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Life
1920-2010; b. Mullingar. Co. Westmeath, son of railway engineer; ed. Presentation College, St. Mary’s CBS and Hevey Institute (Colaiste Mhuire); worked as psychiatric nurse at St. Loman’s in Mullingar; m. Brigid Murphy in 1943; retired early in 1966; trained in photography with Agfa in Kent; fnd. Mullingar’s Little Theatre, and wrote numerous scripts for it; fnd-chairman of Westmeath Archaeological and Historical Soc.; author of short works on Joyce including James Joyce and the Mullingar Connection (Dolmen Press 1975) [ltd. edn. 750]; also a novel set on Aran, The Rock Garden (Lilliput Press 1994) - set in Aran and the first novel to be published by that press; issued Austin Friars from the Black Valley Mountains in Wales to the Midland Plains of Ireland (1994); freq. contrib. to RTE Sunday Miscellany and num. journals; issued a book of photographs of the Aran islands as Oileáin Árann (1975); d. 3 July 2010, in a Mullingar nursing home.
Daly’s account of Joyce’s brief sojourn in Mullingar with his father on electioneering business - and the scene of a play by Joyce entitled A Brilliant Career, dedicated to ‘my own soul’, and with doctor as the central character amidst a plague or epidemcic. The play was panned in manuscript by William Archer and later destroyed. Dalyˆs study focuses on Joyce’s relation to the Hill of Uisneach, the druidic centre of Ireland, where he presumably acquired the ashplant cane which accompanies Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses. Bloom’s daughter Milly is on a trip to Mullingar with a photographer - presumabily as a model - in the novel. His book of 58 pages and illustrations on Joyce and the Mullingar Connection appeared from the Humanities Press (NJ) with an introduction by Bernard Share. The Dolmen Press edition was distributed by OUP. His correspondence with the publisher Liam Miller can be found among the papers of the Dolmen Press for 1973-76 in the Special Collections of the Wake Forest Library. [BS]
An entry on Leo Daly by Linde Lunney in the RIA Dictionary of Irish Biography is dated 2016 - online.
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