John Kells Ingram

[1][2] Ingram was born on 7 July 1823, at the Rectory of Templecarne (Aghnahoo), just south of Pettigo, a village in south-east County Donegal, Ireland into an Ulster Scots family.

William Ingram, a scholar at Trinity College Dublin, rector of the Church of Ireland and curate of Templecarne Parish (Diocese of Clogher), married Elizabeth Cooke in 1817.

[5] He had a distinguished career at Trinity, spanning over fifty-five years, as a student, fellow and professor, successively of Oratory, English Literature, Jurisprudence and Greek, LL.D, FTCD), subsequently becoming the College Librarian and ultimately its Vice Provost.

[5] One evening in March 1843 Ingram wrote the poem for which he is best remembered, a political ballad called "The Memory of the Dead" (better known as "Who Fears to Speak of '98"; or "Ninety Eight"), in honour of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by the United Irishmen.

[6] The poem was published anonymously on 1 April 1843 in Thomas Davis's The Nation Newspaper although in fact its authorship was an open secret in Dublin.

[5] The Nation was the publication of the radical and bourgeois-radical wing of Ó Conaill's movement for "repeal" of the Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain.

[7] Nevertheless, before he died, Ingram made a manuscript copy of "Ninety Eight", proclaiming that he would always defend brave men who opposed tyranny.

He wrote the entries in the Encyclopædia Britannica[6] on Pierre Leroux, Cliffe Leslie, John Ramsay McCulloch,[9] Georg Ludwig von Maurer, William Petty, Francois Quesnay,[9] and Karl Heinrich Rau.

[citation needed] Ingram played an important role in the English Methodenstreit (Battle of methods), (closely associated with the Werturteilsstreit).

Paul O'Higgins attributes the phrase "labour is not a commodity" to Ingram, who used it in 1880 during a Dublin meeting of the British Trades Union Congress.

[11] Ingram was active in the fields of mathematics, archaeology, the classics, economics, etymology, law, literature, medieval manuscripts, poetry, religious speculation and Shakespearean criticism.

In particular, the problem of the Proletariat, of the condition and future of the working classes- has taken a powerful hold on the feelings, as well as the intellect, of Society, and is studied in a more earnest and sympathetic spirit than at any former time.