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 It was superseded by the United Nations on the same date in 1946.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
1820 Sir William Howard Russell, one of the first modern war correspondents, whose coverage included the Crimean War and the American Civil War, born in Tallaght, Dublin.
1969 Death of Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower (78), American army general, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the Second World War and 34th (Republican) president of the United States (1953–61).
1979 The worst-ever accident in the US nuclear power industry began when a pressure valve in a reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania failed to close.
1957 Jack Butler Yeats (85), painter and younger brother of W.B. Yeats, died.
1972 Eight people, seven of them young girls, died when fire destroyed the offices of Noyek’s timber merchants in Parnell Street, Dublin.
1820 William Howard Russell, the first modern war correspondent, renowned for his reports on the mismanagement of the Crimean War for The Times (London), born at Lily Vale, Tallaght, Co. Dublin.
1760 Dublin-born Margaret (Peg) Woffington, renowned beauty and leading actress on the London stage for almost two decades, died.
1973 Irish naval service vessels apprehended the Claudia, a Cypriot coaster, off County Waterford. Six men, including Joe Cahill, were arrested for conspiracy to import arms.