Bloody Sunday Book

On November 21, 1920, Michael Collins sent a team of hand-picked assassins to destroy the brains behind Britain's war against an Irish Republic first declared in 1916 and resurrected in January 1919. Opinions vary as to exactly how serious a blow was struck against British forces that day, but by the following July a British truce offer ended the Irish War of Independence.
Like many of his countrymen, journalist and author James Gleeson has a personal connection to this conflict through his father, then a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. His father was Head Constable at Lanesborough, County Longford, as the conflict broke into the open in 1919. Struggling to maintain a balance in performing his duties, his revulsion at the excesses of the Auxiliaries and the Black and Tans soon led him to resign.
The opening chapter presents the sad truth that Ireland has actually seen three "Bloody Sundays." The first came in 1913 when the Dublin Metropolitan Police broke up a meeting of the then-striking Transport Workers Union; the 1971 incident when British soldiers fired on demonstrators in Derry; and the November 21, 1920 incident when the IRA killed fourteen British intelligence agents in Dublin and the Black and Tans retaliated by firing on spectators and players at a football match in Dublin's Croke Park, killing 14. This lattermost incident is the subject of James Gleeson's book.
However, Gleeson doesn't limit his 13 chapters to just one day in Ireland's often tragic story. He opens with a discussion of the creation by the Crown of the police force that would become the Royal Irish Constabulary. He then carries the story forward through the events of 1916 and the war of liberation beginning in 1919 and spreads across Ireland. Much of this book is more memoir than history as the author presents the recollections and anecdotes of actual participants to tell the story. While the use of such anecdotes might weaken this as a work of history, it greatly enhances it as an account of the 1919-1921 conflict.
Having set the stage in the first half of the book, the author uses the remaining half to traces the events immediately leading up to, surrounding, and following, Collins's blow against the heart of Britain's war in Ireland - the destruction of its central intelligence cell in Dublin. The latter part of the book traces the planning, execution, and aftermath of Collins's' assault on the British intelligence agents. Most of the attacks are covered in detail, as is the retaliatory Black and Tan assault on the football crowd. The final chapter assesses the impact of the attack and its influence upon the conclusion of the Irish war of liberation, as well as the question of whether Collins was right or wrong in carrying out his brutal war against the British forces in Ireland.
(I found it interesting to learn that this episode would ultimately lead to a meeting between a U.S. President and a "terrorist." In 1963, President John F. Kennedy met Irish Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Sean Lemass who had been one of Michael Collins's gunmen on Bloody Sunday. Israeli Prime Minister Menachim Begin, who participated in the bombing of Jerusalem's King David Hotel in 1948, was the other. And depending upon how you feel about Joseph Stalin, the count might conceivably rise to three.)
This edition is a 2004 reprint of the original and long out of print 1962 publication by the author. It includes a foreword by historian WR Rodgers and an introduction by author Dermot McEvoy. This represents an excellent supplement to more general histories and memoirs of the Irish struggle for independence.