Pope John Paul II visited Ireland from Saturday, 29 September to Monday, 1 October 1979, the first trip to Ireland by a pope. Over 2.5 million people attended events in Dublin, Drogheda, Clonmacnoise, Galway, Knock, Limerick, and Maynooth. It was one of John Paul’s first foreign visits as Pope, who had been elected in […]
John Devoy was an Irish nationalist leader and exile.
Father of, well, many of us.
In 1066 the course of British history changed forever when William, the Duke of Normandy, landed on the southern coast of England and seized the country from its Anglo-Saxon king Harold Godwinson. The French had a long history of claims in England, and in 1002 the English king Aethelred the Unready married the sister […]
Mayo agent, Captain Charles Boycott, was sent to a ‘moral Coventry.’ He described his plight in a letter to The Times: “…people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no […]
Manuel I Komnemos of the Byzantine Empire, also known as “Manuel the Great”, breathed his last on this day, September 24th, 1180. He was the last of the great Byzantine Emperors, and with his death, the Empire began to fall into ruin and decay. Manuel was the third son of his father, John II. On […]
On the night of September 23rd, 1846, the German Astronomer Johann Gottfried Galle confirmed the discovery of the planet Neptune, which had been predicted by the French Mathematician Urban le Verrier, based on nothing but numbers. It was one of the great triumphs of 19th century science. Le Verrier discovered Neptune – which cannot be […]
At 4 o clock on the night of the 22nd of September 1917 an explosion occurred at the Kynoch Cordite (a smokeless explosive) factory in Arklow which claimed the lives of 28 people and injured many more. The factory was established by a British industrialist and engineer in the 1890’s in Arklow’s North Beach area […]
Today, the 22nd September, marks the 102nd anniversary of the Rineen Ambush, which took place at Rineen Cross, halfway between Miltown Malbay and Lahinch in 1920.
The Iran-Iraq war, which would last for eight years and claim the lives of about a million people, began with an Iraqi invasion of Iran, on this day, September 22nd, 1980. The pretext for the invasion was the revolution in Iran, which had toppled the Shah and replaced him with a Shiite Islamic dictatorship. Saddam […]
Forty homes were burned out or badly damaged, including almost all of the main street of the town.
Robert Emmett was an Irish Republican and patriot, orator and rebel leader. After leading an abortive rebellion in Dublin against British rule in 1803 he was captured then tried and executed for high treason against the British king George III of Great Britain. When asked if he had any thing to say in response to […]