6 September 1920 General Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, despised Irish republicans. In 1919, he observed in a letter to his predecessor, General Sir William Robertson, that ‘Ireland goes from bad to worse’, recommending that ‘a little blood shedding is needed.’ On 1 September, the following year, he was still deriding…
5 December 1920 On 5 December 1920, three boys discovered the mutilated bodies of two brothers, Pat and Harry Loughnane, 29 and 22 years old. They had been tortured and killed by British auxiliary forces known as the Black and Tans, who had been deployed to crush a widespread Irish rebellion against British rule. The…
9 November 1804 On 9 November 1804, panic erupted among the British garrison of the remote penal colony of Norfolk Island in the South Pacific, when they sighted a flotilla of ships, including the 64 gun warship Athenienne, and assumed they were under attack from the French. The Commandant, Captain John Piper, immediately ordered all…
26 July 1914 On the evening of Sunday 26 July 1914, three Dubliners were shot dead by British troops on Bachelor’s Walk. They were Mary Duffy, a 50 year old widow, Patrick Quinn, a coal labourer and father of six, and James Brennan, an eighteen year old gas fitter’s assistant. More than thirty others were…
26 July 1848 On 26 July 1848, at the height of the potato famine in Ireland, from which over a million died, The Times published an editorial which was far from sympathetic. The Irish were not only deemed undeserving of the totally inadequate relief measures organized by a reluctant British government, but they were also portrayed as…
12 June 1847 An incident occurred today in 1847 which was typical of many during the Irish potato famine which claimed at least a million lives. 260 starving refugees from Ireland’s remote north west coastal region of Erris, where there had been no sustained attempt at organising relief, managed to survive a trek of forty…
27 May 1798 Lieutenant-General Sir John Moore is much praised as a heroic, but relatively humane, figure of the Napoleonic wars. His death in 1809 during the defence of Corruna against the French earned him the status of a national martyr and a memorial by Sir Christopher Wren commemorating his martyrdom still stands in the…
20 March 1920 At about 2 am on Saturday 20 March 1920, Tomas Mac Curtain, the Republican Lord Mayor of Cork, who was a leading figure in the long political struggle to end British rule, was shot dead in his own home by armed intruders with blackened faces. The police refused to investigate the murder…
( The greater part of the text on this page has now been incorporated into an article commemorating the date of Bobby Sand’s death – 5 May 1981 ) 1 March 1981 On 1 March 1981, the 26 year old IRA prisoner Bobby Sands began his hunger strike demanding that he and other IRA detainees…
12 February 1981 On 12 February 1981, David Wyatt of MI6 warned the Northern Ireland permanent secretary that ‘UDA/UFF (loyalist) gunmen, with the full blessing of Tyrie (head of the Ulster Defence Association), are going to continue murdering identified Republicans.’ His statement was yet further confirmation of the already overwhelming evidence the government possessed that…
