connection to the obelisk as I walked through Central Park on my way to the American Irish Historical Society. Founded in Boston in 1897 (Hurlbert died two years earlier), the Society since 1940 has been located at 991 Fifth Avenue, directly across from the MET, barely a five-minute walk from the granite tower.

American journalist William Henry Hurlbert led an 1880 campaign to bring this Egyptian obelisk to Central Park in New York City. Eight years later he wrote a book about Ireland.

Fact-checking St. Patrick’s desnaking of Ireland

Those dang fact-checkers; always deflating a good political talking point or ruining a cherished legend. And so with St. Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland. An online search of “St. Patrick” and “snakes” today returns this AI overview:

The legend of St. Patrick driving snakes out of Ireland is a popular myth symbolizing his eradication of paganism, not a factual event. Scientifically, snakes never inhabited post-glacial Ireland due to cold temperatures and surrounding oceans. The story first appeared in literature centuries after his life.

But the popular press of a century ago also fact-checked the legend. The clipping below is from the March 17, 1926, edition of the Washington Evening Star. William Montana Mann (1886-1960) was director of the National Zoo from 1925 until 1956. As an entemologist, he specialized in ants, not snakes. William Shepard Walsh (1854–1919) was an American folklorist and author. Walsh died seven years before the Evening Star quoted from his 1897 book, Curiosities of Popular Customs and of rites, ceremonies, observations, and miscellaneous antiquities. See page 790.

Washington Evening Star, March 17, 1926.

The Washington Post of a century ago gave a softer, cartoon treatment to the legend of St. Patrick, sans snakes, in addition to news coverage of the day’s festivities in the US capital. The graphic says Patrick baptized “over 12,000 people.” AI says “over 100,000, up to 130,000.”

Who really knows about such things?

‘America and Ireland at 250’ focus of Feb. 4 Georgetown conference

Georgetown University’s Global Irish Studies program and other partners will explore 250 years of US-Irish relations during the 7th annual “Bridging the Atlantic” conference. I will live blog the Feb. 4 event from the university’s Capitol Campus in Washington, D.C.

Ireland’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade Helen McEntee, TD, is scheduled to deliver the keynote address. Panel discussions include “America 250: American Lives, Irish Legacies”, “Revolutionary Routes Across the Atlantic: 1776 and Beyond”, “The New Worlds of 21st Century Irish-America”, and “Re-imagining the ‘Green Wave’: Cultural Visions of Ireland in America.”

Panel participant rosters and registration found here.

Georgetown’s conference partners include the BMW Center for German and European Studies, in association with the Embassy of Ireland, the Clinton Institute at University College Dublin, Queen’s University Belfast, and the Northern Ireland Bureau.

One of the panels at last year’s Bridging the Atlantic VI conference.

Best of the Blog, 2025

My thirteenth year of producing this blog was productive and rewarding. Highlights included the publication of several freelance pieces in scholarly journals or the popular press. The University of Galway accepted my family’s letters between the U.S. and Ireland from the 1920s through the 1980s for their digital immigrant archives. I was interviewed for a St. Patrick’s Day television program and gave a presentation about Michael J. O’Brien, my 2024 entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography. I made my thirteenth visit to Ireland in 25 years.

This website was on pace for record all-time traffic, then rocketed over the top by a mid-November surge of AI content-scraping bots. Or maybe thousands of readers in China have suddenly become interested in Irish news and history. I object to the unauthorized grab of my intellectual property, but I’m happy if it eventually contributes to global knowledge, especially my work about American journalists in Ireland.

More details and links to some of this year’s best content follow below each of the photos:

The gate between the Museum of Literature Ireland courtyard and the Iveagh Gardens. “MoLI replaced the former Dublin Writer’s Museum.

Freelance pieces

Ireland Beautiful–How A 1925 American Photobook Boosted Irish Tourism
History Ireland (Dublin), July/August 2025
The US Press and the American Commission on Irish Independence, 1919
New Hibernia Review, Center for Irish Studies, University of St. Thomas
Spring 2025
When three American journalists visited ‘Paddy the Cope’ in Dungloe, 1919-1922
The Irish Story (Dublin), Jan. 31, 2025
Richard Lee Strout: A Young American Reporter In Revolutionary Ireland
American Journalism, American Journalism Historians Association
Winter 2025
I wrote two non-Irish stories for Gathered Fragments, the annual journal of the Catholic Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.

The former London and North Western Hotel seen in April 2025. A group of American journalists watched from the top floor as Irish rebels and British forces fired on each other during the 1916 Rising. The dark glass building at right is part of the Salesforce Tower, which renovated the former hotel as office and meeting space. The red brick structure at left is the former railway and steam packet terminal operated by the L&NW hotel company. It was vacant during my visit. The building faces the River Liffey.

Two blog series:

Revisiting William Brayden’s 1925 ‘survey’ of Ireland

The Irish-born journalist wrote a summer 1925 series for the Chicago Daily News about the state of Ireland on both sides of the partition. His series, later compiled as a book, and follow up reporting about the end of the Irish Boundary Commission served as the conclusion to American newspaper coverage of Ireland’s decade-long revolutionary period.

Leon and Jill Uris in Ireland

The American husband and wife team, author and photographer, respectively, made several visits during the 1970s. They produced photobooks and a bestselling novel that perpetuated notions of “romantic Ireland” before the Republic’s economic modernization and the Good Friday Agreement at the end of the 20th century.

Family letters

Nearly 60 of my family’s letters to and from Ireland were accessioned and digitized in the Imirce (Irish for migration, emigration) project at the University of Galway. The searchable Joan Diggin Collection is named after my aunt, who either authored or was the recipient of most of the letters. The collection also includes a digitized copy of my 2013 book, His Last Trip, about Joan’s father, my grandfather. The letter manuscripts and a print copy of the book may be consulted in the Archives and Special Collections Reading Room.

This February 25, 1953, note from Ireland before St. Patrick’s Day is part of the Imirce collection. I kept the shamrocks, which also were included in several other letters.

Television interview

Watch my St. Patrick’s Day interview with FOX 8’s “News Now” in Johnstown, Pa. The conversation covers my Irish ancestry and historical research. Each segment is 5 minutes:

My remote St. Patrick’s Day television appearance for FOX 8 in Johnstown, Pa., included the obligatory bookcase in the background. But they are real books that I’ve actually read and use.

Thanks archivists, librarians, and others

This year’s research included multiple visits to the Library of Congress, National Archives and Records Administration, and Catholic University of America here in Washington, D.C. I also spent time at the National Library of Ireland, Dublin, New York Public Library, and the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh Archives and Records Center. I received remote help from the Newberry Library in Chicago, the Catholic Diocese of Gaylord, Mich., and the Paulist Archives in New York City. As always, I am grateful to the professionals at these institutions who assisted my work. … I was delighted to contribute some research and materials to “The Irish Revolution in the African American Press” exhibition at University College Cork. It focused on how the US black press covered De Valera’s tour of America (1919–20), MacSwiney’s hunger strike death (1920), and the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921-22). Dr. Jemima Hodgkinson, a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow, curated the exhibit. … I enjoyed watching excellent presentations by Irish historians (and friends) Daniel Carey and John Dorney at the “Navigating War and Violence in Twentieth-Century Ireland” conference at Dublin City University in April. … On the same trip I was welcomed to Dungloe, County Donegal, by Patrick J. Dunleavy, chairman of the The Cope’s board of directors, who gave me a detailed driving tour of the Rosses region, and by Mark Sharkey and Emma McGarvey, Cope CEO and business support manager, respectively.

I hope to return to Ireland in 2026, and to visit two new domestic archives I’ve eyed for some time. Meanwhile, happy holidays to the site’s human readers, especially my loyal email subscribers. Sláinte!

Low tide twilight at Dungloe, County Donegal. The pier at left replaced the one constructed during the revolutionary period and detailed in 1922 by American journalist Redfern Mason.

More on Jill and Leon Uris in Ireland

I’m keeping my promise to follow up an earlier post, When Jill and Leon Uris went to Ireland. The couple first visited both sides of the partitioned island from May 1972 to January 1973, then published Ireland: A Terrible Beauty in November 1975. The book featured nearly 400 photographs by Jill and text by Leon, an established author.

Leon released his Irish novel, Trinity, in 1976. It became a best-seller. The couple returned to Ireland at least five more times over the next few years. Jill photographed places that represented the fictional locations in Trinity. She did a piece for the Ladies’ Home Journal magazine headlined “Connor and Shelly,” which illustrated the novel’s main characters. Jill and Leon traveled the River Shannon on a houseboat, “a lovely second honeymoon,” she recalled in a second book of photos, Ireland Revisited, published in 1982.^[1]Jill Uris, Ireland Revisited. [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982], 1-2.

Of her half dozen trips to Ireland, Jill enthused:

I always arrive with anticipation, wanting to be haunted by her mysteries and teased by her fantasies. I travel through her tortured landscape wondering what it is about this place that entices me so. Is it ancient ruins, wild seascapes, the hundred shades of green? Or is it the verbal jousting and continual singsong of stories in a language that is something beyond English …yet not quite foreign? It is all of these and more; it is a people whose goal is only to be themselves, whose spirit retains a dignity which is rare in today’s world. It is the Irish refusal to be servants to anyone but their own minds.^[2]Ibid.

The Irish Independent published this advert on Dec. 8, 1982. The image appeared on the book jacket and on an inside page. Titled “Man of Aran,” the figure was Dara Beag Ó Fátharta, the “Bard of Inishmaan,” who died in 2012 at the age of 92.

Revisited received mostly tepid reviews. John M. McGown of Gannett News Service noted the Uris’s first photo book had become “a staple on the shelves of Irish Americans” and the second was “likely to become a companion piece.”^[3]”Two authors write varying views of Irish”, St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, Dec. 2, 1982, and other papers. But Doug Wells of the Des Moines (Iowa) Register compared paging through Revisited to sitting through a neighbor’s vacation slides as he rhapsodized about how much he “just loved Ireland.” Wells continued:

To be sure Jill Uris is a much better photographer than the man next door. Most of her photographs are well done. … She has concentrated on the rural, older Ireland, the romantic image most Americans have of the country. … But just as your neighbor babbles on and on about how beautiful it all was, so Uris carries on about Ireland. Her dullish prose, combined with snips and scraps from Irish writers and poets, upset what flow and balance the pictures provide.^[4]”Too much, too little”, Des Moines (Iowa) Register, Oct. 17, 1982.

In Ireland, Frank Miller of the Sunday Press described Revisited as “a headless horse of a book, a book of photographs based on an unreality, lost and wandering somewhere between the myths and mists of romantic Ireland.” He also complained that Dara Beag Ó Fátharta (image above) appeared “no less than four times through the book.”^[5]”Lost between myths and mists of romantic Ireland”, Sunday Press, (Dublin), Dec. 5, 1982.

Historical context

Ireland Revisited appeared a decade after Bloody Sunday in Derry, Northern Ireland. As copies reached American bookshops in autumn 1982, the Troubles’ death toll climbed to 1,794 by year’s end. This turned out to be roughly half the total of number of people killed in the conflict.^[6]”Year of the death” in Malcolm Sutton’s Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland, found at cain.ulster.ac.uk. Sutton’s index ranges from 1969 to 2001, three years after … Continue reading

Jill Uris wrote that after each of her trips to Ireland “the headlines from the North became more piercing. The people in the Republic wish the ‘troubles’ would just drift away. After all, they are finally building their own country and who needs the continuing hostility and fanaticism of Ulster?”

In fact, the Republic in the mid-1980s was “crippled by political violence, mass emigration, mass unemployment, political paralysis and a sense of hopelessness,” Michael McDowell, an independent member of Seanad Éireann, wrote at the start of 2025. It would take another decade or so before the Republic began the economic modernization known as the “Celtic Tiger” and citizens confronted abuses by the Catholic Church that resulted in today’s militant secularism. More then 40 years after Ireland Revisited, Ireland faces “very real” new challenges, McDowell concluded, “but very different from the dark past we left behind.”

So, too, “Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone. It’s with O’Leary in the grave.”^[7]”September 1913” by William Butler Yeats.

References[+]

References
↑1	Jill Uris, Ireland Revisited. [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1982], 1-2.
↑2	Ibid.
↑3	”Two authors write varying views of Irish”, St. Cloud (Minn.) Times, Dec. 2, 1982, and other papers.
↑4	”Too much, too little”, Des Moines (Iowa) Register, Oct. 17, 1982.
↑5	”Lost between myths and mists of romantic Ireland”, Sunday Press, (Dublin), Dec. 5, 1982.
↑6	”Year of the death” in Malcolm Sutton’s Index of Deaths from the Conflict in Ireland, found at cain.ulster.ac.uk. Sutton’s index ranges from 1969 to 2001, three years after the Good Friday Agreement.
↑7	”September 1913” by William Butler Yeats.

Who leaked the 1925 Irish Boundary Commission report?

In early November 1925 the Irish Boundary Commission concluded a months-long review of the partition between the six unionist counties of Northern Ireland and the 26 nationalist counties of the Irish Free State. Before the commission could present its recommendations, however, the Morning Post in London published a detailed report about its work, including a map that purported to show proposed changes to the border.

Joseph R. Fisher

Journalist and lawyer Joseph Robert Fisher (1855–1939), the Northern Ireland representative of the three-member commission, was “head of the suspects” in the leak to the newspaper, historian Geoffrey J. Hand wrote more than four decades later. The County Down-born Fisher had worked for several British papers, including correspondent for The Times in Ireland during the war of independence (1919–1921). It is unknown whether he passed the Boundary Commission’s work product to the Morning Post, or if this was done indirectly through his correspondence with pro-unionist politicians and loose chatter with Tory journalists.^[1]See Geoffrey J. Hand, “Introduction” in Report of the Irish Boundary Commission, 1925. [Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1969], xviii. Also, “Fisher, Joseph Robert” … Continue reading

Hand speculated “someone of lesser rank” among the commission staff might have been the source of the leak. Contemporary newspapers suggested the Morning Post obtained the report through the printing firm hired to put the material in final presentation form.^[2]”Irish Boundary Crisis Stirred By Newspaper”, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 4, 1925. Regardless of the source, the damage was done. The British and Irish press quickly confirmed the Morning Post’s reporting was substantially correct: the Boundary Commission’s recommendations largely favored unionist.

Notably, the proposed changes did not reassign the border counties of Tyrone and Fermanagh to the Free State, as Irish officials had expected since the Boundary Commission was created as part of the December 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Free State representative Eoin MacNeill resigned from the commission after the leak, though it is believed he originally agreed with its proposals.

The American press was slower to cover the leak and the border controversary. US big city dailies and wire services had moved on from the drama of the Irish war against Britain and subsequent civil war. London-based John W. Owens (1884-1968) of the Baltimore Sun produced some of the best coverage.^[3]Owens later became editor of the Baltimore Sun. He won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. He wrote:

The Irish boundary dispute between the Free State and Ulster now bids fair to become sufficiently complicated and dangerous to satisfy the subtlest Irish combatants or the most inveterate prophets of Irish futility. …

The cause of the latest upheaval is this: On November 7 the Morning Post published a forecast of the Ulster-Free State boundary, which the boundary commission is expected to declare some time before the first of the year (1926). This forecast was favorable to Ulster, which hitherto had been fearing the worst and talking correspondingly at regular intervals.

If one examines the map, as pointed out by the Post, there is nothing in the changes to cause a great row. The space between the old line and the forecast of the new line is seldom really appreciable, often barely perceptible. The net balance of the predicted changes is hardly larger than one good-sized election district in Maryland. But the Free State got the worst of it. More than that, the Post account referred to most of the territory gained by the Free State as wild and sparsely settled.^[4]”League Of Nations May Have To Settle Irish Boundary Spat”, Baltimore Sun, Nov. 25, 1925.

This map of the 1921 border between Northern Ireland (Ulster) and the Irish Free State also showed “probable” and “doubtful” changes proposed by the Irish Boundary Commission. It was leaked to the Morning Post, London, which published the map and narrative descriptions on Nov. 7, 1925.

The Irish-born journalist William H. Brayden (1865–1933), correspondent for the Chicago Daily News, also provided American newspaper readers with extensive coverage of the Boundary Commission, before and after the Morning Post’s scoop. See my earlier exploration of his work:

Emergency meetings between the Free State, Northern Ireland, and the British government were held in London through early December. The three parties agreed to keep the existing border in place, making no changes. The Free State’s obligation for World War One debt and pensions was erased in exchange for dropping its counterclaim of over taxation during the period.

The three parties agreed to suppress the public release of the report, with 20 copies stashed in a British government vault. Other copies were destroyed.^[5]Cormac Moore, “The Boundary Commission–The Fallout” in History Ireland, Vol 33, No. 6 (November/December 20250), pp. 39-42. The report was finally released to the public in 1969, with the introduction by Hand, the historian. He wrote:

Who was responsible for the Morning Post ‘leak’?’ Was it deliberately calculated and, if so, what was the object ? Perhaps, as the years go by and tongues are loosened and desks unlocked, these questions will be confidently answered. As things stand, only suspicions can be offered.^[6]Hand, “Introduction.”

More than 50 years later, the identity of the leaker remains a mystery.

References[+]

References
↑1	See Geoffrey J. Hand, “Introduction” in Report of the Irish Boundary Commission, 1925. [Shannon, Ireland: Irish University Press, 1969], xviii. Also, “Fisher, Joseph Robert” in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.
↑2	”Irish Boundary Crisis Stirred By Newspaper”, Baltimore Sun, Dec. 4, 1925.
↑3	Owens later became editor of the Baltimore Sun. He won the 1937 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.
↑4	”League Of Nations May Have To Settle Irish Boundary Spat”, Baltimore Sun, Nov. 25, 1925.
↑5	Cormac Moore, “The Boundary Commission–The Fallout” in History Ireland, Vol 33, No. 6 (November/December 20250), pp. 39-42.
↑6	Hand, “Introduction.”

Mark Holan's Irish American Blog

Exploring news & history since 2012.

Category Archives: Journalism

‘Trinity’ @ 50 article draws letter to editor

Trump “would love to see” Irish reunification

Leon Uris’s ‘Trinity’ at 50

TCD offers Davitt exhibit onsite & online through June

An American journalist’s connection to Ireland and Egypt

Fact-checking St. Patrick’s desnaking of Ireland

‘America and Ireland at 250’ focus of Feb. 4 Georgetown conference

Best of the Blog, 2025

More on Jill and Leon Uris in Ireland

Who leaked the 1925 Irish Boundary Commission report?

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