On this Day
Published in Editorial, Issue 5 (September/October 2013), Volume 21September
Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all the blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave?
Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone,
It’s with O’Leary in the grave.
—W.B. Yeats, September 1913
3 1513
Gerald (Gearóid Mór) Fitzgerald, eighth earl of Kildare, the dominant figure in the English lordship of Ireland from 1478, died.
3 1963
Louis MacNeice (55), producer and writer with the BBC (1941–61) and one of the most prolific and influential Irish poets of the twentieth century, died.
6 1813
Isaac Butt, barrister who founded the Home Rule movement (1870), born in Glenfin, Co. Donegal.
8 1933
Cumann na nGaedheal, the National Centre Party and the National Guard (Blueshirts) merged to form the United Ireland Party-Fine Gael, with Eoin O’Duffy as leader.
9 1513
James IV’s 42,000-strong Scottish army was heavily defeated by a 20,000-strong English army at the Battle of Flodden Field. James himself was killed, the last British king to die on the battlefield.
10 1763
The first edition of the Freeman’s Journal, the oldest nationalist newspaper in Ireland, which merged with the Irish Independent in 1924.
10 1963
William Conway was appointed archbishop of Armagh in succession to Cardinal John D’Alton.
17 1973
Edward Heath became the first British prime minister to visit the Republic of Ireland when he met with Taoiseach Liam Cosgrave at Baldonnell to discuss the setting up of a Council of Ireland.
23 1913
Five hundred delegates to the Ulster Unionist Council approved the establishment of a ‘Provisional Government’ of Ulster, to be chaired by Sir Edward Carson.
25 1983
Thirty-eight IRA prisoners escaped from the Maze Prison—the biggest prison escape in British history.
October
5 1913
Canon Patrick Sheehan (61), whose Glenanaar (1905) contained a graphic account of the Doneraile Conspiracy (1829), died.
6 1998
RUC Constable Frank O’Reilly (30), a Catholic, died of injuries sustained in a loyalist blast bomb attack in Portadown, Co. Armagh, a month earlier. He was the last of over 300 members of the RUC to die in the Troubles.
10 1813
Giuseppe Verdi, Italian opera composer, born in Le Roncole, the son of a tavern-keeper.
11 1963
Edith Piaf (47), French national diva and legendary international cabaret star, died.
14 1913
Britain’s worst pit disaster, at the Universal Colliery, Senghenydd, Glamorgan, in which 439 miners were killed.
15 1763
Lord Edward Fitzgerald, revolutionary, born at Carton House, Maynooth, Co. Kildare, the fifth son of the 1st duke of Leinster and Lady Emily Lennox.
18 1963
British prime minister Harold Macmillan, in office since January 1957, resigned and was succeeded by Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
21 1913
Archbishop of Dublin William Walsh denounced James Larkin’s plans for sending hungry children of locked-out workers to the homes of English trade unionists for the duration of the struggle.
24 1913
Some 400 Protestants attended a pro-Home Rule meeting in Ballymoney town hall organised by the Presbyterian minister, J.B. Armour, and Captain Jack White. It was there that Sir Roger Casement made his first public speech.
29 1863
The International Red Cross was founded by Henri Dunant as a result of his witnessing of the tending of the wounded at the Battle of Solferino, in northern Italy.
30 1963
Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty (65), a senior official in the Vatican who saved over 6,000 Allied soldiers and Jews during World War II, died.
Personal Histories
On this Day
April 24
- 1951 Enda Kenny, TD for Mayo West (1975–97) and Mayo (1997–2020), leader of Fine Gael (2002–17) and taoiseach (2011–17), born in Derrycoosh, Islandeady, near Castlebar, Co. Mayo.
- 1945
Above: The steamship Monmouth Coast—torpedoed by a German U-boat near Tory Island on 24 April 1945. (Paul Johnson Collection)
During the last week of the Second World War, the Monmouth Coast, an unescorted steamship en route from Sligo to Liverpool with a cargo of barytes ore from the mines of Ben Bulben, was torpedoed by a German U-boat some seven miles north-east of Tory Island. The captain and fifteen crewmen (including two Irishmen) lost their lives, but one managed to survive, thanks to two locals from Arranmore. Two days later, whilst beachcombing on the north-eastern coast of the island, they spotted a life-raft floating in a remote sandy inlet; they rowed out to it and lifted the tarpaulin, to discover a wide-eyed teenager, Derek Cragg (17) from Liverpool, the mess-room boy from the Monmouth Coast. He explained that the ship had gone down very quickly and that those of the crew who managed to leap clear were sucked down after it. He, too, was dragged down but somehow managed to make it back to the surface, where he spotted the life-raft and clambered on board. He was given every assistance by the islanders and safely repatriated, but had the north-easterly wind that drove him 25 miles blown him into the adjoining inlet, his raft would have been smashed to pieces. Over 30,000 Allied merchant seamen, of every nationality, lost their lives during the war. Despite our neutrality, Irish Shipping lost two ships. The Irish Pine was torpedoed off Greenland in November 1942 with the loss of all 33 on board, and the Irish Oak was sunk in the North Atlantic in May 1943, though her entire crew was rescued by a sister-ship, the Irish Plane.
- 1912 Justin McCarthy (82), Home Rule politician, leader of the anti-Parnellite faction (1891–6), historian and novelist, died.
- 1916 The Easter Rising began.Sir Ernest Shackleton and five of his crew set out on their epic 720-nautical-mile rescue mission in the James Caird, from Elephant Island to South Georgia.
- 1974 The Electricity Supply Board (ESB) announced that Carnsore Point, Co. Wexford, would be the site of its planned nuclear power station.
May 19
- 1935
Above: ‘Lawrence of Arabia’—his father was in fact Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath.
T.E.—Thomas Edward—Lawrence (46), the legendary ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, died as a result of a motorcycle accident in Dorset. For much of his adult life Lawrence was a troubled man. Though his key role in the British-inspired Arab revolt (1916) against Ottoman Turkish rule earned him international celebrity, he was torn by guilt over Britain’s post-war betrayal of the Arabs with the implementation at Versailles of the notorious Sykes–Picot Agreement. Then there was the issue of identity. At the tender age of ten he discovered that his parents were not married, meaning that he and his four brothers were illegitimate. Later he was to learn that ‘Mr Lawrence’, his father, was, in fact, Sir Thomas Chapman of South Hill, Delvin, Co. Westmeath, who, though married with four daughters, had fled with their governess, Sarah Lawrence, first to Wales—where ‘Ned’ was born—and finally to London. He was eventually to find himself increasingly drawn to his father’s homeland. A close friend of George Bernard Shaw and his wife Charlotte—GBS had helped him to edit his major work, Seven pillars of wisdom (1926)—he mentioned his desire in his surviving letters to visit Ireland and often referred to the works of Seán O’Casey, James Joyce and J.M. Synge. Indeed, he hoped to write a biography of Sir Roger Casement. It seems that he never did try to make contact with his half-sisters. In 1954, almost twenty years after his death, some of his old friends visited the two surviving ones, who were living at 39 Northumberland Road, Dublin. They told them that they had followed their half-brother’s career with great interest but likewise had made no attempt to contact him.
- 1870 The Home Government Association of Ireland was founded by Isaac Butt with the aim of establishing a federal system for the United Kingdom, which would grant Ireland a parliament responsible for national affairs. Succeeded by the Home Rule League (1873).
- 1868 Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, son of Arthur Guinness (1725–1803), brewer and writer who restored St Patrick’s Cathedral (1860), died.