Category Archives: Northern Ireland

On 9/11’s 25th, other terrorism, and victims’ memorials

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The ivy-covered, wildflower-strewn grotto with the Virgin Mary statue was expected. The 9/11 memorial was not. I encountered both within a few feet of each other during an early July walk through the grounds of St. Kevin’s Parish Church in Glendalough, County Wicklow.

The simple granite sculpture, seen below, represents the 110-story twin towers of the former World Trade Center in New York City, reduced to rubble after terrorists flew planes into each building 25 years ago. The sculpture was the last creation of Brother Joseph McNally, a County Mayo-born artist who witnessed the towers collapse. He died two weeks before the first anniversary of the attack.[1]Marie Cranley, St. Kevin’s parish secretary, in August 19, 2026, email reply to my outreach. Brother McNally should not be confused with New York-based photographer Joe McNally, who created the … Continue reading

The 9/11 memorial at St. Kevin’s Parish Church in Glendalough, County Wicklow. The front right tablet is shown below. The back right tablet is inscribed IX – XI … 9/11. (Holan 2026)

“This monument marks the tragedy and challenge to peace posed by this event and is located in the context of a path reflecting on the defining choices we make on our journey today,” reads a description on the Glendalough Hermitage Centre website. The retreat center and parish church are joined by a large meditation garden, which contains other pieces by Brother McNally. The famous sixth century monastic ruin is just a mile down the road.

The 9/11 monument reminded me of an earlier trip to Ireland. When I landed in Dublin on September 22, 2001, Irish newspapers were packed with stories about the terrorist attacks. The death toll was still uncertain at the time. It eventually settled at just under 3,000 people killed and upwards of 10,000 injured. Some 4,000 others are said to have died later from injuries and exposure to toxic dust. Eighteen of the victims had Irish citizenship, with seven born on the island of Ireland. Moreover, at least a third of the victims had direct family ties to Ireland, including numerous members of the Fire Department of New York and New York Police Department.[2]“Memories of 9/11 at Home and Abroad”, Irish American Heritage Museum, Albany, NY. Undated web page accessed at https://irish-us.org/events/memories-911-home-and-abroad. Wikipedia says six Irish … Continue reading

One of my first stops was a memorial to victims of the May 1974 Dublin and Monaghan attacks; a one-day series of multiple car bombings in the Irish capital and Northern Ireland border town. The Ulster Volunteer Force, a loyalist paramilitary group during the Troubles, 19 years later claimed responsibility for the carnage. Thirty-three people were killed and nearly 300 injured.

Later, in Derry, Northern Ireland, I visited a memorial to 14 victims of Bloody Sunday, in January 1972, when British troops opened fire on civil rights marchers. It is located near the “Free Derry Corner” of the city’s Bogside neighborhood, better know for its colorful murals that depict the episode and other events of the Troubles. I also attended a hearing of the Saville Inquiry at the Guildhall, the government’s second probe into the bloodshed. The original inquiry, hurriedly conducted in 1972, was widely dismissed as a whitewash.

“We will be here as long as we need to be,” John Kelly, brother of one of the victims, told me. “What’s a couple more years, since we have waited nearly 30 to hopefully get truth and justice.”[3]“Terrorism In Northern Ireland”, Mobile Register, October 28, 2001.

It would take nine more years before the Saville Inquiry produced its damning report. British Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologized for the massacre, telling the House of Commons the killings by British soldiers were “unjustified and unjustifiable.”

Indeed, state actors can also be terrorists, as we see today with the Trump administration’s militarized immigration enforcement and other domestic policing. There’s also a notorious example in Irish history. On the same trip that brought me to St. Kevin’s, I stopped at the Ballyseedy Monument, just outside Tralee, County Kerry. In March 1923, during the Irish Civil War, Irish Free State forces tied eight anti-government fighters to a landmine, detonated it, then finished off the few who survived the blast with machine gun fire.

The Ballyseedy Monument near Tralee, County Kerry. (Holan 2026)

Back in 2001, Kelly told me he was stunned by the airplane attacks in New York and Washington. “It was one of the most horrific acts of terrorism I have witnessed, even if you put it side-by-side to any event that has happened over the last 30 years in our country.”

A few days later I drove to Omagh, also in Northern Ireland. In August 1998 an Irish Republican Army splinter group carried out a car bombing that killed 29 people and injured 220. The post-Good Friday Agreement attack was the deadliest single event of the Troubles, second only to the collective toll of the Dublin and Monaghan bombings. In the grim math of terrorism, the ratio of victims to residents in Omagh, population 17,000, was higher than in New York City, population 8 million.

“People here can relate to what’s happening in America,” David Killen, publisher of a weekly newspaper in Omagh, told me in 2001. “There were people here that had to bury coffins filled with sand bags because they didn’t have a body.”[4]Ibid. Twenty-five years after 9/11, despite advances in DNA technology, there are still no identifiable remains for 40 percent of the victims at the twin towers—1,100 people.[5]“Inside the lab working to identify the remains of 9/11 victims”, NPR report of September 11, 2025, accessed at … Continue reading

The grotto at St. Kevin’s Parish Church, Glendalough. (Holan 2026)

I walked from Killen’s office, past the still rebuilding blast site, to the town’s Memorial Garden on the banks of the River Strule. Tiny US flags and other makeshift remembrances linked the terrorism victims in America to those in Ireland. “Time slips past, but the heartache lasts,” read one handwritten note blurred by the rain. The 9/11 memorial in Glendalough reminded me of that simple truth. It doesn’t matter what violent outrage is being remembered, or how long ago it occurred, or whether it was committed by state or non-state terrorists.

Grottos that commemorate the reported 1858 appearances of the Virgin Mary to the young Bernadette Soubirous at Lourdes, France, are ubiquitious in Ireland; on church grounds such as St. Kevin’s, rural crossroads, and village squares. They are lovelier and more peaceful to consider than memorials to victims of violent terrorism.

In Ireland, there are at least four other 9/11 memorials in addition to Brother McNally’s sculpture. In the United States, the three primary national 9/11 memorials are at the attack sites in New York City, the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. But many dozen more 9/11 memorials are found in American communities, large and small, from coast to coast. You might encounter one when you least expect it.

Lest we forget.

References

References
↑1 Marie Cranley, St. Kevin’s parish secretary, in August 19, 2026, email reply to my outreach. Brother McNally should not be confused with New York-based photographer Joe McNally, who created the “Faces of Ground Zero” exhibit.
↑2 “Memories of 9/11 at Home and Abroad”, Irish American Heritage Museum, Albany, NY. Undated web page accessed at https://irish-us.org/events/memories-911-home-and-abroad. Wikipedia says six Irish nationals died in the attacks.
↑3 “Terrorism In Northern Ireland”, Mobile Register, October 28, 2001.
↑4 Ibid.
↑5 “Inside the lab working to identify the remains of 9/11 victims”, NPR report of September 11, 2025, accessed at https://www.kpbs.org/news/national/2025/09/11/inside-the-lab-working-to-identify-the-remains-of-9-11-victims.

Leon Uris’s ‘Trinity’ at 50

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.

 

Car bombs raise terrorist threats in Northern Ireland

UPDATE:

“No matter ‘how scaled down’ the New IRA is, there will always be dissidents married to the idea of the ‘long war’ and prepared to ‘carry the flame’ of violent republicanism from one generation to the next, regardless of the contrary views of the overwhelming mass of the population.” Nice roundup piece by Gerry Moriarty at the Irish Times. … A 66-year-old man has charged with several crimes in the Dunmurry episode.

ORIGINAL POST:

An April 25 car bomb explosion outside the Dunmurry, Northern Ireland, police station appears similar to an attempted attack on the Lurgan police station in March. The bomb did not explode in the earlier episode.  No one has been killed or injured.

Nationalist and unionist political leaders have condemed both episodes, which are being blamed on dissident Irish republicans. Whether the attacks signal a new upsurge in paramilitary violence remains to be seen. The annual tensions of the unionist community’s marching season and bonfires begin in two months.

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

Ireland’s 1926 census released to the public

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

—

More than 700,000 digitized pages of 1926 Irish Free State census return sheets have been released by the National Archives of Ireland. The sheets show names and individualized details such as religion, education, and occupation. They are a gold mine for historians and genealogists.

I located my relations in less than a minute. Begin your search here.

January 1926 US newspaper headline over Hearst story about census on both sides of the Irish border.

The 1926 census was the first headcount in Ireland since 1911. The 15-year stretch included the First World War (1914-1918), Irish War of Independence (1919-1921), and Irish Civil War (1922-1923).

“Matters were too disturbed in the country from one end to the other in 1921–the date of the last British census–for such an operation to be possible at all in Ireland,” Hearst’s International News Service explained to American newspaper readers in a January 1926 story. The return of the census signaled “another hopeful sign of the better relations between the long divided sections of Ireland, growing out of the amicable settlement of the boundary dispute, that they can agree to take their censuses on the same day, that is engage in the peaceful pursuit of counting heads instead of breaking them.”[1]”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

Continue reading →

References

References
↑1 ”Irish Census To Be Completed Soon”, New Castle (Pa.) News, Jan. 20, 1926, and other papers.

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.”

Catherine Connolly inaugurated Ireland’s 10th president

Catherine Connolly has described her 64 percent election victory as “a powerful mandate” by Irish voters “to articulate their vision for a new Republic”; one that is not, as some critics charged during the campaign, “too far out, too left.”

Catherine Connolly at inaugural.

Connolly’s Nov. 11 inauguration as the tenth president of Ireland took place in St. Patrick’s Hall at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British government in Ireland until 1922. The position of president was created by the national constitution of 1937. Connolly is the third woman to hold to position. She acknowledged Mary Robinson and Mary McAleese, who were both in attendance.

Connolly said she and her supporters overcame “insurmountable challenges” to win the Oct. 24 election. She continued:

We were led to believe that it was too great a leap, that our ideas were too far out, too left, at odds with the prevailing narrative. In shared conversations all over the country, however, it became evident that the dominant narrative did not reflect or represent people’s values and concerns. Time and time again, people spoke of how it served to silence, to other, to label, to exclude and to stifle critical thinking.

Along with that however, along with meaningful engagement, we saw the emergence of hope, we saw the emergence of joy, along with the courage and determination of people to use their voices to shape a country that we can be proud of.

Connolly’s vision for the Republic is a place where “diversity is cherished, where sustainable solutions are urgently implemented and where a home is a fundamental human right.” Ireland faces significant challenges regarding immigration (and right-wing opposition to it), climate change, and a shortfall of affordable housing.

Connolly has said she would like her first official visit as president to be to Northern Ireland.

“I would like to see a united Ireland in my term as president. I will use my voice in every way possible for that vision to be a reality,” Connolly said during her campaign, according to the Irish Independent.

In brief comments during her inauguration address, she called for “inclusive and open dialogue across the island in a manner that highlights and recognizes our similarities and respects our differences.”

Northern Ireland Assembly First Minister Michelle O’Neill of the pro-reunification Sinn Féin party, and party president Mary Lou McDonald, attended the ceremony. Their support was critical to Connolly, who campaigned as an independent.

Emma Little-Pengelly, deputy first minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly and a member of the Democratic Unionist Party, declined to attend the inaugural. She cited earlier commitments for Remembrance Day, which commemorates the armistice ending the First World War. The DUP declined to send a representative to the inauguration. Ulster Unionist Party assembly member (MLA) Steve Aiken was the only unionist politician who said he would attend.

Connolly acknowledged Ireland’s “large and growing diaspora.” She did not directly reference the United States.

Read Connolly’s full inaugural speech.

Nine and ten: Outgoing Irish President Michael D. Higgins on Nov. 5 welcomed President-elect Catherine Connolly to her new office at Áras an Uachtaráin.  Both photos from president.ie.

When Jill and Leon Uris went to Ireland

Fifty years ago this month the American book publisher Doubleday released Ireland: A Terrible Beauty, by Jill and Leon Uris. The couple had traveled on both sides of the partitioned island from May 1972 (four months after Bloody Sunday) to January 1973.

Original dusk jacket.

Leon, an established author, conducted research for a new novel, Trinity, which became a best seller when it was released in 1976. Jill, his third wife, 23 years younger, photographed nearly 400 images of thatched cottages, mist-shrouded countryside, and gritty scenes of urban violence; in color, and in black and white.

Their Preface says:

“We were lured there by an intriguing people, their sometimes magnificent, sometimes harsh land, and, mostly, their poignant history. Our aim was to find the keys to that story which would clarify so much of the mystery and puzzlement of recent events and simultaneously photograph everyone and everything wherever the search took us. …

“Ireland is too vast and complex in its story for two people to cover it comprehensively in less than a decade. We made no pretense at attempting to.

“What we do have here is a social, historical, and political commentary on what we consider to be the guts of the matter of a unique people and their lovely but sorrowed island. This is our point of view on the “troubles” that have plagued Ireland for the fatter part of a millennium.”[1]Leon Uris and Jill Uris, Ireland: A Terrible Beauty. The Story  of Ireland Today (With 388 Photographs, Including 108 in Full Color). [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975]. … Continue reading

The couple covered 10,000 miles, mostly by auto, “on some decent and some indecent roads.” Their journey and their book recalled American photographer and antiquarian Wallace Nutting, who estimated he and his wife covered 700 miles in all 32 counties 50 years earlier, during the summer of 1925. Nutting’s book, Ireland Beautiful, was published in time for that year’s Christmas gift-giving. It featured 304 half-tone engravings of Irish landscapes—only six images show people—and his text in support of the title.

From his studio near Boston, Nutting wrote:

“This volume pretends to no place as a guide book, nor is its text intended to cover with precision or fullness any part of Ireland. It is merely a record of impression of beauty or quaintness, observed in a land which for romance and pathos, strange history and legend, for witching grace and mystery, is probably unsurpassed.”[2]Wallace Nutting, Ireland Beautiful. [Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1925]. 302 pp. Quoted from Foreword.

Though he began his career as a Congregationalist minister, Nutting insisted his book had “nothing whatever to do with political and religious matters.” He noted the work of the Boundary Commission, which later in 1925 fixed the partition line in place, and made sweeping, uncontroversial generalizations: “The people of Ulster were as insistent on remaining in the empire as South Ireland was on withdrawing from the empire.”[3]Ibid., 286.

For more on Nutting, see my August 2025 piece for History Ireland, “Ireland Beautiful–How A 1925 American Photobook Boosted Irish Tourism.”

More opinionated

Leon Uris was more opinionated in his analysis of an Ireland then descending deeper into sectarian strife, rather than the island emerging from the war of independence and civil war at Nutting’s visit. During the Uris’s nine-month stay, more than 400 people were killed and thousands of others were injured in shootings and bombings. More than 500 people were charged with terrorist offences. “Their visit coincided with one of the most violent years of the Troubles,” wrote biographer Ira B. Nadel.[4]Ira B. Nadel, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010], See Chapter 9, “Ireland,” 209-232.

Uris leveraged his identity as an American Jew, not an Irish-American of Catholic or Protestant faith, as well as his status as a celebrity author. He took particular aim at “the most diabolic by-product of three hundred and fifty years of the plantation of Ulster, a cancerous growth known as Paisleyism.” Grimly, he concluded: “The nightmare of Ulster has come about with Christian fighting Christian in one of the most advanced of Western societies. Continuation of this travesty with God can lead to the eclipse of civilization in that part of the world.”[5]Uris, Terrible Beauty, 128, 195.

The Troubles got much worse, of course, but not quite that bad.

By coincidence, Terrible Beauty’s November 1975 release was three months after the death of Éamon de Valera, the most consequential leader of twentieth century Ireland. The book says he “had the full measure of that detached, ruthless arrogance, political guile, persuasiveness, and total self-assurance that stamp greatness on a national leader. He was the rarest breed, the head of a small country that has achieved stature among the political giants of this century.”[6]Ibid., 162.

Photographing Ireland

Dev’s death ends the book’s 8-page chronology, which begins at 10,000 BC when the island emerged from the receding Ice Age. Naturally, the book included a map and, like the island itself, was divided into two sections: The Republic and Ulster.

“Photographing in the Republic was almost always a joy. Ulster was another story,” Jill Uris wrote. She described the difficulties of working as a woman and an outsider in the sectarian maelstrom of the North. Her “Photographing Ireland” in the Appendix also contains notes about the pre-digital camera equipment she used during the assignment.[7]Ibid., 209-212

Aside from the images of sectarian violence in the North, most of Jill’s photographs show a mid-twentieth century Ireland without much hint of the rapid modernization that emerged in the coming decades, and certainly since 2000. In this regard her images of the country are similar to those of American photographer Dorothea Lange, who arrived in County Clare in September 1954 on an assignment for Life magazine. See my September 2024 post, “Remembering Dorothea Lange’s ‘Irish Country People’“.

I’ll return to my exploration of the Uris’s visit and their work in future posts.

References

References
↑1 Leon Uris and Jill Uris, Ireland: A Terrible Beauty. The Story  of Ireland Today (With 388 Photographs, Including 108 in Full Color). [Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1975]. 288 pp.
↑2 Wallace Nutting, Ireland Beautiful. [Norwood, Mass.: The Plimpton Press, 1925]. 302 pp. Quoted from Foreword.
↑3 Ibid., 286.
↑4 Ira B. Nadel, Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller. [Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010], See Chapter 9, “Ireland,” 209-232.
↑5 Uris, Terrible Beauty, 128, 195.
↑6 Ibid., 162.
↑7 Ibid., 209-212

On Pope Leo, King Charles, and Soldier F

As voters in the Republic of Ireland selected a new president, two news stories with deep connections to Northern Ireland also made headlines this month:

  • Britain’s King Charles III prayed with Pope Leo XIV at the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, the first joint worship of the English monarch and the Catholic pontiff since King Henry VIII broke away from Rome in 1534.
  • “Soldier F,” a former member of the British Parachute Regiment, was found not guilty of murder and attempted murder for Bloody Sunday, 1972, in Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland.

As king, Charles is also supreme governor of the Church of England. He has met previous popes, but never prayed with them in public. “This would have been impossible just a generation ago,” Anglican Rev. James Hawkey, canon theologian of Westminster Abbey, told Reuters. “It represents how far our churches have come over the last 60 years of dialogue.”

Pope Leo and King Charles in the Sistine Chapel. Photo www.royal.uk.

In Northern Ireland, however, some Orangemen turned red with rage. “A sad day for Protestantism,” the fraternal group said. Rev. Kyle Paisley, son of the late unionist leader Ian Paisley, and other Protestant clergy condemned the visit. Paisley even suggested that Charles should abdicate the throne.

In 1988 Paisley’s father infamously interrupted Pope John Paul II during the pontiff’s address to the European Parliament. “I denounce you, antichrist. I refuse you as Christ’s enemy and antichrist with all your false doctrine,” shouted Paisley, firebrand founder of the Free Presbyterian Church. It was hardly his only anti-Catholic stunt.

Of course, religious prejudice can cut both ways. Defeated Irish presidential candidate Heather Humphreys, an Ulster Presbyterian whose husbanded once belonged to the Orange Order, told the Irish Times that she and her family “were subjected to some absolutely awful sectarian abuse” during the campaign.

Most people in Northern Ireland seem to have accepted the rapprochement between Leo and Charles with a shrug. Not that we are likely to see Belfast “Kick the Pope” bands suddenly replaced by ecumenical choirs. Sectarianism waxes and wanes, but it seldom disappears.

Bloody Sunday verdict

Thirteen people were shot dead and at least 15 others injured Jan. 30, 1972, at a civil rights demonstration in the Bogside area of Derry. Fifty-three years later Judge Patrick Lynch of the Belfast Crown Court said members of the Parachute Regiment “totally lost all sense of military discipline” and shot “unarmed civilians fleeing from them on the streets of a British city,” according to reporting by the BBC.

The 1972 civil rights demonstration in Derry, Northern Ireland, that became Bloody Sunday.

But the evidence against Soldier F, whose anonymity is protected by a court order, fell short of what is required for conviction, Judge Lynch ruled in the non-jury trial.

Reaction to the decision was predictably split along the usual republican and unionist lines. “Deeply disappointing” and “continued denial of justice”, said First Minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin. Democratic Unionist Party leader Gavin Robinson welcomed the “common sense judgement”, but said the trial had been “a painful and protracted process,” according to BBC.

The US-based Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Catholic fraternal group, issued a statement saying it was “saddened but not surprised” by the acquittal. “As we have for decades, the AOH will support the Bloody Sunday families as they take the next steps in their fight for justice, and we will stand with all victims’ relatives as they continue their fight for legacy truth.”

In 2010, then British Prime Minister David Cameron formally apologized for Bloody Sunday. The judges verdict is unlikely to be the last word on the matter, which has become the life’s work of the victims’ surviving family members and others on one side, with British veterans groups and hardline unionists on the other.

See my 2022 History News Network piece on the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday.

On press reports of Ireland’s ‘first’ president, 1938

(My next post will be the eve of the election, Oct. 23, with updates through election day until the winner is announced, probably Oct. 25 or 26. MH)

Irish voters on Oct. 24 will elect the country’s tenth president under the constitution their ancestors adopted in 1937. Irish language scholar Douglas Hyde was nominated as the first president in 1938 by the country’s two main political parties, avoiding a contested election.

“Not a word of English was spoken at the inauguration of the Protestant as the head of the Catholic state,” the Associated Press reported to American newspaper readers. Americans in several markets such as New York/New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C. also were able to listen to a radio broadcast of the Irish language inaugural from Dublin.[1]”Dr. Hyde Inducted As Irish President”, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 28, 1938, and other papers. Radio program listings in multiple papers.

Statue of Douglas Hyde in Co. Roscommon.

Nine of every 10 Irish citizens in 1938 were Catholic, and many aspects of the country’s political and social life were certainly influenced by the Church. But the new constitution that began to transform the 26 counties of southern Ireland from the Irish Free State, created in 1922 as a dominion of the United Kingdom, “did not declare Catholicism the state religion, to the disappointment of my zealous Catholics.” The 1937 constitution also did not declare an Irish republic, though the document defined the state as having 32 counties.[2]Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland. [New York: Overlook Press, 2005], 369-70.

Some American news analysts framed Hyde’s selection as an olive branch to the six partitioned counties of North Ireland, which was roughly two thirds Protestant at the time.[3]In 1937, 30.5 % Presbyterian; 27% Church of Ireland; 4.7% Methodist. “Breakdown of population in Northern Ireland according to Religion, 1861-1991” at CAIN Archive. Catholics now outnumber … Continue reading But Hyde’s ascendance to the new figure head position of president did not reassure northern hardliners. The Ulster Unionist Party of Sir James Craig solidified its hold on power in the north during an election earlier in 1938. The Anglo-Irish Trade Agreement of that year, which ended a five-year dispute over tariffs and transferred control of several naval ports from Britain to Ireland, further reinforced northern recalcitrance.

Hyde’s religious affiliation was not the only thing that made him an unconventional choice. “Politicians usually want a practical man as the head of the state, but Dr. Hyde is a poet,” observed Milton Bronner of the Newspaper Enterprise Association. “The dominant cry in Europe is for young men as leaders, but the Irish chose Dr. Hyde, who is 78.”[4]”Aged Poet, ‘Enemy of None,’ To Be President of Ireland”, Pittsburgh Press, June 5, 1938, and other papers. For more on Bronner, see my post: “Could Maine potatoes have … Continue reading

Bronner’s analysis and other American press reports about Hyde’s inauguration noted his 1906-07 tour of the United States to raise money and awareness for the Gaelic League. These same stories mention that Eamon de Valera, as taoiseach, or prime minister, continued to hold the real political power in southern Ireland. But I have not found any American coverage that recounted de Valera’s 1919-20 U.S. tour as “president of the Irish republic.”

De Valera in 1937.

No such position or country formally existed at the time. De Valera’s real title was Príomh Aire, the chief minister or president of Dáil Éireann; the separatist parliament established in January 1919 by Sinn Féin candidates who won Irish constituencies in the December 1918 British general election. The title of president of Ireland was bestowed on de Valera by Irish American supporters to more easily convey his leadership position to American audiences.

In 1938, at least one letter to the editor writer in Ireland questioned the new title of Irish president, even if the American press missed the historical irony. The Dublin writer noted not only that de Valera had declared himself president in 1919, but also that Pádraic Pearse made the same claim at the 1916 Easter Rising. “Apparently we are now expected to forget that the Irish republic ever existed, or that the blood of Ireland’s greatest men was shed in its defense, and to regard the history of Ireland as commencing on the date of the enactment of de Valera’s new constitution.”[5]”President of Ireland” in “Our Readers’ Views On Topics Of The Day”, Irish Independent, June 27, 1938.

Afterward:

  • Full republic status came to the 26 counties of southern Ireland in 1949. The 1937 constitution’s claim on a 32-county state was amended in 1998 as part of the Good Friday Agreement.
  • De Valera transitioned from taoiseach to president in 1959. He held the latter position until 1973.
  • The Irish Times has ranked Hyde as second best among the nine presidents of Ireland, with de Valera placed at seventh. See their list.

The two candidates vying for the Irish presidency later this month are Catherine Connolly, who was raised Catholic but describers herself as areligious, and Heather Humphreys, a Presbyterian by religious affiliation who describes her politics as moderate Irish republicanism rather than Protestant unionism. Connolly is a fluent Irish speaker, while Humphrey struggles with the language. As mentioned in the previous post, whoever wins the election will become Ireland’s third woman president.

References

References
↑1 ”Dr. Hyde Inducted As Irish President”, Philadelphia Inquirer, June 28, 1938, and other papers. Radio program listings in multiple papers.
↑2 Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland. [New York: Overlook Press, 2005], 369-70.
↑3 In 1937, 30.5 % Presbyterian; 27% Church of Ireland; 4.7% Methodist. “Breakdown of population in Northern Ireland according to Religion, 1861-1991” at CAIN Archive. Catholics now outnumber Protestants in Northern Ireland by 45.7% to 43.5%.
↑4 ”Aged Poet, ‘Enemy of None,’ To Be President of Ireland”, Pittsburgh Press, June 5, 1938, and other papers. For more on Bronner, see my post: “Could Maine potatoes have relieved Irish hunger in 1925?“
↑5 ”President of Ireland” in “Our Readers’ Views On Topics Of The Day”, Irish Independent, June 27, 1938.