Seán Ó Fearghaíl (Kildare South, Ceann Comhairle) | Oireachtas source

Before we proceed, I would like to make a rather unusual intervention. It has been brought to my attention that we have a distinguished visitor in the Visitors Gallery. While it is against the rules of the House to refer to persons in the Visitors Gallery and I am here to enforce them, I can also break them on occasion. James Connolly, a retired brigadier general, was born on 1 November 1923. He was commissioned by President Douglas Hyde in 1945. He was a pilot and, at one stage, head of the apprentice school at Baldonnel. He did UN tours in the early 1960s and the Middle East. His grandfather was James Connolly. His father, Roddy Connolly, son of James Connolly, was at various times a Member of the Dáil and the Seanad. His aunt, Nora Connolly-O'Brien, who, with her mother, wife of James Connolly, visited him on the night before his execution, was an Independent Member of Seanad Éireann as a Taoiseach's nominee in the late 1950s and mid-1960s. It is a great privilege to have him in the Visitors Gallery.

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