The War of Independence:‘four glorious years’ or squalid sectarian conflict?

November 28

• 1920 General Tom Barry’s Cork No. 3 (West Cork) Brigade wiped out an eighteen-man Auxiliary patrol at Kilmichael, on the Macroom–Dunmanway road, Co. Cork.
• 1979 John Hume MEP was elected leader of the SDLP in succession to Gerry Fitt.
• 1990 Margaret Thatcher, Conservative prime minister of the UK since May 1979, resigned. She was succeeded by John Major.
• 1979 John Hume succeeded Gerry Fitt as leader of the SDLP, a position he held until 2001.
• 1905 The Sinn Féin movement—the name famously coined by Máire Butler, a cousin of Irish unionist leader Sir Edward Carson—was launched by Arthur Griffith with the aim of re-establishing the independence of Ireland by withdrawing from the Westminster parliament and setting up a government in Dublin.
• 1863 First edition of the Fenian newspaper the Irish People. Circulating chiefly in Dublin, it was suppressed by the authorities in September 1865.
• 1977 Following a strike (from 3 August) at the Ferenka steel cord factory in County Limerick, the plant was closed with the loss of 1,400 jobs.