July 15
Published in On this Day listing- 1927 Countess Markievicz, née Constance Gore-Booth (59), republican socialist, the first woman to be elected to the British House of Commons, minister for labour in the first Dáil Éireann (1919–21) and Fianna Fáil TD, died.
- 1984 Glenveagh National Park in north-west Donegal, covering 40,000 acres, was formally opened by President Patrick Hillery. The estate was created (1857–9) by businessman John George Adair, who also built Glenveagh Castle (1870) and is remembered today for the Derryveagh evictions (1861), when he ejected 244 of his tenants. Adair died in 1885, after which the castle fell into disrepair. Later, during the Civil War, the castle and grounds were occupied for a time by anti-Treaty forces who used it as their headquarters, and it narrowly avoided being amongst the c. 300 ‘big houses’ destroyed during that period. When the Irregulars eventually moved out, Peadar O’Donnell was told to burn it to the ground. He ignored the order. In 1929 the estate was purchased by an American academic, Professor Arthur Kingsley Porter, who disappeared, presumed drowned, four years later after spending the night in his fisherman’s hut on Inishbofin Island. The last private owner was the Philadelphia art collector and philanthropist Henry McIlhenny, whose grandfather had emigrated from nearby Carrigart during the Great Famine. He sold the lands to the State in 1975 and donated the castle and gardens six years later. All three were generous hosts. Amongst Adair’s visitors were, no doubt, his influential relations from the business and banking world, whilst the polymath George William Russell (‘AE’), equipped with his paints, regularly stayed with Kingsley Porter. McIlhenny, who spent his summers in Ireland, kept an open house there. Besides celebrities like Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable, he hosted the great American composer Samuel Barber (1910–81), who had Scots/Irish ancestry, during the summer of 1952. Barber would be best remembered today for his mournful Adagio for Strings (1936).
- 1993 The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) released a statement admitting sole responsibility for the Dublin and Monaghan bombs in May 1974.
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Personal Histories
On this Day
September 21
- 1866 H.G. (Herbert George) Wells, the father of science fiction and four times Nobel Prize for Literature nominee, born in Kent.
- 1832Sir Walter Scott (61), historical novelist, playwright, poet and antiquary, died from cholera. When Scott made his first and only visit to Ireland, a month-long stay in the summer of 1825, he was an internationally acclaimed poet and author of a hugely popular series of novels with a Scottish historical setting, which began with Waverley (1814). Though published anonymously—he didn’t acknowledge his authorship until 1827—it was an open secret that he was the author. He stayed in Dublin for a fortnight. The Dublin Penny Journal reported that he ‘lingered long’ before the Swift monument in St Patrick’s Cathedral, visited the recently widowed spouse of his long-time correspondent, the author Revd Charles Maturin, and ‘endeavoured to mitigate her sorrows by an act of munificent generosity’, delighted Mr Milliken, bookseller in Grafton Street, by purchasing £60 worth of books on history and antiquities, and dined with the lord lieutenant in Malahide Castle. Everywhere he went, reported the Journal, he was greeted with ‘unequivocal demonstrations of public estimation and favour’. Thereafter he spent an entire day in Glendalough, where, despite his lameness—the consequence of childhood polio—he made the ascent to St Kevin’s Bed. He went on to the Lakes of Killarney in the company of novelist Maria Edgeworth, before returning to the capital via Cork, where he was accorded the freedom of the city, and Cashel. He was not over-impressed with Killarney, the Journal reporting that it ‘failed to draw forth those expressions of enthusiastic pleasure excited by the antiquities of Glendalough and Cashel’. Finally, before his departure from Howth, he held a large dinner party for his friends to celebrate his 54th birthday.
Above: Sir Walter Scott, 1771–1832. Novelist and poet, by Sir William Allan. (Scottish National Gallery)
- 1795 In a faction fight near Loughgall, Co. Armagh, between the Protestant Peep o’ Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders, popularly remembered as the Battle of the Diamond, at least 30 Catholics were killed. That evening the Orange Society, later known as the Orange Order, was founded in the home of James Sloan, a local innkeeper.