People We Hear About

New Zealand Tablet, 5 June 1913, Page 41

People We Hear About

The Kaiser completes twenty-five years’. reign on June 15, He has expressed a wish tiiab no presents should be made to him in connection with this memorable occasion, and suggested that gifts in his honor might take the form of foundations and presentations for charity. ,

Count Plunkett, K.C.H.S., has been elected a corresponding member of the Societe Archeologique de Prance. He represented that society, as well as the Royal Society of Antiquarians of Ireland, of which he is President, at the International Congress of Historical Studies, which held important meetings in London recently.

Mr. J A. P. Aspinall, who is general-manager of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, and a Catholic, has been nominated as president of the Engineering Section of the British Association at the forthcoming meeting in Birmingham. Mr. Aspinall, who is the son of a former Liverpool Recorder, was from 1875 to 1886 manager of the. Inchicore works of the Great Southern and Western Railway of Ireland.

A list of the accomplishments of the Catholic clergy in the world of scientific research would make interesting reading. Cardinal Maffi, Archbishop of Pisa, is the latest experimentalist to have his deeds recorded. His Eminence has been trying to establish wireless communication between the principal churches of Italy, France, and Austria. The wireless installation at Pisa Cathedral has spoken successfully with the Jesuit church in Gratz, Styria, but the military authorities, fearing that the Jesuit wireless station intercepted army messages, ordered its immediate demolition. Cardinal Maffi is striving to convince the authorities that the interception of other messages is impossible, and hopes to be permitted to continue his experiments. ..

The official announcement of the appointment of Mr. Thomas Francis Molony, K.C., to be AttorneyGeneral for Ireland, in succession to the Right Hon. Ignatius O’Brien, appointed Lord Chancellor of Ireland, has given great satisfaction to his many friends at the Bar, and to the general public. Mr. Molony was born in 1865, and has had a brilliant professional career in all branches of the law. Following his early training in the Christian Brothers’ Schools, Mr. Molony had a brilliant course at Trinity College (M.A., LL.D.), and in 1887 he was called to the Bar. He took silk in 1890, and was called to the English Bar m 1900. After a succession of legal appointments ho became Second Serjeant-at-Law in 1911, and in 1912 succeeded to the Solicitor-Generalship on the promotion of the present Lord Chancellor, whom. he now succeeds as Attorney-General. His esteem for, and fidelity to the Christian Brothers are marked traits in the character of the new Attorney-General, and whenever opportunity offers he invariably pays public tribute to their noble educational work in Ireland. Mr. Molony is president of the Christian Brothers’ Past Pupils Union. The Very Rev. Canon Peter O’Leary was born in 1840 at Liscarrigane, in the parish of Clondrohid, between Macroom and Ballyvourney. Though he is best known to the present generation as an eloquent and graceful writer of Irish and a prominent figure in the Gaelic League movement, he also in the days of the Land League and National League played a courageous part as a local leader in advocating the National and agrarian claims of Ireland. It would be difficult to overrate his services to the Gaelic revival. His Seadna is considered by many competent to judge as the best work written in modern Irish, and it has passed through the hands of hosts of students. Among his other works in Irish are two volumes of sermons a translation of the TSj our ToofTmnuf • o frouc]ofmu W 7, 7 'j. j. ' 4 “ . ~i w oi Ox jl tie imitation of Christ; a translation of Aesop's Fables; and a translation -of Don Quixote. Another prominent Gael has described the Irish in the last-mentioned work as seeming as if it was oiled, it is so beautiful.