June 20
Published in On this Day listing- 1972 In response to a prolonged hunger strike by IRA prisoners in Belfast’s Crumlin Road jail, Secretary of State William Whitelaw announced ‘special category status’.
- 1968 Austin Currie, Nationalist MP for East Tyrone in Stormont, occupied a house in Caledon, Co. Tyrone, in protest at discrimination by unionists in allocating council houses. The house had been allocated to a nineteen-year-old single woman with unionist connections over 269 other applicants on the waiting list.
- 1918 Arthur Griffith (Sinn Féin) defeated J.F. O’Hanlon (IPP)—by 3,795 votes to 2,581—in the Cavan East by-election.
- 1867 Clan na Gael, a secret oath-bound organisation, was founded in New York by Jerome Collins, meteorological and science editor of the New York Herald.
- 1763 Theobald Wolfe Tone, United Irishman and iconic figure in Irish revolutionary nationalism, was born at 44 Stafford Street, Dublin, the son of a coachmaker.
- 1210 King John landed in Waterford with 7,000 knights, archers and foot soldiers—the greatest army yet seen in Ireland. His immediate mission was to break the power of the rebellious William de Braose, lord of Limerick.
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