1922 At 4.07am a field gun fired across the River Liffey by Provisional Government forces at the anti-Treaty IRA garrison in the Four Courts marked the beginning of the Civil War.
1920 Members of ‘B’ and ‘C’ Companies of the 1st Battalion of the Connaught Rangers, quartered in Jullundur, Punjab, refused to soldier because of reports reaching them of atrocities being committed in Ireland by members of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries.
1919 The Treaty of Versailles was signed, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led directly to the outbreak of the First World War.
1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, and his wife were assassinated in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo.
1963 J.F. Kennedy, president of the United States, addressed Dáil Éireann. In his speech, Kennedy had planned to quote Lord Edward Fitzgerald’s observation that his family home, Leinster House, ‘does not inspire the brightest of ideas’. The comment was suppressed by an unimpressed Eamon de Valera.
1922 The bombardment of the Four Courts in Dublin, occupied by an anti-Treaty IRA garrison, by the pro-Treaty National Army commences at 4am, marking the beginning of the Civil War.
1920 Members of ‘B’ and ‘C’ companies of the Connaught Rangers mutinied in the Punjab in protest against British atrocities in Ireland. Private James Daly was subsequently court-martialled and executed; other mutineers were sentenced to penal servitude.
1912 The Irish Labour Party was founded in Clonmel, Co. Tipperary.
1973 Elections to the NI Assembly resulted in 26 seats for unionists opposing the government’s constitutional proposals and 24 for Brian Faulkner’s Official Unionist Party, which backed the proposals.
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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
1920 Five RIC officers and a Black and Tan were killed in an IRA ambush at Rineen, Co. Clare. The towns of Ennistymon, Lahinch and Miltown Malbay were later attacked in reprisal and at least five civilians were killed.
1970 Charles J. Haughey, Captain James Kelly, Albert Luykx and John Kelly were charged in the Central Criminal Court with conspiring to illegally import arms and ammunition. The jury was discharged on 29 September.
1989 Ten military bandsmen were killed and a further 22 injured when an IRA bomb exploded in the barracks of the Royal Marines School of Music in Deal, Kent.
1989 Nine British army bandsmen and one civilian were killed when an IRA bomb exploded at the Royal Marine Barracks in Deal, Kent.
1918 Hanz Scholl, founding member of the White Rose resistance movement in Nazi Germany, who was executed in February 1943 along with his sister, Sophie, born in Forchtenberg.
1846 The luxury liner SS Great Britain, en route on her fifth voyage from Liverpool to New York, ran aground on the sands of Dundrum Bay, Co. Down, when her captain mistook the new St John’s lighthouse for the Calf light on the Isle of Man. Designed by the great Isambard Kingdom Brunel and launched in 1843 to serve the burgeoning transatlantic passenger trade, she was the first liner to be made entirely of iron and powered by a propeller. Stuck in the sands, her 180 passengers, which included a girls’ choir en route to a concert tour in the USA, along with her 130-strong crew, were safely evacuated to shore with local help.
It would be eleven months before a successful salvage operation was mounted to rescue her. Under Brunel’s personal supervision she was stripped of what remained of her engines and everything else of any weight and her hulk towed back to Liverpool. And so began her best years. Sold in order to defray the cost of her salvage, she was refurbished with an extra deck and in 1852 made her first voyage to Melbourne with 630 emigrants after which, over almost a thirty-year period, she conveyed thousands from these islands to those shores.
In recent years, a team from the University of Bristol and the SS Great Britain Trust has identified the exact spot on Tyrella beach where she floundered—close to Ballykinler, where Ireland’s first mass internment camp would be constructed some 75 years later. Today, an upmarket restaurant in nearby Newcastle bears her forty cigars-a-day designer’s name and the old anchor displayed at South Promenade in the town is believed to have come from her.