Kathleen Daly was born in Limerick, the third daughter of Edward and Catherine Daly. She was born into a prominent Fenian family. Her paternal uncle, John Daly, a subsequent Mayor of Limerick, was at the time imprisoned for his political activities in Chatham and Portland Prisons in England. Her uncle was released in 1896 and […]
Oliver Sheppard was born in Cookstown, Co Tyrone. After his birth the family moved to Dublin, and he studied at the Metropolitan School of Art. He won a scholarship to the South Kensington Art School, where he studied from 1889 to 1891 before spending a year in Paris. He taught in Leicester and Nottingham. When […]
Civil war was now a virtual certainty as the delegates adopted a new constitution and elected a new 16-member Executive composed of the following members: Liam Lynch (Cork), Frank Barrett (Clare), Liam Deasy (Cork), Tom Hales (Cork), Tom Maguire (Mayo), Joseph McKelvey (Belfast), Liam Mellows (Galway), Rory O’Connor (Dublin), Peadar O’Donnell (Donegal), Florence O’Donoghue (Cork), […]
Leslie de Barra (née Price) was an Irish nationalist active during the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence and the Civil War, becoming Director of Cumann na mBan. She went on to be Chairman and President of the Irish Red Cross. Born Leslie Mary Price in Dublin in 1893 to Michael and Mary […]
James Napper Tandy was born in the Cornmarket area of Dublin in 1740; one of three children born to James Tandy, an iron works merchant, and Maria Bella Jenkins. Tandy received his education at the Quaker boarding school in Ballitore, Kildare, amongst its alumni Edmund Burke, a champion of Catholic emancipation and a supporter of […]
The British government appeals to Éamon de Valera for help and he authorises fire brigades from Dublin, Dundalk, Drogheda and Dún Laoghaire to give assistance. On the evening of 7 April 1941, Fifteen German bombers believed to have been from the Kampfgruppe 26 path finder’s left their airfield in Northern Holland near the town of […]
Italian Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, had just given a speech in Rome to the International Congress of Surgeons when a bullet nearly ended his life. After Mussolini finished his speech praising modern medicine, he walked to his car. At the time, no one noticed Violet Gibson, a small Irish woman with a long history of […]
Bully’s Acre (officially, the Hospital Fields) is a former public cemetery located near the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. Behind a black gate off the entranceway to the expansive grounds of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, now the Irish Museum of Modern Art, lies a large, green field that is home to Dublin’s oldest cemetery. […]
Oscar Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet born in Dublin. At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for libel. Married to Constance Lloyd and father of two children Cyril and […]
Barney McKenna was the last surviving founding member of the Irish folk group the Dubliners. With Luke Kelly’s powerful voice and force of nature on stage, Ronnie Drew’s gravelly memorable vocal sound, it was McKenna’s playing of the tenor banjo, coupled with John Sheahan’s fiddle, that gave the Dubliners their original instrumental quality. In the […]