An Irishman’s Diary

Having spent much of my working life defending Dublin’s architectural heritage, you can barely imagine my surprise when I discovered that my maternal grandfather was involved – at least indirectly – in burning Linenhall Barracks during the Easter Rising.

Even though he never talked about it, we knew that our grandad – FX Coghlan, from Kilcrohane, in west Cork – had been “out” in 1916. Not in the GPO, but in the Church Street area.

Thanks to the Bureau of Military History, we now have his own account of who he was with, what he did and where it happened. And because he was already a civil servant in the Land Commission, he reports it all in a detailed, almost deadpan typewritten statement.

FX had joined the Volunteers in 1913 and was in E Company, “which was composed, to a large extent, of Civil Servants”, according to his five-page statement, which identified him as “Captain, Rathfarnham Coy, IRA” in 1920-1921, during the War of Independence.d

He didn’t know in advance that the Rising was being planned, although felt that “things were getting warm and that something was going to happen”. So on Easter Monday, after parading at Blackhall Place, they moved to Church Street and started building barricades.

A short time after taking up their positions, “two Lancers appeared on the scene, firing as they came along. My party returned the fire, and one of the Lancers was brought down at North King Street corner. That Lancer had shot a child as he was coming along Church Street ...”

“On Wednesday, a party of Volunteers took Linenhall Barracks, by burning it. Twenty-four prisoners were taken there and marched to the Father Matthew Hall .”

My grandad was put in charge of these prisoners until he was relieved and then proceeded to Mary’s Lane where he was “busily engaged in erecting a barricade, facing the markets and Capel Street”, with loopholes that gave them “a good field of fire”.

They were told by commanding officers Piaras Beaslaí and Fionán Lynch that they “were to advance towards Capel Street [and] that the GPO men would try to cut out to meet us ...”. But this line of retreat was stymied “as the British advanced into Capel Street in force.”

He was then ordered to “pick six men and re-take the barricade immediately”. As it was “enfiladed from North King Street, we then threw up a further barricade at Greek Street, with scrap iron from an old yard nearby, [and] held it until the surrender”.

On Saturday evening, he recalled, “we were withdrawn to the Four Courts and addressed by Ned Daly, who told us that we were about to surrender ... Some of the men started breaking up their guns, others just threw them away, and the ‘beaten team’ feeling came over us”.

FX and the rest of them were “marched down the Quays” and up Capel Street to Britain [now Parnell] Street, where they spent the night under guard in front of the Rotunda, then to Richmond Barracks and, from there, to the boat for England and Stafford Gaol.

My grandad was lucky to be released in about six or eight weeks and didn’t move on to the Frongoch internment camp in North Wales “because Darrel Figgis [who was in the Howth gun-running] got the measles”, and they were let go for fear of spreading it.

He went on to take part in the War of Independence but, when Dáil Éireann voted to accept the Treaty, he urged fellow IRA commanders in Dublin to accept it too on the basis that “the army acts on behalf of the Dáil” and brought most of his Rathfarnham company with him.

After joining the National Army under Michael Collins, he was in command of Free State troops to the west of the Four Courts while the republicans who occupied it were being shelled with 18-pounder artillery borrowed from the British army as they were pulling out.

When it was all over, he returned to his old job in the Land Commission and lived out the rest of his long life in a house called St Roch on Taylor’s Lane, in Whitechurch. It had a long garden with vegetable rows, gooseberry bushes, apple trees and beehives.

An old man when I was a child, I’ll always remember him wearing his beekeeper’s hat as he harvested honey from the three hives. Little did we know about his earlier life as an active participant in the revolution that changed Ireland. But now we do, and in his own words too.

I’ll be joining my first cousin Gareth Coghlan – who has gone through a trunk of FX’s personal papers – to give a talk about our grandad as part of RTÉ’s Reflecting the Rising on Easter Monday. See 1916.rte.ie