From Pogrom to Civil War: Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA

By Kieran Glennon

When the attacks against Catholics known as the Belfast pogrom erupted in July 1920, Tom Glennon was a 20-year old officer in the IRA. The next three years took him from brutal street fighting in Belfast to organising a flying column in the Glens of Antrim, to a daring escape from captivity in the Curragh and then the viciousness of civil war in Donegal.

Scarred by his experiences, he sought to create a new life in Australia, only to find further tragedy awaiting him. His silence about his past was so complete that almost eighty years passed before his son learned the truth about his own mother's death.

Now, using contemporary documents and the accounts of comrades and enemies, his grandson not only tells the story of Tom Glennon's life, but also re-examines the mythology of the pogrom and questions Michael Collins' northern policy, asking: were the northern IRA the victims of a monstrous betrayal?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mercier Press
• Release date: Mar 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9781781171912

Kieran Glennon

Kieran Glennon is the grandson of Tom Glennon. He has spent a year and a half researching his grandfather's life and his involvement in the War of Independence and the Civil War. He was born in London to Irish parents, who later returned to Belfast and then moved to Dublin in 1973. He lives in Cherry Orchard, Dublin.

Book preview

MERCIER PRESS

3B Oak House, Bessboro Rd

Blackrock, Cork, Ireland.

MercierGreen.jpg www.mercierpress.ie

missing image file http://twitter.com/IrishPublisher

missing image file http://www.facebook.com/mercier.press

© Kieran Glennon, 2013

ISBN: 978 1 78117 146 2

Epub ISBN: 978 1 78117 191 2

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 78117 192 9

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

For my Dad, who continues to inspire me

Contents

Abbreviations

Foreword

1 Parents, siblings and early life

2 In the IRA during the War of Independence

3 The Curragh – imprisonment and escape

4 Belfast after the Truce

5 After the Treaty: tensions in Dublin and Donegal

6 The end of the 3rd Northern Division

7 Donegal and the tragedies of civil war

8 Peacetime

9 Nan

10 Legacies

11 Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Map of the area of the pogroms in Belfast, 1920

Abbreviations

Adj. Adjutant

AOH Ancient Order of Hibernians

ASU Active Service Unit

Bgd. Brigade

Bn. Battalion

Capt. Captain

C-in-C Commander-in-Chief

Col Colonel

Comdt Commandant

Const. Constable

Coy. Company

DI District Inspector

Div. Division/Divisional

GHQ General Headquarters

IO Intelligence Officer

inst. instant (this month)

IRA Irish Republican Army

IRB Irish Republican Brotherhood

Lieut/Lt Lieutenant

MP Member of Parliament (Northern Ireland or Britain)

NCO Non-commissioned Officer

O/C Officer Commanding

Pvt. Private

RIC Royal Irish Constabulary

RUC Royal Ulster Constabulary

Sergt Sergeant

TD Teachta Dála (member of Dáil Éireann, the Irish parliament)

UIL United Irish League

USC Ulster Special Constabulary

UVF Ulster Volunteer Force

V/C Vice-Commandant

Vol. Volunteer (the lowest rank in the IRA and early Free State army, equivalent to Private)

Foreword

At Christmas 2010, I stayed with my parents for a few days. At the time, I was reading Ed Moloney’s A Secret History of the IRA – my father noticed this and expressed regret that he had never been able to persuade his own father to talk about his time in the IRA. All he knew was that his father had been a member of the organisation at the time of the Belfast pogrom of the 1920s, that he had been captured and imprisoned in the Curragh, from which he had escaped – supposedly in a horse-drawn cart filled with rubbish – and that he had subsequently served in the Free State army in Donegal during the Civil War. His father had only ever let slip two other minor snippets about this entire period – firstly, that he had nearly been thrown in the River Lagan while on duty defending St Matthew’s church in Ballymacarrett against loyalist attacks and secondly, that while in Donegal he had been billeted in a house that was reputed to be haunted. My father had gleaned the story about the escape in the rubbish cart from either his Aunt Lillie or his grandmother, as his father had steadfastly refused to divulge any further details of his past.

While my father’s close relatives fed him these and other titbits, a veil of absolute silence covered the circumstances of his birth. From his birth certificate, he knew that he had been born in Australia, but any time he asked why that had been the case, he was always gently fobbed off and left none the wiser.

My curiosity piqued, I undertook to see what I could uncover about this secret history. As I began my research, I was struck by how little had been published about Belfast during this period. In contrast to areas such as Cork or Tipperary, Belfast had prompted no autobiographies similar to those written by semi-legendary flying column commanders such as Tom Barry and Dan Breen. While my grandfather’s silence thus seemed no different from that of the men alongside whom he had fought, it made me wonder why northern veterans had been so much more reticent about describing their experiences.

Equally striking was the contrast between the paucity of published material about the pogrom era and the absolute avalanche of books written about the more recent Troubles. It seemed at the very least surprising that so little connection was drawn between the two periods, particularly when events such as the burning of Bombay Street in August 1969 had triggered fears that a fresh pogrom was about to be unleashed – evidently there was still at that stage a handed-down folk memory of the earlier period, even if very little had been committed to print. While hostile reaction to the Provisional IRA campaign of the 1970s and 1980s was one of the main triggers of what has come to be known as ‘revisionist’ history, a trend that was broadly hostile to traditional republican accounts of the struggle for independence, when it came to Belfast, and indeed the North in general, there were no traditional histories to be revised. This seemed to be a curious omission.

It is only in the last decade or so – or, more pertinently, since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement and the ending of the modern Troubles – that studies of the earlier period have begun to appear. In that respect, I must acknowledge the fact that, in writing this book, I am standing on the shoulders of two giants in particular. The first is Jimmy McDermott who, in 2001, wrote the landmark Northern Divisions: The Old IRA and the Belfast Pogroms 1920–22, the first, ground-breaking study of the IRA of that period. The second is Robert Lynch, whose The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition 1920–1922, published in 2006, had the advantage of being able to access the witness statements given by veterans of the War of Independence to the Bureau of Military History in the late 1940s and early 1950s, which were not made publicly available until 2003. I hope that this book will add to these two more pioneering works.

This is not simply a biography of my grandfather, as I suspect that would be of little interest beyond the family circle. Rather, it not only tells his story, but also uses his unique career path in the northern IRA and Free State army as a platform from which to address some wider questions. What was the extent of the IRA’s involvement in the Belfast pogrom? What was the real nature of the northern policy of Michael Collins and the Provisional Government? Why was the psychological impact of these events on ordinary participants such as my grandfather – as opposed to the super-heroes of traditional histories – so great that they felt compelled to try to bury their memories in silence? The answers to these questions proved surprising, and in some cases astonishing, to me and will, I hope, add to readers’ understanding of the period.

As ever with Irish history, terminology is a potential minefield. Northern Ireland is a case in point: I have referred to the ‘Six Counties’ and the ‘Twenty-six Counties’ when this is how they were described by the speakers involved, and for the same reason I have used ‘Northern Ireland government’ to refer to that administration; otherwise, I refer to ‘the North’. While it is obviously wrong to assume that all Catholics were nationalists, or that all Protestants were unionists, in practice the terms were often treated as interchangeable by participants in the events, so I have done the same, highlighting exceptions where these are notable. Similarly, while the events of 1920–22 in Belfast did not constitute a pogrom as the term was originally defined in eastern Europe, the period was referred to as a pogrom by nationalists of the time, so I have adhered to their terminology. In relation to the Civil War, I could have used any or all of ‘Dáil forces’, ‘National forces’ (both pro-Treaty) as well as ‘Executive forces’ (anti-Treaty); both sides were ultimately republican but for the sake of clarity and differentiation – and not because of any political connotations – I refer to them as ‘Free State’ and ‘Republican’. I have deliberately avoided the use of pejoratives such as ‘Staters’ or ‘Irregulars’ unless these are the actual words used by someone being quoted. After the outbreak of the Civil War, I use the term ‘IRA’ only to refer to the organisation as it existed in the North, although both sides in the lead up to the Civil War used it to refer to themselves; one reference I found particularly amusing was a letter written by the assistant adjutant of the Free State army in Donegal to the editor of the Derry Journal in April 1922, insisting that the paper refer to troops loyal to the Provisional Government as the ‘Official IRA’.

One final point on terminology: although convention would suggest that all personalities should be referred to by their surnames, I refer to the two people at the centre of the story as ‘Tom’ and ‘Nan’ – as their grandson, I think I’m entitled to that degree of familiarity. To allay the fears of any readers who might feel that this family relationship may blunt my objectivity, I can only point out that my research began with a desire to uncover the truth and so promise to present all the evidence I found. Very few participants in the events emerge entirely free from reproach and my grandfather should have no more immunity from that than anyone else; if I find any of his actions to be indefensible, I say so.

As far as possible, this evidence is given in the participants’ own words, either spoken or written, although there are some potential hazards with this approach. Naturally, I treat statements which were made for public consumption with caution, preferring to give more weight to those made in private, particularly in writing. Oral histories can be very useful – particularly the recollections of participants given to the Bureau of Military History and to Ernie O’Malley – but these statements were made many years after the events they describe and thus may be subject to the vagaries of memory, imprecision with regards to details and even, in some cases, downright embellishment. So, for example, Tommy Flynn’s account of the July 1921 Raglan Street ambush in Belfast states that ‘all the police in the tender were killed’ when the actual casualties were one Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) officer killed and two wounded; this does not necessarily render Flynn’s entire statement unreliable, but for that particular incident, I preferred to rely on the account of another participant whose recollection is consistent with the facts.

This project could not have been completed without the input of a number of people, whom I wish to thank. I must start at the very beginning: the love of reading was fostered in me by my mother – even as a very young child growing up in London, the normal household activity of each day had to stop while we tuned into Listen With Mother on BBC Radio and she promised me that I would learn to read when I went to school; she then dried my tears of bitter disappointment when I still could not read at the end of the first day. My father fed my fascination with books, pamphlets and newspaper clippings from his overflowing collection, but also taught me that no proper interpretation of events could be based on a partial or partisan assembling of facts. My parents thus gave me the gifts to enable this book to be written.

The content would not have been completed without the valuable assistance of many others. In terms of locating invaluable research material, my brother John made the single most earth-shattering contribution on a night in January 2011 that I doubt any of our family will ever forget. The staff of Military Archives in Cathal Brugha Barracks were unfailingly helpful in answering my queries and managed to unearth some documents which had initially appeared unavailable. Similarly, the staffs of UCD Archives, the National Library of Ireland, the National Archives of Ireland and the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) were all equally obliging. The Directors of the National Library and National Archives, Commandant Padraic Kennedy, the Officer in Charge at the Military Archives, the Deputy Keeper of Records at the PRONI and Tim Padfield of the UK National Archives all gave permission to quote from copyright material in their collections. Rory Fitzpatrick, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Lawless and Donal Casey kindly allowed me to reproduce photos from their families’ collections, and Niall Bergin of Kilmainham Gaol Museum was generous in providing photos and other material.

Chapter 9 and the Epilogue would never have been written were it not for Martin Cahill’s habit of reading his paper from cover to cover; his wife Mary then made the most amazing phone call I have ever received, one that reduced me to tears of joy and gratitude. They opened their hearts and their memories as did a wonderful legion of Clancys – John Joe’s Seán, Mary, Michael, Jimmy and Andy; Miko’s P. J., Tommy, J. J., Mary and Jim; Pat’s Andy, Patsy, Ann, Kathleen and Mary; and Mary Ellen’s Mary, Margaret, Thomas and Ann. Meeting them has been the real reward of this project.

Further on in the process, John Dorney read an early draft of what I had written and made useful and practical comments. I was blessed that both Jimmy McDermott and Brian Hanley were so generous with their time and provided not just advice, but also many invaluable pointers and constructive challenges to my thinking. When an unexpected connection to County Clare emerged, Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc shared his knowledge of that county’s history during the period, as well as giving me some valuable contacts. Ciara Breathnach was incredibly helpful to me in getting the material ready to submit for publication and she also helped me to clarify some final thoughts. While these and other historians gave me the benefit of their advice, all conclusions drawn are my own. Everyone at Mercier Press has been an absolute pleasure to deal with.

Brendan Donohoe and Christine Smith, Dave Byrne and Rita Connolly have long been dear friends and they kept me grounded while I was working on this book by reminding me that the present can sometimes be just as important as history.

Above all, my partner Ruth not only patiently tolerated my long absences at the keyboard but also gave me non-stop support and encouragement for over eighteen months, without which none of this work would have been done and for which I am more grateful than I can ever express. Thanks for all the ‘P and Q’, hon – the finger is now officially off the buzzer!

1

Parents, siblings

and early life

Both Tom Glennon’s parents and his paternal grandparents were named Joseph and Martha. His father, Joseph Glennon, was born in Belfast on 11 February 1864, the son of Joseph (Senior), a coach-painter, and Martha, née Honeywood. According to his birth certificate, Joseph was born in Mill View Place, off Townsend Street between the Falls and Shankill Roads. Joseph Senior later moved across the city to Welsh Street in the Markets area and died, aged sixty-one, in Rugby Street in the area of Belfast known as the ‘Holy Land’ on 13 February 1898. The younger Joseph followed in his father’s footsteps and became a coach-maker.

Tom’s mother, Martha Alexandra Victoria McGarry was born on 17 April 1865, the daughter of Luke and Catherine, née Gallicher. Those accustomed to playing the ‘Belfast name game’ might be misled by her splendid collection of names into thinking she was a Protestant, but she was baptised a Catholic in St Malachy’s in the Markets. Her father was a gardener and he and his wife lived in Queen’s Island in the east of the city.

Joseph Glennon and Martha McGarry were married on 28 August 1893 in St Matthew’s in Ballymacarrett. At the time she was living in Euston Street in Ballymacarrett, while he was living in what became the newly married couple’s family home at 24 Lavinia Street, off the Lower Ormeau Road.

Siblings and the 1911 Census

Joseph and Martha’s first child was born on 10 February 1895; he was to have been named Gerard, but he was baptised Gerald Joseph in St Malachy’s – apparently at the priest’s insistence. Two sisters followed: Kathleen Imanda, born on 6 October 1896, and Elizabeth Honeywood, known as Lillie, who was born on 11 August 1898. On 26 July 1900, Joseph and Martha’s second son was born – Thomas Henry Glennon.

Two younger brothers followed Tom in due course – Charles Honeywood, who was born on 27 April 1902 and John Vincent, known to the family simply as Vincent, who was born on 16 March 1906. Vincent was one of twins, but sadly his twin Eileen Patricia only survived six days before succumbing to ‘debility’ on 22 March. Joseph and Martha’s final child was born on 22 November 1908; he was named Edward Morrisey Glennon, most likely after Edward Morrisey, a neighbour of Joseph’s from Lavinia Street, who had been a witness at their wedding some fifteen years earlier. Sadly, Edward did not survive either, dying at the age of five months on 18 April 1909 having, according to his death certificate, suffered ‘debility from birth’.

By the time of the 1911 Census, the Glennon family were still living at 24 Lavinia Street. The family’s census return was notable in a number of respects: firstly, Lillie was not listed among the members of the household, although that merely meant she was not in the house on the night in question; it may be that she spent the night either in a relative’s house or in hospital. If she did stay with relatives, they evidently omitted to include her on the return for their household, thinking only family members had to be listed – in the online census records for 1911, there is no mention of a twelve-year-old girl named Lillie or Elizabeth Glennon or any short version of the name.

Another quirk of the census return is that Joseph and Martha both appeared to have aged more than ten years since the previous census in 1901 – then, they had been listed as being aged thirty-three and thirty-two respectively, whereas in 1911, their ages were given as forty-six and forty-five. However, this anomaly was apparently not uncommon at the time and probably indicates nothing more than that Joseph’s maths had improved in the intervening years!

Most notably, the census return shows that Joseph had become a keen believer in nationalist ideas, as he completed the entire form in Irish, using the Gaelic script in which Irish was written at that time. Given that this census pre-dated both the signing of the 1912 Ulster Covenant and the 1914 Home Rule Act, this was a bold step for any householder in Belfast to take; the 1911 returns show only thirty families in the whole city with surnames beginning with Mac or Ó whose returns were completed in Irish. The census return stated that the family surname was Mac Giolla Fhinnen, although in later years, Tom would spell it Mac Giolla Fhionnáin when using the Irish form of his name.

An intriguing nugget of family legend adds an extra layer to this picture of Joseph as an ardent nationalist – he is reputed to have delivered a graveside oration at one of the annual Wolfe Tone commemorations at Bodenstown in County Kildare. A manuscript of his speech was formerly in the possession of one of his grandchildren but has since been lost, nor was the speech reported in any of the newspapers or nationalist journals of the time. If true, however, this snippet indicates the domestic political atmosphere in which Tom grew up in Lavinia Street; it may also suggest that Joseph was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), as according to Dáil Éireann TD and IRB veteran Pat McCartan, ‘the Wolfe Tone Committee … was the public organisation for the activities of the IRB.’¹

Evidently, following the 1911 Census, Joseph became more prosperous, as by 1915 he had changed his trade to that of insurance inspector and the family had moved from Lavinia Street to 10 Whitehall Gardens, near Holy Rosary parish church on the Ormeau Road.

Little is known of Tom’s early life. All that can be established with certainty is what is contained in his army personnel file – that he spent three years on a scholarship course at the Christian Brothers’ Trades Preparatory School in Hardinge Street in the New Lodge area and that before the War of Independence he worked in a wholesale and retail furniture warehouse in Arthur Street owned by Joe Connolly & Co. Ltd, ‘housefurnishers’.

2

In the IRA during the War of Independence

According to papers in his personnel file, Tom joined the Irish Volunteers in April 1917, aged almost seventeen.¹ The strongly republican environment which his father had fostered in Lavinia Street was an undoubted influence, as two of his brothers, Gerard and Charlie, took the same step. When Tom joined, there were just two companies of Volunteers (A and B Companies) in Belfast, primarily based along the Falls Road. Due to the fact that many of its members were clerks or shop assistants, ‘B Company was known as the collar and tie company.’² The three Glennon brothers joined this company – another member was Thomas Gunn, who recalled:

The strength of B Company in 1917 as far as I recollect was between 40 and 50, but during the conscription scare of 1918 its numbers were swelled to about 120. When the danger of conscription was definitely past, our additional strength fell away and only two of the ‘conscriptioneers’ remained in the company. Further small increases brought our strength to about 70 at the time of the Truce.³

C Company was formed in May 1917, drawing its recruits from around Divis Street – one of them was Joe Murray, who described the Volunteers’ activities at this time:

From the conscription period onwards there were continuous raids and arrests. The arrests were mainly confined to the men who had been active before 1916.

From mid 1918 up to the end of 1919 the Volunteers were holding nightly classes on military subjects. They were training and parading in the country districts outside Belfast and were also studying the city and making reconnaissance of enemy positions and organising intelligence in connection with enemy personnel and strengths in the city area.⁴

These activities were conducted in great secrecy – it was not until the year after Tom joined that the Volunteers could risk any sort of public appearance. David McGuinness, who went on to become assistant intelligence officer with the Belfast Brigade, said:

The South Armagh election, February 1918, gave the Belfast Volunteers a stimulus which enabled us to come out in the open. We sent bodies of Volunteers into the South Armagh area to do election work under their own officers working as a military body. These Volunteers were in the charge of the late Seán O’Neill. The work that the Volunteers were expected to do on elections was purely non-political. Their duty was wholly to protect Sinn Féin interests, protect voters and to prevent the attacks on Sinn Féin supporters from the Hibernian hooligans.⁵

The ‘Hibernians’ to which he referred were members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH), supporters of the last surviving rump of the old Irish Parliamentary Party (known in the north as the Nationalist Party) and especially loyal to Joe Devlin, who later defeated Éamon de Valera in the December 1918 general election to become MP for Belfast Falls. They subsequently became a thorn in the side of Belfast republicans and their competitors for nationalist allegiances. However, it should be noted that the Hibernians were by far the larger of the two rivals – in September 1920, while Sinn Féin had nine branches in Belfast, the Hibernians had eighteen and the associated United Irish League had twenty-five.⁶

Tom McNally, later quartermaster of the Belfast Brigade, had a deep-seated loathing of the Hibernians:

… it was quite clear to me that some of our Catholic neighbours were not reliable – particularly the AOH brand and this is a point which I should like to emphasise. The 3rd Northern were always up against a situation where the Unionist elements, plus the AOH elements … were very antagonistic and were prepared to give information to the authorities.⁷

In 1918 the Volunteers still elected their own officers and Tom was chosen by his comrades to become first lieutenant of B Company. Then, in 1919, he was appointed adjutant to Seán Cusack, officer commanding (O/C) the Belfast Battalion.⁸ The role of an adjutant was to assist the O/C in running the unit, typically in receiving reports and issuing orders, although these tasks would be done, not as an officer in his own right, but under the authority of the O/C, as the adjutant had no independent standing as a commander. To all intents and purposes, he was an extension of the O/C rather than a second-in-command.

For Tom to have quickly progressed at such a young age suggests that his comrades recognised that he had a natural aptitude for organisation and leadership. While ultimate responsibility for commanding the battalion lay with Cusack, adjutant was one of the key positions on the battalion staff and it was obviously one with which Tom’s comrades felt he could be trusted; he may not have been an original thinker in his own right, but he could be relied on to implement the thoughts of others.

Later that year, the Volunteers were renamed the Irish Republican Army (IRA) since they were now considered to be the army of the Republic declared by the first Dáil Éireann. General Headquarters (GHQ) reorganised the IRA battalions in the north-eastern counties into a brigade, with Cusack assuming command:

The new Brigade area, to be known as the Antrim and East Down Brigade, was to include the city of Belfast, all of County Antrim and East County Down. I was appointed O/C of the Brigade. At the time of my appointment as Brigade O/C, the greater part of the Brigade area in Co. Antrim and East Down was practically unorganised and no appointments were made to the Brigade staff pending reorganisation of the whole area.⁹

Cusack took Tom with him as temporary brigade adjutant until he had finished assessing the calibre of officers across the brigade. Despite Tom’s youth – he was still only a teenager – he obviously enjoyed the confidence of the senior officer.

Drilling, training and recruitment continued during that year. One of the new recruits was Tom Fitzpatrick:

I joined the Volunteers in Belfast about August 1919. I joined C Company, Belfast Battalion … About this time, two months or so after I became attached to the Company, the O/C Seamus Keating fell into bad health and asked me to take charge of the company … Sometime after that, it was decided to form a second battalion in Belfast, and I got the job of organising the battalion. We formed one company at Ballymacarrett, one at Carrick Hill and one in the Low Market. There was a fourth company but I cannot think where it was.¹⁰

Although what came to be known as the first shots of the War of Independence had been fired at Soloheadbeg in Tipperary on 21 January 1919, the conflict did not spread to Belfast until early in 1920 – over the Easter weekend of that year the brigade took part in a countrywide campaign of arson attacks on tax offices ordered by GHQ to mark the anniversary of the 1916 Rising. Fitzpatrick explained why there was such reluctance to act:

Some time about February or March 1920, after the military had taken over a place in the Low Market, where they kept a lot of vehicles, we threw a few bombs into it. That was a battalion job and it was done very quietly. There was no sanction from the brigade for it. At that time, the brigade were averse to activities in Belfast for fear of reprisals on the Catholic population.¹¹

The 1911 Census returns show that the population of Belfast was split 76% Protestant and 24% Catholic. Outnumbered to this extent, nationalists in Belfast had far more to fear in terms of potential retaliation for IRA activities than fellow nationalists elsewhere in Ireland. The brigade staff recognised that the wider nationalist community were hostages for the good behaviour of the IRA and this bred a level of timidity on the part of the brigade officers.

The Smyth and Swanzy killings and the start of the pogrom

In March 1920, the Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Cork, Tomás MacCurtain, who was also a prominent officer in the IRA, was murdered in his home. At the inquest into his killing, a verdict of wilful murder was returned, specifically naming Prime Minister Lloyd George as being responsible, as well as the lord lieutenant and the chief secretary for Ireland and District Inspector Oswald Swanzy of the RIC. Although he was not named in the inquest verdict, the IRA also suspected a Sergeant Ferris of involvement. For their own protection, Swanzy was secretly transferred north to Lisburn, while Ferris was transferred to Springfield Road Barracks in Belfast and promoted to district inspector. GHQ issued an order to all brigades

Reviews for From Pogrom to Civil War

[thegeneral_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a very good book and another fine edition in the growing list of recent regional analyses of the War of Independence in various counties. That it is primarily set in Belfast makes it especially interesting. So too does the fact that it is at its heart a family memoir detailing the story of Tom Glennon. Highly opinionated and well researched it is worth a read.