Denny Lane

Denny Lane (4 December 1818 – 29 November 1895) was an Irish businessman and nationalist public figure in Cork city, and in his youth a Young Irelander.

Although a Catholic, he graduated from the mainly Protestant Trinity College, Dublin, where he joined the College Historical Society, became a friend of Charles Gavan Duffy and Thomas Davis, and moved in the circle from which the Young Ireland movement sprang. He was called to the bar from Inner Temple. or "Domhnall Gleannach", he wrote Irish nationalist and romantic lyrics which were published in The Nation in the 1840s, the best known being "Carraigdhoun" (or "Lament of the Irish Maiden") and "Kate of Araglen". Thomas Carlyle on his 1849 Irish tour met Lane on 17 July, describing him as a "fine brown Irish figure, Denny; distiller – ex-repealer; frank, hearty, honest air; like Alfred Tennyson a little".

Lane took over his father's distillery in Cork and later started several industrial businesses near the city, with mixed success. He stood for Parliament in the 1876 Cork City by-election, but the Home Rule vote was split with John Daly, so that unionist William Goulding was elected.

He died at his home on Cork's South Mall in November 1895, aged 77.