The Battle of the Four Courts

"The Irish Civil War began at around four o'clock in the morning on June 28, 1922. An 18-pounder artillery piece began to fire on the thick granite walls of the Four Courts - a beautiful eighteenth-century complex of buildings that housed Ireland's premier law courts. The courts were occupied by a garrison of IRA men who rejected the treaty with Britain that had ended the War of Independence. After three days of fighting, with the building in ruins, the garrison surrendered. In The Battle of the Four Courts, Michael Fewer puts forward new and revealing evidence about the bombardment, the explosion and the fires that destroyed the building. His recreation of this tragic episode, a defining event in modern Irish polotics, is an intimate, detailed and essential addition to the literature of the Irish Revolution."--Cover