On this day 17 May in Irish History

1650 - Cromwell's army is defeated in the second assault on Clonmel, suffering its heaviest losses. The following day, the Mayor of Clonmel negotiates honourable terms for surrender with Cromwell, who did not realise that O'Neill and his soldiers had left the town. Annoyed at being outwitted, Cromwell nevertheless keeps to the terms
1730 - Elizabeth, widow of William Molyneux, marries Nathaniel St Andre, a Swiss surgeon who wins an action for defamation on a charge of having killed Molyneux by administering opium to him in his last illness by her connivance
1855 - Birth in Bantry, Co. Cork of Timothy Michael Healy, one of the most brilliant and most controversial of Irish politicians. His career spans from Parnell's leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1880s to the foundation of the Irish Free State in 1922; he becomes the Free State's first Governor-General
1865 - Shan Bullock, novelist, is born in Crom, Co. Fermanagh
1880 - Charles Stewart Parnell is elected Chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party
1908 - Birth of Vincent Barry, organic chemist, in Cork
1911 - Birth in Roscommon of actress Maureen O'Sullivan Boyle who is remembered for her role as Jane in a series of five movies opposite Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan
1917 - A new military viceroy, General French, acts on mistaken information that Sinn Féin is implicated in a pro-German plot and has most of the leaders arrested
1949 - The British Government recognizes the Republic of Ireland

Any more?

1974 - Dublin and Monaghan hit by 4 no-warning carbomb attacks in which 34 people died including an unborn baby. Noone has ever been held to account for the murders