31 January 1953: The Loss of the Princess Victoria on this day. 126 people were drowned when the car ferry of that name sank while making it’s way from Stranraer to Larne. In one of the worst gales in living memory in these islands the ship went down when heavy seas caused the stern car deck doors to buckle and break open. Water then flooded into the ship causing her to capsize. Among the passengers who perished were Stormont’s Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister Major J M Sinclair, and Sir Walter Smiles, the Ulster Unionist MP for North Down.

Captained by the 55 year old James Ferguson, the vessel left Stranraer's railway loading pier at 07:45 AM with 44 tons of cargo, 128 passengers and 51 crew. Captain Ferguson had served as master on various ferries on the same route for 17 years. A gale warning was in force but he made the decision to put to sea. The ship had sent out distress signals in Morse code but due to the listing of the vessel continually gave wrong readings as to its actual location. The winds were terrific and visibility very poor in great storm that caused havoc across north west Europe that day. As a result ships sent to assist in the rescue failed to spot her as she sank and perhaps lives that could have been saved were thus lost. No aircraft was available to help locate her either.

Eyewitnesses reported seeing a lifeboat containing at least some of the women and children being smashed against the side of the Princess Victoria by the huge waves. The disaster shocked many people because, although it took place in extreme weather conditions, it involved a routine journey, on a relatively short crossing (20 miles) in what were believed to be safe waters. Just 44 people survived the loss of the Princess Victoria. The Captain and his officers did not survive, nor did any of the women and children on board. David Broadfoot, who had courageously kept contact from the radio room until the sea flooded it, was awarded a posthumous George Cross. The captains of the merchant vessels were made members of the Order of the British Empire. Officers of the HMS Contest were awarded the George Medal for their bravery in entering the water to assist the survivors.

https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofBritain/Loss-Of-Princess-Victoria-Ferry/

The Court of Enquiry into the sinking, held in March 1953 at Crumlin Road Courthouse in Belfast found that the Princess Victoria was lost due to a combination of factors. In a report of 30,000 pages the enquiry found that: firstly, the stern doors were not sufficiently robust. Secondly, arrangements for clearing water from the car deck were inadequate.

 

In summary it found that the loss of the M V 'Princess Victoria' was caused or contributed to by the default of the owners and the manager in that they were negligent before the disaster:

a) In failing to appreciate that the vessel was unfit to encounter the full range of foreseeable weather conditions on the Larne and Stranraer route by reason of the inabilit6y of the stern doors to withstand heavy seas.

b) In not taking appropriate steps to provide adequate freeing arrangements on the car deck or else to make the stern doors sufficiently strong and adequate to prevent heavy seas from flooding that deck.

The report concluded "If the Princess Victoria had been as staunch as those who manned her, then all would have been well and the disaster averted."

 

30 January 1972: Bloody Sunday –  British soldiers shot 26 people taking part in a Civil Rights March in Derry City. 13 were killed outright and another man died of his wounds later. Widespread condemnation followed throughout Ireland and abroad. The British Army claimed that its soldiers had fired at identifiable gunmen and bombers. The participants and survivors of the March and many independent witnesses refuted this.

The shootings took place as a major Civil Rights March was coming to an end. Sporadic rioting had broken out involving some hundreds of youths and members of the British Army. These developments were not unexpected and not seen as out of the ordinary at the time.

Then for some reason never satisfactorily explained members of the 1st Battalion, the Parachute Regiment  who were deployed in the City that day opened indiscriminate fire on rioters and innocent bystanders alike, shooting many people and arresting many more. At the time panic and fear were then quickly replaced by anger and grief. These gruesome events were a watershed for many Irish People and undermined any conception they had that the British were neutral in the North of Ireland.

To add insult to injury the subsequent Widgery Tribunal in April 1972 exonerated the soldiers involved of any wrongdoing saying that at most the firing from the soldiers was 'bordering on the reckless'!  

After many years of campaigning by the victims & relatives of that day there was a Full Public Inquiry held at the Guildhall in Derry which led in 2010 to the then British Prime Minister David Cameron to issue a Full Apology for what happened on Bloody Sunday 1972:

But the conclusions of this report are absolutely clear. There is no doubt, there is nothing equivocal, there are no ambiguities. What happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.

https://www.bbc.com/news/10322295

The men shot dead that day were:

Patrick ('Paddy') Doherty ( 31)

Gerald Donaghy (17)

John ('Jackie ') Duddy (17)

Hugh Gilmour (17)

Michael Kelly (17)

Michael McDaid (20)

Kevin McElhinney (17)

Bernard D('Barney') McGuigan (41)

Gerald McKinney (35)

William ('Williee') McKinney  (26)

William Nash (19 )

James ('Jim')  Wray (22)

John Young (17)

John Johnston (59 ) – died 16  June 1972.

 

29 January circa 598AD: Feast day of Saint Dallán Forgaill. Saint Dallán's given name was Eochaid, his father was Colla, and his mother was Forgall. His nickname, Dallán ("little blind one"), was earned after he lost his sight, reputedly as a result of studying intensively. He was born in Maigen near what is now Ballyconnel Co Cavan circa 530AD.

He is famous for writing poetry in particular Amhra Coluim Cille - a poem in praise of St Columba and considered one of the most important poems we have from the early medieval Gaelic world. The "Amhra Coluim Cille" became a popular text for students in Irish monasteries. He also said to have wrote Rop Tú Mo Baile /Be Thou My Vision; it opens with the lines:

Rop tú mo baile, a Choimdiu cride

[Be thou my vision O Lord]

This has been set to music in modern times and is a prayer that belongs to a type known as a lorica - a prayer for protection.

Saint Dallán was killed while visiting his colleague Saint Conall Cael at his monastery on Inis keel/Inis Caoil [above] off the coast of Donegal when pirates raided the island. Dallán  was reportedly beheaded.  He was buried on Iniskeel, his friend Conall Cael was later laid to rest in the same grave. Today the island has no inhabitants.

Dallán was recognised as the Chief Ollam of Ireland - the Bard with the most status in the Country really and was also a noted Latin Scholar.

The following works are attributed to Dallán, although some may be later works by other poets who credited Dallán with authorship in order to make their poems more famous.

1. Amra Conall Coel

2. Dubgilla dub-airm n-aisse

3. Fo réir Coluim cén ad-fías

4. Conn cet cathach a righi

5. Rop tú mo baile

 

28 January 1939:  The death of William Butler Yeats on this day. He died at Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, in the south of France.  He was Ireland’s most distinguished poet and playwright of the 20th Century. Yeats’ works drew heavily on Irish mythology and history. He never fully embraced his Protestant past or the Catholic Religion but he devoted much of his life to study in numerous subjects including theosophy,  mysticism, spiritualism, and the Kabala.

He was born on  13 of June 1865 in Sandymount in County Dublin, Ireland.  His father was John Butler Yeats, a well known portrait painter and his mother was Susan Mary Pollexfen who was the daughter of a wealthy family from County Sligo. In 1884 Yeats enrolled in the Metropolitan School of Art in Dublin during which some of his first poems were printed in the Dublin University Review. He afterwards moved to London where his father was based though he was often homesick for Ireland. Though he visited Sligo almost every summer. He spent time in the British Museum of Natural History doing research for such collaborations as  Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry ( 1888), Irish Fairy Tales (1892) , and A Book of Irish Verse (1895).

In 1894 Yeats met Lady Augusta Gregory of Coole Park and he became involved with The Irish Literary Theatre, which became the Abbey Theatre. One of the first plays to be performed there was Yeats’  Cathleen ni Houlihan, with Maud Gonne in the title role. The Abbey Theatre opened in December of 1904  and became the flagship for leading Irish playwrights and actors. Yeats’ On Baile’s Strand was one of its first productions. Of his many dramatic and successful works to follow,  The Countess Cathleen (1892),  The Land of Heart’s Desire (1894) and The King’s Threshold (1904) are among his best known.

As a successful poet and playwright, in 1903 Yeats went on a lecture tour of the United States, and again in 1914, 1920, and 1932. Yeats and his sisters started the Cuala Press in 1904, which would print over seventy titles. At the age of forty-six, Yeats met Georgie (George) Hyde Lees  (1892-1968) and they married on the 20 October, 1917. They had two children Anne (born 1919 ) and Michael who was born in 1921.

In 1916 the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin, and some of Yeats’ s friends participated in it. This prompted his poem Easter (Sept. 1916). In this year the first volume of Yeats’ autobiography Reveries over Childhood and Youth was published, with the second following in 1922 titled The Trembling of the Veil. In 1917 Yeats bought a Norman tower near Coole Park in Galway for his summer home.  The Wild Swans at Coole was then published in 1919.

In 1922 Yeats received an Honorary degree from Trinity College,  Dublin. He was elected to the Irish Free State Senate in the same year, and he served for six years before resigning due to failing health. In December of  1923  he established his International reputation when he was awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to work on his essays, poetry and the poetry anthology Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935. . As well as Coole Park he also spent time in his home ‘Riversdale’ at Rathfarnham, Dublin but also spent a number of winters abroad.

When he died in France at the age of 73  he was first buried there, but in 1948, in accordance with his wishes he was re-interred “under bare Ben Bulben’s head” in Drumcliff churchyard,  County Sligo.

 His epitaph reads: 

Cast a cold eye

On life, on death.

Horseman, pass by.

 

27 January 1944: Ada English - Patriot and Psychiatrist – died on this day.

Ada English (1875-1944) grew up in Mullingar, where her father was a pharmacist and town commissioner. She studied medicine at the Catholic University School of Medicine, Cecilia Street (now Temple Bar), and worked at the Mater Misericordia Hospital, Richmond Asylum, and Temple Street, before becoming assistant resident medical superintendent at Connaught District Lunatic Asylum in Ballinasloe in 1904. Ada spent four decades working tirelessly at the Ballinasloe hospital, until her retirement in 1942.

Brendan Kelly Irish Times 13 October 2014

These are the bare bones of the Life of Ada English. However her time on this earth was one filled with a pioneering spirit that pushed the boundaries of what was possible in this Country both on how we govern our own affairs and in how we treat our mentally ill.

Adeline English was born in 1875 in Cahersiveen, Co Kerry into a middle class family. Her father was a pharmacist and a member of the Mullingar Town Commissioners while her grandfather, Richard, had been Master of the Old Castle Workhouse in the town. She was educated at the Loreto Convent in Mullingar and graduated from Royal University of Ireland (she attended Queen's College Galway) in 1903, reputedly as one of the first female psychiatrists in Ireland.

Psychiatrists are medical doctors, unlike psychologists, and must evaluate patients to determine whether their symptoms are the result of a physical illness, a combination of physical and mental ailments, or strictly psychiatric.

She seems to have made some impression there as Mary Macken (later Professor) remembered her:

I remember her crisp blond hair, remarkable eyes and fascinating lisp. She struck me as being singularly adult. She was in fact some years my senior and tolerant of everything except incompetence or willingness on our part to put up with it. For she burned to get at her real work of medicine; it was for her as much a vocation as a profession.

Ada English- Patriot and Psychiatrist

Brendan Kelly Dublin 2014

At the time Ada started in her profession the treatment of mental illness in this Country was very different from now. The treatment of those with mental distress was based on incarcerating people in vast institutions with very little in the way of creature comforts or outlets for those unfortunate to be placed in them.

For a short period, she had an appointment at a London hospital before, in 1904, taking the position of assistant RMS at the Lunatic Asylum (St Bridget's Hospital), in Ballinasloe. When she started working at Ballinasloe in 1904, the asylum housed 1,293 patients, 774 of whom were males and 519 who were females. This number was to rise to close on 2,000! It was here that she developed the practice of the use of Occupational Therapy as a therapeutic to help to relieve the boredom and distress of the inmates. Ballinasloe was the first mental institution in Ireland to use electric convulsive therapy to administer shock therapy to patients – a controversial practice but still in use today on a more limited scale.

Ada English was also a committed Nationalist and Republican. Almost her first act in arriving in Ballinasloe was to have the buttons on the staff tunics removed (minted with Queen Victoria) and replaced with Galway’s coat of arms. She was out in Easter 1916 with the Volunteers in Athenry and was jailed by the British in 1920 and spent six months in prison for ‘seditious literature’. In 1921 she was returned unopposed to represent the NUI constituency in Dáil Éireann. She opposed the subsequent Treaty with Britain and spoke against it in the Treaty Debates:

I think it is wrong; I have various reasons for objecting to it, but the main one is that, in my opinion, it was wrong against Ireland, and a sin against Ireland. I do not like talking here about oaths… but certainly, while those oaths are in it, oaths in which we are asked to accept the King of England as head of the Irish State, and we are asked to accept the status of British citizens—British subjects—that we cannot accept.

Ada lost her seat at the subsequent election in June 1922 but did not drop her interest in politics. She assisted the anti- Treaty side during the Civil War and served in a medical capacity in the Dublin battles of July 1922. She maintained her opposition to the Treaty and refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Irish Free State. Along with other members of the rump 2nd Dáil, she played a part in that during the 1920s which saw itself as the true government of the Irish Republic.

She died in 1944 in Ballinasloe a much respected figure both locally and nationally. She is buried in Creagh Cemetery in Ballinasloe [above].

 

26‭ January 1316: The Battle of Ardscull aka 'Skerries’ on this day. Edward Bruce, the Scottish claimant to the Crown of Ireland, defeated an Anglo-Irish army led by Edmund Butler the Justicar, John Fitzthomas Baron of Offaly, Arnold Power, Seneschal of Kilkenny and Maurice Fitz Thomas (afterwards 1st Earl of Desmond).

‭The battle site, near the Motte of Ardscull (Hill of Shouts) was about three miles east of Athy, Co Kildare. Bruce had been making his way south out of Ulster, raiding and burning as he went but his men were tired and hungry by the time he reached this place. A terrible famine was sweeping across the land and provisions were in short supply. To put a stop to the depredations of the Scots, the Anglo-Irish assembled a large but ramshackle force to meet them in the field. In the event the day was won by Bruce who had an easy victory over the Sassenach, as he led his battle hardened veterans against what was primarily a scratch force of country yokels with a leavening of English and Anglo Irish fighting men. In the aftermath the Scots sacked the town of Athy.

After the Battle,‭ the Scottish dead were buried in the graveyard attached to the Dominican Priory in Athy, which occupied the area on the east bank of the River Barrow. Among those buried were two Scottish chiefs, Lord Fergus Andressan and Lord Walter de Morrey. The English lost two men worthy of note, Hamon le Gras and William of Prendergast. No doubt many of the lesser fry on both sides fell on this day as well.

This was the third defeat that the forces loyal to King Edward II of England had suffered since Edward Bruce had landed in Ireland the previous May.‭ The English charged with defending the Colony were mortified to be defeated once again and John of Hotham, who had been commissioned by King Edward to make arrangements for the expulsion of the Scots, sent a report to him that excused the loss of the battle with the words:

‘but by bad luck the enemy kept the field, losing however some of their good people, while the kings forces lost only one, thanks to God’.

Clearly being the bearer of bad tidings was an enterprise fraught with danger for one’s career then as now‭!

However it was Victory that was of limited use to the Scotsman as conditions rapidly became so bad that he had no choice but to turn round and march back to Ulster and the relative security of being in a Province where the Gaels of the North could offer him succour and his back would be towards Scotland and the promise of further help.

Thus this battle decided nothing other than that if the English of Ireland wished to defeat the Scots here and stop the Country slipping completely out of their control they needed better equipped and supplied forces than were currently available during this campaign.

 25 January 1917: The loss of HMS Laurentic OTD with 3200 gold bars onboard. She was an armed merchant cruiser converted from a passenger liner and was sunk off the mouth of Lough Swilly, Co Donegal after striking German mines. With 3,211 gold ingots each weighing 40lb worth a total of £5 million (net worth in 1917) aboard and intended to pay for war supplies, under the command of Captain Norton, Laurentic left Liverpool, United Kingdom bound for Halifax, Canada on 23rd January 1917. 

Around 5.55pm, 3 miles outside the mouth of Lough Swilly , off Malin Head, the Laurentic suddenly hit a German mine, striking her forward end of the port side, followed by hitting a second mine, striking the area of her engine room on the port side. With Laurentic sinking the survivors started to evacuate the ship in the lifeboats; as the power had failed, there was no light aboard the sinking ship. Laurentic sank within about an hour. The last person to leave the ship was the Captain. Those in the lifeboats were not safe – it was a terrible freezing cold winter’s night. The rescue was slow with some being rescued in the morning; others as late as the afternoon. Of the 475 people aboard Laurentic only 121 survived the tragedy resulting from an act of war.

About 45 minutes after the explosion Captain Norton, using an electric torch, searched the ship for survivors. He then boarded a lifeboat, and was the last to leave his ship.  He stated:

To the best of my knowledge, all the men got safely into the boats. The best of order prevailed after the explosion. The officers and men lived up to the best traditions of the navy...The deaths were all due to exposure, owing to the coldness of the night. My own boat was almost full of water when we were picked up by a trawler the next morning, but all the men in the boat survived. Another boat, picked up at 3 o'clock in the afternoon, contained five survivors and fifteen frozen bodies. They had been exposed to the bitter cold for over twenty hours.

Another boat, found 20 hours after the sinking, contained 17 men dead from hypothermia.[In total 354 men were killed and 121 survived: 12 officers and 109 ratings.] The survivors were given a civic reception in the Guildhall, Derry, where each man was given a ten-shilling note and a packet of cigarettes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Laurentic_(1908)

The following day, the Swilly Hotel where officers had dined the night before, was converted 

into a makeshift morgue for the casualties. Of the 470 crew aboard the ship, 354 lost their 

lives at sea. Many bodies were trapped below the lower decks as the ship sank, and were 

washed up for weeks afterwards. Some victims of the tragedy are buried at St Mura's 

Church in Fahan, as well as Cockhill graveyard in Buncrana.

https://www.govisitinishowen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/THE-SINKING-OF-THE-SS-LAURENTIC.pdf

Most of the gold aboard was recovered by the Royal Navy between 1917 and 1924, during over 5,000 dives to the wreck. The last gold to be found at the wreck site was in the 1930’s. Despite some unsuccessful efforts since to recover more, it is believed that 22 bars of gold are still hidden somewhere at the wreck site of Laurentic today.

71 of dead were buried in one large grave in Fahan churchyard with an ecumenical service. The Admiralty afterwards erected a monument over the grave inscribed with the names of the officers and men interred there. Of the 475 officers and ratings onboard, 354 lost their lives. Others are buried in the many graveyards around Lough Swilly and beyond.

https://www.donegalcoco.ie/yourcouncil/communicationsoffice/pressreleases/remembering%20the%20laurentic%20tragedy%20100%20years%20on/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Laurentic_(1908)

 

24 January‭ 1957: Sir Alfred Chester Beatty became the first Honourary Irish Citizen for his distinguished service to the Nation on this day.

Born in New York in‭ 1875 Chester Beatty made his Fortune as a Mining Engineer. He set up a highly successful mining consultancy firm in that city in 1908. By pioneering a new method of extracting copper from low-grade ore he made a Fortune in international mining operations. He was known as 'the king of Copper' and was a millionaire by his early '30s.

However tragedy struck in‭ 1911 when his wife died and he then moved London where he began anew. He remarried in 1913 and visited Egypt on the eve of the Great War where his already considerable interest in Oriental artefacts was whetted when they bought ancient Koranic scripts in the bazaars of Cairo. The dry climate there suited Beatty and he wintered in Egypt on many occasions.

In‭ 1917 he went further East and developed a deeper interest Chinese and Japanese paintings. In the inter war years he became one of the World’s greatest collectors of non western fine arts and was renowned for his great collections of Objects de Art that he amassed. He became a naturalised British in 1933.  During the Second World War he materially helped the Allied cause by ensuring that vital supplies of raw materials were shipped to the relevant destinations where they could be used in the War Effort. For these services he was Knighted by the British.

In‭ 1950 he decided to move to Ireland and it was here he decided to set up a museum for his collection of priceless artefacts. In 1953 he purchased a large house on Shrewsbury Road in Dublin and it was here that the collection stayed for many years. He was made an honourary Citizen in 1957 and when he died in 1968 was accorded a State Funeral. His great collection is today housed in the grounds of Dublin Castle where it is permanently open to the Public.

 

23 January 1803: The death of Arthur Guinness on this day. He founded a Brewing empire in 18th century Dublin whose products have spread around the World. 

At 27, in 1752, Guinness's godfather the Archbishop of Cashel, bequeathed him £100 in his will. Guinness invested the money and in 1755 had a brewery at Leixlip,  just 17 km from Dublin. He married his wife Olivia Whitmore in Dublin in 1761 and they had 21 children, 10 of which survived till adulthood. He wrote years later that:

"..one of my sons* is grown up to be able to assist me in this Business, or I wd not have attempted it, tho' prompted by a demand of providing for Ten Children now living out of one & twenty born to us, & more likely yet to come..."

* Arthur - his 2nd son

His big break came in 1759  when he came to Dublin City and set up his own business. He took a 9,000-year lease on the 4-acre brewery at St. James's Gate Dublin for an annual rent of £45. Dublin was then one of the great cities of Europe and expanding rapidly. There was a growing population of thirsty souls and a demand for cheap good ale to slake their thirst and drown their sorrows in a city of great wealth and abject poverty. Ale was overwhelmingly a drink of the lowers orders though. A good businessman had to come up with a product that would attract the attention of its customer base and sell at a price they could afford to spend on it. Ten years later, on 19 May 1769, Guinness first exported his ale: he shipped six-and-a-half barrels to Great Britain.

At the time Red Ales were all the rage and at first that is what Arthur Guinness produced. But a beverage dubbed ‘porter’ was becoming increasingly popular. It was a  beer the company has become most famous for – porter stout – which was based on a London ale, a favourite of the street porters of Covent Garden and Billingsgate markets in that city. Arthur tried his hand at it from 1778 and it took off - it made Arthur a very wealthy man. 

Arthur Guinness was not just a businessman though but took an active if not prominent part in the commercial and local government of the city of Dublin. He was one of the four brewers' guild representatives on Dublin Corporation from the 1760s until his death. Politics in Ireland was highly volatile at the time and Arthur Guinness steered a middle path through the dramatic and eventually bloody events of those years. He favoured Catholic Emancipation - but opposed the United Irishmen who wanted a complete break with Britain through Revolution. 

When he died in 1803 he left a thriving business that continues to this day. But the direct involvement of the Guinness family came to an end in the 1980s and it is now part of an international conglomerate known as Diago. It is still produced at St James Gate Brewery Dublin and the Guinness Visitor Centre there is the most popular tourist attraction in the Country.

22 January 1901: The death of Queen Victoria on this day. She died at her Royal home at Osborne on the Isle of White, England. Her playboy son, Edward The Prince of Wales, Earl of Dublin etc, succeeded her as King Edward VII.

Her relation with Ireland was always problematical. She became known as the ‘The Famine Queen’ after the disastrous events of 1845-1849 and during which she appeared so detached from the terrible sufferings of so many of her ‘Subjects’. She donated the miserly sum of just £2,000 towards Relief out of her ample personal Fortune. Queen Victoria visited Ireland three times in the early part of her reign: firstly in 1849 during the Great Famine; again in 1853 when she attended the Exhibition of Art and Industry at Leinster Lawn, Dublin, and the third time in 1861 when the royal family stayed at Killarney. It was to be 39 years before she returned again to visit this part her Realm!

Her last tour was a three week affair and generally considered a success when she made a formal visit to Dublin between 3 and 27 April 1900. During this time she drove in state through the decorated streets of the city and carried out a number of official engagements. As on each of these visits she was greeted with great enthusiasm by large crowds of well wishers as well as idle curiosity seekers. However it would seem there was a direct correlation between those who welcomed her presence and those who held political and social power in this Country at the time. The Ascendancy, the Gentry, the Protestant Churches and the followers of those denominations were the most enthusiastic. Amongst the Catholics of Ireland her reception was more lukewarm but not actively hostile either, at least at a personal level. The ‘Castle Catholics’ and certain sections of the Hierarchy were eager to ingratiate themselves but most kept their distance or were there for appearances only.

While she had affection for the Irish People as individuals she never seemed able to comprehend Ireland’s desire to manage her own affairs. Though reasonably tolerant in religious matters she was a reactionary in politics, viewing for instance the members of the Irish Parliamentary Party as ‘low disreputable men, who were elected by order of Parnell.’ As regards the Repeal of the Union she opposed it on the grounds that to countenance it would be repugnant to her Coronation Oath.

Her death was greeted in Ireland with regret by some but indifference by most. The Victorian Era was not one in which Ireland’s lot had improved but if anything declined - while there was no doubt that the converse had happened in her Other Island.

 

 

21‭ ‬January 1919: Sean Treacy & Dan Breen carried out an ambush on an RIC escort at Soloheadbeag, Co. Tipperary. They were members of the South Tipperary Brigade of the Irish Volunteers (IRA). The cart the RIC were escorting was carrying gelignite for a quarry in the Soloheadbeag area (about four miles from Tipperary Town and about one mile from Limerick Junction).  In the ambush, the two RIC men, guarding the consignment, Constables James McDonnell and Patrick O'Connell, were shot dead. It was the start of the Irish War for Independence.

We expected there would be an escort of about six armed police and we had the full intention not alone of taking the gelignite they were escorting but also of shooting down the escort, as an assertion of the national right to deny the free passage of an armed enemy.

The moral aspect of such a decision has been talked about since and we have been branded as murderers, both by the enemy and even by some of our own people, but I want it to be understood that the pros and cons were thoroughly weighed up in discussion between Treacy and myself and, to put it in a nutshell, we felt that we were merely continuing the active war for the establishment of an Irish Republic that had begun on Easter Monday 1916.

DAN BREEN

http://www.bureauofmilitaryhistory.ie/reels/bmh/BMH.WS1739.pdf

 

21‭ January 1919: The Declaration of Irish Independence on this day. The first meeting of Dáil Éireann was held in Dublin to bring together all the MPs still at liberty to attend. Assembling in the Round Room of the Mansion House, those members elected the previous month in the British General Election and not held prisoners by the British or on the run unanimously voted in favour of the Independence of Ireland. Of the 73 Sinn Féin MPs elected only 27 were present, 36 were “Fé ghlas an Gallaibh” (prisoner of the Foreigner) including Eamon De Valera and Arthur Griffith. From now on the members so elected would each be called a ‬Teachta Dála [TD] o‭r ‘messenger to the Dail’.  

The Declaration was as follows:

''Whereas the Irish people is by right a free people:‭ And Whereas for seven hundred years the Irish people has never ceased to repudiate and has repeatedly protested in arms against foreign usurpation: And Whereas English rule in this country is, and always has been, based upon force and fraud and maintained by military occupation against the declared will of the people: And Whereas the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, by the Irish Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people: And Whereas the Irish people is resolved to secure and maintain its complete independence in order to promote the common weal, to re-establish justice, to provide for future defence, to insure peace at home and goodwill with all nations and to constitute a national polity based upon the people's will with equal right and equal opportunity for every citizen...

We claim for our national independence the recognition and support of every free nation in the world,‭ and we proclaim that independence to be a condition precedent to international peace hereafter: In the name of the Irish people we humbly commit our destiny to Almighty God who gave our fathers the courage and determination to persevere through long centuries of a ruthless tyranny, and strong in the justice of the cause which they have handed down to us, we ask His divine blessing on this the last stage of the struggle we have pledged ourselves to carry through to Freedom.''

A‭ Ministry pro tempore [Temporary] Cabinet was then selected to run the Country for the time being and attempt to bring effect to the Independence of Ireland so proclaimed:

Cathal Brugha was the First President,‭ ‬Professor Eoin MacNeill was Minister of Finance, Michael Collins of Home Affairs, George Noble Count Plunkett of Foreign Affairs and Richard Mulcahy  in charge of National Defence.

 

20‭ January 1973: A Loyalist no warning bomb went off in Sackville Place Dublin on this day. The bomb killed a bus conductor and injured 17 other people. It exploded at 3.20 pm on a Saturday afternoon, as Ireland were playing the All-Blacks Rugby team at Lansdowne Road. The man killed was Thomas Douglas (21), originally from Stirling, Scotland. He had been living in Dublin for just four months. His mother was a native of Achill Island, Co. Mayo.

‭While no organisation claimed responsibility for this attack it was generally accepted that a Loyalist gang carried it out. The location of the explosion was almost at the same spot of a bomb the previous month, which killed two other members of Dublin’s bus service. A man with an English accent telephoned a warning to the main telephone exchange stating that a bomb would explode on O'Connell Bridge. But the warning given was ten minutes before the actual explosion and the Gardaí concluded afterwards that it was a diversionary tactic.

The car, a Vauxhall Victor, which had been hired, was hijacked from its hirer that morning at Agnes Street, off the Shankill Road in Belfast. The driver was reported to have been held until shortly after 3 pm, about the time the bomb exploded. In almost all the details, the hijacking of the car that exploded in South Leinster Street, Dublin on 17th May 1974, resembled this earlier hijacking. There was a report that the car had been seen passing through Drogheda at about midday. However, many Northern registered cars were travelling south that day on their way to the rugby international.

http://www.dublinmonaghanbombings.org/home/20jan73.html

No one was ever caught for this crime. But ‘deniability’ was the modus operandi of this shadowy organisation  and to this day the identities and whereabouts of the perpetrators are unknown - as is who it was who sent them on the road to Dublin...

 

18‭ January 1978: Britain was found Guilty by the European Court of Human Rights of the inhuman and degrading treatment of internees on this day under Article 3 of the European Convention on Human Rights. This decision was reached after a submission to the Court by the Irish Government of the day that Britain had tortured prisoners taken at the time Internment was introduced in August 1971. While many men so taken were roughed up and indeed beaten one particular group was singled out for particularly harsh treatment.

The British had learnt from their contacts behind the Iron Curtain that robust and brutal interrogation methods if applied in a specific and methodological way could prove effective in breaking a prisoner into confessing.‭ ‬It was decided that when Internment was brought in that a select group of Internees would be used as ‘Guinea Pigs’ to see if it was possible to gain information otherwise not forthcoming through other ways of interrogation. 

More than 1,000 people would be interned, but just 14 men would be brought to the secret compound in Ballykelly, Co Derry. They did not see it, for they were hooded, and they did not know for many years where they had been.

Their names were Jim Auld, Pat Shivers, Joe Clarke, Michael Donnelly, Kevin Hannaway, Paddy Joe McLean, Francie McGuigan, Patrick McNally, Sean McKenna, Gerry McKerr, Michael Montgomery, Davy Rodgers, Liam Shannon and Brian Turley.

The methods used were:

In depth interrogation with the use of hooding,‭ ‬white noise, sleep deprivation, prolonged enforced physical exercise together with a diet of bread and water.

Deceiving detainees into believing that they were to be thrown from highflying helicopters.‭ ‬In reality the blindfolded detainees were thrown from a helicopter that hovered approximately 4 feet above the ground.

Forcing detainees to run an obstacle course over broken glass and rough ground whilst being beaten.

They had been secretly moved from the internment clearing centres to a destination unknown to them and held for seven days.*‭ They had hoods on their heads throughout, and had no idea where they were. They were continually beaten throughout the time they were being subjected to this. Many of the men subjected to such an ordeal never fully recovered from their experience. Eventually word got out as to what was afoot and  Ted Heath, the British Prime Minister had no alternative but to tell his Intelligence Services to back off as a Public Outcry gathered apace.

The victims of these interrogation methods became known as ‘The Hooded Men’.

In December 2021 the UK Supreme Court recognised that the14 men held without charge in in 1971 were tortured.

https://www.rte.ie/news/investigations-unit/2021/1217/1267382-hooded-men-torture-files-northern-ireland/

* Ballykelly Co Derry

 

17 January 1972: In a dramatic escape seven internees on the Maidstone ship in Belfast harbour swam to Freedom on this day. The men were Seamus Convery, Tom Gorman, James Bryson, Thomas Toland, Thomas Kane, Peter Rodgers and Martin Taylor. They had planned their escape well in advance and the internees had saved their butter rations for weeks so that the men would be able to smear their bodies in a protective cover before they took to the icy waters of Belfast Lough. They also applied black boot polish to themselves for further protection.

 Approximately 850 people were present on the ship at any one time, consisting of around 700 British military personnel and 150 prisoners, including Provisional and Official IRA members and some others that were not involved with either group.

Straight after the delayed afternoon roll call they cut a bar on a porthole, slid down the hawser and swam in single file to the docks about 600 yards away. Meanwhile up above their comrades struck up a ‘Skiffle Group’ to cover any sounds they would make hitting the water. Overheard the British searchlights from the ship swept the darkened surface of the Lough but spotted nothing.

Up to this point everything had gone according to plan but on reaching dry land they realised that they had landed adrift of where their would be rescuers should have been waiting for them. Dripping wet and ice cold and dressed only in shorts and socks they eventually managed to gain control of a bus and by a stroke of fortune one of the group had been a bus driver in Belfast some years before. They made off down into Andersonstown and into a local pub where immediately they were offered help. Fully clothed and in a car given to them by one of the clientele they then set off to safe house.

Within days they were in Dublin and by their audacious and daring action they gave the IRA a major publicity coup that severely embarrassed the British Government.

 

16 January 1922: Michael Collins led the Irish delegation that arrived in Dublin Castle to start the handover of government administrative departments to the new regime. This came about when the British started transferring power to the Irish Provisional Government set up under the terms of the Anglo - Irish Treaty of December 1921 . They were met by Britain’s’ Lord Lieutenant FitzAlan who was to formally hand over the Civil Service for the area designated to be included in the Irish Free State. 

A volley of cheering came from Dame Street and immediately three taxicabs bearing Mr. Michael Collins and his seven colleagues in the Provisional Government whisked through the eastern archway and swung round to the entrance of the Chief Secretary’s office pursued hot-foot by numerous photographers. Mr. Collins bounded from his car through the hospitable portals, and was lost to view, to the chagrin of the camera men. Swift at his heels were Mr Cosgrave, Mr Duggan, and the others. They had all passed through before most of the officials, anxious to catch a glimpse of their new “chiefs”, were aware of their arrival.

Irish Times 17 January 1922

'The eight members of the new Provisional Government, in three taxi cabs, made their way past cheering crowds, through the Castle’s Palace Street Gate and drove up the hill into the Upper Castle Yard. Led by Michael Collins, these ‘Strange Visitors’, as the Belfast Newsletter described them, quickly made their way through the doorway of the Chief Secretary’s Office in the north-east corner of the Yard. They were observed by journalists and photographers, Castle officials and soldiers, and a few lucky members of the public.

Once inside, the party made their way upstairs to the Privy Council Chamber, a ‘purple and gilded’ room above the archway that connected the Upper and Lower Castle Yards. The original room no longer survives – that wing of the Castle was reconstructed in the 1950s – however, The Irish Examiner remarked that the ‘simple stateliness of the Chamber with its two great brass chandeliers, pendant over the red cloth-covered table which occupies the centre of the room, must have impressed the new Ministers’.'

16 January 1922: Remembering the Handover of Dublin Castle to Michael Collins | Dublin Castle

The Dublin playwright Séan O' Casey, described how FitzAlan handed over Dublin Castle and seemed to be doing it as if in a dream: "here's the key to the throne room, and this one's the key of St. Patrick's Hall, my good man".

The official account of the handover, released by Dublin Castle at 4 pm that day, read:

'In the Council Chamber at Dublin Castle this afternoon his Excellency the Lord Lieutenant received Mr. Michael Collins as the head of the Provisional Government provided for in article 17 of the Treaty of 6th December. Mr. Collins handed to the Lord Lieutenant a copy of the Treaty … and other members of the Provisional Government were then introduced. The Lord Lieutenant congratulated Mr. Collins and his colleagues, and informed them they were now duly installed as the Provisional Government … He wished them every success in the task that they had undertaken and expressed the earnest hope that under their auspices the ideal of a happy, free and prosperous Ireland would be attained.'

The Castle had been laid out circa 1200 AD on instructions from King John of England to act as a secure base which the English could use to conquer Ireland. Through all the centuries of strife, wars and revolts it had never been taken, despite serious attempts to do so in 1534, 1641 and 1916. It had remained the focal point of the Royal Administration down through the years and a physical symbol of the Occupation of Ireland. So the early hand over of this ancient fortress to the supporters of the Free State was a useful coup for Collins and Cosgrave as it showed that the British were serious about leaving the 26 Counties and thus getting out of Dublin forever.

Picture: Kevin O’Higgins followed by Michael Collins leaving the meeting with  Lord Lieutenant FitzAlan guarded by a pair of formidable Constables of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

 

14‭ January 1965: For the first time since the partition of Ireland the two current leaders of the respective parliaments on this island, Sean Lemass and Terence O’Neill, met in person. The meeting was held over cups of tea at Stormont, site of the Northern Parliament. O’Neill had approached Lemass through T. K. Whitaker, Secretary of the Department of Finance, and invited the Taoiseach to travel North. 

On the face of it this was a most unlikely encounter.‭ Sean Lemass was a veteran of the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. A long time member of Fianna Fail he held Ministerial Office for many years until he came to power as Taoiseach in 1959 on Eamon De Valera’s election as President of Ireland. 

Terence O’Neill,‭ despite his Irish name, was a true son of the British Empire. He had been educated at Eton and served with the Irish Guards in World War Two. He was later elected an MP and served as a Minister of Government in the North. A dyed in the wool Aristocrat he had taken over the top job as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland when Lord Brookborough retired in 1963. 

Both men were however anxious to bring about a thaw in North‭ –South relations and thus it was agreed that they meet to break the ice on this day. However not everyone was happy with this development and a certain Reverend Ian Paisley organised a group of followers to protest at this perceived outrage. Upon the Taoiseach’s motorcade arrival at Stormont they threw snowballs at his car. The following month the Reverend gentleman denounced O’Neill as a ‘Traitor’, but such an outburst did not stop the leader of the Unionist Party from paying a complimentary return call on Sean Lemass in Dublin later in the year that was meant to further cement the relationship. 

However events precluded a further development of such contacts.‭ ‬Lemass retired the following year and Jack Lynch, who had little interest in the idea, replaced him.  O’Neill then thought better of pursuing such contacts, which he knew clearly upset such a wide body of the Unionist population. He was well aware that Paisley was all too ready to make use of any further such episodes to undermine him at a time when the political situation in the North was becoming increasingly fragile.

 

13‭ January 1800: Daniel O’Connell made his first public speech at the Royal Exchange, Dublin* opposing the idea of a Parliamentary Union of Britain and Ireland.

O’Connell was concerned on two grounds,‭ ‬one professional and the other political.‭ He knew, as did others, that the end of parliamentary sittings in the Capital of Ireland and the removal of the MPs to Westminster would rob Dublin of much of its vigour and political and monetary rewards. As an up and coming member of the Legal profession he well foresaw the pecuniary consequences of such a transfer of power and patronage out of the Country. 

On the other hand Daniel O’Connell was as Irish as they come and as proud of the land of his birth and her People as the next man.‭ He rightly suspected that the British Ministers would attempt to pay even less attention to Ireland once the Union had taken place and a thorn in their side removed. 

‘On‭ 13th January, 1800, he attended a meeting in the Royal Exchange convened by a number of influential Roman Catholics for the purpose of protesting against the insinuation that the Union was favourably regarded by them. Being induced to speak, he opened his mind freely on the subject. It was the first time he had addressed a public gathering; but the diffidence with which he began soon wore off before the approving cheers of his audience. Were the alternative offered him, he exclaimed, of union or the re-enactment of the penal code in all its rigour, he would without hesitation prefer the latter as the lesser and more sufferable evil, trusting to the justice of his brethren, the Protestants of Ireland, who had already liberated him rather than lay his country at the feet of foreigners. To this opinion he continued faithful through life. It is the key-note of his whole political creed — union amongst Irishmen of every religious and political persuasion for national objects an Irishman first and then only a Roman Catholic.’

It is a curious thing enough,‭ he afterwards re-marked to O'Neil Daunt, that all the principles of my subsequent political life are contained in my very first speech.

‭‭* Now Dublin City Hall

 

11‭ January 1970: The foundation of ‘Provisional’ Sinn Fein on this day. The political organisation was activated after a formal split arose within Sinn Fein as to what was the best approach to take in regards to opposition to British Rule in the North and towards the 26 County Government. The more left wing members of the leadership like Cathal Goulding and Sean Garland wanted to operate a broad based ‘National Liberation Front’ [NLF] that would include both Sinn Fein and the likes of the Communist party within its ranks. They also wanted to recognise the parliaments in Leinster House, Westminster and Stormont as legitimate. Political Action within the current political framework was their chosen method of approach.

However to the more traditionally minded SF members these policies were anathema.‭  They wanted to pursue a policy of active opposition to British rule in the North that would include support for armed struggle to bring about a British withdrawal from Ireland. They did not want any recognition of the Partitionist States here. In an acrimonious Ard Feis that took place in Dublin at the Intercontinental Hotel a split emerged into the open that had long been brewing.

Despite the best efforts of Sean MacStiofáin and Ruairí Ó Brádaigh, who eventually led the subsequent walkout, the changes were finally approved by the party membership but not, however, by the two thirds majority required for an alteration of the party’s constitution. In the wake of these decisions they organised a walkout by a minority of like minded delegates who reconvened a meeting at Kevin Barry Hall on Dublin’s Parnell Street and duly set up a ‘caretaker’ Sinn Féin Executive to liaise with the previously elected Army Council.

Some days later the new group made its intent clear in a freshly issued pamphlet:

We pledge our allegiance to the‭ 32 county Irish Republic proclaimed at Easter 1916, overthrown by force of arms in 1922 and suppressed to this day by the existing British imposed Six County and Twenty-Six County partition states.

From then on the IRA split into two distinctive groups - one styled ‘Official IRA’ & the other ‘Provisional IRA’ with the latter being much more militant into how to bring about political change in Ireland especially North of the Border.

Thus were born the‭ ‘Provos’!:

 

10 January 1868: Prisoners off the last convict ship from England to Australia came ashore at Freemantle Western Australia on this day. The ship set sail from Portsmouth (after picking up people along the way down the English coast)  on 12 October 1867 with 280 convicts and 108 passengers on board. Amongst the convicts were 62 Irish political prisoners, convicted for their part in the Rising of 1867. About 17 of these were military Fenians. The transportation of political prisoners contravened the agreement between the U.K. and Western Australia, and news of their impending arrival caused panic there. The fact that military Fenians were transported was also highly unusual, given the United Kingdom Government's previous firm policy not to transport military prisoners.

The presence of Fenians amongst the convicts meant that there were many more literate convicts on board than was usual for a convict ship. Consequently, a number of journals of the voyage are extant: the journal of Denis Cashman has been known of for many years, and the journal of John Casey and the memoirs of Thomas McCarthy Fennell have recently been discovered and published. During the voyage a number of the Fenians entertained themselves by producing seven editions of a shipboard newspaper entitled The Wild Goose copies of which survive to this day.

While conditions on board would have been horrendous by todays standards the only death recorded on the convict shipping and description lists was for Thomas Cochrane (9689) and other sources say he died near Africa on the voyage out.

The Fenians were all convicted for treason and some of them were military men who were court martialled for failing to report or stop the treason and mutinous acts of others within the British Army.  Some were not definitely identified as Fenians in other sources and they have been given a "Fenian???" notation in the passenger list below. The Fenians were members of a Secret Society the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the name came from the US branch of said society The Fenian Brotherhood. Military prisoners were not supposed to be shipped overseas but in this case the British Government made an exception. The transportation of prisoners of any type to the Antipodes was becoming increasingly controversial and this human shipment was the last of its kind.

* Headline from the Perth Gazette & Western Australian Times 17 January 1868

When that last convict ship slipped into Fremantle on that January day 150 years ago,on board were a number of Fenian Prisoners. Their presence on the Hougoumont has kept the name of the ship alive, even though it deserves to be remembered by being associated with an end to a particular chapter in history. These Fenians, among them John Boyle O’Reilly, kept a journal during their voyage to Australia.  Their writings, are on a series of plaques, some of which you can see here, at Rockingham Wild Geese Memorial, which marks the point at which they made a daring break for freedom on the coast of Western Australia.

https://thesilvervoice.wordpress.com/2018/01/09/last-convicts-to-western-australia/

 9‭ ‬January 1980: Charlie Haughey made his infamous 'as a community, we are living away beyond our means' speech on this day. He started his address to the Nation by saying:

I wish to talk to you this evening about the state of the nation's affairs, and the picture I have to paint is not, unfortunately, a very cheerful one. The figures which are just now becoming available to us show one thing very clearly. As a community we are living away beyond our means.

I do not mean that everyone in the community is living too well. Clearly many are not and have barely enough to get by. But taking us all together, we have been living at a rate which is simply not justified by the amount of goods and services we are producing. To make up the difference, we have been borrowing enormous amounts of money, borrowing at a rate which just cannot continue. 

At the time the newly appointed Taoiseach was commended for his straight talking and his apparent determination to tackle the worsening Public Finances as the Economy started to go on the slide.‭ ‬But it was all an illusion as his Government failed to grasp the nettle and engaged in only token reform of the State’s Finances.‭ In the subsequent Budget, the Minister of Finance, Michael O’Kennedy increased PAYE allowances and widened tax bands, but also increased indirect taxation. Taxes on cigarettes, alcohol and petrol all went up, while duties on cars, television sets and gramophone records were also raised. But borrowing continued at unsustainable levels as Haughey fought to cling to power at any price by  spending more than the State could afford.

It was only in the late‭ 1990’s that it emerged that Charles J. Haughey, was also ‘living beyond his means’ with his extravagant Lifestyle as a Country Squire and a Yachtsman down in Kerry besides owning his own island there & was being financed by figures known and unknown in the Irish Business World. In particular his penchant for expensive Charvet shirts from Paris at a time when he told people we had to ‘tighten our belts’ raised much anger - but not a little mirth at the mans audacity!