#OnThisDay 1921 Brigade Commandant Sean Wall from Bruff, Limerick was killed when arrested by the Black and Tans. In the ensuing gunfight, Wall was hit at close range with a shotgun & found next to a dead police man. It would seem that they weren’t gonna let him go.
#OnThisDay 1981 Bobby Sands dies in Long Kesh prison after 66 days on hunger strike. He & the other hunger strikers protested for special status as political prisoners rather than criminals. Sands was an elected MP at the time of his death. He was 27 years old.
“Our revenge will be the laughter of our children”.
#OnThisDay 1916 John MacBride was executed in Kilmainham Gaol. The Rising took took him by surprise as he was in Dublin by chance visiting his brother, but he ended up joining in and was second in command in Jacob’s Factory. His role leading the Irish Transvaal Brigade in South Africa against Britain sealed his fate. At his execution, he asked not to be blindfolded and said:
“I have looked down the muzzles of too many guns in the South African war to fear death and now please carry out your sentence.”
#OnThisDay 1864 Sir Henry Wilson was born in Longford. Wilson, a Boer War & WW1 verteran & at one stage the professional head of the British Army, wrote that ‘a little bloodletting” was needed in Ireland. In 1922 Wilson was assassinated in London by two IRA men. There have been controversy ever since over whether this assassination was approved by Collins or not. Either way, his death sparked the shelling of the Four Courts and the Irish Civil War.
#OnThisDay 1916 Michael O’Hanrahan was executed in Kilmainham Gaol. His last message to Fr. Augustine before he was led out to the Stone Breakers’ yard where he was to be shot was:
‘Father, I’d like it if you saw my mother and sisters and consoled them’.
The Irish at War 