April 10

  • 1998 The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement on the future governance of Northern Ireland was signed by the British and Irish governments and the North’s main political parties, with the exception of the DUP.
  • 1867 George William Russell, widely known as ‘AE’, poet, mystic, editor, writer and artist, born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh.
  • 1838 Father Theobald Mathew launched his temperance movement in Cork. Sixty people took a pledge to abstain from ‘all intoxicating drinks, except used medicinally’. In the space of three years over half the population of Ireland, across all religious denominations, had taken ‘the pledge’.
  • 1923 Republican leader Liam Lynch (33), on his way to a meeting of the IRA Executive in Cork, accompanied by Frank Aiken, was shot by a party of National Army soldiers in the Knockmealdown Mountains and died in Mitchelstown.
  • 1998 The Good Friday or Belfast Agreement on the future governance of Northern Ireland was signed by the main political parties, apart from the DUP, and by the British and Irish governments.