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Tag Archives: Irish Republican Army (1919-1922)


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Birth of Roddy Connolly, Socialist, Trade Unionist & Politician

Roderick James Connolly, socialist, trade unionist, and politician, is born on February 11, 1901, at 54 Pimlico, Dublin. He is also known as “Roddy Connolly” and “Rory Connolly.”

Connolly is the only son and sixth among seven children of Irish socialist James Connolly and Lillie Connolly. A lieutenant in the Irish Citizen Army (ICA) boys’ corps, he is involved in the 1916 Easter Rising. At the age of 15, he serves in the General Post Office (GPO) under his father. He joins the Socialist Party of Ireland in 1917.

Connolly travels to Russia on several occasions in 1920 and 1921 and forms a close association with Vladimir Lenin and is hugely influenced by the Soviet leader. He is a delegate to the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) as a delegate of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in June 1920. It is here he meets Lenin at just 19 years of age following an introduction from journalist John Reed. According to Connolly, Lenin speaks English with a Rathmines accent which he acquired from his Irish tutor.

Connolly helps form and becomes President of the first Communist Party of Ireland (CPI) in October 1921. He is editor of the CPI newspaper, The Workers’ Republic. He opposes the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty between the representatives of the Irish Republic and the British state, and fights in the Irish Civil War on the anti-treaty side. The CPI is the first Irish political party to oppose the Treaty and urges the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to adopt socialist policies to defeat the new Irish Free State government. The CPI is dissolved in 1924 by the Comintern but in 1926, Connolly helps set up a second Marxist party, the Irish Workers’ Party. He is the party leader and editor of its journal, The Hammer and Plough. This party too is dissolved in 1927.

Connolly joins the Irish Labour Party in 1928 and in 1934 participates in the last socialist initiative of Inter-War Ireland, the Irish Republican Congress. He is imprisoned twice in 1935. At the 1943 Irish general election, he is elected to Dáil Éireann as a Labour Party Teachta Dála (TD) for Louth. He loses his seat at the 1944 Irish general election, but is re-elected at the 1948 Irish general election, before losing once more at the 1951 Irish general election. He is also financial secretary of the party from 1941 to 1949.

Connolly enters a semi-retirement between the mid-1950s and mid-1960s, but in the late 1960s, he begins a comeback. He is elected as party chairman in 1971 and holds this position until 1978. During his time as chairman, he oversees the expulsion of the Socialist Labour Alliance in 1971, some of whose members go on to form the Socialist Workers Network (SWN), which in turn eventually establishes People Before Profit (PBP).

Connolly also sits in Seanad Éireann from 1975 to 1977 on the Cultural and Educational Panel. He is a supporter of the Labour Party–Fine Gael coalition government that is in power from 1973 to 1977 and defends the coalition from left-wing critics by reminding them his father, James Connolly, had allied with the likes of Patrick Pearse in 1916.

Connolly dies of pneumonia and stomach cancer in St. Michael’s Hospital, Dún Laoghaire, on December 16, 1980. He is buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

In 1921, Connolly marries Jessica Maidment, a socialist activist in England and chartered accountant, who from 1928 works for Russian Oil Products in Dublin. She dies in 1930 from blood poisoning arising from an operation. He is survived by his second wife, Peggy, whom he marries in 1937, sons, and daughters. His recreations include chess and bridge; highly adept at both, he learns the former from Seán Mac Diarmada as prisoners after the Easter rising and is international bridge correspondent for the Irish Independent.

(Pictured: Roddy Connolly during an interview conducted for the RTÉ Television project “Portraits 1916” on January 9, 1966)


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Birth of Kevin Barry, IRA Volunteer & Medical Student

Kevin Gerard Barry, Irish Republican Army (IRA) volunteer and medical student, is born on January 20, 1902, at 8 Fleet Street, Dublin. He becomes the first Irish republican to be executed by the British Government since the leaders of the Easter Rising.

Barry is the fourth of seven children born to Thomas Barry, dairyman, and Mary Barry (née Dowling), both originally from northeast County Carlow. His father dies of heart disease on February 8, 1908, at the age of 56. His mother then moves the family to the family’s farm at Tombeagh, Hacketstown, County Carlow, while retaining the family’s townhouse on Fleet Street. As a child he goes to the National School in Rathvilly. In 1915, he is sent to live in Dublin and attends the O’Connell Schools for three months, before enrolling in the Preparatory Grade at St. Mary’s College, Rathmines, in September 1915. He remains at that school until May 31, 1916, when it is closed by its clerical sponsors. With the closure of St. Mary’s College, he transfers to Belvedere College, a Jesuit school in Dublin. He joins the Irish Volunteers, the forerunner of the IRA, while still at Belvedere College, and enters University College Dublin (UCD) in 1919 to study medicine.

As a member of 1st Battalion, Dublin Brigade of the Irish Volunteers, he takes part in a successful raid for arms on the military post in King’s Inns, Dublin, on June 1, 1920. Within only six minutes the raiders secure rifles, light machine guns, and large quantities of ammunition, and depart the site with no casualties. He also takes part in an abortive attempt to burn Aughavanagh House, Aughrim, County Wicklow in July 1920, and an attack on a British ration party in Church Street, Dublin, on September 20, with the aim of seizing arms. The final operation fails. Gunfire breaks out, three soldiers of around Barry’s own age are killed or fatally wounded, and he becomes the first Volunteer to be captured in an armed attack since 1916.

During interrogation, Barry is threatened with a bayonet and is mistreated. A general court-martial on October 20, which he refuses to recognise, condemns him to death for murdering the three soldiers, although one of the bullets taken from Private Marshall Whitehead’s body is a .45 calibre, while all witnesses state that Barry was armed with a .38 Mauser Parabellum. Despite widespread appeals on grounds of both clemency and expediency, the cabinet in London and officials in Dublin decide separately against a reprieve, probably because of its likely effect on the morale of soldiers and police.

On October 28, the Irish Bulletin, the official propaganda newspaper produced by Dáil Éireann‘s Department of Publicity, publishes Barry’s statement alleging torture. The headline reads English Military Government Torture a Prisoner of War and are about to Hang him. The Irish Bulletin declares Barry to be a prisoner of war, suggesting a conflict of principles is at the heart of the conflict. The British do not recognise a war and treat all killings by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as murder. The public learns on this day that the date of execution has been fixed for November 1.

He was hanged in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, on November 1, after hearing two Masses in his cell. The timing of the execution, only seven days after the death by hunger strike of Terence MacSwiney, the republican Lord Mayor of Cork, brings public opinion to a fever-pitch. He is buried in unconsecrated ground on the jail property. His comrade and fellow student Frank Flood is buried alongside him four months later. A plain cross marks their graves and those of Patrick Moran, Thomas Whelan, Thomas Traynor, Patrick Doyle, Thomas Bryan, Bernard Ryan, Edmond Foley and Patrick Maher who are hanged in the same prison before the Anglo-Irish Treaty of July 1921 which ends hostilities between Irish republicans and the British. The graves go unidentified until 1934. They become known as the Forgotten Ten by republicans campaigning for the bodies to be reburied with honour and proper rites. On October 14, 2001, the remains of the ten men are given a state funeral and moved from Mountjoy Prison to be re-interred at Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin.

Barry is the first person to be tried and executed for a capital offence under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act 1920, passed twelve weeks earlier. Together with his youth, this makes him a republican martyr celebrated in many ballads and verses. The best-known, set to a tune popular with British servicemen, is recorded by the American singer Paul Robeson, among others. A memorial stained-glass window by Richard King of the Harry Clarke Studio is later installed in the former UCD council chamber (afterward called the Kevin Barry Room), Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin.


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Attempted Assassination of Sir John French

The Irish Republican Army (IRA) attempts to assassinate British General John French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, in his car at Phoenix Park, Dublin, on December 19, 1919. French is unhurt, but one IRA Volunteer, Martin Savage, is killed. IRA volunteer Dan Breen and two Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP) men and a driver are wounded. A Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) sergeant is knocked unconscious.

On a cold December day in 1919, a group of young IRA volunteers wait at a public house near the Ashtown gate of Dublin’s Phoenix Park. Some are from Dublin, members of Michael Collins’ recently created assassination unit, the Squad. Others are from farther afield, like Dan Breen and Seán Treacy from County Tipperary and Martin Savage from County Sligo.

They are waiting for Sir John French, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the most senior British official in the land. He is returning from a visit to the west of Ireland and has alighted at Ashtown train station before returning by car to his official residence, the Viceregal Lodge, in the Phoenix Park.

The IRA men have a signaler in a tree and when French’s car approaches, they attempt to block the road with a farm cart. However, they are too late to block the Lord Lieutenant’s car which sweeps through the impromptu barricade. Shots are fired and one policeman is wounded but French himself emerges unscathed.

A second car, which the IRA believes to contain French, bears the brunt of the volunteers’ revolver fire and grenades. Though the car is badly damaged, there are no casualties.

The third car in the convoy contains French’s military escort and the soldiers inside the vehicle return fire, killing one of the attackers, Martin Savage. Some of the volunteers attempt to recover his body but the Crown forces’ fire is too heavy. Savage’s body is left on the scene as the IRA party flees on bicycles back to the city.

The Irish Times, for one, expresses outrage at the attack, “the attempted assassination of the greatest of Irishmen” which it says will “shock Ireland” and force Sinn Féin, victorious in the election of the previous year, to reflect on whether it wants to be associated with “outrage and assassination.” “There will now be many throughout the world ready to attribute the character of a murder society to the whole new Irish movement.”

But some, even British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, are surprisingly unsympathetic. “They are bad shots” is his only remark on hearing of the attack.

Many in Ireland are even less sympathetic to hear of the escape of the Lord Lieutenant. The Irish Catholic bishops issue a statement the next day condemning not the attack but British rule in Ireland, which they characterise as “rule of the sword, utterly unsuited to a civilised nation.”

The attack is, in hindsight, a turning point, moving the standoff over Irish independence toward all out guerrilla warfare, but also, in a way, symbolising the eclipse of French and of his vision for what the country should be.

Sir John French’s health declines in 1920 and though he holds the position of Lord Lieutenant until April 1921, his central role in Irish affairs is eclipsed by new Chief Secretary for Ireland Sir Hamar Greenwood. He wants to retire to his estates in Ireland in 1922 but is told it is simply too dangerous for him. During the Irish Civil War (1922-23), his country house at Drumdoe, County Roscommon, is raided by armed men who carry off much of the furniture.

French dies from cancer of the bladder at Deal Castle in Deal, Kent, England, on May 22, 1925.

(From: “Today in Irish History: 19 December 1919, The Attempted Assassination of Sir John French” by John Dorney, The Irish Story, http://www.theirishstory.com, December 18,2019 | Pictured: L to R, Sir John French and Martin Savage)


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Birth of Thomas Whelan, One of the “Forgotten Ten”

Thomas Whelan, one of six men executed in Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, on March 14, 1921, is born on October 5, 1898, in Gortrummagh, near Clifden, County Galway.

Whelan is the sixth of thirteen children born to farmer John Whelan and Bridget Price. He attends national school at Beleek and Clifden, before leaving school at the age of 15 to work on his father’s farm. He moves to Dublin at the age of 18, where he finds work as a railway man, and joins the Irish Volunteers as a member of ‘A’ Company, 3rd Battalion, Dublin Brigade. He lives at Barrow Street, Ringsend, Dublin, and works at a train depot.

Whelan is arrested on November 23, 1920, and, on February 1, 1921, is charged with the shooting death of Captain G.T. Baggallay, an army prosecutor who had been a member of courts that sentenced Volunteers to death under the Restoration of Order in Ireland Act on Bloody Sunday (1920).

Whelan is defended at his court-martial by Michael Noyk, through whom he protests his innocence of the charges. As in the case of Patrick Moran, there is eyewitness evidence that Whelan had been at Mass at the time the shooting had taken place.

The prosecution casts doubt on the reliability of the eyewitnesses, arguing that as Catholics they are not neutral. The defence complains that it is unfair to suggest the witnesses “were prepared to come up and perjure themselves on behalf of the prisoner” because “they belonged to a certain class and might hold certain political opinions.”

The military court does, however, trust the evidence of an army officer who lives in the same house as Baggallay and who has identified Whelan as the man covering him with a revolver during the raid. There is also testimony by a soldier who had passed by the house when he heard shots fired. This witness says he saw Whelan outside, attempting to start his motorcycle. Whelan is found guilty of murder and sentenced to death.

In Mountjoy Prison, Whelan is imprisoned with the writer and activist Ernie O’Malley, who describes him as “… smooth-faced, quiet and brown eyed with wavy hair; he smiled quietly and steadily. His voice was soft and when he laughed with the others one knew that the fibre was not as hard and that there was a shade of wistfulness about him.”

Whelan is quoted just before being hanged, “Give the boys my love. Tell them to follow on and never surrender. Tell them I am proud to die for Ireland.”

Whelan is hanged at 6:00 a.m. along with Patrick Moran, the first of six men to be executed in pairs that day. A crowd estimated at 40,000 gathers outside the prison to pray as the executions take place. His mother, Bridget, sees him before his execution and waits outside with the praying crowd holding candles. She tells a reporter that she had left her son “so happy and cheerful you would almost imagine he was going to see a football match.” He is 22 years old at the time of his death.

Following the Two for One policy that decrees the assassination of two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in retaliation for every executed Irish Volunteer, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Whelan’s native Clifden ambushes and fatally shoots RIC Constables Charles Reynolds and Thomas Sweeney at Eddie King’s Corner on March 16, 1921. In response to the RIC’s request for assistance over the wireless, a trainload of Black and Tans arrive in Clifden from Galway in the early hours of Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1921, and proceed to “burn, plunder and murder.” During what is now called “The Burning of Clifden,” the Black and Tans kill one local civilian (John McDonnell), seriously injure another, burn down fourteen houses, and damaged several others.

Whelan is one of a group of men hanged in Mountjoy Prison in the period 1920-1921 who are commonly referred to as the Forgotten Ten. In 2001, he and the other nine, including Kevin Barry, are exhumed from their graves in Mountjoy Prison and given a full state funeral. He is now buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin. An annual commemoration is still held in Clifden in his honor.

(Pictured: Patrick Moran (left) and Thomas Whelan (right) before their executions, Mountjoy Prison, Dublin, March 14, 1921, courtesy of Kilmainham Gaol Museum.)


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The Provisional IRA Resumes the August 1994 Ceasefire

On July 19, 1997, the Provisional Irish Republican Army (Provisional IRA) resumes a ceasefire to end their 25-year campaign to end British rule in Northern Ireland.

The Provisional IRA, officially known as the Irish Republican Army (Irish: Óglaigh na hÉireann) and informally as the Provos, is an Irish republican paramilitary force that seeks to end British rule in Northern Ireland, facilitate Irish reunification and bring about an independent republic encompassing all of Ireland. It is the most active republican paramilitary group during the Troubles. It argues that the all-island Irish Republic continues to exist, and it sees itself as that state’s army, the sole legitimate successor to the original IRA from the Irish War of Independence (1919-21). It is designated a terrorist organisation in the United Kingdom and an unlawful organisation in the Republic of Ireland, both of whose authority it rejects.

The Provisional IRA emerges in December 1969, due to a split within the previous incarnation of the IRA and the broader Irish republican movement. It is initially the minority faction in the split compared to the Official IRA but becomes the dominant faction by 1972. The Troubles begin shortly before when a largely Catholic, nonviolent civil rights campaign is met with violence from both Ulster loyalists and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), culminating in the August 1969 riots and deployment of British soldiers. The IRA initially focuses on defence of Catholic areas, but it begins an offensive campaign in 1970 that is aided by external sources, including Irish diaspora communities within the Anglosphere, and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. It uses guerrilla tactics against the British Army and RUC in both rural and urban areas and carries out a bombing campaign in Northern Ireland and England against military, political and economic targets, and British military targets in mainland Europe. They also target civilian contractors to the British security forces. The IRA’s armed campaign, primarily in Northern Ireland but also in England and mainland Europe, kills over 1,700 people, including roughly 1,000 members of the British security forces and 500–644 civilians.

The Provisional IRA declares a final ceasefire on July 19, 1997, after which its political wing, Sinn Féin, is admitted into multi-party peace talks on the future of Northern Ireland. These talks result in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. In 2005, the IRA formally ends its armed campaign and decommissions its weapons under the supervision of the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning. Several splinter groups have been formed as a result of splits within the IRA, including the Continuity IRA, which is still active in the dissident Irish republican campaign, and the Real IRA.

The Provisional IRA issues the following statement to news media on the morning of July 19, 1997:

“On August 31, 1994, the leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann (Gaelic for Irish Republican Army) announced a complete cessation of military operations as our contribution to the search for a lasting peace.

After 17 months of cessation, in which the British government and the (pro-British Protestant) unionists blocked any possibility of real or inclusive negotiations, we reluctantly abandoned the cessation.

The Irish Republican Army is committed to ending British rule in Ireland.

It is the root cause of division and conflict in our country. We want a permanent peace and therefore we are prepared to enhance the search for a democratic peace settlement through real and inclusive negotiations.

So, having assessed the current political situation, the leadership of Oglaigh na hEireann are announcing a complete cessation of military operations from 12 o’clock midday on Sunday the 20th, July 1997.

We have ordered the unequivocal restoration of the ceasefire of August 1994. All IRA units have been instructed accordingly.”