March 31

May 02

• 1982 During the Falklands War, the Argentinian battle-cruiser General Belgrano was sunk by a British submarine outside the British-imposed 200-mile exclusion zone around the islands; 323 Argentine sailors lost their lives. The Charles Haughey-led Irish government announced its intention to propose the withdrawal of EC sanctions against Argentina.
• 1920 Revd Professor Walter McDonald (66), theologian at Maynooth College, author of Reminiscences of a Maynooth professor (published posthumously in 1925), died.
• 1519 Leonardo da Vinci (67), Italian polymath of the Renaissance and one of the greatest painters of all time, died at the Château Cloux near Amboise.
• 1916 ‘I am to be shot at dawn. I am glad I am getting a soldier’s death. I feared it might be hanging or imprisonment. I have had enough of jail’—Thomas Clarke, in a letter to his wife, on the eve of his execution.
• 1984 The report of the New Ireland Forum was published.
• 1982 The Argentinian cruiser General Belgrano was torpedoed and sunk by the British submarine Conqueror some 30 miles outside the 200-mile ‘exclusion zone’ that Britain had declared around the Falkland Islands. Some 260 crewmen perished.
• 1974 Six people were killed in a loyalist bomb attack on the Rose and Crown public house in south Belfast.
• 1858 Edith Somerville, literary partner of Violet Martin, with whom she published fourteen titles, was born in Corfu, where her father, Lt.-Col. Somerville, was stationed.
• 1974 Five people, all Catholics, were killed when the UVF threw a canister bomb into the Rose and Crown Bar on Belfast’s Ormeau Road.

June 01

• 1921 The Kerry IRA ambushed a detachment of Black and Tans and RIC at Castlemaine, Co. Kerry, killing three, including an RIC district inspector. The IRA lost one Volunteer.
• 1984 US President Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy, arrived on a four-day official visit to the Republic of Ireland.
• 1968 Helen Keller (87), deaf-blind American political activist and writer, died.
• 1944 An American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress en route from Newfoundland to Nutt’s Corner Airfield, Co. Antrim, crashed in dense fog on Cave Hill, Belfast. All ten airmen lost their lives.

June 2

• 1964 Eddie McAteer was elected leader of the Nationalist Party at Stormont. In February 1965 the party assumed the role of official opposition in the Northern Ireland parliament.
• 1994 An RAF Chinook helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland, in foggy conditions, resulting in the deaths of all 25 passengers and crew on board, including almost all of the UK’s Northern Ireland intelligence experts.

June 24

• 1921 Three British soldiers and two civilians were killed when the IRA detonated a mine in Adavoyle on the Louth/Armagh border under a train which was transporting King George’s cavalry escort, deployed in Belfast two days earlier, back to Dublin. Eighty horses were also killed.
• 1314 The Battle of Bannockburn, in which Robert Bruce crushed the army of England’s King Edward II and secured independence for Scotland from English overlordship. Three years later, his brother Edward, earl of Carrick, was to launch an unsuccessful invasion of Ireland.
• 1993 Dáil Éireann passed the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, which decriminalised consensual homosexual acts.

June 30

• 1921 The brothers Richard (24) and Abraham Pearson (19) were executed by an IRA firing party on their farm at Coolacrease in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom Mountains. The pair had been court-martialled for firing on IRA Volunteers, who were cutting down trees on their land for the purpose of mounting a roadblock.

• 1690
  

  Above: William of Orange—had a close shave the day before the Battle of the Boyne when grazed by an enemy musket-ball.

  Eve of the Battle of the Boyne. Early that morning, William led his multi-national army south from their camp in Loughbrickland, north of Newry, through Dundalk, where he was joined by the Duke of Schomberg, who had wintered there, and on through Ardee, arriving at the Boyne in the early afternoon. Shortly afterwards he had a lucky escape. As both armies surveyed each other across the river, exchanging sporadic fire, an enemy ball killed a soldier and two horses directly beside him, and a second, according to a witness, grazed the king’s right shoulder blade, ‘taking away his outward coat, his chamois waistcoat and his shirt and issuing a spoonful of blood’. At four in the afternoon, having had his wound dressed and his arm placed in a sling, William dined on the field and at nine called a council of war. His chief commanders, Schomberg and his cousin, the Count of Solms, sharply disagreed on tactics. Schomberg proposed that the main part of the army should perform a flanking movement, involving a roundabout march of several miles, to cross the Boyne where it bends at Rosnaree, thus attacking the Jacobites’ left flank. Solms, however, favoured a single frontal attack at Oldbridge. William eventually compromised, allowing 10,000 men to be sent to Rosnaree but concentrating the main attack at Oldbridge. Orders were then given that the troops should be ready to march at break of day, with green sprigs in their hats to distinguish them from James’s men, who, it was understood, would wear pieces of white paper. It was after midnight when William retired to his tent ‘impatient for the approaching day’.

• 1934 Nazi Germany’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The leader of the paramilitary SA, Ernst Rohm, and hundreds of his followers, along with dozens of Hitler’s political opponents, were murdered by the SS and the Gestapo in a two-day purge.