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December 22

Published in On this Day listing

1969 Bernadette Devlin was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for her activities during the Battle of the Bogside
1989 Samuel (Barclay) Beckett, novelist, poet and playwright, notably of En attendant Godot (1953), and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1969), died.
1919 ‘Any attempt at [Ireland’s] secession will be fought with the same resolve as the Northern States of America put into the fight against the Southern States’—Lloyd George, speaking in the House of Commons.
1916 Around 600 untried Irish internees were released from Frongoch and Lewes jails. Convicted prisoners remained in custody. James O’Kelly, Fenian, war correspondent and MP for County Roscommon, died.

On this Day

1951 Mary McAleese, barrister, journalist, academic and president of Ireland (1997–2011), born in Ardoyne, Belfast, the eldest of nine children.
1970 After serious sectarian clashes in the north of the city that afternoon, which left three Protestants dead, the Provisional IRA, in action for the first time, engaged in a five-hour gun battle with loyalists in the Short Strand area. Three men, two Protestant and one Catholic, died.
1939 Kathleen Clarke (Caitlín Bean Uí Chléirigh), widow of executed Easter Rising leader Tom Clarke, was elected lord mayor of Dublin.
1970 The Provisional IRA were in action for the first time, mortally wounding four Protestants and losing one of their own members in a gun battle in the Short Strand area of Belfast.
1951 Mary McAleese, barrister, journalist, academic and current president of Ireland (since 1997), born in Ardoyne, Belfast, the eldest of nine children.
1846 Charles Stewart Parnell, nationalist leader, was born.