The Irish War of Independence: A Plain Timeline

Between January 1919 and May 1923, Ireland went from a declaration read in a Dublin meeting room to an independent state that had fought two wars, one against Britain and one against itself. Those four years decided the shape of modern Ireland, and they are also the years most often blurred together in family memory: the Tans, the Treaty, the split, all folded into one story. What follows is an Irish War of Independence timeline kept deliberately plain, so that the order of events is clear and each date can be checked.

One note before the dates. These years are still felt personally in many families, in Ireland and across the diaspora, and people found themselves on every side of them for honest reasons. This timeline states what happened and when. It does not award the argument to anyone. If you are tracing a family through the period, treat the dates as pegs to hang their story on: which side of the Truce a birth fell, what was happening in the country the month a grandparent took the boat.

Before the first shot

The war did not begin from nothing. The Rising of Easter 1916 and the executions that followed had moved public feeling, in Ireland and among the Irish in America who had watched 1916 from a distance. At the general election of December 1918, Sinn Féin won a landslide across most of the country on a promise to withdraw from Westminster and establish an Irish parliament. Within seven weeks it had done exactly that.

The Irish War of Independence timeline: 1919 to 1921

21 January 1919. The first Dáil meets in Dublin and declares independence. On the same day, at Soloheadbeg in Co. Tipperary, two Royal Irish Constabulary constables are killed in an ambush carried out by Volunteers acting on their own initiative. The coincidence of the two events, the parliament and the ambush on the one morning, has marked this date ever since as the start of the war.

Through 1919 and into 1920. The conflict builds gradually rather than erupting: arms raids, attacks on police barracks, a guerrilla campaign finding its shape, and arrests and reprisals following it. In the west, as everywhere, the fear arrives before the fighting does.

March 1920. The Black and Tans arrive, recruited to reinforce the police and sent to break the resistance. Their conduct brings a hard and frightening year to Mayo and the whole country, and their name is still shorthand for it a century later.

21 November 1920. Bloody Sunday. In the morning, IRA units directed by Michael Collins shoot dead members of a British intelligence network in Dublin, around fifteen men killed or fatally wounded. That afternoon, crown forces open fire on the crowd at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing fourteen people and wounding more than seventy. A single day, and the war’s most infamous.

28 November 1920. One week after Bloody Sunday, at Kilmichael in Co. Cork, an IRA flying column commanded by Tom Barry kills sixteen members of the Auxiliary Division. Reprisals follow across the district. November 1920 is the war at its hardest pitch.

3 May 1921. The Government of Ireland Act, passed at Westminster the previous December, comes into force and partitions the island into two devolved territories, Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, each with its own parliament. King George V opens the northern parliament in Belfast on 22 June; the southern one never functions, because Sinn Féin will not sit in it. Partition, so often remembered as a product of the Treaty, is in place before the Truce is even signed.

11 July 1921. After two and a half years, a truce comes into effect. The fighting stops while London and Dublin talk.

6 December 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty is signed in London. It establishes an Irish Free State, self-governing but within the Empire, and it splits the country over the oath of allegiance and the border almost as soon as its terms are read.

The Treaty and the split: 1922

7 January 1922. After weeks of raw debate, the Dáil approves the Treaty by 64 votes to 57. The margin says everything about what is coming. The anti-Treaty side does not accept the outcome as settled, and through the spring the movement that had fought the war together divides into two camps, each holding arms.

28 June 1922. Free State forces shell the Four Courts in Dublin, which anti-Treaty men have occupied. The Civil War begins.

22 August 1922. Michael Collins is killed in an ambush at Béal na Bláth, Co. Cork. The Free State loses its best-known leader before the state itself formally exists.

6 December 1922. The Irish Free State comes formally into existence, one year to the day after the Treaty was signed.

The Civil War ends: 1923

10 April 1923. Liam Lynch, commander of the anti-Treaty forces, is killed. Frank Aiken succeeds him.

24 May 1923. Aiken orders his men to dump arms and end the campaign. The Civil War closes without a surrender, a treaty or a handshake. It simply stops.

The Civil War is the part of this timeline that Irish families found hardest to speak about afterwards, and the reticence itself is part of the history. Former comrades had fought each other; neighbours had informed on neighbours; both sides had buried people they loved. Whatever position a family took in 1922, grief was general by 1923. Some on the losing side took the boat rather than live beside the memory, and the argument crossed the ocean with them. Any honest account has to hold the loss on both sides of the divide, because the people who lived it did.

What came after

The new state’s early years were quieter but not easy. In December 1925 the Boundary Commission confirmed partition, fixing the border with Northern Ireland. Money stayed scarce, and emigration resumed its old pull: by the late 1920s, young people were once again taking the boat, and the letters between Ireland and America carried the same partings they had carried for eighty years.

These years in one family’s letters

Book Seven of the family’s letters runs from 1919 to 1930, and its writer, Nora Óg Gallagher of Ballycastle, sets these events down as they reach one Mayo townland: the first Dáil in January 1919, the Tans in Mayo in 1920, the Treaty turned over and over at the fireside in December 1921, and then the hardest line she has to write, in June 1922, that neighbours are now on opposite sides. Her letters cross to New York, where the family’s American branch reads the birth of the state their grandparents never lived to see.

She refuses to let the correspondence take a side that a family cannot take back, which is its own kind of wisdom about a civil war. Her later letters carry the quieter aftermath too: the Free State finding its feet in 1924, partition confirmed in 1925, and a nephew emigrating in 1927 as the young state’s economy struggled, the old story resuming inside the new one.

If these are the years your people spoke least about, Book Seven, where a nation is born walks through them month by month, and the full journey, from Famine-era Mayo to the Emergency, runs across the eight Books of the series.