Sir, – To suggest that two random rounds – fired during a bombardment lasting almost 60 hours – made any significant difference is as absurd as the exaggerated importance of this historically flawed memoir, written over 40 years after the event by a man who did not even know at whom he was shooting. The IRA was occupying the Four Courts, not the Black and Tans, who had already been withdrawn from the country months earlier.
It must be remembered that the anti-Treaty Republicans wanted to spark a new armed confrontation with the British, which they hoped would unite the two factions of the IRA against their common enemy, and we are expected to believe that they “marched” from Fermanagh to Dublin, and that they were told to be as quiet as possible and not to talk to anyone, and were never confronted, shot at or otherwise? Not only that, but they happened to just arrive in Dublin in time for the attack, and after firing just two rounds, the National Army gun batteries around the Four Courts were now “trained”? A brilliant hands-on account can be read in two books, The Fall of Dublin by Liz Gillis , and Sleep Soldier Sleep, by Diarmuid O’Connor and Frank Connolly. Both books are well researched and come mainly from primary sources. I suggest these “academics” do a little more research on what they find before running to the media with their new unfounded versions of our history. – Yours, etc,