7 Exchange Court

Exchange Court

Exchange Court sits along the eastern edge of Dublin’s City Hall, which was commandeered and used during the War of Independence for courts-martial. The big, open square next to it was once full of large, brick Georgian houses, so that the “court” was in effect a narrow laneway. The house at the end of the laneway, and two more adjoining it to the side, comprised a DMP Barracks, which connected into buildings in the Lower Castle Yard, behind.

For the most intense period of the War of Independence, this barracks was occupied by the “F Company” of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC, more commonly known as the “Auxiliaries”. The Auxiliaries were formed in July 1920 and were made up of former British Army officers. They soon garnered a reputation for brutality as a result of the indiscriminate reprisals they carried out on the Irish population.

21 November 1920 is remembered in Irish history as “Bloody Sunday”. On that morning, Michael Collins’s “Squad” assassinated fourteen men suspected of being British military and intelligence officers. Later that day, at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, British forces fired into a crowd of spectators, killing a further fourteen people.

The night before Bloody Sunday, two members of the IRA’s Dublin Brigade – Peadar Clancy, its Vice-Commandant, and Dick McKee, its Commanding Officer – were captured on Gloucester Street (now Seán McDermott Street). Also taken prisoner that night, at Vaughan’s Hotel on modernday Parnell Square, was Conor Clune, a member of the Gaelic League, an organisation that promoted the Irish language. All three men were taken to the Guard Room of the F-Company’s barracks, here, in Exchange Court. The three men were still there the following day, as the events of Bloody Sunday unfolded across the city. What happened to the three men that night is still contested, but none made it out of the Guard Room alive. Evidence suggests that they were possibly tortured and then killed in revenge for the assassinations that the Squad had carried out that morning. The Government’s official line was that they were shot while trying to escape, although few people believed this story. So concerned were those in charge to convey their version of events that the scene was restaged for newspapers, illustrating exactly what the Auxiliaries said had happened. Following Irish independence, a memorial plaque was erected over a window of the former Guard Room, in 1939.

Few accounts of brutality or execution within the walls of the Castle survive from this period, but they certainly did take place. The deaths of Clancy, McKee and Clune are the most notorious. The account left by Ernie O’Malley of his time as a prisoner at the Castle gives another insight into the grizzly conduct of the War within the Castle’s walls.

For the most intense period of the War of Independence, this barracks was occupied by the “F Company” of the Auxiliary Division of the RIC, more commonly known as the “Auxiliaries”.