Ireland

Dr Marie Stopes, founder of first modern birth control clinic, born Edinburgh.

Nationalist and Gaelic League activist, Mary Ellen Spring-Rice is born

Viscount Mountmorres is killed near Clonbur, Co. Galway

Beginning of famous boycott against Irish landlord Captain Boycott.

Refusing to work for offending landlords, farmers demonstrated their united power in Mayo against Captain Boycott in 1880. The Prime Minister, W E Gladstone, drafted a Land Act in 1881 which gave tenants new rights and set up courts to control (and genera

Mayo agent, Captain Charles Boycott, was sent to a moral Coventry.

Captain Charles Boycott, the land agent for Lord Erne in County Mayo, became the unwilling namesake of a new form of peaceful protest — “boycotting” — during the Irish Land War in 1880.

Parnell delivers his famous speech at Ennis

Charles Stewart Parnell (June 27, 1846 - October 06, 1891) was an Irish political leader and one of the most important figures in 19th century Ireland and the United Kingdom; William Ewart Gladstone thought him the most remarkable person he had ever met. A future Liberal Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, described him as one of the three or four greatest men of the nineteenth century, while Lord Haldane described him as the strongest man the British House of Commons had seen in 150 years.

Death of Ellen Kean, one of the greatest actresses of her time

Five people drown in Derrybeg, Co. Donegal when a chapel is flooded during Mass

Birth of William Thomas Cosgrave

William Thomas Cosgrave, Irish statesman and founding leader of the Irish Free State, is born in Dublin on June 6, 1880. A member of Sinn Féin, he participated in the 1916 Easter Rising and was sentenced to life imprisonment, though he was released in 1917 under a general amnesty.

Birth in Dublin of William Thomas Cosgrave, the first President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State