KLM Flight 633, a Lockheed Constellation Triton passenger flight from Amsterdam to New York City, ditches on a mudbank in the River Shannon immediately after takeoff from Shannon Airport on September 5, 1954. Twenty-eight people are killed in the accident which is caused by an unexpected re-extension of the landing gear, possibly compounded by pilot error.
The Lockheed Super Constellation Triton is piloted by Adriaan Viruly, one of the airline’s most senior pilots. After a refueling stop at Shannon, the plane takes off for the transatlantic leg of the flight at 2:40 AM. There are 46 passengers and ten crew on board. Shortly after takeoff the pilot reduces power from maximum to METO (Maximum Except Take Off). The pilot is unaware that the landing gear is not retracted, and as result the aircraft descends to land in the Shannon. It turns around on impact and breaks into two sections.
The aircraft is partially submerged and at least one of the fuel tanks ruptures during the crash. The fuel fumes render many passengers and crew unconscious, who then drown in the rising tide. In the end, three members of the cabin crew and 25 passengers perish.
Even though the crash occurs less than one minute after the plane takes off from Shannon Airport, airport authorities remain unaware of the disaster until the mud-caked navigator of the craft, Johan Tieman, stumbles into the airport two and a half hours after the crash and reports, “We’ve crashed!” Tieman had swum ashore and floundered painfully across the marshes to the airport, whose lights are clearly visible from the scene of the crash. It is not until 7:00 in the morning that the first launch reaches the survivors, who are huddled on a muddy flat in the river.
The official investigation concludes that the accident is caused by an unexpected re-extension of the landing gear and the captain’s incorrect behaviour in this situation. Viruly, who is only one year from retirement, rejects the responsibility for the crash and is bitter about his subsequent treatment by KLM. In an interview he later states that there simply had not been enough time to react.
A New York city schoolteacher for more than thirty years, McCourt achieves literary fame later in life with his best-selling childhood memoir of the misery and squalor of his childhood, Angela’s Ashes. With a first printing of just 25,000 copies, the book becomes an instant favourite with critics and readers and is perhaps the ultimate case of the non-celebrity memoir, the extraordinary life of an ordinary man.
McCourt wins the annual Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography in 1997 and one of the annual National Book Critics Circle Awards for the book, which is eventually published in 25 languages and 30 countries. It is a bestseller and makes him a millionaire. Three years later, a movie version of Angela’s Ashes opens to mixed reviews with Northern Irish actor Michael Legge playing McCourt as a teenager.
McCourt is also the author of ‘Tis (1999), which continues the narrative of his life, picking up from the end of Angela’s Ashes and focusing on his life after returning to New York. He subsequently writes Teacher Man (2005) which details his teaching experiences and the challenges of being a teacher.
It is announced in May 2009 that McCourt has been treated for melanoma and that he is in remission, undergoing home chemotherapy. On July 19, 2009, he died from the cancer, with meningeal complications, at a hospice in Manhattan.
In December 1858, Roosa is arrested and jailed without trial until July 1859. He is charged with plotting a Fenian rising in 1865, put on trial for high treason, and sentenced to penal servitude for life due to previous convictions. He serves his time in Pentonville, Portland, and Chatham prisons in England.
After giving an understanding that he will not return to Ireland, Rossa is released as part of the Fenian Amnesty of 1870. Boarding the S.S. Cuba, he leaves for the United States with his friend John Devoy and three other exiles. Together they were dubbed “The Cuba Five.”
In 1885, Rossa is shot outside his office near Broadway by an Englishwoman, Yseult Dudley, but his wounds are not life-threatening. He is allowed to visit Ireland in 1894, and again in 1904. On the latter visit, he is made a “Freeman of the City of Cork.”
Rossa is seriously ill in his later years and is finally confined to a hospital bed in St. Vincent’s Hospital, Staten Island, where he dies at the age of 83 on June 29, 1915. His body is returned to Ireland for burial and a hero’s welcome. The funeral at Glasnevin Cemetery on August 1, 1915, is a huge affair, garnering substantial publicity for the Irish Volunteers and the IRB at time when a rebellion, later to emerge as the Easter Rising, is being actively planned. The graveside oration given by Patrick Pearse remains one of the most famous speeches of the Irish independence movement stirring his audience to a call to arms.
The Jeanie Johnston, a replica of a three-masted barque that was originally built in 1847 in Quebec, Canada, by the Scottish-born shipbuilder John Munn, begins a four-month voyage around Ireland on June 9, 2004.
The original Jeanie Johnston makes her maiden emigrant voyage on April 24, 1848, from Blennerville, County Kerry to Quebec with 193 emigrants on board who are fleeing the effects of the Great Famine that is ravaging Ireland. Between 1848 and 1855, the Jeanie Johnston makes sixteen voyages to North America, sailing to Quebec, Baltimore, and New York. Ships that transport emigrants out of Ireland during this period become known as “famine ships” or “coffin ships.”
The project to build a replica is conceived in the late 1980s, but does not become a reality until November 1993 when a feasibility study is completed. In May 1995, The Jeanie Johnston (Ireland) Company Ltd. is incorporated. The ship is designed by Fred Walker, former Chief Naval Architect with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, England.
The original plans are to launch the ship from her shipyard in Blennerville, but a 19th-century shipwreck is discovered by marine archaeologists while a channel is being dredged. To preserve the find, on April 19, 2000 the hull of the Jeanie Johnston is hauled to the shore and loaded onto a shallow-draft barge. There she is fitted with masts and sails, and on May 4 is transported to Fenit, a short distance away. On May 6 the barge is submerged and the Jeanie Johnston takes to the water for the first time. The next day she is officially christened by President Mary McAleese.
In 2003, the replica Jeanie Johnston sails from Tralee to Canada and the United States visiting 32 U.S. and Canadian cities and attracting over 100,000 visitors.
The replica is currently owned by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority who bought it in 2005 for a reported 2.7 million Euro, which were used to clear outstanding loans on the vessel guaranteed by Tralee Town Council and Kerry County Council. It is docked at Custom House Quay in the centre of Dublin.
After winning the California and South Dakota primary elections for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States and speaking to supporters in a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel, Kennedy walks through the kitchen area frequently shaking hands with those he encounters. Kennedy starts down a passageway narrowed by an ice machine against the right wall and a steam table to the left. He turns to his left and shakes hands with busboy Juan Romero just as Sirhan Sirhan, a 24-year-old Palestinian/Jordanian immigrant, steps down from a low tray-stacker beside the ice machine and repeatedly fires what is later identified as a .22 caliber Iver-Johnson Cadet revolver.
After Kennedy had falls to the floor, former FBI agent William Barry sees Sirhan holding a gun and hits him twice in the face while others force Sirhan against the steam table and disarmed him as he continues firing his gun in random directions. Five other people are also wounded.
Kennedy is transferred several blocks to Good Samaritan Hospital for surgery. Surgery begins at 3:12 AM PDT and lasts three hours and 40 minutes. Despite extensive neurosurgery to remove bullet and bone fragments from his brain, his condition remains extremely critical until he dies at 1:44 AM PDT on June 6, nearly 26 hours after the shooting.
Sirhan pleads guilty on April 17, 1969, and is sentenced to death. The sentence is commuted to life in prison in 1972 after the California Supreme Court, in its decision in California v. Anderson, invalidates all pending death sentences imposed in California prior to 1972. Since that time, Sirhan has been denied parole fifteen times and is currently confined at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in southern San Diego County.
As with his brother’s death, Kennedy’s assassination and the circumstances surrounding it have spawned a variety of conspiracy theories. Kennedy remains one of only two sitting United States Senators to be assassinated, the other being Huey Long.
The Gothic horror novel Dracula, written by Bram Stoker of Dublin, is first published on May 26, 1897. The novel tells the story of Dracula’s attempt to move from Transylvania to England so that he may find new blood and spread the undead curse, and of the battle between Dracula and a small group of men and women led by Professor Abraham Van Helsing.
Between 1879 and 1898, Stoker is a business manager for the world-famous Lyceum Theatre in London, where he supplements his income by writing a large number of sensational novels, including the vampire tale Dracula. Parts of the novel are set around the town of Whitby, where he spends summer holidays.
Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, authors such as H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells write many tales in which fantastic creatures threaten the British Empire. Invasion literature is at a peak, and Stoker’s formula of an invasion of England by continental European influences is very familiar by 1897 to readers of fantastic adventure stories. Victorian readers enjoy Dracula as a good adventure story like many others, but it does not reach its iconic legendary status until later in the 20th century when film versions begin to appear.
Before writing Dracula, Stoker spends seven years researching European folklore and stories of vampires, being most influenced by Emily Gerard‘s 1885 essay Transylvania Superstitions. Later he also claims that he has a nightmare, caused by eating too much crab meat covered with mayonnaise sauce, about a “vampire king” rising from his grave.
Despite being the most widely known vampire novel, Dracula is not the first. It is preceded and partly inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu‘s 1871 Carmilla, about a lesbian vampire who preys on a lonely young woman, and by Varney the Vampire, a lengthy penny dreadful serial from the mid-Victorian period by James Malcolm Rymer. John Polidori creates the image of a vampire portrayed as an aristocratic man, like the character of Dracula, in his tale The Vampyre in 1819.
The Lyceum Theatre where Stoker works between 1878 and 1898 is headed by actor-manager Henry Irving, who is Stoker’s real-life inspiration for Dracula’s mannerisms and who Stoker hopes would play Dracula in a stage version. Irving never does agree to do a stage version, but Dracula’s dramatic sweeping gestures and gentlemanly mannerisms draw their living embodiment from Irving.
The Dead Un-Dead is one of Stoker’s original titles for Dracula, and the manuscript is entitled simply The Un-Dead up until a few weeks before publication. Stoker’s notes for Dracula show that the name of the count is originally “Count Wampyr”, but Stoker becomes intrigued by the name “Dracula” while doing research, after reading William Wilkinson‘s book An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Political Observations Relative to Them (London 1820), which he finds in the Whitby Library and consults a number of times during visits to Whitby in the 1890s. The name Dracula is the patronym of the descendants of Vlad II of Wallachia, who takes the name “Dracul” after being invested in the Order of the Dragon in 1431. In the Romanian language, the word dracul can mean either “the dragon” or, especially in the present day, “the devil.”
Dracula is copyrighted in the United States in 1899 with the publication by Doubleday & McClure of New York. However, when Universal Studios purchases the rights, it comes to light that Bram Stoker has not complied with a portion of U.S. copyright law, placing the novel into the public domain. In the United Kingdom and other countries following the Berne Convention on copyrights, the novel is under copyright until April 1962, fifty years after Stoker’s death.
F. W. Murnau‘s unauthorized film adaptation Nosferatu is released in 1922, and the popularity of the novel increases considerably, owing to the controversy caused when Stoker’s widow tries to have the film removed from public circulation. Florence Stoker sues the film company and wins; however, the company is bankrupt, and Stoker only recovers her legal fees and an order by the court for all copies of the film to be destroyed. Some copies survive and find their way into theatres. Eventually, Florence Stoker simply gives up the fight against public displays of the film.
Dracula has been assigned to many literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic fiction, and invasion literature. Stoker does not invent the vampire, but he defines its modern form, and the novel has spawned numerous theatrical, film, and television interpretations.
Sheehy is educated at the Dominican Convent on Eccles Street, where she is a prize-winning pupil. She then enrolls at St. Mary’s University College, a third level college for women established by the Dominicans in 1893, to study modern French and German. She sits for examinations at Royal University of Ireland and receives a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1899, and a Master of Arts Degree with first-class honours in 1902. This leads to a career as a teacher in Eccles Street and an examiner in the Intermediate Certificate examination.
Sheehy marries Francis Skeffington in 1903, and they both take the surname Sheehy Skeffington, which they do not hyphenate but use as a double name. In 1908, they found the Irish Women’s Franchise League, a group aiming for women’s voting rights.
Sheehy-Skeffington gets into numerous scuffles with the law. She is jailed in 1912 for breaking windows of government buildings in support of suffrage as part of an IWFL campaign. That same year she also throws a hatchet at visiting British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith. She loses her teaching job in 1913 when she is arrested and imprisoned for three months after throwing stones at Dublin Castle and assaulting a police officer in a feminist action. While in jail she goes on hunger strike and is released under the Prisoner’s Temporary Discharge of Ill Health Act but is soon rearrested.
Being free from her teaching job enables Sheehy-Skeffington to devote more time to the fight for suffrage. She is influenced by James Connolly and during the 1913 lock-out works with other suffragists in Liberty Hall, providing food for the families of the strikers.
She strongly opposes participation in World War I which breaks out in August 1914 and is prevented by the British government from attending the International Congress of Women held in The Hague in April 1915. The following June her husband is imprisoned for anti-recruiting activities. He is later shot dead during the 1916 Easter Rising after having been arrested by British soldiers.
Sheehy-Skeffington refuses compensation for her husband’s death, which is offered on condition of her ceasing to speak and write about the murder. Rather, she travels to the United States to publicise the political situation in Ireland. In October 1917, she is the sole Irish representative to League for Small and Subject Nationalities where, along with several other contributors, she is accused of pro-German sympathies. She publishes British Militarism as I Have Known It, which is banned in the United Kingdom until after the World War I. Upon her return to Britain she is once again imprisoned, this time in Holloway prison. After release, Sheehy-Skeffington attends the 1918 Irish Race Convention in New York City and later supports the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA) during the Irish Civil War.
In 1926, Sheehy-Skeffington becomes a founding member of Fianna Fáil and is elected to the party’s Ard Comhairle. During the 1930s, she is assistant editor of An Phoblacht. In January 1933, she is arrested in Newry for breaching an exclusion order banning her from Northern Ireland. At her trial she says, “I recognize no partition. I recognize it as no crime to be in my own country. I would be ashamed of my own name and my murdered husband’s name if I did…Long live the Republic!” She is sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.
Earhart first makes headlines in 1928 when she becomes the first woman to cross the Atlantic as a passenger on a trans-Atlantic airplane flight. At the time of her 1932 flight, just one other person, Charles Lindbergh, has flown solo across the Atlantic. A female aviator, Ruth Nichols, attempts the flight in 1931, but crashes in Canada.
After departing Newfoundland, Earhart encounters many difficulties including fatigue, a leaky fuel tank, and a cracked manifold that spews flames out the side of the engine cowling. Ice forms on her Lockheed Vega 5B‘s wings and causes an unstoppable 3,000-foot descent to just above the waves.
Earhart’s plan is to fly to Paris, which was also Lindbergh’s destination, but the weather and mechanical problems force her to land at a farm near Derry, completing the flight in 14 hours and 56 minutes. She describes her landing in a pasture, “After scaring most of the cows in the neighborhood, I pulled up in a farmer’s back yard.”
The first aircraft, an Irish Air Corps Aero Anson A43, lands at the newly opened Rineanna Airfield, which is later to become known as Shannon International Airport, on May 18, 1939.
Transatlantic aviation in the Shannon Estuary first commences with a seaplane base at Foynes. In October 1935, the Irish Government makes a decision to initiate a survey to find suitable bases for the operation of seaplanes and land planes on a transatlantic service. The Department of Defence, which provides technical advice on aviation to the Civil Aviation Section of the Department of Industry, is given the task.
On November 21, 1935, a survey party sets out and surveys sites as far north as Athlone and south to Askeaton. Among the sites for a seaplane base to be considered are the Shannon just below Limerick, Lough Derg, Lough Corrib, Tralee Bay, Kenmare Bay, Lough Ree, and Valentia. Foynes, near the mouth of the Fergus River, is finally selected due to its sheltered anchorage and its proximity to long open stretches of water.
The first priority is drainage to remove surface water from the site and to construct embankments to prevent flooding of the airfield due to its proximity to the tidal River Shannon. Several hundred men are employed to dig narrow lateral drains for the approximately 135 miles of pipes which are laid in parallel lines 50 feet apart over almost the entire area of the airfield site. They also excavate catchment drains to collect water from the surface of the site.
At this time all indications are that regular aerial travel between Europe and the United States will be initially by flying boat and accordingly, the base at Rineanna is designed to cater to both land planes and flying boats. Construction work commences to build embankments and a breakwater to provide for a seaplane base and to protect the airfield site from flooding from the River Shannon.
Developments in aviation during World War I ensure land planes and not flying boats are to be the future of aviation, therefore the mooring basin and the east breakwater which are being constructed for flying boats at Rineanna are never quite finished. Construction of the embankments continue to protect the site from the River Shannon and to form a drainage lagoon for surface water from the western headland of the airport site.
When World War II ends, the airport is ready to be used by the many new post-war commercial airlines of Europe and North America. On September 16, 1945, the first transatlantic proving flight, a Pan AmDC-4, lands at Shannon from New York City. On October 24, the first scheduled commercial flight, an American Overseas Airlines DC-4, passes through Shannon Airport. An accident involving President Airlines on September 10, 1961 results in the loss of 83 lives. The Douglas DC-6 aircraft crashes into the River Shannon while leaving Shannon Airport for Chicago.
The number of international carriers rises sharply in succeeding years as Shannon becomes well known as the gateway between Europe and the Americas as limited aircraft range necessitates refueling stops on many journeys. Shannon becomes the most convenient stopping point before and after a trip across the Atlantic. Additionally, during the Cold War, many transatlantic flights from the Soviet Union stop here for refueling, because Shannon is the westernmost non-NATO airport.
Shannon Airport is one of Ireland’s three primary airports, along with Dublin Airport and Cork Airport, and includes the longest runway in Ireland at 10,495 feet. It is a designated emergency landing site for the Space Shuttle during the U.S. shuttle program. In 2015, 1.715 million passengers pass through the airport, making it the third busiest airport in the country after Dublin and Cork. Shannon Airport is in Shannon, County Clare, and mainly serves Limerick, Ennis, Galway, and the south-west of Ireland.
The RMS Titanic, four days into her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York City, sinks in the north Atlantic Ocean at 2:20 AM on the morning of April 15, 1912, after striking an iceberg just before midnight on April 14.
Titanic‘s maiden voyage, commanded by 62-year-old Captain Edward John Smith, begins shortly after noon on April 10, 1912 when she leaves Southampton on the first leg of her journey to New York City. A few hours later she reaches Cherbourg in France, where she takes on passengers. Her next port of call is Queenstown (now Cobh) in Ireland, which she reaches around midday on April 11. After taking on more passengers and stores, Titanic departs in the afternoon with an estimated 2,224 people on board.
Titanic receives six warnings of sea ice on April 14 but is traveling near her maximum speed when her lookouts sight the iceberg. Unable to turn quickly enough, the ship suffers a glancing blow that buckles her starboard side and opens five of her sixteen compartments to the sea. Titanic has been designed to stay afloat with four of her forward compartments flooded but not more, and the crew soon realises that the ship is going to sink. They use distress flares and wireless radio messages to attract help as the passengers are put into lifeboats. However, in accordance with existing practice, Titanic‘s lifeboat system is designed to ferry passengers to nearby rescue vessels, not to hold everyone on board simultaneously. With the ship sinking quickly and help still hours away, there is no safe refuge for many of the passengers and crew. Compounding this, poor management of the evacuation means many boats are launched before they are totally full.
At about 2:15 AM, Titanic‘s angle in the water begins to increase rapidly as water pours into previously unflooded parts of the ship through deck hatches. Her suddenly increasing angle causes a giant wave to wash along the ship from the forward end of the boat deck, sweeping many people into the sea. Titanic‘s stern lifts high into the air as the ship tilts down in the water, reaching an angle of 30–45 degrees. After another minute, the ship’s lights flicker once and then permanently go out, plunging Titanic into darkness. Shortly after the lights go out, the ship splits apart at one of the weakest points in the structure, the area of the engine room hatch. The submerged bow likely remains attached to the stern by the keel for a short time, pulling the stern to a high angle before separating and leaving the stern to float for a few minutes longer. The forward part of the stern floods very rapidly, causing it to tilt and then settle briefly before sinking.
Titanic sinks with over a thousand passengers and crew still on board. Almost all those who jump or fall into the water die from hypothermia within minutes. RMS Carpathia arrives on the scene about 90 minutes after the sinking and has rescued the last of the survivors by 9:15 AM on April 15, some nine and a half hours after the collision with the iceberg.
The death toll has been put at 1,513, including many Irish, although the number of casualties remains somewhat unclear due to a number of factors, including confusion over the passenger list, which includes some names of people who cancelled their trip at the last minute, and the fact that several passengers traveled under aliases for various reasons and were double-counted on the casualty lists.
The disaster causes widespread outrage over the lack of lifeboats, lax regulations, and the unequal treatment of the three passenger classes during the evacuation. Subsequent inquiries recommend sweeping changes to maritime regulations, leading to the establishment in 1914 of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), which still governs maritime safety today.
KLM Flight 633, a Lockheed Constellation Triton passenger flight from Amsterdam to New York City, ditches on a mudbank in the River Shannon immediately after takeoff from Shannon Airport on September 5, 1954. Twenty-eight people are killed in the accident which is caused by an unexpected re-extension of the landing gear, possibly compounded by pilot error.
seamus dubhghaill 