Reviewer John Dorney

Published by Merrion Press, Kildare 2026

ISBN: 9781785375842

Gerard Shannon has followed up his successful biography of IRA leader Liam Lynch with one of fellow anti-Treaty martyr Rory O’Connor.

Unlike Lynch, O’Connor has been the subject of relatively little scholarly attention up to now, being mainly known for his leading role in the occupation of the Four Courts in April 1922 that helped to start the Civil War, and for his execution at the hands of the Irish Free State in December of that year.

Shannon tries to fill in some of the gaps on O’Connor’s life in this book, with mixed results. It appears that O’Connor did not leave a great deal behind in the way of personal papers or letters. Although the IRA of the era had a mania for paperwork, writing down far more than was prudent for an underground organisation, Rory O’Connor does not seem to have been particularly prolific in this regard either.

Perhaps it was as well. As Shannon shows, O’Connor’s most famous foray into public relations was a disaster. In a notorious press conference of March 1922 he informed the press that the IRA intended to disavow the authority of the Irish parliament, the Dail. When asked if this meant there would be a military dictatorship, O’Connor flippantly remarked ‘you can take it that way if you want’. Which has variously been interpreted as arrogant militarism or even incipient fascism.

Shannon persuasively argues that it was more in the line of an exasperated, abrasive, remark from O’Connor, when he was questioned on a half-thought-out policy rather than a truly malevolent agenda on his part. This did not, however, limit the damage it did to the anti-Treaty cause, the possibility of healing the rift over the Treaty, or the slide towards Civil War in the spring of 1922.

Leaving aside O’Connor’s most notorious faux pas, which has been well documented in the past, we do learn a good deal that is new about O’Connor in this book. What emerges tells us some interesting things about Ireland’s revolutionary elite of that era.

O’Connor was the offspring of a one-generation-old Catholic upper middle class.  His father was a solicitor with the Congested Districts Board, the British government’s land reform body in Ireland. He was expensively educated at Catholic private schools and at University College Dublin. Ernie O’Malley, O’Connor’s contemporary and fellow IRA officer, came from an identical background, and both grew up in Dublin’s Victorian suburbs. Another with a similar background was Kevin O’Higgins, son of a doctor from Laois, with whom O’Connor would develop a relationship whose tragedy was of Shakespearean proportions.

In his student life in Dublin, O’Connor demonstrated nationalism, which was the norm, but not radicalism of any sort. Qualifying as a civil engineer he left for Canada in 1911, working in the expanding railways there, before returning to Ireland in 1914.

O’Connor’s sojourn in Canada is one of the more interesting episodes of the book. He found the English speaking Canadians and Americans uncouth and prone to violence, ‘a beastly vulgar lot of thugs’ he called them in a letter home. He was more impressed with the French speaking Catholics of Montreal, and approvingly noted that the city also had a large Irish Catholic community. He was struck by the unfamiliar multi-culturalism of Canada but doesn’t seem to have harboured particular prejudices against the ‘white, yellow and black races’ that he encountered.

His career on the Canadian railroads was fairly unremarkable. It seems his job was simply to inspect rail track with a team of labourers, in order to fix any potential breaks or faults. He had no particular career progression there, but on his return to Dublin managed to secure, no doubt through family and other contacts, a job as civil engineer in charge of the city’s water supply.

It cannot be said that O’Connor’s life had been very remarkable up to this point. But on his return to Dublin he seems to have had a Damascene conversion to Irish separatism. This was not instantaneous, Shannon records that on his return to Ireland he was still a Home Ruler who supported Irish participation in the Great War. But within a few months he had been sworn into the Irish Republican Brotherhood and was on the road to armed rebellion in 1916.

There is little indication of how this happened. Shannon attributes it to his close friendship with the Plunkett family, like O’Connor an upper middle-class family but one much more imbued with radical nationalism. One of them would be executed for his role in the 1916 Rising, another would be the first man elected under what became the Sinn Fein party in 1917 and another still would die as a result of Free State imprisonment in the Civil War.

It is sadly a recurring feature among Irish Republicans of that era, that their mental pathways, sudden conversions and commitments to political militancy are so poorly documented and explained. Frustration often results from trying to explain their motivations, and so it is with Rory O’Connor. There is little to explain why he took the paths he did.

This is not the fault of biographers such as Shannon as much as the people themselves, who did such a poor job of explaining themselves. It is possible, perhaps, to say that Irish nationalist political culture was so pervasive, its narratives and goals so familiar to those within its reach, that militancy was seen as simply assertive action to achieve what every sensible person was deemed to want. Certainly, everyone within the Irish Catholic community that is, and no further explanation of elaboration of goals was really felt necessary by militants of the cause.

Some few, such as Arthur Griffith or James Connolly, had laid out their rationale for rejecting British rule and elaborated more or less worked out plans for the future – though they could be as diverse as Griffith’s mercantile, protectionist Dual Monarchy or Connolly’s socialist Workers’ Republic. But they were the exception, and Rory O’Connor was no exception to this rule. He never laid out his own motivations or visions for a future Ireland.

Reading between the lines a little, however, and delving into interest rather than ideology, one could argue that to men of O’Connor’s class, Irish independence removed the roadblocks to their advancement as a state forming elite, which British rule would always frustrate. But this tells us little of why some were willing to sacrifice their lives for this, while others were not. Or why some, perhaps the majority, were prepared to accept accommodations with the British Empire, while others, of an identical social background, never would. O’Connor after 1916 was one of the latter, for reasons he never quite articulated.

Shannon’s book admirably documents O’Connor’s activities but does not explain them better than O’Connor himself could.

O’Connor the revolutionary soldier had a mixed career. He was wounded in 1916 while carrying messages between rebel garrisons. The bullets that wounded him on the corner of Stephen’s Green and Grafton Street in Dublin may have been a case of ‘friendly fire’ fired by a rebel sniper ensconced in the Royal College of Surgeons, though it is uncertain who was firing at him. His wounding meant that he escaped interment and was one of the leading figures in the reinvigoration of the separatist, or as it now became, republican movement in 1917-18.

He rose to become IRA Director of Engineering, responsible for the direction of the guerrilla army in sabotage and explosives, as well as coordinating IRA sabotage operations in Britain. His career as a civil engineer helps to explain this, but many in the IRA were not particularly impressed with his performance. Shannon uncovers a range of hostile commentary from within the IRA. One IRA officer Joe Lawless found him ‘peculiarly solemn and unsmiling’ another, Tom McMahon thought he was ‘no revolutionary mind and no calibre of GHQ officer… ineffective, indecisive, slow’. And another, Ernie O’Malley, decried his failure to develop new bombs or mortars for the organisation.

O’Connor was arrested in January 1921 by the British and interned at Rath Camp at the Curragh Kildare. He successfully escaped from there in March of that year, but again appears to have made few friends among his fellow prisoners. Shannon quotes Lawless again who opposed O’Connor as camp commandant and blamed his escape for sabotaging a mass escape planned by other prisoners.

One of the few figures in the republican movement who did appreciate Rory O’Connor was Kevin O’Higgins, at that point a senior figure in the underground republican Department of local government. O’Higgins thought that OConnor was ‘sublime’. The two developed such as close friendship at this time that O’Connor was asked to be best man at O’Higgins’ wedding in October 1921. The two seemed to have a lot in common, from social background to dry satirical sense of humour.

Where they parted ways, of course, was over the Anglo-Irish Treaty which was signed in December 1921. O’Higgins would go on to be one of its leading supporters while O’Connor came to national prominence as an outspoken opponent.

Once again though, we run into problems of interpretation. Shannon reveals that O’Connor was at first ambivalent about the Treaty, arguing for a time Michael Collins’ line that it was a step in the right direction, but later became militantly against it. The Treaty was of course a painful compromise for Irish Republicans, but O’Connor’s opposition to this was not well articulated. He simply stated that Ireland should never voluntarily enter the British Empire, that the Irish Republic existed and that the IRA would defend it. As a member of IRA GHQ Staff he was one of the most senior commanders to reject the Treaty.

How this would be translated into concrete political advances he never seems to have worked out, nor how it could be squared with the majority popular support that Michael Collins managed to rally for the Treaty. The contradictions led to his ill-judged outburst at the press conference of March 1922, referred to above.

Nor were his anti-Treaty colleagues particularly impressed with him. Liam Lynch despaired of O’Connor’s belligerency. Peadar O’Donnell is quoted by Shannon as saying that O’Connor ‘hadn’t the brains of a flea’. Not a very ringing endorsement.

But there was no real plan for dictatorship on O’Connor’s part. Instead, one unplanned escalation ran into another, culminating in the end, in Civil War.

Disavowal of the Dail at the IRA Convention of March 1922 led to mutually hostile pro and anti-Treaty garrisons taking over barracks and other public buildings from the departing British in the spring of 1922. The pro-Treaty occupation of Dublin’s barracks led to O’Connor’s faction occupying Dublin’s Four Courts as a base in response. Finally in June 1922, the assassination of Field Marshal  Henry Wilson by IRA men of undetermined allegiance and resulting British pressure, caused the Provisional government to open fire on the Four Courts in late June.

O’Connor will always be associated with these events, but in truth his control over them was loose. He did not even militarily command the Four Courts garrison during the two day siege there. Afterwards in captivity he nursed his grudges for the outbreak of Civil War and passed the time playing chess with his cell mates.

His last act came with the notorious executions of December 8 1922.

The Provisional, soon to be Free State, government had embarked upon  a series of executions of republican prisoners in November 1922. When in retaliation the IRA assassinated popular pro-Treaty TD Sean Hales, the government decided to execute summarily the four most senior anti-Treatyites in its custody, one of whom was Rory O’Connor. Famously, in the cabinet that approved this reprisal, entirely illegal, as Shannon correctly points out, was O’Connor’s friend Kevin O’Higgins. ‘Great Heavens’ he was to exclaim in the Dail when accused of personal vindictiveness, ‘one of these men was a friend of mine’.

Rory OConnor’s life was therefore snuffed out, just before his fortieth year, before he had a chance to construct his version of events, in writing or otherwise. The manner of his death meant he would forever be a republican martyr, but the details of his life were little known over the decades since. Gerard Shannon’s new biography is an admirable attempt to change that fact, even of much of O’Connor’s internal life may always remain a mystery.

By Emma Ryan

Ballinasloe is a market town in east Galway whose October Horse Fair helped make it one of the more prosperous towns in the west of Ireland. The town grew around a strategic crossing point on the River Suck and, by the early nineteenth century, lay at the heart of the Le Poer Trench estate, with the earls of Clancarty investing in its streets, markets and public buildings.

Today, if you turn off Ballinasloe’s Main Street, you step into what feels like a leftover space: narrow passages, old stonework, a sense of being behind the town rather than in the centre of it. It is easy to pass by without a second thought. Yet for roughly a century, these spaces were home to hundreds of people.

Ballinasloe’s lanes, once teeming with people going about their daily business, were abandoned almost a century ago and most of their houses have since been demolished. From the early nineteenth century until the 1930s, a web of back lanes threaded between the town’s main streets. Today only fragments survive; for many years they lived on mainly in old maps, street names and local lore. The people who lived in these places were families whose labour supported the local economy, yet their homes lay tucked out of sight behind the town’s respectable facades.

The families who lived in the lanes were not marginal to the town’s story, even if their homes were physically tucked away. They were at the heart of its labouring life, raising children, caring for older relatives, and sustaining the town’s streets, shops and fairs from dwellings that sat just beyond the main thoroughfares. The contrast between their economic importance and the invisibility of their living conditions runs through the documentary record.

Apart from 1901 and 1911 censuses, there are no sources that provide accurate numbers of how many people lived in the lanes. While a map associated with Griffith’s Valuation numbers the dwellings in the various lanes and provides the corresponding names of the heads of household, dependents are not listed. Out of the nine lanes examined, there were 153 houses occupied in 1901 with 631 occupants. In 1911, 162 houses were occupied with 697 occupants.

Origins of the lanes

Ballinasloe’s lanes have received little attention in local history. The first comprehensive study of Ballinasloe’s history, Patrick Egan’s The Parish of Ballinasloe, notes how its population almost doubled from 1824 to 1931.

Declan Kelly’s A Moment’s Memory attributes this largely to the presence of the Le Poer Trench family (the earls of Clancarty), the granting of generous leases for the construction of ‘good houses and places of business’, and the economic contribution of the annual October Fair.

Cartographic evidence, in the form of Larkin’s 1819 Grand Jury Map of Galway and the 1842 Ordnance Survey (OS) six-inch map, suggests that many of the lanes were constructed sometime between 1809 and the early 1830s. (Figure 1 shows the location of the various lanes listed in Table 1 in Appendix).

By the time the Ordnance Survey was underway in the mid-1830s, however, the dwellings in areas such as Rutledge’s and Piper’s lanes were clearly marked. Interestingly, some of the names by which these lanes were commonly known are not recorded in the 1842 OS map, despite being of the same configuration as on the 25-inch OS map of 1890–1913. This may indicate that they had not been formally named in their earlier years or that the surveyors did not consider them important enough to record their actual names.

With the boom created by the annual fair, most of Ballinasloe’s main streets were built between 1783 and 1819. That building campaign needed a large supply of labour and domestic servants. The lanes were probably laid out quickly during these years to house those workers and their families.

Mac Lochlainn notes that the lanes were believed to derive their names from the families that dwelled at their entrances, or ‘some of them may have been because of activities that took place within them’. Kelly has also pieced together a catalogue of local street names not recorded on earlier maps and has traced their origins to church and chapel activities.

One example relates to the Primitive Methodist congregation, which occupied a chapel at the northern entrance to the lane; while Woodslip was believed to be the location where slips of wood were hewn and shaped for the construction of barrels.

It has also been suggested that Paradise Row was a name that was bestowed sardonically as the residents looked out on both St Michael’s Catholic Church and the Primitive Methodist chapel, structures directed towards the concept of Christian salvation. In most instances, the lanes appear to have been named after the people who built them or the businesses at each entrance. Reeves’ Lane, for instance, got its name from a business premises, which was owned by Robert William Reeves (1817–1871). Ivers’ Lane was named after William Ivers (1805–1885), who had a business at the entrance, and Hopson’s Lane after James Hopson (1778–1864), who had a boot-making business.

Official and Newspaper Reports

Official reports and local newspapers give us the first outside views of life in Ballinasloe’s lanes. They show how landlords and officials described conditions there – and how those descriptions were challenged by clergy and residents who knew the lanes more closely.

The 1836 report of the commissioners who were appointed to investigate the conditions of the Irish poor took evidence from, among many others, Ballinasloe’s principal landlord, Richard Le Poer Trench, 2nd earl of Clancarty, who was listed among the ‘landowners who built and sustain constant housing’.

Though most of the lanes were constructed in his time as earl, he was unable to state what rents were being paid for ‘cabins’. He opined that on ‘my estate, the cabins generally are comfortable, clean, and supplied with beds, and comfortable bedding’. One doubts that he ever stood in a cabin like that, and he would hardly have had as many opportunities to visit his tenants as the parish priest, Fr Laurence Dillon, who gave contrasting evidence, stating that the dwellings of tenants were ‘very badly furnished’.

One of the earliest newspaper references to Ballinasloe’s lanes dates from late 1847, when a writer to the local Western Star expressed concern at the fact that cholera was spreading rapidly. The following month the same newspaper noted that the ‘bye-ways and back-passages of our town are much neglected.

At a meeting in May 1848 of Ballinasloe Town Commissioners, which had been established in 1841, Captain Dyer, who was in attendance of his official services as ‘inspector of nuisances’, complained that having visited several of the lanes he had serious concerns about the standard of the living conditions he found there. One of the commissioners took umbrage at his remarks, stating that the town was ‘as clean as could be seen anywhere’, while another commissioner said Dyer had no business visiting the lanes.

There was clearly an unwillingness to acknowledge the conditions people were forced to live in, let alone an inclination to deal with them. In April 1849, the Western News noted that the commissioners had visited all parts of the town and found it ‘creditably clean’. They had, however, given notice to some residents of Tea Lane, Piper’s Lane, Harbour Lane and Paradise Row to ensure their houses were ‘properly cleansed’ and had noted that Paradise Row, ‘which was always so filthy, was now extremely clean and the houses beautifully whitewashed’.

Bolger’s Lane came in for criticism for the ‘state of filth … often detrimental to the health of the community’, with one commissioner expressing the view ‘that lane will always be so’. The main problem identified for Bolger’s Lane was the dumping of ‘nuisance’ along the public way during the night.

The commissioners were still raising the issue of the state of Ballinasloe’s ‘back lanes’ in the mid-1860s and the necessity for the ‘Sanitary Committee lately appointed to do its job in ensuring the cleanliness of these areas’. The main concern was the spread of infectious disease, though the commissioners congratulated themselves on Ballinasloe’s freedom from contagion, having distributed lime for use by the general public.

By the late 1870s, the sanitary condition of Ballinasloe’s lanes was still causing concern. The Board of Guardians considered a letter from a man named O’Connor about Agricultural Lane (now Emmet Avenue), which he described as ‘unsafe and unfit for human habitation’. The medical officer, Dr Patrick Horne, was accused of neglecting his duty, while conditions in Tea Lane, Paradise Row and nearby Ivers’ Lane were said to be similar. O’Connor argued that the officers responsible for public health ‘were not acquainted with the lanes’, a suggestion confirmed by others from Ballinasloe.

Ivers’ Lane does not feature in the 1850s Griffith’s Valuation, indicating it was not then occupied, but a local newspaper reference from 1879 mentions that ‘William Ivers of Ballinasloe writes that there are no  “huts” in his yard and that the cottages on his premises are quite weatherproof and comfortable’. It is likely that Ivers’ Lane became a residential area in the late 1860s or sometime in the 1870s and it is known that it had been used previously as a yard for mail coaches.

In November 1883, the Dublin Daily Express reported on the ‘shocking condition of Ballinasloe’ and the subsequent sanitary officer was called on to resign. Thirteen years later, the Western Star noted that the ‘filthy condition’ of Piper’s and Harbour lanes was discussed by the Town Commissioners with a recommendation to serve notices on the landlord.

In March 1900, a special meeting of Ballinasloe Urban District Council (UDC), which replaced the Town Commissioners in 1899, was convened to discuss the fact that there were ‘no fewer than 100 houses in the town in which there is no sanitary accommodation’. Fifteen years later, the local East Galway Democrat was highly critical of the UDC and the ‘housing question’, noting that:

‘Such a length of time has elapsed since we first heard that a number of the dens, we could not call them houses, in the lanes of Ballinasloe were to be closed, and we have so often heard this repeated that we have to remind the Urban Council that a certain hot spot is paved with good intentions’.

The editor went on to say that abandoned houses were being occupied by others and suggested that the UDC ‘make a clean sweep of one after another, of those wigwams, which should really just be saturated with petroleum and a match put to them’. Six months earlier, the same newspaper had called for the closing of the ‘misnamed Paradise Row’.

In April 1915, it was reported that the UDC was taking measures to close houses in Piper’s and Wilson’s (formerly Rutledge’s) lanes. It was also decided that the houses in Paradise Row were ‘unfit for human habitation’. By 1919, officials had identified 95 houses in the various lanes as no longer suitable to live in. Despite this, Paradise Row was still occupied by 1928, when flooding was so bad that some residents had to ‘stand on chairs to leave their houses to get onto the lane’.

It was not until 1932, when a sub-committee recommended to the UDC the clearance of many of the lanes, that there appeared to be a determination to ensure that the issue was dealt with definitively. It was also noted that a lack of funding and lack of powers to clear the areas had hindered the work and that the new Housing Act would expedite matters.

Employment and Survival Strategies

Records for 1901 and 1911 show a community where almost every household contributed labour to the town around them. Patterns like these were common in Irish market towns, but the lanes of Ballinasloe are well documented and allow us to see them in close detail.

In 1901, 145 out of 154 lane households recorded at least one occupation among their members; by 1911, the proportion had risen to 99 per cent. The only house that appears without a listed occupation is one where the head of household was blind, yet local memory remembers him as a piper who performed and entertained, so even that doorway held a working life.

Families in the lanes depended on work for survival. Wages were modest and rent still fell due, so every possible earner played a part. The home itself became a small economic unit where beds, floor space and time all contributed. The census returns show people arranging their lives carefully to ensure the survival of the family unit.

Women’s contribution stands out very clearly. In 1901, 43 per cent of married women in the lanes held specified occupations – in other words, they went out to work. Among widowed and single women, the figure rises higher again to 82 per cent in 1901 and 85 per cent in 1911. Many worked in domestic service, cooking and cleaning; others appear as charwomen, seamstresses or dealers in fish, fruit and other goods. Their wages, small as they may have been, formed a vital strand in household income, especially where illness, widowhood or irregular work affected a man’s earnings.

Male heads of household appear in a range of roles across the town. About 28 per cent held a trade. Many more worked as general labourers or general servants, hired wherever extra hands were needed: at the fair, at the railway, in shops and yards, or on nearby farms. Their work underpinned the daily life and commercial success of Ballinasloe.

Young people also stepped into this world of work at an early age. The legal age to leave school was fourteen, and many went to work as soon as they could. In 1901, adolescents between fourteen and seventeen with recorded occupations lived in 15.5 per cent of lane households; by 1911, the figure had risen to 19 per cent. These teenagers stand in the census as servants, apprentices and assistants, their small wages helping to support parents, grandparents and younger siblings.

Inside the dwellings, families used space as carefully as they used time and labour. One important strategy lay in taking in lodgers. Some lane households did so in 1901, and by 1911 the number had increased. A bed, or even a corner of a crowded room, became a resource that could be exchanged for cash. The decision to share such confined spaces with outsiders says a great deal about the pressure on household budgets and the value placed on every possible shilling. It also shows families’ ability to adapt and make shrewd decisions in the absence of a welfare state to guide or support them.

Taken together, these figures reveal a clear pattern. The lanes housed a population deeply woven into the town’s working life, most of them in hard, poorly paid or unskilled jobs, and they relied on cooperation inside families and between neighbours to get by. Their homes lay in cramped and difficult conditions, yet the energy and effort recorded in the census returns give a strong sense of dignity and determination running through daily life in Ballinasloe’s lanes.

Spatial Analysis of the Lanes

The census returns give totals and room counts, and the old Ordnance Survey maps add shape. Together they show how families in Ballinasloe’s lanes lived very close to each other.

Maps help us picture what this meant on the ground. In Paradise Row, there was very little space between the front doors and the backs of the houses facing Market Square; a few steps from the threshold brought a resident face to face with a wall. Light and air came in thin strips, and inside the ground floor offered little more than a small rectangle in which families had to fit beds, table, fire, storage and movement.

Other lanes show a different kind of adaptation. In Rutledge’s Lane, houses that once had one or two rooms were later all recorded as one-room dwellings. The most plausible reading is that families removed dividing walls inside the houses to create single, larger rooms, even though the census then counted each dwelling as “one room”. Families gained a more workable living space in exchange for an official description that suggested the opposite.

Piper’s Lane shows similar patterns, with families altering their houses over time, perhaps learning from each other’s experiments in making difficult spaces more liveable. In Ivers’ Lane, families occupied former coach-yard buildings that originally served as storage. The footprint in each dwelling was a little larger there, though the overall feel of the lane still reflected close-packed walls and shared yards. My thanks to Gavin Treacy, quantity surveyor, who supplied measurements from the OS maps.

Decades later, the same pressure on space could be seen in Boulger’s Lane. In 1935, ten families still lived there, with most houses containing one room and a kitchen. There was no sanitation in these houses, and “the one room upstairs” – reached by a ladder – was still common. That “one room upstairs” was almost certainly the loft space created by earlier families in search of an extra bed.

These details describe more than bricks and mortar. They reveal daily routines shaped by tight spaces: meals eaten shoulder to shoulder, beds shared by several children, illness managed in rooms with little air, arguments and laughter carrying clearly through thin walls. They also show constant small acts of adjustment, from building lofts to knocking down partitions, as families in Ballinasloe’s lanes tried to create a little more room for themselves within the limits they faced.

Migration between Lanes and Overcrowding

Over time, within these small rooms and cramped yards, households grew. Overcrowding was already a serious concern at the start of the century. In 1901, one-third of the houses in the lanes were counted as overcrowded under the census definition of more than two people per room; by 1911, over 37 per cent of houses fell into that category. In those conditions, every extra square metre mattered. A loft, an enlarged room or a slightly larger house could transform everyday life for a family with several children and working adults.

The census returns suggest that families in the lanes moved more often than the street names might imply. Between 1901 and 1911, households appear and disappear from the records of Paradise Row, Hopson’s, Piper’s, Rutledge’s and other lanes in a way that points to careful choices. Parents weighed up room numbers, rent, access to work, neighbours and small advantages such as a view towards fields or a slightly wider yard. Movement within the town formed part of how families managed limited options.

On Paradise Row, only one of the twelve families recorded there in 1901 still lived on the row in 1911, and even that family had moved to a different house within the lane. Across the lanes as a whole, around 90 per cent of families moved elsewhere between each census, indicating that occupancy of particular lanes was impermanent and that people moved to what they may have perceived as cheaper or marginally better circumstances. Overcrowding likely also played a part in decisions to seek alternative accommodation in lanes with larger dwellings.

Communal Spaces

Outside the front doors, space for children to move and play varied greatly from lane to lane. The ends of Piper’s and Rutledge’s opened out into fields, so children who walked the length of the lane stepped into open ground. Boulger’s and Reeves’ Lane had some shared space at the rear. Ivers’ Lane had very little communal space at all, despite housing a large number of children. Paradise Row faced straight onto the backs of houses a few metres away, though the Market Square lay just beyond the entrance, which must have helped.

In everyday life, children likely walked or ran to these wider spaces, but the area immediately outside many front doors remained enclosed and overshadowed. The geography of each lane shaped the kind of play, sociability and neighbourly contact that could unfold there.

The End of the Lanes

By the mid-1930s, the death knell had been sounded for many of the lane buildings. In 1935, the Council effectively proposed evacuating several of them. The previous year, the Connacht Tribune reported on the near completion of forty-one new houses at St Brendan’s Terrace in Poolboy and described living conditions in the lanes that these houses were meant to replace.

The new state was formed in 1922, but housing reform moved slowly and real change did not come until the early 1930s. Under the 1933 Housing Act, Ballinasloe Urban District Council secured funding for new homes. The first new council estate opened in 1934 with forty-one houses, and a second followed in 1936 with sixty more. For tenants, these schemes marked a shift away from privately owned lane houses into publicly built homes with more space and security. Families moved from houses that still contained a kitchen and one upstairs room, reached by a ladder and without sanitary facilities, into new houses with separate rooms, proper services and much more light. The difference would have felt immediate and profound.

In April 1936, when Dr John Dignan, bishop of Clonfert, visited to bless the newly built council houses, the UDC chairman, Michael Connolly, stated that the 1933 Housing Act was ‘one of the greatest Acts passed by any government’. His words echo the pride many people felt in seeing Ballinasloe offer modern, well-planned homes to families who had spent generations in cramped conditions close to the town centre while supporting the local economy.

Conclusion

Newspaper reports show that sanitary conditions in the lanes occupied the minds of the authorities in Ballinasloe from the very beginning, but that there was no concerted effort to tackle the problem until well into the twentieth century.
That 156 dwellings were deemed unfit for human habitation in 1933 is striking when we consider that Ballinasloe had been renowned for at least two centuries for its annual fair and commercial success. This seems even more notable because successive earls of Clancarty lived locally and were not absentee landlords. It appears that the authorities, despite various resolutions earlier in the twentieth century, were not prepared to take on local landlords, nor were they inclined to do anything that added a penny to the bill faced by local ratepayers.

Despite landlords’ apparent lack of investment in these properties, people continued to occupy the houses in the lanes even as the population within them increased. The material examined shows that life in Ballinasloe’s lanes must have been challenging for the generations of families who lived there, especially as they were so poorly served by the authorities who had it within their power to improve their living conditions.

For a long time, the lives lived in Ballinasloe’s lanes stayed at the edge of the story. The growth of social and family history has encouraged us to look again at sources that were always there – censuses, maps, valuation records, sanitary reports – and to read them for what they say about ordinary working-class families. When we do, the lanes and their residents take their place in both local and national history. Their strength and resourcefulness in the face of neglect come into clearer view, and it becomes easier to see how the story of Ballinasloe’s lanes forms part of a much wider history of working-class life in Ireland.

Sources:

Patrick K. Egan, The Parish of Ballinasloe: Its History from the Earliest Times to the Present Day (Dublin: Clonmore & Reynolds, 1960).

Tadhg Mac Lochlainn, Ballinasloe, Inniu agus Inné: A Story of a Community over the Past 300 Years, 2nd ed. (Galway, 1993).

Declan Kelly, A Moment’s Memory, Vol. 1: A Personal and Historical Reflection on Creagh National School and District (Ballinasloe, 2014).

Declan Kelly, Between the Lines of History: People of Ballinasloe (Ballinasloe, 1999).

Declan Kelly, ‘Whistling Past the Colonial Graveyard: Why the 1916 Rising Failed to Resonate in Ballinasloe,’ in Marie Mannion (ed.), Centenary Reflections on the 1916 Rising: Galway County Perspectives (Galway County Council, 2016), pp. 197–211.

Declan Kelly, ‘Asleep in the Deep,’ in Ballinasloe and District Remembers Those Who Served in WW1 (Galway, 2018), pp. 353–67.

Noel Farrell, Exploring Family Origins in Ballinasloe Town (Longford, 1998), pp. 43–48.

Damian Mac Con Uladh, “The names on our streets.” Ballinasloe Life 10, no. 5 (2020): 58–59.

Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly (eds), The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

British Parliamentary Papers, Poor Inquiry (Ireland), Appendix: E.H.C., 1836(32), supplement 5–6.

Galway County Council Archives, Ballinasloe Town Commissioners, Minutes BTC1–10.

Ordnance Survey 6-inch map of Ballinasloe, c.1842.

Newspapers:

Western Star, 18 Dec 1847; 15 Jan 1848; 27 May 1848; 14 Apr 1849; 25 Mar 1865; 8 Nov 1896.
Western News, 14 Apr 1849.
Irish Times, 6 Dec 1877.
Freeman’s Journal, 15 Sep 1879.
Dublin Daily Express, 8 Nov 1883.
Belfast Newsletter, 3 Jul 1907.
East Galway Democrat, 16 May 1914; 23 Jan 1915; 3 Apr 1915; 5 Jul 1919.
Connacht Tribune, 10 Nov 1928; 2 Apr 1932; 8 Jul 1933; 9 Jun 1934; 23 Nov 1935; 18 Apr 1936; 4 Jan 1947.
Offaly Independent, 30 Nov 1935.
Westmeath Independent, 14 Dec 1935; 9 Mar 1963; 1 Feb 1985.

Emma Ryan (Dec. 2025)
Emma is an independent writer and social historian from Portumna, Co. Galway. This article is based on her MA dissertation in History of the Family at the University of Limerick.

Appendix

Building insights into the lanes from documentary sources

Nine lanes are examined in this article and are set out in Table 1 in alphabetical order. The spellings of their names are those used on Ordnance Survey maps.

Table 1. Ballinasloe’s residential lanes

Producer: Jamie Goldrick, Editor: Ronan Anthony Fox.

PushPull Media (2025)

Reviewer: Brian Hanley

There was a widespread misconception in Ireland about supporters of Irish Northern Aid, or Noraid as it was better known. It was often presumed that the typical Noraid activist was invariably of distant Irish ancestry, raised on tales of famine and exile and steeped in embarrassing shamrock-soaked sentimentality. They had certainly never been to Ireland but were still prepared to fund the IRA’s armed struggle to the tune of millions every year. These long-distance IRA supporters were at best misguided, at worst ghouls, who revelled in death and destruction in a place they had never been to.

Unfortunately, some of the commentary on this excellent two-part documentary rehashed these cliches, reflecting more about the reviewers prejudices than the programme itself (Ed Power in the Irish Times never missing the opportunity to grind the same axe).

The reality about Noraid and indeed Irish America, was always far more complex than these stereotypes. Most of Noraid’s key activists, in the early days at least, were Irish, with a significant number from Northern Ireland. Some of them, then, had more personal experience of the conflict than many of their critics here. Others were as well, if not better informed, than many of their critics.

Noraid and Irish America shown on RTE during July helps correct these narratives. It is refreshing in presenting complex issues in an accessible way. Unfortunately this is less and less the norm, with documentaries being commissioned on the basis of the lowest common denominator. Indeed those commissioning TV programmes seem to assume that viewers are not capable of understanding complexity. That there were two episodes of the also meant that issues could be looked in more detail than usual.

New York was the focus of ‘Anti-Treaty City’, while ‘From Whitey to the White House’ examined gunrunning from Boston. (The ‘Whitey’ being gangster James Bulger).

The programmes were stylish and evocative, with a well-chosen soundtrack; you don’t often find Ruefrex and Odyssey on the same playlist (but you should). There were engaging interviewees, ranging from leading Noraid figures like Martin Galvin, to Boston criminal Patrick Nee, IRA volunteer John Crawley and activists John McDonagh and Brigid Brannigan.

There were vivid reminders of the differences between America and Ireland in those decades.  The contrast between the impossibly glamorous (and dangerous) New York and Dublin, let alone Fenit and Bundoran, was vast. Indeed the social and cultural distance between America and Ireland seemed far greater than today.

That context is also important for understanding how Noraid was viewed at the time, north and south. The 1970s were a period in which a generally benign view of America was replaced by cynicism and suspicion in southern Ireland. There were widely accepted stereotypes of Irish Americans as brash and ignorant or in some cases, conservative and racist. This in part accounts for some of the hostility to Noraid, a hostility, which it should be emphasised, extended far beyond caricature Dublin 4 revisionists. The documentary did note the impact of IRA actions, such as the Harrods bombing of 1984, on American opinion. Indeed, as in southern Ireland, Americans tended to react more negatively to IRA actions in Britain than in the North.

As the documentary illustrated, Noraid activists were well aware of the difficulties this caused, but criticism of the IRA could not be expressed publicly. So watching Martin Galvin explain Noraid’s position in 2025 is substantially different from hearing it delivered, in what often seemed to be a hectoring tone, in 1985. (One of those I spoke to about the programme described the Noraid leader as ‘charismatic’ which I’m not sure even his biggest fans thought during the 1980s).

While a major advantage for Noraid was that it was not covered by Section 31 censorship, this was something of a double-edged sword for republicans, in my opinion at least. Many of those who enjoyed the programme expressed the view that at least these Irish Americans cared about northern nationalists.  This was in marked comparison to perceived southern indifference.

But seeing the south’s reactions in terms of moral failure ultimately ignores important contexts. The most important of these was an ongoing armed struggle that regularly delivered disasters and which, for a variety of reasons, lacked popular backing south of the border.

Naturally enough not every issue could be dealt with in depth. There was passing reference to the fact that much of the money spent on arms in America was coming from Ireland, rather than the other way around. That tensions sometimes existed been Irish republicans and their American supporters could have been explored too. No doubt many northern nationalists were often delighted to meet Americans interested in their plight. But there were also complaints that the IRA sometimes took unnecessary risks to impress these visitors.

While the Gardai were outraged that the NYPD Emerald Society Pipe Band participated in a hunger strike commemoration, some left-wing republicans also wondered why they were marching with cops. Bernadette McAliskey suggested that the poverty in nationalist areas would have shocked Noraid supporters but that might not always have been the case. Those activists who worked as police officers would have seen living conditions in New York far worse than those in Belfast or Derry.

That Noraid was engaged in a constant propaganda battle with British and Irish diplomats, as well as mainstream Irish America, was conveyed to an extent. The British government put huge resources into the propaganda war in America. Their influence waxed and waned, as was illustrated by two clips of New York Mayor Ed Koch. In one, from the early 1980s, Koch repeated Noraid’s slogan ‘England get out of Ireland’; in another, from later in the decade, he denounced the IRA as ‘terrorists.’

While Noraid’s fundraising role, and the more subterranean activities of gunrunners are what draw most attention, a great deal of the group’s focus was on countering (much better funded and resourced) state narratives. That they managed to do this was perhaps among their biggest achievements. Noraid saw themselves as part of the tradition of centuries of Irish activism in America, but the organisation numbered perhaps 5,000 in the 1980s, in comparison to the over one million people who supported Irish republican causes between 1919-21.

The vast majority of Irish Americans never contributed a dollar to Noraid, nor voted for a politician on the basis of their views on Ireland. Most of the mainstream American politicians who identified with Noraid were not Irish American; the big names there such as Ted Kennedy or Tip O’Neill were much more likely to support the Dublin government’s positions. The programme left me wanting to know more about Noraid in other parts of the US and to hear more from its rank and file activists. It would have been interesting to see it in the context of the wave of interest in white ethnic identity that swept the US in the 1970s, in the wake of civil rights and Black Power.

How Irish republicans in Boston navigated the violent protests over school busing for example, would make a fascinating documentary, as would the crossover between the New Left and some Irish activists in the same period. An examination of the transnational causes stressed or played down by Noraid would also have been interesting. But this a brilliant documentary that provides a fascinating snapshot of a significant activist group in an important time and place. It is a pity that RTE are not prepared to commission more like it.

Brian Hanley.

Cathal Brennan and John Dorney interview historian Spencer Jones on the Boer War in South Africa of 1899-1902. First broadcast on the Irish History Show. 

The Boer War was the British Empire’s crushing of the Afrikaaner Republics in South Africa. It was a war that affected Ireland profoundly, with Irish contingents on both sides. The far more numerous Irish on the British side, numbering over 45,000, suffered nearly 2,000 dead, while a smaller contingent, opposed to British imperialism, numbering 2-400 fought with the Boers.

We discuss the uniqueness of South Africa and the Boer Republics and the British advance across South Africa throughout the nineteenth century, culminating in the Boer War. We go on to talk about the war itself, with its initial British reverses and subsquent long drawn out and vicious guerrilla war. The war had a major social and political legacy for South Africa, but also on politics in Britain and in Ireland.

Spencer Jones is a historian at the University of Wolverhampton, author of many books on military history including From Boer War to World War, Tactical Reform of the British Army 1902-1914 . He also hosts the podcasts No so Quiet on the Western Front and Military History Plus.

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Interview with Gareth Prendergast by John Dorney and Cathal Brennan on his book ‘Clear Hold Build’ How the Free State won the Irish Civil War.

First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

Gareth Prendergast is a serving Colonel in the Irish Defence Forces and holder of Phd from University College Cork.

See also a review of the book here.

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John Dorney and Cathal Brennan speak to Vincent Altman O’Connor and Neil Davison about Albert Altman, the possible real life inspiration for James Joyce’s character Leopold Bloom. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

Albert Altman was a Dublin businessman and politician. Born into a Jewish family in 1853 as Albert Liebes Lascar Altman in what was then Prussian ruled Poland, he immigrated to Dublin as a young child. The family developed a salt business on Dublin quays, hence Altman’s nickname in the city; ‘Altman the Saltman’.

Like Bloom, James Joyce’s character, in his famous novel Ulysses, Altman’s father died by suicide and like Bloom, Altman married an Irish Catholic woman, Susan O’Reilly from Cork (though after he death from cancer he remarried a Belfast Protestant Victoria Corbett).

Altman himself developed sympathies for Irish nationalism and was active in the Irish National League from the 1880s and later the United Irish League (UIL).

He was elected to Dublin Corporation as a UIL candidate in 1901, campaigning against corruption and for the taking fo the tramway system into public ownership. He was part of a group who refused to welcome the British King Edward VII to Dublin in 1903. He died shortly afterwards from side effects of diabetes.

We discuss his life and times and parallels with the fictional character Bloom, with Joyce scholar Neil Davison of Oregan State University and Vincent Altman O’Connor, a descendant of Albert Altman.

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Cathal Brennan and John Dorney discuss the trace war between Ireland and Britain in the 1930s. First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

See also our article on this topic here. 

The Fianna Fail government that won the eelction of 1932 refused to pay the Land Annuities owed to Britain under the Anglo Irish Treaty.

The British for their part hoped to oust the de Valera government by economic pressure and placed a series of heavy tarrifs on Irish agricultural goods imported to Britain.

This sparked off a trade war that was only settled in 1938, when de Valera agreed to pay a tenth of the annuities and Britain handed back to Ireland the three naval bases they had retained since 1922.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

Published by Eastwood Books, Dublin 2025

Reviewer: John Dorney

The Irish War of Independence has attracted a certain amount of interest in recent decades from professional military writers and analysts, keen to learn lessons on insurgency and counter-insurgency for the then on-going ‘War on Terror’. Such works include William Kautt’s Ambushes and Armour, William Sheehan’s A Hard Local War and Joe Connell’s works The Shadow War and The Terror War, all of which focus on the development of the IRA guerrilla insurgency in 1919-21 and the British attempts to suffocate it.

The Civil War between Irish nationalists that followed the War of Independence has attracted less attention on the whole from military analysts, even from those interested in counter-insurgency and state building. This is probably because the internecine conflict lacks the direct presence of the British Empire and its forces.

And yet, the Civil War phase of the Irish revolution gives much to ponder from this perspective. Why was it that the ramshackle, rapidly created and mostly untrained National Army of the Irish Free State succeeded where the British had failed in crushing an IRA guerrilla campaign?

In this book, serving Irish Army Colonel Gareth Prendergast attempts to answer this question, applying to the Irish Civil War theories of counter-insurgency developed over the twentieth century by such theorists as Frenchman David Galula and applied, with mixed success, by US and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan in the twenty first century. He summarises this doctrine as ‘clear, hold, build’ from which the book draws its title, connecting them thematically with the Free State forces’ success in forcing the anti-Treaty IRA to admit its defeat in May 1923.

The ’clear’ phase here refers to driving the insurgents from territory which they held – achieved by the pro-Treaty forces in July and August 1922, by urban assaults in Dublin, Limerick and Waterford and by means of seaborne landings into the anti-Treaty strongholds in Counties Cork and Kerry.

The ‘hold’ phase refers to their gradual spreading out control over the countryside, resisting large scale guerrilla operations from the anti-Treatyites which attempted to oust them. This required a major expansion of the National Army and some changes of its methods, such as greater mobility and use of ‘counter-columns’. ‘Build’ describes pro-Treaty forces’ attempts at rebuilding civilian infrastructure such as roads and railways and restoring civil governance.

The books is heavily based on Prendergast’s doctoral thesis, which is focussed on National Army operations in County Cork. It uses Cork as a case study from which to generalise about Free State counter-insurgency and only rarely ventures elsewhere in the country. It does not, for example often cross the county border into more controversial neighbouring County Kerry, where anti-Treaty resistance was more prolonged than in Cork and where many of the conflict’s episodes of killing of prisoners occurred.

Prendergast states that his focus in the book is about integrating the Civil War and the National Army’s counter-insurgency into a theory of military operations and not on individual atrocities, or casualties in general.

In the course of this narrative of successful pro-Treaty operations, Prendergast focuses upon force generation, dwelling particularly on the role of Irishmen who had served in the British Army, whom he credits with introducing training and discipline to the new army.

The book has been well received in military quarters, drawing praise from, amongst others, David Petraeus, the one-time commander of American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and later the head of the CIA.

How well, though, does the thesis stand up? Can pro-Treaty forces in the Irish Civil War serve as a model for counter-insurgency military doctrine? This reviewer has his doubts.

It should be acknowledged first of all, that the National Army’s achievements were not negligible. An army was created more or less from scratch and largely after the Civil War had already started. It did indeed show considerable boldness in successfully dislodging the anti-Treaty side from the territory that it held in the late summer of 1922. And it did gradually grind down the anti-Treaty IRA’s guerrilla campaign, to the extent that Frank Aiken and Eamon de Valera called it off in May 1923, by which time, out of an estimated 15,000 or so anti-Treaty fighters, as many as 12,000 were incarcerated. In the course of 1923, martial law was eventually rescinded and full control could be handed over to the civil authorities.

However, the Free State forces possessed rare advantages in the Irish Civil War – the support of the majority of the population, no real ethnic, religious or social schism that buttressed the insurgents’ support base and overwhelming military and financial aid from Britain, keen to enforce the Treaty settlement. (An interesting digression by Prendergast tells the story of how the Free State resisted paying for all the military hardware Britain sent to it and ultimately never fully paid for it).

Against them was a divided IRA, that had lost its high command, which was mostly pro-Treaty and a large number of Brigade leaders, especially in County Cork, the focus of this book, who remained neutral in the Civil War. Furthermore, their disintegration gathered pace during the Civil War, especially in Cork, where Divisional head Liam Deasy called on his forces to surrender after his own capture in early 1923 and Director of Operations Tom Barry attempted to broker ceasefires with pro-Treaty forces on his own initiative.

The anti-Treatyites possessed very limited means of waging war, in terms of weapons and munitions and had few means of re-supply. The best strategy their Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch, could come up with was a prolonged campaign of material destruction, which could almost have been devised in order to alienate the civilian population.

Government ministers, most notably Kevin O’Higgins, asked not how the National Army had brought the Civil War to an end, but why it took so long and cost so much money, nearly bankrupting the infant Free State. He eventually had an Army Inquiry convened in 1924 in which he accused the Army high command of incompetence and the Army itself of bungling and indiscipline. If O’Higgins’ complaints were in part motivated by frustration and personal animosity against Army Commander in Chief Richard Mulcahy, they still contained a grain of truth.

A not untypical report, for instance, of National Army operations in in the South West Command (comprising parts of Counties Cork, Kerry, Limerick and Clare), in November 1922, stated that they were losing, not gaining, public support after three months of presence there, possibly due to the common practice of ‘holding up congregations’ at Mass and searching for suspects. Furthermore, they had too few men to ‘take more strenuous measures against the Irregulars’. Writing back from Dublin, command staff noted than many ‘senior ranks’ were inefficient’ and bemoaning that many patrols returned with ‘nothing to report’. “What exactly are these patrols doing?” wondered D.O Cochlan of the office of the Commander in Chief. He speculated that their ‘billets are too comfortable for active service’.[i]

By March 1923, the Army had been expanded to over 55,000 men and the IRA campaign was on its last legs, but the National Army’s tactical performance does not seem to have notably improved. A report of a sweep through county Limerick pointed to ‘serious faults’ in the operation, which ‘resembled more an excursion into the country than a warlike expedition’. Troops stopped to visit friendly houses for refreshments but ‘hiding places [of the enemy] are untouched’ and searches were ‘not thorough’.[ii]

J.J. O’Connell, the Army’s Director of Inspections, found at the end of the Civil War that most soldiers were virtually untrained. Among those manning posts in Dublin, for instance, many ‘could not perform simple evolutions’, some had only five rounds of ammunition on them, while others had none at all and the weapons themselves they carried were so dirty and uncared for that some could not be fired.[iii]

While in Cork, Prendergast’s focus, National Army posts generally fought stubbornly when attacked, it was not uncommon elsewhere, well into the Civil War, for whole garrisons to surrender with minimal resistance when attacked, as at southeastern towns Carrick on Suir and Thomastown and others in December 1922 or Ballinamore, County Leitrim in January 1923.

Leaving aside, as Prendergast does, the question of the killing of prisoners, of which there were over 100 documented cases, the discipline and performance of the average National Army unit was generally very poor.

While it is true, as Prendergast maintains, that the National Army was ‘a learning organisation’, in that it found ways to overcome its own limitations, it won the Civil War mainly through weight of numbers and good intelligence, based on local support, rather than any tactical military excellence or innovation. That, and a certain dose of terror, via executions, both sanctioned by the government and not. Prendergast does cover executions but perhaps downplays their terrorising effect, especially given than by the end of the Civil War some 400 men had been condemned to death and those guerrillas still in the field knew that they would be shot if armed actions continued in their localities.

This may all seem a little ungenerous, given that the National Army did actually win the war it was created to fight, but it is doubtful if the force could serve as a model for military best practice.

This review must finish, unfortunately, with two notes of minor frustration, the first is the failure to use the data assembled by the Irish Civil War Fatalities Project by University College Cork in which this reviewer was involved. This initiative, whose findings were published in 2024, would have qualified and clarified a number of Prendergast’s arguments.

Deaths through firearms and other accidents in the National Army, for example were much higher than he states. He lists about 100, in fact ther were well over 200, or about a third of their fatal, non-disease-related casualties, indicating the very poor level of training in the Army. Anti-Treaty IRA deaths, which he speculates may have been ‘in the thousands’ were in fact much fewer- about 430.

Former British Army servicemen may well have formed half of the National Army’s personnel by its close (there has been no definitive study on this) but comprised only 17 per cent of the Army’s fatal casualties, fewer than the 23 per cent who had served in the pre-Truce IRA. Which indicates that British ex-servicemen’s role in the Civil War, particularly in its most bloody ‘kinetic’ phase at the start, may be exaggerated. They may indeed have brought training and discipline to the National Army, but pro-Treaty IRA figures were more prominent in hard fighting and the average recruit had no previous military service.

The second frustrating absence is that of an index, which makes looking up particular topics and themes within the text unnecessarily difficult.

This is not to denigrate the efforts of Gareth Prendergast, or this book, which is a refreshing attempt to apply military theory to the study of the Irish Civil War.

Notes

[i] Military Archives, Civil War Operations Reports South Western Command November 5 1922 CW/OPS/09/04

[ii] Military Archives Civil War Operations Reports, Limerick Command, 29 March 1923, CW/OPS/09/06

[iii] O’Connell report to Army Inquiry 1924, Mulcahy Papers UCD P7//C/9

John Dorney interview Padraig O Ruairc on his new book Burn Them Out, A History of Fascism and the far right in Ireland.

We talk about: small groups such as the Italian fascists in Ireland the British Fascisti, the Blueshirts, Ailteiri na hAisgeiri, and the IRA’s wartime collaboration with Nazi Germany.

First broadcast on the Irish History Show.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our Patreon page for The Irish Story if you would like to support our work.

By Aaron Ó Maonaigh

On 4 May 1934 the contemporary press reported that Thomas ‘Tom’ Barry, ‘one of the most famed and colourful guerrilla fighters of the Anglo-Irish war’, had been tried and sentenced to one year’s imprisonment for possession of a firearm. What the press failed to report was that the fireman found at Barry’s home was no ordinary weapon but an iconic and evocative symbol of the revolutionary era, a Thompson sub-machine gun.

Barry’s case is an intriguing one, not solely due to the presence of a Tommy gun, but for the raison d’être for the searching of the revolutionary veteran’s home which reveals a fascinating insight into the prevailing turmoil and tensions that simmered beneath the surface of Irish political life. The curious tale of Tom Barry and his Thompson gun features the quasi-fascist paramilitary organisation the Blueshirts (ACA), the clandestine Garda unit, ‘Broy’s Harriers’, and murder in West Cork.

In late 1920 IRA agents in the United States secured a deal to purchase several hundred Thompson sub-machine guns with the intent of smuggling the recently developed weapons into Ireland. The deal was effected by the republican emissary in the US, Harry Boland, and financed with Irish republican money which was channelled through Thomas Fortune Ryan, a senior figure in the Irish-American support group, Clan na Gael.

Unluckily for the IRA, on the eve of their exportation on 16 June 1921 a consignment containing 495 of the 653 guns ordered were impounded aboard the SS Eastside by US Customs agents at Hoboken Harbour, New Jersey. The remaining 158 guns were eventually smuggled to Ireland mainly after the Truce. However, at least two early models of the gun were smuggled into Dublin before the climax of the Anglo-Irish war by Irish-American military officers.

These guns received their combat debut during an ambush of a troop special train carrying British military at Drumcondra, coincidentally on the same day as the seizure at Hoboken. The Eastside’s discovery shattered any hopes of a countrywide dispersion of the guns as proposed by IRA GHQ, and its use during the latter stages of the Anglo-Irish war was limited to a handful of operations in counties Dublin and Kildare. The gun saw much more use during the subsequent civil war, particularly on the part of the Republican or anti-Treaty side.

How Tom Barry came to possess a Tommy gun, is likely a result of the successful court case taken against the US authorities by representatives of Clan na Gael in the aftermath of the Eastside debacle. By law it was not illegal to own several hundred machine guns in the United States and so after much legal wrangling, the 158 impounded submachine guns, replete with thousands of rounds of ammunition, were finally released in September 1925 to Joseph McGarrity who secretly exported the guns to Ireland throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

In his role as general superintendant at Cork Harbour Commissioners, Barry personally oversaw the importation of a number of Tommy guns and ammunition from the requisitioned Eastside consignment to Cork in the early 1930s. It is not unreasonable to assume that the gun found at Barry’s home on 4 April 1934 was a keepsake from the Eastside lot. When the Gardaí searched Barry’s home their purpose was not to retrieve the Thompson, however, the discovery of the gun offered the authorities an opportunity to effect their true motive, to arrest and question Barry regarding the alleged murder of a young man in West Cork which occurred some months prior.

‘No free speech for traitors’

In February 1933 Taoiseach Éamon de Valera fired General O’Duffy and Éamonn ‘Ned’ Broy succeeded O’Duffy as Garda Commissioner; O’Duffy assumed the leadership of the Blueshirts. Upon his succession to Commissioner, Broy set up an armed auxiliary force that consisted of former anti-Treaty IRA men and Fianna Fáil supporters. This hastily formed special unit of the Gardaí – dubbed ‘Broy’s Harriers’ – took up duty with little or no formal training and immediately set about tackling the bellicose Blueshirts.

The period between 1933 and 1935 saw the old antagonisms of the Civil War played out writ small as the Army Comrades Association – aka the Blueshirts – and the IRA clashed at regular intervals in towns and villages around the country. The IRA – at this time loosely aligned with Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil party – was legalised by the government and its members began attacking individuals associated with Cumann na nGaedheal and the Blueshirt organisations, and breaking up rallies of same under a slogan of, ‘no free speech for traitors’.

To the conscious observer it appeared as if physical revenge for the republicans’ defeat in the Irish Civil War was a likely prospect. Initially, Broy’s unit took a benevolently ignorant stance with regard to IRA activity, focusing instead on quashing the Blueshirt movement. However, as friction between Fianna Fáil and the IRA leadership emerged the unit began to focus its attentions on active Republican dissenters.

In County Cork tensions between those aligned with the IRA and the Blueshirts raged, manifesting in numerous, sporadic beatings and assaults throughout the winter of 1933 and spring 1934. A confidential memo originating from the office of the Deputy Commissioner Éamonn Coogan reveals that the pretence under which the search on Barry’s home was conducted was based on Garda suspicions of Tom Barry’s involvement in one such attack.

On the night of 28/29 October 1933 the homes of John O’Leary and John O’Reilly, farmers in the Bandon area, were visited by armed and masked men who committed a vicious assault upon Denis O’Leary and Hugh O’Reilly, young men known to be active members of the Blueshirts and sons respectively of John O’Leary and John O’Reilly.

Hugh O’Reilly died subsequently as a result of the beating he received, and at the coroner’s inquest a verdict of murder by some person or persons unknown was returned. Following a tip-off from an unnamed informant, Gardaí investigating the death of O’Reilly believed the incident to have been a reprisal for an alleged Blueshirt assault on Denis O’Connor, a member of the IRA and native of Innishannon, which occurred one week prior.

Chief Superintendent Michael Fitzgerald reported that an informant told him that on 27 October 1933 Tom Barry showed him a report of the alleged attack on O’Connor, who claimed he was taken from his home, stripped and beaten for several hours by associates of the Blueshirts. The informant stated that Barry was incensed by the assault on O’Connor and told him that he planned to do a ‘frightful thing’ in retaliation.

The case attracted considerable attention from Deputy Commissioner Éamonn Coogan, who had Chief Superintendent W.J. Stack of Cork City take over the investigation from Fitzgerald and encouraged him to take a close look at Barry’s involvement. Coogan was eager to have the matter fully investigated, and claimed in a memo dated 12 January 1934 that ‘Barry was known to the Police to have made use of certain threats of reprisals, which showed evidence of intention on his part’.

Despite repeated calls on the part of Coogan to bring Barry in for questioning, Stack thought it inadvisable, as interrogating him in relation to this incident and the alleged threat of reprisal would have serious repercussions for the Gardaí’s unnamed informant.

Fitzgerald argued, the informant proffered his information ‘in confidence… and the divulging of it is likely to have very serious results’. Stack also argued it was inexpedient to interrogate Barry as he ‘would refuse to divulge anything on interrogation’, and ‘No useful purpose would be served by interrogating him —at least at this stage’.

Stack wrote again to Coogan on 16 January promising ‘a more comprehensive report’ to be submitted within in the week. True to his word, Stack reported back to Coogan on 18 January  and explained that the Gardaí, having exonerated three previous suspects, now believed that Tom Barry and four others — Seán Mitchell, Charles McCarthy, Standish Barry and Christopher Aherne from various parts of Cork City— of being main culprits in the murder investigation.

‘In view of this there can be no reason why those persons should not be closely questioned… [and] their houses searched’, Coogan responded on 21 March. All of the men’s homes were searched on 4 April, but nothing was found linking any of them to the crime.

However a Thompson sub-machine gun was found at the home of Tom Barry, in addition to 384 rounds of ammunition. Although the Gardaí failed to find any concrete evidence linking Barry to O’Reilly’s murder, the discovery of the Thompson gun afforded the Gardaí the opportunity to formally arrest him for possession of an illegal weapon. On 18 April Barry was arrested at his workplace, Union Quay, Cork.  As expected, he declined to accept responsibility for the gun’s ownership and refused to answer any questions.

‘Take this message from me to Deputy Commissioner Coogan that I know of his anxiety to arrest me for the past six months’

Barry was brought before a Military Tribunal, at Collins’ Barracks, Dublin, on 3 May 1934. During the course of his trial Barry excoriated several individuals, including the Bishop of Galway, whose statement made earlier that day, that ‘the IRA were a lot of gangsters and that the arms in these men’s hands were not used for any high national purpose but for intimidation, private revenge and armed robbery’ drew considerable admonishment from Barry.

He also took aim at Broy’s Harriers, whom he accused of assaulting and threatening Republicans. ‘Take this message from me to Deputy Commissioner Coogan that I know of his anxiety to arrest me for the past six months’, Barry stated during questioning, much to the embarrassment of Coogan. Barry was found guilty of possession of a Thompson machine gun and 384 rounds of .45 revolver ammunition, and of contempt of court, by the Military Tribunal. He was found not guilty on counts of having the arms and ammunition with intent to endanger life. He was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment, three not to be enforced if he enters into recognisances in the sum of £10 to keep the peace for twelve months.

Just days after Barry’s sentencing the Irish Independent reported considerable tension prevailed in Limerick City as crowds of Republicans assembled outside a Fine Gael dance held at the Lyric Ballroom on Glenworth St. The paper recounted how the ‘crowds indulged in cheering and party cries, such as “Up, Dev, and ‘Up, Tom Barry’, and uncomplimentary references to General O’Duffy.’ The murder of Hugh O’Reilly went unsolved.

Barry was released at Christmas 1934 but was arrested again the following April and sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for sedition, unlawful association, and contempt. Barry’s comments during his trial deeply perturbed Deputy Commissioner Coogan, who suspected a leak in his department. ‘It is evident that Mr. Barry has been informed that the investigation was directed by me’, and ‘I regard the leakage of information, coloured to suit the occasion, as a serious breach of confidence which I submit should be investigated by the Minister’,  he wrote to the Department of Justice .

His complaint was dismissed out of hand by Commissioner Broy who could not understand Coogan’s call to have an investigation of his own branch. ‘It is incomprehensible to me why a police officer of high rank and well known to have been in charge of Crime Branch for years past should exhibit such signs of perturbation over the remarks of an excitable prisoner in the dock’, Commissioner Broy wrote to the Justice Secretary.

He continued, ‘The best proof that there was no leakage was the fact that such a successful raid was carried out on Barry’s residence, resulting in a long sentence by the Military Tribunal’, Broy continued before adding a deliciously deadly caveat, ‘It is not easy to repose confidence in this officer…and the incident merely hastens a reorganisation of our Headquarters Branches that I have in mind for some time’. Coogan was dismissed from his post in 1936.

Further reading:      

Meda Ryan, Tom Barry: IRA freedom fighter (Cork, 2012)

Bowyer Bell, The secret army: the IRA 1916-1979 (Dublin, 1990)

IRA [Irish Republican Army] activities: Attorney General versus Thomas Barry, possession of Thompson machine gun, National Archives of Ireland, Department of Justice files, D/JUS/2011/25/220

Deputy Commissioner Coogan: statement made at military tribunal by Thomas Barry; reports, 1934, National Archives of Ireland, Department of Justice files, D/JUS/ 2006/132/123

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