June 24

  • 1921 Three British soldiers and two civilians were killed when the IRA detonated a mine in Adavoyle on the Louth/Armagh border under a train which was transporting King George’s cavalry escort, deployed in Belfast two days earlier, back to Dublin. Eighty horses were also killed.
  • 1314 The Battle of Bannockburn, in which Robert Bruce crushed the army of England’s King Edward II and secured independence for Scotland from English overlordship. Three years later, his brother Edward, earl of Carrick, was to launch an unsuccessful invasion of Ireland.
  • 1993 Dáil Éireann passed the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences) Act, which decriminalised consensual homosexual acts.