A hundred years ago, a group of anti-Treaty IRA officers gathered for a meeting in the Knockmealdown Mountains in Tipperary, were forced to flee when Free State Army soldiers closed in on their hideouts.
In the gunfire that followed, Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the IRA, was wounded. He died later that day in St Joseph's Hospital in Clonmel.
With his death, the war was effectively over.
A few weeks later, his successor Frank Aiken issued an order to all IRA units to cease operations.
A rare photograph of Liam Lynch in uniform (Credit: Waterford County Museum)
'Get me a priest and a doctor. I am dying.'
It was an impossible task.
The man they carried, on a greatcoat slung between two rifles, was big - a six-footer.
Sweating and softly swearing, the two soldiers did their best, but every move they made down the steep bare rocky slope of the mountain only made his agony worse.
Every few steps, he begged them to leave him down.
A few minutes earlier, a point 303 bullet fired from a Lee Enfield rifle had torn a path through his body from hip to hip. On the way out of his body the bullet carried a section of his lower intestine.
The wound was fatal, irreparable.
Nobody knew that better than the big man himself.
Liam Lynch was the Chief of Staff of the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army. On a secret mission to assemble IRA officers for a summit in the remote mountains of south Tipperary, he and his staff had been flushed from hiding by National Army columns converging from several directions.
Moving across bare open ground in a bid to stay ahead of the approaching columns, Lynch and his men were seen on the upper slopes of the mountain. Their pistols were no match in range for the soldiers' rifles, and a single shot brought Lynch down.
He ordered his men to leave him. They took his pistol and his documents and laid a coat under his head, before resuming their flight up the mountain.
When the pursuing soldiers came upon Lynch, some believed that it was Éamon de Valera who lay before them.
He put them right.
"I am General Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army.
"Get me a priest and a doctor. I am dying."
Liam Lynch with First Southern Division delegates at the Mansion House, before the Civil War. In February these same men told Lynch that defeat was imminent. (Credit: Cork Public Museum, Cork)
'The worst blow ... he is an extraordinary leader and his loss cannot be filled'
Barely 24 hours earlier, Liam Lynch had arrived in the area around Newcastle, Co Tipperary.
His plan was to re-assemble a meeting of top officers, members of the IRA's ruling Executive, which had broken up two weeks earlier in deadlock over how to respond to the crisis engulfing their war against the Free State Army.
IRA men and officers. Under relentless National Army pressure, such units were finding it harder and harder to stay in the field. (Credit: National Library of Ireland, Waterford County Museum)
Staff officers of the Waterford IRA. By the spring of 1923, many of these men had been reduced to individuals on the run, just trying to survive death or capture. (Credit: Waterford County Museum)
Soldiers bring in a prisoner, satisfied with their day's work. (Credit: National Library of Ireland)
Not every engagement went the Army's way; medics attend a wounded man. (Credit: National Library of Ireland)
As he arrived in south Tipperary on 9 April 1923, Liam Lynch's war was collapsing all around him.
He could not ignore the fact that so many of his best men believed the war was effectively over, and that continued resistance at any level was useless.
One of those men was Liam Deasy, Second-in-Command of the anti-Treaty IRA, and Commander of the First Southern Division.
Liam Lynch with his Second-in-Command, Liam Deasy (Credit: Cork Public Museum, Cork)
He and Lynch were close, Lynch had huge respect for Deasy. The National Army Commander General Richard Mulcahy was reported to consider Liam Deasy the military brains of the entire anti-Treaty cause.
All of which made what he did next, so hard for Lynch to bear.
In late January, Liam Deasy was moving from safe house to safe house across south Leinster, in a disastrous attempt at a tour of inspection of IRA operations. Ill, exhausted and deeply disillusioned by what he encountered, Deasy realised whole swathes of the country were lost to the Republican cause.
He believed that Liam Lynch's belief in final victory was so unshakeable because he was out of touch with the reality on the ground, relying on misleading and exaggerated reports from other officers instead of getting out to see for himself.
Deasy's luck ran out when he was captured, in possession of a loaded gun and ammunition, in a safe house in the Galtee mountains. He was court-martialed on 25 January and sentenced to death, to be carried out the next day.
Lynch described Deasy's arrest as "the worst blow, he is an extraordinary leader and his loss cannot be filled".
He wasn't saying that on the morning of 9 February, when the national newspapers carried details of what had happened in the hours after the passing of Deasy's death sentence. The government had kept those details secret since Deasy's arrest, to allow the events described below to unfold.
On the night after his death sentence was passed, Deasy had played one last card. He persuaded his captor General John T Prout to let him contact the National Army Commander General Richard Mulcahy with an extraordinary offer.
General Richard Mulcahy, Army Chief of Staff (Credit: Getty Images)
He would publicly call on the anti-Treaty Executive to end the war, and unconditionally surrender themselves and their weapons.
The answer from those Executive members who answered him was an unqualified rejection.
Lynch condemned the move in public, and vented his fury in private correspondence with Deasy.
Despair laid bare - The evidence mounts
But the despair in the senior IRA ranks was now laid bare for all to see. Éamon de Valera considered Deasy's appeal to be the most serious blow to the Republican cause since the government-in-exile had been formed in October.
Worse, the revelation of Deasy's move was only one indicator of looming collapse that day.
As they pored over the details of Deasy's move in that morning's newspapers, the eyes of readers would alight on other headlines on the same page reporting:
- A new offer of a government amnesty for those anti-Treaty IRA men who surrendered arms and undertook to engage in no further fighting, by the 18th of the month.
- A statement on behalf of the 600 Republican prisoners in Limerick Jail declaring that the war was now a waste of blood and was only a war of extermination, asking that four inmates be released on parole so they could ask the IRA leadership to stop fighting.
- Large numbers of men had surrendered their arms at Kanturk Barracks in Cork, signed the government declaration against engaging in future fighting, and gone home.
- Similar numbers of men had surrendered arms in Westmeath, signed the declaration, and gone home.
Dinny Lacey, Commander of the Third Tipperary Brigade; his death in February was just one more setback in a disastrous month for the anti-Treaty IRA
A few days later, Dinny Lacey, the Officer Commanding the Third Tipperary Brigade, was killed during a sweep of the Glen of Aherlow by General Prout's forces. There were rumours he was making moves to end the fighting by meeting members of the Neutral IRA, War of Independence veterans who had played no part in the Civil War, and wanted the killing to stop.
At the end of the month, at a meeting in Coolea, Co Cork, officers of the 1st Southern Division told Lynch to his face that they believed that victory was impossible and defeat imminent.
Lynch rejected their claim that the war was lost.
The officers in the room pushed back.
They demanded that the IRA ruling Executive should meet to agree on a strategy to respond to the crisis.
No compromise
Lynch didn't want the meeting. He feared that both the IRA Executive and the underground government in exile led by Éamon de Valera since the previous October were capable of what to him was the ultimate betrayal: the search for an end to the war that would mean the dream of a pure republic was dead.
If anything set Lynch apart from almost every other leading figure in the anti-Treaty campaign, it was his refusal to countenance anything approaching compromise on the issue of the ideal republic.
Colleagues like Ernie O'Malley and Liam Deasy badgered him for some idea, any idea, of what Lynch's actual policies would be on how this republic might be governed. Lynch brushed off the requests, insisting that with a republic achieved, all else would follow.
But right now, he was running out of room for manoeuvre. He had no choice but to agree to the officers' demand for an Executive meeting; it would be his only chance to keep all his officers together.
After the shock of Deasy's call for an end to the war, Lynch knew that the doubts that gnawed away at their belief in the cause could lead even his most trusted lieutenants to try to make their own peace with the Free State.
His belief in eventual victory had to prevail over those doubts, and if it took a showdown with the Executive to achieve that, so be it.
And so began the chain of events that ended on a bare bleak mountainside in Tipperary a few weeks later.
'That further armed resistance and operations against the Free State government will not further the cause of Independence'.
The IRA Executive met for four days in late March, in safe houses along the Tipperary/Waterford border.
The number of memorial stones to the fateful IRA Executive meeting in March is testament to how many times the officers were forced to change location due to National Army operations. (Credit: Gerry Shannon, John Foley Images)
The meeting began in James Cullinane's house at Bleantis, Co Waterford.
Éamon de Valera was present, but only as an observer. His marginalised status was indicative of the suspicion with which Lynch regarded the government in exile.
So total was Free State control of the countryside that the members kept having to break up and re-locate, as Army patrols threatened one hideaway after another.
The constant interruptions did not improve the mood. A motion was proposed by senior Cork officer Tom Barry: "that further armed resistance and operations against the Free State government will not further the cause of independence".
It was defeated by a single vote, Liam Lynch's being the decider.
Senior Cork IRA Officer Tom Barry. His motion calling for an end to the war was beaten by one vote. (Credit: Cork Public Museum, Cork)
The Executive was deadlocked. Lynch had done enough to convince a number of the officers present that the war could still be won, if his plans to import German war surplus mountain artillery succeeded.
It was decided to adjourn the meeting to 10 April.
On 9 April, Liam Lynch and the other officers arrived in the area of Goatenbridge and Newcastle, outside Clonmel, and were billeted in local safe houses.
The trap is sprung: Prout makes his move
Lynch's nemesis: National Army General John T Prout. (Credit: National Library of Ireland)
That same day, National Army officers in Tipperary and Waterford received orders to prepare for a sweep of the area. This was no routine search operation; Colonel Thomas Ryan had received well-sourced information that high-value targets were on the move in his area.
General Prout sent a message to his officers:
"Reliable information to hand. Important Irregular leaders are at present in South Tipperary or Waterford."
The detailed instructions issued to the officers and soldiers indicated how closely the IRA leaders were being tracked, and how much was known about their whereabouts.
General Prout's own map of the Tipperary/ Waterford border region. The arrows indicate where he wanted the sweeps and searches of the area to go. The area circled in the lower left-hand corner marks the spot where Lynch was shot. (National Library)
Columns of soldiers would converge on the area from all over South Tipperary and Waterford, searching houses, outhouses, woods and any other likely hiding places.
One column was ordered to move out southeast from Newcastle at dawn on the morning of the 10th.
In command of 60 men were Captain Tom Taylor and Lieutenant Laurence Clancy.
That number of men could not move without being spotted. Around 4am, IRA scouts guarding the assembled officers in safehouses in the area roused their charges and began moving them to houses further up the mountain.
Still unaware of the scale and aim of the Army operation, neither the IRA officers nor their scouts were unduly alarmed at this stage. They could see three columns active in the valley below. If they stayed high enough up the mountain, they surmised, they could just wait out the soldiers.
By 8am, Liam Lynch and his officers felt safe enough to accept the offer of a cup of tea in the home of Bill Houlihan at Crohan, on the lower slopes of the mountain.
Then the front door was flung open, and everything changed.
Forever.
To be continued tomorrow...
