May 02
Published in On this Day listing- 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.
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