Death on a bare mountain: The end of the Civil War

Part two. Read part one here

The IRA Chief of Staff Liam Lynch had taken a massive risk in assembling his senior officers to rally the war effort. The result was disaster. His death that day meant the end of the war was only weeks away.

From inside Bill Houlihan's house on the side of the Knockmealdown Mountains, Liam Lynch and his senior officers were preparing to wait out the soldiers searching the valley below them.

Suddenly a scout rushed in to report that yet another column had been spotted, approaching from behind them, a thousand yards away, and closing.

If the officers stayed where they were, they would be surrounded and captured within minutes.

They gathered their personal weapons and all the documents they had brought for the planned meeting that day. Any of those papers captured by the enemy would give a priceless insight into the state of the IRA; they could not be lost.

Seven men set off in Lynch's party, himself, five officers and a local volunteer. The aim was to break and run over the top of the mountain, putting as much distance between themselves and the army columns as possible.

They headed southwest, towards Melleray over the border in Waterford.

Thickly forested now, it is hard to imagine the scene on the mountain a hundred years ago, treeless and described by Frank Aiken later "as bald as a billiard table".

It meant that there was no cover for the fleeing party to hide from their pursuers. A riverbed in a shallow gulley would conceal them for part of the way, but they would still have hundreds of yards of open ground to cross before reaching the summit.

Even worse, the lead troops were closer than expected, now 400 yards below them. The IRA men were spotted leaving the gulley, and the soldiers opened fire.

The officer in command of the troops, Laurence Clancy, saw a group of men in trench coats standing upright on the rocks, firing down at them with machine pistols and automatics. The firing was for effect; the range was too long to inflict casualties with sidearms.

'My God! I'm hit lads!'

After crossing 200 yards without taking any casualties, the fire from below slackened off briefly. Lynch himself was flagging, exhausted by the uphill run over the riverbed. Seán Hyde was running alongside him, helping him over the rocky ground.

Then, a single shot was heard by the fleeing men.

Lynch cried out.

"My God! I'm hit lads!"

Three men ran to help him: Frank Aiken, Seán Hyde and Bill Quirke. Lynch was lying on the ground, badly wounded and in pain.

Their first instinct was to pick him up and carry him. Hyde and Quirke took his arms, Aiken took his feet. It was hopeless; it was hard enough running uphill across the rocks themselves, with a helpless six-foot man to carry, they were only a bigger target for the soldiers. They would surely be caught or shot before reaching the summit.

Lynch ordered them to leave him. He was in any case in too much pain to bear being carried by running men. Indicating their pursuers, he said: "Perhaps they'll bandage me when they come up."

They took his weapon and the papers he had carried from the farmhouse, and fled over the mountain.

'Get me a priest and a doctor. I am dying.'

As Lieutenant Clancy reached the fallen man, soldiers already standing over him exclaimed:

"We have Dev, we have Dev, Sir!"

Clancy knew the fallen man was not de Valera. He asked him:

"Are you the bloody Chief of Staff of the Irregulars?

"I am General Liam Lynch, Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army.

"Get me a priest and a doctor. I am dying."

"Where are you hit?"

"Oh there, oh there," Lynch motioned to his stomach area.

Clancy pulled the clothes away to check the damage, and saw the intestine hanging from the exit wound. The bullet had to have penetrated vital organs.

He looked around and asked if anyone had a field bandage.

One soldier, a Great War veteran, answered yes – and then refused to offer it to help the dying man, now that his identity was known, claiming he needed it himself.

Clancy had to draw his pistol on the man to get the dressing off him.

He did his best with the bandage, but one dressing could do nothing for such catastrophic wounds.

They made up a crude stretcher with two rifles and a soldier's greatcoat slung between them. It was hopelessly inadequate but it was also the only way to get such a big helpless man down off the mountain.

As they carried Lynch down the steep slope on the improvised carry chair, even Lynch's courage could not stop him begging to be left down every few yards.

Clancy decided to head for the village of Newcastle to seek help. Clonmel was too far away.

At last, the soldiers were able to summon the help of a farmer with a hay cart, to carry Lynch further.

They came into the village. Lynch was brought into the parlour of Walsh's Pub (now Nugent's Pub) and laid down on a couch and mattress. Brandy was brought in, while Clancy telephoned Clonmel to report the capture of the IRA's commanding officer, and to ask for a doctor, an ambulance and a military escort.

As he finished the phone call, Clancy heard Lynch call him back into the parlour.

Lynch asked him: "Is it getting dark?"

Clancy looked out the parlour window at the daylight flooding in, and shook his head. It was just before 3pm in the afternoon.

"I must be dying. I want to ask you to do a couple of little things for me..."

Lynch asked to be buried alongside 'FitzGerald of Fermoy'. Clancy realised this must be Michael FitzGerald, an IRA officer who died on hunger strike during the War of Independence.

"Yes. The greatest friend I ever had on this Earth."

Lynch asked Clancy:

"Are you one of the old crowd, the IRA I mean?"

Clancy replied that he was, that two of his brothers Martin and Patrick had been killed in the war, and he himself had stood trial by Court Martial for murdering police and soldiers.

"I am glad one of the old crowd got me."

They shook hands. Clancy later recalled that by then they both were sobbing.

He recounted Lynch's next words to him:

"God pray for me, all this is a pity, it should never have happened. I am glad I am going away from it all.

"Poor Ireland. Poor Ireland."

Lynch asked Clancy to pass on his personal belongings to his brother and sister. He asked Clancy to take his silver fountain pen, in appreciation of how he had been treated since being wounded.

They shook hands again.

Lynch was resigned to death.

"I will live until about ten o'clock tonight."

Ten minutes later, the front door of the pub opened and in walked General Prout himself, in no doubt about the magnitude of what was happening. Behind him were an Army Captain, an Army Doctor Lieutenant Raymond Dalton, and medical orderlies carrying a stretcher. An ambulance waited outside.

Liam Lynch died around 9pm that night in St Joseph's Hospital in Clonmel.

The inquest into his death concluded that the cause of death was: "Shock and haemorrhage following bullet wounds caused by a party of the National Army in the execution of doing their duty."

'It is the biggest blow we have received.'

The government lost no time in briefing that Lynch's death meant the Civil War was near its end. The newspapers noted that at the adjourned IRA Executive meeting in March, it was Lynch's vote alone that defeated Tom Barry's motion against continuing the war.

And now Lynch was gone.

In captivity, Ernie O'Malley noted that there was no one ready to step into Lynch's place. "It is the biggest blow we have received."

Frank Aiken succeeded Liam Lynch as Chief of Staff of the IRA. He sounded out his senior officers, knowing that with the death of Liam Lynch the momentum would swing behind an end to the war.

Aiken issued an order to IRA units to cease operations on 30 April. He wanted to give Éamon de Valera the breathing space to offer peace terms to the Free State government.

De Valera eulogised the fallen IRA leader, but he had to know that his own position had now changed dramatically. Lynch had consistently sidelined and marginalised de Valera, warning other IRA officers not to listen to his talk of a return to politics. De Valera had stood, literally on the sidelines, at Lynch's last IRA Executive meeting as his determination to continue the war prevailed.

The attempt to negotiate with the government went nowhere; de Valera's 'terms' to Executive Council President Liam Cosgrave seemed more like the demands of a victorious war leader than a man facing total defeat. They were based on an interpretation of Irish national sovereignty that meant repudiation of the Treaty, the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, and the Constitution.

Which was precisely what the entire war had been fought over.

These were Cosgrave's terms:

All weapons and ammunition were to be given up to the authorities.

Military operations against the anti-Treaty forces would cease when all those weapons had been secured.

When arms had been surrendered, prisoners would be released after undertaking to keep the peace.

The principle of majority rule by representatives elected by universal suffrage was to be paramount.

Republicans could stand for election.

The terms were offered on the understanding that all of de Valera's terms were brushed aside. The two sides never engaged; there was no peace agreement, not even a ceasefire order from the National Army.

The war just expired.

On 24 May 1923, IRA Chief of Staff Frank Aiken issued a general order to 'Dump Arms'.

To the modern eye that looks like an order to abandon weapons.

It meant the opposite.

Aiken was very precise in his use of language; all weapons and ammunition were to go into arms dumps, the implication being that they could be taken up again in future.

On the same day, addressing IRA units as 'The Legion of the Rearguard', in his capacity as leader of the government in exile, Éamon de Valera declared:

"The Republic can no longer be successfully defended by your arms. Further sacrifice on your part would now be in vain and the continuance of the struggle in arms unwise in the national interest and prejudicial to the future of our cause. Military victory must be allowed to rest for the moment with those who have destroyed the Republic. Other means must be sought to safeguard the nation's right."