This day is remembered to history as Bloody Sunday, one of two days in Irish history bearing that unfortunate title. The day featured violence on both sides.
The day started with Michael Collins' men of the IRA targeting members of the "Cairo Gang" for assassination. Many of the fifteen men killed by the IRA were British Army intelligence officers assigned to that effort with a few policemen and a few people of unknown allegiance also killed in the early morning action.
That afternoon British police forces raided a football match at Croke Park. The force was a mixed one of RIC personnel and Auxiliaries. The situation was tense and shooting broke out, resulting in the British forces firing over 200 rounds and ultimately killing fourteen people. The RIC later claimed that they were fired on first, but there is little evidence to support it. Testimony by municipal police who simply happened to be on duty there due to the football match was to the contrary. The best evidence is that the RIC and Auxillaries simply stormed in and began shooting.
That evening two IRA men in British custody were killed, with the British claiming they were shot while after trying to violently escape but the evidence otherwise contesting that.
Like a lot of things in the Anglo Irish War, the bloody day has been mythologized and therefore has become a legend, but probably a tragic one that is still somewhat out of context. The RIC and the Auxiliaries were already notorious for their heavy handedness, a shocking example of which we provided earlier this week. But the bloodiness of the day really commences with IRA assassinations aimed at what was proving to be a successful British counterintelligence action. Those killings themselves came in the context of the IRA resorting a war of murder which has, over the years, been glossed over to be presented as a sort of urban guerilla war. In reality, given their weakness in comparison to the British, they were terrorists and justified their actions in the context of their goals. The British counterintelligence actions came in that context and were proving successful, but not so successful that the IRA wasn't able to figure them out and strike back, as the did on this day.
The killings later that day by the RIC were marked by the unwise decision to raid a football match, something of questionable purpose at best, and an even worse decision given the tensions that had developed during the day. Given the nature of the RIC and the Auxiliaries, and the British counterintelligence effort in general, the chances of it turning into a bloodbath featuring what might have simply been reprisal killings of innocent people was high. The RIC was already turning the minds of the uncommitted Irish, whom were a majority of the population, against the British and something like this was guaranteed to greatly increase that trend
Oddly the number of people killed in the 1972 Bogside Massacre by British paratroopers when they opened up on civil rights protesters was fifteen people, with eleven more wounded, making it about equivalent in terms of loss of life by British arms in a similar event. It's that event that was commemorated in U2's Sunday Bloody Sunday.
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