Nick Maxwell

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

1940 Three women were killed when a German bomb struck a creamery at Campile, Co. Wexford.

1971 A 15lb. Provisional IRA bomb exploded at the Electricity Board of Northern Ireland’s offices in  Belfast’, killing Harry Beggs (23), a close schoolfriend of Peter Robinson, later first minister of Northern Ireland (2008–16), and injuring 35 others. Robinson disclosed years later that it was Beggs’s death that prompted him to enter politics. 1819 Alan … Read more

1920 Further sectarian violence in Belfast. By the end of the month c. 400 Catholic families had been driven from their homes and 22 people had lost their lives. 1990 Brian Keenan, a teacher from Belfast, was released after spending almost five years imprisoned in extreme conditions as a hostage of a Shi’ah militia group … Read more