Tag: Cork

#OTD in 1925 – Hugh O’Flaherty was ordained on this date and posted to the Vatican.

20/12/2022.Reading time 9 minutes.

When Germany occupied Rome in 1943, O’Flaherty and some like-minded friends hid Jews and Allied soldiers from the Nazis. They used convents, farms and even flats beside the SS headquarters. When Rome was liberated, 6,500 of O’Flaherty’s escapees were still alive. Monsigner Hugh was also amateur golf champion of Italy. From to 1942-43, Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty […]

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#OTD in 1845 – Frederick Douglass delivers a speech in Belfast | ‘The Cambria Riot, My Slave Experience, and My Irish Mission’.

09/12/2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

In 1845, as Ireland was descending into the despair of the Great Hunger, Frederick Douglass arrived for a four-month lecture tour of the island. Douglass had escaped slavery in Maryland seven years earlier, and had recently published his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. Douglass was greeted in Dublin, Belfast, […]

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#OTD in 1920 – The body of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, rested in St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark.

28/10/2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

After enduring a long, slow and tortuous death over the preceding 74 days, Terence MacSwiney, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Teachta Dála for the Mid-Cork Constituency of the 1st Dáil Éireann and OC of the Cork No.1 Brigade of the IRA, finally achieved his freedom, as he said he would at the outset of his ordeal […]

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#OTD in 1845 – Abolitionist Frederick Douglass speaks to a packed house in Cork on the subject of slavery.

23/10/2022.Reading time 1 minute.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen,—There is perhaps no argument more frequently resorted to by the Slaveholders in support of the slave system, than the inferiority of the slave. In the name of Christianity, I demand that people of these countries be interested in the question of slavery!

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#OTD in 1922 – Michael Collins is buried in Glasnevin Cemetary, Dublin.

28/08/2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

The seven mile journey from Dublin’s pro-cathedral to the Big Fella’s final resting place was lined with half a million mourners, many of whom, would have differed with him on the Treaty. After lying in State for three days, his funeral was held in Dublin on 28 August 1922 where 500,000 people turned out to […]

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#OTD in 1920 – RIC Detective Swanzy was shot dead by Cork IRA volunteers while leaving Church in Lisburn, Co Antrim.

22/08/2022.Reading time 2 minutes.

On 20 March 1920, Oswald Swanzy was in charge of a group of masked RIC policemen who entered the home of Tomás Mac Curtain, Lord Mayor of Cork, and killed him. Mac Curtain was also the leader of Cork No. 1 Brigade of the IRA. On 17 April 1920, a coroner’s inquest was held into […]

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#OTD in 1928 – Pat O’Callaghan wins gold for Ireland at the Olympics.

30/07/2022.Reading time 4 minutes.

Pat Callaghan from Co Cork made history by becoming Ireland’s first ever Olympic Gold medal winner. Little over six years on from the war of independence, the 1928 Amsterdam Olympics was just the second time Irish athletes were able to represent Ireland – the first being the Paris Olympics four years prior. Between 1896 and […]

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