Life
1856-1905; b. 16 June, Ross, Co. Galway; br. of Violet Martin (vide Somerville & Ross); worked as London journalist, humorist and stage-Irish entertainer (as name “Ballyhooly”); author of Days of the Land League (1882, enl. 1884), a collection of pro-landlord topical verse; also issued Bits of Blarney by Ballyhooly (1899); a ballad “Ballyhooly”, dealing with a band whose temperance drink is whiskey punch, is cited in James Joyce’s Ulysses; wrote pro-Union pantomimes Faust and Aladdin, the former portraying Gladstone in the title-role; denounced by Arthur Griffith as ‘a thing called Robert Martin, which has done more to slander Ireland than any man alive’; d. 13 Sept.
Criticism
Patrick Maume ‘Music hall Unionism: Robert Martin and the politics of the stage-Irishman’, in Peter Gray, ed., Victoria’s Ireland?: Irishness and Britishness, 1837-1901 [Society for Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland] (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2004) pp.69-80.
Reference
Belfast Central Public Library holds Days of the Land League (1882).
Notes
Frank Hugh O’Donnell compared the portrayal of the peasants in Yeats’s The Countess Cathleen to characters in Martin’s “Ballyhooly”. (Information on this page supplied by Patrick Maume.)
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