The Irish Book of Days - November

The Joyce River

November 1 - The Gaelic Athletic Association is founded to promote Irish sport (1884).

November 2 - The Toleration Act for Protestant Dissenters is passed (1719).

November 3 - Conor Cruise O'Brien, diplomat, political commentator, and writer, is born (1917).

November 4 - Six women meet at the home of women's activists Hanna and Francis Sheehy-Skeffington to establish the Irish Women's Franchise League (1908).

November 5 - William of Orange arrives in England (1688).

November 6 - Owen Roe O'Neill, a Catholic Confederate against Cromwell, dies (1649).

November 7 - The first public performance of Dion Boucicault's Arrah-na-pogue is given at Dublin's Theatre Royal (1847).

November 8 - Bram Stoker, author of Dracula, is born in Dublin (1847).

November 9 - The Dublin United Irishmen hold their first meeting (1791).

November10 - Fianna Fail's Jack Lynch replaces Sean Lemass as Taoiseach (1966).

November 11 - The first number of the Irish Bulletin is published (1919).

November 12 - Novelist John McGahern, known primarily for his novel The Dark, is born (1934).

November 13 - Ormond is appointed Lord Lieutenant by Charles I (1643).

November 14 - Seumas O'Kelly, playwright, novelist, short story-writer, and journalist, dies (1918).

November 15 - Garret FitzGerald, Fine Gael Taoiseach, signs the Hillsborough Agreement with Margaret Thatcher, agreeing that the constitutional status of Ireland will not change without the consent of a majority of the province's population (1985).

November 16 - George A. Osborne, organist, composer, and director of London's Royal Academy of Music dies (1893).

November 17 - The Irish Free State begins the executions of seventy-seven anti-Treaty republican prisoners (1922).

November 18 - In Dublin, a three-day conference to establish the Home Rule League begins (1873).

November 19 - Wolfe Tone, a Dublin Protestant who was one of the first nationalists and leader of the failed United Irishmen's Rebellion, commits suicide in prison (1798).

November 20 - Francis Andrews is appointed first professor of history at the University of Dublin (Trinity) (1762).

November 21 - The Parliament  (Qualification of Women) Act entitles women to sit and vote in the House of Commons (1918).

November 22 - Jeremiah O'Donovan Rossa, Fenian, contests and wins a Tipperary by-election in absentia, but is declared ineligible as a convicted felon (1869).

November 23 - Ulster poet Derek Mahon is born (1941).

November 24 - Laurence Sterne, clergyman and author of the experimental novel Tristram Shandy, is born (1713).

November 25 - The Irish Volunteers, a militant nationalist splinter of the Irish Parliamentary Party and nationalist version of the eighteenth-century Ulster Volunteers, is founded (1913).

November 26 - Saor Uladh (Free Ulster), a splinter group of the IRA, attacks a police barracks at Rosslea in the south of County Fermanagh (1955).

November 27 - Henry Robinson Allen, tenor and composer, dies (1876).

November 28 - The Irish People, a Fenian newspaper, is founded (1863).

November 29 - Ulster Volunteers' parliamentary reform bill is rejected by the Irish Parliament at College Green (1783).

November 30 - Poet Patrick Kavanagh, famous for his epic famine poem "The Great Hunger," dies (1967).

The Spirit of the Leprechaun - Ring of Kerry