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April 04

Published in On this Day listing

1878
Above: William Sydney Clements, 3rd earl of Leitrim, who was assassinated on 4 April 1878.

Murder of William Sydney Clements (72), 3rd earl of Leitrim. In 1854, after a career in the army in which he rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and a period in politics as MP for County Leitrim (1839–47), Clements inherited over 94,000 acres, including an estate of over 54,000 acres in Milford, north Donegal. He was a dreadful character. As the Freeman’s Journal reported, he was determined to destroy the Ulster custom/tenant right, describing Gladstone’s 1870 Land Act as ‘only another step in the process of spoliation which had been commenced by the Irish Church Act’ (disestablishment). His Donegal tenants, some 3,000 in number, bore the brunt of his belligerence. He prosecuted over 180 of them. A farmer who kept goats against his rules was forced to destroy them in his presence. Worse still, he was fond of having his way with his tenants’ daughters, one of whom subsequently drowned herself. Indeed, his notoriety was such that the lord lieutenant stripped him of his position as a justice of the peace. In the end it was his tenants who dispatched him. After a number of failed attempts, he was ambushed at dawn as he travelled from Manorvaughan to Milford. He met with a grizzly end. A volley of shots killed his driver and clerk instantly and seriously wounded the earl, who was finished off by blows to the head from a musket butt. Though enormous sums were offered as a reward for information, including £10,000 by the 4th earl, the cash was never collected. A cross commemorating his assassins—Ribbonman Michael McElwee and the Fenians Michael Hegarty and Neil Shields—was erected at the scene of the attack in 1960.
1949 The North Atlantic Treaty, an intergovernmental military alliance, was signed, bringing into being the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
2006 Dennis Donaldson (56), former head of administration for Sinn Féin in Stormont and self-confessed British spy, was assassinated at his home in County Donegal.
1968 Martin Luther King (39), American Civil Rights leader, was assassinated by James Earl Ray in Memphis, Tennessee.

On this Day

April 25

1922 Commandant O’Neill, 3rd Cork Brigade IRA, was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area over the following four days.
1920 RIC Sergeant Cornelius Crean, brother of the explorer Tom Crean, was killed by the IRA in an ambush near Upton, Co. Cork.
1870 Daniel Maclise (64), history and portrait painter who worked for most of his life in London, died.
1719 The life and strange adventures of Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe was published.
1819 Vere Foster, philanthropist and educationist, born in Copenhagen, where his Irish-born father was British minister.
1987 Lord Justice Gibson and his wife were killed by an IRA bomb as they crossed the border south of Newry, Co. Down.
1917 Ella Fitzgerald, jazz singer, born in Newport News, Virginia.
1922 Commandant O’Neill of the third Cork Brigade IRA was shot dead at the home of a Protestant family in Bandon, Co. Cork. In a series of unattributed reprisals, thirteen Protestant civilians were shot dead in the surrounding area between 26 and 29 April.
1915 During the First World War, Allied troops landed on Turkey’s Gallipoli Peninsula. The disastrous Gallipoli campaign, ending in January 1916, cost 46,000 Allied lives, including over 2,295 Irishmen.

April 04

Personal Histories

On this Day

April 25