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August 24

Published in On this Day listing

1920 Further sectarian violence in Belfast. By the end of the month c. 400 Catholic families had been driven from their homes and 22 people had lost their lives.
1990 Brian Keenan, a teacher from Belfast, was released after spending almost five years imprisoned in extreme conditions as a hostage of a Shi’ah militia group in Beirut, Lebanon.
1968 The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) held its first march from Coalisland to Dungannon, Co. Tyrone.
1962 Anew MacMaster (68), actor-manager and brother-in-law of Mícheál MacLiammóir, died.

On this Day

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.