Irish Civil War: A hallmark of the conflict was its tragedy of errors

A vast arsenal of guns was handed over to untrained young men. Small wonder so many deaths happened by accident

Alongside veterans of the First World War and the War of Independence, a host of barely-trained young men were handed an astonishing number of weapons during Ireland's Civil War. File Picture: Topical Press/Getty

THE Irish Civil War was in its 12th week when Private James Guinan, a member of the National Army of the Free State, went on duty with two columns of troops in the area of Bushfield, Tipperary. 

After a long day in the area of the Arra Mountains on the banks of the Shannon, Guinan returned to his quarters and lay on his bed for a well-earned rest.

Earlier that day, a Private O’Brien had been on leave for the day. He had left his rifle unloaded by his bed in the room adjoining Guinan’s. Another soldier had taken O’Brien’s gun on the operation that day and had left it back where he had found it, by O’Brien’s bed. 

When O’Brien returned from his day trip he retrieved his rifle to hand over to his Officer in Command. However, O’Brien assumed that the weapon was as he had left it — unloaded. He was unaware it had been borrowed for the day and that there was a bullet in the breech. 

O’Brien pulled the trigger and a shot went off. 

The bullet went through the thin wall and killed James Guinan.

The Civil War was as short as it was calamitous. Despite historical estimates of the numbers of people who died in the conflict running up to 5,000, more recent research indicates that the number of people who were killed was well under half of that total. 

The Military Service Pensions Collection's fatalities map is not definitive, and they point out omissions such as Cathal Brugha. The TD for Waterford is pictured at a rally in Mooncoin on June 12, 1922, with Dev behind him. Brugha was killed three weeks later. Picture: National Library of Ireland

The remarkable research of Eunan O’Halpin and Daithí Ó Corráin, which indicate that 2,346 people died in the Irish War of Independence, has not yet been replicated for the turmoil that followed the Truce and Treaty.

As of the autumn of 2022, 1,077 combatant fatalities have been compiled in the Military Service Pensions Collection Fatalities Map by the Military Archives. 

It does not claim to be the definitive listing of people who died in the Civil War and its immediate aftermath.

Not everyone that died has a corresponding file in the collection. For instance, the Military Archives themselves point to the notable omission of Cathal Brugha. 

The Irish Examiner is publishing a series of articles all this week which you can access at this link: Civil War. Most of them will also be published in Darkest Days — the Civil War in Cork and Kerry, in the 'Irish Examiner' (print and ePaper) on January 9, 2023.

However, the wealth of detail contained within the collection offers a unique perspective on how these men (and four women) lost their lives.

Since the end of December 2018, I have been documenting the events of Ireland’s revolutionary period each day, as it happened a century prior, on Twitter.

The @131weeks Twitter account (the name is a reference to the length of the Irish War of Independence) has attempted to intertwine the lesser-known stories with the major events of the time for my followers. 

The dissemination of history through the medium of social media is not without its detractors. Indeed, the internet is awash with hashtags such as #OTD and #onthisday. 

Unlike others, though, @131weeks does not repeat itself and offers a unique perspective into how events such as the War of Independence evolved, in real time, over a period of months and years.

When the centenary of the outbreak of the Civil War came in June of last year, a little-spoken about trend began to emerge for my followers. 

Several of them commented on how such an apparent significant element of the Civil War is not more widely spoken about in historical discourse. 

This is an attempt to begin that conversation — the conversation around the most needless extinguishment of lives from the Civil War; those who were killed by accident, specifically from gunshot wounds.

As Síobhra Aiken has recently pointed out in her groundbreaking study of trauma and testimony from the Civil War, accidental shootings were part of a triumvirate of motifs used in early Civil War literature along with the brother-against-brother metaphor, and love triangles. 

A National Army soldier leading a wounded anti-Treaty IRA volunteer from the Four Courts. The brother-against-brother aspect strikes us as tragic — but written out of that narrative is the vast number of people who died during the Civil War by accidental shootings, often self-inflicted.

But the accidental shootings referred to in such works usually relate to acts such as unintended fratricide as we see in Liam O’Flaherty’s ‘The Sniper’.

The killing of oneself, or of another, as a result of the slip of a hand, or the stumble of a foot does is not the stuff of Irish Oedipean tragedy.

Of the 1,077 fatalities in the Pensions Collection, 234 are categorised as being ‘accidental’. Among them are 25 men who died in motor crashes of one form or another. Seven men drowned.

Nine men died as a result of accidents involving explosives. Two men even died from plane crashes — Timothy Nevin being a pilot, and John Francis McDonagh being an in-flight observer in the separate incidents — albeit they were after the Civil War had ended.

Some 136 were killed as a result of accidental gunshot. Only 12% of these were from the anti-Treaty side. A further 20 members of the National Army died as a result of accidental gun shot after the Civil War up to May 1924.

The Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland, ubiquitously known on this island as the Treaty, stated that if “the Government of the Irish Free State establishes and maintains a military defence force, [it] shall not exceed in size such proportion of the military establishments maintained in Great Britain as that which the population of Ireland bears to the population of Great Britain”.

In summary, Ireland’s army could not exceed a size proportionate with Ireland’s population to Britain’s. Using back-of-cigarette-box arithmetic, this meant Ireland’s army could only reach 1/14th of the size of Britain’s army.

By the time the Battle of Dublin began at the end of June 1922, the Free State Army had a force of approximately 9,000. 

Thanks to the support of the British government which began to supply vast quantities of weapons to the National Army, this force was better armed than the anti-Treaty IRA. 

However, a sudden recruitment campaign was needed to raise their total of troops to match the numerically larger anti-Treaty IRA force that they faced.

Free State troops unloading guns from a truck at Albert St train station in Cork in August 1922.  The casual deployment of arms and lack of training contributed to the great number of accidental deaths. Irish Examiner Archive

This recruitment campaign began in earnest on July 6 with a ‘National Call to Arms’ which appeared in most newspapers published in Dublin. Anybody who desired to ‘join the national ranks will … be recruited through the Irish Volunteer organisation, and application for service should be made through the local Volunteer Commander’. 

Such notices were conspicuous by their absence in that day’s Cork Examiner which informed its readers that, while it had not been taken over by the IRA fully, they had established “censorship over the publications issued from the Examiner offices”.

As Dublin smouldered for the second time in six years, thousands of young men queued to enlist in the National Army. 

The day after the call to arms was issued, 350 men presented at a recruitment office on Brunswick St, a similar total in Kilmainham, a couple of hundred at King’s Inns, and over 400 on Amiens St. 

These totals did not include Volunteers who had served in the War of Independence who were resuming the service they had ceased on the day of the Truce. Within a few weeks, numbers in the National Army surged to over 15,000 — exceeding the total of the IRA.

As fighting began to rage outside Dublin, these men were thrust into a developing theatre of war with little or no training. If they were lucky enough to receive any training, it amounted to no more than basic instructions. 

The arsenal of the National Army was being bolstered week after week thanks to His Majesty’s coffers.

By September 1922, the British had supplied the Free State Army with over 27,000 rifles, nearly 7,000 revolvers, almost 250 Lewis light machine guns, and five Vickers machine guns. 

The quantity of weapons of the National Army was such that it could have fully armed the entire force twice over.

The deaths of combatants in Ireland from the accidental discharge of weapons was nothing new by the summer of 1922. Around a hundred members of the British forces died during the War of Independence from gunshot wounds accidently received.

Historic accidents

Indeed, the final fatality of the War of Independence, and one of the first of the Civil War, were as a result of accidental gun shots.

On the day of the Truce in July 1921, Hannah Carey was standing outside the Imperial Hotel in Killarney when a lorry of Crown Forces passed by. The driver of the lorry inexplicably had a revolver in the hand he was steering with. 

When he gripped the steering wheel tighter, the gun let off three shots. One of these bullets hit Carey in the neck, and she died within hours. The officer that discharged the shots was mildly admonished, with officers saying he had “contravened all instructions on the subject of handling and using arms”.

Just under a year later, on the same day that the bombardment of the Four Courts in Dublin began, Private John Moran was in bed in Kilkenny Barracks. Another soldier went to wake him and, while doing so, it appears that this soldier was unloading a revolver. 

Moran “made a spring out of the bed at the same time as [the] revolver went off accidentally”. Moran was killed instantly. He had only joined the army four weeks earlier. The shock of the incident, according to Moran’s father, Edward, lead to the death, from shock, of his mother a month later.

Lee Enfield rifles were carried by many combatants in the Civil War. This one was used by John Doyle during the 1916 Rising. File picture

Inevitably, when vast amounts of young untrained men are given a smorgasbord of weapons, their own lives and those around them are put in danger. Dozens of accidental shootings among Free State troops

occurred as the Civil Was escalated. As the dissemination of British weapons increased, so too did the number of people that were being killed accidently. General Eoin O’Duffy wrote to Richard Mulcahy complaining of the 300 ‘duds’ that had been sent to him from the Curragh. 

O’Duffy claims that most of the new recruits had never handled a rifle before they arrived in Limerick.

A tragic month

The peak of accidental shootings appears to have come in September 1922. 

Among the incidents in that month were those that were plainly tragic accidents of the kind that were common in armed situations at the time. 

• Private Thomas Butler was fatally wounded in Clane when a colleague’s weapon fell from his hand and went off.
• Lieutenant Michael Downes’ weapon went off, killing him, when a twig caught the trigger as he was climbing over bushes near Kilmihil, Clare.
• Private Bernard Murphy was killed in Victoria Barracks when a colleague jumped off a lorry leading to his weapon discharging.

While the number of IRA volunteers who died from accidental discharge of weapons was far lower, they were not immune to the same fate either. 

Thomas Butler was with other Volunteers in a house near Blue Ball, Offaly, cleaning rifles when one went off killing Butler. 

The exact same fate befell Volunteer William Barret three days later in Cordal, Kerry.

More training of recruits may have prevented some deaths such as those outlined above. More training certainly would have prevented other deaths that month. Private Patrick O’Malley was unloading his rifle on Altamount St, Westport, when it went off killing him instantly.

It was stated that he was very new in the army and “did not know much about the mechanism of a rifle”. A bemused senior army official wrote that the account he received of O’Malley’s death was absurd, suggesting that it was “scarcely possible” for someone to accidentally shoot themselves in the manner that he did.

Weapons of choice

THE DEATH of Civic Guard Thomas Bolton, who was on military duty, from an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound prompted serious questions as to how these incidents were happening so often. It appears that part of the problem was the lack of a standardised weapon among the troops.

They were using Short Magazine Lee-Enfield rifles, Webley revolvers, Smith & Wesson revolvers, and various other types of automatic pistols.

While the Lee-Enfields could be rendered safe with a safety catch, the Webleys and Smith & Wessons could only be used safely through “thorough and systematic training” based upon the British Army system outlined in Musketry Regulations Part I and II. 

In most cases, it appears training to that extent was not received among the new wave of recruits to the National Army in the summer of 1922.

Carelessness, naivety, or bravado

However, the most tragic cases of all may have been those involving complete carelessness and elements of naivety or bravado. 

Consider the case of National Army troops Thomas Martin and Joseph Kerr, who were in a train station in Cavan and had been shooting at birds before they started to clean their revolvers.

Kerr put some oil on the spring of his gun and pulled the trigger thinking that the pin would strike an empty cartridge. However, it actually struck one of four live rounds and he killed his comrade and friend.

Frederick Wetherup and James Hamilton were both military policemen in Mountjoy Prison. In the five weeks that they knew each other they had become inseparable, and had appealed to their Lieutenant not to separate them for redeployment. 

One day, both men were sitting on a bed in their billets when Wetherup put an empty gun to Hamilton’s head and said ‘how simple it could go off’. Shortly afterwards, Hamilton makes a lunge for that same gun resulting in his own weapon, which was loaded unbeknown to its owner, go off and killing his best friend.

Children with guns

The proliferation of weapons also had the effect of guns falling into the hands of children, leading to tragic accidents.

Margaret Downey was 80 years of age when she sat chatting to her grandson who was a sergeant in the National Army in September 1922 in her home on Upper Gloucester St, Dublin. As they spoke, another grandson, the 16-year-old brother of the soldier, stood at the doorway with the sergeant’s revolver. It went off in his hands and killed his grandmother. 

The gun, which the boy had retrieved from a drawer had one bullet in the chamber. The distraught sergeant told an inquiry that the bullets they got did not usually fit his Colt revolver properly meaning he rarely put more than five bullets in. 

As he had removed five bullets earlier in the day, he had assumed it was unloaded, forgetting he had in fact fully loaded the gun that day.

Friendly fire

One story of accidental death that epitomises the bleak nature of these deaths is that of Sergeant Major Seán Hunter. 

A native of North Dock in Dublin, Hunter was a veteran of the War of Independence and was a member of the National Army Transport Corps on duty in Gormanstown Barracks. On the afternoon of October 6 , 1922, Hunter walked over to a vehicle and began speaking with fellow North Dock man, Lieutenant Frank Teeling. 

Teeling was one of the most well known Volunteers in the Dublin IRA during the War of Independence. He was the only man arrested during the assassinations on the morning of Bloody Sunday and had been sentenced to death before escaping from prison.

Hunter began “fooling and tricking” with Teeling who had placed his gun on the side of the vehicle. Hunter told Teeling in jest “I am not afraid of that!” 

Just then, the gun went off and Hunter was shot in the neck. Teeling immediately jumped out of the vehicle and rushed to his fallen comrade. Hunter told Teeling ‘I am done for … It is all right, Frank, don’t worry. It was only an accident’.

One witness said that Teeling then kissed the man he had shot. Hunter died two days later, on the same day that General Richard Mulcahy gave a speech in Gormanstown at a trooping of the colour.

Shortly after finishing a speech that invoked the memory of the 1916 leaders, the new Commander in Chief was told of Hunter’s death and an inquiry was held.

Another firearm carried by many combatants in the Civil war was the Webley revolver. This one was used by a very well-known figure, Michael Collins. File picture

Hunter’s apparent forgiveness, moments after being shot, illustrates the comradery and valour that Hunter held for his fellow troops.

Questions were raised shortly afterwards in the Dáil as to whether the shooting may not have been as accidental as it had seemed. 

Although dismissed as untrue, Teeling would go on to become a serious liability for the National Army and he was actively encouraged to leave. 

In March 1923, he shot dead a member of the Citizen’s Defence Force in the Theatre Royal and was charged with manslaughter. He received a lenient sentence owing to being under the influence of drink.

Deadly weapons

Through the prism of the 2020s, people such as Teeling should not have had access to arms. 

But he was not alone. 

Bullets left Webley revolvers at 620 feet per second. Some Smith & Wesson models fired twice as fast. Lee Enfield rifles could fire a projectile over one and a half miles.

They were deadly weapons in well trained hands. In the hands of ill-prepared young men, they were as dangerous to themselves as they were to others. But such are the realities of war, then as now.

When dominos tumble into the chasm of conflict there is never enough time to train soldiers sufficiently.