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On the night of September 20 and 21, 1920, events took place in Balbriggan which brought world attention to the Irish War of Independence and proved to be a disastrous setback for Britain’s image abroad.
It started at Smyth’s pub in downtown Balbriggan around 9pm. An altercation ensued between the Chief of the Irish Royal Police, Peter Burke, of Glenamaddy, Co Galway, who was drinking with his brother, Sergeant William Burke, and some locals in the pub.
The exact circumstances have never been determined, but sometime around 11pm they left the pub and were shot and killed by an IRA volunteer, Michael Rock, the commanding officer of the Fingal Brigade.
Balbriggan is situated about two miles from the nearby British Army camp at Gormanstown, just across the border in County Meath.
Shortly before midnight, three trucks loaded with Crown forces that included black and tan, auxiliaries and RIC entered the city and began burning and looting premises.
They burned four pubs, including Smyths, the Gladstone Inn, which was owned by the grandfather of former Fianna Fail TD Jim Glennon, and Derham’s Pub, which was owned by John Derham, a local Sinn Féin representative.
They then made their way to Clonard Street, where they destroyed more than 20 houses and shot them down as terrified residents fled into the fields.
Factory
They burned down the Deeds and Templar hosiery factory, which was the largest employer in the city. It left 200 people without work.
During the night they picked up many known Republican activists from the city and beat and tortured them before leaving the bodies of two of them, John Gibbons and Seamus Lawless, on the street.
In 1981, members of the District Historical Society and local Balbriggan interviewed eyewitnesses to the looting who were children at the time.
“I remember waking up to a terrible noise and screaming and slamming doors. We were crossing the fields at the back of the house as the smoke rose, ”recalled Michael Hammond, who was eight at the time.
“I remember everyone yelling,” recalled Kathleen McGillivary. Two men have been shot in Smyth’s bar. Tonight there will be problems. Clonard Street was fine and on fire. The Black and Tans burned everything they could. “
John Lawless said his grandfather Seamus Lawless was hit with the butt of a rifle, bayoneted and then shot in front of his body and Gibbons’ was thrown into the street. “It was such a horrible thing to do to these two men,” he said.
There were dozens of such retaliations across Ireland during the War of Independence, leading to a phrase that entered the lexicon of gratuitous violence by state forces ‘black and tannery’.
Unfortunately for the British government, Balbriggan was immediately accessible to the international press that had gathered in Dublin to cover the war.
Images and video of burning houses and homeless civilians circulated around the world.
Brittany
They also sparked outrage in Britain among more liberal people, including former British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, who compared the looting of Balbriggan to acts of violence carried out by the German army against French and Belgian civilians at the beginning of the First War. World. .
Wasn’t the sacrifice of the lives of 800,000 British soldiers who died in the Great War supposed to prevent this kind of thing from happening again? Asquith asked pointedly.
In commemorating the centenary, President Michael D. Higgins drew attention to the history of British retaliation throughout his Empire.
The British used similar tactics in India and to suppress the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya in 1952 and in Cyprus in 1956. It was also a policy carried out by the United States during the Vietnam War, the president noted.
President Higgins said the British retaliation was based on “ideological assumptions, of superiority and inferiority in terms of race, culture or ability, on the notion of the collective as a disloyal, desperate or threatening version of the ‘other’.”
The president quoted the Scottish philosopher David Hume who wrote in his History of England: “The Irish from the beginning of time had been buried in the deepest barbarity and ignorance; and since they were never conquered, even, in fact, by the Romans from whom the entire Western world derives its culture, they continued even in the roughest state of society and distinguished themselves by those vices to which human nature, not domesticated by education, nor restricted by law, is subject forever. “
The president continued: “In fact, a century later, Winston Churchill would write: ‘We have always found the Irish to be a little weird. They refuse to be English. ‘ The ‘otherness’ of the Irish people and their culture was undeniably ingrained at all levels of British society.
The president described the Sacking of Balbriggan as “an act of collective punishment, a retaliation, a term that would become the mark of a policy of subjugation, installation of fear in a public that had in its midst those who sought independence.”
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