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The Shooting of Brigadier-General George Adamson, 1922

The six months from Dáil Éireann’s vote of acceptance for the Anglo-Irish Treaty on January 7, 1922, to the shelling of the Four Courts on June 28 were ones of rising tension within the Free State. Despite parliamentary acceptance of the Treaty, the IRA had overwhelmingly rejected the settlement, which fell far short of the all-Ireland republic that was their goal. Not all Volunteers had vowed to take up arms against the Treaty, however. With a further split in anti-Treaty forces, there existed in the new state at the time four different armed factions: the Free State [National] army; the neutral IRA led by Florrie O’Donoghue and Seán O’Hegarty: and the Executive and Convention branches of anti-Treatyites. A “phoney war” of sorts existed during this six-month period, as anti-Treaty and Free State forces jostled for control of barracks across the state, notably in Limerick City in March. And, despite outright hostilities still being some way off, this period was not entirely free from violence; Meda Ryan, in her life of Liam Lynch, claims that eight people had already been killed and forty-nine wounded in clashes around the country by the end of April. The following month witnessed further violence when more than a dozen people were killed in Kilkenny City during the first week of May in a localized outbreak of conflict. Only a week prior to events in Kilkenny a fatal shooting occurred in Athlone, County Westmeath—the course of which defied interpretation then, and continues to do so with respect to where responsibility ultimately lies. Among those potentially implicated in this shooting, through conflicting witness reports and contradictory coroner’s findings, was a prominent Free State military and political figure with strong ties to the leadership in Dublin. The victim, BrigadierGeneral George Adamson of the Free State army, was shot on the night of April