Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla urged Mexicans to rise up against the Spanish-born ruling class. He made the first cry for independence. After a moving speech in the Mexican town of Dolores, Hidalgo took up the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a Roman Catholic image of the Virgin Mary as she appears to Juan […]
Thomas Davis was an Irish writer who was the chief organiser of the Young Ireland movement, who was born in Mallow to a Welsh father and an Irish mother. Through his mother he was descended from the Gaelic noble family of O’Sullivan Beare. His father died one month after his birth and his family moved […]
Scottish biologist and bacteriologist Alexander Fleming discovers penicillin while studying influenza. At the time, Fleming was experimenting with the influenza virus in the Laboratory of the Inoculation Department at St. Mary’s Hospital in London. Fleming returned from a two-week vacation to find that a mold had developed on an accidentally contaminated staphylococcus culture plate. Upon […]
ON THIS DAY: 12TH SEPTEMBER 1919 Dáil Éireann was declared illegal by the British Parliament when Sinn Féin TDs refused to sit in Westminister and set up their own parliament in Dublin, Dáil Éireann The British authorities called it a ‘dangerous assembly, because of this the first Dáil had to meet in secret at different […]
The Battle of Stirling Bridge was a battle of the First War of Scottish Independence, Scottish rebel William Wallace and others defeated the English at Stirling Bridge. The Scots had some 300 cavalry, 10,000 infantry and the English had far greater numbers of 1,000 to 3,000 cavalry, 15,000-50,000 infantry but the Scots were victorious. The […]
Newspapers report a potato blight has hit Ireland. High rents imposed by absentee landlords meant that most people could only afford to live on small tenant farms with inferior soil that only potatoes could grow on; but the potato crop was prone to disease and the farmers did not have extra land to rotate crops. […]
Pádraig Mac Piarais founded St. Enda’s (Scoil Éanna) in Rathfarnham. St. Enda’s was to have an “Irish standpoint and ‘atmosphere’” and be based on what Pearse saw as the two key characteristics of the ancient Irish system of education: freedom for the individual student and inspirational teaching. He wrote later in his essay on education […]
ON THIS DAY: 4TH SEPTEMBER 1607 : THE FLIGHT OF THE EARLS After being beaten by the English in 1603 following the nine years war, Aodh Mór Ó Néill, Earl of Tír Eoghan and Rudhraighe Ó Domhnaill, Earl of Tír Conaill (both Irish Gaelic Lords), and about ninety followers left Ulster for Europe, seeking to […]
ON THIS DAY: 3RD SEPTEMBER 1939 The Emergency Powers Act 1939 (EPA) was an Act of the Oireachtas enacted on 3 September 1939, after an official state of emergency had been declared on 2 September 1939 in response to the outbreak of the Second World War. Éamon De Valera was Taoiseach at the time. #gript
The September Massacres were a number of killings in Paris and other cities that occurred from 2–6 September 1792 during the French Revolution. Catholic Bishops, priests, prisoners and peasants were singled out. More than 1,000 prisoners were killed within 20 hours. By 6 September, half the prison population of Paris had been summarily executed: some […]
The Treaty of Nanking (Nanjing) was signed on the HMS Cornwallis anchored at the city, and it ended the First Opium War (1839–1842) between the United Kingdom and the Qing dynasty of China. It was the first of what the Chinese later called the unequal treaties. Trade wars and economic power struggles between Europe […]
The Dublin lock-out began led by Jim Larkin. William Martin Murphy dismissed hundreds of workers who he suspected of membership of the ITGWU. William Martin Murphy, a major employer at the time, was chairman of the Dublin United Tramway Company, owned Clery’s department store, and the Imperial Hotel and controlled the Irish Independent, Evening Herald, […]