Where Atlantis met the Cliffs of Moher – John Philip Holland the inventor of the submarine

John Philip Holland invented of the submarine

In 1904, two of the most innovative lights of the Age of Invention were reflecting upon the merits of their creations. The younger man, Thomas A Edison, “The Wizard of Menlo Park”, numbered the light bulb, the phonograph and the first motion pictures amongst his hundreds of inventions, and was an acclaimed star of the industrialized turn of the century world.  In their correspondence, Edison was let known in no uncertain terms by his older associate and kindred spirit about the profound impact the latter’s showcase invention would have upon humanity. ''Submarines have assuredly come to stay, animated with the desire of helping to end naval warfare'' wrote the Irishman, John Philip Holland, father of the modern submarine. He genuinely believed that so lethal was his creation that it would serve as a deterrent to war. Ten years later as Holland lay dying in August 1914 the Great War had just begun and within days the lethal potential of the Irishman’s submarine invention finally dawned.

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The depths of the ocean have always spawned mass fascination from the time one of Holland’s contemporaries, the novelist Jules Verne, penned Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea to the ancient myths.  One of the most revolutionary developments in man’s quest for superior weaponry, the submarine’s mystique has always captured the public imagination, with its fascination for the underworld. Just off the Atlantic coast from where Holland was born in Liscannor, West Clare on 24 February 1841 to a coastguard officer father and a Gaelic speaking mother, lay the legendary land of Kilstephen, or Cill Stíopháin. There are constant references throughout the ages to this mystical place, which is said to have been submerged at the time of the great eighth century earthquake.

Ironically, legend has it that once every seven years it rose above the surface of the waves but with it came a terrible curse. It is written in the Annals of the Four Masters in 799A.D. ‘A great storm of wind, thunder and lightening happened this day before St. Patrick’s festival this year, and it killed ten and one thousand persons in the Territory of Corca Baiscainn, and the Sea divided the island of Inis Fithae into three parts.’ Holland would also have been aware of the religious belief that a monstrous eel burst forth from the depths of Liscannor Bay to feast on the corpses laid to rest at the graveyard, and that the local saint, MacCreehy tackled this great beast and slew it after a long fight. Holland grew up close to where the Cliffs of Moher begin at Hags Head where the rock assumes the shape of a seated woman, a Sphinx like head looking eternally westward to the setting sun. He would have learned at the local school of the Spanish Armada ship, the Zuniga, which succeeded in landing and in getting some provisions in Liscannor. Holland knew of the sea’s secrets from the cradle.

John Holland was born at the beginning of a decade of famine in Ireland and a cholera epidemic raged in its wake. When defaulting tenants were evicted from their cottages, landlords saw to it that the thatch was stripped off the roof to prevent impoverished families coming back. It was a process known as ‘leveling’ and the young Holland would have witnessed such tragedy growing up. To him it symbolized the tyranny of imperial domination, and it fired him to hit back. When the English man looked out to sea, he saw the waves which Britannia ruled with its all conquering navy, when the Irish man gazed upon the ocean, he heard beyond the sea of tears, the call of new lands. Holland’s mechanical genius was to be dedicated towards altering this state of affairs.  His invention was to change the course of modern warfare.

John Philip Holland- Philip was the religious name given him - joined the Order of the Irish Christian Brothers in 1858 and became a teacher. He was sent to the North Monastery in Cork for his first assignment and there he met Brother Dominic Burke a noted science teacher. Burke encouraged Holland’s scientific experiments. In these formative years he studied astronomy, and worked on the theory of flight which experts said was accurate.  Indeed he later developed this theory in The Practicality of Mechanical Flight, published in 1891, which was hailed by peers as an extraordinary achievement at a time when the Wright brothers were contemplating the opening of a bicycle shop.

While in Cork city he started to experiment with small models of submarine boats and a pond in the school grounds was used to test his designs. He was thinking along the same lines of David Bushnell whose Turtle (a full size model of which is exhibited at the Royal Navy Submarine in Gosport, Britain) was designed to attack British men-of-war in New York Harbor during the American War of Independence. In 1862, the American Civil War was receiving worldwide publicity and Holland noted the use of ironclad ships in the battles. He also noted the use of submarine type vessels in the battles, such as the Confederate semi-submersible Hunley, which sank its much stronger Federal foe the Housatonic in 1864.

In 1872, Holland’s mother and his brother Alfred immigrated to the USA, and in that same year he decided not to take his final perpetual vows.  Instead in1873 he departed for Boston in the USA carrying with him submarine designs, which formed the basis of his initial submission in 1875 to the US Naval Department. He soon after began courting his future wife Margaret Foley and they were to later have three sons and a daughter.
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In 1874, he had found himself in a teaching post in St. John’s Parochial School in Paterson, New Jersey. It was here that John Philip Holland immersed himself in the working design of the submarine. This Clare exile was soon to come to prominence in Fenian circles. There was much revolutionary fervor in the Irish American circles that Holland moved in.  At a New York fund-raising social for the Catalpa expedition, John’s brother, Michael, who was an activist, introduced him to members of the Clan na Gael leadership, who saw the potential of his designs in a covert naval war against Britain’s powerful fleet. The US Naval Department had already rejected his submarine plans as impractical, “a fantastic scheme of a civilian landsman”.

The Irish World newspaper launched an appeal fund.  The successful testing of Holland’s 33-inch model submarine at Coney Island, New York, convinced the Fenian leadership to sponsor Holland’s $4,000 construction of a full-sized ‘wrecking boat’ from its ‘Skirmishing Fund’.  The success of this 14-foot model led to the $20,000 funding by the Fenians on a second venture by Holland in 1881. This craft, over twice as large as its predecessor and dubbed the ‘Fenian Ram’ by a New York Sun reporter, was also successful.  While Holland was engaged on a third prototype project, an internal rift developed amongst the Fenians, some of whom were growing impatient about slow progress on the diving boat. One group decided to take the ‘Ram’ into their own hands.  One source suggested that this was primarily to avoid legal sequestration while their monies were in dispute.  Led by John Breslin, with forged papers, they towed away the Fenian Ram and Boat No. 3 up the East River into Long Island Sound.  Just off Whitestone Point the prototype was sank, while the Fenian Ram was taken to Mill river in New Haven where it remained in a shed until the 1916 Rising, where it was displayed at Madison Square Gardens to raise money for dependents of the Rising in Dublin.  The Fenian Ram is today on display at Paterson Museum, New Jersey.

Holland was furious, declaring ‘I’ll let her rot on their hands’, and thus ended the great ‘Salt Water Enterprise’.  Holland went on to eventually sell the designs to his Holland VI model, which used a gasoline engine on the surface and electric motors under water as propelling machinery to the US and Japanese navies and ironically to the very power he had originally intended to employ the submarine against, the Royal Navy, although, due to the deception of erstwhile litigious colleagues, Holland never bore the full financial fruits of his labour.  He was, however, honored with the Fourth Class Order of Merit Rising Sun Ribbon by the Japanese Ambassador for his distinguished service to the Japanese nation.

The New York Times, following Holland’s death in 1914 reported that “although he was interested in submarines, Mr. Holland was opposed to war, and his idea of submarines was to incapacitate war ships and not to destroy them and kill the men on them”. This was after all a man, who in his 1907 Sketches and Calculations, planned a forty passenger submarine “for amusement at seaside resorts”, with large circular ports for viewing the underwater world. He also explored the peacetime uses of the submarine and discussed its potential role in scientific research. Within forty days of John Philip Holland’s death however the lethal potency of Holland’s creation was to unveil itself. One single submarine in one day alone turned a small area of the North Sea off the Dutch coast into a struggling mass of humanity when it claimed over 1400 lives in the sinking of three British light cruisers.

Although the Holland VI was formally commissioned into the United States Navy on 12 October 1900, the date it was officially bought, 11 April 1900, is celebrated by the US Navy as the submarine birthday. Another day when Holland is now perpetually commemorated is 1 May. It was on this date in 2006 that John Philip Holland Day was declared in Paterson New Jersey. The day is now established in tribute to the Liscannor born inventor of the ‘Modern Day Submarine’ John P. Holland. The great Doolin musician, Micho Russell sang of Holland:

Come all you young Irishmen who walk upon the land,
There are feats indeed, and fairy creeds, that you might understand:
There is one of them that comes to mind, the likes was never seen,
He was John Philip Holland who invented the submarine

Note: The Great Salt Water Enterprise © Boru Cultural Enterprises 2011

 With the support of the Clare County Enterprise Board, my historical communications services conducted a feasibility study to assess the viability of the extended Irish family honoring the founding father and inventor of the modern submarine, John Philip Holland, through the development of a state of the art educational, heritage and eco tourism project. This also involved assessing the feasibility of developing one of northern Europe's first tourist submarines to be located off Holland's native Clare and the Cliffs of Moher with its c.700,000 p.a. visitors. It has the objective of realizing the potential of our Irish educational & cultural heritage resources as an engine for revival through a viable, enriching proposal that is a direct manifestation of both historical and innovative thinking and delivering social and economic capital for the Irish people and in particular the citizens of Clare.

The findings of this feasibility study have indicated that this project, in a modified form has the potential to become one of Ireland's premier visitor attractions. We have built on this through Phase I feasibility stage and would welcome further support for the John Holland Interactive Museum of Innovation plan, contact  the below for more details on how best to do so:

In a demoralizing era, pockmarked by crippling senior civil servant pension hand outs or self styled doddle reward assignments in Brussels, and bizarre quid pro quo ‘commemorative projects’ which see bizarre plans mooted by state officials to honor imperial RIC forces from the War of Independence in Glasnevin, (the same eyes and ears of Dublin Castle that willfully denied the overwhelming majority vote and declaration of independence by the Irish people of January 1919), the John Philip Holland story  should continue to inspire intrepid minds in today's Ireland that impossible is really nothing.  This is an intriguing history of a relatively unknown genius of true international standing from the Golden Age of Invention.
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  Finally, to the anointed PR asses in the DAAA, when you are bankrolling the next glorification of Dublin Airport in your televised advertisements to the expense of Shannon International Airport (which somehow also belongs in your remit, for the now) please at least do us the courtesy of not hijacking work that is not of your own doing, especially confusing some of the public by presenting JP Holland and his inventions as some kind of Dublin Airport marketing ploy, or a Dalcassian clarification session similar to 1014 will have to be revisited again. Slán tamall and Happy Thanksgiving.

'Gentlemen, you have a country' - Thomas Davis, a real Irish president

Thomas Davis

"Gentlemen, you have a country" - these are not words uttered by the Celtic Times but by an Irishman, Thomas Davis.

An Irishman and a master. Born almost 200 years ago in that historic crossroads of Munster, the innovative heritage town of Mallow, on 24 October 1814.  Davis and his works remain as relevant as ever with a presidential election looming large this Thursday.

Two years from now his native homeland, led by the citizens of Mallow will celebrate his bicentenary and what his activities and writings did for Ireland, not just in his short lifetime but the spark they lit in future patriotic generations. Leading lights from the Celtic pantheon of patriots, from Arthur Griffith and Pádraig Pearse to John O’Leary and Michael Cusack all cited Davis as their inspiration. Economists, poets, Fenians and cultural revivalists revered him. Yet this son of a British military surgeon and an Irish Protestant mother, died at the too young age of 31 of scarlet fever

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Considered once as a troublesome student, Davis learned enough at Trinity College Dublin to become imbued with the teachings of previous graduates from this university, Wolfe Tone and Robert Emmett and came to a life defining conclusion that only a free and independent Ireland could meet the needs of the Irish people.

According to this revolutionary schooling, physical independence and the severing of British rule in Ireland through military action could not be attained and was indeed futile, without having a cultural, spiritual, sporting and economic foundation for liberty.

Thomas Davis strides the stage of mid nineteenth century Irish history as a giant during his public life. Although happy to follow and admire the champion of the constitutional populist movement, Daniel O’Connell and the repeal movement, he was forthright in his views on their shortcomings which created tension with O’Connell and led to an embittered fall out. This eventually led him to follow a divergent militant path to the Young Ireland movement. Yet what remains Davis’ outstanding contribution to Ireland was his vision for cultural independence and the ability to communicate this successfully through his writings in The Citizen, and the famed publication he later co founded with Charles Gavan Duffy and John Blake Dillon, The Nation.

Yet one wonders in this age of a near hegemonic Dublin based print media, how Davis would communicate such ideas today. It is something to behold now on a Sunday morning that we have Rupert Murdoch’s Sunday Times and Tony O’Reilly’s Sunday Independent as near sole proprietors for the Irish public mass, with some British owned red tops, an Irish version red top or two, and the Sunday Business Post. Sin a bhfuil. And how an angle can be taken by such interested parties once interested.

Look for example at how the state TV version of the Message got its point across to the people, when the ample Mother Ireland herself, Miriam O’Callaghan interviewed six Irish presidential candidates and avariciously interrogated the seventh, Martin McGuinness. No matter what way one votes out of seven ways, it is not on for a state paid employee or her scriptmaster(s) to obnoxiously attempt to humiliate a presidential candidate during a live presidential interview on account of being a  a republican past and present. To single out McGuinness and ask his fellow presidential candidates whether they would have a difficulty with McGuinness as president, while not asking the same of the others was quite frankly, contemptible.

Methinks Davis would have been a social media pioneer somehow. He may even postulate that today’s candidates and the crazy amount of undue attention it gets for such an impotent position is just a state sponsored panacea to remove our national thought away from the pain of such as German Finance Minister only a few short weeks ago calling for the Irish tricolour representing the united traditions, religions and culture of Davis’ Ireland to be flown at half mast. He might call it for what it is, a personality driven, Irish 'X Factor' meets presidential cage fighting to numb the masses. He may call out that there are many, many thousands of Irish who see a failed state and demand a new republic.

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That there are many, many thousands of Irish who no longer live, through no volition of their own, in the state that Gay Mitchell has wholeheartedly declared such public love for, which subsequently rejects their right to vote in this presidential candidate but may issue their children to come with certificates of Irishness if they hang tight abroad. That President Mary Robinson lighting candles in the presidential window for the Irish diaspora waxes little today with those interested emigrants who are told by leading, well paid state RTE employees that because they pay no taxes which helps pay their wages, they have no rights to vote. Such is Rome.

This is not intended as a slight on the presidential candidates who are on the whole, good people in their own right, and those who previously flew the kite. They are interested and committed people to varying degrees. Would any of the standing seven to seek to facilitate such voting rights while in office? Would any of the seven use the mechanisms of this economically failed state to refer future NAMA type legislation to the people of the Nation and not just sign off on spooked government finance bills which turned private debt into sovereign debt at the stroke of a pen and placed a millstone on unborn generations to come, like the outgoing president did? Mary McAleese, an otherwise dignified figurehead again remains along with her husband Martin, intrinsically decent people, too decent perhaps to fend off the hand which once helped them into high office?

Sean Gallagher, who now looks a shoe-in comes from the same political gene pool. I like a lot of what I have seen from him, he is an inspirational speaker, and a man who has both failed and succeeded in business. I remember how he spoke at the Entrepreneur’s Show at the RDS last year and said if your business fails so be it, you do not fail, your loved ones will still love you, not your business. If your job becomes redundant, you are not redundant. Become a doer. Strong stuff, but would he still say no to future NAMA bills or toe the line with cap in hand. I think I won’t be investing in this outcome. Would any of them turn to the people?

I can only think one amongst them would. These questions have not been generally asked; just all decentskin, soapy stuff, and nasty, personal guff which has little or no public relevance. And that’s exactly what many reckon we will get, all airs of decency and dignified irrelevance. Davis sought to foster a nationality of the spirit of Ireland. That can-do, self governing, independent thought and action is exactly what we need in the wake of the economic collapse, not just confined to the citizens of the twenty six county state but extended to and embracing the cherished diaspora who are going to be targeted as part of a multimillion euro tourism campaign for the 2013 Gathering. They need, we all need a president to not just symbolise this, but to become this. We have a country still.

Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels of Ireland - part III

Still from the 'Gaelic Gold' DVD

In this the final of our three part look at the clash of the ash and salmon like leaps for midfield aerial supremacy across the world of Gaelic games, we recall some famous and infamous Gaelic sporting events from days of yore, where in some remote or fabled corner there remains fields and memories which remain forever Irish.

 Ireland v Scotland, 1897
- at Celtic FC soccer grounds, Parkhead, the first Hurling Shinty International Match

Michael Cusack himself presented the Celtic Times Challenge Cup (in whose honor this parish is named) in 1897 to mark the first international hurling/shinty match between Ireland and Scotland at the soccer grounds of Celtic FC in Parkhead, and indeed officiated thereafter at a return match played at Jones’ Road in Dublin that same year.

It marked the culmination of close ties and communication between the Scottish Caledonian Society and Irish cultural and sporting revivalists since the early moves to form the GAA.

John Murdoch, the renowned Scottish land league leader and founder/editor of The Highlander newspaper had, along with fellow Scot and entrepreneur, Morrison Millar, (who helped Cusack establish the Celtic Times newspaper) cultivated sporting links with Irish sports enthusiasts. The founding father of Gaelic games, strongly influenced by the Irish independence leader P.W. Nally (later to suffer horrific conditions while incarcerated in the UK and in whose honour the Nally Stand at Croke Park is named) had an internationalised vision for Gaelic games as had the land leaguer and labour leader Michael Davitt who shared his ideas about Tailteann games with Cusack and the world champion athlete and the first president of the GAA, Maurice Davin.

The old Madison Square Gardens

 The Gardens, 1898

A brilliant piece by Classics teacher and Setanta commentator, Kevin Mallon on the first flood-lit GAA match was published a while back in that unlikely parish of record, the Irish Times.

The exiled Gaelic footballers, who lit up Madison Square Gardens, NYC received glowing tributes even from the mainstream US press. Indeed at that time in the US, Irish football or 'Gaelic', which is the euphemism most use for it today, was more popular than the association game or 'soccer', and considered by many sports reporters as on a par with their beloved college game or American football.

Further research shows later floodlit tournaments were also held to packed houses here such as in 1902.

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Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games


Exiled Gaels and Irish sporting rebels: part 2

The Orange Sash and the clash of the ash - The Munster Boys of Melbourne, 12th July 1843-44
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Battle of Stamford Bridge, Part II

The UK’s first affiliated GAA club was Wallsend, near Newcastle, which was formed in March 1885.

Gaelic games had always been popular with the Tyneside Irish, and it was appropriate that it was to their immigrant community which fell the honour of forming the first branch of the GAA across the Irish Sea. The international ambition of the fledgling GAA was shown when a football match was staged between London Irish and Scotland at Stamford Bridge in 1896.

London wins the 1901 All-Ireland Hurling Title

London Emmets put away the reigning All-Ireland Home Final winners Cork to win a historic title. Cork were to exact revenge against the Londoners the following year. The 1902/03 re imposition of the GAA bans were to cause immense problems for the GAA abroad.


No silverware but at least we have Sam Maguire and Liam McCarthy

Although London GAA was never again to scale the heights of 1901 they could claim to have an input into the blue ribbon competitions of the GAA each year, as both the All-Ireland football and hurling trophies were named after former London Irish GAA officials.

Collins and the Killkenny team

And they taught the big fellow too...

Numerous sources, such as the recently released Bureau of Military history papers document the role of the GAA in fermenting the coming revolutionary struggle. Foremost amongst these up and coming GAA officials domiciled abroad were Michael Collins, who was responsible for swearing in whole London Irish GAA teams into the IRB. Stafford Prison, 1916 was the unlikely scenario for Gaelic football matches, in which Collins himself participated, following a rare home defeat to England the previous month.

Wembley Wonders

It was the era of Puskas and the Hungarian soccer team who decimated England at Wembley; the name stuck to the Clare hurlers who defeated Kilkenny in the Oireachtas final held here. Kieran Sheedy, retired RTE Radio 1 director and author, whose brother Dermot played on this team, relayed how after the first sixty five metre free came in towards the Kilkenny goals and the ash was clashed, the gathered Fleet Street photographers behind the goalmouth, fled in terror as they thought the Paddies had declared war on each other.

The Banner Globe Trotters

As emigration drove the population of Ireland to under 2.9 million in the 1950s, St. Senan’s of London, an all Clare football team poignantly toured their native county, ‘renewing many old friendships’ in 1957 and played five matches.
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READ MORE:

Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games


Exiled Gaels and Irish sporting rebels: part 2

The Orange Sash and the clash of the ash - The Munster Boys of Melbourne, 12th July 1843-44
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The Gaelic Olympiad – The Tailteann Games

There was no sporting apartheid here as even the South African GAA got in on the act in 1932. In the Limerick City Library archives, and the wonderful Ó Ceallaigh GAA collection (available online) there are references to Irish exiles, many of whom had formed part of the Irish Brigade in the Boer war at the turn of the twentieth century, playing hurling matches in the Veldt. After the civil war, many disillusioned patriots began to arrive in South African to begin new lives and in 1928 the Transvaal Hurling Association was formed. Hurleys and sliothars were sent out from the old country to encourage their initiative and it was this body which inspired the 1932 Springbokkers who toured Ireland to compete in the Tailteann Games tournament.

Academy awards and Three Kisses

Amongst the spate of hurling movies to come out in the 1950s was Three Kisses, a short, released in 7 October 1955, written and directed by Philly born Justin Herman. It was nominated for an academy. Violence also alluded to in this feature where despite ‘the occasional broken limb and odd bit of concussion, hurling isn’t considered all that rough a sport at all’. Colm Gallagher from a north Cork fictional village is selected by the legendary Cork trainer Jim ‘Tuff’ Barry, a city based tailor to play for Cork against Clare in the 1955 Munster hurling final. Footage from the actual 1955 Cork v Clare Munster semi final is used, in which the Banner men enjoyed a rare triumph. The bold Gallagher is fixated on a local village cailín who partakes in a camogie match which is of much ‘technical interest’ to Gallagher. Brendan Ó hÉithir describes this movie in his acclaimed book, ‘Over the Bar’ and Dr Crossan of NUI Galway has provided both incisive and humorous insight into these revealing histories.

· Also of note was the fury unleashed by Rooney star, John Gregson in 1958 when on British TV he described hurling ‘as something between lacrosse and murder’.


Citizen’s Day, Canada

Just on the eve of an earlier time of war in 1914, a Cork v Rest of Ireland hurling selection put on entertainment for 63,000 Canadians on Citizen’s Day in Winnipeg.

Yankee Stadium, 1936

Yankee Stadium, 1936

Ireland takes on America in two separate International GAA contests on Babe Ruth and Iron Man Lou Gehrig’s hallowed turf.

Polo Grounds, NYC 1947

The 1947 All-Ireland final is held for the first time outside of the mother country, as Cavan and Kerry hit the Big Apple, along with the truly great commentator, Micheal O'Hehir.

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READ MORE:

Exiled Gaels and sporting rebels - Exotic stories of Gaelic and indigenous games


Exiled Gaels and Irish sporting rebels: part 2

The Orange Sash and the clash of the ash - The Munster Boys of Melbourne, 12th July 1843-44
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Off to ‘Nam

Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam war, American Gaels took huge interest in the GAA exhibition matches and competitions which were organised at the US military camps in the Carolinas prior to the young Irish being sent to war for Uncle Sam. Around seventy years earlier and in a similar environment, Mr Naismith had invented basketball to keep troops entertained at their New England base – thus began the phenomenon of the hoops.

The Hurling Boys of Buenos Aires

Until WW1 and the short supply of ash, hurling was immensely popular in Argentina, a country where even Gaeltachts existed in the early 20th century. The Hurling club in Buenos Aires remains today a favoured haunt of the Irish. This parish contended previously in an earlier work, Ireland’s Banner County (and yes, we will shamelessly plug that some copies from a second print are available directly from the Celtic Times or from Gerry Griffin’s much loved Scéal Eile in Market St., Ennis, don’t be foolish enough to pay the €1000 or so quoted online for a 1st edition signed copy previously advertised by some boyo) that there was a larger Clare Gaeltacht in 1930s Argentina than there was in the Banner itself, even accounting for the still magnificently scenic and poignant Carrigaholt and Gleninagh districts.

Of course, there are close ties with our Argentinean brethren, which is probably why our rugby internationals with them have taken on something of a civil war nature with them. It was the Christian Brothers who brought our caid version of the rugby out to the South Americans.

Don’t forget either, it was a Clare man who stuck the winning goal in the world cup soccer final versus West Germany in 1986, Jose Luis Brown - the old townies offspring from Ennis were always good for a goal or two. Although I am not sure if Brown ever got a chance to wear the Tipperary inspired colours of Diego Maradona’s Boca Juniors, which an Irish missionary priest introduced to Buenos Aires

 Rules Made to be Broken…

A cursory overview of Gaelic sports abroad would be incomplete without mention of the good, the bad, and Triple X rated ugly as the catch and kick cousins from Ireland and Oz catch up with each other regularly nowadays in the International Rules Series, the next joust is a few weeks away. And we remind all Aussies how we allowed them borrow our four goalposts field alignment of earlier days.

World champions

It is ironic that the lesser played of the GAA sports, handball, has had the greatest international platform and can afford to the very best a professional livelihood. And as for the Citizen Cusack’s beloved weight throwing, the most traditional of Irish sports, sure didn’t we provide up to Dr Pat O’Callaghan and the 1932 Olympics almost forty unbroken years of world dominance. Perhaps the modern Olympics father, Baron de Coubertin, picked up his sporting inspiration for Olympism from his lengthy Irish stay in the 1890s in pursuit of an elusive cailín.

PS: Congratulations to Clondegad GAA for attaining Clare senior status recently when annexing the Talty Cup; it is some parish to hold two vibrant senior teams, Lissycasey being the other - together they'd rule Munster football although the steadfast sons of Kilmurry Ibrickane may have a say yet on that for some time to come!!

The restoration of the ruined heart of the midlands, St Mel's, and the New Ireland of Auckland

St. Mel's Cathedral

On Christmas Day 2009, residents of Longford town woke up to find its landmark St. Mel's Cathedral ablaze, and with it, the county's most prestigious collection covering the full span of the region's history, including priceless artefacts like the magnificent bronze wrapped yew Crozier of St. Mel himself, and the Shrine of St Cailin.

It was the lot of the Celtic Times to return to the sweet auburn country of County Longford over the weekend, having previously spent the tropical downpours of late spring 2006 to the eve of that same year there conducting an audit of that same St. Mel’s Diocesan Museum Collection at the behest of the National Museum of Ireland.

It was one of the most eclectic and prestigious collections in Ireland, with a rich diversity of material from the Neolithic to the modern age, constituting mostly archaeological, folklife, numismatic and ecclesiastical artefacts but also political, military, ethnographic and geological displays. Longford County Council in partnership with the Heritage Council, commissioned my historical management services, Boru Cultural Enterprises to conduct the said audit, which took place on site at the once towering St. Mel’s Cathedral in Longford town.
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The aim of the project was to document the collection of approximately 450 artefacts currently on display in the museum. This entailed the drawing up of a Collection Management Plan, creation of a database methodology, conservation analysis, preparation of a research plan and showcase layout along with recommendations.

The past tense is used above because that same irreplaceable collection has been substantially destroyed. The remnants of the collection that was in church ownership in the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois are currently held at the National Museum in Dublin. In the immediate aftermath of the fire, our inventory, which also had the input one of the Europe's leading conservators Dr Adrian Kennedy, had been used by the diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois in the initial stages of rescue and consolidation of the remains of the Cathedral.

Mel Gibson

There have been rumours for some time that Mel Gibson, whose Longford mother named him in honour of the diocese's patron saint and who was actually schooled for a period in Aughnacliffe, Co Longford will help in terms of the reconstruction, and one can only hope that a vital umbilical link between people, place and heritage will not be totally severed. So it was with some poignancy that the Bishop Colm O’Reilly allowed the doors of the gutted cathedral reopen to the people for the first time since the blaze last Sunday.

They saw for themselves first hand the extent of the recovery work that lay ahead. There is good fight in the Longford folk and one hopes that the surviving collection will find a fitting new home in the town be it at the Cathedral itself or in a purpose built museum location. Who knows, the now vacant Connolly Barracks may have a new tourism and heritage use designated to it yet for the Longfordians.

When arriving into Longford county, one journeys not just into the physical but the spiritual heartlands of Ireland. The landscape here, so beloved of Oliver Goldsmith, would have sparked some of the greatest masterpieces written in the tongue of the Sassenach, such as She Stoops to Conquer and The Deserted Village.

Maria Edgeworth, author of the famed novel Castle Rackrent which was written in 1800 in the wake of the defeat of the French general, Humbert, and the United Irishmen at Ballinamuck, hailed from an establishment family based at Edgeworthstown who owned vast tracts of the county. Her works which were inspired by the Longford peasantry won the acclaim of Scott, Turgenev, Byron and Jane Austen. She died in 1849, soon after the calamitous famine which decimated many of her adopted people, and was buried in a vault at Edgeworthstown church. Also of the soil of Longford was Paraic Colum, who authored She Moved through the Fair and was a prolific Irish writer of the early twentieth century. Leo Casey, author of the Ring of the Moon, resided in Ballymahon, the southern gateway into the county.
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The Celtic Times took up a brief repose at Cooney’s renowned hostelry in Ballymahon while taking in both a hale and hearty breakfast and the unfolding Australian annihilation at Auckland by the Irish caid playing boys; its special what four of our provinces can achieve together as a nation. It was also both stirring and heart rendering to see them roared on in the stadium itself not just by Irish rugby fans but the tens of thousands of the first wave of the new lost generation of ex pats who have made new homes abroad.

They have done nowt, save only to be born Irish in their Irish motherland, to deserve the lowest, slyest digs of the sleeveen kleptocracy we call our system of governance, a governance that has failed its people and placed it in the grip of economic receivership. It is not too difficult to envisage any fortnight now, which is the regularity with which the life support checks are being signed, that as Berlin sees the fattened largesse and excessive payouts and lump sums still being issued to civil servants that stood as governors and regulators during this surrender, they may yet say that there is nothing in the coffers this week boys.

The Celtic Times states this fully in the knowledge that there are often paybacks for making such statements. It’s a sharp dose of reality many companies, small businesses and self employed across Ireland are already well acquainted with. The Celtic Times though will never confront a problem without proffering solutions. It remains obvious to us in this parish that one of our most potent resources - heritage tourism - needs the slightest bit of management and innovation, and hopefully local agencies across the country like the Longford Community Resources can get the required buy in, and for a relatively small seed investment, considerable economic and social capital is generated.

All the children of the nation have the democratic right to partake equally in this regeneration, not just well versed practitioners of the darker arts of gombeenism and parochialism, for it is due largely to this unashamed cross section of go forward, cop out clowns that we live in what is currently a de facto failed state. Look at it, we have a better endowed, similar land mass to our nearest and dearest neighbours across the sea, a largely well bred, decently fed and educated people, who generally work hard, party hard and have usually conducted themselves well when gathered in droves abroad be it on old battlefields or modern international matches, with a genius for innovation and getting on. We may have a weakness when it comes to a needy want to be held in good esteem in other countries – a want that manifests itself currently in our insane approach to the financial troika as the teacher’s pet – perhaps this can be attributed to a colonised/coloniser complex.

On the whole, not an inherently bad people really. So how in God’s name, can we justify being unable to marshal our resources as a nation to cater for 5 million when sterling John next door, for all his many failings, accounts for 50 million plus in a multi ethnic state.

With this thought process set aside, for now, along with the hale and hearty breakfast, we put ourselves back on the right track in Longford again…..

Sean MacEoin

Amidst the rolling plains and dense boglands of this county, lies the ancient Iron Age trackway of Corlea which dates to 148B.C. and can be accessed during the tourist season through the Corlea Heritage Centre in Kenagh. In Ballinalee lies the recently restored forge of the town’s most heralded blacksmith, General Sean MacEoin, hero of the Irish War of Independence. He took charge of the Longford brigade at Michael Collins’ request. Among the many incidents during the war involving this leading IRA officer, one is recounted where MacEoin was surrounded in a cottage. He came out of the homestead to make his stand because there were women inside. Once outside he took out the commanding British officer and put the rest to flight.

MacEoin himself recalled another prominent family from the War of Independence, from which hailed the much desired Kiernan sisters of Granard. It was during the watershed 1917 Longford by-election which was won by the Sinn Féin candidate Joseph McGuinness, that Collins first came into contact with them, and according to MacEoin, he fell in love with Helen Kiernan, who chose to marry a solicitor, Paul McGovern. Upon this Collins soon turned his eyes towards another sister, Kitty who had already attracted the affections of Harry Boland, Collins’ close friend. This ill-fated love triangle was to have serious consequences for the future fledgling nation state, and Kitty was to lose her fiancé Collins in the devastating civil war to follow.
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At Dromard, in the most northerly part of the county, lies the unique townland of Fyhora, which marks the meeting of three baronies, three parishes, three counties and three provinces. Just south of here lies Ballinamuck, an area made infamous as the last fatal stand of the United Irishmen and the French invasion of Ireland in 1798. The name of Gunner McGee has always crackled in the background of conversations on Irish independence and it was here, hopelessly outnumbered by the advancing British loyalists, that he won his fame. He had charge of a canon, which he had used to devastating effect.

When he ran out of ammunition, he smashed a number of camp pots and kettles and with these loaded his gun. There was time for just one more discharge at the advancing redcoats. When just ready to fire, one of the stocks of a wheel broke, and the gun could not be fired until two of McGee’s cousins who were manning it, stepped forward and propped it up with their backs while McGee applied the match. The discharge broke their spines and their miserable state was soon put at an end when the British captured the gun and strangled McGee. A British officer wrote of that day:

‘How awful to see that healthy mountain covered with dead bodies, resembling at distance flocks of sheep, for many numbers were naked and swelled with the weather.’

Around five miles to the east lay Aughnacliffe, where there is located here a portal dolmen approximately 5000 years old. This immense stone monument marks a pagan burial site, and is one of the largest of its kind in Western Europe. One of the most famous students said to have attended the local school here is one Mel Colmcille Gibson, the actor and director of works such as Braveheart and The Passion of the Christ. This was in the late sixties when Mel’s father and his Longford born mother Anne Reilly Gibson were relocating their family from New York to Australia, to protect the older of their ten children from the war draft, and also in protest at what they saw was the growing immorality of American society. Mel, their sixth born child, was named in honour of the patron saint of the Diocese of Ardagh and Clonmacnois which incorporates Longford.

St Mel

Mel was an Irish saint who is said to have performed a miracle to counter a slanderous rumour. Accused of living in sin with his aunt, St. Mel managed to convince St. Patrick of his innocence by ploughing up a live fish from the land. Gibson’s middle name, Colmcille is derived from the patron saint of the parish where Anne Reilly, Mel’s mother was born. This was an area renowned for its sheltering of priests and rebels during the penal laws days within its high hills and steep descents towards Lough Gowna. Colmcille, in whose honour the parish is named, was a prophet who once foretold that by the end of days, Ireland would be amongst the greatest of nations – typical!

The county town of Longford itself over which St. Mel’s Cathedral had towered since 1840 is a town of fine, hospitable people. It lays no claim to delusions of grandeur, but it has an Irish soul about it that gives the town a taste of more for visitors. It has a decent soccer team, and St. Mel’s college itself has a rich gaelic football pedigree, and is a nursery for the current buoyant county underage teams. Another Longford McGee, Eugene, was responsible for masterminding Kerry’s five in a row downfall in 1982 when in charge of the Offaly boys. When formerly watching the World cup of 2006 in saloons such as Clarkes and Valentines, I was struck by the amount of Poles who bedecked the town on the nights of their short-lived campaign. Many of these have now returned to their original homeland wit a slight Longford lilt.

This is a town and a county where man has found God, craic, tax havens and all the leisure the lordly Shannon can throw up. A place where the land has given up live fish to saints - let that be an image for the resourcefulness that’s required ahead. A place with soul.