On October 5th, 1968 a Civil Rights march took place in Derry protesting gerrymandering and discrimination against the minority Catholic population. The march, organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and the Derry Housing Action Committee, had been banned by the authorities in Stormont but it was decided to go ahead in defiance. At the […]
The Orient Express departs on its first official journey from Paris to Instanbul; It was a long-distance passenger train service created in 1883 by Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits (CIWL). It’s routes changed many times with several routes in the past concurrently used the Orient Express name, or slight variations. Although the original Orient Express […]
Ten IRA and INLA hunger-strikers die between 5 May and 12 August; all but one of the men were in their twenties, the youngest, Thomas McElwee, being 23 years of age. The hunger strike had started on March 1st 1981 after years of the prisoners being on the blanket (blanket protest) and the failure of […]
Recalling an interview with Dan Keating the last survivor of the Tan War In 2006, just a year years before his death in October 2007, I travelled to Castlemaine, Co. Kerry to talk to Ireland’s oldest man, Dan Keating. At 104 years of age Dan was the last surviving veteran of the Irish civil war. […]
The Whiteboys (na Buachaillí Bána) were a secret Irish agrarian organisation which defended tenant farmer land rights for subsistence farming. They sought to address rack-rents, tithe collection, excessive dues, evictions and other oppressive acts. As a result they targeted landlords and tithe collectors. Their operations were chiefly in the counties of Waterford, Cork, Limerick, and […]
It’s the most famous dam in the world, and it was officially dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt on this day, September 30th, 1935. Originally, it was simply called “the Boulder dam”, after the Boulder Canyon, in which it was built. It was renamed for President Herbert Hoover in 1947. The Dam was built to provide […]
John Devoy was an Irish nationalist leader and exile.
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 […]
Ashe took a major part in the 1916 Easter Rising
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 […]
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 […]