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October 15

Published in On this Day listing

1171 King Henry II landed in Waterford with 4,000 troops in a mission to underscore his authority and add Ireland to his extensive Anglo-French empire.
1919 A government proclamation outlawed Sinn Féin, the IRA, etc. Sinn Féin still held its Ard-Fheis, from midnight to 3am.
1968 Nationalist MPs withdrew from Stormont and thereby ceased to be the official opposition in the Northern Ireland parliament.
1922 Army Emergency Powers came into effect, empowering military courts to impose the death penalty; 77 Republicans were executed in the Free State between 17 November 1922 and 2 May 1923.
1710 Richard Steevens, a physician who left his fortune to establish Dr Steevens’s Hospital (1733), Dublin’s first public hospital, died.
1917 Margaretha MacLeod (41), Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was executed by firing squad in France after being convicted of spying for Germany.
1914 Anthony Traill, Ulster unionist, sportsman, chairman of the world’s first electric tramway (Portrush to Bushmills, Co. Antrim, 1883–1947) and provost of Trinity College since 1904, died.
1922 Army Emergency Powers came into effect, empowering military courts to impose the death penalty. The first executions of Republicans were carried out the following month.

On this Day

1820 Sir William Howard Russell, one of the first modern war correspondents, whose coverage included the Crimean War and the American Civil War, born in Tallaght, Dublin.
1969 Death of Dwight D. ‘Ike’ Eisenhower (78), American army general, supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during the Second World War and 34th (Republican) president of the United States (1953–61).
1979 The worst-ever accident in the US nuclear power industry began when a pressure valve in a reactor at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania failed to close.
1957 Jack Butler Yeats (85), painter and younger brother of W.B. Yeats, died.
1972 Eight people, seven of them young girls, died when fire destroyed the offices of Noyek’s timber merchants in Parnell Street, Dublin.
1820 William Howard Russell, the first modern war correspondent, renowned for his reports on the mismanagement of the Crimean War for The Times (London), born at Lily Vale, Tallaght, Co. Dublin.
1760 Dublin-born Margaret (Peg) Woffington, renowned beauty and leading actress on the London stage for almost two decades, died.
1973 Irish naval service vessels apprehended the Claudia, a Cypriot coaster, off County Waterford. Six men, including Joe Cahill, were arrested for conspiracy to import arms.