This Month in Irish History - August
August 1st
1800: The Act of Union 1800 is passed, despite strong opposition, joining Ireland and Great Britain into a single kingdom and abolishing the Dublin Parliament.
The Act also stated that no Catholics were to be allowed to hold public office and made the Anglican Church the official Church of Ireland. Nobody in Ireland welcomed the Act.
Catholics had been encouraged by the English Prime Minister, William Pitt, to believe that the abolition of the Dublin Parliament would be accompanied by emancipation - the right for them to hold land and to practice their religion. It wasn't.
The Protestant ascendancy lost the status attached to having a parliament of their own and became small fish in the big Westminster pond.
August 2nd
1820: John Tyndall, physicist, mathematician and geologist, was born in poor circumstances in Leighlin Bridge, Co. Carlow.
He has returned to public attention of late as he was among the first scientists to recognise the earth's natural greenhouse effect. He was also the first to explain why the sky is blue.
August 3rd
1916: - Sir Roger Casement was hanged at Pentonville Prison in London for his role in the Easter Rising in Ireland. He was the last of those involved in the Rising to be executed.
His body was exhumed from Pentonville in March 1965 and reburied with full military honours in Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.
August 4th
1914: Great Britain declares war on Germany on the date commonly seen as the start of the First World War. 80,000 Irish men, both Catholic and Protestant, enlisted in the army that year, to be joined in later years by many more. It is estimated that as many as 50,000 Irish men died between 1914 and the end of the war in 1918.
August 6th
1781: The first stone of the Custom House was laid with its architect James Gandon, who had just moved to Dublin, looking on. One of Dublin's most familiar landmarks, it took another 10 years to complete and cost £200,000, a fabulous sum at the time.
On June 28th 1922 a fire almost completely destroyed the building and it's contents, which included many irreplaceable paper archives. It has since been restored.
August 9th
1850: The Irish Tenant League was founded by Charles Gavan Duffy with the aim of achieving ‘Tenant Right’ - the right to free sale, fair rent and fixity of tenure - by means of parliamentary lobbying. They ultimately failed in this aim, a failure which was frequently cited in later years by those who favoured militant opposition to the British government as an example of the futility of political activism.
1971: Internment without charge or trial is introduced in Northern Ireland in the wake of the deaths of 34 people that year in the 'troubles'. 17 people are killed in the rioting that followed and a total of 140 more by the end of the year.
August12th
1652: - The Act for the Settling of Ireland was passed, allowing for the transplantation to the West of Ireland of those whose lands are forcibly confiscated by Oliver Cromwell. Thus began a wholesale redistribution of land from Catholic native farmers to Protestant English settlers granted lands in return for their service and loyalty.
The dispossessed were told to go "to hell or to Connaught" (specifically the green parts of the map). There they found, in the words of Edward Ludlow, Cromwell's own surveyor, "neither water enough to drown a man, nor a tree to hang him, nor soil enough to bury him"
August15th
1998: An IRA bomb explodes on a busy shopping street in Omagh Co Tyrone, killing 29 people, injuring over 200 and becoming the worst terrorist atrocity of The Troubles
August21st
1879: A number of villagers in Knock, Co Mayo report seeing The Virgin Mary, along with St. Joseph and St. John the Evangelist in an apparition at the gable wall of the local Catholic Church.
To-day the site of the apparition is a place of pilgrimage with more than 1.4 million people annually visiting Knock.
August22nd
1922: Michael Collins, Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army, was shot dead in an ambush at Beal na mBlath in Co Cork during the Irish Civil War.
His killing, by those who opposed the 1921 treaty with the British which created the 26 county Free State in Ireland, left a legacy of bitterness in Irish politics that lasts to this day. Liam Neeson played the role of Collins in amovie about his life and death.
August23rd
1170: Believed to be the date when Richard de Clare, Earl of Pembroke and better known as Strongbow, arrived in Ireland at Waterford. He came in support of Irish Chieftain Dermot McMurrough in his quest to gain power in Ireland.
Although Strongbow and his descendents would eventually become "more Irish than the Irish themselves", his arrival led to the Anglo-Norman invasion and the beginning of English occupation in Ireland.
August27th
1979: An IRA bomb at Mullaghmore in Sligo kills Lord Mountbatten, uncle of the Duke of Edinburgh, and three others - Baronness Brabourne, 14 year old Nicholas Knatchbull and a 15 year old crew member Paul Maxwell.
Lord Mountbatten had a holiday home in Sligo and was killed while on a fishing trip when a 50lb radio controlled bomb was detonated on his boat.
On the same day an IRA ambush killed 18 British soldiers at Warrenpoint in Northern Ireland.
August29th
1844: Edmund Ignatius Rice was born in this thatched house in Callan in Co Kilkenny, which is now open to the public.
He went on to found the Christian Brothers and the Presentation Brothers, two orders of religious who were, and still are, deeply involved in the education of boys in Ireland and abroad.
1975: Éamon de Valera, Ireland's first Taoiseach (prime minister) and third President died aged 86. He played a central role in the 1916 rising, the subsequent Treaty negotiations and the emergence of Ireland as first a free state and then a republic.
His involvement in public life continued unbroken until he left the presidency, after serving two terms, in 1973.
August30th
1841: The Cork Examiner newspaper, now known as The Irish Examiner, was published for the first time. In it's early years the paper was a staunch supporter of the Catholic Emancipation and tenant rights at a time when most newspapers were published for and supported the ascendancy landowning classes.
August31st
1869: Mary Ward died when she fell from a car as it rounded a bend in Co Down, gaining her the dubious distinction of being the first recorded fatality in a car accident.
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