April 10

• 1998 The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement on the future governance of Northern Ireland was signed by the British and Irish governments and the North’s main political parties, with the exception of the DUP.
• 1867 George William Russell, widely known as ‘AE’, poet, mystic, editor, writer and artist, born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh.
• 1838 Father Theobald Mathew launched his temperance movement in Cork. Sixty people took a pledge to abstain from ‘all intoxicating drinks, except used medicinally’. In the space of three years over half the population of Ireland, across all religious denominations, had taken ‘the pledge’.