Framed Fight poster of Collins v Eubank at Millstreet 1995.
90cm x 68cm Co Cork
Stephen Collins (born 21 July 1964) is an Irish former professional boxer who competed from 1986 to 1997. Known as the Celtic Warrior, Collins is the most successful Irish boxer in recent professional boxing history, having held the WBOmiddleweight and super-middleweight titles simultaneously and never losing a fight as champion.
Collins' first nineteen professional fights all took place in the United States. In 1988 he won the Irish middleweight title, and the regional American USBA middleweight title the following year, defending the latter successfully in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. In his first two world championship challenges, both for the WBA middleweight title, Collins lost a unanimous decision to Mike McCallum in 1990 and a majority decision to Reggie Johnson in 1992. He also challenged unsuccessfully for the European middleweight title later in 1992, losing a split decision to Sumbu Kalambay in Italy.
It was not until Collins reached his early 30s that he fulfilled his potential, becoming WBO middleweight champion in his third world title attempt with a fifth-round TKO victory over Chris Pyatt in 1994, before then moving up in weight to defeat the undefeated Chris Eubank and claim the WBO super-middleweight title in 1995. More success followed, as Collins successfully defended his title by winning the rematch against Eubank later in the year. Collins successfully defended his title another six times before pulling out of a proposed fight in October 1997 against rising Welsh star, Joe Calzaghe, and retiring from the sport, with Collins frustrated by his inability to get a fight against the pound for pound number one boxer of the time, Roy Jones Jr., who was then fighting in the light-heavyweight division.
Having competed against some of the best boxers on both sides of the Atlantic during his career, Collins tends to be linked more to an era in the UK during which there was a notable rivalry between British boxers Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn, both of whom Collins fought and defeated twice.
Early years in Boston
Steve Collins won 26 Irish titles as an amateur before turning professional in Massachusetts, US in October 1986. Collins worked out of the Petronelli Brothers gym in Brockton, Massachusetts alongside Marvin Hagler. His debut fight was against Julio Mercado on the undercard of a bill that featured Irish Americans; his future trainer Freddie Roach and the future Fight of the Year winner Micky Ward. Collins beat Mercado by way of knockout in the third round.
In Boston, Massachusetts in 1988, he defeated former Olympian and British Super Middleweight champion Sam Storey to win the Irish middleweight title, then defeated world No. 5, Kevin Watts to win the USBA middleweight title. After reaching 16–0, Collins stepped in as a substitute in a WBA middleweight title fight after Michael Watson was injured in training, and fought 12 rounds against Mike McCallum in Boston in 1990. Collins was supported by a large crowd of Irish Americans as he battled the champion McCallum, with the fight being close early on before McCallum started to tire as Collins gained momentum in the later stages to bring a close finish at the end of 12 exciting rounds. McCallum got the win by unanimous decision.
In 1992, Collins lost a majority decision to Reggie Johnson in a closely contested slugfest for the vacant WBA middleweight title (which had been stripped from McCallum because he signed to fight IBF champion James Toney). Collins then lost by split decision to Sumbu Kalambay for the European title in Italy, before beating Gerhard Botes of South Africa to win the WBA Penta-Continental middleweight title in 1993.
WBO middleweight champion
Collins then moved to Belfast under the management of Barney Eastwood before basing himself in England where he joined Barry Hearn's Matchroom Boxing. Alongside him was Paul "Silky" Jones, his sparring partner and good friend who later went on to become WBO light-middleweight title holder. Collins was trained by Freddie King in the Romford training camp.
In May 1994, Collins finally won a world title by defeating Chris Pyatt by stoppage in five rounds to become the WBO middleweight champion. Early in 1995, Collins relinquished this title without a defence as he was having difficulty making the 160lbs middleweight limit.
In March 1995, Chris Eubank (41-0-2) had been scheduled to have a third WBO super-middleweight title fight against Ray Close. Eubank and Close had two fights over the previous two years (their first fight a draw, and their second fight a narrow split decision win for Eubank), but Close was forced to withdraw from their scheduled third fight after failing an MRI brain scan. Collins then stepped into Close's place, moving up to super-middleweight to take on Eubank.
WBO super-middleweight champion
Collins defeated the then unbeaten long-reigning champion Chris Eubank in Millstreet, County Cork, Ireland, in March 1995, by unanimous decision (115–111, 116–114, 114–113), to win the WBO super-middleweight title. Collins had enlisted the help of a guru, and they led the press to believe that Collins would be hypnotised for the fight, which noticeably unsettled Eubank. True to form, Collins sat in his corner and did not move, listening to headphones during Eubank's ring entrance. Collins knocked Eubank down in the eighth round, and was well ahead on the scorecards at the end of Round 9, but Eubank finished the fight strongly as he tried to save his unbeaten record and knocked Collins down in the tenth round, coming close to a stoppage. Eubank was unable to finish the job, and Collins held on for victory.
In their September 1995 rematch in Cork, Collins performed brilliantly, changing his usual fighting style by adopting wild, brawling tactics throughout which Eubank really struggled to deal with. Despite most TV pundits and commentators giving Collins a wide points victory with scorecards in the region of 117–111 and 118–110, the three judges saw the fight very differently with Collins only winning by a close split decision, 115–113, 115–113 and 114–115. Collins successfully defended his WBO super-middleweight title seven times, including two fights against Nigel Benn in 1996.
In the summer of 1997, Collins reportedly stated in the press that he had no motivation left, as he had spent the best part of his career chasing Roy Jones Jr. for a fight that had been promised to him many times. Collins is reported to have stated in Boxing World that he had spent so long chasing Roy Jones Jr. that money was no longer important; that he would "fight him in a phone box in front of two men and a dog". but the bout never materialised. A WBO super-middleweight title fight against Joe Calzaghe was agreed for October 1997, but Collins got injured 10 days before the scheduled fight, got stripped of his title by the WBO, with Collins then making a statement saying that fighting Calzaghe would do nothing to satisfy the desire he had for fighting Jones. Collins then added he wanted to retire on a high note with a good pay day, "Joe is a good up-and-coming kid, but he wouldn't fill a parish church". As Collins couldn't get the fight with Jones, Collins decided to retire.
In 1999, Collins announced his decision to come out of retirement to fight Roy Jones Jr. Controversy surrounded the proposed fight, as WBC and WBA light heavyweight champion Jones decided to fight the IBF light heavyweight champion and old Collins foe Reggie Johnson (which Jones won by a shutout 120–106 on all three judges' scorecards), and it was revealed that Collins would have to fight Calzaghe before a showdown with Jones. Collins had accepted this and started to prepare to fight Calzaghe. In training, Collins collapsed during a sparring session with Howard Eastman. Although tests and a brain scan could not find any problems, Collins decided that it was a warning to make him stop boxing, and he retired for a second time.
Collins retired in 1997, with a record of 39 fights, 36 wins (21 knockouts) and 3 losses.
Collins has not entirely faded from the spotlight since his retirement. In 1998 he appeared in the film Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels as a boxing gym bouncer. In 1999 he made a cameo appearance in "Sweetest Thing", a music video by U2. On 15 January 2013, at the age of 48, Collins announced plans to fight Roy Jones Jr.He went on to appear in a number of exhibition bouts in preparation for the proposed Jones fight.
In 2017 Collins joined the Army Reserve's 253 Provost Company of the 4th Regiment Royal Military Police in London where he had been living for the previous 20 years. He gained promotion to Lance Corporal and qualified as an army boxing coach.
His brother Roddy Collins is a former professional footballer and manager.
His brother Paschal was a professional boxer and now a leading professional boxing coach plus manager.
His eldest son Stevie Jnr is a retired rugby player and a retired professional boxer who now coaches and manages boxers
His youngest son Luke is an active amateur boxer and qualified amateur boxing coach
65cm x 50cm Limerick
Vintage advertising poster advertising a car racing in Limerick in 1929 to be held around the city and organised by the Irish Motor Racing Club Ltd ,based in Foster Place Dublin.
People, like this writer, who do not even have a driving licence find it very difficult to understand the extraordinary interest in motor racing which has mushroomed over the last few years.
This newspaper and others have expanded coverage of the sport in a big way and that can only be partly explained by the fact that a young Irishman, Eddie Irvine, has made significant progress in the drivers' championship and that Dubliner Eddie Jordan has a team competing in the constructors' championship.
There is a very long and distinguished history of motor racing in Ireland, going back to the turn of the century and before. Irish motorists have contributed profoundly to the popularity of motor racing history. In this context, names like Dunlop and Ferguson immediately spring to mind.
The Belfast businessman John Boyd Dunlop first hit upon the idea of a pneumatic tyre when he was trying to entice his son to continue what he considered to be a healthy bicycling pursuit. When Dunlop's tyres helped to wipe out all competition in a Belfast sports meeting in Easter 1889, the invention sparked an idea in the mind of a Dublin businessman called Harvey du Cros - a Huguenot who had fled Roman Catholic persecution in his native France to flee to, of all places, Dublin.
The Huguenot refugee had several distinctions. He was a boxing and fencing champion in his day and a founder member of Bective Rangers rugby club. Whether he would have been proud of the latter achievement today cannot be assessed. (Just a joke lads.)
He set up a factory for the manufacture of tyres in Stephen Street in Dublin just before the turn of the century and, in doing so, made an enormous contribution to the revolution of transport in the world.
The name of Dunlop remains synonymous with tyres, but, sadly, the name du Cros is seldom mentioned. Nevertheless he holds the major French decoration of Legion d'honneur.
The Shannon Development Company of 1900 was the first organisation to promote a motor race in Ireland. The company had built a hotel in Killaloe and organised a motor trip from Dublin to that lovely Clare town, via Nenagh. A De Dion brand car, driven by L Fleming, was first to enter Killaloe in July of 1900.
James Gordon Bennett, the American millionaire who had sent Stanley in pursuit of Livingston, offered the first major trophy for motor racing. There was a reluctance to allow this very dangerous sport to be held in Britain and the matter was referred to the House of Commons when an extraordinary alliance involving John Redmond, Tim Healy and Sir Edward Carson all supported the idea that speed limits should be set aside for that day.
The Northern Whig said: "We see a wonderful blending of the Orange and Green. There is, about this matter, a unanimity of which some people considered Irishmen to be incapable."
Could we, perhaps, arrange a Drumcree Grand Prix!
With the blessing of the Bishop of Kildare, a circuit centred on Athy was agreed for Ireland's first serious motor road race which took place on July 2nd, a public holiday, in 1903. The race started just north of Athy and on a figure of eight circuit, the competitors drove 327 miles, going through such exotic places as Kilcullen, Castledermot, Carlow, Monasterevin, Stradbally and Windy Gap.
In the build up to the race, James Joyce earned a few badly needed shillings by interviewing the top French driver of the day, Henri Fournier, in The Irish Times.
Drivers from all over Europe and the United States took part and prices went through the ceiling as foreign drivers, mechanics, and spectators descended on Athy and its environs. There was one report of £50 being charged for two rooms in Kilcullen for one night, a charge which might, even today, be regarded as a little pricey.
Mineral waters, normally costing tuppence, were offered at sixpence, but then what else is new! Local farmers' wives also made "a killing" by releasing their hens onto the practice roads and then demanding compensation when they were killed by the speeding cars.
Readers may ask how come this writer has taken so much interest in this matter without ever having driven anything faster than a tractor. The reason is that, by chance, I came across a book some time ago called Green Dust, by Brendan Lynch, and was immediately captivated, not only by the tales he told and the manner of the telling, but by the picture of Ireland which Lynch painted.
What I see of motor racing on television nowadays bores me to tears, but Brendan Lynch's book is in a different category altogether.
As far as I know it is out of print. Could I humbly suggest that he and the publishers, Portobello Publishing, reprint this sporting treasure.
67cm x 54cm Dublin
The Sunday Press was a weekly newspaper published in Ireland from 1949 until 1995. It was launched by Éamon de Valera's Irish Press group following the defeat of his Fianna Fáil party in the 1948 Irish general election. Like its sister newspaper, the daily The Irish Press, politically the paper loyally supported Fianna Fáil.
The future Taoiseach Seán Lemass was the managing editor of the Irish Press who spearheaded the launch of the Sunday paper, with the first editor Colonel Matt Feehan. Many of the Irish Press journalists contributed to the paper. 'When I open the pages, I duck' was Brendan Behan's description of reading The Sunday Press, for the habit of published memoirs of veterans (usually those aligned to Fianna Fáil) of the Irish War of Independence.
It soon built up a large readership, and overtook its main competitor the Sunday Independent, which tended to support Fine Gael. At its peak The Sunday Press sold up to 475,000 copies every week, and had a readership of over one million, around one third of the Irish population.
Like the Evening Press, the paper's readership held up better over the years than that of the flagship title in the group, The Irish Press, and it might have survived as a stand-alone title had it been sold. However, with the collapse of the Irish Press Newspapers group in May 1995, all three titles ceased publication immediately. The launch of Ireland on Sunday in 1997 was initially interpreted by many observers as an attempt to appeal to the former readership of The Sunday Press, seen as generally rural, fairly conservative Catholic, and with a traditional Irish nationalist political outlook.
When Christmas Day fell on Sunday in 1949, 1955, 1960, 1966, 1977, 1983, 1988 and 1994 the paper came out on the Saturday.
Vincent Jennings at the age of 31 became editor of The Sunday Press in 1968, serving until December 1986, when he became manager of the Irish Press Group. Journalists who worked at the press include Stephen Collins served as political editor his father Willie Collins was deputy editorand Michael Carwood became sports editor of The Sunday Press in 1988[5] until its closure in 1995.
Framed portrait of the three Kennedy Brothers from 1963 ,taken in the White House.
45cm x 35cm Bruree Co Limerick
Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam,” Senator Edward M Kennedy, the youngest of three exceptionally accomplished brothers in the United States’ most famous Irish family, told the US Senate in the autumn of 1971.
This year marks an important anniversary for the Kennedys, the Irish and the world, for it was 50 years ago when Ted Kennedy set his sights on peace in Northern Ireland. And, from that moment to the miracle of Stormont, in 1998, that secured peace, Ted spearheaded the United States’ peace-making efforts. He pushed presidents, worked with key Senate and House members of Irish descent, testified before Congress, delivered speeches, wrote articles, visited the region and met leaders on both sides of the conflict.
Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy were all proudly Irish. They all spoke of the anti-Irish bigotry that had plagued their ancestors in the United States. Jack visited Ireland to trace his roots and, while there as president in 1963, called it “the land for which I hold the greatest affection”. Ted came in 1964 in grief after Jack’s murder, and he spent more time trying to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland than on any other global challenge.
Joe and Rose led discussions about the world with the boys over meals, and Joe invited prominent people, such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and media mogul Henry Luce, to dine with them and enrich the conversations
Ted’s peace-making in Northern Ireland, however, reflects far more than the proud Irishness that he shared with his brothers. It also reflects perhaps the most fascinating and consequential story about the Kennedy brothers that hardly anyone knows – a story with important lessons for the United States of today.
Most people know that Joe and Rose Kennedy groomed their sons for success. They started with Joe jnr, who died at war in 1944 at the age of 29, and continued through Jack, Bobby and Ted. What most people don’t know (and what I explore in my new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire) is that, from the time the brothers were little boys, Joe and Rose pushed them not just to succeed but to look beyond the United States’ borders – to learn about the world, care about the world and, once they attained power, shape the United States’ role in the world.
RFK Election Poster from 1968.
60cm x 50cm Bruree Co Limerick
Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam,” Senator Edward M Kennedy, the youngest of three exceptionally accomplished brothers in the United States’ most famous Irish family, told the US Senate in the autumn of 1971.
This year marks an important anniversary for the Kennedys, the Irish and the world, for it was 50 years ago when Ted Kennedy set his sights on peace in Northern Ireland. And, from that moment to the miracle of Stormont, in 1998, that secured peace, Ted spearheaded the United States’ peace-making efforts. He pushed presidents, worked with key Senate and House members of Irish descent, testified before Congress, delivered speeches, wrote articles, visited the region and met leaders on both sides of the conflict.
Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy were all proudly Irish. They all spoke of the anti-Irish bigotry that had plagued their ancestors in the United States. Jack visited Ireland to trace his roots and, while there as president in 1963, called it “the land for which I hold the greatest affection”. Ted came in 1964 in grief after Jack’s murder, and he spent more time trying to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland than on any other global challenge.
Joe and Rose led discussions about the world with the boys over meals, and Joe invited prominent people, such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and media mogul Henry Luce, to dine with them and enrich the conversations
Ted’s peace-making in Northern Ireland, however, reflects far more than the proud Irishness that he shared with his brothers. It also reflects perhaps the most fascinating and consequential story about the Kennedy brothers that hardly anyone knows – a story with important lessons for the United States of today.
Most people know that Joe and Rose Kennedy groomed their sons for success. They started with Joe jnr, who died at war in 1944 at the age of 29, and continued through Jack, Bobby and Ted. What most people don’t know (and what I explore in my new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire) is that, from the time the brothers were little boys, Joe and Rose pushed them not just to succeed but to look beyond the United States’ borders – to learn about the world, care about the world and, once they attained power, shape the United States’ role in the world.
Beautifully mounted & framed
30cm x 30cm Dublin
Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.”
Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading.
The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test.
By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world.
Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.”
Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981.Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter.
Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid.
In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo.
The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.
The Guinness Brewery Park Royal during demolition, at its peak the largest and most productive brewery in the world.
The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland was moved to St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin.
Guinness has also been referred to as “that black stuff”. Guinness had a fleet of ships, barges and yachts. The Irish Sunday Independent newspaper reported on 17 June 2007 that Diageo intended to close the historic St James’s Gate plant in Dublin and move to a greenfield site on the outskirts of the city.This news caused some controversy when it was announced.The following day, the Irish Daily Mail ran a follow-up story with a double page spread complete with images and a history of the plant since 1759. Initially, Diageo said that talk of a move was pure speculation but in the face of mounting speculation in the wake of the Sunday Independent article, the company confirmed that it is undertaking a “significant review of its operations”. This review was largely due to the efforts of the company’s ongoing drive to reduce the environmental impact of brewing at the St James’s Gate plant.
On 23 November 2007, an article appeared in the Evening Herald, a Dublin newspaper, stating that the Dublin City Council, in the best interests of the city of Dublin, had put forward a motion to prevent planning permission ever being granted for development of the site, thus making it very difficult for Diageo to sell off the site for residential development.
On 9 May 2008, Diageo announced that the St James’s Gate brewery will remain open and undergo renovations, but that breweries in Kilkenny and Dundalk will be closed by 2013 when a new larger brewery is opened near Dublin. The result will be a loss of roughly 250 jobs across the entire Diageo/Guinness workforce in Ireland.Two days later, the Sunday Independent again reported that Diageo chiefs had met with TánaisteMary Coughlan, the deputy leader of the Government of Ireland, about moving operations to Ireland from the UK to benefit from its lower corporation tax rates. Several UK firms have made the move in order to pay Ireland’s 12.5 per cent rate rather than the UK’s 28 per cent rate. Diageo released a statement to the London stock exchange denying the report.Despite the merger that created Diageo plc in 1997, Guinness has retained its right to the Guinness brand and associated trademarks and thus continues to trade under the traditional Guinness name despite trading under the corporation name Diageo for a brief period in 1997.
In November 2015 it was announced that Guinness are planning to make their beer suitable for consumption by vegetarians and vegans by the end of 2016 through the introduction of a new filtration process at their existing Guinness Brewery that avoids the need to use isinglass from fish bladders to filter out yeast particles.This went into effect in 2017, per the company’s FAQ webpage where they state: “Our new filtration process has removed the use of isinglass as a means of filtration and vegans can now enjoy a pint of Guinness. All Guinness Draught in keg format is brewed without using isinglass. Full distribution of bottle and can formats will be in place by the end of 2017, so until then, our advice to vegans is to consume the product from the keg format only for now.
Guinness stout is made from water, barley, roast malt extract, hops, and brewer’s yeast. A portion of the barley is roasted to give Guinness its dark colour and characteristic taste. It is pasteurisedand filtered.
Until the late 1950s Guinness was still racked into wooden casks. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Guinness ceased brewing cask-conditioned beers and developed a keg brewing system with aluminium kegs replacing the wooden casks; these were nicknamed “iron lungs”.Until 2016 the production of Guinness, as with many beers, involved the use of isinglass made from fish. Isinglass was used as a fining agent for settling out suspended matter in the vat. The isinglass was retained in the floor of the vat but it was possible that minute quantities might be carried over into the beer. Diageo announced in February 2018 that the use of isinglass in draught Guinness was to be discontinued and an alternative clarification agent would be used instead. This has made draught Guinness acceptable to vegans and vegetarians.
Arguably its biggest change to date, in 1959 Guinness began using nitrogen, which changed the fundamental texture and flavour of the Guinness of the past as nitrogen bubbles are much smaller than CO2, giving a “creamier” and “smoother” consistency over a sharper and traditional CO2 taste. This step was taken after Michael Ash – a mathematician turned brewer – discovered the mechanism to make this possible.
Nitrogen is less soluble than carbon dioxide, which allows the beer to be put under high pressure without making it fizzy. High pressure of the dissolved gas is required to enable very small bubbles to be formed by forcing the draught beer through fine holes in a plate in the tap, which causes the characteristic “surge” (the widget in cans and bottles achieves the same effect). This “widget” is a small plastic ball containing the nitrogen. The perceived smoothness of draught Guinness is due to its low level of carbon dioxide and the creaminess of the head caused by the very fine bubbles that arise from the use of nitrogen and the dispensing method described above. “Foreign Extra Stout” contains more carbon dioxide, causing a more acidic taste.
Contemporary Guinness Draught and Extra Stout are weaker than they were in the 19th century, when they had an original gravity of over 1.070. Foreign Extra Stout and Special Export Stout, with abv of 7.5% and 9% respectively, are perhaps closest to the original in character.Although Guinness may appear to be black, it is officially a very dark shade of ruby.
The most recent change in alcohol content from the Import Stout to the Extra Stout was due to a change in distribution through North American market. Consumer complaints have influenced recent distribution and bottle changes.
Studies claim that Guinness can be beneficial to the heart. Researchers found that “‘antioxidantcompounds’ in the Guinness, similar to those found in certain fruits and vegetables, are responsible for the health benefits because they slow down the deposit of harmful cholesterol on the artery walls.”Guinness ran an advertising campaign in the 1920s which stemmed from market research – when people told the company that they felt good after their pint, the slogan, created by Dorothy L. Sayers–”Guinness is Good for You”. Advertising for alcoholic drinks that implies improved physical performance or enhanced personal qualities is now prohibited in Ireland.Diageo, the company that now manufactures Guinness, says: “We never make any medical claims for our drinks.”
Origins : Dublin
Dimensions : 43cm x 35cm
Wonderful memento of the legendary Irish Traditional music ,the Chieftains .
54cm x 42cm Dublin
The Chieftains are a traditional Irish band formed in Dublin in 1962, by Paddy Moloney, Sean Potts and Michael Tubridy. Their sound, which is almost entirely instrumental and largely built around uilleann pipes, has become synonymous with traditional Irish music and they are regarded as having helped popularise Irish music across the world.They have won six Grammys during their career and they were given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the prestigious BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2002. Some music experts have credited The Chieftains with bringing traditional Irish music to a worldwide audience, so much so that the Irish government awarded them the honorary title of 'Ireland's Musical Ambassadors' in 1989.
Name
The band's name came from the book Death of a Chieftain by Irish author John Montague.Assisted early on by Garech Browne, they signed with his company Claddagh Records. They needed financial success abroad, and succeeded in this, as within a few years their third album's sleeve note section was printed in three languages.
Career
Origins
Paddy Moloney came out of Ceoltóirí Chualann, a group of musicians who specialised in instrumentals, and sought to form a new band. They had their first rehearsals at Moloney's house, with David Fallon and Martin Fay joining the original three. The group remained only semi-professional up until the 1970s and by then had achieved great success in Ireland and the United Kingdom.
Rise to international fame
In 1973, their popularity began to spread to the United States when their previous albums were released there by Island Records. They received further acclaim when they worked on the Academy Award–winning soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film Barry Lyndon, which triggered their transition to the mainstream in the US.
In 2012, they celebrated their 50th anniversary with an ambitious album and tour. The album, Voice of Ages, was produced by T-Bone Burnett and featured the Chieftains collaborating with many musicians including Bon Iver, Paolo Nutini and The Decemberists. It also included a collaboration with NASA astronaut Catherine Coleman playing the flute aboard the International Space Station as it orbited the earth. The Chieftains performed at Carnegie Hall on March 17, 2012.
The Irish Goodbye Tour
In February 2019, The Chieftains embarked on an extensive farewell tour entitled the "Irish Goodbye Tour", including a 2019 European leg, a 2020 Canadian leg and two 2019 and 2020 US legs.
On 13 March 2020, the band announced that a few tour dates of their "Irish Goodbye Tour" had been postponed (until further notice) following the coronavirussituation.
Collaborations
Paddy Moloney pictured with Bob Dylan, who is a fan of the band's work.
The band have become known for their vast work of collaborations with popular musicians of many genres, including country music, Galician traditional music, Newfoundland music, and rock and roll. Their widespread work as collaborators resulted in the Irish Government awarding the group the honorary title of Ireland's Musical Ambassadors in 1989.
They have performed with (in alphabetical order):
The band has won six Grammy Awards and been nominated eighteen times. They have won an Emmy and a Genie and contributed tracks, including their highly praised version of the song Women of Ireland, to Leonard Rosenman's Oscar-winning score for Stanley Kubrick's 1975 film Barry Lyndon.In 2002 they were given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the UK's BBC Radio 2. Two of their singles have been minor hits in the UK Singles Chart. "Have I Told You Lately" (credited to The Chieftains with Van Morrison) reached No. 71 in 1995. "I Know My Love" (credited to The Chieftains featuring The Corrs) reached No. 37 in 1999.
Dr. Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin said the success of The Chieftains helped place Irish traditional music on a par with other musical genres in the world of popular entertainment. By collaborating with pop and rock musicians, they have taken Irish music to a much wider audience. They have become, in effect, musical ambassadors for Ireland. This de facto role was officially recognised by the Irish Government in 1989 when it awarded the group the honorary title of Ireland's Musical Ambassadors.
Notable performances
They played in a concert for Pope John Paul II, before an audience of more than one million people in 1979 in Phoenix Park in Dublin, to mark the Papal visit to Ireland.
In 1983, they were invited by the Chinese Government to perform with the Chinese Broadcasting Art Group in a concert on the Great Wall of China, becoming the first western musical group to do so.They were the first group to perform in the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C., invited by Senator Edward Kennedy and the former Speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill.
In 2011, they performed at a concert in Dublin attended by President Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth II of Britain during her first ever official trip to the Republic of Ireland.
Tullamore Dew advert
40cm x 30cm Banagher Co Offaly
Tullamore D.E.W. is a brand of Irish whiskey produced by William Grant & Sons. It is the second largest selling brand of Irish whiskey globally, with sales of over 950,000 cases per annum as of 2015.The whiskey was originally produced in the Tullamore, County Offaly, Ireland, at the old Tullamore Distillery which was established in 1829. Its name is derived from the initials of Daniel E. Williams (D.E.W.), a general manager and later owner of the original distillery. In 1954, the original distillery closed down, and with stocks of whiskey running low, the brand was sold to John Powers & Son, another Irish distiller in the 1960s, with production transferred to the Midleton Distillery, County Cork in the 1970s following a merger of three major Irish distillers.In 2010, the brand was purchased by William Grant & Sons, who constructed a new distillery on the outskirts of Tullamore. The new distillery opened in 2014, bringing production of the whiskey back to the town after a break of sixty years.
Mick The Miller,as featured in this iconic advert, was the most famous greyhound of all time. He was born in 1926 in the village of Killeigh, County Offaly, Ireland at Millbrook House(only 5 miles from Tullamore), the home of parish curate, Fr Martin Brophy. When he was born Mick was the runt of the litter but Michael Greene, who worked for Fr Brophy, singled the little pup out as a future champion and insisted that he be allowed to rear him. With constant attention and regular exercise Mick The Miller developed into a racing machine. His first forays were on local coursing fields where he had some success but he showed his real talent on the track where he won 15 of his first 20 races.
In 1929 Fr Brophy decided to try Mick in English Greyhound Derby at White City, London. On his first trial-run, Mick equalled the track record. Then, in his first heat, he broke the world record, becoming the first greyhound ever to run 525 yards in under 30 seconds. Fr Brophy was inundated with offers and sold him to Albert Williams. Mick went on to win the 1929 Derby. Within a year he had changed hands again to Arundel H Kempton and won the Derby for a second time.
Over the course of his English career he won 36 of his 48 races, including the Derby (twice), the St Leger, the Cesarewitch, and the Welsh Derby. He set six new world records and two new track records. He was the first greyhound to win 19 races in a row. Several of his records went unbroken for over 40 years. He won, in total, almost £10,000 in prizemoney. But he also became the poster-dog for greyhound racing. He was a celebrity on a par with any sports person, muscisian or moviestar. The more famous he became, the more he attracted people to greyhound racing. Thousands thronged to watch him, providing a huge boost to the sport. It is said that he actually saved the sport of greyhound racing.
After retirement to stud his popularity continued. He starred in the film Wild Boy (based on his life-story) in 1934 which was shown in cinemas all across the UK. He was in huge demand on the celebrity circuit, opening shops, attending big races and even rubbing shoulder with royalty (such as the King and Queen) at charity events. When he died in 1939 aged 12, his owner donated his body to the British Natural History Museum in London. And Mick`s fame has continued ever since. In 1981 he was inducted into the American Hall of Fame (International Section). In 1990 English author Michael Tanner published a book, Mick The Miller - Sporting Icon Of the Depression. And in 2011 the people of Killeigh erected a monument on the village green to honour their most famous son. Mick The Miller is not just the most famous greyhound of all time but one of the most loved dogs that has ever lived.
Framed photo of an iconic moment as the Beatles arrive in Dublin,pistured outside the old Dublin Airport Terminal in
47cm x 60cm Dublin
November 7, 1963, one of the wildest phenomenons of the 20th century hit Dublin.... a Liverpudlian revolution named The Beatles!
All these years later, according to The Irish Times, a plaque will be placed at the site of the event, the Adelphi Cinema on Middle Abbey Street in Dublin.
The tribute honors a world-changing British rock and roll group who the columnist Quidnunc in the Times described as “four hairy youngsters. [They] appeared onstage to be greeted with shrieks and whistles. Three of them walloped electric guitars which appeared to be amplified to the decibel limit, the fourth walloped a set of drums.“They all opened their mouths and made noises that sounded to me like: ‘Mew; Me-oh, me-ooh, me-ooh-ooh!’”
The Beatles had come to town for two sold-out shows at the Adelphi. Ireland would never be quite the same again
Fifteen days later JFK would be assassinated. The old innocent age drew to a close.
The newspapers all reported on a strange phenomenon called Beatlemania. “It’s happening everywhere,” declared the Daily Mirrorworriedly.
What was significant was that it was young girls who were screaming their heads off, crying, scratching to get near and touch the Beatles. Female sexuality was a completely new phenomenon in Holy Catholic Ireland, and their honors the bishops were not long in weighing in
What happened in Dublin was a riot. The 3,000 pumped up crowd for the first show came streaming out only to run full tilt into the 3,000-second show patrons.
Neither crowd gave way, and pushing and shoving ensued. Then it turned nasty.
A commotion described as a riot took place. The Times lead ran"
“Many arrested as city crowds run riot.”“Cars were overturned in Abbey Street and O’Connell Street, at least 50 people were treated for minor injuries, while three people were taken to hospital with fractured legs and arms.”
A young man was also hospitalized after being stabbed. Two hundred police and three fire brigades arrived. Buses and taxis were halted in the melee.
Only the ringing of the fire bells seemed to settle down the crowd, but soon more crowds arrived and fights began anew.
“One group of youths pushed a parked car into half a dozen policemen who were trying to get them out of the street,” reported the Times. “St John’s Ambulance men treated men and women on the footpaths while the crowds swirled around them.”
The Beatles did not hang around. John, Paul, George, and Ringo escaped in a newspaper van to the nearby Gresham Hotel. Later, two of them went to Drumcondra to see relatives, the Times reported.
The Times’ reviewer at the gig could hear nothing but the sound of “ecstatic, joyful, hysteric, demented” screams from Dublin teenagers. He wrote:
“A pity, this, because the Beatles, in spite of their theatrical gimmicks, their long locks, and ‘with-it’ suits, have a great act…God knows, Dublin has never seen anything like the Beatles.”
Indeed they had not. Nor would they ever see their likes again. Despite their multiple Irish connections, the four lads would never be back, and more’s the pity.
This painting of Clare piper Pádraig Ó Briain by the artist Joseph Haverty was hugely popular in 19th-century Ireland.
82cm x 58cm. Limerick
An oil painting of a street musician who played regularly in Limerick city, was painted in oil on canvas. The subject, uileann piper Pádraig Ó Briain (there are several variant spellings of his name on record), occupied a space on the corner of the Crescent and Hartstonge Street in Limerick and presumably Haverty noticed him there. Pipers were esteemed in Ireland and were a popular subject. Haverty had a sound instinct for what would appeal to an audience. He transposed the piper from an urban to a woodland setting, which is theatrical but effective, and the painting seems to have been known under several different titles, including The Father and Daughter (O’Brien had two daughters but opinions differ as to whether the girl depicted was one of them), The Blind Piper and The Irish Piper.
Reproduced as a print under the title The Limerick Piper, it sold widely throughout the country and became extremely well-known. Haverty made another quite different painting of the piper, now in the University of Limerick collection, but he also made copies of his own work.
To complicate things slightly: The Blind Piper was exhibited by the RHA in 1845, when it was praised in the Nation. It was perhaps this version that Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth bought and exhibited at the Cork exhibition in 1852. But there were other versions in circulation. Young Irelander William Smith O’Brien reputedly commissioned a copy from Haverty, and bequeathed it to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1864.
The Blind Piper is included in the exhibition Oidhreacht: Transforming Tradition at the Highlanes Gallery, Laurence Street, Drogheda, Co Louth (July 13th – September 14th), timed to coincide with Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann which takes place July 10th-18th in Drogheda.
The annual week-long festival, a lively mix of summer school, competition and a packed programme of traditional music concerts attracts up to 500,000 people from throughout Ireland North and South, the UK and internationally. The exhibition of art and artefacts is drawn from Drogheda’s Municipal Art Collection as well as those of major public museums, including the National Gallery of Ireland and Imma. It aims to explore “the rich social, political and aesthetic contexts in which the traditional arts have been expressed”.
Beautifully framed,enlarged print of the Fr Ted commemorative 3 stamp collection as issued by An Post to mark the anniversary of the legendary comedy series.
22cm x 48cm Limerick
A quarter of a century after it first aired, Father Ted, one of television’s most loved sitcoms, has officially stamped itself on popular culture.
Ireland’s post service, An Post, issued a set of stamps on Thursday to celebrate its characters and one-liners and to mark the show’s 25thanniversary.
Phrases forever associated with Craggy Island, the fictional home of three wayward priests and their housekeeper, now adorn four stamps: “That’s mad, Ted”, “Will you have a cup of tea, Father?”, “That money was just resting in my account” and “That would be an ecumenical matter”.
Retro wallpaper in the background of each stamp matches different rooms in the parochial house where Fr Ted, Fr Dougal, Fr Jack and Mrs Doyle played out surreal scenes that entered comedy lore.
“I don’t think until today it has sunk in what a huge thing it is, what an honour,” Pauline McLynn, who played Mrs Doyle, told the Guardian. “How many people do you know can say ‘I was once on a stamp’?”
The writers, cast and crew never imagined that the show, which ran for three seasons from 1995 to 1998, would become so popular or enduring, said the actor.
“I often wonder about the staying power. It’s incredibly stupid and properly funny. We made it 25 years ago and now kids are still finding it incredibly funny. You always hope that things you’re proud of will last the test of time.”
Frank Kelly as Father Jack, Pauline McLynn as Mrs Doyle, Dermot Morgan as Father Ted Crilly, Ardal O’Hanlon as Father Dougal. Photograph: Ronald Grant archive
Written by Graham Linehan and Arthur Matthews, Father Ted was made by Hat Trick Productions for Channel 4. It won multiple awards including Baftas and rivals Fawlty Towers and Seinfeld for funniest comedy in viewer polls.
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In a survey commissioned by An Post, more than a third of respondents said they cited lines from the show on a weekly basis. Best-loved episodes included Hell, Speed 3, Kicking Bishop Brennan up the Arse and A Song For Europe.
Pandemic lockdowns and restrictions had increased appreciation for letters and postcards, said McLynn. “Weirdly now is an excellent time to launch the stamps.”
The actor experienced a Ted-esque moment on Thursday when an RTÉ radio interviewer said the nation looked forward to licking her and putting her on an envelope. She looked forward to it too, she replied.
“I can’t believe he went there,” she said later. The stamps were self-adhesive but McLynn wondered if An Post could issue some lickable ones. “Maybe collectors’ items.”
Kennedy for President -Leadership for the 60s-Election Poster
40cm x 27cm Bruree Co Limerick
Ulster is becoming Britain’s Vietnam,” Senator Edward M Kennedy, the youngest of three exceptionally accomplished brothers in the United States’ most famous Irish family, told the US Senate in the autumn of 1971.
This year marks an important anniversary for the Kennedys, the Irish and the world, for it was 50 years ago when Ted Kennedy set his sights on peace in Northern Ireland. And, from that moment to the miracle of Stormont, in 1998, that secured peace, Ted spearheaded the United States’ peace-making efforts. He pushed presidents, worked with key Senate and House members of Irish descent, testified before Congress, delivered speeches, wrote articles, visited the region and met leaders on both sides of the conflict.
Jack, Bobby and Ted Kennedy were all proudly Irish. They all spoke of the anti-Irish bigotry that had plagued their ancestors in the United States. Jack visited Ireland to trace his roots and, while there as president in 1963, called it “the land for which I hold the greatest affection”. Ted came in 1964 in grief after Jack’s murder, and he spent more time trying to end the Troubles in Northern Ireland than on any other global challenge.
Joe and Rose led discussions about the world with the boys over meals, and Joe invited prominent people, such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and media mogul Henry Luce, to dine with them and enrich the conversations
Ted’s peace-making in Northern Ireland, however, reflects far more than the proud Irishness that he shared with his brothers. It also reflects perhaps the most fascinating and consequential story about the Kennedy brothers that hardly anyone knows – a story with important lessons for the United States of today.
Most people know that Joe and Rose Kennedy groomed their sons for success. They started with Joe jnr, who died at war in 1944 at the age of 29, and continued through Jack, Bobby and Ted. What most people don’t know (and what I explore in my new book, The Kennedys in the World: How Jack, Bobby, and Ted Remade America’s Empire) is that, from the time the brothers were little boys, Joe and Rose pushed them not just to succeed but to look beyond the United States’ borders – to learn about the world, care about the world and, once they attained power, shape the United States’ role in the world.
48cm x 39cm. Dublin
July 19, 1972, Muhammad Ali fought Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park in Dublin, causing quite a stir in Ireland.Decades later, an Irish documentary recounting the epic fight not only won awards but also won the approval of Ali's daughter Jamilah Ali.
"When Ali Came to Ireland" is an Irish documentary that details Muhammad Ali's trip to Dublin for a fight against Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park. In 2013 the film was screened at the Chicago film festival, where Jamilah Ali was in attendance.
TheJournal.ie reported that following the screening, Jamilah said "I've seen so much footage of my father over the years but the amazing thing about watching this film was that I had seen none of the footage of him in Ireland... I loved the film from the beginning to the end."
The film highlights a moment in Ali's career where he was set to stage a world comeback. He had been recently released from prison after refusing to join the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector.
His opponent Al Lewis had also just been released on parole after serving time in Detroit for a murder charge, and he intended to use his boxing career as "a path to a new life."
The movie that won an IFTA in 2013 documents the spectacle in Croke Park, Ali's presence in Ireland and how the public reacted to his being there. It also demonstrates how Ali came to be in Dublin for a fight in the first place, highlighting the involvement of "former Kerry strongman"Michael "Butty" Sugrue.
Sugrue's story also proved to be revelatory to his family- in a quote from Ross Whittaker, co-director of the film, he speaks about how Sugrue's grandchildren had never had the chance to meet him.
"We were amazed when we screened the film in London to find that Butty Sugrue's granddaughters had never heard their grandfather speak. He had died before they were born and they'd never seen footage of him in which he had spoken."
After their 1972 meeting, however, Sugrue and Ali's fortunes took two divergent paths. Ali returned to the ring in America to further glories and fanfare before his retirement, while Sugrue lost a small fortune on the Dublin fight and after dying in London was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in his hometown of Killorglin, Co Kerry.
The Louisville Lip was also incredibly proud of his County Clare roots. Today we recall the man's star quality and his Irish ancestry.
The death of boxing legend Muhammad Ali at 74 in June 2016, from Parkinson’s, would have brought back many glorious memories of the greatest athlete of our times.
At the height of his career, Ali was the most graceful, talented, and brilliant heavyweight boxer who ever stepped inside the ropes.
Though incapacitated by Parkinson's in later life, he always managed to retain the star power and unique presence that always distinguishes the greatest.
I remember seeing him enter the room at the American Ireland Fund dinner in 2011 and grown men, including the Irish leader Enda Kenny, were simply awestruck that they were in the presence of the greatest living legend.
Ali was more than a boxer, of course, he was a fighter who refused to become cannon fodder in the Vietnam War, the greatest mistaken war America entered until the invasion of Iraq. He was also a poet, a showman, a lover of many women, a devout Muslim, and simply a legend.
Ali's stance to end the Vietnam War when he refused to be drafted cost us the best years of his sporting life. He came back still a brilliant boxer, but the man who could float like a butterfly could never quite recover that greatness.
Still, the fights with Joe Frazier, the rope-a-dope that saw him defeat George Foreman in Zaire in the "Rumble in the Jungle" will forever enshrine his name in history.
Muhammad Ali's Irish roots explained
The astonishing fact that he had Irish roots, being descended from Abe Grady, an Irishman from Ennis, County Clare, only became known later in life.
He returned to Ireland where he had fought and defeated Al “Blue” Lewis in Croke Park in 1972 almost seven years ago in 2009 to help raise money for his non–profit Muhammad Ali Center, a cultural and educational center in Louisville, Kentucky, and other hospices.
He was also there to become the first Freeman of the town.
The boxing great is no stranger to Irish shores and previously made a famous trip to Ireland in 1972 when he sat down with Cathal O’Shannon of RTE for a fascinating television interview.
What’s more, genealogist Antoinette O'Brien discovered that one of Ali’s great-grandfathers emigrated to the United States from County Clare, meaning that the three-time heavyweight world champion joins the likes of President Obama and Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as prominent African-Americans with Irish heritage.
In the 1860s, Abe Grady left Ennis in County Clare to start a new life in America. He would make his home in Kentucky and marry a free African-American woman.
The couple started a family, and one of their daughters was Odessa Lee Grady. Odessa met and married Cassius Clay, Sr. and on January 17, 1942, Cassius junior was born.
Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali when he became a Muslim in 1964.
Ali, an Olympic gold medalist at the 1960 games in Rome, has been suffering from Parkinson's for some years but was committed to raising funds for his center
During his visit to Clare, he was mobbed by tens of thousands of locals who turned out to meet him and show him the area where his great-grandfather came from.
Tracing Muhammad Ali's roots back to County Clare
Historian Dick Eastman had traced Ali’s roots back to Abe Grady the Clare emigrant to Kentucky and the freed slave he married.
Eastman wrote: “An 1855 land survey of Ennis, a town in County Clare, Ireland, contains a reference to John Grady, who was renting a house in Turnpike Road in the center of the town. His rent payment was fifteen shillings a month. A few years later, his son Abe Grady immigrated to the United States. He settled in Kentucky."
Also, around the year 1855, a man and a woman who were both freed slaves, originally from Liberia, purchased land in or around Duck Lick Creek, Logan, Kentucky. The two married, raised a family and farmed the land. These free blacks went by the name, Morehead, the name of white slave owners of the area.
Odessa Grady Clay, Cassius Clay's mother, was the great-granddaughter of the freed slave Tom Morehead and of John Grady of Ennis, whose son Abe had emigrated from Ireland to the United States. She named her son Cassius in honor of a famous Kentucky abolitionist of that time.
When he changed his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964, the famous boxer remarked, "Why should I keep my white slavemaster name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unknown, unhonored?"
Ali was not only the greatest sporting figure, but he was also the best-known person in the world at his height, revered from Africa to Asia and all over the world.
To the end, he was a battler, shown rare courage fighting Parkinson’s Disease, and surviving far longer than most sufferers from the disease.
29cm x 36cm. Dublin
Famous picture during The Greatest's visit to Ireland of Muhammad Ali play fighting with two members of An Garda Siochana.Some memory for those officers to tell their grandchildren about !
July 19, 1972, Muhammad Ali fought Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park in Dublin, causing quite a stir in Ireland.Decades later, an Irish documentary recounting the epic fight not only won awards but also won the approval of Ali's daughter Jamilah Ali.
"When Ali Came to Ireland" is an Irish documentary that details Muhammad Ali's trip to Dublin for a fight against Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park. In 2013 the film was screened at the Chicago film festival, where Jamilah Ali was in attendance.
TheJournal.ie reported that following the screening, Jamilah said "I've seen so much footage of my father over the years but the amazing thing about watching this film was that I had seen none of the footage of him in Ireland... I loved the film from the beginning to the end."
The film highlights a moment in Ali's career where he was set to stage a world comeback. He had been recently released from prison after refusing to join the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector.
His opponent Al Lewis had also just been released on parole after serving time in Detroit for a murder charge, and he intended to use his boxing career as "a path to a new life."
The movie that won an IFTA in 2013 documents the spectacle in Croke Park, Ali's presence in Ireland and how the public reacted to his being there. It also demonstrates how Ali came to be in Dublin for a fight in the first place, highlighting the involvement of "former Kerry strongman"Michael "Butty" Sugrue.
Sugrue's story also proved to be revelatory to his family- in a quote from Ross Whittaker, co-director of the film, he speaks about how Sugrue's grandchildren had never had the chance to meet him.
"We were amazed when we screened the film in London to find that Butty Sugrue's granddaughters had never heard their grandfather speak. He had died before they were born and they'd never seen footage of him in which he had spoken."
After their 1972 meeting, however, Sugrue and Ali's fortunes took two divergent paths. Ali returned to the ring in America to further glories and fanfare before his retirement, while Sugrue lost a small fortune on the Dublin fight and after dying in London was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in his hometown of Killorglin, Co Kerry.
The Louisville Lip was also incredibly proud of his County Clare roots. Today we recall the man's star quality and his Irish ancestry.
The death of boxing legend Muhammad Ali at 74 in June 2016, from Parkinson’s, would have brought back many glorious memories of the greatest athlete of our times.
At the height of his career, Ali was the most graceful, talented, and brilliant heavyweight boxer who ever stepped inside the ropes.
Though incapacitated by Parkinson's in later life, he always managed to retain the star power and unique presence that always distinguishes the greatest.
I remember seeing him enter the room at the American Ireland Fund dinner in 2011 and grown men, including the Irish leader Enda Kenny, were simply awestruck that they were in the presence of the greatest living legend.
Ali was more than a boxer, of course, he was a fighter who refused to become cannon fodder in the Vietnam War, the greatest mistaken war America entered until the invasion of Iraq. He was also a poet, a showman, a lover of many women, a devout Muslim, and simply a legend.
Ali's stance to end the Vietnam War when he refused to be drafted cost us the best years of his sporting life. He came back still a brilliant boxer, but the man who could float like a butterfly could never quite recover that greatness.
Still, the fights with Joe Frazier, the rope-a-dope that saw him defeat George Foreman in Zaire in the "Rumble in the Jungle" will forever enshrine his name in history.
Muhammad Ali's Irish roots explained
The astonishing fact that he had Irish roots, being descended from Abe Grady, an Irishman from Ennis, County Clare, only became known later in life.
He returned to Ireland where he had fought and defeated Al “Blue” Lewis in Croke Park in 1972 almost seven years ago in 2009 to help raise money for his non–profit Muhammad Ali Center, a cultural and educational center in Louisville, Kentucky, and other hospices.
He was also there to become the first Freeman of the town.
The boxing great is no stranger to Irish shores and previously made a famous trip to Ireland in 1972 when he sat down with Cathal O’Shannon of RTE for a fascinating television interview.
What’s more, genealogist Antoinette O'Brien discovered that one of Ali’s great-grandfathers emigrated to the United States from County Clare, meaning that the three-time heavyweight world champion joins the likes of President Obama and Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. as prominent African-Americans with Irish heritage.
In the 1860s, Abe Grady left Ennis in County Clare to start a new life in America. He would make his home in Kentucky and marry a free African-American woman.
The couple started a family, and one of their daughters was Odessa Lee Grady. Odessa met and married Cassius Clay, Sr. and on January 17, 1942, Cassius junior was born.
Cassius Clay changed his name to Muhammad Ali when he became a Muslim in 1964.
Ali, an Olympic gold medalist at the 1960 games in Rome, has been suffering from Parkinson's for some years but was committed to raising funds for his center
During his visit to Clare, he was mobbed by tens of thousands of locals who turned out to meet him and show him the area where his great-grandfather came from.
Tracing Muhammad Ali's roots back to County Clare
Historian Dick Eastman had traced Ali’s roots back to Abe Grady the Clare emigrant to Kentucky and the freed slave he married.
Eastman wrote: “An 1855 land survey of Ennis, a town in County Clare, Ireland, contains a reference to John Grady, who was renting a house in Turnpike Road in the center of the town. His rent payment was fifteen shillings a month. A few years later, his son Abe Grady immigrated to the United States. He settled in Kentucky."
Also, around the year 1855, a man and a woman who were both freed slaves, originally from Liberia, purchased land in or around Duck Lick Creek, Logan, Kentucky. The two married, raised a family and farmed the land. These free blacks went by the name, Morehead, the name of white slave owners of the area.
Odessa Grady Clay, Cassius Clay's mother, was the great-granddaughter of the freed slave Tom Morehead and of John Grady of Ennis, whose son Abe had emigrated from Ireland to the United States. She named her son Cassius in honor of a famous Kentucky abolitionist of that time.
When he changed his name to Muhammad Ali in 1964, the famous boxer remarked, "Why should I keep my white slavemaster name visible and my black ancestors invisible, unknown, unhonored?"
Ali was not only the greatest sporting figure, but he was also the best-known person in the world at his height, revered from Africa to Asia and all over the world.
To the end, he was a battler, shown rare courage fighting Parkinson’s Disease, and surviving far longer than most sufferers from the disease.
Framed photo of an iconic moment as the Beatles arrive in Dublin,pistured outside the old Dublin Airport Terminal in
47cm x 60cm Dublin
November 7, 1963, one of the wildest phenomenons of the 20th century hit Dublin.... a Liverpudlian revolution named The Beatles!
All these years later, according to The Irish Times, a plaque will be placed at the site of the event, the Adelphi Cinema on Middle Abbey Street in Dublin.
The tribute honors a world-changing British rock and roll group who the columnist Quidnunc in the Times described as “four hairy youngsters. [They] appeared onstage to be greeted with shrieks and whistles. Three of them walloped electric guitars which appeared to be amplified to the decibel limit, the fourth walloped a set of drums.“They all opened their mouths and made noises that sounded to me like: ‘Mew; Me-oh, me-ooh, me-ooh-ooh!’”
The Beatles had come to town for two sold-out shows at the Adelphi. Ireland would never be quite the same again
Fifteen days later JFK would be assassinated. The old innocent age drew to a close.
The newspapers all reported on a strange phenomenon called Beatlemania. “It’s happening everywhere,” declared the Daily Mirrorworriedly.
What was significant was that it was young girls who were screaming their heads off, crying, scratching to get near and touch the Beatles. Female sexuality was a completely new phenomenon in Holy Catholic Ireland, and their honors the bishops were not long in weighing in
What happened in Dublin was a riot. The 3,000 pumped up crowd for the first show came streaming out only to run full tilt into the 3,000-second show patrons.
Neither crowd gave way, and pushing and shoving ensued. Then it turned nasty.
A commotion described as a riot took place. The Times lead ran"
“Many arrested as city crowds run riot.”“Cars were overturned in Abbey Street and O’Connell Street, at least 50 people were treated for minor injuries, while three people were taken to hospital with fractured legs and arms.”
A young man was also hospitalized after being stabbed. Two hundred police and three fire brigades arrived. Buses and taxis were halted in the melee.
Only the ringing of the fire bells seemed to settle down the crowd, but soon more crowds arrived and fights began anew.
“One group of youths pushed a parked car into half a dozen policemen who were trying to get them out of the street,” reported the Times. “St John’s Ambulance men treated men and women on the footpaths while the crowds swirled around them.”
The Beatles did not hang around. John, Paul, George, and Ringo escaped in a newspaper van to the nearby Gresham Hotel. Later, two of them went to Drumcondra to see relatives, the Times reported.
The Times’ reviewer at the gig could hear nothing but the sound of “ecstatic, joyful, hysteric, demented” screams from Dublin teenagers. He wrote:
“A pity, this, because the Beatles, in spite of their theatrical gimmicks, their long locks, and ‘with-it’ suits, have a great act…God knows, Dublin has never seen anything like the Beatles.”
Indeed they had not. Nor would they ever see their likes again. Despite their multiple Irish connections, the four lads would never be back, and more’s the pity.
Framed Guinness ephemera -these are Guinnessentials- a guide to publicans selling the Black Stuff !
Dimensions : 43cm x 36cm Dublin
Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.”
Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading.
The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test.
By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world.
Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.”
Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981.Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter.
Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid.
In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo.
The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.
The Guinness Brewery Park Royal during demolition, at its peak the largest and most productive brewery in the world.
The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland was moved to St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin.
Guinness has also been referred to as “that black stuff”. Guinness had a fleet of ships, barges and yachts. The Irish Sunday Independent newspaper reported on 17 June 2007 that Diageo intended to close the historic St James’s Gate plant in Dublin and move to a greenfield site on the outskirts of the city.This news caused some controversy when it was announced.The following day, the Irish Daily Mail ran a follow-up story with a double page spread complete with images and a history of the plant since 1759. Initially, Diageo said that talk of a move was pure speculation but in the face of mounting speculation in the wake of the Sunday Independent article, the company confirmed that it is undertaking a “significant review of its operations”. This review was largely due to the efforts of the company’s ongoing drive to reduce the environmental impact of brewing at the St James’s Gate plant.
On 23 November 2007, an article appeared in the Evening Herald, a Dublin newspaper, stating that the Dublin City Council, in the best interests of the city of Dublin, had put forward a motion to prevent planning permission ever being granted for development of the site, thus making it very difficult for Diageo to sell off the site for residential development.
On 9 May 2008, Diageo announced that the St James’s Gate brewery will remain open and undergo renovations, but that breweries in Kilkenny and Dundalk will be closed by 2013 when a new larger brewery is opened near Dublin. The result will be a loss of roughly 250 jobs across the entire Diageo/Guinness workforce in Ireland.Two days later, the Sunday Independent again reported that Diageo chiefs had met with TánaisteMary Coughlan, the deputy leader of the Government of Ireland, about moving operations to Ireland from the UK to benefit from its lower corporation tax rates. Several UK firms have made the move in order to pay Ireland’s 12.5 per cent rate rather than the UK’s 28 per cent rate. Diageo released a statement to the London stock exchange denying the report.Despite the merger that created Diageo plc in 1997, Guinness has retained its right to the Guinness brand and associated trademarks and thus continues to trade under the traditional Guinness name despite trading under the corporation name Diageo for a brief period in 1997.
In November 2015 it was announced that Guinness are planning to make their beer suitable for consumption by vegetarians and vegans by the end of 2016 through the introduction of a new filtration process at their existing Guinness Brewery that avoids the need to use isinglass from fish bladders to filter out yeast particles.This went into effect in 2017, per the company’s FAQ webpage where they state: “Our new filtration process has removed the use of isinglass as a means of filtration and vegans can now enjoy a pint of Guinness. All Guinness Draught in keg format is brewed without using isinglass. Full distribution of bottle and can formats will be in place by the end of 2017, so until then, our advice to vegans is to consume the product from the keg format only for now.
Guinness stout is made from water, barley, roast malt extract, hops, and brewer’s yeast. A portion of the barley is roasted to give Guinness its dark colour and characteristic taste. It is pasteurisedand filtered.
Until the late 1950s Guinness was still racked into wooden casks. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Guinness ceased brewing cask-conditioned beers and developed a keg brewing system with aluminium kegs replacing the wooden casks; these were nicknamed “iron lungs”.Until 2016 the production of Guinness, as with many beers, involved the use of isinglass made from fish. Isinglass was used as a fining agent for settling out suspended matter in the vat. The isinglass was retained in the floor of the vat but it was possible that minute quantities might be carried over into the beer. Diageo announced in February 2018 that the use of isinglass in draught Guinness was to be discontinued and an alternative clarification agent would be used instead. This has made draught Guinness acceptable to vegans and vegetarians.
Arguably its biggest change to date, in 1959 Guinness began using nitrogen, which changed the fundamental texture and flavour of the Guinness of the past as nitrogen bubbles are much smaller than CO2, giving a “creamier” and “smoother” consistency over a sharper and traditional CO2 taste. This step was taken after Michael Ash – a mathematician turned brewer – discovered the mechanism to make this possible.
Nitrogen is less soluble than carbon dioxide, which allows the beer to be put under high pressure without making it fizzy. High pressure of the dissolved gas is required to enable very small bubbles to be formed by forcing the draught beer through fine holes in a plate in the tap, which causes the characteristic “surge” (the widget in cans and bottles achieves the same effect). This “widget” is a small plastic ball containing the nitrogen. The perceived smoothness of draught Guinness is due to its low level of carbon dioxide and the creaminess of the head caused by the very fine bubbles that arise from the use of nitrogen and the dispensing method described above. “Foreign Extra Stout” contains more carbon dioxide, causing a more acidic taste.
Contemporary Guinness Draught and Extra Stout are weaker than they were in the 19th century, when they had an original gravity of over 1.070. Foreign Extra Stout and Special Export Stout, with abv of 7.5% and 9% respectively, are perhaps closest to the original in character.Although Guinness may appear to be black, it is officially a very dark shade of ruby.
The most recent change in alcohol content from the Import Stout to the Extra Stout was due to a change in distribution through North American market. Consumer complaints have influenced recent distribution and bottle changes.
Studies claim that Guinness can be beneficial to the heart. Researchers found that “‘antioxidantcompounds’ in the Guinness, similar to those found in certain fruits and vegetables, are responsible for the health benefits because they slow down the deposit of harmful cholesterol on the artery walls.”Guinness ran an advertising campaign in the 1920s which stemmed from market research – when people told the company that they felt good after their pint, the slogan, created by Dorothy L. Sayers–”Guinness is Good for You”. Advertising for alcoholic drinks that implies improved physical performance or enhanced personal qualities is now prohibited in Ireland.Diageo, the company that now manufactures Guinness, says: “We never make any medical claims for our drinks.”
Origins : Dublin
Dimensions : 43cm x 35cm
Framed print of vintage Guinness advert extolling the delights of a pint being poured by draught.Draught Guinness was first introduced in 1959
Dimensions : 44cmx 37cm Dublin
Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.”
Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading.
The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test.
By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world.
Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.”
Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981.Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter.
Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid.
In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo.
The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.
The Guinness Brewery Park Royal during demolition, at its peak the largest and most productive brewery in the world.
The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland was moved to St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin.
Guinness has also been referred to as “that black stuff”. Guinness had a fleet of ships, barges and yachts. The Irish Sunday Independent newspaper reported on 17 June 2007 that Diageo intended to close the historic St James’s Gate plant in Dublin and move to a greenfield site on the outskirts of the city.This news caused some controversy when it was announced.The following day, the Irish Daily Mail ran a follow-up story with a double page spread complete with images and a history of the plant since 1759. Initially, Diageo said that talk of a move was pure speculation but in the face of mounting speculation in the wake of the Sunday Independent article, the company confirmed that it is undertaking a “significant review of its operations”. This review was largely due to the efforts of the company’s ongoing drive to reduce the environmental impact of brewing at the St James’s Gate plant.
On 23 November 2007, an article appeared in the Evening Herald, a Dublin newspaper, stating that the Dublin City Council, in the best interests of the city of Dublin, had put forward a motion to prevent planning permission ever being granted for development of the site, thus making it very difficult for Diageo to sell off the site for residential development.
On 9 May 2008, Diageo announced that the St James’s Gate brewery will remain open and undergo renovations, but that breweries in Kilkenny and Dundalk will be closed by 2013 when a new larger brewery is opened near Dublin. The result will be a loss of roughly 250 jobs across the entire Diageo/Guinness workforce in Ireland.Two days later, the Sunday Independent again reported that Diageo chiefs had met with TánaisteMary Coughlan, the deputy leader of the Government of Ireland, about moving operations to Ireland from the UK to benefit from its lower corporation tax rates. Several UK firms have made the move in order to pay Ireland’s 12.5 per cent rate rather than the UK’s 28 per cent rate. Diageo released a statement to the London stock exchange denying the report.Despite the merger that created Diageo plc in 1997, Guinness has retained its right to the Guinness brand and associated trademarks and thus continues to trade under the traditional Guinness name despite trading under the corporation name Diageo for a brief period in 1997.
In November 2015 it was announced that Guinness are planning to make their beer suitable for consumption by vegetarians and vegans by the end of 2016 through the introduction of a new filtration process at their existing Guinness Brewery that avoids the need to use isinglass from fish bladders to filter out yeast particles.This went into effect in 2017, per the company’s FAQ webpage where they state: “Our new filtration process has removed the use of isinglass as a means of filtration and vegans can now enjoy a pint of Guinness. All Guinness Draught in keg format is brewed without using isinglass. Full distribution of bottle and can formats will be in place by the end of 2017, so until then, our advice to vegans is to consume the product from the keg format only for now.
Guinness stout is made from water, barley, roast malt extract, hops, and brewer’s yeast. A portion of the barley is roasted to give Guinness its dark colour and characteristic taste. It is pasteurisedand filtered.
Until the late 1950s Guinness was still racked into wooden casks. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Guinness ceased brewing cask-conditioned beers and developed a keg brewing system with aluminium kegs replacing the wooden casks; these were nicknamed “iron lungs”.Until 2016 the production of Guinness, as with many beers, involved the use of isinglass made from fish. Isinglass was used as a fining agent for settling out suspended matter in the vat. The isinglass was retained in the floor of the vat but it was possible that minute quantities might be carried over into the beer. Diageo announced in February 2018 that the use of isinglass in draught Guinness was to be discontinued and an alternative clarification agent would be used instead. This has made draught Guinness acceptable to vegans and vegetarians.
Arguably its biggest change to date, in 1959 Guinness began using nitrogen, which changed the fundamental texture and flavour of the Guinness of the past as nitrogen bubbles are much smaller than CO2, giving a “creamier” and “smoother” consistency over a sharper and traditional CO2 taste. This step was taken after Michael Ash – a mathematician turned brewer – discovered the mechanism to make this possible.
Nitrogen is less soluble than carbon dioxide, which allows the beer to be put under high pressure without making it fizzy. High pressure of the dissolved gas is required to enable very small bubbles to be formed by forcing the draught beer through fine holes in a plate in the tap, which causes the characteristic “surge” (the widget in cans and bottles achieves the same effect). This “widget” is a small plastic ball containing the nitrogen. The perceived smoothness of draught Guinness is due to its low level of carbon dioxide and the creaminess of the head caused by the very fine bubbles that arise from the use of nitrogen and the dispensing method described above. “Foreign Extra Stout” contains more carbon dioxide, causing a more acidic taste.
Contemporary Guinness Draught and Extra Stout are weaker than they were in the 19th century, when they had an original gravity of over 1.070. Foreign Extra Stout and Special Export Stout, with abv of 7.5% and 9% respectively, are perhaps closest to the original in character.Although Guinness may appear to be black, it is officially a very dark shade of ruby.
The most recent change in alcohol content from the Import Stout to the Extra Stout was due to a change in distribution through North American market. Consumer complaints have influenced recent distribution and bottle changes.
Studies claim that Guinness can be beneficial to the heart. Researchers found that “‘antioxidantcompounds’ in the Guinness, similar to those found in certain fruits and vegetables, are responsible for the health benefits because they slow down the deposit of harmful cholesterol on the artery walls.”Guinness ran an advertising campaign in the 1920s which stemmed from market research – when people told the company that they felt good after their pint, the slogan, created by Dorothy L. Sayers–”Guinness is Good for You”. Advertising for alcoholic drinks that implies improved physical performance or enhanced personal qualities is now prohibited in Ireland.Diageo, the company that now manufactures Guinness, says: “We never make any medical claims for our drinks.”
Origins : Dublin
Dimensions : 43cm x 35cm
42cm x 42cm Dublin
The Easter Rising was an insurrection, mostly in Dublin city, that lasted from April 24th until April 30th1916.
The insurgents in Dublin amounted to 1,200 men and women from the nationalist militia the Irish Volunteers, the socialist trade union group Irish Citizen Army and the women’s group, Cumman na mBan.
The Irish Volunteers had been founded in 1913 in response to the blocking of Home Rule, or self government for Ireland by the Ulster Volunteers. The Citizen Army (with around 300 members) was formed during the Dublin Lockout of 1913 to protect strikers from the police. James Connolly afterwards directed it towards pursuit of an Irish socialist republic.
The Volunteers split after the outbreak of the First World War into the National Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers.
The National Volunteers, over 120,000 strong, led by Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, were pledged to support the British war effort and over 30,000 of them joined the British Army. The remaining 13,000 Irish Volunteers, led by Eoin MacNeill, were committed to keep their organisation intact and in Ireland until Home Rule was passed.
The Rising was planned in secret by seven men, mostly of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB, who had formed a “Military Council” to this end just after the outbreak of the First World War. They were, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, James Connolly and Eamon Ceannt.
Their plans were not known to the membership of the Volunteers at large or to the leaders of the IRB and Volunteers, Dennis McCullough, Bulmer Hobson and Eoin MacNeill.
They had arranged with the Germans for a large importation of arms to be delivered on Good Friday, April 21st, but this shipment was discovered by the British off Kerry and its cargo lost.
At the last minute, the plans for the Rising were revealed to Eoin MacNeill who tried to call off the rebellion by issuing a “countermanding order”, but actually just postponed the outbreak from Easter Sunday to the next day, Monday.
The insurgents proclaimed an Irish Republic with Pearse as President and Connolly as commander in chief. They occupied positions around Dublin at the General Post Office (GPO), the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Boland’s Mill, Stephen’s Green and Jacobs’ biscuit factory.
The GPO in ruins after the Rising.
Over the following week, the British deployed over 16,000 troops, artillery and naval gunboat into the city to suppress the rising. In the week’s fighting, about 450 people were killed and over 2,000 wounded.
The rebels’ headquarters at the GPO was bombarded into surrender, which Patrick Pearse ordered on Saturday, 29th April.However the fiercest fighting took place elsewhere, at Mount Street Bridge, South Dublin Union and North King Street.
There were also risings in county Galway, Enniscorthy in Wexford and Ashbourne in county Meath, but apart from an action at Ashbourne that killed 11 police, these caused little bloodshed.
Sixteen of the rebel leaders were executed, 15 in a two week period after they had surrendered and one, Roger Casement, in August.
Over 3,000 people were arrested after the rebellion and over 1,400 imprisoned. The Rising was not widely supported among the Dublin public and was condemned by the Irish Parliamentary Party and much of nationalist as well as unionist opinion. However, combined with other factors, such as the continued postponement of Home Rule, the growing casualties of the First World War and the threat of conscription, the Rising and its repression helped to increase the strength of the radical nationalists in Sinn Fein.
This party, which had not participated in the rebellion, was adopted as a vehicle by the veterans of the Rising and pledged to withdraw from the Westminster Parliament and set up an Irish one.
Sinn Fein went on to win three by-elections in 1917 and a general election in 1918, leading to their proclamation of an Irish Republic in January 1919 and the start of the Irish War of Independence.
Fantastic ,imposing Dublin Gold Matured for Seven Years Irish Whiskey Advert in magnificent, gold frame
60 cm x 95cm Dublin
"A whiskey is the creation of something harmonious, balanced and fundamentally social... It brings together the mastery of the distilling process with the mystery of its humble ingredients.
It is this indefinable nature that makes a Premium Whiskey far more than the sum of its parts.”
The Jameson Masters
In order to be called an “Irish Whiskey”, distilled spirit must be;
- aged in wood barrels for a minimum of 3 years.
- a minimum of 40% ABV.
- distilled and matured on the island of Ireland.There are several types of Irish Whiskey including;
Pot still Irish Whiskey
Pot still whiskey is whiskey made from a combination of malted barley and unmalted barley and is distilled in traditional copper pot stills. Pot Still Irish Whiskeys are characterised by full bodied flavours and a wonderful creamy mouth feel.
Blended Irish Whiskey
A blended whiskey is a combination of 2 or more styles of whiskey (grain, pot still or malt whiskey).
Grain Irish Whiskey
Grain whiskey is typically produced from a mash of maize and malted barley. Grain whiskey is lighter in character than pot still whiskey and generally the characteristics display delicate, fragrant and floral notes.
Malt Irish WhIskey
A single malt whiskey is made exclusively from malted barley and is distilled using a pot still.
25cm x 35cm Limerick
Commemorative stamp issued in 1974 to mark the centenary of the founding of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU).
he Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) (Irish: Cumann Rugbaí na hÉireann) is the body managing rugby union in the island of Ireland (both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). The IRFU has its head office at 10/12 Lansdowne Roadand home ground at Aviva Stadium, where adult men's Irish rugby union international matches are played. In addition, the Union also owns the Ravenhill Stadium in Belfast, Thomond Park in Limerick and a number of grounds in provincial areas that have been rented to clubs.
Initially, there were two unions: the Irish Football Union, which had jurisdiction over clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster and was founded in December 1874, and the Northern Football Union of Ireland, which controlled the Belfast area and was founded in January 1875.The IRFU was formed in 1879 as an amalgamation of these two organisations and branches of the new IRFU were formed in Leinster, Munster and Ulster. The Connacht Branch was formed in 1900.
The IRFU was a founding member of the International Rugby Football Board, now known as World Rugby, in 1886 with Scotland and Wales. (England refused to join until 1890.)
Following the political partition of Ireland into separate national states, the Republic of Ireland (originally the Irish Free State then Éire) and Northern Ireland (a political division of the United Kingdom), the then Committee of the Irish Rugby Football Union decided that it would continue to administer its affairs on the basis of the full 32 Irish counties and the traditional four provinces of Ireland: Leinster (12 counties), Ulster (9 counties), Munster (6 counties), and Connacht (5 counties).
This led to the unusual, but not unique, situation among international rugby union teams, where the Irish representative teams are drawn from players from two separate political, national territories: Ireland (an independent, sovereign state) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). To maintain the unity of Irish rugby union and the linkages between North and South, the IRFU purchased a new ground in 1923 in the Ravenhill district of Belfast at a cost of £2,300.The last full International at Ravenhill involving Ireland for more than a half-century took place in 1953–54 against Scotland who were victorious by 2 tries (6 points) to nil. Australia played Romania in the 1999 World Cup at the ground. The next full International played at Ravenhill was the Rugby World Cup warm-up match against Italy in August 2007 due to the temporary closure of Lansdowne Road for reconstruction.
The four provincial branches of the IRFU first ran cup competitions during the 1880s. Although these tournaments still take place every year, their significance has been diminished by the advent of an All-Ireland league of 48 Senior Clubs in 1990.
The four provincial teams have played an Interprovincial Championship since the 1920s and continue to be the focal point for players aspiring to the international level. These are Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. All four provinces play at the senior level as members of the United Rugby Championship.
25cm x 35cm Limerick
The 1921 Five Nations Championship was the seventh series of the rugby union Five Nations Championship following the inclusion of France into the Home Nations Championship. Including the previous Home Nations Championships, this was the thirty-fourth series of the annual northern hemisphere rugby union championship. Ten matches were played between 15 January and 9 April. It was contested by England, France, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
The Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) (Irish: Cumann Rugbaí na hÉireann) is the body managing rugby union in the island of Ireland (both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). The IRFU has its head office at 10/12 Lansdowne Roadand home ground at Aviva Stadium, where adult men's Irish rugby union international matches are played. In addition, the Union also owns the Ravenhill Stadium in Belfast, Thomond Park in Limerick and a number of grounds in provincial areas that have been rented to clubs.
Initially, there were two unions: the Irish Football Union, which had jurisdiction over clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster and was founded in December 1874, and the Northern Football Union of Ireland, which controlled the Belfast area and was founded in January 1875.The IRFU was formed in 1879 as an amalgamation of these two organisations and branches of the new IRFU were formed in Leinster, Munster and Ulster. The Connacht Branch was formed in 1900.
The IRFU was a founding member of the International Rugby Football Board, now known as World Rugby, in 1886 with Scotland and Wales. (England refused to join until 1890.)
Following the political partition of Ireland into separate national states, the Republic of Ireland (originally the Irish Free State then Éire) and Northern Ireland (a political division of the United Kingdom), the then Committee of the Irish Rugby Football Union decided that it would continue to administer its affairs on the basis of the full 32 Irish counties and the traditional four provinces of Ireland: Leinster (12 counties), Ulster (9 counties), Munster (6 counties), and Connacht (5 counties).
This led to the unusual, but not unique, situation among international rugby union teams, where the Irish representative teams are drawn from players from two separate political, national territories: Ireland (an independent, sovereign state) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). To maintain the unity of Irish rugby union and the linkages between North and South, the IRFU purchased a new ground in 1923 in the Ravenhill district of Belfast at a cost of £2,300.The last full International at Ravenhill involving Ireland for more than a half-century took place in 1953–54 against Scotland who were victorious by 2 tries (6 points) to nil. Australia played Romania in the 1999 World Cup at the ground. The next full International played at Ravenhill was the Rugby World Cup warm-up match against Italy in August 2007 due to the temporary closure of Lansdowne Road for reconstruction.
The four provincial branches of the IRFU first ran cup competitions during the 1880s. Although these tournaments still take place every year, their significance has been diminished by the advent of an All-Ireland league of 48 Senior Clubs in 1990.
The four provincial teams have played an Interprovincial Championship since the 1920s and continue to be the focal point for players aspiring to the international level. These are Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. All four provinces play at the senior level as members of the United Rugby Championship.
The Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) (Irish: Cumann Rugbaí na hÉireann) is the body managing rugby union in the island of Ireland (both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). The IRFU has its head office at 10/12 Lansdowne Roadand home ground at Aviva Stadium, where adult men's Irish rugby union international matches are played. In addition, the Union also owns the Ravenhill Stadium in Belfast, Thomond Park in Limerick and a number of grounds in provincial areas that have been rented to clubs.
Initially, there were two unions: the Irish Football Union, which had jurisdiction over clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster and was founded in December 1874, and the Northern Football Union of Ireland, which controlled the Belfast area and was founded in January 1875.The IRFU was formed in 1879 as an amalgamation of these two organisations and branches of the new IRFU were formed in Leinster, Munster and Ulster. The Connacht Branch was formed in 1900.
The IRFU was a founding member of the International Rugby Football Board, now known as World Rugby, in 1886 with Scotland and Wales. (England refused to join until 1890.)
Following the political partition of Ireland into separate national states, the Republic of Ireland (originally the Irish Free State then Éire) and Northern Ireland (a political division of the United Kingdom), the then Committee of the Irish Rugby Football Union decided that it would continue to administer its affairs on the basis of the full 32 Irish counties and the traditional four provinces of Ireland: Leinster (12 counties), Ulster (9 counties), Munster (6 counties), and Connacht (5 counties).
This led to the unusual, but not unique, situation among international rugby union teams, where the Irish representative teams are drawn from players from two separate political, national territories: Ireland (an independent, sovereign state) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). To maintain the unity of Irish rugby union and the linkages between North and South, the IRFU purchased a new ground in 1923 in the Ravenhill district of Belfast at a cost of £2,300.The last full International at Ravenhill involving Ireland for more than a half-century took place in 1953–54 against Scotland who were victorious by 2 tries (6 points) to nil. Australia played Romania in the 1999 World Cup at the ground. The next full International played at Ravenhill was the Rugby World Cup warm-up match against Italy in August 2007 due to the temporary closure of Lansdowne Road for reconstruction.
The four provincial branches of the IRFU first ran cup competitions during the 1880s. Although these tournaments still take place every year, their significance has been diminished by the advent of an All-Ireland league of 48 Senior Clubs in 1990.
The four provincial teams have played an Interprovincial Championship since the 1920s and continue to be the focal point for players aspiring to the international level. These are Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. All four provinces play at the senior level as members of the United Rugby Championship.
25cm x 35cm Limerick
The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism."Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
Background
Following the founding meeting of the Mayo Tenants Defence Association in Castlebar, County Mayo on 26 October 1878 the demand for The Land of Ireland for the people of Ireland was reported in the Connaught Telegraph 2 November 1878.
The first of many "monster meetings" of tenant farmers was held in Irishtown near Claremorris on 20 April 1879, with an estimated turnout of 15,000 to 20,000 people. This meeting was addressed by James Daly (who presided), John O'Connor Power, John Ferguson, Thomas Brennan, and J. J. Louden.
The Connaught Telegraph's report of the meeting in its edition of 26 April 1879 began:
Since the days of O'Connell a larger public demonstration has not been witnessed than that of Sunday last. About 1 o'clock the monster procession started from Claremorris, headed by several thousand men on foot – the men of each district wearing a laural leaf or green ribbon in hat or coat to distinguish the several contingents. At 11 o'clock a monster contingent of tenant-farmers on horseback drew up in front of Hughes's hotel, showing discipline and order that a cavalry regiment might feel proud of. They were led on in sections, each having a marshal who kept his troops well in hand. Messrs. P.W. Nally, J.W. Nally, H. French, and M. Griffin, wearing green and gold sashes, led on their different sections, who rode two deep, occupying, at least, over an Irish mile of the road. Next followed a train of carriages, brakes, cares, etc. led on by Mr. Martin Hughes, the spirited hotel proprietor, driving a pair of rare black ponies to a phæton, taking Messrs. J.J. Louden and J. Daly. Next came Messrs. O'Connor, J. Ferguson, and Thomas Brennan in a covered carriage, followed by at least 500 vehicles from the neighbouring towns. On passing through Ballindine the sight was truly imposing, the endless train directing its course to Irishtown – a neat little hamlet on the boundaries of Mayo, Roscommon, and Galway.
Evolving out of this a number of local land league organisations were set up to work against the excessive rents being demanded by landlords throughout Ireland, but especially in Mayo and surrounding counties.
From 1874 agricultural prices in Europe had dropped, followed by some bad harvests due to wet weather during the Long Depression. The effect by 1878 was that many Irish farmers were unable to pay the rents that they had agreed, particularly in the poorer and wetter parts of Connacht. The localised 1879 Famine added to the misery. Unlike many other parts of Europe, the Irish land tenure system was inflexible in times of economic hardship.
League founded
National Land League plaque Imperial Hotel in Castlebar
The Irish National Land League was founded at the Imperial Hotel in Castlebar, the County town of Mayo, on 21 October 1879. At that meeting Charles Stewart Parnell was elected president of the league. Andrew Kettle, Michael Davitt and Thomas Brennan were appointed as honorary secretaries. This united practically all the different strands of land agitation and tenant rights movements under a single organisation.
The two aims of the Land League, as stated in the resolutions adopted in the meeting, were:
..."first, to bring about a reduction of rack-rents; second, to facilitate the obtaining of the ownership of the soil by the occupiers".
That the object of the League can be best attained by promoting organisation among the tenant-farmers; by defending those who may be threatened with eviction for refusing to pay unjust rents; by facilitating the working of the Bright clauses of the Irish Land Act during the winter; and by obtaining such reforms in the laws relating to land as will enable every tenant to become owner of his holding by paying a fair rent for a limited number of years".
Charles Stewart Parnell, John Dillon, Michael Davitt, and others then went to the United States to raise funds for the League with spectacular results. Branches were also set up in Scotland, where the Crofters Party imitated the League and secured a reforming Act in 1886.
The government had introduced the first Land Act in 1870, which proved largely ineffective. It was followed by the marginally more effective Land Acts of 1880 and 1881. These established a Land Commission that started to reduce some rents. Parnell together with all of his party lieutenants, including Father Eugene Sheehyknown as "the Land League priest", went into a bitter verbal offensive and were imprisoned in October 1881 under the Irish Coercion Act in Kilmainham Jail for "sabotaging the Land Act", from where the No-Rent Manifesto was issued, calling for a national tenant farmer rent strike until "constitutional liberties" were restored and the prisoners freed. It had a modest success In Ireland, and mobilized financial and political support from the Irish Diaspora.
Although the League discouraged violence, agrarian crimes increased widely. Typically a rent strike would be followed by eviction by the police and the bailiffs. Tenants who continued to pay the rent would be subject to a boycott, or as it was contemporaneously described in the US press, an "excommunication" by local League members.Where cases went to court, witnesses would change their stories, resulting in an unworkable legal system. This in turn led on to stronger criminal laws being passed that were described by the League as "Coercion Acts".
The bitterness that developed helped Parnell later in his Home Rule campaign. Davitt's views as seen in his famous slogan: "The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland" was aimed at strengthening the hold on the land by the peasant Irish at the expense of the alien landowners.Parnell aimed to harness the emotive element, but he and his party were strictly constitutional. He envisioned tenant farmers as potential freeholders of the land they had rented.
In the Encyclopedia Britannica, the League is considered part of the progressive "rise of fenianism".
In the United States
The Land League had an equivalent organization in the United States, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars both for famine relief and also for political action.The Clan na Gael attempted to infiltrate the Land League, with limited success.
Land war
William Gladstone under pressure of Land League. Caricature circa 1880s.
From 1879 to 1882, the "Land War" in pursuance of the "Three Fs" (Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale) first demanded by the Tenant Right League in 1850, was fought in earnest. The League organised resistance to evictions, reductions in rents and aided the work of relief agencies. Landlords' attempts to evict tenants led to violence, but the Land League denounced excessive violence and destruction.
Irish land League poster
dating from the 1880s
Withholding of rent led on to evictions until "Ashbourne's Act" in 1885 made it unprofitable for most landlords to evict.By then agricultural prices had made a recovery, and rents had been fixed and could be reviewed downwards, but tenants found that holding out communally was the best option. Critics noted that the poorer sub-tenants were still expected to pay their rents to tenant farmers.
The widespread upheavals and extensive evictions were accompanied by several years of bad weather and poor harvests, when the tenant farmers who were unable to pay the full arrears of rents resorted to a rent strike. A renewed Land War was waged under the Plan of Campaign from 1886 up until 1892 during which the League decided on a fair rent and then encouraged its members to offer this rent to the landlords. If this was refused, then the rent would be paid by tenants to the League and the landlord would not receive any money until he accepted a discount.
The first target, ironically, was a member of the Catholic clergy, Canon Ulick Burke of Knock, who was eventually induced to reduce his rents by 25%. Many landlords resisted these tactics, often violently and there were deaths on either side of the dispute. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the national police force, largely made up of Irishmen, were charged with upholding the law and protecting both landlord and tenant against violence. Originally, the movement cut across some sectarian boundaries, with some meetings held in Orange halls in Ulster, but the tenancy system in effect there Ulster Custom was quite different and fairer to tenants and support drifted away.
As a result of the Land War, the Irish National Land League was suppressed by the authorities. In October 1882, as its successor Parnell founded the Irish National League to campaign on broader issues including Home Rule.Many of the Scottish members formed the Scottish Land Restoration League. In 1881, the League started publishing United Ireland a weekly newspaper edited by William O'Brien, which continued until 1898.
Outcomes
Within decades of the league's foundation, through the efforts of William O'Brien and George Wyndham (a descendant of Lord Edward FitzGerald), the 1902 Land Conference produced the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903 which allowed Irish tenant farmers to buy out their freeholds with UK government loans over 68 years through the Land Commission (an arrangement that has never been possible in Britain itself). For agricultural labourers, D.D. Sheehanand the Irish Land and Labour Association secured their demands from the Liberal government elected in 1905 to pass the Labourers (Ireland) Act 1906, and the Labourers (Ireland) Act 1911, which paid County Councils to build over 40,000 new rural cottages, each on an acre of land. By 1914, 75% of occupiers were buying out their landlords, mostly under the two Acts. In all, under the pre-UK Land Acts over 316,000 tenants purchased their holdings amounting to 15 million acres (61,000 km2) out of a total of 20 million acres (81,000 km2) in the country. Sometimes the holdings were described as "uneconomic", but the overall sense of social justice was manifest.
The major land reforms came when Parliament passed laws in 1870, 1881, 1903 and 1909 that enabled most tenant farmers to purchase their lands, and lowered the rents of the others. From 1870 and as a result of the Land War agitations and the Plan of Campaign of the 1880s, various British governments introduced a series of Irish Land Acts. William O'Brien played a leading role in the 1902 Land Conference to pave the way for the most advanced social legislation in Ireland since the Union, the Wyndham Land Purchase Act of 1903. This Act set the conditions for the break-up of large estates and gradually devolved to rural landholders, and tenants' ownership of the lands. It effectively ended the era of the absentee landlord, finally resolving the Irish Land Question.
And given that The Bohemian is situated on Doyle’s Corner it seems an apt subject. Doyle’s Corner has an interesting history of which this particular pub is a part of. Back around the turn of the century, the intersection of The North Circular and The Phibsborough Road was known as Dunphy’s Corner. Now, this is where it starts to get a bit confusing because the word Doyle is about to be bandied about as much as it might do in a series or two of Father Ted.
The name Dunphy’s Corner was derived from another public house which sits directly across the road from The Bohemian – now named Doyle’s Corner, formerly named Doyle’s. The pub that provided this named was owned by a man named Thomas Dunphy who presided over it from the mid-1800s up to around the 1890s. The name Dunphy’s Corner must have been widely used by Dubliners because it’s well represented in song, literature and lore. It gets a mention in Peadar Kearney’s anti-enlistment Ballad about the recruiting sergeant William Bailey (Lankum do a great version), who is said to have stood on the corner in the process of his enlisting. And Peadar might have been working on a subliminal as well as a perceptible level here because ‘going round Dunphy’s Corner‘, as it would have been put, was seemingly an idiom used to describe those who had gone to the great beyond, given its nodal point on the route taken by hearses on their way to Glasnevin. Those familiar with the first half of Ulysses, might remember that Poor Dignam went the very same way along that route in the earlier stages of the book.
So in the mid-1890s or so along came John Doyle. And John Doyle fancied he might usurp Dunphy and in setting about doing this, he acquired both number 160 and number 66 Phibsborough Road and placed within each of them a public house which bore his name. It was a trick the evidently worked because, as I’m sure you will know, the corner is still referred to as Doyle’s. Seemingly someone by the name of Murphy – proprietor of the nearby Botanic House – took ownership of The Bohemian in the 1970s and figured he could usurp Doyle by erecting signs which read ‘Murphy’s Corner’. But the inhabitants of Phibsborough and Dubliners alike never took to it. So it remains – Doyle’s Corner.
Next to a statue or the freedom of the city, perhaps the most select honour you can earn in Dublin is to have a street corner named after you in perpetuity. It’s a very rare distinction, available mainly – it seems – to publicans, whose premises command an important junction for a substantial period. It’s also entirely in the public’s gift, not officialdom’s. And the vast majority of city corners are never so named. I can think of fewer than 10 that have been, including Doyle’s, Hanlon’s, Hart’s, Kelly’s, and Leonard’s. Some of those names have long outlived the original businesses, although that said, “perpetuity” may be overstating their lease, as the case of Doyle’s illustrates.
Anyone who was at the annual Bloomsday re-enactment in Glasnevin last Sunday will have been reminded that Doyle’s Corner, in nearby Phibsboro, used to be “Dunphy’s”. As such, it was mentioned in Ulysses for its prominent role in city funerals, including the fictional Paddy Dignam’s, as the last right-angle turn towards the cemetery.
Hence, as Leopold Bloom’s interior voice records: “Dunphy’s corner. Mourning coaches drawn up drowning their grief. A pause by the wayside. Tiptop position for a pub. Expect we’ll pull up here on the way back to drink his health. Pass around the consolation. Elixir of life.”
It also inspires a joke by one of the other passengers in the carriage: “First round Dunphy’s, Mr Dedalus said, nodding. Gordon Bennett Cup.”
His reference to the famous motor race may have been a nod to the haste with which some corteges used to move in those years, under pressure from the cemetery’s restrictive opening hours. In a series of newspaper essays, The Streets of Dublin 1910-11, the then Alderman Thomas Kelly complained he had never seen in any other Irish city “the galloping which, more especially on Sunday’s, disgraces Dublin funerals”.
That same alderman – a future Sinn Féin TD – was the Kelly for whom Kelly’s Corner is named, an honour all the more unusual because he owned a shop rather than a pub. But for apparent immortality in those years, his corner would have had to bow to Dunphy’s, which enjoyed a whole different level of fame. As he also writes, “Rounding Dunphy’s Corner” had become a popular Dublin euphemism for life’s last journey.
Even in 1904, however, Dunphy’s pub had already made way for one called Doyle’s, and the corner name gradually followed. There must have been a period when it was known as both, because the news archives for 1906 have a story about a collapse of scaffolding at “Doyle’s Corner”, during rebuilding of the premises there. Among five people injured, incidentally, was “a man named Coleman, from Exchange Street”, who had also survived the sewer gas tragedy in a manhole on Burgh Quay the year previous (to which there remains today a monument). Talk about luck.
No doubt even the indestructible Coleman rounded Dunphy’s Corner eventually. In any case, by the 1920s, the Phibsboro Junction was firmly established as Doyle’s Corner, and is still known as that, its latter-day notoriety secured by regular mentions on AA Roadwatch. Nobody calls it Dunphy’s Corner anymore.
Mind you, the same location proves that mere changes of ownership do not in themselves confer naming privileges. For a time in the middle of the last century, I gather, there was also a Murphy’s pub on the site, the owner of which erected a sign proclaiming “Murphy’s Corner”. The public did not take the hint.
1940 recording by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra on RCA Bluebird, B-10612-B
In 1910, in Bath, Somerset, the English lawyer and lyricist Frederic Weatherly initially wrote the words to "Danny Boy" to a tune other than "Londonderry Air". After his Irish-born sister-in-law Margaret Enright Weatherly (known as Jess) in the United States sent him a copy of "Londonderry Air" in 1913 (an alternative version of the story has her singing the air to him in 1912 with different lyrics), Weatherly modified the lyrics of "Danny Boy" to fit the rhyme and meter of "Londonderry Air".
Weatherly gave the song to the vocalist Elsie Griffin, who made it one of the most popular songs of the new century. In 1915, Ernestine Schumann-Heink produced the first recording of "Danny Boy".
Jane Ross of Limavady is credited with collecting the melody of "Londonderry Air" in the mid-19th century from a musician she encountered.
Lyrics
The 1913 lyrics by Frederick E. Weatherly:
Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling
From glen to glen, and down the mountain side.
The summer's gone, and all the roses falling,
It's you, It's you must go and I must bide.
But come ye back when summer's in the meadow,
Or when the valley's hushed and white with snow,
It's I'll be there in sunshine or in shadow,—
Oh, Danny boy, Oh Danny boy, I love you so!
But when ye come, and all the flowers are dying,
If I am dead, as dead I well may be,
Ye'll come and find the place where I am lying,
And kneel and say an Avé there for me.
And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me,
And all my grave will warmer, sweeter be,
For you will bend
and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!
Meaning
There are various conjectures about the meaning of "Danny Boy".Some interpret the song to be a message from a parent to a son going off to war or participating in the Irish uprising (as suggested by the reference to "pipes calling glen to glen") or emigrating as part of the Irish diaspora.
The 1918 version of the sheet music with Weatherly's printed signature included alternative lyrics ("Eily Dear"), with the instructions that "when sung by a man, the words in italic should be used; the song then becomes "Eily Dear", so that "Danny Boy" is only to be sung by a lady". Nonetheless, it is unclear whether this was Weatherly's intent.
Usage
Percy Grainger's Irish Tune from County Derry adapts the Danny Boy/Londonderry Air melody for wind ensemble in 1918.
The song is popular for funerals; but the National Catholic Reporter wrote in 2001 that it "cannot be played during Mass."
Select recordings
"Danny Boy" has been recorded multiple times by a variety of performers. Several versions are listed below in chronological order.
1940 Judy GarlandLittle Nellie Kelly soundtrack. Garland also sang it live at her concerts in Ireland and Scotland and most famously at her New York Palace Theatre debut in 1951.
2002 Johnny Cash recorded the song on his album American IV: The Man Comes Around, working with producer Rick Rubin in what would come to be the last album released during his lifetime. Cash had previously recorded the
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Earl William Gill (14 October 1932 – 4 May 2014) was an Irish trumpet-player and bandleader who, with the Hoedowners, achieved fourteen Top 20 hits in the Irish charts between 1966 and 1973. As "Tim Pat", he also had a solo hit in 1971 with a novelty song, "Poor Poor Farmer".
Early life and career
Earl Gill was raised in Dublin's East Wall district by his parents, William and Mary (née Hunter).His father was a pianist at the Queen's Theatre while his mother played the cello.As a boy Gill studied piano at the Royal Irish Academy of Music.] However, at the age of twelve he was involved in an accident which led to the loss of the two middle fingers of his left hand. From then on he concentrated on the trumpet and was soon proficient enough to perform in public while still in his teens.
During the early 1950s, Gill played with several of Dublin's leading bands in venues such as the Olympia Theatre and the Gresham Hotel. In 1954, he formed his own band and within two years they were established as the resident dance band at the Shelbourne Hotel.Among the musicians who played in the Earl Gill Band during the 1950s was saxophonist Sonny Knowles who later found fame in Ireland as a cabaret singer. In 1959, Gill and his band were hired to back singer Ruby Murray on her tour of North America.
Showband years
In 1965, Gill and his colleagues were signed up as the house band on a new Telefís Éireann country music show called Hoedown. Fronted by their new lead singer, Sean Dunphy, the band changed their name to the Hoedowners.A year later their single "Wonderful world of my dreams" reached number five in the Irish charts.The band achieved a further thirteen Top 20 hits between 1966 and 1973, becoming one of Ireland's most successful showbands. While most of their recordings highlighted Dunphy's singing voice, Earl Gill's trumpet took the lead on the instrumental single, "Sunset" (an arrangement of Offenbach's “Barcarolle”), released in 1967. "Sunset" failed to make the top twenty but Gill had greater success with his next solo recording, which he also produced. Wearing a false beard, shabby clothes and Wellington boots, he adopted the persona of "Tim Pat", a down-at-heel farmer who appeared on The Late Late Show to perform his new single, "The Poor Poor Farmer". The marketing ploy worked and the record rose to number three in the Irish Charts in February 1971.
Later years
Following the disbandment of The Hoedowners in 1973, Gill continued to play a prominent role on the Irish music scene. He was one of a number of Irish jazz musicians, including Louis Stewart and Noel Kelehan, who performed together on an ad hoc basis at events such as the Cork Jazz Festival. Gill managed a number of pop groups, including folk rock act, Spud.He also produced recordings by The Dubliners. In the late-1970s and 1980s he was the musical director of several significant shows, including the Cavan International Song Contest, and Noel Pearson's production of Gilbert & Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.
In 1990, Gill released his first solo album, Enchantment, on which he played a selection of traditional Irish melodies and popular show tunes.He continued to perform live throughout Ireland until his retirement in 2012.
Personal life
Earl Gill died in hospital aged eighty-one and is buried in Shanganagh Cemetery. He was married to Deirdre Kenny who predeceased him. They had three children: Derek, Earl junior, and Susan. In March 1995 Gill married his second wife, Mavis Ascott, and they had a son named Robin.
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Major Michael John O'Leary VC (29 September 1890 – 2 August 1961) was an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross, the most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. O'Leary achieved his award for single-handedly charging and destroying two German barricades defended by machine gun positions near the French village of Cuinchy, in a localised operation on the Western Front during the First World War.
At the time of his action, O'Leary was a nine-year veteran of the British armed forces and by the time he retired from the British Army in 1921, he had reached the rank of lieutenant. He served in the army again during the Second World War, although his later service was blighted by periods of ill-health. At his final retirement from the military in 1945, O'Leary was an Army major in command of a prisoner of war camp. Between the wars, O'Leary spent many years employed as a police officer in Canada and is sometimes considered to be a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross. Following the Second World War he worked as a building contractor in London, where he died in 1961.Early life
O'Leary was born in 1890, one of four children of Daniel and Margaret O'Leary, who owned a farm at Inchigeela, near Macroom in County Cork, Ireland. Daniel O'Leary was a fervent Irish nationalist and keen sportsman who participated in competitive weightlifting and football. Aged 16 and unwilling to continue to work on his parent's land, Michael O'Leary joined the Royal Navy, serving at the shore establishment HMS Vivid at Devonport for several years until rheumatism in his knees forced his departure from the service. Within a few months however, O'Leary had again tired of the farm and joined the Irish Guards regiment of the British Army.
O'Leary served three years with the Irish Guards, leaving in August 1913 to join the Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP) in Saskatchewan, Canada. Operating from Regina, Constable O'Leary was soon commended for his bravery in capturing two criminals following a two-hour gunbattle, for which service he was presented with a gold ring. At the outbreak of the First World War in Europe during August 1914, O'Leary was given permission to leave the RNWMP and return to Britain in order to rejoin the army as an active reservist. On 22 October, O'Leary was mobilized and on 23 November he joined his regiment in France, then fighting with the British Expeditionary Force, entrenched in Flanders.
First World War service
During December 1914, O'Leary saw heavy fighting with the Irish Guards and was Mentioned in Despatches and subsequently promoted to lance corporal on 5 January 1915. Three weeks later, on 30 January, the Irish Guards were ordered to prepare for an attack on German positions near Cuinchy on the La Bassée Canal, a response to a successful German operation in the area five days before. The Germans attacked first however, and on the morning of 1 February seized a stretch of canal embankment on the western end of the 2nd Brigade line from a company of Coldstream Guards. This section, known as the Hollow, was tactically important as it defended a culvert that passed underneath a railway embankment. 4 Company of Irish Guards, originally in reserve, were tasked with joining the Coldstream Guards in retaking the position at 04:00, but the attack was met with heavy machine gun fire and most of the assault party, including all of the Irish Guards officers, were killed or wounded
To replace these officers, Second Lieutenant Innes of 1 Company was ordered forward to gather the survivors and withdraw, forming up at a barricade on the edge of the Hollow. Innes regrouped the survivors and, following a heavy bombardment from supporting artillery and with his own company providing covering fire, assisted the Coldstream Guards in a second attack at 10:15.Weighed down with entrenching equipment, the attacking Coldstream Guardsmen faltered and began to suffer heavy casualties. Innes too came under heavy fire from a German barricade to their front equipped with a machine gun.
O'Leary had been serving as Innes's orderly, and had joined him in the operations earlier in the morning and again in the second attack. Charging past the rest of the assault party, O'Leary closed with the first German barricade at the top of the railway embankment and fired five shots, killing the gun's crew. Continuing forward, O'Leary confronted a second barricade, also armed with a machine gun 60 yards (55 m) further on and again mounted the railway embankment, to avoid the marshy ground on either side. The Germans spotted his approach, but could not bring their gun to bear on him before he opened fire, killing three soldiers and capturing two others after he ran out of ammunition.Reportedly, O'Leary had made his advance on the second barricade "intent upon killing another German to whom he had taken a dislike".
Having disabled both guns and enabled the recapture of the British position, O'Leary then returned to his unit with his prisoners, apparently "as cool as if he had been for a walk in the park." For his actions, O'Leary received a battlefield promotion to sergeant on 4 February and was recommended for the Victoria Cross, which was gazetted on 16 February:
No. 3556 Lance-Corporal Michael O'Leary, 1st Battalion, Irish Guards
For conspicuous bravery at Cuinchy on the 1st February, 1915. When forming one of the storming party which advanced against the enemy's barricades he rushed to the front and himself killed five Germans who were holding the first barricade, after which he attacked a second barricade, about 60 yards further on, which he captured, after killing three of the enemy and making prisoners of two more. Lance-Corporal O'Leary thus practically captured the enemy's position by himself and prevented the attacking party from being fired upon.
The London Gazette, 16 February 1915
Returning to Britain to receive his medal from King George V at Buckingham Palace on 22 June 1915, O'Leary was given a grand reception attended by thousands of Londoners in Hyde Park on 10 July. He was also the subject of much patriotic writing, including a poem in the Daily Mail and the short play O'Flaherty V.C. by George Bernard Shaw.Tributes came from numerous prominent figures of the day, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said that "No writer in fiction would dare to fasten such an achievement on any of his characters, but the Irish have always had a reputation of being wonderful fighters, and Lance-Corporal Michael O’Leary is clearly one of them." and Thomas Scanlan who said: "I heard early this week of the great achievements of the Irish Guards. All Ireland is proud of O’Leary. He fully deserves the high honour that has been conferred upon him. Ireland is grateful to him."His reception was repeated in Macroom when he visited Ireland, with crowds turning out to applaud him. Daniel O'Leary was interviewed in a local newspaper regarding his son's exploit but was reportedly unimpressed, commenting: "I am surprised he didn't do more. I often laid out twenty men myself with a stick coming from Macroom Fair, and it is a bad trial of Mick that he could kill only eight, and he having a rifle and bayonet."
O'Leary was further rewarded for his service, being advanced to a commissioned rank as a second lieutenant with the Connaught Rangers,and he was also presented with a Russian decoration, the Cross of St. George (third class).Despite his popularity with the crowds in London and Macroom, he was jeered by Ulster Volunteers at a recruitment drive in Ballaghaderrin during the autumn of 1915. This treatment caused such a scandal that it was raised in the Houses of Parliament in December.
In 1916, O'Leary travelled to Salonika with the 5th battalion of the Connaught Rangers to serve in the Balkans campaign, remaining in theatre until the end of the war, following which he was stationed in Dover with the 2nd battalion until demobilised in 1921.During his service in the Balkans, O'Leary contracted malaria, which was to have severe negative effects on his health for the rest of his life.
O'Leary was in the same regiment as the British actor Stanley Holloway and they served together in France. After the war ended, they remained close friends and Holloway often stayed in The May Fair Hotel where O'Leary worked as a concierge.
Later life
Leaving his wife Greta and their two children in Britain, O'Leary returned to Canada in March 1921 with the purported intention of rejoining the RNWMP, newly renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For unknown reasons, this plan came to nothing and after some months giving lectures on his war service and working in a publishing house, O'Leary joined the Ontario Provincial Police, charged with enforcing the prohibition laws. In 1924, with his family recently arrived from England, O'Leary left the Ontario police force and became a police sergeant with the Michigan Central Railway in Bridgeburg, Ontario, receiving £33 a month.
In 1925, O'Leary was the subject of several scandals, being arrested for smuggling illegal immigrants and later for irregularities in his investigations. Although he was acquitted both times, he spent a week in prison following the second arrest and lost his job with the railway. Several months later, the municipal authorities in Hamilton, Ontario loaned him £70 to pay for him and his family to return to Ireland. Although his family sailed on the SS Leticia, O'Leary remained in Ontario, working with the attorney general's office.
With his health in serious decline, the British Legion arranged for O'Leary to return to Britain and work in their poppy factory. By 1932, O'Leary was living in Southborne Avenue in Colindale, had regained his health and found employment as a commissionaire at The May Fair Hotel in London, at which he was involved in charitable events for wounded servicemen. With the mobilisation of the British Army in 1939, O'Leary returned to military service as a captain in the Middlesex Regiment. O'Leary was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force but had returned to Britain before the Battle of France due to a recurrence of his malaria.
No longer fit for full active service, O'Leary was transferred to the Pioneer Corps and took command of a prisoner of war camp in Southern England. In 1945, he was discharged from the military as unfit for duty on medical grounds as a major and found work as a building contractor, in which career he remained until his retirement in 1954. Two of O'Leary's sons had also served in the military during the war, with both receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross for their actions. As a Victoria Cross recipient, O'Leary joined the VE day parade in 1946, but at the 1956 Centenary VC review his place was taken by an imposter travelling in a bath chair. With his health again declining, O'Leary moved to Limesdale Gardens in Edgware shortly before his death in 1961 at the Whittington Hospital in Islington.
O'Leary was buried at Mill Hill Cemetery following a funeral service at the Roman Catholic Annunciation Church in Burnt Oak which was attended by an honour guard from the Irish Guards and six of his children. His medals were later presented to the Irish Guards, and are on display at the Regimental Headquarters. He is also remembered in his birthplace, the macroom-online website listing him as a prominent citizen and states that "while many might consider he was fighting with the wrong army, in the wrong war, he was nevertheless a very brave, resourceful and capable soldier who deserved the honours bestowed upon him."
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William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others.
Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He was a Protestant and member of the Anglo-Irish community. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Irelandbetween the overwhelmingly Protestantunionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army(IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.
Deep origins
The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the “Old English.” Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The most successful of these “plantations” began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland’s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Because of the plantation of Ulster, as Irish history unfolded—with the struggle for the emancipation of the island’s Catholic majority under the supremacy of the Protestant ascendancy, along with the Irish nationalist pursuit of Home Rule and then independence after the island’s formal union with Great Britain in 1801—Ulster developed as a region where the Protestant settlers outnumbered the indigenousIrish. Unlike earlier English settlers, most of the 17th-century English and Scottish settlers and their descendants did not assimilate with the Irish. Instead, they held on tightly to British identity and remained steadfastly loyal to the British crown.
The formation of Northern Ireland, Catholic grievances, and the leadership of Terence O’Neill
Of the nine modern counties that constituted Ulster in the early 20th century, four—Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry (Derry)—had significant Protestant loyalist majorities; two—Fermanagh and Tyrone—had small Catholic nationalist majorities; and three—Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan—had significant Catholic nationalist majorities. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the British Parliament, responding largely to the wishes of Ulster loyalists, enacted the Government of Ireland Act , which divided the island into two self-governing areas with devolved Home Rule-like powers. What would come to be known as Northern Ireland was formed by Ulster’s four majority loyalist counties along with Fermanagh and Tyrone. Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan were combined with the island’s remaining 23 counties to form southern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence then created the Irish Free State in the south, giving it dominion status within the British Empire. It also allowed Northern Ireland the option of remaining outside of the Free State, which it unsurprisingly chose to do.
Thus, in 1922 Northern Ireland began functioning as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of its population (about one million people) was Protestant and about one-third (roughly 500,000 people) was Catholic. Well before partition, Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, had attracted economic migrants from elsewhere in Ireland seeking employment in its flourishing linen-making and shipbuilding industries. The best jobs had gone to Protestants, but the humming local economy still provided work for Catholics. Over and above the long-standing dominance of Northern Ireland politics that resulted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) by virtue of the Protestants’ sheer numerical advantage, loyalist control of local politics was ensured by the gerrymandering of electoral districts that concentrated and minimized Catholic representation. Moreover, by restricting the franchise to ratepayers (the taxpaying heads of households) and their spouses, representation was further limited for Catholic households, which tended to be larger (and more likely to include unemployed adult children) than their Protestant counterparts. Those who paid rates for more than one residence (more likely to be Protestants) were granted an additional vote for each ward in which they held property (up to six votes). Catholics argued that they were discriminated against when it came to the allocation of public housing, appointments to public service jobs, and government investment in neighbourhoods. They were also more likely to be the subjects of police harassment by the almost exclusively Protestant RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials).
The divide between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had little to do with theological differences but instead was grounded in culture and politics. Neither Irish history nor the Irish language was taught in schools in Northern Ireland, it was illegal to fly the flag of the Irish republic, and from 1956 to 1974 Sinn Féin, the party of Irish republicanism, also was banned in Northern Ireland. Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic. They expressed their partisan solidarity through involvement with Protestant unionist fraternal organizations such as the Orange Order, which found its inspiration in the victory of King William III (William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over his deposed Catholic predecessor, James II, whose siege of the Protestant community of Londonderry had earlier been broken by William. Despite these tensions, for 40 or so years after partition the status of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was relatively stable.
Recognizing that any attempt to reinvigorate Northern Ireland’s declining industrial economy in the early 1960s would also need to address the province’s percolatingpolitical and social tensions, the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, not only reached out to the nationalist community but also, in early 1965, exchanged visits with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Seán Lemass—a radical step, given that the republic’s constitution included an assertion of sovereignty over the whole island. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s efforts were seen as inadequate by nationalists and as too conciliatory by loyalists, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, who became one of the most vehement and influential representatives of unionist reaction.
Civil rights activism, the Battle of Bogside, and the arrival of the British army
Contrary to the policies of UUP governments that disadvantaged Catholics, the Education Act that the Northern Ireland Parliament passed into law in 1947 increased educational opportunities for all citizens of the province. As a result, the generation of well-educated Catholics who came of age in the 1960s had new expectations for more equitable treatment. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Humeand Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rightsgroups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Although more than one violently disrupted political march has been pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles, it can be argued that the catalyzing event occurred on October 5, 1968, in Derry, where a march had been organized by the NICRA to protest discrimination and gerrymandering. The march was banned when unionists announced that they would be staging a counterdemonstration, but the NICRA decided to carry out their protest anyway. Rioting then erupted after the RUC violently suppressed the marchers with batons and a water cannon.
Omagh bombing
August 15, 1998
Similarly inflammatory were the events surrounding a march held by loyalists in Londonderry on August 12, 1969. Two days of rioting that became known as the Battle of Bogside (after the Catholic area in which the confrontation occurred) stemmed from the escalating clash between nationalists and the RUC, which was acting as a buffer between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents of the area. Rioting in support of the nationalists then erupted in Belfast and elsewhere, and the British army was dispatched to restore calm. Thereafter, violent confrontation only escalated, and the Troubles (a name that neither characterized the nature of the conflict nor assigned blame for it to one side or the other) had clearly begun.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries
Initially, the nationalists welcomed the British army as protectors and as a balance for the Protestant-leaning RUC. In time, however, the army would be viewed by nationalists as another version of the enemy, especially after its aggressive efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries. In the process, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the defender of the nationalist cause. From its base in Ireland(which had formally left the Commonwealth in 1949), the IRA had mounted an ineffectual guerrilla effort in support of Northern Ireland’s nationalists from 1956 to 1962, but, as the 1960s progressed, the IRA became less concerned with affairs in the north than with advancing a Marxist political agenda. As a result, a splinter group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos), which was prepared to use force to bring about unification, emerged as the champion of Northern Ireland’s nationalists. (The Official IRA would conduct operations in support of the republicans in Northern Ireland until undertaking a cease-fire in 1972, after which it effectively ceded the title of the IRA in the north to the Provos.) Believing that their fight was a continuation of the Irish War of Independence, the Provos adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, financed partly by members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and later supplied with arms and munitions by the government of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unionists also took up arms, swelling the numbers of loyalist paramilitary organizations, most notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association UDA).
In an attempt to address nationalist grievances, electoral boundaries were redrawn more fairly, efforts were made to rectify discrimination in housing and public employment, and the B Specials were decommissioned. At the same time, the government of Northern Ireland responded to the growing unrest by introducing increasingly stringent security measures, including internment (detention without trial). The overwhelming majority of those arrested, however, were nationalists.
As the 1970s progressed, rioting became more common in Belfast and Derry, bombings of public places (by both loyalists and republicans) increased, and both sides of the conflict perpetrated violent, deadly atrocities. Barbed wire laid by British soldiers to separate the sectarian communitiesevolved into brick and steel “peace walls,” some of which stood 45 feet (14 metres) high, segregating loyalist and republican enclaves, most famously the Falls Road Catholic community and the Shankill Protestant community of Belfast.
On January 30, 1972, the conflict reached a new level of intensity when British paratroopers fired on Catholic civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of whom later died). The incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” contributed to a spike in Provos recruitment and would remain controversial for decades, hinging on the question of which side fired first. In 2010 the Saville Report , the final pronouncement of a British government inquiry into the event, concluded that none of the victims had posed a threat to the troops and that their shooting had been unjustified. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the report by issuing a landmark apology for the shooting:
There is no point in trying to soften or equivocate what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified….What happened should never, ever have happened….Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In all, more than 480 people were killed as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972, which proved to be the deadliest single year in the Troubles. That total included more than 100 fatalities for the British army, as the IRA escalated its onslaught. On July 21, “Bloody Friday,” nine people were killed and scores were injured when some two dozen bombs were detonated by the Provos in Belfast. Earlier, in March, frustrated with the Northern Ireland government’s failure to calm the situation, the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reinstituted direct rule by Westminster.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the IRA shifted the emphasis of its “Long War” from direct engagements with British troops to smaller-scale secretive operations, including the bombing of cities in Britain—a change of tactics the British military described as a shift from “insurgency” to “terrorism.” Similarly, the loyalist groups began setting off bombs in Ireland. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence at mid-decade (1974–76) resulted in the civilian deaths of some 370 Catholics and 88 Protestants.
A glimmer of hope was offered by the Sunningdale Agreement , named for the English city in which it was negotiated in 1973. That agreement led to the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, with proportional representation for all parties, and to the establishment of a Council of Ireland, which was to provide a role for Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Frustrated by the diminution of their political power and furious at the participation of the republic, loyalists scuttled the power-sharing plan with a general strike that brought the province to a halt in May 1974 and eventually forced a return to direct rule, which remained in place for some 25 years.
For the remainder of the decade, violence ebbed and flowed, cease-fires lingered and lapsed, and tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations continued, including the high-profile killing at sea in August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten, a relative of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1976 the opening of the specially designed Maze prison brought with it a shift in the treatment of IRA inmates from that of prisoners of war to that of common criminals. Seeking a return to their Special Category Status, the prisoners struck back, first staging the “blanket protest,” in which they refused to put on prison uniforms and instead wore only blankets, and then, in 1978, the “dirty protest,” in which inmates smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. The government of recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to buckle, even in the face of hunger strikes in 1980–81 that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, who had won a seat in the British Parliament while incarcerated and fasting.
Sands’s election helped convince Sinn Féin, then operating as the political wing of the IRA, that the struggle for unification should be pursued at the ballot box as well as with the Armalite rifle. In June 1983 Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams won a seat in Parliament representing West Belfast, though he refused to take it to avoid taking the compulsory oath of loyalty to the British queen.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration
In October 1984 an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England, took five lives and threatened that of Thatcher. Though she remained steadfast in the face of this attack, it was the “Iron Lady” who in November 1985 joined Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which both countries guaranteed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The accordalso established the Intergovernmental Conference, which gave Ireland a consultative role in the political and security affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. Finally, the agreement stipulated that power would be devolved back upon the government of Northern Ireland only if unionists and nationalists participated in power sharing.
Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, November 15, 1985.
Peter Kemp/AP
The loyalists’ vehement opposition to the agreement included the resignation of all 15 unionist members of the House of Commons and a ramping up of violence. In the meantime, IRA bombings in London made headlines, and the reach of the British security forces extended to the killing of three Provos in Gibraltar. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were underway. In 1993 British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds issued the so-called Downing Street Declaration , which established a framework for all-party peace talks. A cease-fire declared by the Provos in 1994 and joined by the principal loyalist paramilitary groups fell apart in 1996 because Sinn Féin, which had replaced the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading nationalist party, had been excluded from peace talks because of the IRA’s continuing bombing campaign. Nevertheless, the unionists were at the table, prepared to consider a solution that included the participation of the republic of Ireland. After the IRA resumed its cease-fire in 1997, Sinn Féin was welcomed back to the talks, which now included the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the UUP, and the Ulster Democratic Party, among others, though not the Paisley-led DUP, which was protesting the inclusion of Sinn Féin.
The Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, peace, and power sharing
Those talks, mediated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, led to the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), reached April 10, 1998. That landmark accordprovided for the creation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, established an institutional arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland on a range of issues, and lay the groundwork for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. On May 22 Ireland and Northern Ireland held a joint referendum on the agreement, which was approved by 94 percent of those who voted in the republic and 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland, where Catholic approval of the accord (96 percent) was much higher than Protestant assent (52 per cent). Nonetheless, it was an IRA splinter group, the Real Irish Republican Army, which most dramatically violated the spirit of the agreement, with a bombing in Omagh in August that took 29 lives.
Elections for the new Assembly were held in June, but the IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive until December 1999, when the IRA promised to fulfill its obligation to disarm. That month the republic of Ireland modified its constitution, removing its territorial claims to the whole of the island, and the United Kingdom yielded direct rule of Northern Ireland. Ostensibly the Troubles had come to end, but, though Northern Ireland began its most tranquil era in a generation, the peace was fragile. Sectarian antagonism persisted, the process of decommissioning was slow on both sides, and the rolling out of the new institutions was fitful, resulting in suspensions of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule.
In July 2005, however, the IRA announced that it had ordered all its units to “dump arms,” would henceforth pursue its goals only through peaceful means, and would work with international inspectors “to verifiably put its arms beyond use.” At a press conference in September, a spokesman for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning stated, “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Decommissioning by unionist paramilitaries and other republican groups followed..
In March 2007 an agreement to form a power-sharing government was reached by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley,respectively the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, the two parties which had won the most seats in the election for the Assembly that month. On May 8 direct rule was rescinded as Paisley was sworn in as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, became deputy first minister.
The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Irelandbetween the overwhelmingly Protestantunionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army(IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.
Deep origins
The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the “Old English.” Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The most successful of these “plantations” began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland’s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Because of the plantation of Ulster, as Irish history unfolded—with the struggle for the emancipation of the island’s Catholic majority under the supremacy of the Protestant ascendancy, along with the Irish nationalist pursuit of Home Rule and then independence after the island’s formal union with Great Britain in 1801—Ulster developed as a region where the Protestant settlers outnumbered the indigenousIrish. Unlike earlier English settlers, most of the 17th-century English and Scottish settlers and their descendants did not assimilate with the Irish. Instead, they held on tightly to British identity and remained steadfastly loyal to the British crown.
The formation of Northern Ireland, Catholic grievances, and the leadership of Terence O’Neill
Of the nine modern counties that constituted Ulster in the early 20th century, four—Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry (Derry)—had significant Protestant loyalist majorities; two—Fermanagh and Tyrone—had small Catholic nationalist majorities; and three—Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan—had significant Catholic nationalist majorities. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the British Parliament, responding largely to the wishes of Ulster loyalists, enacted the Government of Ireland Act , which divided the island into two self-governing areas with devolved Home Rule-like powers. What would come to be known as Northern Ireland was formed by Ulster’s four majority loyalist counties along with Fermanagh and Tyrone. Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan were combined with the island’s remaining 23 counties to form southern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence then created the Irish Free State in the south, giving it dominion status within the British Empire. It also allowed Northern Ireland the option of remaining outside of the Free State, which it unsurprisingly chose to do.
Thus, in 1922 Northern Ireland began functioning as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of its population (about one million people) was Protestant and about one-third (roughly 500,000 people) was Catholic. Well before partition, Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, had attracted economic migrants from elsewhere in Ireland seeking employment in its flourishing linen-making and shipbuilding industries. The best jobs had gone to Protestants, but the humming local economy still provided work for Catholics. Over and above the long-standing dominance of Northern Ireland politics that resulted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) by virtue of the Protestants’ sheer numerical advantage, loyalist control of local politics was ensured by the gerrymandering of electoral districts that concentrated and minimized Catholic representation. Moreover, by restricting the franchise to ratepayers (the taxpaying heads of households) and their spouses, representation was further limited for Catholic households, which tended to be larger (and more likely to include unemployed adult children) than their Protestant counterparts. Those who paid rates for more than one residence (more likely to be Protestants) were granted an additional vote for each ward in which they held property (up to six votes). Catholics argued that they were discriminated against when it came to the allocation of public housing, appointments to public service jobs, and government investment in neighbourhoods. They were also more likely to be the subjects of police harassment by the almost exclusively Protestant RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials).
The divide between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had little to do with theological differences but instead was grounded in culture and politics. Neither Irish history nor the Irish language was taught in schools in Northern Ireland, it was illegal to fly the flag of the Irish republic, and from 1956 to 1974 Sinn Féin, the party of Irish republicanism, also was banned in Northern Ireland. Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic. They expressed their partisan solidarity through involvement with Protestant unionist fraternal organizations such as the Orange Order, which found its inspiration in the victory of King William III (William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over his deposed Catholic predecessor, James II, whose siege of the Protestant community of Londonderry had earlier been broken by William. Despite these tensions, for 40 or so years after partition the status of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was relatively stable.
Recognizing that any attempt to reinvigorate Northern Ireland’s declining industrial economy in the early 1960s would also need to address the province’s percolatingpolitical and social tensions, the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, not only reached out to the nationalist community but also, in early 1965, exchanged visits with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Seán Lemass—a radical step, given that the republic’s constitution included an assertion of sovereignty over the whole island. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s efforts were seen as inadequate by nationalists and as too conciliatory by loyalists, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, who became one of the most vehement and influential representatives of unionist reaction.
Civil rights activism, the Battle of Bogside, and the arrival of the British army
Contrary to the policies of UUP governments that disadvantaged Catholics, the Education Act that the Northern Ireland Parliament passed into law in 1947 increased educational opportunities for all citizens of the province. As a result, the generation of well-educated Catholics who came of age in the 1960s had new expectations for more equitable treatment. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Humeand Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rightsgroups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Although more than one violently disrupted political march has been pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles, it can be argued that the catalyzing event occurred on October 5, 1968, in Derry, where a march had been organized by the NICRA to protest discrimination and gerrymandering. The march was banned when unionists announced that they would be staging a counterdemonstration, but the NICRA decided to carry out their protest anyway. Rioting then erupted after the RUC violently suppressed the marchers with batons and a water cannon.
Omagh bombing
August 15, 1998
Similarly inflammatory were the events surrounding a march held by loyalists in Londonderry on August 12, 1969. Two days of rioting that became known as the Battle of Bogside (after the Catholic area in which the confrontation occurred) stemmed from the escalating clash between nationalists and the RUC, which was acting as a buffer between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents of the area. Rioting in support of the nationalists then erupted in Belfast and elsewhere, and the British army was dispatched to restore calm. Thereafter, violent confrontation only escalated, and the Troubles (a name that neither characterized the nature of the conflict nor assigned blame for it to one side or the other) had clearly begun.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries
Initially, the nationalists welcomed the British army as protectors and as a balance for the Protestant-leaning RUC. In time, however, the army would be viewed by nationalists as another version of the enemy, especially after its aggressive efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries. In the process, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the defender of the nationalist cause. From its base in Ireland(which had formally left the Commonwealth in 1949), the IRA had mounted an ineffectual guerrilla effort in support of Northern Ireland’s nationalists from 1956 to 1962, but, as the 1960s progressed, the IRA became less concerned with affairs in the north than with advancing a Marxist political agenda. As a result, a splinter group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos), which was prepared to use force to bring about unification, emerged as the champion of Northern Ireland’s nationalists. (The Official IRA would conduct operations in support of the republicans in Northern Ireland until undertaking a cease-fire in 1972, after which it effectively ceded the title of the IRA in the north to the Provos.) Believing that their fight was a continuation of the Irish War of Independence, the Provos adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, financed partly by members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and later supplied with arms and munitions by the government of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unionists also took up arms, swelling the numbers of loyalist paramilitary organizations, most notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association UDA).
In an attempt to address nationalist grievances, electoral boundaries were redrawn more fairly, efforts were made to rectify discrimination in housing and public employment, and the B Specials were decommissioned. At the same time, the government of Northern Ireland responded to the growing unrest by introducing increasingly stringent security measures, including internment (detention without trial). The overwhelming majority of those arrested, however, were nationalists.
As the 1970s progressed, rioting became more common in Belfast and Derry, bombings of public places (by both loyalists and republicans) increased, and both sides of the conflict perpetrated violent, deadly atrocities. Barbed wire laid by British soldiers to separate the sectarian communitiesevolved into brick and steel “peace walls,” some of which stood 45 feet (14 metres) high, segregating loyalist and republican enclaves, most famously the Falls Road Catholic community and the Shankill Protestant community of Belfast.
On January 30, 1972, the conflict reached a new level of intensity when British paratroopers fired on Catholic civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of whom later died). The incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” contributed to a spike in Provos recruitment and would remain controversial for decades, hinging on the question of which side fired first. In 2010 the Saville Report , the final pronouncement of a British government inquiry into the event, concluded that none of the victims had posed a threat to the troops and that their shooting had been unjustified. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the report by issuing a landmark apology for the shooting:
There is no point in trying to soften or equivocate what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified….What happened should never, ever have happened….Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In all, more than 480 people were killed as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972, which proved to be the deadliest single year in the Troubles. That total included more than 100 fatalities for the British army, as the IRA escalated its onslaught. On July 21, “Bloody Friday,” nine people were killed and scores were injured when some two dozen bombs were detonated by the Provos in Belfast. Earlier, in March, frustrated with the Northern Ireland government’s failure to calm the situation, the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reinstituted direct rule by Westminster.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the IRA shifted the emphasis of its “Long War” from direct engagements with British troops to smaller-scale secretive operations, including the bombing of cities in Britain—a change of tactics the British military described as a shift from “insurgency” to “terrorism.” Similarly, the loyalist groups began setting off bombs in Ireland. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence at mid-decade (1974–76) resulted in the civilian deaths of some 370 Catholics and 88 Protestants.
A glimmer of hope was offered by the Sunningdale Agreement , named for the English city in which it was negotiated in 1973. That agreement led to the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, with proportional representation for all parties, and to the establishment of a Council of Ireland, which was to provide a role for Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Frustrated by the diminution of their political power and furious at the participation of the republic, loyalists scuttled the power-sharing plan with a general strike that brought the province to a halt in May 1974 and eventually forced a return to direct rule, which remained in place for some 25 years.
For the remainder of the decade, violence ebbed and flowed, cease-fires lingered and lapsed, and tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations continued, including the high-profile killing at sea in August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten, a relative of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1976 the opening of the specially designed Maze prison brought with it a shift in the treatment of IRA inmates from that of prisoners of war to that of common criminals. Seeking a return to their Special Category Status, the prisoners struck back, first staging the “blanket protest,” in which they refused to put on prison uniforms and instead wore only blankets, and then, in 1978, the “dirty protest,” in which inmates smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. The government of recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to buckle, even in the face of hunger strikes in 1980–81 that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, who had won a seat in the British Parliament while incarcerated and fasting.
Sands’s election helped convince Sinn Féin, then operating as the political wing of the IRA, that the struggle for unification should be pursued at the ballot box as well as with the Armalite rifle. In June 1983 Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams won a seat in Parliament representing West Belfast, though he refused to take it to avoid taking the compulsory oath of loyalty to the British queen.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration
In October 1984 an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England, took five lives and threatened that of Thatcher. Though she remained steadfast in the face of this attack, it was the “Iron Lady” who in November 1985 joined Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which both countries guaranteed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The accordalso established the Intergovernmental Conference, which gave Ireland a consultative role in the political and security affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. Finally, the agreement stipulated that power would be devolved back upon the government of Northern Ireland only if unionists and nationalists participated in power sharing.
Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, November 15, 1985.
Peter Kemp/AP
The loyalists’ vehement opposition to the agreement included the resignation of all 15 unionist members of the House of Commons and a ramping up of violence. In the meantime, IRA bombings in London made headlines, and the reach of the British security forces extended to the killing of three Provos in Gibraltar. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were underway. In 1993 British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds issued the so-called Downing Street Declaration , which established a framework for all-party peace talks. A cease-fire declared by the Provos in 1994 and joined by the principal loyalist paramilitary groups fell apart in 1996 because Sinn Féin, which had replaced the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading nationalist party, had been excluded from peace talks because of the IRA’s continuing bombing campaign. Nevertheless, the unionists were at the table, prepared to consider a solution that included the participation of the republic of Ireland. After the IRA resumed its cease-fire in 1997, Sinn Féin was welcomed back to the talks, which now included the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the UUP, and the Ulster Democratic Party, among others, though not the Paisley-led DUP, which was protesting the inclusion of Sinn Féin.
The Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, peace, and power sharing
Those talks, mediated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, led to the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), reached April 10, 1998. That landmark accordprovided for the creation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, established an institutional arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland on a range of issues, and lay the groundwork for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. On May 22 Ireland and Northern Ireland held a joint referendum on the agreement, which was approved by 94 percent of those who voted in the republic and 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland, where Catholic approval of the accord (96 percent) was much higher than Protestant assent (52 per cent). Nonetheless, it was an IRA splinter group, the Real Irish Republican Army, which most dramatically violated the spirit of the agreement, with a bombing in Omagh in August that took 29 lives.
Elections for the new Assembly were held in June, but the IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive until December 1999, when the IRA promised to fulfill its obligation to disarm. That month the republic of Ireland modified its constitution, removing its territorial claims to the whole of the island, and the United Kingdom yielded direct rule of Northern Ireland. Ostensibly the Troubles had come to end, but, though Northern Ireland began its most tranquil era in a generation, the peace was fragile. Sectarian antagonism persisted, the process of decommissioning was slow on both sides, and the rolling out of the new institutions was fitful, resulting in suspensions of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule.
In July 2005, however, the IRA announced that it had ordered all its units to “dump arms,” would henceforth pursue its goals only through peaceful means, and would work with international inspectors “to verifiably put its arms beyond use.” At a press conference in September, a spokesman for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning stated, “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Decommissioning by unionist paramilitaries and other republican groups followed..
In March 2007 an agreement to form a power-sharing government was reached by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley,respectively the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, the two parties which had won the most seats in the election for the Assembly that month. On May 8 direct rule was rescinded as Paisley was sworn in as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, became deputy first minister.
The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Irelandbetween the overwhelmingly Protestantunionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army(IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a “low-intensity conflict.” Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont.
Deep origins
The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the “Old English.” Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The most successful of these “plantations” began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of Ireland’s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Because of the plantation of Ulster, as Irish history unfolded—with the struggle for the emancipation of the island’s Catholic majority under the supremacy of the Protestant ascendancy, along with the Irish nationalist pursuit of Home Rule and then independence after the island’s formal union with Great Britain in 1801—Ulster developed as a region where the Protestant settlers outnumbered the indigenousIrish. Unlike earlier English settlers, most of the 17th-century English and Scottish settlers and their descendants did not assimilate with the Irish. Instead, they held on tightly to British identity and remained steadfastly loyal to the British crown.
The formation of Northern Ireland, Catholic grievances, and the leadership of Terence O’Neill
Of the nine modern counties that constituted Ulster in the early 20th century, four—Antrim, Down, Armagh, and Londonderry (Derry)—had significant Protestant loyalist majorities; two—Fermanagh and Tyrone—had small Catholic nationalist majorities; and three—Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan—had significant Catholic nationalist majorities. In 1920, during the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the British Parliament, responding largely to the wishes of Ulster loyalists, enacted the Government of Ireland Act , which divided the island into two self-governing areas with devolved Home Rule-like powers. What would come to be known as Northern Ireland was formed by Ulster’s four majority loyalist counties along with Fermanagh and Tyrone. Donegal, Cavan, and Monaghan were combined with the island’s remaining 23 counties to form southern Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Treaty that ended the War of Independence then created the Irish Free State in the south, giving it dominion status within the British Empire. It also allowed Northern Ireland the option of remaining outside of the Free State, which it unsurprisingly chose to do.
Thus, in 1922 Northern Ireland began functioning as a self-governing region of the United Kingdom. Two-thirds of its population (about one million people) was Protestant and about one-third (roughly 500,000 people) was Catholic. Well before partition, Northern Ireland, particularly Belfast, had attracted economic migrants from elsewhere in Ireland seeking employment in its flourishing linen-making and shipbuilding industries. The best jobs had gone to Protestants, but the humming local economy still provided work for Catholics. Over and above the long-standing dominance of Northern Ireland politics that resulted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) by virtue of the Protestants’ sheer numerical advantage, loyalist control of local politics was ensured by the gerrymandering of electoral districts that concentrated and minimized Catholic representation. Moreover, by restricting the franchise to ratepayers (the taxpaying heads of households) and their spouses, representation was further limited for Catholic households, which tended to be larger (and more likely to include unemployed adult children) than their Protestant counterparts. Those who paid rates for more than one residence (more likely to be Protestants) were granted an additional vote for each ward in which they held property (up to six votes). Catholics argued that they were discriminated against when it came to the allocation of public housing, appointments to public service jobs, and government investment in neighbourhoods. They were also more likely to be the subjects of police harassment by the almost exclusively Protestant RUC and Ulster Special Constabulary (B Specials).
The divide between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland had little to do with theological differences but instead was grounded in culture and politics. Neither Irish history nor the Irish language was taught in schools in Northern Ireland, it was illegal to fly the flag of the Irish republic, and from 1956 to 1974 Sinn Féin, the party of Irish republicanism, also was banned in Northern Ireland. Catholics by and large identified as Irish and sought the incorporation of Northern Ireland into the Irish state. The great bulk of Protestants saw themselves as British and feared that they would lose their culture and privilege if Northern Ireland were subsumed by the republic. They expressed their partisan solidarity through involvement with Protestant unionist fraternal organizations such as the Orange Order, which found its inspiration in the victory of King William III (William of Orange) at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 over his deposed Catholic predecessor, James II, whose siege of the Protestant community of Londonderry had earlier been broken by William. Despite these tensions, for 40 or so years after partition the status of unionist-dominated Northern Ireland was relatively stable.
Recognizing that any attempt to reinvigorate Northern Ireland’s declining industrial economy in the early 1960s would also need to address the province’s percolatingpolitical and social tensions, the newly elected prime minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, not only reached out to the nationalist community but also, in early 1965, exchanged visits with Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Seán Lemass—a radical step, given that the republic’s constitution included an assertion of sovereignty over the whole island. Nevertheless, O’Neill’s efforts were seen as inadequate by nationalists and as too conciliatory by loyalists, including the Rev. Ian Paisley, who became one of the most vehement and influential representatives of unionist reaction.
Civil rights activism, the Battle of Bogside, and the arrival of the British army
Contrary to the policies of UUP governments that disadvantaged Catholics, the Education Act that the Northern Ireland Parliament passed into law in 1947 increased educational opportunities for all citizens of the province. As a result, the generation of well-educated Catholics who came of age in the 1960s had new expectations for more equitable treatment. At a time when political activism was on the rise in Europe—from the events of May 1968 in France to the Prague Spring—and when the American civil rights movement was making great strides, Catholic activists in Northern Ireland such as John Humeand Bernadette Devlin came together to form civil rightsgroups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA).
Although more than one violently disrupted political march has been pointed to as the starting point of the Troubles, it can be argued that the catalyzing event occurred on October 5, 1968, in Derry, where a march had been organized by the NICRA to protest discrimination and gerrymandering. The march was banned when unionists announced that they would be staging a counterdemonstration, but the NICRA decided to carry out their protest anyway. Rioting then erupted after the RUC violently suppressed the marchers with batons and a water cannon.
Omagh bombing
August 15, 1998
Similarly inflammatory were the events surrounding a march held by loyalists in Londonderry on August 12, 1969. Two days of rioting that became known as the Battle of Bogside (after the Catholic area in which the confrontation occurred) stemmed from the escalating clash between nationalists and the RUC, which was acting as a buffer between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents of the area. Rioting in support of the nationalists then erupted in Belfast and elsewhere, and the British army was dispatched to restore calm. Thereafter, violent confrontation only escalated, and the Troubles (a name that neither characterized the nature of the conflict nor assigned blame for it to one side or the other) had clearly begun.
The emergence of the Provisional IRA and the loyalist paramilitaries
Initially, the nationalists welcomed the British army as protectors and as a balance for the Protestant-leaning RUC. In time, however, the army would be viewed by nationalists as another version of the enemy, especially after its aggressive efforts to disarm republican paramilitaries. In the process, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became the defender of the nationalist cause. From its base in Ireland(which had formally left the Commonwealth in 1949), the IRA had mounted an ineffectual guerrilla effort in support of Northern Ireland’s nationalists from 1956 to 1962, but, as the 1960s progressed, the IRA became less concerned with affairs in the north than with advancing a Marxist political agenda. As a result, a splinter group, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provos), which was prepared to use force to bring about unification, emerged as the champion of Northern Ireland’s nationalists. (The Official IRA would conduct operations in support of the republicans in Northern Ireland until undertaking a cease-fire in 1972, after which it effectively ceded the title of the IRA in the north to the Provos.) Believing that their fight was a continuation of the Irish War of Independence, the Provos adopted the tactics of guerrilla warfare, financed partly by members of the Irish diaspora in the United States and later supplied with arms and munitions by the government of Libyan strongman Muammar al-Qaddafi. Unionists also took up arms, swelling the numbers of loyalist paramilitary organizations, most notably the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association UDA).
In an attempt to address nationalist grievances, electoral boundaries were redrawn more fairly, efforts were made to rectify discrimination in housing and public employment, and the B Specials were decommissioned. At the same time, the government of Northern Ireland responded to the growing unrest by introducing increasingly stringent security measures, including internment (detention without trial). The overwhelming majority of those arrested, however, were nationalists.
As the 1970s progressed, rioting became more common in Belfast and Derry, bombings of public places (by both loyalists and republicans) increased, and both sides of the conflict perpetrated violent, deadly atrocities. Barbed wire laid by British soldiers to separate the sectarian communitiesevolved into brick and steel “peace walls,” some of which stood 45 feet (14 metres) high, segregating loyalist and republican enclaves, most famously the Falls Road Catholic community and the Shankill Protestant community of Belfast.
On January 30, 1972, the conflict reached a new level of intensity when British paratroopers fired on Catholic civil rights demonstrators in Londonderry, killing 13 and injuring 14 others (one of whom later died). The incident, which became known as “Bloody Sunday,” contributed to a spike in Provos recruitment and would remain controversial for decades, hinging on the question of which side fired first. In 2010 the Saville Report , the final pronouncement of a British government inquiry into the event, concluded that none of the victims had posed a threat to the troops and that their shooting had been unjustified. British Prime Minister David Cameron responded to the report by issuing a landmark apology for the shooting:
There is no point in trying to soften or equivocate what is in this report. It is clear from the tribunal’s authoritative conclusions that the events of Bloody Sunday were in no way justified….What happened should never, ever have happened….Some members of our armed forces acted wrongly. The government is ultimately responsible for the conduct of the armed forces and for that, on behalf of the government, indeed, on behalf of our country, I am deeply sorry.
In all, more than 480 people were killed as a result of the conflict in Northern Ireland in 1972, which proved to be the deadliest single year in the Troubles. That total included more than 100 fatalities for the British army, as the IRA escalated its onslaught. On July 21, “Bloody Friday,” nine people were killed and scores were injured when some two dozen bombs were detonated by the Provos in Belfast. Earlier, in March, frustrated with the Northern Ireland government’s failure to calm the situation, the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and reinstituted direct rule by Westminster.
Beginning in the mid-1970s, the IRA shifted the emphasis of its “Long War” from direct engagements with British troops to smaller-scale secretive operations, including the bombing of cities in Britain—a change of tactics the British military described as a shift from “insurgency” to “terrorism.” Similarly, the loyalist groups began setting off bombs in Ireland. Meanwhile, paramilitary violence at mid-decade (1974–76) resulted in the civilian deaths of some 370 Catholics and 88 Protestants.
A glimmer of hope was offered by the Sunningdale Agreement , named for the English city in which it was negotiated in 1973. That agreement led to the creation of a new Northern Ireland Assembly, with proportional representation for all parties, and to the establishment of a Council of Ireland, which was to provide a role for Ireland in the affairs of Northern Ireland. Frustrated by the diminution of their political power and furious at the participation of the republic, loyalists scuttled the power-sharing plan with a general strike that brought the province to a halt in May 1974 and eventually forced a return to direct rule, which remained in place for some 25 years.
For the remainder of the decade, violence ebbed and flowed, cease-fires lingered and lapsed, and tit-for-tat bombings and assassinations continued, including the high-profile killing at sea in August 1979 of Lord Mountbatten, a relative of both Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip. In 1976 the opening of the specially designed Maze prison brought with it a shift in the treatment of IRA inmates from that of prisoners of war to that of common criminals. Seeking a return to their Special Category Status, the prisoners struck back, first staging the “blanket protest,” in which they refused to put on prison uniforms and instead wore only blankets, and then, in 1978, the “dirty protest,” in which inmates smeared the walls of their cells with excrement. The government of recently elected Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher refused to buckle, even in the face of hunger strikes in 1980–81 that led to the deaths of 10 prisoners, including Bobby Sands, who had won a seat in the British Parliament while incarcerated and fasting.
Sands’s election helped convince Sinn Féin, then operating as the political wing of the IRA, that the struggle for unification should be pursued at the ballot box as well as with the Armalite rifle. In June 1983 Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams won a seat in Parliament representing West Belfast, though he refused to take it to avoid taking the compulsory oath of loyalty to the British queen.
The Anglo-Irish Agreement and Downing Street Declaration
In October 1984 an IRA bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, England, took five lives and threatened that of Thatcher. Though she remained steadfast in the face of this attack, it was the “Iron Lady” who in November 1985 joined Irish Taoiseach Garret FitzGerald in signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, under which both countries guaranteed that any change in the status of Northern Ireland would come about only with the consent of the majority of the people of Northern Ireland. The accordalso established the Intergovernmental Conference, which gave Ireland a consultative role in the political and security affairs of Northern Ireland for the first time. Finally, the agreement stipulated that power would be devolved back upon the government of Northern Ireland only if unionists and nationalists participated in power sharing.
Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher signing the Anglo-Irish Agreement, November 15, 1985.
Peter Kemp/AP
The loyalists’ vehement opposition to the agreement included the resignation of all 15 unionist members of the House of Commons and a ramping up of violence. In the meantime, IRA bombings in London made headlines, and the reach of the British security forces extended to the killing of three Provos in Gibraltar. Behind the scenes, however, negotiations were underway. In 1993 British Prime Minister John Major and Irish Taoiseach Albert Reynolds issued the so-called Downing Street Declaration , which established a framework for all-party peace talks. A cease-fire declared by the Provos in 1994 and joined by the principal loyalist paramilitary groups fell apart in 1996 because Sinn Féin, which had replaced the more moderate Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) as the leading nationalist party, had been excluded from peace talks because of the IRA’s continuing bombing campaign. Nevertheless, the unionists were at the table, prepared to consider a solution that included the participation of the republic of Ireland. After the IRA resumed its cease-fire in 1997, Sinn Féin was welcomed back to the talks, which now included the British and Irish governments, the SDLP, the Alliance Party of Northern Ireland, the UUP, and the Ulster Democratic Party, among others, though not the Paisley-led DUP, which was protesting the inclusion of Sinn Féin.
The Good Friday Agreement, the Omagh bombing, peace, and power sharing
Those talks, mediated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell, led to the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), reached April 10, 1998. That landmark accordprovided for the creation of a power-sharing Northern Ireland Assembly, established an institutional arrangement for cross-border cooperation between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland on a range of issues, and lay the groundwork for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. On May 22 Ireland and Northern Ireland held a joint referendum on the agreement, which was approved by 94 percent of those who voted in the republic and 71 percent of those voting in Northern Ireland, where Catholic approval of the accord (96 percent) was much higher than Protestant assent (52 per cent). Nonetheless, it was an IRA splinter group, the Real Irish Republican Army, which most dramatically violated the spirit of the agreement, with a bombing in Omagh in August that took 29 lives.
Elections for the new Assembly were held in June, but the IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the power-sharing Northern Ireland Executive until December 1999, when the IRA promised to fulfill its obligation to disarm. That month the republic of Ireland modified its constitution, removing its territorial claims to the whole of the island, and the United Kingdom yielded direct rule of Northern Ireland. Ostensibly the Troubles had come to end, but, though Northern Ireland began its most tranquil era in a generation, the peace was fragile. Sectarian antagonism persisted, the process of decommissioning was slow on both sides, and the rolling out of the new institutions was fitful, resulting in suspensions of devolution and the reimposition of direct rule.
In July 2005, however, the IRA announced that it had ordered all its units to “dump arms,” would henceforth pursue its goals only through peaceful means, and would work with international inspectors “to verifiably put its arms beyond use.” At a press conference in September, a spokesman for the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning stated, “We are satisfied that the arms decommissioned represent the totality of the IRA’s arsenal.” Decommissioning by unionist paramilitaries and other republican groups followed..
In March 2007 an agreement to form a power-sharing government was reached by Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley,respectively the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, the two parties which had won the most seats in the election for the Assembly that month. On May 8 direct rule was rescinded as Paisley was sworn in as first minister and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness, a onetime IRA commander, became deputy first minister.
Vintage ticket for the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes 1949 Epsom Derby
Dublin 35cm x 20cm
The Irish Hospital Sweepstake was a lottery established in the Irish Free State in 1930 as the Irish Free State Hospitals' Sweepstake to finance hospitals. It is generally referred to as the Irish Sweepstake, frequently abbreviated to Irish Sweeps or Irish Sweep. The Public Charitable Hospitals (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1930 was the act that established the lottery; as this act expired in 1934, in accordance with its terms, the Public Hospitals Acts were the legislative basis for the scheme thereafter. The main organisers were Richard Duggan, Captain Spencer Freeman and Joe McGrath. Duggan was a well known Dublin bookmaker who had organised a number of sweepstakes in the decade prior to setting up the Hospitals' Sweepstake. Captain Freeman was a Welsh-born engineer and former captain in the British Army. After the Constitution of Ireland was enacted in 1937, the name Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake was adopted.
The sweepstake was established because there was a need for investment in hospitals and medical services and the public finances were unable to meet this expense at the time. As the people of Ireland were unable to raise sufficient funds, because of the low population, a significant amount of the funds were raised in the United Kingdom and United States, often among the emigrant Irish. Potentially winning tickets were drawn from rotating drums, usually by nurses in uniform. Each such ticket was assigned to a horse expected to run in one of several horse races, including the Cambridgeshire Handicap, Derby and Grand National. Tickets that drew the favourite horses thus stood a higher likelihood of winning and a series of winning horses had to be chosen on the accumulator system, allowing for enormous prizes.
F. F. Warren, the engineer who designed the mixing drums from which sweepstake tickets were drawn
The original sweepstake draws were held at The Mansion House, Dublin on 19 May 1939 under the supervision of the Chief Commissioner of Police, and were moved to the more permanent fixture at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Ballsbridge later in 1940.
The Adelaide Hospital in Dublin was the only hospital at the time not to accept money from the Hospitals Trust, as the governors disapproved of sweepstakes.
From the 1960s onwards, revenues declined. The offices were moved to Lotamore House in Cork. Although giving the appearance of a public charitable lottery, with nurses featured prominently in the advertising and drawings, the Sweepstake was in fact a private for-profit lottery company, and the owners were paid substantial dividends from the profits. Fortune Magazine described it as "a private company run for profit and its handful of stockholders have used their earnings from the sweepstakes to build a group of industrial enterprises that loom quite large in the modest Irish economy. Waterford Glass, Irish Glass Bottle Company and many other new Irish companies were financed by money from this enterprise and up to 5,000 people were given jobs."[3] By his death in 1966, Joe McGrath had interests in the racing industry, and held the Renault dealership for Ireland besides large financial and property assets. He was known throughout Ireland for his tough business attitude but also by his generous spirit.At that time, Ireland was still one of the poorer countries in Europe; he believed in investment in Ireland. His home, Cabinteely House, was donated to the state in 1986. The house and the surrounding park are now in the ownership of Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council who have invested in restoring and maintaining the house and grounds as a public park.
In 1986, the Irish government created a new public lottery, and the company failed to secure the new contract to manage it. The final sweepstake was held in January 1986 and the company was unsuccessful for a licence bid for the Irish National Lottery, which was won by An Post later that year. The company went into voluntary liquidation in March 1987. The majority of workers did not have a pension scheme but the sweepstake had fed many families during lean times and was regarded as a safe job.The Public Hospitals (Amendment) Act, 1990 was enacted for the orderly winding up of the scheme which had by then almost £500,000 in unclaimed prizes and accrued interest.
A collection of advertising material relating to the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstakes is among the Special Collections of National Irish Visual Arts Library.
At the time of the Sweepstake's inception, lotteries were generally illegal in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. In the absence of other readily available lotteries, the Irish Sweeps became popular. Even though tickets were illegal outside Ireland, millions were sold in the US and Great Britain. How many of these tickets failed to make it back for the drawing is unknown. The United States Customs Service alone confiscated and destroyed several million counterfoils from shipments being returned to Ireland.
In the UK, the sweepstakes caused some strain in Anglo-Irish relations, and the Betting and Lotteries Act 1934 was passed by the parliament of the UK to prevent export and import of lottery related materials. The United States Congress had outlawed the use of the US Postal Service for lottery purposes in 1890. A thriving black market sprang up for tickets in both jurisdictions.
From the 1950s onwards, as the American, British and Canadian governments relaxed their attitudes towards this form of gambling, and went into the lottery business themselves, the Irish Sweeps, never legal in the United States,declined in popularity.
Origins: Co Galway
Dimensions :39cm x 31cm
The Irish Hospitals Sweepstake was established because there was a need for investment in hospitals and medical services and the public finances were unable to meet this expense at the time. As the people of Ireland were unable to raise sufficient funds, because of the low population, a significant amount of the funds were raised in the United Kingdom and United States, often among the emigrant Irish. Potentially winning tickets were drawn from rotating drums, usually by nurses in uniform. Each such ticket was assigned to a horse expected to run in one of several horse races, including the Cambridgeshire Handicap, Derby and Grand National. Tickets that drew the favourite horses thus stood a higher likelihood of winning and a series of winning horses had to be chosen on the accumulator system, allowing for enormous prizes.
F. F. Warren, the engineer who designed the mixing drums from which sweepstake tickets were drawn
The original sweepstake draws were held at The Mansion House, Dublin on 19 May 1939 under the supervision of the Chief Commissioner of Police, and were moved to the more permanent fixture at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Ballsbridge later in 1940.
The Adelaide Hospital in Dublin was the only hospital at the time not to accept money from the Hospitals Trust, as the governors disapproved of sweepstakes.
From the 1960s onwards, revenues declined. The offices were moved to Lotamore House in Cork. Although giving the appearance of a public charitable lottery, with nurses featured prominently in the advertising and drawings, the Sweepstake was in fact a private for-profit lottery company, and the owners were paid substantial dividends from the profits. Fortune Magazine described it as "a private company run for profit and its handful of stockholders have used their earnings from the sweepstakes to build a group of industrial enterprises that loom quite large in the modest Irish economy. Waterford Glass, Irish Glass Bottle Company and many other new Irish companies were financed by money from this enterprise and up to 5,000 people were given jobs."By his death in 1966, Joe McGrath had interests in the racing industry, and held the Renault dealership for Ireland besides large financial and property assets. He was known throughout Ireland for his tough business attitude but also by his generous spirit. At that time, Ireland was still one of the poorer countries in Europe; he believed in investment in Ireland. His home, Cabinteely House, was donated to the state in 1986. The house and the surrounding park are now in the ownership of Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council who have invested in restoring and maintaining the house and grounds as a public park.
In 1986, the Irish government created a new public lottery, and the company failed to secure the new contract to manage it. The final sweepstake was held in January 1986 and the company was unsuccessful for a licence bid for the Irish National Lottery, which was won by An Post later that year. The company went into voluntary liquidation in March 1987. The majority of workers did not have a pension scheme but the sweepstake had fed many families during lean times and was regarded as a safe job.The Public Hospitals (Amendment) Act, 1990 was enacted for the orderly winding up of the scheme,which had by then almost £500,000 in unclaimed prizes and accrued interest.
A collection of advertising material relating to the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstakes is among the Special Collections of National Irish Visual Arts Library.
At the time of the Sweepstake's inception, lotteries were generally illegal in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. In the absence of other readily available lotteries, the Irish Sweeps became popular. Even though tickets were illegal outside Ireland, millions were sold in the US and Great Britain. How many of these tickets failed to make it back for the drawing is unknown. The United States Customs Service alone confiscated and destroyed several million counterfoils from shipments being returned to Ireland.
In the UK, the sweepstakes caused some strain in Anglo-Irish relations, and the Betting and Lotteries Act 1934 was passed by the parliament of the UK to prevent export and import of lottery related materials.[6][7] The United States Congress had outlawed the use of the US Postal Service for lottery purposes in 1890. A thriving black market sprang up for tickets in both jurisdictions.
From the 1950s onwards, as the American, British and Canadian governments relaxed their attitudes towards this form of gambling, and went into the lottery business themselves, the Irish Sweeps, never legal in the United States,[8]:227 declined in popularity.
Once upon a time, the Lisdoonvarna Folk Festival was the largest and most famous outdoor music festival in Ireland. A total of 150 acts performed at the festival which took place each summer from 1978 to 1983.
The festivals were the brainchild of local men, Paddy Doherty & Jim Shannon, with the first festival taking place in 1978, which proved to be a huge success. One Irish newspaper would go on to call these festivals the “Irish Woodstock” and the Irish equivalent to “Glastonbury”!
A host of top Irish and international artists graced the stage during the 6 years the festival was held here. They included the likes of Jackson Browne, UB40, The Chieftains, Paul Brady, Loudon Wainwright III, Ralph McTell, The Fureys, De Dannan, Stocktons Wing, EmmyLou Harris, Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Panxty, Clannad, to name just a few, and of course the one and only Christy Moore, who wrote the world famous song about the festival, simply called “Lisdoonvarna”.
The festivals enjoyed a hugely successful run until 1983 when two very unfortunate events sadly overshadowed the excellent performances on the stage and effectively ended the festival from being held in its original format.
24cm x 34cm Ennis Co Clare
The Willie Clancy Summer School (IrishScoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy) is Ireland's largest traditional music summer school held annually since 1973 in memory of the uilleann piperWillie Clancy. During the week, nearly a thousand students from every part of the world attend daily classes taught by experts in Irish music and dance. In addition, a full program of lectures, recitals, dances (céilithe) and exhibitions are run by the summer school.
All events happen in the town of Milltown Malbay, in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, during the week beginning with the first Saturday of July. The weekly registration includes six classes, all lectures and recitals (except the Saturday concert) and reduced price admission to céilithe. Lectures, recitals, concert and céilithe are open to the public.
The school
Founded by a committee of local people, after the death of their friend and neighbour Willie Clancy, at a young age, in early 1973. The group included Paddy McMahon, Paddy Malone, Micheal O Friel, Junior Crehan, Martin Talty, Sean Reid, JC Talty and Jimmy Ward. These were later joined by Muiris Ó Rócháin (moved from Kerry 1971), Peadar O'Loughlin (Kilmaley) and after the first ten years of the school Eamonn McGivney and Harry Hughes.
The school has a fine reputation as an event where Irish traditional music can be learned and practised by all. The school was founded with the idea that music could be learned outside of the strictures of competition or borders. Students are children or teenagers as well as adults. All are mixed within classes according to level of musicianship on a particular instrument. It is possible during the week to attend activities as different as reed making workshops for pipes, as well as concertinaclasses, for example.
Classes are held in different venues: schools, hotels, and private houses. Depending on the student's wishes, it is possible to change teachers during the week. Teachers are chosen for their expertise and many are renowned exponents of Irish music and song.
The craic
Craic agus ceol: "fun and music" in Irish, is a frequent description for the atmosphere. During the week, crowds come to Milltown Malbay solely for informal playing, or to listen to traditional Irish music in all kinds of venues - pubs, kitchens, and streets. This audience does not necessarily attend classes.
Framed Fight poster of Collins v Eubank at Millstreet 1995. 90cm x 68cm Co Cork Stephen Collins (born 21 July 1964) is an Irish former professional boxer who competed from 1986 to 1997. Known as the Celtic Warrior, Collins is the most successful Irish boxer in recent professional boxing history, having held the WBOmiddleweight and super-middleweight titles simultaneously and never losing a fight as champion. Collins' first nineteen professional fights all took place in the United States. In 1988 he won the Irish middleweight title, and the regional American USBA middleweight title the following year, defending the latter successfully in Atlantic City and Las Vegas. In his first two world championship challenges, both for the WBA middleweight title, Collins lost a unanimous decision to Mike McCallum in 1990 and a majority decision to Reggie Johnson in 1992. He also challenged unsuccessfully for the European middleweight title later in 1992, losing a split decision to Sumbu Kalambay in Italy. It was not until Collins reached his early 30s that he fulfilled his potential, becoming WBO middleweight champion in his third world title attempt with a fifth-round TKO victory over Chris Pyatt in 1994, before then moving up in weight to defeat the undefeated Chris Eubank and claim the WBO super-middleweight title in 1995. More success followed, as Collins successfully defended his title by winning the rematch against Eubank later in the year. Collins successfully defended his title another six times before pulling out of a proposed fight in October 1997 against rising Welsh star, Joe Calzaghe, and retiring from the sport, with Collins frustrated by his inability to get a fight against the pound for pound number one boxer of the time, Roy Jones Jr., who was then fighting in the light-heavyweight division. Having competed against some of the best boxers on both sides of the Atlantic during his career, Collins tends to be linked more to an era in the UK during which there was a notable rivalry between British boxers Chris Eubank and Nigel Benn, both of whom Collins fought and defeated twice.
65cm x 50cm Limerick Vintage advertising poster advertising a car racing in Limerick in 1929 to be held around the city and organised by the Irish Motor Racing Club Ltd ,based in Foster Place Dublin. People, like this writer, who do not even have a driving licence find it very difficult to understand the extraordinary interest in motor racing which has mushroomed over the last few years. This newspaper and others have expanded coverage of the sport in a big way and that can only be partly explained by the fact that a young Irishman, Eddie Irvine, has made significant progress in the drivers' championship and that Dubliner Eddie Jordan has a team competing in the constructors' championship. There is a very long and distinguished history of motor racing in Ireland, going back to the turn of the century and before. Irish motorists have contributed profoundly to the popularity of motor racing history. In this context, names like Dunlop and Ferguson immediately spring to mind. The Belfast businessman John Boyd Dunlop first hit upon the idea of a pneumatic tyre when he was trying to entice his son to continue what he considered to be a healthy bicycling pursuit. When Dunlop's tyres helped to wipe out all competition in a Belfast sports meeting in Easter 1889, the invention sparked an idea in the mind of a Dublin businessman called Harvey du Cros - a Huguenot who had fled Roman Catholic persecution in his native France to flee to, of all places, Dublin. The Huguenot refugee had several distinctions. He was a boxing and fencing champion in his day and a founder member of Bective Rangers rugby club. Whether he would have been proud of the latter achievement today cannot be assessed. (Just a joke lads.) He set up a factory for the manufacture of tyres in Stephen Street in Dublin just before the turn of the century and, in doing so, made an enormous contribution to the revolution of transport in the world. The name of Dunlop remains synonymous with tyres, but, sadly, the name du Cros is seldom mentioned. Nevertheless he holds the major French decoration of Legion d'honneur.Mineral waters, normally costing tuppence, were offered at sixpence, but then what else is new! Local farmers' wives also made "a killing" by releasing their hens onto the practice roads and then demanding compensation when they were killed by the speeding cars. Readers may ask how come this writer has taken so much interest in this matter without ever having driven anything faster than a tractor. The reason is that, by chance, I came across a book some time ago called Green Dust, by Brendan Lynch, and was immediately captivated, not only by the tales he told and the manner of the telling, but by the picture of Ireland which Lynch painted. What I see of motor racing on television nowadays bores me to tears, but Brendan Lynch's book is in a different category altogether. As far as I know it is out of print. Could I humbly suggest that he and the publishers, Portobello Publishing, reprint this sporting treasure.The Shannon Development Company of 1900 was the first organisation to promote a motor race in Ireland. The company had built a hotel in Killaloe and organised a motor trip from Dublin to that lovely Clare town, via Nenagh. A De Dion brand car, driven by L Fleming, was first to enter Killaloe in July of 1900. James Gordon Bennett, the American millionaire who had sent Stanley in pursuit of Livingston, offered the first major trophy for motor racing. There was a reluctance to allow this very dangerous sport to be held in Britain and the matter was referred to the House of Commons when an extraordinary alliance involving John Redmond, Tim Healy and Sir Edward Carson all supported the idea that speed limits should be set aside for that day. The Northern Whig said: "We see a wonderful blending of the Orange and Green. There is, about this matter, a unanimity of which some people considered Irishmen to be incapable." Could we, perhaps, arrange a Drumcree Grand Prix! With the blessing of the Bishop of Kildare, a circuit centred on Athy was agreed for Ireland's first serious motor road race which took place on July 2nd, a public holiday, in 1903. The race started just north of Athy and on a figure of eight circuit, the competitors drove 327 miles, going through such exotic places as Kilcullen, Castledermot, Carlow, Monasterevin, Stradbally and Windy Gap. In the build up to the race, James Joyce earned a few badly needed shillings by interviewing the top French driver of the day, Henri Fournier, in The Irish Times. Drivers from all over Europe and the United States took part and prices went through the ceiling as foreign drivers, mechanics, and spectators descended on Athy and its environs. There was one report of £50 being charged for two rooms in Kilcullen for one night, a charge which might, even today, be regarded as a little pricey.
67cm x 54cm Dublin The Sunday Press was a weekly newspaper published in Ireland from 1949 until 1995. It was launched by Éamon de Valera's Irish Press group following the defeat of his Fianna Fáil party in the 1948 Irish general election. Like its sister newspaper, the daily The Irish Press, politically the paper loyally supported Fianna Fáil. The future Taoiseach Seán Lemass was the managing editor of the Irish Press who spearheaded the launch of the Sunday paper, with the first editor Colonel Matt Feehan. Many of the Irish Press journalists contributed to the paper. 'When I open the pages, I duck' was Brendan Behan's description of reading The Sunday Press, for the habit of published memoirs of veterans (usually those aligned to Fianna Fáil) of the Irish War of Independence. It soon built up a large readership, and overtook its main competitor the Sunday Independent, which tended to support Fine Gael. At its peak The Sunday Press sold up to 475,000 copies every week, and had a readership of over one million, around one third of the Irish population. Like the Evening Press, the paper's readership held up better over the years than that of the flagship title in the group, The Irish Press, and it might have survived as a stand-alone title had it been sold. However, with the collapse of the Irish Press Newspapers group in May 1995, all three titles ceased publication immediately. The launch of Ireland on Sunday in 1997 was initially interpreted by many observers as an attempt to appeal to the former readership of The Sunday Press, seen as generally rural, fairly conservative Catholic, and with a traditional Irish nationalist political outlook. When Christmas Day fell on Sunday in 1949, 1955, 1960, 1966, 1977, 1983, 1988 and 1994 the paper came out on the Saturday. Vincent Jennings at the age of 31 became editor of The Sunday Press in 1968, serving until December 1986, when he became manager of the Irish Press Group. Journalists who worked at the press include Stephen Collins served as political editor his father Willie Collins was deputy editorand Michael Carwood became sports editor of The Sunday Press in 1988[5] until its closure in 1995.
Framed portrait of the three Kennedy Brothers from 1963 ,taken in the White House. 45cm x 35cm Bruree Co Limerick
Beautifully mounted & framed 30cm x 30cm Dublin Arthur Guinness started brewing ales in 1759 at the St James Gate Brewery,Dublin.On 31st December 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per annum for the unused brewery.Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain before he started selling the dark beer porter in 1778. The first Guinness beers to use the term were Single Stout and Double Stout in the 1840s.Throughout the bulk of its history, Guinness produced only three variations of a single beer type: porter or single stout, double or extra and foreign stout for export. “Stout” originally referred to a beer’s strength, but eventually shifted meaning toward body and colour.Porter was also referred to as “plain”, as mentioned in the famous refrain of Flann O’Brien‘s poem “The Workman’s Friend”: “A pint of plain is your only man.” Already one of the top-three British and Irish brewers, Guinness’s sales soared from 350,000 barrels in 1868 to 779,000 barrels in 1876.In October 1886 Guinness became a public company, and was averaging sales of 1,138,000 barrels a year. This was despite the brewery’s refusal to either advertise or offer its beer at a discount. Even though Guinness owned no public houses, the company was valued at £6 million and shares were twenty times oversubscribed, with share prices rising to a 60 per cent premium on the first day of trading. The breweries pioneered several quality control efforts. The brewery hired the statistician William Sealy Gosset in 1899, who achieved lasting fame under the pseudonym “Student” for techniques developed for Guinness, particularly Student’s t-distribution and the even more commonly known Student’s t-test. By 1900 the brewery was operating unparalleled welfare schemes for its 5,000 employees. By 1907 the welfare schemes were costing the brewery £40,000 a year, which was one-fifth of the total wages bill. The improvements were suggested and supervised by Sir John Lumsden. By 1914, Guinness was producing 2,652,000 barrels of beer a year, which was more than double that of its nearest competitor Bass, and was supplying more than 10 per cent of the total UK beer market. In the 1930s, Guinness became the seventh largest company in the world. Before 1939, if a Guinness brewer wished to marry a Catholic, his resignation was requested. According to Thomas Molloy, writing in the Irish Independent, “It had no qualms about selling drink to Catholics but it did everything it could to avoid employing them until the 1960s.” Guinness thought they brewed their last porter in 1973. In the 1970s, following declining sales, the decision was taken to make Guinness Extra Stout more “drinkable”. The gravity was subsequently reduced, and the brand was relaunched in 1981. Pale malt was used for the first time, and isomerized hop extract began to be used. In 2014, two new porters were introduced: West Indies Porter and Dublin Porter. Guinness acquired the Distillers Company in 1986.This led to a scandal and criminal trialconcerning the artificial inflation of the Guinness share price during the takeover bid engineered by the chairman, Ernest Saunders. A subsequent £5.2 million success fee paid to an American lawyer and Guinness director, Tom Ward, was the subject of the case Guinness plc v Saunders, in which the House of Lords declared that the payment had been invalid. In the 1980s, as the IRA’s bombing campaign spread to London and the rest of Britain, Guinness considered scrapping the Harp as its logo. The company merged with Grand Metropolitan in 1997 to form Diageo. Due to controversy over the merger, the company was maintained as a separate entity within Diageo and has retained the rights to the product and all associated trademarks of Guinness.The Guinness brewery in Park Royal, London closed in 2005. The production of all Guinness sold in the UK and Ireland was moved to St. James’s Gate Brewery, Dublin. Guinness has also been referred to as “that black stuff”. Guinness had a fleet of ships, barges and yachts. The Irish Sunday Independent newspaper reported on 17 June 2007 that Diageo intended to close the historic St James’s Gate plant in Dublin and move to a greenfield site on the outskirts of the city.This news caused some controversy when it was announced.The following day, the Irish Daily Mail ran a follow-up story with a double page spread complete with images and a history of the plant since 1759. Initially, Diageo said that talk of a move was pure speculation but in the face of mounting speculation in the wake of the Sunday Independent article, the company confirmed that it is undertaking a “significant review of its operations”. This review was largely due to the efforts of the company’s ongoing drive to reduce the environmental impact of brewing at the St James’s Gate plant. On 23 November 2007, an article appeared in the Evening Herald, a Dublin newspaper, stating that the Dublin City Council, in the best interests of the city of Dublin, had put forward a motion to prevent planning permission ever being granted for development of the site, thus making it very difficult for Diageo to sell off the site for residential development. On 9 May 2008, Diageo announced that the St James’s Gate brewery will remain open and undergo renovations, but that breweries in Kilkenny and Dundalk will be closed by 2013 when a new larger brewery is opened near Dublin. The result will be a loss of roughly 250 jobs across the entire Diageo/Guinness workforce in Ireland.Two days later, the Sunday Independent again reported that Diageo chiefs had met with Tánaiste Mary Coughlan, the deputy leader of the Government of Ireland, about moving operations to Ireland from the UK to benefit from its lower corporation tax rates. Several UK firms have made the move in order to pay Ireland’s 12.5 per cent rate rather than the UK’s 28 per cent rate. Diageo released a statement to the London stock exchange denying the report.Despite the merger that created Diageo plc in 1997, Guinness has retained its right to the Guinness brand and associated trademarks and thus continues to trade under the traditional Guinness name despite trading under the corporation name Diageo for a brief period in 1997. In November 2015 it was announced that Guinness are planning to make their beer suitable for consumption by vegetarians and vegans by the end of 2016 through the introduction of a new filtration process at their existing Guinness Brewery that avoids the need to use isinglass from fish bladders to filter out yeast particles.This went into effect in 2017, per the company’s FAQ webpage where they state: “Our new filtration process has removed the use of isinglass as a means of filtration and vegans can now enjoy a pint of Guinness. All Guinness Draught in keg format is brewed without using isinglass. Full distribution of bottle and can formats will be in place by the end of 2017, so until then, our advice to vegans is to consume the product from the keg format only for now. Guinness stout is made from water, barley, roast malt extract, hops, and brewer’s yeast. A portion of the barley is roasted to give Guinness its dark colour and characteristic taste. It is pasteurisedand filtered. Until the late 1950s Guinness was still racked into wooden casks. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Guinness ceased brewing cask-conditioned beers and developed a keg brewing system with aluminium kegs replacing the wooden casks; these were nicknamed “iron lungs”.Until 2016 the production of Guinness, as with many beers, involved the use of isinglass made from fish. Isinglass was used as a fining agent for settling out suspended matter in the vat. The isinglass was retained in the floor of the vat but it was possible that minute quantities might be carried over into the beer. Diageo announced in February 2018 that the use of isinglass in draught Guinness was to be discontinued and an alternative clarification agent would be used instead. This has made draught Guinness acceptable to vegans and vegetarians. Arguably its biggest change to date, in 1959 Guinness began using nitrogen, which changed the fundamental texture and flavour of the Guinness of the past as nitrogen bubbles are much smaller than CO2, giving a “creamier” and “smoother” consistency over a sharper and traditional CO2 taste. This step was taken after Michael Ash – a mathematician turned brewer – discovered the mechanism to make this possible. Nitrogen is less soluble than carbon dioxide, which allows the beer to be put under high pressure without making it fizzy. High pressure of the dissolved gas is required to enable very small bubbles to be formed by forcing the draught beer through fine holes in a plate in the tap, which causes the characteristic “surge” (the widget in cans and bottles achieves the same effect). This “widget” is a small plastic ball containing the nitrogen. The perceived smoothness of draught Guinness is due to its low level of carbon dioxide and the creaminess of the head caused by the very fine bubbles that arise from the use of nitrogen and the dispensing method described above. “Foreign Extra Stout” contains more carbon dioxide, causing a more acidic taste. Contemporary Guinness Draught and Extra Stout are weaker than they were in the 19th century, when they had an original gravity of over 1.070. Foreign Extra Stout and Special Export Stout, with abv of 7.5% and 9% respectively, are perhaps closest to the original in character.Although Guinness may appear to be black, it is officially a very dark shade of ruby. The most recent change in alcohol content from the Import Stout to the Extra Stout was due to a change in distribution through North American market. Consumer complaints have influenced recent distribution and bottle changes.
The Guinness Brewery Park Royal during demolition, at its peak the largest and most productive brewery in the world.Studies claim that Guinness can be beneficial to the heart. Researchers found that “‘antioxidantcompounds’ in the Guinness, similar to those found in certain fruits and vegetables, are responsible for the health benefits because they slow down the deposit of harmful cholesterol on the artery walls.”Guinness ran an advertising campaign in the 1920s which stemmed from market research – when people told the company that they felt good after their pint, the slogan, created by Dorothy L. Sayers–”Guinness is Good for You”. Advertising for alcoholic drinks that implies improved physical performance or enhanced personal qualities is now prohibited in Ireland.Diageo, the company that now manufactures Guinness, says: “We never make any medical claims for our drinks.” Origins : Dublin Dimensions : 43cm x 35cm
Wonderful memento of the legendary Irish Traditional music ,the Chieftains . 54cm x 42cm Dublin The Chieftains are a traditional Irish band formed in Dublin in 1962, by Paddy Moloney, Sean Potts and Michael Tubridy. Their sound, which is almost entirely instrumental and largely built around uilleann pipes, has become synonymous with traditional Irish music and they are regarded as having helped popularise Irish music across the world.They have won six Grammys during their career and they were given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the prestigious BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2002. Some music experts have credited The Chieftains with bringing traditional Irish music to a worldwide audience, so much so that the Irish government awarded them the honorary title of 'Ireland's Musical Ambassadors' in 1989.
Paddy Moloney pictured with Bob Dylan, who is a fan of the band's work.In May 1986, they performed at Self Aid, a benefit concert held in Dublin that focused on the problem of chronic unemployment which was widespread in Ireland at that time. In 1994, they appeared in Roger Daltrey's production, album and video of A Celebration: The Music of Pete Townshend and The Who. They also performed with Canadian astronaut Cmdr. Chris Hadfield in Houston, TX on 15 February 2013. Cmdr. Hadfield sang and played guitar on "Moondance" from aboard the International Space Station.
Tullamore Dew advert 40cm x 30cm Banagher Co Offaly Tullamore D.E.W. is a brand of Irish whiskey produced by William Grant & Sons. It is the second largest selling brand of Irish whiskey globally, with sales of over 950,000 cases per annum as of 2015.The whiskey was originally produced in the Tullamore, County Offaly, Ireland, at the old Tullamore Distillery which was established in 1829. Its name is derived from the initials of Daniel E. Williams (D.E.W.), a general manager and later owner of the original distillery. In 1954, the original distillery closed down, and with stocks of whiskey running low, the brand was sold to John Powers & Son, another Irish distiller in the 1960s, with production transferred to the Midleton Distillery, County Cork in the 1970s following a merger of three major Irish distillers.In 2010, the brand was purchased by William Grant & Sons, who constructed a new distillery on the outskirts of Tullamore. The new distillery opened in 2014, bringing production of the whiskey back to the town after a break of sixty years..jpg)
After retirement to stud his popularity continued. He starred in the film Wild Boy (based on his life-story) in 1934 which was shown in cinemas all across the UK. He was in huge demand on the celebrity circuit, opening shops, attending big races and even rubbing shoulder with royalty (such as the King and Queen) at charity events. When he died in 1939 aged 12, his owner donated his body to the British Natural History Museum in London. And Mick`s fame has continued ever since. In 1981 he was inducted into the American Hall of Fame (International Section). In 1990 English author Michael Tanner published a book, Mick The Miller - Sporting Icon Of the Depression. And in 2011 the people of Killeigh erected a monument on the village green to honour their most famous son. Mick The Miller is not just the most famous greyhound of all time but one of the most loved dogs that has ever lived.
Framed photo of an iconic moment as the Beatles arrive in Dublin,pistured outside the old Dublin Airport Terminal in 47cm x 60cm Dublin
Beautifully framed,enlarged print of the Fr Ted commemorative 3 stamp collection as issued by An Post to mark the anniversary of the legendary comedy series. 22cm x 48cm Limerick
Kennedy for President -Leadership for the 60s-Election Poster 40cm x 27cm Bruree Co Limerick
48cm x 39cm. Dublin July 19, 1972, Muhammad Ali fought Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park in Dublin, causing quite a stir in Ireland.Decades later, an Irish documentary recounting the epic fight not only won awards but also won the approval of Ali's daughter Jamilah Ali. "When Ali Came to Ireland" is an Irish documentary that details Muhammad Ali's trip to Dublin for a fight against Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park. In 2013 the film was screened at the Chicago film festival, where Jamilah Ali was in attendance. TheJournal.ie reported that following the screening, Jamilah said "I've seen so much footage of my father over the years but the amazing thing about watching this film was that I had seen none of the footage of him in Ireland... I loved the film from the beginning to the end." The film highlights a moment in Ali's career where he was set to stage a world comeback. He had been recently released from prison after refusing to join the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector. His opponent Al Lewis had also just been released on parole after serving time in Detroit for a murder charge, and he intended to use his boxing career as "a path to a new life." The movie that won an IFTA in 2013 documents the spectacle in Croke Park, Ali's presence in Ireland and how the public reacted to his being there. It also demonstrates how Ali came to be in Dublin for a fight in the first place, highlighting the involvement of "former Kerry strongman"Michael "Butty" Sugrue. Sugrue's story also proved to be revelatory to his family- in a quote from Ross Whittaker, co-director of the film, he speaks about how Sugrue's grandchildren had never had the chance to meet him. "We were amazed when we screened the film in London to find that Butty Sugrue's granddaughters had never heard their grandfather speak. He had died before they were born and they'd never seen footage of him in which he had spoken." After their 1972 meeting, however, Sugrue and Ali's fortunes took two divergent paths. Ali returned to the ring in America to further glories and fanfare before his retirement, while Sugrue lost a small fortune on the Dublin fight and after dying in London was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in his hometown of Killorglin, Co Kerry. The Louisville Lip was also incredibly proud of his County Clare roots. Today we recall the man's star quality and his Irish ancestry. The death of boxing legend Muhammad Ali at 74 in June 2016, from Parkinson’s, would have brought back many glorious memories of the greatest athlete of our times. At the height of his career, Ali was the most graceful, talented, and brilliant heavyweight boxer who ever stepped inside the ropes. I remember seeing him enter the room at the American Ireland Fund dinner in 2011 and grown men, including the Irish leader Enda Kenny, were simply awestruck that they were in the presence of the greatest living legend. Ali was more than a boxer, of course, he was a fighter who refused to become cannon fodder in the Vietnam War, the greatest mistaken war America entered until the invasion of Iraq. He was also a poet, a showman, a lover of many women, a devout Muslim, and simply a legend. Ali's stance to end the Vietnam War when he refused to be drafted cost us the best years of his sporting life. He came back still a brilliant boxer, but the man who could float like a butterfly could never quite recover that greatness. Still, the fights with Joe Frazier, the rope-a-dope that saw him defeat George Foreman in Zaire in the "Rumble in the Jungle" will forever enshrine his name in history.
29cm x 36cm. Dublin Famous picture during The Greatest's visit to Ireland of Muhammad Ali play fighting with two members of An Garda Siochana.Some memory for those officers to tell their grandchildren about ! July 19, 1972, Muhammad Ali fought Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park in Dublin, causing quite a stir in Ireland.Decades later, an Irish documentary recounting the epic fight not only won awards but also won the approval of Ali's daughter Jamilah Ali. "When Ali Came to Ireland" is an Irish documentary that details Muhammad Ali's trip to Dublin for a fight against Al 'Blue' Lewis at Croke Park. In 2013 the film was screened at the Chicago film festival, where Jamilah Ali was in attendance. TheJournal.ie reported that following the screening, Jamilah said "I've seen so much footage of my father over the years but the amazing thing about watching this film was that I had seen none of the footage of him in Ireland... I loved the film from the beginning to the end." The film highlights a moment in Ali's career where he was set to stage a world comeback. He had been recently released from prison after refusing to join the Vietnam War as a conscientious objector. His opponent Al Lewis had also just been released on parole after serving time in Detroit for a murder charge, and he intended to use his boxing career as "a path to a new life." The movie that won an IFTA in 2013 documents the spectacle in Croke Park, Ali's presence in Ireland and how the public reacted to his being there. It also demonstrates how Ali came to be in Dublin for a fight in the first place, highlighting the involvement of "former Kerry strongman"Michael "Butty" Sugrue. Sugrue's story also proved to be revelatory to his family- in a quote from Ross Whittaker, co-director of the film, he speaks about how Sugrue's grandchildren had never had the chance to meet him. "We were amazed when we screened the film in London to find that Butty Sugrue's granddaughters had never heard their grandfather speak. He had died before they were born and they'd never seen footage of him in which he had spoken." After their 1972 meeting, however, Sugrue and Ali's fortunes took two divergent paths. Ali returned to the ring in America to further glories and fanfare before his retirement, while Sugrue lost a small fortune on the Dublin fight and after dying in London was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in his hometown of Killorglin, Co Kerry. The Louisville Lip was also incredibly proud of his County Clare roots. Today we recall the man's star quality and his Irish ancestry. The death of boxing legend Muhammad Ali at 74 in June 2016, from Parkinson’s, would have brought back many glorious memories of the greatest athlete of our times. At the height of his career, Ali was the most graceful, talented, and brilliant heavyweight boxer who ever stepped inside the ropes. I remember seeing him enter the room at the American Ireland Fund dinner in 2011 and grown men, including the Irish leader Enda Kenny, were simply awestruck that they were in the presence of the greatest living legend. Ali was more than a boxer, of course, he was a fighter who refused to become cannon fodder in the Vietnam War, the greatest mistaken war America entered until the invasion of Iraq. He was also a poet, a showman, a lover of many women, a devout Muslim, and simply a legend. Ali's stance to end the Vietnam War when he refused to be drafted cost us the best years of his sporting life. He came back still a brilliant boxer, but the man who could float like a butterfly could never quite recover that greatness. Still, the fights with Joe Frazier, the rope-a-dope that saw him defeat George Foreman in Zaire in the "Rumble in the Jungle" will forever enshrine his name in history.
Framed photo of an iconic moment as the Beatles arrive in Dublin,pistured outside the old Dublin Airport Terminal in 47cm x 60cm Dublin
42cm x 42cm Dublin The Easter Rising was an insurrection, mostly in Dublin city, that lasted from April 24th until April 30th1916. The insurgents in Dublin amounted to 1,200 men and women from the nationalist militia the Irish Volunteers, the socialist trade union group Irish Citizen Army and the women’s group, Cumman na mBan. The Irish Volunteers had been founded in 1913 in response to the blocking of Home Rule, or self government for Ireland by the Ulster Volunteers. The Citizen Army (with around 300 members) was formed during the Dublin Lockout of 1913 to protect strikers from the police. James Connolly afterwards directed it towards pursuit of an Irish socialist republic. The Volunteers split after the outbreak of the First World War into the National Volunteers and the Irish Volunteers. The National Volunteers, over 120,000 strong, led by Irish Parliamentary Party leader John Redmond, were pledged to support the British war effort and over 30,000 of them joined the British Army. The remaining 13,000 Irish Volunteers, led by Eoin MacNeill, were committed to keep their organisation intact and in Ireland until Home Rule was passed.
The Rising was planned in secret by seven men, mostly of the Irish Republican Brotherhood or IRB, who had formed a “Military Council” to this end just after the outbreak of the First World War. They were, Tom Clarke, Sean McDermott, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Joseph Plunkett, James Connolly and Eamon Ceannt.
Their plans were not known to the membership of the Volunteers at large or to the leaders of the IRB and Volunteers, Dennis McCullough, Bulmer Hobson and Eoin MacNeill.
They had arranged with the Germans for a large importation of arms to be delivered on Good Friday, April 21st, but this shipment was discovered by the British off Kerry and its cargo lost.
At the last minute, the plans for the Rising were revealed to Eoin MacNeill who tried to call off the rebellion by issuing a “countermanding order”, but actually just postponed the outbreak from Easter Sunday to the next day, Monday.
The insurgents proclaimed an Irish Republic with Pearse as President and Connolly as commander in chief. They occupied positions around Dublin at the General Post Office (GPO), the Four Courts, the South Dublin Union, Boland’s Mill, Stephen’s Green and Jacobs’ biscuit factory.
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25cm x 35cm Limerick Commemorative stamp issued in 1974 to mark the centenary of the founding of the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU). he Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) (Irish: Cumann Rugbaí na hÉireann) is the body managing rugby union in the island of Ireland (both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). The IRFU has its head office at 10/12 Lansdowne Roadand home ground at Aviva Stadium, where adult men's Irish rugby union international matches are played. In addition, the Union also owns the Ravenhill Stadium in Belfast, Thomond Park in Limerick and a number of grounds in provincial areas that have been rented to clubs. Initially, there were two unions: the Irish Football Union, which had jurisdiction over clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster and was founded in December 1874, and the Northern Football Union of Ireland, which controlled the Belfast area and was founded in January 1875.The IRFU was formed in 1879 as an amalgamation of these two organisations and branches of the new IRFU were formed in Leinster, Munster and Ulster. The Connacht Branch was formed in 1900. The IRFU was a founding member of the International Rugby Football Board, now known as World Rugby, in 1886 with Scotland and Wales. (England refused to join until 1890.) Following the political partition of Ireland into separate national states, the Republic of Ireland (originally the Irish Free State then Éire) and Northern Ireland (a political division of the United Kingdom), the then Committee of the Irish Rugby Football Union decided that it would continue to administer its affairs on the basis of the full 32 Irish counties and the traditional four provinces of Ireland: Leinster (12 counties), Ulster (9 counties), Munster (6 counties), and Connacht (5 counties). This led to the unusual, but not unique, situation among international rugby union teams, where the Irish representative teams are drawn from players from two separate political, national territories: Ireland (an independent, sovereign state) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). To maintain the unity of Irish rugby union and the linkages between North and South, the IRFU purchased a new ground in 1923 in the Ravenhill district of Belfast at a cost of £2,300.The last full International at Ravenhill involving Ireland for more than a half-century took place in 1953–54 against Scotland who were victorious by 2 tries (6 points) to nil. Australia played Romania in the 1999 World Cup at the ground. The next full International played at Ravenhill was the Rugby World Cup warm-up match against Italy in August 2007 due to the temporary closure of Lansdowne Road for reconstruction. The four provincial branches of the IRFU first ran cup competitions during the 1880s. Although these tournaments still take place every year, their significance has been diminished by the advent of an All-Ireland league of 48 Senior Clubs in 1990. The four provincial teams have played an Interprovincial Championship since the 1920s and continue to be the focal point for players aspiring to the international level. These are Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. All four provinces play at the senior level as members of the United Rugby Championship.
25cm x 35cm Durrow Co Laois Michael Collins was a revolutionary, soldier and politician who was a leading figure in the early-20th-century Irish struggle for independence. He was Chairman of the Provisional Government of the Irish Free State from January 1922 until his assassination in August 1922. Collins was born in Woodfield, County Cork, the youngest of eight children, and his family had republican connections reaching back to the 1798 rebellion. He moved to London in 1906, to become a clerk in the Post Office Savings Bank at Blythe House. He was a member of the London GAA, through which he became associated with the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Gaelic League. He returned to Ireland in 1916 and fought in the Easter Rising. He was subsequently imprisoned in the Frongoch internment camp as a prisoner of war, but was released in December 1916. Collins rose through the ranks of the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin after his release from Frongoch. He became a Teachta Dála for South Cork in 1918, and was appointed Minister for Finance in the First Dáil. He was present when the Dáil convened on 21 January 1919 and declared the independence of the Irish Republic. In the ensuing War of Independence, he was Director of Organisation and Adjutant General for the Irish Volunteers, and Director of Intelligence of the Irish Republican Army. He gained fame as a guerrilla warfare strategist, planning and directing many successful attacks on British forces, such as the assassination of key British intelligence agents in November 1920. After the July 1921 ceasefire, Collins and Arthur Griffith were sent to London by Éamon de Valera to negotiate peace terms. The resulting Anglo-Irish Treaty established the Irish Free State but depended on an Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, a condition that de Valera and other republican leaders could not reconcile with. Collins viewed the Treaty as offering "the freedom to achieve freedom", and persuaded a majority in the Dáil to ratify the Treaty. A provisional government was formed under his chairmanship in early 1922 but was soon disrupted by the Irish Civil War, in which Collins was commander-in-chief of the National Army. He was shot and killed in an ambush by anti-Treaty on 22nd August 1922.
25cm x 35cm Limerick The 1921 Five Nations Championship was the seventh series of the rugby union Five Nations Championship following the inclusion of France into the Home Nations Championship. Including the previous Home Nations Championships, this was the thirty-fourth series of the annual northern hemisphere rugby union championship. Ten matches were played between 15 January and 9 April. It was contested by England, France, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
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25cm x 35cm Limerick The 1906 Irish Rugby XV that played South Africa in Belfast in the first ever test match between the two nationsThe Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) (Irish: Cumann Rugbaí na hÉireann) is the body managing rugby union in the island of Ireland (both Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland). The IRFU has its head office at 10/12 Lansdowne Roadand home ground at Aviva Stadium, where adult men's Irish rugby union international matches are played. In addition, the Union also owns the Ravenhill Stadium in Belfast, Thomond Park in Limerick and a number of grounds in provincial areas that have been rented to clubs. Initially, there were two unions: the Irish Football Union, which had jurisdiction over clubs in Leinster, Munster and parts of Ulster and was founded in December 1874, and the Northern Football Union of Ireland, which controlled the Belfast area and was founded in January 1875.The IRFU was formed in 1879 as an amalgamation of these two organisations and branches of the new IRFU were formed in Leinster, Munster and Ulster. The Connacht Branch was formed in 1900. The IRFU was a founding member of the International Rugby Football Board, now known as World Rugby, in 1886 with Scotland and Wales. (England refused to join until 1890.) Following the political partition of Ireland into separate national states, the Republic of Ireland (originally the Irish Free State then Éire) and Northern Ireland (a political division of the United Kingdom), the then Committee of the Irish Rugby Football Union decided that it would continue to administer its affairs on the basis of the full 32 Irish counties and the traditional four provinces of Ireland: Leinster (12 counties), Ulster (9 counties), Munster (6 counties), and Connacht (5 counties). This led to the unusual, but not unique, situation among international rugby union teams, where the Irish representative teams are drawn from players from two separate political, national territories: Ireland (an independent, sovereign state) and Northern Ireland (a part of the United Kingdom). To maintain the unity of Irish rugby union and the linkages between North and South, the IRFU purchased a new ground in 1923 in the Ravenhill district of Belfast at a cost of £2,300.The last full International at Ravenhill involving Ireland for more than a half-century took place in 1953–54 against Scotland who were victorious by 2 tries (6 points) to nil. Australia played Romania in the 1999 World Cup at the ground. The next full International played at Ravenhill was the Rugby World Cup warm-up match against Italy in August 2007 due to the temporary closure of Lansdowne Road for reconstruction. The four provincial branches of the IRFU first ran cup competitions during the 1880s. Although these tournaments still take place every year, their significance has been diminished by the advent of an All-Ireland league of 48 Senior Clubs in 1990. The four provincial teams have played an Interprovincial Championship since the 1920s and continue to be the focal point for players aspiring to the international level. These are Munster, Leinster, Ulster and Connacht. All four provinces play at the senior level as members of the United Rugby Championship.24 November
South Africa
25cm x 35cm Limerick The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism."Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
National Land League plaque Imperial Hotel in Castlebar
William Gladstone under pressure of Land League. Caricature circa 1880s.Withholding of rent led on to evictions until "Ashbourne's Act" in 1885 made it unprofitable for most landlords to evict.By then agricultural prices had made a recovery, and rents had been fixed and could be reviewed downwards, but tenants found that holding out communally was the best option. Critics noted that the poorer sub-tenants were still expected to pay their rents to tenant farmers. The widespread upheavals and extensive evictions were accompanied by several years of bad weather and poor harvests, when the tenant farmers who were unable to pay the full arrears of rents resorted to a rent strike. A renewed Land War was waged under the Plan of Campaign from 1886 up until 1892 during which the League decided on a fair rent and then encouraged its members to offer this rent to the landlords. If this was refused, then the rent would be paid by tenants to the League and the landlord would not receive any money until he accepted a discount. The first target, ironically, was a member of the Catholic clergy, Canon Ulick Burke of Knock, who was eventually induced to reduce his rents by 25%. Many landlords resisted these tactics, often violently and there were deaths on either side of the dispute. The Royal Irish Constabulary, the national police force, largely made up of Irishmen, were charged with upholding the law and protecting both landlord and tenant against violence. Originally, the movement cut across some sectarian boundaries, with some meetings held in Orange halls in Ulster, but the tenancy system in effect there Ulster Custom was quite different and fairer to tenants and support drifted away. As a result of the Land War, the Irish National Land League was suppressed by the authorities. In October 1882, as its successor Parnell founded the Irish National League to campaign on broader issues including Home Rule.Many of the Scottish members formed the Scottish Land Restoration League. In 1881, the League started publishing United Ireland a weekly newspaper edited by William O'Brien, which continued until 1898.
Irish land League poster dating from the 1880s
25cm x 35cm LimerickAnd given that The Bohemian is situated on Doyle’s Corner it seems an apt subject. Doyle’s Corner has an interesting history of which this particular pub is a part of. Back around the turn of the century, the intersection of The North Circular and The Phibsborough Road was known as Dunphy’s Corner. Now, this is where it starts to get a bit confusing because the word Doyle is about to be bandied about as much as it might do in a series or two of Father Ted. The name Dunphy’s Corner was derived from another public house which sits directly across the road from The Bohemian – now named Doyle’s Corner, formerly named Doyle’s. The pub that provided this named was owned by a man named Thomas Dunphy who presided over it from the mid-1800s up to around the 1890s. The name Dunphy’s Corner must have been widely used by Dubliners because it’s well represented in song, literature and lore. It gets a mention in Peadar Kearney’s anti-enlistment Ballad about the recruiting sergeant William Bailey (Lankum do a great version), who is said to have stood on the corner in the process of his enlisting. And Peadar might have been working on a subliminal as well as a perceptible level here because ‘going round Dunphy’s Corner‘, as it would have been put, was seemingly an idiom used to describe those who had gone to the great beyond, given its nodal point on the route taken by hearses on their way to Glasnevin. Those familiar with the first half of Ulysses, might remember that Poor Dignam went the very same way along that route in the earlier stages of the book. So in the mid-1890s or so along came John Doyle. And John Doyle fancied he might usurp Dunphy and in setting about doing this, he acquired both number 160 and number 66 Phibsborough Road and placed within each of them a public house which bore his name. It was a trick the evidently worked because, as I’m sure you will know, the corner is still referred to as Doyle’s. Seemingly someone by the name of Murphy – proprietor of the nearby Botanic House – took ownership of The Bohemian in the 1970s and figured he could usurp Doyle by erecting signs which read ‘Murphy’s Corner’. But the inhabitants of Phibsborough and Dubliners alike never took to it. So it remains – Doyle’s Corner.
35cm x 25cm Limerick"Danny Boy" is a ballad, written by English songwriter Frederic Weatherly in 1913, and set to the traditional Irish melody of "Londonderry Air".
Danny Boy
Performed by Celtic Aire of the United States Air Force BandIn 1910, in Bath, Somerset, the English lawyer and lyricist Frederic Weatherly initially wrote the words to "Danny Boy" to a tune other than "Londonderry Air". After his Irish-born sister-in-law Margaret Enright Weatherly (known as Jess) in the United States sent him a copy of "Londonderry Air" in 1913 (an alternative version of the story has her singing the air to him in 1912 with different lyrics), Weatherly modified the lyrics of "Danny Boy" to fit the rhyme and meter of "Londonderry Air". Weatherly gave the song to the vocalist Elsie Griffin, who made it one of the most popular songs of the new century. In 1915, Ernestine Schumann-Heink produced the first recording of "Danny Boy". Jane Ross of Limavady is credited with collecting the melody of "Londonderry Air" in the mid-19th century from a musician she encountered.
1940 recording by Glenn Miller and His Orchestra on RCA Bluebird, B-10612-B
35cm x 25cm Limerick Earl William Gill (14 October 1932 – 4 May 2014) was an Irish trumpet-player and bandleader who, with the Hoedowners, achieved fourteen Top 20 hits in the Irish charts between 1966 and 1973. As "Tim Pat", he also had a solo hit in 1971 with a novelty song, "Poor Poor Farmer".
25cm x 35cm Limerick Major Michael John O'Leary VC (29 September 1890 – 2 August 1961) was an Irish recipient of the Victoria Cross, the most prestigious award for gallantry in the face of the enemy that can be awarded to British and Commonwealth forces. O'Leary achieved his award for single-handedly charging and destroying two German barricades defended by machine gun positions near the French village of Cuinchy, in a localised operation on the Western Front during the First World War. At the time of his action, O'Leary was a nine-year veteran of the British armed forces and by the time he retired from the British Army in 1921, he had reached the rank of lieutenant. He served in the army again during the Second World War, although his later service was blighted by periods of ill-health. At his final retirement from the military in 1945, O'Leary was an Army major in command of a prisoner of war camp. Between the wars, O'Leary spent many years employed as a police officer in Canada and is sometimes considered to be a Canadian recipient of the Victoria Cross. Following the Second World War he worked as a building contractor in London, where he died in 1961.Early life O'Leary was born in 1890, one of four children of Daniel and Margaret O'Leary, who owned a farm at Inchigeela, near Macroom in County Cork, Ireland. Daniel O'Leary was a fervent Irish nationalist and keen sportsman who participated in competitive weightlifting and football. Aged 16 and unwilling to continue to work on his parent's land, Michael O'Leary joined the Royal Navy, serving at the shore establishment HMS Vivid at Devonport for several years until rheumatism in his knees forced his departure from the service. Within a few months however, O'Leary had again tired of the farm and joined the Irish Guards regiment of the British Army. O'Leary served three years with the Irish Guards, leaving in August 1913 to join the Royal North-West Mounted Police (RNWMP) in Saskatchewan, Canada. Operating from Regina, Constable O'Leary was soon commended for his bravery in capturing two criminals following a two-hour gunbattle, for which service he was presented with a gold ring. At the outbreak of the First World War in Europe during August 1914, O'Leary was given permission to leave the RNWMP and return to Britain in order to rejoin the army as an active reservist. On 22 October, O'Leary was mobilized and on 23 November he joined his regiment in France, then fighting with the British Expeditionary Force, entrenched in Flanders. First World War service During December 1914, O'Leary saw heavy fighting with the Irish Guards and was Mentioned in Despatches and subsequently promoted to lance corporal on 5 January 1915. Three weeks later, on 30 January, the Irish Guards were ordered to prepare for an attack on German positions near Cuinchy on the La Bassée Canal, a response to a successful German operation in the area five days before. The Germans attacked first however, and on the morning of 1 February seized a stretch of canal embankment on the western end of the 2nd Brigade line from a company of Coldstream Guards. This section, known as the Hollow, was tactically important as it defended a culvert that passed underneath a railway embankment. 4 Company of Irish Guards, originally in reserve, were tasked with joining the Coldstream Guards in retaking the position at 04:00, but the attack was met with heavy machine gun fire and most of the assault party, including all of the Irish Guards officers, were killed or wounded To replace these officers, Second Lieutenant Innes of 1 Company was ordered forward to gather the survivors and withdraw, forming up at a barricade on the edge of the Hollow. Innes regrouped the survivors and, following a heavy bombardment from supporting artillery and with his own company providing covering fire, assisted the Coldstream Guards in a second attack at 10:15.Weighed down with entrenching equipment, the attacking Coldstream Guardsmen faltered and began to suffer heavy casualties. Innes too came under heavy fire from a German barricade to their front equipped with a machine gun. O'Leary had been serving as Innes's orderly, and had joined him in the operations earlier in the morning and again in the second attack. Charging past the rest of the assault party, O'Leary closed with the first German barricade at the top of the railway embankment and fired five shots, killing the gun's crew. Continuing forward, O'Leary confronted a second barricade, also armed with a machine gun 60 yards (55 m) further on and again mounted the railway embankment, to avoid the marshy ground on either side. The Germans spotted his approach, but could not bring their gun to bear on him before he opened fire, killing three soldiers and capturing two others after he ran out of ammunition.Reportedly, O'Leary had made his advance on the second barricade "intent upon killing another German to whom he had taken a dislike". Having disabled both guns and enabled the recapture of the British position, O'Leary then returned to his unit with his prisoners, apparently "as cool as if he had been for a walk in the park." For his actions, O'Leary received a battlefield promotion to sergeant on 4 February and was recommended for the Victoria Cross, which was gazetted on 16 February: No. 3556 Lance-Corporal Michael O'Leary, 1st Battalion, Irish Guards For conspicuous bravery at Cuinchy on the 1st February, 1915. When forming one of the storming party which advanced against the enemy's barricades he rushed to the front and himself killed five Germans who were holding the first barricade, after which he attacked a second barricade, about 60 yards further on, which he captured, after killing three of the enemy and making prisoners of two more. Lance-Corporal O'Leary thus practically captured the enemy's position by himself and prevented the attacking party from being fired upon. The London Gazette, 16 February 1915 Returning to Britain to receive his medal from King George V at Buckingham Palace on 22 June 1915, O'Leary was given a grand reception attended by thousands of Londoners in Hyde Park on 10 July. He was also the subject of much patriotic writing, including a poem in the Daily Mail and the short play O'Flaherty V.C. by George Bernard Shaw.Tributes came from numerous prominent figures of the day, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who said that "No writer in fiction would dare to fasten such an achievement on any of his characters, but the Irish have always had a reputation of being wonderful fighters, and Lance-Corporal Michael O’Leary is clearly one of them." and Thomas Scanlan who said: "I heard early this week of the great achievements of the Irish Guards. All Ireland is proud of O’Leary. He fully deserves the high honour that has been conferred upon him. Ireland is grateful to him."His reception was repeated in Macroom when he visited Ireland, with crowds turning out to applaud him. Daniel O'Leary was interviewed in a local newspaper regarding his son's exploit but was reportedly unimpressed, commenting: "I am surprised he didn't do more. I often laid out twenty men myself with a stick coming from Macroom Fair, and it is a bad trial of Mick that he could kill only eight, and he having a rifle and bayonet." O'Leary was further rewarded for his service, being advanced to a commissioned rank as a second lieutenant with the Connaught Rangers,and he was also presented with a Russian decoration, the Cross of St. George (third class).Despite his popularity with the crowds in London and Macroom, he was jeered by Ulster Volunteers at a recruitment drive in Ballaghaderrin during the autumn of 1915. This treatment caused such a scandal that it was raised in the Houses of Parliament in December. In 1916, O'Leary travelled to Salonika with the 5th battalion of the Connaught Rangers to serve in the Balkans campaign, remaining in theatre until the end of the war, following which he was stationed in Dover with the 2nd battalion until demobilised in 1921.During his service in the Balkans, O'Leary contracted malaria, which was to have severe negative effects on his health for the rest of his life. O'Leary was in the same regiment as the British actor Stanley Holloway and they served together in France. After the war ended, they remained close friends and Holloway often stayed in The May Fair Hotel where O'Leary worked as a concierge. Later life Leaving his wife Greta and their two children in Britain, O'Leary returned to Canada in March 1921 with the purported intention of rejoining the RNWMP, newly renamed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For unknown reasons, this plan came to nothing and after some months giving lectures on his war service and working in a publishing house, O'Leary joined the Ontario Provincial Police, charged with enforcing the prohibition laws. In 1924, with his family recently arrived from England, O'Leary left the Ontario police force and became a police sergeant with the Michigan Central Railway in Bridgeburg, Ontario, receiving £33 a month. In 1925, O'Leary was the subject of several scandals, being arrested for smuggling illegal immigrants and later for irregularities in his investigations. Although he was acquitted both times, he spent a week in prison following the second arrest and lost his job with the railway. Several months later, the municipal authorities in Hamilton, Ontario loaned him £70 to pay for him and his family to return to Ireland. Although his family sailed on the SS Leticia, O'Leary remained in Ontario, working with the attorney general's office. With his health in serious decline, the British Legion arranged for O'Leary to return to Britain and work in their poppy factory. By 1932, O'Leary was living in Southborne Avenue in Colindale, had regained his health and found employment as a commissionaire at The May Fair Hotel in London, at which he was involved in charitable events for wounded servicemen. With the mobilisation of the British Army in 1939, O'Leary returned to military service as a captain in the Middlesex Regiment. O'Leary was sent to France as part of the British Expeditionary Force but had returned to Britain before the Battle of France due to a recurrence of his malaria. No longer fit for full active service, O'Leary was transferred to the Pioneer Corps and took command of a prisoner of war camp in Southern England. In 1945, he was discharged from the military as unfit for duty on medical grounds as a major and found work as a building contractor, in which career he remained until his retirement in 1954. Two of O'Leary's sons had also served in the military during the war, with both receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross for their actions. As a Victoria Cross recipient, O'Leary joined the VE day parade in 1946, but at the 1956 Centenary VC review his place was taken by an imposter travelling in a bath chair. With his health again declining, O'Leary moved to Limesdale Gardens in Edgware shortly before his death in 1961 at the Whittington Hospital in Islington. O'Leary was buried at Mill Hill Cemetery following a funeral service at the Roman Catholic Annunciation Church in Burnt Oak which was attended by an honour guard from the Irish Guards and six of his children. His medals were later presented to the Irish Guards, and are on display at the Regimental Headquarters. He is also remembered in his birthplace, the macroom-online website listing him as a prominent citizen and states that "while many might consider he was fighting with the wrong army, in the wrong war, he was nevertheless a very brave, resourceful and capable soldier who deserved the honours bestowed upon him."
35cm x 25cm Limerick William Butler Yeats (13 June 1865 – 28 January 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer and one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature. A pillar of the Irish literary establishment, he helped to found the Abbey Theatre, and in his later years served two terms as a Senator of the Irish Free State. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival along with Lady Gregory, Edward Martyn and others. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Ireland, and educated there and in London. He was a Protestant and member of the Anglo-Irish community. He spent childhood holidays in County Sligo and studied poetry from an early age, when he became fascinated by Irish legends and the occult. These topics feature in the first phase of his work, which lasted roughly until the turn of the 20th century. His earliest volume of verse was published in 1889, and its slow-paced and lyrical poems display debts to Edmund Spenser, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. From 1900, his poetry grew more physical and realistic. He largely renounced the transcendental beliefs of his youth, though he remained preoccupied with physical and spiritual masks, as well as with cyclical theories of life. In 1923, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
25cm x 30cm Glasgow
Omagh bombingAugust 15, 1998
25cm x 30cm Glasgow
25cm x 30cm Glasgow
Vintage ticket for the Irish Hospital Sweepstakes 1949 Epsom Derby Dublin 35cm x 20cm The Irish Hospital Sweepstake was a lottery established in the Irish Free State in 1930 as the Irish Free State Hospitals' Sweepstake to finance hospitals. It is generally referred to as the Irish Sweepstake, frequently abbreviated to Irish Sweeps or Irish Sweep. The Public Charitable Hospitals (Temporary Provisions) Act, 1930 was the act that established the lottery; as this act expired in 1934, in accordance with its terms, the Public Hospitals Acts were the legislative basis for the scheme thereafter. The main organisers were Richard Duggan, Captain Spencer Freeman and Joe McGrath. Duggan was a well known Dublin bookmaker who had organised a number of sweepstakes in the decade prior to setting up the Hospitals' Sweepstake. Captain Freeman was a Welsh-born engineer and former captain in the British Army. After the Constitution of Ireland was enacted in 1937, the name Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake was adopted. The sweepstake was established because there was a need for investment in hospitals and medical services and the public finances were unable to meet this expense at the time. As the people of Ireland were unable to raise sufficient funds, because of the low population, a significant amount of the funds were raised in the United Kingdom and United States, often among the emigrant Irish. Potentially winning tickets were drawn from rotating drums, usually by nurses in uniform. Each such ticket was assigned to a horse expected to run in one of several horse races, including the Cambridgeshire Handicap, Derby and Grand National. Tickets that drew the favourite horses thus stood a higher likelihood of winning and a series of winning horses had to be chosen on the accumulator system, allowing for enormous prizes.The original sweepstake draws were held at The Mansion House, Dublin on 19 May 1939 under the supervision of the Chief Commissioner of Police, and were moved to the more permanent fixture at the Royal Dublin Society (RDS) in Ballsbridge later in 1940. The Adelaide Hospital in Dublin was the only hospital at the time not to accept money from the Hospitals Trust, as the governors disapproved of sweepstakes. From the 1960s onwards, revenues declined. The offices were moved to Lotamore House in Cork. Although giving the appearance of a public charitable lottery, with nurses featured prominently in the advertising and drawings, the Sweepstake was in fact a private for-profit lottery company, and the owners were paid substantial dividends from the profits. Fortune Magazine described it as "a private company run for profit and its handful of stockholders have used their earnings from the sweepstakes to build a group of industrial enterprises that loom quite large in the modest Irish economy. Waterford Glass, Irish Glass Bottle Company and many other new Irish companies were financed by money from this enterprise and up to 5,000 people were given jobs."[3] By his death in 1966, Joe McGrath had interests in the racing industry, and held the Renault dealership for Ireland besides large financial and property assets. He was known throughout Ireland for his tough business attitude but also by his generous spirit.At that time, Ireland was still one of the poorer countries in Europe; he believed in investment in Ireland. His home, Cabinteely House, was donated to the state in 1986. The house and the surrounding park are now in the ownership of Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council who have invested in restoring and maintaining the house and grounds as a public park. In 1986, the Irish government created a new public lottery, and the company failed to secure the new contract to manage it. The final sweepstake was held in January 1986 and the company was unsuccessful for a licence bid for the Irish National Lottery, which was won by An Post later that year. The company went into voluntary liquidation in March 1987. The majority of workers did not have a pension scheme but the sweepstake had fed many families during lean times and was regarded as a safe job.The Public Hospitals (Amendment) Act, 1990 was enacted for the orderly winding up of the scheme which had by then almost £500,000 in unclaimed prizes and accrued interest. A collection of advertising material relating to the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstakes is among the Special Collections of National Irish Visual Arts Library. At the time of the Sweepstake's inception, lotteries were generally illegal in the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada. In the absence of other readily available lotteries, the Irish Sweeps became popular. Even though tickets were illegal outside Ireland, millions were sold in the US and Great Britain. How many of these tickets failed to make it back for the drawing is unknown. The United States Customs Service alone confiscated and destroyed several million counterfoils from shipments being returned to Ireland. In the UK, the sweepstakes caused some strain in Anglo-Irish relations, and the Betting and Lotteries Act 1934 was passed by the parliament of the UK to prevent export and import of lottery related materials. The United States Congress had outlawed the use of the US Postal Service for lottery purposes in 1890. A thriving black market sprang up for tickets in both jurisdictions. From the 1950s onwards, as the American, British and Canadian governments relaxed their attitudes towards this form of gambling, and went into the lottery business themselves, the Irish Sweeps, never legal in the United States,declined in popularity. Origins: Co Galway Dimensions :39cm x 31cm
F. F. Warren, the engineer who designed the mixing drums from which sweepstake tickets were drawn
35cm x 45cm Ennis Co ClareOnce upon a time, the Lisdoonvarna Folk Festival was the largest and most famous outdoor music festival in Ireland. A total of 150 acts performed at the festival which took place each summer from 1978 to 1983. The festivals were the brainchild of local men, Paddy Doherty & Jim Shannon, with the first festival taking place in 1978, which proved to be a huge success. One Irish newspaper would go on to call these festivals the “Irish Woodstock” and the Irish equivalent to “Glastonbury”! A host of top Irish and international artists graced the stage during the 6 years the festival was held here. They included the likes of Jackson Browne, UB40, The Chieftains, Paul Brady, Loudon Wainwright III, Ralph McTell, The Fureys, De Dannan, Stocktons Wing, EmmyLou Harris, Van Morrison, Rory Gallagher, Panxty, Clannad, to name just a few, and of course the one and only Christy Moore, who wrote the world famous song about the festival, simply called “Lisdoonvarna”. The festivals enjoyed a hugely successful run until 1983 when two very unfortunate events sadly overshadowed the excellent performances on the stage and effectively ended the festival from being held in its original format.
24cm x 34cm Ennis Co Clare The Willie Clancy Summer School (Irish Scoil Samhraidh Willie Clancy) is Ireland's largest traditional music summer school held annually since 1973 in memory of the uilleann piper Willie Clancy. During the week, nearly a thousand students from every part of the world attend daily classes taught by experts in Irish music and dance. In addition, a full program of lectures, recitals, dances (céilithe) and exhibitions are run by the summer school. All events happen in the town of Milltown Malbay, in County Clare, on the west coast of Ireland, during the week beginning with the first Saturday of July. The weekly registration includes six classes, all lectures and recitals (except the Saturday concert) and reduced price admission to céilithe. Lectures, recitals, concert and céilithe are open to the public.
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