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Category Archives: Northern Ireland


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Birth of Norman Stronge, 8th Baronet & UUP Politician

Sir Charles Norman Lockhart Stronge, 8th Baronet, senior Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) politician in Northern Ireland, is born on July 23, 1894, in Bryansford, County Down.

Stronge is the only son among two children of Sir Charles Edmond Sinclair Stronge (1862–1939) of Tynan Abbey, County Armagh, and Marian Iliff Stronge (née Bostock) of Walton Heath, Epsom, England. The family holds one of Ulster‘s oldest baronetcies and has a distinguished tradition in public life. Educated at Eton College, he serves in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers during World War I and is mentioned in dispatches by Sir Douglas Haig after the opening Battle on the Somme in July 1916. He is awarded the Military Cross (MC) and the Belgian Croix de guerre. After the war he begins farming in County Londonderry. While in Londonderry he serves as High Sheriff of the county from 1934. Seven years later he moves to his ancestral home, Tynan Abbey, on the death of his cousin Sir James Stronge. He becomes the 8th Baronet in 1939, a year after his election to the House of Commons for Northern Ireland for Mid Armagh. He is appointed High Sheriff for Armagh in 1940.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Stronge joins the North Irish Horse as a lieutenant but has to relinquish his commission the following year due to ill health. He is then granted the rank of captain. Resuming his political career, he becomes Assistant Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Finance (Assistant Whip) (1941–42) and then Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Finance (Chief Whip) (1942–44). His period as Chief Whip is marked by more robust and “fluid” debate within the party and significant backbench discontent in early 1943. In June 1944 he is elected chairman of Armagh County Council, and in the following year is returned unopposed in the general election. He becomes Speaker of the House of Commons of Northern Ireland in 1945 and in this position he earns the respect of, and makes friends with, politicians of every hue, and is regarded as a moderating influence. It has been said of him that he disproved the myth that politicians at Stormont never spoke to each other. He is unopposed in every postwar election up to 1965, when he sees off the challenge of the Liberal candidate. He does not contest the 1969 general election. He is made Chevalier of the Order of Leopold in 1946 and in the same year is appointed to the Privy Council of Northern Ireland. A member of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, he is a delegate to its 1950 conference in New Zealand. Another interest is the Royal Over-Seas League, of which he is president for a time.

Stronge is closely associated with Sir Basil Brooke, Dame Dehra Parker and Sir Henry Mulholland. He is president of the Northern Ireland area council of the Royal British Legion, sovereign grand master of the Royal Black Institution, president of the Federation of Boys’ Clubs, and chairman of the Commercial Insurance Co. and of the Central Advisory Council for the Employment of the Disabled. It is this last position that causes a brief interruption of his speakership, with an act of parliament deemed necessary to remove any doubt about it having been an office of profit. A prominent member of the Orange Order, he is also chairman of the BBC appeals advisory committee and the Northern Ireland scout council. His retirement from public life in 1977 is marked by his investiture as a Knight of Grace by Prince Richard, Duke of Gloucester.

A leading member of the Church of Ireland, Stronge becomes Commander of the Order of Saint John in 1952 and is for many years on the Armagh diocesan synod and council. Until his death, he is a nominator for the position of rector and reads the lessons each Sunday morning in Tynan parish church. In September 1921 he marries Gladys Olive, daughter of Major Henry Thomas Hall of Knockbrack, Athenry, County Galway. They have three daughters and a son, James. In his later life he lives with James, a bachelor, on their 800-acre estate near the border. James is educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. He succeeds his father in the Mid Armagh constituency in 1969, serving as Ulster Unionist MP in the Stormont parliament until 1972. He is firmly opposed to the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973, which he describes as a “great act of political appeasement.” Although both are known in the locality, neither seeks public attention and both live relatively quiet lives. Stronge likes to work in the garden but has little interest in the farm, most of which is let out to tenants.

Stronge and his son become prominent victims of the Troubles when a unit of the Provisional Irish Republican Army shoots them dead on January 21, 1981, at Tynan Abbey and sets the mansion alight, destroying it. The Provisional IRA statement describes them as “symbols of hated unionism” and their killings as “direct reprisal for a whole series of loyalist assassinations and murder attacks on nationalist people.” The killings come five days after an attempted assassination of the former MP Bernadette Devlin McAliskey and her husband. Tynan Abbey is long held to have been an easy target, given its relative isolation and its proximity to the border. In 1985 a man is tried for their murders but is acquitted. In 1999 the shell of Tynan Abbey is demolished.

(From: “Stronge, Sir Charles Norman Lockhart” by Tom Feeney, Dictionary of Irish Biography, http://www.dib.ie, October 2009)


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Preparations Commence for the Plantation of Ulster

On July 19, 1608, preparations commence for the plantation of six Ulster counties of Armagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal, Fermanagh, and Tyrone.

The Plantation of Ulster is the organised colonisation, or plantation, of the Irish province of Ulster by people from Great Britain during the reign of King James I. Most of the settlers, or planters, come from southern Scotland and northern England. Their culture differs from that of the native Irish. Small privately funded plantations by wealthy landowners begin in 1606, while the official plantation begins in 1609. Most of the colonised land had been confiscated from the native Gaelic chiefs, several of whom had fled Ireland for mainland Europe in 1607 following the Nine Years’ War against English rule. The official plantation comprises an estimated half a million acres of arable land in counties Armagh, Cavan, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Donegal, and Coleraine. Land in counties Antrim, Down, and Monaghan is privately colonised with the king’s support.

Among those involved in planning and overseeing the plantation are King James, the Lord Deputy of Ireland, Arthur Chichester, and the Attorney-General for Ireland, John Davies. They see the plantation as a means of controlling, anglicising, and “civilising” Ulster. The province is almost wholly Gaelic, Catholic, and rural and has been the region most resistant to English control. The plantation is also meant to sever Gaelic Ulster’s links with the Gaelic Highlands of Scotland. The colonists, or “British tenants,” are required to be English-speaking, Protestant and loyal to the king. Some of the undertakers and settlers, however, are Catholic. The Scottish settlers are mostly Presbyterian Lowlanders and the English mostly Anglican Northerners. Although some “loyal” natives are granted land, the native Irish reaction to the plantation is generally hostile, and native writers bewail what they see as the decline of Gaelic society and the influx of foreigners.

The Plantation of Ulster is the biggest of the Plantations of Ireland. It leads to the founding of many of Ulster’s towns and creates a lasting Ulster Protestant community in the province with ties to Britain. It also results in many of the native Irish nobility losing their land and leads to centuries of ethnic and sectarian animosity, which at times spills into conflict, notably in the Irish Rebellion of 1641 and, more recently, the Troubles.


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Death of George William Russell, Writer, Critic & Poet

George William Russell, Irish writer, editor, critic, poet, painter and Irish nationalist, dies of cancer in Bournemouth, England, on July 17, 1935.

Russell is born on April 10, 1867, in Lurgan, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland. He writes with the pseudonym Æ (often written AE or A.E.). He is also a writer on mysticism, and a central figure in the group of devotees of theosophy which meets in Dublin for many years. He takes his pseudonym from a proofreader’s query about his earlier pseudonym, “AEon.”

Russell is the second son of Thomas Russell and Mary Armstrong. His father, the son of a small farmer, becomes an employee of Thomas Bell and Co., a prosperous firm of linen drapers. The family relocates to Dublin, where his father has a new offer of employment, when he is eleven years old.

Russell is educated at Rathmines School and the Metropolitan School of Art, where he begins a lifelong, if sometimes contentious, friendship with W. B. Yeats. In the 1880s, he lives at the Theosophical Society lodge at 3 Upper Ely Place, sharing rooms with Hamilton Malcolm Magee, the brother of William Kirkpatrick Magee.

Following his time at the Metropolitan School of Art, Russell becomes an accounts clerk in a drapery store but leaves in 1897 to organize agricultural cooperatives. Eventually he becomes editor of the periodicals Irish Homestead (1905–23) and The Irish Statesman (1923–30). In 1894 he publishes the first of many books of verse, Homeward: Songs by the Way, which establishes him in what is known as the Irish Literary Revival. His first volume of Collected Poems appears in 1913 and a second in 1926. He maintains a lifelong interest in theosophy, the origins of religion, and mystical experience. Candle of Vision: Autobiography of a Mystic (1918) is the best guide to his religious beliefs.

At the turn of the 20th century, Russell is considered by many to be the equal of Yeats, but he does not continue to grow and develop as Yeats does. He is prolific and versatile, but many critics find his poetry facile, vague, and monotonous, with “rather too much of the Celtic Twilight” in it.

Russell designs the famous Starry Plough flag for the Irish Citizen Army, which is unveiled on April 5, 1914, and flown during the Easter Rising in April 1916.

Russell, who had become increasingly unhappy in the Irish Free State which, according to Yeats, he called “a country given over to the Devil,” moves to England soon after his wife’s death in 1932. Despite his failing health he goes on a final lecture tour in the United States but returns home utterly exhausted. He dies of cancer in Bournemouth, England, on July 17, 1935. His body is brought back to Ireland, and he is interred in Mount Jerome Cemetery, Dublin.


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Death of Patrick Mayhew, British Barrister, Politician & Northern Ireland Secretary

Patrick Barnabas Burke Mayhew, Baron Mayhew of Twysden, PC, QC, DL, British barrister, politician and Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, who serves during a critical period in the Northern Ireland peace process, dies at his home in Kent, England, on June 25, 2016. He is a key figure in the December 1993 Downing Street Declaration which leads to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire on August 31, 1994

Mayhew is born on September 11, 1929. His father, George Mayhew, is a decorated army officer turned oil executive. His mother, Sheila Roche, descendant of members of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, is a relative of James Roche, 3rd Baron Fermoy, an Irish National Federation MP for East Kerry. Through his father, Mayhew is descended from the Victorian social commentator Henry Mayhew. He is educated at Tonbridge School, an all boys public school in Tonbridge, Kent.

Mayhew then serves as an officer in the 4th/7th Royal Dragoon Guards, studies law at Balliol College, Oxford, and is president of the Oxford University Conservative Association (OUCA) and of the Oxford Union. He is called to the Bar by the Middle Temple in 1955.

In 1963, Mayhew marries The Rev. Jean Gurney, and they have four sons.

Mayhew contests Dulwich at the 1970 United Kingdom general election, but the incumbent Labour Party member, Samuel Silkin, beats him by 895 votes. He is Member of Parliament (MP) for Tunbridge Wells from its creation at the February 1974 United Kingdom general election, standing down at the 1997 United Kingdom general election.

Mayhew is Under Secretary of Employment from 1979 to 1981, then Minister of State at the Home Office from 1981 to 1983. After this, he serves as Solicitor General for England and Wales from 1983 to 1987, and then Attorney General for England and Wales and simultaneously Attorney General for Northern Ireland from 1987 to 1992.

Mayhew is Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 1992 to 1997, the longest anyone has served in this office.

Mayhew is one of only five Ministers (Tony Newton, Kenneth Clarke, Malcolm Rifkind and Lynda Chalker are the others) to serve throughout the whole 18 years of the premiership of Margaret Thatcher and John Major. This represents the longest uninterrupted Ministerial service in Britain since Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, in the early 19th century.

Mayhew is knighted in 1983. On June 1997, he is given a life peerage as Baron Mayhew of Twysden, of Kilndown in the County of Kent. He retires from the House of Lords on June 1, 2015.

Mayhew suffers from cancer and Parkinson’s disease in his later years. He dies at the age of 86 on June 25, 2016, in his home in Kent.

Mayhew’s son, The Honourable Henry Mayhew, appears in the fourth episode of the series The Secret History Of Our Streets, discussing life in the Portland Road, Notting Hill, London. Another son, Tristram, co-founds the outdoor adventure company Go Ape. His son Jerome is the Conservative Party MP for the constituency of Broadland in Norfolk since December 2019.


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Birth of Fra McCann, IRA Volunteer & Sinn Féin Politician

Fra McCann, Irish politician, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on June 19, 1953. He becomes active in the Irish republican movement and is imprisoned in the 1970s for membership of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. He also takes part in the blanket protest while in prison. In 1987, he is elected to Belfast City Council in a by-election, representing Sinn Féin.

McCann grows up in the Falls Road area of West Belfast. He is educated at St. Comgalls Primary School on Divis Street and later at St. Peters Secondary School off the Whiterock Road.

McCann is interned on the prison ship HMS Maidstone from February 14 until March 14, 1972, when he is moved to Long Kesh Detention Centre.

McCann is released from Long Kesh on May 9, 1972, then rearrested in November 1972 and re-interned until December 1975. During this period of internment, he is sentenced to nine months for escaping from Long Kesh through a tunnel. During this escape, IRA volunteer Hugh Coney is murdered by British soldiers.

McCann is arrested again in November 1976 and imprisoned in Crumlin Road Gaol where he spends six months on remand before being sentenced to three years. He joins the blanket protest in Crumlin Road Gaol where he and his comrades are held in solitary confinement until August 1978 when they are moved to the H-Blocks in Long Kesh, joining hundreds more on the blanket protest. He is released on November 22, 1979.

Upon his release, McCann travels throughout Ireland with other ex-prisoner’s highlighting the inhumanity in the H-Blocks. He travels throughout the United States in 1980 during which time he is arrested and spends 17 days in prison in New York. In 1981, he travels to Canada where he helps form H-Block committees and raises awareness about the hunger strike.

On his return to Ireland McCann is elected to sit on the National H-Block Committee and speaks at many events in support of the hunger strike. In the aftermath of the hunger strike he helps reorganise Sinn Féin in the Falls area.

McCann is elected to Belfast City Council in 1987 and sits on the Strategic Policy and Resources Committee and the Parks and Leisure committee. He is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly representing Belfast West in 2003 and again in 2007, 2012 and 2018. While there he sits on the Finance and Personnel Committee and the Committee for Social Development.

In June 2006, McCann is charged with assault and disorderly behaviour following an incident in west Belfast. The incident occurs as the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) are attempting to arrest a teenager for attempted robbery. However, he claims heavy-handedness by the police and states, “I tried to put myself between one of the officers and the girl when the police officer radioed for assistance.” He is released on bail.

In October 2021, McCann announces that he would be stepping down as Member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) for Belfast West and would not be contesting the next election.


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Birth of Colin Bateman, Novelist, Screenwriter & Journalist

Colin Bateman, novelist, screenwriter and former journalist known mononymously as Bateman, is born on June 13, 1962, in Newtownards, County Down, Northern Ireland.

Bateman attends Bangor Grammar School leaving at the age of 16 when he is hired by Annie Roycroft to join the County Down Spectator as a “cub” reporter, then columnist and deputy editor. A collection of his columns is published as Bar Stool Boy in 1989.

Bateman has been writing novels since his debut, Divorcing Jack, in 1994. Divorcing Jack wins a Betty Trask Award in the same year and is adapted into a 1998 film starring David Thewlis. Several of his novels feature the semi-autobiographical Belfast journalist, Dan Starkey.

Bateman’s book Murphy’s Law is adapted from the BBC television series Murphy’s Law (2001–2007), featuring James Nesbitt. He explains on his website that “Murphy’s Law was written specifically for James Nesbitt, a local actor who became a big TV star through Cold Feet. The ninety-minute pilot for Murphy’s Law on BBC One was seen by more than seven million people, and led to three TV series, on which I was the chief writer.”

Bateman’s eight-part series Scúp is written in English and translated into Irish. It is produced by Stirling Productions and BBC Northern Ireland. A second series has since been commissioned.

Bateman’s children’s book Titanic 2020 is shortlisted for the 2008 Bisto Book of the Year Award and the Bolton Children’s Book Award

Much of Bateman’s work is produced under the name “Bateman” rather than his full name. His 2007 novel I Predict a Riot bears (among others) the dedication: “For my Christian name, gone but not forgotten.” Since 2016, he has moved increasingly into film, writing the screenplays for The Journey, starring Timothy Spall and Colm Meaney, and Driven starring Jason Sudeikis and Lee Pace. Both films are premiered at the Venice Film Festival and selected for the Toronto International Film Festival. He is currently writing films about Fidel Castro in New York, ‘The Hotel Theresa’ and the British double agent George Blake.


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Protestant March Ends in Bloody Battle on the Craigavon Bridge

A Protestant march against the creation of “no-go” areas in Londonderry on June 3, 1972, ends in a bloody battle on the Craigavon Bridge. Soldiers use rubber bullets and water cannon to control the crowd when the so-called “Tartan gangs” at the tail end of the march begin to throw bottles and stones at the British Army.

The “no-go” areas, known as Free Derry, are areas where both the Irish Republican Army and Provisional Irish Republican Army can openly patrol, train and open offices with widespread support and without involvement of security services. Bogside, Creggan and Brandywell make up the area Free Derry, and it is still known by that name despite the barricades no longer being present.

The 10,000 strong march sets off from Irish Street at 1500 GMT to call for an end to the “no-go” areas on the east bank side of the River Foyle.

The biggest security operation since the start of the Troubles is set up for the march with soldiers on every corner. The bridge is the centre of the trouble as it joins the Protestant side of the town to the “no-go” Roman Catholic areas of Bogside and Creggan.

Despite pleas from march organisers for the violence to stop it does not end until the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) steps in. They form a human barrier between the protesters and the Army. The confrontation lasts an hour and results in one man being injured but no arrests.

A spokesman for the Army says, “Naturally it is regretted that we have to fire rubber bullets but there we are. The only alternative is the Bogside would be invaded by the Protestant marchers.”

Despite the violence, William Craig, the leader of the Ulster Vanguard movement, who organised the march, says the marches will go on. “We are no longer protesting – we are demanding action,” he says.

On July 31, 1972, the then Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw orders 20,000 soldiers to dismantle IRA barricades in the “no-go” areas of Derry and Belfast.

1972 becomes the bloodiest year of the Troubles. Some 470 people are killed that year, the overwhelming majority of them civilians.

(From: “1972: Protestant march ends in battle,” BBC On This Day, http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday)


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The Glenanne Barracks Bombing

The Glenanne barracks bombing is a large truck bomb attack carried out by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) against a British Army (Ulster Defence Regiment) base at Glenanne, near Mountnorris, County Armagh, on May 31, 1991. The bombing leaves three soldiers dead and 14 people wounded, four of them civilians.

The bombing takes place at a time when the Northern Ireland Office arranges multi-party talks, known as the Brooke/Mayhew talks, on the future of Northern Ireland. Sinn Féin members are not invited to attend because of their links with the IRA, which prevents them from being recognised as a “constitutional” party. The talks end in failure soon after.

Built in 1972, the barracks house two companies of the 2nd Battalion, Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). Seen as an outpost, it sits on the dividing line between a Protestant area and a Catholic area. Although the military barracks itself had not been attacked by the IRA previously, seven UDR soldiers from the base had already been killed during the Troubles.

At 11:30 PM, a driverless truck loaded with 2,500 lb (1,100 kg) of a new type of homemade explosive is rolled down a hill at the rear of the barracks and crashes through the perimeter fence. According to a witness, a UDR lance corporal who alerts the base, the truck is a Mercedes, and a Toyota HiAce van carrying at least two men acts as a support vehicle. The men are seen outside the parked van, masked and armed, one with a handgun and the other with a submachine gun. This same witness alerts the base believing the IRA team are about to carry out a mortar attack, and debris thrown up on the roof by the lorry as it plunges down the hill is misinterpreted by some inside the base as a mortar projectile. Automatic fire is heard by other witnesses just before the main blast. A Reuters report claims that IRA members trigger the bomb by firing upon the driverless vehicle. It is later determined that the lorry had been stolen the day before in Kingscourt, County Cavan, in the Republic of Ireland.

The blast leaves a crater 200 ft. (61 m) deep and throws debris and shrapnel as far as 300 yards (270 m). The explosion can be heard over 30 miles (48 km) away, as far as Dundalk. This is the biggest bomb detonated by the IRA up to this point. Most of the UDR base is destroyed by the blast and the fire that follows. At first, a massive mortar attack is suspected. Some livestock are killed and windows broken around the nearby Mossfield housing as a result of the explosion. The cars parked outside the base are obliterated. Ceilings are brought down and the local primary school is also damaged.

The barracks is usually manned by eight soldiers, but at the time there are 40 people in the complex, attending a social event. Three UDR soldiers – Lance Corporal Robert Crozier (46), Private Sydney Hamilton (44) and Private Paul Blakely (30) – are killed and ten are wounded. Two of them are caught by the explosion when they come out to investigate after a sentry gives the alarm. A third dies inside the base. Four civilians are also wounded. The Provisional IRA claims responsibility two days later.

Author Kevin Toolis lists the destruction of Glenanne UDR barracks in County Armagh as part of the cycle of violence and tit-for-tat killings in neighbouring County Tyrone. The IRA later claims that the death of three of its men in the town of Coagh is a Special Air Service (SAS) retaliation for the Glenanne bombing.

The base is never rebuilt. It had outlived its operational usefulness and a decision had already been taken to close it down. The decision not to rebuild the compound raises some controversy among unionists. A memorial stone is erected by the main entrance road with the names of the UDR soldiers killed over the years while serving in Glenanne.


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Birth of Betty Williams, Peace Activist and Nobel Peace Prize Recipient

Elizabeth “Betty” Williams (née Smyth), peace activist and co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, is born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on May 22, 1943.

Williams’s father works as a butcher and her mother is a housewife. She receives her primary education from St. Teresa Primary School in Belfast and attends St. Dominic’s Grammar School for Girls for her secondary school studies. Upon completing her formal education, she takes up a job of office receptionist.

Rare for the time in Northern Ireland, Williams’s father is Protestant and her mother is Catholic, a family background from which she later says she derived religious tolerance and a breadth of vision that motivated her to work for peace. Early in the 1970s she joins an anti-violence campaign headed by a Protestant priest. She credits this experience for preparing her to eventually found her own peace movement, which focuses on creating peace groups composed of former opponents, practicing confidence-building measures, and the development of a grassroots peace process.

Williams is drawn into the public arena after witnessing the death of three children on August 10, 1976, when they are hit by a car whose driver, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) paramilitary named Danny Lennon, had been fatally shot in return fire by a soldier of the King’s Own Royal Border Regiment. As she turns the corner to her home, she sees the three Maguire children crushed by the swerving car and rushes to help. Their mother, Anne Maguire, who is with the children, dies by suicide in January 1980.

Williams is so moved by the incident that within two days of the tragic event, she obtains 6,000 signatures on a petition for peace and gains wide media attention. With Mairead Corrigan, she co-founds the Women for Peace which, with Ciaran McKeown, later becomes the Community of Peace People.

Williams soon organises a peace march to the graves of the slain children, which is attended by 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women. However, the peaceful march is violently disrupted by members of the IRA, who accuse them of being “dupes of the British.” The following week, she leads another march in Ormeau Park that concludes successfully without incident – this time with 20,000 participants.

In recognition of her efforts for peace, Williams, together with Corrigan, become joint recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize for 1976.

The Peace Prize money is divided equally between Williams and Corrigan. Williams keeeps her share of the money, stating that her intention is to use it to promote peace beyond Ireland, but faces criticism for her decision. She and Corrigan have no contact after 1976. In 1978, Williams breaks off links with the Peace People movement and becomes instead an activist for peace in other areas around the world.

Williams receives the People’s Peace Prize of Norway in 1976, the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1977, the Schweitzer Medallion for Courage, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Award, the Eleanor Roosevelt Award in 1984, and the Frank Foundation Child Care International Oliver Award. In 1995, she is awarded the Rotary International “Paul Harris Fellowship” and the Together for Peace Building Award.

At the 2006 Earth Dialogues forum in Brisbane, Williams tells an audience of schoolchildren during a speech on Iraq War casualties that “Right now, I would like to kill George W. Bush.” From September 17 to 20, 2007, she gives a series of lectures in Southern California. On September 18, she presents a lecture to the academic community of Orange County entitled “Peace in the World Is Everybody’s Business” and on September 20 she gives a lecture to 2,232 members of the general public, including 1,100 high school sophomores, at Soka University of America. In 2010, she gives a lecture at WE Day Toronto, a WE Charity event that empowers students to be active within their communities, and worldwide.

Speaking at the University of Bradford before an audience of 200 in March 2011, Williams warns that young Muslim women on campus are vulnerable to attacks from angry family members, while the university does little to help protect them. “If you had someone on this campus these young women could go to say, ‘I am frightened’ – if you are not doing that here, you are dehumanising them by not helping these young women, don’t you think?”

At the time she receives the Nobel Prize, Williams works as a receptionist and is raising her two children with her first husband Ralph Williams. This marriage is dissolved in 1981. She marries businessman James Perkins in December 1982 and they live in Florida in the United States.

In 2004, Williams returns to live in Northern Ireland. She dies on March 17, 2020, at the age of 76 in Belfast.


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Charles, the Prince of Wales, Visits Omagh

Charles, the Prince of Wales, visits Omagh, County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, on May 5, 1999, and meets with relatives of those killed in the August 15, 1998 car bombing and some of the young people who were injured.

The prince has a private meeting with a group of those injured and bereaved in the August attack on the Northern Ireland market town, which left 29 dead. It fulfills a promise he made to the people of the town when he visited it three days after the bombing by the Real Irish Republican Army (IRA).

After his meeting with residents at the offices of Omagh District Council, the prince says, “I was determined to come back today to see how all of you were faring after all the terrible things you have had to go through.”

Referring to the IRA assassination of his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, he says, “Having experienced myself a relative who was blown to smithereens, I can well understand how these poor people must feel.” He adds that there is enormous concern and care across the world, and many who have given generously to the Omagh Fund, which organisers say has topped £4.5m.

Before visiting the site of the bombing and the regeneration scheme, the prince says the rebuilding plans are bringing “new life, new meaning and new hope back to this really remarkable community.”

“It always was a remarkable community, it still is. You set a wonderful example to many other communities, not only in Northern Ireland but in other parts of the world who also have suffered so traumatically,” the prince says.

Speaking about his visit to Soho following the Admiral Duncan pub bombing by neo-Nazi David Copeland the previous Friday (April 30, 1999), he adds, “I am sure your experiences will be of enormous help to those people in London who have shared with you yet another tragedy in another horrible bombing.”

Marion Radford, who was injured in the Omagh bombing and whose 16-year-old son Alan died, says, “Visits like this help, just to know people care. I found this helpful, I found him a very nice person, he does care and was a sympathetic listener.”

(From: “UK Prince returns to Omagh,” BBC News, http://www.bbc.news.com, May 5, 1999)