Battle of the Four Courts : The First Three Days of the Irish Civil War

The Irish Civil War began at around four o'clock in the morning on June 28, 1922. An 18-pounder artillery piece commanded by soldiers loyal to Michael Collins and the new Irish government began to fire on the thick granite walls of the Four Courts - a beautiful eighteenth-century complex of buildings that housed Ireland's highest legal tribunals.

Inside the courts a large party of IRA men were barricaded - a clear sign that the treaty ending the war of independence would never be accepted by passionate republicans. Collins had come under pressure from Winston Churchill and his cabinet colleagues in London to clear out the rebels. After three days of fighting, with the buildings in ruins, the garrison surrendered. But the Four Courts also housed Ireland's historical archives, and these irreplaceable documents were destroyed, with leaves of burnt parchment raining down over the city. This was a cultural disaster for the new state and its historical memory. And the Civil War that followed led to generations of entrenched bitterness, with the two main Irish political parties owing their origins to the sides they chose in the war.