The Burning of Cork

The night of 11 December 1920 was a Saturday. Before Sunday morning the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries had burned the centre of Cork, in one of the most destructive acts of state violence in twentieth-century Ireland, carried out in the open over several hours while the fire brigade was held back at gunpoint and the people of the city stood and watched. Most of what you see on St Patrick's Street today went up afterwards, which is why the main street of a medieval city looks the way it does.

Why that night

The trigger was Kilmichael. On 28 November, in the hills of West Cork, an IRA flying column under Tom Barry had wiped out a patrol of Auxiliaries, seventeen dead, the heaviest loss the Crown forces took in the whole war. Reprisals were by then the British administration's habit, a burned creamery here, a shot prisoner there, and on the afternoon of 11 December an ambush at Dillon's Cross on the north side of the city wounded a lorry-load of Auxiliaries and killed one. That evening the men from Victoria Barracks came down into the town.

The night itself

The fires started around Dillon's Cross and moved into the centre after ten o'clock. Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, some in uniform and some not, went through the shopping streets with petrol cans and incendiary bombs, breaking windows, throwing in the petrol and firing the buildings one after another. St Patrick's Street, the main commercial street of the city, went up along most of its length. Across the river the City Hall and the Carnegie Library beside it were set alight in the small hours and burned to their walls. The Cork fire brigade turned out and was interfered with at every turn. Hoses were cut. Firemen were fired on and turned back from buildings at gunpoint. Looting was reported through the night, and a good deal of it was done by men in Crown uniform. Two brothers, Con and Jeremiah Delany, were shot in their beds at Dublin Hill the same night.

What burned

The losses were enormous. About five acres of the city centre were destroyed, more than forty shops and businesses on St Patrick's Street alone, and the damage was put at close to three million pounds, which would be well over a hundred million euros today. The City Hall, the civic centre of Cork since the 1860s, was a shell. The Carnegie Library and every book in it were ash. Around two thousand people were out of work by Monday and some three hundred families had lost their homes. In Westminster the Chief Secretary, Sir Hamar Greenwood, stood up and told the House of Commons that the people of Cork had burned their own city. Nobody believed him then either, and the army's own inquiry, which the government refused to publish, blamed a company of Auxiliaries. The men involved took to wearing burnt corks in their caps, which tells you what they thought of the inquiry.

The rebuilding

St Patrick's Street was rebuilt through the 1920s, largely on the old lines and often by the same firms, and it is mostly that rebuilt street you walk through today, a good deal newer than it looks. The library was rebuilt on the Grand Parade in 1930. The new City Hall opened in 1936, the big limestone building on the south quay, and its foundation stone was laid by de Valera. Whether the burning of Cork hurried the truce that came the following July is something historians still argue over. What is not in doubt is that a government which burned its own second city had run out of road, and the whole world could see it.

On the walk

We walk St Patrick's Street and explain what you are looking at: a city rebuilt in a hurry from plans and photographs, close enough to the original that most visitors never notice. We pass the City Hall and tell the story of what stood there before. The English Market, the Grand Parade, the quays: all of them exist in the form they do partly because of one Saturday night in December 1920.