April 17
Published in On this Day listing- 1971 Tailors’ Hall, Back Lane, Dublin, reopened after restoration. The sole survivor of Dublin’s old guild halls, it was the meeting-place of the Catholic Committee’s ‘Back Lane Parliament’ in December 1792.
- 1969 Bernadette Devlin (21, Unity candidate) won the Mid-Ulster Westminster by-election to become the youngest-ever MP in the House of Commons.
- 1917 Jane Barlow (60), writer, whose Irish idylls went into eight editions, died.
- 1970 Ian Paisley (Protestant Unionist) won his first election, taking the Bannside seat in Stormont in a by-election following the elevation of former prime minister Terence O’Neill to the peerage.
- 1961 The Bay of Pigs Invasion. An attempt by a CIA-trained force of c. 1,300 Cuban exiles to overthrow the Cuban government of Fidel Castro was repelled by Cuban forces.
- 1923 Dan Breen, whose exploits during the War of Independence led to a bounty of £10,000 for his capture and who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), was captured by Free State forces. Imprisoned, he embarked on a series of hunger and thirst strikes.
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