Special Powers - Civil War internment at Newbridge Barracks and Tintown Camp

The final battles of the Civil War were fought in the jails and internment camps of Ireland. Confronted with an armed insurrection that threatened to wreck the economy and de-stabilise the emerging Free State, the Provisional Government resorted to Special Powers to defeat the anti-Treaty IRA. On the Curragh plains over four-thousand republicans languished in dire conditions, while in nearby Newbridge Barracks another 1,500 men were interned.

Captured republicans soon discovered that their former comrades in arms showed less concern for prisoners than their British predecessors. While no prisoners died under the British regime during the War of Independence over two- dozen internees lost their lives at the hands of their old comrades during the Civil War. Among the internees in Newbridge and the Curragh were men who would make their mark on Irish history: unrepentant republicans and writers like Ernie O’Malley and Peadar O’Donnell; Squires Gannon, the first man to lift the Sam Maguire Cup; Seán Lemass, future Taoiseach and leader of Fianna Fáil; John Higgins, the father of President Michael D. Higgins; the acclaimed novelist Francis Stuart; and poet and lyricist Joseph Cambell.

Two of the greatest escapes in Irish penal history took place there: 112 prisoners escaped through a tunnel from Newbridge Barracks in October 1922, while seventy-one men left Tintown Camp via a tunnel in April 1923. All the escapees’ names are recorded in the Appendix. Faced with general neglect, trigger-happy guards and no release date, the prisoners maintained their defiance of the Free State regime with several escapes, protests and the biggest hunger-strike in Irish history.

The camp authorities replied with executions, torture and harsh punishments, random shootings, careless medical treatment, and a brutal murder that reached to the very top of the Free State Government. Special Powers is a fascinating and comprehensive history of Civil War internment using primary sources and told through the words and experiences of the men behind the wire of Newbridge, Hare Park and Tintown.