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June 17

Published in On this Day listing

1922 In reprisal for the killings of Catholics in south Armagh, the IRA attacked a number of Presbyterian farmhouses in the townlands of Altanaveigh and Lisdrumliska. Six people were killed and a number of others badly wounded.
1972 Five men were arrested during a bungled break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate office building in Washington. Their connections with the Richard Nixon re-election campaign committee were to lead to a constitutional crisis.
1981 Nora Connolly-O’Brien, daughter of James Connolly and former senator, died.
1922 In reprisal for the deaths of Catholics in South Armagh, the IRA attacked a number of Presbyterian farmhouses in the townlands of Altanaveigh and Lisdrumliska. Six people were murdered, including a husband and wife and a father and son, and a number of others were badly wounded.
2013 The 39th G8 summit of the world’s richest industrialised countries opened in the Lough Erne Resort, Co. Fermanagh. It was President Vladimir Putin’s last summit. Russia had joined the forum in 1997.

On this Day

1952 Edmund O’Brien (71), County Limerick-born author and yachtsman who in 1923 circumnavigated the globe in his ketch Saoirse, died.
1870 Robert Noonan, house-painter, sign-writer and author, notably of The ragged-trousered philanthropists (1914), born Robert Croker, the illegitimate son of an RIC officer, at 37 Wexford Street, Dublin.
1949 Under the terms of the Republic of Ireland Act (December 1948), designed by John A. Costello’s coalition government to ‘take the gun out of Irish politics’, Ireland formally left the Commonwealth and became a republic.
1918 The Mansion House conference, called by the lord mayor of Dublin, Laurence O’Neill, on the day the Military Service Bill became law, was attended by all shades of nationalist opinion. An anti-conscription pledge, drafted by Éamon de Valera, was issued.
1870 Robert Tressell, nom de plume of Robert Croker, latterly Robert Noonan, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (first unabridged edition published in 1955), was born in Dublin, the illegitimate son of RIC inspector and later magistrate Sir Samuel Croker.
2019 The journalist Lyra McKee (29) was shot dead by a New IRA gunman who opened fire on PSNI officers monitoring disturbances in Derry’s Creggan area. President Michael D. Higgins and Taoiseach Leo Varadkar attended her funeral.