- 1921 John Dunlop (81), Scottish-born veterinary surgeon based in Belfast, who invented the pneumatic tyre (1887) in response to his son’s plea to make his solid-tyred bicycle go faster, died.
- 1960 Seamus MacManus (91), poet, historian and novelist, died. His wife, the writer Ethna Carbery, died suddenly just a year after their marriage (1902).
- 1969 Samuel Beckett was declared the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
- 1993 Nine Protestants, including four women and two children, and a member of the IRA died when an IRA bomb exploded prematurely in Frisell’s fish shop on the Shankill Road, Belfast.
- 1970 After a second ‘Arms Trial’, Charles J. Haughey, Captain James Kelly and Albert Luykx were acquitted of charges of conspiring to import arms to the Republic of Ireland.
- 1921 ‘This is a real nest of singing birds. They chirrup mightily one to the other—and there’s the falseness of it all, because not one trusts the other’—Michael Collins in a letter to John O’Kane on early moves in the Treaty negotiations.
- 1170 Richard FitzGilbert de Clare, earl of Pembroke, popularly known as ‘Strongbow’, landed at Passage, Co. Waterford, with c. 1,000 men-at-arms.
- 4004 BC Alleged creation of the world by God, as estimated by Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh James Ussher in the 1650s.
