Come Here To Me!

IRA men, including Tom Barry, pose with ‘The Mutineer’ at the Four Courts, 1922 (Image Credit)

There is a growing body  of excellent scholarship on the Civil War, including Gavin M. Foster’s masterful The Irish Civil War and Society: Politics, Class, and Conflict and John Dorney’s recent The Civil War in Dublin: The Fight for the Irish Capital 1922-1924. The floodgates of research may open now in the run up to the centenary of the disastrous event, but the bar has been set very high indeed by these and other works.

While the majority of the IRA’s General Headquarters staff supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 which gave birth to the Irish Free State, the opposition of the majority of IRA fighters across the country ensured an inevitable confrontation. Still, beyond men, there was a phenomenal disparity in weaponry between both sides. A tiring volunteer guerrilla army could never compete with the forces of a new state that was – quite literally – backed by Empire. Without the (often reluctant) military assistance of London, the forces of the new Free State would have faced a much sterner military struggle. As Dorney has noted:

Between January and June 1922, when the Pro-Treaty authorities were trying to build up an army, principally from their supporters in the IRA, the British supplied them with nearly 12,000 Lee Enfield rifles, 80 Lewis machine guns 4,000 revolvers and 3,500 grenades.

Correspondence between Dublin and London was often tense in the early stages of the Civil War. Winston Churchill questioned the need of the Free State for mills bombs and rifle grenades, on the basis that “these are the weapons far more of revolution than of Government. If they fall into bad hands they become a most terrible means of aggression on the civil population.” Tellingly, Churchill also alluded to how “we have already issued you one armoured car, which has unhappily fallen into bad hands.” That car, which sat defiantly in the grounds of the occupied Four Courts, became known as ‘The Mutineer’.

The term ‘Mutineer’ was, like ‘Irregular’ or ‘Trucileer’, leveled against those who opposed the Treaty. The later stemmed from a believe that the ranks of the IRA had been swollen by men who were absent during the 1919-21 fight, but joined amidst the relative calm of the Truce period for glory. Sometimes, these terms were utilised in Republican propaganda too:

Republican handbill from Civil War (Dublin City Library and Archive, Birth of the Republic Collection)

Acquiring ‘The Mutineer’:

Ernie O’Malley’s memoir of the Civil War, The Singing Flame, remains one of the definitive first-hand accounts of the conflict. O’Malley perfectly captures the confusion in the months leading up to the outbreak of Civil War,as both Republican forces and Pro-Treaty forces sought to seize upon the chaos of the British evacuation, taking control of abandoned barracks positions across the country.  On an inspection tour of Munster, he recalled visiting Templemore Barracks in Tipperary, finding men with divided loyalties who “courted the Beggar’s Bush Headquarters one minute, the Four Courts the next.”

O’Malley was informed of the arrival of an armoured car which had been sent by the Free State forces in Beggar’s Bush, but sensing the loyalties of the men he requested it for the Republicans in the Four Courts:

We inspected the car.  It was covered with heavy plates of bullet-roof steel. The engine was long, a Rolls Royce. On top was a revolving steel turret which contained a Vickers gun, capable of long sustained fire without overheating; the ammunition was in strips, side by side, in narrow belts.

The morale boost of such a vehicle arriving into the grounds of the occupied Four Courts must have been tremendous; O’Malley remembered how it “was a piece of luck. To think I would return in an armoured car, the only one our men possessed. The car was stuffy at first, but the day was cold. We were soon warm and cosy.” The day after its arrival, O’Malley watched as one of the garrison painted “a name below the turret with white enamel”, and ‘The Mutineer’ was born.

‘Three or four hundred young men’:

For some time, the men in the Four Courts were left to their own devices,though there was frequent denunciation of their actions in the House of Commons. Winston Churchill described the occupation as “a gross breach and defiance of the Treaty”, while Lloyd George condemned the “three or four hundred young men…running a sham Government in the name of the Republic.”

When patience grew thin (and after the IRA’s assassination of Sir Henry Wilson on the streets of London) the question of attacking the Four Courts themselves was raised in London,with General Nevil Macready (the last British military commander in Ireland) quizzed by Lloyd George on a possible British assault.

Inside the occupied Four Courts, morale ebbed and flowed. Seán MacBride, later winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, recalled years later how “we were never a large enough garrison to have held such a building, nor did we expect to have to hold it.” Some Republicans outside of the occupation questioned the wisdom of the seizure of the building; to C.S Andrews, it represented “the intransigence” of the leaders in the Four Courts, as a symbolic but ultimately doomed act.

The inevitable assault on the building came in the early hours of 28 June 1922, with Pro-Treaty forces opening fire on the building utilising borrowed British eighteen pounder guns. General Macready, dispatched to Dublin from London, remembered how it continued into the following day, drawing curious crowds:

The noise went on all day with very little impression on the Four Courts but which much amusement and interest to the inhabitants of Dublin, who lined up on either bank of the Liffey about a hundred yards east and west of the battle, being kept in their places by policemen in the same way as at a festival or a Lord Mayor’s Show.

The Vickers machine gun within ‘The Mutineer’ was used when fighting began, primarily against Free State forces who had taken up position in the tower of the nearby St Michan’s Church. Amidst the fighting, ‘The Mutineer’ was disabled by Pro-Treaty troops. Dorney describes how a Pro-Treaty “Lewis gun team commanded by Dermot McManus, a veteran of Gallipoli as well as of the IRA, which had penetrated into the courtyard of the Courts complex, shredded the tyres of ‘The Mutineer’ armoured car.”

Pro-Treaty soldier posing with armoured car following Republican defeat (W.D Hogan collection, NLI)

‘The Mutineer’ was quickly rechristened ‘The Ex-Mutineer’, and was deployed in Munster during the fighting there. Along with fighting men, she was deployed by sea, landing at Kerry. In Munster, local IRA men attempted to build their own alternatives, with Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc describing how:

Not to be outdone by the Free State army’s superior technology, the men of the IRA’s 1st Cork Brigade…had managed to create their own make shift armoured car by building steel plates and scrap metal onto the body of a lorry.  It was fitted with heavy iron wheels with solid rubber tyres and had two revolving turrets both equipped with Hotchkiss machine-guns. The IRA volunteers who built it christened it ‘The Hooded Terror’.

The use of borrowed and gifted British munitions was, of course, a source of great contention. One song written in the aftermath of the Four Courts defeat took the familiar tune of The Wearing of the Green:

Oh Churchill dear, did you hear, the news from Dublin town?

They’ve listened to your good advice and blown the Four Courts down.

And likewise with O’Connell Street, the worst we’ve ever seen

The guns the best (as per request) and the lorries painted green.

Studies like John Dorney’s recent work, A City in Civil War: Dublin, 1921-4 by Padraig Yeates and The Fall of Dublin by Liz Gillis are all helping us to understand the military and political course of the Civil War on the streets of the capital. Not all bullet holes in the pillars of Dublin buildings come from Easter Week, but some moments remain harder to discuss.