McGuinness resignation sparks range of opinion

As the surprise resignation of Martin McGuinness from the Northern Ireland Executive continues to unspool, opinion writers in Belfast, Dublin and London have offered a range of analysis. Here’s a sample:

Martin McGuinness has earned sympathy and respect
Fionnuala O Connor in The Irish News, nationalist.

Though it stuck in many craws to admit it initially and could never have converted some, the man known first as an IRA leader of clinical ruthlessness became an able front-of-house performer. …  Sinn Féin’s best northern performer by some distance has carried too much expectation for too long. His departure ahead of Gerry Adams, now an uncertain performer who does more harm than good, is a blow to the party.

McGuinness letter of resignation was steeped in sanctimony
Belfast Newsletter, unionist.

Martin McGuinness has travelled a long way since his days as an IRA commander. Not only did he agree to share power at a Stormont parliament under the ultimate sovereignty of the UK, he has even at times seemed to be a moderate and pragmatic power at the top of Sinn Fein during previous crises such as over welfare reform. But a self-righteous, hypocritical and objectionable side to the outgoing deputy first minister was on display yesterday.

From IRA commander to political reconciler – the changing faces of Martin McGuinness, Belfast Telegraph, centrist.

McGuinness has an air of innocence about him, an almost childlike gladness in his nature, and yet he is the man who led the hard men. Many of his former comrades are so appalled by the incongruity, the mismatch between the reconciler and the old soldier that they no longer believe he was ever really on their side. He went further in his efforts to reassure unionists than they did in any effort to placate nationalism and republicanism.

Martin McGuinness’s departure represents failure on all sides, Newton Emerson in The Irish Times, Dublin.

McGuinness may be leaving office with his dignity intact, and many in Sinn Féin will relish the firmer line to come, but his departure still represents failure for all sides in Northern Ireland. Once again, unionists are about to be taught the lesson they never learn: deal with nationalism now, or get a worse deal later.

McGuinness has gone. Stability in Northern Ireland may go with him
Malachi O’Doherty in The Guardian, London.

…there is a high price to be paid for bringing down Stormont and forcing the British to restore direct rule. An obvious one is that the inquiry into the lavishly funded heating scheme will not now take place. McGuinness may have scuppered the very thing he was demanding.

T. K. Whitaker, Irish economist, dies at 100

Thomas Kenneth Whitaker, described as “the most influential public servant” in the history of the Republic of Ireland, died 9 January, a month and a day after his 100th birthday. Born eight months after the Easter Rising, a boy at the time of partition, the County Down native also was involved in Northern Ireland issues.

Read The Irish Times obituary, and “supreme mandarin and good citizen” column by Fintan O’Toole. Video below released for his 100th birthday.

McGuinness resignation sparks Northern Ireland turmoil

UPDATE:

McGuinness is expected to make a second announcement 10 January about whether or not he will seek office again in the expected fresh election triggered by his resignation. Reporting from The Guardian.

ORIGINAL POST:

Martin McGuinness is to resign as Deputy First Minister of the Northern Ireland Executive in protest at the Democratic Unionist Party’s handling of a botched renewable energy scheme, The Irish Times and other media report 9 January. The Sinn Féin politician’s move is likely to lead to a snap Assembly election.

Obama will return to Ireland in ‘coming year or so’

Outgoing President Barack Obama will return to the Republic of Ireland “in the coming year or so,” according to U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Kevin O’Malley. “The last sentence the president said to me … [4 January] when we were saying goodbye, was ‘please tell them I’m coming’,” O’Malley told RTÉ host Marian Finucane.

While the location or context of his return is less clear than the timing, Obama is generally popular in Ireland. His May 2011 visit included a stop in Moneygall, County Offaly, the ancestral home of his great-great-great grandfather.

Since then, a service plaza was erected in Obama’s honor on the M7 motorway just outside the village. In addition to petrol and fast food, the place is packed with Obama souvenirs, plus memorabilia of popular presidents Bill Clinton and John F. Kennedy. In a contemporary sense, it might be the most Irish-American spot in all of Ireland, through certainly not the most scenic or historic.

Barack Obama in Moneygall in 2011.

Obama, who also visited Northern Ireland in June 2013 for a G8 summit, leaves office 20 January, the inaugural of President-elect Donald Trump, who owns a golf resort in Doonbeg, County Clare. O’Malley will leave his Dublin post a few days earlier due to a demanded from the incoming administration that all non-career ambassadors depart immediately.

IrishCentral, citing a tweet from New York Times writer Maggie Haberman, reports the next U.S. Ambassador to Ireland will be philanthropist and businessman Brian Burns, the grandson of an emigrant from Sneem, County Kerry.  Burns, 80, and his wife, Eileen, have been close friends of Trump through the Palm Beach and Mar-A-Lago connection.

O’Malley, a St. Louis trial lawyer whose grandparents emigrated from County Mayo in the early 20th century, was appointed by Obama in June 2014 after a record-setting 18-month gap following the departure former ambassador and Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney.

Irish passport applications surged in 2016

Ireland issued a record 733,060 passports in 2016, a 9 percent increase over the previous year.

The growth was fueled in part by a 40.6 percent jump in passport applications from Great Britain, to 64,996, and 26.5 percent bump from Northern Ireland, to 67,972.

These increases are largely attributed to “Brexit,” the June 2016 vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. (A majority of voters in Northern Ireland wanted to remain in the EU.) There are other reasons behind the overall surge in passport applications, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Charlie Flanagan TD, said in 5 January release.

“There was a strong increase in demand for passports in the first half of the year,” he said. “This was due to a variety of factors including the fact that more Irish people traveled in the first half of the year; we also had the Euros Championships and a historical spike in applications from 2006 feeding through in the 10-year renewal cycle.”

An Irish passport confers the holder with travel and work privileges within the 27-nation EU, which the UK is now figuring out how to leave. People born in any of Ireland’s 32 counties, north or south, or those with a parent or grandparent born on the island, are eligible to apply for a passport from the Republic.

The Irish Consulate in New York had the highest single demand for passports, issuing 7,205 in 2016.  It was closely followed by Canberra, Australia, San Francisco and Sydney.

“I expect this trend to continue in the coming years,” Flanagan said.

Thanks for reading the blog

As the holidays close and we begin walking the footpath of the new year, I want to thank the readers and supporters of this blog. In 2016, annual traffic increased by 71 percent compared to 2015, and average daily views were up 53 percent. The numbers behind those percentages are small compared to commercial sites, but I appreciate everyone’s support, especially those of you who have subscribed via email.

In 2017, I expect to publish my 500th post about the time the blog reaches its fifth anniversary in late July. I’ve also created a new Facebook home: https://www.facebook.com/markholan.org/.

This year, I’ll cover such contemporary issues as the effort to reunify the island of Ireland before the 2021 centennial of partition, attempts to overturn the abortion ban, and most likely a new national election in the Republic. As with my New Year’s Day post about Ellis Island, I’ll continue to delve into historical anniversaries, including the July 1917 election of Éamon de Valera’ to Parliament and becoming president of Sinn Féin, and America’s entry into World War I.

Thanks again for joining me.

Maynooth, County Kildare, July 2016.

 

 

Ellis Island, Annie Moore and other Irish news of 1892

Happy New Year!  Today is the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Ellis Island immigration center in New York. Cork teenager Annie Moore, joined by two younger brothers, was the first immigrant to enter this busy portal to America. She stepped off a steamship gangplank and into the massive building, where she was greeted by U.S. government officials.

The “rosy-cheeked Irish girl” was handed a $10 gold piece in a brief ceremony scaled back from earlier plans for a “pretentious opening,” The New York Times reported. Her arrival in America also was noted a few days later in a one-paragraph brief on page 2 of the Irish Examiner.

The attention didn’t last long.

“Annie may have stepped off the boat and into American legend—the first of 12 million to pass through Ellis Island in its 62 years of operation—but as an actual person she seemed to dissolve the minute she reached Manhattan,” Jesse Green wrote in this 2010 New York magazine piece that explores the fact and fiction of the popular immigration story.

The Times story that helped make Annie a legend also reported that Ellen King, “on her way from Waterford, Ireland, to a small town in Minnesota,” was the first to purchase a railroad ticket at Ellis Island. And it hinted ominously of detained immigrants placed “in a wire-screened inclosure (sic).”

The arrival of these immigrants at Ellis Island was not the only Ireland-related news reported by the Times in the first days of January 1892. Other stories included:

  • The  wreck of the schooner Catherine Richards off the coast of county Kerry on 29 December 1891, killing six crew.  The sailing vessel was carrying a cargo of grain from Africa to Limerick.
  • The 31 December 1891, explosion at Dublin Castle, two months after the death of Charles Stuart Parnell, which stirred “whisperings that the ‘physical force’ party were tired of their enforced inactivity and had given up all hope of Ireland gaining her independence through Parliamentary agitation.”
  • The pending U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn the Supreme Court of Nebraska and allow James E. Boyd to become governor of the state. Boyd was born county Tyrone in 1834 and emigrated to America 10 years later with his family. Boyd’s father applied for U.S. citizenship in Ohio but never completed the process, later moving the family to Nebraska, where his son become involved in business and politics. Once Boyd won the 1890 governor’s contest, outgoing Gov. John M. Thayer challenged his citizenship and refused to yield the office. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that Boyd and other residents of Nebraska gained citizenship when the state joined the union in 1867.

Five years after opening, the Ellis Island center that welcomed Annie Moore burned to the ground in a massive fire that also consumed 40 year of federal and state immigration records. It is the replacement building opened in December 1900 that became the iconic symbol of U.S. immigration through 1954. This is where my Kerry-born maternal grandmother and grandfather arrived in 1912 and 1913, respectively. Today, it operates as the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration.

The original immigration center at Ellis Island, top, opened New Year’s Day, 1892. It burned to the ground five years later. It was replaced by the iconic building, below, that is now a national museum of immigration.

Irish history under the Christmas tree

Santa brought me three new Irish history books for Christmas. Two are 2007 titles about late 19th and early 20th century republican political agitation, which came from my wish list. The third book, selected by my wife, covers a range of topics from the 16th to 21st century.

The Princeton History of Modern Ireland 
Edited by Richard Bourke & Ian McBride:

The book is divided into two sections, described by Bourke in the Introduction:

Part 1 contains six overarching narrative chapters dealing with the main developments in society and politics throughout the period covered by the book. The aim here is to present readers with an up-to-date rendition of the course of Irish history. Part 2 then focuses on topics and themes that played a peculiarly important role in the shaping of that trajectory. These chapters range from exercises in intellectual, cultural, and literary history to analyses of formatively significant subjects like religion, nationalism, empire, and gender.

The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood, from the Land League to Sinn Féin
By Owen McGee

This title won the 2009 NUI Centennial Prize for Irish History. McGee “argues that [the IRB] was never primarily an insurrectionary conspiracy; rather it was a popular fraternal organization and propagandistic body, committed to bringing about popular politicization in Ireland along republican lines,” according to publisher Four Courts Press.

Michael Davitt: freelance radical and frondeur
By Laurence Marley

Another title from Four Court Press. In a review for History Ireland, Seán O’Brien described the book as:

…the first substantial biography of Michael Davitt in 25 years and the only book to deal with all of the roles he assumed in public life. It presents Davitt as an ad hoc activist temporarily allied with a number of different movements but ultimately unable to maintain a lasting connection with any of them. Examining the details of the principled positions that led to his alienation from the Irish Republican Brotherhood, the Parnellites, British labour and the House of Commons, the book makes a strong case for Davitt’s role as a kind of radical consultant, compelled to struggle by his ethical principles but unable to suppress them enough to remain loyal to an organisation.

 

Best of the Blog, 2016

The centennial of the 1916 Easter Rising and my sixth trip to Ireland made this a great year for the blog. Major elections in Ireland, the U.S. and the U.K. also produced outcomes that will have significant impacts for years to come. And there were other historical anniversaries and interesting contemporary developments. So let’s get right to the annual wrap-up:

Elections of 2016

  • In February, the national election in the Republic of Ireland ended in what Irish Times columnist Una Mullally described as a “weird, fractured, all-over-the-place result.” … In my ancestral home of County Kerry, brothers Michael and Danny Healy-Rae, both independents, took the top two of five seats in polling that ousted Fine Gael Minister of Diaspora Jimmy Deenihan and others. … It took until late April for Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil to reach a deal on forming a new minority government coalition.
  • A May vote on all 108 seats of the Northern Ireland Assembly resulted in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and [nationalist] Sinn Féin remaining the two largest blocks, “while newer parties running on nicher subjects with no connection to Northern Ireland’s traditional religious divide are rapidly rising,” the London-based New Statesman said. … Children born just before or after the April 1998 Good Friday Agreement began to turn 18 in 2016 and enter the electorate. 
  • In June, United Kingdom voters decided to leave the European Union by a margin of 52 percent to 48 percent, while the Northern Ireland electorate favored remaining in the E.U. by 56 percent to 44 percent. The so-called “Brexit” raises a number of tough questions about border controls with the Republic and the northern peace process. It has stirred talk of reuniting the island of Ireland, allowing the six northern counties to remain in the E.U. by joining the Republic.
  • For the second consecutive U.S. presidential election  cycle, two Irish-American candidates vied for the number two job. … Donald Trump’s victory drew harsh criticism from many Irish and Northern Irish political pundits as “America’s Brexit.” … Trump invited Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the White House for St Patrick’s Day in 2017, continuing a tradition that dates to 1952. Aside from the photo op, however, there are serious issues to discuss, such as the tax conditions of U.S. businesses operating in Ireland and Irish immigration.

The entrance of Trump’s Doonbeg golf course in County Clare with U.S., Irish and Trump flags.

Rising centennial

  • Sunday, 24 April was the calendar centennial of the start of the 1916 Easter Rising. It also was Census Day in Ireland, which revealed a changing, modernizing country. … The 100th anniversary generated plenty of opinions and interpretations in Ireland, the U.K., the U.S. and throughout the world.
  • I produced more than a dozen stories about 1916, including a five-part series on U.S.-Irish relations; Q & A style interviews with an Irish film producer and a U.S. archivist; and other original features. This work is gathered into the new 1916-2016 section of the blog.

Books about 1916 on the shelves at Eason & Son on O’Connell Street next to the General Post Office, epicenter of the rebellion. July 2016.

Other news and features

  • Irish tourism continued to grow in 2016, fueled in part by 1916 centennial. Fáilte Ireland suggested the market needs to continue “offering more compelling and authentic branded visitor experiences rather than relying on a hazy green image and warm welcome.” … In July, I visited the new, interactive Epic Ireland emigration museum in Dublin, then later contrasted it with the stalled effort to open an Irish American Museum in Washington, D.C. … I also visited Titanic Belfast, which was named the world’s leading tourist attraction for 2016. … For those considering a trip to Ireland, I published travel suggestions based on my visit. … I also introduced a new section of the blog featuring U.S. museums, libraries, cultural centers and programs devoted to Irish ancestry and contemporary connections.
  • 2016 was the 75th anniversary of the Belfast Blitz. … It also was a Leap Year, which marked the 128th (or only the 32nd) anniversary of the opening of the Listowel & Ballybunion Railway, a personal interest of mine, on 29 February 1888.
  • New York drug maker Pfizer and Dublin-based Allergan called off their proposed $160 billion merger after the U.S. Treasury Department announced new steps to curb tax-avoiding maneuvers called “inversions.” … The European Union’s antitrust commission ordered Ireland to collect €13 billion ($14.5 billion) of back taxes from tech giant Apple.
  • “Revolution in Color,” a 90-minute documentary told Ireland’s struggle for independence from Home Rule to Civil War through beautifully colorized archive newsreel and photos. … “The Journey,” a new film about the unlikely Northern Ireland peace partnership between Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and the late unionist firebrand Rev. Ian Paisley, debuted to dreadful reviews. … Sonder Visuals produced a montage of drone-captured images of Ireland–rural and urban, natural and built–that fly past as quickly as the many voices (and dialects) that describe living there.

Freelance stories

In 2016, I published three Irish stories outside of the blog:

Guest posts:

I was pleased to welcome several guest bloggers this year, including:

I appreciate their contributions and encourage other readers to contact me for future guest posts.

Departed in 2016

  • Alan Rickman, British actor who portrayed Éamon de Valera, at 69.
  • Sir Terry Wogan, Limerick-born star of the BBC, at 77.
  • John McLaughlin, former Jesuit priest, speechwriter for President Richard M. Nixon and conservative provocateur, at 89.
  • Dr. Edward Daly, former Bishop of Derry, at 82. In an iconic photograph from “Bloody Sunday” in January 1972, he waved a blood-stained handkerchief ahead of a group of injured civil rights protesters as they tried to pass through British troops.
  • William Trevor, novelist and short story writer, at 88.

From the Archive:

View of the coast at County Kerry .

Christmas and New Year message from Ireland

Irish President Michael D. Higgins highlights the plight of migrants in global trouble spots such as Syria in his annual Christmas and New Year message.

“The circumstances of the birth of Christ, with its forced migration, homelessness and powerlessness, are being re-enacted for us the world over, in the conditions of migrants – including infants and children – as they wait, not knowing what the future will hold for them,” Higgins says.

His message also gives a final node to this year’s 1916 Easter Rising centennial.

“We commemorated how one hundred years ago a small group of women and men set in train a series of events that ultimately led to an independent State. In doing so, we celebrated elements of our past that can provide us with a lasting source of pride and confidence, as well as a compass for the future. We also reflected on aspects of our history that had been forgotten, evaded or even downplayed.”