Soloheadbeg

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Soloheadbeg is a small townland, some two miles outside Tipperary Town, near Limerick Junction railway station.

The place is steeped in Irish history, for it was here that King Mahon of Thomond and his brother Brian Ború defeated the vikings at the Battle of Solohead in 968. It was also a stopping point by Dónal Cam O'Sullivan Bere, during his epic march from Dunboy Castle in west Cork to O'Rourke's Castle in Leitrim in 1603.

Its later claim to fame is for an incident which occurred on 21 January 1919. IRA men Seán Treacy, Dan Breen, Seán Hogan, Séamus Robinson, Tadhg Crowe, Paddy McCormack, Paddy O'Dwyer, Michael Ryan and Seán O'Meara attacked two Royal Irish Constables, Patrick MacDonnell and James O’Connell,^[1] who were guarding two workmen transporting explosive gelignite to a nearby quarry. A monument at Solohead Cross, across the road from the Hideout Pub, commemorates the occasion and where a ceremony of remembrance is held every year which also remembers in prayer the two slain policemen.

The two local constables were killed immediately for not surrendering to their attackers; the two workmen survived. The gelignite was seized by the IRA, but there are no records of any large explosions around that time. Dan Breen claimed the constables attacked first, but a body of opinion says that this was unlikely given the odds against them. Treacy was killed by the British during the course of the Irish War of Independence and Breen went on to serve as a constitutional politician and member of Dáil Éireann until 1965.

Breen later recalled: "...we took the action deliberately, having thought over the matter and talked it over between us. Treacy had stated to me that the only way of starting a war was to kill someone, and we wanted to start a war, so we intended to kill some of the police whom we looked upon as the foremost and most important branch of the enemy forces ... The only regret that we had following the ambush was that there were only two policemen in it, instead of the six we had expected..."^[2]

This was the first use of physical force by the IRA, acting on local authority. By chance, on the same day the First Dáil was established in Dublin after the 1918 elections, which Sinn Féin won. The Sinn Féin Dáil was not consulted, nor was it involved in the attack, declaring war on England only in April 1921.