Rory O'Connor (Irish republican)

Rory O'Connor (1883 - 1922) was an Irish republican activist. He is best remembered for his role in the Irish Civil War 1922-1923, which led to his execution.

O'Connor was born in Dublin in 1883 and in his youth he worked as a railway engineer in Canada.

After his return to Ireland, he became involved in Irish nationalist politics, joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians and was interned after the Easter Rising in 1916.

During the subsequent Irish War of Independence 1919-1921 he was made Director of Engineering of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) - a military organisation descended from the Irish Volunteers.

He did not accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State, but which abolished the Irish Republic declared in 1916, which O'Connor and his comrades had sworn to uphold. On 26 March 1922, the anti-treaty officers of the IRA held a convention in Dublin, in which they rejected the Treaty compromise and repudiated the authority of the Dail, the elected Irish Parliament. Asked by a journalist if this meant they were proposing a military dictatorship in Ireland, O'Connor replied, "you can take it that way if you want".

In April 1922,Fact|date=August 2008 O'Connor, with 200 other hardline anti-treaty IRA men under his command, took over the Four Courts building in the centre of Dublin in defiance of the new Irish government. They wanted to provoke the British troops, who were still in the country into attacking them, which they thought would re-start the war with Britain and re-unite the IRA against their common enemy. Michael Collins tried desperately to persuade O'Connor and his men to leave the building before fighting broke out.

In June 1922, after the Four Courts garrison had kidnapped JJ O'Connell, a general in the new Free State Army, Collins shelled the Four Courts with borrowed British artillery. O'Connor surrendered after two days of fighting and was arrested and held in Mountjoy Prison. This incident sparked the Irish Civil War - as fighting broke out around the country between pro and anti treaty factions.

On the 8th of December 1922, along with three other republicans (Liam Mellows, Richard Barrett and Joe McKelvey) captured with the fall of the Four Courts, Rory O'Connor was executed by firing squad in reprisal for the anti-treaty IRA's killing of Free State member of parliament Sean Hales. The execution order was given by Kevin O'Higgins, who less than a year earlier had appointed O'Connor to be best man at his wedding, symbolising the bitterness of the division that the Treaty had caused. O'Connor, along with the other 76 executed republicans, was subsequently seen as a martyr by the Republican Movement in Ireland.

ources

*Michael Hopkinson, Green against Green - the Irish Civil War.
*Edward Purdon, The Irish Civil War 1922-23.