← 1883 1882 1881 1880 1879 1884 in Ireland → 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889
Centuries:	17th 18th 19th 20th 21st
Decades:	1860s 1870s 1880s 1890s 1900s
See also:	1884 in the United Kingdom Other events of 1884 List of years in Ireland

Events from the year 1884 in Ireland.

Events

• "Dublin Castle scandal" – following a failed libel action, a number of members of the Dublin Castle administration are convicted of participating in male homosexual acts.^[1]
• 22 September – HMS Wasp (1880) is wrecked on Tory Island, County Donegal, with the loss of 52 lives and only 6 survivors.^[2]
• October – Ballymena, Cushendall and Red Bay Railway taken over by Belfast and Northern Counties Railway.^[3]
• 22 October – Isabella Mulvany is one of 9 women to get the first degrees from a Universities in Great Britain or Ireland, and the first in Ireland. Her degree is granted by the Royal University of Ireland.
• 1 November – Mew Island Lighthouse first illuminated.
• 6 December – Representation of the People Act ("Third Reform Act") extends the franchise uniformly across the U.K. to all male tenants paying a £10 rental or occupying land to that value, and restricts multiple voting; this increases the Irish electorate from 126,000 to 738,000.

Arts and literature

• 18 February – English Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins takes up a post as professor of Greek and Latin at University College Dublin on St Stephen's Green, where he will remain until his death in 1889 and write his "terrible sonnets".
• 1 October – first free public libraries in Dublin open.

Sport

Births

• 17 February – Amby Power, Clare hurler (died 1960).
• 20 March – Tomás Mac Curtain, Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork (murdered on his 36th birthday by the Black and Tans 1920).
• 21 March – Nora Barnacle, lover, companion, inspiration and wife of James Joyce (died 1951).
• 12 June – James Somers, soldier, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1915 at Gallipoli, Turkey (died 1918).
• 17 June – Patrick Little, Fianna Fáil TD and Cabinet Minister (died 1963).
• 23 June – Val Harris, soccer player and manager.
• 4 July – Mabel McConnell Fitzgerald, republican, suffragette and socialist (died 1958).
• 14 September – Frederick Alfred Pile, soldier and politician (died 1976).
• 4 November – Harry Ferguson, early aviator and developer of the modern agricultural tractor (died 1960).
• 7 November – Patrick Belton, Fianna Fáil and Cumann na nGaedheal TD, President of the anti-communist Irish Christian Front (died 1945).
• 16 December – J. M. Kerrigan, actor (died 1964).
• 17 December – Stanislaus Joyce, scholar and writer, brother of James Joyce (died 1955).

  Full date unknown

  • Dick Doyle, Kilkenny hurler (died 1959).
  • Edward Richards-Orpen, furniture maker and independent member of Seanad Éireann (died 1967).
  • Ernest George Trobridge, architect (died 1942).
  • William J. Twaddell, Ulster Unionist Party MP (assassinated by Irish Republican Army 1922).

Deaths

• 27 February – Peter Paul McSwiney, politician two times Lord Mayor of Dublin, entrepreneur co-owner of the first Dublin's Department store in 1853, which became the Clerys.
• 1 April – James Travers, soldier, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1857 at Indore, India (born 1820).
• 25 June – Philip Gore, 4th Earl of Arran, Anglo-Irish peer and diplomat (born 1801).
• 28 June – John Sullivan, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1855 at Sebastopol, in the Crimea (born 1830).
• 27 July – Eliza Lynch, mistress of Francisco Solano López, president of Paraguay (b. c1835).
• 17 October – Alexander Martin Sullivan, journalist, politician and lawyer (born 1829).

  Full date unknown

  • Richard Fitzgerald, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1857 at Bolandshahr, India (born 1831).

See also

• 1884 in Scotland
• 1884 in Wales

References