ON THIS DAY in IRISH HISTORY APRIL
5 April 1855 – The Dublin-Belfast railway is completed with building of the Boyne viaduct at Drogheda.
5 April 1962 – Guinness formally adopts the harp as it’s symbol.
6 April 1959 – Sean O’Kelly became the first president of Ireland to be officially welcomed on British soil.
7 April 1941 – A Luftwaffe bomb kills thirteen people in Belfast in the first German bombing of Northern Ireland.
10 April 1867 – George William Russell, widely known as ‘AE’, poet, mystic, editor, writer and artist, was born in Lurgan, Co. Armagh.
12 April 1914 – George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion opens in London.
15 April 1848 – Thomas Francis Meagher presents the tricolor national flag of Ireland to the public for the first time. He was inspired by the French tricolor.
21 April 1916 – Sir Roger Casement is arrested by the Crown after an attempt to obtain German help to win Irish independence.
22 April 1967 – Actor, writer, and novelist, Walter Macken, is best remembered for his historical trilogy Seek the Fair Land (1959), The Silent People (1962) and the Scorching Wind (1964), died.
29 April 1957 – Daniel Day-Lewis, best actor Oscar winner for My Left Foot and There Will Be Blood, is born.
