Most of the work is done by Wikipedia – and yourselves. I supply the birthdates and the names. Some of these names may already be known to you; others probably will not. The interesting thing is that most of these people either knew each other personally or had at least heard of one another. Ireland is a small country and Dublin, even today, is little more than an extended village.
I’m not about to offer any useful hints (politician, playwright, revolutionary, trade union leader) since half of the fun is discovering who these people were and how they related to one another and the “re-creation” of Ireland. In the separate stories of their lives you can piece together the story of the nation-to-be.
In closing, I would like to emphasize the rather significant fact that nearly half of the people on this list were Protestants, which, in the Irish context, makes them descendants of families who had been part of the post-Reformation invasions and settlements of the 16th and 17th centuries This did not make them any less Irish than their “native” counterparts, whether descendants of the Gaels or the Normans of the Middle Ages. In fact, their identification with Ireland was in many ways more acute than the others because it involved a conscious rejection of England and English ways. Without these people the Irish could never have created the modern nation in the way they actually did – and this should never be forgotten or swept under the rug by Irish Irelanders in the style of D.P Moran who proclaimed that only a Catholic nationalist could be a true Irishman or Irishwoman. This is simply not true, and the evidence lies in these various biographies.
1846 - Charles Stewart Parnell (d. 1891, age 45)
1846 - Michael Davitt (d. 1906, age 60)
1846 - Standish O’Grady (d. 1928, age 82)
1847 - Michael Cusack (d. 1906, age 59)
1852 - Lady Augusta Gregory (d. 1932, age 80)
1852 - George Moore (d. 1933, age 81)
1854 - Oscar Wilde (d. 1900, age 46)
1854 - Edward Carson (d. 1935, age 81)
1855 - Tim Healy (d. 1931, age 76)
1856 - G.B. Shaw (d. 1950, age 94)
1856 - John Redmond (d. 1918, age 62)
1857 - Tom Clarke (ex. 1916, age 59)
1860 - Douglas Hyde (d. 1949, age 89)
1864 - Roger Casement (ex. 1916, age 52)
1865 - W.B. Yeats (d. 1939, age 74)
1866 - Maud Gonne (d. 1953, age 87)
1867 - George Russell (d. 1935, age 68)
1867 - Eoin MacNeill (d. 1945, age 78)
1868 - Constance Markiewicz (d. 1927, age 59)
1868 - James Connolly (ex. 1916, age 48)
1869 - D.P. Moran (d. 1936, age 67)
1870 - Erskine Childers (ex. 1922, age 52)
1871 - J.M. Synge (d. 1909, age 38)
1871 - Arthur Griffith (d. 1922, age 51)
1874 - Cathal Brugha (d. 1922, age 48)
1876 - Jim Larkin (d.1947, age 71)
1878 - Francis Sheehy-Skeffington (ex. 1916, age 38)
1879 - Patrick Pearse (ex. 1916, age 37)
1880 - Sean O’Casey (d. 1964, age 84)
1882 - James Joyce (d. 1941, age 59)
1882 - Eamon deValera (d. 1975, age 93)
1882 - Bulmer Hobson (d. 1969, age 87)
1883 - Sean Mac Diarmada (ex. 1916, age 33)
1883 - Denis McCullough (d. 1968, age 85)
1890 - Michael Collins (d. 1922, age 32)
Here are some links to articles or poems on Irish themes to be found on this blog:
Thinking in Irish
The Runup to Easter 1916
Voodoo Drums
From the Normans to Michael Collins
The Celts – Intro
The Celts I
The Celts II
The Celts III
The Celts IV
Dublin Walkabout (1)
Dublin Walkabout (2)
Belfast and Derry (1991)
Joyce, Iraq, Michael Collins etc.
Poems:
Bearla
Terrorists on a Coffee Break
Maureen Rua
Joe McInerney
October in Ireland
An Clar
Irish poetry and comments on Heaney
