BY AODHÁN CREALEY
NOVEMBER
02/1847
Major Denis Mahon, proprietor of the Strokestown estate, was shot dead in the village of Doorty as he travelled home in an open carriage from a meeting of the Board of Guardians of Roscommon Union. Having inherited the 6,000-acre estate just two years previously, Mahon found himself landlord to almost 4,000 tenants who were £30,000 in arrears when the Great Famine struck. His solution, however, proved disastrous:he offered a passage to Canada for those who gave up their holdings.Some 810 tenants took up his offer and sailed for Quebec in two chartered vessels. Typhus, however, raged throughout the voyage, and over 260 of them perished at sea. As for the remainder, the vast majority of his tenantry, they declared that they would ‘neither pay nor go’, in response to which he evicted them all, some 3,006 persons, including, it was said, some 84 widows. Whilst his death was celebrated with bonfires on hills for miles around his estate, the reaction in Britain was one of alarm. Mahon was the seventh landlord to have been assassinated over the winter of 1846–7, prompting Lord Lieutenant Clarendon to call for extra powers to curtail what he described as a ‘rebellious campaign’. Legislation providing for extra troops was duly passed the following month but not before Prime Minister Russell had coldly condemned Mahon’s actions. ‘It is quite true that landlords in England would not be shot like hares and partridges. But neither does any landlord in England turn out fifty persons at once, and burn their houses over their heads, giving them no provision for the future. The murders are atrocious, so are the ejectments.’
01/1625
Oliver Plunkett, archbishop of Armagh (1669–81) and martyr, born in Loughcrew, Oldcastle, Co. Meath.
07/1975
Following extensive talks behind closed doors over the summer, the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention, dominated by the William Craig/Harry West/Ian Paisley coalition (UUUC), recommended a return to majority rule.
08/1975
Dr Tiede Herrema, managing director of Ferenka Ltd, Limerick, who was kidnapped five weeks earlier, was released after his captors, Eddie Gallagher and Marion Coyle, surrendered following an eighteen-day siege in a housing estate in Monasterevin, Co. Kildare.
12/1975
Michael Duggan (32) from the Falls Road was shot dead by the Official IRA during a feud between that organisation and the Provisional IRA which claimed eleven lives, the worst inter-republican fighting since the Civil War.
14/1825
St Mary’s Pro-Cathedral in Marlborough Street, whose vaults became the burial place of over 900 of its benefactors, was consecrated by Archbishop of Dublin Daniel Murray.
14/1925
Following a convention, the IRA announced that it had withdrawn its allegiance to the de Valera ‘Republican government’ and established its own supreme authority, theArmy Council.
20/1925
Robert F. (Francis) Kennedy, politician, lawyer and younger brother of John F. Kennedy, US president (1961–3), born in Brookline, Boston, Massachusetts, the seventh of nine children of Joseph P. Kennedy and Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy.
26/1925
Ciaran MacMathúna, broadcaster, music collector and recognised authority on Irish traditional music, born in Limerick.
27/1975
Ross McWhirter (50), founder of the Guinness Book of World Records, was shot dead by the IRA at his home in Enfield, London, by members of the IRA’s Balcombe Street gang.
30/2015
Fr Gerry Reynolds (80), who, along with fellow Redemptorist Fr Alex Reid, based in Clonard Monastery in West Belfast, acted as go-between for the IRA and politicians for many years, died.
DECEMBER
17/1834
Ireland’s first railway, running between Westland Row (Pearse Station) and Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), a distance of 10km, opened. It might not, however, have been the first. Eight years earlier, a line connecting the cities of Limerick and Waterford was authorised but proved too ambitious for the time and wasn’t constructed for another twenty years. Work on the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, one of the earliest dedicated commuter lines in the world, began in 1833, employing over 1,800 men. Granite from quarries in Dalkey was used for the many bridges, and objections by a number of landowners were assuaged by the construction, where possible, of bathhouses along the route. Travelling at 20mph, trains were divided into three classes with appropriate fares, including travel and bathhouse tickets. The contractor was the celebrated Carlow-born William Dargan, who had worked for the Scotsman Thomas Telford on the London to Holyhead route (1820). By 1853 he had constructed over 600 miles of railway as well as the Ulster Canal, connecting Lough Erne and Lough Neagh. His engineer-in-chief, Wexford-born Charles Vignoles, was equally renowned. He afterwards went on to gain an international reputation as a railway consultant in countries as diverse as France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Russia and Brazil. His greatest engineering achievement was a bridge, the four-span Nicholas Chain Bridge across the DnieperRiver in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, commissioned and named after Tsar Nicholas I and opened in 1853. In its time one of the longest (770m) and most impressive in Europe, it was blown up during the Polish–Soviet war of 1920 by retreating Polish troops. Railways in Ireland reached their peak in 1920 with some 5,630km of line. Today they cover less than half that distance.
03/1925
After a week of intensive negotiations involving the Free State and the British and Northern Ireland governments, a tripartite agreement was signed whereby Northern Ireland’s boundary as defined under the Government of Ireland Act (1920) remained unchanged.
05/1975
Internment in Northern Ireland, introduced in August 1971, ended. During that period 1,981 were interned, 1,874 of whom were nationalists.
08/1945
John Banville, writer who won the Booker Prize (2005) with his thirteenth novel, The Sea, born in Wexford town.
11/1225
Laurence O’Toole, archbishop of Dublin (1162–80), was canonised by Pope Honorius III.
14/1955
Ireland was one of sixteen countries admitted to the United Nations as part of a deal that included both communist and non-communist countries.
16/1775
Jane Austen, celebrated novelist who, aged twenty, had a brief flirtation with law student Thomas Lefroy, a future lord chief justice of Ireland (1852–66), born in Steventon, Hampshire, the daughter of an Anglican rector,
16/2005
President of Sinn Féin Gerry Adams announced at a press conference that Denis Donaldson, the party’s office administrator at Stormont, had for twenty years been an MI5 agent.
19/1975
Two men were killed and at least twenty others injured when a loyalist bomb exploded without warning outside a bar in Dundalk town centre. Three hours later the same gang attacked a bar in Silverbridge, south Armagh, some ten miles away, killing another three men.
31/1975
Five people lost their lives and 30 others were injured when a train en route from Rosslare to Dublin was derailed at Clough Bridge, Tubberneering, near Gorey, Co. Wexford.
31/1975
Two men and a woman died when an INLA bomb exploded in a bar in Gilford, Co. Armagh. In reprisal attacks a week later loyalists murdered six members of two Catholic families, the Reaveys and O’Dowds.A total of 206 people lost their lives in the Troubles that year, 174 of them civilians.