Search Results for 'Geraldine Plunkett'

An early autumn date for your diary as the Roscommon Arts Centre hosts Norma Sheahan and Jon Kenny in John B Keane’s ‘The Matchmaker’ on Friday, November 4.

Eilís Dillon was born on March 7, 1920, in Galway. Her parents were Professor Tom Dillon and Geraldine Plunkett, who was a sister of Joseph Mary Plunkett. They were very republican and were forced to move a number of times. They lived for a time in Daingean House and later in Barna for a few years. Eilís went to Barna National School where she became fluent at Irish, later to the Presentation, and later still to the Ursuline Convent in Sligo. She worked for a while in the hotel business.

Well, I had a lovely event last Saturday night. Ray D’Arcy had invited me on to his chat show and I really enjoyed the chat with him and with so many of the audience I met afterwards.

Acclaimed stage and television actor Geraldine Plunkett (The Clinic, Glenroe) performs a staged reading of Creaking, a play by Noelle Browne, at the Linenhall Arts Centre in Castlebar on Monday, May 22 at 8pm.

Geraldine Plunkett was a daughter of Count George Noble Plunkett and a sister of Joseph Mary Plunkett. She became Joe’s aide-de-camp and knew all the 1916 leaders. She and Joe lived in Larkfield cottage in Kimmage where they stored guns and ammunition, and a lot of drilling, etc, occurred. Joe brought in Michael Collins to help her with the family accounts.

Reading Geraldine Plunkett’s description of a holiday she and her sister Fiona, and their brother Jack, enjoyed at Padraig Pearse’s cottage at Ros Muc in the summer of 1915, I get a glimpse of the relaxing life-style that welcomed Pearse there since he first came in 1903. In fact after Pearse wrote his famous oration, which he delivered with power and menace at O’Donovan Rossa’s funeral on June 29 1915, events swept him along to such an extent that he was never again able to visit the cottage.

Tom Dillon, originally from Co Sligo, married Geraldine Plunkett, on Easter Sunday 1916. The Plunkett family were practically all committed to the Rising, and the subsequent War of Independence. Tom qualified from UCD as a chemist, worked with the Volunteers, and supplied them with a steady stream of hand grenades and bombs. In May 17 1918 he was arrested and interned with other Irish Rebels, in Gloucester prison, England.

Joseph Plunkett and Grace Gifford were to have a joint wedding with his sister Geraldine Plunkett and her fiancé Tom Dillon, at the Rathmines church, Easter Sunday, April 24 1916. The confusion about the on/off Rising, the rumours about the possibility of Roger Casement being taken prisoner in Kerry, kept the couples guessing as to what would happen. But Joseph, one of the principle organisers of the Rising, probably knew more that what he said to his sister, that Grace ‘did not know the smallest thing about the political situation, and had no idea whatever of such things’.*

Padraic Pearse, the self-identified President of the Provisional Government, and Commandant-General of the Army of the Irish Republic was rushed to the gallows, or in this case to the grim stonebreakers yard at Kilmainham jail.

During the past few weeks I have tried to give some of the formative influences on the life of the writer Eilís Dillon as she grew up in Galway. The impact of her parents’ (Professor Tom Dillon and Geraldine Plunkett) commitment to the War of Independence, and her nightly fears of sudden raids on their home by the Black and Tans was a nightmare that stayed with her all her life.