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January 9

Published in On this Day listing

1980 Taoiseach Charles J. Haughey gave his infamous ‘as a community, we are living beyond our means’ television address. Unknown to the public at the time, he owed the AIB £1.143m owing to persistent personal overspending.
1929 Brian Friel, Ireland’s leading playwright, was born in Omagh, Co. Tyrone.
1916
1913 The disastrous Allied Gallipoli campaign ended after eight months with joint Allied/Ottoman Empire casualties of c. 500,000, including c. 4,000 Irish.
1913 Richard Milhous Nixon, 37th president of the United States (1969–74), who resigned in disgrace in the wake of the Watergate scandal, born in California. His ancestor, James Nixon, was born in Ireland c. 1705, probably in Timahoe, Co. Laois, and emigrated to America c. 1730. Nixon visited Timahoe in October 1970.
1984 Seán MacEntee (95), founding member of Fianna Fáil and minister in all Fianna Fáil governments between 1932 and 1965, died.

On this Day

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.