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April 23

Published in On this Day listing

1931 Chuck Feeney, businessman and philanthropist who gave away his fortune of $8 billion over a 38-year period, including $1.3b to projects in the Republic of Ireland and $570m to projects in Northern Ireland, born to Irish-American parents in New Jersey.
1971 C.B. (Cyril Bentham) Falls, military correspondent of The Times (1939–53), historian and author notably of The history of the 36th (Ulster) Division (1922), based on his own experiences, died.
1970 St Enda’s, Rathfarnham, the bilingual school founded by Patrick Pearse in 1908, was presented to the nation as a Patrick Pearse Museum.
1918 A general strike against conscription, organised by the Labour movement and supported by Sinn Féin, the IPP and the Catholic hierarchy, paralysed the country.
1616 William Shakespeare (52), dramatist and poet, died.
1014 The Battle of Clontarf, near Dublin. Brian Boru, claimant to the high kingship of Ireland, and his Munster forces defeated an army of Leinster Norse, supported by their kinsmen from Northumbria, the Isle of Man and the Orkneys.

On this Day

1984 Ann Lovett (15) died while giving birth near a Marian grotto in Granard, Co. Longford.
1953 The Princess Victoria, an early roll-on–roll-off ferry, en route from Stranraer to Larne, sank in hurricane-force conditions off Belfast Lough, with the loss of 133 lives. It was Ireland’s worst peacetime maritime disaster.
1917 Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare.
1913 Having pledged to use ‘all means which may be found necessary’ to stop Home Rule, the Ulster Unionist Council formally inaugurated the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Up to 100,000 enlisted.
1923 The ferry Princess Victoria, en route from Stranraer to Larne, capsized off County Down after a wave burst unsecured bulkhead doors in the stern; 128 lives were lost and 43 survived.