1922

New chief

General Richard Mulcahy, the successor of the General Michael Collins as Commander-in-Chief of the National Army, was quite unknown to the Irish people until the Insurrection of Easter, 1916, and not very prominent until considerably later than that historic and eventful episode.

He is a native of Carrick-on-Suir, County Waterford, where his father was a postmaster for several years, and he himself was engaged in the postal engineering service in addition to pursuing his studies in the National University as a student of medicine.

He fought with the Fingal Volunteers under Thomas Ashe, and with the late Frank Lawless, T.D., in the battle of Ashbourne on Friday, April 28, 1916. The details of that engagement have often been told. The Volunteers armed with shotguns and rifles, mostly captured from the R.I.C. at Swords and Donabate, attacked the police barracks at the Cross of the Rath.

The battle began at 11.25 a.m. The attackers numbered thirty-five. After half an hour, the police in the barracks were about to surrender when eighteen cars, containing reinforcements, dashed along the Slane Road. A fierce fight ensued. Lawless, with a few more Volunteers, arrived later with two can bombs – “a contribution,” wrote Mulcahy in a most vivid and graphic description of the battle, “from those who had been driven from Phibsboro Bridge.”

That was all the additional help Ashe received. The engagement lasted over three hours more, but though less than forty against a hundred R.I.C., they gained a complete victory. The constabulary were heavily punished, and the survivors put up their hands and surrendered.

At the end of the Insurrection Mulcahy was rounded up and brought to Richmond barracks, Dublin, and on May 3, with 307 other prisoners, he was marched through Dublin and sent over the water to Knutsford prison. He was released at the general amnesty which followed.

When the Volunteers were reorganised, largely in the jails and detention camps, and the Irish war projected, Richard Mulcahy was appointed Chief of Staff, with Michael Collins Chief of the Intelligence Department.

The two of them were the most important men in the great struggle, the life and soul of Ireland’s forces, the originators of some of the most audacious and successful military coups, the supervisors of the chief operations, and the men most sought for by the agents of the British Government and army.

It is very doubtful if, indeed, Mulcahy was not as greatly dreaded and as eagerly hunted for as his departed and devoted comrade in arms. He was quite as successful in eluding the sleuth of hounds as Collins himself, and he had as frequent and as narrow escapes from capture.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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