1977 Minister for Health and Social Welfare Charles J. Haughey announced a new social welfare system, based on a simple pay-related contribution—Pay Related Social Insurance (PRSI).
1971 Former Fianna Fáil government minister Kevin Boland launched the Aontacht Éireann (Unity of Ireland) party. In the general election of 1973 its thirteen candidates received less than 1% of the vote. The party was wound up in 1984.
1905 Thomas Bernardo, Dublin-born founder of homes for destitute children, died.
1880 The nationalist leader and MP Charles Stewart Parnell gave a speech in Ennis, Co. Clare, that ultimately led to the addition of a new word to the English language. Parnell asked his listeners: ‘What are you to do to a tenant who bids for a farm from which another tenant has been evicted?’ As reported by the Freeman’s Journal, ‘several voices’ helpfully replied, ‘Shoot him’, but Parnell suggested instead ‘a more Christian and charitable way … by isolating him from the rest of the country as if he were a leper of old—you must show him your detestation of the crime he has committed’. This came at the height of the Land War and, as Parnell surely knew, here was a new way of putting pressure on landlords that was less obviously illegal than what some of his Ennis audience had in mind. Parnell’s suggestion was taken up by Fr John O’Malley, the parish priest of Kilmolara, Co. Mayo, and president of the local branch of the Land League, who at this time was supporting labourers on the estate of Lord Erne near Lough Mask who had asked for a rent reduction following a poor harvest. This was refused via Erne’s local agent, Charles Cunningham Boycott. After Boycott tried to evict eleven tenants who had refused to pay the full rent, O’Malley spearheaded a campaign that saw Boycott’s staff and labourers abandon him and local merchants refuse to deal with him. Boycott’s case became a cause célèbre at the time, but the transformation of his surname into a verb seems to have been due to O’Malley, who suggested it to the American journalist James Redpath as shorthand to describe what was happening in Mayo. ‘Boycott’ as used in this way first appeared in print in Chicago on 12 October 1880 and has had a long and often distinguished career ever since.
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Personal Histories
Personal Histories is an initiative by History Ireland,
which aims to capture the individual histories of Irish
people both in Ireland and around the world. It is hoped
to build an extensive database reflecting Irish lives,
giving them a chance to be heard, remembered and to
add their voice to the historical record.
Click Here to go to the Personal Histories page
1821 Napoleon Bonaparte (51), outstanding military leader and emperor of the French (1804–14), died from cancer as a prisoner of the British on the island of St Helena.
1980 The Iranian Embassy siege in London ended after five days when the SAS stormed the building, killing all but one of the six members of an Arab terrorist group who had taken 26 people, mainly embassy staff, hostage.
1916 Major John MacBride (47) executed.
1966 In Britain the ‘Moors murders’ trial ended with the sentencing of Ian Brady and his accomplice Myra Hindley to terms of life imprisonment.
1808 Sarah Curran, aged 26, youngest daughter of the lawyer John Philpot Curran (1750–1817) and lover of Robert Emmet, died in Hythe, Kent, from tuberculosis.
1879 Isaac Butt, barrister, writer and politician who founded the Home Rule movement (1870), died.
1818 Karl Marx, German philosopher, author notably of the pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (1848) and the three-volume Das Capital (1867), born in Trier, south-west Germany.
1999 Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologised on behalf of the Irish people to those who had spent their childhoods in residential institutions run by eighteen religious orders, an apology that came before the broadcast of the final episode of the three-part ‘States of Fear’ series by Mary Raftery, which detailed the abuse of children in such institutions. He also announced the setting up of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the establishment of a Redress Board.
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