#OTD in 1922 – The IRA kidnaps more than forty Loyalists Activists and ‘B’ Specials.

07/02/2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

In mid-January 1922 the Monaghan football team was arrested in the North on their way to play Derry in the final of the Ulster Championship. On 7 February the IRA responded by kidnapping forty-two prominent loyalists in Fermanagh and Tyrone and held them as hostages. A party of eighteen armed B-Specials, when travelling by train […]

#OTD in 1972 – As eleven victims of Bloody Sunday are buried, the British Embassy in Dublin is burned to the ground by furious demonstrators.

02/02/2019.Reading time 2 minutes.

In Dublin, over 30,000 – 100,000 marched to the British Embassy, carrying thirteen replica coffins and black flags. They attacked the Embassy with stones and bottles, then petrol bombs. The building was eventually burnt to the ground. The three days after the Derry massacre were marked by work stoppages and demonstrations in villages, towns and […]

#OTD in 1972 – Bloody Sunday Aftermath.

31/01/2019.Reading time 1 minute.

The day after Bloody Sunday, British Home Secretary, Reginald Maudling announces a tribunal of inquiry ‘into the circumstances of the march and the incidents leading up to the casualties which resulted’. After being denied the right to provide an eye-witness account of what happened, an emotional Bernadette Devlin, the 24-year-old MP for Mid-Ulster who had […]

#OTD in 1972 – In what is to become known as Bloody Sunday, the British Army kills 13 civil rights demonstrators in the Bogside district of Derry. A 14th marcher later dies of his injuries.

30/01/2019.Reading time 7 minutes.

Thirteen people were shot and killed when British paratroopers opened fire on a crowd of civilians in Derry. Fourteen others were wounded, one later died. The marchers had been campaigning for equal rights such as one man, one vote. Despite initial attempts by British authorities to justify the shootings including a rushed report by Lord […]

#OTD in 1967 – The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) is formed.

29/01/2019.Reading time 8 minutes.

The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (Cumann Chearta Sibhialta Thuaisceart Éireann) was an organisation which campaigned for civil rights for the Roman Catholic minority in Northern Ireland during the late 1960s and early 1970s. According to Joseph Ruane and Jennifer Todd, the ethos of the Northern state was unashamedly and unambiguously sectarian, although Senia Paseta […]

#OTD in 1764 – United Irishman, William Sampson is born the son of a Presbyterian clergyman in Derry.

26/01/2019.Reading time 3 minutes.

William Sampson was one of many non-Catholics who were disturbed by the level of discrimination and violence against members of the Catholic faith. Anticipating an insurrection in March 1798, as a lawyer, Sampson defended United Irishmen for anti-British actions and was imprisoned, disbarred, and banished from Ireland without trial for his courtroom and literary activities. After eight […]

Celtic Mythology | Five Sacred Guardian Trees of Ireland

12/01/2019.Reading time 7 minutes.

Tree lore is a suspected ancient school of knowledge with roots stretching back into our earliest symbolic imaginations. The Tree is a common universal, archetypal symbol that can be found in many different traditions around the ancient world. Trees are symbols of physical and spiritual nourishment, transformation and liberation, sustenance, spiritual growth, union and fertility. […]

#OTD in 1968 – Civil Rights March in Derry, considered by many as the start date of ‘The Troubles’.

05/10/2018.Reading time 5 minutes.

The protest movements that broke out across the western world in 1968 had captured the imagination of many people in the north of Ireland, leading to the creation of a local civil rights movement that began a series of marches and protests calling for greater equality for the Catholic/nationalist minority. The civil rights movement formed […]

#OTD in 2013 – Death of uilleann piper, accordion player, singer, composer, researcher, writer and lecturer, Tomás Ó Canainn.

15/09/2018.Reading time 1 minute.

The uileann piper was probably best known as a member of Na Filí, along with fiddler Matt Cranitch and whistle player Tom Barry, who brought Irish traditional music to an international audience in the 1970s. The Derry native was an engineering lecturer and in the early 1970s moved to work at University College Cork, where he […]

#OTD in 2013 – World-renowned poet and playwright Seamus Heaney died in the Blackrock Clinic in Dublin following a short illness, aged 74.

30/08/2018.Reading time 2 minutes.

“History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme.” ―Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney was awarded numerous prizes over the years and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995. He was born to a farming […]

Stair na hÉireann/History of Ireland

Tag: Derry