James Joseph O’Kelly didn’t just report on the first Cuban war of independence; he joined the cause.
A Fenian revolutionary turned Parnellite MP and a war correspondent who also wrote theatre reviews, James Joseph O’Kelly (1842 – 1916) was a man of many parts. He was also, for a brief period, a man of two wives.
And yet his extraordinarily colourful life may today be better remembered in Cuba than in Ireland, something the ambassador of the former to the latter will attempt to rectify when laying a wreath at his grave later this week.
O’Kelly was born the son of a blacksmith off Dublin’s Townsend Street, not far from where the Irish Times offices now stand. All three of his brothers were artists, the best known being Aloysius, whose Mass in a Connemara Cabin hangs i
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