O'Connor

From the fourteenth of April to the thirtieth of June 1922, in the Four Courts complex on the north bank of the Liffey in central Dublin, an anti-Treaty IRA garrison of about a hundred and eighty men under Rory O'Connor, thirty-nine years old, the anti-Treaty IRA Director of Engineering and one of the anti-Treaty figures, occupied the Four Courts as a political statement against the Anglo-Irish Treaty signed by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith in December 1921. The Provisional Government of Ireland under W. T. Cosgrave (constituted after the Treaty's Dáil ratification of January 1922 and the formation of the new government in February) had political-tolerance for the occupation through the spring of 1922, on the Collins-Mulcahy political-judgement that any Free-State military action against the anti-Treaty IRA would precipitate Civil War. The British government, on the Lloyd-George direct political pressure of late June, demanded the Provisional-Government move on the Four Courts. The assault began at four in the morning of the twenty-eighth of June 1922 with the British-loaned 18-pounder field-artillery firing across the river from the south quays into the Four Courts walls. The Four Courts garrison surrendered on the thirtieth of June. O'Connor was taken prisoner, held at Mountjoy Prison, and was executed by the Free State Government on the eighth of December 1922 as a reprisal for the anti-Treaty assassination of the Free-State TD Seán Hales the day before. The Civil War of 1922–23 had begun.

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