Daniel O’Connell in Paris

Image: Toulouse-Lautrec (Le Lit)

Dungarvan and some heroes and zeros of Irish history...

1984

March

Nearby rose the beautiful bourgeois apartment blocks that surround Place Denfert-Rochereau. Beyond them lay Montparnasse and the neon of its cinemas…

The 1942 Jorge Luis Borges short story The Form of the Sword has a Wiki page of its own. Its central character is from Dungarvan… and he’s an informer… but perhaps to spare any local blushes Borges gave him the unlikely Déise (Co. Waterford) name of Vincent Moon.

The town’s only Nobel Prize winner, Ernest Walton, was born in Abbeyside in 1903. Here he is, sharing his atomic secrets with a couple of local Russian spies back in 1989.

PS

Dungarvan & the New Orleans World’s Fair of 1884, as reported by the New York Times

PPS … from the Sunday Independent of 25 September 2005