Amid today’s challenges, we must recall a turning point in our history
OUR understandable fixation with the coronavirus risks overlooking a significant anniversary in this nation’s history which occurs this week.
And that event, exactly 100 years ago on Friday, was a defining period in the Irish independence struggle like no other time, with the probable exception of 1916 itself.
At 1.12am on March 20, 1920, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomás MacCurtain, was murdered at his home in Cork city in front of members of his own family.
MacCurtain was the first elected Sinn Féin councillor to hold that historic office and his murder – by policemen from the Royal Irish Constabulary – caused an uproar which fuelled further dramatic and violent events in Ireland, and in Cork city especially, through that fateful year.
Tomás MacCurtain was just 36 years old at the time of his murder. Originally from Ballyvolane, just south of Mallow, he lived most of his life in Cork city. Originally a clerk in the City of Cork Steampacket Company, he became a fulltime Irish language teacher and republican agitator.
He was active in Sinn Féin and the IRB and joined the Volunteers at their inception. He and comrades mobilised in Cork in Easter 1916, but took the late orders cancelling the Rising at face value. Later, he was arrested and imprisoned by the British authorities along with those who were in the rising.
Through the War of Independence, he was in Cork organising intelligence, arms supply and other IRA work. Local council elections in January 1920 saw MacCurtain’s election in Cork as part of a pro-nationalist wave just like the December 1918 Sinn Féin landslide in parliamentary elections.
The final months of 1919 and those of early 1920 saw the RIC facing the brunt of IRA violence and clearly ill-equipped and poorly trained to cope. The RIC’s problems were compounded by numbers resigning or taking retirement.
But some RIC members went the other way and engaged in vigilantism and reprisals. On January 20, 1920, when RIC man Luke Finnegan was shot and wounded in Thurles, the officers fired wildly around the town and broke the windows at prominent nationalists’ homes.
Things went a step worse on March 20 in Cork city after the Volunteers had killed three RIC constables over three days and the Lord Mayor was shot dead in reprisal. The ‘Manchester Guardian’ newspaper reported that “a vicious circle of violence had begun”.
The Cork coroner’s court concluded on April 17, 1920, that MacCurtain’s killing was planned and carried out by the RIC. The IRA always held that a particular officer, District Inspector Oswald Ross Swanzy, was chiefly responsible. Months later, he was shot dead during riots in Lisburn,
Co Antrim, on August 22, 1920.
Things quickly took on their own impetus. McCurtain’s place as Lord Mayor was taken by his friend and republican colleague Terence MacSwiney. When he was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment in August 1920, he promptly began a hunger strike which caused his death 74 days later.
MacSwiney’s hunger strike and heroism was an international cause célèbre, and his funeral became the public showpiece that generations of Irish nationalists excelled at. From there, the spiral of violence just continued and Cork was in violent ferment, with truly shocking things happening with IRA attacks, and a violent push-back by the British. It culminated in the mass burning of that city just weeks later again on December 11 and 12, 1920.
Sandwiched in between those events in late 1920 were the tumultuous events of November 21, 1920. These began with the killing of 14 British intelligence officers that Sunday morning in Dublin on the orders of Michael Collins. Later that afternoon the Black and Tans fired into a crowd attending a football match at Croke Park, killing 13 people.
Coronavirus threat or not, how we recall these tumultuous events of a century ago can still define modern Ireland. The first three months of 2020 have not been very kind to us. But throughout 1920, violence was seriously ramped up on both sides, with some very brutal things being done.
By the end of 1920, the two sides had fought each other to stalemate, leading to truce in summer of 1921, and the gradual slide towards Civil War, which kick-started in summer 1922. March 20, 1920 was a turning point.
The spiral of violence continued and Cork was in violent ferment