Irish Army deserters and the morality of neutrality.

January 18

• 1919 The Paris Peace Conference, better known as the Versailles Peace Conference, at which the victorious Allied Powers set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers, began.
• 1979 Leo Varadkar, TD for Dublin West since 2007 and taoiseach since June 2017, born in Dublin.
• 1987 T. Desmond Wilson, professor of modern history at UCD (1949–85) and editor of The Great Famine (1956) with Robert Dudley Edwards, died.
• 1937 John Hume, founding member of the SDLP, member of the British and European parliaments, co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (1998) and one of the architects of the Northern Ireland Peace Process, born in Derry.
• 1936 Rudyard Kipling (70), short-story writer, poet and novelist, who also wrote an acclaimed two-volume history of the Irish Guards (1923), died. His only son, John (18), was killed whilst serving with the Guards at the Battle of Loos in September 1915.
• 1934 Joe Devlin, the leading northern nationalist politician both before and after the Treaty of 1921, died. Devlin was the leading survivor of the rout of the Irish Party by Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, in which he defeated Éamon de Valera in the Falls division of Belfast.
• 1811 Charles Kean, celebrated actor/manager on the London stage, born in Waterford.