Burning of Cork

The Burning of Cork by British forces took place on the night of 11–12 December 1920, during the Irish War of Independence. It followed an Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambush of a British Auxiliary patrol in the city, in which one of the patrol was killed and eleven wounded.

In retaliation, Auxiliaries, Black and Tans and British soldiers set fire to a number of houses and then looted and burnt numerous buildings in the city centre. Many civilians also reported being beaten, shot at, robbed and verbally abused by British forces. Firefighters later testified that British forces hindered their attempts to tackle the blazes by intimidating them, shooting at them and cutting their hoses.

More than 40 business premises, 300 residential properties, City Hall and the Carnegie Library were destroyed by fire. Over £3 million worth of damage (1920 value; €172 millon in today's money) was done, 2,000 were left jobless and many were left homeless. Two unarmed IRA volunteers (who were brothers) were also shot dead at their home in the north of the city, and a woman died of a heart attack when Auxiliaries burst into her house. British forces carried out many other reprisals on Irish civilians during the war, but the burning of Cork was one of the biggest and most well known. The British government initially denied that its forces had started the fires and blamed them on the IRA. However, a British Army inquiry (which resulted in the "Strickland Report") concluded that a company of Auxiliaries was responsible. Although many witnesses described the burnings as systematic and organized, there is debate over whether they had been planned before the ambush.

The War of Independence had begun in 1919, following the declaration of an Irish Republic and its parliament, Dáil Éireann. The army of the new republic, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), waged a guerrilla war against British forces in Ireland: the British Army and the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). To help fight the IRA, the British Government formed the Auxiliary Division. This was a paramilitary unit composed of ex-soldiers from Britain which specialized in counter-insurgency. It also recruited thousands of British ex-soldiers into the RIC, who became known as "Black and Tans". Both groups became infamous for their reprisals against Irish civilians for IRA attacks. Many villages were sacked and burnt. IRA intelligence officer Florence O'Donoghue wrote that the subsequent burning and looting of Cork was "not an isolated incident, but rather the large-scale application of a policy initiated and approved, implicitly or explicitly, by the [British government]".

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