March 24
Published in On this Day listing- 1972 Following the resignation of the Northern Ireland prime minister, Brian Faulkner, and his cabinet over the transfer of security to Westminster, Prime Minister Edward Heath announced that the Northern Ireland government would be suspended and replaced by direct rule from Westminster, with William Whitelaw as secretary of state.
- 1922 Uniformed police officers broke into the home of Catholic publican Owen McMahon in north Belfast and shot him dead, along with four of his sons and one of his employees.
- 1980 Oscar Romero, archbishop of San Salvador, was assassinated as he celebrated Mass by a right-wing group led by a former mayor. His death provoked an international outcry for reform in El Salvador.
- 1972 Following the refusal of Brian Faulkner and his cabinet to accept the transfer of security to Westminster, Prime Minister Edward Heath announced the suspension of the Northern Ireland government, to be replaced by direct rule from London. William Whitelaw took up office as the first secretary of state for Northern Ireland a week later.
- 1968 The Aer Lingus Viscount St Phelim plunged into the sea near Tuskar Rock, Co. Wexford, with the loss of 61 lives.
- 1968 An Aer Lingus Viscount, St Phelim, with 57 passengers and a crew of four, en route from Cork to London, crashed into the sea off Tuscar Rock, Co. Wexford. There were no survivors.
- 1922 In the early hours of the morning uniformed men, either RIC or Ulster Special Constabulary, broke into the home of Owen MacMahon, a Catholic publican, off the Antrim Road in Belfast and murdered him, four other members of his family and a sixth man. Two more members of the family were wounded.
- 1909 John Millington Synge, playwright, died.
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Personal Histories
On this Day
June 8
1876 James McKnight (75), journalist and agrarian reformer, died. McKnight came to national prominence in 1847 as spokesman for the thousands of Presbyterian tenant farmers who flocked to join the Ulster Tenant Right League, which sought to give legal protection to the Ulster Custom. Regarded at the time as the leading Presbyterian layman, it was he who was chiefly responsible for focusing the aims of the League on the extension of the Ulster Custom to the whole island—the ‘three Fs’: fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure, meaning no eviction if rent had been paid. This programme was to guide the Irish land reform movement for the next 30 years. His lifelong passion, however, was in the cultural field, as an Irish-speaker who promoted the preservation and publication of ancient Irish manuscripts. Born near Rathfriland, Co. Down, he initially intended to become a Presbyterian minister before turning to journalism and becoming editor of the Belfast News Letter (1829–46). In the columns of that paper, he continually highlighted the common origins of the Irish and Scots Gaelic languages and, by implication, the shared culture of Irish Catholics and their Presbyterian neighbours. As a committed unionist, albeit a liberal one, he was sharply critical of the nationalist politics of Daniel O’Connell. The Repeal campaign, for instance, he described as divisive, suggesting that patriotic sentiment would be better served by reviving and promoting the Irish language. His enthusiasm for the language never waned. On his deathbed, the story goes, he asked his servant, a Catholic, to recite for him the Lord’s Prayer in Irish. She did as he requested, but at one point was interrupted by the dying McKnight, who pointed out that she had mispronounced one of the words.- 1972 Garda Inspector Sam Donegan (61) was fatally injured by a gelignite bomb reportedly left by the Provisional IRA on the Cavan–Fermanagh border.
- 1949 George Orwell’s Nineteen-eighty-four, mostly written on the Scottish island of Jura when he was seriously ill with tuberculosis, was published.
- 1859 The first edition of the Irish Times as a daily newspaper was published.
- 1917 The Butte, Montana, mine disaster: 168 died, including many Irish, when fire broke out in a mineshaft. Butte was the US’s foremost mining town at the time, with a population of 50,000, a quarter of whom were Irish, mostly from County Cork.