12 June 1954: The IRA Raid on Gough Barracks in Armagh on this day. In an audacious raid the Irish Republican Army seized control of a British Army barracks in Armagh and took 19 British soldiers captive while a party looted the Arsenal of its weaponry. This was the biggest raid carried out on the British Army since the War of Independence in 1921.

The barracks had been well staked out in advance with one of the IRA men joining the British Army some months before in order to be placed on duty there. With the information he garnered IRA GHQ were able to build up a comprehensive picture of the mode of operations of life at the base.

The operation was launched on 12 June 1954, from a farm just outside Dundalk. A large red cattle truck had been commandeered at the last moment and 19 IRA men, about half of the Dublin Brigade, climbed in and were informed as to what their target was. It was almost 3 o'clock on a busy Saturday afternoon when the cattle truck and a car drove into Armagh.

After overpowering the single unarmed guard on the gate the raiders then quickly fanned out and located the Arsenal. They had with them a huge bunch of keys (200!)* but finding the right key to the door proved something of a problem. Eventually the right key was found and in the men went to catch the astounded soldiers within completely off guard.

In less than 20 minutes the place was cleared out. The lorry carrying 340 rifles, 50 sten guns, 12 bren guns, and a number of small arms drove out of the barrack gates and back across the Border. The rearguard in a car followed after locking every gate and door for which they could find keys. At 3.25pm the first alarm in the barracks was given but it was not until 5 o'clock that the general alarm was given and by that time the big red truck was long gone....

This operation was a huge morale boost for the IRA after years in the doldrums and considerably raised their profile both at home and abroad. Conversely it was a huge embarrassment for the British Government and especially the British Army who had failed to secure a place of military operations under their charge from capture by enemy forces.

The barracks was closed in April 1960 as the British Army in the North re organised into Brigade Depots as opposed to Regimental ones. It had been the depot for the Royal Irish Fusiliers, Gough Barracks being allocated to that regiment in the 1880s and had been the regimental depot for more than half a century.

* the keys were later auctioned in America to raise funds for the IRA.

 

12 June 1922: A ceremony took place in St. George’s Hall at Windsor Castle at which King George V received the Colours of five Irish infantry regiments & one cavalry regiment of the British army who were disbanded OTD. These were: The Connaught Rangers; The Leinster Regiment; The Royal Munster Fusiliers; The Royal Dublin Fusiliers; The Royal Irish Regiment & the South Irish Horse. At the time of their disbandment they contained some 12,000 men the majority would have been Irish or of Irish descent. 

The reason for their abolition was the Treaty between Ireland and Britain in December 1921 which saw 26 counties of Ireland becoming The Irish Free State. As a result the British Armed Forces would no longer be able to actively recruit in the South and thus these regiments could no longer be sustained with new members to fill the ranks. Another factor was Britain had an overcapacity of men in the British Army at time that it was stretched to the limit financially. This was therefore a case of financial and political necessity allowing the Cabinet to conclude that they would have to go.

That day at Windsor King George V, with emotion in his voice, received the Colours saying:

Your Colours are the records of valorous deeds in war, and of the glorious traditions thereby created. You are called upon to part with them today for reasons beyond your control and resistance. By you and your predecessors these Colours have been reverenced and guarded as a sacred trust - which trust you now confide in me. As your King I am proud to accept this trust. But I fully realise with what grief you relinquish these dearly-prized emblems; and I pledge my word that within these ancient and historic walls your Colours will be treasured, honoured, and protected as hallowed memorials of the glorious deeds of brave and loyal regiments.

Their Colours were laid up at St George's Hall, Windsor Castle, to be kept forever in the care of the King and his descendants.

On their State Visit to the United Kingdom in 2014 the Irish President Michael D. Higgins & his wife Sabina were escorted by The Duke of York to the Grand Stairs in Windsor Castle to view the colours of five Irish regiments of the British army which were disbanded on that day.

 

11‭ June 1534: The Revolt of Silken Thomas on this day. Lord Thomas Fitzgerald or ‘Silken Thomas’ as he was more popularly known, was a young man of just 21 years of age when he rode through the streets of Dublin with a large band of followers, and entered the Chapter House of St. Mary's Abbey [above] * where the King's Council were awaiting him.

Whereupon with his brilliant retinue of seven score horsemen he rode through the streets to St.‭ Mary's Abbey; and entering the chamber where the council sat, he openly renounced his allegiance, and proceeded to deliver up the sword and robes of state.

A Concise History of Ireland by P.‭ W. Joyce

His father was none other than Garret Óg,‭ the Earl of Kildare, the most powerful man in Ireland. In his father’s absence in England to answer charges against his name Lord Thomas had been appointed the King’s Deputy in his place. But false rumours that Henry VIII had executed Garret Óg reached his ears. He concluded, without waiting to check the veracity of this information, that his father was indeed dead. He felt that no time could be lost in staking out his claim to lead the Catholics of Ireland in opposing Henry and his now openly Protestant Court. He that day renounced his stewardship of being the King’s Deputy in Ireland and declared himself no longer bound to King Henry VIII by word or deed.

Henry VIII treated his defiance of Royal Power as an act of open revolt and confined Garret Óg to the Tower of London,‭ ‬where Garret died two months later. After a bloody Revolt that lasted into 1535 Silken Thomas gave himself up when his forces were defeated and conveyed to London for Trial. He too was placed in the Tower and held in wretched conditions. He wrote home from that place of cold captivity a letter full of pathos:

I never had any money since I came into prison,‭ but a noble, nor I have had neither hosen, doublet, nor shoes, nor shirt but one; nor any other garment but a single frieze gown, for a velvet furred with budge [i.e. instead of a velvet furred with lambskin fur], and so I have gone wolward [shirtless] and barefoot and barelegged divers times (when it hath not been very warm); and so I should have done still, but that poor prisoners of their gentleness hath sometimes given me old hosen and shoes and shirts.

P.‭ W. Joyce

The unfortunate Silken Thomas,‭ born into a life of wealth and privilege, eventually was sent to the gallows. He was hanged alongside five of his captured uncles at Tyburn, London in February 1537. His epic Revolt marked the start of a series of Wars in Ireland against the growing power of a centralised Monarchy committed to enforcing English Royal Rule and the Protestant Religion in this Country.‬ 

 

10 June 1688: James Francis Edward Stuart, aka ‘King James III of England and VII of Scotland’ was born on this day. He was born at St James Palace, London. He was the only legitimate son of James II by his wife Mary of Modena. His birth triggered a Constitutional Crises in these islands as he was baptised a Catholic and stood to inherit his fathers’ Realms in due course. Later that year occurred the ‘Glorious Revolution’ and the deposition and flight of James II to France. It was rumoured that the actual infant died at birth and a substitute was surreptitiously brought into the birth chamber inside a Warming Pan. While this is almost certainly a piece of propaganda spread by the enemies of his father such rumours undermined his status in England in particular when he reached maturity. His birth thus triggered a series of actions that led to the ‘War of the Two Kings’ that was fought upon the soil of Ireland between 1689 and 1691.

On the death of James II in 1701 he proclaimed himself King James III. He was recognised by the followers of the Stuart Cause as the legitimate successor to his father’s Kingdoms. He was also acknowledged as such by a number of Continental Powers incl France & Spain. He also had many secret adherents within England, Scotland and Ireland. As a young man he saw action in the War of the Spanish Succession and twice attempted to establish himself upon the Throne. In 1708 he was thwarted in a landing upon the coast of Scotland. His best chance came upon the death of Queen Anne in 1714 when the Crown was vacant and before George of Hanover (a Protestant) could arrive to take it. But delay proved fatal and James’s Scottish supporters only raised the banner of revolt in late 1715. Their attempt, though initially well backed proved a Fiasco. By the time James landed in December support was ebbing away and after a few weeks he was forced to depart for the Continent. He never saw the island of his birth again. 

Eventually he settled in Rome under the protection of the Papacy where he took up residence at the Palazzo Muti and held a Jacobite Court there with funds provided by the Vatican, the Spanish Monarchy and his supporters. He thereafter lived a long but frustrating life. He married Princess Maria Klementyna Sobieska of Poland in 1719 and had two sons by her. She however died in 1733 and he never remarried. He lived long enough to see his son ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’ fail in his attempt to overthrow the Hanoverian Dynasty in 1745/46. He was known in his years of Exile as the ‘Old Pretender’ to his enemies or ‘The King over the Water’ to his friends and admirers in these islands. He died in Rome on 1 January [O.S.] 1766 and is buried in St Peters in Rome. 

In following such a record of broken hopes and unrelieved failure, the initial sense of disappointment yields gradually to a more temperate compassion. There is an indefinable pathos in the spectacle of this tragedy- king, parading his solemn travesty of sovereignty before an unromantic and imperturbable audience. When it is remembered that he lived to see no less than five sovereigns on the English throne, all of whom he had been taught to regard as usurpers, it may help towards understanding how deeply the iron must have entered into his soul.

Macaulay

 

9 June 597 AD: The Death of Saint Columba (aka 'Columcille' - Dove of the Church) on the island of Iona off the west coast of Scotland.

Columba was the son of Fedlimid and Eithne of the Cenél Conaill people. He was probably born in Gartan, near Lough Gartan, in what is now County Donegal. The earliest surviving evidence – that from his Vita/Life by Adomnán, written about a century after his death – tells us simply that:

‘the holy Columba was born of noble parents having as his father Fedelmid, Fergus’s son, and his mother, Eithne by name, whose father may be called in Latin "son of a ship''

When sufficiently advanced in letters he entered the monastery of Moville under St. Finnian, then at Clonard, governed at that time by Finnian. Another preceptor of Columba was St. Mobhi, whose monastery was at Glasnevin near Dubhlinn [Dublin]. The pestilence that devastated Ireland in 544 AD caused the dispersion of Mobhi's disciples and Columba returned to the North. However his following years were marked by the foundation of several important monasteries at Kells in the north midlands and at Derry in the North. After political troubles at home for which he was found at fault Columba left Ireland and passed over to the island of Iona in 563 AD. Conall, king of Dál Riata gave him the island to use as his base and there he founded his famous Monastery.

The people of Scottish Dál Riata shared a language, culture and political life with the Dál Riata of Ireland, and with Ireland as a whole. It is virtually certain that they also shared the Christian faith. Colum Cille came, therefore, to a Scottish Dál Riata which had already accepted Christianity. We can assume that he came to a landscape already dotted with churches, where priests and even an occasional bishop already ministered to their people.

What Colum Cille brought to Scottish Dál Riata was not Christianity, therefore, but a monastic community of brothers who would live and work and pray together. It is in this light above all that Adomnán seeks to portray him: as the father of monks, founding, teaching and guiding a community. He also portrays him as a man of power – not the secular power of kings and warlords, which Colum Cille had abandoned in Ireland, but the power of the ascetic, the contemplative. He exercises the divine power that is given to those who have rejected worldly power.

Colmcille: Life in Scotland - St Columba Trail

After spending some years among the Scots of Dál Riata, who were related to the Gaels of north east Ulster, Columba began the great work of his life, the conversion of the Northern Picts. After this the remaining years of Columba's life were mainly spent in preaching the Christian Faith to the inhabitants of the glens and wooded areas of northern Scotland. Of course 'Scotland' as such did not exist then as a separate country and indeed the word Scotland comes from the Roman word for the Gaels of Ireland - Scotii.

 

8 June 1739: John Scott, Earl of Clonmell aka ‘Copper Faced Jack’ was born on this day. Scott was one of the most ambitious and successful men of 18th Century Ireland - and one of the most notorious. His family were of middle income but in early life he befriended one Hugh Carleton and his father helped to finance Scott’s studies at Trinity College Dublin in 1756 and subsequently in Law at the Middle Temple. Admitted to King's Inn in 1765, he was entitled to practice as a Barrister.

In 1769 he was himself elected M.P. for the borough of Mullingar. His ability and determination to rise attracted the attention of the lord chancellor, Lord Lifford, and, at his suggestion, Lord Townshend threw out to him the bait of office. The bait was swallowed with the cynical remark, ‘My lord, you have spoiled a good patriot.’

In December 1774 he became solicitor-general, and in November 1777 he was appointed  attorney-general and a privy Councillor.  But his personal feelings did not influence his political opinions, and to his colleague in London he wrote: 

‘Send us two men, or one man of ability and spirit; send him with the promise of extension of commerce in his mouth as he enters the harbour, unconnected with this contemptible tail of English opposition, meaning well to the king, to his servants, and to the country, and he will rule us with ease; but if you procrastinate and send us a timid and popular trickster, this kingdom will cost you more than America; it will cost you your existence and ours’ 

He refused to be badgered into any premature expression of opinion as to the right of England to bind Ireland by acts of parliament, but astounded the house on 4 May 1782 by announcing ‘in the most unqualified, unlimited, and explicit manner … as a lawyer, a faithful servant to the crown, a well-wisher to both countries, and an honest Irishman,’ that Great Britain possessed no such right, and that if the parliament of that kingdom was determined to be the lords of Ireland, ‘he for his part was determined not to be their villain in contributing to it’

Scott, John (1739-1798) by Robert Dunlop

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Scott,_John_(1739-1798)_(DNB00)

He was dismissed but on the fall of Portland’s government he was soon restored and was more careful to not offend those above him in a Country and an Age when Patronage was everything to advancement. Being very much a careerist his noted stance on a principal was something ‘out of character’ for a man noted to crave the finer things in Life like power, money and social status.

 He was promoted on 10 May 1784 to be Chief Justice of the King's Bench and at the same time raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Earlsfort of Lisson Earl.  The King's Bench was the principal court of criminal jurisdiction and civil jurisdiction, and its Chief Justice was the most senior judge in Ireland after the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. 

Probably his most notorious act though was his hounding the editor of the Dublin Evening Post, one John Magee who was being sued by an associate of Scott’s called Francis Higgins aka The Sham Squire. The chief justice, influenced by personal and political motives, caused a capias ad respondendum marked £4,000 to issue against Magee. It was a tyrannical act, but in the state of the law perfectly legal, and would, as Scott intended it should, have utterly ruined Magee had not the matter been brought before parliament by George Ponsonby. The discussion greatly damaged his judicial character.  (Dunlop)

In 1789, he was created 1st Viscount Clonmell, of Clonmel, Co. Tipperary and in 1793 he was created 1st Earl of Clonmell. By the 1790s he had an annual income of £20,000 - a Fortune in those days in Ireland.

John Scott was a very able man but one who made a lot of enemies due to his arrogant and somewhat dictatorial manner. He was a man who took little care of his personal appearance and drank and ate to excess.  Though he does not appear to have been a womaniser. In his diary he made frequent resolutions to mend the manner of his ways but does not seem to have followed them through to any effect. He did not suffer fools gladly however and even thought little of his childhood friend Hugh Carleton. His nickname ‘Copper Face Jack’ came from his very ruddy appearance, especially when he had Drink taken - which was often.

While he had reached the pinnacle of success in chosen career of Law it does not seem have brought him much happiness. In 1797, in the last conversation he would have with his wife's cousin, Valentine Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry, he exclaimed:

 'My dear Val, I have been a fortunate man in life. I am a Chief Justice and an Earl; but, believe me, I would rather be beginning the world as a young (chimney) sweep.'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scott,_1st_Earl_of_Clonmell

Although his tendency was to make his position subservient to government and his own advancement, he ‘never indulged in attacks on his country,’ and never sought ‘to raise himself by depressing her.’ His reluctance to support the arbitrary measures that marked the course of Earl Camden's administration caused him to lose favour at the castle, and as time went on his opinion was less consulted and considered.  He wrote, in his diary on 13 Feb. 1798, ‘‘I think my best game is to play the invalid and be silent; the government hate me, and are driving things to extremities; the country is disaffected and savage, the parliament corrupt and despised.’ (Dunlop)

He died on the day the Rising broke out 23 May 1798. His subsequent reputation suffered even more damage when his personal diary was published some years later. While not written for public consumption it nevertheless put a further blot on his name as within its pages he vilified even those whom he was considered close to both personally and in Law.

The Legal historian Elrington Ball wrote:

"an extraordinarily able man and an equally ambitious one. As he has revealed to us in his diary he had from the first no misgiving as to the object of his life being personal success, and although he wore out his mind and body in reaching his goal he made it against desperate odds."

Ball, The Judges in Ireland 1221–1921 London 1926 

He was married twice and left a son and a daughter by his second marriage. He lived at Clonmel House 17 Harcourt Street Dublin. Today that street houses one of Dublin’s most popular and notorious [?] nightclubs ‘Copper Faced Jacks’.!!!

 

7‭ ‬June 1925: The death of Matt Talbot on this day. He was a reformed alcoholic who turned from a life consumed by Drink to one of physical hardship and mortification devoted to religious worship. Matt was born into a large family in Dublin City in 1856. When he was just 12 years old he started to drink and became addicted. He tried numerous times to give it up but met with only temporary success. When he was 28 years old he took the Pledge and kept it until his death 41 years later. A Priest advised him to follow the ways of the early Monks & Holy Men of Ireland in avoiding the Temptations of the Flesh. He henceforth lived a Life of rigorous Work and Prayer.

He fasted constantly.‭ His breakfast consisted of cocoa prepared the previous evening by his sister, which he often drank cold. With this he ate some dry bread. For his midday meal he had cocoa to which he would add a pinch of tea, and again drank cold. With this he took a slice of bread. His sister would bring him a small evening meal. If she brought fish he would insist that she take it home with her and would make do with bread soaked in the fish juice.

On Sundays he remained in the church for every Mass.‭ Only on returning to his room at about 2 p.m. would he break his fast for the first time since 6.30 p.m. the previous day. The remainder of the day was spent in prayer, reading the Scriptures and the lives of the saints. He gave all his money to neighbours in need and to the missions.

Matt Talbot mortified himself rigorously.‭ He slept on a plank bed with a piece of timber for a pillow. This left his face numb in later years. He slept in chains, which he wore for 14 years before his death, round his leg and on his body.

Reality‭ (July/August 1999), a Redemptorist Publication

He collapsed and died on his way to Mass on Trinity Sunday,‭ ‬7 June 1925 at Granby Row in Dublin’s Inner City. A plaque now marks the spot where he fell. His remains today are located at the Church of Our Lady of Lourdes in Sean McDermott Street. On his coffin is inscribed the following words:

‭'The Servant of God, Matthew Talbot’

On 6 November 1931, Archbishop Byrne of Dublin opened a sworn inquiry into the alleged claims to holiness of the former dock worker. The Apostolic Process, the official sworn inquiry at the Vatican, began in 1947.

On 3 October 1975 Pope Paul VI declared him to be Venerable Matt Talbot, which is a step on the road to his canonisation, a process which needs evidence of a physical miracle in order to be successful. His story soon became known to the large Irish émigré communities. Countless addiction clinics, youth hostels, statues and more have been named after him throughout the world from Nebraska to Warsaw to Sydney. One of Dublin's main bridges is also named after him. Pope John Paul II, as a young man, wrote a paper on him.