ON THIS DAY: 25 SEPTEMBER 1917: Thomas Ashe died from force feeding during a hunger strike in Mountjoy Prison Thomas Patrick Ashe, Tomás Pádraig Ághas was a member of the Gaelic League, the Gaelic Athletic Association, the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) and a founding member of the Irish Volunteers which he joined in November 1913. […]
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 […]
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 […]
Today, the 22nd September, marks the 100th anniversary of the Rineen Ambush, which took place at Rineen Cross, halfway between Miltown Malbay and Lahinch in 1920. The Volunteers in Co Clare had been active since 1917 and by the time of the ambush they had forced the RIC to abandon most of their rural barracks […]
Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the second woman appointed to the US Supreme Court, died over the weekend, triggering an American political crisis. But the first woman to sit on the court, Sandra Day O’Connor, is very much still alive, and celebrates the thirty-ninth anniversary of her confirmation, today, September 21st. O’Connor took to the bench in […]
On September 21st 1601 the Spanish landed in Kinsale Co Cork with some 4,000 men, took the town and awaited the arrival of the Gaelic chiefs from Ulster. With a fleet of twenty-eight, they occupied the port at Kinsale under the maestro de campo general, Don Juan del Águila. The ships were to be brought […]
“The town of Balbriggan they’ve burned to the ground While bullets Like hailstones were whizzing around; And women left homeless by this evil clan. They’ve waged war on the children, the bold Black and Tan.” (From the ‘Bold Black and Tans, Irish Songs of Resistance, Galvin, 1950) The sack of the north Dublin 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 […]
Anne Devlin was born in County Wicklow around the end of the 1770s and in 1800 met Robert Emmet and assisted him in his plans for an uprising in Dublin. On the evening of the 23rd July 1803 the rising went ahead in Dublin, but despite taking the British authorities by surprise, the rebellion collapsed. […]
“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.” The opening words […]