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February 18

Published in On this Day listing

1921 Brian Faulkner, the sixth and last prime minister of Northern Ireland (3/1971–3/1972) and the only one to have been educated in the Irish Free State, born in Helen’s Bay, Co. Down, the son of a shirtmaker.
1920 Timothy Quinlisk, a Catholic ex-soldier and former member of Sir Roger Casement’s Irish Brigade, was executed by the IRA as a British spy in Ballyphehane, Co. Cork. Most IRA executions (66) during the War of Independence occurred in that county.
1992 In what became known as the ‘X Case’, the attorney-general obtained an injunction preventing a fourteen-year-old rape victim from travelling to Britain for an abortion.
1967 Robert Oppenheimer (62), theoretical physicist who played a key role in the Manhattan Project, the World War II project that developed the first nuclear weapons, died.
1948 John A. Costello (Fine Gael) was elected taoiseach in the first interparty government.
1564 Michelangelo (88), archetypal Renaissance man, died in Rome.
1516 Mary Tudor, queen of England and Ireland (1553–8), who was responsible for the first of the English plantations in Ireland (in counties Laois and Offaly), born, the only child of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.

On this Day

2011 The last British troops pulled out of South Armagh. During the period 1970–97, the IRA killed 165 members of the British security forces in the area.
1870 (Robert) Erskine Childers, Sinn Féin politician and author of The riddle of the sands (1903), born in London but raised at the maternal home, Glendalough House, Co. Wicklow, along with his cousin, Robert Childers Barton (1881–1975)
1970 The Catholic hierarchy lifted the ban on Catholics attending Trinity College, Dublin.
1919 William Martin Murphy (75), founder of Independent Newspapers and leader of the Employers’ Federation during the lockout of 1913–14, died.
1970 The Irish Catholic hierarchy lifted its ban on Catholics attending Trinity College, Dublin.
1876 The Battle of Little Big Horn, Montana, USA. Of Custer’s 604-strong 7th Cavalry, some 128 were of Irish birth, representing 29 of the 32 counties. Half of the 215 men who died with him that day were Irish.