1939 in Northern Ireland

Incumbents

• Monarch - George VI

  Events

• 7 March – Harland and Wolff's Belfast shipyard launched the ocean liner for Royal Mail Lines.
• 17 April – Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Lord Craigavon, dismissed the Republic of Ireland government's position of neutrality as "cowardly".
• 4 May – The Prime Minister of Northern Ireland announced that conscription would not be extended to Northern Ireland.
• 17 August – Harland and Wolff's Belfast shipyard launched the aircraft carrier for the Royal Navy.
• 3 September – The United Kingdom declared war on Germany following the German invasion of Poland on 1 September.

  Arts and literature

• June – The Northern Ireland Players performed Joseph Tomelty's Barnum is Right as their first commercial stage play.
• Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal: a poem was published.

  Sport

Football

• Irish League
• Irish Cup

  Births

• 1 January – Billy Reid, volunteer in Provisional Irish Republican Army, killed in gunfight with British Army
• 13 April – Seamus Heaney, poet, writer and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
• 17 May – Eddie Magill, footballer and football manager
• 6 July – Mary Peters, pentathlete and 1972 Summer Olympics gold medal winner
• 27 July – Michael Longley, poet
• 9 August – Vincent Hanna, television journalist
• 16 August – Seán Brady, Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland
• 11 October – Austin Currie, founder-member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, previously Fine Gael TD
• 8 December – James Galway, flautist
• Undated – Éamonn O'Doherty, sculptor

  Deaths

• 2 February – Amanda McKittrick Ros, novelist and poet noted for her purple prose
• 20 September – Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin, astronomer