578. The Irish War of Independence: Bloody Sunday (Part 3)

The Freeman's Journal, 22nd of November 1920. Where will it end? Yesterday morning some fourteen officers and men of the military and secret services were shot dead at the same hour in widely separated districts of the city, some in hotels. some in private residences. In the afternoon, the authorized answer of the government agents came in the form of an attack upon a football crowd assembled, unsuspecting of evil, to watch a match in Croke Park.

Croke Park was turned into Amritsar, with the difference that there were no proclamations, no warnings, no legalities defied by the Assembly in Croke Park. The slaughter was a classic example of a government reprisal. The innocent were shot down in blind vengeance. The pretense that the firing was provoked by an attack upon the government forces will deceive no one in Ireland. It is another base official lie.

So strong words there from the Freeman's Journal, published on the 22nd of November 1920. And the Freeman's Journal had long been Ireland's leading constitutional nationalist newspaper, so backing home rule rather than independence. But there you can sense uh shock, outrage, and the sense of a newspaper perhaps changing its mind. And the reason for that are the events in Dublin of the previous day that the newspaper is describing. And it is a Sunday that has gone down in history as Ireland's first bloody Sunday.

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