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October 05

Published in On this Day listing

1771 Benjamin Franklin, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, arrived in Ireland on a six-week visit.
1977 Seamus Costello (38), leader of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP), was shot dead in Dublin, the first Irish party leader to be assassinated.
1974 The IRA bombed two public houses in Guildford, Surrey, killing five and injuring a further 65.
1970 On a visit to Ireland, US President Richard M. Nixon visited Timahoe, Co. Laois, the reputed burial place of a Quaker ancestor named Milhouse.
1968 In Derry over 100 injured when a march by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which had been banned, was brutally dispersed by the RUC.
1968 Seventy-seven marchers and eleven members of the RUC were injured in violent clashes during a banned Northern Ireland Civil Rights march in Derry.
1911 Brian O’Nolan, alias Flann O’Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, wit, novelist and Irish Times columnist, born in Strabane, Co. Tyrone.

On this Day

1933 The eighth Dáil Éireann assembled: Eamon de Valera formed his second government, with a one-seat majority.
1929 James Connell, County Meath-born Fenian, Land Leaguer and writer of the British Labour Party anthem The Red Flag, died.
1926 The Plough and the Stars by Seán O’Casey opened in the Abbey Theatre. During the fourth performance there was a full-scale riot when the audience protested at what they perceived to be a slanderous distortion of historical events.
1912 The British home secretary, Winston Churchill, shared the platform with John Redmond at a Home Rule meeting in Celtic Park, Belfast. The organisers had been refused the use of the Ulster Hall, where Churchill’s father, a quarter of a century earlier, had warned that Home Rule could come upon them ‘as a thief in the night’.