1972 Minister for Justice Desmond O’Malley reintroduced the Special Criminal Court under Part V of the Offences Against the State Act (1939).
1900 Luke Dillon, a leading light in the Fenian dynamite campaign (1881–5), was sentenced to life imprisonment along with two others for attempting to bomb the Welland Canal in Canada, an important shipping lane at the time for Britain, then embroiled in the Boer War. There was little in ‘Dynamite’ Luke’s early life to foretell such notoriety. Born in Leeds to a couple who had fled the ravages of the Famine in their native County Sligo, he was just six years of age when his family moved to New Jersey. At the age of eighteen he joined the US Army, served in the Indian Wars, married and settled down in Philadelphia as a shoemaker, specialising in the manufacture of slippers. And then he joined Clan na Gael, fell under the influence of the so-called ‘Triangle’ and became a dedicated recruit for their mission ‘to bring the fight for Irish independence to the heart of the British Establishment’. He made two trips to London. In May 1884 he placed a bomb in a public toilet underneath Scotland Yard, which devastated the offices and records of the Special Irish Branch, established a year earlier to combat the ‘dynamiters’. In January 1885 he returned, placing two bombs in the House of Commons as others attempted to blow up the Tower of London. And he remained steadfast to the end. Refusing appeals by Clan na Gael leaders to admit his guilt and petition the Canadian government for clemency—‘the rest of my life,’ he declared, ‘would not be worth such a surrender of principle’—he served his full sentence and promptly rejoined Clan na Gael. ‘The revolutionary who never saw his native land’ died in 1930 at the grand old age of 81.
1819 Jasper Joly, book collector whose donation to the RDS in 1863 of a collection of 23,000 books and unbound papers and prints, notably on Irish history, topography and biography, is now housed in the National Library, born in Clonsast, Co. Offaly.
1949 Jeremy Corbyn, trade union representative, MP for Islington North since 1983 and leader of the British Labour Party since 2015, born in Wiltshire.
1968 Desmond O’Malley (Fianna Fáil) was elected to Dáil Éireann after winning the East Limerick by-election following the death of his uncle, Donagh O’Malley.
1964 President Eamon de Valera began a state visit to the USA. During his stay he addressed both houses of Congress and made a private visit to the home of the widowed Jacqueline Kennedy.
1868 Michael Barrett (27) from County Fermanagh was hanged in Newgate prison, having been convicted on dubious evidence for complicity in the Clerkenwell explosion (13/12/1867). He was the last man to be publicly hanged in Britain.
1848 John Mitchel, Young Irelander, was convicted by a packed jury on a charge of treason-felony and sentenced to fourteen years’ transportation. He began his Jail Journal the following day.
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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.