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Birth of Provisional IRA Member Seán Savage

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Seán Savage, Provisional Irish Republican Army member who is shot dead by the British Army while attempting to plant a car bomb in Gibraltar, is born in Belfast on January 26, 1965.

Born into an Irish Republican family in the Kashmir area of Belfast, Savage is educated at St. Gall’s Primary School, and at St. Paul’s Secondary School in the Falls Road area of West Belfast.

In 1987 Savage and Daniel McCann shoot and kill two Royal Ulster Constabulary officers at Belfast docks. He is also the leader of an IRA attack that places a car bomb beneath the car of John McMichael, an Ulster loyalist paramilitary, in Lisburn in December 1987. McMichael dies of his injuries two hours after the blast.

In March 1988, Savage and McCann, along with another Provisional IRA member, Mairéad Farrell, are sent to the British overseas territory of Gibraltar to plant a bomb in the town area targeting a British Army band which parades weekly in front of The Convent, the official Governors’ residence. However, the British Government acquires information about the intended attack and specially dispatches a British Army detachment there to intercept it, in an operation that it code-names Operation Flavius.

On March 6, 1988 Savage, McCann and Farrell enter Gibraltar from across the Spanish border to carry out a reconnaissance of the target. Having conducted it, they are leaving Gibraltar on foot approaching the Spanish border in two separate parties, when Savage sees McCann and Farrell up ahead being confronted and shot dead by soldiers from the Special Air Service regiment. He turns around and flees, running back into Gibraltar town, closely pursued on foot by another SAS soldier. After a 300-yard chase the soldier catches up with Savage and shoots him dead beneath a beech tree in Smith Dorrien Avenue. Civilian witnesses to the incident state afterwards that Savage is repeatedly fired upon by the soldier that had run him down while he is lying on the ground seemingly incapacitated.

The IRA team is subsequently found to be unarmed at the time of their deaths. A hire car rented by them, converted into a car bomb containing 140 lbs. of Semtex, with a device timed to go off during the changing of the guard ceremony in Gibraltar, is found two days later by the Spanish Police, who had assisted the British Government in tracking the IRA team’s movements in its territory before it had entered Gibraltar.

The bodies of Savage, Farrell and McCann are repatriated to Northern Ireland, where a collective IRA-sponsored funeral is held for them on March 16, 1988 at the IRA plot in Milltown Cemetery in West Belfast. As the coffins are being lowered into the ground Michael Stone, an Ulster loyalist paramilitary, stages a single-handed attack upon the ceremony, throwing grenades and firing a handgun at mourners. The funeral immediately descends into chaos. One group of mourners pursues the retreating attacker, who continues to throw grenades and fire bullets, through the cemetery grounds. Three of the unarmed mourners are killed and scores are injured. Stone retreats onto the adjoining M1 motorway, where he is arrested.

A Gibraltar inquest into the deaths of Savage, McCann and Farrell concludes the three had been lawfully killed. In 1995, the European Court of Human Rights rules that the human rights of the three were infringed, and criticizes the British authorities for lack of control in the arrest operation. They also rule that the three had been engaged in an act of terrorism, and consequently dismissed unanimously the applicants’ claims for damages, for costs and expenses incurred in the Gibraltar Inquest and the remainder of the claims for just satisfaction.

A British television documentary, Death on the Rock (1988), is produced and broadcast about the failed IRA operation in Gibraltar, examining the details of the events, and raising doubts about aspects of the British Government’s statements about the circumstances of the shootings of the IRA team, and questioning whether excessive force had been used in the confrontation in line with persistent rumours in the British media at that time of a “Shoot to Kill” strategy being used against the Provisional IRA by the British Government.


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The Murder of Benedict Hughes

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Northern Ireland is plunged into a new crisis after Benedict Hughes, a Catholic, is shot dead on January 21, 1998, as he is getting into his car after finishing his work in a loyalist area of south Belfast. It is the latest murder aimed at wrecking the peace process and the eighth sectarian killing since Christmas.

Hughes, age 55, dies in a hail of bullets in Sandy Row shortly after 5:00 PM, as he is preparing to travel back to his Suffolk Crescent home in west Belfast. The father of three is shot at least five times in the neck and chest as he tries to get into his car which is parked in Utility Street off the Donegall Road. He is taken to the Royal Victoria Hospital where he later dies. The lone gunman makes off on foot in the direction of Felt Street.

The attack comes after the funeral of Fergal McCusker, a Catholic shot dead by the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) just days earlier and ahead of the funerals of Catholic taxi driver Larry Brennan and prominent loyalist Jim Guiney held on January 22.

When forensic people arrive on the scene soon after the shooting, the area is packed with onlookers who believe the shot man is a Protestant.

As a recovery truck comes to remove Hughes’s car later that night, small groups of people are still watching the scene. The Rev. Richard Darmody, the rector of nearby St. Aidan’s Church in Sandy Row, who went to the scene thinking the victim was one of his parishioners, condemns the murder. “I’m shocked and horrified that the life of an innocent person has been taken and that another family has been plunged into grief and pain. I feel very concerned about where this is going to lead, and the possibility of more lives being taken, and more families being bereaved.”

There is no immediate admission of responsibility. However, the blame is placed firmly on loyalists, either the LVF, which has admitted being behind a series of recent killings, or the Ulster Freedom Fighters, which has remained silent, but which is suspected by the security forces of having joined the killings.

Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) councillor Alex Attwood calls on mainstream loyalists to “clarify whether they are really on a ceasefire” because it is clear, he says, the LVF has received help from other loyalist groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) or the Ulster Defence Association (UDA).

SDLP councillor Alastair McDonnell says the peace process is not in crisis. Hughes was “an innocent Catholic who was just trying to earn a living, who has no connections with any political or paramilitary grouping. If he had he wouldn’t have worked here.” He adds that there is a “small handful of evil people” who do not want to see peace.

Alliance spokesman Dr. Philip McGarry says there is “no excuse, no justification for causing pain to yet another family.”

(From: “Catholic shot dead leaving work in loyalist Sandy Row” by Louise McCall, The Irish Times, January 22, 1998)


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Death of Unionist Politician David Ervine

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David Ervine, Northern Irish Unionist politician from Belfast and the leader of the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), dies on January 8, 2007, following a massive heart attack, a stroke and brain hemorrhage.

Ervine is born into a Protestant working-class family in east Belfast on July 21, 1953. He leaves Orangefield High School at age 14 and joins the Orange Order at age 18, however his membership does not last long. The following year he joins the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), believing this to be the only way to ensure the defence of the Protestant community after the events of Bloody Friday.

Ervine is arrested in November 1974, while an active member of the UVF. He is driving a stolen car containing five pounds of commercial explosives, a detonator and fuse wire. After seven months on remand in Crumlin Road Gaol he is found guilty of possession of explosives with intent to endanger life. He is sentenced to 11 years and imprisoned in The Maze.

While in prison, Ervine comes under the influence of Gusty Spence who makes him question what his struggle is about and unquestionably changes Ervine’s direction. After much study and self-analysis, he emerges with the view that change through politics is the only option. He also becomes friends with Billy Hutchinson while in prison.

Ervine is released from prison in 1980 and takes up full-time politics several years later. He stands in local council elections as a Progressive Unionist Party (PUP) candidate in 1985 Northern Ireland local elections. In 1996 he is elected to the Northern Ireland Forum from the regional list, having been an unsuccessful candidate in the Belfast East constituency. In 1998, he is elected to the Northern Ireland Assembly to represent Belfast East and is re-elected in 2003. He is also a member of Belfast City Council from 1997.

Ervine plays a pivotal role in bringing about the loyalist ceasefire of October 1994. He is part of a delegation to Downing Street in June 1996 that meets then British Prime Minister John Major to discuss the loyalist ceasefire.

Ervine suffers a massive heart attack, a stroke and brain hemorrhage after attending a football match between Glentoran F.C. and Armagh City F.C. at The Oval in Belfast on Saturday January 6, 2007. He is taken to the Ulster Hospital in Dundonald and is later admitted to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast, where he dies on Monday, January 8, 2007. His body is cremated at Roselawn Crematorium after a funeral service on January 12 in East Belfast attended by Mark Durkan, Gerry Adams, Peter Hain, Dermot Ahern, Hugh Orde and David Trimble among others.


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Annie’s Bar Massacre

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The Annie’s Bar massacre, a mass shooting incident in Derry‘s Top of the Hill, takes place on December 20, 1972, during the height of the Northern Ireland Troubles. The bar is located in a small Catholic enclave of the majority Protestant Waterside area of Derry. Five civilians are shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries from a unit of the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) which is a part of the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). The shooting is also known as the “Top of the Hill bar shooting.”

The UDA is formed in September 1971 during one of the most violent phases of The Troubles right after internment without trial is introduced when a number of Loyalist Defense groups combine together. They form a paramilitary wing, the UFF, in 1972 so the organisation can use the UFF name to carry out violent acts and kill people while keeping the UDA name legal by not involving the UDA name with attacks.

The UDA/UFF claim to be combating the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) but approximately 85% of its victims are innocent Catholic civilians. The UDA carries out its first killing on April 20, 1972, when they shoot dead taxi driver Gerard Donnelly in Ardoyne, Belfast. In October, the group is responsible for the deaths of two small girls when they detonate a car bomb outside an Irish nationalist pub in Sailortown, Belfast. The girls killed are Clare Hughes, age 4, and Paula Strong, age 6.

On December 20, 1972, along the Strabane Old Road, Annie’s Bar is packed with customers watching a football match. At about 10:30 PM two men from the UDA burst into the bar, one of them carrying a Sterling submachine gun and the other holding a pistol. Both are wearing hoods to disguise their identities. The men instantly and indiscriminately spray the main room in the bar with bullets. The attack is reported to have lasted less than a minute, but it still manages to leave five people dead, and four others wounded. Those killed in the attack are all males and include, Charlie McCafferty (31), Frank McCarron (58), Charles Moore (31), Barney Kelly (26) and Michael McGinley (37). At the time this is the largest and most deadly attack carried out by the UDA. They do not carry out another attack of this size until February 1992, when they shoot dead five civilians and injure nine in the Sean Graham bookmakers’ shooting on the Ormeau Road in Belfast.

The year 1972 in Derry begins with the Bloody Sunday shooting which occurs in the Bogside area and ends with the Annie’s Bar shooting. Nobody is ever charged in connection with the Annie’s Bar murders, although in recent years relatives of those murdered have been calling for a fresh investigation to take place.

The attack is carried out by members from the UDA’s “North Antrim & Londonderry Brigade.” Although this is one of the UDA’s smaller brigades it also carries out the October 1993 Greysteel massacre which is the UDA’s worst ever attack, in which eight people are killed and 19 others are injured. The Greysteel shooting happens about 9-10 miles away from Annie’s Bar.

(Pictured: Annie’s Bar Memorial stone located at Strabane Old Road, Top of the Hill, Waterside, Derry, County Derry, Northern Ireland. Annie’s Bar is in the background. Photo taken by Martin Melaugh, November 20, 2008.)


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President McAleese & Queen Elizabeth II Meet in Belfast

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President of Ireland Mary McAleese and Queen Elizabeth II shake hands on Northern Ireland soil for the first time on December 9, 2005 — a symbolic milestone following years of peacemaking in this long-disputed British territory.

The British monarch and the Republic of Ireland‘s head of state chat and pose together at Hillsborough Castle, outside Belfast, for an occasion that would have provoked hostility within Northern Ireland’s Protestant majority just a few years earlier. But their trouble-free meeting becomes inevitable once Ireland dropped its territorial claim to Northern Ireland as part of the landmark Good Friday Agreement peace accord of 1998. The visit also fuels speculation the queen could soon make her first official visit to the neighboring Republic of Ireland, where the Irish Republican Army assassinated Lord Louis Mountbatten, the uncle of her husband, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

No British monarch has visited the territory of the modern-day Republic of Ireland since George V visited Dublin in 1911, a decade before the island’s partition into a mostly Protestant north that remains within the United Kingdom, and a predominantly Catholic rest of Ireland that gradually gains full independence from Britain.

Camera crews are allowed to film the moment, but not record the sound, when McAleese shakes the queen’s hand at the start of a 20-minute meeting, their fourth since 1998. Previous meetings occurred at Buckingham Palace and on a World War I battlefield site. McAleese later calls it “a very special day for Anglo-Irish relationships” that brings forward the day when the queen will visit the Irish Republic.

McAleese, a Belfast-born Catholic, had made scores of visits to Northern Ireland since being elected to the Irish Republic’s largely symbolic presidency in 1997. As part of her presidential theme of “building bridges,” she regularly invites Protestant groups to her official Dublin mansion and has built impressive diplomatic contacts with northern Protestants.

Before McAleese’s arrival, visits north by an Irish president were rare events that drew public protests from Protestants, who demanded that Ireland remove its territorial claim from its 1937 constitution. The republic’s voters overwhelmingly supported this in a May 1998 referendum, an action completed in December 1999.

The queen has avoided traveling to the Irish Republic, in part, because of security fears following the IRA assassination of Mountbatten in August 1979. He, his daughter-in-law and two teenage boys are killed when the IRA blows up his private boat near his castle in County Sligo. However, Prince Philip and their son, Prince Charles, make several visits to the Irish Republic in the decade following the IRA’s 1994 cease-fire.


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Birth of Suffragist Winifred Carney

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Maria Winifred Carney, also known as Winnie Carney, suffragist, trade unionist and Irish independence activist, is born into a lower-middle class Catholic family in Bangor, County Down on December 4, 1887. Her father is a Protestant who leaves the family. Her mother and six siblings move to Falls Road in Belfast when she is a child.

Carney is educated at St. Patrick’s Christian Brothers School in Donegall Street in Belfast, later teaching at the school. She enrolls at Hughes Commercial Academy around 1910, where she qualifies as a secretary and shorthand typist, one of the first women in Belfast to do so. However, from the start she is looking towards doing more than just secretarial work.

In 1912 Carney is in charge of the women’s section of the Northern Ireland Textile Workers’ Union in Belfast, which she founds with Delia Larkin in 1912. During this period, she meets James Connolly and becomes his personal secretary. She becomes Connolly’s friend and confidant as they work together to improve the conditions for female labourers in Belfast. Carney then joins Cumann na mBan, the women’s auxiliary of the Irish Volunteers, and attends its first meeting in 1914.

Carney is present with Connolly in Dublin‘s General Post Office (GPO) during the Easter Rising in 1916. She is the only woman present during the initial occupation of the building. While not a combatant, she is given the rank of adjutant and is among the final group to leave the GPO. After Connolly is wounded, she refuses to leave his side despite direct orders from Patrick Pearse and Connolly. She leaves the GPO with the rest of the rebels when the building becomes engulfed in flames. They make their new headquarters in nearby Moore Street before Pearse surrenders.

After her capture, Carney is held in Kilmainham Gaol before being moved to Mountjoy Prison and finally to an English prison. By August 1916 she is imprisoned in HM Prison Aylesbury alongside Nell Ryan and Helena Molony. The three request that their internee status be revoked so that they could be held as normal prisoners with Countess Markievicz. Their request is denied, however Carney and Molony are released two days before Christmas 1916.

Carney is a delegate at the 1917 Belfast Cumann na mBan convention. She stands for Parliament as a Sinn Féin candidate for Belfast Victoria in the 1918 United Kingdom general election but loses to the Labour Unionists. Following her defeat, she decides to continue her work at the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union until 1928. By 1924 she has become a member of the Labour Party. In the 1930s she joins the Socialist Party of Northern Ireland.

Following the Irish Civil War, Carney becomes much more disillusioned with politics. She is very critical and outspoken of Éamon de Valera and his governments.

In 1928 she marries George McBride, a Protestant Orangeman and former member of the Ulster Volunteers. Ironically, the formation of the Ulster Volunteers prompts the formation of the Irish Volunteers, of which Carney was a member. She alienates anyone in her life that does not support her marriage to McBride.

A number of serious health problems limit Carney’s political activities in the late 1930s. She dies in Belfast on November 21, 1943, and is buried in Milltown Cemetery. Her resting place is located years later, and a headstone is erected by the National Graves Association, Belfast. Because she married a Protestant and former Orangeman, she is not allowed to have his name on her gravestone due to the religious differences.

In 2013, the Seventieth Anniversary of Carney’s death is remembered by the Socialist Republican Party. Almost one hundred people attend as a short parade follows, marking and commemorating the work she did for the cause. She is placed in high esteem among the other hundreds of radical women, who stand up for what they believe in, regardless of the consequences they face.


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Birth of C.S. Lewis, Poet & Novelist

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Clive Staples Lewis, novelist, poet, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologist, is born in Belfast on November 29, 1898. He is best known for his works of fiction, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis is schooled by private tutors until age nine when his mother dies in 1908 from cancer. His father then sends him to live and study at Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire. After the school is closed soon afterward, he attends Campbell College in the east of Belfast about a mile from his home, but leaves after a few months due to respiratory problems. He is then sent to the health-resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attends the preparatory school Cherbourg House. It is during this time that he abandons his childhood Christian faith and becomes an atheist. In September 1913, he enrolls at Malvern College. After leaving Malvern, he studies privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father’s old tutor and former headmaster of Lurgan College.

Lewis holds academic positions in English literature at both the University of Oxford (Magdalen College, 1925–1954) and the University of  Cambridge (Magdalene College, 1954–1963).

Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien are close friends. They both serve on the English faculty at Oxford University and are active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. He returns to Anglicanism at the age of 32, owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, and he becomes an “ordinary layman of the Church of England.” His faith profoundly affects his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity bring him wide acclaim.

Lewis writes more than 30 books which have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up The Chronicles of Narnia have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, television, radio and cinema. His philosophical writings are widely cited by Christian apologists from many denominations.

In early June 1961, Lewis begins suffering from nephritis, which results in blood poisoning. He recovers but on July 15 of that year he falls ill and is admitted to the hospital where he suffers a heart attack the following day, lapses into a coma and awakens the next day. After he is discharged from the hospital his condition continues to decline. He is diagnosed with end-stage renal failure in mid-November. He collapses and dies in his bedroom on November 22. He is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington, Oxford.

Media coverage of Lewis’s death is almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of United States President John F. Kennedy, which takes place approximately 55 minutes after Lewis’s collapse.

In 2013, on the 50th anniversary of his death, Lewis is honoured with a memorial in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.


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Death of George Best, Northern Irish Footballer

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George Best, Northern Irish professional footballer, dies on November 25, 2005 due to complications from the immunosuppressive drugs he required following a 2002 liver transplant.

Best is born on May 22, 1946 and grows up in Cregagh, east Belfast. In 1957, he passes the eleven-plus and goes to Grosvenor High School, but he soon plays truant as the school specialises in rugby. He then moves to Lisnasharragh Secondary School, reuniting him with friends from primary school and allowing him to focus on football. He plays for Cregagh Boys Club. He grows up supporting Glentoran F.C. and Wolverhampton Wanderers F.C..

Best spends most of his club career at Manchester United. Named European Footballer of the Year in 1968, he is regarded as one of the greatest players of all time. A highly skillful winger, considered by several pundits to be one of the greatest dribblers in the history of the sport, he receives plaudits for his playing style, which combines pace, skill, balance, feints, two-footedness, goalscoring and the ability to get past defenders.

In international football, Best is capped 37 times for Northern Ireland between 1964 and 1977. A combination of the team’s performance and his lack of fitness in 1982 means that he never plays in the finals of a major tournament. He considers his international career as being “recreational football,” with the expectations placed on a smaller nation in Northern Ireland being much less than with his club. He is regarded as one of the greatest players never to have played at a World Cup. The Irish Football Association describes him as the “greatest player to ever pull on the green shirt of Northern Ireland.”

With his good looks and playboy lifestyle, Best becomes one of the first media celebrity footballers, earning the nickname “El Beatle” in 1966, but his extravagant lifestyle leads to various personal problems, most notably alcoholism, which he suffers from for the rest of his life. These issues affect him on and off the field, often causing controversy. Although conscious of his problems, he is publicly not contrite about them. He says of his career, “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds [women] and fast cars – the rest I just squandered.” After football, Best spends some time as a football analyst, but his financial and health problems continue into his retirement.

Best is diagnosed with severe liver damage in March 2000. His liver is said to be functioning at only 20%. In 2001, he is admitted to hospital with pneumonia. In August 2002, he has a successful liver transplant at King’s College Hospital in London.

On October 3, 2005, Best is admitted to intensive care at the private Cromwell Hospital in London, suffering from a kidney infection caused by the side effects of immunosuppressive drugs used to prevent his body from rejecting his transplanted liver. In the early hours of November 25, 2005, treatment is stopped. Later that day he dies, aged 59, as a result of a lung infection and multiple organ failure. He is interred beside his mother in a private ceremony at Roselawn Cemetery, overlooking east Belfast.


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The Arrest of the Birmingham Six

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Hugh Callaghan, Patrick Hill, Robert Hunter, Noel McIlkenny, William Power, and John Walker, known as the “Birmingham Six,” are arrested on November 22, 1974, in connection with pub bombings which took place earlier in the week.

The Birmingham pub bombings take place on November 21, 1974, and are attributed to the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Explosive devices are placed in two central Birmingham pubs, the Mulberry Bush at the foot of the Rotunda and the Tavern in the Town in New Street. The resulting explosions, at 8:25 PM and 8:27 PM, collectively are the most injurious attacks in England since World War II. Twenty-one people are killed and 182 are injured. A third device, outside a bank in Hagley Road, fails to detonate.

Five of the six arrested are Belfast-born Roman Catholics, while John Walker is a Roman Catholic born in Derry. All six have lived in Birmingham since the 1960s. All the men except for Callaghan leave the city early on the evening of November 21 from New Street Station, shortly before the explosions. They are travelling to Belfast to attend the funeral of James McDade, a Provisional IRA member who had accidentally killed himself on November 14 when his bomb detonates prematurely while he is planting it at a telephone exchange in Coventry.

When they reach Heysham they and others are subject to a Special Branch stop and search. The men do not tell the police of the true purpose of their visit to Belfast, a fact that is later held against them. While the search is in progress the police are informed of the Birmingham bombings. The men agree to be taken to Morecambe police station for forensic tests.

On the morning of November 22, after the forensic tests and questioning at the hands of the Morecambe police, the men are transferred to the custody of West Midlands Serious Crime Squad police unit. Callaghan is taken into custody on the evening of November 22.

The Birmingham Six are charged with murder and conspiracy to cause explosions on May 12, 1975. The trial begins on June 9, 1975, at the Crown Court sitting at Lancaster Castle, before Justice Nigel Bridge and a jury. The jury finds the six men guilty of murder. On August 15, 1975, they are each sentenced to twenty-one life sentences.

On November 28, 1974, the Birmingham Six appear in court for a second time after they had been remanded into custody at HM Prison Winson Green, all showing bruising and other signs of ill-treatment. Fourteen prison officers are charged with assault in June 1975 but are ultimately acquitted. The Six bring a civil claim for damages against the West Midlands Police in 1977, but it is struck out on January 17, 1980, by the Court of Appeal (Civil Division).

In March 1976 the Birmingham Six’s first application for leave to appeal is dismissed by the Court of Appeal, presided over by John Widgery. Their second full appeal, in 1991, is allowed. New evidence of police fabrication and suppression of evidence, the successful attacks on both the confessions and the 1975 forensic evidence causes the Crown to decide not to resist the appeals. The Court of Appeal states that in light of the fresh scientific evidence, the convictions are both unsafe and unsatisfactory. On March 14, 1991, the Birmingham Six are set free.

In 2001, a decade after their release, the six men are awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2 million.


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Founding of the Irish Football Association

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The Irish Football Association (IFA), the governing body for association football in Northern Ireland, is founded on November 18, 1880. It organises the Ireland national football team from 1880 to 1950, which after 1954, becomes the Northern Ireland national football team.

The IFA is founded by seven football clubs mostly in the Belfast area, as the organising body for the sport across all of Ireland. A meeting is called by Cliftonville F.C. of other football clubs that follow the rules set out by the Scottish Football Association (SFA). At that meeting at Queens Hotel, Belfast, the seven clubs form the IFA, making it the fourth oldest national football association in the world, after those of England, Scotland and Wales. The founding members are Alexander F.C., Avoniel F.C., Cliftonville F.C., Lisburn Distillery F.C., Knock F.C., Moyola Park F.C. and Oldpark F.C.

The IFA’s first decisions are to elect its first President, Major Spencer Chichester, and to form an annual challenge cup competition similar to the FA Cup and Scottish Cup competitions, called the Irish Cup. Two years later, Ireland plays its first international against England, losing 13–0, which remains a record for both teams, a record win for England and a record loss for Ireland.

Shortly after the partition of Ireland in 1921, the Football Association of Ireland (FAI) is established as a rival association to regulate the game in what is to become the Irish Free State. The immediate cause of the split lay in a bitter dispute over the venue for the replay of an Irish Cup match in 1921 involving Glentoran F.C. of Belfast and Shelbourne F.C. of Dublin. When the first cup match is drawn in Belfast, because of the Irish War of Independence, the IFA reneges on a promise to play the replay in Dublin and schedules the rematch again for Belfast. Shelbourne refuses to comply and forfeits the Cup.

Such is the anger over the issue that the Leinster Football Association breaks away from the IFA and forms its own national association. Those behind the FAI believe that football should be regulated by a federation based in the Irish Free State’s capital, Dublin. They also accuse the IFA of neglecting the development of the game in the South. The IFA’s supporters argue that the federation should be based where the game is primarily played – namely Ulster, and its principal city Belfast.

Both associations claim to represent the whole of the island, each competing internationally under the name “Ireland” and selecting players from both the rival national leagues, which also split at this time. Interventions by FIFA give the FAI de jure organising rights over the 26 counties of the Republic, with the IFA restricted to Northern Ireland. From the 1950s onwards, the IFA no longer claims it is the association for the whole of Ireland.

In 1960, the association moves to its present location on Windsor Avenue in south Belfast, in a building once occupied by Thomas Andrews. The IFA continues to regulate the game in Northern Ireland, and all results obtained by the Irish national side and records in the Irish Football League and the cup competition stand as Northern Irish records.