Ronan McGreevy

The event that precipitated the Irish Civil War did not even take place in Ireland. It was the assassination by two London IRA men of the controversial Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP that galvanised the British government into forcing the Provisional Government of the nascent Irish Free State into the attack on the Republican garrison in the Four Courts in Dublin, the event that began the ‘shooting war’ in 1922. Irish Times journalist and historian Ronan McGreevy has researched the circumstances that led to the murder of Wilson in his book Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP.