Liam Mellows - Down and Out in New York
Thu, May 03, 2018
Week II
While many of the 700 volunteers who came out in County Galway during the Easter Rising, were being rounded up and shipped off to prison in England, their leader Liam Mellows managed to slip away to Liverpool dressed as a priest. From there he managed to work his passage to America.
‘Much that I would like to say must go unsaid.’
Thu, Apr 26, 2018
On December 7 1922, Pádraic Ó Máille TD and his friend Sean Hales TD of Cork, walked out of a hotel on Ormonde Quay, by Dublin’s river Liffy. They just had lunch, and were on their way back to the Dáil in Leinster House, a short drive away. Ó Máille, Galway city and Connemara’s first TD, had been appointed Leas Ceann Comhairle (deputy speaker ).
Read more ...The Irish Madonna of Hungary - A mystery still remains
Thu, Apr 19, 2018
Week V
When Cardinal Tomás Ó Fiaich returned to Ireland his news was disappointing. Intrigued by Canon Quinn’s unfounded pronouncement that the large stone frame in the Lynch’s chapel in St Nicholas’ Collegiate church had once contained the miraculous painting of the Irish Madonna, he made inquiries when he visited Gyor in 1983. “Having looked carefully at the size of the picture (26’’x20”) I must admit I cannot say one way or the other whether the picture was ever in Galway. It is much smaller than the reserved space (in St Nicholas’) but I couldn’t get any accurate measurement…” said the cardinal choosing his words carefully.
The ‘tradition’ of the Empty Frame
Thu, Apr 12, 2018
Week IV
There is no historical evidence that the Irish Madonna, or The Weeping Madonna of Gyor, was ever in Galway or in the Clonfert diocese prior to its final resting place in Hungary. Many people have tried to locate the picture in Galway’s St Nicholas’ Collegiate church, but there is simply no evidence that it ever saw the inside of that ancient building.
There is no historical evidence that the Irish Madonna, or The Weeping Madonna of Gyor, was ever in Galway or in the Clonfert diocese prior to its final resting place in Hungary. Many people have tried to locate the picture in Galway’s St Nicholas’ Collegiate church, but there is simply no evidence that it ever saw the inside of that ancient building.
Read more ...A ‘strange, wonderful bond’ between Ireland and Hungary
Tue, Apr 10, 2018
It is perhaps an indication of how Ireland was cut off from the rest of the world that no one here knew about the painting of the Virgin and Child, and its miraculous ’tears of blood’, that Bishop Walter Lynch brought with him to Gyor* in Hungary, in the middle of the 17th century.
Read more ...Drama as Galway surrenders to Cromwell’s troops
Thu, Mar 29, 2018
Week II
Living in Ireland during the mid 17th century was a frightening and a bloody time. Following the extreme political crisis that resulted in civil war in England, Ireland was plunged into a period of despair that would lead to the demise of the ancient Celtic fiefdoms, and a vigorous attempt to reconquer the hearts and minds of the Irish people.
The enduring legend of the Irish Madonna of Hungary
Thu, Mar 22, 2018
An extraordinary thing happened in the Hungarian city of Gyor on St Patrick’s Day, March 17 1697. A painting of the Virgin and Child, brought to the city 42 years previously by Bishop Walter Lynch, a member of the esteemed Lynch family of Galway, began to ‘weep copiously’ during Mass. Despite having been wiped clean with linen cloths (one of those cloths is still preserved), it continued to exude ‘a bloody sweat’ for three hours.
Read more ...Women complain at ‘blatant’ discrimination in teaching profession
Thu, Mar 15, 2018
Week IV
The discrimination between salaries paid to male teachers and those paid to women was highlighted in a deputation of the Connacht Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation to the local MP for Galway Stephen Gwynn. The fact that there was such a difference in salaries highlighted yet again the powerlessness of women who had no vote to influence fairness.
Two stories on the ‘crime of being a woman’
Thu, Mar 08, 2018
Week III
Access to university education for women was the important influence in the early years of the last century. Women played vital roles in Galway society, as elsewhere, and were visibly, and successfully, running convents and schools, involved in nursing and teaching, even contesting local government elections, and taking up positions as public officials. The fact that until 1918 women had not the vote did not stop their public activism and achievement. But depriving women of the vote, and barring women from various professional associations because of their sex, branded them as second class citizens despite, in some cases, their university education.
Christobel Pankhurst tells Galway audience: ‘Now is the time’
Thu, Mar 01, 2018
At a time of feverish debate about Home Rule, and noisy Sinn Féin meetings, the fact that Christabel Pankhurst addressed a well attended meeting in Galway’s Town Hall on October 21 1911 was an important event in the political history of the town.
Read more ...How could ‘hysterical’ women be allowed to vote?
Thu, Feb 22, 2018
Home Rule, the campaign for self-government for Ireland within the United Kingdom, was the dominant political movement of Irish nationalism from 1870 to the end of World War I. It dominated all local and national papers in Ireland. Men fiercely argued its pros and cons while Ulster protested that if Home Rule was introduced it ‘would fight, and Ulster would be right.’
Read more ...An Irish Airman
Thu, Feb 15, 2018
Week VI
On February 4 1918 Lady Gregory’ sent a telegram to WB Yeats to tell him about Robert’s death. She told him that she found it ‘very hard to bear’. She added a postscript: ‘If you feel like it sometime write something down that we may keep - you understood him better than many.’
On February 4 1918 Lady Gregory’ sent a telegram to WB Yeats to tell him about Robert’s death. She told him that she found it ‘very hard to bear’. She added a postscript: ‘If you feel like it sometime write something down that we may keep - you understood him better than many.’
Read more ...‘Oh what a happy world it might be with you back and the war at an end’
Thu, Feb 08, 2018
Week V
Whatever misgivings Lady Gregory had about her son Robert’s affair with Nora Summers, that was soon overshadowed by her worry for his safety. In the first few years of World War I the typical life expectancy for a fighter pilot in combat was numbered in weeks. Not all deaths were from German bullets. Many were caused by human errors, faulty machines, injuries sustained at training, or operational mishaps.
Robert Gregory’s ‘happiest days of his life’
Thu, Feb 01, 2018
Week IV
Robert Gregory joined 4th Bn Connaught Rangers as a second lieutenant in September 1915. Shortly after he transferred to the Royal Flying Corps for which his small stature was suited.
The end of the affair
Thu, Jan 25, 2018
Following Margaret’s discovery of her husband Robert in a compromising position with his lover Nora Summers, Nora and her husband Gerald quickly moved out of Mount Vernon, the Gregory holiday home on Clare’s ‘flaggy shore’. But they did not go far. They moved nearby into the bungalow they had previously rented.
Read more ...Robert Gregory and Nora Summers fall in love
Thu, Jan 18, 2018
Week II
In January 1915 Robert Gregory confessed to his wife Margaret that he was having an affair. She was devastated. She had considered herself happily married to Robert for seven years. They had met as art students at the Slade School of Fine Art, London. They had three children, Catherine, Anne and Richard. As artists they shared a carefree Bohemian life between Coole Park, the family’s holiday home at Mount Vernon on Clare’s ‘flaggy shore’, and trips to London and Paris. Robert’s mother, Lady Augusta, loved having her grandchildren living with her. ‘In her safe benevolent care’ they thrived while allowing their parents freedom to roam.
Why did Robert Gregory reach for the sky?
Thu, Jan 11, 2018
On February 2 1918, a day after she heard that her only son had died while flying with his squadron on the Italian front, Lady Gregory wrote briefly to WB Yeats: ‘The long dreaded telegram has come - Robert has been killed in action ….it is very hard to bear.’
Read more ...The ring on her finger told a different story
Thu, Jan 04, 2018
When Sheron Boyle was researching her family’s history she often wondered why her grandmother Margaret (nee Martin), who had emigrated to America at 20 years of age, and who seemed to be happy and settled, living close to her relatives who had gone before her, suddenly returned to her farmstead near Rockfort in Irishtown, Co Mayo.
After a providential start, which I will tell in a moment, she had plunged straight into her new life joining her sister and her unmarried aunt (both named Celia Martin), working as a maid in Hartford, Connecticut, for the politically active Hooker family. A photograph exists showing Margaret with her siblings who had also emigrated, looking happy in a very fine dress, her hair piled high on her fine young head, and smart. It was said she won first prize at a raffle, and that was a ticket back to Ireland. Margaret suddenly came home.
Read more ...The Saga of the Tailor and Antsy
Thu, Dec 28, 2017
“A Star Danced And Under That Was I Born
‘You may snore if you please’ (Per me vel stertas licet)
Thu, Dec 21, 2017
Hands up those of us who did Latin in school?.....three? five? ..OK 12 of us. I know Latin is still sold to some young students as the key to understanding European culture and heritage. Old school masters argue that Latin is better for you than Sudoku, better, even, that The Irish Times Crosaire crossword. Yet when I came across my old Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, I was filled with an old familiar dread. There it all was, the boring conjunctions of verbs, and the declensions of nouns; all the miserable rules of grammar and syntax, possibly the driest book ever created, and not a joke between its covers.
Read more ...