War of
Independence in Cork

In one year, 1920, Cork buried two Lord Mayors and lost its city centre to fire. The places where it happened sit within a short walk of one another, and the war that caused it was being fought in the hills a few miles out.

The two Lord Mayors of 1920

Tomás Mac Curtain became Cork's first Republican Lord Mayor in January 1920. On the night of 19 March, men with blackened faces shot him dead in his home in front of his wife and children. The coroner's inquest named the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the Royal Irish Constabulary in a verdict of wilful murder.

Terence MacSwiney took the office in April. Arrested at City Hall in August, he began a hunger strike the day of his arrest and died in Brixton Prison, London, on 25 October 1920, after 74 days. The world's press followed every day of it, and his endurance did more for the cause abroad than any ambush did at home.

The war in the hills

The killing in the city was one half of the war. The other was fought by flying columns in the countryside, small mobile units drawn from the IRA's three Cork brigades who struck and vanished. In West Cork, Tom Barry drilled the 3rd Cork Brigade's column into the most feared unit of the war.

On 28 November 1920, Barry's men destroyed a patrol of Auxiliaries at Kilmichael, killing seventeen of a force that had been thought untouchable. The shock ran all the way to London. Within a fortnight the government put the county and much of Munster under martial law, and British forces burned the centre of Cork in reprisal.

The columns kept fighting. At Crossbarry, twenty kilometres from the city, Barry's hundred-odd men broke out of an encircling force of some 1,200 British troops on 19 March 1921, a year to the day after Mac Curtain's murder. It was one of the largest engagements of the war, and the column walked away from it.

The night of the burning

The reprisal for Kilmichael fell on the city on the night of 11 December 1920. City Hall and the Carnegie Library beside it burned together, taking centuries of the city's records with them. On St Patrick's Street, Black and Tans and Auxiliaries worked through the shops with petrol, cut the fire hoses and held the firemen back at gunpoint. The damage ran to two or three million pounds and left around 300 families homeless. The British government later paid for the rebuild, and Éamon de Valera opened the new limestone City Hall in 1936. The St Patrick's Street you walk today is largely that rebuild, younger than it looks.

After the war

The truce came in July 1921. The peace that followed split the movement, and at Béal na Bláth, west of the city, Michael Collins died in an ambush on 22 August 1922, in the civil war that grew out of the one Cork had just won.

On the walk

We stand at City Hall, where the statues of both Lord Mayors face the river, and walk the length of St Patrick's Street, telling the story of the year that fixed Cork's name for good.