1769 Napoleon Bonaparte, statesman and military leader, born in Ajaccio, Corsica, the son of a lawyer.
1969 After three days of intense violence in Belfast, during which seven lives were lost and c. 1,800 families were forced to leave their homes, British troops were deployed.
1969 The Woodstock music festival, featuring over 30 acts, including Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Jimi Hendrix, opened before an audience of over 400,000 in Bethal Woods, New York.
1998 Twenty-nine people, including a woman pregnant with twins, died when a Real IRA car bomb exploded in Omagh, Co. Tyrone.
1969 The third day of serious violence in Belfast. Overnight disturbances on the Falls Road/Shankill Road divide and in Ardoyne led to six deaths. Over 100 houses, mainly Catholic-owned, were destroyed. Huge barricades sprang up, particularly in the Falls. That afternoon British troops moved into the city, to be welcomed by residents of the Falls Road with cups of tea.
1917 Jack Lynch, outstanding Gaelic footballer and hurler, leader of Fianna Fáil (1966–79) and twice taoiseach (1966–73, 1977–9), born in Shandon, Cork City.
1914 The 48-mile-long Panama Canal, connecting the Atlantic Ocean, via the Caribbean Sea, with the Pacific Ocean, was officially opened.
1868 A teachers’ conference in Dublin led to the foundation of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO).
1808 Irish Christian Brothers founded in Waterford by Edmund Ignatius Rice.
1843 The biggest of Daniel O’Connell’s ‘monster meetings’, as the London Times described them, in support of Repeal of the Act of Union took place on the Hill of Tara. From the middle of March over 30 such gatherings, attended by hundreds of thousands, took place usually at historic sites in the three southern provinces—gatherings not seen again until the visit of Pope John Paul II in 1979. The day-long—sometimes two-day—proceedings would begin with a huge procession of bands in uniform, floats, carriages and carts, followed by thousands on horseback or on foot, which would proceed to a makeshift platform. Here would sit newspaper reporters, local dignitaries or anyone else prepared to pay a shilling to hear O’Connell at close quarters. The Liberator would then deliver his trademark bellicose speech on the virtues of Repeal, backed up by threats such as parliamentary secession and the setting up of an alternative courts system. Afterwards an evening banquet for O’Connell and a few hundred paying guests would take place in a large hall or specially built pavilion. An estimated 900,000 attended Tara, as described by Lecky:‘O’Connell, standing by the stone where the Kings of Ireland were once crowned, sketched the coming glories of his country. Beneath him, like a mighty sea, extended the throng of listeners. They were so numerous that thousands were unable to catch the faintest echo of the voice they loved so well; yet all remained passive, tranquil and decorous. In no instance did these meetings degenerate into mobs. They were assembled, and they were dispersed, without disorder or tumult; they were disgraced by no drunkenness, by no crime, by no excess …’
1923 Eamon de Valera was arrested during an election rally in Ennis, Co. Clare, where his opponent was Eoin MacNeill. He was released in July 1924.
1998 Twenty-nine people died, including unborn twins, when a bomb placed by the Real IRA exploded during a busy Saturday shopping afternoon in Omagh, Co. Tyrone.
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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
1920 Five RIC officers and a Black and Tan were killed in an IRA ambush at Rineen, Co. Clare. The towns of Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown Malbay were later attacked in reprisal and at least five civilians were killed.
1970 Charles J. Haughey, Captain James Kelly, Albert Luykx and John Kelly were charged in the Central Criminal Court with conspiring to illegally import arms and ammunition. The jury was discharged on 29 September.
1989 Ten military bandsmen were killed and a further 22 injured when an IRA bomb exploded in the barracks of the Royal Marines School of Music in Deal, Kent.
1989 Nine British army bandsmen and one civilian were killed when an IRA bomb exploded at the Royal Marine Barracks in Deal, Kent.
1918 Hanz Scholl, founding member of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany, who was executed in February 1943 along with his sister, Sophie, born in Forchtenberg.
1846 The luxury liner SS Great Britain, en route on her fifth voyage from Liverpool to New York, ran aground on the sands of Dundrum Bay, Co. Down, when her captain mistook the new St John’s lighthouse for the Calf light on the Isle of Man. Designed by the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1843 to serve the burgeoning transatlantic passenger trade, she was the first liner to be made entirely of iron and powered by a propeller. Stuck in the sands, her 180 passengers, which included a girls’ choir en route to a concert tour in the USA, along with her 130-strong crew, were safely evacuated to shore with local help.
It would be eleven months before a successful salvage operation was mounted to rescue her. Under Brunel’s personal supervision she was stripped of what remained of her engines and everything else of any weight and her hulk towed back to Liverpool. And so began her best years. Sold in order to defray the cost of her salvage, she was refurbished with an extra deck and in 1852 made her first voyage to Melbourne with 630 emigrants after which, over almost a thirty-year period, she conveyed thousands from these islands to those shores.
In recent years, a team from the University of Bristol and the SS Great Britain Trust has identified the exact spot on Tyrella beach where she floundered—close to Ballykinler, where Ireland’s first mass internment camp would be constructed some 75 years later. Today, an upmarket restaurant in nearby Newcastle bears her forty cigars-a-day designer’s name and the old anchor displayed at South Promenade in the town is believed to have come from her.