1922 Arthur Griffith was elected president of Dáil Éireann.
1920 The League of Nations held its first meeting in Geneva. It was superseded by the United Nations on the same date in 1946.
1970 An estimated 6,000 attended an anti-apartheid demonstration outside Lansdowne Road as Ireland played South Africa in rugby.
1984 Seán MacEntee (95), Belfast-born founder member of Fianna Fáil (1926), eleven times minister for finance in various Fianna Fáil governments and tánaiste (1959–65), died. He was the last surviving member of the first Dáil Éireann.
1957 Harold Macmillan (Conservative) succeeded Sir Anthony Eden as British prime minister.
1952 An Aer Lingus Dakota aircraft, St Kevin, en route from Northolt (Middlesex) to Dublin, crashed in Snowdonia, Wales, killing all 23 (twenty passengers and three crew) on board. It was the first fatal crash in the airline’s fifteen-year history.
1941 Sir John Lavery, painter, died.
1917 William ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody, so called for killing 4,280 buffalo (American bison) over eight months (1867–8) to feed the workers on the Union Pacific railroad, died.
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Personal Histories
Personal Histories is an initiative by History Ireland,
which aims to capture the individual histories of Irish
people both in Ireland and around the world. It is hoped
to build an extensive database reflecting Irish lives,
giving them a chance to be heard, remembered and to
add their voice to the historical record.
Click Here to go to the Personal Histories page
1972 Neil Blaney was expelled from Fianna Fáil for ‘conduct unbecoming a member of the organisation’.
1972 The Provisional IRA announced a ceasefire.
1917 The first of over one million troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF), under General John J. ‘Black Jack’ Pershing, arrived in France.
1966 Peter Ward (18), a Catholic barman, was shot dead by the UVF in Malvern Street, off Belfast’s Shankill Road. Three members of the UVF, including Augustus ‘Gusty’ Spence, were later convicted of his murder.
1986 A referendum on making divorce available in the Irish Republic was defeated, with a vote of 63% against and 36% for, in a 62% turnout.
1996 Veronica Guerin (35), investigative journalist with the Sunday Independent, was shot dead in Dublin.
1981 The 22nd Dáil Éireann assembled. Garret Fitzgerald was elected taoiseach in a Fine Gael–Labour coalition government.
1963 US President John F. Kennedy arrived in Ireland on a four-day official visit.
1819 Sir Francis Leopold McClintock, explorer who confirmed the deaths of Sir John Franklin and his crew of 129 in an attempt to chart and navigate the Northwest Passage (1845), born in Seatown Terrace, Dundalk.
1819 Ellen Hanley (15), the celebrated ‘Colleen Bawn’, was murdered on the River Shannon by Stephen Sullivan, servant of her alleged husband, John Scanlan.