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March 16

Published in On this Day listing

1820 John Scanlon was executed in Limerick for the murder of Ellen Hanley (15), ‘the Colleen Bawn’, the previous summer.
1988 Loyalist gunman Michael Stone opened fire and threw grenades at mourners attending the funeral of the Gibraltar Three. Three were killed, including IRA member Kevin Brady (see 19th).
1968 US troops led by Lt. William Calley murdered c. 500 civilians, mostly women and children, in the village of My Lai, South Vietnam.
1967 Thomas MacGreevy (74), scholar, poet, critic and director of the National Gallery of Ireland (1950–64), died.
1960 The 45,270-ton P & O liner Canberra was launched at the Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, the last large liner launched from the yard.
1907 John O’Leary, Fenian, known as ‘Pagan’ O’Leary on account of his anti-clericalism, died.

On this Day

1972 Eight people, seven of them young girls, died when fire destroyed the offices of Noyek’s timber merchants in Parnell Street, Dublin.
1972 Eight people, seven of them young girls, died when fire destroyed the offices of Noyek’s timber merchants in Parnell Street, Dublin.
1968 Yuri Gagarin (34), Russian pilot and cosmonaut who was the first man in outer space (1961), died when his jet crashed during a training flight.
1940 Michael Joseph Savage, the son of Irish parents and New Zealand’s first Labour prime minister (since 1935), died.
1766 The vicar of Wakefield, subtitled ‘A Tale, Supposed to be written by Himself’, a novel by Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74), was published.