Terror and Reprisal

However much Prime Minister David Lloyd George might attempt to deny it, he had a war on his hands in Ireland in 1920. Michael Collins’s assassination squad liquidated detectives, spies, government agents and public servants with cold-blooded efficiency. IRA men attacked police barracks, burned over 500 abandoned stations and destroyed income tax offices in twenty-two counties.
From the end of 1919 the government had been enlisting temporary recruits to the RIC, known as the Black and Tans. In July it added an Auxiliary Division, composed of demobilised army officers. These men, given no police training and free from normal military discipline, now brought further terror to the Irish countryside.
The IRA formed ‘flying columns’, mobile units each composed of around 35 men, serving for up to a week at a time. Tom Barry, a Great War veteran and Commandant of the West Cork Brigade, led a particularly active flying column:

This prison scum in brown and black
No tanks or war equipment lack
Yet o’er the sea they’ll ne’er get back
If they’re caught by Barry’s Column…

With increasing frequency, the auxiliaries and Black and Tans saw the dead or mutilated bodies of their comrades brought back to their barracks. Unable to get at the real culprits, they wreaked their vengeance on the ordinary people. On 21st September Volunteers shot an RIC Head Constable in Balbriggan, Co Dublin. That night lorry loads of Black and Tans leaped out to set fire to shops and houses, and – unprovoked - to bayonet two citizens to death in their nightshirts.
Similar reprisals followed in the towns of Milltown Malbay, Lahinch and Ennistymon in Co Clare. Here, one man was shot to death and cremated in the blazing ruins of his own house; and another was killed when he tried to help a neighbour whose house had been set on fire. One eye-witness wrote:

You never saw anything so sad as the sight in the sandhills that morning. Groups of men and women, some of them over seventy years, practically naked, cold, wet, worn-looking and terrified, huddled in groups. I met two mothers with babies not three weeks old, little boys, partly naked, leading horses that had gone mad in their stables with the heat, and then when we got near the village…distracted people running in all directions… with the awful thought haunting them that the burned corpse might be some relative of their own…Every evening there is a sorrowful procession out of the village. The people too terrified to stay in their houses sleep out in the fields.

Soon after, Black and Tans wrecked and burned houses in Trim, Co Meath, and Mallow, Co Cork. For a time this reign of terror seemed to work. Winston Churchill exulted in recent successes in a speech he gave at Dundee:

We are going to break up this murder gang. That it will be broken up utterly and absolutely is as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning…Assassination has never changed the history of the world and the Government are going to take care it does not change the history of the British Empire.

On 25th October Terence McSwiney, who had succeeded the murdered Tomás Mac Curtain as Lord Mayor of Cork and Commandant of the 1st Cork Brigade of the IRA, died at Brixton prison after seventy-four days on hunger strike. An eighteen-year-old medical student, Kevin Barry, was hanged in Mountjoy gaol on 1st November after shooting dead a soldier of the same age. A week later Lloyd George declared:

We have murder by the throat!

But did he? On the morning of Sunday 21st November Michael Collins sent out members of his ‘Squad’ to the Gresham hotel and other places in Dublin. They shot dead twelve British officers, some in front of their wives. One victim was a simple veterinary officer. That afternoon, Auxiliaries and RIC men opened fire on a crowd watching a Gaelic football match between Dublin and Tipperary. They killed twelve civilians including a woman, a child and a Tipperary player. The horrors of that ‘Bloody Sunday’ concluded with the killing of three men held by Auxiliaries in the guard room of Dublin Castle.
On 28th November two lorries filled with Auxiliaries ran into an ambush prepared by Barry’s Flying Column at Kilmichael near Macroom in Co Cork. Seventeen of the eighteen Auxiliaries were killed, almost certainly a majority of them after they had surrendered. Barry recorded that he drilled his men up and down the road amongst the burning lorries and mutilated corpses to stiffen morale shaken by the carnage.
Auxiliaries exacted vengeance on 11th December: they sacked the centre of Cork City, destroying the City Hall, the Corn Exchange, the Carnegie Free Library and most of Patrick Street. In 1921, worse was to come.