JANUARY: The year opens traditionally with Maureen Potter in pantomime, Cinderella in the Gaiety theatre in Dublin.
The big movie is Jesus Christ Superstar at the Adelphi cinema, Ireland and Lions outhalf Mike Gibson, gets an MBE. In the columns of The Irish Times, Edmund van Esbeck wishes our international rugby selectors well, while making it clear he expects little good to come of their deliberations. And a busy year begins for a young woman from a wealthy English background, as Dr Rose Dugdale and three other Provisional IRA members try to bomb a police barracks in Strabane
FEBRUARY: Another wealthy young woman, Patricia Hearst, is kidnapped by a radical group the "Symbionese Liberation Army" who sought to feed the poor of California from the Hearst newspapers' fortune. Soon she throws her lot in with her captors and joins them in bank raids. Designer Louis Feraud decrees "knees well hidden this spring". Derek "Crosaire" Crozier, then as now doyen of crossword compilers, deploys a rare topical reference . "That's the end of half of the Free State (6)". The answer was "demise" ( demi = half , SE, Saorstat Éireann). Britain holds the first of two general elections.
MARCH: The letters pages of The Irish Times host a spat between our intellectuals. One Con Houlihan writes from Castleisland, Co Kerry; "Dr Conor Cruise O'Brien cannot be all that bad. After all, Desmond Fennell does not like him." Contraception is now on the political agenda. Mary Robinson's Family Planning Bill is refused a second reading in the Seanad, but the minister for justice, Patrick Cooney, is preparing his own version. That will fix it.
APRIL: A trust is set up to maintain The Irish Times as a "serious and independent newspaper". A Dublin Corporation bin strike ends, it had begun in February. Dr Rose Dugdale, is busy again. Some 19 paintings including a Vermeer, a Goya and two Gainsboroughs are stolen from the Beit collection at Russborough House in west Wicklow. And Charles Haughey buys an island, Inishvickillane in the Blaskets, as a holiday home.
MAY: Sgt Patrick O'Leary and Garda William Creedon show that the force has a good eye for the fine arts when they spot the missing Beit collection in a rented cottage at Glandore, Co Cork.
JUNE: The first Russian ambassador to Ireland presents his credentials and the international press is amused by the address of the new embassy - Orwell Road - and the fact that it had previously been occupied by the Irish Management Institute.
JULY: The taoiseach, Liam Cosgrave, and six other Fine Gael deputies vote against their own party's Bill to allow married couples access to contraceptives. A nine-week Dublin bus strike ends. The issue - the replacement of a six-day working week by a five-day working week. The military government in Greece is ousted and democracy restored to the land of its birth, but there is trouble looming in Cyprus between the Turks and Greeks.
AUGUST: Author Kate O'Brien dies in exile in Boughton, Kent. Of late her work has been overshadowed by another O'Brien ( Edna), but in time the real value of novels like The Land of Spices will be appreciated. Germany wins the world cup for the second time, defeating Holland in the final.
SEPTEMBER: Nixon, resigns, forced out of the US presidency by the lies of the Watergate scandal. Two Nixon aides, John Dean and John Ehrlichman, receive prison sentences. In Dublin, the attorney general, Declan Costello, announces the formation of a law reform commission.
OCTOBER: Harold Wilson narrowly wins the second British general election of the year. A former IRA chief of staff, Seán McBride, shares the 1974 Nobel peace prize with a Japanese statesman, Eisaku Sato. British - and some Irish - public opinion is not impressed. The Irish soccer team defeats the Soviet Union 3-0 at Dalymount Park, Don Givens scoring all three goals.
NOVEMBER: President Erskine Childers collapses and dies while attending a medical dinner in Dublin. Former judge Cearbhall Ó Dálaigh replaces him in December. Irish is no longer obligatory to get a job in the civil service. The seventh earl of Lucan, "Lucky" Lucan, goes missing, wanted for the murder of his children's nanny Sandra Rivett.
DECEMBER: To curb oil imports the price of petrol goes up 30 per cent. Dublin's much loved artist Harry Kernoff, who chronicled the life and people of the streets, dies age 74. Georgia's governor, peanut farmer Jimmy Carter, declares his intention to run for the US presidency. And Rose Dugdale completes a busy 12 months by giving birth to a baby boy in Limerick Jail.
... compiled by Kieran Fagan