WHALEY, Thomas (‘Buck’) (1766–1800), politician and rake, was born on 15 December 1766, son of Richard Chapel Whaley, a wealthy landowner and notorious priest-hunter of Whaley Abbey, Co. Wicklow, and his second wife Anne, daughter of Revd Bernard Ward. On his father’s death in 1769 Thomas—the second, but eldest surviving, son—succeeded to his father’s estates, … Read more
This year, 2007, marks the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernie O’Malley, and it is almost 110 years since his birth in Ellison Street, Castlebar. He spent only eight years there, where his father, Luke, an official with the Congested Districts Board, was a supporter of the Irish Parliamentary Party, the typical Irish Catholic … Read more
March 2007 marks the centenary of the death of John O’Leary, immortalised in the refrain of W. B. Yeats’s ballad ‘September 1913’. Owen McGee poses the question: can this ‘Romantic Ireland’ that Yeats spoke of be historically defined, and why did he associate it particularly with O’Leary? Yeats evidently equated the death of ‘Romantic Ireland’ … Read more
The year 1849 was a year of portents. Some, such as the reappearance of the potato blight in May or the record number of evictions (13,384), were harbingers of the suffering and social upheavals to come. Two events in that year, however, both of which took place in County Kilkenny, marked an equally noteworthy but … Read more
The Cliffs of Moher have long been admired for their scenic beauty, but few know much about the man who first promoted tourism to this inspiring place. Cornelius O’Brien, a benevolent local landlord, was the first to formally recognise the cliffs as a tourist destination. Samuel Lewis reported in 1833 that O’Brien was erecting ‘an … Read more