Bloody Sunday: 1920
A series of coordinated attacks in Dublin on 21 November 1920 was just the start of an extraordinarily violent day
An assassination and subsequent British crackdown resulted in a brutal day of violence
The war between the rival intelligence services of the Irish Republican Army and the British authorities was vicious, and never more so than on the morning of Bloody Sunday. The British intelligence network was considered a major threat to the Irish independence cause. Many of the British operatives, including the famed ‘Cairo Gang’, had honed their skills during World War I, especially in the Middle East. Now they threatened to cripple the efforts of the IRA to further the cause of Irish independence.
As director of intelligence for the IRA, Michael Collins put together a plan to destroy that intelligence network. Using information from a variety of sources, data was gathered on the secret whereabouts of Britain’s undercover operatives. More than 50 targets were initially identified, but this was whittled down to 35 by the time the operation was ready to proceed.
The operation was seen as retaliation for British acts including the killing of John Lynch at the Exchange Hotel in Dublin the previous September. Collins himself would later claim that he had no qualms about ordering the killings, “For myself, my conscience is clear,” he insisted. “There is no crime in detecting and destroying in war-time, the spy and the informer. They have destroyed without trial. I have paid them back in their own coin.”
Maximum impact
To add to the impact of the operation, Collins determined to eliminate each target at exactly the same time, in a series of coordinated attacks. Although this would undoubtedly be more impactful than a string of smallerscale actions, it raised a problem in terms of resources. Collins’s own ‘Twelve Apostles’, the team of gunmen he had created, was far too small for such a huge operation, so more volunteers had to be drafted in. Inevitably this meant that some of the men involved had never taken a life before.
Details on the targets to be killed were not provided to the gunmen until the last moment. Many struggled to sleep the night before, not knowing where they would be going in the morning but knowing they would have deadly work to do when they got there.
One such man, 17-year-old Charles Dalton, remembered being “wrought up, thinking of what we had to do the next morning”.
At 9am on Sunday 21 November coordinated raids took place at multiple addresses in Dublin. Despite the painstaking gathering of evidence, many of the 35 targets were not at home when the hit squads arrived, but 14 men were killed, nine of them still in their pyjamas and some shot in front of their wives. One target was saved when a nervous gunman opened fire on his own reflection in
a mirror, alerting the British officer and giving him chance to escape. Several others were wounded rather than killed (one of these men died later), testament to the nervousness of some of the men involved.
Inevitably the British authorities claimed the men killed had been regular army officers rather than undercover intelligence operatives, but Collins remained convinced that most, if not all of the men attacked had been spies.
The Croke Park massacre
Following the stunning series of attacks, the British retaliated later the same day. Claiming that many of the IRA men involved had come into Dublin on the pretext of attending a Gaelic football match, they sent a mixed force of RIC, auxiliaries and regular troops to Croke Park. The stadium was surrounded and the crowd was ordered to leave in an orderly fashion through the three exits. Anyone trying to leave through any other route would be shot and all males would be searched.
It is unclear how shooting broke out, but whoever fired first, it was the British forces who fired with the most effect. A total of 12 civilians were killed, including one of the football players and three children, aged 10, 11 and 14. A further 60 civilians were wounded.
An inquiry was held in the immediate aftermath, but its report was kept secret for more than 80 years. When released it revealed that 228 rounds of small arms fire had been expended by the British forces, and 50 rounds had been fired by an armoured car at the St James’s Avenue exit from the stadium (although these were fired above the crowd as a warning).
The report further claimed that it was RIC personnel that had been responsible for most of the firing and that it had been “carried out without orders and in excess of what was required”.
“AN INQUIRY WAS HELD IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH, BUT ITS REPORT WAS KEPT SECRET FOR MORE THAN 80 YEARS”