A century on from the night Arva’s RIC fortress fell

An audacious attack by the IRA on Arva RIC station will be revisited 100 years to the day by historian DR BRIAN HUGHES as part of the Centenary Lecture Series organised by Cavan Library Services. Here the University of Limerick lecturer tells DAMIAN MCCARNEY about rooftop attacks, unpopular sergeants and fears of reprisals.

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‘The first attack in Co. Cavan on an occupied police barrack was made on Saturday night at 11.30, at Arva, which after a short but vigorous investment and stout defence, the fortress fell, the garrison being forced to capitulate.’

This is the dramatic opening line in The Anglo-Celt’s report of the attack under the headline of ‘Arva Barracks Battle’. It reads as if lifted from a Hollywood script, and sat in its director’s chair back on September 24, 1920 was an A-Lister from the ranks of the IRA, Seán MacEoin.

“Around the country, from Easter and summer 1920 the RIC had been evacuating smaller barracks that were hard to defend and the IRA would burn these empty barracks - but this was the first time that an occupied barracks was attacked in Co Cavan,” says historian Dr Brian Hughes, setting the scene. “It was largely led by the Longford IRA, commanded by Seán MacEoin but there were Cavanmen involved in the broader ambush plan, and also parts of Leitrim.

“The IRA volunteers go into a house next door to the RIC barracks, where the local national school teacher, a Mr Corcoran and his family lived. It was separated from the barrack by an arched gateway,” explains Dr Hughes.

Upstairs the IRA volunteers found six young Corcoran youngsters asleep. In a brilliant interview in RTÉ’s archives from 1964, MacEoin claimed to have carried each of them to a downstairs, only rousing one.

“As I was carrying him down he woke up and he said ‘Who are you?’ And I said, ‘I’m your uncle Seán.’

“I never met the boy afterwards until about 12 months ago when he walked up to me and he was a young priest, and he said, ‘How is my uncle Sean?’

With the Corcoran family safe the volunteers could launch the attack.

“They break a hole in the roof of his house,” continues Dr Hughes, “and from that roof they try to break a hole in the roof of the barracks. Most reports suggest they failed to do that - for whatever reason the bombs they throw don’t actually blow a hole in the roof.

The IRA attacked the barracks from five different posts, while the RIC officers, massively outnumbered try to defend it.

“The IRA are shooting in on the building and they are shooting out.

“The IRA claim that the grenades thrown at the gable wall, shake it and cause enough damage to cause the policemen to surrender.”

Accounts of how long the attack took vary between the Celt’s estimate of 20 minutes up to two hours in one account; similarly the numbers involved vary wildly. Dr Hughes estimates that between 70-80 people were involved in the actual attack in Arva, “but much smaller numbers actually doing the shooting”, maybe up to 30 he guesses.

“About a third of them came from Arva, which is interesting because not a huge amount happened in Arva other than this barracks being attacked.

“There were two sergeants in the barracks at the time. One of them surrenders first - he basically runs out of the barracks and surrenders, expecting everyone else to follow. The rest of them don’t and they carry on for a little while anyway.

“One of them was wounded - one of the grenades explodes and shrapnel or debris hits him on the head - he gets a pretty bad head injury. Eventually the rest of them all surrender.

“After they surrendered they are taken into a neighbouring house next door owned by the same woman who owned the building that the barracks was in, a protestant shopkeeper.”

The RIC men were permitted to retrieve some personal items, but not their bicycles. Rifles and ammunitions were removed by the IRA and the barracks was set ablaze. The IRA escape unfettered, the RIC men left to ponder what had just happened.

The first sergeant to surrender - Michael Curran - had already applied to leave the force.

“He wanted out of the police anyway so you can see why he was the first to go,” says Dr Hughes, adding that he proceeds to joins the gardaí soon after.

“By his own account he wasn’t too popular in the immediate aftermath, so he wasn’t treated all that well. He seems to imply that he had to escape for his own safety because the other RIC lads were out to get him. So once he resigned he had to scurry away in the middle of the night to avoid them.”

Intriguingly Dr Hughes adds: “There is a brief reference in one file to help from a sergeant in the barracks - the phrase used is ‘connivance’ of the sergeant, which suggests maybe he had helped them in some way or another. But I think it’s probably unlikely.”

Outside of attacking the barracks the broader plan saw access roads blocked to prevent the Crown’s reinforcements from intervening. Roads as far away as Lavey were rendered impassable, while 13 large trees on the Cavan to Ballinagh Road were felled near Moynehall. Why all the details on the roads? A focus of the Celt’s story was the efforts Cavan supporters took to try to get to a match in Navan the next day!

Dr Hughes gained his insight into the Arva siege through his research into the Irish Grants Committee, a compensation scheme funded by the British Government in the 1920s for “southern Irish loyalists”. There were a significant number of applicants from Arva, mostly from shopkeepers who claimed to have been boycotted by locals due to serving RIC customers. Arva’s RIC officers were also amongst the claimants. In the days after, they are sent to Cavan Town barracks, and Arva is left without a police presence.

“The county inspector for Cavan is reporting for a couple of months that the place is getting worse and worse, in terms of republicans are starting to take control and harass the loyalists in the town, so eventually they decide to send the Black and Tans in [to Arva] instead,” says Dr Hughes.

The Celt reported on the fear amongst the Arva community of reprisals by the Crown forces, but it didn’t materialise. They were fortunate. Just six days later a station in Trim was targeted and the Black and Tans burned and looted properties in the Meath town in revenge.

Arva at that time had a large protestant minority (about 30%). Would an incident like this have polarised the community? He notes that in the following May, two Black and Tans stationed in Arva were shot dead a short distance away on the Longford side of the border, but adds: “I don’t think it did [polarise it] to a huge extent. It’s not like there’s a whole raft of very serious violence in the area afterwards... What’s mostly going on is boycotts - low level activities, it’s not somewhere you would associate with lots of shooting and acts of violence.”

For much more on this fascinating topic catch Dr Brian Hughes’ ‘Centenary Lecture Series’ talk broadcast online this Thursday at 7.30pm here.