1714 – Sir Wentworth Harman, MP for Lanesborough, ‘coming in a dark night from Chapel-Izod, his coach overturning, tumbled down a precipice, and he dies in consequence of the wounds and bruises he received’. Ultimately he was arrested for high treason and managed before entering the court to swallow a quantity of arsenic and died in the dock.

1846 – Birth of Wellesley C Bailey in Co Laois. He was the founder of international charity The Leprosy Mission. In India in the 1860s he witnessed the severe consequences of the disease and vowed to make caring for those with leprosy his life work. The Mission he established all those years ago is still active today.

1863 – American Civil War: Thomas Francis Meagher on Battle of Chancellorsville.

1864 – Birth of William Ellison, clergyman and the sixth director of the Armagh Observatory. On his appointment in 1918, he donates the original late nineteenth-century telescope to the Observatory – an 18-inch Newtonian reflector, made by the famous English telescope maker George Calver; for many years it is one of the largest telescopes in Ireland. During the 1920s and 1930s, Ellison and others use the telescope for observations of the planets and for taking spectral images of the stars, using a spectroscope to split the starlight into its constituent colours.

1875 – Teresa Kearney, better known as Mother Kevin, missionary and founder of Franciscan Missionary Sisters of Africa, is born in Knockenrahan, Co Wicklow.

1916 – Easter Rising, Day 5, British Reaction Escalates.

1921 – IRA Volunteer Patrick Ronayne of Greenhill, Mourneabbey, Mallow, Co Cork was executed at Cork Military Detention Barracks for his involvement in the failed Mourneabbey Ambush, where eight of his Volunteer comrades were killed.

1922 – Nicky Rackard, Wexford hurler, is born in Killane, Co Wexford.

1936 – The Daíl introduces a bill awarding pensions to the Connaught Rangers who mutinied in India in 1920.

1943 – Andrews resigns as Northern Ireland Prime Minister and is succeeded by Sir Basil Brooke, later Lord Brookeborough.

1958 – Aer Lingus service to North America inaugurated.

1969 – Terence O’Neill resigns as Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. He is succeeded by Chichester Clark.

1992 – Death of Dublin-born artist Francis Bacon.

1998 – Some 30 years after waiting on Éamonn de Valera and literary luminaries of the day in the Great Southern Hotel in Galway, 57-year old Rita Gilligan from Bohermore is presented with an honorary MBE by UK Culture Secretary, Chris Smith, at London’s Hard Rock Cafe where she has worked as a waitress for 27 years.

1999 – Ireland’s largest convoy packed with 200 tonnes of relief supplies for Kosovar refugees leaves Dublin for Albania.

2000 – It is announced that 100 free bicycles will be placed on the streets of Dublin for the Heineken Green Energy Weekend. The free bicycles will be placed outside Trinity College, outside Dublin Castle and at the top of Grafton Street and will be available to anyone wishing to cycle around the city to take in the atmosphere of the Festival.

Photo: Dublin Castle

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