Rory O'Connor at the Four Courts

Some occupations are made to be held; others are made to be fired upon. The garrison that walks into a building knowing it cannot be defended is not measuring walls and windows. It is measuring the country watching. A refusal, lodged in stone, is a slower instrument than a rifle, and a louder one.

THE ENGINEER

Rory O'Connor was born at Kilmainham on the twenty-eighth of November 1883, son of the Dublin solicitor John O'Connor and Kate Kelly, schooled at Clongowes Wood, qualified at University College Dublin as a civil engineer in 1909. He had learned to read drawings before he learned to read manifestos. He had joined the Conradh na Gaeilge branch at the university in 1900, gone out in 1916, served as Director of Engineering of the IRA through the war against the Crown, and walked, in December 1921, into the rank of the men who would not have the Treaty. By the spring of 1922 he spoke for a body of officers who held that the Dáil had no authority to dissolve a Republic already declared. On the twenty-sixth of March he told a press conference at the Mansion House, when asked whether the army he stood for was now in mutiny, that the army was, as quoted in the Irish Times the following morning, not under the control of the Dáil. The sentence committed him. From that sentence the building followed.

THE BUILDING

On the fourteenth of April 1922 he led about a hundred and eighty men into the Four Courts on the north bank of the Liffey: the Round Hall, the four radial courts, the long east wing that housed the Public Record Office of Ireland. The site had been chosen with an engineer's coldness and a propagandist's heat. The Four Courts was the seat of Irish justice. To hold it was to say that justice in the name of a Free State could not be administered while the Republic remained unburied. For eleven weeks the garrison sandbagged the windows, mined the approaches, drilled in the corridors, and waited. The Provisional Government did not move. Collins and Mulcahy had taken the view, all through that long spring, that any artillery turned on the Four Courts would crack the country open. The cabinet under W. T. Cosgrave held its hand. London did not.

THE ULTIMATUM

On the night of the twenty-seventh of June, eighteen-pounder field-guns, loaned by the British army, were brought down the south quays and unlimbered at the Bridewell yard, their muzzles set across the river at the north face of the building. At six in the evening a Provisional Government ultimatum reached the garrison: evacuate by four o'clock. The night was warm. From the upper windows of the Round Hall the gun-positions could be made out by the lantern-light moving among the limbers. He walked the corridors in the dark with the engineer's habit of counting paces between load-bearing walls. He had a hundred and eighty men. He had Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey, Dick Barrett, Charlie Daly, Pat Cosgrave. He had, in the east wing, the state papers of Ireland from the twelfth century forward: the Inchiquin manuscripts, the Plantation grants, the Down Survey, the eighteenth-century parish registers, the census returns from 1821 to 1851. He had until four.

A SECOND AT THE WINDOW

Twenty past three. Forty minutes left on the clock the British had set and the Free State had carried. He stood at a first-floor window above the river and looked across at the lantern-light on the south quay. An engineer reads a building the way a surgeon reads a chest: load paths, fracture points, what gives way first and what stands. He knew the Round Hall would hold. He knew the east wing would not. The Public Record Office was a glass-lit repository above a basement, and an eighteen-pound shell entering the roof would find timber and paper and seven centuries of vellum in the same second. He knew this with the cold precision of his training, and he did not move from the window. To evacuate was to concede that the building had been held for nothing; that the men in this room had walked in for a gesture and walked out at the first sound of a limber on cobbles. Collins could not call off the guns now; the pressure from Lloyd George through the past ten days had passed the point where any Irish politician could turn it back without losing his place at his own cabinet table. Mellows would not go. McKelvey would not go. The point of the occupation was not the occupation. The point was the occupation under fire. He thought of the parish registers in the east wing, of the Down Survey maps, of every land case in the country that turned on those rolls, and he understood with great clarity that the archive would be balanced against the refusal and that the refusal would win. He did not pretend the cost was small. He took the cost. He went down to tell the officers the garrison would stand.

THE GUNS

At five minutes past four on the morning of the twenty-eighth of June 1922 the first eighteen-pounder fired from the south quay. The shells struck the river-facing walls of the Four Courts through the morning and into the day. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth an incendiary round, or the fire its impact set, reached the east wing, and the Public Record Office burned. The paper went up in a column visible from every quarter of the city; charred fragments of seventeenth-century chancery rolls fell on the streets of Phibsborough and Stoneybatter through the afternoon. The garrison fought another day in the smoke. On the afternoon of the thirtieth, with the building broken around them, they surrendered. The men were marched out under the rifles of troops who, eight months earlier, had been their own.

MOUNTJOY

From the thirtieth of June he was held at Mountjoy Prison. The Civil War he had begun by refusing to walk out of a building moved on without him: Collins shot at Béal na Bláth in August; the Provisional Government hardening into a state that executed its prisoners by military order. On the seventh of December the anti-Treaty IRA shot the Free State TD Seán Hales on Ormond Quay. The cabinet met that night. Before dawn on the eighth of December 1922, in the stonebreakers' yard at Mountjoy, Rory O'Connor was shot by firing-squad alongside Liam Mellows, Dick Barrett, and Joe McKelvey. The four had been in custody since June and had no part in the Hales killing. The execution was a reprisal, and was declared as one. He was thirty-nine years old. The order was signed by men who, the previous summer, had stood as witnesses at his closest friend's wedding.

THE RETURN

The Four Courts was rebuilt under the Office of Public Works architect Thomas Joseph Byrne and reopened in 1932; the Round Hall and the east wing were raised again on the old footprint. The Public Record Office could not be raised again. What had burned was simply gone. A century later, in July 2022, Trinity College Dublin launched the Beyond 2022 project, an international effort to reassemble the lost archive in digital surrogate from the duplicates and transcripts that had been scattered, before the fire, across other repositories in Ireland, Britain, and the wider world. The work proceeds, slowly, and will not finish in any single lifetime. Rory O'Connor lies in the republican plot at Glasnevin beside Mellows, Barrett, and McKelvey.

Some refusals are paid for once and some are paid for forever. He chose the building over the archive, and the country has been counting both columns since. In the reading-room of Beyond 2022, a scholar opens a digital surrogate of a parish register copied in 1870 from an original burned in 1922, and the page loads, and a name appears on it that no fire could quite reach.