There has been a welcome proliferation of publications marking the centenary of the Irish Civil War. This book from the Irish Times journalist Ronan McGreevy should be required reading on that conflict, as well as on Ireland’s wider revolutionary period. Not only does McGreevy recount, in vivid detail, the murder of Sir Henry Wilson in London on 22 June 1922, he puts the killing in the context of the political tumult from which the Irish Free State emerged.
That the assassins, Reginald Dunne and Joseph O’Sullivan, despite injuries sustained in the war (both had served with the British Army during the First World War and subsequently joined the Irish Republican Army), managed to pull off the attack was extraordinary in itself. The assassination of high-profile figures was a long-standing strategy of militant Irish republicanism and McGreevy painstakingly details how and why Wilson became a target for the IRA. Born in County Longford in 1864, he was a major military figure during the First World War and a much admired informal adviser to Prime Minister Lloyd George. He straddled military and political worlds and, when his armed service was over, he was elected as MP for the staunchly unionist North Down constituency.
