War of Independence, Civil War, Durrus District, Topeka State Journal, Kansas. account of 1920 Attack by 100 IRA Men on Durrus RIC Barracks. Dr. Michael J. McCarthy died 1937.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FZrlZBJAmzrZSvzm3qnYQK20IA7teb-YL-XnwwlCBrQ/edit

During the ‘Emergency’ the Drinagh Co-op Mill in Durrus could not operate as there was no petroleum. This gave a new lease of life it Moynihan’s mill, originally O’Sullivans.

The late Jim Dukelow, Coomkeen said this was a life saver for the area.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZZLYAFhk7o_GeJNFo4h24k6_gxdBE1CIKw_cm2LHPWo/edit

Cataract of the Bantry River in Ireland, Probably with Murphy’s Mills, Donemark in Background from San Francisco Gallery.

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Letting of Flour Mills, Rosscarbery, 1844

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William Young, Bantry Mills selling Indian Meal, Corn, Flour, ex Barque, ‘Parsee’ February 1862.\

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Some extracts from Rent Roll of Rev. Lombard in Bandon and Clonakilty, Co. Cork including some from 1686, Mills and Fishing at Coolfada, Customs from Provost.\

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Mills Co. Cork and Ancient Water Mills

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1941, Drinagh Co-Op, A Real West Cork Success Story Report 1942 Effects of ‘Emergency’, Attempting to Trucks Driven by Gas from  Irish Anthracite, Visit by Committee Members R. Ellis and T. Sweetnam to Pig Farm of Sandy McGuigan, Cloughmills, Co. Antrim

Sandy McGuigan was reputed to be the world’s largest pig farmers at that time.

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1941, Drinagh Co-Op, A Real West Cork Success Story Report 1942 Effects of ‘Emergency’, Attempting to Trucks Driven by Gas from  Irish Anthracite, Visit by Committee Members R. Ellis and T. Sweetnam to Pig Farm of Sandy McGuigan, Cloughmills, Co. Antrim

Sandy McGuigan was reputed to be the world’s largest pig farmers at that time.

Sandy McGuigan was reputed to be the world’s largest pig farmers at that time.

Alexander (Sandy) McGuckian (1895-1952) was born in Cloughmills, Co. Antrim, and as a young man started a piggery on the family farm which, through his expertise in animal husbandry, became the biggest pig farm in the world. He was also a leading expert on grassland management and served on many agricultural and government advisory bodies during his lifetime. The McGuckian family is still active in the pig and farming business on the Drumbare Road.

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The next generation of McGuigans:

How John B. McGuckian, hurling enthusiast got on the pig’s back (Ar Mhuin Na Muice), October 28 1999

12:11 AM John B McGuckian, chairman of UTV, is one of Ireland’s most successful businessmen, writes Charlie Weston JOHN B McGuckian is one of the wealthiest people in Northern Ireland and one of the first Catholics to make it big there.That may be why he felt it was time to give something back when the church in Harryville came under siege recently from angry Orangemen frustrated at not being able to march down Portadown Garvaghy Road. Although it’s not his church and he is not overtly political, Mr McGuckian was one of a number of prominent Northern Catholics who turned up at Harryville to lend their support. He may also have been influenced by the fact that three of his brothers joined the Jesuit Order. However, the captain of Northern industry has never spoken about the Harryville gesture and it has not been reported before. In fact, Mr McGuckian is of the view that most of what he does should go unreported. But trying to be intensely private sits uneasily with the range of businesses he is involved in all over the island. He is director of AIB, Unidare and Irish Continental Group, has extensive property interests across the North, heads the family textile business, is chairman of Ulster Television, a former chairman of the Industrial Development Board, and was a ground-breaking proVice-Chancellor of Queen’s University.

Add to that a failed bid to buy Belfast Airport, losses as a Lloyd’s name and court battles with the taxman, and you begin to realise why he arouses such interest in the North. “John B has his finger in every pie. They say he is in everything but the crib, but as far as the media is concerned he likes to keep out of the way,” one observer of the Northern business scene noted. But it is hard to stay out of the limelight when the company of which you are chairman and the largest individual shareholder decides to pay a special dividend and you end up with stg£1.6m out of it. When that company is UTV and is beamed into every home in the North, being a shy multi-millionaire is a hard station. Mr McGuckian has come a long way.

The glamour of the media is a far cry from pig farming in north Antrim, where his family made its money. The family that sired John originated in Cloughmills, near Ballymena, and his father made his money in textiles and by pioneering intensive pig-farming techniques. John’s cousins, Patrick and Alastair, founded the international agribusiness company Masstock.

He was not raised with any airs and graces, and Mr McGuckian makes no attempt to disguise his unglamorous roots. “There’s a lot to be said for having an Antrim accent.” Those who know him say he tends to play up his regional accent. “It is a disarming accent and tends to put people at ease, but it disguises a fairly cunning business approach. His accent is part of his character.” But his “good ol’ country boy” persona is also resented by some business people who see him as shrewd and hard-nosed. John B, as he is invariably referred to, was educated at a Catholic boarding school, St MacNissi’s College, Garron Tower, and at Queen’s University, where he graduated with a degree in economics. At 24 he joined his father’s textile business as a trainee executive.

The father-son relationship was a close one. In the family firm he is remembered as a hard worker who earned the respect of the employees. Within two years he joined the board of Cloughmills Manufacturing. Other clothing firms he owns include Regatta Fashions and Cooneen Textiles. Mr McGuckian moved up a gear when he joined the board of UTV in 1970, following in the footsteps of his late father who had helped found the station. Business Newsletter Read the leading stories from the world of business. Monday to Friday. Enter your Email Address Sign Up He hit the headlines when he replaced the indomitable Unionist figure Brum Henderson as chairman of the broadcasting company. Mr McGuckian and former chief executive Desmond Smyth were unhappy at the management style of Henderson.

The station has been hugely profitable under McGuckian and Smyth, but the situation has come full circle with many now questioning the strategic focus of the group. A lack of commitment to local broadcasting and timid approach to expansion has led one Dublin broker to wonder why UTV bothers being on the stock market: “UTV has no real corporate strategy. They are very unexciting and cut costs all the time but have no strategy for new income.” When McGuckian upped his UTV stake, he was seen as well placed if an expected takeover from Scottish Media went ahead. But takeover talk at UTV subsided when Canadian group CanWest took a 29.9pc shareholding. What the future holds for UTV only McGuckian knows, but it is understood CanWest is anxious for greater links with Dublin-based TV3, where it is the largest shareholder. Mr McGuckian, who will be 60 in November, may be forced by the institutions to come up with a growth strategy for UTV soon.

The Northern industrialist has had a stint as chairman of the International Fund for Ireland. This position brought him into contact with influential Americans and prepared him for his role as chairman of the Industrial Development Board (IDB). He is no longer chairman, but in his years in the position in the early 1990s he steered the jobs agency through the embarrassment of poor results during recession to record job creation success. “He brought a strong private sector ethos to the agency, which had been shackled by a civil service mentality,” one observer noted. As IDB chairman he created controversy when he lost a court appeal to the House of Lords over a tax avoidance scheme. He was forced to pay stg£400,000 and endure criticism from judges. But McGuckian has little need to worry about tax bills. His investments include extensive property interests with large shareholdings in Newry Buttercrane Shopping Centre along with Foyleside in Derry and Abbey Centre in Newtownabbey. As a director of Dublin-based Unidare, he was influential in forcing through a huge acquisition that was opposed by shareholder Dermot Desmond. At AIB, he was one of the directors called on to resign at this year’s agm over the bogus non-resident accounts scandals.

Outside his investments, his time as Queen’s pro-Vice-Chancellor was notable for him setting up an equal opportunities committee there and telling a college gathering: “There absolutely was discrimination in Queen’s University.” But the personality that has won him friends throughout his life has remained as magnetic as ever. “He is a great raconteur, the kind of person everyone is gathered around at a party to hear him tell a joke,” one industrialist said. Another commented: “He’s one of those people who you are pretty sure is a warm guy. You get a warm feeling, but you don’t get close to him.” He works day and night, but is understood to be upset by suggestions that he is a workaholic. “I would be ashamed if I saw myself as that. I believe in balance in life having friends and taking exercise,” he has said. He and his wife Carmel have four children two sons and two daughters. Conscious efforts have been made to avoid lavishing luxury on them just because their father is a multi-millionaire. However, Mr McGuckian has been transferring many of his shareholdings in quoted companies into trusts for his children lately.He lives in the same house he grew up in in the rural setting of Antrim’s Cloughmills and has a second home on the banks of Lough Erne. What spare time he has is spent skiing abroad, and watching horse-racing and hurling at home.

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Origin group buys Masstock for €81m ORIGIN Enterprises, in which IAWS holds a 71.4% stake, has bought Masstock Group for a total of £61 million (€81.78m) which includes £30m (€40m) of debt. WED, 23 JAN, 2008 – 00:00 BRIAN O’MAHONY, CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT Masstock has operations in Britain and Poland and provides specialist agronomy services directly to arable and grassland farm enterprises. It services more than 8,000 farmers in Britain and 2,300 in Poland and employs 550 people in delivering that process to its customer base. Since the early 1970s Masstock was involved in development farming systems throughout the world. It was the brainchild of two Northern Ireland brothers, Paddy and Alastair McGuckian. Origin said it will fund the deal through borrowings and that the acquisition will be earnings enhancing from the start.

It has emerged also that the existing management team, led by group chief executive Declan Giblin are to stay on with the group. “Masstock provides system-based solutions directly to more than 10,000 farm businesses throughout Britain and Poland,” said Origin chief executive Tom O’Mahony. This business combines an extensive arable research and development capability with add on sales, said Mr O’Mahony.

Origin is a big player in animal feeds and fertilisers and expects to build those sales as a direct result of the takeover. Leading food analyst John O’Reilly, of Davy Stockbrokers, said: “In addition to Masstock Autonomous growth prospects, there is also potential to add other farm-related services to its existing capability.” He also said the deal, expected to be completed in early February, could add about 7% to his EPS growth forecast of 21.7% for the year. Mr Giblin described the move “as an important milestone in the development of Masstock”. As a result, he said the company would become a core part of a group that is focused on delivering value added to primary sectors of the food industry.

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Drinagh Co-Op Creamery, Durrus

There were various private creameries in West Cork in the 19^th century and an early Co-Op was set up in Bandon in 1903.  The English Co-ops dipped their toes into Irish waters but withdrew with the advent of the troubles.  The Drinagh Co-Op was set up by Canon Crowley who was a man of considerable talent.  During a strike in Cork which stopped the export of pigs, he chartered boats to export from Bantry. From the 1920s on there was increasing legislation to improve dairy production standards and this assisted the development of Co-Ops such as Drinagh. 

A major influence in establishing the creamery in 1933 was the Church of Ireland Canon Johnny McManaway.  It was largely built by cross community voluntary labour.  The contractor was Cahalanes of Drinagh who built Drinagh Church and the main creamery there.  Work started in 1933 and it opened in the spring of 1934 with the formal ceremony in July.  At the opening which was performed by Fr. Crowley from Drinagh he singled out Canon McManaway for special praise and he set the machinery in motion saying that he regarded Fr. Crowley as a special friend. Farmers gave a week at a time with horses and carts. Gravel was sourced from the strand and rock was quarried east the Ballycommane Road, the ground was soft and took a great deal of fill. It was necessary to register 1,000 cows and guarantee £1,000 over 3 years.  Canon McManaway was also involved in starting the creamery at Dunmanway, and worked closely with Fr. McSweeney. He may have had some involvement in the starting of the creamery in Kilcrohane in 1938 where the prime movers were the National Teacher Mr Fitzsimons and two progressive small farmers Danny Daly of Dromnea and James Daly of Caher.

In  November 1934  Drinagh was expanding the creamery network tendering for new creameries  at Lowertown in Schull and Kealkil.

1935 Father Cotter, P.P., Durrus presented a silver cup to the creamery supplier with the highest average butter fat throughout the previous 12 months. Prizewinner Miss Mary Ward, Coolculaghta, average content 4.15%, runner up James Swanton, Mollogh, Bantry, 3.85%.  She won again the following year.

The report of the opening of the Durrus creamery stated that the most modern equipment available was utilised and its operations beat all expectations. The creamery was opened before those at Caheragh, Kealkil and Bantry and apart from Durrus farmers, others suppliers from those areas sent their milk there on floats carrying 15 or more churns of milk. Included was Eddie Hurst of Beach House, Bantry (now owned by Mrs Wagner) he was known as a very progressive farmer and involved in the Durrus and Bantry Agricultural Shows. He married Miss Shannon of Clashadoo. They are the parents of well known Bantry historian Hazel Vickery. Before the creamery, butter was sold to Jeremiah O’Sullivan’s (Jer the shop) stores for 4d a lb and was packed in 56 lb. boxes.  It went from his store by horse and cart to Durrus Road Station and thence to Cork.  Apart from taking in milk, the creamery operated as a general store where farmers could make purchases against their cheques.  It purchased chickens and turkeys and supplied meal and other farm supplies. The creamery was a huge benefit to the smaller farmers who were extended credit over the winter and this was paid off from the summer milk deliveries. The creamery had a mill which ceased operations during the war, due to a lack of fuel.   It was an important social outlet where news was exchanged and daily contact made. When milk collection at the creamery ceased this was a major loss to the community.  Improvement in 1939 included a new water supply and a milk heater.  In the late 1930 and 1940s Tom Deane (former Dublin Metropolitan Policeman) and J. Clarke from Durrus were on Management Committees of Drinagh Co-Op.  Tom Deane’s brother Barnabas was on the Committee of Management in 1956.  Creamery Managers from the 30s included M. Meigan, Jack O’Sullivan, Mr O’Mahony from 1944, and Sean Keane Dan Hurley.

In 1948 the creamery managers including the Durrus manager had a case before the Labour Court seeking a pay increase to £6 10s a week.  Evidence was given that Drinagh Co-Op was generally doing very well and milk had increased significantly in price, and the management countered that many of the managers have sidelines in the turf and flax industries and pointed out that they were unable to secure the services of a manager in Kilcrohane.  In the end the Court awarded £5 5s.

In 1956 Drinagh Co-Op with the other West Cork Co-Ops set up the South West Cattle Breeding Society.  Up to the early 1970s farmers received the skim milk back which was fed to the pigs and calves.  From that time on all the milk was processed at the Carbery Milk Plant in Ballineen, which the West Cork Co-Ops had set up with Express Dairies and was run by the late Bernie Cahill. In 1991 with the other West Cork Co-Ops it purchased the outstanding 80% interest in Carbery Milk Products Ballineen. 

In its heyday the creamery had 150 suppliers; this has now dwindled to 14 and their milk is collected by bulk tankers for processing in Ballineen. Sadly, both the creamery in Durrus and Kilcrohane are now closed and for sale (2007).  Jim Dukelow, Coomkeen has lived to see the creamery built and closed in his lifetime.

Drinagh is one of the four West Cork Co-Ops who own Carbery Carbery Milk Products:

Carbery Group is a global leader in food ingredients, flavours and cheese.

Carbery Group is recognised as a leading international manufacturer of speciality food ingredients, flavouring systems and as an award-winning cheese producer. We are owned by four Irish dairy co-operatives, employ almost 800 people, and manufacture from 10 facilities worldwide, including Ireland, UK, Italy, USA, Brazil and Thailand.

Our timeline, Carbery since 1965

Carbery was founded in 1965 as a joint venture between four creameries and Express Dairies, UK. Since then we have grown, taking market leading positions in dairy, ingredients and flavours. This timeline explores our journey of growth and significant milestones along the way.

1965  Carbery Milk Products was formed – a partnership between Carbery Creameries (four West Cork dairy co-operatives) and Express Dairies, UK.

Much of the early success was driven by the late Bernie Cahill of Beara.

The Southern Star in 1940 carried a report of a speech he gave expressing concerns about aspect of the Gardaí collection of evidence in criminal cases. It is likely that the concerns is held my quite a number of the Senior Judiciary in particular those who had a criminal practice prior to elevation to the bench. Whatever about now in the past there was a segment of the Gardaí who subscribed to the Dogs in the Streets School of Jurisprudence, ‘We know who did it and will get him or her’ the drive to get the conviction rate up trumping adherence to justice. Nor a problem confined to Ireland.

The Star report has him the son of the Rev. Meredith of Courtmacsherry. Frank Mac Gabhann gives his father as a barrister which the birth cert confirms. There is however a family connection to the Howe family who lived in the general area. It may be that the Star got it wrong.

This is  Frank Mac Gabhann writing

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Truth Above Everything

Frank Mac Gabhann writes: This decade of centenaries has thus far passed with barely a mention of James Creed Meredith, a man largely unknown outside his family and even to relatively few lawyers and historians. This should not be the case. Not only was he a High, then Supreme Court judge, he was also one of the great sprinters of his generation, a member of the Irish Volunteers and a 1914 gun-runner, president of the Supreme Court set up by Dáil Éireann during the War of Independence who championed Brehon Law, a philosopher, a translator of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (still in print a century later with his commentaries and read by philosophers and students alike), a novelist and playwright who late in life became a Quaker. One wonders how many Irish lawyers of today could even read Kant, much less translate him. 

Meredith was born in 1875 in Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin of a prominent family that was serving the Church of Ireland, if not the British empire, well, with many clergymen among its ranks. His father, of the same name, practised as a barrister and was the deputy grand master of the Masonic Lodge of Ireland and even today there a lodge in Belfast bearing his name. His portrait in his Masonic robes still hangs in the Masonic Hall in Molesworth Street in Dublin. He was knighted by the British monarch and even invited to the coronation of 1910. He was appointed secretary of the new Royal University of Ireland, which may have had something to do with his son enrolling as a philosophy student there. The young Meredith was awarded a BA and subsequently an MA, as well as the gold medal in mental philosophy. He also studied at Trinity College, where he was awarded another gold medal. He qualified as a barrister in 1901. In 1911 Oxford University published his translation of Kant’s Critique of Judgement. In 1895, while at Trinity, he was the Irish champion at the 100, 220 and 440 yard events and the following year won the British championship at the quarter mile. At the time of his death Meredith was considered one of the greatest Irish quarter-milers of all time.

He was a member, with Tom Kettle, of the intellectually fertile Young Ireland branch (the only branch that allowed women to join) of the United Irish League. Perhaps Meredith the philosopher was reading Karl Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach: up to now philosophy has only interpreted the world ‑ the point is to change it. For Meredith now began to marry theory with praxis ‑ practice. By 1913 he was a convinced Irish nationalist and engagé. He joined the Irish Volunteers at its inception, although it is not known whether he wore the uniform. He was one of the organisers of the Howth and Kilcoole gun-running in the summer of 1914 and persuaded Dr Thomas Myles to use his yacht, the Chotay, which he helped to crew, to smuggle the guns to Kilcoole. He was one of John Redmond’s added nominees to the national committee of the Volunteers. Despite being a nominee of Redmond, he worked actively with the Republican members, according to Bulmer Hobson. Immediately following the British declaration of war on August 3rd, Meredith called a meeting at his own home in Dublin for the following evening, at which Seán Mac Diarmada, Bulmer Hobson and some Redmond nominees attended, to discuss how Ireland should respond. When Seán Fitzgibbon arrived late with the news that Redmond had pledged Irish support for the war the night before in the House of Commons, “Meredith was so annoyed that he could not discuss the matter”, according to Fitzgibbon.

Meredith is believed to have drafted the constitution of the Volunteers some months later, with its declared objective, “To secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the people of Ireland”. This is lawyer-speak, probably just vague enough to escape the rigours of the wartime Defence of the Realm regulations. In 1915 he published in a prestigious philosophical quarterly in the US the Kantian essay “Perpetual Peace and the Doctrine of Neutrality”, where he sets out both his anger at the war then raging and his views on pacifism. There is no record of his attitude towards the Easter Rising the following year. However, he did testify as a witness for the defence in the court-martial of Eoin MacNeill following the Rising. As late as July 1917 he was still involved to some degree with the Irish Parliamentary Party during a by-election for South Dublin, then a unionist stronghold. Republicans did not field a candidate in that by-election as the East Clare by-election was being held four days later. Meredith harboured the vain hope that the last-gasp, ill-fated Irish Convention that began that month might provide a way forward.

It is unclear exactly when, but at some stage after the overwhelming victory of Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election Meredith crossed the Rubicon and nailed his colours firmly to the armed independence struggle. He became president of the Supreme Court of the republican Dáil courts, the “chief justice” of the Irish Republic that functioned during the War of Independence. He defied the Irish Bar, which was not exactly stocked with patriots at the time. The Bar had forbidden barristers to appear in Republican courts. Those who did risked not simply the Bar’s sanction but also a different sanction from the Black and Tans, who were armed with more than summonses for professional misconduct. In one case heard by Meredith, he preferred Brehon law over common law in ruling that the father of a child born out of wedlock was required to pay maintenance in respect of that child. This ruling was followed thereafter in all Republican courts. With the winding up of the Dáil courts he was appointed chief judicial commissioner, deciding the disposition of those cases.  

When the provisional government decided to set up a British-style judiciary in 1924, there was no room for Meredith on the new three-member Supreme Court, the “Protestant seat” going to Gerald FitzGibbon, a unionist, in order to allay Southern unionist fears. Nor was there any room for a judge there to follow his Brehon example. A child born out of wedlock in the new Irish Free State reverted to being a filius nullius, a son of nobody, a baby whom the natural father could lawfully neglect. The new set-up was, in effect, demoting Meredith to the newly created High Court.

As there were effectively no vacancies until 1936, he had to wait until then to be promoted to the expanded five-member Supreme Court, joining FitzGibbon there. The unionist FitzGibbon never forgave Meredith for being a Protestant republican and, just before his retirement in 1938, FitzGibbon, without notice to Meredith, launched an unfair and wholly unwarranted attack on his fellow judge in a written judgement. According to the late Adrian Hardiman, this attack was unique in modern Irish judicial history, though typical of FitzGibbon’s vindictive style to one whom, according to Meredith’s family, he may have considered a traitor to his class and perhaps even to his religion. Meredith, by 1938 the good Quaker, did not reply in kind to the attack and turned the other cheek. Apparently alone among all the superior court judges, FitzGibbon is not recorded as attending Meredith’s funeral in 1942.

FitzGibbon had already fallen out with Hugh Kennedy, the first chief justice, without whose recommendation the decade before to the provisional government, he would never have been even considered for the bench. FitzGibbon gave judgement, reported in 1934, in a case involving a minor whose ancestors included a deputy lieutenant and a high sheriff and whose grandfather had owned 25,000 acres in Co Clare in the nineteenth century. FitzGibbon lamented that “the policy of successive Governments . . . has transferred the land [of his grandfather] to its occupiers”. He went on to comment on the possibilities of the minor carrying on the tradition of his class in Ireland to seek “distinguished service and exalted position in the colonies” of the British empire. FitzGibbon had the extraordinary effrontery in a judgement in 1935 to ridicule the state of which he was one of the chief magistrates, referring to “ . . . this other Eden semi-paradise, this precious stone, set in the silver sea, this blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this Saor Stát”, after Shakespeare. Not only is this unique in Irish judicial history, it is all but unthinkable in civilised legal exegesis anywhere.

It may be remembered that FitzGibbon’s father, of the same name, was a judge and loyal servant of the British empire for nearly half a century until he died in 1909. He was well known and despised by most Irish people and for that reason appears in Ulysses, whose action takes place in 1904, when the elder FitzGibbon was still sitting as a judge and dispensing justice. James Joyce playfully slid in a possible double meaning reference concerning him in the Aeolus episode. The elder Fitzgibbon’s father, also of the same name, had been perhaps the most bigoted lawyer in Ireland in the nineteenth century, publishing absurd sectarian drivel about Catholicism and about how fortunate the Irish people were during the nineteenth century to be ruled by Englishmen.

In the meantime Meredith had published in 1928 a translation of Kant’s Critique of Teleological Judgement with notes and analyses, as he had with the earlier translation. He chaired numerous state commissions, including that on the Army mutiny of 1924. He was appointed by the League of Nations in 1934 to supervise a plebiscite in the Saar Basin in still-occupied Germany. He also wrote three plays (including one entitled The Heckled Unionist) and contributed to a plethora of intellectual and literary journals, both Irish and British. His utopian, visionary, philosophical, science-fiction novel The Rainbow in the Valley is a story of visitors to western China, including a thinly disguised, at times whimsical, Meredith. They communicate by radio with Mars and discuss Freud, Aristotle, Hegel and Kant. as well as language, the partition of Ireland, the League of Nations, and politics in general, given the gathering war clouds in Europe. We learn that there has not been a war on Mars for 10,000 years. Even Éamon de Valera and Eoin O’Duffy get a mention, the former telling a joke about the latter. The narrator relates an incident about himself in 1920 going out of his way to avoid being forced by the British military to take off his hat during the passing by of a military funeral procession on the Dublin quays for the detectives shot by the IRA on Bloody Sunday, and how it led to a quarrel with a lifelong friend. The thought occurs that perhaps the comment elsewhere of the narrator, “I have the greatest respect for pacifist theories, but I value Truth above everything”, is Meredith’s credo. Unfortunately for the book’s dissemination, its publication coincided with the outbreak of the world war, although even in times of peace Kantian novels top few bestseller lists.

One of Meredith’s cases was the custody battle between Muriel MacSwiney, Terence MacSwiney’s widow, and Mary MacSwiney, his sister, over his daughter, Máire, born in 1918. MacSwiney, lord mayor of Cork and IRA commandant there, had died on hunger strike in London in 1920, with worldwide publicity. MacSwiney, in his will, had appointed his sister to be joint guardian of his daughter. After the civil war, during which both women took the anti-treaty side, Muriel left for the continent with her daughter. She became involved in leftist politics there. In 1932 Mary, her aunt, went to Germany and, with the daughter’s agreement, effectively kidnapped the minor and raced with her by taxi to the Austrian border and then back to Cork. By this point the child had forgotten both her English and Irish, and had had, as she later wrote, “an erratic upbringing, moving from place to place”. Meredith had to determine which woman would have custody of the fourteen-year-old girl. Both sides fought the case bitterly over several months. Meredith decided to speak with the girl privately in his chambers. By then she understood some English. He asked her with whom she would like to live. She replied, “My aunt”. Meredith awarded custody to the aunt.

An interesting aside to the case is that for a time she and her aunt were furnished with Garda protection as there was evidence that Muriel was trying to “re-kidnap” her. She recalled later her aunt’s discomfiture: she was a diehard Republican who never accepted the legitimacy of the Free State, yet was being protected by their police. Mary MacSwiney, it may be remembered, was one of the seven surviving abstentionist Sinn Féin TDs from the Second Dáil who in 1938 purported to delegate the authority of the Irish Republic to the Army Council of the IRA. This was, presumably, their version of apostolic succession which, according to Irish Republican mythology, converted the IRA Army Council into the legitimate “de jure Government of the Irish Republic”.  

Meredith’s grandson, Rowan Gillespie, is one of Ireland’s finest sculptors, whose work includes the famine statues on the Dublin quays and the dolmen in Blackrock. Proclamation, the sculpture outside Kilmainham Jail, is a tribute both to the vision of the 1916 leaders and to the vision of his grandfather. Meredith died in 1942. Athlete, philosopher, revolutionary, jurist, he is now barely remembered. He deserves better.

pat crowley <pat25a@gmail.com>	2 May 2021, 00:21 (1 day ago)
to me

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tLNzCeJs84Attachments area

Preview YouTube video Interview with A 100 Year Old Irish Doctor, 1989Interview with A 100 Year Old Irish Doctor, 1989

Will be added to:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i_EwveWpxK4Cwt9h6-wH98LsK8TeAuQb1i2z4XXs_Io/edit

On one point Dr. Lane is wrong, UCC was not the first college to admit women to study Medicine. He says in is calas of 1919 there were 6 women graduates.

Women ” In 1865 Nadejda Souslova was in turn accepted at Zurich. In 1866, she requested the right to defend a doctoral thesis; she thus became the first woman doctor to graduate from a mixed European university. I think the first women graduated in the the US in the late 1850s from the women’s medical college of Philadelphia.”

“From John A. Murphy “The College”. “Dora Elizabeth Allman, a nineteen year old Protestant from Bandon, and Lucy Ellmarie Smith. A twenty-year old Presbyterian from Midleton, became the first medical students, graduating in 1896”.