John McCullagh

John Martin

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Although born into the privileged life of a landed Presbyterian family, John Martin laid it aside to serve his suffering fellowman through the dark days of the Famine.  He also endured exile to a foreign land because he sought to reform the Government which he saw as destructive to his native land during the poverty stricken years of the 1840’s.  

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John Mitchel

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John Mitchel

John Mitchel (1815-1875) was a Young Irelander leader and perhaps the most esteemed republican to come from Newry. He was in fact born in Maghera, son of the Rev John Mitchel and Mary (Haslett) but the family settled in Newry from 1823 when the minister received an appointment here.

 

 

From 1842 Mitchel came under the influence of the Young Irelanders who were impatient with Daniel O’Connell’s conservatism. He was especially influenced by Thomas Davis of The Nation newspaper, who induced him to write a Life of Hugh O’Neill. After Davis‘s early death in 1845, Mitchel became main journalist of The Nation and the articles became much more radical and outspoken. In Dublin he lived first in Leeson Street, then at Charlemont Bridge. In 1846, with other friends he seceded from O’Connell’s Repeal Association to form the Irish Confederation. By 1848 Mitchel’s position was so radical that he had left The Nation to found the United Irishman. Encouraged by events in Paris the more radical Young Irelanders were contemplating a revolution.

In the American Civil War he sympathised with the South, lost two sons in the fighting and was for a short while imprisoned by the victorious Northern forces. He went to Paris where he observed his much-loved daughter Henrietta (Henty) – who had become a Catholic – die while still at school. 

Charles Russell

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                                        Charles Russell 1832-1900

A handsome bust in the foyer of our Town Hall commemorates one of Newry’s most famous sons, Charles Russell, the only ever Irish Catholic to become Lord Chief Justice of England.

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Art McCooey: [Kavanagh]

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I must appeal to proper Kavanagh scholars who may explain why the poet dedicated the following to his predecessor poet of our region, Art McCooey. The collection ‘A Soul for Sale‘ was published in the year of my birth by Macmillan. Other poems in this anthology were similarly dedicated to those who went before.

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Kavanagh: The Green Fool

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While deliberating whether Patrick Kavanagh would be acceptable as a ‘local’ poet to our readership, the great irony struck me: that Kavanagh himself, from the black hills and sour fields of Monaghan, struggled to demonstrate the universality of man in his verse and indeed celebrated his people, their time and their landscape to encapsulate the problems of mankind, and of the artist through all regions and ages.


In short, he feared lest he be seen as just a ‘local’ poet!

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