The Rest Is History - 578. The Irish War of Independence: Bloody Sunday (Part 3)

Episode Date: June 29, 2025

What occurred on Bloody Sunday on 21 November 1920 - a turning point in the Irish War of Independence and one of the bloodiest and most brutal moments in Irish history? How many British Army Officers were assassinated on the instructions of firebrand political leader, Michael Collins, that morning? Then, how many civilians did the British army gun down during a Gaelic football match at Croke Park that afternoon, and why given it was largely unprovoked? And, what events did that fateful day set in motion along the road to Irish Independence, by turning Irish public opinion against the British government? In today’s episode, Dominic and Tom are joined once more by historian Paul Rouse, to discuss one of the most tragic events of the entire Irish War of Independence; Bloody Sunday.  ⁠The Rest Is History Club⁠: Become a member for exclusive bonus content, early access to full series and live show tickets, ad-free listening, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. Just head to ⁠therestishistory.com⁠ to sign up, or start a free trial today on Apple Podcasts: ⁠apple.co/therestishistory⁠. For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to ⁠www.goalhanger.com⁠ _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Tabby Syrett + Aaliyah Akude  Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to the rest is history for weekly bonus episodes ad free listening early access to series and membership of our much loved chat community go to the rest is history.com and join the club that is the rest is history.com. So Tom, we have some unbelievably exciting news for our listeners, don't we? We absolutely do, Dominic. The England cricket team will not be the only group of Englishmen touring Australia this coming summer to triumphant effect because we will be as well. We're coming to Australia in November and December this year, and you can get tickets at the rest is history.com. So listen, we will be undertaking four tests for shows in front of our beloved

Australian audience, our very favorite audience, I think Tom, and we'll be doing shows at the Sydney Opera House in Melbourne, and then we'll be doing two more at the start of December in Adelaide and in Brisbane. And we will be talking about one of Australia's greatest exports and the impact that it has had on the understanding of history across the world and through time. So tickets are on sale now for our beloved members of the Rest is History Club. And if you want to snap those tickets up early, you should join the Rest is History Club at therestishistory.com. And tickets will be available to purchase for everyone else from this Thursday, that's

the 3rd of July at 11am Australian Eastern Standard Time. So for your chance to see us live on stage in an Australian city near you, head to the restishistory.com, to the rest is history dot com. Join the club and get your tickets. The Freeman's Journal, 22nd of November, 1920. Where will it end? Yesterday morning, some 14 officers and men of the military and secret services were shot dead at the same hour in widely separated districts of the city, some in hotels, some in private residences.

In the afternoon, the authorized answer of the government agents came in the form of an attack upon a football crowd assembled, unsuspecting of evil, to watch a match in Croke Park. Croke Park was turned into Amritsar, with the difference that there were no proclamations, no warnings, no legalities defied by the assembly in Croke Park. The slaughter was a classic example of a government reprisal. The innocent were shot down in blind vengeance. The pretense that the firing was provoked by an attack upon the government forces will deceive no one in Ireland. It is another base official lie. So strong words there from the Freeman's Journal published on the 22nd of November 1920. And the Freeman's Journal had long been Ireland's leading constitutional nationalist newspaper,

so backing home rule rather than independence. But there you can sense shock, outrage, and the sense of a newspaper perhaps changing its mind. And the reason for that are the events in Dublin of the previous day that the newspaper is describing. And it is a Sunday that has gone down in history as Ireland's first bloody Sunday. So it's probably the single most notorious moment

in the war for Irish independence that had begun almost two years earlier. And that is largely because of what happened where we are sitting right now at Croke Park and if you can hear the humming of a lawnmower behind us tending the sacred turf that is because we are this great shrine of Irish sport but Dominic before we get on to the terrible events of Bloody Sunday should we just remind ourselves of where we've got to in the story of the war for Irish independence?

Sure. Listeners will remember that last time, in the last episode, we began with Sinn Fein's landslide election victory in December 1918. And then we looked at what happened over the next two years. The creation of a Republican counter-state with its own courts and local officials. The growth of the Irish volunteers, which became the Irish Republican Army, which is determined to fight for an independent republic. A growing guerrilla campaign increasingly bloody against the British authorities. Reprisals by British troops, by the Royal Irish Constabulary and most famously the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries.

So we reached November 1920. And to guide us through the story of what happened next, what happened here at Croke Park on that day, we have somebody who's no stranger to this stadium, historian at University College Dublin, national treasure and self-declared pound shop bono, Paul Rouse. And Paul, you're actually a historian by training of Irish sport and the interaction of Irish sports and politics and nationalism and so on. So this story has a real resonance for you, doesn't it?

It's an extraordinary story and an extraordinary day. It begins in the morning with the IRA killing a group of 14 or 15 agents of the British state largely, though not entirely as we will see. In the afternoon there is Croke Park here in the evening there are further murders and the murders aren't just based in Dublin because there are random killings, randy and acts of violence around the country including a policeman who was going home from Mass in a country town in Watford who was shot dead while chatting to a grocer's daughter and for

their part the British Army shot civilians in Meath and in Mayo while there was a civilian killed and while Dublin was under curfew. So this is death in an Irish sense on a large scale. The numbers on the day barely reached 40 dead which in comparison to other conflicts in other times will not seem enormous. So in that newspaper report, there was a comparison to the massacre at Amritsar in India in the same year where there were hundreds killed. It's not on that scale, is it? It's not at that scale of number, but it's the nature of the events on the day that are truly shocking.

They've left the legacy, which I think we should talk about later on as well, the legacy and how it wound through history afterwards, precisely because it was also an intersection of sport and politics. Right. So take us through the day. Let's go through it in some detail and let's start with, you know, dawn breaks Sunday morning, the 21st of November, and the IRA have a long drawn up plan, don't they? An elimination plan.

Basically death squads going out into the city. So the short answer to what happened early in the morning of the 21st of November is that at around 9am, about 100 IRA men, led by the Dublin Brigade of the IRA, targeted 19 men at eight locations around Dublin. Now, before I came in earlier to meet you in the Academy, I walked the streets where those men were based. And it's all in a quite a condensed area in the south inner city, with the exception of one set of killings, which took place in the Gresham Hotel, opposite the general post office where we were the last time you were over.

So 19 men at 8 locations were targeted. 15 of those men were shot dead. 4 others were injured. A group of other men, an unknown number of other men, escaped all injury in what happened. The men who were shot had been identified in intelligence put together by a special unit of the IRA known as the Squad, which Michael Collins had established in 1919. And the idea was that it would combat the activities of the G division of the Dublin Metropolitan Police.

So that was the intelligence unit and the detectives of the Dublin Metropolitan Police. Their men, those G men, their job was to collect evidence against people who were perceived to be the enemies of the state. Now among the squad were some of Collins' squad were some of the Tipperary men who we met right back in the earlier episode who are now in Dublin as full time soldiers of the IRA. So these killings personally ordered or sanctioned by Michael Collins himself? Yes.

Yeah. Okay. So talk us through how it works. So there's a good example, isn't there? The one of the killers, a guy called Stapleton, arrives at Baggett Street. Is it 92 Lower Baggett Street where a guy called Captain W.F. Newbury, who's been designated as a target. So what happens there?

Stapleton and a couple of people who were with him, a couple of men who were with him, broke into Captain Newbury's flat. He was in his pajamas in bed with his wife Hetty, who was over visiting from England. And he tried to escape out a window with Hetty trying to protect him and turn the killer. So he was shot seven times and he ended up hanging from the window from which he was trying to escape. Captain Newbury's wife was, according to William Stapleton, left in a terrified and hysterical condition. It took about 15 minutes for him to die. All the while he was hanging from the window while she covered him in a blanket. The brilliant Trinity historian Anne Dolan, who along with people like Jane Leonard, David

Leeson and Michael Foley have written great work on this day, Anne Dolan writes that Mrs. Newbury was haunted by the sound of shooting of gunmen laughing by the memory of a man washing her husband's blood off his hands in her own sink. Oh my God. And had Captain Newbury been a secret agent? Yes, it appears so. And so what is the reputation of the British Secret Service at this point?

Because you've been talking about how useless all the various departments of the British state and Ireland are. Do they have a formidable reputation among the IRA and if so, is it deserved? One of the singular truths of Irish history is that Irish nationalist and Republican organizations were repeatedly riddled with informers who fed information through various intelligence units and passed them to Dublin Castle. This evidence was not always convincing. Often it was speculative. Sometimes it was information that was clearly made up by people who wish to impress their handlers and get money. We know all this from spy organizations around the world. I think the issue was what happened with the information when it went to Dublin

Castle. But yes, this was an intelligence war of huge proportions. And it mattered to the British state that the intelligence collected was used properly. It mattered that it was well collected. And the problem for British intelligence was that they themselves were infiltrated by the IRA who were feeding information on a loop back to Collins. Let's talk a bit about the people who were shot. So in the sort of IRA version of events, these are a notorious gang, the Cairo Gang, I think they're called, of ruthless British secret agents who had to be eliminated for the survival of the Irish Revolution. First of all, not all of the men who are killed are intelligence officers. And secondly, remarkably, not all of them are English.

So first of all, not all of them are intelligence officers. So some people killed in error. Is that how this? Yes. So I think we'll break them down into different categories. There were intelligence officers who were killed in the shorthand of the Irish revolution. And in the Irish popular mind, it's remembered that Collins had 14 spies shot. And the truth of it is, that's just not correct.

So some were intelligence officers, including, for example, Henry English, who used the alias name of Mac Man while he was in Dublin. He was actually in bed with Joseph Connolly, also an intelligence agent who was from Wexford and had been to UCD when they were attacked by IRA men. There was also a man called Asham Ames. On the day after he was shot, the New York Times actually carried the notice of his engagement to a New York socialite, Millicent Ewing, and a day later again it printed his death notice. There were spies there but there were also a mixture of say court martial officials,

of staff officers and of ordinary police recruits. Right. And a great example I think is Jack Fitzgerald, John Joseph but known as Jack Fitzgerald, who was a recent police recruit who came actually from a well-known Gaelic Athletic Association family in Tipperary. His father was either patron or president of the local GAA club. He was the fifth of 11 children in the classic cliched Irish family. His mother had died young.

He had been sent to Black Rock College, again, the place where De Valera went. He joined the British army in 1915,, when he was 16 years of age, as many people in Ireland of his generation did. He was with the 16th Division who fought at Ganshee and was part of the fight that went on there. In 1917, he joined the Royal Flying Corps. His plane crashed. He was captured. He was kept as a POW. He then escaped. He was then recaptured. He was demobilized in 1919 and he was joining the colonial police to go and serve the British Empire or in the forces of empire around the world. He was due to go overseas actually two weeks later on the fifth of December and he was shot in his bed.

You're right that not all of the people who shot were even connected with the British services. An example is one of the houses where men were killed was on Morehampton Road, 117 Morehampton Road. And one of the intelligence officers there, people who thought was an intelligence officer, was actually a landlord. was there with people who thought was an intelligence officer was actually a landlord. It was his house and he was shot. And another was a kind of a fascinating man called Paddy McCormack who was from Mayo. He'd gone to Castle Lock College, an elite public school on the north side of Dublin. He was a professional jockey after he left school and had won races around Ireland and then became a trainer and a vet qualified as a vet.

He joined the Army Vet Corps in 1917 won races. So we were based in the Quora, based in Egypt. And after the war, he applied for and won a job to run horse racing in Cairo, which he was about to go across to do. And Paul, can I ask, the Cairo set is a word, a name that is given to this grouping of agents and people who were shot, isn't it? Yes, there was a coffee shop on Grafton Street. Where the Secret Service agents are meeting. But loads of people went there.

It was one of those things. And there was this rumour that it was about people who'd been hardened in the colonial service away in Cairo. So it's nothing to do with this guy, horse racing in Cairo. No, nothing to do with him. But he was a trainer of horses and the great Irish trainer, J.J. Parkinson, he was involved with him. So McCormick was actually staying in the Gresham Hotel.

He was an incredible character. It's not quite clear where he got his lifestyle from, but he used to rise only in the late afternoon, unless there was horse racing, he might get up slightly earlier. He lived like Theo. He lived like Theo. He was smiling weakly. He was a man who was fond, I think of, maybe this was Theo as well, like fond of lavish

entertainment. That's definitely Theo. He was due to head to Cairo with his wife and his daughter on the 2nd of December. His daughter was four, her name was Grace, and he was shot and died in a pool of blood in a bedroom in the Gresham hotel. So a bad day for people involved in sport all round. In this case, a simple fact that it gives a lie to the idea that it was 15 spies who were shot. But that's the myth, isn't it, that passes into the bloodstream of the mythology of the

Irish revolution. It's the way the legacy of war works. And we'll talk more about that in a little bit. So Michael Collins has this extraordinary passage where he says his plan was the destruction of the undesirables who made miserable the lives of ordinary, decent citizens. If I had a second motive, it was no more than a feeling such as I would have for a dangerous reptile. By their destruction the very air is made sweeter." And he went on to say, there's no crime in detecting or destroying in wartime the spy and the informer. I've paid them

back in their own coin. And that's the language that we're very familiar with from all kinds of kind of paramilitary conflicts and so on, I guess. But that's gone down in, I guess, nationalist mythology, that it's a kind of a cleansing, that it's, you know, making the air sweeter and whatnot. And there was a failure to properly recognize afterwards that among those killed was civilians such as McCormick. The Cormick family didn't leave a go. They kept at it to say that this is heaping columnarly on a man who you've killed. He was no spy. Yeah.

So the men who were doing the killing, interestingly, you mentioned Anne Dolan in her article, and she looks at actually the people who carried out the killings. And there's a description of the gunmen laughing and the bloke washing their hands in the sink, but some of them are kind of traumatized by having done the killings. Is that right? Oh, deeply traumatized. We were talking about this earlier, the mythology that wraps itself around every conflict where,

and made real in the balance that we were talking about earlier, where it's about people romanticizing, dying for Ireland. But it's quite difficult to romanticise killing another human being. And, Andolan. Well, particularly if they're hanging out of windows with their wives subbing. It's not an attractive proposition. It is not the stuff which mythologies are constructed around. And I mentioned Andolan earlier in her article, Killing on Bloody Sunday, November 1920.

And she looked at the impact of the lives, part of the thing was, was to look at the impact of the lives. And some of the men who carried out shootings on that day were utterly traumatized. They ended up in nervous breakdowns, in habitual drunkenness or in general collapse of health in all of this. I'll give you an example, James Norton, another historian, Mark Duncan has recorded that James Norton said that he was personally responsible for the shooting of three British intelligence officers, two of whom

were killed and one seriously injured or wounded in the presence of their what screaming wives and children. After Bloody Sunday, Norton said that there had been a gradual deterioration in his condition until he had complete mental breakdown in July 1921. And he couldn't cope with what he had done. And he spent a lot of his life in Grange-Gorman Mental Hospital, as it was then called, just down the road from us here on in the north side of Dublin. And Dolan, I think put it brilliantly. She said, killing a spy may have been an order or a duty, but there was much to reconcile

when all you saw was a man in his pajamas clinging to his wife. And interestingly, I think as well, Norton, in Grange Gorman, shared that hospital with men who had fought in the British army in the Great War. Wow. They themselves traumatized. And Paul, is the implication of this that even after two years, the actual habit of killing is upsetting and traumatizing for people. And that to that extent, the habits of normality of civilian life of peace haven't completely broken down.

Yeah. And I think it's all about the nature of the war here where someone might only fire a good, that might've been his first time to fire a gun or many of these. Yeah. Their first time to fire a gun. First of all, it was very hard to get guns. Second of all, they were used only in certain places at certain times. The habitual usage is very difficult to deliver. And talking of the habits of normality, those rhythms of daily life are carrying

on in the city of Dublin, the day of the shooting. And so for instance, you have sports fixtures, they are still going ahead. Yeah. And that's the thing about it is that the killings on the morning of Bloody Sunday were only the start of things. That day, Tipperary is a county more famous for hurling than for Gaelic football, but they had a brilliant Gaelic football team in 1920 and a challenge match was set up between Dublin and Tipperary to be played here in Croke Park. And it was as if, as you say, Tom, the morning had never happened. People were coming across the city to this place as if this was not a city at war. And of course, partly because for a lot of people, it wasn't really a city at war.

There was actually two games here that day. The first was a local club match. And while that was taking place, there was a meeting of GEA administrators in the ground, the Gaelic Athletic Association shortened to GEA, the organisation who runs these games. They were making policy for the coming months and officers of the Dublin Brigade of the IRA came to the stadium and they advised that the match should be called off. That this was dangerous.

They had heard whispers that the British forces would be coming to Croke Park and to look for people. The GAA official said the match will go ahead. If it weren't to go ahead, it would be like us saying that we were somehow complicit in what happened in the morning. And also there was a large crowd inside the ground already who had paid money and that itself can create an issue. So the styles had opened just after 2pm.

The stewards were in place. The ticket sellers were on the roads that we came through on the way here when we walked around the stadium, down the lanes and in the roads were people out selling tickets for people to come into the game. And they reckon that by the time the ball was thrown in to start the match at quarter past three, there were about 5,000 people here. And the proceeds of those 5,000 people here were to go to the Republicans. And what would the capacity have been then?

It could hold more or less 12 to 15,000. Sometimes it says it could go more than that and go up to. So about half. You know, it wasn't intensely packed by any means. So we have an account of what happened from a guy called Jack Scholdis. He'd won the all-island football championship at Dublin and now as an IRA man, and he's also a leading GAA official. And he tells the story that the match starts and then an aeroplane flies over

the ground and there's some kind of signal that comes from the plane or the plane is spotting or something. So what's the story with the plane? So again, this is one of those tangled webs where people are saying, oh, it was to send a signal to say the game had started and you can go in now and you can halt things and you can search people and make them leave. But again, it's hard sometimes to separate the myth from the history here in all of this. That there was a plane, we know that it was scouting, we know, but precisely how that scouting was used is not entirely clear. What we do know is that 15 minutes after the match started, that is to say at 3.30, the lorries

and regiments of the British army and of the local police arrived to the ground and they began firing on people from outside the stadium. Will Barron Right. What have they come for? Is it because they think the killers are in the crowd or that there are people in the crowd who are smuggling weapons or what's their rationale? It was clear in the mind of the administration that the Gaelic-Athletic Association was allied with the nationalist movement and that the nationalist movement and its games were used as a cloak for Republican activities.

This was overdone as an argument, but it wasn't entirely baseless in its notion. And there were people in the ground who'd been involved in what happened earlier that day. Oh, right. Okay. But not with guns and markers that would have identified them. So this is it. This is it. The British forces, how could they be firing on a football match is really your basic question.

How do we get to that point? Well, what had happened was in the kind of the minutes and then the hours after the morning assassinations, there was utter revulsion and fear, no doubt as well, and shock and rage amongst the officials who ran the British state and amongst the security forces. They had lost friends and they'd lost key operatives. And the desire was seen to be to respond, to be seen to act immediately. And that was considered to be paramount. They knew the match was taking place and they did believe that the match was used

to pass people in and out of Dublin. And I've mentioned already about the role of Tipperary and all of this and the fact that it was then added to stuff. So an order was issued from Dublin Castle, which permitted a raid on these grounds for men in arms. So the loose plan was to approach Croke Park from three different directions. Now, you can see the magnificent stadium that's here now holds almost 83,000 people. But what you had at that stage was a much smaller ground with a row of houses around it. Those laneways that we walked

through earlier, they were more in keeping with the height of the houses it, those laneways that we walked through earlier. They were more in keeping with the height of the houses behind that. So it was built into the environment of the city rather than standing out from that environment in how it was done. So the plan was to come from three different directions. The first group of military personnel were to come down Russell Street, where we drove down earlier, past the modern Guilds pub and to stop at the bridge on Jones's road, basically at the corner of what is now the Hogan stand and the Daven stand.

The force that came here was a combination of RIC men and black and tans. That is to say the police and their support, the black and tans who had come in commanded by Major E.J. Mills and they were to take control of the entrance at the canal end here. The second group were soldiers from the Duke of Wellington's regiment who were commanded by Lieutenant Robert Bray. And they took a position at the opposite end of the ground, though along the same side of the road,

at another entrance behind what is now the modern Nallie Terrace. And a third group of soldiers came right behind us here to the third and last exit and entrance into the ground. They were to block that gate which opened out onto St. James's Avenue. So in theory all the gate into Croke Park were now closed off and everyone in the ground could be searched as they left and whatever guns were supposed to be there could then be taken and the men with them. So how do you get from that? Which is, I can understand how that works. They're going to wait outside the ground for people to leave and then search them on the way out.

How do you get from that so quickly to them actually drawing their own guns and opening fire? So instead of a stop and search operation, what you had basically was the killing of innocent men, women, well men, a woman and children. So as members of that first group I talked about, the police and the black and tans, reached the bridge on Jones's Road, several of them for reasons which remain inexplicable beyond the general environmental stuff of the morning. And what we've said earlier, they began firing from the bridge, from outside the ground. The report in the Freeman's journal, which we opened this with, said that the firing was provoked by an attack upon the government forces. And this is dismissed outright as not being true.

I mean, do we know? How do we know that? Maybe there were. We'll come back to this afterwards, but there is not one shred of evidence has been produced that the first shots came from inside. Nothing compelling. There has been claim and counterclaim. But you'll see when we talk about the inquiries afterwards, the evidence that sits in the opposite direction. There was a high wall running at the back of the terrace here, beside where the bridge where the firing started from. And it's across that wall and into the trees that were on this side of the ground.

And this notion of. Boys and girls sitting in trees and watching sports, you know, is is. Jumpers for goal posts. Yeah, it's it's part of a very particular type of world. So there was an 11 year old boy, William Robinson, sitting in one of those trees and he was shot and died instantly as he fell from the tree. A second boy was sitting on the back of a wall just down from Jerome O'Leary. He was 10 years of age and he was killed by a bullet that went through his head

while he was sitting on that wall and again was knocked off. Shortly afterwards a third boy. Billy scott was killed at the far end of the ground here in that lane that we walk through between croak park and the railway there was a gate out on the bullet ricochet and kill him there. So the police and the black and tans from that corner of the bridge. from that corner of the bridge came into the ground and kept firing. And at that point you might think, well, it will stop. They'll realize the horror of what they've done, but actually they continue firing. And now obviously there's bedlam in the crowd and people are screaming and rushing everywhere and you get a bit of a crush on a stampede, understandably.

And it's a kind of, you know, an absolutely hellish scene. It's a hellish scene and there's chaos, confusion, people running in everywhere. And soldiers at the other end can hear firing coming from one end, they come in and they set up and they start firing and all around the place there's people running for cover, people diving on the ground, people transfixed by the fear of the moment. Paul, one of those men was wearing the coat that is beside you right now, for those who are watching on the video, for those who aren't, it's a coat with a hole that has been sewn back on and that hole is where the bullet went in. Yeah. So this is the coat of Tom Hogan, who was along with James Matthews, a spectator who was

at the game and they were shot dead as they tried to run. As always happens in these situations as people, or as you can imagine what should happen in these situations, as people run for cover with gunfire coming from different directions, echoing around the pitch, bullets flying here and there. There was a stampede and a crush to get out and people were left lying dead, were dying on the ground and lying injured. And Jack Shouldis, you mentioned him earlier, he said that the greatest crush was on this side of the ground where we are now, the Bali Bach side where hundreds were wounded or injured in the mad scramble that followed or trampled and torn with barbed wire on the walls trying to get

out with the barbed wire put up to stop people getting in for free. Now stops people getting out for fear of life. And you've people like Jane Boyle shot and crushed in the crowd. James Teehan and James Burke crushed again. Daniel Carroll gets out of the ground, but is shot with a ricocheted bullet. And he died from his wounds in a house outside the ground. And all the while there were still people trapped in here, still trapped, unable to get out.

Jack Shoulders remembered that there were rifles and machine guns trained on people the shooting after the shooting had stopped, but corralling them in and kept there for more than an hour searched as, as they went out of the place. All right. Well, let's take a break now, and then we'll come back and we will talk about some of the people who were killed. We'll talk about the aftermath of the shooting and we'll talk about how this plays out with the rest of the war of independence and how we get from here to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. So come back after the break. Welcome back to The Rest Is History. Paul, you've described in harrowing detail some

of these scenes at Croke Park. Obviously, eventually the ground empties and we'll come back to the inquiries and the cover up and the way that the authorities try to justify what's happened. A couple of things that you think are important. So one of them is that the events of the afternoon and the events of the morning are inextricably linked. Entirely. So what happened in the afternoon is very clearly a response to what happened in the

morning. It's in the manner of the reprisals, though a very extreme version of the reprisals, which are now becoming common. So the reprisals have almost become institutionalised. The authorities will make reprisals after every, as they see every provocation. Yeah, normally it's localised, it's never on this scale, apart from you could say the burning of Cork was the closest you could get to this. And the second thing is, I mean, it's often described as deliberate and cold

blooded. Is it cold blooded or is it in the heat of the moment as it were? In other words, do they know exactly what they're doing, the people who are shooting those guns, or are they out of control and they've lost discipline and they've lost reason? I think they've lost reason. I think they're entirely out of control. I think it's a product though of the perceptions that the soldiers and that the officials held of Irish people and of the nature of the perceptions that the soldiers and that the officials held of Irish people

and of the nature of the war that was underway. I don't think it's cold-blooded. I think it's hot-blooded. Right. Okay. You talked about some of the people that died that day, but one person you didn't mention, Michael Hogan. He's a player who dies and he was from...

Tipperary, yeah. Tipperary. Grains Mokler in South Tipperary. He was the Tipperary, Grains Mochler in South Tipperary. He was the only player killed. He was killed crawling off the pitch down in front of Hill 16. He'd been playing on a famous Dublin footballer called Frank Burke, who managed to get off the field. And one of the stands here is named after him.

Yeah. The stand across from us is called after Michael Hogan. His brother, Dan, was a leading member of the IRA in the Monaghan area, which is up near the border now. And Michael himself was the IRA company commander in the Grains Mochler area where he worked on the family farm. There is no sense, by the way, that he was targeted to be killed because of who he was. It's just, it's one of those things.

But there was other people. I think in fairness, Hogan's remembered because he was the player that was killed. But like you look at, say, Michael Fury, I think Michael Fury is a brilliant, brilliant example. Michael Fury was 40. He was a labourer who lived in the slums behind us here in Buckingham Street in the north inner city. He actually made it out of Crowe Park having been shot, but he was bleeding so badly that he died out on Russell Street.

His body lay unclaimed in a morgue for five days. The British Army officer identified him, noted that a number of his teeth were missing and that he was badly malnourished. He also noticed that he was wearing army fatigues and old worn down army boots. And that's because Michael Ferry, like many other people, had fought in the British army in the Great War. And by 1920, in November 1920, he was really struggling, was unemployed. So this is a whole span of people who went, okay, Hogan is famous for being the player who was shot, but Michael Fiery's life is worth as much as Michael Hogan's.

Yeah, of course. And the death at Croke Park is not the end of the killings on Bloody Sunday. No, it isn't. Dublin Castle, two veterans of the 1916 Rising and men who were hugely important within the IRA, Padra Clancy and Richard McKee, who'd been arrested the previous night and who were involved in the planning of the Bloody Sunday, the earlier killings in the day were shot along with a man called Connor Clune. So Connor Clune was an Irish language activist and a co-op manager from County Clare who had nothing to do with the revolution. He also had been arrested the night before in a case of mistaken

identity or really poor evidence. Now it's contested what's happened here in the official version of events. The three men were trying to escape. Now where that breaks down is clued that no reason to escape. Apart from anything else, it said the three of them were trying to escape around 11 o'clock that night and were shot dead. The generally accepted version is that the three of them had been beaten and

were shot basically summarily executed. For the Dublin IRA, it should be said the loss of McKee and Plancy was really significant. And one of their number said that it knocked all the good out of it. Because it's often said that actually that was more damaging to Michael Collins's intelligence network than the agents who were killed by his agents. Yeah. And it was a bitter blow. And it says a lot for the status of those two men within the IRA that two army barracks in independent Ireland were called after them, Clancy barracks and Marie McKee barracks when, when Ireland, after Ireland, attained

independence. So Paul, the consequences of this, there is a very striking response on the other side of the Irish sea the next morning when the docks at Liverpool are torched. And we should probably just mention at this point that the war isn't confined to Ireland, that there are IRA operatives in England. They are in doing industrial sabotage. There's a plot to poison the horses of the household cavalry

to try and stop the state opening of parliament. But there is a very striking attack that happens three months later when IRA volunteers in Manchester are caught trying to burn down Old Trafford, so the football ground of Manchester United. And they do actually burn down a stand at the ground of Manchester city. So maybe there's a targeted sporting reprisal there. I'm not sure. I'm not sure if those are absolutely tied together.

There is blowback in England. And I guess also a huge part of the blowback is that liberal opinion there is massively shocked. I mean, of course, there's absolute outrage in Ireland, but there is also, people are appalled in England too. There is an outcry in England and the claims that were made and it shows you the nature of the outcry that Sir Hammer Greenwood, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, that is to say the most important British official in the country told the House of Commons, stood up in the House of Commons and said that the first shots came from inside the ground, that 30 revolvers had been found in the ground

afterwards, that the shots fired in the ground had caused a stampede that it was in the stampede that people had lost their lives. And that these are barefaced lies, are they? Oh, straight up. It's a clear cover up. And more than that, he said that the British forces had opened fire because they were fired on by gunmen who were trying to escape. Again, he said he deeply regretted the loss of life, but this loss of life was

entirely the responsibility of Irish gunmen. And in the way of Irish gunmen. And in the way of these things, there were conservative newspapers in Britain who took this story and ran with it. The Guardian regarded it as nonsense. And the British Labour Party sent over a commission to investigate what happened. And the report of the commission found no evidence that the police have been fired on and condemned instead the calculated brutality and lack of self-control of the police force.

And for the next 67 years, further evidence collected by the military and through courts of inquiry were kept from the public. But the historian David Leeson wrote brilliantly on this. He said in November 1999, the public records office in London released three documents. The first was a report submitted by Major Mills on the day after Bloody Sunday. The second was a military court of inquiry at the Matter Hospital and the third was a military court of inquiry at Jervis Street Hospital. I don't think there's any need to rehearse here the full details of these kind of three

sources except to say in the round they demonstrate that the official version of events was a nonsense and Mills wrote that no arms had been found on the ground in search of people. In the round, they demonstrate that the official version of events was a nonsense. And Mills wrote that no arms had been found on the ground in search of people. And the Military Court of Inquiry made clear there was no gun battle. So before, in the last sort of 15 minutes or so of the episode, before we get into the story of the war and how the war winds its way to its conclusion, just to wrap up what happened here at Croke Park, it becomes this absolutely foundational moment in modern Irish history, doesn't it? I mean, it takes on this extraordinary significance

for Irish nationalism, for sport in Ireland, for the GAA. Those of us who follow kind of British and Irish sport will remember the scenes when the England rugby team played here about, was it 20 years ago, 15 years ago, whenever it was for the first time and this sort of day that was freighted with emotion. So what did Bloody Sunday come to mean? Well, not least for the GAA, for the Gay and the Catholic Association. I will come back to that in a second, but I have a real problem with this idea of

how it is presented within history. And for me, the real meaning of Bloody Sunday lies. It doesn't lie in grand historical narratives, but it lies in the personal pain and the trauma of those who were bereaved. How did Jerome O'Leary cope with the death of his young son, who is also called Jerome? He had to go to the Mater Hospital and identify his son. And he simply said he was a schoolboy. How did Bridgett Robinson cope with having to go on a Sunday evening the matter hospital and identify his son. And he simply said he was a schoolboy.

How did Bridget Robinson cope with having to go on a Sunday evening from her house on Little Britain Street across to the old Drumconjura hotel where her young son William 11 lay a bullet had ripped his chest to pieces. He fought to survive and lasted for hour after hour before he died. Bridget Robinson was 29 when she did that. How did her husband cope? Her husband's name was Patrick. He had been in that hospital as a surgeon sought to save his son's life. How did James Boyle cope with the loss of his sister Jane who was 26 and Annie Burke.

Annie Burke came in from Windy Arbor to testify about the loss of her husband. And she just said, he left on a Sunday morning to see a football match. It was two o'clock and that's it. So they're united with the family of Paddy McCormick and all of those other people who were dead whose body laid in blood across this city in two different parts of the day. And again, later that evening in Dublin Castle. And that's the real like people talk about blood sacrifice.

But that's the real legacy in the blood of the families that were shed and could never, never be recovered. And Paul, that line he left on Sunday morning to see the football match. It was two o'clock. The horror of it is massively amplified by the fact that it is a leisure activity, that it should properly be a kind of safe space away from the horrors of the war. And that's why the story has such resonance and it transforms an understanding as well of the sheer brutality of this conflict.

And what it does, I think, in general, is that it shows you the descent into brutality that was well underway by November 1920. So within a week, you have the Kilmichael ambush near McCroom where Tom Barry and his West Cork. We mentioned him, didn't we? Yeah, so Tom Barry and the former British. Yeah, he'd fought in Mesopotamia. I gather, kind of partly being radicalised by how useless he thought the British High Command were there.

He was involved in the Kilmichael ambush in which 17 auxiliaries... Which is the worst military defeat the British suffer in the war, I think. Yes, and then a month later there's another auxiliary killed at Dillon's Cross in Cork. In response to that, signed off on, British forces go in and they burned down the city hall and they burned down the Carnegie library. So they're the kind of the high point reprisals. They're the ones that really stand out. But all across the country were small scale reprisals like attacks on private property on livestock on creamers. Creamers matter so much across rural Ireland foundation of the economy there.

And you can see Crown forces who were bored or untrained or unable to cope with this guerrilla warfare and they felt they were losing. But what's happening is that the war is becoming nastier I guess. A lot of people are dying, there's a sense of possibly brutalization on both sides. Like Bloody Sunday all of this is a terrible propaganda disaster for the British. So abroad you know people look at the burning of Cork or the stories of the reprisals or the story of the shootings at Croke Park and they say, oh, the British are completely out of control. They're behaving incredibly badly and all of this kind of thing.

So Britain has lost the battle for worldwide public opinion at this stage. And yet paradoxically, is there an argument that on the ground, the British have actually stabilized the situation to some degree in that they are now fighting back much harder against the IRA. And it's the IRA that are on the ropes in 1920, what are we 1920 going into 1921? Into 21. So the war was changing and the IRA was having trouble getting money and getting arms in. So it's reckoned that there were about 5,000 people in the IRA by May 1921 that they had maybe 3000 rifles, maybe almost 5,000 revolvers, but ammunition was

really hard to come by. That being said, their targeted attacks were causing a lot of debt. I mean, we're going to talk about a truce that comes in the middle of July, but in the 10 days before that truce, 17 policemen were killed. So there were still capacity on the IRA side. But against that, the government is really going after hard reprisals in response to specific incidents. They don't really have a policy though. They don't know how they're going to get this to end. They can't win this militarily unless they go in and raise the place.

And we've mentioned this already. They couldn't do that. It's a public opinion. But I also think it's a matter of capacity because it would have cost a lot of money and they would have had to send in a lot of troops for a very long time. Isn't it the case that the IRA high command is starting to think that they are losing as well? That both sides think they're losing. I think it's a stalemate. they are losing as well.

The both sides think they're losing. I think it's a stalemate, Tom. I think it's got into this grim, gruesome dance of death where, you know, they're locked in an embrace from which neither can escape, but neither can really control what's happening. And so a good example of that is

the Customs House attack, right? So the Customs House here in Dublin, that's May 1921, and it looks like a great propaganda victory for the IRA. They attack this sort of symbol of British power, but they lose an awful lot of men doing it. And they have like a hundred of them captured, something like that. Oh, yeah. It's a disaster for the IRA who go in to do what they said they would never do, which is another set piece engagement.

Everything was to be guerrilla warfare. So they go in, they burn the customs house and they lose men and guns, which they cannot afford to do. That in itself is a bad, bad blow to the prestige of the IRA in all of that. And it's hard to say that they were about to be destroyed or they were about to lose or that they felt they were going to lose. There was no sense that this was going to end in a military victory for either side. It just did not seem that the capacity was there for either side. Certainly wasn't there for the IRA to militarily defeat the British. What they had done though was destroy the legitimacy of the

British state around huge swades of the country and had left a state that was dependent on reprisal and violence. And is that the feeling increasingly throughout the early months of 1921 in London as well, that the legitimacy of British rule is crumbling and that therefore a new policy is needed, maybe one that's not based on reprisal and force. Well, you can see the first tentative attempts to broker a solution actually began at the end of 1920 when there was a rejuvenator, a kind of a reframing of the British administration in Dublin. And Lloyd George put over people like Andy Cope and Sir John Anderson and came over and they tried to kind of reformulate policy within the organization and there were kind of tentative connections through a Republican businessman called Patrick Mylott as a go-between both sides.

It foundered not least because of Bloody Sunday that those initial attempts and then the Archbishop of Perth, a man called Patrick Clune, who was actually the uncle of Connor Clune who had been shot in Dublin Castle earlier. He tried to broker a deal and that didn't work at all. And then there were various writers such as Lady Greenwood and others who tried to get involved. But circumstances, there is a circumstance which permitted for truce. And that was the actual enactment of the Government of Ireland Act that had come in in 1920. In June of 1921, that's open and King George V goes over and makes a speech. So he goes to Belfast, doesn't he, to open the new Northern Ireland Parliament. As you said last time, the supreme irony that the Ulster Unionists, who had been the most

bitter implacable opponents of Home Rule now have their own Home Rule Parliament. And he opens it and he gives this speech written for him by South African leader Jan Smuts and approved by David Lloyd George. And George V calls for an end to strife in Ireland and he says, I'd like all Irishmen to pause, stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation, forgive and forget, and join in making for the land which they love a new conciliation, forgive and forget, and join in making for the land which they love a new era of peace, contentment and goodwill. And this is perceived as

an olive branch from of all people, the King sort of saying, okay, you know, it's gone too far. Now is the time to put down the guns. And the King had been, I mean, he'd been appalled by the black and tans, I gather. Yes. And really useful to Lloyd George, and it gave him a certain amount of cover because there were people still within the cabinet who were like, we're not negotiating. These are gunmen. These are rabble. This isn't a nation.

These are people who have no right to sit at the same table as us, but the feelings are going out. And there's press coming from within London to resolve this, that this is interminable. But can I just ask about the speech that George V gives in Belfast? Is there a sense that he needs to give that speech to establish the legitimacy of what will become, I suppose, the outpost of the United Kingdom in Northern Ireland, before entering into negotiations with the Republicans.

That's exactly right. That's the key thing in that whole thing. You can now talk about a discussion about what to do with Ireland, because you've fixed up the Ulster Universe problem. It's a bridgehead that they want to keep. It allows, in any negotiation negotiation a British government to say, well, anything we're discussing, we'll discuss all of Ireland, but this actual parliament is in place already and operational

for these six counties, which are now going to be called, or will in the future be called Northern Ireland. And are they doing that because they want to keep that as part of their negotiations or are they already thinking, you know, we could keep this as a base from which to prosecute the war if it goes on? I don't think it's about the prosecution of war. I do think it's about the negotiations that are coming. There's a brilliant book by Ronald Fanning called Fatal Path, which it's a brilliantly told story, exactly what happened here within British politics.

How the truce and then the treaty are constructed, but extending back to 1910 takes it all true brilliantly. Just an incredibly well written book. Let's get to July 1921 a few weeks later. Eamonn de Valera has returned from the United States. So we now have the first meetings between de Valera and Lloyd George, and they are aimed at, you know, can we get a truce and can we get some kind of forum where we'll strike a deal? So there's a truce agreed for the 11th of July, 1921. And in respect of that truce, there was basically the idea that there will be no violence on either side on that.

And in the wake of that, David Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera, as president of the Irish Republic, there are four meetings and about 50 letters shared between them. And the idea is that they will find a basis for the establishment of negotiations, which might lead to a treaty. Kind of vague. Yes. And, and eventually on the 30th of November, and I know you're going to talk about the treaty in the next episode,

but what was agreed was that a team of Irish negotiators would go to London and that there would be negotiations with His Majesty's government, And I quote, will have viewed to ascertaining how the association of Ireland with the community of nations known as the British Empire may be best reconciled with Irish national aspiration. This is where De Valera's command of maths is deeply involved in it. But you have to think about this. It is absolutely extraordinary that such a negotiation should be about to take place with a group who now represent a part of the Irish tradition which was utterly marginal in very many respects in 1914 when the Home Rule Bill had been enacted although not had not become operational.

So can I ask a very simplistic question? What's the simplest explanation for how we got from there in 1914 to where we are now in 1921? Is the key factor the First World War, do you think? I do. I think without the context of war, which truly changed the possibilities for armed rebellion based on the fact that there were guns in the country. Really though I think the radicalization process was made entirely possible, facilitated and kicked on in large measure by the militarization through the UVF and their gun running activities. I think that was transformative of the situation because it gave the context in which the Irish

volunteers could be formed, which could then split in the context of war, which can then gather momentum through the opportunity to hold a rising, to redeem for a generation the idea that there would be an Irish rebellion and rejection of the state. And from that moment on, things truly changed. And Paul, can I ask, I'm sure it's an unanswerable question, but suppose the first world war hadn't happened. Suppose home rule is introduced. Do you think they would still have been an Irish revolution? Would the impetus for Ireland to leave the United Kingdom full stop have continued or?

Or would we still be talking about? Answer Scotland? Yes. I think that's a great question. It's obviously, as you said yourself, an unanswerable question on it. There is a brilliant article in a book called Virtual History by Alvin Jackson, which deals with that particular question. And I really, I would urge people to read that article.

What I will say is that there were a group of people who were unreconciled to the idea of Home Rule being enough. They were not going to stop at Home Rule being enacted. Now, whether that Home Rule Parliament would have become in itself the means to achieve a greater freedom or it would have been... So the freedom to win freedom as Collins will put it. Yes, would it be that or would it be the block on the achievement of freedom is the great unknowable? Yeah, would it be the Scottish Parliament or the Catalan Parliament?

Exactly. Yeah. All right. So the truth has been agreed, the negotiations will begin and the next time on the rest of history, we will return with the Irish negotiating team to London to tell that extraordinary story. Some amazing characters, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Michael Collins, of course, and off stage the long shadow of Eamon de Valera. Very long. And spoiler alert, they will not get the piece they are hoping for. They will find themselves embarking on a bitter and bloody civil war.

But Paul, we should give you a massive round of applause at the end of that episode because you've done three episodes in one day. Yeah. A Herculean achievement. We are enormously indebted to you as ever. The rest is history. And we're indebted to the staff here at Crete Park for hosting us. And thank you so much for setting it all up.

Yeah. Thank you very much for the invitation. It's an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much, Paul. Bye bye. Bye bye. Hi everybody. You're still here right at the end of the episode. I'm very impressed by your commitment.

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