James Lynch

Clongowes 1816-1817 I James Lynch

James Lynch (1807-96), bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, a founder of the Vincentian Congregation in Ireland and of Castleknock College, was a native of Dublin who attended Clongowes in 1816-17. He attended the College of Surgeons, before switching to study for the priesthood at Maynooth. He was ordained in 1833. By then he had joined a small group of priests who introduced the Vincentian Congregation to Ireland. He served as a professor and vice-president of their new school, Castleknock College, Dublin for many years. In 1866 he was appointed coadjutor vicar apostolic of the Western district in Scotland and titular bishop of Arcadiopolis. In 1869 he became coadjutor to the ailing bishop of Kildare and Leighlin, succeeding as bishop only in 1888.

Aidan Joseph MacCarthy I Clongowes 1923-1930

Aidan Joseph MacCarthy (1913-95), RAF physician and Nagasaki atomic-bomb survivor, was a native of Castletownbere, County Cork, who attended Clongowes in 1923-30. He qualified as a doctor at UCC in 1938, and moved to the UK to work before joining the medical branch of the RAF on the outbreak of World War II. He was sent to France and evacuated from Dunkirk, where he tended the wounded. In 1941 he was awarded the George Medal for his courage in entering a crashed and burning plane to rescue two of the crew. Posted to the Far East in 1942, he was captured in Java by the Japanese forces. He was subsequently sent to Japan, and was one of a small number to survive, when the transport ship carrying him and other prisoners was torpedoed. Eventually he was taken to a POW camp at Nagasaki, where he was forced to do factory work in brutal conditions. With thirteen other Irish prisoners, he was flogged by the camp commandant and forced to dig his own grave for supporting Britain against Japan. He was one of a handful of prisoners to survive the atomic-bomb attack on Nagasaki in 1945 by sheltering in a makeshift bomb shelter. Awaiting liberation, he saved the camp guards from being lynched and tended injured Japanese people in the destroyed city. He returned to Ireland in 1945 to the consolation of his dying mother, who believed him dead. He continued to serve with the post-war RAF and held various overseas appointments until 1970, when he retired with the rank of squadron leader after a serious illness. He was deeply religious, and attributed his survival during the war to his Catholic faith. For his service to the church, he was made a knight of St Sylvester. His autobiography A Doctor’s War was published in 1970. His life story was the subject of several documentaries by RTE. He is buried in his native Castletownbere.

Clongowes 1937-1942 I Niall St John McCarthy

Niall St John McCarthy (1925-92), judge of the Supreme Court, was a native of Cork who attended Clongowes in 1937-42. Graduating in classics from UCD, he was called to the bar in 1946, becoming a senior council in 1959. He was chairman of the Bar Council in 1980. He was a brilliant barrister, who was rated the leader of his profession for more than twenty years, during which he was involved in many of the most famous cases and inquiries. Eloquent, intelligent and thorough, he possessed to an exceptional degree the ability to distinguish the essentials from the peripheral and excelled at cross-examination. Appointed directly to the Supreme Court in 1982, he was consistently liberal, intellectually rigorous and a principled moderniser. He was insistent that principles, especially in the area of constitutional rights, should be acted upon, even if that meant taking the government or the oireachtas to task. In 1987 he was appointed chairman of the National Archives advisory council and successfully exerted pressure to have it housed in the Bishop’s Street building. He is credited with the preservation of the Irish Manuscripts Commission as a separate entity. He was chairman of the National Association for the Deaf in 1977-88. He was president of the Clongowes Union in 1988-9. He and his wife tragically died in a road accident in Spain in 1992.

Oliver MacDonagh I Clongowes 1940-1941

Oliver MacDonagh (1924-2002), historian, was a native of Carlow, but grew up in Roscommon. He attended Clongowes in 1940-1. Graduating in history from UCD in 1944, he was called to the bar in 1946, but never practised, preferring to take up a travelling studentship to Peterhouse College Cambridge, where he completed his doctorate in 1950. His early studies focussed on nineteenthcentury government growth. He was elected a fellow of St Catherine’s College Cambridge in 1950 and held other university posts, before moving to Australia in 1964 as foundation professor of history at Flinders University, New South Wales. He blossomed as a university administrator, a role in which he continued during a two-year spell as professor of history at UCC in 1968-70. He was a visiting professor at Yale, before returning to Australia as a research professor at the Australian University’s Institute of Advanced Studies in Canberra, where he spent the rest of his career. This gave him the freedom to concentrate on research. He focussed on Ireland, Australia and literary history. His best-known work is probably his two-volume study of Daniel O’Connell. He contributed the introduction and four chapters to Volume V of the Royal Irish Academy’s A New History of Ireland (1989). He was a well-respected authority on Jane Austen. He was an inspiring teacher, a fine public speaker, a frequent broadcaster and a passionate sportsman, with a particular interest in rugby. Devoutly Catholic, he revered Cardinal Newman, about whom he also wrote. The recipient of many honours, he was a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the British Academy and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences.

Clongowes 1904-1906 I Patrick McGilligan

Patrick McGilligan (1889-1979), minister for industry and commerce, external affairs and finance, was a native of Coleraine, County Derry, who attended Clongowes in 1904-06. A near-photographic memory won him scholarships and medals throughout his academic career. He graduated with a BA in classics from UCD in 1910. He won a gold medal for his oratory in the Literary and Historical Society. He was a good sportsman, playing soccer, tennis and golf. After a period teaching, he became an assistant to the professor of Latin at UCD, and was called to the bar in 1921. He was involved in the national struggle and stood unsuccessfully as Sinn Féin candidate for Derry North in 1918. He was eventually elected to the Dáil in 1923. He continued to be returned for various constituencies until finally defeated in 1965, after which he retired from active politics. His ability soon led to his appointment in 1924 as minister for industry and commerce, where his major achievements were the implementation of the Shannon hydroelectric scheme, along with the institution of a national grid and the founding of the Electricity Supply Board. From 1927 he was also minister for external affairs, increasing Ireland’s diplomatic representation abroad and advancing this country’s role in the League of Nations. He played a major part in securing autonomous status for the dominions at the British imperial conferences of 1929-30, which laid the foundations for the commonwealth. After his party lost office in 1932, he was appointed to a chair of law at UCD. He continued his political activity in the Dáil as a leading and effective opposition spokesman on economic and foreign affairs. During this time he became influenced by Keynsian ideas and developed a strong social concern. These concepts influenced his courage and innovation as minister for finance in the first inter-party government of 1948-51. He introduced a capital budget, borrowed for development, expanded house building and funded the attack on TB. He was attorney general in the second interparty government. Having taken silk in 1946 he practised for a time as a barrister and acted in several major constitutional cases. He was a major figure in the successful establishment of the Irish state, who played an especially important and constructive role in its economic and social development, and in gaining respect for it abroad.

Sir Ambrose McGonigal I Clongowes 1930-1935

Sir Ambrose McGonigal (1917-79), lord justice of appeal in Northern Ireland, was a native of Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1930-5, where he was fine rugby player and won a Leinster schools cap. After ‘two inglorious years studying arts’ at Queen’s University Belfast, he enrolled in the King’s Inns, but with the outbreak of World War II, he joined the British forces and won an MC and bar serving with the commandos. Demobilised with the rank of major in 1946, he returned to legal studies this time in Belfast and was called to the Northern Ireland bar in 1948. Although a late starter, he soon made his mark as an advocate. In 1956 he became a queen’s counsel and was subsequently appointed senior crown prosecutor for County Down. In 1968, overturning the usual sectarian and political divide, he was appointed to the High Court. He was a strong presence on the bench, where he showed decisive judgement and unimpeachable integrity, with little time for any attempt to mislead him or for counsel that were ill prepared. His judgements were seldom reversed on appeal. Following the outbreak of the Troubles, judges’ lives were at risk and they had the added burden of trying non-jury criminal cases, arising from the disturbances. McGonigal was unflinching in his duty, handing down severe sentences where he thought it appropriate, but showing leniency to young offenders whom he considered to have been misled. In 1975 he was promoted to lord justice of appeal, knighted and sworn a privy councillor. In his new role, he upheld human rights in several cases, even where this required him to find against the government. He served on the senate of Queen’s University, where he made a significant contribution to the foundation of the Institute of Professional Legal Studies, at the time a unique institution that provided common vocational training for solicitors and barristers. He also served on the board of St Mary’s College of Education. His brother Richard McGonigal SC, who attended Clongowes in 1917-19, was a leading barrister in the Irish Republic, as is his son, Eoin McGonigal SC, who attended Clongowes in 1959-64.

Tullabeg in 1872-1879 I Sir Joseph McGrath

Sir Joseph McGrath (1858-1923), first registrar of the National University of Ireland, was a native of Bagenalstown, County Carlow, who attended Tullabeg in 1872-9, where he came under the tutelage of the distinguished educationist, Father William Delany, SJ. He was an excellent student, especially proficient in mathematics. He played a leading role in school dramatics. He graduated BA from London University in 1878 and taught for a time at Tullabeg before becoming a mathematics and science tutor at St Patrick’s College Drumcondra and at UCD, which was then under Jesuit management. He was associated with the revival of debating at the latter institution and was auditor of the Literary and Historical Society in 1882-3. In 1892 he was appointed one of the two secretaries of the Royal University of Ireland, which conferred him with an honorary LLD. He was also called to the bar, but never practised. He narrowly missed being appointed first president of the new UCD, which became a constituent college of the National University of Ireland in 1908. Instead McGrath was appointed first registrar of the new university, a post he occupied until his death. He was an efficient administrator. He worked closely with the chancellor, Archbishop Walsh of Dublin, to draft the university statutes, as well as ensuring a smooth transition to it for staff from the older institutions. He was knighted in 1911. He served on the governing bodies of several academic institutions. He also served on the committees of various voluntary bodies, including the RDS, the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the Clongowes Union of which he was a founding member and lifelong honorary secretary. He was devoutly religious. His son, Father Fergal McGrath, SJ, who attended Clongowes in 1908-12, was a leading Irish Jesuit and author. He wrote the standard life of Father John Sullivan, SJ (1941), whose cause for canonisation is under consideration.

Edward ‘Ned’ McGuire I Clongowes 1915-1916 and 1918-1919

Edward ‘Ned’ McGuire (1901-92), businessman and politician, was a native of Waterford, who attended Clongowes in 1915-16 and 1918-19. After a year in UCD, he joined his father in the retail business. Together they turned Clerys, the Dublin department store, from a loss-maker into a highly successful enterprise. The Maguires pioneered modern methods of trading and advertising, appealing to a mass market by balancing low prices against high turnover. In 1933 the McGuires left Clerys and purchased the ailing Brown Thomas store in Grafton Street from Harry Gordon Selfridge. Largely under Ned McGuire’s direction, it was transformed into the leading store in Ireland. A range of fashionable new products was introduced, with names like Dior appearing in Dublin for the first time. The interior was remodelled and display revolutionised, drawing on the talents of the artist, Norah McGuinness. It was a highly profitable business, which McGuire continued to control until its sale in 1970 to Galen Weston. McGuire played a leading part in the formation of the Federated Union of Employers, introducing professional negotiators to the employers’ side of collective bargaining. He was president for many years, and in 1967 was honoured with the title of founderpresident on his retirement. His family had been close supporters of John Redmond, and he was a leading fundraiser for Fine Gael and a senator in 1948-65. He regretted that the party was not closer aligned to business and strongly opposed the adoption of the ‘Just Society’ policy in the early 1960s, which he hyperbolically condemned as ‘pure socialism of the most dictatorial kind’. An accomplished painter himself and a discerning art collector, he served on the board of the National Gallery of Ireland for many years and also as a member of the Arts Council. He was an all-round sportsman, particularly excelling at tennis. He was Irish men’s singles champion in 1931 and played on four Irish Davis Cup teams.

Clongowes 1825-1829 I Thomas McNevin

Thomas McNevin (1814-48), Young Irelander and journalist, was a native of Dublin who attended Clongowes in 1825-9. He graduated with a BA from TCD in 1837, having been auditor of the College Historical Society, where he debated with such orators as Isaac Butt and William Keogh. He became a close friend of Thomas Davis, by whom he was deeply influenced. He was called to the bar in 1838. He joined the Repeal Association, where he worked closely with Davis and the Young Ireland group, contributing regularly to their paper The Nation, edited by Charles Gavan Duffy. He was a leading spokesman for the Young Irelanders, voicing their growing disillusionment with Daniel O’Connell’s tactics and the servility and venality of his supporters. He idolised Thomas Davis and vehemently defended him from O’Connellite critics after the Young Irelanders split from the Repeal movement. Widely read, he was deeply involved in the Young Ireland project of providing the Irish people with accessible and sympathetic historical works to regenerate their national spirit. He wrote two volumes for The Nation’s library of Ireland series on, respectively, the Irish Volunteers of 1782 and the Ulster confiscation. They were well-written works, although based on secondary rather than original research. Although sometimes rash and impetuous, he was a sparkling conversationalist with a sharp intellect. He was devastated by Davis’s death in 1845 and set out to fulfil his friend’s ambition of writing a one-volume history of Ireland, but his mental health deteriorated and the project was incomplete at the time of his death in a Bristol asylum.

John Charles McQuaid I Clongowes 1911-1913

John Charles McQuaid (1895-1973), archbishop of Dublin, was a native of Cootehill, County Cavan, who attended Clongowes in 1911-13. He joined the Holy Ghost or Spiritan congregation and was ordained in 1924, having graduated in classics at UCD and subsequently obtained a theology doctorate at the Gregorian University in Rome. He then became dean of studies and subsequently president of Blackrock College, where he enjoyed an outstanding reputation as an administrator and Catholic educationist. He was an adviser of Éamon de Valera on the drafting of the 1937 Constitution, although disappointed that the final result was not more explicitly Catholic. He was appointed archbishop of Dublin in 1940. He proved an excellent administrator, establishing more than sixty new parishes, building schools and churches and showing special concern (and material support) for TB patients, the elderly, the physically and mentally handicapped, the poor and the sick. Later, he interested himself in traveller settlement, drug and alcohol abuse, and juvenile delinquency. Amongst his most cherished projects was the establishment in 1956 of Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children in Crumlin. The movement of the post-World War II state into social areas, hitherto largely in the control of the church, inevitably brought the government and the bishops into conflict. The most celebrated but by no means the only instance was the 1951 clash over the mother-and-child scheme, in which he played a leading role. The controversy brought down the inter-party government, but also created a damaging and enduring rift between the church and liberal opinion. McQuaid was disturbed and bewildered by the changes introduced by the Second Vatican Council. He had little sympathy with lay participation, and his continued ban on Catholics attending TCD was indicative of his lack of empathy with ecumenism. Both clergy and laity grew impatient at what they perceived to be his minimalist approach to reform, unbending authoritarianism and what the Herder Correspondence called ‘his penchant for the unnecessarily harsh or humiliating phrase’. In 1970, when he submitted his resignation to Pope Paul VI at the age of seventy-five, it was – to his surprise – accepted, with effect from January 1972. Throughout his long episcopate he was the dominant personality amongst the Irish bishops – then at the height of their influence – making him one of the most powerful and influential figures in the Ireland of his time.

Clongowes 1902-1907 I Conor Maguire

Conor Maguire (1889-1971), revolutionary, politician and chief justice, was a native of Claremorris, County Mayo, who attended Clongowes in 1902-07. After attending UCD, where he was active in student life, especially debating and journalism, he qualified as a solicitor in 1914 and returned to Mayo to establish a law practice. A republican, he was imprisoned in Sligo for six months in 1919 for publicising the Dáil loan. On release he became closely involved in planning and operating the Dáil courts, established to undermine British authority, acting as a land-settlement commissioner and occasionally as an appeals judge. He was called to the bar in 1922, practising on the western circuit, and took silk in 1932. He was elected a Fianna Fáil TD for the NUI in 1932, when he was appointed attorney general in the first Fianna Fáil government. He became president of the High Court in 1936 and was chief justice in 194661. He served on the European Commission of Human Rights in 1962-5 and on the European Court of Human Rights in 1965-71. He was president of the Irish Red Cross in 1939-46, and was involved in the establishment of the Red Cross hospital at Saint-Lô and the settlement of German children in Ireland after World War II. His work earned him the Legion d’honneur. Inheriting a keen interest in the Irish language from his nationalist father, he was president of the International Celtic Congress in 1957-61 and of the Conradh na Gaeilge Oireachtas in 1962. He also served on the board of the National Gallery and as a member of the Arts Council. He was a rugby, cricket and billiards enthusiast.

James ‘The O’Gorman’ Mahon I Clongowes 1815-19

James ‘The O’Gorman’ Mahon (1803-91), politician and adventurer, was a native of Ennis, County Clare, who attended Clongowes in 1815-19. He graduated from TCD in 1822. Soon afterwards he adopted the grandiloquent title ‘The O’Gorman Mahon’ by which he was always known. He became a prominent member of the Catholic Association and encouraged a reluctant Daniel O’Connell to contest the Clare election in 1828. He was a good public speaker, but short-tempered, argumentative and give to over statement. His prominence at the time made him a national hero, and he won a Clare seat in the 1830 election, but was unseated due to unlawfully funding his campaign with his new wife’s dowry. He was defeated in the 1831 election and never forgave O’Connell for opposing his candidacy. He was called to the bar in 1834, but never practised. He was briefly MP for Ennis in 1847-52. However, much of his life was spent as an adventurer touring the world. His financial situation was always precarious. He spent time in France, where he was a journalist and financial speculator. It was said that Louis-Phillippe, gave him a colonelcy in the army. In 1846 he fought against the Arabs in North Africa. Travelling to Russia, he became an officer in the tsar’s army and fought the Tartars before proceeding to China, India and Turkey. From there he went to Austria where he held yet another military rank, before crossing the Atlantic where he served in the army or navy of various South American states and on the Union side in the American Civil War. During his life he fought ‘between thirteen and eighteen duels’ on the grounds that it was ‘less trouble to fight a blackguard than to argue with him’. He frequently returned to Ireland, where he became a friend of the rising politician Charles Stewart Parnell. In 1879 he again became an MP (defeating his fellow-Clongownian Peter O’Brien in the Clare by-election) and engaged enthusiastically in the obstructionist tactics favoured by Parnell and his supporters. It was he who proposed Parnell for leadership of the parliamentary party in 1877. Gladstone described him as ‘a stately figure, conspicuous among his contemporaries for his singularly beautiful and gentle manners’. He was the original of ‘the Mulligan’ in William Makepeace Thackeray’s Mrs. Perkins’s Ball (1881).

Francis Mahony ‘Father Prout’ (1804-66), priest and humourist, was a native of Cork, who attended Clongowes in 1815-18, before going to the Jesuit school at Amiens. Destined for a career in the priesthood, he entered the Jesuit seminary in Paris and then went on to Rome to study philosophy in 1823-5. He was a brilliant student, particularly gifted at Latin, which he spoke fluently, but always ‘caustic, irascible, opinionated and argumentative’. He returned to Clongowes as a teacher, where he was appointed master of the Rhetoric class. Within a few months, on a class outing, master and class spent the evening drinking in Celbridge, returning to Clongowes after curfew, all thoroughly inebriated. Word followed that in the course of the revelry Mahony had made a loud and drunken attack on the character of Daniel O’Connell. He resigned as prefect and was transferred to Freiburg in Switzerland. From there he went to Florence, where he was asked to leave the Jesuits. Although hurt, he was not embittered and subsequently defended the Jesuits against their critics. He completed his theological studies in Rome and was ordained a secular priest at Lucca in 1832. He ministered for a time in Cork, but after quarrelling with his bishop left for London, where he led an increasingly Bohemian and dissolute life, and earned his living as a writer and journalist. Although he ceased to perform any priestly duties, throughout his life he still read his daily office in the breviary. He is best known for his series of papers ‘The reliques of Father Prout’, which first appeared in Fraser’s Magazine, and were published in a separate form in 1836. His writing was sharp, ascerbic and often brilliant. He attracted a wide readership and was often known as Father Prout, sometimes even signing himself ‘Prout Mahony’. For Fraser, also, he wrote ‘The Bells of Shandon’ and other well-known pieces of poetry. He also wrote for Bentley’s Miscellany, edited by Charles Dickens. His output included well-crafted translations of works in Latin and French. Moving abroad in 1837, his later life was spent in Rome and Paris as a foreign correspondent for London newspapers. He died in Paris, from where his body was brought back to Cork for burial. Once described as a combination of Voltaire and Rabelais, today he is little read except by a few scholars.

Thomas Francis Meagher I Clongowes 1833-1839

Thomas Francis Meagher (1823-67), revolutionary, soldier and acting governor of Montana, was a native of Waterford, who attended Clongowes in 1833-9. His leadership role in a school revolt over the paucity of fare at the Christmas dinner led to his schooling being completed at Stonyhurst. He abandoned studies for the bar to concentrate on politics, joining the Young Irelanders. He was a passionate and popular orator. In 1846, at the meeting where the Young Irelanders parted company from O’Connell, his famous speech in defence of the ultimate right to have recourse to arms earned him the sobriquet ‘Meagher of the Sword’. In 1848 he was one of the three delegates chosen to carry a congratulatory address to the new French revolutionary government, returning to Dublin with the green, white and orange tricolour, subsequently adopted as the national flag. Involved in planning the abortive Irish rising of 1848, he was arrested, convicted of high treason and condemned to death. His sentence was commuted to transportation for life, and he was sent to Tasmania. He escaped from Australia in 1852 and arrived in New York to a hero’s welcome. He became an American citizen, edited a newspaper and was admitted to the New York bar. However, his earnings from law and journalism were meagre, and his income was largely derived from lecturing on Irish revolutionary matters, although he showed little interest in the new revolutionary organisations, the Fenians and the IRB. When the American civil war broke out in 1861, he took a commission in the Union army, lent his name and energy to the recruitment drive, and ultimately attained the rank of brigadier general. He commanded the Irish Brigade in northern Virginia in 1862, where its ranks were decimated in the terrible battles of Antietam/Sharpsburg and Fredericksburg. He resigned, when denied a request to withdraw the brigade to allow it to regroup and recruit. Meagher was a brave man, but untrained for military command for which he displayed no great talent. However, the well-publicised sacrifices of his brigade contributed greatly to improving acceptance of the Irish immigrants and raising their status in America. After the war, he secured an appointment as acting governor of Montana, where he worked to maintain law and order, contain the Sioux Indians and prepare the territory for statehood. He died in mysterious circumstances, when he fell overboard from a steamer moored at Fort Benton on the Mississippi. There are impressive monuments to Meagher in Waterford, in front of the state capitol in Helena, Montana, and at the Antietam battlefield in Maryland.

Clongowes 1930-1936 I Charles Mitchel

Charles Mitchel (1920-96), actor and broadcaster, was a native of Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1930-6. He spent some time in his father’s business and also attended TCD, which he left without an intended degree in forestry, having spent most of his time acting with Trinity Players. He subsequently became a professional actor. His clear confident diction suited him best to high status and ‘society’ parts. He worked for a time in Belfast with ENSA, the wartime agency for British forces entertainment. In 1947 he joined the Gate Theatre company and over the next decade became well-known for his performances in Dublin and on tour throughout Ireland and Western Europe. He was one of the founders of Irish Actors Equity and served as president of the Catholic Stage Guild. On the formation of RTE he was appointed the station’s chief newsreader and read the first news bulletin on 1 January 1963. He instantly became a household name and was the station’s first major star, generating an audience fan club and personally replying to the many devotees who wrote to him. He was awarded the accolade of Television Personality of the Year and was the first RTE presenter to win a Jacobs Television Award. Listeners were impressed and reassured by his reliable, gentlemanly persona and clarity of diction. He was watched even by the deaf, who could lip read his broadcasts. He later admitted that his RTE job was the one he had always wanted, and he was most reluctant to retire, when the time came in 1984. Nor did his audience easily accept his departure. He was a man of quiet good humour, easy with people and with a compassionate nature that involved him in the Samaritans, the Friends of the Elderly and the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. He was a renowned expert on the breeding, showing and judging of basset hounds. He also played in goal for the RTE soccer team.

Thomas Murphy I Clongowes 1925-1926

Thomas Murphy (1915-97), doctor and president of UCD, was a native of Bunclody, County Wexford, who attended Clongowes in 1925-6. After a brilliant undergraduate career, in 1939 he graduated from UCD’s medical school and subsequently obtained postgraduate qualifications in public health and industrial medicine. He worked in Bord na Móna, as assistant medical officer in County Kildare and in the Department of Health before returning to UCD in 1955 as professor of social and preventive medicine. He was awarded an MD for his published work in 1969. He was a founder member of the Academic Staff Association. He became dean of the faculty of medicine in 1962, registrar of the college in 1969 and president in 1972, a position he occupied for thirteen fruitful years. He was the first president to administer the college from its new Belfield campus. He had a warm, approachable and friendly manner, and proved a shrewd, capable and popular administrator. He oversaw a huge expansion in student numbers and a corresponding increase in staff: twenty-nine new chairs, 120 additional statutory lectureships and a large number of junior appointments. He improved opportunities for promotion and encouraged staff to become more involved in administration and decision-making. He was directly responsible for setting up the Admissions Office and for the establishment of staff-student committees. He oversaw the development and expansion of the Belfield campus, including the building, equipping and occupation of new agriculture, computer-science, universityindustry and library buildings. A sports centre was opened, and site work commenced for a new engineering school. Recognised college status was granted to teacher-training colleges and financial support obtained from commercial institutions. His four sons, all Clongownians, followed him into the medical profession.

Clongowes 1855-1858 I John Naish

John Naish (1841-90), Lord Chancellor of Ireland, was a native of Ballycullen, County Limerick, who attended Clongowes in 18558. He graduated BA from TCD in 1863, having enjoyed a brilliant undergraduate career in which he excelled at mathematics and experimental science. He entered Lincoln’s Inn and was called to the Irish bar in 1865. He practised on the Munster circuit, and in 1880 he became a queen’s counsel. A nervous and diffident speaker, he failed to establish a reputation as a forceful advocate, but compensated for this by his outstanding legal knowledge and expertise. He co-authored a book on common law procedure legislation, which became a standard reference work. In 1880 his legal knowledge gained him the role of legal adviser to Dublin Castle, and during the Land League agitation his legal skill was of considerable benefit to the government. He stood as a Liberal candidate for parliament at Mallow in 1882, but was crushingly defeated by the prominent Home Ruler, William O’Brien. In 1883 he was appointed solicitor general and soon afterwards became attorney general and a privy councillor. In 1885 Gladstone appointed him to the highest Irish legal office of Lord Chancellor. He was only the second catholic to hold the office since the reformation. He lost it with the collapse of the Liberal government, but was made a lord justice of appeal. He returned as chancellor in 1886, only to again lose office when Gladstone’s ministry collapsed, making him once more a lord justice of appeal. His health failed in his forties. He travelled to Germany and died in the spa town Bad Ems, where he is buried.

Peter Baron O’Brien of Kilfenora (1842-1914), lord chief justice, was a native of Ballynalackan, County Clare, who attended Tullabeg and Clongowes in 1854-8. Graduating from TCD, he entered the Middle Temple and was called to the Irish bar in 1865. He devilled with Christopher Palles, but spent much of his time socialising and hunting, only settling down to work in earnest when his prospective bride made it a precondition of marriage. He proved an able barrister, skilful in persuading juries and courageous in standing up to domineering judges. In 1879 he stood unsuccessfully for Clare as a Liberal candidate in a by-election that was won by his fellowClongownian, The O’Gorman Mahon. He became a queen’s counsel in 1880, defending T.D. Sullivan in the abortive trial of the Land League leadership. In 1883 he was appointed crown prosecutor, acting in several agrarian murder trials, including the infamous Maamtrasna case, where several of those convicted are believed to have been innocent, including one who was hanged. His zeal in packing juries with those likely to be sympathetic to the prosecution earned him the odium of the nationalist press and the derogatory nickname ‘Pether the Packer’ (he had a pronounced lisp). Gladstone’s adoption of Home Rule saw him defect to the liberal unionists. He denounced as illegal the ‘plan of campaign’ in defence of tenant farmers. Successively solicitor general and attorney general (he was mentor to the young Edward Carson), he became lord chief justice in 1889 and an Irish peer in 1900. To nationalists he epitomised legal injustice, but in fact he was regarded as fair and merciful in non-political criminal cases, although in civil matters he was said to favour pretty females. He frequently performed unpublicised acts of personal kindness. Keenly intelligent but inclined to be lazy, his judgements were straightforward, but based more on instinct than on learning, prompting Palles on one occasion to audibly comment ‘you never learned that law from me’. Even opponents acknowledged his physical and moral courage in making unpopular decisions. His Reminiscences, edited by his daughter, was published in 1916.

Jeremiah Joseph ‘Ginger’ O’Connell (1887-1944), revolutionary and lieutenant general, was a native of Ballina, County Mayo, who attended Clongowes in 1903-05. Nicknamed ‘Ginger’ because of his red hair, he was so known throughout his life. He graduated with a BA and MA from UCD, where he was active in student affairs, debating and on the boxing team. Having served two years with the 69th (New York) Regiment in the US army (1912-14), he returned to Ireland as chief of inspection for the Irish Volunteers, travelling the country to organise Volunteer corps and provide military instruction. Keenly interested in military history, he delivered a series of lectures on famous Irish battles to the Gaelic League in Dublin, and also drafted a memorandum on how the Irish Volunteers could best undertake war. In 1916 he conveyed Eoin MacNeill’s countermanding order to the Cork Volunteers, and although he took no part in the fighting he was subsequently arrested and interned at Frongoch. On his release he became instructor with the Sligo Volunteers, rising ultimately to the position of IRA director of training in 1920. In 1921 he was involved in defence aspects of the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty, which he strongly supported. He was appointed deputy chief of staff in the new army with the rank of lieutenant general. He took a hard-line approach to the anti-treatyites, and his kidnapping by the Four Courts garrison was one of the factors that led to the start of the civil war. Released when the Four Courts surrendered, he was appointed GOC Curragh camp and command for the remainder of the civil war. With the subsequent contraction of the army, he was reduced to the rank of colonel, which he carried for the rest of his career. He held a succession of army appointments, including chief lecturer in the school of instruction, OC of the equitation school, quartermaster general and director of archives. In 1940 he drew up the army’s defence plan against invasion. He published numerous articles on military affairs and military history. His wife was a sister of his fellow Clongownian, Patrick McGilligan.

Roderick ‘Rory’ O’Connor I Clongowes 1900-1901

Roderick ‘Rory’ O’Connor (1883-1922), republican and revolutionary, was a native of Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1900-01. He attended UCD and the College of Science, Merrion Street, graduating with degrees in arts and engineering. He was a prominent debater in UCD’s Literary and Historical Society, where he advocated militant constitutional nationalism. He worked as a railway engineer in Canada, before returning to Ireland in 1915, apparently at the behest of the IRB. He joined the Gaelic League and the Irish Volunteers. He was wounded in the 1916 Rising and subsequently interned in Britain. He became a member of the Sinn Féin executive in 1917. Ranked commandant general, throughout the Anglo-Irish struggle he was the IRA’s director of engineering primarily responsible for planning sabotage operations and the use of explosives, but also with involvement in arms procurement and prison escapes. Although he had formed a close association with Michael Collins, he vehemently rejected the Anglo-Irish treaty on the principled ground that it fell short of the republic, which he had sworn to uphold. He led the initial opposition to the treaty within the IRA, although the more moderate Liam Lynch ultimately emerged as chief of staff. Amidst a general upsurge in republican activity, the Four Courts was seized and O’Connor took command of the garrison. When negotiations broke down, the Four Courts was besieged by the new army, using artillery. With the court building very badly damaged and on fire, O’Connor surrendered after three days. The adjoining Public Record Office was completely destroyed. Whether responsibility for the resultant calamitous loss of the Irish state papers lay with the attackers or the defenders is still debated. O’Connor was imprisoned and subsequently shot by firing squad in reprisal for the murder of a TD. The tragic divisions of the period were symbolised by the fact that a year earlier he had been best man at the wedding of his fellow Clongownian, Kevin O’Higgins, who as minister for home affairs consented to his execution. Physically frail and devoted to classical music, bridge and chess, O’Connor was widely seen as a man of principled integrity, courage and determination, but lacking in flexibility and political acumen.

Clongowes 1852 I Sir Nicholas O’Conor

Sir Nicholas O’Conor (1843-1908), diplomat, was a native of Dundermott, County Roscommon, who attended Clongowes in 1852 and then went on to its sister college, Stonyhurst in Lancashire. After further education in Munich, he joined the diplomatic service. He held a series of junior appointments in Berlin, Washington, Madrid, Paris and Brazil, before becoming secretary to the Peking Legation in 1883. Following the minister’s death, he ran the legation successfully for eighteen months during a period of turbulent Anglo-Chinese relations. He became consul general in Bulgaria, where he was a steadying and influential hand in the transition of power to the newly elected King Ferdinand and his volatile prime minister, Stambulov. In 1892 he was knighted and appointed envoy to China. In 1895 he became ambassador to St Petersburg and was present at the coronation of the ill-fated Tsar Nicholas II. When relations with the Russian foreign minister became strained over the question of access to Port Arthur (a Russian-controlled enclave in China), O’Conor made no secret of his displeasure over a perceived Russian breach of faith. He was transferred to Constantinople as ambassador to Turkey, where he served for a decade until his death. While there, he enjoyed a good relationship with Sultan Abdul Hamid II and his ministers, whom he pressed to make much-needed administrative reforms. He managed to settle several outstanding problems, such as Turco-Egyptian boundary in Sinai and the British frontier in the hinterland of Aden. He was made a privy councillor in 1897. O’Conor was a leading British diplomat of his time, operating in the highest echelons of international relations, when British power and influence were at their zenith. He was blunt-spoken and honest in his dealings, shrewd in his assessments of events and situations, and wellrespected as a negotiator.

Kevin O’Higgins I Clongowes 1903-1908

Kevin O’Higgins (1892-1927), minister for justice, was a native of Stradbally, County Laois, who attended Clongowes in 1903-08. After a spell as a clerical student, he attended UCD and was called to the bar in 1923. He joined the Irish Volunteers and Sinn Féin, serving a prison sentence in 1918 for opposing recruitment to the British army. Elected Sinn Féin MP for Queen’s County (Laois) in 1918, he sat in the first Dáil. He rose to be minister for local government, gaining the adherence of many county councils and other localgovernment bodies to its administration. His wedding – at which his fellow Clongownian Rory O’Connor was best man – prevented his attendance at the London treaty talks. Although originally opposed to any settlement short of republican status for Ireland, he vigorously defended the treaty in the Dáil, stressing the support for it amongst the public at large. He was appointed minister for economic affairs, before becoming minister for home affairs (later justice) and vicepresident of the executive council. He was the leading political personality of the day. He played a major role in securing Dáil acceptance of the constitution. More controversially, he authorised internment, military courts and even executions by the army. He approved the retaliatory shooting of republican prisoners, including his friend Rory O’Connor. His own father was murdered by the IRA. Determined to restore normal law and order, he introduced a new court system and created an unarmed police force. He also played a role in foreign affairs. He dealt firmly with the threatened army mutiny in 1924. He opposed divorce, restricted pub opening hours and supported book and film censorship. Possessed of great vigour and ability, with a wry sense of humour and an iron will, by nature he was rather shy and private. In 1927 a group of IRA assassins, evidently acting independently, shot him dead.

Clongowes 1930-1934 I Thomas O’Higgins

Thomas O’Higgins (1916-2003), minister for health and chief justice, born in Cork but raised in Dublin, attended Clongowes in 1930-4. He graduated from UCD, where he was auditor of the Literary and Historical Society. He was called to the bar in 1938, taking silk in 1954. Grandson of a nationalist MP, son of a TD and a nephew of Kevin O’Higgins, he was elected to the Dáil for Laois-Offaly in 1948. In the 1954-7 inter-party government, he was minister for health and established the Voluntary Health Insurance Board. In the 1960s he worked closely with Garret FitzGerald and Declan Costello in re-shaping Fine Gael in the ‘Just Society’ period. He was the Fine Gael candidate in the 1966 and 1973 presidential elections. Although unsuccessful in both, in 1966 he came within one per cent of defeating Éamon de Valera, which was widely regarded as an astonishing achievement. In 1973 he retired from politics and was appointed to the High Court. The following year he became chief justice. His most significant decisions all upheld a broadly conservative position: the constitutionality of the Emergency Powers Bill in 1976, the statutory ban on broadcasts by Sinn Féin supporters in 1982 and the prohibition of homosexual conduct between consenting males in private in the Norris case (1984). In 1985-91 he was a judge of the European Court of Justice. His autobiography A Double Life was published in 1996. His brother, Michael O’Higgins, also a Clongownian, was TD for Wicklow in 1961-9.

Count Gerald O’Kelly I Clongowes 1902-1907

Count Gerald O’Kelly (1890-1968), diplomat, was a native of Gurtray, Portumna, County Galway, who attended Clongowes in 1902-07. His title came from an eighteenth-century ancestor, created a hereditary count of the Holy Roman Empire by Empress Maria Theresa of Austria. After school he travelled extensively in the Far East and America, before serving with the army service corps in World War I, when he was wounded in action. His family supported Sinn Féin, and he became Dáil Éireann’s representative in Switzerland in 1919-21 and subsequently the Irish trade agent in Belgium. In 1929 he was appointed first Irish envoy and minister plenipotentiary to France, where he developed excellent social connections that he put to good use on behalf of Irish interests. From 1931 he was also minister (non-resident) to Belgium. Recalled in 1935, he officially retired from the diplomatic service, but was appointed special counsellor to the Irish legations in Brussels and Paris. He was the sole Irish diplomat to remain in Paris throughout World War II, and was responsible for securing the release of many Irish citizens (including several who held British passports) from internment by the Germans. His wine business at 8 Place Vendôme functioned as an unofficial Irish embassy, and it was with O’Kelly that James Joyce’s papers were left, when he fled France in 1940. O’Kelly returned to the official diplomatic service in 1948 as minister to Portugal. After retirement, as chargé d’affaires, he remained comfortably ensconced in the Lisbon embassy residence until his death. He was a collector and connoisseur of old prints. He translated the poetry of Omar Khayyám and the writings of Marco Polo into French. He was a grand officer of the Légion d’honneur, a knight of Malta and a grand officer of the Order of Christ.

Clongowes 1940-1945 I Cornelius O’Leary

Cornelius O’Leary (1927-2006), political scientist and political activist, born in Limerick but raised in Cork, attended Clongowes in 19405. He graduated in history and Latin from University College Cork in 1949, subsequently completing a doctorate at Nuffield College, Oxford, where he published his thesis under the title The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections, 1868-1911 (1962). He joined the staff at Queen’s University Belfast, becoming professor of political science in 1979. He was a popular figure in the university, with both staff and students. His publications were mostly in collaboration with other scholars, and included (with Ian Budge) Belfast: Approach to Crisis: A Study of Belfast Politics, 1613-1970 (1973), (with Sydney Elliott and R.A. Wilford) The Northern Ireland Assembly, 1982-1986: A Constitutional Experiment (1988) and (with Patrick Maume) Controversial Issues in Anglo-Irish Relations, 1910-1921 (2004). He strongly opposed political violence during the upheavels of the Troubles. This led him into the unlikely position of political advisor to the Ulster Defence Association, and he even wrote a paper on Northern Ireland independence. At times he feared for his life. He was vice-chairman of the Irish pro-life campaign. He is buried at Timoleague in County Cork.

William O’Leary, SJ I Tullabeg 1880

William O’Leary, SJ (1869-1939), seismologist, was a native of Dublin, who attended Tullabeg in 1880. He entered the Jesuits in 1886. Having studied philosophy and astronomy at Louvain and theology in Dublin, he became a science teacher at Clongowes and was ordained in 1906. In 1908 he went to Strasbourg to undertake seismological studies and on his return to Ireland established a meteorological and seismological observatory at Mungret College, where he remained as director until 1915. In collaboration with other observers he carried out a number of upper-air investigations using balloons and completed a new seismograph for earthquake detection and measurement. He subsequently moved to Rathfarnham Castle, where he founded a seismological observatory and constructed a seismograph, which gave excellent service into the 1940s. Aware of the need for very accurate timing in seismology, he developed a free-pendulum clock, which he patented in 1918. A similar clock he later constructed for Washington’s Georgetown University is now in the Smithsonian Institute. In 1929 he went to Australia and became director of the observatory at Riverview College, the Irish Jesuit foundation in Sydney. There he collaborated with the Lembang observatory in Java on a programme of photographic research on variable stars, discovering many that were hitherto unknown. He was an accomplished and a popular speaker and a member of several learned bodies, including the Royal Irish Academy, the Société Astronomique de France, the Seismological Society of America and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Tullabeg 1859-1865 I William O’Loughlin

William O’Loughlin (1849-1912), commodore surgeon RMS Titanic, was a native of Tralee, County Kerry, who attended Tullabeg in 185965. Having completed his medical studies in the Catholic University in Dublin and in St Vincent’s Hospital, he qualified as a doctor in 1871. After briefly acting as medical officer to Clane dispensary, he joined the White Star Line as a ship’s doctor. He made this his career, serving aboard such liners as Majestic, Adriatic, Oceanic and Olympic. He had a reputation for devotion to duty, kindness to all and generosity to charity. In 1912, because of his seniority, he was chosen as senior surgeon aboard the newly launched Titanic. He accepted the appointment with some reluctance because he was ‘tired at this time of life to be changing from one ship to another’. On 14 April, during the voyage to America, he dined in style with the wealthy Astors, Bruce Ismay of the White Star Line and Captain Smith. O’Loughlin proposed the toast (in champagne) ‘to the mighty Titanic’. A few hours later the ship struck the fatal iceberg, sinking with the loss of more than 1,500 lives. Numerous eyewitness accounts attest to his coolness and courage during the disaster. An editorial in American Medicine stated that ‘he paid no attention to his own danger, but he went from one group to another, soothing the frightened, encouraging the weak and striving in every way to prevent panic and hysteria’. He declined to wear a life preserver and drowned when the ship went down. Colleagues recalled him often saying that when he died, he wished to be buried at sea. In 1914 the New York Times established a memorial fund to honour him. The money collected went to equip a new emergency ward at St Vincent’s Hospital, New York, an institution with which he had close ties.

Donogh O’Malley I Clongowes in 1937-1938

Donogh O’ Malley (1921-68), minister for health and minister for education, was a native of Limerick, who attended Clongowes in 1937-8. He graduated as an engineer from UCG (now NUIG) in 1943. He was an outstanding sportsman, winning honours at rugby, swimming and soccer, and also interested in horseracing and greyhounds. His style, outspokenness, gregarious nature and generosity made him immensely popular. In 1954 he won a Dáil seat in Limerick East for Fianna Fáil, topping the poll as he did in every subsequent election. He also sat on Limerick City Council and was mayor of Limerick in 1961, resigning to take office as junior minister in charge of public works. In 1965 he was promoted to the cabinet as minister for health, transferring to the department of education in 1966. With his friends Charles Haughey and Brian Lenihan – ‘the three musketeers’ – he was a leading figure in the new generation of modernising politicians, who were committed to Lemass’s vision of economic expansion and social development. He proved an outstanding and dynamic minister, driven by his genuine social concern to introduce a raft of new policy initiatives, to the horror of civil servants, especially in the department of finance. O’Malley overcame bureaucratic and political opposition by deftly appealing to the public and cultivating the press. His greatest achievements were undoubtedly his 1966 free-education and school-transport schemes (both announced to the public without prior cabinet approval, much less that of the Department of Finance). He also established regional technical colleges (now institutes of technology) and (when minister for health) regional health boards. His sudden death, aged only forty-seven, caused widespread shock and grief. Many felt Ireland had lost a future leader, and he remains an emblem of the lost promise of the 1960s. His wife Hilda, as a young woman, was the inspiration for Patrick Kavanagh’s poem ‘On Raglan Road’.

Clongowes 1914-1921 I Alan O’Meara

Alan O’Meara (1903-74), professor of medicine and medical scientist, was a native of Skibbereen, County Cork, who attended Clongowes in 1914-21. He graduated with science and medical degrees from TCD in 1927, subsequently gaining doctorates in medicine and science, and becoming a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. As a student, while studying the growth of staphylococci, he noticed that in time a mould developed. This observation came to the notice of Alexander Fleming and contributed to his discovery of penicillin. O’Meara studied for a time in Leeds, where he introduced what came to be known as O’Meara’s modification of the VogesProskauer reaction, used throughout the world in water analysis and bacterial taxonomy. Working for the Wellcome laboratory, he discovered ‘O’Meara’s method’ of driving copper out of peptones used for bacterial culture, thereby greatly facilitating the production of satisfactory media. He also secured increased production of the tetanus toxoid in anticipation of the coming war. Returning to Trinity at the invitation of the Medical Research Council, he developed the ‘anti-B substance’, a serum factor that conquered virulent diphtheria, which had been a major cause of child mortality up to that time. This was a major contribution to world health. He was appointed professor and made a fellow (later senior fellow) of Trinity. Subsequently he became a leading cancer researcher, earning an international reputation for his work on fibrin in secondary cancers in humans. He was the author of numerous papers on immunology, bacteriology and pathology. He was a member of the Royal Irish Academy and president of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland.

Michael Joseph O’Rahilly (1875-1916), nationalist and journalist, killed in action in the Easter Rising of 1916, was a native of Ballylongford, County Kerry, who attended Clongowes in 1890-3. Illness interrupted his subsequent medical studies at UCD, and his father’s death obliged him to return to Kerry to run the family business. His share of funds raised by the sale of the business enabled him to live at different times in Ireland, England and America. Finally settling in Dublin in 1909, he devoted himself to the nationalist cause. From about this time, he habitually used the title ‘The O’Rahilly’ by which he is generally known. In 1910 he was elected to the executive of the Sinn Féin party and mounted a campaign against the 1911 royal visit. He contributed regularly to nationalist publications, such as United Irishman, Sinn Féin, and the republican monthly Irish Freedom. He was active in the Gaelic League, revamping its loss-making paper An Claideamh Soluis. To raise funds, he introduced the American practice of flag days to Ireland, which was soon widely imitated. He was involved in the formation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 and played a central role in their subsequent gun-running and arms procurement activities. In 1916 he sided with Eoin MacNeill against a pre-emptive rising and carried the countermanding order to Limerick. However, when the rebels mobilised in Dublin on Easter Monday, he joined the men he had trained. He described the Rising as ‘madness, but glorious madness’, adding ‘I helped wind the clock, so I might as well hear it strike’. In the General Post Office, with Desmond FitzGerald as his aide-de-camp, he was placed in charge of the roof, food stores and prisoners. When the GPO was evacuated, he was mortally wounded leading a charge on a barricade in Moore Street. He was the only Volunteer officer to be killed in action. One of Yeats’s last poems ‘The O’Rahilly’ (1937) celebrates him as an exemplar of existential heroism.

Clongowes 1825-1830 I Edmund O’Reilly, SJ

Edmund O’Reilly, SJ (1811-78), theologian, born in London but brought up in County Limerick, attended Clongowes in 1825-30. He studied for the priesthood, first in Maynooth and then in Rome, where he became a close friend of Paul Cullen, rector of the Irish College and later archbishop of Dublin. In 1835 he graduated with a doctorate in divinity. Ordained for Limerick diocese in 1838, he was immediately appointed to the chair of dogmatic theology at Maynooth. He was renowned for his theological knowledge and frequently advised Irish bishops on theological matters and on points of sacred learning generally. At one time he was considered for a theological chair in Rome. In 1850 he was theologian to Archbishop Cullen at the synod of Thurles. In 1851 he resigned from Maynooth to become a Jesuit, taking his final vows in 1862. He was appointed professor of theology at the Catholic University of Dublin, where he became a close associate of John Henry Newman. In 1859 he founded the Jesuit house of studies at Milltown Park, of which he was rector until his death. In 1863-70 he was provincial of the Irish province. He published numerous theological articles, and a collection of his writings, edited by Matthew Russell (whom he had helped to edit Irish Monthly) was published in 1892 under the title The Relations of the Church to Society.

John Marcus O’Sullivan I Clongowes 1897-1898

John Marcus O’ Sullivan (1881-1948), minister for education, was a native of Killarney, who attended Clongowes in 1897-8. As a student at UCD, he won a gold medal for oratory in the Literary and Historical Society. Gaining an MA in philosophy, he was awarded a fellowship that allowed him to travel for further studies to Germany, where he received a doctorate at Heidelberg for his dissertation on Kant and Hegel, subsequently published in English as Old Criticism and New Pragmatism (1909). He failed to get the chair of philosophy at UCD, but instead was made professor of history, which had been a subsidiary subject in his primary degree. He was an excellent and inspiring teacher, but did little to encourage research. His own output was largely confined to articles in Studies, the Irish Ecclesiastical Record and more popular magazines. His views were those of a conservative Catholic, and he regarded philosophers of change, from Luther to Lenin, as prophets of disorder and disunion. He supported the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921, and was elected Cumann na nGaedheal TD for County Kerry in 1923, holding his Dáil seat for the next twenty years. He was an effective parliamentarian, able to research and expound on the most diverse subjects. His first government appointment was in charge of public works. In 1926-32 he was minister for education. He proved a capable administrator, although his scope for action was limited by his belief that the primary responsibility for education lay with the churches. His major legislative achievement was the Vocational Education Act of 1930. He represented Ireland at the League of Nations throughout the 1920s and was president of the fifth commission of the League in 1930. He was an active and articulate opposition spokesman in the Dáil after Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932. He also served on the governing body of UCD and the NUI Senate.

Clongowes 1843-1847 I Christopher Palles

Christopher Palles (1831-1920), chief baron of the exchequer court, was a native of Mountnugent, County Cavan, who attended Clongowes in 1843-7. Graduating from Trinity with a BA in mathematics in 1852, he was admitted to the King’s Inns and to Gray’s Inn, and called to the bar in 1853. His skills at presenting cases, cross examination and drafting pleadings gradually won him a large practice, and he took silk in 1865. A Liberal supporter, he became successively crown prosecutor for Kildare, solicitor general and attorney general. In 1874 Gladstone appointed him chief baron of the Irish exchequer, then one of the four senior Irish common law courts. When these were integrated with chancery as the High Court, Palles retained his title, retiring from the bench only in 1916 at the age of eighty-five. In the course of his long judicial tenure he achieved an extraordinary reputation throughout the common law world. A fellow judge in a posthumous tribute singled out his ‘mastery of law as a science in all its ramifications; his penetrating research; his remarkable case memory; his grasp of common law, of equity and of statute law; his assimilation of every branch of jurisprudence; [and] his methods of historical ratiocination, convincing deduction, and lucid exposition’. Many of his judgements are part of the canon of common law. To all, he was courteous, dignified and fearlessly impartial. He served on the board of national education and the senate of the National University of Ireland. He was awarded several honorary degrees. He was the first president of the Clongowes Union, which was founded in his house, and he held the office until his death. His portrait hangs in TCD, and there is a copy in the King’s Inns. He was the subject of a biography (1960) by fellow-Clongownian, Professor V.T.H. Delany of TCD.

Roland Paoletti I Clongowes 1942-1949

Roland Paoletti (1931-2013), architect, was a native of London, who attended Clongowes in 1942-9. He went to the Manchester School of Architecture, where he was a contemporary of Norman Foster. His first important job was with Basil Spence, then busy with Coventry Cathedral. Subsequently he reconnected with his Italian roots by attending the Istituto Universitario in Venice, then a highly creative environment where Franco Albini, Giancarlo de Carlo and Carlo Scarpa all taught. He ran Spence’s Rome office, working on projects such as the new papal audience chamber in the Vatican. Next he moved to Hong Kong to coordinate the architecture of the Hong Kong Mass Transit Authority. This experience prepared him for his major achievement, which was as chief architect of the £3 billion London Jubilee Line extension. No engineer was appointed at the outset, and Paoletti seized the opportunity to procure the most talented architectural firms to design eleven new stations along the line. Two – Waterloo and London Bridge – were by his own in-house team. The influential Architectural Review hailed him as ‘the Medici of London Transport’. Most of the Jubilee line is deep, and Paoletti applied a design philosophy in which the stations were conceived as huge cathedral-like spaces of concrete and glass that allowed natural light to pour down into the basements below. ‘For the price of an underground ticket,’ he declared, ‘you will see some of the greatest contributions to engineering and architecture worldwide’. The result was a unique variety of architectural statements: each station different, but all beautiful and awe-inspiring. With their swagger and individualism, the stations have been widely acclaimed as a tour de force in public-transport architecture. Although Paoletti lived for his work, he was well read and had broad interests. Increasingly religious in his latter years, he referred gratefully to his Jesuit education. He was appointed a commander of the British Empire (CBE) in 2000.

Clongowes 1867-1869 I Count George Noble Plunkett

Count George Noble Plunkett (1851-1948), revolutionary and scholar, was a native of Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1867-9. He travelled widely, and much of his early life was spent studying renaissance art, but he eventually graduated BA from Trinity in 1884 and was called to the bar in 1886. He was privately wealthy. In 1884 Pope Leo XIII made him a papal count for his generosity to the nursing congregation, the Little Company of Mary. He wrote a number of books, including standard biographies of the Italian artists Botticelli (1900) and Pinelli (1908), Architecture of Dublin (1911) and several collections of his poetry. He also co-edited Charles O’Kelly’s account of the Jacobite war (1894) and revised Margaret Stokes’s Early Christian Art in Ireland (1911). In 1907 he became director of the National Museum of Ireland and took steps to greatly increase attendances. Politically, he grew increasingly radical. He took Parnell’s side in the wake of the O’Shea divorce case, and was subsequently sworn into the IRB by his republican son, Joseph, one of the 1916 leaders executed after the Rising. Both his other sons were also involved. After it, he was sacked from the National Museum and deported to Oxford. All this led to his nomination as the republican candidate in the 1917 Roscommon by-election, which he won easily, but refused to take his seat in Westminster. He was returned again at the 1918 election and presided over the opening session of the first Dáil. He was successively minister for external affairs and for the arts. He opposed the treaty, but remained in politics, although interned. When de Valera formed Fianna Fáil, he remained with Sinn Féin and lost his Dáil seat in the 1927 election. In 1938, with six other abstentionist second-Dáil TDs, he transferred republican sovereignty to the IRA army council. Always courteous, his oratory was more suited to a learned gathering than to the rough and tumble of revolutionary politics.

John Redmond I Clongowes 1868-1874

John Redmond (1856-1918), leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party, was born in Dublin, but grew up in County Wexford. In 1868-74 he attended Clongowes, where he excelled at acting and debating. He attended Trinity, but left without taking a degree. He was called to the bar in 1886. In 1881 he was elected MP for New Ross for Parnell’s grouping, soon to be reconstituted as the Irish Parliamentary Party. From 1891 he sat for Waterford. On his first day in parliament, he made his maiden speech and was also expelled from the house. He became chief whip, and with his brother Willie toured America, Australia and New Zealand to raise funds for the party. Both Redmonds were jailed in 1888 for their role in the campaign to reduce agricultural rents. He supported Parnell after the party split in the wake of the O’Shea divorce scandal. He strove for reconciliation, and in 1900 he was unanimously elected chairman when the party reunited. He was a superb orator and proved a tough and an effective political leader. Debate, consensus and parliamentary activity were the hallmarks of his political career. He played a major role in securing the Wyndham Act, which allowed more than 200,000 tenants to buy their farms on reasonable terms. He drove through the enactment of the Irish Universities Bill. His major objective was to secure Home Rule. This appeared to have been achieved in 1914, but its implementation and the troubled question of Ulster’s exclusion were deferred by the outbreak of World War I. Otherwise, he would have headed the new Irish administration. His support for the war – honourably intended, but arguably misjudged – split Irish nationalism. Huge numbers of Irishmen enlisted and died. (They included more than 600 Clongownians who enlisted, of whom 95 died.) The deferment of Home Rule, the duration of the war, the 1916 Rising by the dissidents and the threat of conscription all brought about a sharp decline in Redmond’s public support. The death of his brother, Willie, in the war was an added blow. His aspiration for a peaceful Irish settlement shattered, he died disillusioned in 1918. In the subsequent general election, his party was routed by the more militant Sinn Féin.

William ‘Willie’ Hoey Redmond (1861-1917), nationalist politician and soldier, was born in Liverpool, but grew up in County Wexford. He attended Clongowes in 1873-6. He was the younger brother and close confidant of John Redmond, although much more outgoing in personality. He spent time as a merchant sailor and contemplated the army as a career, but instead became involved in the Land League agitation, which resulted in the first of several spells in jail. He was elected MP for Wexford borough in 1883, and subsequently represented Fermanagh North and Clare West. He travelled extensively, raising funds for Irish political causes in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and America. He was a popular figure in the House of Commons, passionate and theatrical as a speaker, although not rated a deep thinker. He was more progressive than his brother in his social and economic thinking, opposing the Boer War, while supporting women’s suffrage and old-age pensions. His belief that the Ulster Unionists could be brought round to accepting Home Rule, if the two traditions fought side by side, was one of the reasons he enlisted in the 16th (Irish) Division in World War I. Despite his age, he went to the Western Front, from which he wrote regularly for the newspapers. He was badly shaken by the Easter Rising, which convinced him of the folly of constitutional nationalism’s support for the war. However, he was much too chivalrous to think of deserting his comrades. In 1917 he was mortally wounded in the attack on Wytschaete in Belgium, and buried in a convent garden in Loker. His death was widely mourned, and his bust by Oliver Sheppard stands in a park in Wexford town.

Pat Reid I Clongowes 1921-1922

Pat Reid (1910-90), escape officer, British diplomat and author, was born in India, the son of a civil servant, and attended Clongowes in 1921-2. He attended King’s College London and worked as a civil engineer until 1939, when he enlisted in the army and was captured in France in 1940. Dressed as a woman, he escaped through a tunnel from Laufen prison camp in Austria, but was recaptured within a week. He was then sent to Colditz Castle in Saxony, the supposedly impregnable prison for escape-prone Allied prisoners. He became British escape officer and masterminded several escape attempts, including that of Airey Neave, the first that was successful. In October 1942 he organised his own escape with three companions, by loosening window bars with a saw smuggled in in a food parcel. They evaded the security with the help of a ‘music practice’ conducted by the legless pilot Douglas Bader, who stopped and started the prison band in coordination with the patrols of sentries. All four reached Switzerland safely. Reid was awarded the Military Cross and promoted major. He remained in Switzerland as a military attaché, largely concerned with military intelligence and working closely with the French resistance. He remained on in the diplomatic service after the war, working in commercial affairs and then on the staff of OEEC in Paris in the distribution of Marshall aid. He became famous with his book The Colditz Story (1952), followed by The Latter Days at Colditz (1953). These accounts of prison escapes were made into a successful film (1955), in which John Mills starred as Reid, and a classic TV series (1972-4). He wrote several subsequent books about wartime escapes. He stood for the Conservatives in the 1955 general election, but failed to get elected. He subsequently worked as a civil engineer. It is a school tradition that his first ‘break’ for freedom was from Clongowes!

Clongowes 1899-1903 I John Robinson

John Robinson (1887-1965), architect, was a native of Glenageary, County Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1899-1903. He briefly studied for the priesthood and was then apprenticed as an architect. After working in London, he returned to Dublin to form a lasting partnership with his fellow Clongownian (1901-2), Cyril Keefe. The firm became the favourite architects of the Catholic hierarchy and built numerous churches, especially in Dublin’s swelling suburbs. The churchmen of the time were rigidly conservative, and Robinson and Keefe initially adopted a Hiberno-Romanesque style, later changing to Lombardic-Romanesque, which was spacious and inexpensive, but still traditional. He was the official architect to the 1932 Eucharistic Congress. Robinson was able to indulge his taste for more contemporary art-deco architecture in commercial buildings, vocational schools and cinemas. Notable Dublin examples are the Gas Company offices (now the Trinity School of Nursing) in D’Olier Street, the Carlton Cinema in O’Connell Street, Cathal Brugha Street Catering College and the daring Sweepstakes building (now demolished) in Ballsbridge. The firm received a fresh injection of modernism when it was joined by a third Clongownian, Andrew Devane (1929-36), and was reconstituted as Robinson, Keefe and Devane. Robinson’s final major commission was the very traditional new Galway Cathedral (1957-65). He was a papal knight of the Order of St Gregory and active in the Knights of Malta. As president of the Clongowes Union in 1939-42, he promoted social action by launching the Clongowes Youth Club in Dublin. His son, Patrick Robinson, who attended Clongowes in 1929-35, is also a distinguished architect.

Jack Kelly-Rogers I Clongowes 1916-1919

Jack Kelly-Rogers (1905-81), aviation pioneer, was a native of Dún Laoghaire who attended Clongowes in 1916-19. He was sent to the naval-training ship Conway, moored on the Mersey, before joining the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in which he served aboard an aircraft carrier. Transferring to the Royal Air Force, he was commissioned a pilot officer in 1927. Aviation became his career, especially on the flying-boats, which his naval service had taught him to understand intimately. Based at the flying-boat training school at Southampton, he gained world-wide experience. In 1935 he was recruited by Imperial Airways (later BOAC). He became commanding officer of its flying-boats, ferrying passengers to Australia, South Africa and America. In 1938 he tested the first in-flight re-fuelling of flying boats. He made the first scheduled west and eastbound airmail flights across the Atlantic by a European operator, landing at Foynes to be greeted by Éamon de Valera. In 1940, in a famous wartime episode, he flew the four-engine flying-boat Corsair out of the narrow Dungu River in the Congo, where it had been marooned for ten months. That same year he flew the first passenger flight to and from America, and was the first overseas pilot to land at LaGuardia Airport, New York. In 1942 he flew Winston Churchill home from America, allowing him to take the flying-boat’s controls for a time. In 1946 he inaugurated the first land-plane services between Britain and New York, which ended the era of the flying-boats. In 1947 he became technical manager of Aer Lingus. He wrote extensively on aviation matters and became a fellow and president of the Royal Aeronautical Society. He was interested in aviation history. In 1959 he played a leading role in establishing a monument in Connemara commemorating the pioneering transatlantic flight of Alcock and Brown. He collected items of Irish aviation interest, and was primarily responsible for the creation of a short-lived Irish aviation museum at Dublin Airport. There is a Clongowes tradition that he once landed a plane on the hallowed turf of the cricket crease.

Clongowes 1851-1852 I Comte Henri Russell

Comte Henri Russell (1834-1909), pioneering mountaineer, was a native of Toulouse, but the son of an Irish father. He attended Clongowes in 1851-2. Funded by his private fortune, he travelled extensively, visiting North America, crossing through Russia to China and then touring Australia, New Zealand and India. He was an eccentric, with a great love of the mountainous outdoors and a deep respect for the natural environment. He is often called ‘the Irishman who conquered the Pyrenees’ and certainly from 1861 their exploration became his passion. On his own or with guides, he made numerous first ascents of different mountains and eventually climbed every peak on both the Spanish and French sides of the range. He is especially known for his association with the Vignemale, the highest peak of the French Pyrenees, which he scaled many times. In 1882-93 he built ‘Chez Russell’, a residential complex in a series of man-made caves on the mountain. It was blessed by a priest and became the venue for sumptuous and legendary banquets, where as ‘the comte des monts’ he entertained visiting princes and notables. In 1884 he achieved a great ambition by lying in a sleeping bag in his cave at the edge of a glacier, enjoying a cigar and a mug of rum punch, while ball lightning rolled down the mountain in a thunderstorm that felt like an earthquake. His seventh and final cave, Le Paradis, was constructed in 1893 close to the summit of the Vignemale. It was here that he celebrated his ‘silver wedding’ (to the mountain), marking the twenty-five years that had passed since his first ascent. He made his thirty-third and final ascent of the Vignemale in 1904. He formed the Société Ramond for the scientific and ethnographic study of the Pyrenees. He was a member of the Alpine Club, and of the Geographical and Geological Societies of France. He popularised the sleeping bag, hitherto only used by shepherds in the mountains. He wrote more than a dozen books and has had nearly as many written about him. He died in Biarritz and is buried in Pau. The Pic de Russell (which he first climbed in 1865) in the Pyrenean Maladeta massif is named after him. His statue is to be seen at Gavarnie.

Finbar Ryan, OP I Clongowes 1898-1899

Finbar Ryan, OP (1881-1975), archbishop of Port of Spain, Trinidad, was a native of Rochestown, County Cork, who attended Clongowes in 1898-9. He entered the Dominican Order and in 1905 was ordained at San Clemente in Rome. He taught at Newbridge College, where he became dean. He was subsequently prior at St Saviour’s in Dublin and St Mary’s in Cork. He founded The Imeldist, a religious magazine for children and edited The Irish Rosary, both Dominican publications. An outstanding preacher and lecturer, he was twice elected provincial of the Dominican order in Ireland. He was appointed coadjutor archbishop of Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 1937, succeeding as archbishop in 1940. His authority extended to several other islands in the West Indies. He built churches and founded the diocesan seminary. He was active as a school builder and strongly promoted Catholic education. He wrote the first book in English on the Fatima apparitions (1939), which ran to several editions. In 1962 he was the most senior religious leader to officiate at the ceremonies marking the independence of Trinidad and Tobago, and the new government awarded him the Trinity Cross. He was also a freeman of Cork, a papal count and a grand officer of the Supreme Order of Christ. Although he allowed steel-pan music to be played in Trinidad churches, he was generally authoritarian and traditionalist, like his close friend, Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin. He attended the Second Vatican Council, but it is likely that he found its deliberations and decrees less than congenial. He retired to the Dominican Retreat House in Cork in 1966.

Clongowes 1912-1917 I Michael Rynne

Michael Rynne (1899-1981), republican activist, soldier and diplomat, was a native of Ennistymon, County Clare, who attended Clongowes in 1912-17. He attended UCD, where he was president of the Students’ Representative Council. He graduated BA in 1920 and was called to the bar in 1924. He subsequently studied international law on the Continent, earning his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1929. He had joined the Irish Volunteers in 1917 and saw active service in the war of independence. He was involved in the events of Bloody Sunday and served as a staff officer in the IRA headquarters, where he was a close associate of Michael Collins and Richard Mulcahy. He commanded the Blessington (County Wicklow) flying column in 1921. He resigned from the army after the civil war. In 1932 he became a legal adviser in the Department of External Affairs. After Éamon de Valera took power, he advised him on such matters as the League of Nations and the dismantling of the 1921 treaty. By 1950 he was an assistant secretary and dealt with the preliminary stages of Ireland’s application to join the United Nations. In 1955 he was appointed ambassador to Spain and retired in 1961. Under the pen name Andrew Lysaght, he wrote poems, short stories, radio plays and songs. His son Etienne Rynne, who attended Clongowes in 1948-50, was a distinguished archaeologist.

Charles Sheil I Clongowes 1910-1914

Charles Sheil (1897-1968), judge of the Northern Ireland High Court, was a native of Portadown, County Armagh, who attended Clongowes in 1910-14. He graduated from Queen’s University Belfast and was called to the bar in 1921. Combining eloquence and common sense with a clear and logical mind, he was a successful advocate and soon built up a large practice in Northern Ireland. He became a king’s counsel in 1943. He was crown counsel for Antrim in 1926-43 and then county court judge for Tyrone. In 1949 he was appointed to the High Court, and for the next twenty years he was the sole Catholic member of the Northern Ireland superior-courts judiciary. As a judge, he was dignified without being pompous, and commanded universal respect for his courtesy, good humour and skill at charging a jury in the most complex of cases. Off the bench he was a most convivial and witty companion. He had a strong religious faith and was extremely ecumenical in outlook. He served for twenty-five years on the senate of Queen’s University and was a governor of Armagh Observatory. In 1936 he spoke at the first dinner of the Ulster branch of the Clongowes Union, of which in 1955 he was elected president. His three sons attended Clongowes, one being Father Michael Sheil SJ, current rector of Clongowes, and another, Sir John Sheil, a Northern Ireland Appeals Court judge.

Clongowes 1949-1956 I Sir John Sheil

Sir John Sheil (b.1938), lord justice of appeal in Northern Ireland, was a native of Belfast, who attended Clongowes in 1949-56. He was educated at Queen’s University Belfast and Trinity College Dublin. He was called to the Northern Ireland Bar in 1964, becoming a queen’s counsel in 1975. He was elected a bencher of the Northern Ireland Inn of Court in 1988. He served as a judge of the Northern Ireland High Court in 1989-2004, becoming a lord justice of appeal in 2004. He was chairman of the mental-health review tribunal in 1985-7 and of the fair-employment appeals board in 1986-9. He was also a member of the British Council. In 2010 he was appointed to the surveillance commission, the body responsible for overseeing the use of covert surveillance by public authorities in the UK. He was knighted in 1989, appointed to the privy council in 2004 and made an honorary bencher of the Middle Temple in 2005. He was president of the Clongowes Union in 2000. In 2008 his twin brother, Father Michael Sheil SJ, current rector of Clongowes, was also president of the Clongowes Union. Lady Brenda Sheil, Sir John’s wife, is a lay canon of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh, and his son Michael, also a Clongownian (1994-9) is following the family tradition at the Northern Ireland bar in Belfast.

John Sisk I Clongowes 1922-1927

John Sisk (1911-2001), civil engineer and businessman, was a native of Cork, who attended Clongowes in 1922-7. He graduated from UCD with a civil-engineering degree, before joining his father’s building firm, where he gained a practical knowledge of joinery and natural stonework. He opened a branch of the firm in Dublin and obtained the contract for the new department of industry and commerce in Kildare Street, which he built in 1939-42. During World War II he built bases for the American army in Northern Ireland. After the war, he won contracts for sanatoria and the new Galway cathedral. When he gained overall control of the family construction firm, he merged the Cork and Dublin branches to create a more cohesive corporate structure. He grew the firm into the largest in the Irish construction market (a position it still holds), winning many significant overseas contracts. He introduced performance-incentive schemes for his staff, together with other innovations such as the tower crane. He looked beyond Britain for business opportunities, obtaining the distribution rights for Bosch electrical hand tools. The success of a temporary partnership with a Dutch firm to build Wexford bridge led to a permanent relationship under the name Ascon, which became the largest civil-engineering firm in Ireland. He was a fellow of the Institute of Engineers. He believed that managers should retire at sixty, and in 1974 he followed his own advice. He was a generous benefactor of charitable causes, but disliked any publicity. However, his generosity was rewarded with the Dutch Order of Oranje-Nassau and a papal commendation.

Clongowes 1948-1953 I Sir Michael Smurfit

Sir Michael Smurfit (b.1936), businessman and entrepreneur, was born in England but grew up in Ireland. He attended Clongowes in 1948-53, but left, aged sixteen, to join his father’s Dublin-based packaging company, Jefferson Smurfit & Sons Ltd. In 1967 he was appointed joint managing director, and over the next thirty-five years he led the company into major expansion throughout the world, becoming chairman and chief executive in 1977. He proved an outstanding businessman, who developed the Smurfit Group into Ireland’s first international company. Following the merger of the Smurfit Group with Kappa Packaging BV in 2005, the re-named Smurfit Kappa Group employed 42,000 workers in thirty-three countries on five continents and had sales of €6 billion. His other interests are golf (he co-owns the K Club in County Kildare, which hosted the 2006 Ryder Cup) and art collecting. He is a generous benefactor of charities and education. The postgraduate business school at UCD is named after him as a result of his financial support. He was president of the Clongowes Union in 2012. He is honorary Irish consul in Monaco, where he lives. He was knighted in 2005 and has been honoured by many governments and universities.

William Starkie I Clongowes 1876

William Starkie (1860-1920), classical scholar and educationist, was born at Ross’s Point, County Sligo, but grew up at Rosscarbery in County Cork. He attended Clongowes in 1876 and was then sent to Shrewsbury School in England, where he became head boy. After graduating from Cambridge University, he became professor of classics at the Catholic University in Dublin, before moving to Trinity where he was elected a fellow in 1890. His translation of The Wasps by Aristophanes (1897) was highly regarded. In 1897 he was appointed president of Queen’s College Galway (now NUIG) and to the professorship of history, English literature and philosophy. He returned to Dublin in 1890 to the important and influential office of resident commissioner of national education. He tackled the job with vigour and reforming zeal. He abolished the system by which teachers’ salaries depended on the results of annual oral examinations of their pupils. However, his campaign to amalgamate small schools failed because of opposition from the Catholic clergy. He gained a reputation for being anti-clerical and anti-Irish, despite his personal fidelity to Catholicism and the extensive reforms he made to the primary-school curriculum. These included the introduction to the syllabus of Irish history, geography and language studies, all hitherto disregarded because they were deemed potentially subversive. He introduced science and was also responsible for making Shakespeare familiar to national-school children. He fought for better standards of hygiene and improved facilities. He regularly visited schools himself and laid great emphasis on a teacher’s performance, based on his belief that ‘the crown of all education is the priceless contact with an inspiring personality’. No nationalist in a political sense, he feared assassination during the Troubles. His son Walter, professor of Spanish and lecturer in Italian at Trinity, was a noted authority on Spanish literature as well as a writer of essayistic travelogues. His daughter, Enid, was a well-known French scholar at Oxford.

Clongowes 1833-1836 I Bartholomew Woodlock

Bartholomew Woodlock (1819-1902), bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise and rector of the Catholic University of Ireland, was a native of Dublin, who attended Clongowes in 1833-6. He studied at the Roman seminary in the palace of Sant’ Apollinare and in 1841 was ordained priest for the Dublin diocese. He received his doctorate in divinity the following year. In 1842, he helped found All Hallows College in Drumcondra, Dublin, for the education of priests for the foreign and colonial English-speaking missions. He became the college’s third president in 1854-61 and was made a monsignor in 1855. He was a founder member of the Society of St Vincent de Paul in Ireland in 1844 and its spiritual director for many years. In 1861-79 he was rector of the Catholic University of Ireland in succession to John Henry Newman. He believed that Catholic education should be integrated and under the control of the bishops. However, his ambitious plans for the university’s development were largely unsuccessful. A scheme to build a new college at Drumcondra was a failure, and he experienced considerable difficulty in obtaining financial support from the hierarchy to expand, or even operate, the existing college. By the 1870s the university had only a handful of students and professors. He resigned, when he was appointed bishop of Ardagh and Clonmacnoise in 1880. He was extremely active in introducing educational congregations into the diocese. He supported early restoration work at the famous Early Christian site at Clonmacnoise. He exhausted his private funds to complete St Mel’s Cathedral in Longford. In 1891 ill health forced him to resign, and he retired to All Hallows. He is buried in Longford.

Clongowes welcomes suggestions for the inclusion of further portraits in the Serpentine collection.

Candidates must have spent some time as a student at Clongowes.

A precondition for inclusion is that a candidate must normally be either retired or dead. However, this can be waived in very exceptional cases.

Typically a candidate should possess one or more of the following characteristics: fame; great distinction or a pioneering role in his field; a notable achievement; appointment to an important office of state or to high rank in the public service (national or international); a significant contribution to religion, scholarship, education, business, the learned professions or the arts; prominent participation in famous events. However, other grounds for inclusion are not ruled out. Cabinet ministers, bishops, Supreme Court judges and university heads qualify for inclusion automatically.

A suggestion for inclusion should give the main facts of a candidate’s career, including dates of birth, death and Clongowes attendance. It should state why he is considered worthy of inclusion. It should provide information on where a suitable portrait illustration of the candidate can be sourced.

On receipt of a suggestion, the headmaster will normally refer it to the Serpentine panel for advice. The decision to include the candidate or not, as the case may be, will then be taken by the headmaster.

IPhotograph credits & copyright

The author/editor and Clongowes Wood College SJ as publisher gratefully acknowledge the permission granted to reproduce the copyright material in this book.

Alfred Aylward ...............................................................CWC Daniel Binchy ............................................................Family Thomas Bodkin .............................................................CWC Frederick Boland ...........................................................CWC Joseph Brennan ........................................................Family Stephen Brown, SJ ................................. Irish Jesuit Archive John Bruton ...............................................................Family James Aloysius Burke/ Séamus de Búrca ............................ Sir William Butler .........................................................CWC John Conmee, SJ ..........................................................CWC James Corboy, SJ ..........................................................CWC Timothy Corcoran, SJ ....................................................CWC Michael Courtney ......................................................Family Edward Coyne, SJ .................................. Irish Jesuit Archive Thomas Crean .....................Imperial War Museum, London George Crosbie ..........................................................Family Sir Francis Cruise ......................Royal College of Physicians James Cullen, SJ ..........................................................CWC Patrick Cunningham ..................................................Family Joseph Dalton, SJ .......................Riverview College, Sydney James Deeny .............................................................Family Andrew Devane ..........................Robinson, Keith & Devane William Doolin ...........................................................Family Eugene Esmonde ......................................................Family Thomas Esmonde .........................................................CWC Thomas Finlay ............................................................Family Hugh Geoghegan ......................................................Family Oliver St John Gogarty ..................................................CWC Aubrey Gwynn, SJ .................................Irish Jesuit Archives Francis Hackett ................................U.S. Library of Congress William Hackett, SJ ...............................Irish Jesuit Archives James Hanlon ............................................................Family Richard James ‘Jim’ Hayes ............................................CWC George Hodnett .........................................................Family James Hogan ................................. National Photo Archives John Vincent Holland ...............Irish War Museum, London Sir Andrew Horne .........................................................CWC James Joyce ..................................................................CWC James Fitzgerald-Kenney ..................................................... Thomas ‘Tom’ Kettle ......................................................CWC Sir Gilbert Laithwaite ....................................................CWC Thomas Lane ..............................................................Family Matthew Lawless ..............National Portrail Gallery, London Patrick ‘P.J.’ Little ........................................................Family Enoch Louis Lowe ..........................................................CWC James Lynch ................Dios.Kildare & Leighlin (Delaney Trust) Aidan Joseph MacCarthy .............. book Robson Publicatons Niall St John McCarthy ..............................................Family Oliver MacDonagh ............................................CWC/Family Patrick McGilligan ......................................................Family Sir Ambrose McGonigal .............................................Family Sir Joseph McGrath ......................................................CWC Edward ‘Ned’ McGuire ..................................Fitzwilliam LTC Thomas McNevin ..........................................................CWC John Charles McQuaid .................................................CWC Conor Maguire ..................................................................... James ‘The O’Gorman’ Mahon ............................................ Francis Mahony ‘Father Prout’ ............................................. Thomas Francis Meagher ..............................................CWC Charles Mitchel ...............................................................RTÉ Thomas Murphy .........................................................Family John Naish ........................................................................... Peter Baron O’Brien of Kilfenora ..................The Law Library Jeremiah Joseph ‘Ginger’ O’Connell ........................ National Photo Archives Roderick ‘Rory’ O’Connor ............... National Photo Archives Sir Nicholas O’Conor .....................................................CWC Kevin O’Higgins ............................................................CWC Thomas O’Higgins .....................................................Family Count Gerald O’Kelly .......................Dept. of Foreign Affairs

Photograph credits & copyright I

Cornelius O’Leary ........................Queens University, Belfast William O’Leary, SJ .....................Riverview College, Sydney William O’Loughlin ......................................................CWC Donogh O’Malley ................................................................ Alan O’Meara .............................................................Family Michael Joseph ‘The O’Rahilly’ ..................................Family Edmund O’Reilly, SJ .............................. Irish Jesuit Archive John Marcus O’Sullivan ................................................CWC Christopher Palles .........................................................CWC Roland Paoletti ...................The Architects’ Journal, London Count George Noble Plunkett ...................................... National Photo Archives John Redmond .............................................................CWC William ‘Willie’ Hoey Redmond........................................... Pat Reid .........................................................................CWC John Robinson ................................................................ 91 Jack Kelly-Rogers .......................................................Family Comte Henri Russell .....................................................CWC Finbar Ryan, OP ............................................................CWC Michael Rynne ..................................................................... Charles Sheil .................................................................CWC Sir John Sheil .............................................................Family John Sisk .................................................................Hal Sisk Sir Michael Smurfit ....................................................Family William Starkie ............................................................. UCG Bartholomew Woodlock ....... Dios. Ardagh & Clonmacnoise

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The author/editor and Clongowes Wood College SJ apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.

HARMAN MURTAGH

First published 2014 Supplement 2019

The material in this publication is protected by copyright law. Except as may be permitted by law, no part of the material may be reproduced (including by storage in a retrieval system) or transmitted in any form or by any means, adapted, rented or lent without the written permission of the copyright owners. Applications for permissions should be addressed to the publisher.

Copyright © Clongowes Wood College SJ

Clongowes Wood College SJ Clane Co Kildare

HARMAN MURTAGH

Contents I

MICHAEL BOLAND (Clongowes 1960-1966) Physician and President of World Organisation of General Practitioners

HUGH COVENEY (Clongowes 1950-1953) Hugh Coveney: Minister for the Marine, Lord Mayor of Cork 1982-1983.

NIAL FENNELLY (Clongowes 1953-1959) Judge of the Supreme Court

AIDAN HIGGINS (Clongowes 1942-1946) Writer

PIERCE MCCAN (Clongowes 1899-1900) Republican activist and Sinn Féin MP

DANIEL O’CONNELL (Clongowes 1911-1913) Astronomer and Seismologist

THOMAS O’HIGGINS (Clongowes 1903-1906) Minister for Defence

JAMES O’MARA (Clongowes 1888-1892) Sinn Féin MP and fund-raiser 03

04

05

06

07

08

09

10

11

I Introduction

For many years the Serpentine corridor at Clongowes has been used to hang portrait photographs of distinguished Clongownians. Additions (and sometimes subtractions) were made in no very systematic way, and the collection had a rather Edwardian character. Nevertheless, it was a very familiar part of the school, well remembered by generations of Clongowes students. In 2003-4, as part of a general scheme of improvement, the Serpentine was rebuilt and its display potential greatly improved. In preparation for the Clongowes bicentenary in 2014, it was decided to re-hang the Serpentine, standardising to some extent the criteria for inclusion, and identifying suitable new candidates to modernise the collection and make it more representative. A small committee, reporting to the then Headmaster, Father Leonard Moloney SJ, was formed in 2012. It comprised the Rector, Father Michael Sheil SJ, himself an old Clongowian (1949-56), with two other old Clongownians, David Keogh (1961-5) an architect, and Harman Murtagh (1957-62), a historian, together with Margaret Doyle, the college archivist. Through many meetings over the two years the committee formulated a policy for inclusion, researched and selected candidates who met their criteria, and procured suitable portrait photographs. It was agreed that only those who were deceased or retired would be included, except perhaps in the most exceptional circumstances. Inclusion would be automatic for cabinet ministers, bishops, the most senior judges and university heads. A candidate’s chances were greatly strengthened by his inclusion in the Dictionary of Irish Biography or the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, authoritative publications, which are the major source for many of the biographical notes in this publication. After that, the selection was made on the basis of distinction in any field, a colourful career and inclusivity. Republicans hang beside VCs; archbishops beside writers; judges beside businessmen; physicians beside diplomats; architects beside politicians; scientists beside social activists; scholars beside aviators. The choice is not judgemental, the sole criteria being that all are of course Clongownians or Tullabegians of distinction. (Tullabeg, a Jesuit College at Rahan County Offaly, merged with Clongowes in 1886.) Most of those recognised of course are no longer household names, if indeed they ever were-sic transit gloria mundi! - but all had noteworthy careers and achievements, and many made an important, original or colourful contribution to their times, and often to the benefit of posterity. No one is excluded on grounds of prejudice or persuasion, political or otherwise. Some suggestions evoked considerable debate, but on those ultimately selected the committee was unanimous. Sportsmen will have a gallery to themselves. The selection of its nature is incomplete. Suggestions for further additions can be considered, if made to the Headmaster, supported by a case for the candidate’s inclusion and accompanied by information on where to source a suitable portrait photograph. The Serpentine committee will then advise the Headmaster of their view on the appropriateness of the nominee for inclusion. The pictures are hung in a fairly haphazard arrangement. For ease of reference, this guide is arranged alphabetically, according to surname. The purpose of the guide is to supply a short biography of each of those selected for inclusion in the Serpentine. A wider knowledge of the identities and achievements of the hundred or so ‘Serpentine rogues’ will surely strengthen Clongowes tradition and pride and may be an inspiration to the present and future students at the school. The committee is grateful to all who have helped in this project, especially by sourcing photographs or providing information. For us, researching the lives and portraits of so many Clongownians of outstanding distinction has been a rewarding voyage of discovery, leaving us simultaneously both proud and humbled by the achievement of this great Jesuit school. We hope that you will share these sentiments. Harman Murtagh 2014

Michael Boland I Clongowes 1960-1966

Michael Boland (b. 1948), physician and president of the World Organisation of National Colleges, Academies and Academic Associations of General Practitioners/Family Physicians (WONCA), is a native of Skibbereen, Co. Cork, who attended Clongowes from 1960 to 1966, where he was school captain, and afterwards studied medicine at UCD, graduating in 1972. After completing general-practice training in Cork, he settled in Skibbereen to work as a general practitioner. In 1979 he became active in furthering continued medical education for general practitioners by small-group learning in each locality. Sensing the need for an academic structure, he played a key role in the establishment of the Irish College of General Practitioners (ICGP) in 1984, and was its first chairman. Within three years 95 per cent of Irish GPs had become members, recognising its efficacy in employing a wide variety of delivery methods to bring further education to as many as possible. As a member of the Medical Council, he was instrumental in securing official recognition of general practice as a specialty in medicine in 1979. He was the founding Irish member of the European Academy of

Teachers of General Practice and a council member for twenty years.

Graduating to the world organisation of general practitioners, he joined the council of WONCA in 1986 and was elected to the executive. In 2001 he became president of WONCA, which under his leadership grew to represent eighty-three countries. In 1998 he chaired and hosted the organising committee for the WONCA conference in Dublin, which was attended by 5,000 delegates. It was the largest gathering of general practitioners ever held and the largest medical conference ever to take place in Ireland. As a member of the New Leeuwenhorst Group he joined GPs from all over Europe in the development of general practice as a discipline in relation to education and research, and helped to develop it in countries such as Cuba, Kenya, South Africa and South

Korea. Subsequently as director of the Postgraduate Resource Centre of ICGP he led initiatives in such areas as practice computerisation, distance learning, alcohol misuse, suicide and men’s health. As board chairman of the Office of Tobacco Control he oversaw the introduction of the 2004 smoking ban in work and public places. He is the recipient of many awards, including an honorary doctorate from UCC. In 2013 the

Irish Medical Times acknowledged the pivotal role he played in helping to shape Irish general practice into the ‘professional, evidence-based, patient-centred model that is widely recognisable today, a model built on the twin pillars of academic rigour and patient need’, adding that it is largely due to his vision, leadership, intellectual energy and enthusiasm that it is a world-renowned and highly respected profession. Two of his children are doctors. His son Michael followed him to Clongowes and was also school captain (2003-4), a family double that remains unique.

Clongowes 1950-1953 I Hugh Coveney

Hugh Coveney (1935-98), Minister for the Marine and Defence and businessman, was a native of Cork, who attended Clongowes in 1950-3. He studied at the College of Estate Management,

London, before going on to qualify as a chartered surveyor through his father’s firm in Cork, which he subsequently developed into one of the largest surveying practices outside Dublin. He played a leading role in developing the Cork suburban shopping centres of Douglas and Bishopstown. He also built up an extensive portfolio of interests in hotels, mining, cable television and farming. Possessed of great personal energy and charisma, his work and many other activities were invariably characterised by methodical research and attention to detail.

A commitment to public service brought him into politics in 1979 as a member of Cork Corporation, and he served as Lord Mayor of Cork in 1982-3. At one time he also served as chairman of the Cork executive of the Irish Farmers Association. He was first elected to the Dáil for Fine

Gael in 1981, but lost his seat in 1987. In 1994 he returned to politics by winning a by-election in Cork South-Central. He became Minister for the Marine and Defence in the ‘rainbow coalition’ that was formed soon afterwards, establishing himself as an effective champion of Irish fisheries in particular. He was transferred to the Office of Public Works the following year. He was a close confidant of Taoiseach John Bruton and served on the government’s budget committee and on the Northern

Ireland talks team. He held his seat in the 1997 general election, but the government’s defeat brought him to the opposition benches, where he was Fine Gael spokesman on agriculture and food. He died in a tragic accident in 1998. He was an enthusiastic and successful sportsman, playing rugby with Cork Constitution and later becoming a proficient amateur golfer. He was also an active and very successful competitive sailor, contesting a succession of one-ton yachts in events such as the

Admiral’s Cup. In the hurricane-hit 1979 race he and his crew had to be rescued by helicopter from his damaged craft. At the time the three-boat

Irish team, which he captained, was on course for victory. He supported a number of charities, especially those associated with the needs of children. He was a lover of art and a patron of Cork artists. His six sons all attended Clongowes. Simon, the second eldest, won the by-election that followed his father’s death and entered the cabinet in 2011.

Nial Fennelly I Clongowes 1953-1959

Nial Fennelly (b. 1942), judge of the Supreme Court, is a native of Callan, Co. Kilkenny, who attended Clongowes from 1953 to 1959, where he was imperator of Rhetoric. Graduating from UCD with an MA degree in Economics, he attended the King’s Inns, where he was awarded the Exhibition Prize and called to the bar in 1964. After a short spell with Córas Tráchtála, the export board, he returned to the bar, and built up an extensive practice in Dublin and on the south-eastern circuit, being especially regarded for his expertise in commercial and constitutional matters. He was called to the Inner Bar in 1978. He was appointed chairman of the Legal Aid Board in 1982, later resigning over the inadequacy of its funding arrangements. He was chairman of the

Bar Council in 1990-1. From 1995 to 2000 he was the first Irishman to be appointed Advocate General at the European Court of Justice, where his opinions dealt with issues of free movement, tax and competition.

He was chairman of the Irish Centre for European Law, president of the

Irish Society for European Law and a member of the Board of Trustees of the Academy of European Law at Trier in Germany. He was appointed to the Supreme Court in 2000, where he was noted for his independence of mind and expertise in European law matters. He was elected a bencher of the King’s Inns in 1986 and of the Middle Temple in 2006. On his retirement in 2014, he was appointed sole member of the commission to enquire into matters relating to An Garda Síochána, which provided an interim report in 2015 and its final report in 2017. He has written extensively on European law, especially in relation to constitutional issues. Of Courts and Constitutions, a book of learned essays, was published in his honour in 2014. In 1975 he married Maedhbháine

Milmo. They have four children.

Clongowes 1942-1946 I Aidan Higgins

Aidan Higgins (1927-2015), writer of novels, short stories and radio drama, was a native of Celbridge, Co. Kildare, who attended Clongowes from 1942 to 1946. His family’s status as minor gentry rested on a fortune accumulated by a great-uncle from a mining venture in Arizona; by the time Higgins was born it was all but depleted. He worked in advertising for a time and lived in London, Spain, South Africa and Berlin. Samuel Beckett commended Higgins’s early collection of short stories, Felo de se, to the publisher John Calder, and so began Higgins’s literary career in 1960. His first and best-known novel, Langrishe, go down (1966), won him the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and was widely translated. It was later adapted as a BBC television film with Judy Dench and Jeremy Irons playing to a script by Harold Pinter. This modernist masterpiece is set in a dilapidated Irish big house in the 1930s – the scarcely disguised crumbling estate on which Higgins grew up in Celbridge. The book traces universal social and cultural decline through the brutalizing relationship between Imogene, one of the ageing, impoverished Langrishe spinster sisters, and a German scholar, Otto. Higgins’s second novel, Balcony of Europe, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1972. It tells of the relationship between an Irish artist, Dan Ruttle, and an American Jew, Charlotte Bayless, and is played out against a backdrop of war-torn Andalusia. It too deploys the stream-of-consciousness technique and fragmented narration that are hallmarks of Langrishe. Higgins’s novelistic focus is more on the impact of events on the changing individual consciousness of his characters than on the exigencies of plot. Higgins’s subsequent output included several other novels, collections of short stories, criticism and radio plays. Three volumes of his autobiography, Donkey’s Years (1996), The Whole Hog (1998) and Dog days (2000) are collected in A Bestiary (2004). He was a founder member of Aosdána, the affiliation of Irish creative artists. In the Irish literary canon he is the successor to Swift and to the great modernists, including Joyce, Beckett and Flann O’Brien. Like them, he pushes the boundaries of conventional form and chronology, shifts points of view, and shatters the conventions of grammar and rhetoric. For American novelist Annie Proulx, his distinctiveness is in his ‘muscular power and linguistic acrobatics… the elegant play with language and the daring architecture’. His experimentation and cosmopolitan gaze place him in the international literary company of such writers as Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner and Henry James, and he was as much at home with Kant and Goethe as he was with Maurice Blanchot. He was greatly respected by his peers for the quality of his writing, his probity, his powerful intelligence, his ‘ferocious attention to the task in hand’, and his rejection of cliché, provincialism, hypocrisy and, in its worst sense, religiosity. The poet and critic, Brian Lynch, compares him to Proust, writing that rather than being a novelist, he was a Memory Man, a describer of his own past. Higgins himself said he was “consumed by memories, and they form the life of me”.

Pierce McCan I Clongowes 1899-1900

Pierce McCan (1882-1919), republican activist and Sinn Féin MP, was born at Ballyanne, Co. Wexford in 1885. He attended Clongowes in 1899-1900 and afterwards farmed extensively at Ballyowen House near Cashel Co. Tipperary, where he was a member of the Tipperary

Hunt. He became active in nationalist politics, joining Sinn Féin in 1905, the Gaelic League in 1909 and the Irish Volunteers in 1914. He played a leading role in establishing these organisations in Co. Tipperary.

During World War I he was involved in a plot to free German prisoners of war from Templemore Barracks. The RIC reported at the time that he was ‘intimately acquainted with PH Pearse, The O’Rahilly, Thomas

McDonagh, the Plunketts and other extremists’. In 1916 he obeyed

MacNeill’s order cancelling the planned rebellion, but when he heard that a Rising had taken place in Dublin, he tried to organize some sort of action in Tipperary. This came to nothing, but led to his internment in

Dublin and later in England. Released, he was again re-arrested in 1918 and imprisoned in Gloucester Jail. While there, he was elected a Sinn

Féin member of parliament, but while still in prison he died in the great influenza epidemic. He was known to have been a very patriotic and deeply religious man, with a great love for the Kerry Gaeltacht. 10,000 people attended his funeral in Thurles. When the Sinn Féin MPs met in Dublin to form the First Dáil, Cathal Brugha told the assembly that

McCan’s ‘death was for the cause for which he would have lived, and that his memory will ever be cherished in the hearts of the comrades who knew him, and will be honoured by succeeding generations of his countrymen with that of the other martyrs of our holy cause.’ McCan

Barracks in Templemore, now the Garda Síochána College, is named after him.

Clongowes 1911-1913 I Daniel O’Connell, SJ

Daniel O’Connell, SJ (1896-1982), astronomer and seismologist, was born near Rugby in England, but sent to Clongowes after the early deaths of both his parents. He entered the Jesuits on leaving school and was ordained in 1928. He enjoyed a brilliant university career in UCD where he specialised in mathematics and experimental physics, completing his MSc in 1920. He became interested in astronomy under the guidance of Father W. O’Leary SJ who was director of the

Rathfarnham Observatory. Later, while completing his theological studies in the Netherlands, he pursued spare-time astronomical studies with a number of leading Jesuit experts. Ill-health forced him to abandon a travelling scholarship to Cambridge, and he was sent to

Australia to recuperate. There, he soon became assistant director of the Jesuit observatory at Riverview. In 1931-3 he was a member of the

Harvard University Observatory team, noted for its work on variable stars, which thereafter remained his principal astronomical interest.

Returning to Riverview, he became the observatory’s director in 1938.

His most notable work was in the astronomical field of eclipsing stars and cepheid variables, using the newly developed technique of photographic photometry. His research also included seismological work and the measurement of time with various kinds of clocks. He founded the Riverview Observatory Publications series, which gained an international reputation. He became a member of numerous Australian learned bodies. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by NUI in 1948, made a fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society and elected to membership of the Royal Irish Academy. He represented Australia at various international astronomical conferences. In 1952 he was appointed director of the Vatican Observatory at Castelgandolfo, near

Rome, where he oversaw the installation of a new 24/36-inch Schmidt telescope in the Barberini Gardens. He continued his work on eclipsing binary stars, again using photoelectric photometry. He was responsible for many publications, including in 1958 The Green Flash and other Low Sun phenomena. In 1968 he became president of the Pontifical

Academy of Sciences. On his retirement in 1972 Pope Paul VI appointed him president emeritus, paying tribute to his ‘zeal and distinction – acknowledged by all – in the advancement of science’. He was visited by Pope John Paul II shortly before his death at the Jesuit headquarters in 1982.

Thomas O’Higgins I Clongowes 1903-1906

Thomas O’Higgins (1890-1953), Minister for Defence, was a native of Stradbally, Co. Laois, who attended Clongowes in 1903-06. He qualified as a doctor at UCD and was appointed to a dispensary in Co. Kildare, where he became an enthusiastic local organiser for Sinn Féin and the Irish Volunteers and was imprisoned on three occasions, including a year at Ballykinlar Camp, Co. Down. He joined the national army in 1922, where he became director of medical services and rose to the rank of colonel. A keen horseman, he was instrumental in the establishment of the army equitation school and the inauguration of the Nations’ Cup competition at Dublin horse show. Following the assassination of his brother Kevin O’Higgins (OC 1903-1908), the leading government minister, in 1927, he left the army and entered politics, first winning a Dáil seat in Dublin, before switching to Laois-Offaly, which he retained until 1948 when he was elected for Cork City, which he held until his death. He was a forthright and trenchant speaker, with a commitment to the maintenance of free speech, but sympathetic to right-wing views current in the 1930s, such as anti-communism and corporatism. This led him into the Blueshirts, and in 1933 he was instrumental in bringing that organisation into the political alliance that resulted in the establishment of Fine Gael, of which he became a vice-president and later deputy leader. He was Minister for Defence in the inter-party government of 1948-51. He died at his home in Dublin in 1953. Two of his sons, Tom (OC 1930-1934) and Michael (OC 1930-1935), followed him into the Dáil.

Clongowes 1888-92 I James O’Mara

James O’Mara (1873-1948), Sinn Féin MP and fund-raiser, was a native of Limerick, who attended Clongowes from 1888 to 1892. He graduated BA from the Royal University of Ireland in 1898, while simultaneously working in his father’s bacon company. He took over Donnelly’s bacon factory in Dublin, where he proved a shrewd and successful businessman, becoming extremely wealthy. In 1900 he was elected to parliament for Kilkenny South as a Nationalist, introducing in 1903 the bill that made Saint Patrick’s Day a national holiday. However, by 1907 he had become disillusioned with the lack of progress towards Home Rule and resigned his seat to join Sinn Féin, to which he became a generous benefactor. In 1918 he was appointed Sinn Féin director of elections, and his formidable administrative skills made a major contribution to the party’s comprehensive victory in the general election of that year. He regained his old South Kilkenny seat by a large majority. He became a trustee of Dáil funds, subsequently travelling to the United States to join Éamon de Valera in a fund-raising drive. Again, his administrative skills proved highly successful, and the campaign raised more than $3million. But differences between him and de Valera caused him to resign his trusteeship and his Dáil seat in 1921. He was replaced as fund-raiser and special envoy to America by his younger brother, Stephen (OC 1902-03). James O’Mara strongly supported the Treaty, but was deeply affected by the civil war. He was not a candidate in the 1922 election, but was appointed first Irish ambassador to the United States, serving only briefly. He returned to politics as TD for Dublin South from 1924 to 1927, when he declined a cabinet post in WT Cosgrave’s government. He retired from business in the 1930s, dying at his Killiney home in 1948.

Clongowes welcomes suggestions for the inclusion of further portraits in the Serpentine collection.

Candidates must have spent some time as a student at Clongowes.

A precondition for inclusion is that a candidate must normally be retired or dead. However, this can be waived in very exceptional cases.

Typically a candidate should possess one or more of the following characteristics: fame; great distinction or a pioneering role in his field; a notable achievement; appointment to an important office of state; to high rank in the public service (national or international); a significant contribution to religion, scholarship, education, business, the learned professions or the arts; prominent participation in famous events. However, other grounds for inclusion are not ruled out.

Cabinet ministers, bishops, Supreme Court judges and university heads qualify for inclusion automatically.

A suggestion for inclusion should give the main facts of a candidate’s career, including dates of birth, death and Clongowes attendance. It should state why he is considered worthy of inclusion. It should provide information on where a suitable portrait or illustration of the candidate can be sourced.

On receipt of a suggestion, the Headmaster will normally refer it to the Serpentine panel for advice. The decision to include the candidate or not, as the case may be, will then be taken by the headmaster.

Michael Boland: Mrs Susan Boland Hugh Coveney: Ted O’Brien Studio Cork (for the Cork Chamber of Commerce) Nial Fennelly: Fennelly Family Aidan Higgins: Unknown Piece McCan: Clongowes Wood College SJ Daniel O’Connell SJ: Unknown Thomas O’Higgins: Jim O’Higgins James O’Mara: Unknown

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permissions for the use of copyright material. The author/editor and Clongowes Wood College SJ apologises for any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful if notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints or editions of this book.