Kilmichael: The Life and Afterlife of an Ambush

Introduction few miles outside Macroom, County Cork, an Irish Republican Army (IRA) flying column attacked an eighteen-strong patrol of Auxiliary police, killing sixteen of them outright. One was wounded but survived. Another managed to escape but was later captured and executed. Three IRA Volunteers – Michael McCarthy, Jim O’Sullivan and Patrick Deasy – were also killed or mortally wounded.1 At the July 1921 Truce ending the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), the Kilmichael ambush still represented the greatest loss of life inflicted by the IRA on Crown Forces in a single instance during the conflict, although Dromkeen in Limerick (3 February 1921), and the Headford Junction and Rathmore ambushes in Kerry (21 March and 4 May 1921) came close.

The ambush instantly became a rhetorical hook for wider polemics surrounding the Irish independence struggle. In its immediate aftermath, much of the commentary revolved around whether the attack was a legitimate act of war or an atrocity. Individuals and groupings on both sides, British and Irish, disputed the circumstances in which both the Auxiliaries and Volunteers had died. Dublin Castle issued graphic and overstated press releases alleging that the IRA had tricked the Auxiliaries and massacred wounded men. They maintained that the bodies were mutilated by insurgents kitted out in steel helmets and British military uniforms. Counter-assertions circulated that the Auxiliaries were put to death in retaliation for attempting some sort of feigned or ‘false’ surrender.

Several different accounts of what occurred emerged in the months and years after the ambush. What became the best-known version appeared in Guerilla Days in Ireland, the 1949 memoir of Tom Barry, the IRA commander who led the ambush.2 The second Kilmichael controversy, which arose in the 1970s, was sparked by the publication of a rival account On 28 November 1920, a