Griffith’s Civil War gun donated to museum

A gun said to have been carried by Arthur Griffith in the early days of the Civil War has been quietly rediscovered after being hidden in an attic for decades, it has been claimed.

The elderly son of a garda sergeant privately offered the .38 revolver to a museum after revealing how a ward sister at St Vincent’s Hospital, Dublin, gave the weapon to his father on August 12, 1922.

The officer was on guard by the Sinn Féin founder’s deathbed and first secretly kept the handgun in a Garda station and then hid it in a box in the attic of his house.