Do you know how Hollywood, California, got its name? Its start has its beginning right back in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. 

The Wicklow Gap is one of only two passes through the spectacular Wicklow mountains and, nestled in heart of it, is a lovely little village called Hollywood.

There are two theories on how it got its name. One theory points to the lush holly trees widespread in the area. Another suggests it was originally Holy Wood after St Kevin passed through in the 6th century on his way to found the monastic city in nearby Glendalough.

Evidence suggests the area has been settled since 1192. Today, with a population of about 100, it’s a quiet spot but not without a touch of glamour.

Hollywood, County Wicklow, is near one of Ireland’s prime locations for filmmaking and the village has played host to a number of film stars. For example, during the making of Neil Jordan’s film "Michael Collins" (1995), Liam Neeson became a familiar figure in the village.

Read more: How an Irish priest transported his parish from County Wexford to Wexford, Iowa

Neeson, who played Collins, was in awe of the place. Although most of the film was shot in Dublin, the famous scene at Béal na mBláth, where Collins was murdered in an ambush on August 22, 1922, was filmed in Corrigan’s Glen which is located just a few hundred yards from the village.

American screen idol Meryl Streep was also enthralled by the charm of the village. The actress visited when she was starring in "Dancing at Lughnasa" (1998).

Read more: How many places named Belfast are there in the US?

How did Hollywood, California, get its name? 

But by far the biggest connection Hollywood, County Wicklow, has to the film industry is that local legend holds that it was a Mathew Guirke from the village who founded the other, slightly better-known, Hollywood in California.

Mathew Guirke’s great nephew Jim Guirke was, until his death a few years ago, a postmaster and shopkeeper in the village. With his help, local history buffs have traced the story of the Wicklow blacksmith who founded Hollywood, California.

Mathew Guirke was born in Hollywood, Wicklow, in 1826. His parents John and Anne Guirke rented a house in Knockroe in the village, as well as lands in the nearby areas of Rathattin and Dragoonhill. Mathew was one of six children.

The Guirkes, like many Irish farming families at the time, would have struggled to make a living. And when the Great Famine struck in 1847, they began to wonder if there was a better life for them somewhere else.

By 1850, they had made their decision and saved enough money to pay passage for the entire family onboard a vessel named "Ellen" bound for New York. Mathew was 24 at the time.

Once in America, Mathew set out on an odyssey that took him around that vast country. He started out in March, a year after he arrived, traveling to Charleston in South Carolina where he placed a notice in Boston Globe, seeking information on his uncle Timothy Guirke, a blacksmith also from Hollywood, County Wicklow.

Mathew trained as a blacksmith, but he would soon learn many more skills. At various times his occupation is listed as horse-breeder, horseman, and real estate agent. Records of next decade or so of Mathew’s life are scant, but at some point, he traveled from Charleston to California. He established himself in an area near Los Angeles where he built a cabin.

We can assume he was doing well for himself because he also bought a small race track and started a small community.

Clearly, Mathew never forgot tiny village he came from; he named his new homestead Hollywood.

Mathew’s travels didn’t end, however. In 1865, there are records of him in the Californian town of Sonora. From there he went to Virginia City in Nevada and then onto Helena in the newly formed territory of Montana.

He headed south-west through the town of Bozeman and continued to an area that is at present part of Yellowstone National Park. Mathew started a business there.

In August 1871, at a remote site near where Boiling River empties into Gardiner River, he opened McGuirke’s Medicinal Springs which he was later forced to close because it fell within boundaries of newly established Yellowstone National Park.

Eventually, Mathew was awarded $1,000 by US government as compensation for loss of his enterprise.

By now though, years of hard labor and exhaustive travels in rough terrain had taken their toll and his health was declining. Mathew Guirke died of chronic bronchitis on October 13, 1901, at age of 75. He is buried Rosedale Cemetery in Los Angeles.

Meanwhile, the hamlet he founded in California was growing. In 1903 it became a municipality and later merged with the city of Los Angeles. In 1911, attracted by the quality of light in California, various film moguls moved their studios to the area. And rest, as they say, is history.

Want to read more about the link between Irish place names and American place names?  IrishCentral has plenty of stories on the history between them here. 

The messy affair of a woman who claimed to be a Titanic survivor and heiress to a considerable family fortune.

Editor's note:  On April 15, 1912, the Belfast-built RMS Titanic sank, after colliding with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew on board. This was one of the deadliest commercial, peacetime maritime disasters in modern history and among those on board were many Irish.

In the run-up to the anniversary of the disaster, IrishCentral will take a look at the Irish on board – the lucky, unlucky and heroic.

One of the last great mysteries of the Titanic was solved only recently – and the woman who claimed she was a child survivor exposed as a fraud by DNA tests. Two-year-old Loraine Allison was first reported to have died along with her parents when the tragic liner sank, but nobody was ever recovered. In the years that followed the 1912 disaster, a woman by the name of Helen Kramer came forward and claimed that she was, in fact, Loraine Allison.

Kramer launched a legal bid to be considered part of the wealthy Allison family and entitled to part of their fortune. Before her death in 1992, she contended that she was entitled to the vast majority of the Allison family’s wealth in Canada. Her family had maintained her legal right to the Allison wealth in recent years in an increasingly bitter dispute, according to a report carried by the Irish Independent.

The report said the row has seen restraining orders were taken out, accusations of harassment made and even security patrols set up to stop a family burial plot being interfered with. But eventually, more than a hundred years after the sinking, the mystery was solved and Kramer exposed as a fraud.

The Loraine Allison Identification Project, established by a group of Titanicologists, revealed the results of DNA tests involving members of the Kramer and Allison families. They proved that Helen Kramer was not the little girl who was lost on the Titanic. No genetic link was found between descendants from both sides of the dispute. The report says that the ruling means Loraine will keep the unhappy status of being the only child from first or second class to die in the sinking in 1912.

Read more: The one reason why this Titanic passenger survived

Lorraine traveled on the Titanic with her parents, Hudson, a Canadian entrepreneur, and Bess, as well as her seven-month-old brother Trevor and an entourage of servants. The report says that when the ship struck the iceberg, Trevor was taken to a lifeboat by a maid, Alice Cleaver. Hudson, Bess, and Loraine remained on board and apparently turned down many opportunities to be saved, possibly because they were searching for their son. Hudson’s body was the only one to be found.

In 1940 Helen Kramer, now styling herself Loraine Kramer, first claimed to be the missing child. She told a radio show that she had been saved at the last moment when her father placed her in a lifeboat with a man whom she had always thought was her father. The man, whom she called Mr. Hyde, raised her as his own in England before moving to the US. She claimed he told her the ‘truth’ shortly before his death. Kramer also claimed that Hyde disclosed his real identity as Thomas Andrews, Titanic’s designer who was thought to have died on board.

Some distant relations of the Allisons were taken in by her story, but immediate family members did not accept her.

The claims appeared to have died with Kramer, but the centenary of the sinking in 2012 saw Kramer’s grand-daughter, Debherrina Woods, from Florida, restate the claim on a series of online forums. Woods then tried to contact the Allison family in Canada, a move which prompted the intervention of their lawyers to ask her to cease. A restraining order was taken out to stop Woods scattering her grandmother’s ashes over the Allison family plot in Chesterville, Ontario and extra security measures put in place when she visited the area.

The debate then led to the founding of the identification project by Tracy Oost, a forensic scientist at Laurentian University, Ontario, and Titanic expert. The report says Oost asked both sides to take part in the DNA screening. Woods declined but her half-sister Deanne Jennings and Sally Kirkelie, the great-niece of Bess Allison, agreed to take part. Professor Oost said, “It is good to have a resolution here, but we mustn’t forget that this is all about one of the more tragic tales to come from the Titanic. The only mystery that remains is: who was Helen Kramer?”

David Allison, the grandson of Hudson’s brother Percy Allison said, “I would like to thank Deanne Jennings and Sally Kirkelie for offering their DNA to stop this harassment. This was a courageous, selfless act, and I will remain forever indebted for their act of kindness.”

Read more: Ellen Toomey - domestic servant in steerage class survived

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* Originally published in 2014.

Boarded third-class, at Queenstown, this Athlone man's sensational story tells of an officer shooting two men dead – before another shot rings out and the officer himself falls.

Editor's note: On April 15, 1912, the Belfast built RMS Titanic sank, after colliding with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew on board. This was one of the deadliest commercial, peacetime maritime disasters in modern history and among those on board were many Irish.

In the run-up to the anniversary of the disaster, IrishCentral will take a look at the Irish on board – the lucky, unlucky and heroic.

This is an extract from the book “The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony, which tells the tales of the people who were on board the night the ship went down. This book gives those people a voice. In it are stories of agony, luck, self-sacrifice, dramatic escapes, and heroes left behind.

Eugene Daly

Ticket number 382650.

Paid £6 19s.

Boarded at Queenstown.

Third Class.

From: 2 Wolfe Tone Terrace, Athlone, County Westmeath.

Destination: E.G. Schuktze, 477 Avenue E, Brooklyn, New York city.

Eugene Daly was on board the Titanic until the very end. His sensational story tells of an officer shooting two men dead – before another shot rings out and the officer himself falls.

Daly’s account of the panic and of his own escape is probably the most graphic of any told by any survivor. He was in compartment C-23 on F deck, very far forward on the starboard side, so close to the impact that he was almost thrown out of bed:

"I was in compartment 23, Deck C, steerage [there was no steerage accommodation on C Deck]. Two other men were with me. I was in my bunk asleep on the Sunday night (the night of the disaster). A crash woke me up. It nearly threw me from my bed. I got up and went to the door. I put on my trousers and shoes.

"I met the steward in the gangway. He said there was nothing serious and that I might go back. I went back for a little while. Then I went up on deck as I heard a noise there. People were running around. Then I went down and went to the room where Maggie Daly and Bertha Mulvihill were.

"They came out with me, but a sailor told us there was no danger. He said the ship would float for hours. He also said to go back, and that if there was any danger he would call us.

"I went for a lifebuoy in the stern and Maggie and Bertha came with me. I had a scuffle with a man for a lifebuoy. He would not give it to me, but he gave it to Maggie Daly.

"There was a great deal of noise at this time and water was coming in. We knelt down and prayed in the gangway. Then the sailor said there was danger. We went to the deck but there were no boats going off. Then we went to the second cabin deck. A boat was being lowered there. It was being filled with women. Maggie and Bertha got in, and I got in. The officer called me to go back, but I got in. Life was sweet to me and I wanted to save myself. They told me to get out, but I didn’t stir. Then they got hold of me and pulled me out. Then the boat was lowered and went off.

"There was another boat there, but I went up to the first cabin. The steerage people and second cabin people went to the first cabin part of the ship. They were getting women into the boats there. There was a terrible crowd standing about. The officer in charge pointed a revolver and waved his hand and said that if any man tried to get in he would shoot him on the spot."

Saw two men shot

Two men tried to break through and he shot them both. I saw him shoot them. I saw them lying there after they were shot. One seemed to be dead. The other was trying to pull himself up at the side of the deck, but he could not. I tried to get to the boat also but was afraid I would be shot and stayed back. Afterward there was another shot and I saw the officer himself lying on the deck. They told me he shot himself, but I did not see him.

Then I rushed across the deck, and there was a sort of canvas craft there. I tried with six or seven men to get it out, but we could not. It was stuck under a wire stay which ran up to the mast. The water was then washing right across the deck. The ship lurched and the water washed the canvas craft off the deck into the ocean. I was up to my knees in water at the time. Everyone was rushing around, but there were no boats. Then I dived overboard.

Read more: Why do we care about the Titanic more than the Lusitania?

When I struck the water I swam for the boat that had been washed over. When I got to her she was upside down. I helped myself up on her. About fifteen people got upon her the same way. At the time I jumped there were a lot of people jumping overboard.

As I stood on the craft I saw the ship go down. Her stern went up and she gradually sunk down forward. Her stern stuck up high. I thought she would fall over on us, and she seemed to be swinging around, but she did not. There was no suction at all that we felt. Our craft was not drawn in at all. - (Daily Sketch, 4 May 1912, reprint of New York Herald)

Eugene Daly was finally rescued on collapsible B, a life-raft lashed to the roof of the officers’ quarters on the port side until washed off by the onrushing sea. He had previously seen his cousin Maggie and his Athlone neighbor Bertha Mulvihill into lifeboat No. 15, all the way aft on the starboard side, which loaded from A Deck and from which he himself was bodily pulled having defied orders.

The boat where men were gunned down appears to have been collapsible A, all the way forward on the starboard side since Daly says he then ‘rushed across the deck’ to collapsible B on the port side. In 1913 evidence he cited two shot dead, but no officer.

Dr Frank Blackmarr, a passenger on board the Carpathia, noted that Eugene Daly was unconscious when carried to his cabin, where he was revived with stimulants and hot drinks. Dr Blackmarr later took down Daly’s dictation of his experiences as they approached New York on 18 April 1912. This was his first account of what transpired: 

"I left Queenstown with two girls from my own hometown who were placed in my charge to go to America. After the accident, we were all held down in steerage, which seemed to be a lifetime. All this time we knew that the water was coming up, and up rapidly.

"Finally some of the women and children were let up, but, as you know, we had quite a number of hot-headed Italians and other peoples who got crazy and made for the stairs. These men tried to rush the stairway, pushing and crowding and pulling the women down, some of them with weapons in their hands.

"I saw two dagos shot and some that took punishment from the officers. After a bit, I got up on one of the decks and threw a big door over the side. I caught hold of some ropes that had been used setting free a lifeboat. Up this I climbed to the next deck because the stairs were so crowded that I could not get through.

"I finally got up to the top deck and made for the front. The water was just covering the upper deck at the bridge and it was easy to slide because she had such a tip. 

 ([Blackmarr’s note:] Here this man fell back on his pillow crying and sobbing and moaning, saying: ‘My God, if I could only forget!’ After a bit he proceeded.) 

My God, if I could only forget those women’s cries. I reached a collapsible boat that was fastened to the deck by two rings. It could not be moved. During that brief time that I worked on cutting one of those ropes, the collapsible was crowded with people hanging upon the edges. The Titanic gave a lurch downwards and we were in the water up to our hips.

She rose again slightly, and I succeeded in cutting the second rope which held her stern. Another lurch threw this boat and myself off and away from the ship into the water. I fell upon one of the oars and fell into a mass of people. Everything I touched seemed to be women’s hair. Children crying, women screaming, and their hair in their face. My God, if I could only forget those hands and faces that I touched!

As I looked over my shoulder, as I was still hanging [on] to this oar, I could see the enormous funnels of the Titanic being submerged in the water. These poor people that covered the water were sucked down in those funnels, each of which was twenty-five feet in diameter, like flies.

I managed to get away and succeeded in reaching the same boat I had tried to set free from the deck of the Titanic. I climbed upon this, and with the other men balanced ourselves in water to our hips until we were rescued. People came up beside us and begged to get on this upturned boat. As a matter of saving ourselves, we were obliged to push them off. One man was alongside and asked if he could get upon it. We told him that if he did, we would all go down. His reply was ‘God bless you. Goodbye.’ 

I have been in the hospital for three days, but I don’t seem to be able to forget those men, women and children who gradually slid from our raft into the water.

Signed, Eugene Daly. Collapsible B. 

~~~~~~

After safe arrival in New York, Daly wrote a letter to his mother in which he clearly and casually glossed over all that had happened:

Dear Mother, got here safe. Had a narrow escape but please God, I am all right, also Maggie. I think the disaster caused you to fret, but things could have been worse than what they were.

(The Cork Examiner, 7 May 1912)

But the Irish World of New York, in its May 4, 1912 issue, offered another picture:

Eugene Daly of County Athlone [sic] bore the marks on his face of blows from sailors who fought with him against entering the last boat as it was lowered with many vacant seats. With five other men he launched a life raft and put off, picking up a score or more of passengers and crew who were struggling in the water.

‘We were only a little distance from the Titanic when I saw her sinking and sinking, but I mistrusted my eyes until I looked and saw that the sea covered the place where she had been.’

It had all been so different when Daly first set out to join the Titanic at Queenstown. A 29-year-old weaver in Athlone Woollen Mills, he was also a mechanic and a prominent member of the Clan Uisneach War Pipers’ Band, the Irish National Foresters Band and the local Gaelic League. He had been working for ten years at the woollen mills when he decided to leave that job and the terraced family home which faced directly onto a salmon weir that roared and foamed with the rushing waters of the broad and majestic Shannon river. He bought his passage in Butler’s of the Square, Athlone.

Traveling with his 30-year-old cousin Maggie, Eugene played airs on his bagpipes on the tender America ferrying passengers from Queenstown to the Titanic anchorage at lunchtime on Thursday 11 April 1912. The Cork Examiner of 9 May reported that as the tender cast off from the quay, he played ‘A Nation Once Again’, his performance being received with delight and applause by his fellow travellers.

He played many native airs on board the tender and as the latter moved away from the liner, the pipes were once more giving forth A Nation Once Again. Those who were on board the tender that day heard with extreme pleasure of his being amongst the survivors."

Daly’s pipes are visible from his right ear downwards as he stands with them on the tender America in a little-known photograph taken on the day the Titanic sailed by Cork Examiner photographer Thomas Barker (see page 2). 

The Westmeath Independent played up its local hero on May 4, 1912:

"Eugene Daly’s courage

"The courage credited to Eugene Daly in the foregoing will not surprise his fellow townsmen, who knew him as a man of principle and pluck. In the present deplorable disaster, he appears to have upheld the traditions of the Gael, and one can well imagine that when the Captain seized the megaphone and roared: ‘Be British!’ Daly thought of the Pipers’ Club in the old Border Town and determined to ‘Be Irish’, as he ever has been."

The Cork Examiner (May 7, 1912) said he was an Athlone man who ‘acted the part of a hero. He fought his way to the boats and was the means of saving two of his town’s women.’ Actually another passenger, Katie Gilnagh, also credited Daly with helping to save her life. 

The Longford woman told how she was woken by a man she had seen playing the bagpipes on deck earlier that day. He told her to get up, ‘Something is wrong with the ship.’

"The famous bagpipes were actually Irish uileann pipes, and Daly later claimed $50 compensation from the White Star Line for their loss. He was very pleased with the level of compensation and considered it more than the pipes were worth. A set of pipes has been recovered from the Titanic’s debris field which may have belonged to Daly. They are undergoing restoration. Not everyone who heard them was impressed with his playing, however. Lawrence Beesley, a teacher in Dulwich College, wrote in his survivor’s account, The Loss of the SS Titanic:

Looking down astern from the boat deck or from the B deck to the steerage quarter, I often noticed how the Third-Class passengers were enjoying every minute of the time; a most uproarious skipping game of the mixed-double type was the great favourite, while ‘in and out and roundabout’ went a Scotchman with his bagpipes playing something that [W. S.] Gilbert said ‘faintly resembled an air’.

The Westmeath Examiner spoke of the same festive feeling:

 Athlone piper’s story of Titanic disaster: scene of jollity  

In a letter to a former colleague in the Athlone Pipers Band, Mr Eugene Daly describes the scene of jollity on board immediately before the Titanic ran into the iceberg. They were, he said, having a great time of it that evening in steerage.

‘I played the pipes and there was a great deal of dancing and singing. This was kept up even after we had struck, for the stewards came through and told us that we need not be afraid, that everything was all right. There was no danger, they said. 

‘Most of those assembled believed them until it was too late. That is why so many of the steerage were drowned. When they tried to get on deck the rush had begun and they could not get to the boats.

‘I lost my pipes, which were a presentation, and which I prided myself so much on possessing. I lost my clothes and £98 which it had taken me many years to save in anticipation of this voyage to the United States …’

Daly later attested to the fact that his thick overcoat had saved his life in the freezing water. He dubbed it his lucky coat, and wore it religiously thereafter. 

Report of the American Red Cross (Titanic disaster) 1913: 

No. 99. (Irish.) Mechanic, 29 years of age, lost $250. Had delicate sister, aged 17, dependent on him in Ireland. ($250) Daly told US immigration in New York that he was from Lisclougher, County Meath, where his mother, Mrs Catherine Daly, was born. His younger sister named to the Red Cross was Maggie, the same name as his cousin who accompanied him on board the Titanic. The 1911 census report showed that his mother, Kate Daly, was a 60-year-old widowed housekeeper, while Maggie was a 21-year-old dressmaker, and Eugene’s brother John a 19-year-old warper of wool.

Finally, the Irish American newspaper of May 4, 1912, reported that the irrepressible Daly was quickly back to his pipes: 

"Gaelic Feis in Celtic Park

"Athlone Piper Who Lost His Kilts and Pipes in Titanic Wreck to Play the Old Tunes

"The Gaelic Feis to be held in Celtic Park on May 19 … One of the competitors in the War Pipes is a survivor of the Titanic disaster, and he has recovered sufficiently to be confident of marching off with the prize. His name is Eugene Daly, from Athlone, Ireland. Eugene was coming from Ireland to compete at the New York Feis and sailed on the ill-starred liner. He lost his Irish kilts and bag-pipes when the Titanic went down and he himself was floating on a raft for over two hours before he was picked up."

Eugene did not win the competition, but he stayed in New York for much of his life, occasionally returning to Ireland to visit relatives. On at least one occasion when he did so, he related that ‘six or seven’ men had been shot on board the vessel and that there had been pandemonium in the final struggles for survival. It was not at all as noble or as civilized as had been suggested, he said. He told his nephew Paddy Daly that by the time his lifeboat reached the Carpathia there were many already dead, ‘frozen solid’. Many years later, Daly was interviewed in Ireland in connection with script preparation for the 1958 film A Night to Remember. 

He returned permanently to the United States in the early 1960s and died on October 30, 1965, at the age of 82, and was buried in St Raymond’s Cemetery, the Bronx. He and wife Lillian had an only daughter, Marian Joyce, later Marian Van Poppe.

Athlone woman Bertha Mulvihill told the Providence Evening Bulletin of April 19, 1912, that a boy named Eugene ‘Ryan’ from her hometown had told the group on leaving Queenstown that he had dreamt the Titanic was going to sink: 

‘Every night we were at sea he told us he had dreamt that the Titanic was going down before we reached New York. On Sunday night just before we went to bed, he told us the Titanic was going to sink that night. It was uncanny.’

Daly certainly knew Bertha and seems to have been keen on her. On August 20, 1912, he sent a postcard to ‘Miss Mulvihill’ at the City Hospital in Providence, Rhode Island. The card was a Titanic memorial card. Daly placed an X on the front illustration to indicate where his sleeping quarters had been and wrote on the reverse that he had ‘got home safe’, apparently after a visit to Bertha. He added: ‘Hope you keep well until we meet again and perm. me to be ever your friend, Eoghan O’Dalaigh, a survivor. xxx"

“The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony is available online.

* Originally published in 2012.

While it’s recently been shown that Viking blood had a larger impact on Irish DNA than previously thought, what other contributions did the Vikings have in Ireland?

The fact is that the Vikings had quite an impact on Ireland and contributed to the country more than you may think.

Vikings in Ireland facts and timeframe:

Vikings first invaded Ireland in 795 AD and the rest is history. The Vikings from the Scandinavian countries began raiding Ireland just before 800 AD and continued for two centuries before Brian Boru defeated them at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014.

The first recorded Viking raid in Ireland occurred in 795 AD when the church on Lambeg Island in Dublin was plundered and burned. At the time, there were no true towns in Ireland but rather scattered communities near monasteries that served as ‘safe houses’ for valuables, food, and cattle. This made those locations prime targets for Viking raids.

Read more: Massive genetic study reveals Irish have more Viking and Norman DNA than previously thought

As the Vikings continued their raids on Ireland during the ninth century they established settlements around the country, many of which still survive today.  One of the earliest Viking settlements established at the mouth of the Liffey survived to become what is now modern Dublin.

In 914 AD, a fleet of ships established a base at Waterford, followed by a base at Cork. Somewhat later, an invasion along the Shannon estuary laid the foundation for Limerick. Wexford was another stronghold, with the region between Wexford, Waterford, and Kilkenny known as Ireland’s Viking Triangle.

Why did the Vikings come to Ireland?

The act of traveling overseas to other lands and plundering them of their wealth and riches was really what the Viking society was about. The Vikings were great experts at building boats which were used for long journeys and they made use of this to travel, raid, and gather as much as they could from other people.

Read more: How to find out if you have Irish Viking ancestry

How did the Vikings change Ireland?

Researchers at Trinity College Dublin believe that Viking and Norman invasions of Ireland may have made a more striking impression on the DNA breakup of the country than previously thought. They also discovered 23 new genetic clusters in Ireland not previously identified, leading to the belief that we may have far more Viking and Norman ancestry than previously evidenced.

By comparing 1,000 Irish genomes with over 6,000 genomes from Britain and mainland Europe, genetic clusters within the west of Ireland, in particular, were discovered for the first time, leading the researchers to investigate if invasions from the Vikings and Normans to the east may have influenced genetics in that part of the country.

Some of the most common Irish surnames also derive from Viking origins. Doyle (son of the dark foreigner), MacAuliffe (Son of Olaf) and MacManus (Son of Manus) all originate from the Scandinavian warriors who settled in Ireland and married the native Irish.

Viking contributions in Ireland:

The Vikings are credited with creating the first trade routes between Ireland, Scandinavia and England. Using Dublin as their main base in Ireland, they traded with the rest of Europe to a level the native Irish never had before them. This brought in many influences from Europe which remain in Ireland to this day.

As the Vikings continued their raids on Ireland during the ninth century they established settlements around the country, many of which still survive today. Waterford, Cork, Dublin, Wexford and Limerick were all turned into trading centers by the Vikings and later developed into the towns and cities we know today

As well as this, arguably the most famous cathedral in Ireland and still to this day a big draw for tourists in Dublin, is the magnificent Christ Church Cathedral. Silkbeard, the Norse King of Dublin was responsible for it being built around the year 1030.

A retelling of ancient the Irish myth of King Lir, his four children and his powerful wife Aoife, that forms the basis the of the ballet classic, Swan Lake.

 Many years ago, in ancient Ireland lived a King and ruler of the sea, called Lir. He had a beautiful wife, called Eva, who gave him four children – eldest son Aodh, a daughter called Fionnula and twin boys, Fiachra and Conn. When children were young, their mother Eva died. Lir and children were very sad, and King wanted a new mother for his young sons and daughter, so he married Eva’s sister Aoife who, it was said, possessed magical powers.

Aoife loved the children and Lir at first, but soon she became very jealous of the time that King spent with Aodh, Fionnula, Fiachra, and Conn. She wanted to have all of his attention for herself. One day, she took children to swim in a lake while the sun was hot in the sky. When they got there and children took to the water, Aoife used her powers to cast a spell over children, which would turn them all into beautiful swans.

She knew that if she killed children, their ghosts would haunt her forever, so instead, she cast this spell, forcing them to live as swans for 900 years; three hundred on Lake Derravaragh, three hundred on Straits of Moyle, and three hundred more on Isle of Inish Glora. The spell would only be broken when children heard the ringing of a bell, and arrival of St. Patrick in Ireland.

But Aoife’s spell had not taken away children’s voices, and so it was that these four beautiful swans could sing beautiful songs and were able to tell their father what had happened to them. Lir, who had been searching for his children, came down to the lake and saw Fionnuala, now a swan, who told him of spell cast on them by Aoife. Enraged, he banished Aoife into the mist, and she was never seen again.

Although saddened by his children’s fate, Lir remained a good father and spent his days faithfully by the lake listening to their singing. Their three hundred years on Lake Derravaragh were filled with joy, but at end of this first part of their spell, children had to say goodbye to their father forever. They travelled to Straits of Moyle, where they spent three hundred years enduring fierce storms and spent much time separated from each other. But they survived these three hundred years, and eventually traveled, together again, to fulfil final stage of their spell, on a small saltwater lake on Isle of Inish Glora.

Read more: Tír Na nÓg - The legend of Oisín, Niamh and land of eternal youth

The King by now had passed, and of his once glorious castle nothing but ruins remained. One day, they heard the distant ringing of a bell – one of the first Christian bells in all of Ireland – and swans followed the sound, knowing that end of their spell was near. They followed bells to house of a holy man called Caomhog, who cared for them for last years of their fate.

One day though, disaster struck again, when a man appeared at house dressed in armor, saying he was King of Connacht, and he had come for now legendary and mystical swans with beautiful singing voices. He threatened to tear down and ruin Caomhog’s house if swans did not come with him, but just as he was laying his hands on them, bell tolled again, and mist of lake came and enveloped swans, turning them back into children they were nine hundred years before.

The frightened King of Connacht fled immediately, and children in their human form started to age rapidly. Caomhog knew that they soon would die, so he quickly christened them before their human bodies passed away, so that their legend and their names could live on forever, for these were Children of Lir.

Read more: How much of an influence did Irish folklore have on the creation of Bram Stoker's Dracula?

* Originally published in July 2013 on Ireland of the Welcomes.

Ballina woman Dr. Norah Patten will be returning to the USA this month to continue her training as a scientist-astronaut candidate.

Dr. Patten became Ireland’s first scientist - astronaut candidate with Project PoSSUM (Polar Suborbital Science in the Upper Mesosphere) late last year.

Now she has been selected to participate in the next phase of the training and will depart for the USA this week (April 7).

During her initial training, Dr. Patten was among a team who learned to apply their respective skills to effectively conduct research on the next generation of space vehicles. The selected team were also trained on high-g flights and learnt the science behind the Earth’s atmosphere.

Read More: Campaign underway for first Irish engineer Norah Patten to go to space 

Dr. Patten told The Connaught Telegraph that she will be doing two related training programs back to back.

“Spacecraft Egress and Rescue Operations will teach us hands on skills required during the spacecraft landing phase. I will also be taking part in the Advanced Spacecraft Egress and Post Landing Operations which will include learning how to exit the spacecraft with and without the spacesuit on,” she said.

Norah’s training will cover many aspects including getting out of the vehicle (Egress), evacuation from the spacecraft, rescue and raft operations, sea survival, nominal and contingency operations, and spacecraft design.

This letter has made my heart melt 😍 Thank you Brógán - keep shooting for the stars because the sky is not the limit 🚀⭐️ @ISU_SSP @ISUnet @spacenation @People_Of_Space @SpaceWeekIRL @ReelLifeScience @PoSSUMAstronaut @PrimaryTimesIRL @primarytimesdub @mayodarkskies pic.twitter.com/gg46bSuTWe

— Norah Patten (@SpaceNorah) March 27, 2018

Read More: Irish American astronaut twins Mark and Scott Kelly no longer identical after one year space study

Dr. Patten, a PhD graduate from the University of Limerick, is the only Irish person of the twelve who have been selected for the highly sought after training program.

"I am really looking forward to this next stage of the training – it is another step closer to achieving my ultimate goal of becoming Ireland’s first astronaut. I would also like to thank AerLingus for their generosity in sponsoring my flights this April,” she said.

For updates and progress, follow Dr. Patten on Twitter @SpaceNorah and Facebook here.

The incredible good luck of a woman who should have perished on the Titanic on April 15, 1912, and instead went on to start a new life, in the New World.

Editor's note: In the early hours of April 15 1912 the RMS Titanic sunk having struck an iceberg while en route to New York. Those icy waters claimed the lives of 1,517 people. On April 11 the White Star Line ship stopped on Queenstown (now Cobh), in County Cork, to pick up passengers. This is the tale of one woman who had planned to board the ship. 

My image of my grandmother, Margaret Boyle nee Martin, was an old lady with her dark, fine hair scraped back in a bun. A widow for many years, she dressed in the regulation black and white of her generation, with the occasional navy blue thrown in as a nod to high days and holidays.

When we stayed at the family farm outside Milltown, Co. Galway in the 1960s and 1970s, she wore workman-like black boots and I’d stare at them thinking that back in Yorkshire, my home city, I didn't know any women who wore such footwear.

Life halted at 6pm in her bungalow as Irish TV played the Angelus – the prayer of devotion traditionally recited in devout Catholic households three times a day. My grandmother stopped whatever she was doing, sat in her high-backed wooden kitchen chair and prayed. Then the TV would be switched off – and covered with a tea towel while we ate our meal.

At night time I’d quietly watch her silhouette as she knelt at her bedside to pray before she got into bed with me.

Her careworn face was lined and tanned – undoubtedly from years of running the farm, raising her seven children, caring for a disabled husband and tending the orphaned seven children on the neighboring farm.

But though the top of her back was stooped as age took hold, her blue eyes always had a twinkle in them.

Today, her story would probably register as shocking. Back then, and in the harsh times of life in the first half of the 1900s, it was undoubtedly one replicated in all of Ireland’s counties.

Indeed, many readers whose family hailed from other native shores will tell similar tales.

Occasionally, it would be mentioned that my grandmother had been to America as a young woman. And more shockingly, she had been due to sail on the Titanic, joining the hundreds with a third class ticket hoping it would transport them to a better life across the Atlantic.

It was a story I never, regrettably, asked her about. But it is said that on the April 15 anniversary of the ship’s sinking, she would never talk about it and would feel ill.

I have spent years researching my family tree – long before the Internet was in mass use – and my doggedness helped me get quite far back on my mother’s Mayo-based Costello, Leitrim-rooted McPartland, and Wicklow Keegans lineage.

It’s only in the last three years that I have tackled the Boyle and Martin (my paternal grandmother’s maiden name) side.

But as I gathered information, it made me reassess the old lady staring stoically into the camera in our family photos and see through fresh eyes the once beautiful young woman she was.

Following the 1840s Famine, Irish people were forced to leave their homeland to survive. They really only had two choices – America or England. And so my ancestors immigrated to both lands. By 1890, two of every five Irish-born people were living abroad. By the end of the century, the population of Ireland had almost halved, and it never regained its pre-Famine level.

Second and third generations of my family settled in northern England, working in the mills, mines and construction industry. My maternal grandfather Patrick Costello recalls the sign `No Irish Need Apply’ displayed at several boarding houses in the West Yorkshire city of Wakefield, where he worked down the coal mines.

Over half of my ancestors went to the US. Margaret was the seventh of 12 children. She was born in 1891 to Thomas and Ellen Martin on a small farmstead in County Mayo.

When the brown-haired young 20-year-old decided to try for a new life in America, where at least three siblings had already immigrated, she paid £7 for her steerage class ticket – no 367167 – and was booked to sail along with the 120 other Irish folks on April 11, 1912, on the Titanic.

She was due to sail with a cousin, Celia Sheridan of Stripe near Milltown Galway.

Family myth has it that thanks to Celia being late leaving her family home, and so possibly unable to buy a ticket, the duo missed the boat – finally leaving 24 hours later on the SS Celtic. My grandmother canceled her passage and her ticket (which incorrectly has her listed as Mary) simply states 'Not boarded.'

Though she never discussed her brush with that fateful journey, she must have imagined herself in the place of those who perished on the ship that night. Her chances of survival were slim – 44% of steerage passengers did not survive.

However, when the 'unsinkable' Titanic crashed into an iceberg, Margaret was fast asleep in her cabin 700 miles away.

US newspapers indicate that news of the sinking – in which 1,517 passengers died and 700 were saved – was kept from the Celtic passengers. As the New York Times, on 21 April 1912, reported:

"The news that the Titanic had gone down was received by Capt. Hambelton of the Celtic last Monday, several hours after the liner went down, but it was not known among the passengers until last Wednesday when it was posted on the bulletin board. Many of the passengers became nervous when they read the terrible story told in the bulletin and from that time on some of them kept a life preserver near at hand.

The second and third class passengers did not learn of the disaster until Friday when the liner was in halting distance of New York. The Rev. Dr. W. F. Hovis took the lead in a successful effort to calm the more excitable of the passengers."

The Chicago Tribune for Sunday, April 21 reveals the Titanic sent an 'SOS' to the Celtic, but other boats were nearer, adding:

"After Wednesday the nervousness spread. Few passengers, if any, took off their clothing when they retired. When Mrs. H. C. Bergh, wife of a Rochester businessman, refused to go to bed, her example was followed by most of the married women passengers. A minister, the Rev. W. S. Hovis, of South Bend, Ind., was pressed into service as a storyteller to help relieve the gloom of the cabins.

The news of the disaster was kept from the second cabin and steerage until yesterday."

And so as Margaret was among the first passengers to sail into New York on April 20, docking in the very bay where the Titanic should have been, it must have been a gloomy New World she entered.

But she must have thought how lucky she was to have missed the boat, in the very saddest sense.

Margaret went on to a new life – joining her sister and spinster aunt (both named Celia Martin) working as a maid in Hartford, Connecticut, for the prosperous and politically-active Hooker family.

It was while in America, she posed for a handsome black and white photo with her three brothers – Owen, Jim and Pat and the latter’s wife Delia, and her sister Celia Martin, all living in the Hartford area. Margaret has a lovely white blouse on, her lustrous hair piled high and her high cheekbones defined her face.

Shades of her strong character emerged, as it became known that she had become close to a man who, shockingly for then, rumor had it was a non-Catholic and was said to have German origins. My Aunt Margaret Cleary – my father’s sister who lives in Manchester, CT – believes his first name was possibly Michael and surname Blackburn.

I employed a genealogist to help me overcome hurdles I faced. Michael Rochford found a copy of the Titanic ticket and then, amazingly, helped track down a Blackburn family in Connecticut.

He discovered the Blackburns left Dewsbury – a mill town only six miles from my home today – where the father was a foreman and moved to Sagan in Germany for him to work in a mill there.

A widower, he met and married a German woman and en masse they immigrated to Windsor Locks, Connecticut, which had a developing mill industry. Michael Blackburn was a product of his father’s first marriage but had a German step-mother – hence the link.

The family story passed down is that at some point my grandmother won a raffle and the unusual prize was a paid trip back to Ireland – so she went home – as yet I cannot find when.

Read more: The one reason why this Titanic passenger survived

I personally doubt there was ever a raffle and wonder if it was a story put out by her family? Did her spinster aunt, then in her 50s, disapprove of the relationship? Did she write to her brother and wife telling them what their beloved daughter was doing? Did they then order their young daughter home?

With the religious and cultural differences, Margaret and Michael were never going to be, though as she left America for good, he gave her a gold ring with the letter `M’ engraved inside it. In the romantic sense, they were ships that passed in the night. She later told a neighbor it was an engagement ring.

Margaret’s effort to carve out a new life in the bright New World ended not as maybe she hoped. And so in 1923, at the relatively late age of 32, Margaret wed my grandfather Michael Boyle, a man older than herself. It was thought to be a semi-arranged match.

They settled at his family homestead in a hamlet called Emracly outside Milltown, Co Galway. After fathering seven children, including a set of twins, Michael succumbed to arthritis – so severe that my own father Michael could never recall seeing him walk.

But the redoubtable Margaret coped with her lot, running the small farm, raising her brood and overseeing the seven neighboring orphaned Donnelly children. When social workers came to take them to a children’s homes, she put her cattle on their land and simply refused to allow them to be split up. To this day, the Donnellys – many now in Philadelphia – credit her with keeping them together.

The circle of life continued and – as countless other families had to – she waved off one son Pat and three daughters, Mary, Margaret and Philomena to the US, and my dad and his brother Jimmy for the UK, while the youngest Sean stayed behind to run the family farm.

In their late teens, my father Michael and his lifelong pal Jimmy Donnelly traveled to Lincolnshire and the North Yorkshire market towns, where they slept in a barn with pigs and hired themselves out for work.

Dad eventually settled in Wakefield and worked for decades as a miner and a laborer. His siblings settled to varying degrees in the US. Margaret was just 16 when in 1948 she left their thatched cottage home – with no electricity or indoor toilet – and flew into New York for a new life.

My generation of the family undoubtedly benefited from their hard work – we were the first to go to university, travel the world for pleasure, not necessity, and have genuinely comfortable lives.

After my gran’s death – at the great age of 92 in 1982 – her wedding ring and her lost love’s ring – which she had kept all her life – were passed to her daughter Mary, in Philadelphia.

As for her lost love, my aunt Margaret Cleary was introduced to Mr Blackburn at a social event in Hartford in the 1950s, where she had settled.

Mother-of-five Margaret, now 85 and living in Manchester, Conn, recalls the meeting: `It was at a picnic and my Uncle Pat Martin, a bus driver, introduced us. Mr Blackburn was told I was Margaret’s daughter but he said he knew straight away who I was as I looked like my mother.

`I think he was called Michael, but I am unsure. My mother did tell me about him when I was young. I wish now I had asked her more but you don’t think about it at the time.’

Mr. Blackburn told my aunt that he had never married but was very pleased to meet her. Did he always hold a candle for my grandmother?

My grandmother told a friend she regretted leaving America. I took my children to see the house where she worked as a maid and thought why wouldn’t she feel sad – leaving her first love and the home comforts and hopes of a modern US to return to the hard life of rural Ireland?

One day, I hope to tell her story in a book. Meanwhile, it is left to us, the ancestors she left behind, to ponder how different life would have been if Margaret Martin had boarded the Titanic – if she had not missed the boat in many senses of her life – but such was the journey she took that brought me to be born and raised in Yorkshire and my other family to America.

Read more: The last letter written on board the doomed Titanic

* If anyone has any information about the Martin or Blackburn family, contact Sheron on sheronboyle@aol.com, via Facebook, or on Twitter at sheronboyle1.

* Originally published November 2014.

Remembering the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. and his influence on Robert F. Kennedy on the anniversary of his assassination (April 4, 1968).  

Editor's Note:  On this day, April 4, in 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennesse. His death inspired RFK to give one of his greatest speeches. On the anniversary of his death, the article below from Dermot McEvoy looks at the development of Kennedy's political career and how his attitude to civil rights and MLK changed over time. 

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr. was gunned down in Memphis. A short time later, Senator Robert Francis Kennedy, running for the office of President of the United States of America, touched down in Indianapolis.

Despite warnings from the mayor and chief of police that he was in hostile territory, he immediately headed for the black ghetto. There, in 556 extemporaneous words, in maybe the best speech delivered in America since the Gettysburg Address, he told the crowd of the country’s loss.

“What we need in the United States,” said Kennedy, “is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence or lawlessness; but love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be black.”

“My favorite poet was Aeschylus,” he said. “He wrote: ‘In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.’ ”

Sixty-three days later Robert Kennedy would be dead.

Forty-eight years later the U.S. is still presented with many of the problems Kennedy spoke about, but it’s almost impossible to imagine any of the candidates who ran for president in the 2016 election showing such compassion, let alone quote—or even pronounce—Aeschylus.

Read more: How Martin Luther King inspired a Northern Ireland uprising

Bobby Kennedy had come a long way from being one of Senator Joe McCarthy’s hatchet men only fifteen years before. If there ever was a politician disguised as a riddle, it was Kennedy. Former Boston Globe journalist Larry Tye decided he had to decipher that riddle and "Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon" (Random House) is the result.

“I wrote about Bobby partly because he was a hero of mine growing up,” Tye told IrishCentral, “and I wanted to learn more about him and see if I’d been right in embracing him. As important, I pick my subjects for the same reason every biographer does: because their small and human story is a lens into a bigger, more cosmic one. In Bobby’s case, his transformation over his 20-year career lets us see how America was changing (for the better) from the Eisenhower era of the 1950s through the tumultuous 1960s. Nobody better reflected that change than Bobby and nobody was more instrumental in steering it.”

Tye never met Kennedy, but he had some important “ins” to the Kennedy family. “I did go to a small high school outside Boston with Bobby’s son David and his nephew Chris Lawford,” said Tye. “Bobby’s brother Ted was one of my best sources during my 15 years at the Boston Globe, and over the years I met others in the Kennedy clan, through work and play.”

Perhaps his biggest coup was getting Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, to talk to him. How did he pull that off? “I came along at the right time—when Ethel was sensing her mortality (she just turned 88) and, I think, was ready to talk. I had several friends who were friends of hers and vouched for me. And I was plain lucky.”

Read more: Martin Luther King’s legacy for the undocumented immigrant children

Most politicians, if they evolve politically, evolve from left to right—Ronald Reagan being a prime example, going from New Deal Democrat to Arch-Conservative. Kennedy, however, went the opposite direction, compounding his riddle.

“It’s one of several ways in which Bobby defied intuition and custom,” said Tye, “which he relished doing. Most people get more conservative as they age partly because they lose their idealism and reach, but Bobby got more idealistic the more he saw wrongs that needed righting and he reached ever-further in trying to change things that made him angry. Would that more politicians did that, and more of the rest of us.”

Of course, politicians we admire “evolve,” but politicians we despise are called “flip-floppers.” Why wasn’t Kennedy a flip-flopper?

“Something deeper was involved,” insists Tye. “Bobby, I am convinced, changed in ways that were deeply felt and painfully arrived at. He’d always been a balance between tough and tender, and the more he suffered—with the tragic death of two brothers and a sister, up-close encounters with poverty and pains, and the costs of a war he had strongly backed—the more the tender came to dominate. Another difference: Flip-floppers change in the direction of the prevailing political winds, whereas Bobby changed on issues like Vietnam before being anti-war was popular and when it could and did cost him his relationship with a very powerful president, Lyndon Johnson.”

Kennedy was a fairly devout Catholic, an Irish one at that. Did that have any bearing on his evolution?

“Any faith,” said Tye, “and especially Catholicism, can push one in either ideological direction, since there’s scriptural and clerical support for liberalism and conservatism. In Bobby’s case, he took practical and spiritual direction from his devotion to his faith and it was a central part of what drove and sustained him."

Kennedy liberal detractors always bring up Kennedy’s association with Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose tactics would add a new definition to the dictionary: “McCarthyism.” Yet Kennedy never abandoned him, even traveling to Wisconsin for his funeral in 1957. Looking back at both of their careers, they certainly were a political odd-couple.

“Bobby was firmly anti-Communist in the 1950s,” explained Tye, “and he felt that Senator McCarthy was one of the only public figures willing to stand up to the Reds. Bobby was devoted to his father, and Joe Kennedy was devoted to Joe McCarthy. And Bobby badly needed a mentor, and Joe McCarthy served that role for Bobby in a way that was real and made clear he was a friend as well as a boss.”

Of course, there was another character in this political ménage à trois who has just shot back into the news—Roy Cohn. It has recently been revealed that Cohn in the years before he died of AIDS, was a political mentor to none other than Donald J. Trump. Not surprising, as much as Kennedy admired McCarthy, he loathed Cohn.

“Bobby was jealous that Cohn was running McCarthy’s staff,” explained Tye, “while he was a junior staffer who Cohn treated like a go-fer. Bobby chose to blame Cohn for the McCarthy Committee’s excesses, which was right in that Cohn was mean and dogmatic and demagogic, but it let McCarthy—who, after all, was Cohn’s boss—off the hook far too easily. For his part, Cohn hated Bobby because he saw him as a spoiled rich kid, which he was, and because he knew Bobby got the job because McCarthy was beholden to rich Joe Kennedy, which he was.”

One of the great ironies of Kennedy’s political life was that he was bedeviled by two Senator McCarthys: Joe in the beginning and Gene at the end. IrishCentral asked Tye if he thought Kennedy would see the terrible irony in this mad juxtaposition?

“I do think he saw the irony, albeit reluctantly,” replied Tye. “He also must have bitten his lip when Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary accurately quipped in 1968, ‘It took Bobby Kennedy seventeen years to come out against McCarthy, and then it was the wrong one.’ ”

Probably the best statement Tye made about the JFK/RFK relationship was: “Bobby was all Gaelic, bristling with energy and trusting his gut. If the Church had been their calling, Jack would have been pope, Bobby a parish priest.”

What, exactly, did Bobby get out of being the parish priest of the Democratic Party? “It was the place,” replied Tye, “at the grassroots, where Bobby felt he learned the most, contributed the most and felt most appreciated. Jack never pretended to like the grunt work and aspired to be president from the instant he was elected to Congress. Bobby had trouble imagining himself as a senator, then as president, although he was much more qualified—from having done his grunt work—than his older brother, who’d always been removed and pretentiously pope-like.”

Kennedy, as his brother’s Attorney General, gradually began to evolve from right-winger to lefty. As AG he was in charge of desegregating colleges in the south and the mayhem, violence, and murder made a deep impression on him.

The Cuban Missile Crisis also had a profound impact on him. Tye is extremely critical of Kennedy and his maneuverings during the crisis and some of the self-serving things he wrote in his book on the crisis.

“He and the world had come closer to a nuclear holocaust than it had at any time before or since,” says Tye, “and it sobered him as it did everyone. It also eventually tempered his hatred of Castro and resolve to depose him, but that took a bit more time. The sad thing is that Bobby felt the need, because of his political ambition and determination to whitewash Kennedy history, to embellish and whitewash his role in the crisis when he wrote about it in his book 'Thirteen Days.' He was an advocate of the dovish naval blockade, but only later; at first he was among the most militant of the hawks.”

RFK was so right about so many things: poverty, civil rights, apartheid in South Africa, Vietnam, and his amazing prediction that there would be a black president within 40 years. What does this out-of-the-box thinking tell you about him? And how come so many people—many so-called intellectuals—got so many of these things wrong?

“It tells me that he had the confidence to admit he’d screwed up,” says Tye, “which most intellectuals don’t. And he had the foresight to cut through the crap and see the essence of the situation, whether it was Vietnam or civil rights, but only the second time around, after he’d made mistakes and learned from them.”

After President Kennedy’s assassination, Bobby went into a depression in which he emerged a different man. Kennedy had a great love of children which was best expressed in a wonderful, heartfelt moment a month after JFK’s assassination.

Kennedy was visiting a school when a little boy yelled “Your brother’s dead!” The outburst stunned the onlookers, but Kennedy put them at ease when he told the little boy, “That’s all right. I have another brother.”

Kennedy’s emergence from his profound depression took just about a year, culminating in his bid for New York's US Senate seat.

“It was partly that his Senate campaign,” notes Tye, “made him see that he still had a role to play in the politics and policies of the nation and that the public responded to him as separate from and nearly equivalent to the beloved assassinated president. It also gave Bobby the most essential of cures for situational depression: time and distractions.”

After his election to the Senate Kennedy started championing the causes of the rural poor, the Chicanos, the blacks in city ghettos, and the forgotten whites. No one ever got elected in American politics by being a hero to these forgotten people, as we can see in present-day politicking. Why did he do it?

“Because,” says Tye, “he couldn’t not do it, the way he was moved by seeing starving kids in the Mississippi Delta, abused ones in the grape and lettuce fields of California, and forgotten ones—white as well as black—in Brooklyn and Queens and upstate New York. It’s also that he was crafting a new politics where those forgotten Americans—black, brown, and blue-collar white—would form a new, triumphant electoral coalition.”

Tye added, “Instead of following a straight line from conservative to liberal, he had skipped straight to revolutionary.”

A remarkable statement, but was Bobby Kennedy truly a “revolutionary”?

“In every sense of the word,” insists Tye. “He was willing to try new, untested, and unpopular solutions. He was as impatient as hell and ready to topple anyone who stood in his way. He was familiar with old-style politics and politicians and hated both. All that was apparent in his attitudes about everything from poverty to fighting the wrong wars. What we lost the night Bobby was killed was the tough liberal—or perhaps tender conservative—I’ve spent my life waiting and hoping for.”

Senator Kennedy concluded his speech that awful night in Indianapolis by saying: “Let us dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.”

Today, on that very spot in Indianapolis, stands the Landmark for Peace Memorial, a remarkable sculpture that shows Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. reaching out for one another, perhaps contemplating giving each other a High-Five when their life’s work is finally accomplished.

---

Dermot McEvoy is the author of the "The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising and Irish Miscellany" (Skyhorse Publishing). He may be reached at dermotmcevoy50@gmail.com. Follow him at www.dermotmcevoy.com. Follow The 13th Apostle on Facebook.

* Originally published in 2016.

Jeremiah Burke is fabled to have thrown a despairing message in a bottle from the decks of the sinking Titanic. The message washed up at his home in Ireland a time later, as the legend tells it. 

Editor's note: On April 15, 1912, the Belfast-built RMS Titanic sank, after colliding with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew on board. This was one of the deadliest commercial, peacetime maritime disasters in modern history and among those on board were many Irish.

In the run-up to the anniversary of the disaster, IrishCentral will take a look at the Irish on board – the lucky, unlucky and heroic.

This is an extract from the book “The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony, which tells the tales of the people who were on board the night the ship went down. This book gives those people a voice. In it are stories of agony, luck, self-sacrifice, dramatic escapes, and heroes left behind.

Read more: Historic Titanic pier at Cobh to be reconstructed

Titanic passenger: Jeremiah Burke

Ticket number 365222. Paid £6 15s

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class

From: Ballinoe, White’s Cross, Upper Glanmire, County Cork

Destination: Mrs. Burns, 41 Washington Street, Charlestown, Massachusetts.

Jeremiah Burke [19] is the passenger fabled to have thrown a despairing message in a bottle from the decks of the sinking Titanic. Miraculously, the bottle washed up on the shoreline just a short distance from his home in Ireland just over a year later.

The message contains an unclear date which could variously be 10, 12 or 13 April 1912. The Titanic struck the berg at 11.40 p.m. on 14 April. Interestingly, an article in the Irish News, published on 20 April 1912, observed that very few authentic messages from shipwrecks had ever come to safety and "very many … are cruel hoaxes." 

Jeremiah’s grieving family believed the message found by a coachman on the shore at Dunkettle, close to their home, was authentic. The message reads: "From Titanic. Good Bye all. Burke of Glanmire, Cork."

Kate Burke, his mother, recognized her son’s handwriting. She announced that the bottle was the same holy water bottle she had given to her boy on the day of his departure.

Jeremiah Burke was only 19 and stood six feet two inches in his stockinged feet. He was the youngest of seven children who had all worked on the 70-acre family farm and stated on embarkation that he was an agricultural laborer.

Two of his sisters had previously emigrated to the US and he was resolved to join them when a letter arrived from Charlestown with money for his passage. His cousin Nora Hegarty, from neighboring Killavarrig, decided to accompany him on the expedition to America.

Jeremiah’s father William drove the cousins to Queenstown in his pony and trap. He reported seeing them making friends with another intending passenger, a piper identified as Eugene Daly. He survived, while both Jeremiah and Nora drowned.

Read more: Real story of heartbreaking Irish mother and children from Titanic movie

Titanic newspaper reports:

More Cork Victims

The sympathy of the people of Cork will go out in full measure to the parents of Miss Nora Hegarty of Killavallig, Whitechurch, and Mr. Jeremiah Burke, of Upper Glanmire, both of whom were only 19 years of age and who lost their lives in the Titanic disaster.

They left Queenstown full of hope for a bright and happy career in the United States.

They were seen off by a number of relatives and friends and with them, they cheerfully discussed their future prospects, but alas their young hopes and schemes were doomed by cruel disappointment.

They were both very popular in the Glanmire and Whitechurch districts and the shock which their death occasioned was general and acute. Their parents and relatives will have the sympathy of all in the great sorrow into which they have been plunged.

(The Cork Examiner, 27 April 1912)

Then in early summer 1913, the Royal Irish Constabulary contacted the family with the news that a man walking his dog had picked up the message in a bottle at Dunkettle, where the river in Glanmire meets the Lee and flows to the sea. The note is now on public display at the Queenstown Experience visitor attraction in Cobh.

His grandniece has said: "The bottle and note were all his mother had, and in a way, it was like a tombstone. He wouldn’t have thrown away a bottle of holy water his mother gave him. There was an element of panic to it."

Last Hour Messages

The possibility that messages from some of the people left on the doomed Titanic may have been committed to the deep is discussed … Such notes, enclosed in bottles, may have been thrown overboard; and if so, their chances of being found are a hundred times better than those of any messages ever given to the sea.

The US cruiser [sic] MacKay-Bennett is only one of the many ships that will be sent specially to search the scene of the shipwreck, and the possibility of salvaging something from the wreckage is certain to draw many Newfoundland fishing boats to the spot.

It is, of course, true that very few authentic messages from wrecks have ever come to safety. Very many that were first reported turned out to be cruel hoaxes. The bottle- messages that purported to come from the Yongala, which went down off Queensland, and from the Allan liner Huronian, which was lost in the North Atlantic, and from the Waratah, whose fate was never known, were all discovered to be false.

One of the few cases that were considered authentic was the bottle-message that was found sometime after the Bay of Bengal sailed from England, saying that she had been wrecked almost immediately after putting to sea. Nothing more was ever heard of this ship.

(Irish News, 20 April 1912)

The theme of the ship that sailed and was never seen again has always had a horrible fascination. The White Star steamer Naronic was built in 1892 and was described as the finest and safest vessel ever launched.

She left Liverpool for New York on February 11, 1893, and then disappeared forever.

But six weeks afterward a champagne bottle was found on the beach at Ocean View, Virginia, containing a letter alleged to have been written by John Olsen, a cattleman on board.

"The Naronic is fast sinking. It is such a storm that we cannot live in the small boats. One boat with its human cargo has already sunk. We have been struck by an iceberg in the blinding snow. The ship has floated for two hours. It is now 3.20 in the morning, and the deck is level with the sea."

That is all we have ever heard of the Naronic.

(Galway Express, 27 April 1912)

But here is a case of a Corkman’s bottle, thrown overboard in mid-ocean, which indeed drifted for a year before making landfall, albeit on a different coast:

The Voyage of a Bottle from the North Atlantic to the Florida Coast

Long Journey of a Corkman’s Message

On the 23rd February 1931 when the Dresden was 2,125 miles from Cove, Mr. Michael O’Sullivan, who originally hailed from the Mallow district, dropped a bottle overboard containing the following message –

February 21, 1931. Tourist cabin 336A. – On board the SS Dresden from Bremerhaven via Cherbourg and Queenstown to New York … This note in an airtight bottle has been cast overboard 2,125 miles from Queenstown and at a latitude N. 41.32, and longitude W. 62.18. Finder please send to Cork Weekly Examiner, Patrick Street, Cork city, Ireland, giving your name and address and where found and when …

On Saturday last, 26 March, the Editor received a letter enclosing the message from Miss A. McBride, the Belleview Biltmore Hotel, Belleair, Florida. Miss McBride had picked up the bottle on the beach at Belleair while bathing on March 6, 1932. Here is her letter:

"While bathing at a local beach here in Florida I found the enclosed note which was dropped from the SS Dresden by a Mr. O’Sullivan and I am carrying out his instructions by sending it to you – sincerely Miss A. McBride.

PS: March 6th, 1932, when I found this bottle washed onto the beach."

We leave it to our nautical readers to calculate the exact mileage covered by that bottle. It must have drifted over one thousand miles almost exactly in twelve months. We hope that Mr. O’Sullivan will communicate to us his present address when we will have much pleasure in returning to him his note, which is in marvellously good condition, after its adventurous voyage.

(Cork Weekly Examiner, 2 April 1932)

Jeremiah Burke left total assets of just £10, according to a subsequent application for administration of his estate by his father.

1911 census: William Burke (55) Farmer; wife Kate (54). Married 28 years, nine children, even alive. Kitty (23), William (20), Jeremiah (18), Laurence (16).

“The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony is available online.

* Originally published in 2012.

Top tips from Irish Americans who are hooked on chasing their ancestors back home in Ireland.

Kate grew up in North Albany, NY, also called “Little Limerick”.  St. Patrick’s Day in was one of the most celebrated holidays of the year. Mike grew up in Harrisville, NY in rural Lewis County. A glance at the 1850 U.S. Census for Harrisville reads like a ship log of Irish emigrants headed to Boston or New York Harbors during the Great Irish Famine.

According to the 2013 Community Survey taken by the U.S. Census Bureau, we are only two of the 33 million Americans who reported Irish ancestry.

We both were raised hearing stories and tales about our Irish American immigrant ancestors. It wasn’t until later in life that we became “hooked” on “chasing” our ancestors back in time to the Emerald Isle.

Most Irish Americans begin their search by following one or more ancestry lines.

Kate began by chasing her Fitzpatrick clan and expanded to her Regan and Harney lines.

Mike began by following his Laide line and expanded to his Doyle, Whelan and Kennedy lines.

If you decide to begin “the chase” for your Irish American ancestors, then we recommend you begin with one specific clan and expand out from there. Be aware, it will soon become a lifelong pursuit that will keep you up through the early morning hours on many occasions!

When we were new to the business, we met with a genealogist who told us that we would be lucky to find the homelands in Ireland of 50% of our ancestors.

Since then, many more Irish records have become available online and the odds of finding the homelands of one’s Irish ancestors has definitely improved.

The most important lesson our genealogist friend taught us was that your search must begin in the U.S!

The more you can find out about your Irish ancestors in the U.S., then the better your chances are of finding where they lived in Ireland.

We have set the stage to help you “chase” your Irish American ancestors. By sharing with you some of the records we have uncovered, we hope to help you learn as much as possible about your ancestors.

There is no better place to start than contacting family members to find out if they have records, photos, bibles or stories they can share. Concentrate on your oldest family members and make sure you keep a record, taped or written, of any information they share. Family stories are so very interesting and enchanting. They may not be totally accurate, but are usually filled with useful bits of information that will point you in the right direction.

The “luck of the Irish” gave Mike access to two family bibles. Both are treasure troves and contain dates of births, marriages and deaths, as well as family photos. The Doyle/Whelan bible contains the marriage certificate for Mike’s great great grandparents James Doyle and Mary Whelan who were married in 1859.

The second bible contained photos of Mike’s Irish immigrant ancestors on the Kennedy and Laide sides. Truly unique photos that were not found anywhere else! Mike also inherited a scrapbook put together by his great aunt Grace that contained many, many obituaries and newspaper stories about his ancestors, another treasure trove indeed.

After learning as much as you can by interviewing family members and pouring over family records, then move on to the cemeteries where your Irish American ancestors are buried. Make sure you head out with a good pair of shoes, notebooks, pens, laptop or pad, good camera, sidewalk chalk, a water squirt bottle, and “prayers for and help from your ancestors”.

Most of Kate’s Irish ancestors were laid to rest in St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands, NY. Thanks to the fantastic records held in the cemetery office, Kate was able to obtain cemetery plot cards for her ancestors.

After discovering a gravestone with one name on it (Johanna Regan), Kate asked the cemetery’s genealogist for a copy of the plot card. Johanna was the first of 18 of Kate’s ancestors buried in this one cemetery plot between 1886 and 1934. That’s right, 18 souls buried in the plot with only one name on the gravestone! Kate’s immigrant great, great grandparents James Regan and Catherine Walsh are buried in this plot. They had both followed their emigrant children to Albany, NY. Don’t forget to ask for cemetery plot cards!

If you haven’t already done so, you are now ready to begin “chasing” your ancestors online from the comfort of your own home. Start with a simple Google search and move on to the free Family Search website. Start by searching the 1940 U.S. Census (the most recent census available online) and then go back in time (e.g. 1930, 1920). We also recommend the subscription websites Ancestry.com or My Heritage if you decide to go further. On these three websites alone, you will find all types of records including censuses, births, deaths, ship immigration logs, city directories and military records. Submitting a DNA sample to Ancestry.com or some other website will surely keep you up late on many nights as you exchange messages with your DNA matches.

Death certificates seldom exist in the U.S. prior to 1880. By 1900, most death certificates included the names of the parents of the deceased and where they were born. Few states have death certificates online, so you will likely pay a fee to obtain a copy from the town or state where your ancestor died. Just do it! You may strike out on some of your requests, but you will certainly find more treasure troves.

Kate’s great grandmother Nora Regan’s death certificate gives the names of her parents as James Hearney and Nora Pendergast and says that both were born in Ireland. What a fantastic find! Unfortunately, death certificates for individuals born in Ireland seldom include the name of the county in Ireland where they were born, let alone the name of the townland.

And by the way, don’t forget the Find A Grave and BillionGraves websites. Both host millions of cemetery gravestone records that have been voluntarily entered by individuals who want to help others “chase” their ancestors. Historic newspapers are great sources for obituaries and social news regarding your ancestors. Genealogy Bank and Newspapers.com are excellent subscription websites, but also look for free state historic newspaper websites (e.g. NYS Historic Newspapers).

If some of your Irish male ancestors immigrated prior to 1862, then it is likely they served in either the Union or Confederate Army during the U.S. Civil War. For a fee, you can request Civil War records from the National Archives. The records for one of Mike’s ancestors (Matthew Whelan) stated that he was from Littermore, Blackwater, Co. Wexford, Ireland. What a miraculous find! As for Kate, she discovered that her great grandfather William Fitzpatrick served in the Civil War and was buried in one of his daughter’s family plot. His name was not on the gravestone, but thanks to his great granddaughter Kate, his name and Union Army Unit now are engraved on the stone. Kate’s way to memorialize an ancestor who’s records were “lost in time” for 150 years.

Once you have exhausted the search for your Irish American ancestors in the U.S., then you are ready to “chase” them in Ireland. If you have determined the names and approximate dates of birth for your immigrant ancestors, as well as the names of their parents and/or siblings, then you have a good chance to find the townlands in Ireland where they lived.

We have both been extremely successful in “chasing” many of our Irish ancestors back to their “roots” in Ireland. We have spent many exceptional and emotional days visiting and sharing family history with distant cousins in Counties Waterford, Wexford and Wicklow. They are always as excited about being found by us as we are about finding them!

Our last article for IrishCentral was "Our surprising adventures chasing Irish American ancestors in Ireland"

* Kate and Mike Lancor live in Moultonborough, NH and enjoy “chasing” their own Irish ancestors as well as helping others “chase” theirs. They run a genealogy search business and can be reached by emailing oldfriendsgenealogy@gmail.com or on their Old Friends Genealogy Facebook page. They have traveled to Ireland six times and especially enjoy “chasing” Irish ancestors for their clients. If you have “hit a brick wall” or simply don’t have time to “chase” your ancestors, then send them an email to see if they can help.

Ellen Shine was a Cork-born Titanic survivor, who lived to the age of 98. She told how men in steerage were held back and that she witnessed murders.

Editor's note: On April 15, 1912, the Belfast-built RMS Titanic sank, after colliding with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew on board. This was one of the deadliest commercial, peacetime maritime disasters in modern history and among those on board were many Irish.

In the run-up to the anniversary of the disaster, IrishCentral will take a look at the Irish on board – the lucky, unlucky and heroic.

This is an extract from the book “The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony, which tells the tales of the people who were on board the night the ship went down. This book gives those people a voice. In it are stories of agony, luck, self-sacrifice, dramatic escapes, and heroes left behind.

Ellen Shine

Ticket number 330968. Paid £7 12s 7d, plus 4s extra.

Boarded at Queenstown. Third Class.
From: Lisrobin, Newmarket, County Cork.
Destination: 205 Eighth Avenue, New York City.

The longest-lived Irish survivor of the Titanic was Ellen Shine. She reached the age of 98 (although she had convinced herself she was 101), dying in Long Island, New York, in 1993. She told a story of the men in steerage being kept back and was quoted as witnessing actual killings.

Cork girl’s story: 

A thrilling story was told by Ellen Shine, a 20-year-old girl from County Cork who crossed to America to visit her brother.

"Those who were able to get out of bed," said Miss Shine, "rushed to the upper deck where they were met by members of the crew who endeavored to keep them in the steerage quarters.

"The women, however, rushed past the men and finally reached the upper deck. When they were informed that the boat was sinking, most of them fell on their knees and began to pray. I saw one of the lifeboats and made for it.

"In it, there were already four men from the steerage who refused to obey an officer who ordered them out. They were however finally turned out." – Reuter

That report, carried in The Times of London on Saturday, 20 April, is exactly the same as quotes attributed to Ellen Shine and carried in the Denver Post, the Daily Times, and other US newspapers on the previous day, with one difference. The American reports continued:

"… in it were four men from the steerage. They were ordered out by an officer and refused to leave. And then one of the officers jumped into the boat, and, drawing a revolver, shot the four men dead. Their bodies were picked out from the bottom of the boat and thrown into the ocean."

How can posterity reconcile these two versions? Were the claimed killings the product of a survivor’s fevered mind or a journalist’s reckless embellishment? Did Reuter deliberately choose to tone down the story by plucking it from another source, or was there simply no mention by Ellen of any killings in the first place? No other witnesses described four men being callously shot inside a lifeboat by an officer of the White Star Line, and no bodies were ever recovered with discernible gunshot wounds.

Ellen Shine appears to have escaped in lifeboat No. 13, which was located at the second-last boat on the starboard side, towards the stern. Eugene Daly frankly confesses that he was a steerage passenger who climbed into a lifeboat in defiance of orders at this location. Daly said he was forced from a boat at the ‘second cabin deck,’ an area of promenade for middle-ranking passengers, and talks of being on the starboard side, where boat No. 13 was lowering:

"We afterward went to the second cabin deck and the two girls and myself got into a boat. An officer called on me to go back, but I would not stir. Then they got a hold of me and pulled me out."

Read more: Eugene Daly's detailed account as the White Star Liner went down

No one testified to any disorder at boat No. 13 at the two official inquiries. Steward Frederick Ray, who was in this boat, told the US Senate investigators, in reply to questions, that he saw no male passengers or men of the crew "ordered out or thrown out of these lifeboats on the starboard side. Everybody was very orderly."

But Irish passenger Dannie Buckley declared: "Time and again officers would drag men from the boats … " Resolution of the problem is elusive. Should one disregard the claims of men shot dead for staying stubbornly in a lifeboat? Someone somewhere is spinning pure invention.

Ellen Shine told her story once and would never be drawn on it again. According to the embarkation records, she was an 18-year-old spinster, but by the time US immigration had come aboard the Carpathia, she declared herself to be a 16-year-old servant from Newmarket, County Cork. She was actually aged 17 when she boarded the Titanic and from the small hamlet of Lisrobin (Buckley mistakenly referred to her as ‘the Shine girl from Lismore’ in a letter home composed on the Carpathia). She was on her way to join her brother Jeremiah in New York.

Ellen collapsed in hysterics when met by Jeremiah and other relatives at the Cunard pier in New York, according to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It reported the next day that she and other women had knocked down crewmen who tried to prevent steerage passengers from reaching the boat deck.

Ellen’s was case number 418 to be dealt with by the American Red Cross. The notes from this report record her saying she was aged 16 and that she had lost clothing and a cash sum of $500. She was awarded $100 in aid.

In later years, Ellen Shine married and became Mrs. John Callaghan. Her husband, a firefighter, hailed from Kiskeam, also in Cork, and they settled in New York. They first returned to Ireland only in 1959, on the Mauretania, but made a number of visits thereafter. The couple had two daughters, Julia and Mary, whom Ellen would be fated to outlive.

In 1976 she moved from Manhattan to Long Island to be with her family following the death of her husband. In 1982 she entered Glengariff nursing home where she celebrated her 100th birthday in 1991 – three years early. By this stage, however, Ellen was in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease. Never having discussed the Titanic disaster in nearly seventy years, she suddenly could not stop babbling about it. A torrent of Titanic revelations flowed from her loosened tongue to the irritation of other residents. When Ellen finally wanted to talk about the disaster, no one was listening.

Ellen Shine Callaghan died on 5 March 1993 and is buried in St Charles Cemetery, East Farmingdale, New York.

A survivor of the Titanic Dies: Glen Cove woman was 101

Helen Shine Callaghan of Glen Cove, one of the last survivors of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, died yesterday at North Shore University Hospital at Glen Cove at the age of 101.

Callaghan, who was a resident of the Glengariff Nursing Home in Glen Cove, was 20 when she left her native Cork County, Ireland, for a better life in the United States, according to her granddaughter, Christine Quinn [in 2011, the Speaker of the New York City Council].

‘She was from a big family and her parents were deceased and her sister was head of the family and decided that some of the siblings had to go to America,’ said Quinn.

Like many of the survivors, Callaghan rarely discussed the tragedy. ‘I remember asking her questions as a girl. She never really answered them directly,’ Quinn said. ‘My mother only found out about it when she was in school and the teacher passed around a list with the survivors’ names on it and she saw her mother’s name on the list.’

- (Glen Cove Record-Pilot, 6 March 1993)

1911 census – Shine, Lisrobin.

Mary, widow (55). Had been married 21 years, nine children, eight yet living.

Maggie (30), Ellie (18), James (22), John (25), creamery manager.

“The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony is available online.

* Originally published in 2012.

The son of a labor organizer, Arthur Sheilds was quick to join James Connolly in the GPO when the 1916 Easter Rising started. 

Editor's note: Dermot McEvoy is the author of "The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising." This passage is taken from his latest book “Irish Miscellany: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Ireland.” This chapter is entitled “Can’t tell the rebels without a scorecard?”

The motion picture that defines Ireland to many Irish-Americans is John Ford’s “The Quiet Man.” Although made over 60 years ago, many still believe that sentimental Ireland depicted in the film was the “real” Ireland of the time. It wasn’t—and probably never was. The things about the movie that still resonates are those involved in it, especially its director, Irish-American John Ford, and two of its scene-stealing stars—Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields.

Even today many don’t realize that Barry (real name William Joseph Shields) and Arthur were brothers. Fitzgerald was born in 1888 on Walworth Street in the Portobello section of Dublin. (As a child he played with the younger siblings of James Joyce who he called “a young man with a beard and very clever.”)

He was followed eight years later by his brother, Arthur. (Their house, right next to the Jewish Museum, is today marked by a plaque.) Their father, Adolphus, lists his occupation in the 1901 Census as “Press Reader,” but he was well-known in Dublin as a labor organizer.

One of the big secrets of the family is that, although the brothers made their living in part playing Catholic priests, they were all Church of Ireland. (It should be noted that their mother, Fanny Sophia, who was born in Germany, lists her religion in the 1911 Census as “Agnostic.” Their sister Madeline lists her religion as “Spiritualist”—very outspoken for women in early twentieth-century Catholic Dublin!)

How Arthur Shields ended up fighting in the Easter Rising

Arthur Shields is one of the great stories of twentieth-century Ireland. He became involved early at the Abbey Theatre and worked there as an actor, director, and stage manager. (He was known as “Boss” Shields.) But, still unknown to many, is that he was also a patriot. In 1916 he was a member of the Irish Volunteers and was prepared to fight on Easter Sunday when the orders were countermanded.

On Easter Monday the revolution was on again, and Shields went to the Abbey and retrieved his rifle from under the stage. He went around the corner to Liberty Hall and joined with James Connolly’s Irish Citizen Army. (Connolly, an ardent socialist and master labor organizer, admired his father and congratulated Arthur on his parentage.)

He then marched to the General Post Office in Sackville Street where he fought before evacuating on Friday. He was sent to Stafford Prison in England with another famous rebel—Michael Collins—and from there, they were both sent to the Frongoch prison camp in Wales. Both would return to Dublin by the end of 1916, Collins to terrorize the British and Shields to return to the Abbey stage.

Read more: Easter Rising 1916.

William Shields—known as Will to his friends—worked in the Irish civil service in Dublin Castle, which must have been an interesting place during the War of Independence. After the Easter Rising, he joined his brother at the Abbey and befriended a playwright by the name of Seán O’Casey. While Arthur, tall and lean, was the romantic star of the theatre, Barry Fitzgerald—he took the pseudonym because he was still working in the civil service while moonlighting as an actor—was short and quiet, but had a comic magic that today would be simply translated as “star power.”

Barry’s relationship with O’Casey would soon have Ireland’s foremost playwright writing parts for him, including Captain Boyle in "Juno and the Paycock" and Fluther Good in "The Plough and the Stars". In fact, when that play premiered at the Abbey, riots broke out and little Barry could be seen boxing outraged theatre-goers who attempted to take the stage.

Read more: Top ten Irish movies of all time (VIDEOS)

In his wonderful book, "Hollywood Irish", Adrian Frazier makes a very salient point about the two kinds of people—Catholic and Protestant—working at the Abbey. O’Casey, also a Protestant, burst on the scene after the Irish civil war with "The Shadow of the Gunman" and became the most prominent Irish playwright since John Millington Synge (also a Protestant).

Shadow was followed by "Juno and the Paycock" and then by "The Plough and the Stars". Plough proved to be an incendiary play in the Dublin of its day. It questioned much of the nationalistic dogma of the time and brought an earthliness—it contained whores, drinkers, and looters—that upset much of the hierarchy in both government and Church.

It also created a chasm at the Abbey. The Catholics actors were very dubious and nervous about some of O’Casey’s tenets as expressed in Plough, while the two Shields brothers sided with their friend O’Casey. This chasm turned into an open wound when the Abbey, under Yeats and Lady Gregory, rejected O’Casey’s "The Silver Tassie".

The Sheilds brothers move to America

The Shields brothers and O’Casey started to look for greener pastures. Fitzgerald and O’Casey found them in London, while Shields, for the moment, remained at the Abbey. But the (barely) state-subsidized Abbey was in terrible financial shape and it was decided that the Abbey Players would go on the road to America to keep the theatre afloat.

After the repressive, smothering atmosphere of Catholic Dublin in the new Irish Free State—Arthur Shields famously said that he didn’t want to “say your prayers in Gaelic”—the United States seemed wonderful and invigorating. It also gave the Shields brothers a chance to make real money for the first time, something almost impossible in their itinerant trade back in Dublin. America also contained something called “Hollywood” and the lure would take several years, but finally seduced, first Barry, then Arthur.

Both worked in John Ford’s film version of "The Plough and the Stars". While Arthur continued with the Abbey Players in many capacities, Barry stayed in Hollywood where after appearing in "Bringing Up Baby" with Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, he became a familiar face. The brothers would be reunited for Ford’s "How Green Was My Valley" and "The Long Voyage Home". With the advent of World War II, they were stuck in America and continued to work, mostly as reliable character actors.

Fitzgerald’s big break came when he was cast as the ancient Father Fitzgibbons (although he was only 56 at the time) in "Going My Way". To put it mildly, he stole the picture from Bing Crosby and was nominated for two Academy Awards, as Best Supporting Actor (which he won) and Best Actor (which Crosby won).

(It’s interesting to note the disparity in salary: Crosby was paid $150,000, while Fitzgerald only pulled down $8,750.) Fitzgerald’s dual nominations forced the Academy to change the rules in that no one actor could be nominated in two categories for the same role.

The Oscar made Fitzgerald a star and he went on to receive top billing in movies, including the seminal "Naked City" (1947). In this innovative Mark Hellinger production, filmed on the streets of New York in documentary style, Fitzgerald plays a tough New York homicide detective out to solve the murder of a model. For its time the film is full of forensic science. The movie led to the television series "Naked City" and without it, there would be no "Law and Order" and "CSI". In fact, Jerry Orbach’s "Law and Order" detective Lennie Briscoe owes a lot to Fitzgerald’s Lieutenant Dan Muldoon.

Fitzgerald made a lot of films—some pretty good like "And Then There Were None" and "Union Station" and some awful like "Top o’ the Morning"—between "Going My Way" and "The Quiet Man". Shields meanwhile found steady character work in over thirty films and TV work during the same period. But John Ford’s "The Quiet Man" was to be the apex of both their careers.

"The Quiet Man" remains one of the most beloved films of all time, but it is interesting culturally as well. Fitzgerald plays the roguish matchmaker Michaleen Oge Flynn while Shields plays the kindly Protestant minister, The Reverend Mister Cyril Playfair. Another Abbey player of renown, Eileen Crowe, plays Rev. Playfair’s wife, while an Abbey up-and-comer by the name of Jack MacGowran made his movie debut, playing the fawning little squint, Ignatius Feeney.

"The Quiet Man", ironically, represents a changing-of-the-acting-guard for the works of both Seán O’Casey and Samuel Beckett. O’Casey wrote parts for Fitzgerald, which, in the years ahead, would be played by MacGowran. (MacGowran was on Broadway playing Fluther Good in "The Plough and the Stars" when he passed away from pneumonia in New York in 1973 at the age of 54; his last movie part was in "The Exorcist.")

And in the years ahead MacGowran would become Samuel Beckett’s favorite actor and Beckett would write parts specifically tailored to MacGowran’s talents. “Author and actor are so commonly rooted in spirit,” wrote Mel Gussow in the New York Times in 1970 about MacGowran’s one-man show, Jack MacGowran in the "Works of Samuel Beckett", “that if Beckett were an actor he would be MacGowran, and if MacGowran were a writer he would be Beckett.”

After "The Quiet Man" Fitzgerald’s career tapered down and he made only four more films and a few television appearances. He died in Dublin in 1961. Shields continued to work steadily, especially in television. His last film appearance was with Charlton Heston in "The Pigeon That Took Rome" in 1962. Unsurprisingly, he played a Vatican priest, Monsignor O’Toole. He died in 1970 in California.

The Shields brothers are buried side-by-side in Deansgrange Cemetery, Blackrock, Dublin. Barry Fitzgerald headstone lists only his birth name, William J. Shields. Both, home at last.

---

Dermot McEvoy was born in Dublin in 1950 and immigrated to New York City four years later. He is a graduate of Hunter College and has worked in the publishing industry for his whole career. He is the author of "The 13th Apostle: A Novel of a Dublin Family, Michael Collins, and the Irish Uprising," "Terrible Angel," "Our Lady of Greenwich Village," and "The Little Green Book of Irish Wisdom." He lives in Greenwich Village, New York.

* Originally published in February 2015. 

A well-respected emigrant this Limerick man had lived in Chicago for nine years and was returning to the US when tragedy struck on April 15, 1912.

On April 15, 1912, the Belfast built RMS Titanic sank, after colliding with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew on board. This was one of the deadliest commercial, peacetime maritime disasters in modern history and among those on board were many Irish.

 In the run-up to the anniversary of the disaster, IrishCentral will take a look at the Irish on board – the lucky, unlucky and heroic.

This is an extract from the book “The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony, which tells the tales of the people who were on board the night the ship went down. This book gives those people a voice. In it are stories of agony, luck, self-sacrifice, dramatic escapes, and heroes left behind.

Patrick Dooley

Ticket number: 370376. Paid £7 15s.

Boarded at: Queenstown. Third Class.

From: Patrickswell, Knockainey, Lough Gur, County Limerick.

Destination: 142 East 31st Street, New York city, for onward to Chicago.

A postcard, written by Patrick Dooley (38) from Queenstown, declared:

 ‘I am sailing today, Thursday, on Titanic on her maiden trip to New York, her first trip on the Atlantic. Goodbye. Love, Patrick Dooley’. The postcard showed a man standing in a roadway, cap in hand.

Titled ‘The Irish Emigrant’, a poem beneath ran:

I’m bidding you a long farewell, my Mary kind and true, But I’ll not forget you Darling, in the land I’m going to; They say there’s bread and work for all, and the sun shines always there, But I’ll never forget Ould Ireland were it fifty times as fair, were it fifty times as fair.

Patrick J. Dooley, by all accounts, was an extremely generous and considerate man.

Much regret was felt by the people of Bruff and Loughguir districts when it was learned that Mr Patrick Dooley, son of Mr Edmond Dooley of Patrickswell, was amongst the number who went down with that ill-fated vessel.

Mr Dooley was home on holidays from Chicago, chiefly for the purposes of seeing his aged father, and left in good spirits.

"He was a fine type of our exiled countrymen and on several occasions won distinction in American athletics. Mr Dooley was also one of the truest Irishmen that ever emigrated to the Great Republic of the West and never kept his purse closed when the cause of Ireland needed it."

(The Cork Examiner, 16 May 1912)

Dooley had been living in Chicago for nine years, having emigrated in early 1903, and worked in a hotel. He was on the verge of coming home for good and was only traveling back to the United States for a short time. A letter found in his estate administration papers suggests this strongly, and was written by a solicitor acting for Dooley’s elderly father, who is presumably the source of the lawyer’s information:

1st July, 1913.

Dear Mr Travers,

I enclose papers for Grant of Administration intestate herein. The deceased was drowned on the Titanic and the only property he left was a deposit receipt in the Munster & Leinster Bank for £104 deposited a few days before he sailed out. He may have taken some little money with him, but he was not to remain long over. Have I the place of death described correctly? If not, please return to be amended.

Yours faithfully,

Roger Fox.

The described place of death was ‘in mid-ocean, being a passenger on board the Titanic.’ The single slip of paper lying behind in some safe place at home, signifying a hoard at the bank branch in Bruff, is a poignant image, somehow conveying again Patrick Dooley’s detachment from money as an end in itself. His father, Edmond, who was illiterate, declared in the application to inherit the money left behind that his son was a 38-year-old bachelor, a laborer, who left only his father and one brother surviving in Ireland.

A number of the family had emigrated from the tiny hamlet of Patrickswell, not to be confused with a town of this name in the same county.

The American Red Cross nonetheless had to step in to assist other relatives left in the lurch by the loss of Mr Dooley. The details vary in this description, but there is little doubt that he is the person concerned since that organization alphabetized its caseload:

Report of the American Red Cross (Titanic Disaster) 1913:

No. 87. (Irish.) A motorman, 34 years old, was drowned while returning from a visit to his parents in Ireland. A widowed sister and four children were dependent upon him for support, and his brother and wife and two children had also been helped by him.

The appropriation made will be administered by the local charity organization Society for the benefit of the dependent sister and her family. ($468)

The occupation described here is likely to be most accurate, whereas ‘laborer’ was almost a generic term for ‘Irishman’ when it came to filling out legal papers. As regards age differentials, Patrick Dooley claimed to be 32 when signing aboard the Titanic, while posthumous legal papers put him six years older.

What is known is that Pat Dooley had planned to stay with his brother Richard (37) at East 31st Street, New York. They had only met once during Pat’s near-decade in the USA. Their widowed father, Edmond, still farming, was into his seventies by 1912. It may have been intended that Pat would take over running the farm.

Patrick also had a sister Mary (41), and brothers Michael (39) and John (33). Many of these lives would not have been so damaged had the Cymric sailed as scheduled, four days before the Titanic, on Easter Sunday, 7 April.

“The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony is available online.

* Originally published in 2012.

The name of the victims listed over 1,000 in the World War II Belfast Blitz, which began on this day, April 7, in 1941. 

On the night of April 7 – 8, 1941 Belfast suffered the first of four air attacks by the Germans Air Force, the Luftwaffe. At least 1,000 people were killed in the attacks as the city lay unprepared and undefended. It was believed that the Luftwaffe could not travel that far.

Belfast Blitz: Facts

In total there were four attacks on the County Antrim city. The first (April 7 -8), a small attack, was most likely carried out to test the city’s defenses.

The next took place on Easter Tuesday, April 15, 1941. In this attack, 200 German bombers targeted military and manufacturing sites across the city. Some 900 people were killed and 1,500 were injured as a result of this air raid. Apart from London, this was the greatest loss of life in any night raid during the Blitz.

The third was over the evening and morning May 4 and 5. The death toll was 150. The final attack took place on May 5 – 6.

Read more: Buzzing Belfast is learning to leave its troubles behind

Why did the Belfast Blitz happen? 

Belfast city was a target during second World War due to its large shipyard and aircraft manufacturing base.

On the night of the most fatal of the attacks, Easter Tuesday 1941, an air warden said, "The sirens started at quarter to eleven, and by eleven o'clock my team was on the street – that started six hours of horror, death and destruction."

For several hours, hundreds of tons of high explosive bombs and incendiaries were dropped on the city.

Belfast Blitz: Names of victims

Crowded terraced houses were near the targeted docks area. The dead were stacked in the Falls Road public baths and in a market close to the city center.

Many of the victims could not be identified. If Rosary beads were found in a pocket then it was assumed they were Catholic.

As well as the huge loss of life, there was also extensive damage across the city, as half of the houses in Belfast city were hit by bombs which in turn left 100,000 people homeless.

One Belfast survivor remembered putting out fires across the city.

"Two of our comrades from the Sans Souci station were killed. They were coming along Royal Avenue when a bomb dropped and it left a crater. They drove into the crater," he told BBC New Northern Ireland.

"I saw an Alsatian dog with a dead baby in its mouth. It was running away. I took off my metal helmet and threw it on the ground. The rattle scared the dog and he dropped the baby.

Read more: How Guinness saved Ireland in World War II

"I remember wrapping the baby's body in some old net curtain from one of the bombed houses.

"I left the baby with some soldiers, having attached a note to say that the body was found on York Street... Things like that, you never forget."

He also recalled a friend who was unable to find his mother and father’s bodies after their house was bombed.

"We went down to the stalls in the market. The dead were laid out on them. And I remember going along and lifting the sheeting to look at the bodies. But we never found his parents."

Read more: Irishman shares his horrific World War II experience

Belfast Blitz memorial

There are two monuments in Belfast city where the unidentified were buried in mass graves. Both are on the Falls Road. One is located at the Catholic Milltown Cemetery, the other in the non-denominational City Cemetery.

Have you visited the monuments to the Belfast Blitz? Let us know in the comments section, below. 

Today, April 7, is World Health Day, a global health awareness day celebrated every year under the sponsorship of the World Health Organization (WHO).

With that in mind, we decided to turn our minds to some ancient Feng Shui tips, disgusting drinks, potions, Irish superstitions, and remedies for you to consider while contemplating your health. 

Shakespeare’s witches, with their "Eye of newt, and toe of frog”, could well have been related to some of our Irish ancient ancestors if some of these remedies are to be believed. From healing dead hands, hair clippings, ancient Feng Shui and disgusting drinks and potions, ancient Irish superstitions and remedies were certainly strange.

Read more: Ten best Irish hangover cures (PHOTOS)

Here’s our selection of the top ten Irish cures for World Health Day:

Irish cure for a dead hand

The hand of a corpse was believed to be a cure for all diseases.  Sick people would be brought to a house where a corpse was laid out so that the hand could be laid on them.

Similarly, the corner of the sheet used to wrap a corpse was used to cure a headache or a swollen limb.

Irish cure for burns 

The candles used at funerals were also thought to have curative powers. The butts of the candles would be saved to cure burns. Another Irish cure for burns is said to be a raw potato.

Irish cure for immunity

A bunch of mint tied around your wrist was thought to cure stomach disorders as well as warding off infection and disease.

Ancient Irish Feng Shui

The Irish believed that a sick person’s bed should face north to south and never east to west.

The Irish graveyard cure

Nettles gathered from a churchyard and boiled down were believed to cure water retention when boiled down into a drink.

Curative nature of the sea, according to Irish lore

The ancient Irish believed that if a person had a fever they should be placed on the shore when the tide is coming in. When the tide retreats it would carry the fever and the disease with it.

Read more: An Irish cure for what ails ye - medicinal hot whiskey recipe

How is an iron ring an ancient Irish cure 

An iron ring worn on the fourth finger would ward off rheumatism.

Ancient Irish cure for infertility

It was thought that the seed of dock leaves (Rumex) tied to the left hand of a woman would prevent her from being barren.

To get pure blood

They believed that boiled down carrots would purify the blood.

The Irish cure for fretting

Our ancestors believed that the clippings of the hair and nails of a child tied in linen and placed under the ill person’s bed would cure convulsions and problems with fretting.

Do you know any ancient Irish cures? Let us know about them in the comments section, below. 

Source: www.the-irish-path.com

*Originally published December 2013

On this day in 1926, a woman raised on Merrion Square in Dublin attempted to assassinate the Italian fascist leader Benito Mussolini.

On April 7, 1926, an upper-class, 50-year-old Dublin woman shot Benito Mussolini, Italy's fascist leader, in the face.

How had Violet Gibson’s life gone from the well-heeled upbringing of Merrion Square in Dublin to dying in a mental asylum having attempted to assassinate a world leader and how different the world may have been if she had succeeded?

If she had hit her target Mussolini’s reign as the “strongman” would have ended and his successes could not have emboldened Adolf Hitler. Il Duce’s legacy is still felt in Italy (his granddaughter Alessandra is a Member of the European Parliament) and in Greece, the Golden Dawn proclaim themselves fans of the fascist leader.

What’s worse is that Gibson’s attempted assassination triggered a wave of support for Il Duce which possibly helped strengthen his grip on Italy.



So what drove Gibson to this fateful act?

Her upbringing was one of privilege. Her father was made 1st Baron Ashbourne and went on to serve as Lord High Chancellor of Ireland from 1885 to 1905. She grew up dividing her time between Dublin and London and at the age of 18 was a debutante in the court of Queen Victoria.

It was noted , however, that as a child Gibson was often sick with scarlet fever, pleurisy, bouts of ill-defined "hysteria" and that she had a “violent temper.” During her younger years she also showed an interest in Christian Science and then theosophy, but at the age of 26, in 1902, she converted to Catholicism.

By 1913 Gibson had been married, to an artist, and widowed. She then moved to Paris and worked for pacifist organizations. In this year she contracted Paget's disease (an abnormal breakdown of bone tissue) and a mastectomy left her with a nine-inch scar. She then returned to England where a surgery, for appendicitis, left her with chronic abdominal pain.

Read more: The Irish took sides in the Spanish Civil War

Gibson became more and more obsessed with religion during her 40s. She went on retreats, followed the Jesuit scholar John O'Fallon Pope and became fixated on the ideas of martyrdom and "mortification."

By 1922 she had had a nervous breakdown and was committed to a mental asylum having been declared insane. Two years later, along with a nurse named Mary McGrath, she traveled to Rome where she lived in a convent. By this point, she was convinced that God wanted her to kill someone as a sacrifice.

In February 1925 Gibson got hold of a gun and shot herself in the chest. Miraculously she survived.

In March 1926 Gibson’s mother passed away. By April of that year, her obsession with killing someone had refocused; it was now trained on Mussolini.

On the fateful day, she went to Palazzo del Littorio with her gun wrapped in a black veil and a rock, in case she needed to break Il Duce’s car windshield. While “Il Duce” drove through Piazza del Campidoglio in Rome, on April 7, after leaving an assembly of the International Congress of Surgeons, to whom he had delivered a speech on the wonders of modern medicine, Gibson jumped from the crowd and shot the leader.

Her rock was unnecessary as the leader walked among the crowds just feet from Gibson. Her first shot grazed his nose and on the second shot, the gun misfired. The fascist leader stayed very calm and told the crowds “Don't be afraid. This is a mere trifle." Mussolini was only slightly injured and after having his nose bandaged he continued his parade.

Later he said that while he was ready for “a beautiful death” he did not want to die at the hands of an “old, ugly, repulsive" woman.

In custody for her crimes, Gibson said she shot Mussolini “to glorify God,” who had sent an angel to keep her steady.

The Gibson family wrote to the Italian government to apologize for her actions. Gibson was then declared a "chronic paranoiac" and returned to England and St Andrew's Hospital. She died in 1956. There were no mourners at her funeral.

Benito Mussolini was finally killed on April 28, 1945, during the final days of World War II. He and his mistress were taken to Milan and left in a suburban square hanging upside down from a metal girder above a service station.

Read more: How a Nazi SS storm trooper went from being Hitler’s henchman to an Irish farmer

* Originally pubilshed in 2015.

Bridget Delia Bradley went mad with fear and tried to clamber back out of a lifeboat and on to the sinking Titanic, on April 15, 1912.

On April 15, 1912, the Belfast built RMS Titanic sank after colliding with an iceberg, killing over 1,500 passengers and crew on board. This was one of the deadliest commercial peacetime maritime disasters in modern history and among those on board were many Irish.

In the run-up to the anniversary of the disaster, IrishCentral will take a look at the Irish on board – the lucky, unlucky and heroic.

This is an extract from the book “The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony, which tells the tales of the people who were on board the night the ship went down. This book gives those people a voice. In it are stories of agony, luck, self-sacrifice, dramatic escapes, and heroes left behind.

Bridget Delia Bradley

Ticket number 334914. Paid £7 14s 6d.

Boarded at Queenstown.

Third Class.

From: Ballinahulla, County Kerry; bordering Kingwilliamstown, County Cork.

Destination: 29 William Street, Glen Falls, New York.

She was saved – sitting securely in a lifeboat that was beginning its jolting descent to the water. But Bridget Delia Bradley felt she had to escape from the vessel of her salvation. Demented with fear, she tried to get back on the doomed ship:

"There was a girl from my place, and just when she got down into the lifeboat, she thought that the boat was sinking into the water.

"Her name was Bridget Bradley. She climbed one of the ropes as far as she could and tried to get back into the Titanic again, as she thought she would be safer in it than in the lifeboat. She was just getting up when one of the sailors went out to her and pulled her down again."

-(Daniel Buckley, testifying to the US inquiry, day 12, 3 May 1912)

Read more: Who was the longest-living Irish survivor of the Titanic?

Buckley also mentioned Bridget in a letter he wrote home from the safety of the rescue ship Carpathia:

"Thank God some of us are amongst the saved. Hannah Riordan, Brigie Bradley, Nonie O’Leary and the Shine girl from Lismore are all right."
-(Letter printed in The Cork Examiner, 13 May 1912)

Bridget’s family believed she was rescued in lifeboat No. 4, launched from the starboard side of the sinking Titanic at 1.55 a.m., but this is inconsistent with her being seen by Daniel Buckley, whose own lifeboat departed a little earlier.

Bridget was interviewed by the Daily Times while still recovering from her ordeal at St Vincent’s Hospital in New York:

"I was in bed at the time the accident occurred and the shock, which was a comparatively slight one, did not disturb me greatly. A knock on the doors of our rooms caused us to get up and dress ourselves. I slipped on a lightweight black dress and wrapped a small shawl about me, the only clothes I saved, and went to the deck where I found the most of the passengers assembled.

"There was no disorder on the deck that amounted to anything, and all the officers acted in a manner that convinced us the ship was not in grave danger. The story that the men on board acted like heroes is true in every detail, and it was ‘women first’ in nearly every case except for a few of the steerage passengers who tried to fight their way to the lifeboats and who I have been told were shot by officers of the boat.

"All the lifeboats were lowered while I was on deck and it looked for a time as if I would be left. I saw men lead their wives to the lifeboats and leave them there, returning to the deck, and we on deck were not so horribly frightened as might be thought. Every one of us thought that it was impossible to sink the ship.

"Just as the last lifeboat, the one with Mr Ismay in it, was launched over the side, one of the officers shouted ‘There’s more room in that boat’ and I and eleven other women were crowded into it. This was after 1 o’clock. I don’t know how much, but it was after one. The lifeboat was manned by enough men to care for it properly and immediately on touching the water, the men rowed with all their strength to get away from the ship, so that, if it did go down, we would not be caught in the suction.

"The night was extremely cold, and we womenfolk had little wraps to keep us warm and we huddled there in clusters watching the great ship as it slowly sank. Not until we got off the boat did we fully realize the danger. Then we saw that the boat had tilted forward and that slowly, but surely, she was sinking.

"We saw the bottom row of lights disappear under the water and watched as line after line disappeared, showing us the rapidity of the sinking of the ship. We were entirely surrounded by large cakes of ice and there was no food or water on the boat, and in the long wait for the Carpathia the majority of us prayed for the coming of the ship. When the welcome ship hove in sight many of us were too much exhausted to realize the greatness of the disaster …

"We were picked up at 6 o’clock and I am informed that every one of the boats that were launched from the Titanic were picked up, with the exception of one which turned over and drowned everyone on board. The relief that we experienced when on board the Carpathia is beyond description, but there was with many a fear that this ship might meet the same fate as the Titanic and it was not until the ship touched the port of New York that we all felt safe.

"To realize what we passed through is impossible for anyone who was not on the ship. The hand of death was over us and as we floated out in the frail lifeboats, with no food or water, and as our thirst began to increase, the thought that we might not be picked up, and huddled up in this manner should die of starvation, made us beside ourselves, and as we prayed the smoke-stack of the Carpathia hove in sight …"

"Practically two out of every three who sailed on the Titanic are now at the bottom of the ocean, and when I realize that I was one of the last twelve to leave the ship, I cannot help thinking what might have been.

"The brave men who went down have left a memory in the hearts of every one of us survivors that will linger as long as we live. The ‘women first’ rule was carried out to the letter and those who had womenfolk on board devoted their time to getting the women in the small boats while they themselves were content to remain on deck.

"A few men, including six Chinese, had hidden under the seats of the lifeboats and were carried out, according to the stories on the Carpathia on Monday night, but it is said that two of them were crushed to death by the weight thrown upon them. There were none of them in our boat."

Bridget was the fifth eldest of nine children who lived in a cottage with no bath or electricity. She occasionally went to school barefoot. Older siblings Mary and Michael emigrated to the United States, both settling in Glen Falls, where Mary became a domestic and her brother a fireman.   On discharge from the hospital, a penniless Bridget was assisted by the American Red Cross, receiving $125. She worked as a domestic in Glen Falls for two years before moving to New York and becoming engaged by the wealthy Nicholls family.

She lodged a court claim against the Ocean Steam Navigation Company, owners of the Titanic, in the US District Court, southern district of New York, in company with numerous other litigants. Her claim was for $153 worth of lost personal effects, made up as follows:

"Three pairs high shoes, at $3.50 – $10.50; One lady’s suit, woollen consisting of coat and skirt, $25; Two suits union underwear, flannel $1 – $2; Three pairs woollen stockings, $.50 – $1.50; Three pairs half hose $.50 – $1.50; One lady’s hat with trimmings, $3; One toilet set consisting of brush, comb, soap, tooth brush, one bath towel, two plain towels, one silver soap case, one silver hair pin case and leather case for set – $5; One leather valise – $3.50; Two lady’s dresses, cotton, $3.50 – $7; One black dress, mixed goods, $28; Six white shirt waists, $1 – $6; Cash $25; One large steamer trunk, $10; Paid for medical attendance as result of the collision, $25. Total: $153."

In 1925 Bridget met the supervisor of the Nicholls’ summer estate on Howe Island in the St Lawrence river in Canada. She was 32, he was 40. They were married two days after the following Valentine’s Day at St Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, New York. She was now Mrs Bernard LaSha, and she adopted the first name Delia, a familiar name for Bridget. They settled in Gananoque, Ontario, where their first child, Mary, was born in September 1927. John Joseph arrived fourteen months later, and Rose Henrietta two years after that. Joan Margaret was born in 1931.

By 1929, Delia LaSha, Titanic survivor, had become a boat owner herself. Her husband plowed his savings into a tour boat, named the Sun Dance, to take passengers around the islands of St Lawrence. In the autumn of 1932 he suffered a seizure and on March 29, 1933 died aged 47, at the height of the Great Depression. A few months later, heart worn and suffering from shingles, his widow gave birth to their fifth child, who lived only a few days and was buried with his father.

Bridget could not face the water commerce business herself. She hired a man to operate the Sun Dance, which cut down on her own income, and she took up babysitting to try to make ends meet. In 1951, she suffered a stroke which severely impaired her speech and paralyzed her right arm and leg. The boat was sold.

When the film "Titanic" was shown in the local cinema that same decade, Delia LaSha was guest of honor. Her daughter Mary Higgins recounted: ‘Mom became very emotional during the movie and at times kept shaking her head as if to say it didn’t happen that way. If able to speak, I am sure she would have had many comments to make.’

Three years later she was dead, having outlived her husband by twenty-three years.

According to her death certificate, she was born on January 10, 1893, and passed away on January 24, 1956, aged 63.

Read more: 103 years ago this week my grandmother was booked to go on the Titanic

* “The Irish Aboard the Titanic” by Senan Molony is available online.

* Originally published in 2013.

Origins of Irish guerrilla tactics and how they were modified during the Irish War to be successful.

The origins of Irish guerrilla tactics used during the War of Independence (1919-1921) are difficult to determine. Many writers claimed that the type of guerrilla campaign initiated by the IRA was without precedent, and some officers insisted that their methods were unique and homegrown. However, as do all successful insurgents, the Irish Volunteers/IRA studied the tactics of previous guerrilla wars and adapted the most favorable of them to the Irish terrain and circumstances. The Irish War demonstrated how insurgents can and must modify to be successful.

The War of Independence contributed four concepts that we find in later insurgencies:

1. Irish forces could hold their own against the British only in a guerrilla war.

2. It was not necessary to wait until all conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection can create them – Che Guevara used this later.

3. The Irish countryside was the basic area for armed fighting, but guerrilla principles worked well in Dublin – the Irish War was probably the first urban war to succeed.

4. The Irish made extensive use of roadside explosives – what are now called Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs.

The Irish War of Independence was the first guerrilla war in which there was a significant counterinsurgency use of mechanized vehicles. The Irish had to develop tactics, techniques and procedures to disrupt and disable the British counter-insurgency forces.

Read more: Winston Churchill ordered Black and Tans into Ireland on this day in 1920

Moreover, the primary purpose of the Irish ambush was to acquire weapons. Guevara stated the principle that ‘All attacks should recover the amount of ammunition as that expended’. When the War started in 1919, Britain became a vital source of arms for the IRA. Two things are needed for any guerrilla war, and Michael Collins took the point in providing both: arms and money. Collins did business with gunsmiths in London, German arms dealers, British members of the IRA who worked at collieries in Scotland, criminal gangs in the Mid-lands – in effect, anyone who would take their money. Liverpool Volunteer Paddy Daly recalled: ‘we found the Englishman always willing to do business’.

The British command at the Curragh Camp required that all Lorries on patrol carried a ‘box of 1000 rounds of .303 ammunition’ to supplement that carried by each soldier. (The .303 ammunition was used in British rifles as well as in Lewis and Maxim machine-guns and was the most prevalent ammunition size used by weapons in the War on both sides.) Taking a lorry’s spare ammunition was a prime motive for all Irish ambushes. In fact, at the end of the War in July 1921, it was apparent that the Irish ran out of ammunition: they didn’t run out of weapons, they were running out of ammunition.

Read more: 50,000 military records of Easter Rising and War of Independence released

The British started out using high driving speeds to avoid an ambush. In response, the Irish would dig a shallow trench in the roads to disable the British lorries. As guerrilla wars are always evolving, the Irish found that their simple answer was soon unsuccessful, so by autumn 1920, Irish ambush tactics began to change. To counter the use of armor, the IRA began to rely on interdicting the roads particularly by the use of explosives.

The Irish were not the first to use explosives in ambushes: the first recorded roadside assassination effort by explosives was an attempt on Napoleon in 1803. Irish revolutionaries used explosive devices in the mid 19th century, and by the Fenians in the latter part of the century, but mostly in attacks on barracks and other buildings, not in ambushes. Where the Volunteers/IRA were really the first was to manufacture from raw materials explosives, casings, springs, and all the other necessary bomb components.

The IRA IEDs came from 3 sources:

- Stolen from civilian companies, particularly Scottish quarries and mines

- Stolen from the British military

- Manufactured in Irish munitions factories

At the beginning of the War the most common explosive used was gelignite (a nitric based explosive) stolen from quarries, along with detonators customarily used in collieries. Gelignite was susceptible to freezing and could not be left in the ground for long periods in cold weather, and as a commercial explosive was simply not powerful enough unless used in very large quantities. The supply was insufficient and became more difficult to obtain, so the Irish turned to chemists and others with military experience from WW I to develop home-made explosives.

James O’Donovan was the primary ‘chemist/inventor’ of explosives for the IRA, and the person most responsible for developing and establishing Irish-centered explosive manufacturing. He was a post-graduate chemistry student at UCD and worked directly for Collins.

He began producing fulminate of mercury explosives in 1918 – a notoriously unstable compound. In 1919 Collins directed O’Donovan to develop an explosive that was more powerful, but that ‘men with no technical skill could produce it in a farmhouse kitchen… They have to be fairly foolproof because we can’t have people all over the country having their heads blown off!’

Irish War Flour was O’Donovan’s first original explosive, named after its appearance: it was a nitrated resin using the ingredients of resin, flour, acid and potassium chlorate. Irish War Flour was quite unstable and didn’t have the explosive power he wanted so he kept experimenting.

He called his second explosive compound Irish Cheddar, again named because of its looks. This was his nickname for a form of cheddite, an explosive used quite extensively in the early 20th century. Its ingredients were paraffin, potassium chlorate, nitrobenzene and castor oil.

The first attempt at a road mine in the War took place at Annascaul on 18 August 1920. The IRA command detonated a small charge in the roadway, a lorry was upset, the British surrendered and the Irish took their weapons. The attack at Annascaul utilized a very small mine and was the first used against a vehicle, but an IED was not the norm in ambushes at that time.

In autumn 1920 and thereafter, there was an increase in IRA anti-road and anti-bridge attacks, and they also began to use what we now call IEDs in ambushes with regularity. In the British War Diaries, there were reports of 172 ambushes from then until the Truce in July 1921, and 109 used explosive devices of some sort. The British records of their use are the most accurate, and they indicate that of the 109 attempts there were about 23 instances when the bombs did not cause much damage.

British tactics taught at the Curragh noted ‘Lorries should be so disposed in depth that it becomes difficult for the ambushers, without employing a large force, to ambush the whole column’. The IRA quickly learned the trick of laying multiple roadside IEDs at the same spacing as the British vehicles in a convoy, which usually traveled 300 yards apart.

Having the explosives was not enough – proper placement of IEDs was difficult for the inexperienced Irish – they had little enough training in how to conduct ambushes and placement of men, much less how to use explosives in these attacks. As the War progressed, the Irish found that their IEDs were best initiated not by pressure/contact detonators, but with electrical detonators attached to hidden wires buried in the road and exploded just when they were crossed by a lorry or armored car.

The first major IRA attack with what we would now recognise as an IED with sufficient explosive power to bring the fight to a quick result was on 2 February 1921 in the Clonfin ambush in County Longford. Under the command of Sean MacEoin, the IRA attacked two lorries of Auxiliaries, disabled one, killed four (including the O/C Lieutenant Commander Francis Craven) and wounded nine, and after a short firefight the Auxiliaries surrendered. Following the fight, the Irish recovered twenty rifles and over 1200 rounds of .303 ammunition.

The IRA eventually had 11 foundries making bomb components by the Truce in July 1921. Collins also had his engineers working on armor-piercing ammunition, because his sources could not buy them at any price. However, the Irish were never able to manufacture their own.

The IRA’s use of explosives did not stop with the end of the War of Independence. During the Civil War, on 18 August 1922, a fuel delivery lorry was packed with explosives and set off in Dundalk. The anti-Treaty IRA had set off the bomb to stop the Free State army who were marching on Dundalk barracks, which had been taken over by anti-Treaty forces under Frank Aiken on 14 August.

Though Collins wanted to utilize IEDs as much as possible, he knew their primitive explosives were unreliable and the Irish were inexperienced in their use. As a result there were few ambushes where the IEDs were crucial, rather than ancillary, to the attack itself. However, the Irish War of Independence introduced the IED and the car bomb to the catalogue of guerrilla war tactics.

Sidebar on James O’Donovan (Séamus Ó Donnabháin)

James O’Donovan became IRA Director of Chemicals in 1921.

Apart from devising most of the explosives in the War of Independence, O’Donovan has an ‘interesting’ story. He was arrested during the War of Independence, imprisoned in Mountjoy Prison and Kilmainham Gaol. He went anti-Treaty and imprisoned during the Civil War.

In August 1938, at the request of Sean Russell, he wrote the ‘S-Plan’ a bombing and sabotage campaign targeting England. In his unpublished memoirs O’Donovan wrote that he ‘conducted the entire training of cadre units, was responsible for all but locally-derived intelligence, carried out small pieces of research and, in general, controlled the whole explosives and munitions end’ of S-Plan.

O’Donovan went to Germany in 1939 and became a spy for the Abwehr. Ernst Weber-Drohl, an Abwehr agent, was landed by submarine in County Sligo in February 1940, and reported to O’Donovan as his contact. The Germans requested O’Donovan concentrate his S-Plan attacks on military rather than civilian targets.

Increases in the security surrounding infrastructure targets in Britain had a major effect on the IRA’s ability to conduct operations, and their attacks tapered off around early to mid-1940. At the time, O’Donovan noted the S-plan was: ‘hastily conceived … with ill-equipped and inadequately-trained personnel, too few men and too little money....and fizzled out like a damp and inglorious squib’. In the 1960’s, O’Donovan assessed the results: ‘It brought nothing but harm to Ireland and the IRA’.

James O’Donovan died in Dublin on 4 June 1979.

Read more: True scale and violence of Ireland War of Independence as seen from Kerry

* Originally published in April 2018 issue of An Cosantóir (The Defender) The Irish Defence Forces Magazine."Joseph Connell is the author of Dublin in Rebellion: A Directory 1913 – 1923.

The term "Black Irish" has been in circulation among Irish emigrants and their descendants for centuries. Yet, as a subject of historical discussion, it is almost never referred to in Ireland.

There are a number of different claims as to the origin of the term, none of which are possible to entirely prove or disprove.

The term is commonly used to describe people of Irish origin who have dark features, black hair, a dark complexion and dark eyes.

A quick review of Irish history reveals that the island was subject to a number of influxes of foreign cultures. The Celts arrived on the island about the year 500 B.C.

Whether or not this was an actual invasion or rather a more gradual migration and assimilation of their culture by the native Irish is open to conjecture, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that this latter explanation is more likely.

The next great influx came from Northern Europe, with Viking raids occurring as early as 795 A.D. The defeat of the Vikings at the Battle of Clontarf in the year 1014 by Brian Boru marked the end of the struggle with the invaders and saw the subsequent integration of the Vikings into Irish society. The migrants became 'Gaelicized' and formed septs (a kind of clan) along Gaelic lines.

The Norman invasions of 1170 and 1172 led by Strongbow saw yet another wave of immigrants settle in the country, many of whom fiercely resisted English dominance of the island in the centuries that followed. The Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century saw the arrival of English and Scottish colonists in Ulster after the Flight of the Earls.

Each of these immigrant groups had their own physical characteristics and all, with the exception of the Ulster Planters, assimilated to some degree into Irish society, many claiming to be "more Irish than the Irish themselves"

The Vikings were often referred to as the "dark invaders" or "black foreigners." The Gaelic word for foreigner is "gall" and for black (or dark) is "dubh."

Many of the invaders' families took Gaelic names that utilized these two descriptive words. The name Doyle is in Irish "O'Dubhghaill" which literally means "dark foreigner" which reveals their heritage as an invading force with dark intentions.

Read more: The Black Irish - what are the truths and myths

The name Gallagher is "O Gallchobhair" which translates as "foreign help." The traditional image of Vikings is of pale-skinned blond-haired invaders but their description as "dark foreigners" may lead us to conclude that their memory in folklore does not necessarily reflect their physical description.

The Normans were invited into Ireland by Dermot McMurrough and were led by the famous Strongbow. The Normans originated in France, where black-haired people are not uncommon. As with the Vikings, these were viewed as a people of "dark intentions" who ultimately colonized much of the Eastern part of the country and several larger towns.

Many families, however, integrated into Gaelic society and changed their Norman name to Gaelic and then Anglo equivalents: the Powers, the Fitzpatricks, Fitzgeralds, Devereuxs, Redmonds.

It is possible that the term "Black Irish" may have referred to some of these immigrant groups as a way of distinguishing them from the "Gaels," the people of ultimately Celtic origin.

Another theory of the origin of the term "Black Irish" is that these people were descendants of Spanish traders who settled in Ireland and even descendants of the few Spanish sailors who were washed up on the west coast of Ireland after the disaster of the Spanish Armada of 1588.

It is claimed that the Spanish married into Irish society and created a new class of Irish who were immediately recognizable by their dark hair and complexion. There is little evidence to support this theory and it is unlikely that any significant number of Spanish soldiers would have survived long in the war-torn place that was 16th century Ireland.

It is striking, though, how this tale is very similar to the ancient Irish legend of the Milesians who settled in Ireland having traveled from Spain.

The theory that the "Black Irish" are descendants of any small foreign group that integrated with the Irish and survived is unlikely. It seems more likely that "Black Irish" is a descriptive term rather than an inherited characteristic that has been applied to various categories of Irish people over the centuries.

One such example is that of the hundreds of thousands of Irish peasants who emigrated to America after the Great Famine of 1845 to 1849. 1847 was known as "black 47." The potato blight which destroyed the main source of sustenance turned the vital food black. It is possible that the arrival of large numbers of Irish after the famine into America, Canada, Australia and beyond resulted in their being labeled as "black" in that they escaped from this new kind of black death.

Immigrant groups throughout history have generally been treated poorly by the indigenous population (or by those who simply settled first).

Derogatory names for immigrant groups are legion and in the case of those who left Ireland include "Shanty Irish" and almost certainly "Black Irish." It is also possible that within the various Irish cultures that became established in America that there was a pecking order, a class system that saw some of their countrymen labeled as "black."

The term "Black Irish" has also been applied to the descendants of Irish emigrants who settled in the West Indies. It was also used in Ireland by Catholics in Ulster Province as a derogatory term to describe the Protestant Planters.

While it at various stages was almost certainly used as an insult, the term "Black Irish" has emerged in recent times as a virtual badge of honor among some descendants of immigrants. It is unlikely that the exact origin of the term will ever be known and it is also likely that it has had a number of different iterations, depending on the historical context. It remains, therefore, a descriptive term used for many purposes, rather than a reference to an actual class of people who may have survived the centuries.

Visit The Information about Ireland site to read more about Irish history, culture, and heritage. 

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* Originally published 2013.

IrishCentral has put together a list of the top 100 common Irish surnames with a little explanation of where these names come from.

Whether you're looking to trace your family crest or trying to trace your family roots, this list will point you in the right direction. If your name does not appear in this list, you may find it in our comprehensive list of 300 most common Irish surnames and their meanings.

From Aherne to Whelan, here is our top 100 Irish names:

Aherne, Ó hEachtighearna / Ó hEachthairn

In Irish, Ó hEachtighearna / Ó hEachthairn, can possibly mean "lord of horses". Originally Dalcassian, this sept migrated from east Clare to Co. Cork. In County Waterford the English name Hearn is a synonym of Hearn.

MacAleese, Mac Giolla Íosa

In Irish, Mac Giolla Íosa, means "son of the devotee of Jesus". The name of a prominent Derry sept. There are many variants of the name such as MacIliese, MacLeese, MacLice, MacLise, etc. The best known of this spelling, the painter Daniel MacLise, was a family of the Scottish highlands, know as MacLeish, which settled in Cork.

Allen, Ó hAillín

This name is usually of Scottish or English origin, but sometimes Ó hAillín in Offaly and Tipperary has been anglicized Allen as well as Hallion. Occasionally also in Co. Tipperary Allen is found as a synonym of Hallinan. As Alleyn, it occurs frequently in medieval Anglo-Irish records. The English name Allen is derived from that of a Welsh saint.

MacAteer, Mac an tSaoir

Meaning "saor" or "craftsman". An Ulster name for which the Scottish MacIntyre, of similar derivation, is widely substituted. Ballymacateer is a place-name in Co. Armagh, which is its homeland. Mac an tSaoir is sometimes anglicized Wright in Fermanagh.

MacAuley, Awley

There are two distinct septs of this name, viz. MacAmhalghaidh of Offaly and West Meath, and the more numerous MacAmhlaoibh, a branch of the MacGuires, which, as MacAmhlaoibh, gives the form Gawley in Connacht. Both are derived from personal names. The latter must not be confused with MacAuliffe.

MacAuliffe, Mac Amhlaoibh

An important branch of the McCarthys whose chief was seated at Castle MacAuliffe. The name is almost peculiar to south-west Munster.

Barry, de Barra

The majority of these names are of Norman origin, i.e. de Barr (a place in Wales); they became completely hibernicized. Though still more numerous in Munster than elsewhere, the name is widespread throughout Ireland. Barry is also the anglicized form of Ó Báire (see under Barr) and Ó Beargha (meaning "spear-like", according to Woulfe), a small sept of Co. Limerick.

Blake, deBláca (more correctly le Bláca)

One of the "Tribes of Galway", an epithet name meaning "black", which superseded the original Cadell. They are descended from Richard Caddell, Sheriff of Connacht in 1303. They became and long remained very extensive landowners in Co. Galway.  Branch settled in Co. Kildare where their name is perpetuated in three town lands called Blakestown.

Brennan, Ó Braonáin

The word "braon" has several meanings, possibly "sorrow" in this case. It is the name of four unrelated septs, located in Ossory (or Osraige, present-day County Kilkenny and western County Laois), east Galway, Kerry, and Westmeath. The name of the County Fermanagh sept of Ó Branáin was also anglicized to Brennan, as well as Brannan. 

O'Brien, Ó Briain 

A Dalcassian sept, deriving its name from historical importance from the family of King Brian Boru. Now very numerous in other provinces as well as Munster, being the fifth most numerous name in Ireland. In some cases O'Brien has been made a synonym of O'Byrne and others of the Norman Bryan.

Browne, De Brún 

More correctly le  Brún ("brown"). One of the Tribes of Galway. Other important families of Browne were established in Ireland from the Anglo-Norman invasion onwards. The Browns of Killarney, who came in the sixteenth century, intermarried with the leading Irish families and were noted for their survival as extensive Catholic landowners throughout the period of the Penal Laws (the Kenmare associated with their name is in Co. Limerick). The Browne family shown on the map in Co. Limerick is of Camus and of earlier introduction. Yet, another important family of the name was of the Neale, Co. Mayo. In that county Browne has also been used as a synonym of (O) Bruen.

Burk, de Burgh, de Búrca

This one of the most important and most numerous Hiberno-Norman names. First identified with Connacht, it is now numerous in all the provinces (least in Ulster). Many sub-septs of it were formed, including MacHugo, MacGibbon, Mac Seoinín (Jennings), MacRedmond, etc.

Butler 

Always called deBuitléir in Irish, though it is of course properly le Butler, not de. It is one of the great Norman-Anglo names, which, however, did not soon become hibernicized like the Burkes, etc. Historically, it is mainly identified with the Ormond country. It is now very numerous in all the provinces except Ulster.

MacCabe, Mac Cába

A galloglass (from Irish: "gall óglaigh" means foreign warriors) family with the O'Reillys and the O'Rourkes, which became a recognized Breffny sept. Woulfe suggests "cába" ("cape"), a surname of the nickname. Having regards to their origin, it is more likely to be from a non-Gaelic personal name.

Callaghan, Ó Ceallacháin

The derivation from "ceallach",  meaning "strife", which usually given, is questioned, but no acceptable alternative has been suggested. The eponymous ancestor in this case was Ceallacháin, King of Munster (d. 952). The sept was important in the present Co. Cork until the seventeenth century and the name is still very numerous there. The chief family was transplanted under the Cromwellian regime to east Clare, where the village of O'Callghan's Mills is called after them.

Campbell, Mac Cathmhaoil

From Irish "cathmhaoil", meaning "battle chief". An Irish sept in Tyrone; in Donegal it is usually of Scottish galloglass origin, viz. Mac Ailín a branch of the clan Campbell (whose name is from "cam béal", meaning "crooked mouth"). Many Campbells are of more recent Scottish immigrants. See MacCawell. The name has been abbreviated to Camp and even Kemp in Co. Cavan.

MacCarthy, Mac Ćarthaigh

Meaning "son of Cárthach", from Irish "cárthach" - "loving". The chief family of the Eoghanacht and one of the leading septs of Munster, prominent in the history of Ireland from the earliest times to the present. MacCarthy is the most numerous "Mac" name in Ireland.

Cassidy, Ó Caiside

A Fermanagh family of ollavs (professors or learned men) and physicians to the Maguires. Now numerous in all the provinces except Connacht.

Clery, Cleary, Ó Cléirigh

From Irish "cléireach", meaning "clerk". One of the earliest hereditary surnames. Originally of Kilmacduagh (Co. Galway), the sept was dispersed and after the thirteenth century settled in several parts of the country; the most important branch were in Donegal, where they became notable as poets and antiquaries. In modern times, the name is found mainly in Munster and Dublin.

O'Connor, Ó Conchobhair

The name of six distinct and important septs. In Connacht there were O'Connor and O'Conor Don (of which was the last High King of Ireland), with its branches O'Conor Roe and O'Conor Sligo; Also O'Conor Faly (i.e. of Offaly), O'Connor Kerry and O'Connor of Corcomroe (north Clare). The prefix, "O", formerly widely discarded, has been generally resumed. Similarly the variant from Connors has been O'Connor again.

(O) Conroy, Conree, Conary, Conry

These mainly Connacht names, owing to the similarity of the anglicized forms, have become virtually indistinguishable. They represent four Gaelic originals, viz. Mac Conraoi (Galway and Clare), Ó Conraoi (Galway), Ó Conaire (Munster), and Ó Maolchonaire (an important literary family of Co. Roscommon).

Cooney, Ó Cuana

Originally of Tyrone, this family later migrated to north Connacht. The Cooneys of east Clare and south-east Galway may be of different origin. (For the probable derivation see Coonan.)

MacCormack, Cormick, Mac Cormaic

This name, just like MacCormican, is formed from the forename Cormac. It is numerous throughout all the provinces, the spelling MacCormick being more usual in Ulster. For the most part it originated as a simple patronymic; the only recognized sept of the name was of the Fermanagh-Longford area. Many of the MacCormac(k) families of Ulster are of Scottish origin, being a branch of the clan Buchanan-MacCormick of MacLaine.

Daly, Dawley, Ó Dálaigh

From Irish "dálach" or "dáil", meaning "assembly". One of the greatest names in Irish literature. Originally from West Meath, with sub-septs in several different localities. As that in Desmond, it appears in the records as early as 1165 - it is probable that this was a distinct sept.

Darcy, Ó Dorchaidhe

From "dacha", meaning "dark" in Irish. One of the "Tribes of Galway", also anglicized as Dorsey, it is the name of two septs, one in Mayo and Galway, the other in Co. Wexford.

(O) Delaney, Ó Dubhshláine

Meaning "descendant of Dubhshláine" or "Dubhshláinge" ("black of the Slaney"). The prefix "O" has been completely discarded in the anglicized form of the name. It appears as Delane in Mayo. Both now and in the past, it is of Leix (County Laois) and Kilkenny.

(O) Dempsey, Ó Díomasaigh

From Irish "díomasach", meaning "proud". A powerful sept in Clanmalier. O'Dempsey was one of the very few chiefs who defeated Strongbow in a military engagement. Many of his successors distinguished themselves as Irish patriots and they were ruined as a result of their loyalty to James II. The name is now numerous in all the provinces.

Disney

Derived from a French place-name, Isigny-sur-Mer, and originally written D'Isigny, "from Isigny", the name Disney occurs quite frequently in the records of several Irish counties in the south and midlands since the first half of the seventeenth century.

(O) Dolan, Ó Dúbhláin

The general accepted form in Irish today is Ó Dúbhláin (mod. Ó Dúláin) as given by Woulfe and others. O'Dolean, later Dolan, derives from Ó Dobhailen, the name of a family on record since the twelfth century in the baronies of Clonmacnowen, Co. Galway, and Athlone, Co. Roscommon, in the heart of the Uí Mainecountry and quite distinct from Ó Doibhilin (Devlin). There has been a movement north-eastwards so that now the name Dolan is numerous in Co. Leitrim, Fermanagh, and Cavan as well Co. Galway and Roscommon.

Mac Donagh, Mac Donnchadha

Meaning "son of Donagh". A branch of the MacDermots of Connacht, where the name is very numerous. In Connemara, the name is usually that of a branch of the O'Flahertys. The MacDonagh sept in Co. Cork were a branch of the McCarthys: the name is now rare there and, apparently, many of these resumed the name MacCarthy.

O'Donnell,  Ó Domhnaill

The main sept, one of the most famous in Irish history, especially in the seventeenth century, is of Tirconnell; another is of Thomond, and a third of the Uí Maine (Hy Many, in Co. Galway).

(O) Donoghue, Donohoe, Ó Donnchadha

An important sept in Desmond: where the name was perpetuated in the territory called Onaght O'Donoghue. There also were two others in Counties Galway and Cavan, where the spelling Donohoe is usual. According to Dr. John Ryan, there was another O'Donoghue sept in Co. Tipperary of Eoghanacht descent.

O'Dowd, Dowda, Doody, Duddy 

This is one of the 'O' names with which the prefix has been widely retained, O'Dowd being more usual than Dowd. Other modern variants are O'Dowdy and Dowds, with Doody, another synonym, found around Killarney. O'Dowd, which comes from Ó Dubhda, which means "black" or "dark complexioned", was first found in county Mayo. A branch settled in Kerry where they are called Doody. Another small sept of Ó Dubhda is in Co. Derry and they are usually Duddy now.

Doyle, Ó Dubhghaill, MacDowell, Mac Dowell, Mac Dubhghaill

Meaning "descendant of Dubhghaill ("dark stranger")". This is the Irish from of the name of the Scottish family of Macdugall, which came from the Hebrides of galloglasses, and settled in Co. Roscommon, where Lismacdowell locates them. Doyle, rarely found as O'Doyle in modern times, stands high on the list of Irish surnames arranged in order of numerical strength, holding the twelfth place with approximately 21,000 people out of a population of something less than 4 million. Though now widely distributed, it was once most closely associated with the counties of southeast Leinster (Wicklow, Wexford, and Carlow) in which it is chiefly found today, and in the records of the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

(O) Duffy, Ó Dubhthaigh

Duffy or O'Duffy is a numerous name in all of the provinces except Munster. Modern statistics show that is now the most numerous name in Co. Monaghan.

(O) Dwyer,  Ó Duibhir

From "dubh" and "odhar", gen. "uidhir", meaning "duncoloured". Of Kilnamanagha, a leading sept in mid-Tipperary. A great name with resistance to English domination.

Mac Fadden, Fayden, Mac Pháidín

From "Paídí n", a diminutive of Pádraig or Patrick. An Ulster name, of both Scottish and Irish origin. Without the "Mac", it is found in Mayo.

Fanning, Fannin, Fainín

A Name of Norman origin, prominent in Co. Limerick, where Fanningstown, formerly of Ballyfanning, indicates the location. They were formerly of Ballingarry, Co. Tipperary, where in the fifteenth century the head of the family was, like Irish chiefs, officially described as "captain of his nation". Fannin is a variant.

Fitzgerald, Mac Gerailt

One of the two greatest families, which came to Ireland as a result of the Anglo-Norman invasion. It had two main divisions, Desmond (of whom are the holders of the ancient titles Knight of Kerry and Knight of Glin); and Kildare, whose leaders held almost regal sway up to the time of the Rebellion of Silken Thomas and the execution of Henry VIII of Thomas and his near relatives in 1537. The bane is now very numerous.

Fitzpatrick, Mac Giolla Phádraig

Meaning "devotee of St. Patrick". The only Fitz name of Gaelic-Irish origin, the main sept being located in Ossory (or Osraige, present-day County Kilkenny and western County Laois). The name is numerous also in Fermanagh, where families so called are said to be of MacGuire stock.

O'Flaherty, Laverty 

From "Flaithbhertaig", meaning "bright leader". The O'Flahertys possessed the territory on the east side of Lough Corrib until the thirteenth century when, under pressure from the Anglo-Norman invasion into Connacht, they moved westwards to the other side of the lake and became established there. The head of the sept was known as Lord of Moycullen and as Lord of Iar-Connacht, which, at its largest, extended from Killary Harbour to the Bay of Galway and included the Aran Islands.

Flanagan, Ó Flannagáin

From "flann", meaning "ruddy" or "red". Of the several septs of the name that of Connacht is the most important: their chief ranked as one of the "royal lords" under O'Connor, King of Connacht.

Flood

Some Floods are of English extraction, but in Ireland they are plainly Ó Maoltuile or Mac Maoltuile, abbreviated to Mac an Tuile and Mac Tuile anglicized MacAtilla or MacTully as well as Flood. Tuile means "flood" but probably it is here for "toile", gen. of "toil" or "will", i.e. the "will of God". In parts of Ulster, Flood is used for the Welsh Floyd. (Welsh llwyd. Grey).

(O) Flynn, Flyng, Ó Floinn

Another name derived from "flann", meaning "ruddy". This numerous and widespread name originated in a number of different places, including Kerry and Clare. Of the two in Co. Cork one was a branch of the Corca Laoidhe, the other, lords of Muskerylinn (Muiscre Uí Fhloinn); in north Connacht the O’Flynns were leading men under the royal O’Connors, and there was also an erenagh family there; while further West on the shores of Lough Conn another distinct erenagh family was located. For the name in Ulster is an indigenous sept.

(O) Gallagher, Ó Gallchobhair

This name, from "gallchobhar" (meaning "foreign help"), has at least 23 variant spellings in anglicized forms, several of them beginning with Gol instead of Gal. It is that of one of the principal septs of Donegal.

MacGowan, Mac an Ghabhann, Mac Gabhann

In Co. Cavan, the homeland of this sept, the name has been widely changed by translation to Smith (though Smithson was a truer translation); but in outlying areas of Breffny MacGowan is retained.

(O) Grady, Ó Grádaigh

From "gráda", meaning "illustrious". A Dalcassian sept. The leading family went to Co. Limerick, but the majority are still in Clare, where the prefix "O" is retained more than anywhere else. An important branch changed their name to Brady in the late sixteenth century. The well-known name Grady has to a large extent absorbed the rarer Gready, which is properly a Mayo name.  This resulted in the name of Grady being numerous in north Connacht and adjacent areas of Ulster.

MacGrath, Magrath, Mac Graith, Mag Raith

Derived from the personal name, which in this case is Craith, not Raith. The name of two distinct septs; namely (i) that of Thomond, who supplied hereditary ollamhs in poetry to the O'Briens, a branch of whom migrated to Co. Wexford; and (ii) of Termon MacGrath in north-west Ulster, a co-arb family. MacGrath is often called MacGraw in Co. Down and MacGragh in Donegal.

(O) Hagan, Ó hÁgáin

It is fairly well established that this name was originally Ó hÓgáin (from "óg", meaning "young"). It is that of an important Ulster sept: the leading family was of Tullahogue. Ó hAodhagáin, also anglicized O'Hagan, is said to be a distinct sep of Oriel, but owing to proximity of Co. Tyrone and Armagh, they are now indistinguishable. The Offaly name mentioned by Woulfe is now extinct or absorbed by Egan in Leinster.

Hanlon, Ó hAluain

Possibly from "luan", meaning "champion", and intensified by "an". One of the most important of the septs of Ulster. The present association of the name with West Munster is of comparatively recent inception.

O'Hara, Ó hEaghra

An important dual sept located in Co. Sligo, the chiefs being O'Hara Boy ("buidhe") and O'Hara Reagh ("riabhach"). A branch migrated to the glens of Antrim.

(O) Healy, Hely

This is Ó hÉalaighthe in Munster, sometimes anglicized Healihy, and ÓhÉilidhe in north Connacht, derived respectfully from words meaning "ingenious" and "claimant". Ballyhelyon Lough Arrow was the seat of the altar. The Munster sept was located in Donoughmore, Co. Cork, whence was taken the title conferred on the Protestant branch.

(O) Heaney, Heeney

The Principal sept of this name is Ó hÉighnigh in Irish, important and widespread in Oriel, formerly stretching its influence into Fermanagh. Hegney is a variant. Another family of the name Ulster were erenaghs of Banagher in Co. Derry. Minor septs of Ó hÉanna (Éanna, old form of Enda), also anglicized Heaney, were of some note in Clare, Limerick, and Mayo up to the seventeenth century.

(O) Higgins, Ó hUigín

From an Old-Irish word akin to Viking, not from "uige". A sept of the southern Uí Néill, which migrated to Connacht. The O'Higgins father and son of South American fame came from Ballinary, Co. Sligo, not Ballina.

(O) Hogan, Ó hÓgain

Hogan comes from "og", meaning "young". Three septs are so called: one is Dalcassian, and one of Lower Dormond (sometimes regarded as the same); there is also one of the Corca Laoidhe. 

Joyce 

Though not Gaelic and sometimes found in England of non-Irish origin, Joyce may certainly be regarded as a true Irish name, and more particularly a Connacht one. The first Joyce to come to Ireland of whom there is authentic record was Thomas de Jorse or Joyce, stated by Mac Firbis (Dubhaltach Mac Fhirbhisigh) to be a Welshman, who in 1283 married the daughter of O'Briend, Prince of Thomond, and went with her by sea to Co. Galway.

Kane, O Cahan, Ó Catháin

As lords of Keenaght, the O'Kanes were a leading sept in Ulster up to the time of the plantation of Ulster. The name is still very numerous in its original homeland.

Keating

One of the earliest Hibernicized Anglo-Norman families, whose name was gaelicized Ćeitinn. They settled in south Leinster. The historian Dr. Geoffrey Keating was of Co. Tipperary. The name with the prefix "Mac" is associated exclusively with the Downpatrick area, where MacKetian is a synonym of it. The theory that Keating is derived from Mac Eitienne is improbable. Woulfe makes it toponymic. The most acceptable suggestion is that it is from Cethyn, a Welsh personal name.

(O) Kelly, Ó Ceallaigh

The derivation of Kelly is uncertain: the most probable suggestion is that it is from "ceallach", meaning "strife". The most important and numerous sept of this name is that of the Uí Maine. Kelly is the second most numerous name in Ireland. In 1890 less than one percent of them had the prefix "O", but this has been to some extent resumed.

Mac Kenna, Kennagh, Mac Cionaoith

A branch of the southern Uí Neill, mainly located in Co. Monaghan, where they were lords of Truagh; the name is now fairly numerous also in Leinster and Munster. Locally in Clare and Kelly the last syllable is stressed, giving the variants Kennaw, Ginna, Gna, etc.

Kennedy, Ó Cinnéide

From Irish "ceann", meaning "head", and "éidigh" - ugly. An important Dalcassian sept of east Clare, which settled in north Tipperary and spread thence as far as Wexford, whence came the family of President J.F. Kennedy. The Scottish Kennedys are by remote origin Irish Gaels.

Lawless, Laighléis

From the Old-English "laghles", meaning "outlaw". The name, introduced into Ireland after the Anglo-Norman invasion, is now numerous in Counties Dublin and Galway. It was one of the "Tribes of Kilkenny", but has now no close association with the city.

(O) Leahy, Ó Laochdha

From Iris "laochda", meaning "heroic". This name is very numerous in Munster but not elsewhere. It is, basically, distinct from Lahy, though they have been used synonymously.

(O) Leary, Ó Laoghaire

Laoghaire was one of the best-known personal names of Ancient Ireland. A sept of the Corca Laoidhe established in Muskerry, of importance in all fields of national activity, especially in literature, and in the military sphere both at home and as the Wild Geese.

(O) Lennon, Lenna, Ó Leannáin, Linnane, Leonard, Linnegar, MacAlinion

Possibly from "leann", meaning "a cloak" or "mantle"; "leanán", meanings "paramour", has also been suggested. This is the name of several distinct septs located respectively in Counties Cork, Fermanagh, and Galway. The last named is of the Sodhan pre-Gaelic stock. The Fermanagh family were erenaghs of Lisgoole. Ó Leannáin is also used as a synonym of Lineen (Ó Luinín), another Fermanagh erenagh family. Further confusion arises from the fact that these have been widely changed to the English name Leonard.

Mac Loughlin, Mac Lochlainn

From a Norse personal name. Of Inishowen. A senior branch of the Northern Uí Néill. They lost their early importance as a leading sept of Tirconnell in the thirteenth century, but are still very numerous in their original homeland - Counties Donegal and Derry - where their name is usually spelt MacLaughlin; MacLoughlin, also numerous, is more widespread. Minor septs in Connacht were akin to the MacDermota and the O'Connors.

Mac Mahon, Mac Mathghamhna, mod. Mac Mathúna

From "mathghamhan", meaning "bear". The name of two septs, both of importance. That of Thomond descends from Mahon O'Brien, grandson of Brian Ború. MacMahon is now the most numerous name in Co. Clare. In later times the majority of the many of the name were from the Co. Monaghan, where McMahons are numerous today, though less so in Thomond (present-day County Clare and County Limerick).

(O) Malley, Mailey, Ó Máille

From "meall", meaning "peasant" in Irish. A branch of the Cenél Eoghain located in Tyrone, where their territory was known as "O'Mellan's Country". They were hereditary keepers of the Bell of St. Patrick. 

(O) Malone, Ó Maoileoin 

Although Malone is a genuine 'O' name, being in Irish Ó Maoileoin (meaning "descendant of the follower of St. John"), it is never met with in English with its prefix. The Malones are an ancient sept, associated with the O'Connors of Connacht, and for centuries their principal family was associated with the Abbey of Clonmacnoise, to which they furnished many abbots and bishops. For a time Clonmacnoise was an independent see ("see", i.e. the place in which a cathedral church stands, identified as the seat of authority of a bishop or archbishop). before being united with Ardagh.

(O) Meara, Mara, Ó Meadhra

From "meadhar", meaning "merry". This well-known sept, which has produced many distinguished men and women, gave its name to the village of Toomevara, which locates their homeland. This one of the few "O" names, from which the prefix was never very widely dropped.

Molloy, Mulloy, Ó Maolmmhuaidh

The adjective "muadh", denotes "bit" and "soft", as well "noble". An important sept of Fercal in mid-Leister. Molly is an anglicized form of Ó Maolaoidh. Apart from five variant spellings, such as Maloy and Mulloy, Molloy has been officially recorded as synonym of Mulvogue (Connacht), Logue (Co. Donegal), Mullock (Offaly), Mulvihill (Kerry), and Slowey (Co. Monaghan), while Maloy has been used for MacCloy in Co. Derry.

(O) Moran

Apart from MacMorran of Fermanagh, which has inevitably been changed to Moran, there are a number of distinct septs of Ó Moráin and Ó Moghrain, whose name is anglicized Moran. Four of these are of Connacht - in which province the name is much more numerous  than elsewhere - originally located (a) at Elphin in Co. Roscommon (akin to the O'Connors), (b) in Co. Leitrim (of the Muinitir Eolais), (c) in. Co. Mayo at Ardanee, (d) in Co. Galway, a minor branch of the Uí Maine. The Leitrim families are also called Morahan, as is the fifth to be enumerated, namely that of Offaly, where Morrin is a synonym.

Moynihan, Ó Muimhneacháin, Muimhneach

Meaning "descendant of Muimhneacháin" ("Munsterman"). Although there was a small sept of this name, sometimes changed to Munster, in Mayo, families so called belong almost exclusively to south-west Munster, Moynihan being very numerous on the borders of two counties. Minihan, another form of the name, is mainly found in Cork.

(O) Mulligan, Ó Maolagáin

Probably a diminutive of "maol" (see MacMullen). An important sept in Donegal, much reduced at the time of the Plantation of Ulster and now found more in Co. Mayo and Monaghan.

(O) Murphy, Ó Murchadh

Murphy is the most numerous name in Ireland. The resumption of the prefixes "O" and "Mac", which is a modern tendency with most Gaelic-Irish names, has not taken place in the case of Murphy.

(Mac) Nally, Mac Anally, Mac an Fhailghih

From "failgheach", meaning "poor man. Without the prefix "Mac" this name now is found mainly in Mayo and Roscommon; with the "Mac" it belongs to Oriel (Airgíalla in Irish, an ancient kingdom in northeast Ireland). Woulfe says that the Mayo Nallys are of Norman or Welsh oigin and acquired a Gaelic name. This is unlikely in the case of the MacNallys of Ulster as there they are often called Mac Con Ulaidh ("son of the hound of Ulidia", i.e. eastern Ulster). In the "census" of 1659 it appears as MacAnully, MacEnolly, MacNally, and Knally, all in Oriel or in counties adjacent thereto.

Mac Namara, Mac Conmara

Meaning "hound of the sea". The most important sept of the Dál gCais (Dalcassians) after the O'Briens, to whom they were marshals.

O'Neill 

O'Neill is one of the proudest Irish names. It means "descended from Niall" - one of the great early Irish chieftains, Niall of the Nine Hostages. "Niall" can mean "passionate" or "champion". 

(O) Nolan, Knowlan, Ó Nualláin

From "nuall", meaning "shout". In early times holding hereditary office under the Kings of Leinster, the chief of this sept was known as Prince of the Foherta, i.e. the Barony of Forth, in the present county of Carlow, where the name was and still is numerous. A branch migrated to east Connacht and Co. Longford. In Roscommon and Mayo, Nolan is used synonymously with Holohan (from the genitive plural); and in Fermanagh as an Anglicized form of ÓhUltacháin (Hultaghan). There was also a sept of the name of Corca Laoidhe, which is now well represented in Co. Kerry.

Prendergast, de Priondragás

One of the powerful families, which came to Ireland at the time of the Anglo-Norman invasion. They are still found mainly in the places of their original settlement. Some of those in Mayo assumed the name FitzMaurice.

MacQuaid, Quade, Mac Uaid

Meaning "son of Wat". A well-known name in Co. Monaghan and adjacent areas. Without the prefix "Mac" the name is also found in Co. Limerick. 

(O) Quinn

Quinn is one of the most numerous Irish surnames, the number of people in Ireland so called at the present day being estimated at seventeen thousand: in the list of commonest surnames it occupies twentieth place in the country as a whole and first place in Co. Tyrone, though widespread in many counties. Tyrone is the place of origin of one of the five distinct septs of this name. The Gaelic form is Ó Cuinn, which means "descendant of Conn".

(O) Rafferty, Ó Raithbheartaigh, mod. Ó Raifeartaigh 

Though etymologically this name (from "rath bheartach", meaning "prosperity wielder") is distinct from Ó Robhartaigh (from "robharta", meaning "full tide") anglicized O'Roarty, these two names have been treated as one, at least since the fifteenth century. As co-arbs of St. Columcille on Tory Island, Roarty is now mainly in Co. Donegal, while Rafferty is of Co. Tyrone and Co. Lough.

(O) Rahilly, Ó Raithile

This well-known Munster family originated as a branch of the Cenél Eoghain in Ulster, but has long been closely associated with west Munster. The poet Egan O'Rahilly, for example, was a Kerryman.

Redmond, Réamonn

A Hiberno-Norman family of importance throughout Irish history. They are associated almost entirely with South Wexford. The branch of the MacMurroughs in north of that county, some of whom adopted the name of Redmond, whose chief was called Mac Davymore, are quite distinct from the MacRedmonds.

(O) Regan, Ó Riagain

Ó Réagain is used in county Waterford. There are three septs with this name. That shown as of Leix (Co. Laois) was in the early times one of the "Tribes of Tara". The eponymous ancestors of the Thomond sept were akin to Brian Boru. The third was akin to the MacCarthys.

(O) Reilly, Ó Raghailligh

One of the most numerous names in Ireland, especially so in Co. Cavan. The prefix "O" has been widely resumed in the anglicized form. The head of this important sept was chief Breffny O'Reilly.

(O) Riordan, Rearden, Ó Riordáin 

This numerous sept belongs exclusively to Munster, the earlier form of Ó Rioghbhardáin reveals its derivation from "riogh bhard", meaning "royal bard" in Irish.

(O) Rooney, Ó Ruanaidh

Originating in Co. Down, where Ballyroney locates them, this name is now numerous in all of the provinces, except Munster. In West Ulster and north Connacht, Rooney is often an abbreviation of Mulrooney. 

Ryan, (O) Mulrian 

Ryan is amongst the ten most common surnames in Ireland with an estimated population of 27,500. Only a very small proportion of these use the prefix 'O'. Subject to one exception, to be noticed later in this section, it is safe to say that the great majority of the twenty-seven thousand five hundred Ryans are really O'Mulryans - this earlier form of the name is, however, now almost obsolete. First found in Tipperary.

(O) Shea, Shee, Ó Séaghdha; mod. Ó Sé

From "séaghdha", meaning "hawklike", secondary meaning "stately". Primarily a Kerry sept, but (as in Shee) it is notable as the only Gaelic-Irish name among "the Tribes of Kilkenny", to which county and Co. Tipperary a branch of the sept migrated in the thirteenth century.

(O) Sheehan, Sheahan, Ó Síodhacháin

The obvious derivation from "síodhach", meaning "peaceful", is not accepted by some Celtic scholars. The Dalcassian sept, which spread southwards, accounts for the majority of Sheehans, who are now very numerous in Counties Cork, Kerry, and Limerick. Formerly, there was also an Uí Maine sept of this name, which, however, is rarely found in Connacht today.

(O) Slattery, Ó Slatara, Ó Slatraigh

From "slatra", meaning "strong". Of Ballyslatterly in east Clare. The name has now spread to adjacent counties of Munster.

Smith, Smyth 

When not the name of an English settler family, Smith is usually a synonym of MacGowan, nearly always so in Co. Cavan.

(Mac) Spillan(e),  Mac Spealáin

Sometimes appears as a derivation of O'Spillane, this family name is, however, quite distinct from Ó Spealáin (O'Spillane). Spollan and Spollin, rarely retaining the prefix Mac, are numerous in County Offaly. Older anglicized forms were Spalane and Spalon.

(O) Sullivan, Ó Súileabhain

While there is no doubt that the basic word is "súil" ("eye"), there is a disagreement as to the meaning of the last part of the name. This is the most numerous surname in Munster and is third in all of Ireland. Originally of south Tipperary, the O'Sullivans were forced westwards by the Anglo-Norman invasion where they became one of the leading septs of the Munster Eoghanacht. There were several sub-septs, of which O'Sullican Mor and O'Sullivan Baere were the most important.

(Mac) Sweeney, Swiney, Mac Suibhne

The word "suibhne" denotes "peasant", the opposite of "diubhneI". Of all galloglass origin, it was not until the fourteenth century that the three great Tirconnell septs of MacSweeney were established; more than a century later a branch went to Munster.

(O) Tierney, Ó Tighearnaigh

From "tighearna", meaning "lord" in Irish. There were three septs of this name, in Donegal, Mayo, and Westmeath, but it is now scattered. It is much confused with Tiernan in Mayo. In southern Ulster this name is usually of different origin, namely Mac Giolla Tighearnaigh, which was formerly also anglicized MacIltierney.

Walsh, Ó Breathnach

Ó Breathnach, meaning "Breton," "Welshman," or "Foreigner", which is re-anglicized also as Brannagh, Brannick, etc. A name given independently to many unconnected families in different parts of the country and now the fourth most numerous of all Irish surnames. It is sometimes spelt Welsh, which is the pronunciation of Walsh in Munster and Connacht.

(O) Whelan,  Ó Faoláin

From Irish "faol", meaning "wolf". A variant form of Phelan numerous in the country between Co. Tipperary and Co. Wexford. Whelan is also sometimes an abbreviation of Whelehan and occasionally a synonym of Hyland. Whelan is rare in Ulster.