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Seventy-five ‘missing persons’ added to the Dictionary of Irish Biography online.

A range of lives feature in the December 2015 ‘missing persons’ update – comprising persons omitted from the 2009 first edition – added to the DIB online.

These include include sisters Kit, Min and Agnes Ryan of the noted Tomcoole, Co. Wexford family; Mark Clinton, government minister and farmer; John James Quinn, of H. Williams supermarkets; Vincent Hanley, music broadcaster; Peggy Hogg, camogie player; Harry Cavan, IFA president and FIFA vice-president; John Clarke, potato breeder; and Niall Crowley, businessman. Also included are Jim Phelan, writer and tramp; Miriam Daly, historian and activist; William Tillie, shirt manufacturer; Róisín Walsh, librarian and linguist Ernst Lewy.

Three figures involved in events of the 1916 Easter rising are indicative of the expansive range of lives found in the Dictionary: Sir Francis Vane, soldier, radical, author and scout leader, who attempted to bring Francis Sheehy-Skeffington’s murderer to book, appears alongside Father Albert Bibby, Capuchin priest and republican, who ministered to some of the executed rebels. Father Dominic O’Connor, another Capuchin friar, was a volunteer chaplain in the British army in 1916, and later supported the republican cause. Mary Latchford Jones, public representative and lord mayor of Manchester; Walter Quinn, writer and royal tutor; James Dalton, Irish-Australian merchant and pastoralist and Emma Duffin, nurse, diarist and welfare worker exemplify the diverse lives of many of those who feature in the Dictionary.

This update of of seventy-lives can be found at dib.cambridge.org, and brings the total number of lives in the Dictionary to 10,249.