In an earlier edition of the blog we discussed the shooting dead of George Adamson in April 1922. In that article, Dr John Gibney described Adamson’s career and the local reaction to Adamson’s death. It was an event that shocked people in Westmeath and nationally. Here, we look in more detail at the subsequent propaganda battle in which both pro- and anti-Treaty forces blamed each other for Adamson’s death.
by Ian Kenneally During the Irish Civil War, Custume Barracks served both as a headquarters for the Provisional Government’s National Army and as a vast prison for captured members of the anti-Treaty IRA. Although Custume Barracks briefly housed prisoners in April 1922 following the shooting dead of George Adamson, it was not until the summer […]
by Dr Paul Hughes In one of the sitting TDs for Longford-Westmeath, Laurence Ginnell, anti-Treaty republicans had a powerful propagandist in their camp after the outbreak of civil war. A veteran of the Irish Press Agency, the publicity arm of Irish nationalists in Britain set up during the late 1880s, Ginnell put his experience to […]
by Dr. Paul Highes Athlone and south Westmeath Reports of the outbreak of civil war published by the Westmeath Independent were redolent of those sensational and bewildered paragraphs which appeared in the Westmeath Examiner in the wake of the 1916 rising. ‘No news and too much rumour’ read one headline, while another column carried eyewitness reports of the fighting […]
by Dr. Paul Hughes One hundred years ago last week, in the early hours of Wednesday, 28 June 1922, the anti-Treaty Irish Republican Army Executive’s headquarters at Dublin’s Four Courts was attacked by the National Army with two eighteen-pounder guns, which had been placed across the Liffey. This action, vividly recreated in Neil Jordan’s 1996 […]
by Dr. Paul Hughes Between the Irish censuses of 1911 and 1926, the Protestant population of Westmeath – that is, people living in the county who professed the creeds of ‘Protestant Episcopalianism’ (Church of Ireland/Scotland/England), Methodism and Presbyterianism – fell by 49.4 percent.[mfn]Census of Ireland reports, 1911 and 1926 (available at www.histpop.org).[/mfn] According to figures cited by […]
We just had to get out of the place’ IRA barrack evacuations, May 1922 On Monday, 1 May 1922, Laurence Ginnell, TD and his wife, Alice, returned from Argentina after nearly eight months representing Dáil interests in Buenos Aires. They arrived in Liverpool on board the SS Darro, where they were greeted by Ginnell’s father-in-law, James […]
Left: Longford native and National Army soldier Patrick Columb, who was killed in violent pre-civil war incidents in Mullingar on 27 April 1922. Right: A headline from the front page of Cork’s Evening Echo, 22 April 1922. Ten days: the barracks, the standoff and the bloodshed Just over one hundred years ago, on Tuesday, 18 […]
George Adamson was shot dead in Athlone on 25 April 1922. His killing remains unsolved, but it foreshadowed the civil war over the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty that would break out two months later. Adamson was born on 3 April 1897, the fifth of seven children born to a shoemaker, Joseph Adamson, of Athlone […]