Here are just the top ten most surprising and influential.

1. Guinness

Well maybe this isn’t so surprising but its popularity and longevity have made it Ireland’s most successful and recognisable export undoubtedly the most famous Irish export throughout the world. Drunk around the globe and loved by millions, its Guinness. Arthur Guinness began brewing Guinness in Leixlip, County Kildare before transferring to St. Jame’s Gate Brewery. In 1759 he signed a 9,000 year lease at £45 per year. That’s how confident he was in his product. Now, 251 years on, the best selling alcoholic drink of all time boasts of sales exceeding $2.6 billion. To Arthur, Slainte!

2. Color photography

Certainly one of Ireland’s most prolific inventors, John Joly was responsible for meldometer for measuring the melting points of minerals, the steam calorimeter for measuring specific heats, and the photometer for measuring light intensity and use of radiation for cancer treatment. What he is most known for however is the invention of color photography. In 1894 this Irish genius from Hollywood, County Offaly found a successful way of producing color photographs from a single plate. He changed the way we see the world.

3. Trans-Atlantic calls

It’s a long way from Skype but it was an Irishman who was knighted for his work in establishing the Atlantic Telegraph Cable in 1865. Lord Kelvin Thomson helped to lay the cable which stretched from Newfoundland to Valentia in County Cork. He also had a very keen interest in the measurement of temperature and thermodynamics which led to the scale of temperature, “The Kelvin Scale”.

4. A Cure for Leprosy

This one I’m especially thankful for. It was an Irish man who accidently discovered a cure for leprosy while he was looking for answer to Ireland’s tuberculosis problem. What a lucky mistake. Vincent Barry made this accidental and miraculous discovery, with the catchy title of compound B663. This compound would go on to cure 15 million people of this devastating disease.

5. The Modern Tractor

“The Mad Mechanic”, Harry Ferguson was responsible for the original Ferguson System of tractor. It was patented by the mad inventor in 1926 and is the same basic design for a modern tractor that is used today.
This County Down loony also invented his own motor cycle, race car and plane and in 1909 he was the first Irishman to fly. Originally a bicycle repairman he even built himself the first ever four-wheeled Formula-One car.
His name lives on in the Massey Ferguson company.

6. The Submarine

This man probably took a lot of slake for this invention…an underwater boat? We’ll believe it when we see it!
As it happens back in 1881, in County Clare, John Philip Holland was the first person to successfully launch a submarine. The first of its kind, it was called the “Fenian Ram”. By 1900 the U.S. Navy was formally commissioning the production.

7. The Tank

From Blackrock, Dublin in 1911, came the world’s first armored tank. When, the then Home Secretary in Britain, Winston Churchill commissioned the design of a vehicle “capable of resisting bullets and shrapnel, crossing trenches, flattening barbed wire, and negotiating the mud of no-man’s land” this is what our Dublin boy came up with. The World Wars might have been very different without his invention. Though modern tanks might look entirely different to his original designs the essential “battle buggy” remains exactly the same.

8. Guided Missile

It’s strange that such a peace loving people seem to have had a good head for army equipment. From Castlebar, County Mayo, Louis Brennan invented the guided missile. This stealth torpedo was used as a costal defensive mechanism.
Brennan is also credited with inventing the first helicopter however his prototype crashed and burnt in 1925.

9. Ejector Seat

It is rather worrying that it was Irishmen who came up with the first functioning helicopter (Louis Brennan) and also the first ejector seat. In 1945 Sir James Martin tested out his device on a dummy, a wise choice. The following year a man called Bernard Lynch became the first live tester of the County Down man’s invention. It was soon adopted by the Royal Air force as a standard safety device.

10. Apparatus for Whiskey Distilling

A Dublin chap with a very exotic name, Aeneas Coffey, came up with the world first heat-exchange device in 1830. This might not sound like that big a deal but this very efficient little piece of equipment led to huge advances in distilling, including whiskey.

Irelands Writers

Irish literature is filled with playwrights, novelists, short story writers, poets, essayists, historians, humorists, and philosophers. They come with names like Jonathan Swift, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, William Butler Yeats, Frank O’Connor, George Bernard Shaw and Edmund Burke.

The following are just a few of Ireland’s greatest writers:

Jonathan Swift

was born in Dublin, in 1667. He studied at Kilkenny Grammar School, Trinity College in Dublin (1682-89), receiving his B.A. and M.A.. In 1695 Swift was ordained in the Church of Ireland (Anglican), Dublin. Irish author and journalist, dean of St. Patrick’s Cathedral (Dublin) from 1713, the foremost prose satirist in English language. Swift became insane in his last years, but until his death he was known as Dublin’s foremost citizen. Swift’s most famous works is Gulliver’s Travels (1726), where the stories of Gulliver’s experiences among dwarfs and giants are best known. Swift gave to these journeys an air of authenticity and realism and many contemporary readers believed them to be true. Jonathan Swift died in Dublin on October 19, 1745.

Edmund Burke

1729–97, attended Trinity College, in Dublin. He was a member of Samuel Johnson’s inner circle. The son of a Protestant father and a Roman Catholic mother and himself a Protestant, he never ceased to criticize the English administration in Ireland and the galling discrimination against Catholics. Burke’s political career began in 1765 when he became private secretary to the prime minister, and formed a lifelong friendship with that leader. He also entered Parliament in 1765 and there encouraged a wiser treatment of the American colonies. In 1766 he spoke in favor of the repeal of the Stamp Act, although he also supported the Declaratory Act, asserting Britain’s constitutional right to tax the colonists. Burke, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), became the first political philosopher to argue the value of political parties. Although he championed many liberal and reform causes, Burke believed that political, social, and religious institutions represented the wisdom of the ages. He withdrew from political life in 1795 and died two years later.

Oliver Goldsmith

was born at Pallas Co. Longford,in 1728. Soon after his birth his family moved to Kilkenny West. Co. Westmeath. In 1744 he went to Trinity College, where his life at college was miserable. He was graduated in 1749.For the next several years he made two more attempts at college and wandered the European continent playing the flute. In 1756 he returned to England. In London through the publication of The Bee and the Life of Beau Nash, Goldsmith achieved considerable popularity, and his fortunes began to mend. He belonged to the circle of Johnson, Burke, Reynolds, and was one of “The Club.” The Traveller appeared in 1764, and his reputation as a poet was firmly established. The Vicar of Wakefield, published two years later, increased his popularity, and when he produced his first play, The Good Natur’d Man (1768). In 1770 came The Deserted Village, and three years after his dramatic masterpiece, She Stoops to Conquer, which was highly successful. But Goldsmith’s carelessness, his intemperance, and his habit of gambling, soon brought him into debt. Broken in health and mind, he died in 1774.

Maria Edgeworth

was born at in, Oxfordshire, the second child of Richard Lovell Edgeworth . who was, a well-known author and inventor. After her father’s second marriage in 1773, she went with him to Ireland, where she eventually was to settle on his estate, Edgeworthstown, in Co. Longford. There, she mixed with the Anglo-Irish gentry. She acted as manager of her father’s estate, later drawing on this experience for her novels about the Irish. In 1800 by her first novel Castle Rackrent, which was an immediate success. On a visit to London in 1813 Maria met Lord Byron and Humphry Davy. She entered into a long correspondence with Sir Walter Scott . She visited him in Scotland at Abbotsford House in 1823 and they formed a lasting friendship. After her father’s death in 1817 she edited his memoirs, and extended them with her biographical comments. She was an active writer to the last, and worked strenuously for the relief of the famine-stricken Irish peasants during the Irish Potato Famine (1845-1849). She died in Edgeworthstown in 1849.

Oscar Wilde

1854–1900, was born in Dublin and studied at Trinity College, and at Magdalen College, Oxford.Wilde’s stories and essays were well received, but his creative genius found its highest expression in his plays—Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In 1891, Wilde met and became intimate with the considerably younger, handsome, and dissolute Lord Alfred Douglas .Soon Douglas’s father, began railing against Wilde and later wrote him a note accusing him of homosexual practices. Wilde brought action for libel against Douglas and was himself charged with homosexual offenses under the Criminal Law Amendment, found guilty, and sentenced (1895) to prison for two years. His experiences in jail inspired his most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898),Released from prison in 1897, Wilde found himself a complete social outcast in England and, plagued by ill health and bankruptcy, lived in France under an assumed name until his death.

William Butler Yeats

(1865-1939) was born in Dublin.Yeats was educated in London and in Dublin, but he spent his summers in the west of Ireland in the family’s summer house at Connaught. He was active in societies that attempted an Irish literary revival. His first volume of verse appeared in 1887. Together with Lady Gregory he founded the Irish Theatre, which was to become the Abbey Theatre, and served as its chief playwright until the movement was joined by John Synge. His plays usually treat Irish legends; they also reflect his fascination with mysticism and spiritualism. Although a convinced patriot, Yeats deplored the hatred and the bigotry of the Nationalist movement, and his poetry is full of moving protests against it. He was appointed to the Irish Senate in 1922. Yeats is one of the few writers whose greatest works were written after the award of the Nobel Prize. William Butler Yeats died on January 28, 1939 and is interred at Drumcliff in Co. Sligo

James Joyce

1882–1941, Joyce was educated at Clongowes Wood College, Belvedere College and then attended University College in Dublin (1899–1902). Irish novelist. Perhaps the most influential and significant novelist of the 20th century. Joyce was a master of the English language. His novel Ulysses, which is among the great works of world literature. Ulysses, written between 1914 and 1921, was published in Paris in 1922 by Shakespeare & Company. Its publication was banned in the United States until 1933. Joyce returned to Ireland briefly in 1909 in a futile attempt to start a chain of motion picture theaters in Dublin, and again in 1912 in an unsuccessful attempt to arrange for the publication of the short story collection Dubliners, which had to be abandoned due to fears of prosecution for obscenity and libel. From 1922 until 1939 Joyce worked on Finnegans Wake (1939), a complex novel that attempts to connect multiple cycles of Irish and human history into the framework of a single night’s events in the family of a Dublin publican. Joyce died in Zürich in 1941.

George Bernard Shaw

was born in 1856. Shaw attended Wesleyan Connexional School, and Dublin’s Central Model School, ending his formal education at the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. At the age of 15 he started to work as a junior clerk. In 1876 he went to London. Irish dramatist, literary critic, a socialist spokesman, and a leading figure in the 20th century theater. In 1895 Shaw became a drama critic for the Saturday Review.Shaw was a freethinker, a supporter of women’s rights and an advocate of equality of income. In 1925 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Shaw accepted the honor but refused the money. Shaw’s popularity declined after his essay “Common Sense About the War” (1914), which was considered unpatriotic. Shaw died on November 2, 1950

Frank O’Connor

was born in Cork in 1903. In 1918 O’Connor joined the Irish Republican Army and served in combat during the Irish War of Independence. He opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 . He was one of Twelve thousand Anti-Treaty combatants who were interned by the government of the new Irish Free State, between 1922 and 1923. Following his release, O’Connor took various positions including that of Irish teacher, theatre director, and librarian. In 1935, O’Connor became a member of the Board of Directors of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, founded by William Butler Yeats and other members of the Irish National Theatre Society. In 1937, he became managing director of the Abbey. Following Yeats’s death in 1939, he left the Abbey . In 1950, he accepted invitations to teach in the United States, where many of his short stories had been published in The New Yorker and won great acclaim. Frank O’Connor on 10 March 1966.

Seamus Heaney

, born in 1939, is an Irish poet, writer and lecturer who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2006. He currently lives in Dublin. Heaney may be the finest poet writing in English today. In his early works, such as Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969), In Station Island (1984), often declared his best sustained work, he tries to come to terms with his own exile. He is widely recognized as Ireland’s greatest poet since William Butler Yeats.

Nine Famous Irishmen

In Ireland in 1848 the following 9 men were captured, tried and convicted for treason against
Her Majesty, the Queen of England, and were sentenced to death: John Mitchell, Morris Lyene, Pat
Donahue, Thomas McGee, Charles Duffy, Thomas Meagher, Richard O’Gorman, Terrence McManus
and Michael Ireland.

Before passing sentence, the judge asked if there was anything that anyone wished to say.
Meagher, speaking for all said: “”My lord, this is our first offence but not our last. If you will be easy
with us this once, we promise on our word as gentlemen, to try and do better the next time. And the
next time, – sure we won’t be fools to get caught.”

Thereby the indignant judge sentenced the all to be hanged by the neck until dead and then to
be drawn and quartered. Passionate protest from all over the world forced Queen Victoria to commute
their sentence to transportation for life to the far wilds of Australia.

In 1874, word reached the astounded Queen Victoria that Sir Charles Duffy , who had been elected
Prime Minister of Australia was the same Charles Duffy who had been transported 25 years earlier. On the
Queens demand, the records of the rest of the transported men were revealed, and this is what was uncovered:

Thomas Francis Meagher: Governor of Montana
Terrence McManus : Brigadier General United States Army.
Pat Donahue: Brigadier General United States Army.
Richard O’Gorman: Governor General of Newfoundland
Morris Lyene: Attorney General Of Australia
Michael Ireland: Attorney General Of Australia (succeeded Lyene)
Thomas Darcy McGee: M.P. for Montreal, Minister of Agriculture and President of Council Dominion of Canada.
John Mitchell: Prominent New York Politician.
(note: His son, John Purroy Mitchell became Mayor of New York at the outbreak of WWl.)

Other Famous Irishmen

The Quiet Man Back in the news…………………

The railway station used in the iconic 1952 movie ‘The Quiet Man’, starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, is under threat and may collapse.

Castletown Station, as seen in ‘The Quiet Man’

 

Following on from the news that the pub used in the movie was sold to a fan is the announcement that a campaign to save the train station depicted in the movie is now underway.

The campaign has been launched to save Ballyglunin station that was called ‘Castletown’ in the much-loved movie. The campaign is seeking to raise thirty thousand euro to try to repair the roof that is disintegrating.

The history of the railway station dates back to 1860 when the Blake family of Ballyglunin park were said to have their evening meals transported from the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin all the way to Galway! The carriage boxes were insulated with hay in order to keep the meals warm.

The station was closed in 1980 and has been falling into disrepair ever since. The Ballyglunin Community Development Charity wants to open an arts and heritage center at the site.

Mark Gibson is one of the directors of the charity:

‘The Ballyglunin Community Development Charity has huge plans to develop this amazing location, however the roof is now at serious risk of collapse. If nothing is done, we’ll be saying goodbye to an important slice of Irish history.’

Galway Voted World’s Friendliest City

The United States-based ‘Travel and Leisure Magazine’ has announced its latest ranking of the friendliest world cities and there is good news for Ireland,

The west of Ireland has for generations been considered one of the most beautiful parts of Ireland and it seems that the beauty of the Connemara scenery is matched by the demeanor of its inhabitants. Galway has been voted the most friendly city in the world in what is sure to be a great boon to the Irish tourist industry. The city is a tourist hub with countless festivals within the town itself that serves as a great base for exploring Connemara, Oughterard, John-Wayne country, Clifden and beyond.

Amazingly, the good news did not stop there.

Dublin managed third place while Cork was fourth. Obviously the people running the Irish tourist industry have done a great job in promoting what is probably Ireland’s most important indigenous industry.

The full list:
1. Galway
2. Charleston, South Carolina
3. Dublin
4. Cork
5. Siem Reap, Cambodia
6. Auckland, New Zealand
7. Melbourne, Australia
8. Sydney, Australia
9. Edinburgh, Scotland
10. Savannah, Georgia

The well-regarded Travel Magazine remarked:
‘Galway won readers’ hearts with its festive nature, lively population, and musicality. Fiddlers and banjo-players, flautists and whistlers bang out traditional Irish reels on pedestrian streets and in all the pubs.’

Dublin was recently voted in second place by another US travel site, Conde Nast Traveler, so clearly this is no fluke!