Search Results for 'Maud Gonne'

Voices of the Free State — an impressive book faturing selected essays from WG Fitzgerald’s The Voice of Ireland almost a century ago will be launched in the city next week.

Back in Connemara for Christmas, which she insisted on calling Christ Mass, Ethel Mannin opens the door of her little cottage, located between Roundstone and Clifden, close to Mannin Bay. She has been away for some time. She lights fires in all three rooms, to drive away the musty smell and damp, and soon she is comfortable sitting by the window looking out at the sea, the mountains beyond. She was back to stay until restlessness, or some political challenge, calls her away again.

The final curtain came down on the relationship between Annie Horniman and the Abbey Theatre in the days following the death of Edward VII on May 6 1910. It was customary that on the death of a British monarch all theatres would close as a mark of respect. Dublin theatres were expected to uphold that tradition, and indeed they did, the only exception on this occasion was the Abbey Theatre.

Not only is it interesting to see the initials of the people Lady Gregory admired on her ‘Hall of Fame’, the famous autograph tree at Coole Park, Co Galway, it is perhaps more interesting to see the names she leaves out.

The most revolutionary play ever produced on an Irish stage was Cathleen Ní Houlihan written by WB Yeats and Lady Gregory. It was performed to a packed audience on a makeshift stage at St Teresa’s Hall in Clarendon Street, Dublin on April 2 1902. It was astonishing in its veracity.

ENGLISHWOMAN, IRISH republican, suffragette, activist, actor, writer, and muse to WB Yeats, Maud Gonne was one of the most prominent figures in late 19th and early 20th century Ireland.

Two remarkable women, overshadowed by two remarkable brothers, were remembered on Sunday at the opening of The Studio, a meeting and workplace for artists and craftspeople, at Thoor Ballylee, in south Galway.

Kathleen B Curran, who began working for the Galway Harbour Board after she left school, would rise spectacularly through the ranks to become the combined Harbour Master and secretary to the Port Authority (an unheard of position for a woman in Ireland). She was intimately involved in all of the major events which the harbour witnessed during the latter part of the last century. But I am sure she took particular pleasure, as an Irish language enthusiast and a great admirer of the poet WB Yeats, when Galway was picked out to play a role in the great poet’s funeral.

Éamon Ó Cuiv TD has had his first tentative piece of literary writing published in the current The Galway Review (volume 4). It is a competent piece of writing, and no one would have expected anything less, from the young Lochinvar who rides out of the west to astounding political victories every time. He wrote a review of Daniel Sammon’s Croagh Patrick and Me, Ireland’s holy mountain, which he can probably see from his kitchen window.