Outnumbered and outgunned, the Republican forces embarked on a campaign of ambush, sabotage and evasion, striking Free State troops hard and fast before disappearing into the countryside
The Irish Civil War was bloody and brutal, but it was the personalised nature of this brutality that made the war such a dark moment in Irish history. Members from both sides had been comrades fighting side by side against the British during the Irish War of Independence from 1919-21.
Many members from the Provisional Government, or the Free State, had even been members of the IRA during the war, helping shape its strategy, war plans and run its operations. The level of familiarity that many government leaders such as Michael Collins had with the IRA and its operations inhibited the IRA’s war efforts. The IRA began the conflict using the same tactics that had proven successful during the fight for independence, which were already well understood by the Free State command. The IRA also failed to change the locations of their safe-houses and weapons caches, leaving them vulnerable to attack and lacking supplies.
The army was aware that the IRA were struggling for resources – at one point they had one rifle for every two men. To ensure that they had the upper hand, the Free State was provided with arms and resources by the British, ensuring that they were vastly outgunning the IRA. With their advantage, they tried to tempt the IRA into open battles, as demonstrated by the army capturing Carrick-On-Suir in August 1922. The army then used their superiority to target IRA strongholds, and while they were able to successfully capture the west and began gaining control in the south from the IRA, victory was not yet in sight.
With the loss of the west and the army gaining the ascendency, Liam Lynch, chief of staff of the IRA, was forced to change strategy because he realised they would not be unable to regularly match or beat the army in an open battle. They reformed their formations into flying columns, attacking from remote areas, and these new IRA tactics started to look more like an armed insurgency. These units were unable to hold on to garrisoned sites, but they were able to cause disruption and damage to the army by removing them from towns and taking their weapons.
Initially the IRA had enjoyed a relatively large amount of support, particularly in the countryside, but as the war went on this support began to wane. After the street fighting in Dublin, and the siege of the Four Courts, much of the IRA’s support, outside of the rural regions of the nation, disappeared. Many of the men that had maintained their popular suppor
