Flash: Tories annihilated as British Labour win landslide – exit poll
Labour will win a landslide victory in the Westminster general election, defeating the Conservative Party that has been in power since 2010, according to a comprehensive exit poll by a group of British broadcasters.
Labour is predicted to win 410 seats, giving Keir Starmer (pictured) a majority of 170 seats, according to the poll by Ipsos for Sky News, the BBC and ITV News.
The Conservative Party under Rishi Sunak is expected to crash to 131 seats, the lowest in the party’s history.
The party’s final seat tally may have been hit by the far right Reform UK led by Nigel Farage, which is forecast to win 13 seats.
The centrist Liberal Dems have performed especially well in seats where they started second to the Conservatives, giving the party its best result in a hundred years.
No exit polling was carried out in the north of Ireland.
Counting is currently getting underway, with the first official election results due from England around midnight, with first results from the north of Ireland due in the early hours.
Here are the exit poll results in full:Labour: 410 Conservatives: 131 Liberal Democrats: 61 Reform UK: 13 SNP: 10 Plaid Cymru: 4 Green Party: 2 Other: 19
There were three men who were born in Ireland that were signatories of the US Declaration of Independence. Learn about the historic document’s Irish links here!
July 4, 1776: John Hancock (1737 – 1793), president of the Continental Congress, is the first to put his signature to the Declaration of Independence, watched by fellow patriots Robert Morris, Samuel Adams, Benjamin Rush, Richard Henry Lee, Charles Carroll, John Witherspoon, John Adams, and Edward Rutledge. Original Artwork: Printed by Currier & Ives. GETTY IMAGES
The Declaration of Independence was unanimously adopted by the Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the date which is now known as Independence Day in the US.
Just over a month later, Irish and Irish American men were among the 56 signatories of the historic document on August 2, 1776.
The Irish signatories of the physically beautiful Declaration of Independence made it all the more special and when I was a kid, I had an image of it on my wall.
The Irish and Irish American signatories of the Declaration of Independence, including “McKean,” gave me the story I needed to feel at home here like a native.
My love of country, the United States, and of my heritage, Irish, converge in that document because I acknowledge the Irish who risked their lives to sign it.
Among the citizens who signed what could have been a death warrant, were at least eight Irish Americans and three who were born in Ireland.
Many of them were Orange Irish or Scotch-Irish who hated monarchy, and whose spirit of independence is at the heart of the Republics they would crucially help found in America and Ireland. Their brand of Irish defiance saw right through British imperialism and used Enlightenment Republican ideas to create an alternative society for free people.
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The Irish and Irish American signatories of the Declaration of Independence
Thomas McKean
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Thomas McKean, painted by Charles Willson Peale after 1787. (Public Domain)
Thomas McKean (March 19, 1734 – June 24, 1817) was the son of William McKean from Co Antrim who came to Pennsylvania via the city of Derry as a child and later married Letitia Finney whose family had also emigrated from Ireland.
Thomas would become an American lawyer and politician, serving as President of Delaware, Chief Justice, and then Governor of Pennsylvania.
During the American Revolution, he was a delegate to the Continental Congress where he signed the United States Declaration of Independence and served as a President of Congress.
Thomas McKean led the movement in Delaware for American independence and served as commander of a patriot militia group known as the Pennsylvania “Associators.”
Charles Carroll
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Charles Caroll by Michael Laty, circa 1846. (Public Domain)
Charles Carroll of Carrollton in Maryland (September 19, 1737 – November 14, 1832) was the only Catholic and the longest-lived signatory of the Declaration of Independence, dying at age 95.
He was held up by Catholic Americans as tangible proof of their patriotism and loyalty in America which was run by a largely WASP establishment until JFK’s election. He is descended from the noble Gaelic family of Tipperary, Clan Ó Cearbhail, who trace their origin to The Cianachta, a tribe recorded to the third century CE.
Carroll was born in 1737 in Maryland—the only colony tolerant of Catholic immigration, thanks to Lord Baltimore.
James Smith
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An engraving of James Smith by Ole Erekson, circa 1876. (Public Domain)
James Smith was born in Ireland in c.1719 and was forced with his family to emigrate to the American colonies as a boy due to abuse by landlords. The name “Smith” in Ireland is oftentimes a translation of MacGabhann, which is an older Irish name meaning “son of Goibhniu,” who was the Celtic deity of metallurgy.
Smith emerged as a leading lawyer of his day and wrote legal opinions denying the constitutional power of Great Britain over the colonies in America. He also urged as Jonathan Swift would do in Ireland, an end to the import of British goods.
He raised a militia group in York, Pennsylavnia, and joined the American Continental Congress in July 1775, a year before the Declaration was ratified.
Smith would become a member of the Continental Congress 1776-1778, and served in the War of Independence as a Colonel of Pennsylvania Militia 1775-1776. He was killed on July 11, 1806.
George Taylor was born in Co Antrim, Ireland in 1716 and emigrated to America in 1736 at the age of 20.
Taylor operated a furnace and was an iron manufacturer in Pennsylvania. He was a member of the Committee of Correspondence, 1774-1776, and of the Continental Congress, 1776-1777.
Taylor is an old name common in Ireland since the 14th century.
Matthew Thornton
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Matthew Thornton. (Public Domain)
Matthew Thornton was born in Ireland in 1714 and went out to America as a four-year-old child in the passage of five ships carrying 120 Irish families from the Bann Valley (Coleraine-Ballymoney-Aghadowey-Macosquin).
He would practice medicine and become active in pre-revolutionary agitation before being elected to become a member of the Continental Congress in 1776. He was a Colonel of New Hampshire Militia, 1775-1783.
Thornton was sometimes used in Ireland as a synonym for Drennan, Meenagh, Tarrant, or Skehan, while other Thorntons were planted in Limerick in the 16th century.
Edward Rutledge
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A portrait of Edward Rutledge by James Earl, 1791. (Public Domain)
Edward Rutledge (November 23, 1749 – January 23, 1800) was the youngest signer of the Declaration of Independence. His father Dr. John Rutledge left Co Tyrone in 1735, and would raise a son to be 39th Governor of South Carolina.
In the 2008 miniseries “John Adams,” Rutledge was portrayed by Clancy O’Connor. With his brother John, Edward Rutledge was elected to the Continental Congress in July 1774.
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Thomas Lynch Jr.
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Thomas Lynch, Jr. (Public Domain)
Thomas Lynch Jr. (August 5, 1749 – 1779) stood in for his father Thomas Lynch Sr. who was unable to represent South Carolina due to illness. His grandfather was Jonas Lynch of the Galway Lynch tribe who was exiled following the defeats at Aughrim and the Boyne.
At the close of 1776, he and his wife sailed for the West Indies. The ship disappeared and there is no record of his life after.
George Read
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George Read by Robert Edge Pine. (Public Domain)
George Read was born in Maryland in 1733. He was the son of John Read and Mary Howell Read. John Read was a wealthy resident of Dublin who emigrated to Maryland. When George Read was an infant the family moved to Delaware.
As he grew up, Read joined Thomas McKean at an Academy in Pennsylvania and then studied law. In 1763 John Penn, the Proprietary Governor, appointed Read Crown Attorney General for the three Delaware counties and he served in that position until leaving for the Continental Congress in 1774.
Honorable mention – John Dunlap
Dunlap was born in Strabane, Co Tyrone. In 1757, when he was ten years old, he went to work as an apprentice to his uncle, William Dunlap, a printer and bookseller in Philadelphia.
During the American Revolutionary War, Dunlap became an officer in the First Troop Philadelphia City Cavalry and saw action with George Washington at the battles of Trenton and Princeton.
In 1776, Dunlap secured a lucrative printing contract for the Continental Congress. On July 2, the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence, and on July 4 they agreed to the final wording of the Declaration of Independence.
That evening, John Hancock ordered Dunlap to print broadsides. Dunlap printed 200 copies of the Declaration of Independence. The first newspaper outside America to publish the first text was the Belfast News Letter in its edition of August 23-27, 1776.
Motorists advised of possible traffic disruption in Derry this weekend due to march
Up 300 people are expected to take part in an Orange Order march through the city centre on Sunday, July 7
Orangemen taking part in a previous march in Derry
Staff Reporter
01 Jul 2024 3:23 PM
Behind the scenes: Sky News election…
The PSNI said officers will be on duty to assist with any traffic issues, and accommodate the flow of traffic. Road users may wish to seek another route, if not attending a parade.
Up 300 people are expected to take part in an Orange Order march through the city centre on Sunday, July 7.
The parade will assemble at 1.15pm, and leaves at 1.45pm with participants moving along Bond Street in The Waterside, making its way along Clooney Terrace, Spencer Road, across Craigavon Bridge, towards The Diamond and back towards Clooney Terrace for 3.15pm
At 4.25pm, parade participants make their way from Clooney Terrace, via Glendermott Road and Bond Street, Spencer Road, Craigavon Bridge, Carlisle Road Ferryquay Street, The Diamond, Bishop Street, Palace Street and Society Street for dispersal at 5pm.
The army were searching for IRA weaponsA large number of guns, mostly belonging to the Official IRAThe killing of civilians, the use of CS gas and widescale destruction turned the population against the army
Military Police stand guard at checkpoint on the Falls Road in 1970
Today at 02:18
On the 3rd of July 1970, a Friday, the British Army seals off the lower Falls area of west Belfast.
A ‘curfew’ is announced, although without a legal basis.
Troops go in, searching from house to house, looking for IRA weapons.
But the use of CS gas, houses being wrecked, looted even, turns the population against them.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of rounds were fired – four people died – all victims of the army.
The Official IRA decided since they couldn’t get their guns out – they should fight the army in what they called ‘The Battle of the Falls.
In the end the army did seize a considerable number of weapons though many were smuggled out.
However, the standing of the British Army in west Belfast had been completely changed.
To hear the story of the Falls Curfew and its impact, Ciarán Dunbar is joined by historian Brian Hanley, and by Belfast Telegraph columnist and author Malachi O’Doherty.
The Falls Road Curfew: The raid on the Official IRA which turned west Belfast against British Army
Although he lived only 44 years, Thomas Francis Meagher played a pivotal part in Irish and US history. GETTY
On this day, July 1, 1867, General Brigadier Thomas Francis Meagher died after falling overboard on the Missouri River. In honor of his anniversary, we look at the astounding biography of the American Civil War hero and leader of the Irish Brigade.
Although he lived only a short 44 years, Thomas Francis Meagher, who was born in Waterford in 1823, played a pivotal part in two of the most important movements in the histories of Ireland and the United States.
Yet today, to many Americans and Irish alike, Meagher is a distant landmark of history, the Civil War hero who, early in the war, guided the “Fightin’ 69th” and following their success was asked to form the famed Irish Brigade.
But the story of Meagher starts long before the American Civil War. It begins in Waterford, Ireland where he was born into privilege in 1823. Well educated in both Ireland and England by his politically-connected father, Meagher was appalled at what he saw the English doing to Ireland.
On the first page of the “The Immortal Irishman,” Egan writes: “You would not think in Irish, so the logic went if you were not allowed to speak in Irish.” The English stripped the Irish of their culture—then introduced famine. “Today,” said Egan, “we would call it ethnic cleansing. It’s also close to apartheid. Basically, the English did everything they could to strip away the basic dignity of a people. They took religion, language, sport, property, even music. And all it did was make the Irish more defiant. They clung to their religion, they made the harp a national symbol, they even started a hurling club in the first British colony, in Newfoundland—all as a way for a conquered people to remain Irish.”
Meagher grew up during one of the most interesting periods in Irish history. One of the treats of “The Immortal Irishman” is Egan’s wonderful description of the Young Ireland movement of the 1840s. First, there was O’Connell’s emancipation of the Catholics; then the Young Ireland movement with Thomas Davis, John Mitchel, William Smith O’Brien, and Oscar Wilde’s mother, Speranza—and Meagher knew all of them personally (Meagher and Speranza were even thought to be lovers).
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IrishCentral asked Egan how great was the influence of the Young Irelanders, not only on Meagher but on the Fenians of 1867 and the rebels of 1916? “Meagher and Young Ireland influenced both the Fenians and the Easter Rising rebels,” replied Egan. “You can see his influence in a book Arthur Griffith wrote about the time of the Rising, praising Meagher, and resurrecting his words. The Young Ireland slogan—Ireland for the Irish—was basically the same as the young rebels used in 1916.”
The thing that galvanized Meagher and the Young Irelanders was the Famine, which devastated Ireland during the 1840s, cutting the island’s population almost in half. Egan takes a good look at Charles Trevelyan, the man put in charge of famine relief. Trevelyan, a fine Christian man, thought the famine was sent from God, as a means of ridding the English of the lazy Irish—a “selfish, perverse and turbulent people” according to Trevelyan—always looking for a handout. “Being altogether beyond the power of man,” Trevelyan said, “the cure has been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence.”
When reminded that we still hear this type of stuff out of American politicians during election cycles as they cite the need to cut food stamps to the poor—pitting the “givers” against the “takers”—Egan said, “Yeah, I actually wrote a New York Times column on this. I was in the middle of researching the famine and Paul Ryan’s comments came to mind. It started a pretty vigorous discussion in Irish America magazine as well.”
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General Brigadier Thomas Francis Meagher.
Meagher also was close to John Mitchel, one of the weirdest Irish nationalists to ever breathe—a true political schizophrenic. In Ireland he was for freedom; in America, he was for slavery, and against blacks, and, especially, against President Lincoln. (Mitchel considered the slaves “an innately inferior people.” He also described President Lincoln as “an ignoramus and a boor.”)
Meagher was fiercely anti-slavery and a personal friend of Lincoln. “A very strange relationship,” said Egan of the Meagher-Mitchel friendship. “They were very tight in Ireland; Mitchel had Meagher’s back. Meagher was the voice; Mitchel the pen. Then they reunited in both Tasmania and America. But things got dicey in the U.S. Mitchel was a white supremacist, and he ended up losing (I think) two sons, who fought on the side of the slaveholding Confederacy. As I recall, one of the Mitchel boys was on the other side of Marye’s Heights wall when Meagher’s Irish Brigade charged.”
The “Rebellion of 1848” was really a skirmish in County Tipperary, but it was cited by Patrick Pearse (“six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms” Pearse wrote in the 1916 Proclamation) as one of the times that the Irish had risen up in arms against the British. Betrayed by an informer, it also cost Meagher his freedom when he was convicted of sedition, although he wasn’t even present at the “Battle of Ballingarry.” His death sentence was commuted and he was exiled to Tasmania.
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Life down-under wasn’t too bad for Meagher because his family had money. He lived well and found a wife. (They were to have one child, which Meagher would never meet because of his banishment from Ireland.) But he longed for freedom. As other convicts had done, under harrowing circumstance, he escaped to America. “America was a fascinating mess” his friend Richard O’Gorman told Meagher on Meagher’s arrival in New York. There was the problem of all the new immigrants and the nativist backlash of the “Know-Nothings.”
Things haven’t changed a lot in over 150 years, have they? If you exchanged the Irish for the Latinos it’s just about the same policy. “So true,” agrees Egan. “A point I try to make. It shows that, even though we’re a nation of immigrants, this anti-immigrant nativist streak comes and goes; it’s never far from the surface.”
The “Know-Nothings” went after Irish Catholics with a ferocity that America would not see until the civil rights battles of the 1960s. They terrorized the Irish in such cities as Philadelphia and Boston, burning churches to the ground, but did not succeed in New York principally because of the stand taken by “Dagger” John Hughes, the County Tyrone-born, toupee-wearing archbishop, the man who started building St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
Yet as the Civil War and the military draft took center stage the moral compass of Hughes was compromised and in the case of John Mitchel, utterly destroyed. Meagher stood strong, backing the Union and remaining strongly anti-slavery. “Meagher originally was an agnostic on slavery,” says Egan. “But he changed his view, and changed rather dramatically, after all the sacrifices the Irish Brigade made on behalf of the Union cause—which was, after all, the cause for liberation of black men. Once he came to that conclusion he was all in. And you saw, in the draft riots, that it would have cost him his life at the hands of fellow Irish had he been in New York when the rioting broke out.”
The heroics—and sacrifices—of Meagher’s men at places like Bull Run, Richmond, Antietam and Fredericksburg was instrumental in allowing the Irish to be accepted as Americans. “They were amazing warriors,” says Egan, “and no one thought they’d be able to fight at the start of the war. But they also kept their cultural traditions intact; they essentially took them to war—the horse races, the feasts, the masses, the plays, the poetry readings, and music.”
“The Immortal Irishman” is Egan’s seventh book and took him three years to write. His previous books include “The Big Burn,” “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher” and “The Worst Hard Time,” for which he won a National Book Award. There are many colorful characters—Meagher himself, O’Connell, Thomas Davis, Mitchel, Smith O’Brien, Dagger John, General Sherman, Lincoln, etc. in “The Immortal Irishman.”
Did Egan ever think of making the book a novel? “No,” he replies definitively. “Here was a case where truth was much better than fiction. If you made up the dozen lives of the period no one would believe you.”
Meagher received his general’s commission directly from President Lincoln. “Lincoln liked Meagher and vice versa,” says Egan, “even though they were in different political parties. Lincoln made time to see Meagher even when he saw no one else. Lincoln shrewdly named Meagher a general as a way to win over the Irish masses to the Union cause.”
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After his first wife’s death, Meagher remarried in New York and after the Civil War, the couple were sent to the Montana territory by President Andrew Johnson where Meagher soon found himself the Acting Governor. There was a lot of lawlessness out there and Meagher fought the battle on the side of the angels. It may have caused his death because Egan believes, Meagher was murdered by his opponents. “I do. And I think that’s the emerging consensus view of historians in Montana who’ve looked at him in the last ten years or so. The earlier story of his death was bullshit.”
One of the things that strikes the reader of “The Immortal Irishman” is the similarity between Meagher and another Irishman—John F. Kennedy. Both were born into privilege; Meagher came from Waterford and Kennedy’s people came from the next county north, Wexford; both were extraordinarily handsome with keen intellects; both were the greatest orators of their day; both were war heroes; both were heroes of the civil rights movements of their time; and both were murdered in their middle-40s.
Did these similarities occur to Egan? “They did. And I’m glad you noticed. I only picked this up when I was looking for an ending and starting going through stories of JFK’s family, and the trip to Ireland. Many, many similarities—the charisma, the speechifying gift, the warrior heroism, the love of verse.”
Thomas Francis Meagher, a man not only for his time, but an Irishman for all time.
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