November 11
Published in On this Day listing- 2011 Michael D. Higgins (70) was inaugurated as the ninth president of Ireland.
- 1919 First edition of the Irish Bulletin launched by Dáil Éireann in response to a ban on all Republican newspapers and journals. Though obliged to change premises on twelve occasions, production—until the Truce (July 1921)—was not affected.
- 2011 Michael D. Higgins (70) was elected ninth president of Ireland.
- 1964 Pádraig Ó Siochfhradha (81), teacher, Gaelic League activist and writer in Irish under the pen-name ‘An Seabhac’, died.
- 1965 Ian Smith’s whites-only Rhodesian Front government announced a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).
- 1958
Above: Richard Harris as ‘the Bull’ McCabe in the 1990 film version of J.B. Keane’s 1965 play The Field, which was inspired by the murder of Moss Moore in Kerry in 1958.
The disappearance of Moss Moore (46), a bachelor farmer from Reamore, north of Tralee, Co. Kerry. During the summer of that year, Moss Moore’s neighbour, Dan Foley, erected a fence on what he considered to be the natural boundary of his land on a bleak Kerry mountainside. Moore, however, was not happy. He accused Foley of encroaching on almost an acre of his ground and demanded that the fence be removed at once. Foley stood firm and they became bitter enemies. The pair proceeded to take legal action against one another and a date to hear the case was set for December at the district court in Tralee. But Moore was troubled. He told the Gardaí that Foley, a burly former IRA man in his sixties, known to have a violent temper, was stalking him and begged them to warn him off. The Gardaí declined. They told him that his row with Foley was a civil matter. After an extensive search, Moore’s body was recovered nine days later from a nearby riverbank, his hands up and his fists clenched to fight off his attacker and his face severely battered. The Garda investigation went nowhere. Foley’s wife declared that her husband had not left their house on the evening of the murder; no forensic evidence was uncovered; and, above all, the locals, though convinced of Foley’s guilt, remained silent. A file was sent to the DPP but no charges were laid against Dan Foley. Moss Moore remains the victim of an unsolved murder, a sordid story that inspired J.B. Keane’s classic The Field, first staged at the Olympia Theatre in November 1965.
- 1957 Five members of the IRA were killed when a landmine they were preparing exploded prematurely at Edentubber, Co. Louth.
- 1926 George Bernard Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- 1918 The First World War ended when representatives of the new Republic of Germany signed an armistice in the presence of Marshal Foch, commander-in-chief of the Allied armies, in a railway carriage at Compiègne in northern France.
- 1997 Mary McAleese was inaugurated as the eighth president of Ireland, the first time in the world that one woman succeeded another as elected head of state.
- 1998 A round tower memorial in honour of the c. 200,000 Irish who served with the British Army in the First World War was inaugurated by President Mary McAleese outside the Belgian village of Mesen (Messines). Also in attendance were Queen Elizabeth of England and King Albert and Queen Paola of Belgium.
