MERCIER PRESS
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© Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc, 2010
© Foreword: Gabriel Doherty, 2010
ISBN: 978 1 85635 675 6
ePub ISBN: 978 1 78117 068 7
Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 069 4
This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
For Deirdre & Liam.
Wishing you not civil strife,
But many happy years together.
| Acknowledgements | ||
| Foreword | ||
| Chapter 1 | The British Withdrawal | |
| Chapter 2 | Early Hostilities in Limerick | |
| Chapter 3 | The Outbreak of the Civil War | |
| Chapter 4 | The War comes to Limerick | |
| Chapter 5 | The Battle for Limerick | |
| Chapter 6 | The End of the Conflict in Limerick city | |
| Appendix 1 | Casualty Lists for Limerick, 11–21 July 1922 | |
| Appendix 2 | Biographies | |
| Endnotes | ||
| Index |
War with the foreigner brings to the fore all that is best and noblest in a nation. Civil War all that is mean and base.
Frank Aiken in a letter to the Provisional Free State
Government, 3 August 19221
Lloyd George was really right in what he did, if we had gone on we could probably have squashed the rebellion as a temporary measure, but it would have broken out again like an ulcer the moment we removed the troops. I think the rebels would probably have refused battles, and hidden away their arms, etc., until we had gone. The only way therefore was to give them some form of self government and let them squash the rebellion themselves; they were the only people who could really stamp it out, and they are still trying to do so and as far as one can tell they seem to be having a fair amount of success. I am not, however, in close touch with the situation over there, but it seems to me they had more success than we had.
Letter from Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery to
Major Percival, 14 October 19232
I wish to thank the following:
My parents, Pat and Monica. My siblings Deirdre and Kevin. Eoin Purcell whose concept this book was. Tom Toomey, Thomas Mac Con Mara, Jim Corbett, Danny McCarthy, Martin ‘Bob’ O’Dwyer, Donal O’Flynn, Liz Gillis, Cormac Ó Comhraí, Des Long, William Butler, Miceál O’Hurley-Pitts, Seán O’Hehir, Jeremiah Hurley, Terry O’Reilly, Declan Barron, Seán Ó Murchada, Pat Gunn, Dr Ruan O’Donnell, Dr John O’Callaghan and all the other historians I know who are so generous with their time, advice and information. John White, Chris Coe, Cyril Wall, Aidan Larkin, Mick Houlihan, Billy McGlynn, Andrew Clancy, Johnny White, Connor Farrell, Gavin O’Connell, Dara Macken, Maurice Quinlivan, Liam Hogan, Jim Forde, Séamus Welsh, Sean Curtin, Martin and Norma Naughton, Seán Gannon, ‘The Rubberbandits’, the staff of Charles Fort, but especially Karen, Brendan, Claire and Evelyn, the two Marys in Dungarvan, Brian Hodkinson and the staff of the Limerick Civic Museum; Mike Maguire at the Local Studies department, Limerick City Library; the staff of the Irish Military Archives; the National Library of Ireland; the staff of the National Archives; the staff of Kilmainham Jail Museum; Peter at the Clare Local Studies Centre; all the staff of the Clare Library; the Khaki and Green War of Independence Reenactors, especially Éamonn Dunne and Ray Murphy; Seán O’Mahony and the 1916–1921 Club; Francis E. Maguire for giving me permission to use extracts from John Pinkman’s diaries; Mary, Patrick and Wendy and all the staff of Mercier Press.
It is a truism that the defining feature of the Irish Civil War was that it was, indeed, a war. That is, it is undeniable that the salient characteristic of life in Ireland between the attack on the Four Courts on 28 June 1922 and the ‘dump arms’ order issued to the IRA by its chief-of-staff, Frank Aiken, on 24 May 1923, was the existence of a state of (to quote but one, brief dictionary definition) ‘armed hostile conflict’, involving the use of destructive lethal force by belligerent parties. That it is necessary to draw attention to this apparently self-evident fact will be surprising to many, but some of the (very fine) scholarship on the subject of these seminal eleven months that has been produced over the last decade – focused as such writings have been on political developments or sociopsychological dimensions to the Treaty split – have, by accident or design, tended to elide this base-line fact. This omission does not, of course, make such works ‘wrong’; at worst it makes them incomplete – and bearing in mind Clausewitz’s mandatory dictum that war is simply the extension of politics by other means, a strong case might be made that the specifically martial aspects of the conflict are, indeed, of secondary importance. The lacuna, however, remains striking, and all the more so when one considers the numerous, and extremely welcome, publications on military aspects of the War of Independence that have appeared in the last two to three years (many of which, I am delighted to note, can be attributed to the industry and acumen of Mercier Press).
This omission is, of course, nothing new; on the contrary, it is entirely consistent with what went before – or, more accurately, what didn’t. One of the most insidious legacies of the Civil War was the want for decades of a dispassionate analysis of the causes, course, and consequences of its military aspects; not surprisingly, partisan accounts were, by way of contrast, plentiful and even more insidious. The reasons for this absence were numerous and entirely understandable. They include the determination of the Cumann na nGaedheal government to deny its enemies in the IRA the retrospective comfort of implied belligerent status; the bitterness of republicans at the memory of what was, after all, a crushing defeat; public aversion at the excesses perpetrated by both sides; and the general realisation that the cherished (if tenuous) unity of the ‘four glorious years’ had been lost forever, to the extent that it had meaningfully existed at all. Ground-breaking general studies by Calton Younger and Michael Hopkinson subsequently facilitated an atmosphere more conducive to evidence-based discussion, although both were handicapped (as, indeed, were researchers in many other fields of historical enquiry) by the failure of the state for many decades to open its archives to independent inspection. The eruption of violence in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s was another factor that helped to extend the shelf-life of Ireland’s Great Silence.
This new series, specifically examining the military aspects of the Civil War, is intended to address this obvious gap in modern Irish historiography. Covering all the principal local theatres, with an obvious focus on the battle for Munster where the majority of the fighting took place, each volume will discuss the fighting strength and tactics of the opposing forces, and focus as much on the human dimensions to the combat (in terms of death, injuries and personal experiences) as on the political and strategic significance of each engagement. Taken collectively they will offer innovative insights into a topic that has been hidden in plain view for too long.
In your hands you hold the first volume to appear in the series. It focuses on the fight for Limerick, a city not unused to military engagements or unfamiliar with disputed treaties, and a veritable cockpit of republican enmities in the spring of 1922. It is a story by turns suspenseful, awful and heartrending, and is adroitly narrated by the author, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc. It is a fine point of departure for a series that will, I believe, capture the wide audience it merits.
Gabriel Doherty
Department of History
University College Cork
