This day in history

[macliam]

28th September

1912 - Edward Carson, Ulster Unionist leader, stages signing of "Solemn League and Covenant" against Irish Home Rule, with the threat of action by the Ulster Volunteers.

1920 - After an attack on a military barracks in Mallow, Co. Cork, British forces burn and sack the town.

1932 - Víctor Jara, Chilean singer and teacher, later tortured and killed by Pinochet in 1973.

1934 - Brigitte Bardot, French former singer and actress, born in Paris.

1964 - Following Ian Paisley's demand that the RUC forcibly remove the Irish Tricolour from a window at Sinn Féin’s Belfast headquarters, riots break out in the Divis Street area.

[Richard Frost]

September 29 1941

Babi Yar massacre begins

The Babi Yar massacre of nearly 34,000 Jewish men, women and children begins on the outskirts of Kiev in the Nazi-occupied Ukraine.

The German army took Kiev on September 19, and special SS squads prepared to carry out Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s orders to exterminate all Jews and Soviet officials found there. Beginning on September 29, more than 30,000 Jews were marched in small groups to the Babi Yar ravine to the north of the city, ordered to strip naked, and then machine-gunned into the ravine. The massacre ended on September 30, and the dead and wounded alike were covered over with dirt and rock.

Between 1941 and 1943, thousands more Jews, Soviet officials and Russian prisoners of war were executed at the Babi Yar ravine in a similar manner. As the German armies retreated from the USSR, the Nazis attempted to hide evidence of the massacres by exhuming the bodies and burning them in large pyres. Numerous eyewitnesses and other evidence, however, attest to the atrocities at Babi Yar, which became a symbol of Jewish suffering in the Holocaust.

[macliam]

September 29 1941

Babi Yar massacre begins

A truly horrendous set of incidents, even in the context of the horrors of the time.

Ukrainians were sadly not without guilt in this context... the hatred of the Soviets by Ukrainian nationalists and an expression of the antisemitism prevalent in Eestern Europe at the time made them easy pawns for the Nazis...... a fact played upon by Putin in his latest atrocities.

Babi Yar and the death camps for the Axis forces and the massacres at Katyn, Mednoye, Piatykhatky and in the Baltic states, as well as the Holodomor and the brutality of the Gulag system showed that neither the Nazis nor the Soviets could claim moral superiority.

Unfortunately, the UKs hands are also unclean, as the betrayal of the Free Polish Forces and the forced repatriation of anti-Soviet prisoners to almost certain death in the USSR rank amongst the least justifiable actions of WW2.

1155 - A proposed invasion of Ireland by Henry II is rejected at the Council of Winchester, although henry receives papal approval for such an invasion.

1678 - Count Peter Lacy, a wild-goose soldier who became governor of Livonia (Latvia) and a field-marshal in the Imperial Russian army, is born in Killeedy, Co. Limerick.

1898 - Fenian Thomas Clarke is released from Portland Prison - 18 years later he is executed by firing squad as the oldest signatory of the proclamation of Independence, after the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.

[Richard Frost]

1630 John Billington, one of the original pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, becomes the first man executed in the English colonies. He is hanged for having shot another man during a quarrel

1954 NATO nations agree to arm and admit West Germany.

[blythburgh]

24 September

1661 - One of the oddest entries ever.... "Faithful Tadpole was admitted as a clerical vicar choral of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin on this day". Son of John Tadpole Sr. and brother of John Tadpole Jr., all three formed part of the choir reassembled after the restoration, it having been suppressed during the commonweath.

1880 - The birth of a common term. A Co.Mayo land agent wrote in The Times: "...people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no workmen to do anything...." The land-agent who was sent to this 'moral Coventry.' was Captain Charles Boycott.

And when we refused to buy something or use a business etc we had a name for what we were doing. We were boycotting

[macliam]

24 September

1661 - One of the oddest entries ever.... "Faithful Tadpole was admitted as a clerical vicar choral of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin on this day". Son of John Tadpole Sr. and brother of John Tadpole Jr., all three formed part of the choir reassembled after the restoration, it having been suppressed during the commonweath.

1880 - The birth of a common term. A Co.Mayo land agent wrote in The Times: "...people collect in crowds upon my farm and order off all my workmen. The shopkeepers have been warned to stop all supplies to my house. My farm is public property, I can get no workmen to do anything...." The land-agent who was sent to this 'moral Coventry.' was Captain Charles Boycott.

And when we refused to buy something or use a business etc we had a name for what we were doing. We were boycotting

yes, as I said, a term derived from his name......

[macliam]

September 30th 1430

A great council meets at Dublin on on this date; it states that "Irish enemies and English rebels have conquered almost all of Limerick, Tipperary, Kilkenny, Wexford, Carlow, Kildare, Meath and Louth, so that hardly anything but Co. Dublin remains in the colony".

This evolves from the rebellions of the "Geraldines", the anglo-norman dynasties, like the FitzGeralds who intermarried with local lords and disputed the control of the English king. The Statutes of Kilkenny, in 1366, had complained that " ... many English of the said land, forsaking the English language, manners, mode of riding, laws and usages, live and govern themselves according to the manners, fashion, and language of the Irish enemies"

Nice to see that the Irish are formally declared"enemies" in their own land.

[Richard Frost]

2009 The Supreme Court of the United Kingdom takes over judicial functions of the House of Lords.

1991 Siege of Dubrovnik begins in the Croatian War of Independence.

1989 Denmark introduces the world’s first “civil union” law granting same-sex couples certain legal rights and responsibilities but stopping short of recognizing same-sex marriages.

[Richard Frost]

1963 A violent coup in Honduras ends a period of political reform and ushers in two decades of military rule.

1955 Two children’s television programs and a family sitcom all destined to become classics debut: Captain Kangaroo, Mickey Mouse Club, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

1952 The UK successfully conducts a nuclear weapon test, becoming the world’s third nuclear power

[macliam]

1963 A violent coup in Honduras ends a period of political reform and ushers in two decades of military rule.

1955 Two children’s television programs and a family sitcom all destined to become classics debut: Captain Kangaroo, Mickey Mouse Club, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

1952 The UK successfully conducts a nuclear weapon test, becoming the world’s third nuclear power

It says much that the UK decided it needed to spend megabucks to develop their own technology on something that they had helped their "ally" to develop during WW2. Now, of course, all that is gone as we just provide platforms for US weapons at huge expense. Just sayin'......

1691- Treaty of Limerick ends the Williamite War in Ireland; the treaty allows evacuation of the Irish army to France and promises tolerance of Irish Catholics, but the latter are soon forgotten leading to limerick being known as "The City of the Broken Treaty".

1961 - Ireland applies for membership of the European Economic Community on 1 August and also joins UNESCO on this date

1975 - Dr Tiede Herrema, chief executive of the Dutch-owned Ferenka factory in Ballyvarra, County Limerick, is kidnapped by the IRA. He is taken to a house in Co.Kildare and eventually released on Nov 6, after intensive negotiations. Dr Herrema survived and later donated his papers to the University of Limerick.

1981 - In the Maze Prison, the hunger strike for recognition as political prisoners, that saw the deaths of 10 IRA and INLA inmates between 5 May and 12 August, is called off. Four of the "five demands" made by the prisoners are conceded and the fifth - not to be forced to do prison work - is not conceded, but closure of the workshops stops it anyway.