Battle of Dublin, 1922: the shelling of the Four Courts

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 split the movement that had fought the War of Independence. It created a self-governing Irish Free State inside the British Commonwealth, and Dáil Éireann approved it, but most of the Irish Republican Army did not. John Borgonovo, writing for RTÉ's Century Ireland, estimates that 70 to 75 percent of IRA members opposed it. In March and April 1922 an IRA convention renounced the Dáil's authority and elected its own Army Executive, and in April anti-Treaty forces under Rory O'Connor occupied the Four Courts, Dublin's great domed law courts on the river Liffey, as their headquarters.²

The road to the Four Courts

For two months the Provisional Government led by Michael Collins tried to talk the garrison out. Then events forced its hand. On 22 June two IRA men shot dead Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, an adviser to the Northern Ireland government, in London, and the British government insisted the occupation end. On 26 June the National Army arrested an anti-Treaty officer, Commandant Henderson, during a raid on a Dublin garage to seize vehicles, and that evening men from the Four Courts kidnapped the army's deputy chief of staff, General J. J. O'Connell, in retaliation. On 27 June the government decided the occupiers had to be removed.³

That night, according to the historian Michael Fewer in History Ireland, the British Army handed two 18-pounder field guns and their ammunition to Major General Emmet Dalton at the back gate of Marlborough Barracks. Before dawn, Dublin's telephones were cut, troops occupied houses overlooking the courts and turned out the residents, and the guns were dug in across the river. RTÉ's newspaper-style account of the day puts the force around the building at about 1,000 soldiers with armored cars.⁴

Four in the morning

At 3.45 a.m. an ultimatum went in to the garrison: release O'Connell, evacuate the buildings and surrender the arms, or face attack. No reply came. At about 4 a.m. the National Army opened fire with the field guns, machine guns and rifles, and the Irish Civil War began. O'Connor's own communiqué, written that morning, timed the first shots at 4.07 and reported three slight casualties.⁵

Men who had fought side by side a year before were reluctant to kill each other, and the early exchanges showed it. The gunners, novices who had probably had a few hours' instruction, laid their shells methodically along the walls in the hope that the noise would bring a surrender. Fewer argues that, despite their reputation, they did well. The defenders simply moved out of the line of fire into the cellars. After more than 24 hours the guns were given a new task, to blow two breaches in the walls, and infantry broke in and took the Public Record Office on the second day, pushing the garrison back into the Round Hall.⁶

The great explosion

On 30 June, with both sides exhausted and hungry, a fire spread through the block where the garrison kept its explosives. At around 12.30 p.m. the store went up in an enormous explosion. Free State propaganda claimed it was a mine detonated to kill the attackers; Fewer, studying the damage, concludes that the explosives were set off by the heat of the fire and not deliberately, which is why no one was killed. The blaze spread to the Record Treasury, and the fires destroyed much of the Public Record Office, with centuries of Irish documents, while scorched papers drifted across the city. The garrison surrendered at about 4.30 p.m., and that evening the dome of the Four Courts fell in.⁷

The fight for O'Connell Street

The battle was not over. While the Four Courts held out, other anti-Treaty units under Oscar Traynor had seized a row of hotels and buildings on the east side of Sackville Street, today O'Connell Street, on the wrong side of the river to help the garrison. They tunneled through the walls to link them into what became known as the Block. Inside, according to the Kildare historian James Durney, were much of the republican leadership, Éamon de Valera among them as a private soldier. The National Army surrounded the Block and attacked it with artillery and machine guns. Most of the defenders slipped away, de Valera and Austin Stack among them, leaving a small rear guard under Cathal Brugha.⁸

On the evening of 5 July, with the last hotel on fire and in danger of collapse, Brugha ordered his men out to surrender. Then he came out himself, revolver in hand, and ran at the soldiers. They fired low, but a bullet cut his femoral artery, and he died two days later, on 7 July. The National Museum of Ireland, which holds his death mask, notes that both sides suffered heavily in the city fighting and that many civilians were killed; RTÉ's account of the first day alone reported 14 dead and about 30 wounded.⁹

A war of brothers

The National Army had, as Borgonovo puts it, decapitated the IRA by capturing or killing much of its leadership in the Four Courts and the city fighting. The war spread across the country, first in a conventional phase of about seven weeks and then as a guerrilla struggle, until May 1923. Rory O'Connor did not see the end. He was held in Mountjoy and, on 8 December 1922, executed by firing squad with Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joe McKelvey, in reprisal for the killing of a pro-Treaty member of the Dáil. Among the losses of that week, Fewer counts the records in the Public Record Office as priceless.¹⁰