28 September 1846 On 28 September 1846, during the height of the Irish potato famine, forty mounted soldiers of the First Royal Dragoons were called out to deal with a large crowd of up to twelve thousand starving peasants and labourers. They had converged on the coastal port of Dungarvan, until the town was ‘literally…
26 July 1575 Rathlin Island forms a rugged rocky L-shape six miles long, lying just off the Antrim coast of Northern Ireland. By the mid 1570s, Walter Devereux, the first Earl of Essex and a rising star in the Elizbethan court, was increasingly frustrated by Scottish sailors and soldiers using Rathlin as a base from…
11 October 1649 Today in 1649, the inhabitants of Wexford were massacred by British troops. One month earlier [ 11 September 1649 ] Oliver Cromwell, commanding British parliamentary forces in Ireland, had ordered his soldiers to offer no quarter to the royalist garrison at Drogheda, and had slaughtered almost all those who had surrendered, along…
25 December 1847 Historians refer to the year as ‘Black 47,’ the most terrible of the ‘Great Hunger’ in Ireland with hundreds of thousands succumbing to famine and disease. At the same time, tens of thousands of tenants, who could no longer pay their rents, faced mass evictions from landlords, who often relied on the…
11 December 1920 On the evening of Saturday 11 December 1920, during a few hours of indiscriminate arson and looting, British ‘Black and Tans’ auxiliary police burned down three hundred homes and forty business premises in the city of Cork. The vast majority of residents were Catholics, most of them sympathetic or supportive of the…
7 December 1846 In December 1846 Ireland was in the grip of a devastating potato famine as well as one of the worst winters in many years. Wherever a few people could find employment at a local public works, it provided the sole possible source of income and survival for the local community. One can…
21 November 1920 On the afternoon of Sunday 21 November 1920, armed police officers under British command surrounded Croke Park Football Ground in Dublin. They rushed in from either end of the stadium and fired directly into the stampeding crowd, killing eleven civilians and seriously injuring at least sixty, of whom three died the following…
25 October 1920 Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, died at 5.40 am on Monday 25 October 1920 on the seventy fourth day of his hunger strike at Brixton prison. His biographer, Francis Costello, remarked that the MacSwiney’s ‘solitary protest would be seen, in the context of the Irish struggle, as personifying the triumph…
13 October 1845 On 13 October 1845, a report from Lord Heytesbury, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, lay on Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel’s desk. It predicted the failure of Ireland’s potato crop, on which almost its entire population depended for survival. Peel considered his response carefully. He insisted he needed to see conclusive proof…
25 September 1917 Thomas Ashe was a prominent Irish Republican, who had taken part in Ireland’s 2016 Easter Rebellion against British rule. He died, aged 32, on Tuesday 25 September 1917, just five days into a hunger strike at Dublin’s Mountjoy Prison, due to a complication from forced feeding. At the subsequent coroner’s inquest, it…
