Search Results for 'amon de Valera'

On June 7 1917 Major Willie Redmond, MP for East Clare, was killed in action leading the Royal Irish Brigade to victory at the Battle of Messines Ridge at Ypres. A member of the Irish Parliamentary Party (his brother John was party leader), he had represented East Clare at Westminster for 25 years. At 53 years of age Redmond was too old to be a soldier. But he was convinced that an Ireland loyal to the Crown would succeed in achieving Home Rule, and so he joined the Irish troops at Flanders.

First published in Irish in 1918, Seacht mBua an Éirí Amach/Seven Virtues of the Rising is a collection of seven stories by Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882–1928), published in English for the first time. Despite the title of the collection, the stories themselves are not directly concerned with the actual events of the 1916 Rising, although there are several allusions to key figures and locations.

We are one month out from Christmas, to the day, and I would like to mark it by wishing you and yours a happy Black Friday. The retailers’ fabricated start to the Christmas shopping season has already caught on in little old Ireland. The run up to Christmas no longer begins on the Church’s specified day, but instead is determined by frenzied shoppers, wound up by delighted retailers. Of course, the upside is that shoppers bag bargains, businesses take on extra employees, and extra income is regenerated as a result of the additional footfall.

At the January 1933 general election Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil retained power by increasing its seat count to 77. Since its first general election in 1927, the party had increased its Dáil representation at every subsequent contest. In order to halt Fianna Fáil’s march, opponents of de Valera formed a new party in September 1933 by merging the bulk of the membership of the pro-Treaty Cumann na nGaedheal with two smaller conservative groupings, the National Centre Party and the National Guard (a fascist group known as the Blueshirts). Fine Gael — The United Ireland Party was formed and immediately began the process of holding Cumann na nGaedheal’s core support and growing its membership base.

The iconic statue of writer Pádraic Ó Conaire will finally be returned to the Galway City Museum today, in advance of a bronze replica being installed in Eyre Square later this year - the statue's original home.

There was hardly a marriage of two minds greater than that between Hanna Sheehy and Francis Skeffington, who were married in Dublin in 1903, and who committed their lives to many causes, particularly feminism, pacifism, socialism, and nationalism. Hanna was one of the founders of the Irish Women’s Franchise League, determined to win votes for women. As part of its disobedience campaign, women were urged not to fill in the 1911 Census form correctly. Her husband Francis, totally supportive in all her endeavours, and as head of the household, submitted the following:

Where is more beautiful, Connemara or Kerry?

On December 3 1920, at the height of the War of Independence, quite an extraordinary event happened in Galway County Council. It passed a resolution, known as ‘The Galway Resolution’, repudiating the authority of the newly established Dáil; it rescinded the resolution for the collection of rates, (which were collected locally, and passed on to Dáil Éireann, and not to the British authorities), and incredibly, Galway County Council now offered its offices to negotiate peace, directly with the British prime minister, David Lloyd George.

Despite the crucial role many women played in the 1916 Rising, very few were given the credit they deserved. In fact some were refused a pension for many years because they were not ‘men’. In at least one case, the valiant role played by Nurse Elizabeth O’Farrell was simply airbrushed out of history.