October 05

• 1771 Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, arrived in Ireland on a six-week visit.
• 1977 Seamus Costello (38), leader of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), was shot dead in Dublin, the first Irish party leader to be assassinated.
• 1974 The IRA bombed two public houses in Guildford, Surrey, killing five and injuring a further 65.
• 1970 On a visit to Ireland, US President Richard M. Nixon visited Timahoe, Co. Laois, the reputed burial place of a Quaker ancestor named Milhouse.
• 1968 In Derry over 100 injured when a march by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which had been banned, was brutally dispersed by the RUC.
• 1968 Seventy-seven marchers and eleven members of the RUC were injured in violent clashes during a banned Northern Ireland Civil Rights march in Derry.
• 1911 Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, wit, novelist and Irish Times columnist, born in Strabane, Co. Tyrone.