6 November 1649: General Owen Roe O’Neill/Eoghan Rua Ó Néill died at Cloughoughter/ Cloch Uachtar Castle in County Cavan on this day. He was the leader of the last Gaelic Army of the North and one of Ireland’s greatest Generals. He was born circa 1585/90 and was the son of Art Mac Baron O'Neill and the nephew of the Great Aodh O'Neill, the Earl of Tyrone, who led the Catholics during the Nine Years War (1594-1603).

He was sent to Spain at an early age and joined the Irish Brigade of the Spanish Army. He was an able and talented soldier and destined to command at a high level. He never forgot his Homeland though and kept in contact with those in Ireland who wished to overthrow the religious and civil persecutions that the Irish Catholic People suffered under. His greatest test came in 1640 when he was in command of the City of Arras (then part of the Spanish Netherlands) that was besieged by an overwhelming French Army. With just 1,500 men he held out against the odds for eight long weeks despite many assaults on the Citadel. Forced eventually to ask for terms he was allowed to march out with the Honours of War.

But the following year the Rising of 1641 erupted and he decided that his place was back in Ireland and the head of Irish soldiers. Accompanied by a cluster of trusted officers he sailed in a tiny fleet to make it back here in July 1642. Shocked by the mayhem and indiscipline he encountered he quickly reformed the men placed under his care into a cohesive and efficient armed force. Despite this he was defeated at the Battle of Clones in 1643 but he learnt his lesson of never again meeting the enemy on anything less than favourable terms. In 1645 the Papal Nuncio, Archbishop Rinuccini,　arrived with Arms & specie to breathe life into the Confederate Armies, of which O’Neill’s force constituted a semi-autonomous component. This was to be a turning point in the struggle to gain mastery over the North.

In the early summer of 1646 he achieved his greatest Victory when he took the field against the Anglo-Scots of Ulster under the command of Sir Robert Monro. At the Battle of Benburb on 5 June of that year he defeated and overwhelmed a British Army led by Monro. It was the biggest set-piece battle of the Confederate War and a major setback for the British in Ulster, but, split by internal divisions and engaged in futile negotiations with the Duke of Ormond, the Confederates failed to follow up the military advantage of O'Neill's victory. The Catholics were hopelessly divided between those who wished to reach an agreement with King Charles I to allow for a level of toleration for the Catholic religion and those who would settle for nothing less than the removal of all impediments to the open practise of Catholicism.

Such internal pressures eventually led to what was in effect an internal Civil War in which Owen Roe O’Neill was called upon to move south to back the Papal Nuncio in his implacable opposition to the Peace Treaty with the Protestant Viceroy Ormond. In September 1646, O'Neill marched to Kilkenny to support Rinuccini, who then forced the Supreme Council to agree to a Confederate attack on Dublin with the Ulster and Leinster armies. Owen Roe O’Neill’s Ulster Army swept down upon the plains of Meath, burning homesteads and destroying the crops in an effort to hamper the Royalist War effort. But the two pronged assault on Dublin fizzled out as the City was well protected by strong walls and a determined garrison. The onset of Winter then put a stop to any chance of a prolonged Siege.

During 1647, moderate members of the Supreme Council succeeded in relegating O'Neill to service in Connacht and relied upon Preston to protect Kilkenny with the Leinster army. In 1648 the Confederates again fell out amongst themselves. O'Neill remained loyal to Rinuccini. In June 1648, he declared war on the Supreme Council and marched against Kilkenny. Although he failed to capture the Confederate capital, he spent most of the summer pillaging the surrounding country and manoeuvring against Inchiquin and Confederate forces in Leinster. In January 1649 Archbishop Rinuccini departed from Ireland in despair. O'Neill refused all approaches to join the Royalist-Confederate coalition because Ormond would not commit himself to promising the restoration of Irish lands in Ulster as O'Neill demanded.

By then King Charles I had been executed and Oliver Cromwell was ready to lead a well equipped army to Ireland to attempt a Re Conquest. Despite negotiations O’Neill was wary of the shaky coalition of Catholic Confederates and Protestant Royalists led nominally by the Duke of Ormond - a rather shady character. Neither side trusted the other and O’Neill was effectively isolated from events in the rest of the Country. Indeed so weak had become O’Neills position and so starved was he of supplies that he made an arrangement with the Parliamentarians Colonel Monck and later with Sir Charles Coote in order to stop the lands he held been overrun by the Ulster Scots, who now fought under the King’s Charles II banner.

General O’Neill, perhaps unwisely, took up an invitation to dine in Derry with Sir Charles Coote, the Governor of the City. Soon afterwards he became ill, took a fever and died. His followers quickly suspected treachery and perhaps they were right. If so it was a devious but effective way of the English Parliament to rid itself of one of the most able soldiers this Country has ever produced. He is buried in an island in Lough Oughter in Cavan.

 

5 November 1946: The start of the Rural Electrification Scheme in the Irish Free State on this day. This major project began in a field at Kilsallaghan in north county Dublin[above]. Kilsallaghan was the 1st rural area in Ireland out of 792 so designated to receive electricity under the scheme. The Rural Electrification Scheme employed up to 40 separate units of 50-100 workers, spread across 26,000 square miles. By November 1961 280,000 rural premises were connected, at a cost of over £30,000,000. The purpose was to roll out the benefits of electricity to every household and farm in the State. The task was entrusted to the Electricity Supply Board (established 1927) and the mammoth task entailed the purchase over one million wooden poles from Finland. Over 75,000 miles of wire were also needed.

‘The electrification of rural Ireland had been envisaged since work first began on the Shannon Scheme in 1925. Dr Thomas McLaughlin, the founding father of ESB, believed that rural electrification represented ‘the application of modern science and engineering to raise the standard of rural living and to get to the root of the social evil of the “flight from the land”.

‘However, the financial resources were not available to extend electricity to rural Ireland in the first days of the newly formed Irish free state and in the 1920s and 1930s. Electricity from the Shannon Scheme was supplied to roughly 240,000 premises in towns and cities only, leaving over 400,000 rural dwellings without power. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, ESB and the government began working on broad plans for rural electrification, and the state agreed to subsidise its roll out. However, the outbreak of World War II in 1939 delayed the process, and work could not start on the scheme until after its end in 1945.’...The last area to receive electricity was the remote area of Blackvalley, Co. Kerry, in 1978.

https://esbarchives.ie/2016/03/23/life-before-and-after-rural-electrification/

 The benefits of electricity was of course huge. It was something that just about every home and farmstead in the State wanted with only the very odd one refusing to be connected. Up until then the managing of a household or farm had been a hugely labour intensive operation for both men and women. Everything from cooking to washing to heating was pure manual work.

‘Activity on the farm and in rural households was dictated by the availability of daylight. After dark, limited lighting was provided by oil lamps or candles. Water had to be drawn from a well, and carried home by foot or by cart. Clothes had to be washed by hand, or with a hand-powered ‘wringer washer’. Heating and cooking depended on solid fuel, such as timber and turf, often cut and harvested by the family. Cooking was confined to an open hearth or range. Food safety was difficult to ensure without any form of refrigeration, a particular difficulty on the farm and in the dairy. Industrial development was not feasible without a supply of electricity.’

https://esbarchives.ie/2016/03/23/life-before-and-after-rural-electrification/

Today we live in a world where the lack of electricity in our daily lives is unthinkable. But there are still Irish households today where the oil lamp is not a source of curiosity but a memento of a time when they could not make their way about their house after dark without one.

 

4 November 1846: The Great Irish Famine/An Gorta Mor swept across the land of Ireland. The direct cause of the calamity that the Country experienced in those times was the failure of the Potato crop, whose tubers were left rotten by a blight. However an Act of Nature was compounded by acts of folly and nay indifference by those acting on behalf of the British Administration here.

By November 1846 it was clear that the poorest of the people faced another Winter of complete hardship as the blight returned to haunt the land. The effects of prolonged malnutrition on weakened bodies proved too much for many of those so afflicted by the want of necessities to sustain human life. The deaths of two such unfortunates was reported in the Cork Examiner on this day.

November 4, 1846

TWO MORE DEATHS FROM STARVATION.

IN the letter of an "Out-Door Pauper" from Macroom, will be found the recital of the death at Sleaven, from famine, of a poor woman, returning from the Workhouse, where she and her children had received their daily meal. The Tallow Relief Committee, in a resolution just forwarded to the Lord LIEUTENANT and which we give elsewhere, announce the death of another man, named KEEFFE, of Kilbeg, who also perished for want of food.

We know not what to say. We have already expressed, with the most indignant vehemence, our horror of the negligence which permitted our fellow beings to perish in the midst of us. We leave these last instances to speak for themselves-- for murder speaks with a most miraculous organ-- and these are scarcely less than a murder. We trust in GOD we shall be shocked no more by such recitals. There is a promise of general employment, at last; and to this we turn from the prolonged horror of Irish suffering and despair.

Cork Examiner

 

3 November 1815: The birth of the Patriot John Mitchel on this day. He was born near Dungiven Co Derry. His father was a Clergyman. In 1830 he entered Trinity College, Dublin, with the encouragement of his tutor Dr Henderson. He took his degree in 1834 before entering a solicitor's office in Newry, Co Down. He later practised in Banbridge, Co Down. He took cases defending the rights of Catholics in the town and became increasingly attached to seeing Ireland break free from English Rule.

Mitchel began writing for the Nationalist paper The Nation, and when Thomas Davis died in 1845, Charles Gavan Duffy invited Mitchel to join the newspaper. In 1846, Mitchel and other Young Irelanders broke with Daniel O'Connell, rejecting the doctrine of 'moral force', and founded ‘The Irish Confederation’. 

More impatient than Duffy, Mitchel soon left The Nation and the Confederation, and in February 1848 published the first issue of The United Irishman. It openly preached revolt and in May 1848 Mitchel was convicted of ‘treason felony’ by the British and sentenced to fourteen years' transportation. 

Sent to Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania), Mitchel escaped in 1853 to America, where he published his famous Jail Journal.

Mitchel launched several newspapers in America, and as editor of the Richmond Examiner championed slavery. His sons fought in the War for the Confederacy in which two of them were killed in action. He was imprisoned for several months after the Civil War ended. In 1867, he founded the Irish Citizen in New York, but angered Fenians by suggesting they should give allegiance to their new country. In 1875, he was returned unopposed as MP for Tipperary, but was disqualified as a convicted felon. Returning to Ireland, he was again elected, but died at Dromalane, Newry, on 20 March 1875 before he could be unseated.

While today his stance on Slavery would be looked on with askance his posthumous claim to fame is undoubtedly his masterly ‘Jail Journal’ which is still in print today and in this he describes his imprisonment and Transportation to Van Diemen's Land in a British prison ship.

May 27, 1848 -  On this day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, I, John Mitchel, was kidnapped, and carried off from Dublin, in chains, as a convicted “Felon.”...

Nov. 7th, 1848 - In my cell, "Dromedary" Hulk. - This evening, after dusk, as I sat at my window, looking drearily on the darkening waters, something was thrown from the door of my cell, and lighted at my feet. I heard a quick noiseless step leaving the door. Picking up the object, I found it to be a London paper. The Halifax mail has arrived – I long for the hour when my cell is to be locked, and carefully hide my treasure till then.

At last the chief mate has locked and bolted me up for the night. I light a candle, and with shaking hands spread forth my paper.

Smith O’Brien has been found guilty, and sentenced to be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution and hanged. The other trials pending.

 

2 November 1815: George Boole Professor of Mathematics University College Cork 1849-1864 & father of digital thought was born on this day. He was a child prodigy, self-taught linguist and practical scientist, philosopher and teacher. He was born in Lincoln, England, the son of a struggling shoemaker. Boole was forced to leave school at the age of sixteen and never attended a university. He taught himself languages, natural philosophy and mathematics. After his father’s business failed he supported the entire family by becoming an assistant teacher, eventually opening his own boarding school in Lincoln. He began to produce original mathematical research and, in 1844, he was awarded the first gold medal for mathematics by the Royal Society.

Boole was deeply interested in the idea of expressing the workings of the human mind in symbolic form, and his two books on this subject, The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854) form the basis of today’s computer science and electronic circuitry. Much of the ‘new mathematics’ now studied originated in his ground breaking studies – set theory, binary numbers and Boolean algebra were areas where he led the way.

In 1849, Boole was appointed first professor of mathematics in Ireland’s new Queen’s College (now University College) Cork and taught and worked there until his tragic and premature death in 1864. Boole was a creative and unorthodox thinker who found a way to write logical questions as algebraic equations. He thought of himself as a logician rather than a mathematician yet, in a series of publications in the 1840s and 1850s, he opened a whole new direction for mathematics.

A century later, the American mathematician and engineer Claude Shannon, himself acknowledged as the ‘father of information theory’, used Boole’s concepts, and especially his ‘Boolean algebra’, to design the first digital circuits. By reducing answers to x and y as set out by Boole it was possible for Shannon to develop the concepts to build the first digitally based machines. Today these are more commonly known as 0 & 1 binary numbers which are used to reflect true or false values in computer systems.

However in late 1864 Boole one day walked for miles in the pouring rain to get to the Cork College and came down with pleurisy. His wife tried to help but made matters worse by pouring cold water over him to cure him! He died on 8 December of that year. Boole’s funeral took place on December 12th, to St Michael’s Church of Ireland in Ballintemple, Co Cork and according to a report in the Cork Examiner the following day, his cortege was followed by “serried files of students” in their gowns and caps.

Today, UCC lays claim to be Boole’s academic home. There’s a library named in Boole’s honour and, in the Aula Maxima, a fine stained-glass window erected in his memory by public subscription shortly after his death.

As one of the most important scientists to have ever worked in Ireland, Boole effectively laid the foundations of the entire Information Age while working from UCC. So it’s fair to say that without George Boole, there’d be no Google!

https://www.google.com/doodles/george-booles-200th-birthday

 

1 November 527 AD: After Muircheartach [Muirchertach Mac Erca] … had been twenty four years in the sovereignty of Ireland, he was burned in the house of Cleiteach, over the Boyne, on the night of Samhain after being drowned in wine.

Annals of the Four Masters

 

Muirchertach Mac Erca was one of the greatest of the early Irish Kings. His first great victory was at the Battle of Ocha in County Meath in circa 483 AD. There he helped defeat and kill Ailill Molt, the King of Connacht. Muirchertach was the great grandson of Niall of the Nine Hostages and from the Northern Uí Néill branch of that family. Initially he ruled most of the North from his royal site at Ailech (near Derry). But after the death of King Lugaid of Tara from the Southern Uí Néill (and the joint victor of Ocha) Muirchertach succeeded him to the title of ‘King of Tara’ and moved his power base south. He was clearly a king of some military ability and after Ocha he was victorious in 11 further battles over his enemies in the course of a long career.

These were the battles of: Cenn Losnada, Inne Mór, Segais, Cenn Eich, Áth Sige, Éblenn, Mag Ailbe, Aidne, Almuin, and the 2nd battles of Cenn Eich and Áth Sige.

King Muirchertach came to a bizarre end, being drowned in a vat of wine. This strange event took place somewhere about the location of those ancient Neolithic passage tombs, Knowth, Dowth and Newgrange. It would appear that this was a planned royal assassination in which the King’s body was to be left unblemished, but his soul sent to eternity. Possibly his death was due to an internal family rivalry due to him taking a much younger mistress - a woman by the name of Sín!

Sín is the woman that killed thee,

O, Mac Earca, as I perceive;

Numerous will her names be here—

She will set one astray.

Chronicon Scotorum

It must be said though that the various Annals differ as to the year of his death it would appear to have been circa 530 AD and on the night of Samhain [31 October/1 November]

 

1‭ November 1920: Execution of IRA Volunteer Kevin Barry on this day. Betrayed by a local after the shooting dead a British soldier he was tried and sentenced to death. A Medical student in UCD he was just 18 years old when he was hanged in Mountjoy Prison. His brave stance under torture and through his ordeal gained the admiration of many and his death became the subject of the famous ballad that bears his name.

He was a Volunteer of the Dublin Brigade IRA when on‭ 20 September his Company ambushed an army bread van on Queens Street in the City Centre. In the ensuing gun battle a British soldier was shot dead. Two more died of their injuries. The Volunteers withdrew from the scene when British reinforcements arrived. They escaped except for Barry who was captured while hiding under a lorry. While it is believed Barry’s pistol jammed in the attack there is no evidence that he fired any of the fatal shots. He was court-martialled and sentenced to death by the British on 20 October. Despite widespread pleas from many people and organisations for a stay of execution on the morning of November 1 1920 at 8.30 am he was led out to the gallows and executed by hanging.

Barry spent the last day of his life preparing for death. His ordeal focused world attention on Ireland. According to Sean Cronin, author of a biography of Barry (Kevin Barry), he hoped for a firing squad rather than the gallows, as he had been condemned by a military court. A friend who visited him in Mountjoy prison after he received confirmation of the death sentence, said:

He is meeting death as he met life with courage but with nothing of the braggart. He does not believe that he is doing anything wonderfully heroic. Again and again he has begged that no fuss be made about him.

He reported Barry as saying "It is nothing, to give one's life for Ireland. I'm not the first and maybe I won't be the last. What's my life compared with the cause?” Practically his last words before being led out to his place of execution were: The only message I have for anybody is hold on and stick to the Republic

His imminent execution was viewed with aghast by large sections of the Irish Public   

he had been captured taking part in ambush...there was no evidence that he had fired a fatal shot, and the immense crowd which stood around the prison praying for him at dawn on that November morning scarcely believed that the execution would take place.

The Irish Republic Dorothy Macardle 

Kevin Barry was buried in the yard of Mountjoy Prison but in October‭ 2001 his remains along with nine other executed prisoners were transferred by the Irish Government to Glasnevin Cemetery Dublin and re interred in a specially prepared plot. His grave is near the entrance and along with his comrades is one of the most frequented places in that vast necropolis.