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BIRTHDAY POST—UPDATED

Previously published as The 16th Green
on Oscar’s birthday in 2016 and 2018.

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October 16 is a noted birthday in Ireland.

I do not refer solely the young man above—followers of this blog should need no reminding that Oscar Wilde was born on this day,

But consider also a curiosity about this date in Irish lore.

If one thinks of the struggle for Irish independence, a leading figure immediately comes to mind—Michael Collins. 

It turns out that Collins was also born on October 16th, 1890, in Sam’s Cross, County Cork. In the eponymous 1996 biographical film about him directed by Neil Jordan, Collins was played by Liam Neeson, also an Irishman—who supplements the Wilde connection because in the 1990s he portrayed Wilde on stage in The Judas Kiss.

Collins was the youngest of eight children, and you might think it would be stretching credulity to find another famous Irishman with a birthday on October 16 who was also born the youngest of eight children—but there is one.

The popular recording artist and pop singer Joe Dolan, arrived on October 16th, 1939 in the County Hospital in Mullingar, County Westmeath, the eighth child of parents who both died while Joe was young.

Nor was Michael Collins the only political Collins to be born this day. Gerard “Gerry” Collins, the former Fianna Fáil politician and Cabinet Minister was born in Abbeyfeale, County Limerick in 1938, also on October 16th.

Closer to Wilde’s milieu, there is also a famous dramatist born on this day. Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama, Eugene O’Neill, was also born on October 16th in 1888. Son of Irish immigrants, fellow playwright, O’Neill, like Wilde, suffered from bouts of depression and alcoholism later in his life. Curiously, they both died in late November in hotel rooms: Wilde in his bare rooms at the Hotel d’Alsace in Paris, and O’Neill in Room 401 of the Sheraton Hotel, Bay State Road, Boston.

The actress Angela Lansbury, daughter of the Irish actress Moyna Macgill, achieved a significant Wilde connection by playing Sybil Vane in the 1945 film of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, In 1970, Lansbury relocated from Hollywood to County Cork and took up Irish citizenship. This move may have been shaped by her Celtic heritage, but it now seems likely to have been influenced by the phenomenon that, she too, was born on October 16, 1925.

But by what luck of the Irish did this October 16 tradition begin?

I used to think that the convention was instigated by John Hobart Caradoc, 2nd Baron Howden, the politician and soldier instrumental in the battle of Vinegar Hill (a military engagement during the Irish Rebellion of 1798), who was born in Oscar’s home city of Dublin, needless to say, on October 16th, 1799.

But of course there is a predecessor.

I am sure you don’t need me to remind you that Fr. Luke Wadding—yes, the Franciscan friar and historian born in Waterford, Munster on October 16th, 1588, was an early adopter of the Irish habit.

© John Cooper, 2016—2024.

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