On This Day Posts

Cloughleagh Castle More than a decade of war raged across Ireland from 1641 - 1653. the Irish historian, Padraig Lenihan estimates that 20% of the Irish population perished in this conflict - some 200 thousand of the 1 million estimated to inhabit…

John Flanagan, the three-time Olympic Hammer champion athlete, was born on 9 January 1873 at Kilbreedy,  Limerick. He emigrated to America in 1896 where he joined the New York City Police Department. While in New York he rose to fame in athlet…

Dany La Rue (1927 -2008) was born Daniel Patrick Carroll on 26 July 1927 in Cork. He is best remembered as a theatrical artist who performed both in and out of drag. Here he is performing in 1976 in The Good Old Days, a BBC TV series which recreate…

Poet, lyricist, and writer Thomas Moore (1779 - 1852) was born on Aungier Steet in Dublin City in 1779. He was born into a prosperous Catholic family and attended private school supplemented by private tutoring. In 1795, he entered Trinity College f…

Francis Beaufort was born in Navan Meath on May 27, 1774. He served in the British Navy for over 50 years rising to rear admiral and appointed as Hydrophager of the Navy. He is best remember for the Beaufort Scale which relates wind speed to observe…

Some 4,000 United Irishman gathered at the Hill of Tara in County Meath in late May of 1798. They camped on the hilltop with the intention of controlling the main Ulster to Dublin road and also likely occupied the site due to its cultural significan…

The Battle of Clontibret, part of the Nine Years' War began on May 25, 1595. It would prove to be a two-day rolling engagement between the Irish forces of Hugh O'Neill (1550 - 1616) and the English troops of Henry Bagenal (1556 - 1598) Bagenal an…

Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington (1877 - 1946), suffragette, feminist, nationalist, and socialist was born in Kanturk Cork on 24 May 1877. On marrying her husband, Francis Skeffington, in 1903, they took each other's last names as a demonstration of equalit…

William Drennan (1754 - 1820) republican, polemicist, poet, and physician was born in Belfast on May 23, 1754. Inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions, he was one of the primary movers in the United Irishma…

1903 portrait of Lady Gregory by John Butler Yeats Isabella Augusta, Lady Gregory (1852 - 1932) was born in Galway on March 15, 1852. Despite being born into an Anglo Irish family, Lady Gregory would have a profound nationalist impact on Ireland. …