The Burning
of Cork

The night of 11 December 1920 was a Saturday. The Black and Tans and Auxiliaries burned Cork city centre that night in one of the most destructive acts of state violence in twentieth-century Ireland, carried out in the open over several hours while fire crews were blocked and bystanders watched.

The immediate cause was an ambush at Kilmichael in West Cork on 28 November, in which an IRA flying column commanded by Tom Barry killed seventeen Auxiliaries. Reprisals were the British administration's preferred response. In Cork they went further than anyone had seen before.

The night itself

The fires started in the small hours of 12 December, technically the early morning after the Saturday. Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, some in civilian clothes and some in uniform, moved through the city centre with petrol and incendiary devices. St Patrick's Street, the main commercial thoroughfare, was set alight. The City Hall on the south bank of the Lee was burned. The Carnegie Library was destroyed. Buildings on the north side of Patrick Street and along surrounding streets went up through the night.

The Cork fire brigade was interfered with. Hoses were cut. Firemen were turned back at gunpoint from some buildings. Looters were reported, some of them members of the Crown forces.

What burned

The losses were enormous. Estimates placed the damage at between £2 and £3 million, roughly a hundred million euros in today's terms. The commercial centre of a city of 80,000 people was gutted. Businesses that had traded for generations were gone. The City Hall, which had been the civic centre since the 1860s, was a shell. The Carnegie Library and its contents were reduced to ash.

Around 300 families lost their homes. The exact number of casualties is unclear. It was night and the city had partly cleared, but the human cost in terms of livelihoods and displacement was severe.

The rebuilding

St Patrick's Street was rebuilt through the 1920s, and it is largely that rebuilt street that you walk through today. The architecture of the city centre is mostly early twentieth century as a result, later than it looks. The new City Hall opened in 1936. It is the large classical building on the south quay that gives the waterfront its weight.

Internationally as well as in Ireland, the burning confirmed that British administration of the country had become indefensible. The Irish War of Independence ended with a truce in July 1921, seven months after the fires. Whether the Burning of Cork accelerated that outcome is something historians still argue about. Nobody disputes that the city came out of it permanently changed.

On the walk

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