Faulkner’s Dublin Journal called it “the Finest Composition of Musik that ever was heard,Words are wanting to express the exquisite delight it afforded.”The concert raised £400, divided between Mercer’s, the Charitable Infirmary, and debt relief for prisoners. Handel himself took no fee.
The hype was real. Ladies were asked not to wear hoop skirts and men to leave their swords at home, to squeeze in more people! Over 700 packed into the hall on the 13th of April.
Rehearsals began in February 1742. Handel personally secured permission from Jonathan Swift, Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, to use its choir, alongside that of Christ Church. Uniting Anglican forces in a rare moment of cooperation.
Handel arrived in Dublin on the 17th of November 1741, and fell in love with the place. “The Politeness of this generous Nation cannot be unknown to you,” he wrote to his librettist Charles Jennens, who had assembled Messiah from scriptural passages.
Disease followed hunger. Mercer’s Hospital on Stephen’s Street, and the Charitable Infirmary on Inns Quay were packed to bursting. In response, the Charitable Musical Society invited Handel, a German-born composer down on his luck, to perform a benefit gig.
Ireland was reemerged from a devastating two-year famine. Between 13-20% of our island’s 2.4 million people had died, proportionally worse than the Great Famine a century later.
Today in 1742 Handel’s Messiah, performed by George Frideric, had its world premiere on Fishamble Street in Dublin. We were a city clawing its way out of disaster. The venue was Neal’s Musick Hall, newly opened in October 1741.
At Shannon Airport a protester climbed onto the wing of a US Air Force C-130 Hercules and damaged the fuselage using a hatchet.
When our fields failed us, and so did our "masters". Over a million starved in the Great Famine and another million fled many on coffin ships bound for exile in the great and terrible city of New York.
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A shattered cottage, brought from Carradoogan, Attymass, stands at the centre of it. Its hearth long cold, it's doorway open to a foreign metropolis sky. But remember, this is not a romantic Ireland. This is the genocide Ireland of Black ’47
The structure rises like a hill out of the urban flatness. From below it looks like half-ruin, half-fortress. Its sloped roof is created from tons of earth of County Mayo. Dry stone walls divide fields of wild flora like blackthorn, heather and yellow gorse.
It is no accident that the site faces Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty. Embedded along the outer wall are illuminated texts. They're quotations from famine survivors, newspaper reports and accounts of British apathy and cruelty. The politics of starvation.
The Irish Hunger Memorial, opened in 2002, isn’t just a monument, it’s a reconstruction. A fragment of rural Ireland, exiled and reassembled across the Atlantic. Designed by artist Brian Tolle, the memorial incorporates stones from all 32 counties of Ireland.
Tucked into the glass and steel jungle of Manhattan’s Battery Park City, just a stone’s throw from Wall Street, there’s a quiet acre of Ireland where the memory of famine stalks our soil still.
The story later attracted novelist Andrew Hughes, who fictionalised it in his 2013 debut "The Convictions of John Delahunt". Hughes found the bare facts while researching a social history of Fitzwilliam Square.
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The case forced a temporary internal review of how the DMP managed its informant network. It is worth noting what Kilmainham was, in 1842, before it became the shrine most people know today. The prison and its gallows were the machinery of ordinary criminal justice, not political martyrdom.
The executioner struggled to get him upright, placing the noose as he lay unconscious. The lever was pulled and the greedy coward dropped. It likely goes without saying theres a very good chance those two boys werent his only victims, especially considering he admitted planning them in advance.
The hanging took place outside Kilmainham on Saturday, February 5th, 1842. Twenty thousand people came to watch the psychopathic scumbag. Delahunt reportedly when apeshit when he reached the gallows, had a screaming breakdown and fainted on the trapdoor.
Dublin Castle wasted no time. The same authorities who had paid Delahunt, employed him, and looked the other way through at least one previous perjury quietly dropped him. He was tried at the Dublin city commission and convicted. The verdict surprised nobody.
When he was arrested and the investigation began to close around him, Delahunt's story unravelled fast. He eventually confessed he had planned the killing of young Thomas Maguire for two months. He chose a child to not fight back. A heartbreaking detail he disclosed was "the boy did not cry out".
The case attracted a reward and Delahunt appeared to the DMP and promptly gave sworn evidence against a man named Richard Cooney, and collected his fee. Cooney was eventually acquitted. The police noted the pattern but did nothing about it. Then ten months later, Delahunt witnessed another murder.
The DMPs system was simple, you got a few bob for info. The more serious the crime, the bigger the reward. A conviction for murder paid considerably better than a conviction for pickpocketing.
Earlier that same year in July, a young Italian boy had been found murdered in the city.
Delahunts evil plan fell apart when it turned out the poor mother had a perfect alibi. She was in hospital. So what was Delahunts motive for this dirty deed? Wel the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) and their paymasters in Dublin Castle ran a sprawling network of paid informants.
A 20year old Trinity College student named John Delahunt lured a 9year old boy named Thomas Maguire into a lane off Pembroke Road and slit his throat. Then he walked to the nearest police station and reported the crime. Except he said a woman killed the kid and described poor Thomas's Ma exactly.
This is one of the darkest dives into the underbelly of Dublin. The sickening murder of a little boy by a Trinity student in 1841 that opened a disturbing can of worms that went all the way to the government in Dublin Castle.
Unfortunately very true. And she is also "the old sow that eats her farrow" as Joyce said Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
The State paid out €425.49m in total to Ukrainian accommodation providers last year. Healy-Rae's slice of that was, in fairness, a small fraction.
Sources: irishexaminer.com/business/compa…
oireachtas.ie/en/members/reg���
Company accounts for Roughty Properties Ltd and associated firms cro.ie
He also holds shares in the New York Times, which is a detail that invites its own questions. Roughty Properties posted post-tax profits of €241,244 in the year to May 2025, down 36% on the previous year's €376,048, leaving the company sitting on accumulated profits of €1.08m.
The recently published Dáil Register of Interests confirms @MHealyRae is the biggest landlord in Leinster House, with 28 properties and pieces of land to his name. He lists his occupations as politician, postmaster, farmer, service station owner, plant hire operator, and rental property owner.
Michael Healy-Rae's property firm Roughty Properties, trading as Rosemont House in Tralee, has received €1.33m in State payments for housing Ukrainian refugees since 2022. The Kerry TD and Minister of State collected €113,480 of that in 2025 alone,with €1.22m flowing in during the preceding 2 years.
