Great Irish Heroes E-Book

Sean McMahon

• Herausgeber: Mercier Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 176

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

From Collins to Cú Chulainn and from Dev to Daniel O'Connell, this is a collection of short biographies of some of the most admirable Irishmen and women in history. The heroes range across time and offer an exceptional overview of Irish history, including well-known figures from the worlds of medicine, science, politics, the Arts and education, as well as some of the lesser-known but equally brave and heroic characters from our history. Designed to inform and entertain both the new reader and those familiar with Irish culture, it features: Michael Davitt, Constance Markievicz, Charles Stewart Parnell, Mary Aikenhead, Éamon de Valera, Patrick Pearse, Brian Boru, George Boole, James Gandon, Henry Joy McCracken, Patrick Sarsfield, Betsy Gray, St Brendan, Henry Grattan, Nano Nagle, Michael Collins, Douglas Hyde, Daniel O'Connell, James Connolly, Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Jonathan Swift, Cú Chulainn, Liam Lynch and Theobald Wolfe Tone, among others.

Leseprobe

MERCIER PRESS

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© Sean McMahon, 2018

ISBN: 978 1 78117 579 8

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 580 4

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 581 1

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Foreword

The dictionary defines ‘hero’ variously as: a man or woman of distinguished bravery; an illustrious person; a person reverenced or idealised; the principal figure in a work of literary or dramatic art. Both real people, and mythical ones too, are covered in this generous spectrum of meaning. Here, the figures dancing in a national frieze astound us with their variety, their courage, their achievements and their Irishness. This last quality is usually achieved by being born here and having a main sphere of activity here. But some born here achieved heroic greatness, of whatever kind, far from the oul sod, and a few, though born elsewhere, made Ireland their local habitation.

The list includes saints and scholars, soldiers and statesmen, pirates and politicians, poets, mathematicians, founders and feminists, martyrs and survivors and bold Fenian men. We stride down the ages and meet a host of outstanding, and sometimes unlikely, heroes.

Ireland is full of heroes – this book could be ten times as large. This is just a heroic handful and it is fitting to remember their glories and rejoice in their heroism.

Mary Aikenhead

Founder of the Religious Sisters of Charity 1787–1858

Mary Aikenhead was born in Daunt’s Square, off the Grand Parade in Cork, on 19 January 1787. She was the eldest daughter of David Aikenhead, a wealthy Protestant doctor of Scottish descent, and Mary Stackpoole, a Catholic heiress. Mary was baptised into her father’s Anglican religion at St Anne’s church in Shandon but was fostered, because of ill-health, by a poor Catholic family called Rorke, who lived in a small cottage on Eason’s Hill, a poor country area behind Shandon. She stayed there for six years, receiving weekly visits from her parents and only being allowed home to make a brief acquaintance with her younger siblings: Anne, Margaret and St John. Her return home at age six was made less traumatic by the incorporation into the Aikenhead household of her beloved foster parents, ‘Mammy Rorke’ and ‘Daddy John’.

Whatever motives lay behind the fosterage, it had the effect of acquainting Mary with the dire poverty in parts of the city, and the memory of her sojourn there was to prove significant in her later vocation. It also was her introduction to Catholicism, as she went to mass with the Rorkes.

Her father also knew the poor areas of the city well, since he ministered, often unpaid, to the poor of Cork. By the time of his death in 1801, his teenage daughter realised just how necessary and unusual this practical charity was. She was strangely moved when her father converted to Catholicism on his deathbed. She had continued to attend mass regularly, but secretly, so as not to offend him. Soon she was taking instruction and was received into the Church on 6 June 1802, when she was in her sixteenth year. Her two sisters and brother followed her into the faith of their mother.

When Mary was twenty-two she went to stay with a married friend, Anna Maria O’Brien, in Dublin and, joining her in charitable work, found conditions in the poorer parts of the city indescribable. Still very religious, she resisted a strong vocation because all of the existing religious orders were enclosed and, while fully supporting that kind of calling, she felt hers was intended to be more practical.

While in Dublin, Mary met Daniel Murray, who later became archbishop of Dublin, and he chose her to be the founder member of a congregation called the Sisters of Charity. He also gave his support to Catherine McAuley, who founded another religious order, the Sisters of Mercy.

Mary thought it essential to have training in the religious life and so, with a companion, Alicia Walsh, she endured a rigorous novitiate at the Convent of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin in York from 6 June 1812 to August 1815. The two made their vows of perpetual profession privately to Murray and, with assent from Pope Pius VII, initiated the Pious Congregation of the Religious Sisters of Charity on 9 December 1816. As well as the usual vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, there was a vow of service to the poor, with a particular emphasis on visiting people in their homes. One of their first foundations was in North William Street, off Summerhill, in north Dublin; a second was in Stanhope Street. The authorities in the grim Kilmainham Gaol invited the sisters to visit the convicts. Mary, superior-general of the order, made the women on the death wing her special concern.

Of the members of her immediate family, St John died young, Margaret married a doctor and went to live in Kerry, and Anne, in 1823, joined the order in Stanhope Street.

In 1824 Bishop of Cork John Murphy asked Dr Murray to let him have a community of Sisters of Charity in his diocese. Dr Murray referred the matter to Mary, who was delighted at the prospect of having a community in her native city. However, Dr Murphy wanted to have the Sisters under his own jurisdiction, whereas the Congregation had been established as one with a central governing body. Having consulted Dr Murray, Fr Peter Kenney, SJ, and Fr Robert St Leger, SJ, Mary informed Bishop Murphy that she could not accede to his request. Although this did not please him, Bishop Murphy decided that, even if they weren’t under his jurisdiction, he still wanted the Sisters of Charity in Cork, and in September 1826 the sisters moved into the house provided for them. This proved to be a ramshackle building, which the sisters jokingly called Cork Castle. It was to be their home for nineteen years before they finally acquired St Vincent’s Convent on Peacock Lane. The order had by then won much praise for their succouring of the poor, especially during the great cholera outbreak of 1832.

Realising the need for a hospital for the needy in Dublin, in 1834 Mary bought the townhouse of Lord Meath in St Stephen’s Green for £3,000 (about €270,000 today) and opened it as St Vincent’s, the first Catholic hospital in Ireland and the first run by nuns. Medical expertise was obtained by sending members of the order to Paris for training. By this time Mary had begun to show signs of inflammation of the spine, which severely debilitated her but did not stop her work.

In 1838, at the request of John Polding, archbishop of Sydney, the Sisters of Charity established a community in his city. Convents were also opened in Waterford in 1842, Galway in 1844 and Clonmel in 1845.

Though crippled with spinal troubles, dropsy and eventual paralysis, Mary continued to work prodigiously. In 1845 she moved to Our Lady’s Mount in the rustic village of Harold’s Cross, south of Dublin city. It was there that she died on 22 July 1858, having spent many years of her heroic life in a wheelchair. Her coffin was carried to the graveyard in Donnybrook by working-class men.

Mary was commemorated on an Irish postage stamp in 1958, the centenary of her death.

George Boole

Mathematician 1815–1864

George Boole was born in Lincoln on 2 November 1815, the eldest child of John, a shoemaker with an interest in mathematics and instrument-making. His mother, Mary Ann Joyce, was a lady’s maid. George was not born until nine years after their marriage on 14 September 1806. Three other children, Mary Ann, William and Charles, followed quickly over the next five years.

George was a sickly baby and not expected to survive, but he defied expectations and showed early indications of unusual intellectual ability. By the time he was eight he had outpaced his father in mathematical knowledge, and deeply depressed a local bookseller who had offered to teach him Latin, by translating Virgil and Horace by the age of twelve and learning Ancient Greek by himself. This ability in the Classics caused a local storm when he translated a poem by the Greek poet Meleager; his father was so proud that he had it published. A local schoolmaster hotly denied that any lad of fourteen could produce such work. But of course that lad had been taught mathematics by his father from an early age and, fluent in French, German and Italian, was appointed a teacher in Heigham’s School in Doncaster before his sixteenth birthday.

In fact, it was necessary for him to work to earn money to keep the family because his father’s business had failed.

By the time he was nineteen, George found it advantageous to return to Lincoln and open up his own school. He spent what free time he had studying mathematics, finding his ability in its more obscure aspects greater even than his linguistic skills. Textbooks were expensive and hard to find but Boole was able to make use of the libraries in the local Mechanics Institute, the virtually free source of adult education that most sizable towns possessed at the time. Soon he was an expert on such standard mathematical works as Newton’s Principia and the works of the French mathematician and astronomer Laplace and Italian mathematician and astronomer Lagrange.

In 1838, when he was twenty-three, George moved to Waddington, a village five miles south of Lincoln. There he ran a boarding school known as Hall’s Academy with the help of his family, for whom the school was the only source of income. He began to publish papers on all aspects of modern calculus, gradually building up an international reputation as a modern master. In 1844 he won the Royal Society’s medal for a paper ‘On a General Method in Analysis’, which used algebraic methods for the solution of differential equations.

This honour encouraged him to apply for the chair of mathematics in the new Queen’s Colleges set up in 1845 in Ireland by Sir Robert Peel to appease the Repealers. His sponsors included Augustus de Morgan, who was fascinated by Boole’s work on logic, and the future Lord Kelvin. In November 1849 he was appointed as the first Professor of Mathematics at Queen’s College Cork (now University College Cork) and quickly gained a reputation for brilliance and dedication. He was elected Dean of Science in 1851, by which time he had met Mary Everest, whose uncle, George Everest, had surveyed the Indian subcontinent and had the highest Himalayan mountain named after him. Boole was seventeen years older, but, when her father died and left her penniless, he asked Mary to marry him. The marriage, which proved extremely happy, was solemnised on 11 September 1855 in her home village of Wickwar in Gloucester. They had five daughters, the youngest of whom, Ethel Lilian (1864–1960), became famous as a novelist. She was the author of The Gadfly (1897).

With more leisure time in Cork than he had as a teacher, Boole was now able to work on his most significant contribution to mathematical theory. In 1854 he published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, on which are founded the Mathematical Theories of Logic and Probabilities. It was the first introduction to Boolean algebra and claimed logic as a mathematical discipline and not a philosophical one, as it had earlier been treated.

The Boolean system remained relatively ignored until modern electronic researchers, particularly Claude Shannon, realised that its structure fitted exactly that of circuitry. The language and mechanisms devised since then have brought about the greatest surge of invention since the discovery of the wheel. The computer used for the writing of this book is the result of a rapid evolution for which the genius son of a Lincolnshire cobbler must take much of the credit.

Boole continued to run his department and to publish mind-stretching papers. At forty-two he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, and he received honorary degrees from Dublin and Oxford Universities. His Treatise on Differential Equations (1859) and Treatise on the Calculus of Finite Differences (1860) were further examples of his brilliance, but sadly his work on probability, so vital for actuaries and space walkers, had not been fully developed at the time of his death.

He lived two miles from the college and one winter’s day gave his lectures soaked to the skin after walking there in the pouring rain. He caught pneumonia, a dangerous disease in those years before the invention of sulfa drugs and antibiotics. Mary, who had some idea of homeopathic medicine, kept dowsing his bed with buckets of water, but he died on 8 December 1864, not long into his forty-ninth year, at the height of his career.

He is remembered in University College Cork, where the library and an underground lecture area are named in his honour.

Brian Boru

‘Emperor of the Irish’ c. 941–1014

Brian mac Cennétig, aka Brian Bóruma and known in English as Brian Boru, was born c. 941 in the territory of his people, the Dál gCais, who held land on both sides of the Shannon, parts of the present-day counties of Clare and Limerick. His familiar name came from his birthplace Béal Bóramha, near Killaloe in Clare. He became king of Munster, ruler of the Leth Moga (the southern half of Ireland marked by a line from Dublin to Galway Bay and the traditional territory of the Eóganacht clan) and árd rí (high king) of the whole country, and was given the title Imperator Scotorum (‘Emperor of the Irish’) by his confessor, Máel Suthain. He gained power by ruthlessness in warfare and surprising benevolence in victory.

The Dalcassians had come to prominence when the Dál gCais chieftain, Cennétig Mac Lorcáin, Brian’s father, had challenged the hegemony of the Uí Néill. Brian trained the Dalcassian army and assumed command on the death of Mathgamain, his older brother. He avenged his brother’s treacherous killing by the Limerick Ostmen (as the settled Scandinavians called themselves) by killing their king, Ímar, and his sons in the church of St Senan on Scattery Island near Kilrush, thus sacrilegiously disregarding the tradition of sanctuary.

Brian also learned from the Norsemen, the most belligerent of the Scandinavians, about the use of naval tactics in battle. His great aquatic highway, the Shannon, and the rivers Slaney, Barrow, Nore, Suir and Blackwater gave him access to Leinster. The original Norse invaders had used the rivers to penetrate the inland Irish settlements on their plundering incursions and Brian used their tactics in his internal wars.

There is, however, another Brian Boru beyond the clever tactician and diplomat. When, at the end of the eighteenth century, a slowly resurgent Ireland was able to begin to cherish its heroes, Brian Boru became a symbol of a once great and unconquered land. A country emerging from psychological shock after centuries of defeat and subjection found it salutary to take pride in such a hero. Tom Moore, their Minstrel Boy, urged Erin to remember the days of old and also the glories of Brian for, ‘Enough of his glory remains on each blade/To light us to victory yet.’

As the condition of the Irish improved after the horrors of the Famine, Brian came to be revered as a near-saint as well as the archetypal warrior. Most Irish parochial halls had on their wall a picture of the saintly Brian kneeling at a crucifix in his tent at Clontarf about to have his venerable and still crowned head hacked off by the evil Viking mercenary Brodar, who, fleeing from the battle, stumbled upon the king by accident. This scene was also illustrated in most primary school readers. He was the exemplary pious king who defeated the wicked Danes and saved the island for Christianity. It was also noted that he died on Good Friday.

To be truthful, the hagiography began early, after the publication of the twelfth-century Cogadh Gaedhel re Gallaibh (‘The War of the Gaedhil with the Gaill’), a pseudo-historical account of the activities of the Viking marauders in the ninth and tenth centuries, and of the resistance of Brian and Mathgamain, culminating in the final defeat at Clontarf on 23 April 1014. It was almost certainly commissioned by Muirchertach Ua Briain (d. 1119), Brian’s great-grandson, for use as propaganda in his bid for the high-kingship against the Uí Néill.

One of the distortions passed down to modern times, apart from the saintliness of Brian, was the belief that his last enemies were the Danes. In fact, of all the Scandinavians the Danes were the least warlike, the ones most interested in settling down to a life of commerce. The decisive battle of Clontarf was, in fact, between two armies made up of Ostmen and Irish. The Leinster Ostmen were led by Sitric, who was Brian’s son-in-law, and Máel Mórda Mac Murchada, the king of Leinster, whose sister Gormflaith had been married to both Brian and his supporting general, Máel Sechnaill. (He was the Malachy who ‘wore the collar of gold that he won from the proud invader’.) The Leinster side also had allies from Viking settlements in Man, the Hebrides, the Orkneys and Iceland under the general command of Sigurd, who, the contemporary equivalent of the tabloid press claimed, had come because the bewitching Gormflaith had offered herself as an extra inducement.

The battle, which undoubtedly crushed the militancy if not the commercial acuity of the Ostmen, was important enough to figure in the thirteenth-century Story of Burnt Njal, the most famous of the heroic sagas of Iceland. It includes a slightly fictionalised form of the story of Clontarf and Brian’s death, and refers to the remarkable Gormflaith as Kormlada. The Munstermen (with their Ostmen allies from Limerick, now reconciled to the árd rí) won the battle but the cost was high. Murchad, Brian’s son and best captain, and Murchad’s son Turloch both died, robbing the short-lived dynasty of its heirs. Brian’s other sons were weak and indecisive, so the hope of a strong and united Ireland waned, and the Imperium Scotorum passed like an unlikely dream.

Under Brian there had been a decade of peace and artistic, ecclesiastic and academic development. He made good the destruction of the Norsemen, rebuilding monasteries and libraries, and establishing the primacy of Armagh, the place where he tacitly accepted the imperial title. The older chroniclers made much of his triumphal circuit round the quasi-united country, ‘keeping the sea on his left hand’. It used to be thought that a sobriquet given to Brian – ‘of the tributes’ – referred to the adulation, real and organised, that greeted him on this royal progress, but it may have been referencing something as simple as refusing to pay the yearly tribute of cattle to the Eóganacht, the previous rulers of Munster.

Brian’s private life was characteristic of the aristocracy of the time, affected by the need to make political alliances. He married four women: Mór, the mother of his favourite son Murchad; Echrad; the stellar Gormflaith; and Dub Choblaig, daughter of the king of Connacht.

After he was killed on Good Friday, 23 April 1014, his body was taken to Armagh for burial in what is now the grounds of the Church of Ireland cathedral there. Even then, there was some kind of a sense of sanctity about this authentic Irish hero.

Brendan the Navigator

Monastic Founder and Voyager c. 484–c. 578

Brendan was born c. 484 at Ciarraighe Luachra near Tralee in County Kerry. He was baptised by Erc of Ardfert in the same county and placed under the care of Ita, known as the ‘Brigid of Munster’, in her convent at Killeedy. When he was six he was put into the care of Erc, who tutored him until he was ready to attend the great teaching monasteries of Jarlath of Tuam, Finnian of Clonard and Enda of Aran, with the proviso from Erc: ‘Come back to me that you may receive priestly orders from my hand before I die.’