Bloody Sunday, 1920 - killing & dying in the Irish revolution

By Mark Duncan

[A fully annotated version of this article is available here]

It was the storm after a comparative calm.

It followed one of the quietest weeks in a year of escalating and brutal violence and in a month that had begun amidst the rising unrest that had been unleashed by the death on hunger strike in Brixton Prison, late the previous month, of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork. Then, in one 48-hour period, Dublin Castle reported, 38 people had been violently killed and a further 79 wounded. Many were non-combatants and the innocent dead and injured included women and children. It was, the authorities confirmed in its routinely grim round-up of weekly events, a ‘weekend of tragic awfulness without parallel in Irish history since the Rebellion week of 1916’. 

As with the rebellion, the killing had been heavily concentrated in Dublin. Unlike the events of Easter four years previously, however, much of the killing on this occasion was done on a single day, if not all at once. On Sunday, 21 November 1920, violent death in Dublin was delivered in three principal instalments: it began with a series of co-ordinated killings by the IRA of 14 suspected British intelligence officers in their various lodgings, all bar one in a relatively compact network of streets on the south-side of the city; this was followed by the indiscriminate shooting of civilians attending a football match at the GAA’s Croke Park headquarters, where a further 14 people were killed; and it ended within the confines of Dublin Castle, headquarters of the British administration in Ireland, where three men arrested the previous evening – Dublin IRA leaders Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy and civilian Conor Clune – were brutalised and killed in the custody of their captors. To observe that the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – as 21 November became known – fitted within what was then a well-established pattern where targeted IRA attacks were followed by British reprisals upon a civilian population would not be inaccurate, but it would be to obscure one key point. This day was different. For its brutality and sheer bloody theatre, it was, as historian Anne Dolan assessed, ‘quite unlike any other day in the Irish revolution’s calendar’.

Weekly summary of events in Ireland from the administration in Dublin Castle, 22 November 1920. Click images to enlarge. (Image: National Archives UK, CO 904/168)

PRELUDE

The Tipperary footballers travelled to Dublin on the day before the match.

It was not a championship fixture, but a challenge game, arranged after the Tipperary men had essentially goaded the Leinster champions into it. Writing to the Freeman’s Journal newspaper, the Tipperary men had alleged that their apparent superiority as a footballing side had been somehow questioned by Dublin. The short letter to the editor ended with an effective call to a sporting duel: ‘We, therefore, challenge Dublin to a match on the first available date, on any venue and for any object.’

Dublin accepted the challenge and the GAA’s Central Council fixed the date and venue for Sunday, 21 November at Croke Park. As to its ‘object’, the game was advertised as a benefit for an ‘injured gael’, though Jack Shouldice, the secretary of the Leinster Council, later described it as fundraiser for the Irish republican Prisoners Dependants Fund. There is no doubting that its purpose was both political and philanthropic. Shouldice had written on 8 November that the match was being organised in aid of the ‘D.B.’ (Dublin Brigade of the IRA), with 20% of receipts to be set aside for the benefit of Brian Houlihan, a player who had been injured in a provincial match at the same venue the previous year and who was then still in the care of Richmond Hospital.

Ballaghaderreen-born, but a former All-Ireland medal winner with Dublin, it was to Shouldice that the GAA entrusted organisational responsibility for the fixture. Shouldice, a veteran of the Easter Rising, was then a Lieutenant with the 1st Battalion of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade, and throughout this period he balanced his revolutionary commitments with his GAA duties. Overlapping memberships of the the GAA and the IRA during the war of independence were not exactly novel, but nor were they necessarily the norm. While Shouldice regarded the GAA as a ‘great recruiting ground’ for the IRB and later the Volunteers and the IRA, one academic estimate suggests that, for all that the GAA espoused a broad nationalist ethos and exhibited republican sympathies, its members accounted for only 0.0006 per cent of the IRA’s total active membership. The late Peter Hart would go so far as to observe that there was ‘little evidence to suggest a strong link between the two’ organisations.

The Tipperary (L) and Dublin (R)  teams at Croke Park. (Image: GAA Archives)

Of the Tipperary team that travelled to Dublin on 20 November, only two – Tommy Ryan from Tubrid, outside Cahir, who had served three months in Waterford Jail the previous year, and Michael Hogan from Grangemockler – were IRA men. Drawn from clubs across the county, the players boarded at various stations along the route to Dublin and it was only at Ballybrophy, when Hogan and three others transferred from a Kilkenny train, that the full complement was gathered. It was not long after when they were joined in their carriage by a contingent of soldiers from the Lincolnshire Regiment that had also boarded at Ballybrophy. According to Tommy Ryan’s account, a row erupted when Tipperary player Seán Brett reacted to ‘unseemly remarks’ the soldiers had passed to a priest to whom he was in conversation. Soon most of the players and soldiers were involved in a full-scale fracas. In his witness statement to the Bureau of Military History, Ryan delighted in recounting the enjoyment that he and his namesake, Jim Ryan, derived from ‘playing handball with half-a-dozen of these soldiers. When we finally had them all down for the count, we took two of them up and pitched them out through the carriage window.’ Even if this was most likely a gilding of what actually occurred, it was not surprising in the circumstances that when the train pulled into Kingsbridge station in Dublin, the players feared that they would be met by police and military. No such welcoming party awaited them, but in the wake of the events the following day the press would report that ‘a band of assassins had come up from Tipperary to carry out the shootings in Dublin on the Sunday.’ The Tipperary footballers were nothing of the sort. Still, after the events on the train, it was decided that rather than proceed, as planned, to spend the night before their match at Barry’s Hotel on Gardiner Place, the players would scatter across several hotels in the city. As it happened, Tommy Ryan and Michael Hogan, the two IRA men on the team, went together to spend the night at Phil Shanahan’s pub on Foley Street. It was at Shanahan’s that they caught wind of plans for early the following day. ‘We were not told any details of what was being done’, Ryan recalled. ‘We just heard that there was a big job coming off in the morning.’

MORNING

There was good reason for secrecy around what was being planned. The ‘big job’ in question was, as one of its participants claimed, an effort ‘to liquidate members of the British Intelligence Service who resided in private houses and hotels throughout the city’. To attempt to do so in one spectacular swoop would not only strike a blow against the British military and intelligence operation in the city – it would send out a message that the momentum swing against republicans in the Anglo-Irish War had been arrested. For much of 1919 and the first half of 1920, the separatist cause had made remarkable and rapid advances. Dáil Éireann had been established. So too had a shadow judicial system. And hundreds of local public bodies had also transferred their allegiance from the Crown to the new Sinn Féin government. Simultaneous with this erosion of British authority in Ireland was a retreat of the police force to the towns and cities. The social ostracisation of the police – De Valera had branded them ‘spies in our midst’ and the ‘eyes and ear of the enemy’ – had begun in April 1919 and there followed a campaign of intimidation and attacks against police officers and isolated rural barracks. The effect of this was profound: the RIC was forced into a retreat that saw a large number of their barracks destroyed or abandoned, leaving vast swathes of the countryside effectively un-policed. In Dublin, meanwhile, Michael Collins had established a special unit known as ‘the Squad’ and begun targeting for assassination members of the ‘G’ Division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police (DMP), men whose role involved the gathering of political intelligence against enemies of the Crown. The Squad’s first victim, Detective Sergeant Patrick Smyth, was gunned down in Drumcondra in July 1919 – Smyth had allegedly helped identify a number of the 1916 leaders after their arrest and had, prior to his killing, ignored threats against producing evidence that had helped secure a two year jail sentence for prominent Sinn Féin member, Piaras Béaslaí. More assassinations followed. By late January 1920, indeed, Dublin Castle was posting notices offering reward money for information that might lead to convictions in cases involving the killing of five DMP and nine RIC officers across the previous 12 months. 

The British response to these developments – the RIC retreat in rural Ireland and the debilitation of its intelligence operation in Dublin – was slow, hesitant and incoherent. When Nevil Macready, already implacably hostile towards Ireland, was appointed as General Officer Commanding the Irish Forces in March 1920, he was aghast at what he found on his arrival. ‘Before I had been here three hours, I was honestly flabbergasted at the administrative chaos that seems to reign here’, he wrote to London. In the Spring and early summer of 1920, Macready would be joined in Ireland by Sir Hamar Greenwood as new Chief Secretary, by Hugh Tudor as chief of police; and by Brigadier-General Ormonde Winter as head of the intelligence service. His arrival coincided too with the replenishment of the Irish police with recruits from the ranks of Britain’s First World War veterans: recruitment for the Royal Irish Constabulary Reserve Force – better, and more notoriously known, as the ‘Black and Tans’ – had begun in November 1919 and they arrived in Ireland in March 1920. Membership was made up of rank and file ex-servicemen who had fought in the First World War and they were joined in July of that same year by a new Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary (ADRIC), an elite corps drawn from ex-commissioned military officers. The Auxiliaries effectively operated independent of other RIC units and, like the Black and Tans, soon earned for themselves a reputation for ill-discipline and casual brutality towards the civilian population.

Combined with the overhaul in the Dublin Castle administration, this reinforcement of the Irish police presence – they joined over 40,000 British soldiers – signalled the start of the British counter-insurgency. If it bore many hallmarks of a reign of terror, it had the effect of enabling the Crown forces to establish what historian Michael Foy called a ‘psychological ascendancy’ and to render the IRA increasingly impotent. As if to underline the latter, not a single attack on the British army or Auxiliary force in Dublin was launched by the IRA between July and the beginning of November 1920. In some areas outside the capital, the situation was somewhat similar. Tom Barry, the IRA Commander who would lead the iconic ambush of Crown forces at Kilmichael in late November, recalled that, in the months prior to that attack, the Auxiliaries had been allowed engage in a ‘terror campaign’ throughout the country for four or five months without a single shot being fired at them by the IRA. ‘This fact’, Barry wrote in his memoir, ‘had a very serious effect on the morale of the whole people as well as the IRA.’ A deepening Republican disillusionment was matched by a growing confidence on the part of the British government that they had finally wrested the initiative back from the IRA. On 9 November 1920, in a speech delivered at London Guildhall, a clearly buoyed Lloyd George trumpeted that he had ‘murder by the throat’ in Ireland. 

The Prime Minister was mistaken – and the operation organised for the morning of 21 November exposed as much. In the telling of how it was planned and executed, much of the focus would fall on the quixotic personality of Michael Collins. And while the man who doubled as the Dáil’s Minister for Finance and the IRA’s Director of Intelligence would sanction and support the plan for systematic assassination, the operational detail was the handiwork of others. As Collins’s most recent biographers – Anne Dolan and William Murphy – point out, the events of Bloody Sunday morning were a ‘Dublin Brigade operation, and it would be simply naive to go on looking for the hidden hand of Collins when he admitted himself that it was only ever discreetly there.’ Once the decision was taken to attempt a daring single strike at the British intelligence network, responsibility for its planning was devolved to the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, the key strategists being Dick McKee, the brigade’s commanding officer, and Seán Russell, Commandant of the 2nd Battalion. Over the course of a number of weeks, intelligence was gathered, names and addresses were collected and lists of targets drawn up and revised. So numerous were they that ‘the Squad’ alone was ill-equipped for the task and a large cohort of Volunteers – over 100 – were drawn into the operation, many of them with no prior experience of shooting a gun.

In design and execution, Bloody Sunday morning was an exercise in co-ordinated killing.

19 suspected intelligence officers were shot and 14 killed at eight locations, all at 9 am or as close to that time as possible. ‘All slain at fixed hour’, the New York Times reported the following morning. The original IRA hit-list was undoubtedly longer than that finally targeted. And not all of those targeted were killed. Some escaped, some were never visited and others were fortunate enough not to be at home when the IRA came calling. When, for instance, Todd Andrews went looking in Ranelagh for what he understood to be a ‘key man in the British network’, he was met not by his target but by a ‘half naked woman who sat up in bed looking terror-stricken.’ The encounter left Andrews feeling ‘shame and embarrassment’ and somewhat confused as whether to feel relief or annoyance at his unaccomplished mission. 

What killing did take place was intimate and personal.

Nine of those slain were in their pyjamas when they met their end. ‘This was’, as Anne Dolan has written, ‘face-to-face killing where the battlefield was a bedroom, where combat took the form of assassination, where the army was nothing more than a band of very young men, without uniforms and often the training to use the weapons in their hands.’ One of those young men was William James Stapleton, a member of 'B' Company, in the 2nd Battalion of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade. On that Sunday morning, Stapleton was amongst a group of IRA men who visited 92 Lower Baggot Street. Captain William Frederick Newbury was in a first floor flat with his wife, visiting Dublin from her home in England, when Stapleton and his crew burst in. Newbury didn’t surrender to his dismal fate. He attempted to barricade the door to prevent his assassins’ entry and when that failed, still in his pyjamas, he made a dash to escape from a lounge-room window. It was then he was shot – several times. The bullets that killed him were fired from different directions, within and without the flat. ‘One of our party on guard outside fired at him from outside’, William Stapleton recalled. ‘The man's wife was standing in a corner of the room and was in a terrified and hysterical condition.’ Stapleton estimated that the operation lasted, start to grisly end, 15 minutes and when the police arrived they found Newbury’s body lying in the window sill, above a pool of his own blood.

William Stapleton clearly impressed with his contribution to Newbury’s assassination.

Shortly after Bloody Sunday he was invited to commit full-time to Collins’s Squad’, his enlistment bringing their number to 12. Collins himself had no qualms about what had been done or how it had been done. ‘By their destruction the very air is made sweeter’, he later remarked of the morning’s assassination. ‘For myself, my conscience is clear. There is no crime in detecting and destroying, in war-time, the spy and the informer. I have paid them back in their own coin.’ Bullish as this defence was, Collins would subsequently concede that not all of those targeted and killed were spies; rather, they were, as historian Jane Leonard has documented, a mixture of courts martial officers, regular staff officers, recent police recruits and civilians. Bar the two civilians – Patrick MacCormack, killed at the Gresham Hotel and due soon to re-settle to Egypt, and Thomas Herbert Smith, killed at 117 Morehampton Road where he was landlord to another ‘target’ – all of the others assassinated that morning fitted the description of enemy Crown forces, if not the cream of the British secret service. Curiously enough, given what was to follow that afternoon, their number included John Joseph Fitzgerald, a war veteran and recent police recruit, who came from a ‘well-known Tipperary GAA family’.

AFTERNOON

The distance from the Gresham Hotel on O’Connell Street to the Jones’s Road home of the GAA is little more than a kilometre.

On the same Sunday morning that two men were killed in the hotel, Croke Park played host a Dublin Intermediate Championship match between Dun Laoghaire Commercials and Erin’s Hope and this was followed a meeting of administrators – 100 in all – to consider issues around the operation of the GAA’s ban rules governing the playing of foreign games. Neither was the venue’s principal billing for the day. That was always going to be the meeting of Dublin and Tipperary for which a large crowd was expected and for which tickets had been printed. However, following the events across the city that morning, the context in which the game was to be staged had suddenly changed. Would it and should it still go ahead as planned? About hour or so before its scheduled start, and with spectators already within the grounds, three officers of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA travelled to Jones Road and advised on the cancellation of the game. On a tip-off from a DMP Sergeant, they had word that a raid on the grounds would take place. It has been suggested that Seán Russell, one of the three IRA men and a Battalion Commanding Officer for the area, pointed out ‘what an appalling thing it would be if the enemy opened fire with machine guns on that crowd.’ The GAA listened but was unmoved: the Association’s top officials – Luke O’Toole, James Nowlan, Andy Harty, Dan McCarthy and Jack Shouldice among them – considered the advice and decided against heeding it. There were legitimate reasons for doing so. To do otherwise and call off the game off at such short notice would, they surmised, have been to implicate the GAA in the events of earlier that day. What’s more, Luke O’Toole, the GAA’s full-time secretary and manager of the grounds, factored that it was too late to abort the fixture. He guessed that spectators would want their money back and worried that this would hinder the possibility of speedily processing them out of the ground. He feared too that an announcement to empty the stadium at such a late stage might lead to panic and a crush at the turnstiles.

To an extent, the GAA response to the IRA’s pre-match warning was a mixture of concern and complacency. Concern at the safety risks to its patrons should they hastily announce a cancellation; and complacency that, notwithstanding the severity of the British reprisals that had already occurred in locations like Balbriggan, any raid would not be too bad in any case. As Jack Shouldice reflected many years later: ‘Raids...were common but we never anticipated such a bloody raid.’

Michael Hogan, the Tipperary player who was killed on Bloody Sunday. The Hogan Stand in Croke Park is named in his honour. (Image: GAA Archives)

As it happened the raid was not long in coming. The match commenced later than advertised (it had been fixed for 2.45 pm, but it was 3.15 before the ball was thrown in) and it was only 10 minutes on when, unusually, an aeroplane was observed flying over the Croke Park field. And not just once: it returned to fly over the ground for a second time before wheeling away in the direction of the Phoenix Park. Very shortly after, Luke O’Toole was approached in the stands to be told that an armoured lorry was at the entrance gates that led to the sideline seats and the pitch.

It was not the only armoured lorry. A dozen or more were reported to have arrived in the minutes after the start of the game, carrying a mixed force of RIC, military, and Auxiliaries. They took up positions outside the ground. Their plan was to surround Croke Park and erect pickets at the various exit points and on the Railway bridge on Jones’s Road. According to an operational outline submitted to a subsequent military inquiry, it had been intended that, before the game ended, a special intelligence officer would use a megaphone to warn patrons that anybody leaving the ground other than by the designated exits would be shot and that all males were to be stopped and searched on their way out of Croke Park. 

If that was indeed the plan, it bore no resemblance to what actually materialised.

Instead of confining themselves to a stop and search of match-goers, the Crown forces entered the ground, perhaps or perhaps not firing first into the air, but certainly firing indiscriminately into the crowd that numbered anything between 5,000 to 15,000.

The shooting began at the Canal End of the Croke Park pitch and what followed was a scene of a chaos and panic. A reporter for Freeman’s Journal wrote that the ‘whole place was a mass of running and shouting men and shrieking women and children’. Jack Shouldice remembered it as a ‘mad scramble’, with ‘hundreds’ of fleeing spectators injured. Some were trampled upon by the stampeding crowd; others had their clothes and flesh torn on the barbed wire on the perimeter walls; more were hurt jumping 15 to 20 feet from high walls into the grounds of Belvedere College or the into the back gardens of houses on adjacent streets.

On the pitch, many of the players darted instinctively for the sidelines and a route to escape. Not all, however: about six of them hit the ground instead.

One of them was Tommy Ryan who credited his own calm reaction to his Volunteer training. Another was his Tipperary team-mate and full-back, Michael Hogan. The players on the pitch laid low until, eventually, one by one, they edged themselves towards the palings at the Hill 16 (then Hill 60) end of the ground. It was in doing so, crawling on all fours, that Michael Hogan was shot. Ryan, his team-mate, sprung to his assistance, but the ‘blood was spurting from a wound in his [Hogan’s] back’. When Ryan tried to lift him, he recalled that Hogan let out what would prove to be his last words. ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph! I am done!’

Hogan died in a pool of his own blood, lying on his back with his feet on the Croke Park turf and his body on the gravel walk around it. Later, when the frenzy of gunfire had abated, a priest would attend to the deceased Hogan and a knot of people would recite the rosary over his corpse while it lay, still on the pitch and still clothed in the distinctive Tipperary jersey, with its green hoop and gold lettering. Hogan was the only player to be killed, but his story, while best known of all the victims, was no more or less tragic than that of others who lost their lives at Croke Park. Jane Boyle, a butcher’s assistant, had been standing near the half-way line on the terracing opposite the main grandstand when the match had commenced. She was holding onto the arm of Daniel Byron, her fiancé, when the bullet struck her. The pair, due to be married the following week, had been trying to make their escape from the ground. One of the first to be shot was 10-year-old Jeremiah O’Leary, who was struck by a bullet through the right side of the head while sitting on wall at the Canal End of the ground. O’Leary was one of three schoolchildren killed – the others were 11-year-old William Robinson of Little Britain Street who was shot through the chest and 14-year-old Billy Scott from nearby Fitzroy Avenue.

Not of all those killed died at the scene or on the day itself. 11 did indeed die on the day, some inside Croke Park; others outside its walls or in the various local hospitals to which they had been taken. The aforementioned William Robinson and 26 year-old publican James Teehan died on 22 November; Daniel Carroll of Templederry succumbed to his injuries on 23 November; while Kilmallock-native Thomas Hogan, whose shoulder had been shattered by a bullet and whose arm had been amputated in an effort to save his life, was the last of the sporting crowd to die. Thomas Hogan’s death was confirmed at 12.30 pm on 26 November in the Mater Hospital – five days after Bloody Sunday.

Mass Card for one of the Bloody Sunday victims, Jane Boyle. (Image: GAA Archives)

The shooting in Croke Park lasted only a matter of minutes but it was time enough for 50 rounds of ammunition to have been discharged from a machine gun situated at the St James’s Avenue exit to the ground and for a further 228 rounds of ammunition to have been fired from smaller weapons. And there would be more shootings – and deaths – before the day ended. These shootings were not confined to Dublin, but in the telling of the Bloody Sunday story it would be the events in the guard-room at Exchange Court that would provide the bookend to the day’s atrocities. Here, two Rising veterans and high profile IRA men, Dick McKee and Peadar Clancy, were being held since their arrest on the Saturday evening at their hideout in Gloucester Street. Alongside them was the politically-unconnected Conor Clune, a Clare-native and Co-op Manager, who was picked up in a sweep of a City Hotel, also on the Saturday night. All three were shot at 11 pm on Sunday while allegedly attempting to escape from the guardroom, an implausible Dublin Castle claim dismissed by republicans who believed the men to have been interrogated, tortured and executed as a reprisal for the morning’s assassinations. For the Dublin IRA, the loss of McKee and Clancy cut deep and, alongside the civilian casualties in Croke Park, it took much of the shine off the apparent success of their morning operation. ‘It knocked all the good out of it’, remarked Liam Tobin, a close ally of Collins and an IRA GHQ intelligence officer. ‘We had no sense of jubilation as the enemy had evened up on us.’

AFTERMATH

The events of Bloody Sunday made headlines across the world. So dramatic and shocking were they that the British authorities in Ireland acknowledged the need to move swiftly to control the narrative around what had happened, particularly in relation to the events at Croke Park where the casualties were all too obviously civilians. This wasn’t just about imposing a particular interpretation upon those events; it was about the dissemination of an account of the afternoon’s atrocity, the purpose of which was to deflect responsibility away from the Crown forces.

The line put out by Dublin Castle within hours of the Croke Park shootings was one that was broadly maintained, albeit with modifications to key details, in the days and weeks that followed. Simply told, this version of events held that the military had travelled to Croke Park on the understanding that some of the ‘Sinn Féin gunmen’ involved in the morning murders had travelled to Dublin under the guise of attending the football match and that, on their arrival, they were met with gunfire, which they returned in self-defence. In the first official account, it was claimed that the firing began outside the ground by ‘pickets’ who raised the alarm about the approaching Crown forces’; in a later account, delivered on the floor of the House of Commons by the Chief Secretary of Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, it was claimed that firing began when shots were directed at the troops from the crowd inside the stadium. Where both official versions were in agreement was in the claim that many revolvers were found on the ground following a search of nearly 3,000 of the spectators that took place after the shooting. In his first House of Commons contribution in the wake of Bloody Sunday, however, Greenwood made not a mention of the events Croke Park. Instead, on 22 November, he focussed on the events of the previous morning, the killings of British officers being used as justification for the authorities’ uncompromising methods in responding to the republican challenge. ‘I hope that this series of cold-blooded and carefully planned atrocities will bring vividly before the House and the public the cruel reality of the Irish situation. We are fighting an organised band of paid assassins.’ To reinforce his message, the Chief Secretary read into the parliamentary record the details of some of the killings and suggested that the British government might request parliamentary approval for even more repressive measures in dealing with the ‘organised conspiracy’ in Ireland.

The failure of either the Chief Secretary or the Prime Minister to mention Croke Park in their initial remarks on Bloody Sunday was striking. When the Irish Nationalist MP Joseph Devlin interjected to point this out, he was angrily shouted down. ‘Sit down! Sit down!’ came the roars from the benches around him. But Devlin did not sit down or stay quiet. He continued to press both the point and the patience of his political opponents. Angered at his persistence, the Conservative MP Major John Molson, who sat in front of Devlin in the chamber, stood up and grabbed him around the neck in an effort to drag him into the row below. Blows, most missing their target, were exchanged and the temper in the House of Commons was further raised. Shouts of ‘Kill him, kill him’ were heard as the sitting was suspended.

The heady scenes in Westminster were replicated in the more modest chamber of Belfast City Council. There, after a resolution was proposed to express the Council’s abhorrence at the morning murders of the officers and soldiers in Dublin, Nationalist Alderman John Harkin assumed the defiant role of Joseph Devlin. He intervened to question why the Council had nothing to say about the events in Croke Park when ‘men, women and children were slaughtered’. Harkin remarked that while he did not condone murder or assassination, those who felt likewise should at least be consistent and sincere and extend their condemnation to all murders. In a city that had endured months of sectarian violence and the forced exodus of Catholic workers from the Belfast shipyards, Harkin’s comments met with predictable and angry denunciations, particularly after he asserted that it was Sir Edward Carson, the leader of unionism, who had given birth to the ‘murder gang in Ireland’.

As it was in the parliamentary and council chambers, so it was in the popular press. For the most part, newspaper reaction to the day’s events reflected wider political divides: whereas the focus of outrage in the British and unionist press was largely fixed on the events on the morning, it was the afternoon’s events that inflamed an Irish nationalist press that was quick to label it an Irish ‘Amritsar’, a nod to a prior Imperial outrage in India when, in April 1919, indiscriminate firing by British troops had resulted in the murder 400 innocent civilians. The Freeman’s Journal denounced the Croke Park ‘slaughter’ as a ‘classic sample of a government reprisal. The innocent were shot down in blind vengeance’. The newspaper rejected the government claim that their forces were fired upon first as yet ‘another base official lie’ which would ‘deceive no one in Ireland’.

Yet some were deceived. The unionist press was only too willing to adhere to the official line. The Belfast News Letter coldly concluded the sequel to the morning’s assassinations in Croke Park ‘carries a warning with it to everybody who is peaceably disposed to avoid crowds.’ The News Letter was at one with the British Conservative press, which accepted as fact the first official version of events. The Daily Mail ran with the headline: ‘12 Dead, Sinn Féin fire returned, sports ground stampede’. The Times placed a similar construction on events, though its editorial focus was more directed to the morning’s executions.

Significantly, the two English papers that challenged the official version – the Daily News and Manchester Guardian – had journalistic boots on the ground and sent their own correspondents to the scene. On the day after Bloody Sunday the Manchester Guardian‘s special correspondent in Ireland walked the Croke Park field and talked to eye-witnesses. What he saw and heard was sufficient for him to poke holes in the official account and to reject completely the assertion that the troops had been fired upon first. ‘What did unquestionably happen is that the Auxiliary police rushed through the two main entrances carrying the turnstiles with them. They fired as soon as they got inside.’ The stampede was understandable, he added, because the crowd believed that they were being ‘massacred as a reprisal’.

The correspondent concluded that when the full story of Croke Park on the day was disclosed, it would ‘unveil one of the most awful incidents in the Irish troubles, and one for whose responsibility the authorities cannot be exonerated. The discipline of the forces evidently failed at the last moment.’

From the leader of Catholic Church in Ireland the events of the morning and afternoon both merited condemnation, yet he stressed that there was no equivalence between the two. Cardinal Logue had never recoiled from denouncing republican assassinations and he did so again in an Advent pastoral that was read out in the churches of his Armagh archdiocese the week after Bloody Sunday. Aghast at what he saw as the cruelty and pitilessness of the morning’s killings, he claimed that the ‘perpetrators of such crimes are not real patriots, but the enemies of their country.’ And yet, the cardinal felt compelled to add: ‘If a balance were struck between the deeds of the morning and those of the evening, I believe it should be given against the forces of the Crown. They are bound by their efforts to protect, not to destroy, the people, especially those who are not within their rights and innocent of any offence... Assassination of individuals is a detestable crime and terrible outrage against God’s law, but it is a greater shock to humanity and a graver outrage against the Divine ordinance...to turn lethal weapons against a defenceless, unarmed, closely-packed multitude, reckless of the numbers of innocent people who may fall victims. No amount of special pleading or misrepresentation can rob such an act of its horrors.’

INQUIRIES

The military tribunal established to inquire into events in Croke Park did not obscure the horrors to which Logue referred. Too much was already known for that. What it served to do instead was reinforce the official line that Crown forces had been reactive rather than pro-active and defensive rather than offensive when opening fire in the crowded stadium. It served also to point the finger of blame for the killing of innocents away from those Crown forces. One witness, a police constable, told the inquiry that he had been standing on the football field near a small boy. ‘I was with another constable when the boy was shot dead by a shot which came from the crowd. I heard the crack of the bullet and the boy was hit in front as he was half facing the crowd about the SE corner of the playing field.’

The statement from Luke O’Toole, GAA Secretary, to the military inquiry. Click images to enlarge. (Image: GAA Archives)

The military inquiry was always an unlikely vehicle for getting at the full story. Firstly, it involved the military investigating itself which raised obvious questions about its impartiality, including from the floor of the House of Commons. Secondly, it was held in camera, the secrecy of its proceedings helping to further undermine its credibility. Although the likes of the GAA’s Luke O’Toole were content to give their evidence, there was a clear understanding of the limits of the process by some of those contributing to it. When Michael Comyn KC, senior counsel for the relatives of Jane Boyle, appeared before the inquiry he did so only to let it be known that, as it was not a ‘public inquisition’ in an open court, he would not be producing witnesses. For Comyn, the inquiry set-up was a ‘tragedy’ that was sufficient to offend his sense of justice - he declared it to be very much ‘opposed to the British idea of sport.’

The verdict of the military tribunal was delivered on 8 December 1920 and it made for unsurprising reading. There was criticism of the RIC, as opposed to the Auxiliaries and army, for shooting without being ordered and in a manner that was indiscriminate and unjustified, but on the key contentious question of who fired the first shots, the inquiry essentially endorsed the official version of events as set in the first statement issued by the Dublin Castle authorities. It was the opinion of the inquiry, signed by Major General G.F. Boyd, that the ‘firing was started by civilians unknown, either as a warning of the raid or with the intention of creating a panic.’

That a military inquiry should find in defiance of eye-witness testimony and in defence of its own interests was to be expected.

Plan of Croke Park grounds from the British Labour Commission report on Ireland. (Image: Internet Archive)

Crucially, however, it was not the last word on the matter. Such was the concern at the growing catalogue of atrocities in Ireland that the British Labour Party undertook to establish a commission of inquiry of its own in order to ascertain the facts as to the question of reprisals. The report, 124 pages in length and a broad-based investigation of the Irish situation, was striking for its investigative purpose and its accommodation of witness testimony. In the case of the Croke Park killings, the commission had visited the stadium, and attempted to reconstruct the events by interviewing witnesses on location. When it came to weighing up the evidence it had gathered, the conclusions reached by the Commission, chaired by Labour chief whip and MP, Arthur Henderson, were very different to those of the military tribunal. Although dismissive of the suggestion that Croke Park was a ‘premeditated reprisal’, it deemed the actions of the Crown forces to be guided by a ‘spirit of calculated brutality and a lack of self-control’. It found, too, that the official charge, articulated by Hamar Greenwood in the House of Commons, that shots had been fired first from two corners of the field was not ‘tenable’ – not a single commission witness corroborated it. If the issue of who shot first was a key dividing line between the military inquiry and the Labour commission’s findings on events at Croke Park, it would prove similarly critical to the historical judgements brought to bear on them. Historian Charles Townsend thought it ‘perhaps wise to keep silence’ on the matter, while still observing that the official account was ‘far from the most improbable’. In contrast, David Leeson’s forensic 2003 examination of the afternoon’s shootings, concluded that the ‘critical version of the massacre is more accurate than its rival.’ A reprisal had not been planned and the police operation had indeed been designed to stop and search the crowd, yet Leeson was firm in his judgement that the police ‘began shooting without provocation.’ He added: ‘There were no rebel gunmen outside the park, and there was no return fire from the crowd. The Croke Park massacre was a battue, not a battle.’

LEGACIES

There was no pause to either the violence or the repression in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday. Instead, there was escalation. Exactly a week after the events in Croke Park, on 28 November 1920, the West Cork brigade of the IRA led by Tom Barry, ambushed and killed 17 Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, an episode that was every bit as audacious – and, in time, controversial – as that undertaken the previous Sunday morning in Dublin. The two events gave lie to the Lloyd George’s early November assertion that his government had finally got a handle on the Irish situation. It clearly hadn’t. As for British policy, Bloody Sunday led to what Charles Townsend has called a ‘step-change’ that involved a ramping up of its counter-insurgency campaign. What this meant in practice was the arrest and incarceration of some 500 republicans, including several TDs like Arthur Griffith, Joseph McGrath and Eoin MacNeill; the introduction of martial law across four counties in the south-west of the country; the continuation of reprisals, the most spectacular of which was the burning of buildings and businesses in Cork City on the night of 11 and 12 December. What it meant in Dublin was an intensification of raids and arrests by Crown forces – where only 66 raids were undertaken in Dublin the month of October, 1920, 274 were carried out between 26 and 31 November and 859 in the following month of December – this represented peak Crown forces activity in the city and county for the entire period of Anglo-Irish war. What followed Bloody Sunday, then, was more unrest, violence and terror, and though it was accompanied by growing speculation about a possible truce and peace negotiations, it would be July 1921 before such a truce would be finally agreed to allow for those negotiations to begin.

Unveiling of Bloody Sunday Plaque, Croke Park 1926 via British Pathé

To an extent, therefore, Bloody Sunday did not so much alter the course of the war of independence as signal the onset of its violent endgame. But what about those directly impacted by those events? Two men, Thomas Whelan and Patrick Moran, were among those picked up by the authorities in the days following Bloody Sunday and both would be executed in Mountjoy Jail in March 1921 for their alleged involvement in the murders of Captain Baggally and Lieutenant Aimes respectively. The remains of Whelan and Moran, who shared a cell prior to their hanging and protested their innocence to the end, were buried alongside eight others (Kevin Barry included) within the walls of the prison where they would remain until re-interred by the Irish state in Glasnevin Cemetery in October 2001. Frank Teeling would surely have been among them – he, too, had been sentenced to death – had he not escaped from Kilmainham Jail in March 1921. Teeling had none of the defence of Whelan and Moran for his whereabouts on Bloody Sunday morning – he had, as his own legal adviser admitted, been ‘caught red-handed when he was escaping over a garden wall, so there could be no real defence for him’. At the time of his capture a then 20-year-old Teeling received a gunshot wound to the thigh and some 14 eventful years later, in 1934, he would write to Frank Aiken, then Minister for Defence in the state to which the war of independence had given birth, to solicit financial support for medical treatment having been forced, he claimed, to give up a job as a sawyer owing to the pain and swelling around his old wound. 

But the scars left by the events of Bloody Sunday morning were not all physical. They were psychological, too. The morning’s violence, and its intimate character, had traumatic after-effects. Many of the IRA Volunteers who had engaged in the attacks had clearly been uneasy about the operation to which they had contributed. Simon Donnelly, Vice-Commandant 3rd Battalion Dublin Brigade of the IRA, later confessed that ‘Sunday morning did not appeal very much to our men who preferred to meet the enemy in the open.’ Donnelly would nevertheless provide a pension reference for Albert Rutherford who did take part. Rutherford, a 1916 veteran, was inside 28 Pembroke Street that Sunday morning when three officers were assassinated – Hugh Ferguson Montgomery and Charles Milne Cholmeley Dowling had been taken from their beds and shot in the chest, while Leonard Price, at the same address, was shot as he and his wife emerged from their ground floor flat. Even for such chilling undertaking, Rutherford appeared equipped with the right sort of personality traits. One of his combat colleagues would describe him as being ‘always very good humoured and quite undisturbed in the face of danger’. It was said of him that he ‘seemed to enjoy the terror’ and that he carried out his duties ‘no matter how irksome without a murmur’.

And yet, there was no disguising that the actions of Bloody Sunday morning were no ordinary duty. ‘That certain job alone’, Rutherford would himself reflect in the 1930s, ‘has been a great strain on men’s nerves...a job of that disagreeable nature was something more than Active Service.’ For James Norton, the strain on the nerves was simply too much. He would spend much of his life in Grangegorman hospital dealing with the fallout from the violence of which he’d been a part. In 1937, when applying for a disability pension, Norton reflected on the events of the morning of 21 November 1920 where he said he was ‘personally responsible for the shooting of three British Intelligence officers, two of which were killed, & one seriously wounded in the presence of their screaming wives & children.’ In the months that followed, Norton recalled there had been a ‘gradual deterioration’ in his mental condition until ‘complete mental breakdown was reached in July 1921’ – the month of the truce.

But, of course, it wasn’t only those who pulled the triggers who felt the violent aftershocks. So too did those who witnessed it. The wife of one officer who survived the attack said that on her return to England that she turned over ‘the whole of that ghastly day’ in her sleep. ‘Every night I woke up to see a ghoulish figure creeping up the garden path with a revolver in his hand. I heard the shots, and saw the blood-stained hall and stairs, and the figures of the dead and dying. I saw my friend in her pink nightgown covered with her husband's blood... And I shall see it all as long as I live.’ Unsurprisingly, the horror of the personal experience and the memory of it shaped an attitude towards Ireland that was anything but fond or conciliatory. Ireland, to this officer’s wife, was an ‘accursed country’ and ‘for every stick and stone of it will be forever hateful to me.’

It was during the days and weeks after Bloody Sunday that all the victims were laid to rest. The bodies of nine of those slain in the morning were returned to London for public funerals that were attended by, amongst others, Lloyd George, Hamar Greenwood and Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson. Their coffins had been removed from Dublin on union jack-draped gun carriages and carried to the North Wall for transportation to London. By government request, shops and businesses were closed in the city as more than a thousand troops accompanied the cortege of bodies on their final journey out of Ireland. ‘Never has Dublin seen a more reverent or solemn funeral’, the Irish Times editorialised, though Oscar Traynor recalled it somewhat differently in his subsequent statement to the Bureau of Military History. Such solemnity as was shown was more enforced than volunteered, Traynor suggested. Civilians, he claimed, were beaten and one or two of them thrown into the River Liffey for ‘their attitude of ‘disrespect’ to the passing funeral.’

Report by RTÉ's Joe Mag Raollaigh on a Ceremony held to mark the grave of a man, James Mathews, who was shot dead by British on Bloody Sunday in Croke Park in 1920 and had been buried in an unmarked grave.

On the same day in the same city, the remains of 11-year-old William Robinson were laid to rest in Glasnevin Cemetery. Robinson, whose family lived on Little Britain Street, had died in Drumcondra Hospital from the wounds he sustained at Croke Park and his school-mates at St Michan’s National School accompanied his grief-stricken parents, brothers and sisters in following the hearse from the church to the graveyard. His was not the first funeral nor would it be the last – more of the afternoon’s victims would be buried in the days that followed. Over time, however, only one among the Croke Park dead, Tipperary footballer Michael Hogan, would command a hold on the public imagination, his memory honoured in the naming of GAA stands and pitches and in the etchings of plaques erected at Croke Park and in his native Grangemockler. As for the others, their personal stories were largely lost in commemorations that, for many decades, saw the GAA invoke them in number rather than name and, invariably, as little more than symbols of its own revolutionary era sacrifice. Indeed, eight of the 14 people killed at Croke Park, would lie in unmarked graves until Sunday Times sportswriter Michael Foley afforded them, in all their innocence and uniqueness, a principal billing in his brilliantly written and widely read book, The Bloodied Field. Published in 2014, Foley’s book provided the impetus for a ‘Bloody Sunday Graves Project,’ where the GAA and the Glasnevin Trust would liaise with relatives of victims to ensure that headstones were erected where necessary and graves were properly tended to where needed. One of the first gravestones to be unveiled was that in honour of James Mathews, a 38-year-old labourer from the North Cumberland Road at the time of his death. 60 of Mathews’ living relatives attended the ceremony in August 2016, among them his daughter, a 95 year-old Nancy Dillon, who was only born three months after the events of Bloody Sunday. ‘I did not know him’, she said of her father. ‘I had only seen his picture’.

Mark Duncan is a Director of Century Ireland.