February 01

  • 1982 Corporal punishment was banned in schools in the Republic of Ireland.
  • 1969 Charles Bewley, lawyer and diplomat, first Irish minister to the Holy See (1929) and to Berlin (1933–9), from where he was recalled by de Valera, died.
  • 1968 The image of South Vietnam’s police chief General Loan summarily executing a captured Viet Cong suspect was widely circulated in the American press, shaking the American public’s confidence in their South Vietnamese allies.
  • 1966 Buster Keaton (70), comedian and one of Hollywood’s all-time greatest actor-directors, notably of The General (1926), died.
  • 1963 Cardinal John Francis D’Alton, archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland since 1946, died.
  • 1918 William Melville (67) from Sneem, Co. Kerry, head of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and from 1909 first chief of the British Secret Service, died.
  • 1815 In a duel, regarded at the time as a contest between Orange and Green, Daniel O’Connell fatally wounded Dublin councillor John d’Esterre.
  • 1814 Belfast Academical Institution, locally known as ‘Inst’, was formally opened. In his inaugural address, the poet and former United Irishman Dr William Drennan announced that the aim of the school was to ‘diffuse useful knowledge, particularly among the middling orders of society, as a necessity, not a luxury of life’.
  • 1612 Conor O’Devany, Franciscan bishop of Down and Connor, and Fr Patrick O’Loughran of Donaghmore in the archdiocese of Armagh were hanged, drawn and quartered at George’s Hill, Dublin, for suspected association with the earl of Tyrone.
  • 2008 Taoiseach Bertie Aherne and the North’s First Minister, Revd Ian Paisley, opened a resort and spa in Ballymena, Co. Antrim.