Nick Maxwell

1971 Clifford Loring (18) of the Royal Artillery Regiment was shot dead by an IRA sniper whilst on checkpoint duty in West Belfast, the 35th death since the introduction of internment that month. 1994 The IRA announced a ‘complete cessation of military operations’. 1997 Diana, Princess of Wales (36), was killed in a road traffic … Read more

1951 Rosemary Scanlon, a singer known as ‘Dana’, broadcaster in the US with the conservative Catholic television channel EWTN and independent MEP for Connacht-Ulster (1999–2004), who made two bids for the Irish presidency, born in London. 1911 The Parliament Act reduced the power of veto of the House of Lords over legislation initiated in the … Read more

1971 Two men were killed and 27 injured in an unclaimed IRA bomb attack on the crowded Four Step Inn on Belfast’s Shankill Road. 1871 Jack Butler Yeats, illustrator and painter, born in London, the youngest child of the portraitist John Butler Yeats and brother of W.B. Yeats. 1975 Eamon de Valera, revolutionary, Fianna Fáil … Read more

1987 John Huston (81), film director, screenwriter and actor, whose last film, released that same year, was an acclaimed adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead, died. 1814 Joseph Sheridan le Fanu, journalist and writer, notably author of the Gothic suspense novel Uncle Silas (1864), born at 45 Dominick Street, Dublin.

1979 Lord Mountbatten, his nephew and a 15-year-old boy killed by an IRA bomb on their boat. That afternoon the IRA killed 18 soldiers at Narrow Water, Co. Down. 1969 The British home secretary, James Callaghan, toured troubled parts of Belfast. The following day, from an upstairs bedroom window of a house near Free Derry … Read more