December 07
Published in On this Day listing- 1521 Columba/Colmcille, Irish abbot and missionary to Scotland, where he founded the monastery of Iona (AD 563), born in Gartan, Co. Donegal.
- 1979 Charles J. Haughey defeated George Colley (44 votes to 38) to become leader of Fianna Fáil; he was elected Taoiseach on 11 December.
- 1985 Robert Graves, poet, novelist, critic and classicist whose autobiographical Good-bye to all that (1929) was one of the most influential and best-selling books about the First World War, died.
- 1979 Charles J. Haughey defeated George Colley (44 votes to 38) for the leadership of the Fianna Fáil Party. He was elected taoiseach four days later.
- 1941 A Japanese task force of over 350 planes launched a massive surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, wrecking or sinking four US battleships and over a dozen other ships, destroying almost 200 aircraft and inflicting over 3,000 casualties.
- 1922 Seán Hales TD was shot dead in Dublin and Padraic Ó Maille, leas ceann comhairle of Dail Éireann, was wounded. The following morning, in retaliation, the government executed Rory O’Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett, all of whom had been imprisoned since the fall of the Four Courts in June that year.
- 1916 David Lloyd George replaced H.W. Asquith as prime minister in Britain’s coalition government.
- 1867 ‘Song’ by T.D. O’Sullivan, which soon became known as ‘God Save Ireland’, the anthem of Irish nationalists until 1916, was published in The Nation.
- 1817 William Keogh, Conservative and Independent Irish Party MP and judge who was a special commissioner at the trials of the Fenians (1865), born in Galway.
- 1817 William Bligh (63), Royal Navy officer and colonial administrator, best remembered for his role in the mutiny on the Bounty (1789), died.
- 1972 A referendum—with a 50.7% poll—lowered the minimum age for voting from 21 years to 18 and deleted the reference to the special position of the Catholic Church in the Constitution.
- 1972 Jean McConville (37), a widow with ten children, was abducted from her home in the Lower Falls area of Belfast and murdered by the IRA.
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Personal Histories
On this Day
June 8
1876 James McKnight (75), journalist and agrarian reformer, died. McKnight came to national prominence in 1847 as spokesman for the thousands of Presbyterian tenant farmers who flocked to join the Ulster Tenant Right League, which sought to give legal protection to the Ulster Custom. Regarded at the time as the leading Presbyterian layman, it was he who was chiefly responsible for focusing the aims of the League on the extension of the Ulster Custom to the whole island—the ‘three Fs’: fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure, meaning no eviction if rent had been paid. This programme was to guide the Irish land reform movement for the next 30 years. His lifelong passion, however, was in the cultural field, as an Irish-speaker who promoted the preservation and publication of ancient Irish manuscripts. Born near Rathfriland, Co. Down, he initially intended to become a Presbyterian minister before turning to journalism and becoming editor of the Belfast News Letter (1829–46). In the columns of that paper, he continually highlighted the common origins of the Irish and Scots Gaelic languages and, by implication, the shared culture of Irish Catholics and their Presbyterian neighbours. As a committed unionist, albeit a liberal one, he was sharply critical of the nationalist politics of Daniel O’Connell. The Repeal campaign, for instance, he described as divisive, suggesting that patriotic sentiment would be better served by reviving and promoting the Irish language. His enthusiasm for the language never waned. On his deathbed, the story goes, he asked his servant, a Catholic, to recite for him the Lord’s Prayer in Irish. She did as he requested, but at one point was interrupted by the dying McKnight, who pointed out that she had mispronounced one of the words.- 1972 Garda Inspector Sam Donegan (61) was fatally injured by a gelignite bomb reportedly left by the Provisional IRA on the Cavan–Fermanagh border.
- 1949 George Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four, mostly written on the Scottish island of Jura when he was seriously ill with tuberculosis, was published.
- 1859 The first edition of the Irish Times as a daily newspaper was published.
- 1917 The Butte, Montana, mine disaster: 168 died, including many Irish, when fire broke out in a mineshaft. Butte was the US’s foremost mining town at the time, with a population of 50,000, a quarter of whom were Irish, mostly from County Cork.