Soloheadbeg ambush marked start of Irish War of Independence in 1919

Seamus Robinson, a Belfast man who had been a monk in Scotland before the Great War and had participated in the events of Easter week in 1916, was supposedly in charge of the operation.

Treacy fired the shot which hit Constable McDonnell in the temple and killed him instantly.

Another assassin shot Constable O’Connell in the back. Treacy performed a celebratory dance and kissed his rifle.

The ambush party subsequently claimed that the two constables levelled their rifles at the ambushers when called upon to surrender and that they had shot them in self-defence. This has always seemed improbable.

In 1967 Breen admitted that the two policemen never had a chance to fire their carbines.

Breen told the Bureau of Military History (which was established in 1947 with Seamus Robinson as one of the five founder members) that he and Treacy, without telling Robinson, had always intended to kill the policemen.

Breen and Treacy saw the purpose of operation to kill the policemen rather than to obtain the gelignite. Breen explained that Treacy had told him the only way to start a war was to kill somebody.

Treacy’s contention was that military confrontation with the RIC and the Army was the only way to establish the Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916, but we do not have the testimony of Treacy on this matter because he was killed in a gun battle in Talbot Street in Dublin on October 14, 1920.

Breen also told the Bureau of Military History that his only regret was that there were only two dead policemen rather than the six they had been expecting.

Although Robinson and Breen became a Fianna Fáil senator and a Fianna Fáil TD respectively, Robinson loathed Breen whom he viewed as an assiduous self- publicist and a fraud.

Furthermore Robinson was aggrieved because he never received the recognition he felt he deserved - partly because he was a Belfast man and he thought Tipperary people feted only their own.

In the early 1970s Tim Crowe, a local IRA veteran, claimed Breen’s revolver jammed at the critical moment and by the time he got his revolver to work, the attack was over. He relieved his frustration by pumping bullets into the two corpses lying on the road.

Constable Patrick O’Connell was 30 years old, came from Coachford in Co Cork and was about to get married.

Constable James McDonnell, a native Irish speaker, was a 56 year-old widower who hailed from Belmullet in Co Mayo and was the father of seven children.

Although Breen regarded these men as having ‘deserted their country’ and become ‘spies and hirelings of her enemy’, locals regarded their deaths as murder.

At their inquest the coroner observed that both constables were decent and quiet men who had been in Tipperary for a long time and had been very popular.

Like 75% of the membership of the RIC, they were both Roman Catholics. The ambush was roundly condemned by local priests, politicians and the local nationalist newspaper.

Archbishop Harty of Cashel and Emly said that the deaths of the policemen was ‘a crime against God’ and ‘an offence against the fair name of our country’, a point reiterated by other clergy.

One cleric described the ambush as ‘a crime that cried to heaven for vengeance, as they knew from the words of God when Cain slew his brother Abel’. Another described the two murdered policemen as ‘martyrs to duty’.

Soloheadbeg is conventionally regarded as the beginning the Irish War of Independence.

The very same day 130 miles or so away in Dublin, 27 Sinn Fein MPs assembled as Dáil Éireann in the Mansion House in Dawson Street.

Twenty-nine names were recorded as present but this was to conceal the fact that Michael Collins and Harry Boland were on a mission to spring de Valera from jail.

The membership unanimously adopted a provisional constitution for itself (which adhered very closely to the Westminster model), a declaration of independence, an address to the free nations of the world (calling for international recognition but no such recognition was forthcoming), and a democratic programme (a vaguely socialist document drafted by the leader of the Irish Labour Party but hurriedly watered down because few Dáil members subscribed to socialism).

The meeting lasted only two hours because the proceedings were conducted almost exclusively in Irish, a language which very few Dáil members understood.

There was no relationship between Soloheadbeg and the meeting of the First Dáil because it had no control (theoretical or otherwise) over the IRA until August 1920 when IRA members swore an oath of allegiance to it.

Richard Mulcahy, the chief of staff of the Volunteers, had serious misgivings about Breen and was reluctant to risk the lives of volunteers or kill policemen if it could be avoided. Mulcahy argued ‘people had to be educated and led gently into open war’.

He told Breen to go to the United States and that if he stayed in Ireland he would be disowned, advice Breen ignored.

The meeting of the First Dáil was not the only event taking place in the Mansion House that day. Before the First Dáil met a luncheon was held in honour of 350 members of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers who had just returned from the war.

The building was festooned with Union Flags and as the republicans entered the building they did so to the strains of ‘God save the King’.

Thus the occasion had a surreal quality. A trader in Dawson Street who witnessed the departure of the Dublin Fusiliers and the arrival of the Sinn

Feiners observed: ‘No city in Europe can beat Dublin after all.’ He may have had a point.