On this date in 1922, Robert Erskine Childers was shot by the Irish Free State for carrying a gun its founding colossus had gifted him.
Many Irishmen were executed on either side in this terrible time, but Childers cuts a unique figure among them.
To begin with, he wasnâ??t all that Irish â?? â??that damned Englishman,â? fellow Republican turned Civil War enemy Arthur Griffith called him. The London-born son of a British scholar and an Irish mother, Childers was a lifelong Protestant, itself an anomaly since Irish nationalism mapped (and still maps) strongly to Catholicism.
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