Rory O'Connor

This article is about Irish Republican activist Rory O'Connor . For the medieval high king Rory O'Connor see Ruaidhrí Ua Conchobair

Rory O'Connor ( Irish Ruairí Ó Conchúir , * 1883 in Dublin , † 8. December 1922 ) was an Irish - Republican activist. He was best known for his role in the Irish Civil War , which led to his execution .

Rory O'Connor was born in Dublin in 1883 and worked as a railroad engineer in Canada during his youth .

After returning to Ireland, he became involved in Irish politics and was interned after the 1916 Easter Rising .

The War of Independence

During the subsequent Irish War of Independence from 1919 to 1921 he was appointed technical director of the Irish Republican Army (IRA, Irish Republican Army ), the guerrilla force that fought the British.

He did not accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, which established the Irish Free State but abolished the Irish Republic of 1919, which O'Connor and his comrades had sworn to uphold. On March 26, 1922, the officers of the IRA held a meeting in Dublin in which they rejected the treaty compromise and the authority of the Dáil Éireann , the elected Irish parliament. When asked by a journalist whether that meant that they were proposing a military dictatorship in Ireland, O'Connor replied: "You can take it that way if you want" (German: "If you want to take it that way ...").

Civil war

In April 1922, in open disregard for the new Irish government, O'Connor took over the Four Courts building in central Dublin , along with 200 other contract opponents of the IRA under his command . They wanted to provoke the British troops who were still in the country to attack in order to rekindle the war and to reunite the IRA against their common enemy. Before the fighting broke out, Michael Collins tried desperately to persuade O'Connor and his men to leave the building.

After the crew of the Four Courts captured JJ O'Connel, a general in the new Free State Army , in June 1922 , Collins fired at Four Courts with borrowed British artillery. O'Connor surrendered after two days of fighting, was captured and held in Dublin's Mountjoy Prison .

As a reprisal for the murder of the State Parliament member Sean Hales Rory O'Connor was born on December 8, 1922 along with three other Republicans ( Liam Mellows , Richard Barret and Joe McKelvey ), who were arrested after the fall of the Four Courts, by a firing squad executed . The execution warrant was given by Kevin O'Higgins , who - symbolic of the bitter division the contract had caused - had appointed O'Connor as his best man less than a year earlier. O'Connor, along with the other 76 executed Republicans, was subsequently regarded as a martyr by Irish Republican tradition.

literature

• Michael Hopkinson: Green against Green - the Irish Civil War , Gill & Macmillan, 2004, ISBN 978-0-7171-3760-2
• Edward Purdon: The Irish Civil War 1922-23 , The Mercier Press Ltd, 2000, ISBN 978-1-85635-300-7

This article is based on a translation of the article en: Rory O'Connor (Irish republican) from the English Wikipedia in the version of April 22, 2007.