August 08

  • 1980 Five adults and five children died in a fire at the Central Hotel, Bundoran, Co. Donegal.
  • 1969 Bulmer Hobson, leading member of the Irish Volunteers and IRB prior to the Easter Rising, died.
  • 1966 The Chinese Communist Party central committee endorsed Chairman Mao Zedong’s ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, which was to claim the lives of between 1.5m and 2m people.
  • 1958 Brendan Bracken, County Tipperary-born publisher, Conservative Party MP, parliamentary private secretary to Winston Churchill 1939–40, died.
  • 1918 The Battle of Amiens began, marking the beginning of the Hundred Days (Allied) Offensive that led to the end of the First World War.
  • 1914 The Endurance, commanded by Sir Ernest Shackleton, set off on its celebrated expedition to the Antarctic.
  • 1910 Harry Ferguson flew a distance of three miles at Dundrum Bay, Newcastle, Co. Down, winning him a prize of £100. In December the previous year he had flown some 130 yards at Hillsborough, Co. Down, becoming the first man to build and fly his own plane in Ireland.
  • 1923 The Civic Guard, established in February of the previous year, was reconstituted and renamed An Garda Síochána.
  • 1953 The Chester Beatty Library and Museum, housing the collections of mining magnate Sir Alfred Chester Beatty, opened. The present museum, in the grounds of Dublin Castle, opened in 2000 and was named European Museum of the Year in 2002.