One hundred years ago today much of Cork City was a smouldering ruin.
Although the Brits would do their Orwellian best to cover up the truth, it was self-evident.
Elements of their elite RIC Auxiliary Division were out of control.
Volunteers of the Cork No1 Brigade had ambushed a patrol of Auxiliaries at Dillon’s Cross not far from Victoria Barracks in Cork City.
Grenades were thrown at the Crossley Tender one Auxie died, and 12 were wounded.
The Brits then went on the rampage of arson and looting.
This is the sort of scenario that had been imagined in the winter of 1916 in an internment camp in Wales.
Mick Collins had strategized that when the British released him, he would wage “a propaganda war backed up by a shooting war”.
In burning Cork, the British were saying that the Irish people as a whole were their enemy.
It was an act of revenge on an entire city in response to a successful IRA operation.
At that moment, the enemy lost the propaganda war, and there was no way back.
This is exactly how Mick Collins thought that Crown Forces would react to an IRA guerrilla campaign.
Coming so quickly after Bloody Sunday in Dublin and the Kilmichael Ambush, this orgy of arson and looting, destroyed the official British narrative that they were in control of the situation.
As with any atrocity by Crown Forces in Ireland, the default position of the British government was initially to deny any involvement.
In fairness, there was a lot to cover up.
Over seventy business premises covering five acres of the city were either damaged or destroyed, £3,000,000 worth of damage was done, around 2,000 people were left jobless, and many others became homeless’.
The British government immediately denied any responsibility for what happened in Cork.
Sir Hamar Greenwood, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, even blamed its citizens for starting the fires in the city centre!
File under “Perfidious Albion”.
The Daily Chronicle also assisted the British government by publishing a fake map showing where the fires had been started by the locals.
Florence O’Donoghue, the Intelligence Officer in Cork No. 1 Brigade, later recorded that, since they arrived, the Auxiliaries of K Company had:
Indulged in raids on houses, holding up and searching civilians in the streets, robbery and insulting behaviour…their drunken aggressiveness became so pronounced that no person was safe from their molestations. Age or sex was no protection.
Poor women were robbed of their few shillings in the streets in broad daylight. After their raids on houses articles of value were frequently missing. Whips were taken from shops with which to flog unoffending pedestrians. Drink was demanded at the point of the revolver.
Firefighters did their best to battle the blaze.
However, they were hampered by Black and Tans and Auxiliaries who subjected them to threats, insults and physical abuse and in some cases, cut their hoses.
On 13 December, K Company was transferred to the town of Dunmanway in West Cork. Two days later, an Auxiliary named Vernon Hart, shot dead parish priest Canon Thomas Magner and a local man named Tadhg Crowley.
The Auxies sported burnt corks on their Tam O Shanter caps as a sign of their “victory” in Cork City.
It was clear to the local people who the real terrorists were.
Moreover, foreign journalists were on the sport to report the truth.
The British Empire was trying to crush the spirit of the Irish people by making war on unarmed civilians.
Meanwhile, the IRA Flying Columns were defeating the British in engagements like Kilmichael.
Despite the official attempts at the cover up the truth about the burning of Cork, the reality seeped out.
A member of K Company named Charles Schulze in a letter to his mother wrote:
We did it all night. Never mind how much the well intentioned Hamar Greenwood would excuse us. In all my life and in all the tales of fiction I have read, I have never experienced such orgies of murder, arson and looting as I have witnessed the past 16 days.
In another letter to his sister Edith, he wrote:
You will have read all about Cork. Suffice to say I was there and very actively employed to boot until the dawn on Sunday…We took a sweet revenge.
Today the writ of the Saxe-Coburg crime crew does not run in Cork.
Crown forces are still in the Northeast of this country, but they’re on borrowed time.
It will be a Border Poll that will finally see their evacuation from all of this island.
I reckon that Mick Collins would have chortled with glee at the own goal of Brexit.
Now the Brits are threatening to burn their own economy in exchange for blue passports.
Despite their loss of empire, the madness of British exceptionalism is still with us.
However, as in 1916, we have our exiled children in America and gallant allies in Europe.
Our sweet revenge will be the laughter of our children.
Lest we forget…
Discover more from Phil Mac Giolla Bháin
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Michael Collins’s strategy of winning the propaganda war, to be followed by a shooting war has been oft repeated. However the provocation of an opponent, in the hope/expectation that they over-react is not black and white, morally. If Scott Brown provokes Alfredo Morelos or Ryan Kent into doing something silly, that’s one thing; but for, say, a Flying Column to carry out an ambush, in the full expectation that there will be severe reprisals against innocent civilians is harder to justify.
I listened to Billy Hutchinson, of UVF and now PUP ‘fame’, describe last week how he would deliberately target innocent Catholic civilians back in the 70s, in order to sicken their population into withdrawing their support for PIRA; it didn’t work, of course. Similar ‘justifications’ for atrocities were provided for the mass slaughter of civilians in an undefended Dresden, by our gallant airborne heroes.
These examples are the other side of the Michael Collins strategy coin. Was it ok for him to consider it ok to ‘sacrifice’ a few of his countrymen, while seeing the bigger picture? Was his Willie Whitelaw-esque “we can take the casualties” approach morally defensible? Or do we tell ourselves that’s ‘different’?
Hindsight is great, even in 2020:-), and we can have civilised chats over lattes and finger sandwiches, while we ‘judge’ those who have gone before us. But unless we’ve walked in their shoes, be it the Flying Column members, the WW2 bombers, or even Billy Hutchinson, we shouldn’t condemn. As Christy Moore sang in his Unfinished Revolution album, “Of those who are forced to choose, some will choose to fight”.
So let’s remember the bravery of Michael Kenny, who made his choice and stepped into the road at Dillon’s Cross back in 1920, and waved down the approaching lorries. We should never, ever, take what we have for granted, and we should never, ever, forget the sacrifices of those who chose to fight.
They did the same, as a similar reprisal, when they sacked Balbriggan the same year, burning my grandma’s family out of their house, along with many others. When the Germans killed innocent people and razed their villages to the ground, the rest of the world thought it was barbaric. Strange double standards!
Montgomery (later to be General) said that he didn’t care how many houses he had to burn in Cork so long as they beat Sinn Fein.
Blue? My new one looks black to me.