The Fourth Northern Division of the Irish Republican Army operated in an area covering parts of counties Louth, Armagh, Monaghan, and Down. Frank Aiken was commander and Padraig Quinn was the quartermaster general. John McCoy was Adjutant General for the division; after he was shot and captured by British Crown forces in 1921 Sean F. Quinn, Padraig's brother, took over the position.
At the outbreak of the Civil War, the Fourth Northern Division was neutral and in control of the Dundalk military barracks after the British army vacated it on April 13, 1922. Aiken was in Dublin with Richard Mulcahy (Chief of Staff of the IRA until the split), arguing against the Free State taking military action against a large anti-treaty IRA force which had taken over the Four Courts. Mulcahy ordered Aiken back to Dundalk.
On July 4 Aiken wrote to Mulcahy stating the Fourth Northern Division would stay neutral, called for an end to the fighting and for the removal of the Oath of Allegiance from the Treaty because “you have the simple national abhorrence of swearing allegiance to a foreign king and allowing part of the Nation to be ruled by people who have a sworn loyalty to that king.”
On July 15 Aiken again met in Dublin with Mulcahy, arguing for peace. The following day Mulcahy's men came as friends to Dundalk and captured Aiken's barracks through a breach of faith, and Aiken and his officers and men were imprisoned in Dundalk jail. On July 27, Padraig Quinn (who during the Anglo-Irish War also commanded a unit that operated against the British in Dublin city centre) led a small unit that attacked Dundalk, breached the prison wall with dynamite, and in fifteen minutes captured the garrison of 300 men and arms for 400. There no casualties during the jail break. A number of escaping divisional members were recaptured by Free State soldiers, including John McCoy of Mullabawn, who was a brigadier in the barracks before the Free State troops took command.
On April 23, 1923, Aiken was elected chief-of-Staff of the IRA and an Army Council composed of him, Pilkington and Tom Barry was appointed. Sean F. Quinn succeeded him as officer commanding of the Fourth Northern Division. On April 27, Aiken issued a ‘Suspension of Offensives’, a command that all offensive operations should be suspended from noon on 30 April. This marked the end of the civil war.
Famous quotes containing the words fourth, northern, division, irish, republican and/or army:
“For the Lord thy God is a jealous God among you.”
—Bible: Hebrew Deuteronomy, 6:15.
The words are also found in Exodus 20:5, referring to the second commandment: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image ... for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me.”
“The note of the white-throated sparrow, a very inspiriting but almost wiry sound, was first heard in the morning, and with this all the woods rang. This was the prevailing bird in the northern part of Maine. The forest generally was alive with them at this season, and they were proportionally numerous and musical about Bangor. They evidently breed in that State.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If the technology cannot shoulder the entire burden of strategic change, it nevertheless can set into motion a series of dynamics that present an important challenge to imperative control and the industrial division of labor. The more blurred the distinction between what workers know and what managers know, the more fragile and pointless any traditional relationships of domination and subordination between them will become.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“The Republican Vice Presidential Candidate ... asks you to place him a heartbeat from the Presidency.”
—Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965)
“A Jew without Jews, without Judaism, without Zionism, without Jewishness, without a temple or an army or even a pistol, a Jew clearly without a home, just the object itself, like a glass or an apple.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)