MAY
08/1987
The Loughgall ambush. Eight members of the East Tyrone Brigade of the IRA, including their commander, Patrick Joseph Kelly, were killed by the SAS/RUC as they attacked the part-manned RUC station in north Armagh. The East Tyrone Brigade was one of the most active and successful IRA brigades during the Troubles, with a simple strategy to create and expand ‘no-go zones’ which the RUC/British Army did not control, in the course of which they had carried out 22 attacks over the previous six months, killing seven members of the security forces. Meanwhile, Det. Chief Supt. Francis Murray—a Catholic from the Ards Peninsula, based in Portadown, who had played hurling in his youth—was determined to do his duty. Ten years earlier, whilst investigating a booby-trapped IRA arms dump in Lurgan he lost a hand, a leg and an eye, which sidelined him for three years. Returning to duty, he spent most of his time scrutinising intelligence reports until he eventually made a breakthrough; in a monitored telephone call an IRA Volunteer indiscreetly told his girlfriend about the plan for Loughgall. With permission to deploy a group of SAS personnel and RUC marksmen, he briefed them in detail—from his knowledge of previous attacks—on the IRA modus operandi before they took up positions at the station. As predicted, the IRA arrived with a stolen mechanical digger with a 200lb bomb in the bucket, which destroyed much of the base. Then, as they proceeded to their getaway van, they were mown down in a hail of 1,200 rounds, though six did manage to escape. The ambush, however, had no long-term effect on the East Tyrone Brigade, which lost 53 Volunteers during the Troubles, mostly at the hands of the SAS and UVF. Chief Supt. Murray was awarded an MBE and the Queen’s Police Medal and retired after a 32-year police career. Twenty years to the day of the ambush, Sinn Féin went into a devolved government with the DUP in Stormont.
02/1974
Five people, all Catholics, were killed when the UVF threw a canister bomb into the Rose and Crown Bar on Belfast’s Ormeau Road.
05/1999
Taoiseach Bertie Ahern apologised on behalf of the Irish people to those who had spent their childhoods in residential institutions run by eighteen religious orders, an apology that came before the broadcast of the final episode of the three-part ‘States of Fear’ series by Mary Raftery, which detailed the abuse of children in such institutions. He also announced the setting up of the Commission to Inquire into Child Abuse and the establishment of a Redress Board.
13/1974
A Dublin couple successfully challenged a section of the Adoption Act (1952) relating to the prohibition on a husband’s adoption of his wife’s illegitimate son if the latter’s religion differed from his.
14/1974
The Ulster Workers’ Council, a loyalist umbrella group opposed to the Sunningdale Agreement and the Council of Ireland, began a general strike.
17/1944
The supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, made a two-day visit to Northern Ireland to inspect US troops in preparation for D-Day.
17/1974
Twenty-seven people were killed and hundreds injured when three bombs exploded without warning in Dublin. Less than an hour later a bomb exploded in Monaghan town, killing seven others.
25/1974
Prime Minister Harold Wilson inadvertently rallied Protestant support for the Ulster Workers’ Strike by referring to the UWC strikers as ‘spongers’.s
27/1974
With a total electrical power breakdown imminent, Chief Executive Brian Faulkner tried to convince the Executive to negotiate with the UWC strikers. The SDLP, however, insisted that the British army should man the power stations. Faulkner resigned and the Executive collapsed.
29/1874
G.K. Chesterton, writer, philosopher and Christian apologist, born in London.
JUNE
05/1880
W.T.—William Thomas—Cosgrave, first president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State (1922–32), born at 174 James’s Street, Dublin, the son of a grocer. Popular history, the history of the people and not the historians, invariably remembers the dramatic iconic image. Charles Stewart Parnell, for instance, was a complex individual. Since he wrote so little, and never took a fixed position on any issue, the unanswered question is still debated: what was his real attitude to Irish independence and the use of force to achieve it? On the other hand, popular history remembers his affair with Mrs O’Shea, his overthrow, his premature death, the lost leader etc. Similarly with Michael Collins, again a complex character—visionary, brilliant organiser, spectacular fund-raiser, natural leader and motivator. Popular history, however, focuses on the dashing Corkman in military uniform and the ambush at Béal na Blath. Cosgrave—who, after the deaths of Griffith and Collins in 1922, found himself in charge of a fledgling independent Irish state—never made it in popular history because he presented no iconic image. He was, in fact, a small, quiet man with little personality. Historians, however, rate him and his government highly in that his Cumann na nGaedheal government, in which, aged 42, he was the oldest member when he took office, succeeded in establishing, from scratch, a functioning Irish government, parliament and civil service, and did so in the face of civil war and at a time when the rest of Europe was moving away from democracy. And then, in 1932, he peacefully handed over power to his arch-rival, Eamon de Valera, securing the state as a democracy. Even de Valera himself had to praise him. He summed up Cosgrave and his government in one word—‘magnificent’.
01/1944
An American Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress en route from Newfoundland to Nutt’s Corner Airfield, Co. Antrim, crashed in dense fog on Cave Hill, Belfast. All ten airmen lost their lives.
02/1994
An RAF Chinook helicopter crashed on the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland, in foggy conditions, resulting in the deaths of all 25 passengers and crew on board, including almost all of the UK’s Northern Ireland intelligence experts.
03/1974
Michael Gaughan (24), Mayo-born IRA Volunteer, died on hunger strike in Parkhurst Prison, Isle of Wight, where he was serving seven years’ imprisonment for his part in a bank robbery.
05/1984
On the third day of his trip to Ireland, President Ronald Reagan visited his ancestral home, Ballyporeen, Co. Tipperary, from where his great-grandfather Michael Regan had emigrated early in the nineteenth century.
06/1944
D-Day landings in Normandy. Some 120,000 Irishmen—c. 70,000 from ‘neutral’ Ireland—served in the British army during the Second World War.
07/1924
William Pirrie, shipbuilder and businessman who was chairman of Harland and Wolff from 1895, died.
07/2004
Mary Holland (68), acclaimed Northern Ireland correspondent for the Irish Times, died.
17/1974
An IRA bomb caused extensive damage to Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the British Houses of Parliament.
18/1984
Police and miners clashed at what became known as the Battle of Orgreave in South Yorkshire during the Miners’ Strike, one of the most violent clashes in British industrial history. Over 90 miners were subsequently charged with riot and violent disorder but were later acquitted owing to ‘unreliable’ police evidence.
26/1824
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, mathematician, engineer and physicist who pioneered the subject of physics as an academic discipline, born in Belfast.
29/1974
Isabel Perón was sworn in as the first female president of Argentina, replacing her ailing husband, Juan Perón, who died two days later.