The burning of Cork City centre 100 years ago this week was not only one of the worst ‘reprisals’ carried out by British crown forces, it was also a direct attack on democracy with the destruction of the City Hall, seat of the City Council. That attack on democracy was seen again soon afterwards in Dublin when British forces seized the City Hall. 

The Auxiliaries went on a... Free article

On the late afternoon of Sunday 28 November 1920, the flying column of the Third West Cork Brigade of the Irish Republican Army lay concealed in ambush positions in a rocky, heathery glen. Their leader was Tom Barry, a former member of the British Army, who had joined the Republican Movement and helped to pioneer guerilla warfare by the IRA’s flying columns. Free article

One of the most shocking incidents of British terror in Ireland occurred 100 years ago when the Loughnane brothers, Pat and Harry, were kidnapped and brutally tortured by the Auxiliaries. Free article

The massacre of 14 civilians by British forces at Croke Park on Bloody Sunday 1920 echoed the massacre at Amritsar in India the year before and prefigured Derry’s Bloody Sunday of 1972. Free article

The IRA's dramatic elimination of the British spy network on 21 November 1920 and the British massacre of civilians at Croke Park overshadowed the murders on the same day of three political prisoners in Dublin Castle. Free article

The events of Bloody Sunday 1920 began with the IRA striking a major blow in the intelligence war which had raged and intensified between them and the British regime in Dublin Castle since 1916. But this war had deeper roots in the past. Free article

The Bridge of Killaloe spans the River Shannon between the towns of Killaloe, County Clare and Ballina, County Tipperary. This setting, surrounded by beautiful countryside, was the scene 100 years ago of one of the most notorious acts of terror by the British crown forces in the violent month of November 1920. Free article

As the British government and its Unionist allies prepared to divide Ireland, and as they planned to put the UVF in uniform and arm them as the B Specials, the UVF was active along the emerging border. One of their victims was IRA Volunteer Michael Kelly, recalled here by Monaghan Sinn Féin activist Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin, former Cavan-Monaghan TD. Free article

A once banned civil war based novel by Liam O’Flaherty has been republished after 87 years. Free article

Notorious for their sectarianism and inextricably linked with decades of Unionist one-party rule in ‘Northern Ireland’, the B Specials pre-dated the formal establishment of the Six-County state and their formation 100 years ago this month signalled the British government’s intention to impose Partition by force, while re-arming Unionism to subdue the nationalist minority. Free article