1857 in Ireland

Events

• 27 March – 24 April: General election.
• 12 July – in Belfast, confrontations between crowds of Catholics and Protestants turn into 10 days of rioting, exacerbated by the open-air preaching of Evangelical Presbyterian minister "Roaring" Hugh Hanna, with many of the police force joining the Protestant side. There are also riots in Derry, Portadown and Lurgan.
• 4 October – the Catholic St. Mary's Cathedral, Kilkenny, is opened.
• The Natural History Museum is opened by the Royal Dublin Society.
• Dublin Zoo's lions breed for the first time.
• Scrabo Tower erected above Newtownards as a memorial to Charles Vane, 3rd Marquess of Londonderry.
• Tom Gallaher sets up the Gallaher tobacco business in Derry.

  Arts and literature

Sport

Births

• 7 February – Windham Wyndham-Quin, 5th Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl, peer and politician.
• 12 February – Margaret Pearse, Fianna Fáil politician, mother of Patrick Pearse and Willie Pearse.
• 11 March – Tom Clarke, nationalist, rebel and organiser of the Easter Rising.
• 17 April – Jane Barlow, poet and novelist.
• 19 April – Patrick Stone, Member of the Western Australian Legislative Assembly.
• 20 April – Thomas Myles, surgeon, Home Ruler, involved in importation of arms for the Irish Volunteers in 1914.
• 22 April – Ada Rehan, actress.
• 1 May – T. W. Rolleston, writer, poet and translator.
• 19 May – William Morgan Jellett, Irish Unionist MP in the Parliament of the United Kingdom.
• 11 July – Joseph Larmor, physicist.
• 1 August – Alan Joseph Adamson, politician in Canada.
• 22 August – William Dowler Morris, mayor of Ottawa.
• 5 October – Peadar Mac Fhionnlaoich, Irish language writer.
• 1 November
• * W. H. Grattan Flood, musicologist and historian.
• * John Joly, physicist.
• 18 November – Stanhope Forbes, painter.
• 20 November – Sir Henry Robinson, 1st Baronet, civil servant.

  Deaths

• 29 January – John Connors, soldier, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1855 at Sebastopol in the Crimea.
• 3 March – William Brown, creator and first admiral of the Argentine Navy.
• 9 April – Charles McCorrie, soldier, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1855 at Sebastopol, in the Crimea.
• 11 July – John Egan, businessman and politician in Ottawa.
• 27 July – Laurence F. Renehan, priest and historian.
• 10 August – John Wilson Croker, statesman and author.
• 19 September – John Purcell, soldier, recipient of the Victoria Cross for gallantry in 1857 at Delhi, India, later killed in action.
• 23 September – John Nicholson, military hero in India.
• 17 December – Francis Beaufort, hydrographer and officer in the British Royal Navy, creator of the Beaufort scale.