May 23

  • 2011 Barack Obama, 44th president of the United States, made a one-day visit to Ireland, during which he visited his distant cousins in Moneygall. Co. Offaly, and addressed a crowd of 25,000 in College Green, Dublin.
  • 1770 ‘The Deserted Village’ (likely the village of Auburn, near Athlone) by Oliver Goldsmith was published.
  • 1949 West Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany until German reunification in 1990, came into being.
  • 2011 US President Barack Obama made a one-day visit to Ireland during which he visited his ancestral village of Moneygall, Co. Offaly, and addressed a rapturous 50,000-strong crowd in Dublin’s College Green.
  • 1910 Mary Eva Kelly, widow of the Young Irelander Kevin Izod O’Doherty (d. 1905) and poet, known as ‘Eva of the Nation’, who contributed patriotic verse and poetry to The Nation and other nationalist periodicals, died in poverty in Brisbane.
  • 1618 The Defenestration of Prague marked the beginning of the Thirty Years’ War, one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in human history and Europe’s deadliest religious war.