Piercing the heart of a giant

In March 1916, just a few weeks before the Easter Rising, the police raided Liberty Hall. In response, the Irish Citizen Army was mobilised across Dublin.

Irish Citizen Army members pictured on the roof of Liberty Hall (Image Camera Press Ireland)

In the run up to Easter Week, an ICA member recounted how Liberty Hall “resembled a military barracks in everything but name” as Citizen Army men “some in dark green uniform, some in their ordinary working clothes, some in their Sunday best” took over the building.

On the first floor “improvised hand grenades were being manufactured. Cartridges were being altered, to fit rifles and guns for which they were never meant. Bayonets, of an old French type, were being heated over a blow-lamp and bent or reshaped to fit an old German Mauser rifle… [it was] common to see… [a] man sitting over the fire; brewing a can of tea on one side of it, while melting a pot of lead on the other side; two or three men at a bench making repairs to a rifle, while at the same time, two or three others were stretched on the bare floor, snoring, fast asleep.”

Ireland’s Strongest Union. #ourSIPTU

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