Further Violence

Article 'Matters of the Moment' published in The Catholic Bulletin (Vol X No. 9) September 1920

In November, Cork was the scene of the significant Kilmichael ambush when 18 Auxiliaries died in an attack by Tom Barry’s Flying Column. One of the most notorious actions of the War of Independence also occurred in November on “Bloody Sunday”. Over a dozen spectators at a football match between Tipperary and Dublin in Croke Park were killed by Auxiliaries, following the earlier killing of a number of British agents by the Michael Collins squad.  The present Hogan Stand is named after a Tipperary footballer killed on the day.

A “soviet” was briefly established at Knocklong Creamery in County Limerick in May. This was similar to the one in Limerick City that took place the previous year though it lasted but for a few days.

In the North, where the Unionist community under the leadership of Edward Carson who was about to make way for James Craig, was heading in the opposite direction to the rest of the country. Serious sectarian disturbance erupted throughout the year with dozens of deaths, partly connected with the Belfast shipyards, in a city where over 400 Catholics were driven from their homes. August was a particularly bad month in the city, at the end of which St. Matthew’s Catholic church in Belfast had been attacked by loyalists, followed by 180 fires with damage of around £1 million.

The IRA carried out a number of notable operations during the year, including the killing in Dublin in March of the magistrate Alan Bell who had been examining republican fundraising activity and of the RIC Commander for Munster, Gerald Smyth in Cork in July. A RIC barracks in Ballytrain in Monaghan was captured by an Ernie O’Malley unit in February, as was Mallow Military Barracks in September by Liam Lynch’s group. This was the only one so captured by the IRA during the entire War of Independence.

Another martyr emerged for the republican cause in November, a week after the death of MacSwiney, with the hanging in Mountjoy Gaol of the eighteen-year-old medical student Kevin Barry. That death sentence drew strong demands for a reprieve because of Barry’s youth, even though one of the British soldiers killed in the operation at a Dublin bakery from which Barry was arrested was even younger than he.

Two other events kept Ireland on the international stage. In June there was a mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India for which Private James Daly was executed and others sentenced to penal servitude. In August the Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne in Australia, Daniel Mannix was briefly arrested upon arrival at Queenstown / Cobh to prevent him from speaking for the nationalist cause, though he went on to receive the Freedom of Dublin.